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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
Oni narrows her eyes right back at him, unsure which is more annoying: The nickname that he just won’t let die, or his use of her full name. Once, twice, maybe three times, she opens her mouth, trying to interject until, finally, she gets a word in edgewise. “I didn’t mean those sorts of issues, Wade. You… You understand that I’m a literal monster, right? They could inherit that from me. And, with that, a genuine, bonafide, hand-on-a-stack-of-bibles, big fucking curse. Bein’ haunted by ghosts ain’t nothin’ to sneeze at, so excuse me if I don’t wanna pile anything else onto that.”
It may come as some surprise to him that Oni’s voice turns uncharacteristically gentle. Perhaps the gentlest it’s ever been with him. “Of course we can’t have our parents back. To tell you the truth… I can’t remember my mother, either. Not even what she looked like…”
“But that’s one of the nice things about havin’ a kid in your life. You get to try to be the kind of parent you wish you had.” And that, essentially, is why she was so adamant that Neph didn’t need to fight her battles. Why she was so angry with Logan for taking their ‘daughter’ on any of his escapades. She knew what it was like to be a child-soldier. “I’d offer to adopt you but, to be fair, y’had a countdown to when Neph was ‘legal,’ so that’s a hard no from me,”
“There’s other kinds of family, no? Not just parents and children. We could be like… Cousins?” She chews on that thought for a second, then smirks, adding, “Distant cousins. On the condition that you stop starin’ at my ass…”
no subject
As she calls herself a monster, he's already shaking his head to negate her words. It's funny, the two of them call themselves monsters all the time, and then other people including them refute that claim. So it's hypocritical to insist she is not even as she insists he isn't and he doesn't believe her either. But he does it anyway.
"You're not a monster. Werewolves aren't monsters. That's just bad PR from the movies. Propaganda from scared humans. And ghosts are cool!! If I saw them all the time, that'd be fun."
He offers her a sad shrug. "I'm sorry. We are orphans together, then. But not cousins. I can't promise anything when it comes to checking out your ass. It's just too fine. I can't help myself. That is the best booty I have ever seen in my entire life. It is supernaturally amazing. It draws the eye, the hand, and the quarter. I have no idea how such perfection can exist in the universe. It's like a god that doomed us all to imperfection let that one little thing slide through the cracks, that one perfect booty."
no subject
It’s sweet, even if every fairytale begs to differ, but his denial earns him her most skeptical look. “Werewolves aren’t monsters… Really? That’s the headline you wanna go with? Look, I’ll spare you the history lesson, but there’s a reason human beings drop a proverbial deuce when they see me… Present company excluded.” And, well, it isn’t only him. She’s found that, while not every mutant is exempt from Delirium, their odds are better than your garden variety homo-sapien, but maybe that has less to do with genetics than experience… Horrible, horrible experience. “And before you get all melodramatic on me, yes, you’re human.”
She buries her face in her hands, shaking her head as he launches into what is basically a dissertation on the merits of her ass. All she can do is be grateful there isn’t an actual 36-slide PowerPoint presentation to go along with it. “Is that a pun?” she groans through her fingers.
no subject
And he is. He really is. for like, ten straight minutes of staring off into the distance with a dopey grin on his face. It's so perfectly awful and lecherous, and yet to his mind it doesn't hurt anybody so he's cool with it. She might not be, but oh well. Wade is not always the best with consent, and he's the worst with fantasy consent.
"You know, you wanna talk headlines, I'd go with saying that humans are monsters. Not even 'too', just humans are monsters, full stop. You tear things up, but you generally have a pretty set goal of saving the planet. Just, you know, violently. And also your kind is kind of a dick to all the other changers, so you learned a few lessons from the humans in that regard unfortunately. BUT. Humans are still way worse. They...we...intentionally fuck over all that we see, the planet, those we label as monsters, each other, etc etc. Just ask any of the bajillion extinct races. Or anybody that's not a white male. In comparison, yeah, I'll stick with werewolves aren't monsters. You look like puppies in comparison to humans. Humans even invented vampires to give you a harder time when they couldn't do it well enough regularly."
