returnjourneylogs | SIMULATION: ANOTHER BORDER

SIMULATION: ANOTHER BORDER

"I felt in that moment as if it were all a dream—the training, my former life, the world I had left behind. None of that mattered anymore. Only this place mattered, only this moment, and not because the psychologist had hypnotized me. In the grip of that powerful emotion, I stared out toward the coast, through the jagged narrow spaces between the trees. There, a greater darkness gathered, the confluence of the night, the clouds, and the sea. Somewhere beyond, another border."
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

Introduction

April 1st – April 7th, 2022
Welcome to the event log for the "Another Border" simulation.

Twenty years ago, a strange phenomena overtook an undisclosed area of Florida coastline. It manifested as a metaphysical border, visible only as a shimmering halo. Animals, humans, vehicles, radio signals, internet, waves — anything that crosses the border is lost. As far as anyone knows, nothing has ever returned, but year by year, the border creeps forward, engulfing more and more of the land. It could be decades before it reaches the nearest city, but considering it has eluded all understanding thus far, it feels like time is running tight.

Every few years, the government sends new recon parties into "Area X", hoping this team will find the source of the phenomena, return, or simply establish communication from within. And it's time to send in another crew.

If you have any questions about the event, please ask here. You can familiarize yourself with simulation basics on our events page.

1. Entering Area X

Security is tight. There are military checkpoints, final psychological and physical exams, gear to be inventoried and mounted. The plastic sheeting and polished steel, and the air smells of gasoline from the generators and the faintest whiff of rubbing alcohol. Sterile. A world away from the untamed wilds ahead of them.

There's a cold finality to it all: it is very likely that none of these explorers will come back. Is there a glimmer of hope that they will this time, or is it all just rote, we go because we must, because we've been ordered to, because the idea that something more will make the difference? It's hard to say. Someone passes around beers. Some prattle. Some just sit with their thoughts. We all prepare in different ways. Does any of it change the first steps through the shimmering halo of Area X?

Or perhaps you've evaded security entirely — the borders of Area X are ever-growing, and ever harder to police. There is very little beyond common sense preventing people from wading through swamps, boating out just past the coastline, or simply creeping through the vast miles of forest under cover of darkness.

2. Strange Discoveries

The world is full of strange and wonderful things, especially so in a place where the basic building blocks of life intermingle freely and without judgement.

In this way, the strange can become familiar. Millennia ago, before civilization and industry and the written word, a human could wander the forest in the purest state of nature, no different from other animals. That can be true here, too. People have come here in flak jackets and rip-stop and nylon, and the world around them asks them to consider a life without, a world where saplings sprout from deer skulls and you can come home. The roofs of the buildings in an ancient town have collapsed, as nothing here needs a roof over its head. One can press their palms into the earth and feel sustenance without a single morsel passing their lips. You can belong here.

And in another way, the wonderful can become terrifying. Maybe it's the way plants grow into facsimiles of human forms with boughed arms, and if you dare to touch them, they reach to touch you. Maybe it's finding the corpses of past explorers subsumed in fungal growth, human arms wrapped around mushroom and mushroom sprouting from skin. Maybe it's some animal, an alligator possessing human eyes and fingers, birds capable of speech, a manatee that splits open to reveal human organs.

What cannot come along is your damage. It doesn't — shouldn't — matter here, but humans are often too sentimental to let it go. That may be the strangest and most wonderful challenge at all.

3. Annihilation

"That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains."
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

There are countless ways to die in Area X. Even if you evade the refracted wildlife, avoid merging with the flora, or survive encounters with other explorers, you fragment with every step. What's left of you when you're broken down into the base parts of yourself? What can you let go?

It's a truth you'll have to confront, or lose your sense of self to the world around you, yet another explorer swallowed by the wilds beyond the shimmering barrier.

4. Escape

There is no peaceful waking up. Post-death or post-change, awakening is a weightlessness shattered by a hard and sudden connection with the ground.

