recolle | (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

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!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"And let you up?"

This is not the time to indulge a mean streak, but Mariko's question lacks the amusement of a sadist in it's tone. No, she just looks at A2, winding herself up and just barely smiles.

"I don't think so. I like having most of my limbs."

Mariko takes a knee and winces at the mess just shy of her elbow. She knows should be screaming and crying, that she should be shaken beyond believe as such an injury - but all she can manage is annoyance with everything about it. Her eyes flick to A2, before she sighs.

"I think we have more in common than you might believe. Tell me what you're trying to protect her from."

Tell me your name, she wants to repeat again, but it's fruitless. Nothing's going to change no matter how many times she insists. She'll have to give up information she doesn't want to give up in exchange for nothing, and the Major has her exactly where she wants her. And—damn it. Damn it, why did she say something that's starting that goddamned Knot whirring again? Why does it care that the Major and A2 have something in common?

Son of a bitch.

"From losing me," she says, the words sharp and direct and bitter on her tongue. "She was miserable before she started remembering me." This is too much. This is too much to say, but the words keep coming out in some effort to fucking make the Knot stop writing information, to stop taxing her processes, to let her rest for the love of any god that's been written into this world please let her rest.

"She didn't know what to do with her life. She didn't think anything was ever going to change and that she'd be stuck going from dead-end job to dead-end job until she died. She forgot how to fight and didn't know what to fight for without me."

It's self-aggrandizing. It's pompous. It's not as wrong as it should be. Stop calculating. Stop trying to solve this.

Mariko listens to A2 and her doll-like knitting of brows evaporates. The details of the story are different, but the beats make her heart feel like it's stopped in her chest. The more things are different, the more they're the same.

"I was too, before I started to remember. I think I was just better at hiding it."

She finally sits, not caring about the mess of blood and oil as she sighs. Damn, she's tired. It's probably the blood loss.

"I'm Mariko Aramaki and before all this app bullshit, I was a fucking garbage person. I ran through dates like cheap tissue paper, drank like a fish and broke the hearts of at least three men that I actually liked and thought the fact that I helped put people behind bars maybe evened the scales."

Her eyes flick to the half of her arm left and there's the shock wearing off. Bags seem to develop under her eyes instantly as she suppresses the gag and she gingerly adjusts the makeshift tourniquet.

"And then I started to remember the Major and that she maybe kills people for a living, maybe even for the government and that she's a lot of things I don't think I am anymore."

Mariko grimaces,wincing at the new tightness of the strap.

"Nice to meet you, Anna. Y'know. Face to face."

public static void marikoAramaki(). The tightness in A2's chest that she has to have been imagining but still feels so, so real dissipates in an instant as the function calls itself to mind, the data begins writing to the newly-discovered file. The file that has one conversation in it. No audio data, barely any visual data.

All for the want of a horseshoe nail.

"Don't compare me to her," she says as she hears the hard drive of the Knot winding down. "She doesn't deserve that." A2 should have her processing power back soon. She isn't sure she feels like using it. There are a lot of things she could say. A lot of things that wouldn't be accurate. Or would they? The android she is, the construct, the complicated array of data granted physical form isn't anything but that. So whatever she's coded to say is what she should think is correct.

There's no reason, for example, to still be antagonistic. Not when she's pretty sure this is over, when she doesn't think she has any fight left in her after being worn down in a way she'd never once expected to happen. But still she tries, just in a different way.

"Are you fucking proud of yourself?"

"Fair enough."

Mariko knows better to argue against a sentence like that and she's pretty sure having that conversation with anyone besides Togusa is bound to end in bloodshed.

There's a silence that feels longer than it probably actually is, now that she's not exactly worried about dying and the 'whrrr' of the Knot has faded into something almost normal sounding. It reminds her that she has to rewire her personal rig, install a better cooling system so her baby doesn't choke the way A2 did. Hopefully, she remembers.

Then A2 spits her question and Mariko laughs; it's a quick, tired snort that is more seen in the sudden jump of shoulders than properly heard.

"Honestly? Kinda. But I'm an asshole." She laughs again, shaking her head - eyes flicking warily to the sword in A2's hand. "And I'm probably going loopy from blood loss."

A2 rests her head on the ground below her. The idea of resting is so pleasant that she doesn't ever want it to stop. Of being able to not calculate something after spending this entire conversation working in overdrive, pulling up 404 after 404, burning resources she already didn't have trying to figure out who this is... for nothing. For so little it might as well have been nothing.

It's almost funny, but she has no energy to laugh.

"Yeah you are," she says, and she means it for the asshole bit, but the blood loss is also probably a thing that she'll have to worry about, isn't it. A2's chest is rising and falling and she's certain she doesn't have to be doing that but it's happening anyway. The orders for functions of this class were to stop them from reaching the Knot. She's done that, hasn't she? She can stop now. Right?

"Keep me as part of her and I'll let you leave," she says weakly. She's not in any position to be making offers.