Recollé Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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recolle2018-08-17 05:53 pm
recollecters) wrote in recolle2018-08-17 05:53 pm
(no subject)
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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. No other messages will be sent or received from this account. Welcome to 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! |
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[She bit her lip, sorting out her thoughts before she spoke again. Okay strange monster creature...]
...You're my sister. Lucy.
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There were pink haired girls in her memory. Memories. Some that looked like her, some who didn't. Luna was one who did, or should have been.
Lucy grabbed onto that line of thought, uncurling the trailing ideas that went with it. For a moment, her voice stopped being so echoey.]
...where's mom?
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Uh.
[Luna wasn't sure, really.]
Weeeeell, I'm pretty sure I fell asleep in class, so...probably...at work?
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[Not far away, not missing, not some faceless entity she had the phone number of but never called.
A little more, and the thread would start to unspool from the other thoughts, the other memories.]
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I mean, she was here when she scolded me this morning for not eating my cereal so...
Preeeeetty sure.
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...but if that was true, if their--their--mother was here, then it meant she wouldn't be quite so alone. And that was a greater temptation than she could resist.
Silently, the shadow drifted to the edge of the lake, closest to Luna. It looked down at the girl again, with its unblinking red eyes. That was right. She was usually looking down at Luna, but only because she was the older sister and taller. But not this tall.
The shadow began losing cohesion, its back and many legs fraying into indistinct bits of black. It shrank, and the glowing wound in its chest did too until it was impossible to see.
Because the shadow was gone now. It was Lucy--Lucy as Luna remembered her from just earlier today, with Minako's ribbons tied to her horns--who stepped out of the lake's shallows onto the rocks surrounding it, though her steps were uncertain and shaky.]
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[Please be good.
[When it disappeared into the water and was suddenly...Lucy, standing there, looking perfectly normal and lucy-like, Luna let out a breath she hadn't even known she was holding a took a couple steps forward, hesitating, uncertain....]
Jeez sis, you had me worried for a minute there. Though I might've gone crazy or something!
[But she could pretend she hadn't been scared, of course.]
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Sorry.
[It didn't cover...nearly all the things she should say, but it was the best Lucy could manage right now. She sounded tired again, but when she spoke it was only with one voice.
Her head still felt crowded, like there was more than one person's thoughts in there.]
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Sooooo....
[She frowned up at the older girl.]
What was with the giant spider monster thing, huh?
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...I think that was me. A lot of me's.
[She knew it was, in the part of her mind she didn't want to acknowledge. A monstrous, inhuman mess of contradictions and hidden things that shouldn't exist, but did anything.]
Here is...full of memories. They're all mine. Some...most, I don't want. Can't get rid of them.
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Well, you look a lot better this way. [She joked.]
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She turned back away from the lake to face her sister--and snorted a little, at the joke.]
Yeah.
[Lucy's arms--normal, human ones--curled around Luna's shoulders in return. She was here, not somewhere poorly defined and full of whispers.]
...I think you helped me.
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Of course I did. That's what I do, sis. You weren't even as dense as I expected!
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Are you a psychologist now?
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I'm better! Since I clearly know you well enough to fix whatever all that was.
[She gestured vaguely at the black lake behind Lucy.]
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[Lucy shook her head, then reached out to ruffle her sister's hair a bit. She'd been learning--both of them.]
Come on, let's get out of here.
[And she started making her way across the rocks back to the elevator, still wobbling a bit precariously sometimes.]
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Soooooo....how do we wake up anyway?
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Wake up?
[She frowned a little, and looked at the vacant elevator.]
Just like...
[She reached for the elevator door, but it began to split at the seams. It blurred and fuzzed out at the edges, like an image with a too-bright light behind it.
The elevator, the cavern, the stones underfoot--all gave way to a blinding, blurring light. Lucy blinked her eyes closed.
When she opened them again, she was staring up at the ceiling in the living room. There was a crick in her neck that twinged as soon as Lucy tried to sit up on the couch, and she grimaced. How long was she asleep?]
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[She was in bed. A bit sweaty and tangled up in the sheets but alive and whole and at home. But...]
Lucy!
[It wasn't quite a shout, but it was loud, as the memories of the dream rushed into her and she sat up in surprise. Her dog monster was curled up on the floor next to the bed, and he raised his head to peer at her for a moment, then put it down and went back to sleep.]
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...considering what she just woke up from, that may or may not be a good idea. Probably not. Scrubbing the sleep from her eyes, she grabbed for her phone on the coffee table, and--paused, for a second.
They'd been hopping around dreams for almost two months now, but that didn't feel quite like the others. It was more like some scene, some set piece viewed from a half-dozen perspectives all at once. And Luna was in it. It wasn't a too-unreasonable hour, so maybe...
Lucy typed up a message, and sent it to her sister's number.]
Are you awake?
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Well I am now!
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You didn't *have* to answer
Are you busy?