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ximilialog2021-11-06 01:06 pm
- ! event log,
- ! open,
- altered carbon: takeshi kovacs,
- btvs: buffy summers,
- cotar: rhysand,
- doctor who: clara oswald,
- doctor who: the doctor (11),
- fear street: ziggy berman,
- fullmetal alchemist: edward elric,
- grishaverse: alina starkov,
- grishaverse: the darkling,
- gundam seed destiny: athrun zala,
- gundam seed/destiny: yzak jule,
- mass effect: kaidan alenko,
- mcu: bucky barnes,
- mcu: daisy johnson,
- mcu: erik stevens,
- mcu: gamora,
- mcu: peter quill,
- mcu: sam wilson,
- mcu: shang-chi,
- mcu: yelena belova,
- old kingdom: sabriel,
- one piece: rosinante donquixote,
- pacific rim: newton geiszler,
- star trek aos: james t. kirk,
- star trek aos: leonard mccoy,
- star wars: finn,
- star wars: l3-37,
- star wars: r0-gr,
- stranger things: eleven,
- supernatural: dean winchester,
- the old guard: andromache,
- towards the terra: soldier blue,
- transformers: drift,
- transformers: megatron,
- twisted wonderland: deuce spade,
- yakuza: zhao tianyou
MISSION: THE SLEEPER
● ● ● M I S S I O N 3 . 1
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
F Y I
• 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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By which we mean: if Finn reaches out with the Force and tries to feel if the entire room is alive, what he will find is something far more surprising — it is not just the room. He will feel sparks of similar consciousnesses all over the castle, some closer, some farther. As far as he can determine... it wouldn't be wrong to say much of the castle is, in fact, alive.
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Finn starts screaming.So, after a couple of hours pass and he calms down enough to accept that this is his life now... can he... talk to... it...? Similar to how he "spoke" to Nessie what with putting out some feelers and all? Things he wants to know/is chill enough to focus on asking about:
- Does it know what caused the whole sleeping thing?
- Does it know how long ago this sleeping thing started?
- Does it know WHY it's alive like that's a hard question for anyone but--
- Does it know where anyone (perhaps even everyone) is?? Like the people native to this place? Any locals?
- Lastly, can he get across that they're here to help?
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As for why the castle is alive, it emits one, strong answer: To protect the Little Lady. It seems the castle has a very firm sense of purpose, but there is fondness for Master, who gave it the possibility to protect them.
It does know where everyone in the castle is — it seems offended that Finn would doubt that, because of course it does! If something is walking on you, wouldn't you know? But it doesn't seem interested in anything that is outside of its boundaries — all it cares about are the two people living in the castle.
Finally, the castle seems puzzled about the idea of help — as if it doesn't quite understand the concept.
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1. So, uh, Finn wants to explain the concept of "helping." It'll mainly boil down to that they're here to protect this Little Lady and the Master, too, like the castle is already doing. They want to find them and, uh... be friends! Hopefully, the Master would like to be friends, too.
2. If the castle... feels them all moving around in there (djlsfhdfldks), he would like to make sure that they aren't hurting the castle itself or something. What with... I don't know, stomping? Did someone punch a wall? He's very sorry. Like super sorry.
3. Right, so, anyway, where's the Master at and how can they get to him? If they're going to be of any help, they'd really like to talk to him. It's sort of the whole reason they're here. (This is Finn under the assumption that either the wizard has the orb or knows where it is, considering that box he found.)
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2. The castle seems vaguely offended by the idea that they could hurt it, but conveys the idea that it would appreciate if people wouldn't trail mud all over the floors once they come back from the otherworldy rooms.
3. To his question about the Master, Finn gets the idea of Master and his room, and then the image of a room at the top of a tower. Master changes the entrance is another thought conveyed to him — the castle may protect Remi and Aureliah, but it cannot interfere with the Master's magic... after all, it was born from that magic.
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2. Right, he'll... let the others know. Don't worry.
3. He wants to ask about some elaboration on Master changes the entrance. Changes it how? Where is the entrance? Is that the only way in?
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And then, the image of just a random door in the caste, opening again and again and again, each time to a different place. The final image shows a winding staircase.
Always one door. Always different door. Don't know which one it is now. Find it, and you will find Master... if you can open it right.
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Thank you again, Castle. ♥
his stress levels have never been higher. emperor whomst? exegol whatst?*Clarifying here! Finn's going to keep his "ears on" so to speak and try to keep the connection open between himself and the castle.
