idolpro | Heart Game: Duality

OOC Information:

There is nothing glaringly obvious to fix, but there are ICly known objectives to do.

Scoring will be based on how far a character gets with one or several objectives.

You're allowed to do as much or as little as you want, this includes doing more than one objective.

This is an exploradora with some linear areas that will trap you and force you to move forward.

TRY TO KEEP AN INVENTORY. You're free to pick up items and move around/bring them with you.

Powers aren't off, but it's as if they're hard to remember. You only retain your favorite unit skill with clarity along with your chosen quirk.

Cats.

More cats.

.......................Mmmmmaybe save some cats?

Heart Objectives as displayed on your phones:

Rescue! What or how you rescue something/~~cats~~/someone is up to your discretion.

Return things that are lost or misplaced.

Explore.

Find the True Heart.

ICly known information:

You have a quirk! You know this power intimately, and you're good at using it.

Your unit skills are muddy in your head, and you only seem to remember one with clarity. Maybe this will change?

Your phone displays the heart objectives without further explanation.

Your phone also has a countdown of sorts. You don't know what it's for, but it's ominous, isn't it?

You have a map on your phone! Too bad it's useless as it's completely covered, and the only visible area doesn't seem to reflect the hallway very well.

Edited 2020-02-16 14:07 (UTC)

For scored runners, please turn in below with significant things you did. Did you save any cats, did you find any items, etc.

Edited 2020-02-16 13:17 (UTC)

The moment your mind clears and you sit up, you notice you’re in a large hallway! It’s fairly nondescript, blank and all FiN chrome and silver and stretches off far away in both directions, columns lining the middle. The way you’re facing is only shadows, darker the further away it goes, and you can’t even make out any details no matter how hard you squint. If you stand still for too long, you can feel a breeze of cold coming from that direction. Behind you the hallway stretches to a pinprick of light in the distance.

To your immediate right there are two doors: The rightmost door is silvery, like an elevator, looks automatic and has a sensor pad beside it, probably to swipe some sort of device to open it. The screen above the pad currently displays a red X.

The leftmost door is a silvery futuristic take on a traditional Japanese sliding door. It’s also closed. There's a white cat flopped on the floor in front of this door, quietly snoozing away.

Across the hall is a staircase, though it’s hard to see past the first few feet inside the archway in the wall, the rest veiled in shadows. Does it go up or down? That’s also not discernible from where you’re standing.

To the left of the staircase is another door. Probably? Or is it just a doorframe? It’s hard to tell as it’s completely void and thickly black.

You can also follow the hallway in either direction if you so wish.

Gosh, did you step into pillow heaven? This room is filled to the brim with soft pillows, blankets and cat plushies. It’s clearly a room where all things soft are supposed to live. It’s not empty because there are cats everywhere! White, calico, fluffy, less fluffy, young, old, on pillows, curled up in blankets and stretched out in all the soft. In the middle of the room is… Duality? Though he doesn't quite seem like himself, with cat ears and a tail, languidly stretched out like a large cat himself, dozing. He looks up as you enter, blinking slowly as he sits up.

“Oh. Hi~”

There is another door right ahead across the room, but it’s barely visible behind a mountain of blankets and pillows.

The moment you step inside the arch of the staircase, the first thing you notice is it’s going up, and it’s very narrow.

The second thing is there are no walls surrounding it, as if it goes right up in the air without any structure or support. The area around it is dark, a little unsettling.

Then…

Then you might notice something soft bumping against your leg. Or your head. Or all of you, as a rain of what looks to be cat plushies of all shapes and sizes tumbles down the stairs in an almost avalanche. Maybe you want to run, or shield yourself, lest you want to be buried in plushies.

The moment you step inside, the door behind you shuts and won’t budge no matter how much you push or pull. In other words, you can only go forward, downstairs.

Every step you take seems to get slightly heavier the further you go, and it’s tempting to sit down and rest, but would you be able to get up if you do? You’ve only taken a few steps, it seems… so why? The air is a little thick, hard to breathe. Halfway down the stairs you step into something wet and very cold. It doesn’t feel like water, but more like some icy sludge. It’s running in rivulets down the stairs (from where??) but at least it doesn’t reach above your ankles.

Technically, you don’t walk very far until you reach the bottom floor. The basement isn't very large, but it's not isolated. You can see this because the room you enter isn’t entirely dark, but illuminated from some light source you can’t determine.

