MAY EVENT LOG

[monstertruckers]

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Out of the thorn brush, the land still looks twisted and broken. And it turns a lot more jagged as rocks burst up and out of the ground like teeth… And keep reaching upwards, in defiance of all the gravity that should be pulling them down. The further up the rock spires reach, the more they splinter until the stones are free floating. The same happens to the threadbare trees, their branches and leaves breaking off and hovering in empty air. The nature of this place becomes clear: reach too high, and eventually gravity gives up.

01: BATTLE GROUND

The ground grows rougher, pockmarked with craters and rents, like the landscape is scarred. A little further up the road is the source of those wounds. Curious Drifters will find a tangle of rock and metal reaching high up to the sky. It’s a snarl of wrecked vehicles, rock spires… And bodies.

Robotic hunters are half melted into the bones of a giant monster, and the lights have long since gone out of their lens eyes. Many of them still clutch weapons; swords, guns, and bullets by the bag-full. The hunters and weapons remain locked with the corpse of a horn crowned monster with arm length teeth, and it’s clear this tangle is the only thing that keeps the hunters or their weapons from floating off. Drifters can potentially loot the weapons… They just have to be careful about not floating off while they salvage equipment. The footing here is uneven, and the ground looks ready to break with a wrong step.

These hunters also carry prayer screen beads, but the data on them is horribly scrambled. Any attempts to tamper with them cause them to repeat a single message: “I STILL LIVE” before shorting out and shutting down.

02: HEALTH INVERSION

A building grows out of the valley; a hospital that has been turned upside down, and its foundations reach for the sky like weird tree branches. The hallways inside are all sorts of twisted up, and the building can’t seem to decide if Drifters should walk on the ceiling or the floors.

Twisted as the building is, ruins gutted by time and overgrown with vegetation… There is salvage available. Medical supplies, healing potions, healing herbs, all of it is bountiful in the hospital. The hospital is also rife with Husks, but all of them are inert… Or have already been broken apart long ago.

Then there’s the matter of the hospital screens flickering on in the wake of the Drifters. Warning lights try to flicker on, as old electronics try to scan the Drifters. The machines give up flickers of data, declaring Drifters to be “infected.” The old restraining systems of the hospital are still active, as manacles and straps alike shoot out, trying to restrain Drifters. The bonds keep them inert until they can be sedated and enclosed in what look like holding pens for violent patients. Best hope there’s someone around to help break a Drifter out.

03: SHARED THOUGHTS

The valley is overgrown with strange plants that glow with eerie light. Sometimes in camp stray glowing tumbleweeds roll through… And any contact has interesting side effects. Drifters will find they’re more aware and capable of picking up on unsaid things. These powers can the month. Each glow confers different abilities:

Blue Glow: Makes Drifters more empathetic in a psychic sense. They can register the emotions of those nearby, and may start to feel those same emotions.
Green Glow: Makes Drifters capable of projecting their emotions to other people.
Purple Glow: Gives Drifters telepathy, to hear and send thoughts to others.
Orange Glow: Grants Drifters limited psychometry. (Object reading.) Using it in the hospital or the battleground will yield unique visions and messages. Please comment to the mod/NPC thread below if your character wishes to do so!

Drifters can stack these effects, but this can overload their minds and force transformations. Those with Swarm traits will find it easier to handle psionic abilities. Additionally, ALL DRIFTERS who experience psionics will find themselves susceptible to Events 4 and 5.

04: MONSTER SHIFT, HIVE-MIND

Worryingly, extra contact with the glowing plants can not only stack mind abilities, but also force Swarm traits. The more a Drifter is overwhelmed by psionics, the more likely this is. Drifters will have access to all Swarm traits for this event, and the following:
+Psi Hunger. A need to eat psychic energy in the form of dreams, psi-infused objects (like sage brush) or even psychic minds.
+Psi Senses: luckily, Drifters can glimpse heavy psychic energy in the brush through enhanced senses, and pick out strange brain monsters. These are good eating for Swarm monsters… And there’s an unnervingly high number of them.
+Group Mind: compelled to link thoughts with other Drifters, to share emotions, memories, and achieve cohesion.
+An increasing reliance on telepathy/empathy/etc in place of speech.
+Increasing collectivist mindset. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few; this becomes more evident during high stress situations.
+Compelled to spend more time in the wilds, absorbing power from plants and hunting prey in wilderness. May also be compelled to share this prey with others.
+Gravity Affinity: If possessing wings or the ability to wall climb, may freely hunt/traverse corrupted gravity areas.

