prismaticrap | ▶ TDM .012

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You awaken amidst the darkness with only a faint light to greet you. 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. After an hour or two of wandering through the crystal wilderness, a group of people find you worse for wear. They are the gallant Moon Knights from the planet of Prismatica. Because of the strange phenomena during the past months when scientists observed the sudden appearance of rainbow crystals in the sky, the government has been feverishly combing through the moon for more Moonblessed to be rescued. You’ll eventually be brought into Iris’s moon government center.

You all may have your usual inquiries — Where are we? Who are you? What's going on? — and the Prismals are almost too eager to answer. They tell you about their world and about the first appearance of the Moonblessed as the medical staff give you an examination to make sure you’re not carrying any viruses or biological hazards. If you react violently, you may be restrained and nerfed with a specialized neurotransmitting gun that releases a numbing agent through the top of your spine. Once the examinations are over, you’re informed that you will be provided accommodations on their planet during your stay. You will then be escorted to the docks, and led onto a large transport vessel that makes frequent trips back and forth between the Iris moon and the planet. Faces onboard vary from both old and new Moonblessed as well as the local Prismals.

The next destination: Prismatica.

▶ I am the Terror That Flaps in the Night
Iris Moon, Government Center (Arrival) and Planet Prismatica, City of Lunatia | top

Welcome to Prismatica’s hub, Lunatia, the city of your dreams! A bustling metropolis lush with bright lights, vibrant colors, luxuriant plant life, and all the conveniences of technology absent from your own world… It seems like paradise to all the uninitiated. After a quick tour of the city, new arrivals can find themselves getting cozy in their new homes.

A Settle in your new home at Level 2 to find new roommates and say hello to your neighbors! City officials will give you directions to the designated districts across Level 2 and instruct you to pick out a unit. Each apartment complex has a different aesthetic, some may look cozy, some stylish, and some bizarre. The free accommodations have a basic living space that can only fit two or three people at most in one unit.

Starter Chromaspace furnishings are provided which can be controlled with the touch of a built-in panel. Examples are color-changing curtains, transforming sofa beds, cabinets turning into tables, etc. Customizing your apartment or moving out will have to wait until you earn more chroma. Until then, why don’t you check out your new neighborhood or explore the city levels? Maybe your new roommates or neighbors can give you a “hand” with allowance for dinner.

B Your new flat is covered in a sprinkling of feathers here, there, and everywhere! They appear to be coming through the air vents. This seems to be a city-wide problem in all buildings, as many news outlets are informing people to stay alert. They believe the feathers are from the masked seraphim, King Majestas, who attacked the Elaran Amphitheater a few weeks back.

You are advised to destroy the feathers on sight. Prolonged contact with these feathers cause hallucinations and paranoia. You will feel as if winged creatures are always after you, be it one-winged angels or dark-winged ducks. Other side effects include hearing the chanting of voices in an indecipherable language out of this galaxy. These hallucinations may cause headaches, dizziness, or nausea. Thankfully, a bit of moonlacing will heal these symptoms away.

▶ Got Milk?
Level 2, Crystal Beach | top

With the Coiled Hearts Festival fast approaching, local fishermen have already begun procuring food across Crystal Beach’s clear waters to meet next month’s demands. Around this time of year, the popularity of octopus dishes dramatically rises. The Lunatians have an annual tradition to prepare flavorful octopus dishes for the romantic season, such as the much-lauded dark chocolate-coated octopus or the mouth-watering octopus braised with red wine.

Everyone is welcome to join this heart-throbbing affair. During the Second and Third months, everyone is encouraged to give your loved ones something special for a long, successful relationship. Friends, family, and new acquaintances are traditionally given a small amount of Demichroma in tiny cute cases, while lovers are given something that reminds the gifter of their homeland.

