April 23-29: EVENT - INVASION
So, this month's events are up! Event: Invasion. Sound interesting? LET ME RUIN IT WITH A GIGANTIC BLOCK OF TEXT. Also, I've been adding ETAs here and there so uh look out for those?
The almost infinitely longer version: Almost since she's been here, Toshiko has been rebuilding and tweaking the time lock she designed in canon but didn't live to see operating. Now she's going to put it to the test. Without asking anyone if they mind. :|
When the next flood approaches, the time lock will come into effect in an attempt to 'seal' the Barge inside a bubble of time that will prevent the flood having an influence. And it works! Sort of. But the time lock interacts badly with the Barge's weirdness and has its own influence on the people therein.
This triggers Stage 1: the Moment In History flood. This will briefly take all affected characters back to a pre-Barge point in their past - any point. It's self-explanatory; more to come later. For Tosh, it takes her back to a few days back at Torchwood where she encountered Adam. She's forgotten about him, but the time lock malfunction will restore her memory. And simply knowing that he exists will bring him onto the Barge.
So who's Adam? Adam Smith is an alien being who lives and thrives by manipulating the memory of the people around him. During the flood, he will worm his way into the Barge, manipulating the network and the same sort of functionality that gives us stuff like Barge mistletoe.
If you've seen his episode, you'll know that Adam operated by touch. But that's not really going to work here and I refuse to let the 'how' get in the way of the 'what' for the sake of Torchwood science. :|| Let's just say that having more people around, or being in an inter-dimensional void, or the mysterious power source of the Barge makes him stronger; it's the same sort of ass pull the show would use.
Anyway, ultimately, a few days after the flood everyone will know who he is. (Breach rules apply: from here on in, everyone is affected.) As far as you know, Adam's a Warden - currently between Inmates - and he's been here as long as anybody can remember. By your own standards you're on good terms with him. If you're the sort of person who makes friends easily, you're BFF; if you're less so, you have a social acquaintance. Even if you're a douche and you hate everything, you respect Adam for his intelligence or his ability or even his physical prowess. Like with anybody else on the Barge, you'll remember specific events: say,that time he had your back against the Borg, or what a dick he was during the mirror flood, or how he turned into an adorable chipmunk during the Animal Magic flood. (This will be consistent - everyone will remember the same things. If at any point you need a specific conclusion on 'what happened when...', ask me. <3) His posts, and comments to other people's posts, will be in the network's history.
In the past, it may have occurred to you that it's odd for him to more-or-less get along with such a disparate bunch of people, but you shrugged it off. He's just such an awesome dude. Overall you know him and - however uncharacteristically - to a varying extent you trust him. Something that you'll know about him is that he's afraid of the deck. Like, deathly afraid. He won't even go through there to get to the Warden-only areas unless he absolutely has to. He claims he's agoraphobic and everyone's just sort of accepted this.
So once everyone's under his spell. he'll start changing things. This is Stage 2. And what Adam's going to do is fix everyone! :D
Take a look at your character. What is the one negative aspect of their behaviour that a someone else would consider 'worst', or most frequently at the fore? How would they behave if it was reversed?
Adam's general aim is to make people happier, calmer or more satisfied in themselves. He wants them to feel better about themselves so that they won't want to change back if he gets caught out. In his canon appearance, he 'fixes' Toshiko's shyness and Owen's aggression: she becomes less uptight, more sexual and significantly more abusive towards Owen, who becomes a bespectacled nerdy doormat. To use my own characters as further examples, he would 'fix' Shego's weaponised sarcasm, making her more sincere and sociable but a bit more meek and mild. He would 'fix' Eris' sadism, making her more centred and genuinely friendly but deeply regretful over the chaos she's ruled over and resentful about a role she would see as being forced upon her.
To clarify, this is not a retread of the mirrorverse flood. Good people are still good (or at least well-intentioned); Inmates still have a reason to be there. You may have to alter Inmates' remembered histories slightly to fit with their new personalities, but this flood has more to do with their motivations and the way they perceive themselves and interact with other people than what they actually do all day. If they've done bad things in the past, they've still done them. They've just done them with a smile. :D Side effects of this event may include mild creepiness.
