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where we're going--

✖ EVENT HORIZON

Ⅰ. ARRIVAL
You can read all about your character's arrival in the game lore.
There has always been some confusion as to whether or not the ferry cuts through sea or sky, but this month as you glide along you will find yourself more and more convinced that it is the latter. It is nigh impossible to see where you are headed, the way forward shrouded in darkness.

At first you think the lights ahead are stars.

The ferry docks inside of a metallic bay of some kind. It’s an extension of what must be the island, although this one does not resemble any earthly land mass. It appears to be a deliberately constructed structure, contained on all sides. Maybe you’re familiar enough with technology or science fiction enough that you realise it resembles a space station more than an island.

Once you’ve disembarked from the ferry, you will find that you cannot go outside of the structure.

Inside, there are seemingly endless corridors for you to explore. The halls on the upper deck are rounded, metallic, with lights set at regular intervals. Here there are chambers roughly the length and width of a single bed, with sufficient height for a person to crawl in and sit up on the bed. There is a television screen set in the wall at the foot of the bed by the door, and sockets for electronics. That is all.

Also on this floor is a mess hall where you can get beige, mostly tasteless nutritional sludge dispensed from machines. Water and coffee are also available, likewise dispensed from machines. (There is a cookbook hidden on a shelf written by one Serak the Preparer, but no ingredients anywhere.) There are private showers and bathrooms, a small gym, and rooms clearly meant as places for people to sit and talk. There is a medical bay, although there is no staff. In fact, the whole place seems empty.

There are some rooms that are locked - these look like offices. The doors to these rooms are extremely difficult to break down, but if you have superhuman strength you could manage it. Or maybe you’re clever enough to work the electronic panels beside the doors.

Inside you will find round monitors on the walls and square tablet-like devices on desks. Attempt to work any of these and a soft, pleasant but emotionless voice will inform you that you do not have access. You can try to speak to the AI - called MUTHER - but it is supremely uncooperative. Someone very good with technology could use the tablet the old fashioned way, perhaps, to access files. You might want to be careful, though - MUTHER might decide to retaliate. Harshly.

There doesn’t seem to be a temple anywhere readily apparent.

Notes:
1. The High Temple and anything characters may have stored there is only accessible to those who are experiencing their first island outside of the TDM via a marked door. Everyone else must make do with what is available.

2. Please remember to mark threads appropriately with Content Warnings when necessary.

3. The televisions play mostly game shows. You can also find a set of controllers for it and play Pong. Just Pong.

4. MUTHER will not deliberately kill any people on the station - her programming forbids it. She is not above releasing hallucinogenic gas into the air vents, though.

5. Have fun!

Ⅱ. CONSCIENCE
CW: psychological trauma, threat of death.
It’s easy to get lost; nearly identical corridors branch off from one another. As you walk along you gradually become convinced that someone is following you. Periodically you’ll hear footsteps, a sigh, a rustle of cloth. But every time you turn around you see nothing… unless it’s one of your fellow Travelers. Or maybe you run into them because you’re so busy looking over your shoulder.

Regardless, as you walk along the lights in the corridor flicker, and when they turn back on you will find someone you know standing directly in your path. Someone who you know absolutely cannot be there.

Maybe they died. Maybe you haven’t spoken in years. Whoever they are, the feeling they inspire within you is one of intense guilt. You did something to this person, something for which you think you can never be forgiven.

The apparition might speak, or it might just watch you with silently accusing eyes. You begin to wither under its gaze, feeling weaker and weaker until you can barely stand. You just want to lay on the floor and close your eyes… maybe forever.

Your fate rests in the hands of whoever is with you or finds you. All they have to do is introduce a smidgen of doubt into your mind, a recognition that maybe it isn’t all your fault. Of course, that means you might have to tell them what you did.

Oh, dear.

Notes:
1. The severity of the offense is of course up to the player - this can be deadly serious, or played for laughs. No matter how it is played the only way to save a character from sleeping on the floor until they die from dehydration is to convince them of even the possibility that they might not be guilty. They do not have to feel completely absolved.

Ⅲ. STOWAWAY
CW: monstrous creatures.
The lower decks of the station are darker, more utilitarian looking. These are corridors that lead to rooms full of computers and machinery that keep the station running so it’s probably best to keep out of there.

There are also storage bays filled with both prosaic wooden crates and large metallic pods. Most of these are locked up tight. But not all. Investigate some of the pods and you’ll find that the floor around them is wet with some sort of milky, slimy substance that sure seems like it came from a living organism.

