ximilialog | MISSION: THE SLEEPER

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MISSION: THE SLEEPER

● ● ● 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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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[It kind of reminded him of a group of his own. A set of people he'd left back home. They often met at a bar to hang out, even after their little adventure together. It had become a hard habit to break even when the dust had settled. It had been nice.

He wondered how they were doing. Did they...know he was gone? He just vanished one day to end up here. Would they look for him? Would they mourn him?

He looked at Andy as she watched the scenes play out before her. He wasn't sure if this was more of the castle's magical nature or something else, but he got the gist of what this was. Memories. They had to be her memories of her friends, right? People that made her happy.]

Looks like fun. [He replied quietly, as if he didn't want to interrupt.] You enjoy that. The game, the food... the people.

[ despite how much they've all fought and killed together, andy loves these men and they know how to have fun too. joe's probably the best at getting them all to lighten up, and there is no where else andy feels more at ease than with them, not at this point. ]

[ she hums. ] It is. We've been doing it for a long time.

[ even before booker came into their lives, joe and nicky were constantly giving her baklava, trying to fool her. ] The people are fun too. They're my team.

['They're my team'. Yeah, he could see that. He had mixed feelings on the subject, but looking at her with those men and how happy she was...well, he could feel that happiness. He couldn't ruin that.

He nodded once.] A good team. Bit like family.

Is it hard? Being away from them?

[ she lived in isolation for so long, that as much as she needs her space and her breaks, andy knows she could never stay away from them forever. ]

They are my family. [ she doesn't feel ashamed admitting that, especially since it's out there in the open, in this dream. she could never deny them like that, not like this. ]

[ she hums. ] I've been apart from them for longer than I've been on this spaceship. I miss them, but I'll see them again.

[Zhao nodded acceptance. An actual family... that was nice. To be able to think of people that way... good people... close people. Yeah, he liked that idea. He was happy for her.

He watched a little longer. Then tilted his head slightly, catching onto her last words.]

Ah, long periods of time away from family and friends... I always figured that would be hard. [He looked directly at her and smiled.] Nice optimism there, Ms. 2020. That's a good way to go.

We've had a lot of time together. Sometimes families need some space too. [ what's a year apart compared to centuries together? her time on ximilia is a drop in the bucket. ]

[ the memories play on and she doesn't miss the way zhao smiles, seemingly genuinely happy for her. it's odd, to have that directed at her from people who aren't her boys. ] It's not optimism. When I walk away from this ship - when, not if - I'll find them again. Doesn't matter how long.

[ she speaks so matter-of-factly about it. ]

[That also made sense. He definitely needed time away from his gang. A quick escape while no one was looking, having a nice quiet evening to himself for a change, not thinking about the next agenda... handing over the reins while he went escapading with Kasuga and party. He liked it. Maybe enough to never go back. Maybe not. Time would tell. (This new chance to fix a regret, if gotten, would tell most of all.)

Zhao tilted his head slightly as he looked at her.]

Sounds like a whole lot of optimism to me. Not that that's a bad thing. You do sound sure, and I don't doubt you could or would make it happen, but you know... you just never know what will happen tomorrow.

I like it though. Let's forget the dreary possibilities. So! What'll be the first thing you do when you meet back up with them?

You're humoring me, but it's not overconfidence or positive thinking. [ in theory her immortality could end at any point in time, she'll never shake witnessing it happen to lykon, but the nature of this mission has her refusing to acknowledge it with quynh on the line. ]

Depends on where we are. Usually we eat. And not always just baklava. Nicky likes to cook. [ she gestures at one of the white men, the shorter of the two. ]

A man after my own heart. What's your favorite dish?

[His eyes scanned over the shorter man. He'd probably never meet these people unless they ended up on the station, too. Time to soak up as much about them as he could. That would tell him more about her.

Was that prying? Probably. But, hey, such was the nature of a gremlin.]

Baklava. [ :) ]

[ she knows that's not what he's asking, but she doesn't know if she has a favorite dish of all time. there's a whole lot of time. ]

I'm not a picky eater. I like cacciatore, for Italian foods. [ since they're on the subject vaguely of nicky, not that zhao knows he is (medieval) italian). ]

[He huffed out a silent laugh of amusement. Good answer. He's thankful she continues though.]

Oh, that's a good one if we're talking Italian foods. There's a fancy Italian restaurant in Ijincho. I've been once or twice. It's alright.

[It was actually kind of hilarious because the rest of his group didn't know how to act in a fancy restaurant so it was always entertaining to watch them.]

[ she gestures again at nicky, the man who won the bet in the dream, the man who can cook almost anything. ]

He's Italian. His standards are high for Italian restaurants, and he'd much rather just cook it himself.

[ sometimes andy likes to bring home olive garden just to see the look on his face. ]

Ah, one of those types. I...rather like not making certain foods on my own. Too time consuming.

[He smiles though, amused.]

Bet it's nice having him cook the authentic stuff though. Always nice to have a good cook in the group, yeah?

[Never mind the fact that in his own group... that's him.]

He really likes to cook. [ it's probably one of his love languages, despite certain hostilities. ] I'm not gonna complain about him feeding me, though it's not like I complain about most foods.

[ her standards... are so low. except for baklava. ]

You got one too?

Nothing wrong with that. [Liking to cook, that is.] ...also nothing wrong with liking most foods. At least you've got variety.

[He smiles at her.]

Yeah. It's me.

I wouldn't say I like everything. I've just eaten a lot variety over the years. [ including things that no longer exist! ]

[ she gives him an amused look. ] So what do you like to cook then?

Nothing wrong with that either.

[Variety was the spice of life! Or something.]

Oh, I guess I just like what comes natural to me: traditional Chinese dishes. I'm not picky. But rice and noodle dishes are simple but fun favorites. Ask me to make something like rou bao zi though and... well, you better catch me at a good time. Shit like that just takes too much time.

[ she laughs a little. now she wants some pork buns though. unfortunate. ]

You can't go wrong with rice and noodles. Can you make nian gao? [ yes of course she pivots to the desserts. andy has a sweet tooth. ]

[Zhao waggled his hand in a so-so motion.]

Eh, I'm more of a cook than a baker but I could probably cobble something together. I think I might remember the recipe...

[It was the honest truth. It was also more humble than necessary as while it was true, Zhao was also skilled at perfecting things within a sort amount of time. And his "good" was sometimes seen as "great" by others. He didn't get it.

Give him a few tries and by the third bake he'd probably have it down to perfection.]

Well, if you decide to give it a try, I'll be a taste tester. Maybe you can scrounge up the ingredients back on the ship.

[ she will eat... so many things. especially desserts. ]

Yeah, maybe I will. I'll see what I can convince Viv-chan to give me for ingredients when we're back.

[Deal is on. He'll ~~cook~~ bake, you taste-test for him till it's perfect. They could do that when they got back from the mission.]

She seems pretty willing to try bringing stuff on, but I don't know how food works on that front.

[ given the food supply on the station, andy really has no idea. and she's never actually asked viveca for anything herself yet either. ]

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MISSION: THE SLEEPER

● ● ● M I S S I O N 3 . 1

F Y I

8.0

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