september 2019. welcome to the void.

[modblob]

Who: Everyone in Anchor.
What: Third Introductory Mingle
When: The Month of September 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. turrets.

That power surge kicked off some sh... stuff, all right. It took a while for the systems to cycle back on, but two new areas of Anchor are now accessible and usable. One of them is nice and relaxing and safe, and we'll get to that one in a minute. The other one, addressed first, is not very nice and not very relaxing and definitely not safe.

The internal defense systems on the upper levels have come to life, and have targeted anyone within their range as a hostile entity. Get ready to run the gauntlet if you want to turn them off - you'll have to dodge lasers, bullets, and aggressive defense bots (that can be rewired and/or rebooted to assist characters instead of trying to murder them). The reward? Getting to the heavily protected (think many many murderbots and lasers) security control room. If you can make it, you'll be able to reboot the internal defenses, turning off the aggressive targeting and having access for the first time to surveillance of almost all of Anchor. Those areas your characters didn't know were there? Revealed. Those dense patches of jungle-like growth in the agricultural center? You've got a spotlight into their heart.

Though, huh, not all the cameras seem to be working. What's with those screens that show up from time to time that are nothing but static?

Oh well, doesn't really matter, does it?

b. hot springs episode.

One of the areas adjacent to the bar and intimacy lounge has been sputtering on and off ever since the power surge. One evening, with a loud crack and a humming sound that slowly dissipates, the lights come on and water starts flowing down the artificial waterfall into the fountain out front. The spa is back online!

The lobby is inviting and zen, with holographic walls that depict scenic locations (some of them very unlike Earth), with fountains splashing delicately on either side of the door. The attendants are slightly malfunctioning bots, but the most harm they'll do is bring you six towels when you ask for one, or a bucket of massage oil to work on those knots in your back with.

There are three areas in the spa, each of them fully-outfitted with towels, robes of all sizes, fuzzy slippers, the works. One has all the amenities of a Turkish bath, right down to the fantastically arched roofs and mosaics of Istanbul. One is designed not unlike a Japanese hot spring, though the spring is heated artificially rather than naturally. The springs are large enough to be communal in some areas and small enough to be private in others, varying in depth from deep enough to swim on one end and shallow enough to sit on the bottom on the other. All hot springs have a stone shelf around the edges where those who don't want to swim can sit. The last area is more Western, with steam rooms, saunas, massage tables, and mud baths for the adventurous.

One thing all of these areas have in common: the settings on virtually everything can be adjusted to taste. Not in the traditional way, either. The steams and waters can be tweaked to be soporific, can serve as muscle relaxants, can ease anxiety, and can even bolster moods. None of these effects are involuntary, and none of them are brought on by drugs - it's more an advanced mix of pheromones and harmless compounds that can affect a single person or a given pool or room. Also, the baths and hot springs have adjustable bubble settings. The water colors can change, some of them even allowing characters to dye their hair the color that's been selected for the tub without staining their skin. Bubbles of all kinds can rise up out of the water, from the foamy comfort of childhood bubble baths to hovering golden bubbles that chime when you pop them. Characters can choose from a variety of bath salts, scents, and oils - the spas were designed not just for relaxation, but for pure and simple fun.

c. joe's dirt.

So you've survived the security malfunction. You've washed off the dirt and anxiety at the spa. But the newly reactivated security stations throughout Anchor have revealed something odd. There's a blip in the power systems in one area of the agricultural level, like something is siphoning off power from the main lines. Tracking down the source in the deep tangle of underbrush won't be easy, and there may be a few mutated, fanged, clawed cattle that maneuver shockingly well between the trees, but eventually you'll come to a breach in Anchor's wall. At first it just looks like a crack, but it's large enough to squeeze through and there's the darkness of an open space behind it. A tunnel, leading down into the earth outside, well below surface level and thus largely safe.
Wires run along the roof and floor, though the tunnel itself is dark. Walk long enough and you'll come to a wider space, open enough for two or three people to move around comfortably at the same time. It's still dark, lit only by screens that show the same security feeds that are available at the stations throughout the city. And others. Angles on the surface that show Anchor from a distance, and other visuals that don't show Anchor at all, trained instead on massive structures or formations or lakes out on the surface somewhere. But there's something more disturbing: there are cameras set to record some people's rooms. And the only rooms that are shown are occupied.