You wake in your bed or your bunk and, in that first instant, everything is as real as if you're still there. And then, at your own pace, there's a coming down to earth: this is you, these are your memories, and they're different from the ones that have flooded your mind for the past few days. It was real, if only in a dream.

The ship is quiet. The light are dimmed, swelling to life only when someone passes through the area and settling back into darkness on their heels. Many are still asleep in their beds. Their eyes twitch beneath their eyelids, and they move occasionally, shivering, mumbling. They will wake for nothing, not until they've completed their task, as you have.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

( It was the night before. Jason sat in a beat-up recliner, cigarette shoved into his lips, whiskey to his side. He was only nineteen but he acted somewhere around forty. They both had to, you know. Grow up fast. The draft letter was pinched between his fingers as they kept turning flipping it around in idle motion. Eyes flicked up to his sister with a sigh. He puts the paper down, butts out his smoke, and takes a good swallow of that amber liquid before rising to his feet. )

You know I have to. ( She hadn't said anything but he felt the impulse. ) Our parents, what if I can find them, what if I can find several people who never came back? I have to try. ( Because, if Jason thought about it, he felt guilty. Leaving her here like their parents left them. He'd been angry about it for a long time. Still was, and maybe that in part drove him too. )

Jason, this is crazy. There is no option in which you come back out of there alive. No one ever has. You're not going to be different! You're just going to be... dead! What is the point of this?

[ She stands there, hugging her arms to herself, feeling for all the world like she's trying to make a convincing argument to a brick wall. Not an unusual feeling, where trying to control her little brother is involved. ]

Are you really going in there to try to find something? Or are you just running away?

( You know, he was ready to shoot back and try to plead his case rationally but then she had to go and say something like 'or are you just running away'. His brows furrowed and lips parted with a breath. His expression... like he just couldn't believe she's fucking say something like that. )

Run... Grace what the fuck? You know I've been-- ( training for this his entire life, its the only reason he went into the military himself. But Jason stops himself before getting too heated and approaches slow, reaching out for her shoulders. ) You know our parents, if they're out there I gotta find them.

[ Her face falls, and she buries it in her hands, taking a deep breath. Enough. ]

This has gone too far. This obsession with finding Mom and Dad... Jason... I let you indulge this... delusion because you were a kid, and I didn't want to hurt you worse than they already had, but... you're grown now. You have to realize...

[ She sinks into the chair behind her, sighing, as if the air in her lungs personally offended her somehow. The rest of her words come out like she's having to physically tear them out of her body. ]

They abandoned us. They knew nobody comes out of there, and they went anyway, and now they're just as dead as everyone else who has ever set foot in that godforsaken place. They left us here, alone, because walking into their own deaths was more appealing to them than being our parents. They didn't care. They are not worth throwing away your entire life!

So Grace and Jason are siblings. Jason is younger, Grace older. Their parents were in the military and were called in to area x--never came back. Since then, they'd been on their own. When Jason gets the letter they have an argument about why he shouldn't go. Eventually, he says he'll resign in the morning, but his impulses get the better of him and he leaves during the night instead. Grace, knowing he'll probably do this, follows without him knowing.

From Grace's perspective, she says all the wrong things instead of the Right Things to make him stay, like she says "why would you do that, how could you do that, it's such a bad idea" etc., Instead of saying what she should have said, which is "you're the only thing in my life that has any meaning at all and i can't lose you too" So, accepting that they'll probably die she follows cause better to die together than alone right?

Jason doesn't notice she follows him until they get into some hot shit and he sees her being taken away by others. He puts up a fight, looses his shit, but also doesn't manage to save her. He doesn't know whether she died with them or not. He couldn't ever re-find the group. But she did eventually die by a mutated gator chompin' on her and bleeding out.

On the other hand, after running into other people and scenarios, Jason completely fails the mission. The thing he was trying to face was his violent tendencies, he absolutely does not succeed, and he dies by becoming a rose bush.

SIMULATION: ANOTHER BORDER

For Grace -- Pre-Entering & Entering Area X.

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OOC - Handwave Summary