etrayamemes | TDM 002

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!tdm

TDM 002

⏵ arrival⏴
Arrival goes as anticipated. Characters awaken in the pristine, new hospital, greeted by Aurora and potentially getting a rundown of what's happening depending on their approach to being dropped somewhere new. The door to their room opens, and new arrivals are left free to explore their new environment.

When the first round of citizens arrived, Aurora and the companion bots had been largely unprepared. This time? They made sure to put up welcome banners, even if the sentiment isn't quite right. There are cupcakes and cookies set out in the hospital's lobbies, and a digital map has been placed just in front of the entrance of the hospital, telling others how to reach the various locations throughout Etraya. Companion bots wander throughout the city, some carrying construction equipment to half-built facilities while others act as nurses, servers, or sales associates throughout the constructed buildings.

⏵ rainy awakenings ⏴

Many concepts are new to Aurora, including rain. She is familiar with how it functions, and its purpose, but rain has never been present on the lands of Etraya. Given how new it is, that may not be all too surprising - but the method of how it’s being introduced is… a little much. Rainfall commences in the early days of April, a persistent downpour that waxes and wanes in intensity but never ceases entirely.

Most nights in Etraya are characterized by a soothing patter of rain against rooftops. Yet, some nights leave the grounds flooded come morning. Rivers begin to swell, the current much too strong to justify trying to go for a swim. These showers also bring a new assortment of plants blooming across the green lands: bright blossoms whose petals spread wide when the yellow sun shines down on them, while numerous cherry blossom trees have grown out of nowhere, flourishing despite the rainfall. Clover carpets the grassy expanses of the islands, weaving a beautiful tapestry of color across the grounds.

⏵ Getting drenched by the rain can trigger a surge, followed by a slump. Initially, individuals will feel giddy, excited, full of energy, and ready to take on the world. However, in the subsequent days, they’ll find themselves feeling depressed, lacking the energy and motivation to move forward. Aurora advises that these effects are only temporary and should fade within the week, but they can be resolved more quickly by embracing a stranger. Attempting to hug anyone they already know well will not produce the same effect.

⏵ With the rain comes a significant increase in the greenery around Etraya that isn’t fake. Most of these plants will resemble ones originally found in the characters' universes.

⏵ A couple of these plants contain magical properties:

The Emberloom is a bright red, fiery flower that only inhabits smaller land masses. Those exposed to its pollen will experience heightened aggression and impulsivity.

Shadowbloom resemble tulips during the day, but during the night the petals open and it looks more like the night sky: dark petals with specs of white throughout them. Growing too close to the apartment building for comfort, those who look at the petals after nightfall will fall into a deep sleep. Worse yet: the dreams they find themselves in are not their own, but are the dreams of other residents. Ones who had not looked into the Shadowbloom, but had drifted off to sleep elsewhere on the planet. The one who looked into the Shadowbloom will find they cannot awaken until the person whose dream they have entered does.

These flowers will continue to bloom through April, after which the companion bots will search for and remove them from the atmosphere bubble.

⏵ If there is a specific, unique plant that those in game (or those accepted during the next round!) would like to add, please comment to the LOCATIONS page! We’ll add mentions of these to the Outskirts section.

Along with the botanical resurgence, numerous new animals appear: glowing fish swim freely through the waters. In the canopy above, new species of birds and critters flit among the branches. Some diligently construct new nests in anticipation of the coming spring, while others seek refuge in the shelter of trees, retreating from the weather.

Not all the creatures are so small, or so peaceful.

⏵ Small critters make themselves comfortable in the forested area around Etraya, staying mostly out of the way. There are the occasional visitors that will let themselves in through windows for a quick visit, or maybe a snack, but they’re mostly harmless.

⏵ Several larger beasts make their way into the city to try and find land that’s more habitable for them. Giraffes navigate gracefully through the areas designated for new arrivals, using their elongated necks to reach for the foliage near the hospital when they aren’t finding new places to make themselves comfortable. An eclectic array of cats, ranging in all sizes and breeds, brazenly saunter into buildings they don’t belong. Hopefully, the lioness lounging in the apartment complex's common area does not prevent residents from reaching their rooms, because she has no intention of yielding.