Wardens will be trickier if they don't have any clear 'problems' or hang-ups. Personality alterations might not be obvious and may only emerge in times of stress. Keep in mind that Adam can read your memories: he knows everything you've done and everything you feel about it. Using my own stable again, Tosh's neuroses are obvious but Iroh and Merlin's are less so. But they both carry a lot of guilt over people close to them who've been hurt; without that, they would still be more or less the same people on a day-to-day basis but in a time of crisis they'd be much more chill with allowing people to risk their lives. So, on some levels they'd both be 'worse' people overall, but it's not like they'd suddenly turn evil or become Inmate material.
Changes don't have to be massively 'deep'. Losing (or gaining) a personality quirk that will a (preferably positive) impact on their day-to-day interactions with other people are enough.
The key here is to be imaginative. The purpose of this event is to see how your characters would act and interact if they weren't hampered by a particularly troublesome personality trait, and how it would improve or otherwise affect their relationships with other people. Keep in mind that Adam will want to create in your character an alternate personality that they will in some ways see as superior to their former self.
Also, everything is retroactive. Your character's entire memory has been altered, so breach rules again: everyone is affected somehow, and nobody will know anything has changed. As far as they know, they've always been this way, both on the Barge and off it. How this may have affected current interactions is obviously something that will need to be discussed in advance, which is partly what this post is for!
ETA: If there are parts of a character's past history that are very heavily reliant on the character trait you're interested in changing, and cannot possibly be reinterpreted to have happened for any other reason, it's fair to say that they may have changed their ways or developed into their 'fixed' personality since those events happened, possibly even during their time on the Barge.
ANYWAY. This goes on unhampered for a couple days. Then cracks start appearing. The problem with Adam's power is that when he pushes memories into your head, some things might fall out. Some characters might find themselves reaching for the face of an old friend or a particularly treasured memory and find that they've suddenly forgotten. In a couple of extreme cases, characters may completely forget other people they know well. No Admiral announcement, so it can't be a flood. None of this can be attributed to Adam. Yet.
However, the Barge is partly staffed by creepers very smart, paranoid people. Some characters keep off-network records: handwritten diaries, obsessive notetaking and whatnot. Anyone going back to these off-network records will notice that Adam is simply not there. Even people who know him as a best friend will look in their diaries and find nothing; they'll look around for gifts they remember getting from him and find them mysteriously lost. And of course, he is the only person of whom this is true.
ETA: Something I forgot. Adam will be careful to zero in on people who are obviously going to present a threat and attempt to deal with them before they can raise an alarm. This will include people who are very obviously on the ball as regards record-keeping - everyone who uses the Barge Blotter thing, for one. This can take the form of altering memories to cast Adam as such a stand-up guy that he doesn't need to have notes made about him, or straight-up blackmail ('here is a memory of a terrible thing you did in your past and I helped you get away with, if you talk I'll tell everyone'). These tactics may not work, and he may not get everyone relevant? But he'll try.
This all leads to Stage 3: the takedown. When Adam realises people are on to him (and he'll work it out very quickly: he starts losing his ability to hold a physical form when people's confidence in his existence is shaken), he'll start lashing out. If people try to confront him, he'll go into their heads and ruin their dearest, most cherished memories, with the promise they can be restored if only he's allowed to survive on the Barge. He'll go to other people and give them false memories to engender their loyalty as defenders. Characters may have some aspects of their old personalities restored as they lose faith in Adam's existence.
It'll get messy. Adam will be turning people against each other, creating long-running enmities and deep-seated loyalties to distract them from getting at him. This is something that will obviously be plotted out in more detail closer to the time. Inevitably, though, he'll be cornered.
In canon, Adam is returned to the Void because Team Torchwood took amnesia drugs to forget him, but obviously that won't work for game purposes because what use is an experience you don't remember. But all is not lost. Remember how I said he's phobic of the deck? That's because as far as he's concerned, the twinkly black space around the Barge is the Void. And just as forgetting him will return him there, returning him there will make everyone forget him. Somebody will need to work this out, although frankly he was kind of a moron and just straight-up told them how to kill him in canon.
