PHASE I [ 10 00 ] The “cleansing" doesn't begin too strangely. No, instead it starts with some minor inconveniences. After Mosley's broadcast, anything running on electricity seems to be… mildly on the fritz. Characters will find their home appliances suddenly rebelling just enough to be troublesome. Anything that uses electricity within the bounds of the colony will start suffering from some small malfunctions. (Do we have any cyborgs in the crowd tonight?) Toasters burning your breakfast and shooting the crispy things at you. Televisions suddenly exploding in a haze of smoke before working perfectly fine a moment later. Hair dryers suddenly running a little too hot and whoops, your hair's on fire… Well, this is all still just a small issue. Probably. Here's hoping the fire extinguisher doesn't run on electricity too?
PHASE II [ 1200 ] It's only glitches for a day or so, but by noon the next day, things get a little weird. We interrupt your regularly scheduled routine to bring you this important message: Welcome to ViViD. … Wait, what? Yeah, sorry about that. Whether you wanted to or not, you've found yourself in the virtual simulator… except it doesn't seem very… virtual anymore, no. The monsters look a bit meaner, and they seem to be after you in particular. You might suddenly be glitched into a dead end, or a level that actually doesn't seem to be beatable at all, with people you've never seen before as your party members. Endless mazes! Boss battles with a wooden sword! Dungeons with no walkthroughs! When you finally make it to the end, you might even find a giant wall blocking your way, or a moat where there was once a path. Now that's troublesome.
And make sure you don't get hurt by any of those monsters. Not like it matters, it's just HP, right? Wrong. Rather, it'll actually hurt quite a bit, just as if you were injured in real life.
If you're lucky, you'll find yourself glitched back out maybe half an hour later -- your wounds still fresh from the experience and still bleeding. Just don't die. You don't want to see what will happen if you die.
PHASE III [ 1800 ] It's the day after, and you've survived your unfortunate ViViD runs (though there's no promise that you won't end up there yet again). But for now, you've finished your work day without too many electrical object malfunctions, and you're on your way home. Normally the transit system is so very reliable. From district to district, the metro is your only way of travel and today? Today it's stopping with an ugly screech. Hopefully you don't need to be anywhere because it's safe to say that you're not getting off this ride any time soon. The lights aren't only flickering anymore, they're completely out. The darkness settles in uncomfortably as you're only left with the other people who were making the same trip. A second later, things start to get weird. Cold breath down your neck. The scratch of something sharp and angry against the outside of the cabin. Seconds pass in silence, the presence of something outside growing more and more frightening. If you hold your breath and stay very still, you might make it out just fine. That is until a forceful SLAM sounds behind you and there's something against your window. At least you know what's been making all that noise.
Of course, should you pry open the doors, there's nobody there, but… you couldn't have been imagining that, right?
Looks like the entire city's blacked out… and without the hum of technology and warmth of the advanced lighting system, some ghosts have come out to play. But they can only be seen from the corner of your eye, a glimpse, a breath, a nondescript whisper on the air and then they're gone. Who knows what they want from you…? Either way, they're not saying, staying just out of reach and mostly out of sight… but always there, watching and waiting.
PHASE IV [ 0000 ] Here you are, finally: day 4. You made your way through the dark, avoided the things that go bump in the night and found your apartment. Your pants are gone, your door is locked, and you've managed to stumble right into your bed/nest/cocoon/what-have-you. Your unbearably long day is finally, finally about to come to a close but then something glitches, worse than before. Suddenly you're not all cozy in your bed, but rather suspended in an unidentifiable space. In this darkness, there is screaming and only screaming. You try to move your limbs, use your voice -- and there is nothing. Rather, you can only look on as the space shifts and you see two figures appearing in the darkness, glowing in the same digital blue that lights up the rest of the colony. As you get closer, the screaming grows louder -- a woman's screams, you can hear now. It sounds garbled, like broken pieces of sound bytes. She's being strangled, you can see now. The other figure strangling her is a robot, metallic and ruthless. He turns to see you and his eyes glow with the same blue shine. As the woman -- LILITH, for those who have seen her or heard her voice may recognize -- finally begins to lose her strength to scream, the robot's mouth slowly spreads into a smile as he maintains eye contact, cold and yet somehow pleased.
In the next second, you have been returned to your body, echoes of screaming your only lullaby. Sleep doesn't seem as likely anymore, does it?
