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

[ximilian]

As they explore all the different dreamscapes, the team will find that there is nothing consistent — nothing that is the same, no pattern... every dreamscape truly fashions itself after the individual who is dreaming.

However, all of them wander into memories that seem to belong to different natives.

Blue and Rosinante walk into a large, beautiful castle — even larger and more beautiful than the Crystalline Palace. The scene he walks into takes place in the throne room. Upon the throne, a woman sits, her eyes upon the man standing in front of the throne. Guards stand next to the throne, and they can guess that the memory belongs to one of them.

"Remi d'Arbes, the Royal Sorcerer of Kilnan, I hereby name you the commander of our army," the queen says, calm and serene. The man — Remi — is anything but, though; eyes blazing, he glares at the woman.

"Cut the shit, Ingria! You know how I feel about this! You have an army, you have the Institute's special forces — you don't need me. I refuse. Get someone else to fight your wars for you."

A deadly hush falls over the room; the guards shuffle, looking at each other, unsure of what to do. But Queen Ingria smiles.

"You are an inch away from treason, brother dear. And wrong, at that — I do need you. You know as well as I do that no one has magic like yours... well. Almost no one. Should I make her fight, instead? Perhaps I shall. A princess should defend her country, too."

In the middle of the room, the air around Remi lights up. Bright magic pours out of him, swirling around him as if alive.

"You leave her out of this. You would use everything as a pawn, even your own daughter. After the war is over, I want nothing to do with you or this country."

Magic still crackling around him, Remi turns on his heels and starts marching out of the room. Ingria, still smiling, calls out to the soldiers around the room, with a tone of steel:

"Salute your commander! You shall all report to him starting tomorrow."

As the scene fades away, something happens with the dreamscape — instead of being able to jolt the soldier who the memory belongs to out of it, the dream seems to become aware of intruders and both Blue and Rosinante feel the dreamscape shift... and then they are rudely booted out of it, and back to their own dreamscapes.

The same happens with Erik and Jim, after they have witnessed another scene that seems to belong to a soldier. In the memory, Ingria and Remi walk on the hallway of the royal palace and soldiers posted in front of Ingria's personal quarters end up the unwitting witnesses to yet another argument.

"It's your fault she's like that," Ingria says with the tone of someone who has said this same thing a thousand times before. "Why shouldn't I make use of her skills? I am enrolling her in the Institute's armed division as soon as the war is over."

"Why shouldn't you — are you crazy? She's your daughter, that's why! And besides, what I did was save her life! How many times do we have to have this conversation?" Remi sighs, running his hand through his hair. "You know she would have died as an infant if I had done nothing. That the spell's side effect gave her arcane abilities was never my intention. But back to your insanity... Aureliah doesn't want to fight. You know that. Don't force her into it."

"I'm a queen first, mother second," Ingria answers, tone even. "The country's best comes first."

"It always does, with you."

With that bitter statement, Remi walks away, and the dreamscape shifts, blending with another scene. It shows them the outside of the castle: signs of battle are everywhere, and the air is heavy with the scent of ozone. Some soldiers are still standing; one of them is clearly the same as in the previous scene, making it clear who the memories belong to. On the battlefield, Remi stands with five others dressed in the traditional robes of sorcerers. All have strange weapons in their hands: one has a blade made of pure white energy, another holds a bow where the string vibrates with purple, lightning-like power.

"Good job, everyone. You've done well," Remi says, giving a faint smile to his team of sorcerers.

He shifts to pick something up from his pocket — a green jewel. Looking at it, he seems to listen to something and then nods.

"Yes, Phyllie, go ahead. As agreed. Make them forget."

Alarm flashes on the faces of the five, and Remi looks at each in turn, eyes regretful.

"I can't let you remember how to do this. This knowledge will not pass on. If someone else were to learn the theory... it would be far too dangerous. Now... forget."

A green glow grows, and grows, until all Jim and Erik can see is the bright, bright green —

and then they are booted back to their own dreamscapes.

Meanwhile, Andy and Clara find themselves walking into a different dreamscape. For a moment, they think they are back at the castle, that someone has woken them — but instead, the room around them shifts and starts showing a memory.

"See, this is where you went wrong. You drew this line horizontally and not vertically." Remi, sitting around a table, speaks to a red-haired teenager who sits across from him.

"I see..." Aureliah answers, and quickly picks up a pen to make the necessary corrections.

"Good. I think we're done for today. You know the deal — don't tell your mother I was here. I'm still not talking to her." Remi pushes the chair back, preparing to leave, but as he does, Aureliah jumps up as well and quickly rounds the table, grabbing his sleeve.

"Please, Uncle, don't go! Don't... Mother said she — that she's sending me... to the Institute. Please, don't make me go! You can't! You know she wants me to become the next commander, but I don't want to hurt anyone!"

Remi, listening to his niece with growing alarm, curses softly under his breath.

"Ingria... is there no low you won't stoop to?" And then louder, he says, "What do you want me to do, Li-li? I've tried talking to her before, and she's never once listened."

Aureliah takes a deep breath. "Take me with you! To your castle. You can keep me safe, right? You told me during the war... that if we lost, you'd take me there and no one would get to us. Were you lying?"

For a long moment, Remi seems torn in two, gritting his teeth. Then —

"No. No, I wasn't. Quick, get your things. The sooner we're gone, the better."

Aureliah squeals and throws her arms around her uncle... and the room shifts once more, as if a spell falls away.

Instead, Andy and Clara are left with a room that once more looks like it could be in the castle — and the very same girl from the dream, perhaps a year or two older now, staring at them.

"Who are you?" she asks, eyes wide and panicked. "You don't belong! Leave me alone!! I won't go back!" A bright blue energy gathers around her, and before either woman has a chance to do much of anything, it blasts straight at them... throwing them out of this particular dreamscape, and into those of others'.

[winscenario]

Alright, so! After they've witnessed these memories, everyone is shoved out - likely to that in-between "dark lake" space, correct? Would mods be OK if all the pairs were shoved out at the same time, and therefore able to speak to what each pair had seen as a full group?

If that is possible, they will share what they've seen, and share some of the theories they have. Afterwards Blue will attempt to wake at least some of them up, so that they can share what they've seen with everyone, and shed some light on the backstory of this particular deal.

When Blue's finished psychically slapping some folks awake, he'd want to try and pursue the minds who were behind the memory he & Rosi saw, wanting to seek out the source, be it human or otherwise. He would take Rosi & whomever else would like to look too (limitations pending on mod input of course).

[ximilian]

Yes, they would return to their original, unchanged dreamscape — it is fine for the pair to be shoved to the same dreamscape instead of two separate ones.

To clarify, will Blue and Rosinante keep trying to find the guard in the dreamscape, or outside of it? And how exactly are they going about trying to find the guard?

[firstroar]

Inside!
Blue's trying to seek out the mind of the dreamer of that memory he witnessed in that in-between space - sentient minds would look kind of like candles in the dark out there, since he can perceive them. If he can get the "scent" of it, he'd try to follow it through whatever dreams/memories it would take him - keeping Rosi's mind tethered to him if he can.

[ximilian]

Okay, great.

In that case: it seems that the more Blue tries to sift through the dreamscape by focusing on that "scent" of the guard's mind, he'll become more aware of something else in the periphery of this dreamscape.

It's a kind of sentience that feels a little more like a forest fire than candles, and yet it still seamlessly blends itself into the backdrop unless deliberately focused on. And once that presence becomes aware of Blue and what he's attempting to do, it will push both Blue and Rosinante clear out of the dream with force enough to bruise, snapping them both awake.