legionooc | Announcement: Whistling In the Dark [Mod plot/signups]

Hey there, gang! It's time to set up and do signups for our first mod plot. This plot will be a little more event-like than some of the plots planned for the game but it should allow for a nice and easy plot for us all to dip our feet into things.

WHISTLING IN THE DARK

THE BASICS

Synopsis: One of the support staff that has been making trips down to the planet the PCs appeared on has been infected by a mass of semi-sentient creatures (known as The Lux) that accidentally slipped through the tear in spacetime from another dimension. These creatures can only exist on worlds that are cold, airless, and dark and to survive the hot, light-filled hostile world they found themselves in, they possessed the technician's body and rode it up to Legion World.

In their desperation to survive, the Lux are going to leave the body of the one technician and spread out, possessing other individuals on Legion World and will use them to sabotage life support on the ship to make it cold, airless, and dark. As a result, the PCs will have to cooperate with each other and fight through gravity malfunctions, hull breaches, life support failures, and other dangerous conditions to get the Lux off the ship and save the lives of everyone on Legion World.

The Lux: The Lux are semi-sentient and don't really mean to harm the people on board but they're desperate to survive and have fallen back on primitive survival instincts. Because of the hostile conditions they've found themselves in, they're having trouble thinking logically. However, it won't be immediately obvious that they're not hostile, so there is potential for the PCs to manage communication with them to find that out.

People possessed by the Lux look mostly normal but shining a bright light in the eyes of the possessed person will cause them to leave their body and free the host (who will be confused but still alive). More than one Lux can possess a single host.

Outside of a host, they take on an eerie appearance: a shadowy outline vaguely in the shape of the last person they possessed. The longer they're outside a host, the more the edges of the shadow start bleeding and stretching out, helping them move. Over time, they melt like candle wax and their appearance takes on a viscous oily quality. They can fly through the air and fit through any material or hole that liquid could fit through. The longer the Lux are outside a host, the more instinctively they act, trying to damage any technology they can touch in the hopes they can damage the ship and turn off the life support.

The Lux cannot be physically harmed. If a character tries to hit them they will either just have their attacks bounce off or the Lux will temporarily lose form and simply reform after.

A Lux will be shown on the network at the start of plot so players know how they act for their threads, but in general they will speak and say very simple words using the speech they've picked up from the hosts' minds.

ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS

The Lux themselves won't try to purposefully injure the characters. They can physically touch them both while in their host bodies and in their true forms but the most they'll do is try to knock your character over. However, the environmental threats on the ship will be hugely dangerous as they damage the ship, and will get worse as the plot goes on.

Lighting failures: The Lux love the dark so many of the lights will be cut, leaving characters with only dim emergency lighting or no light at all. Characters will either have to fix the electrical systems, find switches for emergency lighting overrides, find flashlights, or stumble around in the dark until they find a lit up area.

Tech-damaging energy pulses: Due to some of the systems malfunctioning, energy pulses will go through some areas of the ship, temporarily shutting down or limiting the functionality of tech like the flight rings, omnicoms, and transuits. This will make some of the other threats they face even more dangerous. This can also cause telepathic earplugs to fail, leading to characters not being able to read Interlac and communicate with each other and/or the support staff, making it more difficult for them to do what they need to do.

Gravity failures: Some parts of the ship will have gravity failures where the gravity turns off. In other areas, it may become too strong, pinning characters to the floor and forcing them to crawl to other areas where the high gravity is not in effect or to emergency boxes where they can flip emergency switches to fix the problem. In some areas it may work perfectly fine but flip them onto the wrong surface, like a wall or the ceiling. In other areas, it may be dangerous, switching from wall to floor to ceiling, throwing unsecured people and objects around the room as it shifts.

Hull breaches: Damage to the shields and other systems will lead to explosions, unplanned airlock openings, and hull breaches. While there are some automatic shields and systems to deal with this, they won't always work quickly enough to prevent people from being sucked out, leading to some support staff needing rescue and characters sometimes having to hold on long enough for a the ship to shield a breach -- or even needing to pull themselves past area doors so they can manually shut them. The suction involved here can potentially overpower a flight ring, depending on where the breach is. Characters may also use powers or find quick solutions to seal a breach as a solution to the problem.