Someone has been here, recently enough to track where new people have moved in.

On the floor in one corner, there's a crumpled photograph of a man some might recognize as Creepy Joe, happy and whole, with a little girl sitting on his shoulder. It looks like it's been stamped into the dirt.

Navigation.

Comments

[abheirrant]

His eyes are also on that ruined spot on the floor, locked there as though he could fix it if he stared hard enough. Thus far, it isn't working.

"At least I may wake from a nightmare," he laments, his hands going from wringing one another to picking at a wrinkle in his sleeve. Even in death, he caters to all the same nervous habits he had before. "This is the waking world now, and it is all I have."

Realizing he's going to pick a hole in his clothes and that, given how he needs those layers to successfully hide what he is, he really shouldn't do that, he drops his hands to his sides as he gives Poison a sideways glance. "Thank you for your proof, Miss Poison. For having cared enough to have proof of my existence and our meeting."

[writtendestiny]

He doesn't know her, not yet, and the sting of that doesn't go away... but he seems willing to know her and that helps take the sharp edge away from it all.

"I still care," she says, albeit carefully. The idea that he might be afraid, now, of how much she might know and what she might say to others is one that has already crossed her mind.

"If you don't want me to say anything to anyone... I won't."

[abheirrant]

He thinks to ask Poison why she would offer that; he considers reminding her of the rotted spot on the floor before them, of the danger he could easily present to the people in this new world. He wonders what they'd do if they knew an undead creature walked among them, and fears what he'd do if he felt cornered. He has so many amends to make, and no idea just how long he has to make them.

And so, he shakes his head, shame etching into his visible features. "I am afraid of what they'd think. I am already afraid of what I think. I- I lived a life judged. I need time to find my place here. To find what purpose I have left."

[writtendestiny]

"You can't do that by hiding from everyone," Poison points out.

She moves away from the wall and to the discoloured patch on the floor. Lightly, with the tip of her toe, she scuffs at it. The wood crumbles slightly under her shoe.

And still, it doesn't frighten her. Carlisle would have to show willing malice for her to turn on him now, and she doesn't believe for a moment that he is all that far removed from the person that she knew in Hadriel, even if he's been through more than enough to change him.

"I tried that once. It doesn't work, and all I did was hurt people."

cw: suicidal ideation

[abheirrant]

As much as he'd prefer not to admit it, she's right: he can't find what purpose he has, if any, by sequestering himself away as usual. He was lucky the first time, as the healers who pieced him back together after his failed Hunt had discovered his talent for healing -- he knew his purpose before he realized he was cursed, had it to fall back on whenever he felt like giving in to despair. His father died, his uncles vanished, and he was the failure of a dying bloodline, but he still had a use, a way to serve his goddess. People still needed him, and through his service, he could simultaneously bring pride to his lineage and make amends for continuing to exist when he should have died long ago.

He doesn't have any of that here. He doesn't have his bloodline, his people, or his healing. He's not sure if his goddess can still hear him, or if she'd even care in the slightest for a being who is now the antithesis of all he was taught -- all he was in life. There is a sickening, ravenous bitterness clawing at him all the time, feeding upon his guilt; he wants to assuage his conscience, but struggles to conceive how he could do any good to anyone anymore. Why not hide from it? Why not spare everyone his misery by finding a way to rid the world of himself?

Carlisle knows why -- he's afraid of what the end means. He had once feared the tattered remnants of his soul would be abandoned in the Land Beyond Living if he simply gave up. He now knows that his premature death brought much worse than that. What might another death bring? Will the Blight Heir rise a second time, against all odds? He doesn't know, and now that he has experienced an end worse than death, his uncertainty is more terrifying than it ever was in life.

He pulls in a deep breath, trying to calm himself before he rots another spot in the floor from his agitated nerves. "Tell me of it," he requests. "Unless you already have."

[writtendestiny]

Poison, for all her youth and apparent inexperience, knows what it is to feel entirely powerless. She knows how it is to feel as if you have no control of your destiny, and that fate is just laughing at you while it pulls the strings of your life in the background.

