spherememing | (no subject)

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 mean, there are a lot of nerds, but some surprisingly cool ones.

[She may be a bit of a nerd now, but she's not gonna admit that. She actually likes school here because the teacher lets her learn about whatever she wants so that helps.]

Yeah, because if it was always on, then there'd be way more mental porn on the network, especially with you here.

[Because she's gotta tease him.]

Cool nerds is an oxymoron, but I'll take your word for it, Red.

[Liking school? Who have you become, Miss Marsh!

Richie grins, wide and delighted, as if Bev has just given him the best gift of his life.]

Why, because all the hot babes will be having wet dreams about me on the network? It's not my fault that I can't control the appeal of all this!

[So clearly not what she meant.]

[Bev just snorts a little.]

I'm pretty sure all the hot babes on here would kick your ass you know.

Man, just my type! Maybe I'm gonna like staying in this place.

[He's talking out his ass, but Bev probably knows that.]

[She definitely does know that.]

It really isn’t so bad you know. Beats Derry by a lot.

[She's an angel for not calling him out.]

Yeah, well. Not like that's hard.

Uh. How long have you been here?

Like. Eight months. I was somewhere else before then though.

[An abnormally long amount of time, just like Stan. Richie hates it.]

Were you by yourself the whole time?

[Without any of the Losers, he means.]

Stan was here for like half of it. But there was some things he missed.

[Like when the network spilled her guts for her across it.]

We were here. Older us, I mean. For a little while.

[Bev's voice is softer with that, because it's a lot and she knows it.]

Stan's been weird ever since and he won't talk about it.

Huh. Still more than the rest of us, I guess.

[we bitter!!!]

Older us? Yeah, no wonder he's been weird Bev, because that's fucking nuts! Are you sure it wasn't- [You know.] I don't know, some kind of shared hallucination? You guys got wasted and imagined future you?

Yeah. I am. Other people, friends I’ve made her talked to her for sure. And she knew about everything. Including IT coming back in 27 years. She was there in Derry fighting it before she got yanked here for the month.

Well fuck me with a hot iron. Why don't we all just bounce? Skip town! What the fuck are we doing coming back years later? I thought we all agreed- [Agreed isn't the best choice. An agreement doesn't usually culminate in one of your best friends punching you in the face.]

Whatever. I thought we weren't going back.

You know why we had to go back. Cause we're the only fucking assholes who can deal with the whole thing.

[And that's the long and the short of it really: they're the only ones.]

[Richie sighs, long and loud, like he knows she's speaking the truth but he doesn't want to admit it.]

I mean, duh. But I don't know why we have to suffer just because It chose to fuck with us, and everyone else is either too much of a pussy to deal with it, or too dumb to see jack shit that's happening around them. They don't even fucking deserve our help.

[He doesn't mean that. Not completely, anyway. Betty Ripsom deserved someone helping her.]

The fucking adults sure don’t.

[Because fuck adults let’s be honest.]

But the kids of the down deserve better than what we got.