VoidTrecker Express Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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middleofsomewhere2021-07-14 07:28 am
voidtreckermods) wrote in middleofsomewhere2021-07-14 07:28 am
Entry tags:
So Familiar a Gleam: Ongoing
JUST Ā̸̛͇̹̈́͌͐͛̐̋͝Ǹ̵̠͍̲̘͈̮͈̺͔̤͙̳̓̔͑͌̒̓̃́̄̚͘Ớ̶̻̱̄̓͆͂̈́̄̔͋͌̽̀̕͘T̵͙͍͓̻̩͙̻͙̹͎̫̘͇̱̈́̌̓͝ͅH̶̭̻͇̰͈̯̦̹̦̗͐̒́Ẽ̵̡̡̘̳͉͇͚̼̗̣̩͎̞̏͒̈́̏͂̈͝Ř̴̠͋̐͘ NORMAL DAY
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"Jinnjar citizens. Unfortunately, all train travel will be closed due to issues on the lines. Members of the Voidtrecker Express have been located around the city, and are deploying trickery to agitate and confuse us. We ask any volunteers at this time to help us locate any suspicious objects and people, and to restrain them. For the f̴̘̯̰̦̺͖̔͌̋̃ũ̴̢̖̦͙̩̼̺̪͚͍̥͈̜̝͋̌̒̊̚ẗ̶̪̺͕̤̯̞̤͓̝́̑̄̎̊̕future of our city!" |
A TL;DR notes version of days/prompts: (click to show)
EVENT BASICS:
DAYS 5 & 6:
- By now, some people have broken out of their fake lives while some haven't. Tension is rising in the city as people are led to believe this is by the Voidtreckers, which some will believe due to illusions and messing with one's heads is believed to be one of their many tactics.
- Some oddities are occurring with travel, and glimpses of how the city is made beginning to show. The streams of colour - the void - are getting brighter. Electronics are not working well. Some monster sightings are seen, but not to a large degree.
- The prompts here are light to give characters and players time to ICly coordinate, as Voidtreckers are being more actively hunted. Some faces are known. You know who you are, troublemakers.
- The world is really starting to go a bit wild now, with more things disappearing, animals on the loose and more monster sightings.
- By the end of day eight most people have realised the truth though those who are very susceptible to mind control or very stubbornly wanting to believe in this world will still be trapped, believing this is the Voidtreckers doing.
- There are monsters to fight, people to keep calm and a plan to make.
[ HOME SWEET...HOME? ] By day 5, the people of Jinnjar are in a state of anxiety more than before. There's those who realise they're not a part of this world, never were, while there's those who still cling onto this life. Health services say that the source of confusion comes from the colour trails that are brighter than ever in the sky, while the D-Force/Heroes have it confirmed - internally and publicly - that there are Voidtreckers amongst them. The media shows pictures of potential suspects, some Voidtreckers, some not; a man with the same face as two others, one who made a show by creating ice in the middle of the street. Your face may be shown, but don't worry - they're asking people not to play vigilante.
That'll surely keep people behaved.
[ TRAVEL REVIEW. ] As if it couldn't get more frustrating, most of the trains are down. Air taxis are still available for short journeys, yet some people have the bizarre occurrence where they end up in the wrong spot, and even remember going in this wrong direction...but never say anything about it. Those using the tele-pads will also find themselves not always arriving where they should, or worse, suffering intense headaches, swirling colours behind their eyes, their thoughts jumbled for as long as ten minutes before it passes.
You might want to walk.
[ MAKING DO. ] Still, with all the chaos, many are trying to live. You have a life here, no matter what some other force is trying to make you believe,
- For our HEROES: The cinema has rethought its showings due to the worrying happenings of the last few days. Clearly a boost in morale is needed and so they have pulled out some of the great films of the past. Action films that show heroes beating the bad guys, disaster films where the good guys beat the aliens, stop the natural disaster or thwart the secret agency looking to take down civilisation from the inside, at the last minute. Even the childrens films have taken on a pro-hero and triumphant air.
It's not quite distraction though, how could it be when every film has a warning before and after. REMEMBER TO REPORT ALL SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY TO DFORCE and WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED THE SHOW. REMEMBER TO WATCH YOUR SURROUNDINGS AS CAREFULLY AS YOU DID THE SCREEN. - Fun Park: It's for the kids, but one of the largest arcade parks has a special discount on everything to anyone who come visit. It's even advertised across the news: For half the price, get amazing fun and even better food! Kids younger than eight or from the orphanages get free access everywhere!
It's time not to think too hard, and to ignore the trouble! Play laser tag, racing cars or get a high score on the dance mat! - Encroaching Dangers: Something new is beginning to happen, as the city continues to shift. It starts at night, those that stay out past when the streets go quiet might see a shadow, might hear a growl.
Rumours and reports start to spread about monsters on the street.
