The Legion [Mods] (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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legionmissions2017-01-03 12:57 am
letsgolegion) wrote in legionmissions2017-01-03 12:57 am
Entry tags:
SILENT HORIZON - [Part 1: The In-Between] [modplot]
Who| Everyone who signed up
What| 2 spoopy
Where| In The In-Between, the pocket dimension inside the Silent Horizon
When| After Valor's Day. Mission starts shortly before "No Sanity Clause" and runs simultaneously in game time
Warnings/Notes| Potential warnings for EVERYTHING. This is a horror plot that may tread a lot of ground. Please keep in mind that you can stumble on disturbing stuff in almost any thread. We advise all players to put warnings in the subjects of threads when they lean towards cut-worthy stuff.
The mission was simple. The team had to board the derelict Silent Horizon, a ship with an experimental stardrive, after it finally reappeared in UP space, many hours after it was supposed to reappear, during its first field test. No life signs were aboard, but the presence of several Roboticans on the crew -- who were undetectable by bioscan -- meant that the ship had to be boarded to make sure the Robotican crewmen were gone, too.
The United Planets government, concerned about the loss of the crew members, asked the Legion to step in, in case the threat on board was of a metapowered nature. Due to the massive danger implied by an entire starship crew going missing, the response team sent on the mission was relatively large, more than enough to handle any hostiles. None of this "we'll just send one tiny team to go alone into a giant starship against an unknown threat" business. No, if there was a hostile force on the ship, the plan was "let's drop 25+ Legionnaires on its head." Safety in numbers.
It was a good idea. In theory. In most cases, it would've given them the edge that would've let them face something very nasty without succumbing to it themselves. But in practice, it just meant that it was a much larger team that suddenly went missing after watching the last video log of the previous crew on the command deck.
Screams poured out of the screen the moment it started to play -- automatically -- when they entered the command deck. Onscreen, they saw the original crew murdering each other, tearing each other apart in a blood-soaked rampage.
"Wait, stop! What's wrong with everyone? Why are you --?" cried out one of the Robotican crew members, clearly immune from whatever was causing the madness, but his cries went unheeded as one of his Coluan crew-mates bashed his head clean off with a chair.
After the video played, the darkness swept in, wrapping around the whole team of Legionnaires, making them feel frozen all the way down to their bones and stealing consciousness away from them. When they woke again, they all found themselves separated, waking up in a realm of nightmares.
The halls breathe here -- at least in the places that have walls. They flex in and out, like the passageways inside the lungs. Sometimes the walls give way to open nightmare-scapes, remote and foggy, or bright and alien and exposed. The landscape bends and shifts around them, reacting to their thoughts and fears. And every so often, far off, there is the pitter-pat of something strange moving through this place. Like the sound of many feet -- or hands -- slapping against the ground or flesh-walls.
At some point, there is always a voice that each of them hears, tinny and robotic and distant, warning them of a being called the Faceless, that rules this realm. They're told not to feed from his blood, that if they do they'll be made a part of this place. If they accept his offer, and change forms, they'll eventually bleed to death, and if the Faceless isn't stopped before they die, those that die in their mutated forms will belong to him forever.
It's not the only voice they'll hear, though. This is a land filled with whispers. And screams. And the sounds of begging sometimes, too.
And for some of the Legionnaires, the In-Between speaks to them, touches something deep and dark inside them -- and it's calling them home.
What| 2 spoopy
Where| In The In-Between, the pocket dimension inside the Silent Horizon
When| After Valor's Day. Mission starts shortly before "No Sanity Clause" and runs simultaneously in game time
Warnings/Notes| Potential warnings for EVERYTHING. This is a horror plot that may tread a lot of ground. Please keep in mind that you can stumble on disturbing stuff in almost any thread. We advise all players to put warnings in the subjects of threads when they lean towards cut-worthy stuff.
The mission was simple. The team had to board the derelict Silent Horizon, a ship with an experimental stardrive, after it finally reappeared in UP space, many hours after it was supposed to reappear, during its first field test. No life signs were aboard, but the presence of several Roboticans on the crew -- who were undetectable by bioscan -- meant that the ship had to be boarded to make sure the Robotican crewmen were gone, too.
The United Planets government, concerned about the loss of the crew members, asked the Legion to step in, in case the threat on board was of a metapowered nature. Due to the massive danger implied by an entire starship crew going missing, the response team sent on the mission was relatively large, more than enough to handle any hostiles. None of this "we'll just send one tiny team to go alone into a giant starship against an unknown threat" business. No, if there was a hostile force on the ship, the plan was "let's drop 25+ Legionnaires on its head." Safety in numbers.
It was a good idea. In theory. In most cases, it would've given them the edge that would've let them face something very nasty without succumbing to it themselves. But in practice, it just meant that it was a much larger team that suddenly went missing after watching the last video log of the previous crew on the command deck.
Screams poured out of the screen the moment it started to play -- automatically -- when they entered the command deck. Onscreen, they saw the original crew murdering each other, tearing each other apart in a blood-soaked rampage.
"Wait, stop! What's wrong with everyone? Why are you --?" cried out one of the Robotican crew members, clearly immune from whatever was causing the madness, but his cries went unheeded as one of his Coluan crew-mates bashed his head clean off with a chair.
