MISSION: THE SLEEPER

[ximilian]

● ● ● M I S S I O N   3 . 1

INTRO • MAY ALL YOUR BACON BURN • IF YOU HAVE A DREAM DON'T WAIT • FYI

// INTRO. beam us down!  

It’ll be during the early hours in the morning when the communications device pings the Orbers in the midst of whatever you may be doing: whether it’s sleeping in, having a leisurely breakfast, or being deep into whatever task it is you’ve planned for the day. Viveca’s familiar voice filters through, a cheerful interruption.

// VIVECA.AI

Hi everyone. We’ve got your next mission ready, but I was asked to give you the file a little bit in advance so you could prepare better… so here it is. I don’t think I can delay the teleportation machine more than a day, so early tomorrow morning it’ll be time to go. The situation in Kilnan is a little strange, so I’ve prepared an antidote for you just in case. Pick yours up from the infirmary before you get going. It’ll only work once, so be careful. The orb is somewhere in the castle… I trust you’ll find it. Good luck.

Without any further fanfare, the comms go silent and you’re left with a new mission file and some rather concerning information within the report about a sleeping sickness. But instead of the immediate departure like you might be used to, you’ve been given the day to rest up and prepare for the trip down. So pack your things, grab the antidote, maybe enjoy a hot shower and a good night’s sleep … or if you’re not the sleeping kind, find a good song to jam to and get you motivated for what’s to come.

The next morning before most of your alarms will go off, the teleportation machine will hum to life, crackling with stored energy. Those who have been here for longer might notice this difference and what Viveca had meant when she said she didn’t think she “could delay it for more than a day”. As soon as you’ve been gathered together, you’ll feel the pull — and a tug that removes you from the station.

For what might seem like an agonizingly long moment, you simply hang there in stasis, white light surrounding you accompanied by a strange, ethereal chorus that whispers in your ear, informing you of the goal currently set before you and the cost to achieve it, as well as the exchange for its power —

But before you can venture to open your mouth and respond, the light around you materializes into a fog of cool, damp cloud cover. The moment your feet touch solid ground and the fog parts as you move through it, you’ll see a marble road ahead.

Welcome to the country of Kilnan, Orbers.

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// PART I.MAY ALL YOUR BACON BURN  

Around you, the courtyard of the Crystalline Palace opens up — white marble pavement, extravagant sculptures half-covered in moss, and fountains that have long since dried up — its splendor abandoned and left for time to neglect like a long forgotten secret.

If you look behind you, you’ll see nothing but clouds; and underneath you is mostly open sky. Faintly (if you really squint), you might be able to make out the grassy earth somewhere below the clouds but the distance seems a little treacherous to even consider taking your chance to get there. As such, the only way is forward — up the wide steps and through the imposing, but majestic, double doors of the castle.

1.0   Once inside, a seemingly empty castle greets you. There are no servants rushing to greet you, no hustle and bustle that you'd expect from a castle this size... just silence.

You’ll find yourself standing in the middle of a grand foyer. Daylight filters in through tall windows framed with long flowing curtains that seem to sway just a little, even though the casements are clearly shut. Further in, you’ll notice multiple staircases leading you to the upper floors, some of them straight, and some of them curved, while others wind upwards in a seemingly endless direction towards one of the towers. Most of these stairways will appear to be your regular run-of-the-mill means of egress, but the moment you turn away and look back to where you’d just come from, you might notice that the stairs have disappeared … only to be right in front of you when you glance back. Another set of stairs may take you in one direction, but try and retread your path and you’ll find the very same staircase you’d just used will take you somewhere completely different.

These stairs might be playing tricks on you, or maybe you need to get your eyes checked.

