This section is for general RP prompts. While character actions in these prompts may have an overall impact on the event, mods will not be responding directly to any actions taken here.
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➥ Enter the Matrix
(cw: dissociation and derealization; existential horror related to the size of the universe; villain actively attempting to induce a mental health crisis; altered mental states in general; paralysis; harm to imaginary animals)
The minds of living creatures know their own fragility on some deep, unthought level. There are facts of life and science known to anyone with a basic education, that are yet not known, things learned by the mind that the soul refuses to ever truly comprehend. One can speak of lightyears, of galaxies and the vast emptiness of space in an ever-expanding universe, but the divide between understanding numbers on a page rather than truly absorbing the merciless scope of existence is a mental divide born of self preservation.
Zyrian's machine is designed to tear down that divide, to peel back the layers of its victims' natural defense against seeing, comprehending, and Knowing precisely how unimaginably small they truly are in relation to the totality of reality. Once you're caught in the wires and plugged into the machine, you will begin to understand. There's an excruciating duality to it, knowing at once that you are ensnared in cables among many others, conscious of your body but unable to move or cry out, but seeing at the same time what the machine has to show you.
You are a fledgling bird on a precipice, surf crashing against the base of the cliff so, so far below you. The slate-grays of the rock, the sky, and the fathomless ocean are all of one palette and each blends into the next, the featureless sky leaving you exposed and helpless where you cling to near-vertical stone. Vicious wind carries stinging whips of sea spray. Your talons slip, the stone that has been your meager sanctuary disappears from reach, and you plunge through the air for seconds that stretch into minutes that stretch into eternities, hitting the water only to continue your suffocating journey down, down, down--
You are a dandelion with its face turned skyward, an endless blue dome above, a plane of green that stretches beyond sight on all sides of you dotted with countless more of your kind, each as insignificant as the next. As night falls and the sun slips below the horizon, slowly but dizzyingly comes the realization that it's not the sun moving from view, but the Earth turning slow somersaults. Gazing upward into the blackness of space between pinpricks of starlight still spinning above, you are grasped by the knowledge that up and down have little meaning beyond where your roots are now withering in the dirt below you. With a last painful jolt the Earth lets you go and you fall into the sea of stars, alone and spinning out of control in the empty black–
You are an asteroid at once hanging motionless in space and yet hurtling through it. In the endless emptiness there is no frame of reference until a pinprick of light before you begins to grow in size and brightness. First white, then blue, then comprehensible as a lonely, clouded marble cast in the light of a distant star, you finally recognize the planet of your birth. As it grows in your sight, you finally understand the speed at which you must have been traveling this entire time, and you realize that you're on a collision course. At this speed you'll surely be destroyed, along with the specks of life that inhabit that remote little globe, but there's no altering your course. You hurtle ever closer, the planet growing until it fills your vision–and your stony skin burns as you skim its atmosphere, yanked onto a different course that sends you flying away into lonely space once more, leaving you bereft with the knowledge that you've just lost the only chance you had at contact with another living thing in this vast emptiness–
Again and again your mind grapples with the information fed to it by the machine, your subconscious translating it into one vision or metaphor after another. All the while, you remain a mind trapped in a body trapped in a machine, and the knowledge of where you are and what you are slowly grows rather than ever diminishing or being subsumed into the visions. You are one of many, but the many are so small as to be nothing. The server room that houses you is enormous, but it is a speck on a speck destined to be lost in the tapestry of the galaxy. What you see in the visions is only a taste of what you are meant to see and understand in the real, physical world.
When you truly understand, the visions will stop…and then it will be too late. Once the duality of your experience reintegrates into a singular perception of your real self and your true place in the universe, your mind will break and you will know nothing but that truth and the fear and unending despair it brings.