DAY SIX: HELP FROM INSIDE
[ AID. ] DIAGNET is full of videos but one that has started doing the rounds is of a small droid and a cat. It's not hard to see why it has gone viral, the cat and cleaning droid are chasing each other around an apartment, caught on a home security footage. The cat tries to catch the droid but every time it gets close the droid turns to chase it and the cat runs away. It has been uploaded with stirring orchestral music, which adds to the madness.But... For those Voidtreckers who have already regained their memories that little droid seems familiar indeed. As do the sounds that punctuate the music.
beep beep beep boop | boop
boop boop beep | boop boop boop
boop boop | boop boop boop | boop boop boop | boop beep | boop beep beep | beep beep boop | beep beep beep | boop
boop beep boop beep | beep boop | beep beep boop beep | beep
boop boop boop | beep boop beep | boop beep beepp | beep | beep boop beep
boop beep | beep beep boop | boop | beep boop beep | beep beep | boop | beep | beep boop
Of course it might not be anything, just weird droid sounds that haven't been fully edited out of the video.
[ MOONDUST CAFÉ. ] It might be that they figured out the message or, it might be that a friend is dragging them to the cafe. But for those that make their way there, they will find the Moondust Cafe is a bustling cafe on the edge of a park, near local transport links.
For those that say the right words, a slightly bored looking teenager manning the counter waves them to a side door. "Best sit downstairs, service will be quicker."
Downstairs has a fair number of tables and booths and is lit by coloured lighting making everything look a little obscure. There's soft music playing, not loud enough to make it impossible to hear each other but enough to make it a little harder for evesdroppers.
Mingle, discuss. This is probably the closest to a safe space there is.
[ LOST & LOST. ] You may have spotted it already - that is, spotted what's missing. There's been the pets, the birds in the sky, a pen or apple or wrench from the garage. But now, with every single bad thing going on, more is starting to disappear. Machines stop working, from air conditioning, freezers, your Jinnjar MP3 player, to TVs and more.
And in some business buildings, even entire rooms are gone, their floors empty of more than the door you opened to find this out. Even the heroes seem worried and they quickly clear any affected areas, chasing away bystanders and sealing off whole wings of office blocks.
None of them have answers though, except that this must be the Voidtreckers doing. After all who else but that group could have power enough to do such damage?
DAY SEVEN & EIGHT: UNRAVELLING
[ OVEREXPOSURE. ] Everything is starting to escalate. The headaches are getting regular the more you're outside, buildings are starting to go missing around the outskirts. People see parts of the city flickering, and when they reach certain sections of the city, they find they can't go beyond it.
Life tries to go on, but as more areas of the city begin to be sealed off and considered dangerous, even those who are most stubborn about pretending everything is normal can see that is is not.
[ LET LOOSE. ] The breaking down of the city has caused a lot of chaos, but one of the biggest problems are that parts of the zoo have vanished. Walls, fences, enclosure roofs. Meaning that the animals inside are no longer confined and are now prowling the city streets. Real birds now fill the sky that the fakes left empty.And they aren't all that's there. Twisted creatures are becoming more common on the streets of Diagad. Creatures that look almost like animals but warp and twist between them, one moment a bear the next it has horns and then it is a wolf. But no matter how they look those claws and teeth are bad news for everyone.
[ CRUMBLING, CRUMBLING. ] By day eight whole streets are disappearing. homes, houses. people need to be moved in closer around the congress sector. Colours crackle through the sky like lightning and the world shakes often.
It's not just the infrastructure but the memories of those in the city. Dreams have come realities and all but the most stubborn have begun to realise that this world is not their own. They are from another place. What is going on? Why are they in this city? Who are these people who are their 'family'?
Confusion and anger are growing in the streets and it is perhaps time for the Voidtreckers to come out of the shadows.
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And then the girl drops by with some actual information. It's somehow both a relief and not at all reassuring.
"What happened to it?" His voice is low and level, and he doesn't look at her. If the Hunger followed them here, that means it's probably done with Faerun, and that means they're in a hell of a lot of trouble.
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She smiled at them both, brighter at Yondu though she looked around. "I thought there were a lot of unfamiliar faces. Including this other man. "What do you mean, they cam from somebody's world?"
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Right, the world eater whatever the fuck it was.
"I wasn't here for that. I just heard about something that showed up an' caused the train to have to abandon a mission an' get out." He says to Wash. "Heard that it hit the train's homeworld, too." He'd paid attention to that post, but didn't have much to say. "Last mission, the thing what's causin' this claimed it was from Diagad, an' Diagad was gone."
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He watches Yondu, and listens, and looks back at their informant. "So it's dead, but it left something behind." It sounds like a minor point of clarification, sure, but so far as he knows, the Hunger doesn't leave anything in its wake - it obliterates dimensions and moves on. If whatever's eating worlds left a corpse, then it's not the Hunger, and that's one less thing to worry about (on an admittedly extensive list of things to worry about).
