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Holiday mingle log

It’s the most wonderful (welcome) time of the year

Christmas is coming earlier and earlier every year, which isn't a surprise but hey they're starting the Christmas/Winter stuff the week before thanksgiving. Because why not. this month’s party takes place in the Merchant dome. But it’s not the everyday appearance of the merchant dome. No, for the next five days the Merchant dome’s appearance has been altered to look like a sort of Bavarian Christmas Market. There are small clusters of tables every so often, so people can just sit and chat and eat and drink.

Some enterprising person has even managed to make it snow through some unknown means. It’s not cold, but the snow is soft and steady and slowly building up.

The entire dome, all of the streets and all of the merchant stalls are practically glowing with white fairy lights that are strung everywhere. Vendors in their stalls gleefully cry out to paterons passing by, offering them free food or drinks. The food consists of the sort of things that one might expect to find in a place like this: sausages on buns and on sticks, pretzels, pizza, loads of cookies of every variety that one could think of, including elaborately decorated gingerbread, chocolates, fruits, french fries. Think winter fair food, and be as absurd and as complicated and extra as you want. It is a fair, after all. Go nuts. Drinks are also along the same line: hot cider, mulled wine, hot buttered rum, hot chocolate both with booze and without, as well as all the normal things: water, coffee, tea, milk, soda, and a variety of fruit juices that you’ve both heard of and not.

But food isn’t the only free thing that people are giving away! They’re also offering characters hats and gloves and scarves, small toys, books, delicate ornaments, perfumes, wine… it’s a giant welcome party after all, and these people are cheerful and happy. Even offering to pay just gets met with laughter and being told not to worry about it.

Fun and frivolity.

There are even carnival rides set up! A medium sized ferris wheel, a carousel, a giant slide and ice skating ring are all along the outside of the stalls.

At the far end of the dome, the snow has fallen deeper and held to several inches. Wouldn’t you know it just happens to be perfect snowball snow! So, there of course needs to be a snowball fight! What did you think those free mittens and gloves and scarves are for after all? The snowball fight can be organized into teams, or one on one depending on the player’s choice. This is a friendly fight, of course, so no rocks or slush balls or anything. Well, probably not. No one in the Sphere is your mother.

So you want some summer?.

While the welcome party rages on in the merchant dome, people have made a smaller party in one of the recreation domes. Around the pools, as a matter of fact. There’s almost like a small barbecue clustered around the largest of the three pools, and the light is constant and sunny here. The large pool is olympic sized, and is a sparkling blue. It’s fresh water, and probably clean enough to drink. I still wouldn’t drink it. The second pool is slightly smaller and more kidney shaped with a gradual sand mound at one end of it. This pool is salt water and looks a bit more like a beach than a pool. The third pool is a kiddie pool, complete with a splash pad, that’s running. Buckets drop, it’s got one of those mushroom things, and sprinkler jets. There aren’t any kids though, so people are welcome to go nuts.

Bathing suits and towels are provided in the changing rooms. There’s frozen and fruity drinks flowing freely, along with finger food and snacks. Loud music is playing from a local band that’s just generally of a pop sort. There’s people dancing rather in a rather haphazard fashion, but the dance floor is there and present!

Oh yeah, and there's definitely the baths and everything too!

Network.

In the Sphere, the network is neural, and accessed via touching the glowing golden circle behind your character’s ear. They can identify themselves with a screen name if you so desire, but messages should be one of three ways or a combination of them. 1. Audio. Your character thinks audible words onto the network. 2. Writing: Your character thinks text into the network. 3. Video. Your character projects a broadcast of a video of themselves onto the network. Replies are determined by the player.

The network needs to be accessed by choice, so character broadcasts are not automatically beamed directly into people’s heads. The Sphere isn’t that rude.

Private messages are allowed by pressing and holding and pressing and holding again as you picture the person in your mind. This can be an image or a name, err more on the side of things being more accessible than less.

Welcome to my nightmare.

For anyone within the architecture dome, the library dome, the sunlight rec dome and any personal dome that people chose, around midnight people will have a curiously tired sensation. They just need to rest their eyes for a moment, or some may fall asleep for longer. No matter the length of time that the character is out, the nightmare infects them, and when they wake they will be filled with a curious but urgent sensation.

They have lost something. The loss can be a physical object, an emotion, a memory, a person or perhaps a sense of self. If the lost person is currently present in the game, they will be unable to be seen by the character who is experiencing the waking nightmare. Urgency will grip the character, because the longer the sensation goes on for, the worse it becomes. Characters can search and scrounge for their loss everywhere, but until the nightmare is over, they will not find whatever it is. Even if it is themselves. Instead, they may be frantic, angry, or just play old scared to death. They need to find this at whatever cost. Where they may find it is something that their own brains will settle on, but of course until the nightmare is over, they will not be able to.

The nightmare ends with either the character falling into a normal, restful sleep naturally or through some other means (someone might mention the infirmary has sedation medication just for the is purpose, or that there’s always a brick) or when they are woken with the intervention of someone else. The intervention of someone else is entirely up to you, and can come from a player character or a NPC, depending on how the player is feeling with the thread. By intervention we mean someone who is able to talk the person out of the nightmare, or to slap or shake them out, or to use some sort of trick that shows them that they are indeed inside of a nightmare. The knowledge that someone is affected by a nightmare must come from an external source, and should come from a character that your character would trust. After all, would you believe someone who told you that you were in a nightmare if you didn’t know that? That said, the best way to deal with waking someone is to remove them from the affected domes. Too bad you don’t know which domes are affected.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I thought House Stark believed him to be a rapist?" There's a hint of distaste in her voice. While she had been naive to believe Viserys about their father, all who had known Rhaegar seemed to love him. Ser Barristan viewed him highly and it seemed that he was not a man to give praise lightly. "Growing up, Viserys only referred to Lyanna Stark as Rhaegar's 'lady'. He didn't believe she was kidnapped."

