redstringtheories

Entry tags:

!tdm

TDM #2

➥ Arrival

(cw: potential for severe disorientation/vertigo, claustrophobia, arachnophobia, body horror)

It happens in the blink of an eye. You may have been asleep. You may not have. You may have stepped through a door or turned a corner. You may have seen a flicker of something at the corner of your vision and turned to look. Or maybe you didn't.

It doesn't matter. What matters is that you find yourself somewhere entirely new and entirely unfamiliar. The arrival point is not always the same. (If you're lucky, it might be a canteen or an open office. If you're not, well... you aren't claustrophobic, are you? Or arachnophobic. These ducts do seem to be a bit cobwebby.) There is no one waiting for you but you don’t seem to be alone, either. Even in a janitor’s closet or the bathroom, you’ll find at least one person who seems to be just as out of place as you are.

If characters have arrived in a location devoid of NPCs, they may want to work together to figure out what is going on... or to avoid their 'kidnappers.' If you’ve arrived in the middle of the entry foyer or the gym, there may well be a few people who startle a bit at your arrival and try to approach (or discreetly leave the room... where are they going?). Will you cooperate or fight? Do you even understand what they're saying? You might need to find a translator, if you’re not immediately willing to follow a stranger.

After characters follow their new hosts (or are forcibly taken in) there will be a limited tour and the chance to settle in at the ADI-provided housing. (Do you enjoy living with strangers? Well. It's a new situation to navigate, anyway.)

➥ Say, Say O Playmate

(cw: hallucination, potential mind-control, blood, ritualistic sacrifice, claustrophobia, potential for being buried alive)

Weird things happen in Dogtown, everyone knows it. The Apocalypse Disruption Initiative (ADI) is not above taking advantage of that to test out the waters for its newest arrivals. They're not looking to send anyone to their death, though. That's far too much paperwork, you'd been assured with a wink from the employee who'd directed you to the park trailhead. You've been left with another person. Maybe they're a new arrival, as well, or a more seasoned 'veteran.' Either way, you're together for the next while and you've been asked to find and record any paranormal activity in the park. You have your phones and any other equipment you might have brought with you. Those who succeed in documenting anything peculiar will receive a $100 reward to be used as they see fit.

This month, there seems to be something odd afoot with some playground equipment. ADI has had reports of a few disappearances around town and Dogtown seems to be the locus of them. When characters go investigating, they will invariably stumble across a lone tube slide somewhere out in the woods. Though it seems a little grimy - though less grimy than one might expect from something you’d find in an abandoned settlement - there’s nothing noticeably off about it. (Not unless you find abandoned slides suspicious.)

Nothing, that is, until someone climbs up to the top of the slide and looks down the tube. As soon as they do, they may feel the urge to slide down. (Or perhaps this is just nostalgic and they feel like taking a trip down it anyway!) Either way….anyone who disappears into the tube will be disappeared. Characters who find themselves in this situation will slide for much longer than expected. It might almost seem interminable, with plastic walls closing in around them. The slide does end, though, and characters will find themselves in one of two places when it does: underground in a cramped, winding cave system or in the interior of a stone temple.

The former experience will be disorienting as characters try to find their way out. They may realize that they’ve already passed certain features...or they think they have? Even a level-headed person might be given to panic, to the fear that they might never find their way out or that they might make a wrong turn and be simply stuck. They will have the sense that they are not the only thing down here, that something is lurking just out of sight, following them. However, perseverance will be rewarded, as will reliance on one’s partner. Eventually, they’ll find another plastic tube and if they climb through it, will emerge back where they started.

Characters who find themselves in the temple will discover that they are locked in. There is seemingly no way out, since the tube that they slid through is just too steep to climb back up. But the room is not... empty. No, there is an object suspended above a pit in the ground, held by chains. And there are two stone disks set slightly out from the wall on opposite sides of the room that seem like they could be depressed inwards. Like a button. Pressing them in tandem will lower the object (which seems to be a... great big black garbage back) down into the hole. As they do, the bag starts to... move. Is it living or... is there just something alive within it? Characters will not be able to get the bag open, whatever they try, but they'll notice blood leaking from it

Lowering the bag -- whatever it is, whatever its contents -- will eventually cause two previously hidden doors to open. An unearthly scream comes from one. The other reveals a stone tunnel. How fast can you crawl?

