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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.
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.
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.
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.
Is anybody out there listening?
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.
no subject
Kyle looks very lost and very young at the moment - he's twenty-four, but right now he could pass for eighteen. "So how do you know you're not?"
no subject
"What makes you think that you're a bad person?" Malcolm asks. Perhaps it ought not be up to him to be judge and jury for Kyle, but hopefully Malcolm will be able to reassure him that he's not a bad person.
no subject
"I got my teacher burned alive," he says softly. "And an innocent kid sent away for years and years because we let him take the blame." He shudders all over, barely resisting the urge to just go to sleep and hope he never woke up.
"I saw him. The kid. He was here."
no subject
He swallows hard. "I don't think you really saw him," Malcolm says slowly. "It was the Isles trying to trick you." The fact that he might see someone he doesn't want to see, like his father, leaves Malcolm feeling equally unnerved.
"Come on. We can't talk like this."
no subject
no subject
Reaching down, Malcolm grips a hold of Kyle's arm. If he's not going to come, Malcolm will try to drag him along.
"This place is making you feel that way. You can't let it get to you. Come on."
no subject
This time when Malcolm goes to help him he manages to push himself up.
"Okay. Okay, yeah. Kids don't understand a lot of the time, do they? Like... I didn't really think he'd be gone so long. I was just trying to stay out of trouble. My mom would have killed me."
no subject
Once Kyle is on his feet, Malcolm lets go of his arm. "Come on, let's go get some horrible coffee," he says.
no subject
"Thanks, yeah." He glances over, a weak smile on his face. "You're pretty understanding. I guess you must have to be, to know how people work."
no subject
They get to the mess hall and Malcolm sticks a cup under the machine that dispenses coffee. The only reason he even drinks it is because he'd probably go into caffeine withdrawal if he didn't.
He passes the full cup to Kyle and then fills another for himself. "So, what happened back home with your teacher?"
no subject
"Thanks," Kyle says gratefully as he takes the coffee. It's not good, but it's better than nothing.
"Oh. Uhm. This was is preschool. My friends and I wanted to play fireman, and we decided it would be better if the fire was real. So I said, hey, Trent would probably do it, because he was the toughest kid in our class. And he did, and we couldn't put the fire out."
He sighs. "Miss Claridge tried to put it out and she caught fire. And Trent got blamed for it, and we didn't speak up. He went to like, juvenile detention for five years."
no subject
"My God," Malcolm says. "You were, what? Three? You didn't even know what you were doing. The trauma of it probably haunts you even more than your classmate going to jail." He's seen burned bodies before but never watched one burn. Malcolm can imagine how horrific that was.
He sips his coffee, then something else dawns on him. "Wait, they sent a preschooler to jail?"
no subject
He shrugs. "Well, juvie, but yeah. Honestly I'm not sure HOW that happened? But my hometown is exceptionally dumb. Like, really, REALLY dumb. I could tell you stories and you'd think I was fucking lying, dude. It's why I don't really tell anybody stuff if I can help it."
no subject
It doesn't make a lot of sense, but Malcolm's heard a lot of strange stories from different people's homes. "I don't like this place," he says, indicating to the space station around them.
no subject
"Me neither," Kyle agrees. "Like, I don't have the best experience with stuff in space in general, but this place is especially creepy. We should definitely just chill in one of the places we know are more or less safe.
"You've been okay so far?"
no subject
He nods. "It might be better if we all stay closer together. I tend to prefer being alone, but not in a place like this."
Malcolm lets out a shaky sigh. "Mostly, yeah. Trying to avoid certain areas, like that hallway I found you on."
no subject
"Did something happen to you, too? Or are you worried it will?"
no subject
"Ever since I visited the sphere I've been hearing... voices. Mostly of my family, begging me to go through the sphere and come home." He shakes his head. "I know it isn't real. It's some kind of trick."
no subject
"You're probably right, it's probably like... you jump in and you get turned inside out or some shit. But like, that's rough, emotionally. You must miss your family a lot. Did. Uhm. Did you want to go home?"
no subject
"I did. I still do. There are a lot things that I left unfinished at home." He has to make sure that everyone is okay. That's what his mother and sister's voices have been asking him to do: come home and protect them.
It's not how they would ask. That's how Malcolm knows it isn't real.
no subject
"I guess I did, too. And I miss my family a lot. But... I dunno. This isn't all bad." It sounds stupid to his own ears. "I mean, they're probably okay without us. Don't you think?"
no subject
"I don't know. My mother... I'm sure she misses me." Maybe Gil and a few other people too.
no subject
He studies Malcolm carefully. "I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess something really shitty happened right before you got here. You don't have to tell me, obviously, but like... if you want to, I'll listen."
ready to wrap this thread?
Other people here know what happened, but Malcolm doesn't feel like talking about it right now. He's sure that the isle will find some way to bring it up again. That's the only reason that anyone else here knows. At least he's grown more comfortable talking about it and the rest of his issues.
Totally :)
"Sounds good, dude. Let's get the hell away from here and get some awful coffee."