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]

[ it's funny how in this moment, in this sleeve, he hadn't actually been that old, somewhere in the forties if he can remember it right. but even then, he'd already been drained of his spirit, livened up over the course of a few years with quell's aid, with helping him to believe in something again. it helps to have something worth fighting for to give you a reason to live. ]

Nearing three hundred.

[ he doesn't know the exact anymore, and doesn't care. it's not about the exact quantity. it's more than enough for him. ]

That's already longer than any human should live. The years, they — they twist at the mind, even if there are ways to keep the body young, even if it can be switched out for another. Time poisons in a way that can't be cursed or fixed, not by technology or magic — [ the latter of which has only become a recent revelation with the things he's come to see. ] We were never meant to live forever.

[cruelyethuman]

[The smug look that had stolen across his face, the Darkling's surety in the short life of this man, fades. Replaced by something else-

Something tinged with fear and the metallic taste of truth.]

That is quite a long life.

[Which is just another way to find a way to twist the words coming from Kovacs, to turn them over in his mind until they no longer make sense. The bright and burning question about how and why, are there - to distract and to stall. But those are not the answers that he seeks the most, not the dulled terror of being seen and found wanting.

Only three hundred and Kovacs lost his purpose, apparently.]

Time does put a lot of things in to perspective. It makes our choices ring through the ages, and you would have to live with the consequences. What was the consequence of this moment?

[kovach]

[ either people are surprised when he says his age or they're not. it's a complicated thing, too, when he hasn't exactly been conscious for the entire span of that time, but ultimately, it doesn't really matter. he's still far older than he should more, outliving the people he loved, the people here whose lives ultimately ended in tragedy.

it's precisely that he's thinking of when kirigan carries on, when he poses that question, even if it comes with plenty of answers, plenty of consequences. ]

Everyone here on this bridge wanted to make a difference. We all wanted to end the expansion of immortality, knowing it'd only give more power to those who could afford, that the rich would just dominate the less fortunate. But the fight — it ended up before it could finish, and the Protectorate killed everyone involved.

[ everyone. the envoys. his sister. quell. ]

Except me. I lived to see everything we feared become a reality.

[cruelyethuman]

[The Darkling has experience on his side, having had to live every day of the past five hundred years. There was no pause and no way to stop time from marching on.

To have watched that many hours and days grind away at ones soul-]

Even that woman?

The one with the bright eyes and the conviction burning in her voice.]

[kovach]

[ he doesn't want to be back, doesn't want to be reliving this, but then, it's not much different than every day of his life, of replaying it all like a hallucination, every memory of the envoys, of quell, stitching together like theater in front of him, meant as a nightmare only for his eyes.

now that anyone else can see it, he's not sure how he feels about letting it be shared. ]

Even her.

[ he utters quietly. ]

Everyone's gone. All that's left are the bastards that made it burn.

[cruelyethuman]

[It's strange, to feel this vague and disconnected sense of kinship. Of knowing the emotions churning deep inside this stranger that shares a room with him on an alien space station.

But he does.

Knows the rage and the sorrow that sinks its hooks in to your heart, the gut wrenching sensation of falling and knowing that no one will break that fall for you.

The Darkling's face twists in empathy.]

And how does your story end, Kovacs?

[kovach]

[ it's much more than he'd ever expect to say to the other man. even with the months they've shared a room, there's been an unspoken understanding of privacy, of knowing that there's no need to mix up their affairs, that the arrangement had only been out of circumstance.

but it's almost like a silent weight that washes over him now, confessing a truth to the things that haunt him, particularly through the hours of the night from the other side of the room.

he almost laughs without humor at the question. ]

I don't know. It should ended with them. [ but he kept going. because quell told him to. ] Now I just ... survive.

[cruelyethuman]

[He's heard a multitude of platitudes about that, living. 'As long as there is breath, there is hope' is one. Or, that living will be its own reward.

It's all shit.

No one who has lived through lifetimes would dare to even think it, since living can be its own prison. The cage they made for themselves, the bars forged from heartbreak and broken dreams.

He sees it all in the foreign face that Kovacs was born with.]

Because what else is there, than to endure.

[kovach]

[ even surviving has had its torments, having survived just to end up in a prison for over two centuries, waking up to a world more toxic and twisted than the one he was first born into, only to find that humanity had simply clutched tight to all their worst qualities, expanding on them all the more now that they had longer lives to swim in their greed.

he'd survived but what was the cost? if it meant losing his family, losing rei, losing quell — was any of it worth it? ]

To endure or — to change it.

[ he raises a brow to kirigan, in reference to their purposes here, to the deal that's been made with the orb, to fix a regret somehow. maybe it isn't a deal made on hope, but it is built on taking action somehow. ]

[cruelyethuman]

[He believes in the purpose of their missions - in the whispered promise of an unseen voice, that he will be able to undo his regret. That none of the suffering he's had to endure was pointless.

Without the choke-hold of the Fold on Ravka, the country stood a slim chance at prospering. If only he did it different, fueled by something other than raw grief and bitterness. If he tried his hand at creation with a firmer grasp of his own powers, of what would happen should he fail again.

But every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and this one will lead to Alina vanishing. It will lead to him longing for her, for the half of their combined whole, his balance. His equal. A longing that will go on forever, forged in the Making at the Heart of the World at the beginning of time itself. His end of the tether tied to his beating heart and her end will lead to nothing.

And this is the sacrifice that he must make, watching Kovacs hang by his arms as his lady love walks away. As they both skirt around the issue of eternity and the emptiness that follows.]

Or we can change it, yes. Do you want her back, is that your regret?