Maybe you should get out of here.

Before you can get good and gone to the upper decks, however, you find exactly what you probably didn’t want to unless you have a very exciting Tinder profile: an alien.

At least eight feet tall, with pale almost translucent skin, the creature has an elongated skull and a mouth that hosts two sets of jaws like a moray eel. It has a whiplike tail and spiky protrusions along its upper back. It is bipedal, and very, VERY fast.

Better hope you’ve got something to fight with! Your chances of survival are definitely greater if you work with a partner.

And you better hope there’s just the one.

Notes:
1. The aliens are extremely dangerous, but they CAN be killed. Their blood is thick and yellow but is not acidic or poison.

Ⅳ. TEMPLE
CW: potential insanity, violence.
If you wander the dark lower decks long enough, you will find yourself moving ever inward toward the very center of the station. There is a door there that is supposed to be locked, but often isn’t. It’s waiting for you, beyond that door and down a dark corridor: the station’s heart.

The room the solitary corridor opens into is round, walls sloping gently up to a domed ceiling. In the middle of the room is a machine of some kind: a series of concentric thick metal rings rotate in different directions around a sphere. The only noise it makes is the gentle swooshing of the circles as they spin out, up, around.

The air feels heavy and charged. It’s not pleasant.

Before you can leave, all of the rings line up so that they appear to radiate out from the sphere in the center. Light flares, and then in the space where the sphere once was you can see it:

Home.

It’s your homeworld, perhaps exactly as you left it, or perhaps earlier or later along in the timeline. It may be pleasant, or it may be awful, but it is undeniably the place from which you came. The place where you belong.

Stare into this portal home long enough and the compulsion to return will slip over you. You just need to jump into the glowing, trembling center of that dimensional gate.

Whoever is with you, however, realises that leaping headfirst into an unknown dimension might not be the smartest idea you’ve ever had, especially considering how ominous the whole place feels. They might be able to talk you down. Hopefully they can talk you down, because the longer you stare at the portal the more convinced you become that you MUST leap into it, and the only way to do so is to kill whoever is trying to get in your way.

If instead you turn away from the dimensional gate, the lights will flare once more before the rings resume their movement. That brief glimpse of home is gone. In its place is the sound of soft voices; people you have left behind, calling out to you with accusations of things left undone, begging to be told why you won’t come home...

These voices will follow you throughout the ship. They are not constant, but they never leave you alone for very long. They won’t be silent until you give them an answer to the question of why you have chosen to remain.

Notes:
1. If characters DO jump into the gate… They can pass through and emerge on the opposite side gravely injured or completely out of their minds. Or you may use this as a very dramatic exit from the game.

Is anybody out there listening?

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When Kyle leans into his field of vision his eyes light up brightly a moment. Delighted for the moment of relief from feeling miserable that Kyle brings with him.

"Kyyyyle," he sighs warmly. "Sweet, empathetic, patient, Kyle," he scooches over and pats the floor next to him. "I'm fine. You should lay here with me though because I'm not sure I'm ever getting up and if I have to spend the last pathetic moments of my life on the floor, I'd like to them at least be with you."

Kyle is, unsurprisingly, not comforted in the slightest.

"What do you mean you're not getting up?" he asks as he sits beside Quentin. He studies him carefully, looking for injuries.

"Quentin, you're not dying.." Said with barely suppressed panic, like saying it will make it true.

"I mean I can't get up. Because I don't think my legs work," he says. "Or if they do they weigh a million pounds each and I can't, I just can't, you know?"

He rubs his eyes lazily before he feels around blindly for Kyle's hand. "Maybe not. Maybe I am. I dunno. Have you ever been depressed? Like cripplingly, not-capable-of-basic-functions-like-eating-and-showering levels of depressed? It's like that. It just crept into me. And now all I wanna do is sleep forever."

Kyle takes Quentin's hand and squeezes tight.

"I haven't, but I'm familiar with the symptoms," Kyle says. His other hand reaches out to smooth Quentin's hair back.

"Why are you depressed? Did something happen? When I saw you earlier you were bitching about having to have sex in a Japanese capsule hotel."

"Oh god, yeah that's gonna be so difficult," he whines, his eyes welling up out of defeat and frustration for something they haven't even attempted yet. It's all just too much to think about right now.

