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Entry tags:
- !mod post: intro mingle,
- asoiaf: arya stark,
- assassin's creed: ratonhnhakéton,
- dctv: mick rory,
- ffxv: noctis lucis caelum,
- hunger games: finnick odair,
- marble hornets: brian thomas,
- mcu: peter parker,
- original: athena parker,
- original: carlisle longinmouth,
- overwatch: hanzo shimada,
- red dead redemption: charles smith,
- red dead redemption: kieran duffy,
- samurai jack: scaramouche,
- ssss: onni hotakainen,
- star wars: kylo ren,
- tales of symphonia: zelos wilder,
- umbrella academy: ben hargreeves
january 2020. welcome to the void.
Who: Everyone in Anchor.
What: Seventh Introductory Mingle
When: The Month of January 2020
Where: Around and outside the city.
Warnings: Please add any warnings in the subject lines.

What: Seventh Introductory Mingle
When: The Month of January 2020
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. champagne supernova.
Normally, the changes in the sky are subtle, happening between glances or over the course of days.
That's not the case now, when the bright sky with its three suns is wiped away in an explosion of blue light, right at sunrise on the morning of January 1st. The light pulses across the sky in uneven blazes, sending out lattices of what might be lightning or something worse. There's no moon. No brightness. Just this lightning-storm brilliance in space, shedding little light on the world below.
And the suns don't come back on. As the day wears on, the supernova brightness in the sky starts to fade out and no new light appears. The sky is static and black, with no stars, no moons, no suns. The mild rolling blackouts that started with the opening of the relaxation room intensify with the sudden loss of solar power, as the backup systems try to compensate for the increased use of power.
For a moment, power goes out in Anchor entirely, leaving the place plunged into darkness.
The darkness doesn't last. Thanks to those generators everyone worked so hard to sort out, the backup systems struggle back to life, keeping the lights on and the bar, kitchen, and agricultural supports open, but there are some things that the limited power just can't cover.
That's not the case now, when the bright sky with its three suns is wiped away in an explosion of blue light, right at sunrise on the morning of January 1st. The light pulses across the sky in uneven blazes, sending out lattices of what might be lightning or something worse. There's no moon. No brightness. Just this lightning-storm brilliance in space, shedding little light on the world below.
And the suns don't come back on. As the day wears on, the supernova brightness in the sky starts to fade out and no new light appears. The sky is static and black, with no stars, no moons, no suns. The mild rolling blackouts that started with the opening of the relaxation room intensify with the sudden loss of solar power, as the backup systems try to compensate for the increased use of power.
For a moment, power goes out in Anchor entirely, leaving the place plunged into darkness.
The darkness doesn't last. Thanks to those generators everyone worked so hard to sort out, the backup systems struggle back to life, keeping the lights on and the bar, kitchen, and agricultural supports open, but there are some things that the limited power just can't cover.
b. tower of babelfish.
The first, and perhaps the most noticeable system to start failing, are the auto-translation programs. While not affecting every area in Anchor equally, communication between those who speak different languages is going to be a lot more difficult. The effects are spotty, coming and going, sometimes completely failing, leaving only people's naturally-spoken languages available. Sometimes it just struggles, making conversations sound a lot more like babelfish translations than recognizable speech. People themselves seem to be affected differently by the translation struggles, depending on who and where they are. There's no rhyme or reason to when and how it fails. But the problem persists through most of the month.
c. the hidden passage.
The second system failure is harder to spot.
At the end of what seemed to be a maintenance hallway, a set of doors have appeared from behind what used to be a shielded hologram of a dead end. The doors stick out from their surroundings: thick metal, barred heavily from the outside. A clear attempt to keep something locked away inside, not to keep people from entering.
For those adventurous enough, or foolish enough, to wrestle the locks open, a problem will reveal itself. A short flight of stairs, leading down into an area flooded by murky water. It's hard to see more than branching halls down below.
Those who choose to brave the water will find a hallway lined with bulkheads and sealed doorways, all guarding rooms that could be accessed with the right combination of smarts and brute force. It's the question of what would be ruined by the water if the doors are opened that might give people pause. What kind of secrets could be wiped out or destroyed if the doors are forced and the water passes through the bulkheads? Can the water be drained? How?
But there is one room open, or mostly open, where the bulkhead doors didn't quite manage to seal when the area flooded. It'll be a squeeze, for bigger characters, but the flooded room beyond contains artifacts preserved behind glass - strange medallions, strings of glowing beads, broken sceptres, arrows fletched with feathers from creatures no one has ever seen before.