A Interested in catching your own octopus? Horned taurus octopi very frequently migrate to the shorelines to perform their elaborate mating rituals. It’s easy to find clumps of taurus octopi participating in a vigorous dance, filled with undulations and strange moaning noises that octopi should not be making. You can lure the octopi by either using a special flute which mimics their moans to gather them in heavy droves. It’s ideal to have a partner with you to scoop the octopi quickly into water containers once they’ve become entranced enough.

Play the flute carefully! If the taurus octopi grow too excited by your music, they will squirt white ink. If you are spritzed with the thick substance, you will start either randomly puking or uncontrollably secreting a milky sweet substance from any body part that secretes liquids. Luckily, the high-end boutique Prissy Polyp is nearby in case you need a change of clothes due to any sizable stains. Effects will naturally wear off after an hour.

B Come with a friend and enjoy learning some octopus recipes together. The Crystal Beach Resort has opened a seminar where several professional chefs will be demonstrating and teaching how to cook various dishes of different flavors and ingredients guaranteed to impress your date, and taste-testing is free!

One dish makes use of horned taurus octopi skin as the star ingredient, renowned for its irresistibly delectable scent. The chefs explain the palatable skin is a potent ingredient in various love potions and aphrodisiacs, so add or mix them to your dishes in moderation! The effects have a significant delay, so you may feel fine for a while, but when it hits, it hits hard. You will become enamored with every little thing — hey, you just met them and this is crazy — but that person’s smile, the sound of their voice, or the way they say your name will make you unable to resist the urge to shower them with your affection.

▶ Going Viral
Level 2, Moonlight Medical Center | top

“Help Wanted” posters can be found on virtual forums and announcement boards across Level 1 to 3. The Moonlight Medical Center has put out a call for volunteers due to a recent shortage of medical staff. The work involves filling in for overworked nurses, performing tasks such as feeding patients their meals, wiping away their sweat, changing their clothes, encouraging their spirits, and so on. Any volunteers may directly walk-in at the hospital. You will be provided a nurse uniform and any necessary equipment while on the job.

The shortage has resulted from the hospital recently taking in a severe number of patients from a nearby small village to the west of Lunatia, Port Sylvel, a known shipping and freight destination. The number of patients worryingly keeps on rising by the day and will soon fill all available rooms.

A Some of the patients are experiencing varying degrees of paralysis. The worst cases have crystallizing parts of their body. The hospital staff will stress that you should be careful around patients with crystallized limbs. Patients like these have a history of aggressively biting anyone who comes close hard enough to draw blood. Those bitten will exhibit similar symptoms as the victims, including crystallization on their bodies, and experience a steady drop in Chroma. An uncomfortable heaviness will cause you unable to move without the aid of others as well as an uncontrollable urge to aggressively bite someone.

While affected Moonblessed can cure it by moonlacing, the Prismals can only be cured by a gluteal inoculation the Lunar Scientia has recently managed to develop. The sick and beleaguered will probably hate you less if you aren’t the one trying to stabbing them with injections in the hindquarters.

B Aside from nursing duties, other available tasks to be completed include making coffee for fellow nurses and doctors, delivering flowers to patients, and general housekeeping. Specifically, disinfecting medical equipment, tidying up rooms, and cleaning the spaces around the hospital. As a result of the current situation, many crystal shards can be found decorating multiple surfaces, such as floors, walls, toilet seats, and so on. These will have to be swept away!

However, as your work day progresses, some of the shards can be seen suddenly moving on their own. These crawling shards will start clustering together to turn into elaborate, floating monolithic formations that will then begin attacking anyone nearby. Their main ability includes shooting diamond spears to impale any unfortunate victims in their line of sight. In the midst of the chaos, nurses and doctors will beg the Moonblessed to please protect the sick and wounded. The crystal formations can be destroyed by any method, though because of their incredibly sturdy composition, they require multiple hits before they shatter into dust.