Straight ahead you see a barred off area (bars like this!). There’s no door, so no actual way to get into it. For some reason any light you carry and the light of the room won’t reach beyond the bars, so you can’t see what’s on the other side. The sludge on the floor seems to emanate or flow into this area through the bars.

To the left is what looks like the silvery doors to an elevator, with a similar pad sensor beside it, and to the right is a black door, simple with a handle.

The roar of an audience assaults your ears as you step through the double doors and you’re presented with a huge sports arena. In the middle is a raised platform, with a figure currently standing on it. You can feel power beneath your fingertips, your quirk coming to life under your skin. If you don’t have a quirk, you still have the feeling that this is your battle, and your opponent is right there, waiting for you.

Do you accept? Or do you decide not to fight?

Oh hey, this is FiN’s dorms! Everything looks pretty much like the real deal, save for the larger amount of blankets in the corners. There’s a table, cube chairs… but also a sofa! It’s got LED’s carefully gadgeteered straight into the upholstery, lining the edges. All FiNs that Duality have ever encountered are represented in this room, holograms walking around. Some are bleaker than others, like members who aren’t in Imeeji any longer, while all current members of FiN are clearly visible. Duality is here too, but he seems a little bleak himself. Hm.

There are doors leading to all member rooms, including Duality's.

This room isn’t very large, but Japanese in style, with tatami mats lining the floor and a cozy kotatsu to the side. There’s a sliding door open towards a patio overlooking a traditional Japanese garden. It’s not too hot, and not too cold, and there’s a soft breeze flowing into the room, bringing along warm feelings that totally fills you up and settles. It’s like having a crush, but… it’s also tinged with a bit of confusion and sadness. Something doesn’t seem quite right, though. The room is almost entirely monochrome.

Even though it looks like it should be vibrant, it isn’t, the colors dull and depressing in a dead way. Maybe it needs some redecorating. There are a bunch of items scattered on the floor in the room, and out on the walkway. There’s display shelves lining the walls, its current only occupants being a few cat plushies. A chimera cat is curled up on top of one of the shelves, and it looks up, startled, as you enter.

Besides the patio, there’s another sliding door leading somewhere else.

Items in this room!
A bunny plush, a piece of blood red jewelry, a cupcake, a Wild City themed hoodie, a pair of sunglasses, a cat plush with a witch hat, a bandanna in the style of the ones from C to his minions, several dumb cat drawings, cat plushies in the shape of everyone on FiN and everyone in Prison squad and a few other friends; Cobalt, Hardcore, Eclipse... if they're his friends, they're there. There’s a tray with tea out on the patio.

This room is a huge, no, VAST cave. It’s covered in ice and snow, jagged black and blue icicles protruding from almost every available surface, a blueish dark light illuminating the space. It’s almost pretty in a way, but it feels cold and oppressive. It’s clear now that this is the barred off area you saw when you entered the basement, as the bars are visible further ahead. In the middle of all this ice is a dark lake. It’s iced over but it looks precariously thin. What looks like a slab of rock sticks out from the middle of the lake, and upon closer inspection you can see a cat, tightly curled up on it, shivering against the cold. If you look closer at the lake, you can see shapes of items on the bottom, clearly things that don’t belong there.

You could risk stepping across the ice for the cat, even break the ice to get to the items on the bottom of it, or you could choose to take the long way around the lake to get to the other side and get out of here. The air is freezing after all, and you don’t want to stay here for too long.

On the other side of the lake stands a figure, completely still, almost like a statue.

There are two doors... openings? One on each side of the lake.

Edited 2020-02-16 16:31 (UTC)

The moment you step into this room, the door slams shut behind you. The blast of regularly temperature air is enough to shock your senses and you feel dizzy. Your head clears after a moment, but it doesn’t improve otherwise, as your body, now heavy like lead, struggles to keep you upright from the immense pressure in the air, almost as if gravity increased tenfold. It’s… painful to say the least, and it feels so utterly wrong as if this room has turned upside down and is tilting on its axis.

The worst feeling is the feeling of empty and loneliness and utter uselessness, though. It's reflected by the white walls, the white floor, the white ceiling and sterility of your surroundings. It's... big? Probably, and utterly and completely barren. This room needs more, something… just more of anything that isn’t empty. Despite the urgency to leave, you have a feeling that you can’t move forward without leaving something behind. It doesn’t matter what it is, physical or otherwise, perhaps a thought or an idea, something you picked up along the way.

In a corner sits another figure, hunched over, arms protectively curled around something.

