monstertruckers: (Default)
monstertruckers ([personal profile] monstertruckers) wrote in [community profile] route666rp2025-05-06 05:39 pm

MAY EVENT LOG




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











mytearsaremine: (dubious)

Emo metal

[personal profile] mytearsaremine 2025-05-11 07:12 pm (UTC)(link)
It takes Jolie the whole day before she will come out of her car after the attacks, go near any other person. That's about how long it takes for the sensation of a raw, aching brain and the too-much feeling of other people around her to fade to something bearable.

The blaring music is what has her drifting over Blake's way. "I am fourteen," she comments. Then: "I've never heard music like that."

Look, her childhood was fairly limited when it came to current cultural touchstones. Or anything not folk music or gospel.
andnevermore: (009)

[personal profile] andnevermore 2025-05-13 08:37 pm (UTC)(link)
"There's a lot of different names for it. This is more pop-punk; this other CD I found is gothic metal. We had similar bands back home, but these are really good."

If she's never heard music like this before, Blake is about to blow her mind. She hops down from the roof of her van -- aided by her new bat wings, outstretched to soften her landing -- Blake opens the door, and starts switching CDs.

"I found a bunch of these a few stops back," she explains, "in some wrecked cars. Some are compilations, or more like regular pop. There's this one artist called Taylor Swift who's amazing." She hits pause on My Chemical Romance, and inserts the Evanescence CD instead. Blake shoots her a smile. "Check this out."
mytearsaremine: (Default)

[personal profile] mytearsaremine 2025-05-14 02:17 am (UTC)(link)
Jolie watches her glide down with an expression that's trying really hard not to be impressed. It looks really cool. And the music is neat, and she can tell that the singer is really good, like better than almost any singer she's ever heard.

But there's also a pressing issue she asks after a moment: "Is it music from here? Or from our world?"
andnevermore: (005)

[personal profile] andnevermore 2025-05-16 07:58 pm (UTC)(link)
"It's definitely not from my world, but I don't know if it's from here, either," Blake admits.

She leans into the van again to pick out a CD at random -- the Now That's What I Call Music 8, the one that Shadow found -- and offers it to Jolie to examine, if she wants. None of the artists are familiar to Blake, but maybe Jolie might recognize some of them?

"The genres are familiar, though. I guess music doesn't change that much even across different dimensions."
mytearsaremine: (thoughtful)

[personal profile] mytearsaremine 2025-05-20 04:16 am (UTC)(link)
For a moment, as she takes the CD in her hands, she gets a flash of teenagers, loud music, flashing lights, somebody's house party and she has to shake herself, blinking hard, in order to actually see the names on the case. None of them are familiar to her, either, but that's more because of her sheltered upbringing than anything else.

"Maybe not. Though this world does look a lot like Earth, the world I come from," she says, remembering belatedly that not everyone is even from Earth here.
Edited 2025-05-20 04:17 (UTC)
andnevermore: (007)

[personal profile] andnevermore 2025-05-21 01:36 am (UTC)(link)
"Really?" Blake's never heard of this Earth place, but if Jolie is at all familiar with it, then that could be a real help. "Have you recognized any landmarks, or do you have any idea of where we are?"

Because some of the environments have looked similar to her own world, Remnant, but Blake definitely knows it's not Remnant because there's no Grimm here. And if there was an apocalypse on Remnant, Grimm would be everywhere.
mytearsaremine: (Default)

[personal profile] mytearsaremine 2025-05-22 05:02 am (UTC)(link)
"Not anything specific," Jolie admits, looking a little embarrassed. "But the diner and garage from last month? They had the exact same kind of parts and stuff my family's diner and garage had. Like, the brand names are different, but it's the exact same tools and dishes and things."
andnevermore: (014)

[personal profile] andnevermore 2025-05-22 08:24 pm (UTC)(link)
"Interesting. I recognized some of the tools -- I guess no matter what universe you come from, a spanner is a spanner -- but some of the things were definitely different. The combustion fuel they use here is totally unlike what we use. But if everything's that similar for you, then yeah, it might just be the same world. Or at least, one extremely close."

Blake wishes there were other things for Jolie to compare, but beyond the music she has, the only other things she has are half-burned books.

"What about the monsters? And the husks? Did your world also have them?"
mytearsaremine: (knees)

sorry for the delay :(

[personal profile] mytearsaremine 2025-05-31 03:15 am (UTC)(link)
"No, nothing like them," Jolie says, shaking her head. "We had aliens, but they were all dead, being studied by the government." Or killed by Odd. But that alien was pretty dead, too, so. "Nothing like here. No magic or weird broken moons or anything like that."

She offers the CD back. "The cars almost all look like they're from my world, too, though."
andnevermore: (005)

[personal profile] andnevermore 2025-06-05 08:55 pm (UTC)(link)
Blake blinks at the casual mention of aliens. Look, she's gotten used to the concept of multiple worlds existing, but somehow, the concept of aliens hasn't yet really come up. Even if it seems... kind of obvious.

"The cars look kind of similar to my world, too. The outsides, at least. The engines look a little different." At least, according to Yang who's been tinkering with them.

She takes the CD back, and puts it back into the nook between the seats. She's got a whole collection now, and it's only growing.

"I guess the more important question is where we're heading," Blake admits, "but I think it's useful to find out as much about this world as we can. Even the little things help, you know?"