"I never did," she murmurs, shaking her head. She can't remember the last time she did tell someone about it. Her actions then had been a testament to the selfishness of a teenage girl too convinced, and yet at the same time not at all convinced enough of her importance.

Poison sighs.

"Where I come from... and it isn't something most people know - our entire world is controlled by one person. The Hierophant. That one person writes everything important that ever happens. The rules of the land, even the laws of nature, and no one is above them. When I found out, it... I didn't take it very well."

[abheirrant]

Carlisle's eyes flick from the floor to Poison -- that is certainly a dangerous power, one he cannot imagine being placed in the hands of someone so young. Then again, he never imagined he'd rise from the dead and bring ruin to his entire town, yet here they both are, terrible examples of gifts gone wrong.

"What did you do?" he asks softly, no judgment in his voice. He's not in a place to cast such stones -- not anymore.

[writtendestiny]

He's not to know she did the worst of it before she even knew the power was hers.

"When I met Melcheron - that was his name - and he told me that my whole life was just... something written in a book, I stopped. I stopped eating, I stopped trying, I stopped doing anything." And when she thinks back on it, she's ashamed of how she acted. It had felt like the only thing she could do then.

"I couldn't stand the idea that I had no control over anything. It felt like my whole life had been a joke."

[abheirrant]

As someone who has felt as though he had little to no agency his entire life, Carlisle cannot help but commiserate, even if he cannot fully relate to the situation. To find out she was merely written into existence, her choices predetermined by the whims of a writer -- that is a struggle Carlisle cannot even imagine.

"Those you hurt, then" —he'd thought maybe she was the Hierophant, given what they were talking about and the way she worded it, but he assumes he may be wrong now that she mentions someone else— "who were they? And would they have not also been written into being?"

[writtendestiny]

"Well... yes, of course. Knowing that didn't help, either."

She'd been ready to see it all end. A ridiculous, childish tantrum that had served little purpose at all, until it served as a vehicle for an important realisation.

"I decided that if I had no control over my life, I wouldn't live it, and... everything started to fade away. Everyone around me started to get sick. Even the Phaerie lords and ladies. I was... stubborn, and selfish, and I nearly killed them all." Poison frowns and shakes her head. There's no way to phrase it that makes it sound good.

"Because it was my story. It couldn't exist without me. Because I was the next Hierophant."

[abheirrant]

Oh, his initial assumption had been right, in a way, but that doesn't make the reality Poison faced any easier to swallow.

"Like a poison to them," he muses under his breath. "In that regard, I suppose the name makes, um... sense."

Murmuring an apology at how rude his immediate thought was, he continues. "But you did not know, did you? It was an accident."

[writtendestiny]

"I suppose so. But I chose my name, when I was fourteen." Just to make it clear, in all respects, that it wasn't something she got as a result of what she did before she finally realised her destiny.

"... I didn't know. I don't think I ever would have known. Melcheron was supposed to tell me... I think. He was murdered before he could."

[abheirrant]

"Oh. Well, er."

He clears his throat, deciding another apology regarding the remark about her name would just make him look even more foolish. He's done plenty of that in this conversation already, what with his earlier tirade. At least there's one thing he can commiserate with her on:

"Make that two of us, then, who knew not what evil we could unleash upon our worlds."

[writtendestiny]

It's not the first time someone has made a remark about her name and no doubt it won't be the last... nor the most colourful. 'Poison' is a strange thing to be called, even where she comes from.

"I was a child having a tantrum. Now, I'm the Hierophant, and the world is in my hands until I hand it over to my successor."

She says it so easily, so matter-of-factly.

"But I can't do anything here. This story isn't mine."

[abheirrant]

"I cannot imagine this is a story many would choose, if given the chance. I certainly wouldn't."

Not that Anchor hasn't been a breath of figurative fresh air composed to the ruins of the life he left behind, but if he had his druthers, that life he left behind wouldn't be in ruins at all. He pushes a sigh through him.

"May both of our stories improve from here. I cannot imagine mine any worse, but... I suppose I thought that before, didn't I?"