Everything is normal today during the early hours of the morning. There's really no hint, no way of knowing, no anything that could indicate that CERES -- and thus Cerealia -- is about to irrevocably change. There would be birds chirping, if there were birds, but since there aren't any, there's just the constant sounds of a city in motion, humming with technology even that early in the morning.
And then, regardless of where you are or what you're doing or how early it is, everyone's CereVices flicker on to show a perhaps-familiar, perhaps-unfamiliar face.
Bellona Recreare, the business owner of Cerealia and CEO of CERES, stares at everyone with a flat, cold look. She doesn't seem happy.
(When is she ever?)  It has come to my attention that there has been industrial espionage and corporate sabotage in CERES' personnel. Such a thing will not be tolerated.
Due to this, Mosley's employment with CERES has been terminated. Please now direct any public relations questions to 1-800-7322934844444.
Good day.
|
PHASE I [ 6 00 ] Bright and early, not long after that sudden announcement by Bellona, you may decide to go back to sleep, or you may decide to get up and go about your day (or you may not have woken up at all).
Either way, it doesn't matter.
Because your apartment is broken.
The entire apartment. The door is locked shut (and that sucker is solid metal so it might be time to try a window), the HOLO(gm) is flickering wildly between settings, and the blender is out for your blood. Anything technological in any way (that is CERES-brand or has been tampered with by CERES) will be malfunctioning in a way that comes across as... oddly malicious.
Now's a bad time for the late sleepers to realize that the beds, too, have auto-control tech functionality. Hope you enjoy that electroshock wake up call, or the fact that the bed could fling you totally across the room.
PHASE II [ 1000 ] The rest of the city isn't faring so well either.
The trains are completely out of commission; even if the doors do open, it's probably not a good idea to get on. If you do, it looks like the doors will slam shut behind you, and the train will go hurtling forward at dangerous speeds with sudden stops. Many of the shops can't be accessed at all, automated doors refusing to open, and worst of all, every single last piece of tech in Cerealia now seems to have the sole goal of Making Your Life Hard.
The Pleasure District is flooded now that the spas are broken, but hey -- at least the perfume ensures that water smells good, and it's pretty warm. That's good, right? Maybe go for a nice swim.
The CERES police bots are out of control, chasing people down to arrest them for imagined crimes (What do you mean you aren't a closet voyeur?), and heaven forbid you're around any of the auto shops when everything goes totally wrong. The auto-drive feature in many of CERES's cars seem to be a little... finicky today. It doesn't seem like anywhere in the city is exempt from this. Good luck.
And towards the end of the second day of this insanity, the train, with whatever unfortunate passengers are on it, will derail. It crashes into part of the shopping district, leveling buildings and leaving the wrecked overturn husk of a train resting there uselessly.
Suddenly, things don't seem so harmless anymore.
PHASE III [ 1100 ] Of course... you're CERES-owned too.
Your code, rather, is made and owned by CERES, and it's inevitable with the craziness going on that it would soon affect everyone's code as well. So as the hour approaches noon, a few unlucky souls may start to notice that things are just Not Quite Right with them. Their powers may be on the fritz, functioning entirely wrong or not at all, or even stranger -- fire powers turning into water, ice into flame, electricity brings mud. Your clothing might suddenly change when your coding glitches, or it might be gone entirely. You may suddenly have an uncontrollable urge to start singing, or frolicking. You may suddenly be wildly in love with the first person (or robot or mirror) that you see, unable to stop it until the odd glitching wears off.
And then, just like that, you're back to normal, if a bit more tired than before. How troublesome.
There are also moments where what appears to be an ID number appears on the back of your neck in glowing light blue numbers. Each of these codes is a 7 digit number, with an E at the front of the number. It appears that the longer you've been in Cerealia, the lower the number is -- like a brand of some sort. You may not be able to see it yourself with it on the back of your neck like that, but everyone else sure can.
PHASE IV [ 1645 ] And, just like that, on the last day of this madness, the city goes dark. The lights cut out. The technology shuts off. Every last robot in Cerealia is completely and totally down, and can no longer be booted up. Even when the lights come back on in a few hours... the robots remain dead.
Cerealia's a lot harder to function in without those handy dandy robots running the place. It's also a lot more desolate, and rather quiet.
