january 2020. welcome to the void.

[modblob]

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.

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.

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.

Navigation.

Comments

[braidmage]

Reynir laughs, not entirely sure to what degree Jacob is or is not kidding about the possibility of this little adventure being really dangerous. Maybe Jacob doesn't even know, himself. He is sure that if Onni were here he'd be telling Reynir not to be so trusting of a complete stranger. Probably he is texting back something to that effect right now. But Reynir wants to help! The lights going out is a problem and someone has to try to fix it!

"Reynir Árnason."

He climbs into that darkness right after Jacob, wishing he'd been carrying a flashlight on him - but how was he supposed to know that the power would go out?

He's not afraid of the dark, but it's not his favorite, and so to distract himself from it as the two of them crawl towards... whatever it is that might be broken, he asks:

"Are you from Earth, Jacob Frye?"

It's a good first question, he is discovered, to establish a baseline of how much shared ground the two of their worlds will have.

[nothinglikefather]

If they had been walking and talking, Reynir might have earned a more visible reaction. Jacob might have stopped and looked at him like he was crazy but... they aren't walking and talking.

Neither is it such a strange question, if the universe has bounced you around before. He only knows of one person who doesn't come from Earth, but perhaps that's enough.

"Jacob. If you use my full name I think you're about to arrest me." Or sentence him. Neither are good. "I am from Earth. I don't know how much that's actually worth, by itself. Maybe when is just as valid."

[braidmage]

Jacob's insistence on not using his full name startles a little laugh out of Reynir; he's nervous and excited over this impromptu adventure, and some of that comes through in the laugh. But he is, at the same time, charmed.

"Yeah, fair. When people use my full name I feel like I'm about to get a scolding from one of the old people in the village."

He is curious, however, and asks, with some humor in his voice:

"Are you often in situations where you're afraid that you're about to get arrested, then?"

And of course, Jacob is quite right that just being from Earth only provides some context; Reynir is grateful that he seems to understand so quickly what Reynir is trying to do, establishing what he can expect to have in common with Jacob and what he won't.

"True, when is important, too. I'm from the year 90. But possibly that is... much further in the future than you might think. Where I come from, the numbers sort of... started over, when the Old World fell. I won't bore you talking about it too much, mostly 'cause um. Every time I do it really bums people out? So basically, long story short and hopefully less depressing, there was an Illness that wiped out most of the humans on Earth, but some of us survived and now we're working on rebuilding."

[nothinglikefather]

Jacob is grinning, even if the other can't see it, and chuckles at the comment about scolding from the older people he knows. Oh Jacob can relate to that very well indeed. They don't even have to be very much older than him for that matter- five minutes will do the trick.

"Once or twice." A day.

But as charmed as Reynir might be at the moment, that is sure to fade the moment he has any idea of what and who Jacob is. So on that front he keeps quiet, because there really is no need to worry anyone with that sort of thing now is there?

Of course this isn't Jacob's first time in a strange world. He knows that often you have to feel out the differences and similarities between the Earths they know. He's bemused, because his first assumption is that Reynir means 90AD. But then he starts talking about what happened. It is, frankly, impossible.

Well. It can't be impossible, because that is what this kid has lived through. But he's heard a lit about apocalypses since he first started all this travelling-the-multiverse, and its never cheerful.

"Maybe this time you'll do a better job of it? Seems like we keep getting it wrong, one way or another."

[braidmage]

Reynir can't help but wonder whether Jacob is telling the exact truth - but in which direction? It's possible he is someone perfectly law-abiding trying to play up his edginess and danger as a self-image thing. Reynir had known a boy like that in the village he was from: always pretending to be much more disreputable than he really was. Or, it's possible, Jacob really is an outlaw of some kind (maybe a vigilante? Cho had explained what those were...) and is downplaying it.

Still, since he has no way of knowing for sure, Reynir just... tucks that question away for now. People always showed you who they were, in the end. The truth came out sooner or later. Reynir knows that.

Right now, the thing that strikes him most about Jacob is that he takes the news about an apocalypse, even if it was one on another Earth and in the past, very calmly. Much moreso than most Reynir has told since he came here. Usually they are so distressed at the idea of all that death... the end of the world as they knew it, or closer to it. But Jacob just treats it like a part of a life cycle. A natural process, almost.

"Yeah... hopefully. Gods willing."

He lets that hang a moment before asking.

"What do you mean by that though? Getting it wrong?"

Is he implying - the way plenty of people do in Reynir's world - that the Illness was some kind of judgment, divinely handed down, for a world that had abandoned its gods? Or is he saying, as still others do, that it was all that technology and the way people had treated the planet that had caused the Illness? Or has he perhaps heard of another world that had gone through an upheaval as intense as Reynir's...?

[nothinglikefather]

The mention of gods gets a little snort, but he makes no comment about anyone else's religion. As an assassin, he knows that gods aren't real, but a method of controlling humans used by the First Civilisation. But it's not his place to tell anyone that- the fact is humans are better off not knowing, for the most part.

