prismaticrap | ▶ TDM OVERFLOW .001

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▶ TDM OVERFLOW .001

Cybernetic dream, something like you've never seen

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▶ Lisa Frank's LSD Fun House
anytime, anywhere on the moon Iris | top

Everything is darkness except for dim lights sparkling in the distance, a faint gleam that greets you as you start to unfurl from your dormant state. Your body is hemmed in by shards of crystals, gently sparkling and possibly pricking your skin. The surrounding landscape is dyed in the pinks and purples of the dusk filled with crystals protruding from the ground, some as large as a skyscraper. Throat parched and skin dry and aching, you grope your body in alarm to make sure your possessions are still in place. This is far from home— perhaps a dream? You pinch your skin and slap your cheeks, yet nothing seems to do the trick. Searching for answers only rewards you with an endless expanse of purple dust as far as the eye can see. You have four options: one, panic; two, soil yourself; three, admire it all then soil yourself; or four, go into survival mode. Eventually, you’ll realize that you’re not alone.

A ⬤ As you traverse the near-barren landscape, you feel something sting your skin. It's small and subtle at first, then you finally catch sight of it: an elegant, crystalline mosquito buzzing around from the corner of your eye. However, a pest is still a pest. After a while, marks near your welts begin to form strange patterns on your skin, mimicking ancient runes. Each rune has with it a particular side-effect that may hinder you on your journey:
✾ The Mark of the Enchanter: Hallucinations, hallucinations galore. Your character will see everything and anything their imagination can conjure and will have difficulty separating reality from fiction.
₪ The Mark of the Destroyer: Limbs start to cease their function, causing you to stumble or try and get around one-handed. Other certain body parts may be affected as well. Look at the bright side: you can stop worrying about jiggle physics and hiding your fear boner.
⍢ The Mark of the Sinner: Your hunger, your thirst, your fatigue and your desire are at an all-time high. Your impulses are rabid and uncontrollable. Maybe you experience only one of those symptoms. Maybe you experience them all. All you know is that you want relief now.

These effects will eventually clear up with a bit of accidental or purposeful physical contact with another person, making you wonder if there was anything wrong with you at all.

B ⬤ Hunger starts to gnaw at you vigorously. Perhaps you consider hunting the moon's creatures to sate your hunger. That's when you see it: a thick, meaty, juicy meal on legs. ~~No, we're not talking about Alex Louis Armstrong~~. A wild silver-white pegasus runs across the purple landscape, its hair billowing in the wind as its hooves smack loudly against the ground. Try and shoot it, and you may find your efforts curtailed by its legendary rage. Eyes aglow and wings beating up a storm, this pegasus is no dainty horse. Two thousand pounds of pure muscle swoop down and charge at you, all blades and ammunition deflecting off its impenetrable skin. Taming appears impossible; it will buck anyone away and leave a sizable horn- or hoof-shaped hole in them for their efforts. Hunting it, however, should be easier. Relatively.

C ⬤ Or you may decide that you'd like to take a drink in the prismatic waters. A small pond can be found just a few miles away from where you first awoke, but gazing into it reflects what appears to be a window into your own world. You see the faces of loved ones or at least someone very close and familiar to you gathered around your prone body, shaking it frantically as though to try and rouse you, yet your image lies frozen and unresponsive, not even a whisper of life running through you. Did you die in your world? Is this your afterlife? The questions start to pile up along with the gnawing dread that you may never return home again.

▶ Camp Nowhere
anytime, anywhere on the moon iris | top

Time moves strangely when you're trapped on a moon with no sun to guide you. Hours feel like days, and days feel like weeks. Travelling has rendered you weak and tired. Luckily, a few crystal formations in the shape of a cavern may offer you a small place refuge as you decide to nap. You notice a few artifacts left over from previous explorers.

D ⬤ A comm unit abandoned within the cavern will display the former owner's idol obsession. As you tap the buttons indiscriminately, a holographic screen will appear, and you will see a fabulous recorded concert featuring three bubbly young ladies in animal print, singing to you about something called Cordis, a cat, and a bag of gems. Does this make any sense to you? Probably not, but the beat is catchy. You may even find yourself tapping a foot along to it. Don’t worry. We know it’s plastic love.

E ⬤ There's a small cooler-like container of preserved powdered food bags labeled with only the word “Edible” that can be safely consumed. Although the powder tastes as bland as you’d expect, it’s oddly filling, sating either hunger or thirst. But who will be the first — and the bravest — to try eating them?

F ⬤ A strange, pointed instrument is among the effects found in the cavern. It's silver, long, and thin with a curved end and a light. When you grip it with warm hands, it seems to vibrate enthusiastically and comes in three settings indicated by a frowny face, a neutral face, and a happy face. What could it mean exactly? No one knows, but you can fiddle with it to your heart's desire. Just don't ask yourself where it's been before. You don't want to know.

