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.
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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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Re: Phase I
He got the feeling Ankh wanted him to drop the subject, but of course, this was Eiji and he didn't know how to leave "well enough" alone.
"Back there, when the walls started looking like fire...you got scared."
Re: Phase I
It's not what Eiji means, but it's as much as he wants to say.
Re: Phase I
He knew better than to push, but three times was well past coincidence.
"This is because of Inugami, isn't it?"
Re: Phase I
"So what?" He's not going to deny it. He never had any problem with fire before that, but what do you expect when the two of them got trapped by a forest fire while he was stuck in a human body? So good job, Eiji, you figured something out. Now figure out that Ankh doesn't want to talk about it.
Re: Phase I
"So? I know I've had problems since then. If you did, you should have told me."
Re: Phase I
Re: Phase I
"I mean it. You never tell me anything, no matter what's wrong. Besides, we're not talking about me right now."
Re: Phase I
"Why should I? So you can try to fix me while you keep ignoring everything that's wrong with you?!" What good would talking do? It's just one more thing for Eiji to worry about when he already does more of that than he needs to. "I thought you were busy enough with everyone else in the world."
Re: Phase I
Eiji, ignoring his own problems as surely as he ignored that sentence? Of course not!
Re: Phase I
"What would you do, then? How do you think you can help this?" The only thing he's figured out how to do for Eiji's issues with his appearance is to get used to it himself. In general, he wouldn't ask for anything other than the same courtesy in return, though there's something else behind that question, too.
Re: Phase I
"I don't know! Maybe actually talk about it, since we can never seem to talk about anything without fighting? But no--you don't talk. You never do, and how many times have we ended up in danger because of it?"
It's unfair, considering a good half of the reason they do end up in this position is because Eiji is just as stubborn and forces the issue when he really shouldn't. But he doesn't care right now.
Re: Phase I
"So I put us in danger? Aren't you the one who always runs out into everything like an idiot? I'm usually the one who has to go stop you from getting yourself killed."
...and on that note. "You know what? You want to talk about this. Let's talk." His voice is less loud as he says that, but not any less angry. "You're right. After everything that happened, I don't like fire. Maybe I'm scared. But here's the real question:" He steps closer again, grabbing at Eiji's shirt this time. "Why the hell aren't you?"
Not once in all the time since they'd gotten here had Eiji reacted to flames like they were any kind of trouble. Just now, he even made it sound like it had been weird for Ankh to be worried when he almost caught himself on fire with that stupid sponge. Eiji's the one who died in that mess so how can he be so calm about it?
Re: Phase I
"I don't know! Maybe because I wasn't thinking straight back then, so it wasn't what really scared me. Is that why you created that Yummy? Because it's a power you have that you're not scared of?"
Re: Phase I
"If you don't know, then I'll tell you. You only care when other people get hurt." That's why he cares more about the Yummy, about having been turned into a zombie in the first place, about the purple eyes that are too reminiscent of a time when he couldn't control his own violent actions. Even with him yelling about what he personally went through as a zombie or thinking more about things like where might be safe to live here, that's what it still comes down to. Ankh even tried to get him to take better care of himself, and how did that go? Ankh hasn't had to pay for his own popsicles yet.
"You died!" And those words are punctuated by Eiji getting shoved into the nearest wall, because it seems like someone has to beat it into his thick skull that this is an important fact. "You go on about how precious life is and how you want to save everyone, but why are you always an exception? You spent two years fixing that damn medal, but who fixes you?" Eiji is human. Humans die permanently. That thought is much more terrifying than fire itself will ever be.
It takes a second for him to realise exactly what he just said, and then he lets go and turns away, yanking himself away from Eiji's grip on him in the process. See, Eiji, this is why you should learn to drop the subject.
Re: Phase I
"I..."
For a minute, he has no idea what to say or do. Because much as he hates to admit it, yeah, he's the broken one. He was broken a long time ago, and he's only ever just been getting by. He says he'll try to do better, and he does try, but he never gets better. He does the same things, he picks at the scabs when they should be healing, and he flinches at the scars when they show so plainly on him.
And suddenly, without realizing it, he's on the other side of the arguments they've had from the start. What does Ankh see in him? What's so special? Why does he keep trying to bring him back?
And without even thinking about it, he parrots Ankh's words from then: "I didn't ask for you to fix me!"
Re: Phase I
"What? You ran out of your own arguments so you have to use mine?" Excuse him if he's not going to be especially cooperative with that, considering he still doesn't fully understand what Eiji was thinking even if he's accepted it at this point, and he wouldn't even know where to begin trying to explain it in reverse.
Re: Phase I
"And why not? You asked me back then why I tried so long to fix your Medal. Now I want to know why you care so much about fixing me. Why you're scared about me more than about you."
Re: Phase I
"You said it before, didn't you? We're stuck with each other." Except that now instead of threatening to kill each other, they're both desperately trying to keep the other one alive. "Get used to it."
Re: Phase I
He sits down in a heap instead. "We really are a mess, aren't we? Neither one of us can take care of ourselves."
Re: Phase I
"I used to be better at that, until I met a certain reckless idiot." Now he's gotten himself killed trying to protect the moron, twice. What a bad influence. The way he says it isn't trying to pick another fight, though. Truth be told, he prefers it that way, having someone around that he thinks is that worthwhile.
Re: Phase I
But he's pouting now, so at least he's got some improvement.
Re: Phase I
It doesn't even get close to them. It's barely cleared the corner before it gets a fireball thrown at it, and a second one as soon as it starts recovering from the first. Given everything that led up to this conversation, Ankh seems surprisingly unaffected by watching this obnoxious robot burn. Maybe a little satisfied, even.
Re: Phase I
"Ankh, you..."
There's a look of shock on his face, but not scared. More like pride, oddly enough.
Re: Phase I
"It deserved it."
Re: Phase I
"I can't argue there."
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