august 2019. welcome to the void.

[modblob]

Who: Everyone in Anchor.
What: Second Introductory Mingle
When: The Month of August 2019
Where: Around and outside the city.
Warnings: Please add any warnings in the subject lines.

Redshift: Welcome to the v͖͕̺̲̘̱̜͎o̴̦̣̠̦̘̹͞i̯̖d̛̪̬͈̱̦̝͍̕.

Click here to read what characters will experience when arriving in Anchor.

a. bright spots in the darkness.

The redout and accompanying power outage has been going on for over a week now - even though someone must have managed to get the generators up and running so things are a little less dismal, that doesn't mean that everything is fun and games. The generators are enough to power the essentials, like lighting, the MedBay, resident sat phones, sanitation facilities...basically just the things that make life livable instead of kicking the whole city back to the dark ages.

Sometime during the second week, though, around the end of July, residents might start to notice bright spots in the darkness, mostly around the Agricultural levels. Little bobbing blobs of bright blue or vibrant green or glowing red that move soundlessly through the night, poignantly noticeable because everything else is so dark. At first, and from a distance, they might look like your typical swamp gas fake ghost, little glowing smudges in the darkness. Could be promising...but it could be dangerous too.

If residents are brave enough to head up to the Agricultural levels in the darkness and investigate the source of the light, a mildly harrowing mission, they will find that the source of the glowing is...animals. Barely differing from the usual animals one might see in a daylight in the Agricultural levels, these animals prove to simply be nocturnal versions of the usual animals that might survive in the wild and who have made their homes in the faux forest and grasslands. And when everything else is dark, these creatures roam the night, letting off a curious and almost radioactive glow.

There are, however, a slightly wider variety of these animals, who are descendants of animals exposed heavily to radiation that mutated but did not kill them. While there are the usual deer and wild horses, foxes and monkeys, rodents and insects, there are also domestic creatures that seem to have thrived in their glow-in-the-dark forms where non-glowing ones were picked off by predators. Anyone investigating may find glowing kittens and puppies, domestic mice and rats, snakes that are open to being touched, and even a few more exotic domesticated pets like ferrets, hedgehogs, turtles and foxes. While these creatures are still wild, they are the descendants of domestic stock, and with a little effort and coddling, they might turn out to be passable pets, once they're scanned in the MedBay and found to not give off dangerous radiation.

It's not all puppies and kittens, though. Some of these seemingly predatorless glow-in-the-dark creatures are mutated, just like their regular counterparts, but to a more extensive degree. Keep a close eye out while you're trying to tame that adorable glowing purple kitten, because you might find yourself as the prey to a huge mutated lizard or spider, or maybe an oversized glowing wild warthog.

Nighttime exploring, after all, is for the brave at heart...and comes with pros and cons!

b. nightmare swarm.

As if the mutated glow-in-the-dark creatures in the Agricultural levels aren't bad enough, there's something new in Anchor to cause problems. A couple of weeks after the generator room was opened, strange apparitions start showing up in various places around the city. At first they're nebulous clouds that gather in places where there's strong evidence of past violence - in the upper levels of the city where there's serious fire damage, near the security station, hovering outside the armory or wherever there are burns and gouges into the stone walls of the city. But as the month wears on, the clouds start to take shape, and some of those shapes might be very familiar.

Starting at around August 8th, whenever a resident passes by one of these ominous clouds, it will start to coalesce into a solid form, the particles coming together into a concrete shape - the shape of fear. Whether the particles coalesce into the shape of a monster or villain from a character's homeworld or previous game setting, the nebulous representation of their worst fear, a person or thing from their past that evokes a terrible memory of trauma, or even just a generic horrific monster that would particularly frighten that particular person, it's something that is guaranteed to terrify. Essentially, they will turn into the worst thing that your character can imagine.

And these representations of fear? They're not ghosts, they're not digital afterimages, they're not apparitions or holos. They're real, or at least they feel real, they can do real damage, and they're almost impossible to kill. The best way to survive an encounter with the nightmare swarm? Run fast. Because they're generally confined to areas where the echoes of old violence linger, and the quicker you leave those areas the better. Get into whatever light you can, get somewhere safe, and the fear creature will dissipate back into a nebulous cloud, lying in wait for the next victim.

c. power up.