⏵ The leopard adorned with a rattlesnake tail in the hospital's cafeteria may be difficult to ignore, given his determination to devour everything in sight and attack anyone in his way.

⏵ Cat scratches and bites pose a significant risk of infection. In the event a character is injured, individuals can expect the companion bots to quickly seek them out and approach them with a special antibiotic cream developed specifically for these cats. Refusal of treatment may result in severe symptoms, including high fevers and itching. In extreme cases, individuals may begin to exhibit cat-like characteristics, ranging from physical alterations to changes in mental traits.

⏵ Numerous other creatures of all shapes and sizes will be coming and going through the city. You may play with this as you wish!

While the uproar caused by these guests doesn’t particularly bother Aurora, she does send out a message to everyone wearing an earpiece to request their assistance in capturing the larger animals that her companion bots may not be able to handle themselves. She has converted an island to the East into a temporary holding area until the companion bots can set them up with something a little more permanent.

⏵ network ⏴

Welcome to Etraya! Upon your arrival, Aurora provided an earpiece, a device to make communication with others stuck in the same situation more simple. The device connects to an internal network, which is accessible by everyone else currently residing on planet. Whether you’re looking for guidance, camaraderie, or want to see if there are any familiar faces around, this is the perfect place to do it! Please feel free to post any questions, offer your name, ask for assistance, or maybe complain to the powers that be about how you’ve got better things to be doing than sitting around here completing their missions. Maybe they’re listening. Maybe they’re not.

⏵ NOTES⏴

⏵ During April, Etraya’s getting a little wet! Those who spend too long in the rain may experience a few unfortunate effects.

⏵ The rain brings in new flora, including a couple that may cause characters to experience aggression and impulsivity, or take a stroll through others’ dreams.

⏵ New animals also appear! While many of them are friendly, others… are less so. The cats specifically seem to be a little grumpy. Characters scratched or bitten by these cats may find themselves becoming just as catty.

For any questions relating to the contents of this log, please reply below. All other questions can be directed to the FAQ. The TDM is game canon, meaning everything happening above is occurring within the game properly. Those who apply to join in the April application round may keep their TDM threads as game canon.

⏵FULL NAVIGATION⏴

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Krouse may have had worse dreams, but this one does have the dubious advantage of novelty and uncanny vividness. The first time he goes under, it feels real, and the sputtering, too brief burn of the breath he manages to take when he's hauled up comes with a hot burst of panic.

He struggles against the hands holding him, blinking water out of his eyes, trying to see clearly enough to get a lock - and back under he goes, bubbles rushing past his face as he thrashes.

By round five, watery snot spews out of his nose as he chokes on a gasp, the crashing rush of his heartbeat still not loud enough to drown out the singing of the total asshole at the dunk tank next to his. Singing that has a choral counterpoint, a blurry line of -

"You've got to be fucking kidding m- " Krouse snarls, his raw voice cracking in teenaged indignation, and receives a mouthful of icy water for his troubles.

The puppets and Wade keep singing. It's the song doesn't end after all, it must go on! But the scene does eventually change. Krouse isn't being waterboarded anymore or tortured this time, but the dreamer still is. Wade is tied up while a very buff and muscular woman is punching him over and over, bruises coloring him all sorts of interesting shades.

"And they'll continue singing it forever just because--" Wade is punched across the face and finally stops singing, going into a fit of coughing, "Gonna... have to go on... singing without me, Charlie Horse..." He looks up, but instead of finding the puppets, he sees his dream guest instead.

"Huh, you're--" He spits some blood on the ground, "You're new. C'mere. I have a very important question. Critical. How's your singing voice?"

He can see where this is going.

"I'm not fucking singing," Krouse says, wet hair plastered to his forehead above hot and red-rimmed eyes. He drags a soaked red hoodie sleeve across his mouth and leans over to spit, too, which shifts approximately none of the metallic, sour taste of bile and terror. "What's the plan, here? Reverse torture? Annoy them into killing you?"

He wonders where on his list of personal lows arguing with a figment of his imagination ranks. Bottom ten, minimum.

Except: you're new. Except: this isn't the first time he's ended up in someone else's nightmare, and the last thing he remembers before this wasn't crawling into bed. Except: fuck.