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➥ Mod Notes
ENTER THE MATRIX (16-19 June) - Players are encouraged to invent their own visuals and metaphors for how their characters' minds would attempt to parse the vastness of the universe being forced upon them. Scenarios experienced inside the machine will generally be dream- (or nightmare-)like rather than strictly narrative, so players are welcome to have things shift around unpredictably. Characters can find each other in the mindscape and offer each other support in whatever form they find themselves. Strategies that can help delay a Bad End while they await rescue from the physical world outside the machine include focusing on small-scale concepts and refusing to look at anything big; focusing on memories that bring meaning to one's life; or (perhaps dangerously) retreating further into a state of derealization and hallucination to avoid making the mental connection between the machine's teachings and one's own real, physical existence. Focusing on memories and finding meaning in one's own existence is the only method that will allow characters to regain muscle control long enough to unplug themselves; otherwise they will need to be rescued from outside the machine. Characters who have escaped from the machine may experience flashbacks to their time in it at player discretion.
General Setting Prompts - Part 2
This section is for general RP prompts. While character actions in these prompts may have an overall impact on the event, mods will not be responding directly to any actions taken here.
(cw: dissociation and derealization; existential horror related to the size of the universe; villain actively attempting to induce a mental health crisis; altered mental states in general; paralysis; harm to imaginary animals)
The minds of living creatures know their own fragility on some deep, unthought level. There are facts of life and science known to anyone with a basic education, that are yet not known, things learned by the mind that the soul refuses to ever truly comprehend. One can speak of lightyears, of galaxies and the vast emptiness of space in an ever-expanding universe, but the divide between understanding numbers on a page rather than truly absorbing the merciless scope of existence is a mental divide born of self preservation.
Zyrian's machine is designed to tear down that divide, to peel back the layers of its victims' natural defense against seeing, comprehending, and Knowing precisely how unimaginably small they truly are in relation to the totality of reality. Once you're caught in the wires and plugged into the machine, you will begin to understand. There's an excruciating duality to it, knowing at once that you are ensnared in cables among many others, conscious of your body but unable to move or cry out, but seeing at the same time what the machine has to show you.
You are a fledgling bird on a precipice, surf crashing against the base of the cliff so, so far below you. The slate-grays of the rock, the sky, and the fathomless ocean are all of one palette and each blends into the next, the featureless sky leaving you exposed and helpless where you cling to near-vertical stone. Vicious wind carries stinging whips of sea spray. Your talons slip, the stone that has been your meager sanctuary disappears from reach, and you plunge through the air for seconds that stretch into minutes that stretch into eternities, hitting the water only to continue your suffocating journey down, down, down--
You are a dandelion with its face turned skyward, an endless blue dome above, a plane of green that stretches beyond sight on all sides of you dotted with countless more of your kind, each as insignificant as the next. As night falls and the sun slips below the horizon, slowly but dizzyingly comes the realization that it's not the sun moving from view, but the Earth turning slow somersaults. Gazing upward into the blackness of space between pinpricks of starlight still spinning above, you are grasped by the knowledge that up and down have little meaning beyond where your roots are now withering in the dirt below you. With a last painful jolt the Earth lets you go and you fall into the sea of stars, alone and spinning out of control in the empty black–
You are an asteroid at once hanging motionless in space and yet hurtling through it. In the endless emptiness there is no frame of reference until a pinprick of light before you begins to grow in size and brightness. First white, then blue, then comprehensible as a lonely, clouded marble cast in the light of a distant star, you finally recognize the planet of your birth. As it grows in your sight, you finally understand the speed at which you must have been traveling this entire time, and you realize that you're on a collision course. At this speed you'll surely be destroyed, along with the specks of life that inhabit that remote little globe, but there's no altering your course. You hurtle ever closer, the planet growing until it fills your vision–and your stony skin burns as you skim its atmosphere, yanked onto a different course that sends you flying away into lonely space once more, leaving you bereft with the knowledge that you've just lost the only chance you had at contact with another living thing in this vast emptiness–
Again and again your mind grapples with the information fed to it by the machine, your subconscious translating it into one vision or metaphor after another. All the while, you remain a mind trapped in a body trapped in a machine, and the knowledge of where you are and what you are slowly grows rather than ever diminishing or being subsumed into the visions. You are one of many, but the many are so small as to be nothing. The server room that houses you is enormous, but it is a speck on a speck destined to be lost in the tapestry of the galaxy. What you see in the visions is only a taste of what you are meant to see and understand in the real, physical world.
When you truly understand, the visions will stop…and then it will be too late. Once the duality of your experience reintegrates into a singular perception of your real self and your true place in the universe, your mind will break and you will know nothing but that truth and the fear and unending despair it brings.