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

[abheirrant]

"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."

[kaballin]

"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?"

[abheirrant]

"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."

[kaballin]

"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.

[abheirrant]

"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."

[kaballin]

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.

[abheirrant]

"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?"

[kaballin]

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.

[abheirrant]

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."

[kaballin]

"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."

[abheirrant]

"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.

[kaballin]

"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."

[abheirrant]

"He finds our respective crafts to be incongruous," Carlisle explains, reaching the top of the stairwell. He's grateful to see the light of Anchor proper at the end of the corridor. "It is not a matter of his, er. Personality so much as his methodology."

That's his nice way of avoiding whether or not Qubit is 'too stuck-up to consider' learning magic, despite Carlisle asking if he had any interest in the art.

"Not everyone has a grasp over the energy required for magic, after all. And those who do still require training to hone it. For all I know, he may be perfectly capable of it, but has no idea what it feels like to draw upon that well. Like a muscle unused."

[kaballin]

Those are a lot of words with too many syllables and Kabal only half follows what Carlisle is saying here.

"So Qubit might not just be a tech-nerd, he might also be able to start throwing fireballs at people? Fuck that noise. Never teach him that."

You know, for the good of the community.

[abheirrant]

"Why not?" Carlisle asks. "Afraid he will use such arts against you?"

He's apparently feeling bold enough to tease, not thinking too long on just who he is teasing.

[kaballin]

"He can try. I've been on fire before, think that makes me immune now."

It doesn't. And he knows that, but he also can't find it in himself to really care. If he dies, he dies. "Also if you could shoot fireballs think you would have done that already."

[abheirrant]

"That's not how being on fire works."

Though no, he cannot shoot fireballs — that'd fall under evocation, which was more his uncle's area of expertise than his — he can conjure a spark with a snap of his fingers, just enough to start a small flame. He does just that, the flame hovering between the fingers he snapped to call it into existence as though burning invisible tinder.

[kaballin]

"Now you're an expert on being on fire?" But yeah, he knows that's not how it works. Would be nice if he was fireproof forever now, but unfortunately he's not.

"Terrifying." One spark can start a fire but until there's lava and embers raining from the ceiling he's not impressed. "You rot things, heal things, make fire, and put shit back together. That's a weird assortment of things you realize."

[abheirrant]

If only Kabal knew someone who could make glyphs to make his gear magically resistant to fire. If only.

"I had plenty of time and material to study, once," he notes. "Even then, versatility has never been my strength."

He leans on the wall, glad to be out of the flooded halls and away from that horrible room and its suffocating magic. "Well, if that will be all..."

[kaballin]

What a shame that he doesn't.

"You got nothing but time now. Go hang out in the library and learn how to vaporize the creepy tentacle faced dude into dust." Because clearly the library is stocked with 'How-to' books of magic. Kabal is pretty sure that's how libraries work, you get smarter just by being in them via osmosis.

"Yeah yeah. Go back to your exciting life of playing by the rules and hiding from yourself."

[abheirrant]

"I would prefer to spend my time hiding from you," Carlisle grumbles, cutting Kabal a sour look as he heads off.

Yes, he's going to the library, but not to study some spellbooks he doubts are there — he's going to mull over the fact that Kabal possibly saved his life back there, and that's not something he's ready to deal with just yet.