"Don't give away the game, dick hole!" Wade hisses before he's punched again across the face. Because of course that's what Wade wants. It's what he's wanted for a long time.

They're falling now, right off a building. Although the drop seems to span forever, the cement below never getting any closer. The puppets are still there too, surrounding them as they fall and flap in the wind, singing as they plummet to their deaths. He looks different, the previously handsome but sickly face now covered in scars and bald-- scars that cover his arms too.

"I usually love an audience, but not when I'm doing this." Not when he's spiraling into the darkest parts of himself. Audiences are for when he's putting on a show to hide behind.

"Fuck!"

Krouse doesn't flail at the air, as much as instinct tells him to. He's fallen before, learned to cope with the panic, how to pivot mid-air to reorient himself to see the ground. If he can see the ground, he can find something to swap with.

There's nothing but the fall, and more puppets, and a guy who looks like the contents of many of Krouse's own personal nightmares. The lurch in his guts only has fifty percent to do with the untethered pull of gravity, and maybe one surprised percent to do with how the guy has been apparently dipped in acid, rolled in salt, and healed over in whorls of gnarled flesh.

He knows this kind of dream.

"I'm not exactly loving this either!" He snaps back, anger quicker and easier than fear. "Great time to think some happy fucking thoughts, Peter Pan!"

Wade seems like he doesn't have a care in the world as they plummet. He even turns in the air, hands resting behind his head like he's laying on a bed and not falling to his death, "Happy thoughts... hmm." He seems to think about that, "I gotta be careful about that one or this is going to turn into a wet dream." Wade waggles his hairless brows, then grins, "Oh! I've got something!"

Suddenly they are on their feet again, and covered in blood. The singing has mercifully stopped, and the puppets are nowhere to be found. But they are standing on a pile of bodies. Bodies wearing different variations of polka-dots and bright colors, and big red shoes much too big for their feet.

"Fuck you, clowns!" The man is now dressed up in a full-body red and black suit, with two katanas in his hands being wielded with brutal precision as they are being surrounded by more clowns, all laughing, honking their noses, and smiling even as Wade slaughters them. He looks over to his dream visitor, pulling out one of his Desert Eagle pistols from its holster and tossing it to him, "Make yourself useful, kid! These bastards need to die! Ha-ha! Oh, yes-- this is much better. This is my happy place!"

This is the mindscape of a sick, twisted individual. Krouse takes in the absolute goddamn horrorshow of the scene change with a stricken expression, torn between losing his lunch over the change of momentum or losing his shit at the capering lunatic he's trapped with.

But then again, at least this isn't a wet dream. Or he really, truly, deeply fucking hopes this isn't a wet dream.

Krouse catches the tossed gun reflexively, sparing a second to think that, of fucking course, this is the kind of guy who carries a Desert Eagle. It goes with the katanas.

"There is something seriously fucking wrong with you," he hisses, which is information that he's pretty confident has been shared with his brand new acquaintance before, and pivots to bring the gun to bear on the nearest clown approaching from the rear.

By sheer unhappy fucking coincidence, his first shot nails one of the clowns right in the plastic water squirting flower on its chest. He makes a noise of strangled irritation as blood gushes out of the hole with perfect slapstick timing, then shoots another clown, whose menacing banana creme pie flies up in a tumbling arc before falling to splatter all over its prone face.

"I know! But don't pretend this isn't kind of fun!" Wade cries out gleefully, turning just in time to see that pie splatter on Krouse's face laughing out loud and the perfect display of absurdity, "Classic!"

It goes on like this for a while, the pile of clowns getting higher and higher and the parade of clowns continue, which do seem to be coming out of a clown car if he looks off in the distance. There are a few mimes in the crowd too for good measure, who die just as silently as they'd lived.

"Oh, yeah, classic!"

The slam of recoil up his arms is a huge, concussive jolt every time, gun kicking in his hands like an enthusiastic dog yanking at its leash to go play. Krouse hits the point where he knows he must be out of bullets, miscounted or not, and it just keeps firing - because in dreams, you only have to reload when it's dramatic.

"My favourite part of going to the fair! Cotton candy, Ferris Wheel, kill a bunch of psycho clowns!" Krouse yells, a rising hysterical edge to his voice, and blows off the top of another bewigged head. "Who needs Call of Duty when you have mime murder?"

