+ TDM 001.

[luxflowmod]

Welcome to Luxflow's first TDM.

Let's get into it.

ARRIVAL

— You wake up encased.

It’s dark, naturally, but a few tendrils of light slip past the — vines? Why are you tangled up in vines? It gives you panic — why can’t you remember — breath quickening, in and in and in again. Your frenzied movements against the vines let in more light, more air.

And you breathe.

As you exhale, a shaky but sure breath against the rough foliage, a light flows out of you. It’s just a little orb that pours out, past the greenery and into that unknown.

The vines melt away into ash, and you’re left standing in a clearing, trees impossibly tall and swaying in the night breeze. Your breath comes in deep and steady, now, and it occurs to you that you should be panicking still … But then as you look around the clearing, you see more vine cocoons, like yours, and others climbing out of them …

There’s people in the center of the clearing. They’re armed but they’re friendly, and they tell you in short and sweet sentences about the place you’re in now …

“ You’re in the Feeding Forest. ” says one, “ This place’ll eat you alive if you can’t break out of the vines. You must be special, huh? ”

Special?

“ C'mon, we’ll take you back to the city. You’re probably here for a while. We’ll fill you in … ”

SPIT SHINE YOUR BLACK CLOUDS

You're trying to get your bearings, but this City stops for no one.

On the next morning after your arrival, there's a festival! It's near the hole, Heart and Center, in the middle of the place. When you arrive there, you're fooled for a moment, and the place doesn't seem so scary; the colors are bright and the citizens are so cheerful as they dance and cheer on the new arrivals to strange music.

No one really knows why they're celebrating, but the arrival of the strange ones feels like it's heralding something good. Maybe there's unheard prayers that are being answered! Maybe their prayers will be answered! There's drinks and food and song, so why not join in? You can get drunk or high or just chill and take it all in.

Yet as the festivities burn on, the locals all hush at some point late in the evening. Words ripple through the throngs, and it reaches you fast. They're going to heave prayers up to the Setting Sun. But first, the great chasm needs an offering from those praying.

They throw in valuables and invaluables alike; drinks and food and clothes and jewelry and weapons and boomboxes are thrown in without a second thought.

What will you offer? If you choose to at all, you'll feel bereft; if it's a memory or power, a light will flow from your mouth and down into the chasm ...

They're silent thereafter in their prayer. Do you pray, too? If you do or you don't, you can't help but feel intense shame, like someone is laughing at you ... Still, after all that, the party continues on.

You're just a little more unsettled, now, a little more uncertain.

SILHOUETTE SALOON

The Silhouette Saloon is open! Or so the signage around town says. Excessive and garish, these signs point characters down a winding path into a place called the Silhouette Saloon. When you enter, everything goes white and everyone appears merely as shadows ... Pretty on the nose, but it provides a strange anonymity.

The fixtures of the saloon are all shadowed out too, stark black against the misty backdrop of white. You can drink here and be free to tell your secrets to anyone who'll listen. The bartender or maybe one of the dancers just finishing their set will tell you that this place keeps secrets.

If you were to tell someone a secret, or hear one, you wouldn't remember it exactly. You would, however, feel a strange nagging sensation about the person who told it to you. Once on the outside, you might not be able to get through a conversation with them without thinking they're hiding something ...

If you don't tell someone a secret, you'll feel compelled to tell someone one once you're out of the Saloon, where the secret won't be so hidden ... It might be better to tell one in the safety of anonymity then, hm?

But the longer you're in there, the more you lose of yourself. You'll forget your name, your purpose, everything about yourself until you pass out on the dance floor. You'll wake up outside the Saloon, stricken with amnesia. It'll wear off after a few hours, though.

PITY'S GOT AN UGLY PRICE TAG

Besides the Drifters and Givers, a new group has popped up. They're called the Pleading, or called plain annoying. They beg for anything you've got from the roadside, calling you over. If you hear them out, they'll hypnotize you in a way; they plead for anything you can possibly spare their poor soul -- the shirt off your back, a memory, an ability. Their sob story goes from believable to something horrifying and personal to you. They'll tell you your mother won't forgive you if you don't, or they'll tell you that the fate of your very best friend hinges on you giving them your wallet.

What do you do?

If someone breaks you out of the grasp of the Pleading's hypnosis, you'll be free.

If you give in, they'll take, and you'll be bereft of what you gave and that will be that.

If you don't, you'll feel immeasurable guilt, mounting more and more with each step ... You might have to be talked out of that guilt, or you might throw yourself into the chasm, inconsolable ...

DIGITAL VEIL ( network )

A question appears on the network. There's no handle attached.

BRUISES OR ROSES OR CRADLES OR COFFINS? WHY WHY WHY? :'D

Answers to this 'question' will be displayed to all; feel free to comment on others, try to gain some sense of what this could mean ... You can also post to the network freely.

QUESTIONS?

Ask below. Have fun.

Comments

[gingerjedi]

"His name is BD-1," Cal says, a bit sharp. The closeness he has with the droid is a little weird, probably, but he doesn't really care. He wouldn't be alive without the little droid, and he has no reason to treat droids as less than overall. He's spent many years traumatised and lonely, after all, so finding a friend in a droid isn't that surprising. Of course Trilla doesn't share that, but so what? He corrects her anyway.

"And yeah. Yeah, he scanned the area just after I woke up, but...something's really weird about it. It's like it doesn't stay the same. I figure that's some kind of illusion set up to screw with us, but I don't know." Dathomir had been full of those sorts of things, but that didn't ever change the info on BD-1's sensors. The fact that it's happening now is unsettling. "And before you ask, he's not malfunctioning. Checked that too." Cal's a good mechanic; there's no way he'd neglect that if something was coming up weird. He's not a programmer, exactly, but he knows his way around droids.

He doesn't think like Trilla, like someone wrapped in the Dark Side. He's not manipulative, prone to using people to get what he wants. But he is smart enough not to trust people immediately, especially anyone from the Empire. He knows what she's been through, and at the end, she was...so different. But does that mean they're friends? Definitely not. Maybe in another life, another time, they could have been. He wishes for that, but wishing is for younglings.

But she's not exactly looking down her nose at him the same this time, and her face is better than the cold blankness of the helmet, so he has to believe there's hope.

"Trilla, I..." He has no idea how to say what he wants to say. I watched you die. I'm sorry. A hundred other things.

Instead, he settles for, "I don't know how we got here, especially how you got here. But whatever this is, we can figure it out together. If you want."

[suduri]

Inquisitors have been trained to view the world at a certain slant: take Cal and his obvious affection for this droid as an example. Connections are weaknesses meant to be exploited, drawing their prey out into the open and leaving them open for attack. While Trilla doesn't have it as her driving goal, at least anymore, she thinks to herself what a disadvantage this could cause.

Droids can be harmed or manipulated just as much as people, she knows.

"You're right," she agrees. It's unsettlingly matter-of-fact. "I should be dead, likely with whoever else might have drowned in that facility. Had the universe some sense of mercy, perhaps it should've been done the first time I arrived there."

She turns her back to him. Whether or not this means she trusts him not to attack or that she won't do it herself — both ideas aren't entirely true or false. "Regardless, we are both now here. Persist however you must, Jedi."

Trilla reaches up with one hand. To prove some point, about her knowledge of Cal, and for how long she's watched him, hunted him, knows him in some awful way, she reaches out with the Force and one of the vines from above swings down to dangle into her gloved palm. She looks at him over her shoulder. "I mean to explore."

It isn't a direction invitation. It isn't even a full warning, but it could be; stop me at your own risk, only not in quite those terms. Whatever Cal Kestis chooses to do is up to him.