apocalypsehowcomm | Event

Event - Lullaby

Lullaby

➥ For You Never Shut Your Eye

Photo of a small grassy area within an urban environment. Two men are passed out across the grass and sidewalk. There is a purple gradient filter over the photo.
(cw: supernaturally-induced sleep/fatigue, supernaturally-induced sleep disorders/somniloquy, needles/injections)

The line between waking and sleep is beginning to blur. People will find themselves sleeping far too much, but it never feels like enough. The music is growing more prevalent and persistent throughout town. The effect is still weaker within the building, but as October wears on, more and more people are affected and ADI staff are more intent than ever to find the source and also figure out how to block the effects. Characters will find themselves conscripted (between Halloween Party preparations) into assisting with building or testing anti-music and sleep devices along or with helping to try to track down the source of the music.

For those helping to build and test devices, there is an R&D lab in the basement levels of ADI that will be available. Devices native staff have been able to devise include:

Headphones that play different frequencies to try to cancel out the sound of the singing.
An armband that periodically stabs a small needle into the arm with a small dosage of adrenaline.
Headbands set to a constant low vibration.

The efficacy of all of these devices is… questionable, but perhaps others may have their own expertise to lend to the efforts, attempting something on a broader scale than just personal protection devices.

For those helping to track the source of the music, finding it seems to be impossible, but there is a definite pattern that characters will note as the days pass. The epicenters of the music are moving, migrating out of the graveyards and converging on ADI Headquarters. As this goes on, the building will become less and less of a safe haven, the music penetrating its walls and affecting the staff there more heavily. You might find yourself having to help a neighbor who's fallen asleep while working. Or you might not even be able to fully tell they've fallen asleep as they sleepwalk and talk almost like they're actually still conscious. Even those who have never been prone to sleepwalking and talking may find themselves affected and… far more open with what they say when in the unguarded state of semi-unconsciousness.

➥ Till the Sun Is In the Sky

A caucasian woman is lying on the floor, eyes closed. The room is dark around her with a spotlight shining on her. A secondary image of the woman, semi-transparent and wrapped in white clothes floats just above the woman on the floor. There is a purple gradient filter over the photo.
(cw: supernaturally-induced sleep/fatigue, thanatophobia, character death, death by poisoning, blood, choking, emetophobia, death by crushing)

By the 25th, some people may find waking up to be a challenge in and of itself. But they do manage to wake up. Seemingly. Perhaps the day is much like any other, heading to ADI or out around the city, grabbing coffee and- something is wrong. Something is very wrong. That cup of coffee you just drank had tasted a little different than usual. A touch of almond to it? It hits you that your throat is burning, bile and blood rising up and choking you as you hack and gasp and vomit. Your legs grow weak, you're losing control of everything, falling, dying.

And then you wake up.

Just a nightmare. Just a bizarre and horrible nightmare. You head out and… is this home? You're home! Or maybe… wait, this doesn't seem right. Have you gone somewhere else? Some things might be familiar, memories intertwined and mixing with fantastical elements, some your own, some not. You notice people you recognize, ones who might be as confused as you are. This isn't where they should be and they remember dying, too. Or seeing you die or someone else. It doesn't make sense, but somehow, they remember they had a dream they shared last night. And then something falls from above and nearly crushes you or your partner. Or maybe it does crush them, and you're suddenly looking at a dead body as the world and this nightmare that feels so very real becomes more and more hostile. Maybe something falls on you.

And then you 'wake up.'

➥ When the Blazing Sun Is Gone

Three sheet ghost halloween decorations stand in a line. There is a purple gradient filter over the photo.
(cw: supernaturally-induced sleep/fatigue, thanatophobia, character death, body horror, detailed description of painful physical transformation, description of the loss and regrowth of teeth, violence, mental status alterations, temporary power-loss, spiders)

Even with people dropping left and right thanks to the odd sleep effect taking hold, ADI staff are hellbent that their Halloween party will not be completely ruined. And on the 28th (a little before the actual holiday), everyone wakes up. Or… seems to. For those trapped in dreams, it will seem very much that they've woken up, the music has stopped, and they can actually carry on. For a few days, it even seems like things are normal. The party on the 31st is a blow-out bash. The entire first floor of ADI HQ has been transformed with decorations. The canteen is serving festive food and has set up a dance floor with holiday-appropriate music playing. Some of the offices feature additional activities, including party games like bobbing for apples in a trough that's been brought in, a guess this gross food booth, and more general party games. For a quieter time, there are also areas set up with board games and card games to play. And for some extra fun spooks a mini-haunted maze has been set up with faux spiders and webs, along with other goofy-looking monster creatures.

