As a note, we’d like to apologize for the long wait and thank you for your patience. We will be making a conscious effort to get responses out to all of you during the finale at a much more reasonable pace.
It would seem that Mira, Papyrus, and Sans are just the right team to plunge into these depths. Before diving they get the run down not just from our trusty Literature Club gals, but also from Lup. They attempt their dive at around 6:20 in the evening, after the Cursed Zone team has begun their offense against the Cursed. None of the released Cursed agress them at the thorny entry point to the underwater tunnel, and they enter safely.
The first thing they notice is the lack of monsters. No matter how far they go, there are no creatures waiting for them in the tunnel. Aside from the multiplying glitches, the tunnel seems cold, empty, and lifeless.
Those glitches, as mentioned, keep multiplying. Though the scientists have done well to delete glitches outside of this tunnel, it would seem that as the other two teams approach Lucretia, the glitches began to distort aggressively. They don’t cause any harm, but severely impede the progress Mira, Papyrus, and Sans make. It’s nearly an hour before the chamber containing the Relic comes into their sight.
To their fortune as they continue down the tunnel, the glitches reduce in number— and a number of them even dissolve themselves into white static. The only indication the trio gets of why are these sudden, nearly overwhelming waves of oppressively negative energy.
(DC 6, +7ea, Papyrus ADV; Mira: 14, Sans: 18, Papyrus 11/15) All three of them pass through the first wave with nothing but an inkling of dread, aware suddenly just what threat they face. It’s almost as though someone was attempting to scare them away, oozing feelings of loneliness and desperation onto their shoulders, but it slides off in moments, leaving them at peace as they fix more and more glitches.
(DC 10, “ ; Mira: 14, Sans: 12, Papyrus: 11/22) The second wave hits and they’re prepared for it to happen, though they can’t expect what emotion hits them. For just a moment a delusion hits them, a belief that the world really is going to end, no matter what their choices are. But all three of them have felt this kind of fear before, and with a few looks at each other and some forced smiles, the feeling is pushed away. Papyrus seems to be filled with determination, and as Sans and Mira repair yet another glitch, he chatters on with an inspirational speech. They forget the impending doom almost as quickly as it came.
(DC 13, “ ; Mira: 12, Sans: 26, Papyrus: 20/22. Penalty to Mira.) The third wave takes a toll on Mira. It’s just slight, but it’s enough even to slow her down just a bit as the wave hits. It’s guilt, a lonely guilt. A sudden sense that they’re leaving so many people behind, so many people that don’t deserve to have their worlds eaten. People that deserved to live to see their world saved.
Mira looks up and just ahead of her, Sans is telling a joke to Papyrus. The pun makes Papyrus’s eyes roll, and Sans’s ever present smile only seems wider. For a moment Mira is afflicted with a jealousy that isn’t even her own when she realizes the brothers have remembered each other. But Sans looks to Mira and gives her that strange skull wink, and that connection reminds her that she can be jealous, but she’s glad for the bone boys, too. Mira is pulled away from the wave of despair and into the moment again, and catches up.
Still, it feels as though a hollowness has started to enter her heart.
(DC 16, “ ; Mira: 13, Sans: 10, Papyrus: 16/24. Penalty to Mira, Sans.) The fourth and strongest hit slows both Sans and Mira, dissolving the glitches that surround all three of them into nothing but white static. It’s raw despair, hopelessness, loss, bereftness. The cave seems to vibrate around them, pulsing, closing in on them, though Papyrus can see himself that the cave doesn’t move at all.
The loss of a child, of a pet, a brother, a parent, a lover, all of those feelings and more compound on the two all at once. The loss of an entire world. Of many entire worlds.
And for just a moment, the two are tempted with the idea of giving in to that despair, of giving up, of assimilating with something.
But Papyrus is prepared and mostly unaffected himself, and presses play on the liveriver.
"If you tell me a little more of your story, I'll write something for you, okay? So be sure you come back safe, so I can write you the best poem ever!"
The message that plays is meant for Mira, but it speaks to another Sayori left for Sans; You're my family now, so you have to come back safe, okay? Her voice jars Mira and Sans from their spells of intense despair, and the world seems to stop shaking around them. There is a new ache left in both of their hearts, but they carry on with Papyrus.