---
So, some time later, Finn pops back in touch with the castle. Hi, new bestie!
Anyway, his friends found who they believe is the wizard, and Finn was wondering if the castle could maybe crack the window of the Master's room open for them pretty please.
See, the Master has fallen victim to this sleeping thing he mentioned before, and they're wanting to wake him up and stuff. Make sure he's okay.
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finn's so tiredAs an aside, Finn's also going to thank the castle for Yelena regarding her puppy room and apologize on behalf of Newton for bathing in the kitchen sink, unaware of the letter Newt "sent." Plus, at the urging of McCoy, he'll ask if Redwing can scan the castle now (but that's not actually relevant since Sam's already in a search request and Redwing's hurt; the mun and I chatted about it). But, anyway, now he's ICly passed along the messages.
Thank you again, Castle. You're a good friend.
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A little while after that, the castle actually reaches out to Finn. It emits a feeling of confusion, and then an image of this — the question seeming to be, what is it and is it important. Castles can't read, alas, but it seems to be aware the letter is meant for it and is confused about its meaning.
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Finn gathers quickly enough that this is a letter to the castle itself from Newton (aww). He tries to put across that someone he knows, another good friend, was trying to send this message to it as a means of contact, sort of like what they've been doing.
With that hopefully established, he begins to read the letter aloud to the castle. The first paragraph easily lifts his spirits after such a difficult mission for him, and he makes a mental note to hug Newton as soon as possible.
He may pause a couple of times to briefly explain some words (like "orb" or "science" or... "underoos") and his eyebrows might lift a bit when he realizes that Daisy was in on this sink bathing adventure, wow.
But then he comes to "I've been told it's customary to ask for your hand in marriage for the incident" and that's when some of his high spirits wane and his brow furrows back into its previous place of perpetual confusion. Alas, he continues and eventually draws the letter to an close, pinching the bridge of his nose and wondering how his life wound up here.
So, he explains what "metaphorical" means. That's the easy one. Then he moves on to... "marriage"... See, okay, it's like when two (or more!) people decide they want to have a partnership that everyone else recognizes. It's sort of like becoming one in a legal sense? Wait, no, he really doesn't want to get into law- It's like- Okay- It's like...
Okay, so romance is when two (OR MORE) people really really like each other and like to spend a lot of time with each other and they call each other cute pet names and stuff and they'll decide that they don't really want to be apart so they'll do the marriage thing so Newton's trying to say that he really likes the castle a lot (??????) and that he's wondering if the castle likes him back and if it would like to try this partnership thing with him... and possibly Hermann because Finn's like 83% sure that there's something happening there...
So... Yeah...
And if not, Newton's wondering if there's someone else that the castle really really likes spending time with (hence the word "love" because that's pretty much what that means, sure). Anyway, he'll understand if this decision may take some time. It's a big decision, after all. A "yes" can come with this whole ceremony thing and all sorts of stuff can be involved.
So. Right. Yeah. He'll... try to answer any questions the castle's got about... this...
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Then, it promptly sends Finn the thought of confusion again — it doesn't even know this Newt person, how could it be attached to him? Nor does it know any Hermanns, so judging by what Finn has explained it, it would like Finn to tell Newt to send the same questionnaire to this Hermann person instead, thank you.
It also sends Finn an image — a clear memory of sorts, of a man with light grey hair teaching a young girl with bright red curls, sitting in the library and pouring over magic theory. The memory is coloured with affection — the closest the castle can imagine this "love" thing to feel like is what it feels for the Master and Little Lady. It doesn't want to call them pet names or do any ceremonies, though, just protecting them is enough.
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A little while later, Finn comes back after speaking with Newton. He tries to get across that Newton understands, appreciates the response, and respects the castle's decision with the hope that they can still become friends. He resolutely does NOT tell the castle that the whole thing was a joke.
While they're chatting, though, Finn asks the castle if it can open that window in the tower one more time. He's already headed that way to meet up with Alina, Sam, and the others. He has a friend, Finn tells the castle, that could try to get in through the window for real this time.
If the castle can't, Finn wants it to know that it's no big deal and that they can handle things from here. Castle has already been a big help, and he really appreciates their new friendship. ♥
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However it would need to be put to the voting post, should the friend decide to pursue this particular path — and potentially be part of the conclusion if need be!
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ModsCastle! ♥