thenightroom | MISSION ONE: THE TIME MACHINE

Entry tags:

!ic,
!mission log

MISSION ONE: THE TIME MACHINE

MISSION LOGS

MISSION ONE: THE TIME MACHINE

▐ OBJECTIVES ▐

The machine has malfunctioned, resulting in the random splintering of individuals across time and across the vast expanse of possible realities. Each person pulled has subsequently been recruited temporarily until a solution to return them home has been reached.

The first mission is simple: return to the last splinter point the machine reached and retrace the steps of the team to locate any temporal anomalies and record them. Record anything strange or out of the ordinary for missions. The year is 1993, and you are going native.

In the 'present', the team should begin a physical document mapping out where the new recruits come from and try to determine if splintering back is possible with their current technology.

▐ OUTCOMES ▐

Characters will have experience using the time machine and players will have chance to explore the past or explore the facility in the 'present'.

A brief comprehensive idea of where everyone comes from should be starting to form, with Dr. Jones conducting individual interviews. You can be as vague about your characters personal circumstances as you like, as Dr. Jones will be more interested in the world itself, the year and will make quick character judgement's based on the conversation itself. At the end of the mission, characters should be starting to form connections, however small or significant.

SETTINGS

▐ 1993 ▐

Before you leave, you will be interviewed by Dr. Jones. This can be hand waved for inconvenience. She will ask you only the most pertinent questions: your name, your age, the year you are from. She will ask for as in depth description of your world that you can provide. If you want to elaborate on your personal circumstances, you can. If not, that's fine too.

Before you leave, normal protocol takes place. The machine will be explained to you, as will the injections required before hand. The machine itself is dangerous, but the danger of being catapulted across reality again is 0.000001%. Reassuring in every way, of course. You will travel to 1993, Seattle. The only relevant information about this previous mission is the places the team were and anything odd they can recall. You will, however, be free to explore the State and note anything odd.

There will be vague temporal anomalies, but nothing big enough to cross the multiverse.

▐ PROJECT SPLINTER INTEL GATHERING ▐

Interviews conducted by Dr. Jones are mandatory. Until you complete it, you will be held in the brigg quarters which, compared to the rest of the facility, is hugely uncomfortable. It is the same process as above. In turn, Dr. Jones will brief you on the current state of this world. She will only share relevant and confirmed information.

After you're done, you are free to also share these experiences with the new 'volunteers. '

▐ EXPLORING YOUR SURROUNDINGS ▐

The obligatory wild card. Explore the facility. The rooms, the kitchens, the shower rooms. Head up to the roof and look upon the vast wasteland that has become of the world. Do whatever you want!

table code by

optimisty

Threaded | Flat

[Whoever you are, regardless of when you come to speak to Dr. Jones or where you're going after: the setting is relatively the same for everyone. It's conducted in the main briefing room.

Dr. Jones sits, her face lined but her mouth quirked into a dry smirk. There's a cigarette hanging from her finger, smoke billowing as she moves through her paperwork with one hand. Behind her, there is an investigation board overflowing with photos, news paper clippings, documents and aerial maps. It's clear that whatever she's been doing here in this facility, she has been doing it for a long time.

The room is cold. Not freezing, the way it is in the winter. It's just all concrete and air vents and not a lot of heat stays inside it. When it's full, bodies all around the table and the doors, it's not so bad. Here, one on one, well. It's brisk.

To her right is an audio recording machine. She gestures for you to sit, and after a drag of her cigarette, she says:] We'll start with your name, shall we?

i.

[ He has been through some shit, as the old saying goes. Overall, he's not sure how he's meant to feel. One second he's about to take Cassie and get the hell out of Titan and the next, he's being pulled apart and spat back out into the Splinter Facility. The whole thing is jarring to say the least, especially when the first thing Katarina Jones says to him is a flabbergasted: Mr. Deacon, you're supposed to be dead.

A cheery thought. He dwells on it the entire time he's cutting his hair off and shaving off the months of facial hair growth in the shower. Things are new here. The showers are hot, for one. There are men that he's sure ought to be dead, walking he facility with their guns, staring at him like he's a goddamn ghost. He remembers hearing Cole talk about timeline's, once. How once he ended up in one where everything was wrong.