▶ Questions
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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ barnes is another matter altogether. barnes, she knows, might hold something akin to a grudge, if not a grudge full stop. he’d felt hurt, she knows, when he’d realized that there had come a time when the howlies had stopped looking.

so peggy thins her mouth into a line and gives her head a little shake. ]

Similar circumstances on the surface. Frozen, kept alive, revived in the future. [ she picks at a splintered edge of table. ] Except the wrong sort of people found him.

[ —which leads to the man sitting across from her, her dear friend, assassinated. now it’s her turn to escape eye contact. ]

Wrong sort of people,

[Howard echoes with a raised eyebrow. He's still unclear as to how the man survived the fall, let alone the exposure afterwards, but that's just more information to gather, more hypotheses to form and test. He thinks about it in terms of science because it's easier to process that way. Later he can let the emotion seep in around the edges but - god, he's already got more than he can handle right now, is it so wrong to try and push the rest of it off to a time when he can bear the emotional burden more easily?]

The Germans were barely holding it together by then. [He's thinking through the likely suspects out loud, as he does so often. Hearing his own voice helps him think.] Hydra might've had the technology, but we cleared them out. [Or so he believes, anyway.] The Soviets? [He knows they've been hiding technology of their own - that's certainly become apparent enough to all of them.]

[ everything howard says, everything he articulates and acknowledges and assesses, are the same conclusions she’s struggled with ever since learning what really happened.

she nods, nods, nods—until she’s not nodding any more. ]

HYDRA, [ she confirms. ruefully. ] By way of the Soviets. If you can believe it.

Christ.

[He runs his fingers through his hair. Possibilities tumble through his head, and none of them are good. Howard hadn't thought about Hydra taking root in other countries, hadn't considered there had been any left to spread. It is, he realizes, something he should have given more thought to - but, hell, there'd been so much going on in the aftermath of the war that once Red Skull had been brought down and the last facilities had been raided, he'd had to turn his attention to other things.]

What'd they do to him?

[After a fall like that? Howard imagines some sort of a Frankenstein creature, pieced together where the original body had been too mangled.]

[ suddenly, she realizes—it’s worse to tell this story than be told it. playing audience member, she’d been allowed to indulge her horror and her surprise. now, in recounting it, it’s her responsibility to decide what can and can’t be shared.

peggy frowns. it’s not her secret. not her trauma. ]

Nothing good.

[ she wants to tell him to go ask barnes himself—but then also, viscerally, she wants to keep the two separate for as long as possible. might some old programming rear its head and incite violence between the two? ]

He lost an arm. And a number of memories, too, I believe.

[There are times when it's more informative to listen to what Peggy isn't saying - times when Howard has to overcome his own natural instinct to fill the empty spaces in their conversation and let the silence speak for itself. The furrow in her brow tells him more than those three sparse sentences, and as reluctant as he is to relinquish the bottle, he slides it across the table to her and drinks his lukewarm tea instead.]

I'll keep that in mind for when I run into him.

[There are more questions he has, but none that need to be answered specifically by Peggy; anything else he might want to know can be found out through investigating his environment - or, perhaps, through first-hand experience. (He's tempted to joke about the latter, but now...well, now isn't exactly the time.)]

Anything else I need to know?

Probably.

[ her turn to take the bottle, to take a swig, to feel the pleasant bolstering burn from throat to stomach. ]

But it’s a tricky business—telling someone about their own future. I’ve been told I don’t always handle it well.

[ both the telling and the being told. ]

Let’s start with what’s going on back home. There’s very possibly some temporal difference between the two of us. It’s a common enough pitfall in a place like this.

[ she’s almost too cavalier about the possibility. ]

[He can't bring himself to be particularly surprised by Peggy not handling it well; as fond as Howard is of Peggy, he's the first to admit that tact is oftentimes not her strong point. As for the other, it's not like he has any room to talk on that point.]

Oooh, temporal difference. [Howard waggles his eyebrows. It's even more over the top than usual, a deliberate attempt to distract both Peggy and himself from his bleak mood.] You know how I like it when you talk all technical, Peg.