Slowly but surely, the rest of the technology will boot itself back up towards the end of the last day. But the robots remain broken, and cannot be fixed. In fact, opening them up will reveal that nothing's wrong with them at all... they just won't wake up.
As time ticks by, it doesn't look like Bellona will address anything on the network about the events and all people are left to do now is... learn how to function again. Without any help.
BONUS [ ???? ] If you were a stupid brave enough soul to log into ViViD during this time (or were unfortunately glitched there, which could happen), you will find that ViViD is in... safe mode. It's struggling to boot up, and even when you finally enter, you'll find yourself wandering through skeleton levels of half-completed scenery and incomplete quests. There are readings in the corner of each level that can be seen now, one about Energy Gain and one about Energy Loss, and just as the gain goes up the longer you are there, the loss, too, rises. At first, it's fascinating, and it isn't particularly dangerous... but then it becomes clear that you can't actually log out.
You can't exit Safe Mode at all.
Slowly, it feels as though you can breathe less and less, that the empty walls of the level are closing in on you... and there's nothing you can do. Unless you are or find a particularly genius hacker and they can access the source code and find the exit buried inside that code within the next few minutes... there's nothing to be done.
And then everything goes dark.
You'll wake up the next IC day, with those same energy readings marked on your wrist like some sort of bright blue digital tattoo. When you wake in the mornings, it will read at 100% and slowly go down during the course of the day until you sleep. It will fade after three IC days.
And from now on, ViViD always has those energy levels in the corner, even when it's fixed. They always seem to be recording you, every time you're in ViViD. Strange.
[ 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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no subject
[ Chihiro drops one knee down, planting a hand on the ground to better twist around to look at Rei. She has to consider that possibility. She's been wondering what it is that CERES gets out of the code-born, because companies get something out of what they do when they're for profit. The code-born (as she thinks of those pulled out of the code, per CERES story) aren't providing anything obvious, but they're being taken in, put up, and eventually asked to work.
She doesn't understand all the nuances of people's behaviour ,but she feels something off about this. The not knowing what it is. So that said... Rei could well be right, from where she sat. ]
Any kind of energy... it'd explain why they try so hard to save us, only to forget about us once we're here. Emotions do have power. If there's something they do when they make us... um, when they save us. Maybe they can do what you're saying.
[ Maybe that's the contract that isn't written; the quid pro quo for why they're alive and here at all in the first place. Talk about heavily unsettling, but strangely grounding all the same. If it's true, then they are working for CERES. Just not directly. ]
no subject
It definitely explains some things. They have to have a reason for wanting us here. We're not slaves, we're relatively free to do what we want, save leave the colony for extended periods of time. The air is essentially toxic, and long exposure will kill us. So, we can't leave. But we have free reign of a place that's filled with all sorts of distractions.
It's like they want us happy, and then take it away with things like this just to see what we'll do. Emotional energy, or a television program, or a bizarre social experiment are about the only reasons I can think of for any of this.
no subject
She scoots around, bringing her knee back up so she can cross her arms over them again, she resists an urge to frown. ]
I didn't know it was the air we had trouble with beyond the colony.
[ Just that Maris had said they had trouble beyond the colony, on the world proper. Just what had been stated in the document Athena shared. ]
Mm... We're still working for them, in a case like that. Because we're not just allowed to freeload... even the kids aren't said, "We'll take care of you." That's other people saying, "We'll help you out." If you're rescuing people, leaving them in a weird place far from home, do you sit back and ignore them after they're rescued? Why rescue them in the first place if you don't know how to get their homes back?
no subject
[And that's both troubling and annoying. She'd like to believe in something, at least, to have some clue.]
I don't know, at all. All I know is that they left us here, and we have to make the best of it.
[Rolling over, she checks the trunk and pulls out a couple of sealed water bottles.]
Here. This is clean. It's not like we'll be short on supplies, with the colony here, thankfully.
no subject
It will be good for things to stay that way.
[ For the colony to provide enough, is what she means. Chihiro glances up and toward Rei, expression somewhere between neutral and almost... tired. ]
It doesn't need to be a lie. "We'll get your homes back." Eventually. You can be honest and still say things which aren't what people think they are.
no subject
[What a precious, smart little girl. Rei looks back, impressed with the deduction.]