Only one object isn't sealed away. It's a handful of small orbs, with shifting colors, held in place by a shield array that still seems to function, for the most part. They can be touched, can even be removed from the stand with the right know-how or a willingness to smash stuff.
But once an orb is touched, the colors start to spin more rapidly. The more it's handled, the brighter and faster the colors shift. Whether it takes hold immediately or not is up to you, but those who handled the orb will find the bright colors start to glow under the surface of their skin, in the shape of veins, glowing bright for a few minutes before fading. And those people bring a different kind of contagion back with them to the surface. Memory loss, communicated from one person to the next via contact. It can be partial or complete, or not happen to your character at all - they can be an unwitting "carrier" of the effects, passing it on without experiencing the losses themselves. The loss can last from hours to weeks, with carriers being "infected" for the duration of that time.
It also leaves behind magical traces, ones that don't fade after memories return. The cleverest might start to wonder if it wasn't a kind of inoculation, though against what, it remains to be seen.
At the end of what seemed to be a maintenance hallway, a set of doors have appeared from behind what used to be a shielded hologram of a dead end. The doors stick out from their surroundings: thick metal, barred heavily from the outside. A clear attempt to keep something locked away inside, not to keep people from entering.
For those adventurous enough, or foolish enough, to wrestle the locks open, a problem will reveal itself. A short flight of stairs, leading down into an area flooded by murky water. It's hard to see more than branching halls down below.
Those who choose to brave the water will find a hallway lined with bulkheads and sealed doorways, all guarding rooms that could be accessed with the right combination of smarts and brute force. It's the question of what would be ruined by the water if the doors are opened that might give people pause. What kind of secrets could be wiped out or destroyed if the doors are forced and the water passes through the bulkheads? Can the water be drained? How?
But there is one room open, or mostly open, where the bulkhead doors didn't quite manage to seal when the area flooded. It'll be a squeeze, for bigger characters, but the flooded room beyond contains artifacts preserved behind glass - strange medallions, strings of glowing beads, broken sceptres, arrows fletched with feathers from creatures no one has ever seen before.
Only one object isn't sealed away. It's a handful of small orbs, with shifting colors, held in place by a shield array that still seems to function, for the most part. They can be touched, can even be removed from the stand with the right know-how or a willingness to smash stuff.
But once an orb is touched, the colors start to spin more rapidly. The more it's handled, the brighter and faster the colors shift. Whether it takes hold immediately or not is up to you, but those who handled the orb will find the bright colors start to glow under the surface of their skin, in the shape of veins, glowing bright for a few minutes before fading. And those people bring a different kind of contagion back with them to the surface. Memory loss, communicated from one person to the next via contact. It can be partial or complete, or not happen to your character at all - they can be an unwitting "carrier" of the effects, passing it on without experiencing the losses themselves. The loss can last from hours to weeks, with carriers being "infected" for the duration of that time.
It also leaves behind magical traces, ones that don't fade after memories return. The cleverest might start to wonder if it wasn't a kind of inoculation, though against what, it remains to be seen.
GLOOM AND DOOM, TIME FOR TERROR ROOM
Since their last venture, a couple of the bulkheads have been opened one by one through a variety of means. The door he tried to rot previously has been unlocked, the room beyond now as flooded as the hallway; another in the middle of the hall has been nearly destroyed, a part of the wall around the bulkhead itself coming down in the process. All the doors at the end of the corridor remain closed, their secrets yet to be seen.
And maybe they won't be seen, as Carlisle has no doubt whatever could be lurking behind them is likely in there for a reason. He eyes a bulkhead where the metal around the door has been welded shut as an extra layer of security.
"I assume a lock alone was not enough for this door," he remarks, not sure if he wants to know why.
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"Look at all these. People been getting to the good shit before us. Fucked up. And none of them are posting all over the network about whatever they found which goes to show how altruistic everyone is. Meaning: not at all."
He runs his fingers along the weld of the door, just to check to see if he could bash it in himself. But that's a no. Not unless he wants to dislocate his shoulder, which he doesn't. And why should he when he has a human decay machine that he can point in the direction of something and make it fall apart?
"Alright, you're up Carlisle. Do your thing."
Look at that, he remembered his name.
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"You seem so confident this will work this time," he mutters, closing his eyes and focusing his energies before him. He keeps his control over them, recalling what happened last time -- and the way Kabal nearly crushed his head against the rot-resistant door to snap him out of it. He likes his head in one piece, thank you very much.