Still. No matter how close those screams follow characters as they crawl and slide their way through the tunnel, they’ll eventually find themselves sliding down...bright plastic. They too will emerge back into the clearing they disappeared from.

In both cases, that clearing will be empty, with no sign of the slide.

➥ Silver Ghost

(cw: large-scale vehicular collision, industrial disaster, fire, harm to animals)

It's nearly midnight when a thunderous crash shakes the buildings of Gloucester. It begins with the shriek of metal on metal, a drawn-out, tormented sound like a great beast screaming out its last dying breath, followed by a terrible concussive blast like a clap of thunder. There's the sound of shattering glass and roaring wind as the buildings that make ADI Headquarters and apartments, as well as Bonnie's Flophouse, shudder on their foundations, and in the moments that follow there come the pitiful cries of the wounded and dying amidst the groans of twisted metal. The air reeks of burnt flesh and the taste of hot metal lays cloying on one's tongue. Somewhere, animals are screaming. Somewhere, flames lick upward, filling the heart of old Gloucester with a sickly, unnatural light.

Except...

Except the people of Gloucester lay sleeping peacefully. Most native guards stand their posts blissfully unaware of anything untoward happening on their watch. There are no alarmed crowds flooding into the streets, and what few people are out on some errand in the night drive on past the flames without so much as a glance. No windows are broken; the buildings stand miraculously undamaged. Those who venture out into the night to investigate or to help will find that the phantoms of destruction flicker back into darkness and silence, though not before the light of the flames leads the way to an abandoned railyard.

➥ A Switchman's Story

(cw: fire, destruction of home, mention of insects, infection, and altered perceptions)

It's hard to say when this railyard ceased to be a major hub of the web of rails that connects Gloucester to other cities up and down the coast. Freight trains still periodically rattle through on a few of the lines, so one best stay aware of one's surroundings, but this is by and large a dead place. The few railway workers here seem perpetually to want to keep moving, and there's the sense of a heavy, oppressive presence that hangs over the place both night and day.

A derelict train car sits rotting on long-unused tracks. The local workers take no notice of that ramshackle hulk of metal and wood, gazes skittering past as though they don't want to see. At first glance it seems there's little to find here but termites and tetanus, but for those brave enough to scramble inside, there's something more. Inside, the train car is almost like the burnt husk of an old house after a fire, with the collapsed remains of bunk beds and a cracked washbasin still recognizable despite signs of an inferno followed by decades, perhaps even a century, of neglect. What looks like peeling wallpaper turns out, on closer inspection, to be a large number of posters pasted to the walls. Many are burned and decayed beyond recognition, but on a few it's still possible to make out the shapes and faded colors of clowns, elephants, and tigers.

Little information seems to be available about the railyard or the crash at ADI headquarters. The more junior staff members of the research department are eager enough to help and will do their best to set new staff up to search online databases for information, but there's an unfortunate lack of a real starting point for research and the overworked senior staff aren't available to help. For now it's a long slog through online journals and newspaper archives with no results in sight.

