goneawayworld | DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL

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DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL - INVESTIGATION

DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call...The Twilight Zone.

LINKS
OOC FAMILY INFO/WORKSHIPPING
PLOT PART 1
NIGHT EVENT
NETWORK POST

MAP

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Darlington High School: The town's high school, home to various cliques of teenagers, and containing secrets that can only be discovered after dark.

Sheriff's Station: The sheriff seems like a typical sitcom sheriff, neighborly and helpful, but the sheriff's station has carefully guarded files that might be of interest to the New Hires.

Abandoned Factory: In such a sunshiney town, why is there an abandoned building?

Library: Information about the town can be found here, including a section with town records.

TV Studio: The possible source of strange broadcasts that can be found on TVs in Darlington.

???: A completely unassuming house.

Abandoned Mall: Another abandoned building, and one that's outside of time. This shopping mall is a decade or two early for the time period in the sitcom. Perhaps something useful can be found inside.

Murnjgod Appliances: The TV's in the window of Murnjgod Appliances sometimes display cryptic messages that might offer clues or puzzles to be deciphered.

DETAILS

The first night and day don't leave them much freedom. The sitcom scenarios keep them occupied periodically during the day and evening and then whatever brought them there dragged them "home" the first night around 10 pm and then battened down every door and window of the building they were each in.

The second day is much the same. Forced scenarios, some free time in between. It's only at night fall that something relaxes, like the world is letting out a sigh. There is a sense of pervasive fatigue like whatever was pushing them through this has just exhausted itself trying to control all of them at once.

That means the doors and windows stay unlocked that night, allowing some of them to move around.

The streets are empty - emptier than streets often are in reality. There's no one driving home from a late shift or walking their dog. There are no barking dogs for that matter, either, despite them sometimes being visible in yards around the neighborhood.

Sitcoms tend to move to interior settings at night. So the streets are eerily quiet and empty. At 10 pm on the second night, instead of dragging them home and trapping them, every light in town other than their own house lights and the street lamps turns off simultaneously.

Their doors lock once but almost as if it's for show, a bluff to make them think they're trapped again. They can be unlocked and opened this time. The houses all have flashlights, and sheds full of tools that can maybe be used to break into places.

It's time to get to the bottom of this.

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Saturday nods sharply, agreeing. "Clear this floor an' work our way up? I wanna see what's in those crates."

She nods towards the ones she means, looming like cyclopean slabs in the dark.

"An' what do you go by? Don't think we got a formal introduction."

"Sure." She starts moving toward the containers, though not quickly; she knows how to scout an area for hostiles, even if the search pattern is a little different because neither of them have guns. She always sucked at shooting, anyway.

"Though if we don't find anything useful..." She points the flashlight down to where the floor appears to have sunk. "There's something down there." She's not really relishing the thought of that.

"I'm Wrath."

"It'd be a pleasure, Wrath, if not for the situation." She falls into pattern next to her new partner, back to back and watching her six as they move towards their goal. The crowbar is a pleasant weight in her palm - her sword arm is still silvery, but it's felt curiously inert ince she arrived and she doesn't want to test it by trying to draw 'Ni-chan. The place might realize it's magic and take it away, and then she's short an arm and no use to anyone.

Besides, if she can't kick ass with a crowbar she might as well wander off into the woods to die and spare the tribe the expense of her upkeep.

"I'm thinkin' we check the crawlspace last? If there's anything here my gut's tellin' me it's down there - might be clues or somethin' we'll regret not pickin' up first somewhere else. I saw some offices upstairs, too."

"It's always in the crawlspace," Wrath says grimly. That's just how these things work. Whatever they need, it's going to be in the smallest, grossest, worst place possible. But just in case they've gotten lucky, they can't really skip everything else.

But she certainly doesn't move through the area like someone who expects the danger is limited to the worst possible place. She heads carefully to the first of the cargo containers, pausing by the door. She glances at Saturday, waiting for the nod, then opens the container's door with her crowbar.

The inside is...strange. There are large containers within that seem reinforced with some kind of heavy duty material - plastic? Metal? Something in between? The material is a silvery gray, with an almost iridescent quality.

Opening the containers is a bad idea, judging from the single container that has a slight crack. Over time, little bits of liquid - or a particle sand-like solid? - have oozed out of it in miniscule amounts into a little puddle.

They've seen this substance now and again on the rig - sometimes in little puddles from leaks in the rig's structure, quickly cleaned up by hazmat janitors. Sometimes looking out on the grey storms sweeping over the landscape.