From the foyer, hallways appear to sprawl in all directions of the wind, some of them lined with paintings from a very deft hand (or hands). Walk along and peer at one of these incredibly detailed depictions of vibrant rich cities, lush idyllic countrysides, alluring, well-manicured gardens and find that all of them seem so incredibly lifelike — almost uncannily so. If you study one for too long, you’ll find yourself losing focus of the world around you, only seeing the painting that beckons you forward … and helpless to resist, you take a step forward and wind up within the world of the painting. Is it as beautiful as it seemed from its frame? Of course it is. Just look at that colour! Feel that breeze! Take a deep breath of the air around you. But remember that you probably can’t stay here forever; you have to get back. And the way to the castle is … somewhere here. You just have to find it.

2.0   Inside the castle, your task is clear: find the orb.. and for some of you, perhaps try and look for the people sent to the castle before you. To do that, you’ll need to search through the different rooms and accompanying towers… but the moment that you try to, it becomes apparent that this is no ordinary castle and the rooms are not exactly just rooms either. Some have stark differences in scale: in one room you enter, all the furniture within appears to be made for giants; while in another room, everything has been shrunk down to its miniature.

Further still, another room will appear to be deceptively normal… but the moment you step past the threshold, the door will lock shut behind you and then fade into the wall like it’d never been there at all. You only have one clear objective then: search through the room for a way to get out… or make yourself a way out.

3.0   When you enter this next room, you find yourself having to pause to take it all in, it’s so incredible that you can barely believe your eyes: whatever this room holds within seems to cater specifically to your individual interests and desires like it sees into your soul. It might offer rare books to those interested in knowledge, the best entertainment for those who seek self-indulgence, decadent foods you’ve always wanted to try for those with a discerning palate. What a wonderful time! So wonderful, in fact, that it’s too easy for you to forget the passing of time … what was it you were doing before? Nothing important, surely. Right?

4.0   There are rooms that don’t even seem like rooms at all once you’ve entered them: you open a green painted door and instead of the marble floors, you step right into a hedge maze. When you turn to glance over your shoulder, you’ll find that the door has vanished, and your hand lingering on the door knob is now clutching at a cluster of prickly foliage. With nowhere else to go but to brave the labyrinth, you move forward. The path you take will twist and wind until you realize that the best-case scenario here is coming face-to-face with a deadend rather than the other delights that the maze holds in store. One end greets you with a particularly angry tree, hell-bent on wiping you off the face of this plane; at another turn, a creature that looks suspiciously like a Sphinx, sitting on her hind legs and blocking the way, might ask you a riddle in exchange for passage; and there is always a chance that the right-hook you take will pull you through a cloud of deceptively beautiful fluttering dots of lights that whisper to you with the voices of people long-dead before you.

5.0   Another room will pull you — quite literally — into the eye of a storm. Hail and rain pours down, drenching you immediately, while lightning flashes in the open sky — it almost looks like the countryside you saw beneath the castle, but that couldn’t be, right? You don’t remember leaving the castle… And more importantly — the rain really is coming down, and that lightning is striking dangerously close. It might be wise to find some temporary shelter, perhaps a little cottage to hide in, or at the very least, get to that overturned hay cart and hide beneath it — and wait for a chance to find your way back to the exit door … wherever (or whenever) it may appear.

6.0   Not all of the castle will be entirely strange, however; there, too, are regular, non-eventful rooms scattered within. A large dining room with the table set for one, a thin layer of dust collecting over the silverware, for instance; a library filled with old tomes and scrolls that don’t appear to have been touched in years; a storage room full of strange items; and, if you make it into the cellar, you’ll find the kitchen, its food storage still robust despite the fact that some of the meat has begun to gather mold, and some of the vegetables have darkened and gone a little mushy. On the layer of dust settled over the floor, there is exactly one set of footprints, perhaps smaller than you’d think, but even those seem at least a number of weeks old.