From that last wave, there isn’t much of a stretch left before they reach the chamber’s entrance. But as the tunnel’s mouth widens, the team notices something more terrifying than the formless glitches from before; around the chambers entrance, they can see what appears to be disembodied limbs. They display static and warped images much like the glitches, but have a solid 3-D form of hands, feet, arms, heads, even torsos, with those glitched images wrapped around them like images mapped to a model. Where the appendages don’t display an image, they are blacker than black, as though light itself has disappeared entirely from their forms.
It’s Sans’ turn to shine. He casts Digital Phantom (Relative Pass) and obscures the team from the view of the disembodied limbs. Unfortunately, none of them can account for the limb-creatures sensing the very despair in their hearts, and as the trio enters into the chamber area, the limbs turn toward the team. Actually, they seem to ignore Papyrus altogether, and as they all orient themselves toward Sans and Mira and begin to swim toward the two, Mira thinks fast; she casts Moonbeam. (DC 12; NATURAL 20)
Despite that despair Mira felt, she remembers seeing the skeleton brothers joking in the tunnel, and remembers the bond she shared with her own brother. That memory burns through her despair, becoming magic itself, channeling through Mira’s moonbeam, and absolutely obliterates the disembodied limbs that threaten to attack them.
When the light clears, Sans and Papyrus peer over Mira’s shoulders to see that the entire relic chamber is free of awaiting threats. It is perhaps the dourest part of the tunnel, however, completely unlike the colorful kelpy seas surrounding Baisla. Some of the walls still flicker with glitched images as if they are broken display screens, and cracks in the walls pull in shocks of opal as black as those limbs were. That black opal still holds some of the only color in the chamber, universe-like colors glinting in what little light they have.
The other color in the chamber belongs to the brightly-decorated and gold-buckle-sealed leather cover of Caleb Cleveland and the Imaginary Island, a veritable tome of a youth reader fiction book that rests unassumingly on a bed of withered coral at the bottom of the chamber.
The team might be surprised by how swimmingly their plan goes; Sans opens the dimension box on his phone and Mira, from her and Papyrus’s distance, uses her Mage Hand to pluck the Relic up from its resting place and guide it toward Sans’s phone. The Mage Hand drops the book into the awaiting— (DC 13; 4) — outstretched hand of Sans, whose eyes have been distant since the moment the Relic came close to him. His spooky monster eyes stare forward, unseeing, as the Relic speaks to him.
(Initiative between Mira and Papyrus; Heads or Tails, Papyrus = Heads; Tails)
None of them could have known the Relic’s influence stretched outside of its form, and Papyrus has never seen a Relic in use before. But Mira’s had experience with a Relic, one fateful mission ago, and it's her Mage Hand that’s closest when Sans takes the Relic. Still burning on that feeling of hope from before, Mira grasps the Relic with her Mage Hand and gives it a hard tug to loosen Sans’s grip. By the time he has a chance to readjust, Mira’s closed the distance between them.
(DC 13; 15)
As Mira reaches out, time slows around her to a stop. Even she herself slows to a stop, physically, though her mind is kept awake and clear and alert. The image of Sans disappears, the sight of Papyrus in her peripheral, of the almost-colorless chamber— they all dissolve away until all that remains is nothingness, the Relic, and Mira.
Why are you resisting?
Asks a voice, gentle, genderless. It sounds like all the voices Mira has ever heard and none of them all at once, like it’s in her head instead of in the air around her.
We can be incredible together, you and I. I am a Relic even closer to what we are meant to be. Stronger.
Around Mira, the nothingness changes to the beach waiting for them outside. Though Mira isn’t given the ability to move, she’s given the sensation of sand underneath her feet, the noticeable absence of water around her, the scent of salt in the air she breathes in. The breeze even blows her hair against her face.
Think of where you are now. Think of how perfect it seems. A world where no one goes without their needs met.
You and I, we can make something even better.
Suddenly Mira is in an apartment familiar to her. In her peripheral, a body lays slumped at a desk, another form standing over it, holding a pendant. They are out of her sight, just barely, but somehow Mira is given the impression of just who they are and what they are and even though Mira is locked in her outstretched pose, reaching for the Relic ahead of her, unable to look back at the scene behind her, she knows and the Relic makes sure she knows.