And if they had any doubts at all about what it is, skittering around the edges of that puddle is a strange creature - a massive spider with legs too spindly to be like a normal spider's. It has large butterfly wings, the size of a dinner plate - but too many of them, layered over one another, like the overlapping petals of flowers.

Who knows what started out as as - one bug dreaming of the other, or two of them merging together. It's always hard to tell with Stuff.

"Well, heck," Saturday says, a lot more mildly then she feels. "Heck a duck." The rhyme should make her true meaning clear. She stares for a long moment, taking in the containers, the insect, the leaking Stuff.

"...I wonder who started collectin' it. Like if it was before or after this place existed..."

Maybe this is how this hell-town got to be a hell town.

This is Wrath's first encounter with any amount of Stuff, let alone its little effects. In a way, that means this has less of an effect on her because she's not sure how concerned she should be to begin with. She still takes several steps back, though, not wanting to risk touching any of it.

She'll take the cue from Saturday that it's bad, at least, and she gestures at the insect thing with her crowbar. "Should I be killing that?"

Saturday keeps her thoughts very still as she gestures for Wrath to back away with her, and starts to close up the container. She focuses on each word and each word alone, stalking the perimeter of her mind for stray horrible ideas, trying to detach sound from concept.

"Nah, just keep away from it. Could be harmless, could melt our faces, better to leave it alone if it doesn't make any sudden moves." She pulls the latch shut, as firmly as she can. Not as firmly as she could have, if she were all herself. She even grunts with the effort. "That's the Stuff - how much of a briefing did you get before they pushed you into th'general population?"

Wrath moves to help get the thing closed, at least.

"There was a presentation." Wrath shrugs. "It was probably a lot of bullshit because no corporate ever tells the truth about anything."

She eyes the other containers. "Think that's what's going to be in all of these?" It's a tough call, because search protocol is to look into and clear everything without making assumptions, but when there's potentially hazardous material involved, that makes things more complicated.

Plus they're working on a limited clock. "We can check everywhere else and swing back if there's nothing else useful and there's still time."

"Not all bullshit. Self-serving, though." Saturday doesn't relax until the crate is sealed again. "The skinny is that a while back, this place blew itself to kingdom come with some kind of magic bomb that unmade reality - it worked sort of like radiation does on human DNA? Scrambled up all the things that tell reality what it's supposed to be. Reality doesn't like not knowing what it is, so the Stuff - the melted reality bits - latches on to the nearest mind and uses that mind as its instruction set, becoming what it fears or hates or wants or has a passing thought about."

She eyes the crate like its a venemous snake,

"Just what's in there is probably enough to give us a real bad time," she continues. "We should let the others know, ASAP. If they're all full of the Stuff... that's a real potential hazard."

Wrath takes all this in and thinks about it. Really thinks about it, setting aside her other more orderly thought processes about how they should be proceeding with a search of the factory.

Wait.

"...if there's a bunch of that here... and it gets made into a new reality kind of thing by a nearby mind... then that's got to be what's powering this whole thing, right? Maybe not what's stored in the containers, waiting, but maybe some has already been used. And that's what made this town. Because this town makes no sense."

Is the understand this right?

"If there's someone's imagination behind this, does it all go away if I cut off their head?"

Saturday hits her with the double fingerguns. "That's exactly what I'm thinking. At least, it's part of the puzzle. This much Stuff in one place could make its own instance, I'm sure."

She shakes her head at Wrath's other suggestion, though. "Maybe, maybe not. Stuff just takes the template, best I understand it. It's still its own thing... an' the person who made the town like this might not have been whoever stockpiled it. Probably didn't even know they'd done it. Could be a kid, even."

"Oh, okay." She seems perhaps weirdly disappointed that simple murder is not going to fix this. Maybe because murder is the simple and easy thing she's trained for.

"Okay. Let's count the containers, take the dimensions on them." So they know how much there is. "Can probably knock on them to see if they're all full... unless that pisses it off?"

"Honestly, I'd rather stay as far away as we can. I dunno how close you gotta be for the Stuff to latch on..." Saturday is still trying to keep her mind blank, which is tricky when you're also thinking and speaking. "Grab the dimensions off this and let's do a quick visual count, then let's check the offices and head upstairs?"

Wrath does a quick walk around the container. She can compare how big it is to various models of tanks she knows since she has clear memories of what they look like at different distances, and that'll tell her approximate dimensions.