So! He gets thrown overboard and retroactively ceases to exist. Everyone returns to normal. The people of the Barge will remember the changes they underwent, and they will faintly remember the alternate past Adam created (just as they remember the alternate lives they had during the mirror flood or the summer camp breach) but as far as Adam himself goes? They don't specifically remember him. There's a sort of blank space in their memories. They know somebody fucked with them and got their ass kicked? They just don't remember who or what it was. They don't remember a word he said or what he looked like, just the influence he had.
And Tosh has a broken time lock and a vague suspicion this was all her fault.
Aaaand that's a wrap. Enjoy the wait until the next disaster, Barge.
Significantly Contracted Version
This was originally planned to be almost twice as long, but the mods asked me to keep it down to a week, which is sensible. There's only so long anyone wants to spend away from their Original Flavour characters. Hence this is all going to be a bit thick and fast:
23rd-24th - Stage 1: the Moment In History flood. This will briefly take all affected characters back to a pre-Barge point in their past - any point. Adam appears via the flood and installs himself into the Barge, but remains silent. The moment the flood ends:
25th-27th - Stage 2: People's personalities are 'fixed'. Things continue as normal for a few days. Adam will be milling around and enjoying the burrow he's made for himself in everyone's memory.
28th - Stage 2.5: Things start going awry: some characters lose some old memories, and in a couple of cases they entirely forget someone close to them. The paranoid filekeepers of the Barge start to realise that Adam may not be all he's cracked up to be.
28th-29th - Stage 3: Adam starts seriously screwing with people's memories and creating chaos to try and keep his grip on the people of the Barge, but ultimately fails. He's cast overboard and returns to whence he came.
Adam will be NPCed by myself (and anyone else familiar with that episode who feels like taking him up? Let's talk); obviously some interactions with him will have to be plotted out and assumed because of time constraints and so forth.
AND THAT'S THAT. DISCUSS, PLOT, QUESTIONS, ETC.? I'll be putting up a specific post for the flood and a finalising arrangements-type post closer to the time.
The almost infinitely longer version: Almost since she's been here, Toshiko has been rebuilding and tweaking the time lock she designed in canon but didn't live to see operating. Now she's going to put it to the test. Without asking anyone if they mind. :|
When the next flood approaches, the time lock will come into effect in an attempt to 'seal' the Barge inside a bubble of time that will prevent the flood having an influence. And it works! Sort of. But the time lock interacts badly with the Barge's weirdness and has its own influence on the people therein.
This triggers Stage 1: the Moment In History flood. This will briefly take all affected characters back to a pre-Barge point in their past - any point. It's self-explanatory; more to come later. For Tosh, it takes her back to a few days back at Torchwood where she encountered Adam. She's forgotten about him, but the time lock malfunction will restore her memory. And simply knowing that he exists will bring him onto the Barge.
So who's Adam? Adam Smith is an alien being who lives and thrives by manipulating the memory of the people around him. During the flood, he will worm his way into the Barge, manipulating the network and the same sort of functionality that gives us stuff like Barge mistletoe.
If you've seen his episode, you'll know that Adam operated by touch. But that's not really going to work here and I refuse to let the 'how' get in the way of the 'what' for the sake of Torchwood science. :|| Let's just say that having more people around, or being in an inter-dimensional void, or the mysterious power source of the Barge makes him stronger; it's the same sort of ass pull the show would use.
Anyway, ultimately, a few days after the flood everyone will know who he is. (Breach rules apply: from here on in, everyone is affected.) As far as you know, Adam's a Warden - currently between Inmates - and he's been here as long as anybody can remember. By your own standards you're on good terms with him. If you're the sort of person who makes friends easily, you're BFF; if you're less so, you have a social acquaintance. Even if you're a douche and you hate everything, you respect Adam for his intelligence or his ability or even his physical prowess. Like with anybody else on the Barge, you'll remember specific events: say,that time he had your back against the Borg, or what a dick he was during the mirror flood, or how he turned into an adorable chipmunk during the Animal Magic flood. (This will be consistent - everyone will remember the same things. If at any point you need a specific conclusion on 'what happened when...', ask me. <3) His posts, and comments to other people's posts, will be in the network's history.
