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

1. a departure (for Jack)

The old man is friendly—not with the guards, to whom he seems oblivious, but the other men. Men in suits who drift behind the scenes, who issue reports and rarely deign to look the dead-to-be in the eye. They shake William's hand. He has a distinctive handshake; it breaks off abruptly, pulls the other person in close. His smile sprung like a trap.

One of them, his hair long and white, invites William to his office to share a glass of fine whiskey. This is the price he pays for entry.

With the base at their backs, the old man's demeanor changes. Though he's weighed down with gear his step lightens; his gaze, once cool and exact, becomes animated. He breathes in deep. As he and his obligatory protector near the Shimmer he stops more than once, stooping to take the leaf of a flower affectionately in hand, exclaiming over a bright yellow string of mold.

“It's distracting,” he says, a keen edge to it, “knowing the wildlife.”

2. a discovery

Impossible to say how the panther died, how long it's been here: flies don't trouble its carcass, and there are no wounds to be seen. No blood matting its fur, which is thicker and lighter on its back, patterned with dashes of white. To the touch it's coarse, oily.

The old man crouched beside it wears a tan fishing hat and an intent expression. One of his hands rests at the dead animal's shoulder, as if to soothe it. The other works at its jaw.

3. an end

He finds it in the twilight, a high jut of rock overgrown with flowering vines. Something furred flaps past his face as he approaches, brushes his cheek. He turns to watch it soar, feeling like his whole body has broken out in goosebumps, and twenty more rustle from somewhere, scatter into the treetops.

He's given up on species, on English and Latin. The flowers clinging to the rock are white, shaped like hands with the fingers pressed together. At first he uses his knife, cutting the stems with care—knowing this place, he expects blood, but the liquid is clear and thin. Salty, when he raises a finger to his tongue.

Come across him now or after he's resorted to using his hands, scraped his knuckles raw tearing at the vines. The rock itself is brilliant in the ever-waning light, a cascading, pulsing silver that's almost painful to look at. Darker patches too—embedded in the rock, their shapes not yet clear.

[ Plotting comment here! I'm always open to wildcarding, let's get craaaaaazy >)

PS William looks like Ed Harris but doesn't dress like his icons. ]

Twenty more rustle, scatter.

The flowers shed their tears for scoured knuckles.

Something is wheezing nearby. A figure, thin and crooked, one leg turned in.

He wears something like a jumpsuit or coveralls, company issue, the design years out of date. Empty sleeves tied around his waist, the knot made all but irreversible by wet and dry and wet and dry, the cuffs hanging like storm-shredded flags. His undershirt stained where sweat ought to be. Gaunt clavicles and shoulders, peeling in ragged pale sheets, maybe sunburnt, the skin glossy pink beneath.

Veins or vines or rivers climb his arms, his neck, tendrils or tributaries stretching for his face. His hands appear stained, dark purple or grey fading back from the fingers, like maybe he grasped handfuls of ash and smeared it up his arms. His left forearm is bound in what used to be a shirt, showing blooms of ferric brown.

His hair is slicked and dried flat on one side, projecting wet sickles on the other. A face sculpted in sharp bones. The dark ridge of his brow. There's something wrong with his eyes, something nestled under the bend of his jaw.

Deep breaths, thick and wet. Slow. Carefully drawn and exhaled through his mouth.

He's just looking.

Edited (that one c) 2022-04-10 02:42 (UTC)

The rock dazzles under the darkening sky. The man's progress with the vines grows haphazard; they curl away from his outstretched hands. He digs fruitlessly at the rock, cracking fingernails. Raking his palms down its face. Hard to tell, after a while, whether it's the rock he wants to tear through or his own skin.

He knows he's being watched. That's the way of this place, to be apprehended, teased apart. He does not expect, when he turns—body sagging from exertion, skin approaching translucence in the cast-off light—to meet another pair of eyes. His head tips back, wondering. His hands bunch loosely at his sides.

He follows the course of the figure as though surrendering to a current, his gaze swept down the neck, past the shoulder and along the arm to the greying hands. His breath deserts him; he stares avidly, reverently.

“Can you break it?” A childish note of hope in his worn voice.

The bruised skin around his eyes creases, his brows gather a momentary frown: human indications, dissonant against the proposal that perhaps this is a piece of the communal landscape playing at personhood. There's still a mind in there, and that mind knows exactly how he looks when he lets his joints hang, gives his habitual slouch permission to sink deeper.

It's a warning look. A look to move feet. It is not a look that ought to receive attention of this quality in return.

Yes, he thinks—he could break everything in a hundred-metre radius—but there is really only one coherent response to such a question, and for this he prepares by closing his lips and swallowing. The movement of his throat says he tries first and accomplishes second. It issues a voice like breath carrying a humid woodwind note.

"Why?"

In anticipation of the answer, he's coming to see, at a stiff, limping shuffle through the grass.

As humanity rouses itself, eroding bony promontories into expression, the old man looks on with flat distaste. The way some might regard an insect writhing from their food. He cants his head, listens to the air soughing through this other body—all at once obscurely moved. Hearing in it an expulsion, a rejection.

“Here.” He steps to meet the advancing figure. His hand snatches at one of the discolored limbs. Guides it to a dark protrusion in the rock. It's rough, pitted with holes and crevices. Asymmetrical. William's hand—ruined as it looks, knuckles busted and bones jutting—presses unrelentingly against the other man's.

Abruptly he backs away, the proximity shattered. “I need...” His jaw works ineffectually. He cups his hands together, as though expecting this apparition to fill them. “I need a way in.”

Yes. As true as anything.

The ruined hand snatches, presses. The darkened wrist is wet with a thin layer of mucus, the bones felt easily through cool, toneless flesh. It's not too slick to grasp; the texture of calloused fingerprints is enough.

He sucks in a gasp, but allows it to happen, stands stiff-shouldered against the pull on his straightened arm, posed like a doll until he's released. The awkward angles of his body reorient themselves. He shrinks into his own posture, holds his arm close. Careful breathing out. Trying not to cough. This close, the line of his jaw looks like a wound in bloom, clusters of delicate filaments folded slick against the gleaming wet skin of his neck.

A struggle would have been wasted; absorption was immediate. He can taste foreign matter in the back of his mouth, in his sinus, like he's breathing it: skin, sweat, chemical physiology. The skin of his knuckles is rupturing.

Not the in the man was asking, but he's got it all the same.

To where? He'll ask in return. Maybe he asks it without speaking. His eyes are locked on to the hand that grasped him, alert for signs of a trade.

Jack is not interested in getting to know her charge beyond what she needs to keep him alive. It's a suicide mission, her colleagues told her—colleagues, because she doesn't do friendship; she doesn't have friends—but she's always been a natural skeptic, and on the chance that they survive, the payout makes it all worthwhile.

She stops every time he does, standing guard with a wary eye. They're not beyond the Shimmer yet, but there are a lot of government fucks around with guns and she doesn't trust any of them.

"It's a flower," she says distractedly, glancing over. "Who cares?"

SIMULATION: ANOTHER BORDER

NO CWS YET but violence, body horror, and suicidal ideation all on the table

3, with body horror on the way;

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hello i'm late but i'm here