On August 2nd, the dust storm causing the redout and power outage will subside, and a stiff wind will take its place, washing away about two thirds of the red sand piled up on the dome. This fortuitous change in weather will make it possible to start work on getting the power back up. Residents will be able to exit the city through the usual channels so they can work on clearing the dust out of the various installations outside the city that transform wind and radiation and sunlight into power that keeps the city up and running. After they're cleared off, residents can start to get the power up by making repairs to the dust-damaged computer systems. Thankfully, once the power installations outside the city have been cleared off, an automated computer subroutine will boot up on some of the computer panels in the common areas of the residential quarters, with a user-friendly guide to repairing sand damage to the power system.

Mind you, the user guide assumes that residents have a lot of tools, supplies, and assistant bots that the current population doesn't really have on hand, so user-friendly or not, it's tougher than the system seems to think it is.

Thankfully, there is another option. Anyone with a particularly tech-savvy mind who's encountered the nightmare clouds might have picked up on it already, but the clouds are actually swarms of nanites. Released from the room that held the generators, these nanites were originally intended to conduct repairs on the city (there was a reason that room and those generators were so pristine!) that have been corrupted and are malfunctioning due to the ambient radiation in the city that has only increased since their creation. Anyone with even a basic knowledge of computers (and a very strong spine) could collect a sample of the clouds in one of the containment units from the labs or the R&D area, where the semi-functioning computer can be used to work out what's wrong with the nanites...and fix them.

If characters are able to work this out and deploy repairs to the various swarms around the city, those nanites might be super helpful for fixing some of the malfunctioning tech around the city. Food for thought!

d. the wreckage in the wasteland.

Once the emergency situation with the power is sorted out, residents might become a little curious about what caused all the trouble in the first place. The dust storm was, after all, initiated by a loud crash landing outside the city. With the dust storm abated and the windows in the Observation Area cleared off, residents will be able to see the wreckage of a spacecraft crashed into the ground, several miles out from the city. Far enough away to make it impossible to see any identifying marks, but close enough to be a tantalizing mystery for anyone so inclined.

Adventurous souls will be able to suit up and trek their way out to the site of the crash in the battery Jeeps to see what's going on, risking the rough ever-changing terrain and the possibility of a red shift, to see what might be salvageable from the crashed ship, or just in pursuit of knowledge. Once those characters approach, they will find the hulk of a badly-damaged spacecraft, about as big as a medium-sized cruise ship. The hull is badly burned, with tears in the metal, and it will be obvious to anyone who's got any experience with space travel (or even anyone who's watched enough sci-fi movies) to see that the ship didn't do well on its slow fall through the atmosphere. The metal is melted and punctured, anything that might have extended away from the hull has been burned off and lies in tatters, and the sand around the crash site is littered with metal and plastic debris.

But the one thing that's still possible to tell from the wreckage? It probably came from Anchor.

The ship is pieced together from salvaged materials, the tech will be familiar to anyone who's been in the colony for more than a couple days, and there's even a few corpses of very familiar bots lying in the sand. Approaching a large tear in the side of the hull will reveal a way inside the husk of a ship, giving access to the ship's small crew quarters section. If explorers choose to proceed inside, they'll be able to dig through what few personal items remain and find personal tablet computers and sat phones with their hard drives corrupted but possibly salvageable with the right skillset and the right technology repaired back in Anchor. They will also be able to find a way down further into the ship, though it's dark and clouded with sand and...well, quite menacing.

Because it isn't just the darkness and the danger of the red shift coming while you're trapped down there, or the danger of the ship's hull cracking with the weight of the sand piled up on its shell from the dust storm...but looking into the darkness, there's a flickering bluish glow. Digital and glitchy, it flickers from wall to wall, with the faintest impression of a human form. A face. A hand. The movement of hair or clothing. And then there's the echoing sounds - soft laughter, snippets of childrens' rhymes, unintelligible whispers or mumbles.

Well. Enter at your own risk.

ooc: exploration info.

As you can probably tell, this final prompt is kind of a doozy! While the first level of the ship is available for anyone to explore with the information provided in the prompt, going further into the ship will require mod guidance, via an NPC.

Any questions can be asked in the mod questions thread below, and if your characters have progressed to the point of wanting to explore deeper in the ship, please hit up the NPC request thread with a link to where the NPC should tag in.

Have fun guys!

Navigation.

Comments

[benhargreeves]

He had hated it, but in a lot of ways, things had been easier when he was a ghost. So much of emotion is wrapped up in the body, and he hadn't had one. So even though he felt things in stressful situations (Klaus ODing, his siblings fighting, Vanya's book...), he didn't have a heart to race, a stomach to churn, a body to go cold all over. Coming back to having a body again has been a learning process. And even though more than a month has passed, it still catches him off-guard sometimes, how intensely the physical effects of emotions can hit him.