Which this does kind of remind him of. Zombie mode, specifically. Wave after wave of dumb enemies, infinite ammo on, and a mindless flow of reaction.

Wade loves a good dramatic reload. A bullet rips through the skull of a clown that looks a little bit like Pennywise, still giggling as he crumples at his feet, "Nice shot."

If he notices that his dream partner is losing it a little, Wade doesn't say anything. Wade doesn't like even being in his own head, so it's obviously not going to be fun for anyone else. Even if he's doing the fun stuff right now, like massacring clowns. Although as it goes on, there are cracks in this particular fantasy. Rain starts and the clowns start to slow and the pile of bodies at their feet seeming far less absurd. And more horrific. The clowns shifting to just normal people. Faces locked in terror as the rain washes the clown make up away. Wade stumbles. They are faces he recognizes. People he's killed, not that Krouse is likely to know that.

Then there are a few faces of those who aren't dead yet, but may as well be if he is supposed to be their savior. Dophinder. Weasel. Cable. Domino...

"Bet she's not feeling so lucky now." Wade's katanas fall to the ground at his feet when a hand shoots out of the pile of bodies and a familiar voice calls to him, 'Wa-ade?'

He tastes the bile crawling up his throat, "Ness?" He rushes over, but much too slow in the way that dreams tended to do, before finally pulling the injured and dying woman out of the pile of corpses, shaking as he hauls her into his lap, "No...no-no-! Not again!"

When Krouse hears the crack in Wade's voice, he thinks he'd prefer it if the puppets came back.

He lowers the gun with his back still turned on what he can guess is happening behind him. The rain keeps pouring down, mixing with the blood into shallow, diluted puddles around the crumpled bodies of people he doesn't know, and doesn't want to know.

"It's not," he starts, and cuts himself off, squeezing his eyes shut hard enough for a second that white stars burst behind his eyelids like echoes of muzzle flash.

Krouse turns around, gun in hand and finger off the trigger, and watches someone whose name he just heard for the first time go through the worst thing that's ever happened to him, and it doesn't matter if it's not real. This is the song that never ends, after all.

He can't not be here, but he can keep his mouth shut.

Wade stays there in that pain, Vanessa dying in his arms, utterly helpless to stop the inevitable, for what feels like eons. It's a moment that's seared into the back of his retinas. The other bodies disappear, leaving them alone in a too dark apartment with a toaster oven that seems to be dinging over and over and over again in time of that familiar song.

He cries then. Sobs. He doesn't even remember he's got company in this dream-- this horror of his mind. Krouse can take heart though because he's not going to be stuck here forever. He won't have to relive this again. Of course, he might well have his own horrors waiting for him behind his eyelids in his own dreams, but he won't have to see Wade's again if he's lucky.

Wade's eyes are slow to open, blinking back the much too bright lights of the sun streaming through his window.

Krouse doesn't belong in this memory. It's a sense that goes past discomfort into dislocation, as if his body is a half-step out of sync with the apartment that closes around them like the stilled walls of a dead heart.

At some point, during one of the dings, he puts the gun on the kitchen counter and braces his hand against its edge, his feet not enough to hold him up on their own. That's when he realizes he's about to take a step forward, to do - something. He doesn't know what it is, yet.

And he doesn't find out, because that's when Wade wakes up.

Krouse sits up jerkily from the damp grass outside of the apartment building like one of Wade's puppets snatched at by an invisible hand. The first breath he takes is ragged and glass-edged, and the one that follow aren't much better.

He scrubs at his face, then squeezes his eyes shut to dig his knuckles against them, forcing back an unwelcome burn with the clarity of pressure.

"Fuck," he says, strangled and quiet, and curls up into himself like a fist.

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TDM 002

shadowbloom | cw: torture

cw: blood, torture

cw: blood, torture

cw: suicidal ideation... just all the cws apparently.

cw: suicidal ideation, more cws will continue

no subject

cw: blood, gun violence

Re: cw: blood, gun violence

cw: blood, gun violence, clown slaughter

cw: continued more of the same

cw: blood, death, grief

Re: cw: blood, death, grief

no subject