Likewise, when doesn't answer Reynir's question immediately it's not because he's trying to avoid it. The truth is that they've come to a part where the metal tunnel splits- left and right. He's trying to feel where, if anywhere, a breeze comes from. But there is none, so all he can do is take a breath, let his vision fade to white, grey and black, and try and work out what why they should head. The boy behind him is a bright, friendly green, the two paths before them grey.

Then his view pulls back, as if the gaze is that of a bird, somehow seeing through the layers of the city and it's many tunnels and passageways, it's conduits and drains.

The right passage leads, a little further on, to a slope that goes down to the next level of the city. The left twists and turns, but he can't see exactly where it goes. So he follows that path, as that's more likely to lead them to something worthwhile.

"Where I come from, there's people playing with things they don't understand. Something beyond humans, things that weren't meant for us, dangerous and powerful things. They know it's dangerous, but they want to understand everything so intently they don't care about consequences. At some point, it's going to go tits up."

[braidmage]

When their progress in the tunnel halts, Reynir cranes his neck so that he can see past Jacob and figure out what is causing the delay. When he sees the split in the tunnel, he understands. He's just opened his mouth to ask if he can help, when he notices that Jacob doesn't look confused, and has not asked for help or even made any small noises of consideration. Perhaps he is trying to remember a map, or using some other method that Reynir doesn't know. So he resolves, for once, to be quiet for the time being.

That patience pays off, and Jacob makes the decision on his own, seeming plenty confident about it. So Reynir follows without complaint or question, though he does make a mental note of the way they came, in case they need to backtrack later.

"Like... technology? Weapons? Or are you talking about spiritual dangers?"

Reynir seems to regard all of these possibilities as equally likely, equally dangerous. He sighs, shaking his head, and then re-tucking his braid out of the way.

"That kind of recklessness seems like a really, really bad situation. Some rules are stupid and unnecessary - a lot of them - but some are there to keep everyone safe. It's one thing to endanger yourself, it's another to endanger others."

[nothinglikefather]

He's doing just what Evie does, he realises as he hears the young man shift behind him, trying to see in the gloom what the hold up is. It's one of Jacob's many complaints about his sister- she makes decisions without consulting him, or explaining what she's done.

"That way slopes down steeply in about 20 feet- just down to the next level. This way... doesn't. I think it's a better option."

He can play nicely. He can talk to people, explain himself. Not just charge off without thinking. Of course, his twin isn't here to see that, and probably would still find fault with him anyway, but he's trying.

This kid is full of questions, isn't he? But they're not stupid, thankfully. And Jacob does like to talk, so he can hardly complain. "All three, I suppose. We don't really understand it all. We shouldn't be trying- it should be kept away from people, or destroyed entirely. Those things have caused nothing but pain and suffering for thousands of years."

He doesn't reply to the statement about rules. He doesn't like any rules, they all feel like they were decided to personally curtail his freedom. But one thing does tickle him, and he can't resist mentioning it.

"You seem to be an expert in reckless, considering you came down here with someone you don't even know, and neither of us know exactly where we're going."

[braidmage]

Reynir makes a soft noise of understanding, when Jacob explains his reasoning. Sounds logical enough, and he feels a little more confident actually knowing the thought process behind the decision.

When Jacob calls him reckless he sucks in a breath and opens his mouth to argue, but nothing comes out right away. Honestly, he's feeling so called out right now. But the man's not wrong.

"I - well. Okay. Yeah. Okay, you're right about that, but my recklessness probably isn't a danger to anybody but me..."

After a pause, he adds, with some regret creeping into his voice.

"Though... I guess it would be kind of bad for Onni if anything happened to me."

He really needs to keep that in mind more, before he goes charging off - how close he and Onni have gotten and how much Onni has lost and that it would be really hard for him if someone else got hurt and he felt like it was his fault for not stopping it.

"But maybe we will be able to help, and it would have been more dangerous to just sit around and think somebody else would investigate!"

The things Jacob has told him about his world are intriguing, and Reynir wonders about the specifics - but that degree of vagueness seems, well, intentional. And perhaps it is a lot to expect, that Jacob will explain more fully when the subject is so serious and they've only just met.

[nothinglikefather]

"That's what I used to think." Jacob replies, "I thought if I get hurt, or killed my sister might be a little bit put out about it, but no one else is likely to suffer. As it turns out, I caused several riots when I almost ruined the economy."

And killed an innocent man because Pearl Attaway had told him a bunch of lies he hadn't bothered to fact check.

"So while you think your actions won't have a wider effect, you might well be wrong. Ripples in a pond, and all that."

He takes a deeper breath. There's not much he can do about that now, but the mistake still weighs on him, and Pearl's death can't restore the innocent life he'd taken.

But he won't dwell on that now. He puts an effort into sounding his usual up-beat self.

"That's the spirit! We have to see if there's something we can do. And if not, we report back to someone who might know how to fix it." He says, glancing over his shoulder with a grin.