[EVENT] The Simulation Ends

[sixthiteration]

WHERE: 6I Fountain Park & Elsewhere
WHEN: April 1
OPEN TO: ALL - Mingle
WARNINGS: N/A

---

In the snug circle of an old park, a fountain sits burbling beneath a broad, midday sky.

Once-neat paving stones have buckled and cracked from the slow nudge of wayward roots. Benches stand covered in lichen and rust. Three paths push into the underbrush like the spokes on a wheel, the encroaching forest creating lush tunnels through the dark.

But the fountain stands singular and pristine, brightly splashing in open rebellion of the deep, muffled sounds of a place long ago gone to seed. A vibration hums through the ground, there and quickly gone, and the water in the fountain trembles, lapping against the high walls of its cool, pale reservoir.

Far, far away, in a place that isn't really there, people begin to blink out of existance.

It is the first of April.

It is precisely ten o'clock in the morning.



[Please see event details and guidelines here.]

Comments

[theintercessor]

Aside from the strain, and whatever's making his arms feel full of sand at the moment, he can't lodge any specific complaints. Wet, cold: but his fingers successfully wiggle and his vision isn't tunneling. One more cough to clear his throat: "Thanks, I think I'm okay."

Stella's always had enough of a presence at important meetings that her name matches her face; he had at least one sketch from a dinner or breakfast, something of a comparison of the natural, light waves of her hair and the tighter, darker curves of Peggy's. He notices the damp, drawn back length of hers before he can push back his own and realize just how long it is. On the way back down, he touches his jaw, finding water caught in a rather sparse beard.

All right may need another assessment. "Before this, people were disappearing--are we all here? Did we all come out of that again?"

[ex_assertiveness90]

"That's what it looks like." A slight frown, as she looks around her. "I think we've still a few people missing, but as far as I've been able to tell, people have been appearing in the fountain in groups of three every few minutes."

People have been bringing towels from the inn; Stella looks about until she finds a dry one, hands it to him. "Everyone seems to be fine physically, aside from the hair—" this punctuated with a very slight rueful smile, "—and I don't think we're quite sure what these do yet, if anything aside from being fancy wristwatches." She raises her right arm a little to indicate what she's talking about. Stella is from the era of smartphones, but smartwatches are so new in her time she wouldn't know what to do with one.

If she sounds like she's trying to sort everything out aloud, she is. It's in Stella's nature to want to have all the facts on the table, so to speak. That there are alarmingly few of these facts is... not really anything new, to be honest. She's used to the observers keeping them in the dark.

[theintercessor]

He hadn't noticed the band at his wrist--the green band gives him a second look at his attire, and he vaguely remembers wearing black his first time out of the fountain. Doesn't seem of consequence; the band is nothing he's seen before, more like a futuristic toy watch than something he'd assign any use. It's an accomplishment to have any kind of portable phone, and that was more on campus than home.

"Why would they suddenly care if we can tell the time?"

The puzzle's never interested him so much as the concrete tasks and facts of the village, but the watch is concrete enough. And it keeps him talking, breathing, not panicking while he towels off his hair. Not asking other things, about specific people--he wants to trust everyone seems fine and leave it. "Is anything else changed?"

[ex_assertiveness90]

"I haven't the slightest idea." It's a bit of a bald admission for her, but really it ought to be no surprise she hasn't any more idea of what's going on than anyone else. Stella, for all her investigative skills, was just as thrown by her sudden... arrival? transition? to this place as the rest of them, and she hasn't had time to sit down and try to sort the details.

"It wouldn't surprise me if they were meant to be tracking devices of some sort," she hazards a guess. Not the most pleasant thought, but given who (or what) they're dealing with — well. She would not put it past the observers to find some additional means of tracking their every move.

"From the state of the buildings it seems as if no one's lived here in years," she says, "and—" A nod at the horizon, where there used to be a canyon wall blocking the way through. "The canyon's vanished."

Vanished, as if one can simply erase a wall of rock from existence as if it had never been. She hasn't got around to the whole simulation idea yet, but once she does, all of this nonsense might start to seem a little more clear.

[theintercessor]

Well, the lack of canyon answers his immediate question: why track what you've contained to a small enough area. In the kind of story where people wake up with mysterious tracking bracelets, they usually tracked more than location--but he still feels a little foolish, making that kind of suggestion.

"Maybe it does things like temperature and heart rate. That room--" he can't help but think of the fluorescent panel in the cave wall, coolers with red-black vials and initials. "It reminds me of the equipment there."

But that room had been in a cave, inside the vanished walls. There's no telling if they could find it now--if it even exists in this new, dust-covered village.