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// PART II.IF YOU HAVE A DREAM DON'T WAIT  

It’s almost too easy to become distracted by all of the strange happenings within the castle, easy enough to forget about the sickness you’ve been warned about — and perhaps, with so far there having been no sight of anyone actually affected by it, it’s easy enough to think that there might have been a mistake or a misunderstanding. But the longer you spend within these beautiful white stone walls, you become aware of a whisper: quiet at first, the barely-there breath of a language you know you understand and yet you still can’t quite grasp it, the meaning frustratingly close to the edge of your consciousness. And the more you try to touch those not-words and too-light-whispers, you feel a little dizzy before the world around you suddenly changes.

7.0   At first you think you’ve simply fallen into another room, just another hidden trap-door or painting you’d stepped into. So perhaps you don’t even realize that you’ve fallen under a spell at all when everything around you is just … dark. Beneath your feet, if you focus your gaze, is a still surface of a black lake glinting — and yet you are not sinking. Every step that you take forward creates a little ripple across the glassy surface. As your eyes adjust, so do your surroundings begin to take shape. It will be different for everyone, this dreamscape morphing and melding into a scene (an island, a meadow, a small patch of forest, or will it remain the lake?) or setting that reflects you — it’s where your soul feels most at ease … for now.

8.0   As expected, the dreamscape does not stay still for long. The more time you spend here, the more it seems to draw inspiration from your memories. Suddenly you find everything around you materializing into solid form, the experience being dragged from the depths of your mind into manifesting a vivid study in touch and sight and smell and sound. It’s something you’ve already been through before, but whether you like it or not, this memory is being replayed around you and now you’re the observer … you and the lucky (or unlucky) person who has entered this memory with you.

Do you stay, or do you try to run from it?

9.0   The stronger the memory, the stronger its effect on you: the heaviest memories, whether they’re happy ones or sad ones, may latch onto your subconscious so tightly that it pulls you right into the memory itself.

Just as these dreams often do, it’s hard to tell whether this is made up or reality itself — perhaps you remember that this has happened before and you’ll try to change the course of events. Or perhaps you think you’re living this memory for the first time. Whatever it might be, you find yourself fully convinced of its authenticity … but the power of belief is a dangerous thing. Beware that the injuries sustained in this state will become real, visible to those who might be observing this — and observing you — from the outside. (You know the line: if you die in the game, you die in real life.)

NOTE: These strong memories might also draw you into them as yourself from that time, so someone wandering into this re-lived memory might find you there as a child, a teenager, a young adult, or perhaps someone with the same or a different face — whatever you were at the time of the memory.

10.0   Once you become aware of these memories, you may push them away or will them to stop. The moment that you do, the dreamscape will immediately shift to become its unaltered state once more. The other way to escape these memories is to leave. At the edge of your dreamscape, you will find that the air shifts and shimmers just a little differently than the rest of this space … and once you get close enough, the doorway will open to let you out of your dreamscape and into someone else’s like a chain of several small links. If your dreams are more akin to nightmares, perhaps you enter the door willingly. But just as likely, you might simply get too close and are sucked into the passageway.

And you never know just whose dream you end up in next …

The only way to leave the dreamscape is by being woken up by someone administering the antidote to you, and it will only work once. So if you fall back asleep, remember — if it takes you in again, you will remain under this sleeping spell, unable to wake … at least until the cause of the sickness has been found.

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F Y I

• The events in this log take place during the month of November.

• If you have questions about any of the prompts or the mission in general, please direct them HERE.

• To submit a search request regarding exploring a specific place during any of the prompts, please do so HERE.

• Voting for how the characters will get the orb will go up November 22. Though voting will be done in an OOC post, it is an IC vote in the sense that you should pick a choice your character would ICly make. What the characters choose to do will determine the conclusion of the mission.

