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goneawayworld2021-04-02 06:31 pm
goneawaymod) wrote in goneawayworld2021-04-02 06:31 pm
Entry tags:
DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL - FINALE
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
Click for larger map
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
Day has broken and the town is still acting...strangely. The townspeople are milling around like normal, living their lives, but some of the monsters are still roaming around, too. People can avoid their attention by playing their parts whenever they're around, and they don't automatically attack everyone just for being outside.
Something is also wrong with whatever's controlling this place, like their searching and prodding around has somehow unhinged something. The mechanism that was shoving them around different places has stopped. The laugh track sometimes goes out of control, laughing at random moments.
The different groups are free to move around and prepare, with one pair going to fix the machine, and the other pair heading towards Joshua Nichols' house and then the TV station. Once the machine is fixed, others can start herding the townspeople out of town and the area's effect.
THE MACHINE - Cammie and Brainiac 5
While it keeps some of the room in color, the effect doesn't seem to extend to the two of them.
There are tools to use in the room they can use to work on it.
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"Not gonna lie, I was really hopin' being near to this thing would fix us. Call me vain but I miss my own voice and my ears—which, actually, that's a practical thing. Way more useful when I can turn them towards noise."
She says this as she's already moving over to crouch near the machine to examine it, cursing in censored curses under her breath at the impracticality of the damn clothes she's still stuck in, too.
"You said on the network that you've got experience with reality alteration and stuff, right?" she asks, looking at Brainy. "Cause I sure don't, not like this."
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He grabs the tools and brings them over.
"It's best to think of this as the machine doing all the work. We just have to amplify the range and potency." A pause. "And the efficiency, so that it can make better use of its limited power supply. We can possibly get more power out of the generator but not as much as we need. So the alternative is making it do more with less."
He kicks off his heels and kneels, pulling off a panel so they can get to work. Fortunately, his closet produced pedal pushers this morning, which are a lot easier to kneel in than pencil skirts.
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“A second time? Geez, this is weird enough just the once,” she says, adjusting her dress enough that she can crouch close enough to her favoured resting position. “Closest we get to reality alterin’ back home is immersive VR and MR—that’s uh, mixed reality.”
She takes a look at the tools at their disposal and squints at the revealed mechanisms now the panel’s off. She’s worked on some weird and powerful tech in her time, but hardly under these circumstances.
“I’m never gonna take MR for granted again,” she mumbles, then just claps her hands together. “Alright. Like you said. Efficiency, range, and strength. Do we wanna try push the input from the generator up a notch or just focus both our efforts on the machine, since it won’t be enough regardless?”
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THE TV STATION - Merton and Hiccup
When they check the second house, where his foster parents took him, the house is wrecked, half of it demolished. But there are fortunately signs someone survived. Someone clearly grabbed a few pictures out of frames and took them, implying someone was alive to grab a few mementos.
One that they missed, because it fell face first on the couch, is a framed picture of Josh with his foster moms. They each have an arm around him and are smiling widely. One of them is a black woman with braids, purple lipstick, and sharp, dark eyes. The other is a heavyset woman with green eyes and long, bright red hair in a loose bun.
In the picture, Joshua is holding up the adoption papers and smiling and crying at the same time.
The picture is framed on top of the formal approval of his adoption. The adoption papers list his name change as: Joshua Okafor.
Player Choice: With Merton's encouragement, Hiccup grabs it and brings it with them.
The TV Station looks...strange. In that there is a sign that says it's the TV station but the front door looks suspiciously like the front door of the house they just explored.
Re: THE TV STATION - Merton and Hiccup
"Think we should knock? Seems like the polite thing. Plus, y'know, reality warper."
No sense in starting off with this little discussion by annoying him.
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At the suggestion that they knock, he thinks it over for a second and shrugs.
"Suppose it is his house, so, couldn't hurt." In a rare moment of taking the initiative, he steps up next to Toothless and gives the door a knock before quickly backing up to stand just behind Hiccup again.
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The inside is a mess. It's half living room, half lobby of a TV station. And it also gets mixed up the farther they get in, the rooms of a house merged with recording rooms and offices and studios.
