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open log » ❝ The VR Program ❞

Date & Time: August 5th, mid morning.
Location: Anywhere characters happen to be/the VR.
Characters: Everyone.
Summary: From August 5th to August 8th, characters are plunged involuntarily into the VR Program.
Warnings: Potential violence within the threads.

When the chance arises, she's quick to take it. The programming is incomplete, she knows; the simulation isn't ready — but she's not likely to get another shot at it. And so she moves, slipping through security codes to input the command. The machines hum to life with nothing but a flicker of a green light in a dark room, and it takes only seconds to establish connections. The signal is sent out; the weapons respond.

In a single pulse, reality drops away.

There will be darkness at first as the mind realigns itself to the signals being sent it. Slowly, the darkness fades, forms take shape. People take shape. The setting is terribly familiar, plucked from the user's own mind. It might feel like a dream at first, with events playing out as if predestined, the would-be dreamer moving through a familiar and unalterable route in them. But as things begin to feel more and more realistic, as more senses more fully connect to the simulation, awareness will change. This is not a dream. This is more than a memory.

Welcome to the VR.

Only 20 minutes later, in some underground quarters, Doctor Sponde is roused from an undignified sprawl. He's hastily briefed and shuttled toward the command center, looking grim. He knows the problem demands an immediate fix, but… well, this is some complex machinery. It could take some time. It could take days. He gets to work.

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He nods quickly enough in agreement, shoving Cailan roughly away from him enough that the man stumbles. Alistair's concerned for a moment that it's going to go ass-over-teakettle into the abyss and he won't have a chance to knock the man out, but he manages to keep himself from falling off the edge.

"It isn't high on my list of things to do, trust me on that one!" He might not have liked the elf, but that didn't mean he wanted to kill Zevran just when he was actually starting to prove he might not be one of the worst beings on the planet.

"This might be poor timing, Elissa, but I seem to be all about that -- so I'll just come out with it.

I'm glad you're here."

Elissa turns when Zevran lunges and she grabs his hand, twisting his arm behind his back. "Stop it," she hisses in his pointed ear, hoping that will slow him. It barely does; he kicks her shin and gets loose, but she punches him again and forces him back. She's not very good with hand-to-hand, not with someone like him, and she keeps her eyes on the assassin's stance.

"Glad to hear!" she calls, and there might be a faint smile on her features.

She tries not to be too distracted but she turns to him for a second, then looks back to her adversary. "It's good to be here. Beside you, again," she says, and it's so bumbling that she winces. She takes out her embarrassment on her former friend, striking Zevran again with her elbow, smashing his nose and sending him into the snow.

Edited 2012-08-09 03:11 (UTC)

In one instant, he was walking along near the city's edges, minding his own business, listening to the strangely pleasant mixture of birdcalls and cars. In the next, the entire scene shifted, as though someone had forcibly teleported him out of the city and into--a town back home? In the dead of night, no less. He took a few steps forward, then turned around, taking in the familiar shapes of the houses, the unpaved streets, and the utter quiet of a world without so much as a beep of electronic technology.

A familiar voice called his name.

"Zel! Zel, we got it!"

Zelgadis whipped around, panicking, as one does when a dead man shouts for you. Because that was old man Rodimus's voice, and he had been gone for years.

"It's not possible," Zel muttered, even as Rodimus and the others burst into view, their arms laden with treasure from the town's vaults.

"What're you standing around for? Let's go!" Zolf said, grabbing him by the arm. Zelgadis stumbled along after them until they were well clear of the town's lights; his body seemed to follow a pre-set path, something he had memorized. When the group finally stopped moving, they were in another, much smaller settlement, a place that was more of a hamlet than a proper town. Dawn was breaking, and people emerged from their ramshackle homes to greet Zelgadis and his friends. Children swarmed them, asking for apples; Zolf handed one of the bags to Zel and he found it brimming with these and other fruits. He handed them out gladly, in a daze.

He was in the past, somehow. Years in the past, before he knew the truth about Rezo, before his friends had perished or disappeared. Zel looked down at his pale hands.

Before he was a chimera.

He was so giddy at the sight of his rock-free skin that he almost didn't notice Rodimus lift his axe and swing, right at his mid-section.

When Charles finds himself in this memory, it seems only tangentially relevant to himself for the first few seconds—then he's seeing Raven, and his eyes widen. He's running toward her almost immediately, his automatic reaction to hurry to come to her rescue and in that moment he realises–he's not equipped for this.

He has his sword beside him and he stares at it after a second, laughs to himself in a sort of off-hand, embarrassed way. There was no reason to pick up something like this and he knows it, and as he reaches for it to carry it with him to join Raven, he finds it lighter than expected. Still, a half-second split of self-deprecation comes over him in waves and he's biting it back, sealing up his confidence once more.

"Raven! Are you all right?" he's calling, bending and ducking just behind that couch with her, his voice urgent.

Sollux has no idea how he left his own dreambubble- that's what he's calling these now, even if it's not the same thing. Still covered in his own blood as it dribbles from his nose and ears, as well as stain his shirt from his own VR experience, he's trying to figure out how he even got to this one. Hey, it's that guy who gave him food. Soup-thing. And he's having a bit of difficulty right now, it seems.