"It's not even normal depression," he coughs like this just exasperates him further. "I can change regular depression, you know? I can just get right in there and stimulate the right dopamine receptors and shit. This is... it feels like it but it's nothing I can fix. I'm just useless against this. I think it's actually sapping my energy."

He closes his eyes a moment when Kyle pets him. Tempted to just go to sleep like his body wants to so badly.

"I dunno. I bumped into a girl I know. Knew. And we were talking. And it sucked. And I started following her and then every stupid step got harder. And then I couldn't get off the floor. And she was gone. And I'm just completely useless here."

Quentin being too exhausted to be horny is a new and frightening development.

Kyle listens, knowing there has to be some sort of trigger. This place always has one.

"What girl, Q?"

"Martha," he sighs. "She's just a friend. I mean. She was a friend. You'd like her. She doesn't have a body. She's just a brain in a jar. It's pretty metal to be honest."

Kyle accepts this statement completely; it's frankly not the strangest thing he's ever heard.

"What happened to Martha, Q?" Kyle asks, stroking Quentin's hair again. "What did she say to you?"

"She said—" he hesitates a moment realizing Martha didn't actually speak to him. Everything that was said between them was from him. His own bitching, and then begging and pleading for her to speak to him again. All she had to do was watch him coldly until the life felt like it was draining from his bones.

"She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. I just said hi and she wouldn't talk to me or tell me why she was mad at me. But I know why. I was a complete dick to her when we were on Utopia. I almost killed her. We've barely talked since and we were friends before that. We were tight. She's cool. I shouldn't have treated her like that. I know. I know, it was fucking dumb," he rambling, slowly dissolving into some amount of snivelling as the tears run back towards his temples in his position.

Gently, Kyle uses his sleeve to wipe Quentin's tears away. "People fuck up," he tells him. His voice is soothing.

"How did you nearly kill her? You can tell me, I won't leave you."

Despite his misery, he reserves a weak little smile for the way Kyle dotes on him. He can't help but wonder where Kyle got his care-takery instincts and has to suspect the mother he's often described as being quintessentially mommish.

"I attacked her," he says plainly. Shrugging against the floor beneath his shoulders. "I attacked them all, really, but I made her the first line of defence. Because she was there. And the only one I could reach. That's it," he laughs mirthlessly. "There's no good reason. Just because."

Between Sheila and Kyle's role as big brother, it's no surprise he turned out this way.

"But why did you attack them? Were you on that drug stuff, uhm, kick?"

He can't imagine Quentin didn't have a reason, even if it was a terrible one.

Edited 2022-03-06 18:50 (UTC)

When he looks at Kyle fresh tears well up and shiver in his eyes. Knowing what a miserable answer he has to that question makes him think there's bound to be an end to Kyle's understanding and he's about to come crashing into it.

"No. I didn't have a reason. I was just angry. And trapped. And tired of being stuck in that lab not knowing if I'd ever get back to my body or my powers." He sniffles a little. "We used to play headgames. Me and Martha. We were telepaths. We went to junior high together. We practiced on each other. We knew what we were capable of. I was just... going stir crazy, trying to get out. She was just the first one who heard me screaming in there and I turned her into collateral damage."

"What lab?" Kyle asks. He's trying to keep his emotions in check, but he is shocked both by the reason for the attack and the word 'lab.' That can never be good.

"You recognized her?"

"Oh, I was kept incorporeal in a tube Hank's lab for a couple of years after they killed me for starting that riot at Xavier's," he mutters. "They didn't know what to do with me and thought if they let me out the Phoenix would inhabit me so they just left me there. They didn't even have a plan for bringing me back so I knew I'd have to bust myself eventually," he waves his hand around lazily as he so often does when he's barrelling through the details.

"They forgot about me down there. They forgot about me while they went off to carry out my ideas without me."

He nods ruefully. "When I figured out how to reach out again. How to push my thoughts out of that tank. Martha was just... the first one to hear me. And even she didn't seem to notice how long I'd been gone," he scoffs.

"They did WHAT to you?!" Kyle shrieks. He has perhaps not the most flattering impression of the X-Men already thanks to Carter, but Logan and David have at least some positive things to say. But this? This is abhorrent.

"Oh my god, Quentin," he says as he physically hauls Quentin into his arms. "Oh my god, that's... oh my god. Quentin, I know you hurt her, and that's not good, but you were clearly NOT in a normal state of mind. You were trying to save yourself. Don't you see that?"

"Not from Martha though!" he bawls, clinging to Kyle when he drags him into his arms.