It's like something tried to convert the station into a home by force.
Various places have small screens, near areas where they clearly had people monitoring things as they filmed live. The screens blip on and start to show things.
A boy that must be Joshua sitting in a shabby home, alone. He's young, watching black and white television, occasionally smiling at the jokes.
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cw: face body horror
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cw: face body horror
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EVACUATIONS - Open to Everyone
The townspeople will start to get disoriented - some will even start remembering who they once were. They'll be much easier to herd towards the town's limits, and now there's finally something beyond them.
At the edge of town there's now a field of energy that looks like static, but in places where it's thin, trees and fields and abandoned buildings can be seen beyond - all in color. While it takes some effort, people can push through the field and find themselves back to normal - and wearing their old clothes - on the other side.
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Now that he has his proper shape back the final operation comes into play, as he starts roaming the crowd, looking for the Jorgmund-sent scientists, who aren't yet safe - either from the wastelanders, or some of the New Hires.
A nearby wastelander eyes Bunny and backs up a few more feet, like shape-shifting could be contagious. With this much Stuff around, they might not be wrong.
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“Woah, keep one eye on where you’re going and don’t go swimming for a good hour after a mental whammy,” he says, clapping them on the shoulder. “You both okay? Bunny - everything cool?”
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The wastelander looks silently between Robbie and Bunny, matching them both up to his memories from the false life they just escaped, and backing off slowly, calmly this time.
With the mortal calmed and distanced, Bunny sidles up to Robbie as he surveys the crowd.
"If the scientists group off," he says, quietly. "You and I shouldn't get too many paces from them. Will your Legionnaires stand by you?"
He didn't jump into the argument, but he made sure to listen in on it. He made sure to know who was likely to try for a very specific kind of field justice.
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Across that border, her intense relief that her hair is appropriately violently pink again is something she only gives herself a moment to enjoy. Otherwise, she's using her returned strength to, if necessary, physically pick people who are mostly larger than her up and drag them around to get them herded. If she encounters a scientist, they get exactly the same treatment, and her face is utterly expressionless.
She knows how to complete a mission even if she doesn't like or agree with it.
Re: EVACUATIONS - Open to Everyone
Unlike most of the others, though, he hasn't breeched it himself. His outfit seems to flicker, the suit coat becoming a trench, the trousers and shirt occasionally shifting to look like his body armor. But he just keeps going back, finding people to bring back.
He pauses at the barrier, running his hand back through his hair as he ushers a family through. "Don't worry, we'll get you all to safety. Just need everyt'in' to sort out here, first."
THE END
And then the effect over the area suddenly blips off, leaving an abandoned town, ravaged by the apocalypse.
How they all got in the town finally comes back to the New Hires' memories - it was a mission to find out what happened to the project, due to a loss of contact. They were told to recover staff, data, and people Jorgmund said were "volunteers." (A clear lie.) The rescue part had been legitimate and so they'd walked in and then been absorbed by the anomaly zone, forced to forget due to the town trying to assimilate them.
Color returns to everyone but Josh. All of the New Hires' clothes turn back to their uniforms. All their gear can be found nearby if it hasn't been found yet. Their powers return too.
Joshua Okafor is the only one that still looks like he's from a black and white sitcom. Even the clothes his rescuers had scrounged up for him have turned back and white from contact with him. But he's mostly back to normal, other than some odd, mutated body proportions. He still clings to the framed picture of his foster moms and sticks close to Hiccup.
"Mom! Ma! Are you here?!" He wanders around calling their names, tears in his eyes.
A miracle happens. They had come back to the town. They had been caught in the expanding reality alteration field after gathering supplies at the house. They had been transformed back from being two of the paper dolls.
"Josh? Josh, sweetie, is that you?" A red-haired woman shoves her way through the crowd and immediately starts crying when she sees him. Josh starts crying too. "Oh my God, oh God."
"Mom!"
Josh drops to his knees, shaking from relief, and his one mother practically power slides to meet him, pulling him into a tight embrace. He drops the picture to wrap his arms around her.
His other mother had already found her wide. She slides in too.
"Joshua! Joshua!" she wraps her arms around her wife and her son. "Thank you, God, thank you, thank you, thank you."