We can make a world where things like this don’t happen.
There’s more wind against Mira’s face as the setting changes once again. A fresh field on a rolling hill in France. Noah ahead of her looking over waves of grass and daisies and wildflowers, hand in hand with Aiden. Mira’s brother looks over his shoulder at Mira, meets her eyes, and the Relic speaks again.
We can make a world where there are no gods to control people’s lives. No reincarnations—
— the setting around her changes like pages in a flip book, light skipping as if through a film real with each change. Mira’s clothes change. The setting is old, far too old, far too magical for a life that Mira remembers.
—no being used as someone else’s pawn—
In flashes the faces of gods Mira knows and doesn’t, of Faerun and Mira’s own world and of others, of chains and shackles, the sounds and screams of desperation deafening for a moment.
—no rejection based on something as petty as how very special you really are—
Mira’s parents stand before her. They don’t look at her. They speak to each other, not acknowledging her presence. Unlike the vision of Noah, it’s as if Mira isn’t even there.
—nothing predetermined. No enemies that could have been dearly treasured friends.
Finally, back in the nothingness of before, Mira can’t even see the Relic. What she now is posed to reach for is Elios, who stands in front of her with a perfect smile, reaching for her as well but just out of her reach.
We can make the perfect world for everyone, Mira. We have the ability to do it. My power is greater than any other Relic’s, a power even closer to creation itself.
Take me, Mira. Use me. Make a better world with me.
...While this is occurring, Papyrus is given a bit of a puzzling sight. Sans is holding the Relic, which is glowing bright, and Mira is reaching for it, but at an achingly slow pace. From his vantage point, he is closer to Sans than he is to the Relic, and may be able to grab hold of Sans without feeling the effect of the Relic’s thrall.
As Mira pulls the attention of the Relic away, the thrall begins to weaken on Sans, as well.
From here you may take three actions:
Sans may recall a locked away memory that may improve or ensure he is able to let go of the Relic. Papyrus may move to pull Sans away, and may have time to attempt to appeal to him as well. Mira may offer a rebuttal to the Relic, improving or ensuring her chances of taking the Relic and resisting its thrall.
What will your team do? Let us know each character's approach to their dilemmas!
no subject
It would seem that Mira, Papyrus, and Sans are just the right team to plunge into these depths. Before diving they get the run down not just from our trusty Literature Club gals, but also from Lup. They attempt their dive at around 6:20 in the evening, after the Cursed Zone team has begun their offense against the Cursed. None of the released Cursed agress them at the thorny entry point to the underwater tunnel, and they enter safely.
The first thing they notice is the lack of monsters. No matter how far they go, there are no creatures waiting for them in the tunnel. Aside from the multiplying glitches, the tunnel seems cold, empty, and lifeless.
Those glitches, as mentioned, keep multiplying. Though the scientists have done well to delete glitches outside of this tunnel, it would seem that as the other two teams approach Lucretia, the glitches began to distort aggressively. They don’t cause any harm, but severely impede the progress Mira, Papyrus, and Sans make. It’s nearly an hour before the chamber containing the Relic comes into their sight.
To their fortune as they continue down the tunnel, the glitches reduce in number— and a number of them even dissolve themselves into white static. The only indication the trio gets of why are these sudden, nearly overwhelming waves of oppressively negative energy.
(DC 6, +7ea, Papyrus ADV; Mira: 14, Sans: 18, Papyrus 11/15)
All three of them pass through the first wave with nothing but an inkling of dread, aware suddenly just what threat they face. It’s almost as though someone was attempting to scare them away, oozing feelings of loneliness and desperation onto their shoulders, but it slides off in moments, leaving them at peace as they fix more and more glitches.
(DC 10, “ ; Mira: 14, Sans: 12, Papyrus: 11/22)
The second wave hits and they’re prepared for it to happen, though they can’t expect what emotion hits them. For just a moment a delusion hits them, a belief that the world really is going to end, no matter what their choices are. But all three of them have felt this kind of fear before, and with a few looks at each other and some forced smiles, the feeling is pushed away. Papyrus seems to be filled with determination, and as Sans and Mira repair yet another glitch, he chatters on with an inspirational speech. They forget the impending doom almost as quickly as it came.