• And finally, have a soundtrack for this log! ♪ ♪ ♪

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Comments

9.1

[oiorpata]

[ it's not a terribly unfamiliar sight in layout - opposing forces, defectors, rebellion: it's a story intrinsic to humanity. she doesn't recognize anyone in the scene, but it comes together when the woman says a name she certainly knows, and andy knows all about the sleeves, so she catches up to speed quickly enough. she's witnessing kovacs, perhaps his original body. she's gleaned bits and pieces of his world, and in some ways she's curious to see an actual part of it now. ]

[ andy hovers at the edge of the bridge watching it play out, wondering how much is colored by time. he's old too, and even three hundred years could be enough to muddle a memory. ]

[ she doesn't speak up, doesn't want to intrude, and only when she hears him talk first does she acknowledge she's even there. ]

Who is she?

[kovach]

[ he can't quite tell if it's a dream or a slip in his memory, or maybe even a construct made especially for him; it happens often, especially in torture attempts, to try scrambling into the prisoner's brain for older memories. but if that's what it is, kovacs wouldn't have expected to find himself here for all that he tries to preserve every memory of quell against those that might try to take her away, even in memory.

but the person he finds next to him isn't someone he'd imagine leading any kind of construct. maybe it's just someone wearing the face of someone who's become familiar, someone he's come to regard as a good ally.

either way, he's always too enchanted in seeing quell again, even when he's never stopped seeing her, hallucinations on the daily meaning that she stands beside him in everything he does. but this feels more real than any fantasy, and he wants to come back here desperately, to when it all started. ]

Quellcrist Falconer — leader of the Uprising, founder of the Envoys. [ that's how people see her in the books. but he saw her as so much more. his voice is quiet, almost distant. ] I loved her.

[oiorpata]

[ she has lived a very long time. her face could look plenty similar to someone he's seen before, but andy isn't really thinking about whether or not she's recognizable so much as the curiosity and almost familiarness that comes with the atmosphere of this... dream, she supposes. usually they're not so interactive. ]

[ she notes the past tense. if it wasn't for the tone of his voice, andy might not immediately assume the worst. she's aloof ninety percent of the time, but here at least she seems to tread more carefully. maybe it's because she's started taking an actual liking to kovacs. it's hard not to, if only for that longevity connection. ]

Envoys? A rebel faction? Did she pull you in then? [ given the way the meeting on the bridge went versus his quick admonition of love. ]

[kovach]

[ of course, if this meeting was anything to judge by, it'd be pretty easy to see that there was resistance on kovacs' part at the time. he was an ex-ctac officer who came across an enemy group that had been trying to fight the very people he'd been a part of, and his priority had been in getting out of there completely with rei.

but he'd come to realize later just how quickly quell had snatched into him, how she'd seen right through him from the start, piercing through layers of guards he hadn't even realized were masking something else entirely.

even now, he wants to keep it all to himself, but it's hard to distinguish dream from reality, his typical control over a construct making itself useless ever since he'd first made his way onto the station. so it's easier to speak it out loud, to talk to andy like she could really be here; she might not be, but then it wouldn't make much of a difference then what he says. ]

She found a way, just by speaking. She convinced me there were ways to ... actually make a difference. To fight for something instead of just watching the world slip by. [ the way he lives now in comparison. ] To embrace humanity instead of the emptiness of immortality. For a little while, it ... was a life worth living.

[oiorpata]

[ despite his rather forthcoming attitude about other parts of his world, the sleeves and his age, she's not surprised there are parts he keeps tucked away. three hundred years is a drop in the bucket for her personally, but it's still a long period of time. she didn't even know booker three hundred years ago, and now he's an intrinsic part of her life, and she knows to him it's already been way too long. ]

[ the love kovacs has for quellcrist is clear in the way he speaks about her, and she can see a little of it from the brief vision of her earlier, the magnetism in the way she interacted with kovacs. ]

[ andy also notes the past tense. she wants to ask what happened. she can assume, given kovac's age versus quell's seemingly anti-immortal stance. ]

Did she return it? How you felt?

