november 2019. welcome to the void.

[modblob]

Who: Everyone in Anchor.
What: Fifth Introductory Mingle
When: The Month of November 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. outbreak.

There's a plague in the city.

What was an annoyance before, a bug that seemed to be passing, has erupted into a full-scale biomedical hazard. Onset is slow. It’s a near mystery who is infected and who isn't, who is immune and who isn't. Doors lock themselves seemingly at random to prevent people passing through. Is that person with you one of the sick? How do you know? Would they tell you if they were?

The city will do its best to isolate the ill, once again locking them out of communal areas and trying to force them down toward the MedBay for quarantine. All bots will be temporarily shifted to plague protocols, rounding up and caring for the ill as best they can. (Lucky you, you get your cough syrup with a mixer courtesy of the barbot.) But they might not always get things right, and what healthy person wants to be locked away in a ward full of the violently ill? How do the bots even know which is which?

The ill will slowly find themselves dizzy, lightheaded, with chills and fever. They may cough hard enough to spit blood from irritated throats, or sneeze so long and hard they give themselves bloody noses. The symptoms can vary wildly depending on body chemistry, species, and dozens of other factors, making it difficult to pin down a specific set that indicates a person is infected. All bodily fluids are dangerously infectious. Maybe you want to keep your distance from your friends if you start to feel the onset, to keep them safe. But you also want to keep your freedom, not get trapped in a room full of people who seem to be dying. And anyone who was exposed to the first outbreak will find themselves either completely immune to this new one through early exposure...or far more susceptible, their immune systems doing almost nothing to protect them, with extreme symptom sets that hit them much harder than the average infected.

And through all of this, that voice that cheerfully chirped out helpful hints during the item exchange, that giggled and sang songs in the crashed spaceship in the wasteland can be heard again - but this time it's different. This time, there's very little cheer left, and though the commentary is still sing-song, it's much harsher, more monotone and without much energy. 'Go on, hurry up to the MedBay. No breaking quarantine!' it says, or to those moving through the city with friends, 'You must not like those people much, are you sure you want to get them sick?' In the depths of the worst of it, in the third week of the month, people may start hearing more of those 'helpful' suggestions - 'Maybe it would be better if we just left them out in the wastelands, you know? For the greater good and all...'

Mod Note: An NPC post will be going up next weekend on redshiftrp to supplement this prompt. Keep an eye out!

b. gone to shit.

With 90% of the city's bots repurposed to serve the ill (the matchmaking bot being the notable exception), things are starting to go downhill fast elsewhere. Didn’t realize how much work the bots were actually doing? You can't avoid knowing now.

Restaurants, slowly coming back online after the increased activity in the agricultural areas, are promptly shut down again with things starting to go bad in the fridges. The VR rooms have no attendants to help with glitches. The maintenance bots are prowling the halls looking for ill people to assist to the MedBay. The spa bots are all down in the lower levels helping keep people comfortable while they convalesce, leaving the spas to run themselves. Sometimes to overflowing. It's definitely going to be an adventure discovering what else the bots were doing to keep things running smoothly.

There's no bots manning the bar (make your own drinks while you can), but this also means there are no bots cleaning up the messes people leave behind in the bar either. The detritus of people living their lives starts to pile up - which means if you don’t want garbage filling up the most used common rooms, you're going to have to apply some good old elbow grease. Exactly what you wanted to do while everyone is violently ill, right?

c. dance of the moonlight jellies.

In spite of everything going on elsewhere in the colony, something magical is happening in the lakes and ponds of the park. Maybe your healthy or recovering character stumbles across it on their own. Maybe they see the glow from a higher levels and are drawn down to it. Maybe a persistent and super helpful voice, the same voice from the item exchange, the same voice that suggested throwing the sick out into the wasteland, suggests that you should go down and look at what's happening there.