"Okay, got it." She tells Saturday a pretty accurate assessment of the container's dimensions. "Get the count and we'll hit the stairs. I'll take point."

"There's some offices here, too. We're gonna wanna circle back and hit them before we go into the undercarriage." Where the danger, if any, is almost certain to be. People are predictable, and monsters even more so.

Saturday scans the pile, taking count the way her father taught her. How big's the space, how big is what you're counting, divide and count it up. If asked, she would say indignitly that it's not math, she's terrible at math, it's just looking properly.

It is, however, totally math.

"...man, I hope they're not all packed full." The number is an alarming one, if they are. She shares it.

"Head up. I got your six."

"Understood." Wrath moves up to take the front, heading for the stairs that go up. The terrain is tricky, but she also doesn't rush. At this point, they're better off being slower and not stumbling onto something terrible. She holds her crowbar at the ready.

The upper floor is...glitchy and there's a hum from a machine in the center of the room. Whenever the lights on the machine briefly flicker off, the room flickers too, flashing to the black and white of the TV show and back again. Almost like the machine is keeping that area in color and in the real world.

There's a lab of some kind inside, with strange equipment that has purposes that are hard to discern. There are broken monitors that are all black except for one. It's hard to see what's on the screen but it looks almost like the back view of a kneeling humanoid form hunched over. Broken flood lights can be seen around it, like they were once operational but no longer are.

There's no more detail than that.

Some of the lab - like the monitor - is still drawing energy from a large generator in the corner.

Most of the paperwork has gotten shredded in a big shredder, like things went to shit and the people in the lab were trying to destroy evidence of their involvement.

There's a memo on the floor, one of the only ones that slipped away and survived.

Research Site Alpha

Request for early closure of the Project: denied.

Project: Desilu has been deemed an essential project due to potential to find an alternate form of ███ production. Early results show too much promise to shut the project down.

Continue acquisition of D-class subjects from wastelands and placement of subjects in reality overwrite scenario. Upon mental adjustment to reality overwrite, continue reporting on their perceptual influence on un-reified matter upon introduction to reality overwrite zone. Collect results of any reified matter for analysis. Monitor Anomalous Entity JRG-034 for any changes in behavior or changes in reality overwrite potential.

Close project, terminate subjects' volunteer terms, destroy evidence, and evacuate only in case of breach of reality overwrite field.

There is no name on the letterhead. Just a symbol.

Saturday sucks in a breath at the lab equipment, and the flickering console.

"Can you take a look at that?" she gestures, nodding towards the gear. "I'm more likely to break it - maybe there's files?"

The memo, when found, doesn't exactly surprise her.

"Great. So this is some kind of abandoned experiment, went out of control or something?" She studies the logo. "Creepy logo. Don't like this. Hey, is there any way to tell where that monitor is streaming from?"

Wrath doesn't like any of this. Labs give her a bad feeling even if she can't explain why, entirely. Still, she nods and goes to look at the machinery, though it's not something she has any kind of expertise in, either. "Why would you break it?"

She examines the monitor, trying to get a sense of what kind of place the picture is coming from. But other than that... "I don't really know much about computer stuff at all. I had a friend who was an AI and he used to be in charge of that." Delta could have probably figured out a lot about these things.

There's no way to get a closer look at the being but it suddenly moves - only just a light shift where it sits.

The movement helps give a sense of scale because of a shoulder briefly blocking a broken flood light behind it.

It's quite possible, whatever this thing is, that it's huge.

Otherwise there's nothing else useful to be found in the abandoned upstairs lab.

"I got kind of a curse with machines. Anything that uses computers doesn't like me."

She leans over the monitor, whistling and careful not to touch it. "Big boy."

"Oh, that makes sense." Well, it doesn't make sense as such, but Wrath has seen a lot of things that don't make sense, and they don't have to.

"I don't like is."

Well, it doesn't matter what she doesn't like. She's seen a lot of stuff she doesn't like at all. Best to just focus on doing the mission.

"If that's everything, let's check the office downstairs and see what kind of bullshit it under the floor."

She'll lead through the door if Saturday is ready.

"Not a lot here to like." Saturday pauses to fold the memo and flip it in her pocket. "Can you get a couple pics of the room an' send them to my comm 'fore we go?"

"Yeah, sure." Wrath gets her own comm out and starts taking pictures of everything that looks like it could mean something. She even takes a picture of the monitor, though she knows a lot of times those don't turn out well. And she's able to send them to Saturday easily since she's one of the most recent people she's talked to.

"That should do it."

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