(DC 13, “ ; Mira: 12, Sans: 26, Papyrus: 20/22. Penalty to Mira.)
The third wave takes a toll on Mira. It’s just slight, but it’s enough even to slow her down just a bit as the wave hits. It’s guilt, a lonely guilt. A sudden sense that they’re leaving so many people behind, so many people that don’t deserve to have their worlds eaten. People that deserved to live to see their world saved.
Mira looks up and just ahead of her, Sans is telling a joke to Papyrus. The pun makes Papyrus’s eyes roll, and Sans’s ever present smile only seems wider. For a moment Mira is afflicted with a jealousy that isn’t even her own when she realizes the brothers have remembered each other. But Sans looks to Mira and gives her that strange skull wink, and that connection reminds her that she can be jealous, but she’s glad for the bone boys, too. Mira is pulled away from the wave of despair and into the moment again, and catches up.
Still, it feels as though a hollowness has started to enter her heart.
(DC 16, “ ; Mira: 13, Sans: 10, Papyrus: 16/24. Penalty to Mira, Sans.)
The fourth and strongest hit slows both Sans and Mira, dissolving the glitches that surround all three of them into nothing but white static. It’s raw despair, hopelessness, loss, bereftness. The cave seems to vibrate around them, pulsing, closing in on them, though Papyrus can see himself that the cave doesn’t move at all.
The loss of a child, of a pet, a brother, a parent, a lover, all of those feelings and more compound on the two all at once. The loss of an entire world. Of many entire worlds.
And for just a moment, the two are tempted with the idea of giving in to that despair, of giving up, of assimilating with something.
But Papyrus is prepared and mostly unaffected himself, and presses play on the liveriver.
"If you tell me a little more of your story, I'll write something for you, okay? So be sure you come back safe, so I can write you the best poem ever!"
The message that plays is meant for Mira, but it speaks to another Sayori left for Sans; You're my family now, so you have to come back safe, okay? Her voice jars Mira and Sans from their spells of intense despair, and the world seems to stop shaking around them. There is a new ache left in both of their hearts, but they carry on with Papyrus.
From that last wave, there isn’t much of a stretch left before they reach the chamber’s entrance. But as the tunnel’s mouth widens, the team notices something more terrifying than the formless glitches from before; around the chambers entrance, they can see what appears to be disembodied limbs. They display static and warped images much like the glitches, but have a solid 3-D form of hands, feet, arms, heads, even torsos, with those glitched images wrapped around them like images mapped to a model. Where the appendages don’t display an image, they are blacker than black, as though light itself has disappeared entirely from their forms.
It’s Sans’ turn to shine. He casts Digital Phantom (Relative Pass) and obscures the team from the view of the disembodied limbs. Unfortunately, none of them can account for the limb-creatures sensing the very despair in their hearts, and as the trio enters into the chamber area, the limbs turn toward the team. Actually, they seem to ignore Papyrus altogether, and as they all orient themselves toward Sans and Mira and begin to swim toward the two, Mira thinks fast; she casts Moonbeam. (DC 12; NATURAL 20)
Despite that despair Mira felt, she remembers seeing the skeleton brothers joking in the tunnel, and remembers the bond she shared with her own brother. That memory burns through her despair, becoming magic itself, channeling through Mira’s moonbeam, and absolutely obliterates the disembodied limbs that threaten to attack them.
When the light clears, Sans and Papyrus peer over Mira’s shoulders to see that the entire relic chamber is free of awaiting threats. It is perhaps the dourest part of the tunnel, however, completely unlike the colorful kelpy seas surrounding Baisla. Some of the walls still flicker with glitched images as if they are broken display screens, and cracks in the walls pull in shocks of opal as black as those limbs were. That black opal still holds some of the only color in the chamber, universe-like colors glinting in what little light they have.
The other color in the chamber belongs to the brightly-decorated and gold-buckle-sealed leather cover of Caleb Cleveland and the Imaginary Island, a veritable tome of a youth reader fiction book that rests unassumingly on a bed of withered coral at the bottom of the chamber.
The team might be surprised by how swimmingly their plan goes; Sans opens the dimension box on his phone and Mira, from her and Papyrus’s distance, uses her Mage Hand to pluck the Relic up from its resting place and guide it toward Sans’s phone. The Mage Hand drops the book into the awaiting—
(DC 13; 4)
— outstretched hand of Sans, whose eyes have been distant since the moment the Relic came close to him. His spooky monster eyes stare forward, unseeing, as the Relic speaks to him.