All that is running in the back of Ben's mind, distantly, as Cho comes closer to him, touches his arms and delivers her impassioned speech about how his mother's death hadn't been his fault. At first he tries to shut it out, invalidate it silently, telling himself that she doesn't know the circumstances. That if she did know, she'd change her mind and say he was the exception. But as she keeps talking, she makes it clear that no matter what the situation or complications, she wouldn't think it was his fault.

That throws him. He thinks, from the ferocity of her conviction, that she must have some personal stake in this, too. Her family sounds traditional: had they blamed her for being born female, like she said? Was her mother infertile after her, barring any future sons? But whatever her own experiences, they don't take anything away from her words.

Ben's heart is thudding away, his arms pressed so tight to his chest that it's like he's trying to keep himself from flying apart. He swallows, little flashes of pain crossing his face without him really realizing it, even as he bites the inside of his lip and does his best to stay stone-faced. He doesn't know why, exactly, it hurts so much to be told this. That it wasn't his fault. He had just assumed that it was, and that anyone would agree. Cho insisting, over and over, that it wasn't his fault, feels rather like being stabbed. He'd never been told that by anyone apart from Klaus, and Klaus is so close that Ben almost forgets sometimes that his brother is not another piece of himself.

It isn't until she says that she's sorry his mother isn't here that Ben actually starts to cry. In his head he blames a million things - sleep deprivation, all ambient post-traumatic garbage that had already screwed him up from being around those rodents earlier, something he ate, some kind of odorless emotion gas in the air... But no matter the catalysts, when she calls him the kind of person who wants to take care of others and says she's sorry Ben's mother couldn't see him like that, he has to reach up and quickly brush hot tears from the corners of his eyes.

He gives a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of his head. He doesn't know anything about his mother. Not her name, how old she was, what she looked like. But he is sure that no possible mother - except one that had been programmed specifically to do so - would look at his life with anything resembling love, or pride. All the people he'd killed... all the blood he'd been steeped in over the years, while he was still a child. One of those children that Cho, because she is a good person, probably thinks are as innocent as babies.

"So... you don't think... anyone is just- born evil? By nature?"

His voice is thick with emotion and held-back tears, and it's only too clear this is what he's thought, about himself. That, if her guess earlier was correct, he had been taught to think about himself. Evil down to his bones, in his cells, fundamentally. Full of a darkness that needed to be contained, because the second that he came into existence, he started to hurt people.

[tenuefarfalla]

Cho shucks her gloves, dropping them onto the floor, and then from a little pocket at the waist of her leggings (usually meant to hold your house keys while you go on your run) she pulls a pale lavender handkerchief with darker purple embroidery at one corner. She tucks it into Ben's fingers as he's wiping at his eyes, and her heart breaks for him.

"No one is born evil." She says this with a kind of conviction that few people ever hear from Cho. It's not always easy to dig down this deeply into what makes her tick, and she likes to hold herself safe from pain when she can, but everyone has those things that they just can't let pass without comment. This is a big one, for her. It's not a child's fault if their mother dies in childbirth, it's not their fault if they're conceived in violence, it's not their fault if they're unwanted for whatever reason. Maybe that's the case with Ben? Maybe that's why he blames himself, because he was unwanted, but any terrible thing that happened to his mother, he didn't do that. "Hey." She reaches up, to cup his face and make him look at her. "No one is born anything. We're-- blank slates. We're a part of our mother until we're born, and her choices and feelings and actions are her own. We're born as nothing, just potential, and then our own actions shape us. We are a sum total of our choices. You can choose to do bad things, you can choose to do good things, but no one chooses to be born, no one chooses how it happens." She didn't choose her gender, her mother's complications, he didn't chose his mother's death, no baby who has ever been born into bad circumstances has been born so because they deserve it, or have done something wrong.

"You were not born bad." And then she's hugging him. Which is not something she would usually do without permission, but heck if this isn't pinging some very deep wells of personal feelings for her, too. No one asks for life, and no one chooses their family. Well, their biological family. "There are people in the world who will do bad things, for selfish reasons, and cause pain and feel nothing out of place while they do it. They weren't born that way, though. Someone taught them how to hate. Someone broke them, or they broke themselves, but it happened to them." I don't think evil by nature exists. It's just an excuse. A good person can do a bad thing, and a bad person can do a good thing, and that's-- really scary, because it means that we decide who we're going to be, but I think it's better to have the choice."

