[X] Existential
Ella woke up with a groan and a massive hangover fuzzing over her head. Had she been partying...?
The realization that she was not in her bed but laying on the hard metal ground of an unfamiliar hallway, faintly illuminated by flickering emergency lighting. Pushing herself to her feet in a mild panic, she quickly checked herself for injury and found that she seemed more or less fine other than the headache and an error signal from her muse. Frowning at that, she began to try to sort out where she was by following the hallways.
Was this a dream? Was she back in that dark tangle of corridors and madly illuminated rooms that she had started to suspect had something to do with the darker parts of her personality?
No... no... this felt... felt different somehow. There was something distinctly strange and unsettling about the atmosphere of this place, but in a way that Ella could not quite put a finger on. Rapping a knuckle on the walls and getting the hollow ring of metal, she felt strangely isolated and fragile. The sound of this place was off, was fundamentally insecure in its aspect, somehow. Trailing a hand to keep her balance in the dark, she pressed onward. The hallway she was in was cluttered at foot level with decayed, ratty boxes of some sort of flimsy polymer that were empty and mostly in tatters, with only dry things that may have once been clothing spilling out of the remnants of some. It was very strange.
She reached a set of doors that then caused her to pull up short, holding herself timidly at the threshold. On one side there was metal under her feet, but beyond the battered and only partly connected polymer doors there was a pale, diffuse light and the floor was made out of some strange ceramic she had never seen before. Crouching down, she scratched a nail against the weird, rough substance, and while it seemed strong enough to support her, it felt far, far too insecure to be of any use as an actual building material. Still, with more light she could potentially figure out what was going on, so she tentative stepped over the edge onto the peculiar substance, a strange feeling of queasy unease washing over her. It was like her body could tell that the substance she was standing on was wholly inadequate to the demands of a building.
As she moved into better lighting that seemed to come from under door frames and other hallways, Ella was struck by something that had been gnawing at the back of her mind before but was now becoming more evident... the architecture was subtly wrong on every level. It wasn't inhuman, it was very much human in fact, but it was all designed in ways that felt unpleasantly foreign to her. The spacing of the walls was different, things felt flimsier than they should, things felt more haphazard... it was all very unpleasant, like walking into a room where someone had deliberately arranged things to create perspective tricks. Running a hand across a nearby wall, Ella flinched away from it like she had been burned over the fact that it had some give to it, and its surface felt almost fuzzy. It was like she could lean on it hard and punch through to the other side, a thought that sent instinctive shivers up her spine. How? How could someone build even internal walls like that? What insanity had gripped the builders of this place?
Creeping along, feeling like everything would come crashing down around her, Ella soon came to a doorway made of some sort of strange, flimsy, now rotted composite material. It was weirdly organic in nature, almost like Terran wood, but its sheer size precluded such things. You couldn't make something this big out of Terran trees, and the material was utterly lacking in any metal, so it couldn't be proper wood. Pushing it open to find a room filled with the tattered remnants of some sort of store, with the broken remains plastic shell mannequins shoved into a heap in one corner and various rusted over racks and smashed up shelves scattered throughout. The far end of the store opened up into a large space through which wan light spilled forth. While the underlay was clearly the weird ceramic/composite material, it was now overlaid with some sort of extruded marble tile, so that at least let Ella pretend a bit that there was something solid under her feet.
Moving carefully she paused and crouched to examine a pile of some weird substance near the entrance of the store. It was almost like ash but it was too coarse for that, and as she ran it between her fingers, letting the grains crumble away back to the pile, her hands came away more or less clean. It was a distinctly unnatural feeling substance that felt almost like what she suspected some of the abrasive powders used in engineering might feel like. She also noticed a few glittering shards within the pile and gingerly picking one up. A small, irregular almost-cube of transparent material, it was definitely glass, but it was also definitely artificial why would anyone make glass instead of using a sturdier material or using the far more aesthetically pleasing bioglass available from the biosphere?