It's around 9 PM when the music and lights suddenly cut out. There's nothing for several seconds. Then, a voice begins to sing, filling the halls of ADI. It's a young girl's voice.

"Bye-bye, bye-bye,
Quickly you will die,
On the morning will be frost,
And you’ll go to the graveyard, the graveyard.

Grandfather will come there, too,
And he will bring the coffin.
Grandmother will come along,
Her tears, they will not soften.
Mama sings the prayer song, then,
And falls down on her knees.
Daddy takes you to the grave,
No one can hear his pleas.

Bye-bye, bye-bye,
Quickly you will die,
On the morning will be frost,
And you’ll go to the graveyard, the graveyard.

As the last notes of the song fade away, all hell breaks loose. Those who had been wearing particular sorts of costumes, ones that are more monstrous in nature, may find themselves transforming, growing, twisting, shifting. It's not a clean change, but a violent, agonizing one that cracks bones, tears and reshapes muscles and tendons, pushes out teeth to make room for new ones. Those transformed will find themselves compelled to chase, to hunt, to kill anyone they can get their claws, teeth, or other appendages on.

For those who stay themselves, it's not just their transformed friends who pose a danger, but the decorations they've set up, as well. Those fake giant spiders and webs? They're no longer fake. Neither are any of the other demonic little creatures. The goal of everything in ADI and even outside for those who manage to make it out the doors, is to remind you how very, very mortal you are. Those typically possessed of fantastic abilities will find that they have been sapped away. There's no calling on magic or innate abilities. You are mortal and you are going to die like everything mortal does.

In the chaos, characters will catch glimpses of a young girl flitting amongst the chaos, seeming unperturbed by it all. Trying to catch up to her or speak to her is fruitless, but she's there, and she's humming that song from before.

➥ When He Nothing Shines Upon

A caucasian woman has just woken up and stares grumpily at her phone. There is a purple gradient filter over the photo.
(cw: supernaturally-induced fatigue/malaise, thanatophobia)

Those who are killed at the party will find themselves waking up wherever they actually fell asleep a few hours or even days ago. If your character was one of the lucky few who somehow managed to escape the effect, you'll notice people waking up all over ADI HQ and elsewhere. There are no signs of damage on the bodies, but those who died in the dreams will find themselves feeling incredibly weak and generally ill for several hours to several days after the experience.

The music has actually stopped, and this time, it would seem you've actually woken up. Depending on how long you were passed out for, that may be a more unpleasant experience for some than others. There's a message posted from a random ADI employee's phone a few days later to the network:

Mr. S was right. This was fun! I'll have to come back next year to play with you. - Ava, the Lullaby Girl

P.S. Sorry for stealing your phone, horsegirl67. But I wanted to say, hi. C:

Unfortunately, there are no further messages and attempts to respond to the message will receive no reply for now.

But... fortunately…? All of the Halloween preparations are still up, and there's a festive party to attend if anyone actually feels keen on trying it in real life. Pam Ruan, the main organizer is bloody-minded about it now and will have her God damn Halloween party, but those who work themselves up to attend out of festive spirit or morbid curiosity will find it a distinctly muted affair that breaks early in the evening.

Happy Halloween, Gloucester!

