recollecters: (Default)
Recollé Mods ([personal profile] recollecters) wrote in [community profile] recolle2018-08-17 05:53 pm

(no subject)

EVENT
Reverted
The city of Recollé...have you looked beyond the city lately? It may be time to do so.

I.

The good news, perhaps, is that everyone is back in their original bodies. The last few weeks may have been trying and embarrassing for several of you, but never fear! You're all in this together.

The nice thing about returning to your original body is that everything else seems to disappear along with the unintentional swapping. Your dreams on the evening of the 16th and the 17th are unoccupied and you're blissfully alone. Hallucinations fade away and the city almost feels brighter and cleaner. The messy paint job from May and June slowly flakes off to reveal a sparkling almost-new landscape below. All buildings, landmarks, flora and fauna are back to their original colors. The sky, however, is still painted a strange wash of colors and symbols.

The other nice thing about returning to your original body is that it's much easier to feel the sudden, sharp pain on your palm at midnight on the 18th, a needling high-pressure pain that lasts for all of 30 seconds. Upon looking at your hand, however, you'll notice something new.

In bright red font there's a new marking that reads: 13 Days:23:59:59.

58. 57. 56...


The timer steadily counts down, each second synced with each beat of your heart. As the days pass by the timer will slowly shift from the red to a dark, ominous purple. The glow of the mark becomes harder to ignore, and there doesn't seem to be a way to remove it. Good luck with that.

II.

The Retrospec app doesn't seem to be much better. The scrambled messages and posting errors seem to have stopped and users are no longer receiving messages and pictures about themselves.

In fact, the app seems to be quiet for a while.

As users continue to use the app they will find that any post, comment or message that they send via the app will be tagged with a different ID. Instead of their name, all messages will be from Alpha##### or Beta#####. The string of numbers will be unique for each user and cannot be changed at any time. Individual mailboxes will be attached to your name, but the Alpha/Beta ID has made its way there, too.

Over the course of the rest of the month, Alphas (those who have had the app for at least a year from August 2017) will find that messages to other Alphas are sent more easily than to Betas (those who have had the app for less than a year from August 2017) and vice versa. Messages to anyone from the opposite "faction" may drop out half-way or appear blank entirely. It might be wise to find a better mode of communication in the meantime.

III.
Even if you're alone in your dreams, you're not alone in the waking world. No one is free from the timer on their palm, though they may come to find that it impacts some users more than others.

Some users will experience a steady pulsating in their hand as the timer counts backwards, each second ticking by. Standing still just long enough will send the pulse out of their hands and through the rest of their body, over their arms and through their feet straight into the ground.

The earth begins to shake under these unlucky users, little quakes and trembles that spread out and seek out anyone else nearby. Whether you know this person or not, whether you're alone or several of you are impacted by this earthquake, the ground beneath you splits open and you're pulled straight down into the crevice, falling aimlessly. Instead of finding your own life flashing before your eyes, you'll find yourself witnessing events, faces, and memories that are important to the user the pulses came from.

On the outside of things, the user will promptly collapse into a coma-like state no matter where they're at. Inside their mind, however, a scene begins to set itself to welcome you as you land. It isn't a memory and it isn't a hallucination. It's a construct of someone else's innerworkings that have trapped you and blocked you in.

As the haze around you dissipates, the puzzle you received earlier this month floats in front of you. Whether you have finished building it or not it is now fully completed and all of the words have faded except for "Gordian Knot."

Your cell phones will not work in these dreamscapes, and even Retrospec seems to be disconnected. It's up to you to venture further into someone else's mind and help them untangle whatever mystery is hidden within themselves.

IV.
So about that timer. As time begins to run out, more and more people begin to experience dream dives and encounter the knots of others that they must fix. Even inside the dreamscape, the timer glows just as brightly as it had out in the real world and it continues counting down.

At least it gives you a sense of time and just how many minutes, hours, or days you've been stuck inside someone's subconscious. You might even realize that the timer is directly tied to just how much time you have to unravel the knots of your friends, loved ones, and strangers.

Easy, right? Take caution, citizens. The monsters and demons lurking in the corners of someone else's psyche can manifest to something quite powerful. You will not wake up and be booted out of someone's dream if you are attacked, but your physical body and mind will shut down and remain unconscious for one week.

Be careful how you approach these knots, however! Should you change any part of them too much, the host will find themselves rejecting this new information. Too great of a change will result in the loss of an important memory to them and no way to recover it inside the dive.

Even with these possible losses divers are responsible for fixing what's gone wrong and relieving the knot wound tightly in the host's mind. Venture forward, explore, and break it apart to awaken then. You will be greatly rewarded for your effort.

Failure to break the knot and save the host from this comatose state will result in all parties suffering a loss. At first it may not be obvious, but over time it will be clear an important memory or item has left your possession.

Is it just limited to dives though? Some users will feel that even with successful diving they don't quite feel like themselves. It seems as though there's some further self-evaluation they must meet in order to fully recover who they are...or were, as it may be.

Tick-tock, Retrospecters. Mind the time.

BONUS.
Ever since he moved in back in February, the lights have always been on in Zee's office and home at the top of the Towers. Office hours are whenever he feels like making them and he's usually reachable by phone, email, or app.

However, beginning on the 18th, messages to his inbox begin to go unanswered. Checking the inbox itself will reveal a change as well.

Delta#02018329 is no longer receiving messages.

On the 19th, the lights go off permanently. Beginning on the 20th, anyone who ventures to his office will find the building empty and locked, no sign of Zee at all. Reaching out to him receives a bounce-back error message.

Any previous correspondences with him will remain, though his name has been replaced with his Delta ID.