In the past, it may have occurred to you that it's odd for him to more-or-less get along with such a disparate bunch of people, but you shrugged it off. He's just such an awesome dude. Overall you know him and - however uncharacteristically - to a varying extent you trust him. Something that you'll know about him is that he's afraid of the deck. Like, deathly afraid. He won't even go through there to get to the Warden-only areas unless he absolutely has to. He claims he's agoraphobic and everyone's just sort of accepted this.
So once everyone's under his spell. he'll start changing things. This is Stage 2. And what Adam's going to do is fix everyone! :D
Take a look at your character. What is the one negative aspect of their behaviour that a someone else would consider 'worst', or most frequently at the fore? How would they behave if it was reversed?
Adam's general aim is to make people happier, calmer or more satisfied in themselves. He wants them to feel better about themselves so that they won't want to change back if he gets caught out. In his canon appearance, he 'fixes' Toshiko's shyness and Owen's aggression: she becomes less uptight, more sexual and significantly more abusive towards Owen, who becomes a bespectacled nerdy doormat. To use my own characters as further examples, he would 'fix' Shego's weaponised sarcasm, making her more sincere and sociable but a bit more meek and mild. He would 'fix' Eris' sadism, making her more centred and genuinely friendly but deeply regretful over the chaos she's ruled over and resentful about a role she would see as being forced upon her.
To clarify, this is not a retread of the mirrorverse flood. Good people are still good (or at least well-intentioned); Inmates still have a reason to be there. You may have to alter Inmates' remembered histories slightly to fit with their new personalities, but this flood has more to do with their motivations and the way they perceive themselves and interact with other people than what they actually do all day. If they've done bad things in the past, they've still done them. They've just done them with a smile. :D Side effects of this event may include mild creepiness.
Wardens will be trickier if they don't have any clear 'problems' or hang-ups. Personality alterations might not be obvious and may only emerge in times of stress. Keep in mind that Adam can read your memories: he knows everything you've done and everything you feel about it. Using my own stable again, Tosh's neuroses are obvious but Iroh and Merlin's are less so. But they both carry a lot of guilt over people close to them who've been hurt; without that, they would still be more or less the same people on a day-to-day basis but in a time of crisis they'd be much more chill with allowing people to risk their lives. So, on some levels they'd both be 'worse' people overall, but it's not like they'd suddenly turn evil or become Inmate material.
Changes don't have to be massively 'deep'. Losing (or gaining) a personality quirk that will a (preferably positive) impact on their day-to-day interactions with other people are enough.
The key here is to be imaginative. The purpose of this event is to see how your characters would act and interact if they weren't hampered by a particularly troublesome personality trait, and how it would improve or otherwise affect their relationships with other people. Keep in mind that Adam will want to create in your character an alternate personality that they will in some ways see as superior to their former self.
Also, everything is retroactive. Your character's entire memory has been altered, so breach rules again: everyone is affected somehow, and nobody will know anything has changed. As far as they know, they've always been this way, both on the Barge and off it. How this may have affected current interactions is obviously something that will need to be discussed in advance, which is partly what this post is for!
ETA: If there are parts of a character's past history that are very heavily reliant on the character trait you're interested in changing, and cannot possibly be reinterpreted to have happened for any other reason, it's fair to say that they may have changed their ways or developed into their 'fixed' personality since those events happened, possibly even during their time on the Barge.
ANYWAY. This goes on unhampered for a couple days. Then cracks start appearing. The problem with Adam's power is that when he pushes memories into your head, some things might fall out. Some characters might find themselves reaching for the face of an old friend or a particularly treasured memory and find that they've suddenly forgotten. In a couple of extreme cases, characters may completely forget other people they know well. No Admiral announcement, so it can't be a flood. None of this can be attributed to Adam. Yet.