"She's a good person! And frankly one of the precious few who could probably totally get being formless and forgotten! She's been asking for a body for years and what have any of them done for her!? And I just needed someone to fucking notice me and when she did I fucking destroyed her for it! I can even remember sort of thinking hey! Hey! I'm doing her a favour! because if she gets into it with me and comes out the victor, people might actually think more of her! Like whoever ended up winning my stupid little game they might not completely fucking underestimate at least one of us!"

Edited 2022-03-06 19:59 (UTC)

"No, not from Martha," he agrees, petting Quentin's hair back over and over.

"You did a terrible thing, Q. But in this case you were hurting so badly. How could they do that to you? I just... you weren't some rampaging adult, you were still YOUNG. And you fucked up. You did, and you should have apologized to her, but Quentin... they treated you like an animal. And animals will bite."

Finding the strength to lift his arms he scrubs the tears from his eyes with the heel of his palms.

"I should have," he agrees easily, "I should have said something to her. I shouldn't have gone so far. I shouldn't have smashed her tank. I was just... surprised. When I heard her and I reached out for her and she sort of wanted it. Trouble." He sniffles again. "Just like when we played headgames in Junior High. She liked having someone to square off with. She liked the idea of being anyone's nemesis. She liked the challenge. Even when it got real."

But I used her. Because I was angry. And that was shitty. 'Cause I'm a shitty person basically most of the time."

"Yeah, and maybe one day you can. She might not forgive you, but that's not the point if an apology - it's to acknowledge harm done. And you know you did wrong, and you care. That matters."

He presses a kiss to Quentin's smooth head. "You're not shitty all the time now, dude. Maybe you were, before. But even if you were, even if you were an asshole, you were not solely responsible for what happened. What the fuck did these bastards THINK was gonna happen, huh? Sure, lock up one of the most powerful telepaths and telekinetics on the planet with his own genius thoughts, I'm sure THAT can't go wrong."

Edited 2022-03-06 21:16 (UTC)

"I should have already. I know I should have, because of course something like this would happen and I might never be able to," he scolds himself in a way that few people ever see. Thoughts this self-effacing usually never leave the very private confines of his own head but the breathless way he babbles makes it sound like he couldn't keep them contained if he wanted to.

"Making a whole stupid new country and learning how to resurrect mutants just made everyone feel like they've got nothing to atone for anymore. Like this fresh start would just take all the shit everyone did before and sweep it under the rug and I shouldn't have let this end up there too." he inhales deeply after all that.

Sniffling quietly, he goes quiet just to listen to Kyle. It's easy to listen to because it feels good to hear someone else justifying his behaviour for a change. It's so tempting to believe it. "What if... what if they said you were just making excuses for me?" he asks, gently testing the strength of this idea.

Kyle hugs Quentin to him, not disagreeing. He knows this kind of regret, and knows that it is justified.

"It's not just you," he says instead. "It sounds like everyone on your mutant thinks the same way. And other people do, too. You tell yourself, hey, new chapter in life as if it absolves you. I've done it too, dude."

Kyle thinks about that, cradling Quentin in his arms as much as he can. "They might day that, because I love you. But I don't think I am because if anybody else had this happen, I'd feel the same way. If David hurt someone, or Malcolm, or even Eric Fucking Cartman. You can't throw someone in what is essentially solitary confinement and expect them to remain rational.

"What you did was wrong. But what they did was inhumane."

It's not hard to imagine that Kyle would advocate the same way for anyone else. He's ridiculously prone to fairness like that. Which only makes this line of thinking a little easier for Quentin to swallow.

Unwittingly, he plants his hand on the floor and pushes himself up right. It helps to still have Kyle to lean on but at least he has the strength to sit up again. "Maybe..." he sniffs. "I really did think everyone kind of forgot me in there," he admits.

"Of COURSE you did," Kyle says. He's still horrified, but now also angry on Quentin's behalf.

"They obviously weren't checking on you. It took another young person to do that. No wonder it turned out so badly for the both of you."

He hugs Quentin tightly.

"Whoever did that better pray I never meet them."

"I think you've met some of them..." he admits. The Cuckoos certainly weren't alone in that effort, but they've always been a part of it. "Maybe I deserved it anyway. Or it was pre-karma for the whole UN thing."

I really do like Martha," he mumbles, burying himself against Kyle's chest a minute even though he's certain he could hold himself up again. It just feels safer there.

"Even if she hates me now. I built her anti-gravity floats because she's cool and deserves the kind of autonomy she wanted."

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