[benhargreeves]

Ben takes the handkerchief when she presses it into his hand, more out of reflex than acceptance of the gesture. But he doesn't use it; just clutches it tightly in his hand and blinks hard, fighting with all his will to force the tidal wave of awful feelings back into a manageable little container that he can bury again, deeper this time, deep enough that a conversation with a kind stranger wouldn't accidentally unearth it.

But Cho just keeps talking and every word is like a twist of the knife. Ben wants to believe her, but again he thinks, that he was not born a clean slate. He was born a baby connected to another world, full of unspeakable horrors. Had his slate never been blank? When she touches his face, Ben goes still, wary and alarmed by the intimacy of it. The gesture is a kind one, but kindness is such a foreign thing, to him. Kindness that is not Grace, acting on her programming, or Klaus, making it bearable much of the time by mixing it with humor and smiling cynicism.

Then she talks about choices, people choosing to do bad things... he wonders again if the things he had done with the Academy had been bad, had been good, had been necessary, had been cruel. He thinks that he can't entirely blame his father, for the people he'd killed on missions. Sure, he'd been a child, been trained, had been given no choices. But killing is still killing and maiming is still maiming and there must be some level at which pointing the finger at somebody else just didn't cut it.

He doesn't hug back, when Cho suddenly hugs him, but he doesn't pull away or tense up, either. He just stands there, breaths shaky and thin, wondering how he had let this whole situation get so far out of his control. Just accepting the comfort, believing her, doesn't feel like an option. No matter how nice it would be if he could. He forces himself to exhale, as slowly and deeply as possible. The words are hard to summon up, but he manages a few.

"I think... the way you see the world is very... humane. And I think - you're a very good person."

Which is decidedly not the same as saying he agrees with her. But that would be a lot to ask, on the spot. She's given him some things to think about. He folds the unused hanky up, very neatly, and offers it back to her, with the smallest smile, all tinged with sadness at the edges still.

"Thank you. For- what you said."

That had been a lot of vulnerability for Ben to show, and particularly to someone who wasn't even family. His eyes are a little red but he pulls himself together, collecting the scattered threads of his dignity and forcing himself into something resembling calm. God, if he had known talking about his mother would set him off this badly, he would have avoided the topic more carefully. At least he knows now, for the future.

"Do you... do you have enough?"

And he gives a little gesture to the carrier with the animals she had collected in it.

[tenuefarfalla]

Cho takes her handkerchief back, but she's not certain Ben won't still need it. She's not going to force the issue, though. He's hurting, and if he didn't want anyone to see it, this must be so difficult for him. Even if he's the kind of person who doesn't mind someone else seeing their pain, it still wouldn't be easy.

There are some containers in the carrier that are still empty, but Cho is not quite so obtuse that she doesn't recognize the question for what it is. Ben would probably keep going if she said she needed more, because he's also a nice person. He's just been through something very rough, emotionally, and he probably needs some time to get his head straightened out. She can always come back later. "This is good, yeah. Plus, we didn't run into anything scary. It's nice to come up here and not leave running in terror." She is only half kidding.

She's putting the container of mice back into the larger carrier when a little glowing blue dot flies through the air, and hits Ben's back. Cho frowns, tilts her head to the side, and watches as one tiny leg stretches out, recognizing the general shape of it. "You have a tiny frog on your bottom."

[benhargreeves]

The way she phrased that definitely makes it sound like she has gone running in terror from something up here, before. Ben is curious, and if things were different he would have asked a follow-up. But right now he doesn't trust his own voice, and all his mental resources are being devoted to just keeping it together until he's alone. Then he's probably going to have the rest of that cry, but not a second earlier.

He doesn't see that same dot, so it surprises him when Cho is suddenly walking around and quite openly staring at his back, and then, well, his butt. It's entirely incongruous, until she mentions that a frog has jumped on him. Then, Ben laughs, soft and shaky with the remnants of tears, twisting around to try to see it.

"I do? I don't feel anyth- oh it's tiny."

He had thought she might be exaggerating, but the frog itself is no bigger than a fingernail. Ben doesn't seem perturbed by its presence, the way he did when the mice were on him. But the angle is awkward, and so he asks.

"Do you mind, uh, relieving me of my hitchhiker, please? I don't wanna squash him."