Their reunion is almost ruined by the people around them.
"You!" calls out a woman to Josh. "What are you? Are you New? Did you do this to us?"
"New?" he says, tears still on his face. "I don't - I don't know what that means. I was - Something happened to me and my mind was all messed up, and - and I don't know what happened, I don't understand what happened to me. There was this weird silvery dust that messed me up and made me big and -" He gestures towards Hiccup and Merton. "But these two people helped me."
"My son would never hurt anyone on purpose," says the redhead.
"You messed with our heads," the woman continues. "You -"
"Hey! Back off," says a young man. "It sounds like he got messed up by Stuff. Everyone who touches that shit gets fucked up. It's probably not his fault. It's Jorgmund that shoved us into that place, knowing there was some dude all messed up in there, instead of helping him. They're the ones that messed with our heads."
They turn towards the crowd of Jorgmund staffers and look suspicious at the New Hires, but before a confrontation can happen, there's a rumbling of engines in the distance. The Wastelanders and townspeople that had been stuck in the anomaly all turn.
The cars are nothing special in terms of make and model. There are Saabs. Honda Civics. Ancient Yugos. But they are all souped up to an unbelievable degree, with equipment that almost look like jet engines and almost certainly uses some form of nitro. Many of them have the Katiri flag on display somewhere - in a window, on an antenna. Some of the cars are painted in the flag's colors: green, yellow, and white.
The cars stop a distance away, spread out across the road and several empty parking lots. A young woman with wings gets out and spreads out her hands. A forcefield of some kind shimmers into place, protecting the caravan from any potential gun shots.
A dark-skinned man gets out of the foremost car, a Rolls Royce. He is dressed in a pair of linen trousers and an open-necked shirt, over which he wears a leather jerkin. Around his middle is a red sash, with various useful items dangling from it - and two cutlasses. This Errol Flynn-like figure signals for two members of the convoy to raise a flag: the Jolly Roger - a skull and crossbones - against the backdrop of the Katiri flag.
The man is handed a megaphone.
"Greetings, fellow survivors of the Wasteland! Do not fear our flags, they are a message to Jorgmund alone. Soulless and barbaric, we know what they have done here must have been a great wrong, as it always is. We are survivors of Wastes, too. We are the free Katiris and the Found Thousand! Our people welcome all, even those touched by Stuff, even the New. We offer you safety and freedom from Jorgmund's control. If you join us, we will offer protection and transportation, but you will be able to come and go as you please - the right of all free people! You may stay here and try your luck within Jorgmund's grasp but if you come with us we will help you flee this place. Make your choice now!"
He signals to the many Katiris.
"And those who serve the corrupt, who snake their way around the world, we strongly suggest you do not interfere. Jorgmund staff or soldiers that prevent these people from leaving will suffer the consequences! We will let you live if you don't fight us, but if you fight us, you will find yourselves filled with considerably more holes than just the ones inside your hearts."
The Katiri pirates he signaled to all draw out some heavy duty weapons. Assault rifles, rocket launchers, machine guns they set up on little stands on the roofs of trucks.
"It's the Bey! The Bey and his pirates!" a Wastelander calls out.
The Wastelanders talk amongst themselves briefly, fervently. They explain the danger of their situation to the people that were trapped in the town from the start, the ones that never got to find out about the war. The consensus: Jorgmund bad, pirates good, the New Hires are Jorgmund, so they're untrustworthy regardless of some of them seeming to help.
And so off they go - every one, including Josh and his mothers. He gives the New Hires a brief look back of gratitude, a hand gesturing towards Hiccup and Merton, but lets himself get ushered along.
"Thank you," he mouths and then he turns to go.
The captives all race for the pirates, passing through the fairy woman's forcefield. Katiris load people into cars and trucks, making room wherever they can. Engines rev as they start to leave.
"What are you doing?!" says a Jorgmund scientist to the New Hires. "Stop them!"
The New Hires each get to choose if they try to stop anyone. Or, they can decide the mission is over, and that it's time to inspect their gear and leave. Given all those guns, it might be best to let this one go and be grateful the pirates and Wastelanders would rather leave than chop off some heads.
