redshiftlogs | january 2020. welcome to the void.

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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.

Navigation.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He follows Carlisle without really thinking about it, ready to go on the attack should there actually be something in here. But it's totally empty except..

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?"

Preoccupied with the room itself and the magic he feels stirring within its walls, Carlisle remains unaware of Kabal's distress until the man crosses his periphery, backing against the wall in what Carlisle can only assume is fear. That can't be right, can it? There is nothing about this awful fellow and his intimidating ways that has ever said he's capable of even feeling fear. Maybe it's pure, instinctual apprehension that makes Kabal agree with Carlisle's sentiment, but whatever the reason, the clergyman finds himself both surprised and relieved he doesn't want to stick around to see what treasures they may find hidden behind the chair. They shouldn't be there.

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.

There's something horrifyingly fascinating about the images on the walls, the way the bones clink together to form approximations of people, of things, some with too many arms. They lumber around with no real purpose.

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?"

Between the hammering at his temples and the intangible pressure mounting all over him, Carlisle feels as though he's suffocating, his head pushed beneath a current he cannot possibly fight. The magic of the room swallows him whole like a great beast as the figures projected on the walls bleed, their skeletal frames oozing with blackened blood and ink. It pours from their eyes, and then his in tandem, black droplets splattering across his glasses from the inside; his knees buckle, and he's so sure he's going to hit the floor—

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?"

Edited 2020-04-09 02:56 (UTC)

"Yeah. And we need to get you some cheeseburgers, but that's a later problem." He glances back at the doorway, the faint hum still tugging at the bounds of his consciousness. Almost like someone is grinding metal just out of sight, setting his nerves on edge and unable to be ignored.

"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."

"I'm glad w- we agree, for a change," Carlisle sputters, putting a hand to his chest; he can feel ink on his chin, surely bleeding through his mask. He straightens his glasses, his free hand still pressed against the wall for support. He, too, can still hear that hum at the back of his mind, reverberating through his bones. The pressure he felt continues to emanate from the hole, reaching out toward him.

"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.

Edited 2020-04-09 04:37 (UTC)

Kabal doesn't look back, he is not going to look at that chair again if he can help it. Time to shove all those memories down into some burnt up corner of his mind where they'll never see the light of day again. Fuck all of that.

"Did we wake it up or something? Cuz I didn't hear this shit before the door came down." Maybe it was trapped. Which meant there might actually be something of value hidden in there that this was supposed to be protecting.

But for the first time in his life Kabal weighs the options and decides whatever it is just isn't worth it. He's not going back in there.

"Aight let's get the fuck out of here. I'm done with flooded corridors for the rest of my fucking life." Between Carlisle and Qubit nothing down here had been fun.

He shakes his head. He doesn't know if they awakened a beast, or if it was already there, waiting to be freed; either way, the result is the same.

"We can't leave it like this," he calls to Kabal. Though he's still trembling from head to toe, he seems adamant in his protest. "It- it wasn't like this before broke the door. What if it gets out, like- like the fellow with the eye said? This must be what he was talking about!"

"He did? Tentacle guy?" Kabal had only been paying attention to the part of 'something is down there' and focused on the fact it was something Joe didn't want them to know about. Not that it might actually be dangerous and it was a warning.

Hindsight is 20/20 after all.

"I don't suppose that rot power of yours works in reverse does it?" Because short of lugging a bunch of bricks down here and walling it up he's not really sure how to close the door now. "I guess I could break the chair."

But he doesn't seem eager to go back in there, still not looking that way at all, though with the mask it's a little hard to see where he's looking in the first place.

There's half a second where Carlisle reaches toward Kabal reflexively, as though to grab his shirt, a sleeve, anything to keep him from heading back in there; it's only belated does he realize that not only is Kabal not moving, but that he ought not touch him anyway, especially not when his energies are so unsettled.

"D- don't," he murmurs. "Don't go back in there. I will seal it, just- just give me a moment."

