Day 9: Twilight

Twilight: 12:00noon - ??:00 Unknown

[ IRL Timeframe: July 20th - Onward, 2021 ]

In the past, the heroes had found themselves face-to-face with the Protector and the Wizard on year 0. They'd found the shattered pieces of Sxicq. They'd found the story before anyone had polished it into what it was today. It was free of all the lies, save for the ones coming from an alien's mouth.

The heroes influenced the past in subtle ways: Confronting the Protector with questions. Shaking the Wizard's solid foundations and instilling curiosity about the truth. Most importantly, Sxicq had seen all of their faces.

After chasing the crystals around the town and mountain, the heroes were pulled back into the room beneath the mountain. There, to their huge surprise, they were hidden behind some incredibly convenient piles of rocks to watch the events unfold that would define the next forty years. Floating over twelve of the platforms in the cavern were twelve of the crystals with kids inside of them that had been floating around the mountain. In the center of the circle stand two figures: Sxicq and the Wizard. The two appear apprehensive, but it's the third figure at the edge of the circle that's ruining it:

"Contain it! What are you doing!" The Protector shouts, stomping a foot. The air feels heavy, like it's made of electric cotton, and the hairs on everyone's arms stand upright.

"Get-- out! Of the way!!" He continues, stomping forward into the circle. As he does, a familiar blade slides out into his hand. Its shape is a tear in reality, a hole in the very makeup of the world itself.

The only thing that keeps the heroes from leaping forward to change history is the twelve small, glowing forms that are holding their hands. Smaller than children. Animals. Twelve of them, pleading in whispers: Stay. Watch.

True to their word, there is something to watch. The Protector rushes in, swinging his blade in a high arc before plunging it downward into the center of the circular floor of the platform. From it: A blue beam of energy, like lightning, fires forth through his chest. It pierces out from him, through Sxicq, through the Wizard, through the twelve crystals, and finally through the twelve animals where they're sitting around the heroes.

One bright white explosion later: The animals are gone. The crystals are gone. Sxicq is gone. The Wizard is gone. Only the Protector remains, standing over the circular rings in the floor. Slowly, he retracts his blade from the center. The edges of reality start to go to static.

"It is done." He declares with an air of finality. The static creeps in on the edges of everything, fading the vision as Sxicq descends into slumber.

The Protector's wrist beeps in defiance. He looks down at it, his face scrunching up in disgust. "It has to be done! Acknowledge: Mission complete!" He nearly yells at his wrist, only to be met with a response that stuns him.

"User not recognized, access privileges locked down." Says the same voice that came from within the ship. The static finishes pouring over everything, fading the vision of the cavern into nothing but noise.

And then everyone wakes up.

Everything feels wrong: The clocks all say it's sometime after noon, but the sky is an ever-churning, ever-shifting muddled mess of blues, purples, and darkness. The sun is missing. Weather outlets everywhere didn't have any explanation for the phenomenon. News stations were being careful to avoid referring to it as a sign of the end. The Protector had told them things were dire, after all, but they couldn't cause a mass panic.

And, most importantly, a small handful of news headlines on the planet were talking about time travel being real. They're talking about the blip to forty years ago. They're talking about the very same things that the heroes had just experienced, like they had experienced those exact same things. What effect would this have on the carefully-crafted story that the Protector had pieced together over forty years? Just how many people had shared this experience too?

Unknown to Luka, Gyre, and Olivia: Terrence had been to the past and had an experience much like the one they'd shared as a trio. He ended up with two regular people from the world who didn't recognize him as one of the heroes from this year.

What would happen now?

Ninth Afternoon Event: Afternoon Twilight

The Weather
The birds aren't chirping.
68°F
A little breezy.

Prompts:

12:00noon The Return, The Garden: When Gyre, Luka, and Olivia return, they're placed on the ground around the portal arrival in the garden. Nearby, Terrence has also been deposited: But he's in a tree about three feet up.

At least the gang's all here?

1:00pm Onward, Around the Garden: Once the heroes start making their way around the garden and inside the monster house, they'll realize that, for the first time, all of the monsters are here either inside or somewhere nearby. If the heroes wanted to find anyone, now was the chance for them to do so!

Procedure:

Reply to the appropriate toplevel comments for events below. Indicate if a post is a private conversation with "Private" in the subject otherwise all threads should be open to interaction with others. Plan OOCly how you'd like to toss everyone around.

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He jumps slightly at the louder-than-normal text notification, and pulls it up on his phone promptly.

"The metal kind." He replies matter-of-factly. "With the static electricity."

Duh, Nine! What other kind of cubes are there?

There were so many other kinds of cubes. What if he'd been asking about sugar cubes? The kind you mixed into hot cocoa and maybe ate one on the side too? A moment before Luka receives a text in response, there's the unmistakable sound of Nine's stomach gurgling hungrily. Whoops.

"That's one of my cube things. Which one is it?"

"The one in Four's room." He says. "What does it do?"

He sends the picture he took via text, just in case 'the cube in Four's room' wasn't explicit enough.