05: WHAT DREAMS MAY COME

On several nights the wind picks up, and sage brush is uprooted and sent tumbling into camp. The plants trade their prior glow to something more baleful and crimson. With the wind whipping through the camp, it’s almost impossible to avoid unless a Drifter is already secure in the Convoy.

The effects aren’t immediately obvious, until the Convoy sleeps for the night… And that sleep is different. Namely the sleep is connected, showing both memories and dreams from other Drifters.

Memories from their pasts can blend together to form a strange dreamscape, that connected Drifters can travel through. But those dreams can easily turn into nightmares. Those who were exposed to the fear toxin in February will trend towards nightmares and may have their old fears make a reappearance.
If those nightmares are vivid and unsettling enough, they can force a transformation. (This may be either current monster traits, or a Swarm monster!) And then…

06: BRAIN ATTACK

It happens just before dawn, during the blue hour… Or perhaps it might be more apt to call it the red hour, with how the sky is stained crimson. It’s just bright enough to distinguish something moving in the hills. Drifters can pick out a rustling in the brush; something that isn’t wind. There’s something moving, crawling on claw tipped legs… And looking less like sage brush and more like a brain.

The Intellect Devourers numbers in the hundreds. Their claws scour the ground as they race towards the Convoy and smash into the shield. Numbers start to overwhelm the generator, along with the chaos the brain brush has sown with their psychic echoes.

The psychic echoes increase as they swarm the campsite, trying to drive Drifters into a frenzy with nightmares, fears, and strange visions. The brains are also ready to use those long sharp claws to tear anyone disoriented enough into ribbons, and start feasting on them.

06-A: BRAIN BRAWL

Hallucinations: The Intellect Devourers try to whip up more terrifying visions. Anything to disorient the entire Convoy, or drive the Drifters into a madness that leaves them transformed and too wild to easily counterattack. These hallucinations may be past trauma, or something a Drifter fears happening; the ultimate goal is to leave Drifters panicking, changed, and vulnerable.

Rally: Still, there’s one thing the Devourers didn’t anticipate: and that is how sharing a mental link has given the Drifters an anchor with each other. With all the psychic echoes spreading through the camp, any and all mental links from before can easily flare back up. Drifters who have shared dreams or some form of mental connection may still transform, but their mental link can keep their minds stable and coherent instead of growing feral.

Scars: Whether through brute force battles or mental link resistance, eventually the Convoy is able to shrug off the attack… But there is still some damage done. The shield generator has shorted out, and the Convoy itself has taken a few gashes and gouges. Not to mention any transformed Drifters will still need to be talked down. Luckily the mental links are still in place to help with that, and there’s a truck full of medical supplies to help with patching up any hurts.

MICRO ENCOUNTERS:

PLEASE NOTE! These are small bits of set dressing for players to include in threads if they wish, rather than full fledged prompts or events. You may handwave your exploration of these areas, or thread them out.

Disorientation: When wandering through the brush, Drifters may experience a swarm of disorientation: their thoughts suddenly scramble, they forget where they were going or what they were doing. They may also come to with a set of gashes along their legs, and a sense that they may have seen something in the sage brush move… Or maybe it was just the wind.

Float: Occasionally, parts of the road just give up their hold on the ground and go drifting skywards. Hopefully those chunks of road don’t take Drifters and their vehicles with them. Tough vehicles can likely survive the drop, while Fast vehicles can speed away before they float too far upwards. Drifters caught outside their vehicles will have to hope they have fast reflexes… Or are either good fliers or good jumpers for the leap back down.

Raining Down: On occasion, gravity will flicker and warp oddly… And that means that other odd things can fall where they used to float; rocks, plants, not to mention the odd bit of hardware and buildings. Watch for falling objects of various shapes and sizes!


NAVIGATION

Comments

1

[definitionofcrazy]

For Faith's part, she's not really fussed about the phantom twinge hand pain. She punches enough stuff, with enough frequency, that she just figures it's residual damage. It never occurs to her that there's an external source.

As such, she's much more distracted by the sight of Jolie punching rocks in the weird trippy gravity. Or, uh. Trying.

"Do me a favor, don't try to punch anything like that for real, you'll break your hand."

[mytearsaremine]

"How else do you punch things?" Jolie asks, a little sullenly, still shaking her hand out. It's embarrassing for the cool badass fighter woman to catch her messing up something Faith probably knew how to do for years or something. "You make a fist and you hit it, right?"

[definitionofcrazy]

Oh. Uh. Crap.