"If we don't know what's eating worlds, then what do we know about Diagad? This one or the real one."
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And this man in front of him, he seems real. Despite not being a Voidtrecker. "System #401837400141, known as Diagad was destroyed... Recently. Within the last year, probably more like four or five months ago. From the little I could find about the world this place seems to be a pretty decent copy, a little idealised perhaps."
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He refers to Wash there. They'd only interacted for a few days and part of that time was Yondu trying to frantically regain his bearings. But he'd seen him enough to know that his mannerisms were that of a genuinely unimagined soul.
"Someone real powerful an' I suspect real young must of made it away. Sounded real young when they was pickin' at us on the last mission, anyway." Then, to explain to Wash, he continues. "This thing, it decided to start tryin' out tricks on different levels of this real shithole of a city. One level all places, one animals, one was controllin' people's minds an' emotions with illusions, an' one was takin' 'em over through electronics. Just knockin' 'em clean out. Once we started makin' headway it walked ever'body out into this fatal wasteland. We had to follow an' it set up a maze for us, full of stuff we dug out of our own heads."
Stuff he doesn't care to remember, but if this poor guy's been caught up in it, it's best that he knows.
"Includin' people we cared about. I saw my old team leader in there. Just tryin' to lure me in and keep me put." And how much he cared for that person he'll keep to himself. "So that's why she's wonderin'."
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More information is definitely helpful, but it sure as hell isn't comforting. "Wait, so getting completely mindfucked is just- a known issue for you people?" Bold words from someone who'd just spent the past year thinking he was a high fantasy Sean Bean character, but at least Wash knew who to blame for that bullshit, and Karsus was a world away at this point.
But he sighs and pulls himself together. Not helpful. Try again. "So we have a recently dead world, and a very powerful survivor who's- I don't know, experimenting? Trying to bring it back? If messing with an already populated world didn't work, then I guess making your own is the next step." He's pretty sure he's seen this before - in a movie or a TV show, probably - and it generally doesn't end well. "What I don't get is, if our god wannabe knows that you're onto them, why would they bring you here? It makes sense to grab people like me, who have no idea what's going on, but if you've already beaten them at their game once, why would they even let you know they're playing again, let alone drag you in?"
Unless the god wannabe is an idiot. That's always a possibility - powerful and smart don't necessarily go hand in hand.
Fucking Karsus.no subject
The whosit, whatever it is, had said that it wanted a new home. So that much was accurate.
"So if this was the industry standard, like if this was about what Diagad was like an' an idealized version of it too? We got these li'l bitty powers. Controllin' plants. Turnin' invisible. Flyin'. Whoever this is is strong as shit, prodigy level. An' Diagad was an interstellar world, tight? Had connections to other planets what knew things about it. You'd think somebody that strong, even if they was just a kid or whatever," who knows, they could just be childish and dramatic, "They'd have a reputation that made it offworld. Nothin' like 'em in the news besides them breezin' by other worlds?"
let me know if this is no good, guys!
... He's telling no one, but he was sort of temporarily stuck in a shadow. Being free of the illusion, and trying to selectively believe enough to make a power work, does not go well. He's probably going to stop experimenting.
"Do you ever get whole worlds birthing consciousnesses, or cities, or... larger things than individuals?"
He waves, nodding his head to Yondu, to Wash, and to Anan. Hello everyone.
"Just as interesting is it wants people alive as long as they go along with the story it wants to tell. People aren't what it's inventing. And it acts young, and angry, and a whole slew of emotions I've been feeling here tied into the energy that gives this illusion form. All form. So... find a world that hasn't been catalogued, find it's blank enough it can be written over or make it that way, and what. Summon people? Did that cause all the void points here, or because those points came to exist, summoning happened? Or something else?"
He tried to recall what had been said on train prior to the countdown to everyone being tossed into this world and the exceptionally layered illusions that kept it functioning.
Re: let me know if this is no good, guys!
"I'm not sure if it brought us here purposfully. Us void agents I mean. Or if we just got too close and got sucked in. I was headed here to investigate and then... I was here. No idea if my team are or if they are still somewhere out in the void."
She looks worried there. "How it gotten others here though, I don't know exactly. The void points might have something to do with it, it's almost like a void nexus. A very very unstable one."
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But...nobody else is reacting. The new person is probably another Voidtrecker. Which makes him pulling a knife look crazy. Great.
He settles and tucks the knife back away. "So then this place is, what?" he says as though none of that had just happened. "Interdimensional flypaper?"