However you ended up in the park, the place is filled with a silvery glow that emanates from the ponds, rivers, and lake. Fish have come up from the bottom, from where they were buried under the sand. They look almost like East Asian dragons, for those familiar with Earth. They're long, muscular, with two sets of fins trailing in the water like legs. Their heads are delicate, beautiful things that trail whiskers in the water along beside them.

And they're dancing.

In loops and whirls, over and under each other, diving deep and then rising up again to create patterns of light and shadow. Anyone who watches for more than a minute can start to feel relief moving through them, calm, the sense that things will be okay. Watching the dance is almost like meditation. Probably, for some, a much-needed break.

Navigation.

Comments

[scowlish]

[It takes hours for Onni to wake up.

Given the opportunity to sleep uninterrupted and the sleep deficit he's been nursing, his body takes everything he seems to be offering it. Slowly, he slides down the wall until he's slouched against it, his arms crossed over his lower chest, legs crossed, cramped up in a little ball. It's not a peaceful sleep - there's a sort of restlessness as he wanders his dream space, not doing anything productive, not really resting, just pacing around with a sort of nervous energy that won't leave his limbs and heart.

When he wakes up, he's sore from the position he's been lying in, from getting less sleep than he should, from falling asleep with his eyes still stinging from crying. He feels like his body has been beaten from top to bottom and like the insides of his eyelids are made of sandpaper, dehydrated, head pounding. It takes a few moments for his brain, groggy and still half-asleep, to register where he is, that he's in his room but on Lalli's bed.

Then, abruptly, he remembers what had happened and why he feels so awful and all of his worry and fear over Lalli. It registers that he has no idea how long he's been sleeping, and the anxiety kicks in. Sitting up straight, he winces as something in his back cracks, but that completely leaves his mind when he turns to check on Lalli and sees nothing but a hollow in the bedsheets and his blankets pushed back.]

Lalli?

[It comes out as a sort of croak, and he slides off the bed, staggering to his feet and rushing to the bathroom to check if his cousin is there. Nothing. He's not in Reynir's room or the kitchen, either, and when Onni goes back to the bedroom and presses his hand against the spot where Lalli had been lying only to find it cold and barely even damp anymore.

For a while, he just stands there with his hand on the bed, staring almost blankly, processing what he's seeing, what he's feeling. The realization that Lalli had left takes a while to dawn on him, not just because he's still exhausted, but also because it's so hard to comprehend the magnitude of the emotions that are attached to it.

Lalli left. He got up while Onni was sleeping and crept out of the bedroom, and left.

Before Onni can do much more than formulate those words, his chest is rising and falling fast and shallow with panic, his ears are ringing, he feels like he can't breathe, like everything in his chest is seized up. Lalli left. He ran away. And the only reason Onni can think of that he would run away in his state is because the last thing Onni had done was pin him down while he was sick, until he was making those awful distress noises and fighting him like a wounded animal.

He feels like he's going to throw up, suddenly, and all he's aware of is the ringing in his ears and the twisting panicky nausea and the sound of his open-mouthed gasps for breath. Thoughts running so fast and so tangled that they aren't even words, just images and emotions and raw panic. And then it hits him like a hammer, the guilt and shame so intense he can barely breathe.

'I hurt him. I scared him. I made him so hurt and afraid he ran away.'

It repeats over and over in his mind, and he can't make a sound, just standing there struggling to breathe and process, paralyzed, incapable of working out what to do, how to proceed. Usually, he's good in a crisis, can keep his head well, can react logically and with purpose, but now he's completely lost, he can't think, and all he knows is that it's his fault. All of this is his fault, and he's too exhausted and overwhelmed and guilty and terrified to even begin to think of something practical to do.

A moment later, he realizes he's sunk to his knees with his arms crossed on the edge of Lalli's bed, his face buried in them, his mouth still open as he struggles to breathe, and all he can do is make a strangled noise in his throat.

There's nothing else to do. Not until Reynir comes home and snaps him out of this.]