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But he'd rather not get his hands dirty.
"Practice makes perfect, I'm helping. How are you gonna learn if you don't do?"
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He would leave and isolate himself to the wastes, but a few notable people insist their lives are bettered by his company. Ever a coward through and through, Carlisle is desperate to avoid suffocating in the solitude that so burdened him in life, and so, he remains, despite his good judgment. That puts him in contact with people -- and in healthy doses he has belatedly realized he needs -- but also in proximity of less savory characters like Kabal, hence his current predicament.
Rust blossoms beneath his fingers; he assumes Kabal will tell him if it's not working.
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"See? you're doing it. Easy peasy." He folds his arms and leans against the far wall to wait, not wanting to be too close to whatever it is he's doing. He'd rather his skin not start decaying again, it's in a bad enough state as it is.
"I don't know why you're always complaining about. I'm gonna share the spoils with you. What's the problem?"
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"The problem is that I can do this at all," he hisses. "The problem is what a danger to Anchor my continued presence presents, if this is all I'm good for now. And exercising a command over necrotic energies may only empower them further, like a muscle growing stronger with repeated use. Excursions like this may only be exacerbating a future problem in the making."
In good news, the wall is definitely corroded enough to break through; in bad news, the water around him is tinted with rust again, the ruddy color spreading its way toward where Kabal has planted himself.
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"So you become a badass rust master. What exactly is the problem here?" He watches as the water starts to tinge with red, flakes of the door falling off and causing ripples in the tainted water. Finally it actually dawns on him what that problem might be. "Afraid you can't control it and you'll just obliterate everything? It happens."
He's relatively chill about all this, taking a few steps away but not with any semblance of thinking he's in danger. "When you've got magic powers, or whatever is making that happen: jinsei, chi, souls of the damned, whatever. Eventually it all explodes or gets unhinged. Not really your fault, and nothing to be done, so why worry about it now?"
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"Those who believe there is nothing to be done only find nothing because they stop looking," he cuts back, the denial heavy in his voice. "There has to be something. I- I cannot believe otherwise."
Of course not, as he believed that his entire life: that his goddess would spare his tainted soul from damnation, that his affliction would not fully define him, that through his service and hard work, he would be redeemed... and look where his faith got him in the end. He's barely more than a husk, an animated corpse clinging to the scraps of his identity, desperately trying to remain himself rather than sinking into his monstrous nature once more. Maybe all he did wasn't enough, or maybe Kabal is right. Maybe there's nothing to be done, no point in existing, no reason to keep moving forward—
He shakes his head, the rest of his body trembling, his eyes bright in the low light; the chill is back in the air, but this time, it is fixated around the man before him rather than the wall beside him.
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He shifts ever so slightly from where' he's leaning against the wall, because is Carlisle actually glaring at him? Oh that's rich. That's real cute.
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And yet, this man understands him so well. The very notion is equal parts appalling and infuriating.
"I controlled it now, but to what end?" he demands to know, taking a step toward Kabal; his fingers curl against his palms as his temper flares, the fabric taut on the skeletal knuckles beneath. He should be afraid, but all he can feel is wrath bubbling against the cold depths of his lifeless chest. "I have lost control of it so many times already. I can manage it when I'm forced into theft, but not when someone's life depends on it? How long until it happens again? And how many will be on the receiving end? How many will rise from the dead this time? That's not who I want to be!"
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Sure once it had been a generator room and they might have killed the power to all the residents, but in Kabal's defense he didn't think about that because that's a problem for other people.
"When someone's life depends on it? You rotting doors to get to dying people? There's people trapped in here?" Well that's new and interesting and potentially exploitable. "Who was stuck behind a door? Why were you... wait."
Wait a second.
"Hold on back up. Rise from the dead? Why the fuck do you know about that?"
Because obviously Carlisle has somehow found out about Kabal's past, and isn't talking about himself.
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As it turns out, losing his temper makes him lose a great deal of his discretion, as well. "Know about what?" he spits, seething. "All the horrible things I've done? Because it's what I do now, apparently. It's what I'm good for! I can heal, sure, but you know what'd be great? Rotting holes in walls, draining the life out of everything within arm's reach, and uncontrollably raising the dead. What a productive and useful member of this place I am with skills like that! Thank you for opening my eyes!"
