modblob: (Default)
Mods ([personal profile] modblob) wrote in [community profile] redshiftlogs2020-01-01 03:38 pm

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.

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.

hyperthermic: (ehK1KdS)

[personal profile] hyperthermic 2020-02-29 02:01 am (UTC)(link)
For a second, Mick is left hanging in Jacob's grip, but even when he gets his balance again he knows he's beaten. Broken arm. Blade at his throat.

Why didn't he just kill Snart when he had the chance?

He bares his teeth at Leonard, since he can't move to glare at Jacob. Still looking for a way out, a way to fight, a way to just crush Leonard's ribs and drive him under the water for good. Defiant still, furious still, refusing fear the same way he's done for the past two hundred years.

"Go on. Do it. Do it."
hypothermic: (68)

[personal profile] hypothermic 2020-03-29 05:54 am (UTC)(link)
"You wish I would." And with that Leonard cracks Mick upside the head with his gun. At some point he stopped trying to talk Mick down and started knocking him out.

Mick made him do it. That's how Len consoles himself when he looks at himself in the mirror at night, and can see a sliver of Lewis Snart in his reflection. The man who took what he wanted no matter the cost. The man who hit instead of spoke. The man he used to justify being bad, because daddy would always be worse.

But Mick did make him do it, didn't he?

Len doesn't have time to ponder the meaning of his arguably (according to the timeline ) pointless life, because all three of them are bleeding, and the room is filling with water cold enough to make Len's teeth chatter.

He grabs hold of Mick by the collar, keeping his head above the waterline.

Lewis would leave Mick to drown.

Every self-preserving instinct inside of Len wholeheartedly agrees, because Mick picked this fight, and he deserves it for being such a monumental armored asshole, and impossibly high-maintenance sociopath.

Plus, he's fucking heavy. Mick is two hundred plus pounds of dead weight, and the armor is another hundred on top of that. Len is still half-drowned, coughing up water with every other breath. He could kill himself trying to save Mick.

Unless he has a little help from Jacob. Who has zero reason to keep the man who was trying to kill him sixty seconds ago alive, never mind risk his life to do so.

"Kid, grab an arm, and I'll make it worth your while sometime."
nothinglikefather: made by peaked (073)

[personal profile] nothinglikefather 2020-03-29 06:38 am (UTC)(link)
What the bloody hell is wrong with this two? Jacob's mouth falls open, and for a moment he doesn't react, wonders if he should just kill the big guy now and save himself the trouble later. Bastards like this will keep coming for you, Jacob knows that. You put them down before they get you.

But Cold seems to have other ideas. What the history is between these two he can only guess, but it's probably a quagmire.

Then again, drowning is a horrible way to go.

Although he might freeze to death first.

"Fine." It's said petulantly, but Jacob moves. Ducking under an arm, taking the majority of the big bastard's weight on his own shoulders. He has the strength to do it, he's carried dead weights often enough, bigger men than him either out cold or dead. Even in the rushing freezing water, he's able to make progress towards the door. Slow progress, but steady, checking that Cold is with them before there is no more time left and they have to swim for it.

The water is cold and presses in on him like a vice, and the few seconds it takes to get to the surface seem like an eternity. And then when his head breaks the tension of the water he's gasping, hauling the big guy up onto the steps.
hypothermic: (pic#13787970)

[personal profile] hypothermic 2020-03-30 12:13 am (UTC)(link)
The water is cold, even by Leonard's standards. Swimming with one arm on Mick's collar, pockets heavy with bling (they worked too hard to leave it all behind), his body tired, beaten, and freezing. At one point, Jacob was pulling them both through the water.

The struggle is real, but Len's had realer. At this point in his life, Len wouldn't know what to do if he wasn't struggling. Retire to the Bahamas? No. Too hot. Maybe Antarctica, at that base with all the penguins.

Bitches (Len) love penguins.

Breaking the surface of the water, Len is feeling less penguin and more sea-slug crawling onto the stairs, only making it half onto the dry steps before collapsing. Len's conscious, he's just having a moment. Enjoying the often underrated gift that is oxygen, and inhaling until it hurts.

He cracks a bleary eye open, glancing over the wet heap of Mick's body to check Jacob's status. Without him, it's likely none of them would've made it out. No one's in good shape, but at least they're alive.

"You got some balls on you, kid."