▶ Interstellar Action Force Assemble
prisma, iris | top

Over a day has passed when a group of people find you worse for wear. Some are full of uncertainty and fear while some are full of curiosity and excitement. They claim that they are scientists from the planet Prismatica here to investigate the sudden appearances of rainbow crystals in the skies. That means you and the others they’ve located within the area. You are all a surprising find to them, and they are quick to load everyone in their transport vehicles for examination and questioning.

You all may have your usual inquiries — Where are we? Who are you? What's going on? Why are the pegasi so ill-tempered? — and the Prismals are almost too eager to answer. They do have questions on their own, so it’s only fair to trade. They tell you about their world as they poke and prod you, trying to understand what you are and how you came into their land. If they’re not trembling in fear, some of them may ask you odd and invasive questions in return, such as what the rate at which your body achieves thermoregulation is, how long your refractory period is, and if you would be willing to submit various kinds of body fluids to them. It's up to whether you wish to comply or protest.

G ⬤ If you react violently, you will be restrained and nerfed with a specialized neurotransmitting gun that releases a numbing agent through the top of your spine. They came prepared, so have fun with that! In any case, conscious or not, you’ll be brought into one of the transport vehicles. If you choose to peacefully cooperate, you’ll be provided any necessary first aid and a refreshing drink to help you recuperate after the rough time you had for the past few days. Each transport vehicle has a few small rooms to rest in, but due to the limited space, you’ll have to snuggle up with someone else on that bunk bed. Unfortunately, the moonshine fruit the ship is also carrying in its cargo has an extremely sweet smell that’s been permeating through certain areas of the ventilation system… Taking a whiff of it may inebriate you for the rest of the trip.

H ⬤ It’s a bumpy ride as terrain vehicles draw over various crystal formations until you see a large dome-like structure up ahead. Within its confines lies the seat of the Prismatica's government, Prisma. It’s a bureaucratic wet dream: skyscrapers practically touch the upper surface of the dome, windows glimmer with a prismatic sheen as daylight hits them, and small ships can be seen flying to and from its spaceport. The scientists, members of the Lunar Scientia, usher you into their facilities for tests. Arrivals are likely to twitch, tremble, and panic as Lunar Scientia fellows take and broadcast every embarrassing, unfiltered detail about you — height, weight, age, strange odors, estimated frequency of sexual activity —- to one another. These scientists will ask you politely to undress, too, but understand if you don't want to. They're especially fascinated by the readings of pure Chroma inside you, whispering among one another excitedly about the possibility of the new arrivals being a new moon species. What should they call them? Moonborne? Moonblessed?

I ⬤ At long last, the questions and physical examinations are done. They’ve decided to call the arrivals as the Moonblessed. They’ll take you under their care until they understand more about you. You're allowed a very refreshing hot shower and a warm meal for your efforts. Don’t worry, the meal was imported from their planet. “Planet?” you might ask, but you won’t need to wonder for too long. The ships are preparing for their next destination: the nearby planet Prismatica, where you will be dwelling for the time being. You're free to explore the government center until then.

▶ Wildcard
Lunatia, Prismatica | top

It only takes a couple hours for the ships to reach their home planet. The ships drop the characters off at the city of Lunatia, where they will be given their communication devices and a plastic card they can present to certain landlords at any residential district for their subsidized (read: absolutely free) lodging. Officials at Prisma instructed the newcomers to await further instructions from the government, but you have a lot of time to kill before then. Why not explore in the meantime? Learn the ins and outs of the world, get a job, transform under the full moon, and explore the many mysteries of planet Prismatica!

This is this TDM's overflow. Feel free to move your threads from there and continue tagging!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Temple can be a bit of an asshole and he can be cold sometimes but he’s not too cold for a laugh or two.]

[If he was that cold and humourless, he probably wouldn’t have befriended Biff and a whole lot of his life would have been very different.]

[After all, for him and Biff, joking around with each other was a big part of their friendship.]

You thought I didn’t? Really?

[He then closes his eyes.]

Lot of you survivalist types don't, all right?

[He spins the other man, hand over hand on his shoulders, until he's good and dizzy.]

All that 'man vs. wild' mentality kills humor, I think.

Most of the time, it wasn’t the wild I was fighting.

[He laughs.]

Though I did end up getting rather good at fishing after I moved into my underwater lair.

Now you just sound like some sort of supervillain. We're not destined to be sworn enemies, are we?

[There's a tiny part of him that's kind of serious. Like, two percent.]

Well, are you an agent of Project Freelancer?

[Temple is sure that the answer will be ‘no’ but he supposes he should ask anyway, just to make sure.]

[And he’d rather not say that he does bear some resemblance to a supervillain - and plays it up for fun when it suits him - because he wants Klaus to keep on liking and trusting him.]

[Klaus is definitely the most morally flexible of the Umbrella Academy, anyway, so unless he intentionally murders busloads of children or something then he's probably fine.

He scratches absently at his forearm, where the umbrella-shaped tattoo sits.]

Ah, that would be a no.

Yeah, that’s what I figured.

[Temple hasn’t and wouldn’t murder busloads of children but he has murdered people. And done raids on places. And almost destroyed the Earth by accident.]