Dropping the shard back in the pile of abrasive, Ella looked outside the store and almost immediately scuttled back away from the entrance in panic, towards the service corridor. As she had expected the store opened up into a large hallway with other stores - some sort of shopping centre - but the terrible ruin had extended to the skylights. The entire complex was open to the sky, with undulating, frozen waves of abrasive having taken over the interior. The architecture still on display was all at once familiar and yet alien, adding a spike of the uncanny to the reasonable terror of being in an environmentally compromised building. Retreating out of the service corridor and into the relative but still grossly insecure region of the dark metal hallways, Ella shivered uncontrollably for several long moments. None of this made sense! This had to be some sort of insane dream. She just... just had to figure out how to wake herself up from it.
Some part of her screamed that she couldn't be dreaming, that despite the insanity of the architecture this felt all too real. Another part of her found that this was a feeble excuse and at the very least she should treat the situation as if it were real, for safety's sake if nothing else.
Pushing her way further into the dark metal corridors, Ella soon found them emerging into a large sort of storage area, where she was on the second floor, metal stairs leading down to a ceramic floored area filled with the remnants of smashed up boxes and their rotten and tattered contents spilled out. While there were areas of deep, impenetrable shadow far from the dim emergency lighting, there were a few holes in the roof that allowed shafts of illumination to spill out, typically serving as a spotlight upon the piles of pale abrasive that had leaked through the compromised metal. Shuddering in horror at the breaches, Ella made sure to avoid those areas like the light was pure reactor flux and instead found her way into the service corridors of the lower floors, the remains of various offices slowly breaking down in the dry air and the dark. Eventually she came upon a metal door that had the faded impression of lettering on it. Unable to really read it in the bare light, Ella reached out to see if she could feel out anything significant, only to discover that the door was not really attached to its frame and was only held up by inertia. Falling over, light flooded into Ella's face, blinding her for a moment.
What she found when her eyes had adjusted enough to see caused her to start screaming.
As the wind brushed against her skin and flicked her hair, she screamed hard enough to wake up.
Desperately struggling out of her sheets and cot, Ella half crawled and half ran at a desperate, frantic pace to the bathroom, where she violently retched up thin, bilious vomit in raw panic.
No trees! No trees!
Just an open sky under an unnatural sun shining down on endless waves of abrasive... enough abrasive to erode away an entire world, an entire ecosystem. What barren hell was that? And then the wind had blown against her bare skin and she knew that a killing storm was coming, with only the pathetic, inadequate ruins to shield her. She shuddered as her mind played through the scouring erosion of her body that would come when those piles were stirred and shredded the building. Everyone knew that the wind meant death, especially if you weren't in proper gear, and to have that stirring such all consuming abrasive? Ella shuddered again.
Ella shuddered again and went back to glare at the nightmare cube. She should turn it off... and yet for all that the dream had terrified her on a fundamental level, she found that she could not. The image of an endless world of deadly abrasive was stuck in her mind and she just couldn't let it go. She had to... had to see more.
Gained Trait: Stressed
Gained Trait: Obsessive Stressor (cannot lose Stressed trait or turn off Nightmare Cube until obsession fulfilled)
Research (Int+Aca) 11 + 18 = 29
Obsessive, frantic research over the next few days yielded little from the archives, other than to identify the abrasive material she had seen as most likely being something called 'Sand'. There were historical records of large deposits of it on other planets but it was something entirely artificial on Dandriss, with little use outside of certain related powders being used for certain machining purposes. There was a somewhat related material called sandstone that was occasionally used as an artistic cladding by those rich enough to splurge on such extravagance, but she had never seen it in use.
Ella wanted to tell herself that what she had seen surely had to be some sort of strange idea her mind had assembled from vague memories of off world histories where such possibilities were harmless, but everything had felt so real. There was something important about it all, but she had no idea what. Even as such a clear dream eluded her in restless nights, she wanted to see that abomination again. She had to... had to somehow feel such a place and know that it was safe, that the images dancing in her mind and playing off every self preservation instinct were not in fact dangerous.
She didn't want to look at a window and imagine abrasive sand slowly wearing it away to nothing to let the horrors of the outside world come inside.
Choose a manifestation...
[] Sketch
[] Sculpt
[] Read
[] Sensation