However, the Barge is partly staffed by creepers very smart, paranoid people. Some characters keep off-network records: handwritten diaries, obsessive notetaking and whatnot. Anyone going back to these off-network records will notice that Adam is simply not there. Even people who know him as a best friend will look in their diaries and find nothing; they'll look around for gifts they remember getting from him and find them mysteriously lost. And of course, he is the only person of whom this is true.
ETA: Something I forgot. Adam will be careful to zero in on people who are obviously going to present a threat and attempt to deal with them before they can raise an alarm. This will include people who are very obviously on the ball as regards record-keeping - everyone who uses the Barge Blotter thing, for one. This can take the form of altering memories to cast Adam as such a stand-up guy that he doesn't need to have notes made about him, or straight-up blackmail ('here is a memory of a terrible thing you did in your past and I helped you get away with, if you talk I'll tell everyone'). These tactics may not work, and he may not get everyone relevant? But he'll try.
This all leads to Stage 3: the takedown. When Adam realises people are on to him (and he'll work it out very quickly: he starts losing his ability to hold a physical form when people's confidence in his existence is shaken), he'll start lashing out. If people try to confront him, he'll go into their heads and ruin their dearest, most cherished memories, with the promise they can be restored if only he's allowed to survive on the Barge. He'll go to other people and give them false memories to engender their loyalty as defenders. Characters may have some aspects of their old personalities restored as they lose faith in Adam's existence.
It'll get messy. Adam will be turning people against each other, creating long-running enmities and deep-seated loyalties to distract them from getting at him. This is something that will obviously be plotted out in more detail closer to the time. Inevitably, though, he'll be cornered.
In canon, Adam is returned to the Void because Team Torchwood took amnesia drugs to forget him, but obviously that won't work for game purposes because what use is an experience you don't remember. But all is not lost. Remember how I said he's phobic of the deck? That's because as far as he's concerned, the twinkly black space around the Barge is the Void. And just as forgetting him will return him there, returning him there will make everyone forget him. Somebody will need to work this out, although frankly he was kind of a moron and just straight-up told them how to kill him in canon.
So! He gets thrown overboard and retroactively ceases to exist. Everyone returns to normal. The people of the Barge will remember the changes they underwent, and they will faintly remember the alternate past Adam created (just as they remember the alternate lives they had during the mirror flood or the summer camp breach) but as far as Adam himself goes? They don't specifically remember him. There's a sort of blank space in their memories. They know somebody fucked with them and got their ass kicked? They just don't remember who or what it was. They don't remember a word he said or what he looked like, just the influence he had.
And Tosh has a broken time lock and a vague suspicion this was all her fault.
Aaaand that's a wrap. Enjoy the wait until the next disaster, Barge.
Significantly Contracted Version
This was originally planned to be almost twice as long, but the mods asked me to keep it down to a week, which is sensible. There's only so long anyone wants to spend away from their Original Flavour characters. Hence this is all going to be a bit thick and fast:
23rd-24th - Stage 1: the Moment In History flood. This will briefly take all affected characters back to a pre-Barge point in their past - any point. Adam appears via the flood and installs himself into the Barge, but remains silent. The moment the flood ends:
25th-27th - Stage 2: People's personalities are 'fixed'. Things continue as normal for a few days. Adam will be milling around and enjoying the burrow he's made for himself in everyone's memory.
28th - Stage 2.5: Things start going awry: some characters lose some old memories, and in a couple of cases they entirely forget someone close to them. The paranoid filekeepers of the Barge start to realise that Adam may not be all he's cracked up to be.
28th-29th - Stage 3: Adam starts seriously screwing with people's memories and creating chaos to try and keep his grip on the people of the Barge, but ultimately fails. He's cast overboard and returns to whence he came.
Adam will be NPCed by myself (and anyone else familiar with that episode who feels like taking him up? Let's talk); obviously some interactions with him will have to be plotted out and assumed because of time constraints and so forth.
AND THAT'S THAT. DISCUSS, PLOT, QUESTIONS, ETC.? I'll be putting up a specific post for the flood and a finalising arrangements-type post closer to the time.