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]

So there are zombies, where you came from?

[ No joking about it, no disbelief - just confirming that he had heard her correctly and understood what she was saying. That sort of thing was only fiction in Ben's world, but he'd spent half his time on earth as a ghost. He knows that the rules of life and death can be permeable, and that impossible things can happen at any time. ]

And you have fought them, before?

[ Not that she'd seemed up to much fighting when he came across her just now... ]

[redwinekindofgirl]

Yeah... More zombies than Living people.

[Still true, even now. The Cure hadn't been a quick thing, and even the ones who were slowly coming back to Life weren't all the way there yet. The Boneys, though... they were something else. They'd always been dangerous, even to other Dead, and she'd never seen one of them come back. There was nothing human left in them.]

Fought... not exactly. [She's swung a hedge-trimmer at a few of them once or twice.]

Hard to fight something that doesn't really notice when you harm it. They don't feel pain.

[benhargreeves]

[ It takes a moment for her words to sink in. She's not talking about a secret, underground threat, here. She's not even talking about a dawning crisis. She's talking about a world that has more monsters than survivors. His expression grows serious, sad, and he says, quietly: ]

Wow. That's awful.

[ He had known right from that first meeting that Julie is a girl who has been through some shit. But he'd been so blinded by worrying about his brother that all his empathy over that had gone out the window. Now... that's not the case.

He thinks about Five, about how he had had to grow up in an empty world, nothing living or undead there with him. Would that be better or worse than a world full of undead monsters that seemed pretty vicious and deadly? Is there any point in comparing? Weighing two apocalypses against one another? ]

But you survived them, long enough to make it to Hadriel and - now here.

[ Ben thinks that doubtless Klaus knows all this. She must have told him already, and while there is some temptation to say his goodbyes and go grill his brother for this information... that would probably be pretty shitty of him. He's really trying, to be less shitty. So he lets out a slow sigh and asks: ]

Has it always been like that, your whole life?

[redwinekindofgirl]

[... They're going to talk about this? Sure, they'll talk about this. Julie makes a small motion of her head to tell him to walk with her. If they're talking about this it's not going to be while they loiter in the middle of a corridor.]

Yeah. I didn't notice it as much when I was growing up, but we had to leave New York when I was eight and we drove all over the country looking for somewhere safe to live. It took us more than three years. [She frowns, clasping her hands behind her back and curling her fingers together tightly.]

My mom tried to make it seem like an adventure, but it wore her down. My dad... only cared about finding the next safe place. He was a General in the army. [The young woman purses her lips slightly, then sucks in a breath to continue.]

But it wasn't just the zombies, you know? Living past the end of society does things to people. I had to kill someone when I was nine years old. It wasn't the last time I had to do that. [She pauses, swallows, then casts him a small smile.] You guys, you know what that does to a kid.

[benhargreeves]

[ Ben walks with Julie, not knowing whether she'll have an easier time talking while in motion or whether she just wants to put more distance between herself and that nightmare swarm. Either way it's a good idea. He glances over at her now and then as she speaks, but also stays vigilant of where they're going, making sure they don't head to any areas where he knows these things are lurking, or anywhere too dark.

She isn't telling him much, but that only means the details she does include seem more meaningful. 'Wore her down' sounds mild, but Ben is sure the actual experience of it was much different. And her dad being in the army, that suggests a certain authoritarian ruthlessness. If he had only cared about safety, that didn't exactly suggest the most patient or affectionate parenting.

All of those suspicions being backed up, of course, by the fact that Julie had told him that first time that she and Klaus had a lot in common. And Klaus has never exactly been as discreet about how awful their childhood was as Ben's other siblings. So... chances are there maybe were some similarities, between Reginald and the General. ]

Three years... damn.

[ Ben is braced for it in a way, when she says that she'd had to kill someone when she was only nine and that it hadn't been the last time. He wasn't expecting a happy story. No - what catches him off-guard is that she says you guys - him, and Klaus, no doubt - know what that does to a kid. And Ben falters, falling behind a few steps.

She's right. Of course she's right. Ben had killed people when he was only a kid, too. He knows what it does, intimately. But he hadn't realized until just this moment that Julie would know that he knew that. That, in the process of getting to know Klaus, and some of the stuff he'd been through, that Julie might have also heard stories about him.

And it hits him all at once. There are so many things he has told Klaus that he's never spoken of to another soul. Not to Vanya, not to Diego, not to anyone. What had Klaus told her about him? How much? Which stories, which details? Did she just know the basics - that the Umbrella Academy had gone on missions as kids, had fought bank robbers and murderers, and there had been casualties? Or had he told her other things, too? Things about how their father had trained them? Things about his powers? ]

......... Yeah. I do.

