Ad Visitatores

[animusmods]

Characters: anyone participating in the event
Setting: floor 56 and eventually other areas of the Tower
Format: either
Summary: Welcome to the Tower.
Warnings: horror/creepiness/potential danger/generally unfortunate things all possible
Notes: PLEASE GO HERE TO MAKE NEW POSTS.

A few minutes before anything happens, Ruana's voice rings out over the Tower's intercom--it manages to be louder than anything the residents happen to be doing. "Hey, everyone, there's something exciting going on at floor fifty-six! Go make sure they don't get themselves killed!"


You arrive, stepping or tumbling, in a surgical suite. It looks abandoned, with dust collecting on the table and floors. The lights flicker, and for a moment blood dripping off the table, puddling on the floor--but no, the lights are back, and surely that was your imagination. It's quiet, eerily so, but nothing hinders you, and you're free to spread out and explore. There are multiple rooms here, like in any hospital, and it's all a bit confusing. Occasionally the lights flicker, and it's a bit frightening as Things appear that shouldn't exist. Shadowy creatures stitched together and reaching for you, doctors brandishing phantom surgical tools, blood splattering the walls or floor or ceiling, how did it get there--but none are real, and all of them vanish when the lights return. Eventually you find the staircase, spiraling up and down into darkness. Approach it, though, and the thing glitters with a barrier that will push back any attempts at climbing the thing.

A girl, a teenager dressed in red and black, appears. And she does simply appear, inserting herself into the space, nearly pushing it aside to make room in it for where she is now. Her face beams with unconcealed excitement, and her words tumble out on top of themselves. "You can't go there! Yet, I mean. You'd all die!"

The girl steps onto the staircase, passing through the barrier as if it weren't there, and sits on the steps to address everyone. "Hi! I'm Ruana. You didn't show up the normal way, so the Tower can't support you yet. We got this one floor ready when I saw you were coming but, well, the Tower's kind've big, so getting all of them set up is taking a little longer than I thought." She smiles, sheepishly apologetic in a carefree sort of way. "I've got everyone coming here to visit you--or at least they know they can visit you--and I'll have someone bring food up for you. It'll be oatmeal, and oatmeal is super boring, but you have to eat it, okay? Then you can have whatever you want! The cafeteria's down on the first floor if you get hungry. We should have everything ready in a few hours. I've gotta go help with that, so you guys wait here.

"Don't worry, the monsters can't get to this floor as long as that barrier is up."

And then she's gone, blinking out of existence. The barrier will remain for three hours.

Comments

[floreatnoctem]

Oh.

[Chidori's voice is quiet, disinterested- like someone who's found something they never thought they'd see again and can't be bothered with it. She tilts her head at him, brows rising.]

They just won't leave you be, will they?

[themortalhalf]

[Chidori.

Well, this is another surprise. He hadn't expected to see her in a good long while, if ever.

He meets her eyes, surveying her with a decidedly neutral expression. She's another one with one of those damn collars.

Tch.]

Ain't like I have much choice.

[Not that he's sure he ever did.]

[floreatnoctem]

[She raises a brow slightly at the way he looks at her, but doesn't remark on it- she's had enough experience with the tower's ridiculousness that people giving her strange looks is just another part of her day.]

Have any of us ever?

[She shakes her head a little though, and looks him over.]

How did you even get here?

[themortalhalf]

Fair enough.

[He frowns briefly at her question, mulling over how to even begin explaining what he thinks he understands without the explanation itself sounding idiotic. Not that relocating to another universe to begin with doen't sound implausible enough in itself. He thinks he knows the basics of how he got here, but that doesn't really cover much about the hows and whys, only that it's possible and it (obviously) works, even if he doesn't know the mechanics behind it. "Magic" might be as good enough of an explanation as any, different from the kind that pulled him into Hinoto-ri, and closer to the time you see in adventure game shit.]

It's complicated. Felt like a dream, but there's more to it. More specifics than I know.

[Though he's pretty damn sure it has something to do with the artifact they discovered in the Mictlan. Hell if he knows how it works, but the dream had made that obvious enough. And they're obviously here for a reason—to find someone, with nothing but a vague few seconds' worth of instructions that really aren't much of a compass at all. Might as well just be an ignorant rat in a maze.]

Probably not much of a surprise.

[floreatnoctem]

I figured it was.

[Except it's not fair. It's never 'fair'- not for them. By now though, Chidori has more or less stopped questioning the 'why' of things in any real seriousness. Mostly, she tends to ask just to hear the explanations she'll get.

She likes to be the one to tell people they're wrong when the tower shows its hand.]

You get a dream, we get a nightmare.

[Again, not fair, but she doesn't say that. Instead she raises her eyebrows a little more an then shakes her head a bit.]

At the very least, it seems like we're all victims of something larger than ourselves- again.