[ oh, the look she gives him! peggy’s exasperation and her pride both fight for position on her face. but it gives howard precisely what he wants—a distraction. ]

Yes. Well. I’ve gotten plenty more technical since we last spoke.

[ mostly on the topic of time travel, granted, and even then it’s only what rip hunter deigns to explain. ]

Last I recall, you were in Peru.

[ that should be a safe, soft gauge of his when and his where. she needn’t tell him about the gut injury. she also needn’t tell him why he was in peru if it turns out she’s a bit ahead. ]

Now you're just teasing me.

[With the promise of more science, that is. It really is too bad Whitney Frost turned out to be crazy, because, god, that woman's mind is the kind of thing Howard would love to appreciate in so many different ways.]

Last I recall, I'd successfully wooed Dr. Wilkes away from you and you were about to leave me and go back to New York.

[So apparently he's ahead of her.]

[ oh.

her posture stiffens. it’s immediate and obvious—howard stark, just now, got the better of her somehow. she toys with the whiskey bottle’s neck, frowns a moment as she wonders what exactly he means by wooing jason away, and eventually lands on a sly, curious reaction. ]

Back to New York?

[ she questions him. ]

Not much left for you to do out in California.

[Though his expression is enigmatic enough to leave room for interpretation there - less so on the front of their particular case, admittedly, which is very much closed.]

Although I'm afraid Jarvis was disappointed by the thought of going back to chasing Bernard around the estate.

[ not much left for her to do out in california.

—well, that’s an odd feeling! a sensation of unearned completion steals over her soul. given the high stakes of her current case, she can only imagine that a return to the east coast would be a triumphant one.

she wants to ask about jason. she wants to ask about whitney frost. she want to ask about a lot of people and a lot of things, but she settles on asking… ]

And Dottie Underwood?

[There's a fleeting expression of who? on Howard's face - look, his brain is crammed full of more knowledge than anyone really needs, a solid chunk of which is completely trivial, and for some reason, Dottie Underwood manages to slip his mind every damn time. But, yes, somehow he manages to get back to 'that crazy broad who tried to kill me' all on his own, and-

Oh. Right. Definitely still at large.]

Um.

[Howard rubs the back of his neck uncomfortably. Couldn't she have asked about Whitney Frost instead?]

Well. She's out there.

[ peggy curses—quiet, but vicious. it might be rather good news to imagine that their zero matter issue is put to bed. but beyond that? underwood is a problem that she’d caused. hubris and ego and desperation had pushed her into that terrible idea.

well. she hadn’t intended for this to turn into such a pity party. ]

And likely halfway to somewhere without an extradition treaty, now.

[ another low-voiced bloody hell. ]

I get the feeling she's more likely to stick around in the States. She seems to be drawn like you like a bee to nectar.

[He's not going to venture any theories about Dottie's apparent obsession, he just thinks that they haven't seen the last of her. Which means, in Howard's opinion, that Peggy should have a solid chance to catch her again, despite the other woman's cleverness. If he has faith in one person, it's Peggy Carter.]

[ an expression both dark and foreboding steals across peggy’s face. as eager as she might be to sink her claws into her quarry, she doesn’t much enjoy howard’s implication that the soviet agent would risk her own hide just on the off-chance that their paths might cross once more. ]

Aren’t I lucky?

[ she grumbles, rubs idle at the back of her neck, and then sinks into her chair. ]

Look, Howard, there’s something else you ought to know…

You could do worse than have a pretty blonde lady obsessed with you.

[Conveniently ignoring that said lady has tried to kill both of them more than once, but that's Howard for you. He snags the bottle back from Peggy's side of the table, regarding her with some apprehension.]

There's more?

[Oh, Howard, you have no idea.]