Oh. That cube. Well. There was the more important first thing to address about that cube:

"You went into Four's room."

The text is matter-of-fact, a little accusatory of course, but then she follows with more information. If she saw the picture he sent, she doesn't give any indication from where she's flopped.

"It isn't ready yet. You didn't move it did you?" She asks, her body giving the first indication of life this whole time as she jerks slightly. The movement causes a metallic rattling from the nine cables she has plugged in.

"Yeah, I did." He admits readily. "The door was unlocked."

Luka is aware it was presumptuous to let himself into Four's room - but it turned out to be unoccupied and practically barren, anyway. Hardly anything to intrude upon.

"Didn't move it - way too heavy. It moved me more than I moved it, really." He clarifies, slightly annoyed by the memory. "Well, I did touch it a bit, though. Is that okay?"

Well... If Luka was being honest, then there was only one answer to his question. Nine had to reason to believe he was lying, but there was still reason to be cautious, so...

"It might be okay." Comes her first text, spaced out by a ten-or-so-second delay before the second text:

"I'm going to need to plug you into it later."

Those texts are... concerning! Luka taps his phone screen a second time, prompting it to read them out again - just to make sure he hadn't misheard them.

"Might be okay?" He repeats back, somewhat alarmed. As if touching the cube without permission hadn't been entirely his own choice!

"And what do you mean you need to plug me in!? What does that mean? Why does it have to be me?"

Whatever Nine is doing, it seems she doesn't mind the time Luka takes to re-listen to the messages. She doesn't elaborate on his concern that it might be okay, deciding to focus on the several questions he'd asked.

"Answer in three parts:" Comes the first text, why is she doing this in multiple texts?

"One: If you broke it I need you to unbreak it and I can't unbreak it if you're not in it so I have to plug you in to put you in it." She explains in, what she thinks is, a perfectly understandable and not-at-all-confusing way.

"Two: It means you might have done something bad." She adds, not noticing (or caring?) that the way she'd phrased it sounded a little accusatory.

"Three: It's you because you touched something you shouldn't have in a room you shouldn't have been in." She finishes, uh, way more accusatorily. Geez Nine, that's a little mean!

And, after the texts finish, her body shifts slightly in the chair, her head lolling forward as her shoulders hunch slightly. Is she going to get up? She doesn't continue moving, though, the cables still largely holding her in place.

"Hey, how was I supposed to know what rooms are off-limits to me? Are there any more areas that I should stay away from?" Luka huffs and folds his arms, not appreciating the implied accusations.

Even if Nine had an answer for his question, he didn't intend to let it stop him.

"It's not broken." He insists. "And if it is, I couldn't have been the one who did it. It barely even reacted and all I did was touch it."

"No others, just Four's room until they're back." She answers, leaving that hanging in the air before she answers his other statement.

"If you touched it you might have broken it. It's touch activated." She explains, not clarifying on why something that's touch-activated would also be touch-broken?? Nine, that seems like an oversight??

"Wait, Four's coming back? Like, soon?" Technically, Luka knew Four had the potential to come back - they did every year for the past thirty-nine years so far.

It was part of his justification for killing them at the time. But this year wasn't going like past years had, and Luka had written off the idea of anyone coming back anymore.

"Uh, what exactly is the touch supposed to activate, anyway?" He asks after a pause, though the function of the cube isn't quite as pressing as the idea of Four's return.

"Yes." Nine answers... and doesn't elaborate?? That seems like something that was supposed to have more details to it?

"Touch activates the cube's programming if everything is right. It acts like a magic vacuum." She answers, apparently assuming that describing something as a vacuum would make sense to Luka. That was an easy concept, right? It was something that sucked magic, she figured, so magic vacuum made sense!

"Magic vacuum." He repeats incredulously. "You trying to make me do.... housework? Because I'll tell you right now, I am not cut out for that type of thing."

It wasn't an unrealistic assumption on his part, considering this house had an orb-shaped oven. A cube-shaped vacuum just makes sense.

There's a pause that's much longer than the others as Nine parses what Luka had just said. She backs the conversation up in her thoughts, following how 'housework' could have possibly come into the equation. When she realizes it, her body jerks a few times in the chair as she laughs aloud. The movement rattles the cabling connected to her body, filling the room with the clinking and clattering of the various metallic components. Her laughter echoes strangely, seeming to reverberate from both the center of the room and the walls.

"Not housework. The cube vacuums magic itself and captures it. Sucking it in like a vacuum. I'm going to use it in the mountain." Her answer arrives on his phone after her laughter has subsided and her body goes still again.

"Oh. Hmmm. Well that sounds... useful?" He isn't sure the implications of the cubes purpose, fully. But he's trying to be supportive with his limit understanding nonetheless. "Well... unfortunately, I didn't notice any, uh, vacuuming when I touched it."

Maybe it was broken after all. He wasn't too excited about the prospect of Nine putting him inside of her magic vacuum cube, though.