[ The words come out, stiff and awkward. Ben mechanically forces himself to start moving again, but there's a brittleness to it that wasn't there before. His quiet feels louder than it had, when he was listening before. After a few strained moments of silence he says: ]

I was thinking - I was asking questions because I wanted to try to get to know one another. Since you're important to my brother and- I messed things up the first time. But- I didn't realize- I should've asked- I don't know how much Klaus has already told you about me.

[redwinekindofgirl]

[That time, when she had mentioned that she and Klaus had so much in common, she never really got that chance to explain why it might be. It had been on the surface - the drugs, the alcohol - but not the reasons behind it. If she's honest, she's glad to get that out there.

She falters mid-step when he falls back, waiting for him to catch up and ask a question that makes sense to ask, that she's not going to be coy about answering because she knows it's going to be important to Klaus that she gets along with his family. Or, at least, that she doesn't actively try to rile them up.]

Oh... he complained about you sometimes. That you'd always be nagging him to eat and not sleep in dumpsters. [She shoots a small smile his way, another of those barely-there things.] Sounded like you were really trying to take care of him.

[And she finds herself oddly grateful for that, despite not having known Klaus very long at all.]

But you were a ghost, so... it must have been really hard. When he was the only one who could see you.

[benhargreeves]

[ Ben manages a little smile and a shrug back, when Julie says that Klaus mostly complained about him being a nag. It would be brighter, if he weren't so distracted dreading what further truths she might be building up to. Still, it's clear that he doesn't mind being complained about, or that his brother thought of him as an annoyance. Ben knows how annoying he can be. He knows that he didn't always handle Klaus as well as he should have. He got angry and impatient and he could be judgmental and he knows, too, that just being around him could make Klaus so, so sad sometimes. Thinking about how he had died, how their family had fallen apart afterwards.

He doesn't know who she means it would be hard for - him or Klaus - when she talks about him being a ghost. The answer is, of course, both of them, in different ways. But is she saying it would make it harder for Ben to care for him or harder for Klaus to be around him or accept his care?

Either way, he is holding his breath, waiting for Julie to add an 'Oh and also...'. But it never comes. The uncertainty and the waiting just twist the anxiety in his chest a little tighter and so he prompts: ]

And that's all? Then - but it can't be. He must have said something else or- why... did you say that just now? About- how I would know what it does to a kid?

[ Everything about Ben's body language right now is screaming discomfort - his hands buried deep in his pockets and so much tension in his neck and shoulders, his eyes fixed to the corridor in front of them, not looking over at Julie for even a moment. God, this is horrible. Talking to people is horrible. It's not often he wishes he was a ghost again, but right now... well. It would be easier even if it was worse. ]

[redwinekindofgirl]

[It doesn't occur to her just why this might be so important. That Ben has had so little control over how anyone has spoken about him for so many years that this might be a far more sensitive issue that it might be with others. Klaus had kept the things he told her to mostly things about himself, but Ben had been so intrinsically linked into some of those things.]

He's told me about how he grew up. The Umbrella Academy? I know he wasn't fighting crime on his own.

[She sighs, and finally looks at him enough to add up the physical signs of his discomfort. He's not looking at her. The tension across his shoulders. She might be unobservant at times but she isn't blind.]

And what you can do, he told me a bit about it. I mean... I haven't asked what you did back there. [So maybe that part was obvious.] But, like... nothing super-personal? Just about him. The rehab, shit like that. That you've always been there for him.

[benhargreeves]

[ Ben winces just a little when she mentions what he'd done back there. Well, that's one question answered. He admits: ]

I - didn't know if you'd seen that.

[ They'd both been running and all his attention had been focused on stopping the threat, so he hadn't known whether or not she looked back or just kept going. He had been kind of hoping she hadn't. But, of course, he isn't that lucky.

The fact that she had seen, and was so calm about it - well, even if Klaus had warned her what his powers are, that shows she is someone who can handle a lot. Ben knows how horrifying his powers are. How horrifying he is. Even glimpsing that for a few seconds is enough to send most people screaming.

Some of the tension in his gut loosens when she says Klaus hadn't really gone beyond talking what was relevant to his own life. He should have known that. Should've trusted his brother more. But it's been a point of conflict, before. Klaus is so open, compared to Ben. He just talks about stuff in a way that Ben doesn't - or couldn't. ]

I've tried to be here for him. But I- there's been so much I haven't protected him from.

