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.

superposition: ((headache))

[personal profile] superposition 2020-04-09 05:35 am (UTC)(link)
[ Those are all very good questions! And unfortunately, he only knows the answer to one of them! And he's very reluctant to admit it! ]

I - I miscalculated. He'd have been fine if it weren't for the water -

[ He adjusts his grip as Kabal starts to slip underwater again. ]

- but in these conditions it only takes forty volts to cause cardiac arrest and I just hit him with eighty thousand. We're wasting time, can you just heal him, please?!
abheirrant: (❧ it stoked a flame within him)

[personal profile] abheirrant 2020-04-09 06:04 am (UTC)(link)
You want me to heal him now, now that he's been hit with enough volts to kill him several times over!?

[Carlisle doesn't mean to snap on Qubit, but he's starting to fret over the thought that they might be murderers. Again, in his case. No, he doesn't want to think about that, either. He doesn't want to think about the water in his boots, or the rust that's probably staining his pants, or the part where he he called Qubit for help and now Kabal is probably dead.]

I could heal him from death back when I was alive, but I don't know about now. I'm afraid to even touch him! I might rot right through him, or drain the life out of you, or worse!
Edited 2020-04-09 06:11 (UTC)
superposition: ((laying down the law))

[personal profile] superposition 2020-04-09 07:21 pm (UTC)(link)
Or, he might not be dead yet! Just try, all right?

[ It's not that he particularly cares whether Kabal lives or dies - the man's nothing but trouble - but Qubit does not want to be the one to kill him. He's past that, he's trying to be better than that, and it's even worse if he manages to do it through sheer stupidity... ]
abheirrant: (❧ an unnatural glow)

[personal profile] abheirrant 2020-04-09 10:59 pm (UTC)(link)
Fine! But if you die next and I'm left alone down here, you can both rot!

[He doesn't bother to figure out where best to put his hands on Kabal, as he might anyone else he's healing; he goes for the neck, as it's just below the surface of the water, and close enough to the heart for his channel to reach it quickly.

Unfortunately, in his furious panic, he doesn't take into account that Kabal, whether dead or unconscious, is susceptible to corpse scrying. The moment Carlisle places his hands on Kabal, his eyes light up behind his glasses, his body stiffening as he views the last waking moments of the man in his grasp. He can feel the water on his limbs, the drag of his own breath, the weight of Qubit as he's slammed into — oh right, that's the real him there — and then the shock of, as he described it himself, enough volts to kill him several times over.

Carlisle responds automatically, uncontrollably. He'd meant to just give Kabal's heart a nudge, see if any of his internal organs were fried by Qubit's retaliation: what he does instead is send a torrent of magical energy through Kabal's frame, giving him a very different kind of shock than he received before. He'll have less injuries than he did, both from this incident and prior, but is he alive?

The clergyman has no idea as he releases Kabal, writhing as he backs away and into the wall, his arms curling in unadulterated pain as the healing energies counteract those animating him.]
kaballin: (Recover)

[personal profile] kaballin 2020-04-10 05:35 pm (UTC)(link)
[Kabal's not dead. Hooray!

He is, however; very unconscious. For a length of time that's not going to be healthy for him later. But that's a later problem.

The now problem is that Carlisle just shot him with another 80,000 volts of healing which, while helpful, his battered and toasted insides did not appreciate. His muscles jerk in retaliation, pulling free of Qubit and then plopping right back down into the water to drown.

There's bubbles this time though. So he's breathing.

Breathing water instead of air, but hey, it's a solid first step.
]