BONUS [ whyo'clock ] If at all possible, the darkness just got darker. How, you might ask? Well, it seems like someone just put a bag over your head! That's a little inconvenient, but it looks like you're suffering from an old school kidnapping at some point through these couple of days, complete with your assailants pushing you around asking, “Where the hell is the money?!" As they shove you into their shady kidnapper van, you can hear a certain song playing which is… a bit too on the nose for this situation. As the wheels of the vehicle stop and you're pushed out, the bag comes off and you're facing down your friendly neighborhood debt collector. He's slow to get his words out but they are very menacing indeed, something about threatening your family and sleeping with the alien fishes in the park. When you protest, insisting that you don't owe them any money, they pull out a CereVice and show your bank account, which does indeed seem to be approximately 50 million credits in debt.
They'll do this even if you're not in debt at all, and, in fact, it is impossible for you to be in debt, as CERES doesn't loan money to you people. Looks like the glitching did a number on your bank account though, and the numbers don't lie.
Looks like you're out of luck, friend. Why not have a friendly chat with the other half a dozen people who have been bagged and kidnapped as well? There's even a small table with snacks as you wait. Wait for what, they haven't exactly said yet. Maybe you should just leave through the window.
PENALTY [ xxxx ] Should you be unlucky enough to die in ViViD while it is glitching and injuries are being sustained, you will find yourself in a penalty game. Even more than usual penalty games, this one is increasingly unnerving. There is nothing but a dark room, a single light hovering over two masks on a table. One might recognize them as the masks of comedy and tragedy. In front of the player, red words slowly illuminate the room. Pick one. Well, that's an easy penalty game, isn't it?
Yet as you reach for one, the masks will suddenly turn into the faces of the two most important people to you. Their voices whisper, growing distressed as time goes on, “Pick me, pick me, pick me." The red words turn into a countdown if you take too long -- your hand forcibly moved to pick one mask or the other if the timer runs out. Yet once you put on the mask, you will see the person who was not picked, suddenly and brutally murdered right before your eyes by a shadowy figure, wearing the mask you chose.
With that, you will return to the colony, good as new. Though on occasion, you may see the person whose mask was not picked in the corner of your eye, dressed in black and wearing the very same mask of tragedy.
[ Remember to apply proper warnings on threads with sensitive or inappropriate material and do let a mod know if your thread careens off into maiming or canoodling so we can lock the log. ] |
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iv
So here she was, just flying in circles. The ceiling of the colony was far too low, and she still couldn't shake the feeling that she wasn't even supposed to be flying within city limits, (that was the law in Mid-childa,) but it was better than lying awake in bed all night.
She had just about completed far too many rounds when she spotted someone she knew, and she lands in front of Inaba. ]
I'm guessing you can't sleep either, Inaba-chan?
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[ She doesn't bother yawning at all; then again, she's used to staying up late nights without any sleep at all, though she does stretch out her arms. ]
I just saw something that I probably shouldn't have.
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[ Actually, it was far too real to be just an ordinary nightmare. It was more like she was transported somewhere else, which Nanoha would have said was impossible not too long ago, but after the random transporting into ViViD... ]
And the ghosts around town this evening... It was terrible, Inaba-chan!
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[ No, she's serious. She was just laying in her bed just staring at the ceiling. Who needs sleep, anyway? Certainly not Inaba Himeko. ]
This week has definitely been the worst.
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[ She undoes her Barrier Jacket, leaving behind an overly large pink button up shirt and not much else. Nanoha's version of pajamas. ]
Everything is glitching out, but... I have a feeling it's not just glitches.
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[ That honestly doesn't come to her as a surprise. But then again, things here seem to be a lot less surprising now that she's into the rhythm of things. ]
If we all saw it, the person being strangled must have been important. I've never seen her in person, but. . . I'm thinking that's probably LILITH. First the former CEO and his secretary, and now her. It's suspicious, honestly. It's possible that the robot might be involved with the CEO's death, too. [ Inaba seems to be thinking about this hard, and it shows in her serious expression. ] Ah, and it's probably not. No matter how many times I call it a glitch, I think it's honestly more of a ploy from CERES. But I can excuse it for once this time considering they're under new management. Not that I actually trust that it's a glitch either way.
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What kind of ploy could this be though? It seems like the only thing this is doing is scaring everyone, and when people panic they start doing incredibly rash things. Showing us a bunch of murders, making our things go haywire, randomly throwing us into death matches, and having ghosts pop out. It just doesn't make sense, unless somebody is looking for an excuse to start a riot against CERES!
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Don't you know anything..? Fear is the easiest way to get into a person's head and then manipulate them. And that's how you gain power and control.
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Unless that was the intention all along? Somebody sabotaging the new boss? But so soon after the old one was killed off? Is there just somebody with a big grudge against all of Cerealia?
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Though now that i think about it, that is possible. It's not as if we know who killed the previous CEO to begin with, and I'd bet that rumors are spreading fast.
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But well... Even with that information it's not like I can do anything about it. I'm not exactly an investigator.
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Not that I can do that much about it besides actually write an article about it so everyone would know the truth.
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