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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

[ This is difficult. Painful. Clouded. It's something she doesn't fully understand the circumstances of but it's...

It's irritating.

That's what she realizes in this moment. It's not that she isn't empathetic - clearly, the boy had gone through something horrible, something that she had recognized and hugged him for before. Right now though, confronting this for the third time in so many meetings with this kid, there's an irritation which doesn't feel like her own while at the same time being fully her own. And so Natalia...

Takes her rapier in hand and wills dozens and dozens of swords of varying sizes to surround both the young and old man. An obvious threat, but more importantly, to show that she is in control of this situation now. She could kill either of them easily. And so she says, ]

Slow down, please! Let's hear this out coherently.

[They both look at her. The boy with shame, the father simply laughs, amused at his predicament more than anything]

Doesn't seem like we have much of a choice do we?

[The boy sighs, his hands shake, morphing back and forth between looking normal and blade like]

Ask away...I won't hide much

What's to ask? You both are telling a story without letting me follow it at all. ... His mother died, and you resent each other.

[ Frankly, the man seems loathesome, but they're both irritating, and it shows on her face, in her red eyes. But the implication is - go on. Coherently. The blades continue to orbit around them, there and ready to impale them as she slowly rotates her wrist. ]

[They both look at each other]

They are both supposed to be dead, I have no idea why HE is still alive.

We didn't have enough money to pay for rent, food and his stupid protection fees.

So we went to his house and she sold her body as usual, while I tried to sleep on the couch after eating my fill.

I hated going there, but mom kept saying we had to...

[The father cuts in]

Stop the fucking sympathy act, you didn't steal enough, so your mother paid the price. You just happened to be around when the police tried to kill me and she got caught in the crossfire looking for a coward.

[ What. What the fuck is- ]

So what, you're some sort of small time crime lord here, Mister?

[The father doesn't quite like being called "small-time" and stares at you for it]

I was called the river devil! Wine or blood made the river red! All vices were up for sale!

[The child, rolls his eyes and butts in]

Basically yes but it's complicated so he sometimes has a seat with the big boys and that gets to his head.

and to think I was so proud when you stole your first wallet at just ten years old...

CAUSE WE WERE STARVING YOU ASSHOLE!

Calm down.

[ she snaps at the boy, and then focuses hard on the man. Wine or blood. And then a starving family...?

... God. ]

So what's got a bee in your bonnet, if you're so talented?

[The child glares at his father still fuming with anger, in fact, you can see his eyes are no longer brown, but a glowing fiery red. He keeps quiet, but it is quite obvious he is angry. The man laughs]

You see how much of a brat he is? That's the ungrateful child I'm supposed to name my successor one day! I want my criminal empire to expand! CONQUER AND SURVIVE! Long after I'm gone! But this WIMP doesn't have what it takes to run it!

[The boy shakes and appears to age a few years almost instantly to look about Al's actual age now, his skin slowly turns black and looks metallic. His fingers are each a blade. His voice changes to one filled with anger, resentment, and hate. It sounds like a whisper, but it echoes throughout the entire park and it shakes the earth underneath everyone's feet]

Lies...LIES! You extorted us! I was an unwanted child! Who had to see mother tire herself with men to make ends meet! You never lifted a finger to stop ALL THE PAIN! ALL THE TEARS! While you lived in a castle, we lived in a dump! Because you loved money more than you loved us!!

[ what a mess.

When she's having this much identity crisis herself, Natalia lowers her head and sighs, flicking her wrist as if to bring the blades a few centimeters closer to both, the thread obvious. How does she untangle this. A knot?

Even so... ]

A criminal empire, are we- are you actually serious?

[The father takes the threat seriously but despite the grave situation he still speaks with pride, the other who is starting to look more demon like by the second growls in annoyance by your question.]

Of course! Now you see, what this insolent BOY was DESTINED to be!

YOU NEVER WANTED ME TO BE BORN! AND PUNISHED MOM FOR HAVING ME!

[The demon's voice gets louder, angrier, black spikes pop out all over his body, liquid fire comes out of it's eyes...glistening down his face like he is crying]

Edited (Punctuation) 2018-09-28 19:40 (UTC)

[ and here at the end of i...t. Natalia bursts out laughing. She laughs here, not able to contain it as she lifts her head and her eyes are wide. The red eyes comboed with that look a little manic ]

Are you serious?! What is this, a fantasy story?! Wow! Wow!

[The demon roars, it skin by now looks fully metallic and its eyes are just made of fire. It slashes wildly at the crystal blades surrounding it. One such a burst goes toward the father. Who, despite what is going on, looks amused more than anything]

[ She did warn them.

The blades are fragile, but they are also quick to be replaced, and Natalia wills more and more into existence, with every intention, as she leaps back, to will the blades to impale into the demon. Small ones though, ones to draw blood but not to rip through him or anything, more to the point though- ]

Get ahold of yourself, Albert!

[It takes several of them, but they do draw...lava and small droplets go to the ground, sizzling it. He roars again before hearing you and looks at you, huffing loudly. His face is filled with anger, but with some confusion, as if he has trouble recognizing you]

Stop it.

[ man. this is so irritating... ]

[He glares at your eyes for some time, the black spikes gradually come back inside his body, and one of his eyes turns back to his normal brown one, the other is no longer on fire and is a blood red]

Good!

... Now.

[ To Look at this "crime lord" here, she grins and she retracts the blades a little before stepping forward and making to kick him down. ]

[The man was looking very smug, amused and sounds impressed by what you just did]

Controled him better th-

[That's when you kick him, with all the swords everywhere, he doesn't dare do anything. Other then let you kick him to the ground.

Al is taking deep breaths and watches.]

I don't think you can kill trauma. So chances are, you're going to stick with the boy. ... But it's probably better if you shut up for the time being. Nothing you've said has been productive so far, right?

[ So says Natalia as she casually makes to... well.

Step on him.

Even she's not positive how she's coming to this. ]

[Al smiles, as the man makes a small grunt while you step on him. He doesn't bother to squirm, knowing, that even if you can't "kill" him. You can inflict lots of pain. So he silently nods his head, meekly. For once, the arrogant look on his face is gone.]

Now! Do either of you know where a knot is?

[ Let's just...

be done with this. ]

No idea what you're talking about. But, there is a hallway that none of us will dare go in.

Might be in there.

[The previously closed door slams wide open, there is nothing but darkness. If you use a flashlight, you will only see a set of stairs going downward. The man gradually fades into a thin mist]

Well then, this has been lovely. Good bye for now...Albert Bahar

[ Bahar?

... Well, whatever. Let's move on towards this hallway, waving for Albert to come along too. She'll consider the implications when she can will herself to calm down. For now, her mood is running terrible, and she flicks her wrists down, to shatter all the blades as she exhales. ]

[Albert walks behind you, however you here a "POP" the second he walks in and disappears behind you.

If you walk a few steps down the door will shut, causing an echo to occur. Each step has a very soft bioluminescence, making itself visible when you are a few steps away from it.

The steps lead to the left and if you use your flashlight, you can see it is a downward spiral and space is vast and empty. But nothing more, you can't see the bottom]

Albert...?

[ . . . Okay, he vanished.

...

What the hell? Seeing no real other options, she continues on the path and sees the steps alight below her as she licks her lips and... let's just. Yeah. Let's go on down more. ]