[ Now that he'd asked those questioned, acted so intense and strange, if he just leaves things without explanation, what is she going to think? He's sort of painted himself into a corner here where, in being so insistent on knowing what she knows, he now kind of has to explain why, and in doing so, tell her a little. But he would rather do it, himself, than worry about how someone else might have framed it.

So he speaks, words coming out in fits and starts, painfully. Saying them is like pulling teeth, but at least he can manage it. Because Julie had said she killed someone as a kid, too, so maybe she won't look at him too differently, after. ]

Sorry to- be weird. I - thought maybe he'd told you more, because of what you said. Because, with the Umbrella Academy, I mean, we all... killed people. Even Klaus a couple times. Just... um. [ The silence stretches, taut and awkward, until Ben manages: ] Most of it. Was me. I was the- whenever a lot of people needed to be dead, that was my job.

[redwinekindofgirl]

[It might have been something she'd have found to be way too much a couple of years ago, but when you world hop for a while you tend to see things and 'interdimensional Cthulhu tentacles' is about the mid-range on the weird and freaky shit that Julie has seen just in the past two years.

Still pretty horrifying. Not enough to put her off, though.]

It's not weird. I mean--... I guess it's understandable to be kinda freaked out when you know someone's been telling a total stranger shit about you.

[She shrugs, brushing it off and quite sure she wouldn't like it either if she was in his position. And she has questions, too, about his powers and what he got up to back home if he'd want to answer them. For now, she keeps them to herself.]

And-- I dunno. It's messed up, right? Kids killing people.

[benhargreeves]

Did Klaus tell you our sister wrote a whole book about all our fucked up family stuff, and then published it?

[ Ben might not be as mad about that as Diego had been, but - well, he doesn't really get the impulse. At all. What had made her think that airing all that would make any of it any better? And some of the things she'd said about him... he knows she had never thought he would read any of them. She'd thought he was dead and gone, when in actuality he was dead and not-gone. But that doesn't make it easier, having read her real interpretation of him, presented to all those strangers as fact. ]

Yeah, no fucking kidding.

[ Even in a world like Julie's where it sounds like there's danger around every corner, it still sucks she'd had go through that. Ben wonders if her parents had encouraged her to be violent, to protect herself - or whether they'd been almost entirely uninvolved in it. He wouldn't know how to ask, though, and he isn't sure he ought to anyway. ]

Sorry to hear you're a member of the world's shittiest club.

[redwinekindofgirl]

[She shakes her head. That particular titbit had never come up in conversation, yet she would have been more surprised if none of the siblings had ever done something like that. Surely it's in human nature to want people to know your story, and for all their strange abilities, they certainly act entirely human.]

Yeah, well, I guess I'm still alive. So that's something.

[Eventually, if they ever talk about it, Ben would find out that her mother never wanted her to face the horrors that the world could throw at her. It was always her father who insisted. Her father who taught her to shoot. Her father who had her stand there and watch when she shot a boy who was trying to drag her out of the car while he turned and then told her to shoot him again.

And she'd done it.]

Lots of people aren't. Like my mom. My ex. My best friend's little brother. [A shrug.] But I think it's the people who walk around looking like they're still alive, but they're not, that's the worst. Not the zombies, but the people who still have a heartbeat and are just waiting for it to end. My dad got like that. But now he's gone, too.

[benhargreeves]

[ Ben looks over at her then, raising his eyebrows, fake-offended. He knows she will probably be able to tell the difference, because she has actually seen him angry before. This is just a performance, a joke capitalizing on the humor of her saying at least she's still alive... to a guy who had been dead for a decade and a half. Ben adds: ]

Wow, okay, just brag about it why don't you? Harsh. Some of us didn't live past our teens, you know.

[ And he thinks Julie will get it. He can't joke like this with people who haven't been through awful things. But if she's so close to Klaus she must be okay with how he uses humor to cope, and Ben is similar, if less vocal about it most of the time.

That humor fades, though, when she begins to recite the people she'd lost, and... it's a long list. When she talks about people losing their will to go on, Ben says: ]

For what it's worth... I barely know you, but I can't picture you ever getting like that. You seem... strong.

[ And sometimes, when humor isn't enough to get through, all Ben has to fall back on is trying his hardest to feel useful, like he's accomplishing something, taking some action. He thinks that might be the key to helping Julie equalize after that nightmare swarm had terrorized her.

So, briskly, he says: ]

Come on, I've got a few places I wanna search to see if I can find you a backup inhaler for you. I won't know if it's the right kind unless you're there, though.