Everything about this feels wrong. His interview with Kat is brief. He asks his questions firsts, to her bemusement and he sees that things are not only wrong, but they are beyond the most fucked up fuck up he could imagine. There is no Cole, no Cassie. No goddamn Ramse, or Jennifer. There's just Jones and the rag team of ruthless motherfuckers she's adopted and a mission similar enough to the one he's used to that he gets on board, if only to get back home. To get back to Cassie, who's still in that room. Still locked up in her ivory tower, surrounded by demented cultists.

It's a rough fucking day, to say the least.

So he does what he does best. He breaks into Kat's room, helps himself to her finest, aged whisky and he hits the roof to compare the scenery. Still the same, more or less. The faces are different, though. Most of them.

He's there for hours; sometimes a soft, out of tune don't you forget about me making it's way down the stairs as an echo. ]

ii.

[More people get spat out by the machine and Deacon realises that this is a whole thing now. Something's wrong with it, the alarms going off in the middle of the night, sometimes over and over and over again. Sometimes they'll be doing maintenance and he'll be watching, his gun against his chest, and it'll just start going, the light's all wrong and lo and behold, some new schmuck is there in the chair, looking wild eyed and out of place.

There's no easy way of dealing with the arrivals. They're scared. They're angry. Deacon's new approach, as opposed to Kat's please stay calm is to approach the chair, whisky out-stretched and a dry:] Real sorry for the inconvenience, we're having some technical difficulties with the time machine.

[And it's either a good ice breaker or a real bad one. ]

iii.

[There is a room in the facility that is small. It holds two old leather couches and old magazines collected since the fifties, when the place was used by the U.S. Army. In another universe, it's where Cole keeps his whisky bought in the past and where he comes to do whatever the hell it is he does.

Deacon takes it over. It's his now. Dibs, double dibs. It's full of his whisky now. The odd bottle of vodka. One bottle of expensive gin that has not been opened.

The room isn't a secret, but it's his. For most people who knew the Deacon of this world -- the one who died -- that's enough to keep them away. New faces though? They don't know any better. Deacon's getting old now, though, and softer and ... it's not terrible. To have company, once and a while. He doesn't turn anyone away, usually. ]

i. headfirst into sci-fi wet dream

[He doesn't take to it at first. He doesn't actually think this is anyone's fault, his slow acceptance of the situation, it's just that it's all very sudden and very new. He's working late, when he's taken, you see. The lights of the lab had been bright while he finished up labeling his blood samples and the new samples of influenza. Sometimes they flicker, as they had done before he was taken, because the lab is old and the generator even older. The noise, though, is new. This soft, pitched whine like an engine in the distance and then the lab is gone. He manifests to puzzled looking men in lab coats, but where he is is certainly no laboratory. The men with guns are a dead give away, as is the slightly bedraggled appearance of everyone who starts to approach him.

Needless to say, he has a minor freak out.

At first, he's certain he is hallucinating. That all the weeks running on three hours of sleep a night have finally caught up to him and this is the result. It isn't. Next, he wonders if he's fallen asleep at his desk. He hasn't.

The truth is a tough pill to swallow. Time travel is one thing, but cross-dimensional time travel is so off the wall bananas that Jay spends a lot of time sitting down, looking vaguely grey and feeling ill.

It takes a couple of days for him to get over it and convince himself moping about it will get him nowhere. The positives start to align up. First, he reminds himself that he has crossed off one impossible bucket list dream: time travel. Second, he enthuses himself about working with the people responsible for said impossible dream. Eventually it becomes easy to just act into it. On day three, he reasons that if he doesn't start making friends, it's going to be a lonely road back home.

And so, at breakfast, the day after Dr. Jones announces an actual real life time travel mission, he slides right beside you and says, after taking one big bite of an apple: ] You think you'll volunteer for it? [He's sort of on the fence about it himself. ]

ii. explore surroundings

[The downside to all of this -- as opposed to being trapped in a future that is not strictly his own -- is that while the cots are sort of big and relatively comfy for a military based operation, they are not private rooms. Jay hasn't shared a room since his last girlfriend, and certainly has never shared one with more than three people at the most.

It's a lot to get used to, hearing other people breathe at night. Listening to them toss and turn. Listen to them come and go in the dead of night.