She had been so deft with all the small creatures before, and he doesn't need to tell her what a weird angle it is, and how much he's having to crane his neck to catch a glimpse of the little guy. He'd probably be more embarrassed to ask, considering the general real estate that the frog had chosen, but honestly, he'd just had a fucking breakdown over his mom dying and he'd cried and at this point, nothing could be more mortifying.

[tenuefarfalla]

"Sure." It looks small enough that it might be able to squeeze through the air holes in the containers, but since they're heading out, and Cho has used up most of her apple pieces already, she doesn't need that container any more. It doesn't have any holes, and the little thing won't use up much air in the time it takes her to get back. So she flips open the lid, and dumps the apple pieces on the floor. "All right, I'm about to touch you in an inappropriate place. I apologize in advance." Even though it's probably not surprising. The frog is on his butt, after all.

Cho crouches down, and takes note of the way the frog's limbs are folded underneath itself. Assuming there's nothing really strange going on here, anatomically, she's pretty sure she can anticipate which way it's going to jump depending on where she nudges it. So she holds the container up and to the side, the opening angled toward the frog, and then pushes her finger lightly against Ben's jeans, moving it until it nudges the joint of one back leg, causing it to jump more or less in the direction she expected, and a slight movement of the container has it jumping right in and adhering to the wall.

Perfect. She stands up, snapping the lid back into place, and holding it up to stare at the little glowing amphibian through the clear plastic. "Have you ever seen a frog this small before?" She sounds utterly smitten. With a frog. So that's a thing.

[benhargreeves]

"It's all good. Do what you gotta do. I'm just going to not move."

And so Ben stands perfectly still, waiting while Cho works her magic. He can't really see the entire maneuver, but she barely grazes him and then she is standing up and triumphantly closing that little container. It's a little uncomfortable, sure, but not anything compared to the conversation they'd just had, or earlier when she had helped him with those tiny mice. Once she has the container at eye level he can get a better look at the little luminescent frog, giving off its little speck of glowing blue.

"Definitely not. Is it - just hatched, or do you think this kind just doesn't get any bigger than that?"

His voice is returning to normal, with every word the lingering aftereffects of his tears less and less audible. It is good to just have something concrete and good to focus his attention on; he can't bear thinking about himself, and how she must be perceiving him, and to what degree he is a monster, one bit more for today.

[tenuefarfalla]

"When they're just hatched they have tails, not legs. Tadpoles. Or Polliwogs. As they mature, they absorb their tails into their bodies for the nutrients. Froglets would still have a little bit of the tail, and... it doesn't look like he does." She turns the container slowly, looking from many angles, and holding it high enough for Ben to be able to do the same. "No tail, so he might get a little bit bigger... or he might be done growing." Either way, he is absolutely adorable, and even though she probably won't be able to take any samples from him without some very specialized equipment that she does not currently have, she can still make observations.

She's going to take him with her, she decides. He really is just too cute for words. "Did you know there are something like two dozen species of frog that could fit on a dime. Isn't that wild? A dime." Talking about frogs, that's good, right? It's safe, and it's tame, and it's not at all personal, and it'll move the conversations where she hurt him further and further into the past.

[benhargreeves]

"I didn't know."

And, bizarrely, more than anything else, that little factoid helps Ben to feel calmer, saner, less like he's broken into pieces. Because yeah, his life is kind of fucked up and his head is more than a little fucked up and there's all kind of ugly psychological issues hiding just beneath the surface... but there are more than two dozen species of frog that can fit on a dime. And that's a wonderful thing. The world is big, and full of variety, and life, and tiny frogs, and all of that is entirely indifferent to him, and his issues.

Exhaling slowly, and shakily, he manages a very small smile and nods in the direction they came, as soon as Cho has got the little frog held securely between her hands.

"Wanna head out, before anything else decides to hop onto any other inappropriate parts of my body?"

See, he's even joking now! He's fine! Please forget about the whole crying thing, Cho. Best to pretend that had never happened.

[tenuefarfalla]

Pretending that it never happened, she can do that. It's been an emotional roller-coaster, and he looks and sounds better, and she's grateful for that. She packs up her things, a good sampling of animals, and they managed to get through their acquisition without anything trying to eat them. So double bonus!

Cho happily keeps up with the useless animal factoids as they make their way back downstairs, letting her chatter be a sort of white noise. If she's talking, he doesn't have to. She resists the urge to ask him if he's all right when they part ways, and it's not easy, but she finds herself hoping that she'll see him again. It was nice talking with him, and he seems like such a truly kind person. "I'll see you around," is all she says when they head off in opposite directions. "Thanks for keeping me company."