He can't help but grin at her reaction to his dissertation on the merits of her ass. And what makes you assume there wasn't a 36 slide Powerpoint presentation? Just because it wasn't narrated...
no subject
“Please don’t.” She could just see it all in the lurid expression painted on his stupid mask. “You save that nonsense for when I’m not sittin’ directly across from you…”
Oni smirks, leaning back in her chair. Much as she hates to admit it, Wade has some points. Inexcusable as Impergium was… If you add up the toll of suffering and death humanity inflicts on itself, there really is no comparison. “Who you been talkin’ to?” she asks, because that’s way more than he should know about garou and the other Fera, “Kind of a dick’ is putting it mildly.”
Wherever the line for ‘too far’ was drawn, the garou passed it long before they eliminated the Bunyip. “You’d be surprised th’shit you get away with, when you say you’re doin’ it to save the planet. ‘Gotta admit… I never thought of it that way, humans inventing vampires, but I reckon you’re not wrong.”
no subject
At her question, he pulls out a Werewolf: The Apocalypse book. "Oh, I got the sourcebook on your stuff. White Wolf made a whole game about you guys. And about the Vampires too." He pulls out that book. "Technically I probably shouldn't have these here, but the game is ending and I never did get to spend all those points I saved up. I was gonna bring in Jeff the Land Shark, but that'll have to be for another game. Maybe that game with the folksy fox if I join it. So now it's just splurging the points on fun stuff like the sourcebooks for your game to make your head hurt!"
no subject
“Sourcebook…?” She blinks, and he produces a book out of seemingly nowhere—- We’re calling it ‘seemingly nowhere,’ because she doesn’t want to even think about where he stashed a whole ass book on his person. “Points…?”
“It’s working,” she groans, because her head really does hurt from trying to keep up. “I don’t know if you’re talkin’ about Kitsune or what-the-fuck but, take it from me, don’t play any games with them that you aren’t prepared to lose. Card sharks, the whole lot of ‘em…”
no subject
He folds his arms at her, looking all imperious and judgmental, before he grins. "Nah, just fuckin' with ya. But seriously. Your face is hot too, it's just more fun to go off about the perfection that is your ass. Because it IS perfection. How is it so perfectly shaped and so firm?!? Like, I mean, your face is a solid 10/10, but that ass is like 150 million/10. It makes me want to believe in reincarnation so that one day I'll die and come back as somebody hotter who can actually date your immortal ass. No pun intended. Except that's a great pun, so we'll say it was intended."
Wade snorts. "Not kitsune. That's a different source book." He pulls that out too. "Although I guess it's weird to know that humans turned your life and history into a roleplaying game..."
no subject
“I can’t believe we’re actually havin’ this conversation in SPACE,” she mutters to herself. Then, louder, “You havin’ a snowball’s chance in hell with me has nothin’ to do with looks and everything to do with the fact that you bounced quarters off my ass for the better part of ten fucking years,”
“And you never would’ve noticed me in the first place, if I weren’t married to yer man-crush, so don’t even go there.”
She’s eaten enough that the risk of frenzying out of hunger is pretty minimal, so Oni uses her spork to gingerly flip open one of the books. For one thing, the art work is pretty ridiculous. “Sometimes hangin’ out with you makes me wonder if I’m not still trapped in a hallucination, Wilson…”
no subject
Wade blinks, and tilts his head to this side a little. "Hey wait, you're not immortal? How long do you have then? I know you've been around for a long time..." That she's not immortal is actually really disappointing to him. He knows he'll outlive damn near everyone, and the people he can keep around mean a lot.
He waves a hand. "Or the reason I kept giving Wolvie so much attention is because I wanted to hang out with you more. It goes both ways! But does the origin of the relationship matter as much as the relationship? Fact is, you and me, we're here, now, together when so many others have disappeared." Once again, his face looks a little forlorn under the mask. It's a heavy and sad fact.
"Oh you are," he chirps, "But does it matter if you feel real to yourself?"