Still, looking at that Shadow, Sollux can't help but laugh a little.

"Wow, what the fuck am I looking at?"

Totally ignorant to the battle ahead? Yes, yes he is.

Not a member of the Initiative, if he has to guess. Certainly not a shade of someone else's dream or memory from the way he's acting. Possibly a fellow transport, even if this place doesn't seem as busy or populated as the others.

"Who are you?"

There was a lingering recognition how ridiculous this would look to an outsider - especially since he was pretty sure a similar scene was in almost every movie about nerds uprising to confront jocks or a prick teacher - but the desire to laugh was pretty nonexistent. That probably had something to do with his classmates pelting papers, pencils and datapads at him, not someone who actually deserved it. Okay, maybe he deserved it for that time he showed up the instructors in the simulation run, definitely for when he told a five year old Gunny her ponytail was restricting the blood flow to her head and he gave her a pair of safety scissors, but those were still very minor crimes on the scale of things.

Unfortunately his mouth wasn't keeping up with his brain to quip in his defense, a string of very coherent curses that sounded suspiciously like 'shit, shit, shit!' following him to the back of the classroom as he tried to avoid the worst of the brawl. He managed to grab his assault rifle in his haste but the niggling sensation that he knew these people, even if they weren't real and were currently trying to viciously bludgeon him with whatever inanimate object they had on hand didn't exactly sit well. The gun remained unfired.

"Look, can we all just - ow - calm down for one second?" He yelled over the din, backing up as quickly as his legs would allow.

Right up until someone decided to toss a chair. One of the legs clipped his hip and Joker swore once more as it crashed into the door behind him.

"Charles, what the hell is going on?" She glares over her shoulder toward the others, annoyed that (apparently unlike Charles, who for some reason has a damn sword) she has nothing to defend herself with except her own form.]

"I swear, if this is some sort of mind-control telepath of crazy-gas-releasing mutant and we didn't know about it, I'm going to be mad." She sighs, though, and looks over to her brother.

"They're acting weird, too." Not that they'd ever really been close to disciplined in this particular scenario. No, they'd been unprepared and they'd gotten stomped by the 'bad guys' that were set to show up any time, now.

Koltira sure as hell didn't know what kind of trick the girl had just pulled--was it a spell, a skill, something in-between? His plan might not work, but he decided to try it, anyway. A sickly, unholy glow enveloped Byfrost as he activated the necessary rune; the glow grew, pulsing, until it turned purplish, forming into a spherical shield that encompassed both Martin and himself. Although the barrier could not negate magic entirely, any spells that passed through it were severely reduced in power and efficacy.

"This is a manipulation by our hosts," Koltira said. "Come to your senses and move, boy!"

Edited 2012-08-09 06:29 (UTC)

Koltira hoped that if he just kept running, he would eventually find his way back to the waking world. Unfortunately, he wasn't quite there yet. The scene he walked into was at once alien and familiar: groups of adventurers faced terrible evils regularly on Azeroth, and the enemies they faced did not look so different from the monsters before him. The particulars were a bit different--he did not recognize these specific demons--but he was otherwise in his element here.

"It's not a dream," Koltira said, brandishing Byfrost. "It's a memory."

More fruitless running, dashing between spaces, between minds. He recognized a few patterns by this point: it was always in someone's past, and it was always a battle. The situation was clearly connected to the announcement made on the network just a few days prior to all of this madness, but Koltira had no conception of virtual reality; the phrase might as well be from another language entirely.

Whatever was happening, he had walked into a fight among strangers. Several men, many of them very strangely dressed--and coming from Koltira, that was something--were attacking an elegant woman who looked only mildly bothered by it all, as though she were surrounded by a swarm of persistent flies. He could not call to her, as he did not know her name, and so instead he waited for a target to present itself.

Through the rush of trying to figure out what Owen and Michael are up to and how to get safely out of there without injuring anyone, Nikita slowly becomes aware that they aren't the only ones in the room. A young woman. But... She doesn't think about it much longer before she makes her way to Alisha's side. She fires a few shots in the men's direction to keep them from getting too close.

"How'd you get in here?"

For Nikita, it's still a nightmare. She hasn't figured out that there are other memories out there. Or that she has to defeat this one to get anywhere.

[ Artika doesn't trust that her bullet has finished her completely, not as thoroughly as she would have herself, if she'd been nearer and in another form— but it will have to do. She doesn't see Catsovi until it's far too late for any reaction but her most basic instinct.

Her involuntary cry of fear becomes a birdlike yowl of pain as a blade bites deep into a black-scaled flank. The other sword bounces off of the golden armor, but the first is enough to wash her side with blood. But pained or not, she's quick to strike back. She rakes forward with both forelegs, aiming to disembowel her attacker, and her long neck snaps her jaws up toward his neck at the same time. ]

"Not a junior of anything," he said, and the flatness finally filled his voice. "What's it matter? You'll be popping out of here in a second or two anyway."