What's your home like, Chihiro-chan? You're pretty worldly for your age.
no subject
[ She blinks, twisting the lid off her bottled water. ]
It's pretty normal? We had just moved to a smaller town when my dad got lost and we ended up in the spirit world for a while.
[ Take a guess on where she really got any sense of worldliness... ]
Our new house was going to be blue.
[ SHE HAS YET TO MAKE IT TO THIS HOUSE ]
no subject
Rei'd probably say something about that, but...]
You've been to the spirit world?
no subject
I don't think I'm supposed to really remember it, but I do. Probably because... [ she makes a motion with her hand. ] ... of being here. Have you been too?
no subject
[She's never had the chance.]
It's not an easy place to get to, I understand. Did you fall into a gateway or were you...kamikakushi?
[She lapses back into Japanese for that, deliberately this time, to give the phrase the proper weight.]
i laughed lasdjf
Kamikakushi.
[ What a strange, strange reality that had proven to be, too. Winning back her parents and her own freedom... she owed so many thanks for that, not the least of which is also herself. ]
Hah, good.
Were the spirits malicious? They didn't hurt you, did they?
[Because the dead can come to Cerealia...]
no subject
They could be. For the most part, they weren't.
[ As far as being hurt, the most physical damage she endured was from a friend, and she doesn't regret any of that. She'd fall down and hold down a writhing, bleeding, injured dragon again to save him if she needed to. ]
Kind of like humans. There were a few who got really mad, and it was frightening at times, but there were more important things than letting myself stay scared.
[ Her parents; Haku. Reasons not to allow the world to chew her up or swallow her whole. ]
They weren't so bad in the end.
[ SHE WAS VERY LUCKY and she knows it, in a vague sense. ]
no subject
That's a good thing then.
[She pauses thinking a moment.]
You came from there to here didn't you? That's...maybe why you remember it.
no subject
I was on the way back to the human realm when... [ a vague gesture of her hand as she sits up, lifting her chin off her arms. ] I didn't look back. Haku said not to, so I walked out of the tunnel with my parents. Or I was in the middle of that... but I know I didn't look.
[ IS THIS ALSO A HORROR NOVEL we never will know ]
I think that's got to be why I remember, too. It's just so weird... I'm glad, though. This way I remember even the people I met there, so they're not forgotten.
no subject
[Rei does know the stories, and she knows what it's like, remembering something that should've been forgotten. That's her life, in a lot of ways.
Alas though, her stomach grumbles.]
Hey. Do you think you'll be alright, if I left you here for a little bit and brought back food? I don't really have much here, and I want to be on the safe side. I shouldn't be gone more than thirty minutes.
no subject
I'll be fine. Be careful out there, Rei-san! Oh, and if you want a snack while you're out there, I do have...
[ She pulls her backpack around to her, riffling through, to grab on to a twinkie... type... food... to hand over to Rei. ]
... This. Take it with you.
[ Link got handed a weapon; Chihiro tells her to stay safe handing her a twinkie. ]
OH MY GOD
I'll do that. I'll be back soon, okay!
[She leaves then, rolling out from under the tarp and she definitely comes back. Don't you worry, Chihiro, she's not abandoning you. She just really needs to get some basic things, and hunting in the garden feels silly when there's an abandoned convenience store she can loot just outside the park...]
"it's totally fine to leave" WHILE SOBBING
Thus she works on her notes and her not-quite-drawings, waiting for Rei's eventual return. She'll still have her notebook out when Rei returns, folding it closed and searching Rei's face for any sign of trouble before offering a small smile of welcome. ]
Going to wrap this up soon!
Told you. I was only gone twenty minutes.
o7
You were.
[ Not that Chihiro would know either way, to be honest. Regardless, she's glad to see a familiar face once again. ]
Welcome back.
no subject
[Rei peers at the notebook for a moment, debating whether or not to be nosy, deciding against it. Then she holds open the sack of goodies for Chihiro.]
See anything you like?
no subject
Maybe this?
[ Either way, it seems they're both in a safe enough place for the moment. Temporary haven or otherwise, it's a calm port in the storm of the chaos reigning the colony for the time being. (Or maybe forever. WHO KNOWS???) ]