He digs through the satchel at his waist, grateful it remained largely above the water level, and pulls out piece of chalk. Though his lines are uneven, as his hands are still shaking, he starts drawing a glyph around the hole, feeling the tendrils of energy from beyond the threshold pulling at him. Unfortunately, when it comes to the part above the door, it's just out of his reach.

"I- I need a hand. Please."

Fortunately for Carlisle's pride, Kabal doesn't notice that brief concern for his welfare because he's thinking about how much he really doesn't want to go back in there. And he's not sure that trashing the room would stop whatever's going on anyway. He could break the chair, tear down the walls, but if it's magic then it probably wouldn't do a damn thing.

Sometimes if a magic object was destroyed the magic would fade. But this didn't seem like one of those times.

He's almost relieved when Carlisle has a different option, one that involves neither of them having to go in the room. The glyphs aren't familiar, but the idea is recognizable, sorcerers all love their chicken scratch symbols that apparently mean something. Twenty years in servitude to one and he never learned what a single glyph meant.

Ah well.

His first instinct is to pick Carlisle up by the back of his jacket, to scruff him like a cat and hold him up there. But that's still almost touching him, and everything he's seen means that's a bad idea. Maybe Carlisle could stand on his shoulders or something. Out of reach of those hands that rot everything. ... Though it's come out of his feet too. All the options here are bad.

"Need a lift?"

Because surely he's not asking Kabal to draw something.

He's not, thankfully. Even if Kabal knew glyphcrafting, Carlisle wouldn't trust someone he calls an oaf on a regular basis with an enchantment.

"Yes. I can't reach the top."

He steps aside so Kabal can get closer, readying himself for however the man chooses to boost him, hoping all the while he won't just hurl him up there like a stone.

"What are these marks supposed to do? Seal it back up?" Carlisle hadn't melted his arm off when he'd lugged him out of the room, but that might have been due to them both being a little stunned by what they were seeing. Now that they're out here he's not sure he wants to touch Carlisle and risk having any bits of him rot off.

He may look like roadkill, but he'd like to stay looking like that and not make it any worse.

But he definitely wants whatever is in that room to not come out.

Fuck. He hates doing things for the common good if it puts him at risk. That's how he ended up with this extra crispy exterior in the first place.

He grabs Carlisle around the middle, one-handed, hauling him up to be eyelevel with the top of the door where he can stand on Kabal's shoulder. Kabal is a hulking Black Dragon enforcer, but he probably could have thrown Carlisle down the hall with a perfect spiral the guy is so light. He doesn't though, keeps him up where he is so he can do whatever he's doing to the door.

"Glyphcrafting," Carlisle starts to answer once he's gotten himself situated on Kabal's shoulder, "is a versatile craft where one can dictate their magic toward outcomes of which they may be naturally unskilled. In this case, w- where I am adept in neither metallurgy, nor transfiguration, I am constructing a glyph that will do both."

Finishing his work, he motions for Kabal to put him down before he activates the glyph, not wanting to risk drawing energy from him in any way. He might not like Kabal, but he doesn't want to be left alone with whatever is on the other side of the door, either. Placing his hand on the activation point, the glyph lights up bit by bit; once fully illuminated, the metal around the rust starts to pull together, melding in all directions much like a physical scar until the hole they entered through is no more. The wall is undoubtedly thinner, and still flecked with spots patches of rust, but he can no longer feel the magic emanating from the other side.

"An im- improvement," he groans, his head still throbbing, but at least he can pinpoint why that is. "Imperfect, but the magic I felt on the other side is contained for now. It will have to do."

"Huh. Neat." He's actually a little impressed, watching it knit itself back together and seal over. He doesn't want to touch it and test how strong it is in case he shatters it somehow, but it's better now that he can't see into the room.

His hand goes to the hookswords on his back, feeling along the handle to reassure himself they're still there.

"That's pretty handy. So that's how you do non-healing shit? With uh... glyphs?" Look at him learning. He almost gets it. "And I'm guessing you can only do a couple before you pass out or something?"