[ she watches, dark-eyed, while he claims her bottle and keeps it for himself. it’s not that she needs the liquid courage—it’s just that it’s easier to tell these sorts of secrets with a bit of whiskey clinging to the back of your throat.

but she might as well finish what she started. ]

I was somewhere else. Before I was here. Somewhere—similar, but far from identical. Like here, there were people from other worlds. From our world. From worlds that seemed like our world but couldn’t possibly be.

[ and here’s the kicker. ]

It was called Wonderland.

[Howard absolutely does need it to fortify himself, and he takes a long swig as she talks, his Adam's apple bobbing as he drinks. But he's also listening to every word she says.]

Wonderland? [He sets the bottle down and arches an eyebrow.] You follow a white rabbit there?

[Never mind that she certainly hadn't gone missing for any length of time at home; they've already established that this involved time travel somehow, and so something like that seems negligible.]

Anyone else, I'd ask if they'd been on drugs. [But not Peggy, not with him.] We - I say we, but frankly, it was mostly Doctor Wilkes and Whitney Frost - figured out that the Zero Matter came from another dimension. According to Wilkes, it had devoured everything in that world and wanted to come to ours to do the same. So it's not too much of a stretch to assume that there are even more universes out there.

[ something rankles in what he tells her—wilkes and frost? together or separately? the curiosity turns a metallic taste in the back of her throat but she swallows it down. ]

You joke. [ she answers, dryly. ] But there was an Alice and there was a Queen of Hearts and there were looking glasses everywhere.

[ and peg can’t say whether it was truly wonderland or a wonderland-like fiction speckled over reality. ]

But there wasn’t any Chroma. Nor any moonlacing either. [ … ] Wonderland traded on memories instead of intimacy.

There's an argument to be made there for expectations influencing reality. [A thoughtful crease forms between his eyebrows.] Even if you had people there who weren't from Earth, [and, oh, he says that more casually than someone who's just arrived has any right to] they'd still pick up on the idea from those who were familiar with it, or else just- go with what was already in place. It feeds on memories, and that reinforces the fiction holding things together.

[What? Figuring things out is what he does.]

[ it’s comfortable. cozy, almost, the way he falls into his theorizing and the way peggy rides along the same wavelength. she nods—enthusiastic—and reaches for her whiskey bottle.

she’d like a drink, thanks. ]

Every fortnight or so, the whole place would pluck an experience from someone’s memory—often something terribly traumatic—and inflict it upon the entire population.

[ she tells howard more than she’s told anyone else, more than she’s told steve, because there is a kind of built-in collaborative safety net with her dear friend. something unspoiled by decades apart and frayed heartstrings. ]

Before I arrived here, Wonderland was in the midst of just such an event. Our worst memories were playing, on loop, in our quarters. Tempting us to try and rewrite them.

[With someone else, he might hug them, but with Peggy - even though she allows him to embrace her, albeit begrudgingly - he just reaches out to take her hand and squeeze it. A hug doesn't seem right at a moment like this, if only because of the warmth of moonlacing complicating things.

(And, of course, he allows her the bottle without complaint.)]

Christ. I'm not sure I would've made it.

Edited 2020-03-11 01:36 (UTC)

[ nevertheless, a small crackle of connection brews between their hands when howard offers her some comfort. something softens in peggy’s expression—but she buries it quickly in a mouthful of alcohol. even in such a short span of months, wonderland had inflicted all kinds of horrors.

her fingers relax and go slack against the interior of his palm. ]

You would surprise yourself. [ she assures him, assuring herself by proxy. ] All the events you can endure because you know it’ll be done in a few days—and that most everyone around you are quick to forgive. They’re put through the same wringer.

[ —perhaps it’s a strange thing to say, now, considering how much of her life and work happens in wholly different countries to howard stark. but… ]

I could have used you.

[ it's a cool way of saying she missed him. because he wasn’t simply popped out to peru, for her, but was instead entirely absent for the last half a year. no phone calls, no telegrams, no infuriating little anecdotes from mister jarvis. ]

▶ TDM .012

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