➥ Mod Notes

GENERAL - Players are welcome to play NPCs for themselves when they are needed in a thread. If you need more information on general behavior for these types of NPCs, please feel free to ask! In general, the information provided in the prompt should be sufficient and you're welcome to make up any details beyond that for your specific scene. The Lullaby Girl (Ava) can be seen throughout character dreams, but they will not be able to interact with her during this event. They will either wake up or simply find that the physics of the dream are warped and she cannot be reached or there's a sheet of glass between her and the character or whatnot.
FOR YOU NEVER SHUT YOUR EYE (15-24 October) - Characters are welcome to develop their own devices for attempting to stop the music. Characters will have modern day technology available to them along with a few slightly more advanced electronics and tools. Please do not go too out there. This isn't Tony Stark's array of tools and the like. But characters can create additional devices to test within reason. Some of them may be more or less effective, but with how sporadic the effect is, it might be difficult to tell what's actually working or not. There can also be negative side-effects from devices, if you'd like to play those out. Characters with the appropriate magical charge may also attempt to supernaturally block the music, but this will not be condoned or facilitated by ADI. Characters searching for the source of the music will not be able to find it, just discover that it is moving. For characters who are sleep-talking, they may find themselves unusually honest. They may or may not recall conversations with other characters and all that they told them.
TILL THE SUN IS IN THE SKY (25-27 October) - Characters will experience repeated nightmares of dying in a shared dreamscape. They will remember every time that they die in the dreams. Feel free to get as creative and gruesome with this as you would like. These are dreams and fantastical situations that might not actually happen (e.g., a robot showing up and shooting a laser through your character) may occur. Players are welcome to introduce elements of their memories into the nightmares and mix those memories around between characters who might wind up in a dream together. Please ensure all top-levels are appropriately tagged for any and all content warnings. Add content warnings as you go along, if needed. Dying in the dreams will trigger the sense of waking up. This can be a fake wake-up or characters might actually wake for a short while and find others passed out around them.
WHEN THE BLAZING SUN IS GONE (28-31 October) - Again, this will be a shared dreamscape where characters will be under the illusion (at first) that all has returned to normal. For those who investigate, everything seems to be real, nothing too off, excepting the night of the Halloween party. Once the Lullaby Girl finishes her song, characters who are dressed in costumes that depict animals or other monstrous creatures may find themselves transformed into their costumes. Transformed characters may gain powers for the duration of this prompt/event related to their monstrous forms without mod approval. Go wild, kill your friends and neighbors, and generally trash everything around you. The decorations that come to life will be attempting to murder all characters, transformed or not. If characters escape into the city, they will find all of the festive decorations out there have come to life and want to kill them, as well. Death is unavoidable for this particular prompt, but it can be something swift and painless or something drawn out and horrible at player discretion. It is the only way to actually wake a character fully. Players also have the option of keeping their characters awake. They will not experience the shared dreamscape and will just be stuck with a lot of unconscious people around them for the duration of this portion of the event.
WHEN HE NOTHING SHINES UPON (31 October) - Ava, the Lullaby Girl, cannot be contacted or immediately located, but she will be available in future plots for interactions with characters. There is no immediate information regarding who Mr. S. is. Players may have the general sleep/death malaise last for a minimum of two hours and a maximum of three days. Regular medications for the flu can ameliorate some of the symptoms, but they will ultimately clear up on their own. Characters may wake up in whatever state players would like. Feel free to play out the effects of them having been slumped in a corridor for three days without food or water. It's going to be a bad time all around. Those who attend the real Halloween party will be thanked profusely by Pam and showered with candy. At least they'll get a few HR brownie points?

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He startles briefly, as if expecting a punch more than an arm around his shoulders. Jeff wipes his eyes, which doesn't really help much, just smears more makeup around, and lets out another smaller, weaker laugh.

"Some costume, huh. I was a witch, um, until I-- I lost the hat." Jeff sniffs, looking around furtively. Yeah, a few passersby are shooting some weird looks, and normally Jeff wouldn't care much. But now he kind of feels like he's dragging Gil down in the gutters with him.

It's better to just go with him. Get off the streets for a change.

"Do you... Do you think I'm, um, that I'm a bad person?" he asks, hesitantly, like he's not sure he wants to hear the answer.

Gil's heart aches, and he wishes life was as simple as acknowledging that you've done something stupid and not making the same mistake again. He'd probably be out of a job, but that wouldn't be a bad thing.