"I am capable of more than 'a couple,'" Carlisle chides, wanting to defend what little pride he has. "I am currently... unwell. Rattled by that- by whatever it was that was in the room. It unsettled my energies, making them harder to control."

And thus making himself, a being animated by magic, harder to control, as well. His legs move stiffly as he starts walking, his hand trailing the wall. He keeps talking, trying to keep his mind off the thundering in his head.

"As reparation — and apparently necrotic — magic are my only areas of expertise, yes, I must use glyphs for most everything else."

"So what you're saying is you can do a lot more shit like that?" He follows along next to Carlisle, ready to grab him should he collapse into a pile.

"Anything that's not healing or rotting you gotta draw glyphs for. Got it. If you keep using the same ones over and over aren't you then an expert in those too?"

You know, the way that people are experts in putting on pants because they do it daily.

"An expert in the memorization of such glyphs, I suppose," Carlisle returns with the barest chuckle, trying not to dwell too long on the fact that he's having a legitimate conversation with a man who has threatened his well-being on more than one occasion. It helps that he's getting to explain something about which he's knowledgeable — a favorite pastime.

He rounds the corner, grateful the stairwell out of the water is in sight. Thankfully, his limbs are working better the further away they get from the white room. "Or at least in the components necessary for impromptu crafting, as was the case a moment ago. I rarely meld materials together, and never have before to seal a powerful force within a room, but once one knows the principles behind glyphcrafting, constructing a glyph for such a purpose becomes relatively easy."

That's a lot of words Carlisle. Normally he wouldn't even be listening or paying attention, but he's kind of frazzled by having a bunch of unpleasant memories flooding in so the distraction of listening to someone ramble on about shit he doesn't understand is sort of welcome.

"Every glyph means something right? Can you .. read them? If you saw one you didn't know, would you be able to tell what it did?"

That's an awfully pointed question from someone who's a big dumb brute.

"If written in Anaric. Or any other language I can read. Reynir's runes for example, made little sense to me, but he insisted the mages of his world were given power from deities rather than drawing it from within, so perhaps that is where the difference..."

He trails off, glancing over his shoulder as they reach the stairs, giving Kabal a scrutinizing look. "Why do you ask?"

The mask gives away nothing as he stares back impassively. "Wondering if you're as smart as you talk yourself up to be."

Anaric. That doesn't sound familiar, and he'd never seen any of Reynir's runes. It's probably a pointless line of questioning - Kabal isn't sure he could replicate the glyphs Quan Chi used anyway. He had a vague memory of what they looked like, some triangles and scratches and circles, but if this was actually a language then misplacing one line might change the entire meaning.

Though he lets out a suspicious grunt, Carlisle keeps walking, pulling himself up step by step.

"It's not as though I'm rambling about a topic with which I am unfamiliar," he huffs. "Unless you, like Mister Qubit, assume magic is inherently frustrating because you cannot quantify it the same way one does technology."

"I know it works, I don't need to know how. For either of 'em. So long as it gets the job done I don't care what makes it tick." He is a simple man, with simple needs.

"Thought you two were friends."

"We are," Carlisle insists, though there is the barest amount of uncertainty in his tone. He considers them friends, and he likes to think Qubit considers them friends, even if he hasn't said it aloud like Reynir. He's a private person who clearly wouldn't vocalize such sentiments, no matter how much they may mean to the parties involved. And even if they weren't friends, it's not as though Carlisle wouldn't understand, given his affliction, the threat he presents just by being in Anchor, the number of times he's lost his temper in Qubit's presence and put him in danger as a result—

"Just because we do not agree on certain subjects does not mean we are not friends," he continues, cutting off his thoughts before they get out of hand.

Edited 2020-04-11 19:18 (UTC)

"Sure ya are." He doesn't care one way or another, but he can't figure out how anyone can stand to be around Qubit for more than ten seconds without wanting to punch his teeth down his throat.

"I'd think he'd wanna learn how you do your magic stuff. Might help him with his tech stuff. But I bet he's too stuck-up to consider it."

january 2020. welcome to the void.

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