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Entry tags:
- !event; countdown; day 14,
- !open post,
- alucard,
- chikusa kakimoto,
- elizabeth bathory,
- featherine augustus aurora,
- gladion,
- jaune arc,
- jirou sakuma,
- koujirou genda,
- lenka utsugi,
- louis,
- mako,
- makoto fukami,
- mitsuru kirijo,
- nakigitsune,
- nobunaga oda,
- okuyasu nijimura,
- pharos,
- raidou kuzunoha xiv,
- yuuri katsuki
COUNTDOWN: FUTURE & PAST
It's been a week since the first network post. Upon waking up early Saturday morning, you notice that the app is not responding. Is it finally over, as strangely as it began?
Which makes explaining what happened impossible. Others have already tried to figure out more about it, but nothing has been working. Bringing it to a repair shop to get it looked at? No programs found. Even getting the phone completely wiped did nothing, as the icon just showed up a few minutes after they walked out of the store. Showed it to a family member? The minute you blinked or turned it around to show them, it simply wasn't there.
It's taunting you. Whoever programmed this is really good. Frighteningly so.
Saturday night rolls and still nothing from the application. The news this Saturday is nothing special. There's been another fire at night that was put out by the firemen and an instance of someone being outside. According to both departments, neither of the incidents are connected. It's just a case of someone who wasn't back home in time and unfortunate damage to a building that occurred with some of the habitats still sleeping inside. It is a tragedy, but no city can survive without any loss of life. It's simply mathematically impossible. It's notable enough that it gets second page billing and a blurb in the morning news, but nothing too huge.
At least you had assumed.
The warning bells of the Nightly Curfew ring across the city as a few people finish locking their doors for the night. As the last bits of light fade from the city, the night lights take over. Civilians are settling in for a late supper and preparations for school or work tomorrow.
Not you, however. There's been a damn headache building for the past hour and by now your ears are ringing. Food doesn't look appetizing and you feel an urge to go to bed early. Maybe you caught the flu or maybe it's just pre-Monday blues a day early, which makes it all the more frustrating. The flower festival is tomorrow!
Either way, a little shut-eye would be welcome at this point. You don't even think too hard about it, and the headache fades into blissful sleep.
2AM and you snap awake. The strange foreboding voice of...something echos in your head. It's the only thing you can hear, with your headache gone, and the quietness of the city is fast asleep. You're not sure why, but the voice makes you get up and grab your phone.
It's humming softly. The icon is glowing again. Before you do, you take a look around and suddenly notice...nothing's moving. Nothing but you. Almost as if time was frozen.
Is that even possible?
You can't back down now. Pressing the button reveals another terms of agreement, but it looks quite different. It's almost...gentle?
It may take a while or near instantly, but you eventually take your finger and trace your name over the signature area to continue. You've gotten this far in any case and this one isn't trying to kill you...at least you think. Yet as your hand moves to write your name, it gets replaced into other letters. Another name that tells you nothing. Somehow you feel like you should, but it's...it's...
It stays there for a few more seconds, leaving you with your thoughts before the contract disappears.
You're back into that chatroom again. Questions pop up in rapid succession before you're even permitted to type anything else. Once more, it seems that you find yourself typing things that aren't matching up with what you really want to say.
At least...you think...
What is your name?
Write it here.
Do you think the future is unavoidable?
Yes | No
Do you consider yourself a bad person?
Yes | No
Have you ever killed someone/something?
Yes | No | Yes, but (insert your reason here)
Did you enjoy it?
Yes | No | It's complicated (but yes) | It's complicated (but no) | It's just complicated
Now share one or two of your darkest secrets with the rest of the group! It's like team bonding, we promise!
Write it down here.
With questions like that and nothing around you moving, you feel like it's going to be a very, very, very long night.
[OOC: Starting from now on, the network posts will allow users to post their names, but they will show up as their CANON ones. The user's persona can be added at the end, or not show up at all. Additionally, the occupations will still be censored.
MEMORY REGAIN: Right before their answers are posted, they will also get a longer flash of someone calling them by this name. The memory HAS to be someone calling them by their name. It could be both a good or a bad memory, that is up to you.]
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[It's not really a lighthearted or a flippant observation, but he's not committed to it, either. A threatening app that wants to be thought of as protection. And more mysteries than he can count surrounding it, perhaps more than the entire mystery of Eddan together.]
it was the same for me, for the contract.
[Even if it still feels familiar. Like the choice isn't new. Like he's accepted this before, a choice that isn't a choice. It's probably just the hallucination, messing with his head.]