"No." He gives Jeff's shoulder a little squeeze, drawing him toward the ADI apartments. Wherever Jeff might want to be tonight, he's going to be on Gil's couch. "I think you're young, and you're screwed up, and you're shortsighted, but the first one's not a crime and everyone's the second. Just gotta work on how you handle it."

He's pretty sure they're not heading towards Bonnie's, but he doesn't protest. Somehow, in spite of all the sleep he's gotten over the past... fuck, however long it's been-- After all that sleep, he's still tired. Maybe it's the come-down from the drugs, or the beginnings of a hangover, or maybe he's just spent in some broader sense. It's a kind of exhaustion that goes beyond the body.

He's just so fucking tired.

"I'm sorry I..." he starts lamely, not really sure what he's apologizing for. Sorry he almost swept Gil up in the madness? Sorry he's just... who he is? "Sorry I made you chase me." He keeps his gaze low as they walk, like he's afraid of passing anyone who might recognize him from the 'party' he'd started. "Those people are gonna be okay. It's-- the song wears off on its own."

Gil doesn't answer right away, weighing his possible responses. How much of a point needs to be made versus how terrible Jeff already feels.

"That's good." It is. It unknots the sharp fear that he's going to have to bring ADI in to help those people. Put Jeff on their radar. Another few steps of silence before he adds, "They going to remember it? What they did? What it felt like?"

"Yeah." He shrugs his shoulders. "I mean, probably. I guess it depends on how... how bad it gets. You know, it's like when you go on a bender?" He looks at Gil for a moment, like he's trying to suss out how likely it is that the man's been on drug or booze fueled benders, then huffs out a breath. "Well. Maybe you don't know, I don't know."

Gil makes a slightly affronted noise. "I was your age in the eighties. I made my share of adventurous mistakes."

Adventurous mistakes. Christ, he really is old.

A pause, then a little length of rope thrown out to help pull Jeff back from the loneliness of self-recrimination. "Sometimes I dragged other people into them, too."

"Adventurous mistakes..." he repeats, and there's a snort, then, hey, Jeff actually laughs. He sounds light and carefree, just for the moment, a little window into who he could've been, if he wasn't such a fucking basket case.

"So what happened, you... you just grew out of it?" There's a note of skepticism in his voice, right at the end there. Like he's heard it before, over and over again. It's what he'd expect to hear from an adult-- not from, like, his own parents or anything, but from teachers. Guidance counselors. Friends' parents. Those kinds of adults. Never a real answer, just some promise (threat?) of inevitability.

One day, a flip will switch, and Jeff will be a Respectable Adult. Except he's already 21 and he's pretty sure that switch is broken. He wouldn't even want it to begin with.

"I got arrested," Gil says blandly. "Criminal possession of a controlled substance in the fifth degree. Middle-class Filipino kid with respectable parents--didn't matter. I was Hispanic enough. Brown and carrying drugs. Those were the important parts."

He goes quiet for a moment, both remembering and considering what to say next. "First offense. First one I got caught on, anyway. If it has gone to trial I probably would have gotten the max. Seven years, fine of up to $5000, which in the eighties, let me tell you. That was a lot more even than it is now."

"Jesus." Five thousand dollars. Seven years in jail. He tries to imagine the hammer coming down on him like that. It's never been a particular fear of his, for reasons that are... extremely obvious, looking at Jeff.

"What happened? How'd you get out of it?"

Gil smiles softly. “Arresting officer’s partner ‘lost’ the evidence. And no, I don’t mean he took it for himself. I mean his partner told him to go log it in and he detoured between the bullpen and the evidence room and flushed what they found.”

He swipes them in to the ADI apartments, finally taking his guiding arm from around Jeff’s shoulders to hit the button on the elevator of his building. “Gutierrez. Officer Alex Gutierrez. His partner looked like he wanted to murder him. Don’t remember that guy’s name. No reason to, really.”

He looks at Gil, and he tries to picture him young-- Jeff's own age-- and scared and on the cusp of losing everything. If that one cop didn't decide to do something good and show him mercy, then... this version of Gil, the one he's talking to, wouldn't even exist.