[kovach]

[ as much as he almost can't even make sense of the dream, he's aware of andy's presence, of her ears listening to his words, of her asked questions. and it's almost strange that it's her he's speaking to — thousands of years old, she'd said. andy's very existence is something quell believed to be wrong, but so has kovacs. he despises his own lasting presence in the world and from what he's seen of the people who have used power to live for centuries, he knows the wretchedness that comes from it.

but in the little he's known andy, her quieter presence, her more reserved nature, her more observational actions, she hasn't held the same disdainful reputation that they typically hold. maybe it's because whatever keeps her alive isn't something she chose. maybe that's what makes the difference. maybe that's why he trusts her. ]

She did. [ he answers quietly, the natural use of past tense making him realize just how aware he really is that this isn't happening now, that this isn't real. ] But we were separated when they found us. The Protectorate used a virus to kill every Envoy here — [ he looks forward, at the faint figures of the rebels around them, at old friends that had become his family in time. ] All except three that weren't within the radius of the hit. But Quell and my sister, they — I told them to take the ship, to escape, but they — [ he swallows, eyes still turned away, his throat going dry as if every word makes it all reality again.

and almost as if the rush of memories distorts the world around them, the bridge becomes a open patch of the forest, an explosion suddenly occurring overhead, a shower of ash falling over them in its wake.

kovacs' lip quivers in watching the scene play out again, fingers shaking, as he barely whispers, ] They didn't make it.

[oiorpata]

[ immortality in kovacs's world functions far differently from hers; it's open and acknowledged there, nothing but a secret in hers. at least that's what they all want it to be. andy is older than a lot of things on earth, but it's true that none of it is her choice. sometimes she thinks, if given the choice, she would take it away from herself. but there's no rhyme or reason to it. ]

[ she holds out her hand, feeling the ash on her fingertips, and it makes her think of - something. other things. days and years blur together more often than not. the important part is it's not an unfamiliar sensation. the grief burns alongside the ash. ]

I'm sorry. [ it's not pity or courtesy; there's a genuine sympathy and understanding in it, bearing the weight of loss for years and years. she thinks of booker, his own hurt and agony still so fresh compared to hers when she cannot even recall her sisters' faces. ]

When you're the one still there, you replay it and wonder how it could have gone differently. [ she thinks then of quynh. of how kovacs was in love with quell and how her own heart has always been a little bit hollow since. without thinking, she shifts, moving closer to settle her hand gently at his shoulder, giving it a small squeeze. ] It isn't easy.

[kovach]

[ he feels the slight presence of andy's hand at his shoulder; no comfort would ever be enough in this moment, but it's still appreciated, still something in the realm of reassuring, even if he's likely to never actually be eased away from the survivor's guilt that's been latching onto him since this very moment.

he can taste ash on his tongue, his mouth dry, and knows that no matter how long ago this was, the taste will always be there. ]

I did wonder if I could change it. [ the deal to change a regret. it's the first he's even referenced it out loud to anyone, to admit to what he'd been trying to fix. ] But even if I changed a single moment, if I somehow warned them in time, if I tried to change Quell's mind, if I — I never even joined them at all ... I know it'll always lead back to this somehow.

[ fate. destiny. he's not sure if he believes in those things more than shitty circumstances, but he does at least know the usual direction of his luck. ]

She'd say it wouldn't be worth it.

[oiorpata]

[ survivor's guilt is a hell of a burden. sometimes andy thinks she's numb to it, but then it'll hit her on occasion like a ton of bricks. ]

A friend of mine believes wholeheartedly in destiny. [ she heaves a sigh and pulls her hand back. ] I don't know if I do. But there's probably a reason why I'm here and he's not.

[ she looks over at him. ] This is fucking shitty, Kovacs. This kind of loss - [ she knows it, on some level. the ache and regret. the way it haunts for decades. it's a different kind of haunting when it lingers and lives longer than a standard human life. ] I can't blame you for wanting to change it, even if Quell might think otherwise.

[ but that's probably why quell is a good person, and andy already knows she's not. ]