➥ Mod Notes

ARRIVAL (Aug 1 - 21): Two people will always arrive in the same general location together. Arrivals occur throughout the early month, not all on the same day or in the same place. Arrivals are not naturally fluent in English/other languages immediately upon arrival. Characters may attempt to evade capture, but they will eventually be snagged before they can leave the building. PC's already in-game are more than welcome to interact with and try to guide new PC's to get them oriented. Please refer to the Arrival page for details regarding the arrival and onboarding process.
SAY, SAY O PLAYMATE (Aug 1- 21): Characters will only encounter the slide once. If they make it out, it will not appear to them again. For those who enter the cave system, the pervasive sense of being observed and followed will not relent, nor will characters be able to find the source of it. The caves are utterly silent save for the noise the characters themselves make. For those who enter the temple, there will be no way to get the bag off the chain or pull it onto stable ground. The pit it hangs over is just too large for that. Both characters will have to press buttons on opposite walls in order to lower the bag and open the way out. Characters who try to stay and face what is chasing them, they will be met with a bubbling, oozing mass of mud. If it washes over characters, they will be buried alive and die in the temple. If characters jump down the pit, they will die in the temple. If characters refuse to lower the bag into the pit, they will be trapped and eventually die in the temple. Please bear in mind that if a character dies in the TDM prompt, they are dead. A different version who doesn't have TDM memories may be apped in their place.
SILVER GHOST (Aug 21): Characters will find that native NPCs are largely unaware of the apparent crash, both within ADI and without. Any characters who appear at ADI in the minutes before the crash will also be unaware of the sights and sounds. Only characters who have gone through ADI's onboarding process for interdimensional arrivals will have heard or seen the ghostly crash. Some native ADI personnel appear to be aware of it, but not all.
A SWITCHMAN'S STORY (Aug 21-24): If characters talk to any of the railway employees, they'll find that everyone who works at this railyard is a new hire, a recent transfer, or here on temporary assignment. All of them want to transfer away as soon as they can, though none of them can articulate why they don't like this place. None of them have any awareness of the crash the characters heard. Within the relatively brief timeline of the TDM characters will not be able to find historical resources regarding the railyard and rotting train car; characters conducting in-depth research will be able to uncover more information during the in-game event that will take place later in the month.
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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He definitely knows what he's doing. It's inconvenient, but not entirely surprising. It might make her life easier if facility guards were all the incompetents shown in 90% of action cinema, but reality has never been inclined to make her life easy.

(Something still nags at her, an itch at the back of her mind.)

She kicks the grate free, and it clatters against the ground, spinning in a lazy half-revolution before bumping against the wall. She slithers out after it, letting herself drop rather than attempting to lower herself slowly, trusting in her own reflexes to let her land on her feet, knees bent to absorb the impact.

Accepting the slight risk of landing badly and spraining something is better than accepting the much greater risk of making herself an easy target in a slow descent.

She takes in her surroundings, noting the placement of the doors and the current lack of any human presence besides herself and the masked man, and mutters a curse in her native Russian.

She would have so bet on backup having arrived out of her line of sight while he held her attention.

He snags on the Russian and replies readily in kind. "What is your purpose here? Are you an intruder or a newcomer?" He sounds like Russian is, in fact, easier to speak in than English, despite having no discernible accent in his English except "bland middle-American".

After all, he remembers his arrival here. Sudden and confusing and definitely not an intentional intruder.

Her eyes widen slightly in surprise when he speaks to her in Russian rather than the English they'd previously been conversing in. Which is, perhaps, a little unfair on her part.

Something in his voice draws her spine up straight, shoulders back, shedding the casual air she's adopted as camouflage over the past several years. She doesn't immediately notice - involuntary and voluntary reaction are still a tangle of thorns in the back of her mind. Perhaps they always will be.

"Newcomer," she allows in the same language. It rankles a little to admit to being caught off guard and in the dark, but of the two options presented, she's certain it's the safer one to choose. Then, because the question itself raises questions of her own, "Is this normal? Do people just get lost in your ceilings?"

"Yes. Or the halls. Or the broom closets." Look, it was a weird fucking day, and he'd actually spent a good couple of hours wedged in said broom closet, gun trained on the door, unable to make himself go out and face the people he could hear going up and down the hall.

He's a lot more together, after a month here, at least. Or he can fake it better. "The ADI staff can explain." A pause. "They all speak English." Just so she's aware.

A shadow of unease flickers across her face. That sounds familiar, like so many accounts of the Blip - something she should have put together much more quickly. She has only her disorientation to blame for that. Disorientation, and the fact that it doesn't feel familiar - she had returned to a place that had been in much the same shape as she'd left it, nothing added or removed during the time she'd been absent.

"America?" she asks, and then the much more important question: "What year is it?"