[Hopefully, Klaus is okay with that because the only part Temple is even close to regretting is the last part.]

[And the only reason he doesn’t regret it is that he is not sure if Loco’s machine would have actually destroyed the Earth.]

[Man, if you got put on the supervillains list for accidentally destroying the Earth -- then technically he's on that list, too.]

All right, so which way is it that we're going?

[Well, that’s not all Temple is on the list for.]

[Temple points to the left.]

That way.

[That's...also fair.

Klaus motions with no small amount of flare off to the left, a smirk on his lips.]

Then our fate is sealed, however temporarily.

[Temple starts moving in that direction, and looks behind to make sure Klaus is following him.]

Yeah. I suppose it is.

[Sure enough, he is following -- however lazily, with his hands shoved in his pockets.

He looks at the crystal structures with some curiosity, reaching his hands out to run over the smooth surfaces now and again, but he keeps pace well enough, like a foot soldier ought to.]

Damn, this place really does look like the moon, doesn't it? I mean, a shitty recolor of the moon.

With a lot more crystals too.

[Though, for all Temple knows, Klaus’ world’s moon could be crystalline like this. He doubts it, seeing as Klaus seems to be from Earth but...]

Well, I'm not the one who's been to Earth's moon.

[Just, you know, one of the ones that his sister was trying to kill when she blew the moon up. Way different.]

But, even still, you’ve seen pictures of it, right?

... unless you’re from a time before humans could take good photographs of the moon, somehow. But that would mean that time travel is involved in this...

Which would make things much weirder than I initially supposed...

[Temple is forgetting that, before people regularly went to the moon, whether it had lots of crystals on it or not was not something people cared about that much since, well... there wasn’t much of a chance that they would get to interact with those crystals.]

...Weirder than being transported to a foreign planet with no memory of how you got there? I don't think time travel's all that weird, compared to that.

At least I know time travel exists.

[Which is, again, a weird sentence to say out loud -- but then again, so is 'I see dead people', even after that stupid Bruce Willis movie.]

Yes, it exists.

People still do it less than they go to space, though, so it’s weird to me.

[Temple is aware that it is possible because Loco’s machine turned out to be able to open a time window into Blood Gulch. And he suspects that Loco gave it that ability because he wanted Temple to be able to see Biff, his dead friend, again.]

[... which makes Temple feel sad about how he accidentally killed Loco so he really doesn’t want to continue thinking about it.]

...well, yeah. That's true.

[He can't argue with that, since Five (and whatever agency Cha-Cha and Hazel had been from) was one of the few people who seemed to be able to do it, and certainly the only one to be able to do it without aid of a machine.

Klaus snorts.]

But for all I know, that's why Luther got sent to the moon in the first place -- to mine crystals.

[Except that he'd already been told that Luther had been sent to the moon as busy work. He'd actually felt bad for the big ape at that point.]

[Confused:]

Luther? Who’s he? And who sent him to the moon?

[Based on what he knows about Klaus already, space travel is not as common in his time period as it is in Temple’s so there probably is something significant about Luther and/or his trip to the moon. And it could have something to do with why they are on this recolour of the moon, perhaps, sooo...]

...Just another brother.

[Right, 'just'. He shrugs his shoulders, an easy roll, like he's trying to shrug off any sort of importance that the man might have to whatever it is that they're a part of right now.]

And our asshole father sent him to the moon. Don't worry about it.

[Temple’s tone of voice becomes harder.]

So, you’re sure that he has absolutely nothing to do with us ending up here right now?

Because, if you know something that can help us figure out what is going on here, you should probably say it.

[It is not a threat so Klaus has nothing to worry about. Temple just wants to make as sure as possible that Luther has nothing to do with what happened to them.]

I highly fucking doubt it. Dad's dead, and Luther hasn't been on the moon for a few weeks.

[And if Temple wants to connect those two things and intuit out that Luther probably came down from the moon because their dad died, well, he's a sharp cookie.

Klaus sighs, rubbing his hand over his jaw.]

No, this place doesn't make any sense for me, no matter how fucked up things were before I got here.

[Temple intuits that and decides to let the matter rest for now.]

[Then, his voice significantly softer, he says:]

Sorry.

I suppose I should have guessed that from how you were behaving when I first saw you. But I guess I got too far into Business Mode there and forgot that.

[Klaus is quick to flash the other man a smile that's half-crooked, half-sharp.]

Trust me, darling, I'm not so easy to offend. Better to do what you're good at and get something fucking useful done than worry about breaking a few eggs.

[That's a mixed-ass metaphor, Klaus.]

[Temple laughs sheepishly, scared a bit by Klaus’ expression and tone of voice.]

Well, if you say so.

But, please, if I do do something that hurts you, let me know, alright?

[Because he honestly can’t help but be concerned despite himself. And despite how Klaus is absolutely frustrating sometimes.]

[Because Klaus has grown on him by now. Like mold.]

[But Klaus is far more pleasant than mold, despite his flaws.]

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