Edited 2020-02-24 23:28 (UTC)

You fall. You fall for a long time, and it feels like hours. The longer you fall, the colder it gets. It's an icy feeling that curls around your body, and gets stiffer, crystallizing into ice, and you can't move, you can't breathe...

You barely feel your body hit the ground, but you can feel something shattering. You can't tell. Not when you're busy trying to close out so many horrible feelings and images flooding your mind at once.

There are flashes of blood, a knife being stabbed into your chest— no, you're choking on your own air— no, you're consumed by your own flames— no, you're the one who drives the knife into someone you care for, the one who burns someone else to a crisp because you weren't good enough, you couldn't control your powers. It's your fault.

Yours.

Yours.

Your fault.

You didn't train enough. You're useless. Get up, you're better than this. You're only five. You're old enough to be trained. No wait you're in Imeeji and you're still not enough. You see your best friend lose his head. You see your unitmates gutted and left to die and you couldn't do anything. It's your fault.

It keeps going. It's just images, right? But it's so painful. It's just an hallucination. But is it?

You're shivering. You need to warm up, you need to keep your temperature balanced, so you should try and melt the ice. But what starts as a simmering heat expands and you can feel flames consume all of you.

It dies down after a while, leaving you wheezing for breaths on the floor, unable to drag oxygen into your lungs.

In the distance is the outline of a door. You can see it, but can you get to it?

After a couple of moments the hallucinations(?) start up again, and it continues in a vicious cycle.

Edited 2020-02-16 19:30 (UTC)

The room you step into is absolutely fancy looking and was probably even more so in its prime. Someone's dragged in sofas and armchairs, beanbags and what have you to create a cozy little space.

There are people lounging around in this room, though they're more like afterimages of them instead of the real deal. C, B, Silver, Gold, Mori, Primrose are all doing whatever, scrolling their phones, lounging in a chair or that pillow pile on the floor.

Duality is there too, and he's the only one who isn't an afterimage. He's currently asleep in one of the armchairs, curled up.

There are several doors off along the walls and a hallway disappearing back somewhere.

Duality’s room looks almost exactly as his room in FiN, though a little embellished. The cat agility course is still there, along with the cat shelving and his bed covered in blankets and softs. There's a table with tea and other knicknacks are strewn about.

Some things are a bit off, though. There seems to be something missing from this room, but it's hard to put a finger on it.

Duality himself is sleeping on the bed. He doesn't look comfortable, and is shifting this way and that.

Edited 2020-02-16 16:47 (UTC)

You’ve stepped into a corridor. To the left and right ahead is a dead end. There are no doors. To the right it stretches for a bit until it takes a turn to the left. The walls are fancy and decorated, like the game tower lobby. Something doesn’t feel quite right, and there’s a sense of dread and resignation in the air that you can’t shake.

Do you proceed?

Oh hey, there's an elevator over there! It wasn't there before. Either way, once inside, you'll find only a single button. No instructions or anything. Do you push it?

[OOC INSTRUCTIONS: Once a person has explored at least four rooms, they’ll have access to the elevator from anywhere. It's also directly accessible from the basement. The elevator somehow connects to a multitude of rooms despite not being anywhere near them. You cannot access an unexplored room, though.]

Edited 2020-02-16 18:27 (UTC)

[ Eclipse is like, hm, this is very future-is-now-like... People can come approach him to talk because he sort of looking around him. ]

Huh...

[ Then he notices Yuki(?) and goes over to crouch down in front of her. ]

[Taking note of the cat before leaning on the archway.]

[same thoughts]

Is it Yuki?

Does is bear any recognition for you?

[Heading straight to the sensor pad because of course he is. Does it look like it's for a keycard or something?]

What the hell... Couldn't whoever owns this place afford better lighting?

[ Trying to use her phone's light to check out the staircase across the hall ]

Edited 2020-02-16 14:13 (UTC)

I think it is...?

[going to absentmindedly give the cat some pets if it allows for it while appraising the various doors and whatnot with some apprehension]

Heart Game: Duality - Round 2

OOC

Instructions

TURN IN

HALLWAY

CATS AND PILLOWS

STAIRCASE

BASEMENT

ARENA

FIN

EMOTIONS

VOID

BLEAK

INSOMNIA

PRISON

DUALITY'S ROOM

LABYRINTH

ELEVATOR

Re: HALLWAY

Re: HALLWAY

Re: HALLWAY

Re: HALLWAY

no subject

Re: HALLWAY

Re: HALLWAY

Re: HALLWAY