"Massachusetts," he agrees, sounding vaguely unimpressed. It tends towards cold and rainy, up here. He's not really a fan. Honestly, he's not sure if he's a fan of any of it, besides being given something to do and a roof over his head he doesn't have to think too hard about. "Twenty-twenty-one." And, because he knows why she might ask that question (though not for the same reason), he adds, "It was twenty-fourteen before I got here.

Her eyes widen at that. A later date wouldn't be surprising. Had been expected, even, though she'd been hoping the interval would be shorter this time than it had been the last, five months instead of five years.

But 2021?

"That's impossible," she says. "Time doesn't work that way. It doesn't run backwards. That's science fiction."

There is a small part of her that's fully aware of how ridiculous that statement is. She's been kept under mind control. Alien gods visit Earth on a regular basis. She'd missed five years because she was part of the half of the universe wiped out because of a giant purple alien's incredibly flawed understanding of resource distribution and population dynamics.

Winding up in an air vent approximately three years in the past isn't all that far fetched, in comparison. It is, perhaps, just one thing too many.

Look, he gets it. It's very strange. But he's been here long enough, done enough stealthy research online, overheard enough conversations, and has a no-longer-remembered grounding in science fiction itself that he has a fairly good idea of what's going on. "This is not our Earth," he says flatly. "There is magic here. Strange creatures. People from multiple other versions of Earth, in the past and the future. And also from other worlds." The guy with the ears and the tail, in particular.

So it's not about time, kiddo. It's about alternate dimensions.

He hasn't entirely registered that he's said "our", that on some level some part of him does in fact recognize her, but it's in there. "Come," he says. "They will explain it better."

She waves a hand dismissively. "We have magic and strange creatures. You said 2014, you have to remember the invasion of New York." Even if he's not from New York, that had been impossible to miss. The Avengers, in general, were impossible to miss.

She falls into step alongside him, just out of easy reach, and studies him out of the corner of her eye as they walk. She had registered that he'd said "our", and while she isn't certain if she believes his claim that they're on some alternate Earth, if he's telling the truth - or telling something he believes is the truth - then that means that nagging tug of familiarity at the back of her mind doesn't just go one way. If he isn't, it's a crack in the lie. Either way, it's worth keeping track of his reactions, as much as she can with half his face covered.

She gets a side-long look back, and though it's hard to tell with the mask over his mouth, there's something to his brows that say he's frowning. "No. I was in cold storage. I have twenty hours of memories prior to my arrival here."

And apparently before that there was an invasion of New York? With magic and strange creatures?

He might have liked to see that.

Her eyes narrow, and she suppresses a shudder. Not at him, exactly - she has a healthy wariness of large, masked, well-armed men, but they're a familiar variable. Dreykov had liked his women subjugated, and his men anonymous.

His words, though...

She might hate some of her memories, but at least they're hers.

And that answers, finally, that nagging itch.

"Winter Soldier."

He looks sharply away, out ahead of them, plates in the metal arm shifting with something like discomfort-- which is probably a good enough answer. He hasn't heard those words, in that language, in-- in--

When he speaks again, it's back to English. Giving him a little distance from those words. "You know me." "You know me." No I don't! "Do I. Know you."

Yelena does not make the linguistic switch with him. Whether it's out of obstinacy, for her own comfort, or because she wants to make things just a little harder for anyone who might be eavesdropping is impossible to tell.

"A long time ago. I was much younger." She holds her hand about shoulder height, an illustration of how much younger, if he looks back at her. "You weren't. Do you know the Red Room?"

If he only has 20 hours of autobiographical memory before all of this - whatever this lunacy is - then she doubts he'll have any personal recollection of the facilities. She doubts he would remember her in particular anyway, just one more weapon disguised as a little broken doll in a sea of the same. But he's too functional for all the knowledge to have been stripped away, and so maybe the name will mean something.

At the movement in his peripheral vision, his head turns enough to make sure it isn't a threat-- instinctive more than a reflection on her, though there's a certainty in the back of his mind that she is quite deadly for an unmodified human-- and his brows come together again.