He gestures at Yondu. "And that's the question I want an answer to. If Diagad was part of a known network of planets, and the rest of those planets survived, and someone from Diagad was this powerful, then how does nobody know who they are? You'd think they'd have a reputation." Information can be kept quiet - Wash has lived through several different flavors of that - but unless the god wannabe was some kind of government secret, there's no way gossip alone wouldn't have caught up with them. Someone has to know something, right?
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"Or an interdimensional magnet." He says.
"How many scouts were with you? And do they got the same tells as you an' I do if we need to find 'em?" He taps his wrist, above the leather of his coat, where the SCA is.
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Collectively, they were asking good questions, so he shifted his thoughts to one that bothers him as a person who hates seeing people at risk, particularly for situations outside their control.
"Beyond that, is this world stable enough to support the people not tied to scouts or something else keeping them alive out here? Whatever the manner people were abducted, they're in danger, and need to get home safe. Is there a way to make this not-quite nexus stable enough to send them all back before a collapse?"
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She frowned, letting that sink in. "There were five of us, one other scout, two fighters and Malin runs tech for us. She doesn't often come into systems at all but... I can't contact her, nor the others. They should all have their SCA's. We wear them even on our craft."
She nodded at Wei Wuxian. "That's the big question. We know why me and my crew are here, even if the details are blurry. We know how you voidtreckers got here. But how about everyone else? How did they get here? And how do we get them back?"
Broke order again while I'm awake and my head doesn't hurt.
But he will worry more about that later, since now that makes this person feel like a more fixable problem.
He pulls his cell phone out of his pocket. "A lot of us had accounts already set up for us when we showed. Like we'd been here forever. A lotta names line up, too. Might wanna take a look an' see if you know nobody." He offers it to her.
Broke it? Or made it *better?*
The fact that there's no plan for displaced people who aren't Voidtreckers - like him - only makes it worse. He'll take death if it comes as a consequence of his own decisions - he's already done that once, and it sucked, but at least it was a result of his actions - but getting yanked into an entirely different dimension and possibly being stuck while it crumbles around him is some existential horror he is not prepared to deal with.
So he's quiet. Yondu's got the right idea - let their informant see if she recognizes any of her crew on the local internet, and they can go from there. Nothing else has any answers yet.
we all love scrambled eggs in this thread
The rest is brushed aside. "In other systems that have been entirely destroyed like that, have there been survivors? Energies that escaped out through whatever void ties they had in place? If I recall, Diagad was just figuring out its own relationship to the void in the time before it was destroyed." Was this even a singular entity? Though, at another, longer pause.
"How many living worlds were in that system?"
The issue of getting people out of this place weighs even more heavily on his mind. "Hey, that tethering thing. If people aren't tethered to one of the vessels, do they end up tethered to this place, or could we tether them back to their own worlds? Something has to call you home," he says, nodding to Wash, "Because we're all tied to that place, wherever it is, even when it doesn't exist. Case in point."
A gesture to the room around them, but more broadly, this imitation of what Diagad might have been.
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"You're right." She nodded at Wei Wuxian. "They can't be tethered. There's no craft. However they've been pulled here it's... Are they somehow tethered to this world? They must be still connected to their world. Can we figure a way to get them back? Using that..."
She was still looking through the phone and paused. "Jin-Roh." He's one of us.
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He feels for Wash, he does. Because he still doesn't know what the hell his tether will do. What happens to him after the train decides to get rid of him. But he's already told Anan as much. "We really gotta figure out or get our hands on some method of emergency tetherin'." He mutters, like it makes that much of a difference.
"Is the atmosphere on this world part of what's bein' generated or do we gotta look out for that as well?"
A lot of questions for her, but it was daunting to think of how many living worlds probably died in this system when he knew how many were swirling arorund in his galaxy.
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Slow breath in; slow breath out; keep your shit together, Wash. Focus. "Okay, Jin-Roh's one. Who else?"
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Tethering starting to sound like fishing in his mind, but he quiets, because he's thinking on the energy of the one driving this whole illusion. The one giving them a table to sit at, and he frowns.
"Is it sane to say each person here in the city may well be from their own unique system?" Madcap, that kind of power, plus targeting those associated more directly with the void. Anan one example, themselves another, but from a potentially different sort of... hm.
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And act fast, in case it was the case.
"I think that's true." She nodded at Wei Wuxian. "Obviously all you voidtreckers come from your craft, me and my crew come from ours. But everyone else, each from their own system seems to be the case."
It's harder to tell, when they all believe each other family and friends within this city.
"Malin, Sendez and Pepper. They're the others."
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"I can confirm that suffocation ain't the most fun way to go." He's shared that concern outright already. But he's selfish enough that he doesn't want to face it again. Dying once was bad enough.
"I gotta go huntin' for some other people later. You want me to tag along with ya some," he offers Anan. At least for a little bit two sets of eyes might work better than one.
"You ever had cases where you had to get Void misplaced people home?"
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He pauses, and frowns. "I hope it has some kind of anchor here."
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