He wonders if he's at his own crossroad moment like that, or if he's already walked past it, and set on his path.

"Is that why you decided to be a cop?"

"That was part of it. A big part, but not the only reason." The elevator doors chime and open up, and Gil motions Jeff inside. "One thing you'll learn when you've got a little more life under your belt--choices are very rarely a one-to-one thing. Some significant events will influence where you go more than others, but there's very, very rarely only one reason for anything that somebody does."

He hits the button, looking over at Jeff again. "Something else you'll learn: it's not over until you're dead, kid. Every damn choice every damn day changes who you're turning into, no matter where you are right now."

He follows Gil into the elevator, leaning back against the wall as he crosses his arms around himself. Now that they're inside, in air conditioning, he can feel goosebumps prickling over his exposed skin. Fuck... Jeff hopes Gil's got an extra pair of sweatpants or something. He's so ready to get out of this costume. His fingers curl near his own hip bone, suddenly more aware than ever of the coke he's got stashed in his underwear.

Fuck. He's taking drugs into a cop's apartment. In the ADI housing complex, which has got, like, fucking surveillance shit everywhere.

He swallows, trying not to let his nerves show.

"So you... you don't think it's ever too late for someone to be a..." He hesitates, before finding the right word. "A worthwhile person."

Not good. Just better than garbage.

Gil knows junkies, and he knows kids, and he knows the nerves that come when you toss the two together in front of figures of authority. He's not going to broach that subject, not yet. Policework is patience. And there's a lot of work to do, here.

"No," he says softly. The elevator chimes again a moment later, and Gil puts an arm around Jeff's shoulders again, drawing him to the front door of his shared apartment and hoping that no one else is home at the moment. He hasn't seen Yuri in a while, which is worrying, but he can only deal with one thing at a time.

And, mercifully, the place is quiet and empty. "Get in the bathroom and clean up. I've got some gym gear you can wear. Clean. I promise. I'm not sharing my underwear, though, and you're not going to keep on whatever nasty pair you've abused for the past day. I'm sure you're not unfamiliar with going commando."

Jeff lets out a sort of petulant huff, but hey, Gil's right to call him out. It's true that his clothes are, uhhh, less than fresh. He feels filthy, inside and out, so he's sure as hell not going to protest. A shower and a fresh set of clothes sounds pretty nice right about now.

"Got a trash bag I can dump my stuff in?"

If so, all his clothes are going to get tossed in, the bag tied off like he's trying to contain some biohazards. And the coke, after some deliberation, gets stuffed into his sock, balled up with its twin. Should be a decent hiding place for the night. Easy to smuggle back into Bonnie's without any issue.

He makes his shower quick, practically in-and-out, with the efficiency of somebody who's used to unpredictable plumbing and limited hot water. But he feels better already, and slipping into fresh, dry clothes after (even if they're, like, a dad's gym clothes)? Feels like a fucking luxury.

There's still a little bit of eyeliner stubbornly hanging on to his face, but otherwise, he comes out looking clean and almost respectable, like in some other universe, he could've been some picture-perfect boy next door instead of... whatever he is now. Disposable junkie trash.

He stands in the living room, looking a little lost, clutching his bag of dirty clothes.

"Um. Thanks. For, uh, everything."

Gil is in the kitchen, putting together a horrifying-looking concoction that's practically guaranteed to be some kind of familial hangover cure-and-or-prevention. "For what everything? Sit you're skinny butt down, Calhoun. You're not going anywhere tonight."

Jeff looks around helplessly for a moment, as if he can find some escape from the imminent dad-ing, but he can't, so he finally flops his skinny butt on the couch, dropping his bag of dirty clothes at his feet.

Fiiiiiine.

"I'm fine, Gil, I swear." It's a half-hearted protest, though, but he's not really sure what else to say. His own parents were always pretty easy to shake, so this? It's new.

Edited 2021-11-25 18:31 (UTC)

"You're at least half-way to high, and I'm guessing you're on the losing end of the ride," Gil says dryly. He comes over, holding out the glass in hand. "This'll help with the hangover, at least, though you might be young enough that it's not an issue yet."

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Event - Lullaby

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