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

[kovach]

[ his mind is somewhat still caught up in the dream, snaring him in a way that he's taught himself better to avoid, that quell herself has taught him. but he can't help himself; he misses her, and for all that a part of him knows this is just a picked piece of his memory, he doesn't want to leave it.

because in it, quell's alive, and there's still a chance of saving her.

he can sense quill near him, hearing the man speak, but his attention still focuses on his surroundings of harlan's world, and though he's momentarily back in his ryker sleeve, the question almost seems to reel him back in again, once more wearing the skin he'd worn when he met her. ]

It's my birth sleeve. [ even if the protectorate had taken it from him early on, not seeing it for nearly two decades. ] She made it seem like we could change the world. Like we could make a difference.

[spacedisaster]

[ Peter has learned that the longer they stay in these memories, the more real the dreamscape becomes, and he's wary of getting too involved. It has happened to him before, and it seems to be inevitable every time. He studies the man in front of him, how the looks flicker and change, and commits the new features to memory. ]

Your birth sleeve...right. [ That doesn't tell him much, unfortunately, but Peter is trying to make sense of things. Either Kovacs went through really intensive plastic surgery or this is something else, and everything points to the latter. ] Your birth body, you mean? It's not fair that you're so handsome in both of them.

[ The blond jokes lightly, trying to keep things casual, trying to remind Kovacs of his other body, so he doesn't get too into the dream and gets lost in the process. The temptation of staying in a reality were your loved ones are alive and well is very tempting, Peter would fall prey to it too.  Here, now, he shouldn't indulge Kovacs either, but Peter can't help himself, he's too curious. ]

Not an easy feat, changing the world. You joined her dream, then, fighting against that the Protectorate? What were you fighting for?

[kovach]

[ it's the body he was born with, put under the care of the protectorate for years while he trained in others, but he's already been used to slipping into other sleeves by this point, nearly two decades or more spent hopping around in different bodies, playing an assassin for ctac. but right now, even with quill's words, ryker's sleeve is the furthest thing from his mind.

right now, he wants to be back in this world, latching on to the deal he'd made with the orbs about bringing quell and the envoys back. ]

To end immortality so we can embrace being human again. [ because with the former, everyone had begun to drift away from the latter. and in two hundred and fifty years, he came to see the consequences of that. ] To stop the stack technology that allows the rich and powerful to live forever. But ... we lost.

[spacedisaster]

[ As far as memories go, this isn't as terrible as other Peter's seen, that carried death and destruction in them, so he figures it won't be so bad if they let it play for a little while. It feels selfish too, to try and make Kovacs focus on the present, to try and make him think about a body that really isn't his, even if staying might be dangerous in the long run.

He has to do some mental gymnastics to figure out the immortality part, piercing together what he's learned about Kovacs a minute ago to understand, but Peter is a fast thinker and somewhat more insightful than most people give him credit for. ]

So that's what people do in your world? Change bodies, keep on living anew. And...you all lost something in the process. If the ones in power are often those who had lived longer, it's no wonder they didn't support her fight.

[ Humans aren't meant to live forever, immortality messes with their minds. Even Asgardians, one of the most long-lived races in the galaxy, can die eventually of old age. It's just the natural order of things. His expression sours at the news of how it ended, even if he can't say he's surprised. ]

I'm sorry. [ He doesn't know what else to say, and Peter is aware that these two words aren't enough to soothe the pain, the frustration, of everything that had happened. ] Do you plan on pursuing her goal? To keep on trying?

[kovach]

[ the thing is, these memories will ultimately end in death, so much of it, eventually as his time with the envoys passes more forward. but for now, he can linger in this, in the false pretense of being here again, during a time that he was actually happy for a while, where he had family, friends, love. ]

She knew what they'd all end up becoming. The power they'd hold over those who couldn't afford it.

[ quell saw it all before it came to pass and he lived long enough to see it all in full swing. he thinks about the question asked of him and he doesn't know how to answer. finish the mission, she'd told him in his subconscious mind, a memory of her ghost giving him a purpose. ]

I ... I don't know. Doesn't really matter anymore. It's all happened already.

[spacedisaster]

[ It's a good memory, and maybe that's the reason why the magic or the orb chose it: It makes them want to stay. And that's dangerous.

Peter is silent for a long moment, saddened and yet understanding, torn between letting the subject go or sharing some painful memories of his own. Against better judgment, he goes for the latter. ]

Back home, a few days before I got dragged into a space station, I was with my half team trying to stop a crazy purple alien guy from gathering the Infinity Stones. They're fancy magic space rocks, not that much different from the orbs, that give the wielder infinite powers, enough to wipe off half the galaxy. That is what he wanted to do, Thanos believed that such a psychopathic plan would help those who survived in the long run...

[ Peter doesn't mention what he thinks of that kind of insane troll logic, but the expression on his face tells enough. it's a mix of anger and frustration, with a big dose of 'Being So Fucking Done With everything'. It morphs into a tired look as he gets to the point he was trying to make. ]

We lost. Everything we did, what we tried...it wasn't enough. He killed my girlfriend, his adoptive daughter, and I...I just lost it. [ Peter takes a deep breath, trying to will his voice not waver and his eyes to stay focussed. He can feel them getting wetter. There's a reason why he doesn't often share the regret that brought him to this station. But he wants Kovacs to know that he understands, to not feel so alone. ]

I fucked up, and we all lost. Thanos erased half of all sentient life in the universe from existence, it turned everyone to dust, me included. It wasn't until five years later that a small group of heroes who had survived that found a way to bring back everyone and defeat Thanos. Five long years. To me, it's as if only mere seconds had passed from one moment to the other. Even, now after 3 months, it doesn't feel real. But the point it...It doesn't matter how long it takes or the battles we lose. No evil is forever, there will be people who will raise up to change what's wrong. Don't lose your faith, it's never too late. It will be difficult, and it will be painful, but it will be worth it too. Living always is.

[kovach]

[ kovacs doesn't expect the sudden tale, but he turns his eyes to listen to it all the same, surprised to hear a more solemn fragment of peter's life, something far more extraordinary in its scope for it to have such an effect on the galaxy as a whole.

but there's the empathetic feeling of loss, as he'd lost quell, for peter to lose someone he loved too, all in the name of losing a much bigger war. his heart sinks, feeling the grip of a weight in his chest, but it eases as peter carries on, expressing something of a positive turn by its end.

he's not sure how much he'd be able to change, not with quell gone, remaining the last envoy there is, but — there's a reason he didn't just pass on bancroft's offer, why he didn't just choose to go back on ice. it's for what peter's telling him now.

finish the mission, he hears quell whisper faintly in his ear. ]

... Yeah, maybe. [ as still pessimistic as it sounds, there's more hope in his tone than would be expected otherwise, his nod slight but showcasing the gratefulness he has for peter's words. ] Five years. Two hundred and fifty. Someone's always gotta stick around to do something about it.