(Initiative between Mira and Papyrus; Heads or Tails, Papyrus = Heads; Tails)
None of them could have known the Relic’s influence stretched outside of its form, and Papyrus has never seen a Relic in use before. But Mira’s had experience with a Relic, one fateful mission ago, and it's her Mage Hand that’s closest when Sans takes the Relic. Still burning on that feeling of hope from before, Mira grasps the Relic with her Mage Hand and gives it a hard tug to loosen Sans’s grip. By the time he has a chance to readjust, Mira’s closed the distance between them.
(DC 13; 15)
As Mira reaches out, time slows around her to a stop. Even she herself slows to a stop, physically, though her mind is kept awake and clear and alert. The image of Sans disappears, the sight of Papyrus in her peripheral, of the almost-colorless chamber— they all dissolve away until all that remains is nothingness, the Relic, and Mira.
Why are you resisting?
Asks a voice, gentle, genderless. It sounds like all the voices Mira has ever heard and none of them all at once, like it’s in her head instead of in the air around her.
We can be incredible together, you and I. I am a Relic even closer to what we are meant to be. Stronger.
Around Mira, the nothingness changes to the beach waiting for them outside. Though Mira isn’t given the ability to move, she’s given the sensation of sand underneath her feet, the noticeable absence of water around her, the scent of salt in the air she breathes in. The breeze even blows her hair against her face.
Think of where you are now. Think of how perfect it seems. A world where no one goes without their needs met.
You and I, we can make something even better.
Suddenly Mira is in an apartment familiar to her. In her peripheral, a body lays slumped at a desk, another form standing over it, holding a pendant. They are out of her sight, just barely, but somehow Mira is given the impression of just who they are and what they are and even though Mira is locked in her outstretched pose, reaching for the Relic ahead of her, unable to look back at the scene behind her, she knows and the Relic makes sure she knows.
We can make a world where things like this don’t happen.
There’s more wind against Mira’s face as the setting changes once again. A fresh field on a rolling hill in France. Noah ahead of her looking over waves of grass and daisies and wildflowers, hand in hand with Aiden. Mira’s brother looks over his shoulder at Mira, meets her eyes, and the Relic speaks again.
We can make a world where there are no gods to control people’s lives. No reincarnations—
— the setting around her changes like pages in a flip book, light skipping as if through a film real with each change. Mira’s clothes change. The setting is old, far too old, far too magical for a life that Mira remembers.
—no being used as someone else’s pawn—
In flashes the faces of gods Mira knows and doesn’t, of Faerun and Mira’s own world and of others, of chains and shackles, the sounds and screams of desperation deafening for a moment.
—no rejection based on something as petty as how very special you really are—
Mira’s parents stand before her. They don’t look at her. They speak to each other, not acknowledging her presence. Unlike the vision of Noah, it’s as if Mira isn’t even there.
—nothing predetermined. No enemies that could have been dearly treasured friends.
Finally, back in the nothingness of before, Mira can’t even see the Relic. What she now is posed to reach for is Elios, who stands in front of her with a perfect smile, reaching for her as well but just out of her reach.
We can make the perfect world for everyone, Mira. We have the ability to do it. My power is greater than any other Relic’s, a power even closer to creation itself.
Take me, Mira. Use me. Make a better world with me.
...While this is occurring, Papyrus is given a bit of a puzzling sight. Sans is holding the Relic, which is glowing bright, and Mira is reaching for it, but at an achingly slow pace. From his vantage point, he is closer to Sans than he is to the Relic, and may be able to grab hold of Sans without feeling the effect of the Relic’s thrall.
As Mira pulls the attention of the Relic away, the thrall begins to weaken on Sans, as well.
From here you may take three actions:
Sans may recall a locked away memory that may improve or ensure he is able to let go of the Relic.
Papyrus may move to pull Sans away, and may have time to attempt to appeal to him as well.
Mira may offer a rebuttal to the Relic, improving or ensuring her chances of taking the Relic and resisting its thrall.
What will your team do? Let us know each character's approach to their dilemmas!