[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

[lastofthekellys]

Kate whirls. Later, she will laugh at the appearance she must have presented, a wild banshee of a woman with her matted mass of dark hair and her furious dark eyes. For now, she's just a small whirlwind of anger and agitation. "Am I all right?"

But questions require answers, so she actually stops, takes a gulping breath and stares up at the sky as she attempts to answer. It doesn't do much: as she talks, her head drops back to staring at Miss Gibson and her voice rises.

"No, I am not. This is, this is obnoxious. What, what is this?" Kate lifts her arm to show her wrist. "It was bad enough the first time, bein' stripped of my, of our clothes without our say so, but then when we get comfortable they do it all again? And, what. What kind of boneheaded, petty, disturbed comedians are runnin' this little circus? UGH"

Her foot stamps with frustration when the bracelet refuses to come off.

"And just look at our hair."

[ex_assertiveness90]

Stella is about halfway to laughing herself, more out of stress than from any sort of actual amusement. Five minutes ago, it seems, she'd been in the village, only to... come back through the fountain, into the village again? For what purpose?

As she looks around, though, she's starting to realize things are different. This place looks run down in a way she doesn't remember the village having been, as if someone turned back the clock to the day they arrived. She can see enough of the houses and outbuildings to recognize things look more dilapidated than they did. The schoolhouse is there, when she quite clearly recalls Credence destroyed it when he was overcome by the Obscurus, all those months ago.

She doesn't quite know how to react to Kate's... well, temper tantrum is the only word for it, because telling her to calm down would be unhelpful, and besides, it isn't as if Stella isn't also confused and frustrated. She just doesn't express it so... explosively.

"Jesus," she breathes, just an exclamation, a reaction to everything that's going on rather than anything Kate or anyone else specifically is doing. The mention of the bracelet makes her look down at hers, finally examining it properly. The band itself is rubber in the same dark blue as her scrubs, and she almost startles on realizing it's got a digital display of the kind she's never seen in the village. It's showing what she assumes is the time, in 24-hour format, and a date. 1 April.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

If this were all one giant April Fools' joke, that would explain a lot of things. Unfortunately, Stella has the feeling things are a bit more complex than that. "Looks to be some sort of wristwatch," she comments, but even as she says it she knows it can't only be that. Why would the observers give them a watch? Why the sudden insistence on them knowing the date and time, when up till now they've had to do things the old-fashioned way? What else does it do besides track the time and date? She would be utterly unsurprised if they were some sort of tracking device, and the fact that they can't take them off certainly says something.

So does the sudden unaccustomed weight of her unusually long hair, but she hasn't yet put all of the pieces together. "We'll get all of this sorted properly," she says, almost more of a reassurance to herself than to Kate, although her attention is focused back on the other woman. "You're not hurt, physically?"

[lastofthekellys]

Kate glares at her with all the bedraggled, wounded dignity of a cat fished out of a water trough, but it isn't personal. It's as personal as her foot-stamp, as her shouting, which is to say: it's all directed at their captors.

Well.

Maybe a little bit of it is at Miss Gibson, and the need to be sensible and pragmatic.

"No, I am not," she says, finally. "You look at be about the same, is that so, Detective Gibson?"

(It could be progress, her using the woman's title. Or it could simply by that, grudgingly, she accepts that a policewoman may be useful in cases of kidnapping - which is also progress.

It's progress.)

[ex_assertiveness90]

Frankly, it's always been Stella's (somewhat self-appointed) job to stay collected while everyone else around her is falling apart, and that hasn't changed now. She ignores the glare; she's dealt with considerably more hostility than that in the past, and she knows it's not aimed at her, not really. Mostly.

"I'm fine," she says, which is true this time, at least as far as it goes. Physically, she feels fine — better the more she moves about, actually, as if she's woken up from a deep sleep and just needs to stretch her muscles. She's not yet entirely aware there might actually be something to that.

She looks around them, recognizing there aren't many other people here at the moment — she doesn't see Peggy, at least not right now, but that doesn't mean she's not here somewhere. "They must be taking us in groups, a few at a time," she deduces aloud. Three at a time, maybe — she saw Felicity Smoak, too, just now. Which means the rest of the villagers may well be arriving after them, and it isn't time to panic just yet over who's missing.

"Is this the real village, do you think? Where do you suppose we were just now?"

Stella does not really expect Kate to have real answers to those questions. A long while back, she had a theory the observers were drugging them, that some or all of their experiences were hallucinated, that what they thought they were seeing and doing and what was really happening were two different things. Her mind hasn't made the leap to simulation just yet, and right now that's probably a good thing. The idea that they were being manipulated with hallucinogens is something she can at least comprehend.