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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?

Network · Logs · OOC · Memes · Plurk

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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."

"Even your UN stunt doesn't deserve that shit," Kyle says vehemently.

He kisses Quentin's cheek. "I think Martha sounds cool. If we wind up back in your dimension? We'll make her a body."

He sounds so confident.

He smiles a tired, but earnest smile. "I really didn't think so either, but some people are still really salty about that."

When Kyle's lips leave his cheek he turns to chase his mouth for a proper kiss. "That's the thing I've been thinking about!" he whisper-shouts. "We're back home on Krakoa literally turning out bodies like bottles of Coke! We could make her any kind of body she wants!"

He follows Kyle's arms until he can hold his boyfriends hands. "Help me up?" he asks, shuffling his feet around before using Kyle for leverage.

Kyle huffs. "Well, maybe those people should take a long hard look in the fucking mirror."

Kyle kisses back, finally relaxing a little. "Exactly! So we'll take over the cloning vats, give her a fucking... Cardi B bod, I don't know."

Kyle nods and gets up, grabbing Quentin's forearms and yanking him up. "C'mere, baby."

He staggers a little when his legs still feel half-asleep, but thankfully he feels like he can fill his lungs with air again. "She's kind of mousy. She'd be super embarrassed if she came out looking like a total sexpot," he chuckles.

"My legs stilly feel noodly," he admits, leaning more than just a little of his weight on Kyle. "You didn't see her did you? Martha?" As he utters the name a picture of this girl— the disembodied brain in a floating fishbowl— arises in Kyle's mind. Because apparently description alone wasn't enough.

"I can't tell if— I mean I thought it was actually her. You know. like here. With us. But maybe the whole thing was just some kind of mindgame."

"She might surprise you," Kyle says, smiling. "All you hero types are gorgeous."

Kyle 'looks' at the image, then shakes his head. "No. I was looking for a place to piss and I just saw you laying in the hallway. Scared me to death, dude, I thought you were dying."

He snorts at that. "You clearly just haven't met enough for an adequate sample size."

"I was dying! I think... I mean I could feel everything inside me shutting down and I couldn't stop it! Frankly, I'm still not sure what stopped it exactly, but it definitely had something to do with you," he says latching on tightly to Kyle again as if he's reluctant to let him go at all until he knows he'll survive without him.

Edited 2022-03-07 04:16 (UTC)

"Hmm, let me think, I know like seven hero people? And you're all beautiful."

Kyle keeps Quentin tight against him as they walk. "Yeah? I think this place probably fucking dredged up Martha's likeness. So let's get the fuck to the upper deck."

"Trevor is covered in eyeballs. And Glob Herman has see-through skin like a jellyfish. But with humanoid innards. And Slick is... I don't know something like a hairless gremlin with penguin feet," he prattles.

Squeezing himself close to Kyle's side he makes the effort to lighten his steps with a little telekinetic help but even that just gives him the first pangs of a headache. "Ow..." he mutters. "Did you find any bigger pods? Like double occupancy sized? That's what I was wandering around down here for when Martha showed up."

"Yeah, but how cute is Trevor's butt?" Kyle challenges.

"Don't do that, dumbshit," he chides. He laughs softly and shakes his head.

"No. We're just gonna have to be real cozy, babe."

Quentin blinks incredulously a moment. "I can't say I've ever— oh God I have to imagine it has eyes all over it. Oh my God, I bet he has eyes everywhere."

"Shut uppp I thought I could," he mutters. His fingers curling into a fist around a handful of Kyle's shirt. "Kay. I can do cozy," he promises.

"Hey Kyle," his voice is small. Especially for Quentin. "Thank you."

Kyle cackles softly. Quentin's face is just too good.

He looks over, surprised at the tone. Then he just leans down and kisses Quentin's head.

"Dude. You've saved me, too. It's what we do."

It's true, too. Kyle isn't sure he'd still be around if not for Quentin and his friends.

"Oh thank fuck, I think that's an elevator."

It's tempting to ask Kyle not to tell anyone. Not because he thinks he would, but because his own anxiety craves that kind of reassurance. Instead Kyle raises a question.

"Have I?" he asks honestly. "I mean I would. Obviously. But I don't think I've-- and being a werewolf from Jersey counts as life threatening."

He blinks at the button panel a moment and waits for Kyle to direct them where to go. "Sorry, I, I can't even remember my way around this place right now," he mutters rubbing the bridge of his nose in the hope it will clear his head of whatever just came so close to taking him down.

"You have," Kyle reassures him. "Dude. You know how much shit we've been through in a year?! So much. You've kept me going in a lot of ways."

He smiles softly. "Shh, baby. It's okay, that's why I'm here." He presses the button, holding Quentin closely as they wait.

"You're okay."

"Stop it," he mumbles, but it's got none of his usual bite. "You're not allowed to get all doting and mushy until we're in a bed somewhere and not literally keeping me upright."

He sways when the lift does, but he's got Kyle to lean against now and he's never felt more justified in having a tall, athletic boyfriend. "I feel dizzy," he sighs.

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