"Aight, look. One, don't punch rocks. I don't do that unless the rock has it comin', and I got superpowers."

That's not entirely true- she's punched a few inanimate objects for stress relief in her time. But that's definitely going in the 'do as I say, not as I do' file, as far as she's concerned. She nods at Jolie's hand.

"Make a fist for me, lemme see what you got."

[mytearsaremine]

"I was just frustrated with them," Jolie admits, a little embarrassed to be caught at it by someone she kind of sees as cool. And she has superpowers? That's way too cool and also even more embarrassing. But she does make a fist. It's all wrong, too, like what you'd do if you were just clenching them.

[definitionofcrazy]

"Uh..."

Okay, that slipped out without her meaning to. Uh. Whoops. Better dial that back.

"Okay, not quite. Fingers first, then thumb. And relax your grip a little. Check it."

She demonstrates by holding out her own fist, turned upward so Jolie can see the way the fingers and thumb are curled. First, she grips the thumb inside the fist, and demonstrates pressing it against her other palm.

"You hit like this, you're gonna break your thumb."

She then curls her fingers and rests the thumb along the side of her fist and demonstrated the same motion.

"You hit like this, the thumb's gonna hit first. Sucks, trust me."

She then curls the thumb around the closed knuckles and demonstrates a third time.

"This hits straight-on, thumb's out of the way. Still gonna hurt, especially if you never punch sh-stuff-"

She almost recovered. Damn.

"But it's not gonna break your thumb that way. Long as you keep your wrist steady, won't break that either. Now lemme see."

[mytearsaremine]

Faith is actually doing a pretty good job so far. She manages not to make it sound like she's giving any orders, and she shows it as she explains it, and gives reasons behind why things are done. She neatly sidesteps all of Jolie's issues just by being a casual, experienced badass.

Jolie nods along, and mimics her fist once she's made it too. "Like this? How do you keep your wrist steady? Is there a trick to that, too? Because I definitely don't want to break my wrist."

[definitionofcrazy]

"Couple ways."

She holds up her own hand, open and facing .

"Tell you what, punch my palm, but do it slow, lemme see how you move."

Partly so she can critique the form, partly so she doesn't injure herself if she's sloppy. The kid is clearly coachable, at least. That should help.

[mytearsaremine]

As long as it stays at coaching and suggestion rather than direct orders. So far, Faith is doing fine. She looks a little skeptical about punching her, but then, she did just say she had superpowers, and Jolie's in good shape, but not super good.

So she makes the fist Faith showed her, gathers up, and swings into Faith's hand like how she'd seen her brother punch one of their cousins once. The form isn't terrible, she's not going to break anything probably, but it's also wild and untutored.

[definitionofcrazy]

The punch is a little harder than she expected, but hey, a teenage girl punching her in the palm is still better than a giant rock-skinned demon throwing her around an empty warehouse. She's more appreciative than anything.

"Not bad. Straight wrist, hit with the knuckles straight on. Knuckle might hurt, but you won't break your wrist."

She lowers the hand and nods.

"Little tip. You can swing like that if you want, but it's not gonna hit as hard. Lemme show you something?"

[mytearsaremine]

The praise is unexpected, especially after her poor showing with proper fist-making techniques, and she blushes just a little beneath the green streaks in her cheeks. "Okay." She drops her fist, relaxing her non-existent stance, and watches.

[definitionofcrazy]

"Alright, check it. When you swing wide like this-"

She slowly swings a wide punch at the air beside, similar to the one Jolie threw, so she can watch it from the side.

"You're only gettin' power from your arm. You wanna try keeping it more straight, like this."

Still moving slowly so Jolie can observe, she swings another punch from a centered stance, turning from her hip and fully extending her arm into a straight jab at the air. It's... a lot neater than she usually fights herself, but hey, do as I say, right?

"Then you get your whole body behind it. Here, try it again."

She holds up her hand for Jolie to try it on.

[mytearsaremine]

Jolie also doesn't have superpowers, so her doing it right is probably more important. She leans over a little to get a better view. "Huh. Okay. I'm pretty small, so I probably ought to use what leverage I have, right?"

She attempts to mimic it. She has pretty good body control, but it's not perfect right off the bat, either. She'll need to practice to keep her center of gravity balanced.

[definitionofcrazy]

She gives a slight smile as she examines the palm Jolie just hit.

"Hey, not bad. Try to keep your feet spread a little bit more, you'll be sturdier."

She turns her palm out to Jolie again, beckoning with her other hand to continue.

"Keep going. You're getting the hang of it."