Life support failures: Some areas will have life support failures, where breathable airflow stops or fills with carbon dioxide/other dangerous gases, or the heat starts to go too high or turns off, causing an area to start overheating or rapidly freezing. Again, this is an issue where support staff may need rescue. Techie characters may need to fix the issue (it's often possible to find consoles or engineering junctions where things can be rewired, or for the less tech-inclined, manual levers and switches to put emergency systems in place). Or characters may have to struggle to get to another area of the ship where the life support is stable.

Lockdowns: Some areas will lock down doors, trapping people in a section of the ship, making things even more dangerous if the area has other problems. They'll have to either break the doors down, science them open, or find alternate ways around them like the maintenance tubes/ventilation systems, etc. The latter is potentially dangerous given that the ship is having small explosions, unexpected plasma venting, and life support problems (like, say, carbon monoxide venting into a maintenance shaft).

Fire control system failures: In some areas there will be fires due to damage and explosions, and the fire control systems will malfunction, leaving characters having to rescue support staff and escape or find a way to fight the fire. This is especially dangerous in areas where a lockdown has happened.

Possession: The Lux will mostly just try to knock your characters down but if your character is in a dark area the Lux can potentially possess them, too! If they do so, they'll mostly use your character to damage the ship but may use their powers to attack other people. If they do so, their control of the powers won't be very good and they'll be aiming more to scare others off than cause harm.

HOW CHARACTERS CAN FIGHT THEM

When a Lux is possessing someone, they can be chased out of the host by shining a bright light in their eyes. Outside the host, they cannot be physically damaged but they can be herded around by sources of bright light and heat. The PCs with powers that produce this can use their powers against them. Characters that don't have powers effective against the Lux can use things in their surroundings (like jury-rigging lamps to be extra bright or breaking and redirecting engine plasma vents). Or they can find equipment like bright flashlights and tools capable of producing heat or fire to use against them.

However, if you think of any other unorthodox strategies the characters can possibly use, put them past the mods and we'll see if they can work as well.

The exact strategy they use to get them off the ship or trap them will potentially be up to you to come up with OOCly/the characters suggest ICly. OOCLY you can work this out in the ooc discussion post that will be up during the plot and/or ICly the characters can use the network to work this out. However, if you guys have trouble thinking up one, we have a premade solution we'll also toss in as an option.

HOW THIS WILL BE RUN:

This plot is opt-in. If it's not your cup of tea you can god your character as off maybe exploring one of the planets like Earth or can use a lockdown to handwave they were locked in an area of the ship that had no other problems (which might be an interesting option to pursue if you'd like them to be locked in with someone else sitting out).

After you comment to the signup below, we'll RNG you into pairs and provide a post for you to plot together before the plot starts. You'll have two things to figure out:

1) What environmental factors your characters will face. This is entirely up to you and you will handle working these elements into your threads as you play rather than the mods npcing them. You can have it that they luck out and have none and just play with the creepiness of fighting the Lux/possession. Or you can pick a few! Or you can have your characters be extremely unlucky and get hit by them all!

2) Whether you want to npc the Lux yourselves or have the mods do it for you. Some players prefer the former so they can control what happens and do it at their pace and some prefer the latter.

Please sign up by 1/16/16 @ 11:59 EST so we have time to RNG and allow you to plot before plot start.

Plot Start: Tentatively 1/20/16. We'll put up the RNG rolls and a plotting post over the next week or so.

Plot Length: We expect it to last maybe 2-3 weeks but it depends partly on your pace. However, this plot will be set up in a way that it can be backtagged pretty easily, so backtagging can go on as long as you need it to. Regardless of how long it takes, you can still do normal threads bendytimed before the plot as much as you want, and when the final solution is agreed to, you can easily handwave threads as taking place after the plot.