Re: THE END
"All anyone needed to do to fix this was show that kid a picture of his parents," he spits. The fact that this could've ended ages ago angered the Hel out of him.
"You had months with pretty much all the info you could want at your fingertips, we managed in less than a week with none. You want them back, you can go get them yourselves."
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“Why would we stop them?” Robbie asks in a much less fired up voice. He’s very good at guileless. “They’re volunteering. It’s what volunteers do. If we stopped them, they’d be voluntold.”
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"Plus, did you not see their giant guns and rocket launchers? We have Maybe-Kevlar, at best, and some of us don't even have that anymore." He gestures at his own lack of a jacket. Despite keeping his tone light and joking, there's nothing kind or comedic about his expression. Even the crooked smile reads as tired and pissed off. "I'm pretty sure running out in front of them would be considered willful destruction of Jorgmund property."
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"Don't shift," she says, low in her throat. "The Katiris might take it as a threat, and I really don't want to get shot full of holes today."
She watches the Wastelanders and townspeople fleeing to the safety of the Bey and his pirates and the Found Thousand, whoever they are.
"I guess the Bey isn't Beyoncé then, huh?"
It's quiet enough that the proper Jorg employees shouldn't be able to hear her.
Re: THE END
She's watching the pirates; some of them are watching her. The guards, she'd wager, by the way they shift when they catch her eye and also the weapons they're holding. The rest are busy helping the townspeople.
If she could just talk to them - she glances at the Jorgbots - too damn risky. She could about scream. To be this close!
One of the pirate's kept looking at her, paying attention to her. She crouches down to open her recovered found pack, continuing to glance at them as he keeps his eyes on her. Likely thinks she's planning something, and she is, she just doesn't know what yet.
She's got rations, a flashlight, a bottle of water and a hand towel.
"Sparing no expense again, I see," she mutters. Maybe the towel? Send up a white flag, surrender - what else can flags do. Upside down is a distress call -
Ha. Ha, ha ha. It might not work, but it's not nothing.
She pulls out the water bottle and drinks deeper then she needs to, letting the water fall down her face and front and drip to the ground. The pirate is still watching. The bottle is empty; she lets it fall and, glancing again to her pirate. Still paying attention, now looking a little confused.
The towel she uses to wipe her face. Theatrically. When she's done, she flaps it out with a crisp snap, and then ties a knot in the end, letting it hang for just a second like a flag. A white flag, tied in a knot. Parley/surrender; aid urgently needed. Then she balls the rest of it up and shoves it in her pack, already coming up with a line of bullshit about knotting towels to wring them out faster in case someone asks.
Her pirate's expressions seems to have shifted. She lets herself hope that he understood, at least, that she was trying to send some kind of message, a message that for some reason she can't say openly. Maybe someone in their crew will recognize the signal, or just be willing to take the chance. After all, why would it be a secret if it wasn't something interesting, and potentially useful?
It's not something. But it's not nothing, either.
Re: THE END
Zaher Bey looks at Saturday curiously, whispering something to some of the pirates closes to him.
They noticed. At least it's something.
Re: THE END
It's something. It's an interest. All she can do now is hope. She's lived on worse.
Message sent, she turns away and goes looking for Guts.
Re: THE END
And then there's that asshole, yelling at them like this is something they'd stop.
She's been so good, she's been trying, but she's fucking done.
Wrath walks over to the scientist and grabs the front of their shirt and any lab coat they have in one fist. Despite the fact that this person is quite a bit taller and bigger than her, she lifts them entirely off their feet and holds them up, her arm extended.
"Shut your fucking mouth before I shut it for you." She gives them a firm, bone-rattling shake, and then sets them carefully back down on the ground. Pats the front of their shirt smooth. Smiles prettily. "Sir."
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He doesn't have a shock collar fob.
He does have the ability to rat on her to the executives when he gets back.
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Re: THE END
It could be written off as a friendly gesture from a protective figure. At least, in a Jorgmund writeup.
"You're not a diplomat, and you're not out of the woods yet," he growls in the scientist's ear. "Keep your mouth shut and think about who you've got on the Rig to get back to."