So, really, his three hour a night sleep record does not actually improve. If anything, it stays the same and feels actually worse. But he supposes it's a good bonding experience? Maybe? At least, if he has to share a room with a group of people, he figures it's best to know them on a surface level. So about as smoothly as his smooth apple operation on day three, he asks casually, while making his bed: ] Hey, do you have Power Rangers were you're from? [Good neutral territory, is Power Rangers. ]

iii. mystery box

[whatever u wanna do. ]

Edited 2017-06-27 22:49 (UTC)

[ Morgan... he's never been one to show many emotions. If his parents were the kind who cared about mental health, let alone the one of their most useless son, he would probably have been diagnosed with something pathological.

The fact is that when he wakes up in the loudness and brightness of the machine, his teeth grit with shock, his hands clench at the possibility that he's coming to after an attack and kidnapping, but his head manages enough control before it lashes out into killing the people around him - accidentally or otherwise. His thoughts are ready as soon as his consciousness recomposes itself, and he listens.

Time passes. His magic goes without use, just to test if it will be damning or a leverage. Who knows, it might be more impacting if no one sees it coming. The element of surprise is usually the most essential part in any strategy. The time to talk about missions and requirements comes in a particular accent from a particular moment, and Morgan can't say he's particularly inclined to follow orders... but the prospect of being taken elsewhere by this machine is appealing. ]

Who knew science would actually come up with something like this.

[ 'Sup, stranger. ]

[ This one has been a problem since he arrived, though not of his own accord.

The problem with his arrival in the chair is how lost he'd gotten in it, simply from the physical contact. He'd been practically catatonic until they'd removed him from it, and even then his mind was still deep in its workings, as unaware and identityless as blood that makes a circuit of a body's arteries and veins.

After a few hours, he'd managed to withdraw, to collect himself back into the sloppy assortment of personality quirks he has to call himself. Iain, a man now twice removed from the only place he's ever felt real. And he'd answered every question, made eye contact without really seeing anyone, walked into a wall the moment they tried to let him move around on his own, and ...

In any case, now he's up, very early in the morning, and the withdrawn, monosyllabic, sad malfunctioning robot man who's been around for the last few days is now cooking a very large breakfast in the kitchen. He is methodical and efficient, not terribly creative with the ingredients at hand, but certainly competent enough. He is also silent unless addressed, but he will respond readily, whether it's a greeting, a complaint, or a request for something other than what he's already cooking. ]

( note: cr au, which u can read here. )

i. adjustment period + exploring

[ She's worried that she might seem strange. At first, she doesn't react any differently to anyone else who comes through to the chair. It's a jarring thing, to be one place one second and then somewhere else, another. The whole process is -- uncomfortable. Not just the splintering itself, but the eyes looking at her when she manifests. The fact that she comes alone.

Later, she's just thankful that she came through fully dressed.

Adjusting ends up being easy, after she's introduced to Dr. Jones. She knows the name and the terminology, in fragments and uncompleted pieces. It's harder adjusting to the fact that this facility has never housed James, or the people he considered friends. Family. The love of his life.

It's harder still adjusting to sleeping alone, more or less. To being cold more than she's warm.

She compensates by volunteering to pick up a gun. She puts her name down for missions.

And then she explores. First, the nooks and crannies. Then where all the paper work is. The files. Names of the men and women who have come and gone. It's alarming, possibly, that someone so young has adapted so well. ]

ii. 1993 vintage chokers

[ She's excited about the mission. Not because it's a mission, per say, but because of a lot of things that aren't necessarily related. She's excited to experience something she's only heard about through not happy stories. She's excited about the concept of going anywhere, any time.

She's excited about 90's chokers and tshirts, and stocking up on clothes that aren't left overs from someone who might have died in this building, at some point.

She's mostly dressed the part, in what she arrived in. Black overalls and a white tshirt. Standard work clothes, for a long night and now standard work clothes to blend into a pre-Spice Girls society. ]

Blimey. [Is the breathless reaction to staring down the machine, before it's time to go. ] It looks different when you're hopping back onto it. [The chair, she means. More intimidating. Less of a chair and more of an uncertain thing, that has the potential to mess up again and catapult her into another reality again.
]

Edited 2017-07-06 19:24 (UTC)

Threaded | Flat

INTERVIEWS.

t. deacon | 12 monkeys | o o open

jayesh dara | original character