After the video played, the darkness swept in, wrapping around the whole team of Legionnaires, making them feel frozen all the way down to their bones and stealing consciousness away from them. When they woke again, they all found themselves separated, waking up in a realm of nightmares.
The halls breathe here -- at least in the places that have walls. They flex in and out, like the passageways inside the lungs. Sometimes the walls give way to open nightmare-scapes, remote and foggy, or bright and alien and exposed. The landscape bends and shifts around them, reacting to their thoughts and fears. And every so often, far off, there is the pitter-pat of something strange moving through this place. Like the sound of many feet -- or hands -- slapping against the ground or flesh-walls.
At some point, there is always a voice that each of them hears, tinny and robotic and distant, warning them of a being called the Faceless, that rules this realm. They're told not to feed from his blood, that if they do they'll be made a part of this place. If they accept his offer, and change forms, they'll eventually bleed to death, and if the Faceless isn't stopped before they die, those that die in their mutated forms will belong to him forever.
It's not the only voice they'll hear, though. This is a land filled with whispers. And screams. And the sounds of begging sometimes, too.
And for some of the Legionnaires, the In-Between speaks to them, touches something deep and dark inside them -- and it's calling them home.
C
At least he was already running with his shamisen in hand, and he still had about half the paper he'd arrived with. He skidded to a stop and realized quickly he'd come across Mabel's brother.
It was unfortunate that he'd never made it to actually meeting the other Pines twin in person. Mother had arrived and he'd been thoroughly occupied with the miracle of her third return from the dead, too much so to meet with potential new friends his age for a good chunk of time. Even on the ship over, he'd only waved politely to Dipper, in between looking out at the stars and holding conversation about them with his mother.
The boy's words spoke to him quickly, though.
"I know," he responded. "They're protective of me too - they think I haven't had to take care of myself already, but they don't know -"
He trailed off as Dipper went on, eye narrowing. Peer pressure. Belonging? "Is that how the . . . the transformations start? You feel like you belong here, and it . . ."
It makes you belong more. It explained why he hadn't succumbed to the same transformation. He had felt a half sense of belonging in his village, with his grandfather, with Kameyo, with other humans, but he belonged fully between a monkey and a beetle on a boat of leaves, eating sashimi cut with a magic sword.
His place was a strange one. But it was a beautiful strangeness that he belonged utterly to, not to horror and violence that needed no reason to ruin lives.
With a sinking horror, Kubo wondered how Dipper could possibly be displaced, hurt enough to feel like this was where he belonged.
Kubo recalled the fragments he knew of Mabel's story - how she could listen to him talk about his grandfather stealing his eye with sympathetic horror, but also carry on that conversation with horrors of her own. Dipper had seen too much -
- and it had taken his sight with it.
For some reason, all of Kubo's sympathetic, horrified response to Dipper's condition flattened into a disbelieving, narrow-eyed stare as his one eye met the glowing coal in Dipper's eye socket.
"His eyes? Really?"
This was it. He'd tried to draw the Gunslinger out of himself and been threatened with death by the doctor whose first instinct had been to promise care and attention to him in his own home. But this was the sticking point that made Kubo (figuratively) throw his hat on the ground and stomp on it.
"What is it with monsters from the stars taking eyes?"
He didn't have much time to object to Dipper's ocular situation before the Unhinging of the Jaw and the Inhuman Screams, though, and Kubo bolted for a bit more cover, fingers finding the chords he'd need on his shamisen. Though he was well-versed in stories, he wasn't well-versed in any where unhinged jaws and chasing were common enough to be cliche, so Dipper's final comment went unresponded to as he trilled a couple of notes that pulled his paper out of his pack.
no subject
It was just that tagging Kubo "it" entailed eating him. That was all. Very subtle difference.
He practically skipped across the ground on his twisted, misshapen limbs after him, and the glee on his malformed face still likely held some familiarity.
When Dipper was happiest, he looked as bright and cheerful as his twin, after all.
no subject
Dipper would catch up to him in no time if he didn't find the right route - and when his paper fluttered in front of a small side tunnel, registering the breeze blowing through it, Kubo ducked into it fast. Heavy and humid as the wind was, its presence meant the tunnel didn't dead-end, and the debris would help conceal him as he set up his distraction.
He dodged through the small space, more paper flying from his pack as he played. Practicing playing while running had been his own top priority even before he began training with Wash, before his mother arrived, and now it was paying off. Half his paper folded into sharp-beaked birds, half stayed open as it fluttered behind him, and when he emerged into the open space, it scattered around the bottleneck in wait.
Kubo ducked into a fissure, behind a growth that looked like an enormous tooth. The chamber was full of them, creating canyons and fissures of partially eroded bone and enamel, humidity beading on the porous, pocked surfaces. His playing reverberated through the landscape at confusing angles, camouflaging his location.
"I don't want to hurt you!" he shouted, taking advantage of the sonically confusing landscape. "I won't let you hurt me, though!"
Just so they were clear. Not that Dipper was in his right mind to accept Kubo's intentions.
no subject
"Come on, I just want to murder you a little," he says, his voice echoing through the chamber.
He starts crawling along, peeking around tooth-like stones to see if Kubo's hiding behind them.
"Mabel doesn't have to know. We can keep it a little secret. Y'know, between us guys."