There's a long moment of silence as he tries to put words to the feeling that name brings up. They're not quite memories, but there's-- something-- "Widows," he finally says. The reason he recognizes she is deadly, as much as from watching her move.

"I used to be," she confirms. In many ways, she will always be a Widow, but she can choose to call herself otherwise. There's no Valentina to nip at her here.

"Not the famous one, though. I'm Yelena."

He finally slips back into Russian with her. "Good. I. Think I shot her a few times." This one, he doesn't have the feeling he's ever had her between his cross-hairs. The only feeling he gets from her is that certainty that she knows what she's doing, and a weird-- protectiveness. A feeling like she should, indeed, be much smaller. Rounder cheeks. The occasional tear before she learned to hide them.

Like they all learned to hide them.

"I will not shoot you, here," he adds, in case she was worried.

"She forgave you," Yelena replies. She isn't entirely certain of the truth of the statement, even knowing the chain of events that set Natasha on the run - her sister had been more than capable of saving someone even if she personally loathed them - but she likes the idea of it.

The corners of her lips twitch, pulling up into a small, almost teasing smile. "I don't know if I would, so it's a good thing you don't plan to shoot me."

(She does know. She would. She'd spent far too long under Dreykov's control to fail to realize it's the hand that wields the weapon that's at fault.)

What a weird thing. Does he need forgiving? He wouldn't expect it. He would expect her to shoot him, in return, and he wouldn't even be mad. Annoyed, maybe, but not mad.

He's silent for a moment, but the lingering familiarity makes it seem a little safer to ask, "Why? I'm a threat. She should continue to think of me as such."

"A lot of things can change in ten years," Yelena replies. She eyes him sidelong for a moment, then exhales slowly through her nose. "I don't know the whole story, just what was in the news, and in the files leaked from SHIELD."

More a flood than a leak, she thinks to herself, but now isn't time for semantics.

"But you're important to someone she cared very much about. And you weren't a personal enemy."

"I don't know the story, either." He walks in silence for a few steps, mulling sourly over "important to someone she cared about". Who could that be, hmm? Ugh.

Then he says, haltingly, "Before here. I dragged my target out of the river. And ran as the helicarrier fell apart." That's officially the last memory of their universe he has. At least that might help place him a little better on the timeline.

She nods slowly. "It was on the news. The helicarriers falling out of the sky, not you pulling someone out of the river. The beginning of the end of HYDRA."

She draws her lower lip between her teeth, an old childhood habit that she's never quite been broken of. "I don't know if it would be kindness or cruelty to tell you what I know of what happens between what you remember and what I do. I think I'm missing too many of the important details. But if there are things you want to know, I'll do my best to answer. But - maybe after. I don't think your bosses will want to wait so we can play catch up."

Edited 2021-08-21 08:04 (UTC)

For a beat, he actually opens his mouth under the mask to ask one of half a dozen questions that immediately spring to mind.

But. He's not really supposed to ask questions. And some of the things he thought of to ask would... hurt to know, he thinks. Things that might make him want to hide in a ball in a corner. (Even if there's a part of him, far in the back of his mind that he's pointedly ignoring, that kind of wants to do that already.)

So he says, "Maybe after." Though he probably won't ask, he thinks. And then, "Do you have questions? Before we get inside." More important than what happened to people is getting her prepared.

"I have all the questions," she admits. "But the most important one is, who are these ADI?"

Everything else - everything else - will flow from that one.

Edited (html) 2021-08-23 00:57 (UTC)

"The Apocalypse Disruption Initiative," he answers, in English, because he's not honestly sure how "apocalypse" should be translated into Russian, here. He goes back to Russian for the explanation. "There are fears that are intelligent beings and want to take over the world. Or end it. These people say they are trying to stop them. So far mostly I patrol and train, but there have been missions. Saving seal-people from horse-people, delivering artifacts that burn when touched, investigating rumors."

Horse people. Seal people. Burning artifacts. Ugh. It sounds like madness, like universe-murdering alien warlords, like waking up five years after disintegrating to find her sister dead. Yelena grimaces, and shoots a glare down the hall.

"Why us? I don't do magic. This is Avengers business."

TDM #2

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