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It's not a good memory and his hands go to his hookswords in an instant. Carlisle might be useful but if there's the barest hint of him being an actual threat to Kabal he's gonna slice him to bits. A threat to the rest of the place? That's fine. Kabal only cares about Kabal and damn the consequences.
He... has no idea what Carlisle is talking about. It doesn't sound like him anymore, or look like him really, almost as if there's been some magical shift into someone with a backbone that wasn't going to take Kabal's shit.
Well.
That won't do.
"You're gonna want to stop doing whatever the fuck it is you're doing." His voice is low and calm, glaring at Carlisle from behind the mask. First instinct is to attack him, or if not that at least threaten it, but he can see the area around them decaying, even the water around his feet seems to be strangely rotten. He's not gonna touch him if he can help it.
Instead he swings the hookswords to his side, crouches low and then disappears in a wave of purple energy. He hasn't actually vanished, he's just moving far to fast to be seen, darting around Carlisle to stand behind him, one sword out and pointed at the back of his head.
"Never done that in water before, that's actually fucking awesome." His threatening display looses something when he sounds kind of giddy at the results. While he's now a good distance away from where he'd been, there's a strange tunnel through the water showing the path he took that remains for a few seconds before splashing back down.
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Carlisle spins on his heel, only to be met with a sword aimed right at his face. All that keeps him from stumbling backward in terror is the thought that he might be split asunder if he moves even a hair. The glow of his eyes dissipates, his frame trembling as he is gripped with a sudden, paralyzing fear: if his physical body is destroyed, who is to say what remains of his aura will not manifest into an incorporeal wraith, an aberration incapable of empathy and human rationale? Who could even deal with such a threat were that to happen? And what would be the consequences for what few friends he has made in Anchor?
He'd expressed that fear once to Qubit, but now, when faced with the edge of a blade, it rises again at the back of his throat like a suffocating, viscous bile. Kabal may be reveling in delight at his impressive display of speed, but Carlisle can barely manage a sentence, intimidation preventing him from stringing together words in a coherent way.
"I- wh— how?"
How is it that you, a muscular oaf for whom such a feat should be impossible without magic or supernatural trickery, managed to get behind me so deftly might be what he was going for, but that'll have to do.
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He chuckles, lowering the sword. Carlisle looks himself again, back to being terrified and compliant and a good little lackey. But Kabal saw that, the hint of defiance, and worse, that there might be something behind that. Every good henchman has delusions of grandeur and thinks they can take over (himself included) so it's only natural at some point they'll test those who are their betters.
But what he just saw hints at the fact that Carlisle is likely more powerful than he's letting on.
Or perhaps that he knows about.
"Got it out of your system now?"
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"Yes," he murmurs, wondering just how much of what he said actually caught Kabal's attention. Discretion is difficult when it comes to his true nature: if he's not fighting against the vile temperament that come with being a Revenant, he's losing control of his magic even when trying to do good. Healing is complicated, as the energies required to mend directly counteract those keeping him animated; however, necrotic magic, which should be a challenge to control even in this state, comes to him so naturally now, despite his never having practiced with them in life. He rots walls and raises the dead without even knowing, unconscious of his energies seeping into the surfaces and corpses around him until it's too late. He could do so much worse to the people of Anchor if he actually tried, couldn't he?
He doesn't want to think about it. As it is, he's desperate to keep his status among the non-living as under-wraps as his physical frame, and throwing a tantrum where he lists aloud some of the more despicable things he's done does not help. He glances toward the wall -- the rust has eaten completely through it, making a few hand-sized holes at eye-level. At least that's one job well done, no matter how reluctant he was to do it in the first place.
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As for the door it's rusted enough to be destroyed, so time to focus on that and ignore everything that just happened. Emotions are for other people.
Holstering the swords on his back he aims a kick at the door, disintegrating it into pieces and making a hole big enough to fit through.
"Come on. Let's see what we found." Still we. They're still partners in this even if Carlisle doesn't want to be.
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He'd expected a storeroom with shelves, each filled with junk that Kabal would no doubt rifle through and assign arbitrary value; he would have been pleasantly surprised if there'd been something like a bedroom, or another kitchen, or a passage to something less dank and flooded than the hallway they just left. What greets both Carlisle and Kabal instead is an empty white room with a single metal chair in the center. Bolted to the floor, the chair's armrests and legs house unlatched, metal restraints, as though waiting for a prisoner to be seated.
It looks like something out of a torture chamber, and Carlisle decides right then and there that he doesn't like it one bit. A shudder runs up and down his spine, unseen pressure weighing upon him from all angles as he detects magic all around them; it riles his own energies, choking them with their strength.