And there was the name her brother whispered in her vision. What was it? She couldn't remember now, but was it Lyanna? All she could recall was that it was a woman's name.

"Was it all a lie? My father killed two men in a terrible way and then demanded the heads of others. This, I don't believe, was a lie. Everything else, it was small details fanning a larger fire."

"We did believe that, only it wasn't true." Ned had known the truth of it for years and he'd passed on the lie anyway, and while Jon knows that this was for his safety, and that it had been better that way, there's still the fact that Ned Stark, the most honorable man he's ever met, lied to him. Lied about him, and about his true parents, for years. Ned Stark had let him take an oath giving up a claim he didn't even know it was his to make.

He still doesn't know how to feel about that.

"He didn't kidnap her. He married her. Only she was supposed to marry Robert."

Somehow these things don't shock Daenerys. She believed her brother a better man than that. Marriage though, that was more extreme than she imagined. There were a number of questions there as well, but from what she had seen in the House of the Undying, it seemed both Rhaegar and Elia were aware of some greater prophecy. If that was the reason...

All of it was a bit much for her to process at once and she couldn't make sense of it all without Ser Barristan to speak to. He might know better, whether marriage might have been possible. Not for the first time, she longed for his presence.

"The Pact of Ice and Fire." She chuckled, crossing her arms over her chest, wishing she had her lion's pelt. "Supposedly a Targaryen princess was to marry a Stark prince. Rhaegar chose a Stark instead. How could you know this?"

Edited 2019-12-22 04:28 (UTC)

And then there are the things that he's sure were never mentioned during the lessons, but with the Targaryens all but gone and the history between them, it probably hadn't seemed important.

Then it comes right down to it and he's going to have to mention it now, although the conversation had turned that direction awhile ago anyway, and it's better to get it out there earlier than later. "I'm not Ned Stark's bastard. Jon Snow was a fabrication to hide the truth. Ned's not my father. He's my uncle."

Hopefully she can figure it out from there, with what he's already told her.

He's not suggesting what she thinks he's suggesting?

She's torn between laughing and crying. It was almost a perverse joke. All of her life, she had been on the run with Viserys, the last two Targaryens cowering and huddling together in whatever place would shelter them. She had dreamed of Rhaegar and her mother, she begged to be told stories of their family, always searching for any small connection to their history. She had never known home or family, the throne was her duty and last connection to the Targaryens. All she had done was try to return and find something of the red door in the throne's shadow.

Viserys was gone, her mother was gone, Rhaegar was gone and she was alone...only this boy that she had never met claimed that he was the last of her family, family she had never known existed. What was based off of? A period of time when Rhaegar was missing with Lyanna Stark and what else?

But as much as she fought against it, knowing deep down it was likely a lie, a deeper part of her wished it was true. How much easier and warm would her life be with someone else? Someone who might understand? She longed for it, needing her brothers, her mother, another Targaryen. But she had seen how tempting images could be nothing but false visions.

She took a breath and turned her face away, unable to look at him. The bitter blow, the painful reality made this jape too difficult to bear. "Don't mock me."

"I'm not." Not that he has any proof. All he has is his word, which was all Sansa had, but at least she's someone he knows and he knows she wouldn't have lied about it. Especially with the information coming from where she says it came from.

"You know what would have happened if certain people" -- whose name he doesn't want to say right now -- "had known the truth. It's why I didn't even know. Only one person knew, and he got the information from my mother."

"I know what would happen. My entire life was spent running from free city to free city, always trying to outrun the Usurper's assassins. When I was carrying my son, he had a man sent to give me poisoned wine. He put a hammer into my brother's chest and let him bleed out on the banks of the Trident. He allowed and rewarded the man that raped my brother's wife, slaughtered his daughter and battered his son. I am well aware of what the cost is of being a Targaryen."

She shuddered, not meaning to have taken it out on him. If he was joking or not, she didn't want to unleash that sort of frustration on someone she didn't know. It was the only response she could give. So many years alone, so many years afraid. She felt close to breaking. Tears were the safest option and anger at the man who brought the tears.

"You say you are Rhaegar's son, but..." she shook her head, trying to find the right words and the most pervasive thought. "...I can't believe based on want. I want one of his children to live, so I won't be alone." Gods, she didn't even care if she lost the throne. She may be Viserys' heir, but she wanted Viserys, no matter what he did. "The last man I trusted sold my secrets to the Usurper."

He had known that Rhaegar had had another wife before Lyanna, and that there had been children. Children who were his siblings, his actual siblings and not cousins passed off as such, but he hadn't really thought much about them until now. He'd been thinking of his parents, and what had happened to them.

Robert really had destroyed his family. Even the Starks felt the effect of Robert's Rebellion.

"My mother asked her brother to keep me safe. So he took me back to the North and claimed me as his son, and spent the rest of his life as the only person alive who knew the truth."

[ooc: Continued HERE]