EVENT ∞ LOG — May 126

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Event ∞ Log

The Mnesic Loop

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Jump ⇅ :: The Flood — The Loop — The Surface — Notes

Info & Mechanics

The Flood

In the evening, when the sky darkens and the clouds gather, few pay attention. Another rainy night, you think to yourself, and grab your umbrella before heading out. The first few drops that fall are cold and, at first pass, seemingly wet. Instead of soaking into your clothes or hair, however, it simply rolls off and lands on the ground with a gentle plop. Round and globular, it sits there on the pavement. As more and more droplets join it, the liquid begins to spread, viscous like mercury. The city's yellow and neon glow casts an odd rainbow sheen over the "puddle."

Curiously, nothing stays wet. When you cup the liquid in your hand, it rolls gently without absorption. Those who are familiar with the Yawning Sea may recognize its colorful hue...and outside on the streets, many fluxdrifts who know better grow concerned. This isn't just any rain.

Over the next few hours, the rain falls harder. The water rises. You look out your window and see cars bobbing down the road. It seems beneath your door, filling your room. You hear loud barking and find a dog paddling downstream. You come across children who are struggling to keep their heads above water. Perhaps your car is one of the many floating away, and you're forced to swim after it. If you're in the Fringes, you end up stuck in your car, drifting helplessly. You might be in a diffusion zone made more dangerous by the pouring rain: a glass room that fills up suddenly; a downed powerline that sends sparks through the water.

To be sure, contact with the water is ill-advised, but given the flood of it everywhere, there's no avoiding it now. Either way, your night is thoroughly ruined. You wonder if you can even get any sleep. And then...

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The Loop

You collapse just as the Sea recedes, withdrawing rapidly and sweeping everything in its path as it does. As you fall into blackness, you tumble through a vortex not unlike what some of you might've experienced on the Rail. Two bright suns. Black stars against a blinding sky. A lake that's now become an ocean, swallowing you down. For a wild moment, you fear you're drowning.

When you finally open your eyes and gasp for breath, you're not where you were. Your surroundings are hazy at first, then slowly come into focus. You don't have a lot of time to adapt, though. Wherever you are, something is happening: gunfire, screaming, explosions. Or perhaps it's a bit quieter, the calm before the storm: light chatter in the park, a quiet drive on a sunny day. Do you recognize the person beside you? Do you recognize the faces you see? In fact...are you seeing yourself? It might be you as a child, or it might be a more recent recollection from a year ago.

If it's a very old or damaged memory, the figures within might have undefined features, and parts of the environment might shift constantly. One moment, your past self might be wearing a pink skirt; the next, they're in a pair of blue shorts. If you naturally have heightened senses, sounds and smells that made an impression on you in the memory could be overwhelming to any visitors.

You don't know what's going on, but one thing becomes clear: at least one of you recognizes where you are. More than that, at least one of you knows what's coming next. You've lived it before.

For memory share mechanics, see the Plot Post for details.

A Friend in the Shadows

You walk through the same set of memories for the fifth, twentieth, hundredth time. You've lost track of the hours...or is it days? For some of those loops, you're alone. For others, you're accompanied by another, whether a friend, a stranger, or merely a passing acquaintance. Or perhaps instead, you've been wandering aimlessly from one foreign landscape to the next, attempting to help those you can and failing to change much at all with others.

At first, you're focused on the memories themselves. They are equal parts terrifying and awe-inspiring, depending on what you've encountered. But the more you go on, the more you begin to notice something out of the corner of your eye. For a split second, the faces and structures surrounding you flicker and shudder, twisting into a gnarled shadow. Each time you turn to look directly at it, it disappears. The Subvariant Shade only haunts your peripheral, stalking you through billboards, morphing along the rough bark of a tree, slithering over the features of a memory figure.

Come to me, it whispers. Your key is meant for grander doors.

Perturbed or outright alarmed, you ask the others if they've seen something similar. Perhaps they haven't yet. But they will.

The Shade's presence is unsettling, but it will not attack nor disturb the memory directly. However, its appearance can startle characters at key moments, waylaying any carefully laid plans in the memory.

Dissolving Union

When the loop crumbles, your surroundings begin to dissolve. The ground beneath your feet turns to goop. The people in your memories begin to melt like candle wax, flesh sagging, eyeballs oozing out of their sockets. You sink into the primordial soup of your memories. It gathers you into its embrace, and for some strange reason, you are no longer afraid. You let it engulf you whole.

For an unknown while, it's dark. You don't know how much time passes because time is immaterial.

Then your eyes snap open. You're back in reality, but you don't have much room to process this: something is crawling behind your eyes, an overwhelming pressure that's borderline painful. Instinctively, you sense it must be dying, whatever it is, and it feels a bit like you might be dying, too. The sensation slithers down your face, through your sinuses. You realize something is struggling to wriggle free from your mouth and nose.

You pull and you pull. The substance is not so much black as it's devoid of light, like a black hole. It squishes in your hands, thick as bread dough and equally stretchy.

After too long a time, it pools beneath you. Its abyssal sheen rapidly regains the rainbow hue of the Yawning Sea. It writhes, making a horrible discordant howl, and eventually dematerializes. Whether you're holding onto it or staring at it on the ground, it simply vanishes. But you're not so sure it's died or disappeared into thin air. Perhaps it's simply returned home.

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The Surface

When you finally gather your bearings, you may not be where you last remembered before the memories pulled you under. A rare Good Samaritan might've delivered you to the nearby hospital or one of the smaller clinics throughout Panorama. You wake up with a concerned nurse standing over you, perhaps about to administer another dosage of medicine. You may be startled enough to strike, or you might hold yourself back in time.

If you're less fortunate, you find yourself missing several belongings, wallet taken, even shoes stolen right off your feet. You might have a bruise or scrape from where you fell and hit your head. You could be in a musty warehouse, tossed into a dumpster, delivered to a kindly neighbor's home, or any number of places.

Regardless, the flood is gone, and most of the city is back to normal, barring a few abandoned cars or belongings scattered along the streets that haven't been gathered yet. When you ask another drift, someone you've never met before, what happened, they'll appear a little confused and tell you they aren't sure. They remember the pouring rain and the flood, but they spent the past day in a bit of a daze and have only just sorted themselves out.

Common, the doctor or the bartender tells you. Any contact with the Yawning Sea will do that, but it's nothing to worry about. The effects are usually temporary. Only prolonged contact, diving under the water itself, will cause more severe damage.

That's strange, you think. You remember so much more.

Once characters awaken, they can check on their friends, clean up their room, gather their missing things, or locate their car. If they were brought to a hospital or a clinic, they might end up with a bill they must pay.

∞ Notes ∞

• A mnesic loop can be broken after you resolve one memory OR multiple memories. The choice is yours, depending on whether you want to play out breaking every memory or just one or two key ones, while the rest are more inconsequential.
• For characters who may struggle with meeting the conditions, see this answer for options on how to play that out.
• Injuries, deaths, and other physical effects sustained in the loop will not carry over into the real world. Kill your character as many times as you want!
• Reminder that other NPCs will not know what you're talking about. To them, they experienced the typical confusion, memory loss, and fugue states caused by contact with the Yawning Sea, but no more.

Questions? Ask here

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