"Hypothetically, if you did plug me into it... what would I have to do?"

"Very useful." Nine's first answer comes immediately, vocalized out of Luka's phone but this time the word 'very' was stretched out in slow-mo like 'veeeeeeeery.'

But then he asked for specifics and, well, that answer of hers is much more tricky and takes her about 30 seconds before the message plays from Luka's phone.

"If nothing changed, you'd just have to press a button. If you changed a lot, are you any good with machines?" she asks despite being almost positive that the answer he's about to give her is 'I am terrible with machines.' She really hopes that's not what he's about to tell her.

"Yeah, I'm good with machines." His answer comes immediately and with confidence. He was good with some types of machines. The non-boring ones, mostly. "Have you ever heard the name Eutychia? Well, if you have, it's probably because of me - but its also my family's business. A huge manufacturer of magitech, you know?"

Luka had avoided involving himself in his family's magitech business, but he wasn't above adding it to his credentials here. Experience with magitech devices was unavoidable in his life.

"So yeah. I can probably handle whatever cube fixing business you need from me."

Nine is surprised by this answer! Her body shifts much more abruptly than it had previously, the upper three cables connected to her back popping free with several loud 'hiss' sounds before they clatter to the floor. She's still connected, just less connected.

"If it's broken. And it's probably broken. There's going to be a manifestation inside that you will have to deprogram. It has to be a blank slate. The cube probably copied some of you to inside of it. You'll have to find six machines to wipe it." She explains, making sure the texts that are read out of Luka's phone are sufficiently spaced out with gaps after her sentences. The last thing she wants is for her texts to just come out as one giant garbled stream of words.

"It's probably fiiiine!" Luka insists. He barely touched it, how could it be broken?

"Wait - what do you mean it 'probably copied' me? What's a manifestation!?" These weren't the types of questions he had anticipated when he told Nine he was good with machines. Were these even normal machine terms?

"Is it going to try to fight me?"

Those were totally normal machine terms! Absolutely nothing here was out of the ordinary. The cube was no more complicated than a toaster. (This is false. It was much more complicated than a toaster.)

"If you would fight you then it will probably fight you. It will probably look like you." she explains, wondering how specific she should get. This wasn't seeming as fine as Luka wanted it to be, to be honest!

"When are you free to deal with it?"

If anyone could make a toaster complicated, it was definitely the monsters. But that was beside the point.

"I wouldn't fight the real me, no. Maybe I'd have to fight someone else who shamelessly stole my entire vibe, though?" Luka taps his chin in thought. He hadn't really considered what he would do in the situation of being faced with a clone of himself, and he's probably overthinking it now that he has.

"I'm not too busy right now." He shrugs. "I mean, besides... everything going on with the planet."

If Nine made a toaster, she would make it able to make an entire sandwich. To just have something that toasted bread and ejected it was thinking too small. She wanted automation. She wanted solutions!

"It might think you're stealing the 'entire vibe' then." Nine sends the first text, letting it hang in the air before she gets to the second, more complicated part.

"We're all busy with that. If you want to cube now, you'll need two cables. They're in the corner box." She explains. Sure enough, in the corner is a box filled with metal cables. Each one is about six feet long.

Luka's displeased at the implication that this cube version of himself would think he's the fake one. The audacity?

"Which corner?" He asks matter-of-factly. There are presumably four, and hes not about to waste time checking each of them. One he gets the answer, he'll pull the first two cables he finds from the box.

"Ok, got them. What now?"

It takes Nine a moment to realize why Luka needs to know which corner. The automatic response of 'the one with the boxes' comes to mind first, followed by 'but he can see the boxes,' followed by the realization.

"Behind you, to your left." She explains, making a mental note to group Luka in with Eight. She waits for him to get the cables before explaining what they're for.

"Plug one cable each into opposite sides of the cube. Twist the other ends until they're sticky and put them in your palms." To her, this explanation is completely normal and not at all something that would be cause for concern.

But she's also focused on something else. There's a soft hissing as all the remaining cables separate from her body and clatter to the ground, leaving her finally free of them. The helmet she wears starts humming softly, a gentle whirring coming from various fans in it that have kicked on. The front visor starts glowing too, glowing with a soft blue light.

"I'll need to plug in to help guide you to the six machines. But I can't help with your manifestation." She speaks with her own voice now, instead of the phone. Her voice is high and light, not quite a whisper but certainly not what anyone would consider conversational. If anyone else was speaking, she'd be drowned out. But if she was any louder, her voice might've been squeaky.

Edited 2022-04-04 13:43 (UTC)

"Eugh." Luka's reaction to her instructions is almost involuntary. This was definitely a cause for concern, or at least mild annoyance.

He's distracted, thankfully, by the sudden new noises in the room - and somewhat taken aback my Nine's voice.

"Oh, the manifestation," He waves a dismissive hand, though his voice lacks confidence. "I can handle that, easy. Just show me where these machines are and we'll get this fixed quick."

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wizardseason - 2022-04-12 04:12 (UTC) - Expand

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