"I—" There's a current of a hum under his voice as he pulls in a breath. "We shouldn't be here. There's- do you feel that?"
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Kabal stops dead. Not moving. Barely even breathing. Focusing on that chair.
He'd been in that chair. Mavado had tortured him for weeks, maybe months, in something just like that. Granted the room hadn't been pristine and white, it had been a cinderblock basement. But the memories flood in nonetheless.
Sometimes Kabal brought that torture up casually, bragging that he didn't break under the leader of the Red Dragon's torture. But what he meant was that he hadn't given up any information. It had been a failure for Mavado.
But Kabal had definitely broken in other ways.
"Motherfucker." Kabal backs up against the wall they'd just came from, all but ignoring Carlisle next to him. Fear is something other people feel, he'd been actually scared a handful of times in his life. But what he's feeling now is verging on that. Anger and bitterness and the revenge he was denied and memories he'd shoved down behind a guise of not caring about anything.
"Yeah. We shouldn't..." He doesn't sound right, voice softer and breathier as he deigns to agree with his lackey that they should probably get the fuck out of here. "No but I hear it. Why? What do you feel?"
Around them the room pulsates, the lights seeming to surge before they fade out then come back even brighter than before, the walls around them seem to erupt with images of fire, of burning embers and charred wood falling into a heap and sending up sparks. It fades out to an ocean of blood, waves crashing against a shore made of bones, the splashing sounding viscous and wrong.
"What the fuck?"
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He tries to pry his foot from the ground, but it won't budge, as though the pressure from the magic all around them were holding him in place. His head throbs painfully — that should be impossible too, right? No no, it may be caused by his own energies being agitated, as they most certainly are now, but that should be from his own doing and not external forces—
Carlisle puts one hand to his temple, then the other; the images flashing on the walls all around them only worsen the pulsating behind his eyes. He hasn't felt like this since he was alive, and he's terrified of what it means.
"There's magic here!" he chokes out. "There's hngh! Something in this room!"
The bones on the walls, images they may be, rattle and twist, pulling themselves into malformed abominations, their eyes glowing with a hostile light like the fires from before. Some of them resemble monsters; others individuals from the memories of both men in the room, their features twisted nearly beyond recognition.
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It isn't real enough to look like they're going to actually come out of the walls, but Kabal isn't going to wait around to find out. He is thoroughly unsettled by this in a way that he's not been for decades.
He agrees completely. They should not be here.
Eyes flick to Carlisle who is holding his head as if it might explode. His experience with sorcerers is limited and terrible, but that can't be good. From their little blow up previous he doesn't want to see what happens if Carlisle actually loses control and starts rotting everything with reckless abandon.
He swipes at him, meaty arm around that very scrawny frame, dragging him like a skeletal sack of potatoes back the way they came. Carlisle is extremely light, he feels emaciated. But that's a fleeting thought because Kabal just wants to get the fuck out of there right the hell now.
Once back in the flooded hallway he sets Carlisle down almost carefully, "Still with me?"
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But he doesn't. Carlisle braves cracking his eyes open as he feels the incredible hum of the room die down, and finds himself being set back in the ruddy water of the hallway. The pressure dissipates; though he hasn't needed to breathe in years, Carlisle pulls in air as though it's his first time, his body shaking as he leans on the opposite wall, choking behind his mask. It's only once he swallows down the clot of ink bubbling in his throat that he pieces together what happened.
"Wh—" He looks around as though there must be someone else who hauled him out of there. It seems too charitable for the self-serving Kabal. He runs a hand through his hair, his hand still trembling. "Did you- did you carry me out here?"
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"You gonna make it? Some magic thing going on right now that I don't know about?" The superhuman speed that he moves with isn't really magical, though he'd been healed by an Outworld sorcerer in order to not die when he was roasted. That had definitely enhanced it, but he didn't have any magic powers himself and couldn't sense whatever it was that was making Carlisle react like this.
"I'm gonna give this one to you. We shouldn't have broken down that door. You win this one. Kabal: 2. Carlisle: 1."
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"There's—" He swallows harshly, biting back a cough. "There's something in the room. Something- magical, and powerful, and impossibly dark. It was- it was suffocating. I could feel it all around us, looming, watching us as though we were prey."
His glowing eyes flick to the hole in the wall -- the images have disappeared, the chair all by itself in the stark, white room once more.
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