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As for fate, I'm not comfortable with that idea. It doesn't feel right. That's like saying I've never made a choice in my life, isn't it? If fate exists then do we matter? Actually, thinking about it...
If the app is saying that we make choices of our own free will, but then it brings up fate, which is it? I don't think you can have both. Maybe it's to justify forcing us to do things and pretending we chose it?
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[He's being careful with the possibility. They're already in a suspicious app with a lot of people who could be suspicious, but if they start turning against each other... who knows what would happen.]
fate... it's confusing. and philosophical. someone i talked to said that they do this sort of thing, in the really old philosophy classes.
[He doesn't really have any deep answers. He's 15, and hasn't thought particularly hard about fate at all, though he does know that this odd mixture of fate and contracts doesn't make much more sense than the infamous TOS no matter how professionally it's spun.]
it's strange that they'd need to justify it, though. after last week.
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[He pauses for a while, chewing his lip. In dire circumstances, he can actually think before he starts typing.]
This stupid thing's really getting to me, I guess. Nevermind.
It's definitely weird. They can do whatever they want already so I don't get it
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[It's less a platitude, and more sympathy: because he understands the urge to fly off the handle, he really does. Pointlessly frightening this many people, a lot of them students, possibly some younger than him; he could be properly angry about it, if he let himself, but...
Maybe it's shellshock, or just the recognition that taking it out on his phone won't change anything. (You can't change anything, help anyone, you have no weapons, nothing, nothing, nothing.)
The next message comes after a minute, maybe two:]
maybe they have rules, that they need to follow. just not ours.
[He remembers a brief conversation about that, that neither party probably took seriously. But it's something.]
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that would explain some of this.
[All these network shenanigans and giving them the runaround with at least two messed up signatures, wouldn't it be nice to explain all that? It might be reaching. But he's been thinking about the countdown. It makes him wonder.]
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[It comes back to that a lot, doesn't it? They can't answer that any more than they can answer their own damn questionnaires, but as for what they can do...]
i wonder if anyone would agree. like last time.
[His last answer, at least, wasn't too far off from his own thoughts. What changed?]
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[Can't be nice all the time.]
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[Are they talking about entirely different people or is he being diplomatic, mysteries.]
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[Maybe it's better, to bull forward. They haven't had the choice so far -- but... there's still something in him, that wonders about the choices they've been allowed or not allowed to make. But try as he might he can't quite put his finger on it.]
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I don't want to say that going with it is our only option.
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[Something about that feels right. If you're trapped in a course of action, find a way to make it your own. Maybe it's just empty struggle; but he's never been the type to be able to take things sitting down.]
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But it also makes him think along that line. Change... in another life, he'd brood over this for a while, but he starts typing as he thinks.]
That's what I want to do. But I keep not having any idea how. It's getting beyond frustrating.
Actually speaking of change
I have a memory that isn't mine that belongs to the name I have. Someone else answered the questions I've answered. I've been wondering about that for a while, but... you think maybe something's trying to change us?
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[The real question is whether it's a matter of them racing against the clock or not. For the moment, they have bigger things to worry about.]
i hadn't thought of them as memories. but, if the choices we're not allowed to make are someone else's, or... [his reasoning is a bit scattered, because he's also thinking and typing at the same time, and not so good at it, however:] changing us, into someone who would make those choices.
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If you think they're something else I'd like to know what.
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[Unlike dreams, or hallucinations (though he admittedly has less experience with those), he can still taste the visceral fear days later -- and he can tell the latest vision will be the same.]
but i don't remember them.
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I said a name this time, and then I find out there's someone here who has that name. I'm still angry about it and I don't know why. I don't know. It feels too real. Some part of it is still here.
That's why I'm this spooked.
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"Lenka, come have dinner at my house later."
He hadn't thought anything of it at the time, because he hadn't had the second name to go by. But...]
this name... the new one. it was in both visions i had, but i don't remember anyone else's name.
[He kind of wishes he did. Especially the second time.]
the one with the name in your memory, did they see it too?
[If they did, then it's proof that... what? That it's possible for them to make sense of these visions, perhaps, if they can't defang them? Small comfort, but better than none.]
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[Of course, his own experience actually disproves that, but he's not sure how to reassess these visions -- memories? -- in light of that.]
but if people have memories of each other, it's something else.
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[He's acknowledged that by now, even if he doesn't want to, and even if he can't make heads nor tails of his own experience with the app. It's disingenuous for him to pretend there's nothing there.]
we'll find out. all of us, maybe once the countdown ends. [how does he refrain from sounding ominous.png] or before then.
[Nailed it.]
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