[ a wave of something pleasant washes over him. Marco's pretty convinced that something is the absence of pain. It's starting to feel like a new emotion by this point. He breathes, mentally anyways because he's pretty sure ants don't come equipped with the sigh of relief package. ]

< Thanks man, I owe you one- >

[ the ground vibrates and Marco smells the scent of the intruder's blood. Not good. ]

< Hold on, I got you buddy. >

[ not sure why the ants have stopped attacking him for the moment being, Marco charges forward. He uses the ant's instinct to guide him as he clamps his pincers down on a red ant, tearing off a chunk of its abdomen. Ants are strong ]

And then the weird, mystic breeze began asking questions. Marco stilled, trying to think about the logic behind a human voice inside of an ant tunnel-

-but then another leg was in the process of being ripped off. So maybe if this was a hallucination it was better to go along with it for all it's insanity.

< Marco. Please don't say Marco Who? Now's not the time. > He muttered, trying to wiggle something, anything, away from his attackers. < I'm the impossibly attractive black ant over here that's getting ripped into pieces. >

"It is NOT a trick question! It is a YES or NO question-!" Marco felt the seatbelt dig into his chest and he let out a big oomph of air as the jeep swerved to the left. What kind of sick place was this?!

"FINE!" He had played Wipeout. He could do this.

[ he remembered this one.

Peeta closed his eyes in his Games, and opened them again only to be standing next to the wedding cake. He stared at it, remembering how he had individually formed all the scalloped frosting pieces, hand painted all the waves on the shore. Kept his hands busy. Kept his mind focused somewhere else.

But this one he remembers. This one was clean. Nothing shiny or tainted about it. A wedding.

Peeta watches as Annie, looking beautiful, and Finnick, looking happy, exchange vows. About to kiss-

And Katniss's arrow goes by Finnick's head.

Peeta feels a heavy weight settle in his stomach.

This one hadn't been shiny. It still wasn't shiny.

And Katniss was loading another arrow into her bow. The people of Thirteen were reaching for their weapons.

Real.

This one is Real.

And it's punctuated by another arrow aimed at Annie.

Peeta doesn't think about it anymore. He just does.

The cake slams onto the floor as he flips the table over for a barricade. Eyes trained on Katniss as he flexes his fingers. Peeta looks over to where Finnick landed on the ground and deducts that he's a victim of her too ]

Behind a table! [ he yells, knowing that the best way to fight an archer is cover. Followed by close-range ]

He doesn't recognize it right away, but it doesn't take that long either for him to realize why the sound was familiar.

"Marco?"

The fellow NEXT with the shapeshifting power, he remembers, so he accepts the explanation and moves in that direction quickly - inhumanly quickly, in fact - looking for a black ant getting mauled by the others. He'll find one, hoping it's the right one, and kick one of the red ants right off - accidentally really, since he's still not used to the combination of his Institute boots with his Hundred Power. But it's effective and looks cool, so he'll never tell.

"Is this you?"

Peeta connected to the ground with the wind being knocked out of him, but he looks up and sees someone there with a shield. Peeta frowns, knowing that of all the weapons the Capitol would give their tributes, a shield would be the last thing on their minds.

The humming gets louder, and so does the singing. Peeta clamps his hands over his ears for a minute, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to figure something out. Finally, he yells, a finger pointing at Katniss as she draws another arrow.

"It's her! The mockingjays and the trackerjacks are here because of her!"

"Curiosity," he says even if his own voice is far from light. "I want to know more about the situation with the Initiative, the United Earth, and my fellow transports. If you have any information, I'd appreciate hearing it and would make it worth your while."

I was elsewhere before. I continued moving until I found myself here.

[If it sounded like a simple explanation, it's because it was. Halibel didn't know how else to phrase it.

She cut and slashed her way through the oncoming soldiers, though their numbers remained great regardless.

How many more would she need to kill?

How many more would need to be sacrificed?]

Peeta's heart almost escaped its cage as he looked around the room. Cameras. A one-way mirror. Metal ceilings.

The Capitol. The Capitol had him again.

Peeta could feel the walls starting to shrink and see black spots form in front of his eyes, but before he made the complete journey into relapse he noticed that he wasn't alone in the room.

To his side, there was a man sitting at a table.

With two Peacekeepers going in for an attack against him.

Without thinking, Peeta ran up behind one and grabbed his head. Twisted.

The Peacekeeper fell down limp.

With shaking hands, he looked at the man at the table, barely registering what had just happened before the other Peacekeeper took a swing at his head.

[ ooc: let me know if I did anything too godmodey and I'll change it! ]

[She would've fought each and every single one of them. Her sword was ready, and Halibel had prepared herself for such a fight. And yet... this had happened.]

They've made their intentions clear, Ico.

The time for pity and mercy has passed.

[She raises her sword and puts it between herself and the new (and) large arrival. How familiar, fighting against a much larger opponent... Size isn't always an advantage, though. Halibel manages to push him back through her own strength while putting more distance between the monster and herself while she's still able to.]

Strength in numbers... An intelligent tactic.

[One she was intimately familiar with.]

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open log » ❝ The VR Program ❞

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