It's hard to say what's happened, but after some time, all users will finally receive a message from Delta#68422.

Stop him.


No other messages will be sent or received from this account.

Welcome to [community profile] recolle's August event, part 2!

As notated in the plotting post, the dreamdives are now live! Players are in charge of creating their own unique dive experiences for characters to explore and play through. These can be as harmless or as dangerous as you'd like. However, please be sure to let us know here if your character will be failing a dive and what memory/item they will be losing!

For Prompt II, characters IDs will be comprised of the following: The date your character first appeared on Retrospec (so in Zee's case, that was 02/01/18) and the last four digits of your character's IC inbox as found in the HTML (in Zee's case, 8329.) These IDs will be more relevant in September, but for ease of playing/making sure no one ICly overlaps please use these numbers!

Friendly reminder that if your character will be keeping their new AUs, please reply to this comment on the OOC plot post! As per Prompt IV, characters who are failing to recover their original AUs will begin to notice something is off and will not be able to accomplish what is needed to regain their original AUs. What this is is up to you!

As per the plotting post, threading out successful dream dives will earn you a free memory! Qualifying threads must be at least five comments from you and can be from you either hosting a dive or participating in one. Please note that failed dives will not be eligible for freebies.

Any questions you have regarding this event may be directed to the mod comment here. Be sure to review the mods' question thread on the plotting post for important information as well!
selfloving: (LX.)

woof

[personal profile] selfloving 2018-08-25 03:16 am (UTC)(link)
[Strange and terrible, how a world can feel like something familiar and yet ultimately, painfully alien. Jasmine hesitates upon finding herself in this dream, utterly unwelcoming as it is. Because it feels like it could be a place she knows, albeit twisted and separated by gaps of time wider than an ocean.

She remembers something, a conversation maybe, about this thing. A2, not a person, an android. It's terrifying, really, to be human and realize you aren't human at all. Despite all of the concealer she tries to hide it with, the Roman numeral on her forehead is starkly visible.

The empty sound of her footsteps on a path heralds her arrival.
]

A soldier or a killer. That was the question, wasn't it? [To fight or to murder...the scenery around them makes the answer seem obvious.]
hauntedsavior: (the voice of sympathy)

[personal profile] hauntedsavior 2018-08-25 02:43 pm (UTC)(link)
[and a text log appears on the screen of the Knot in front of A2. a private conversation between private abstract main() and protected static void jasmineGeteilt(). words about family, about keeping things closed off, about private static final roseGeteilt(). and about what main() is turning into.]

Looks like we finally have an answer. Doesn't it, Jasmine? [she glances up from the screen at the display of bodies while the line I'm the one who broke my family up scrolls by. they don't have an answer, really. A2 is murderous, perfectly willing to kill anyone and everyone who enters this realm, but only because she's been coded that way. only if they trip one of several if-then statements in her programming.]

Are you here to talk or to die?
selfloving: (LXXI.)

[personal profile] selfloving 2018-08-26 10:20 pm (UTC)(link)
[That's not her name. Instinctively, it's the first thing she thinks when the text scrolls, because the sight of something like that hits her like an electrical shock. It isn't who she is, but it feels like something more than that.

Then again, she isn't One, either, and Annalise isn't A2. Doesn't want to be A2, at least. Can she extend the same understanding to others?
]

I don't think I want to die. [Who does? she thinks without asking, because Jasmine knows the answer is crueler than her glibness. Her head is throbbing.]

What is it that you want?
hauntedsavior: (spare me your obsolete empathy)

[personal profile] hauntedsavior 2018-08-27 06:17 am (UTC)(link)
[the question is whether A2 knows to extend that understanding. she's a construct here, same as everything else; Jasmine is the only real one here. congratulations.]

To be left alone. [she looks back down at the terminal, reads the words carefully. tries to interpret what main() had even been talking about. data is just ones and zeroes and it's up to her to ascribe meaning to it. of course, these alternate pathways are sanitized, in a way—conclusions have been reached, resolutions made. but that doesn't mean she has to come to the same conclusions.]

What is it that you want, Geteilt? [there's a little more distortion in that surname than normal. as though it isn't correct here, or is only correct in one of those alternate pathways.] You've always been so tight-lipped about that. Always asking questions of others and never answering any yourself. You infuriated her.
selfloving: (LXIV.)

[personal profile] selfloving 2018-09-01 02:00 am (UTC)(link)
[And what's real at all when they're all copied over souls, or whatever they are, when the relationship the One she remembers has to Zero seems increasingly more and more fraught?

Jasmine sidesteps once, twice, to look more clearly at their surroundings, the terminal. She remembers that she has a weapon, One's weapon, and that she doesn't know how to use it. But she'd use it in a moment if she had to. Who is she, really?
]

To help others, I suppose. But I can't say I did the best job of that this time around.

She must like you more than she did me, to tell you everyone she did. [Zero never cared for anyone in her life, she assumes, wrongly.]
hauntedsavior: (the voice of sympathy)

[personal profile] hauntedsavior 2018-09-02 12:31 am (UTC)(link)
[there's little else to see for now. the white platform, the terminal with its keyboard and its display still repeating that same text conversation between these two, or whichever versions of these two chose to have that conversation in the first place. the triptych of bodies, floating in sight and out of reach with swords through each of them, bloodied tips sticking out the back.]

Your sister has the biggest file in here out of everyone. But I don't give a shit what she thinks about me. [she might as well just speak the truth at this point. there's a difference between A2 and main() and whether Jasmine understands that or is going to keep talking like they're the same isn't A2's concern. she'd much rather take the chance to needle back at her like the data tells her happened all the time outside of this realm.]

How was someone like you planning on helping anyone?