NIGHTMARE PLOT

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:43:53 GMT

HI SING

Alex Wilson is getting canon updated! When she gets canon updated, she's going to be murdered horribly by someone she used to trust, then turned into a crazy reality-warping superweapon by the last person that person murdered, then set loose on Boston!

Then she's coming back here.

SO.

Alex is going to be fused with the collective unconscious rage of all humanity from her universe (this will make her look like she's got a huge raven skeleton stuck through her body, also a giant raven skull fused to her head. FUN). She's going to be... well, mostly not her, and mostly Collective Unconscious Rage. She'll be doing two main things:

1. Alex will be producing creatures called Nightmares; these are beings of raw emotion. They are NORMALLY invisible, but more on that later. Nightmares go and try to find a person to latch onto; once they've latched on, they tend to increase negative emotions slowly over time. These Nightmares are a bit souped up though, so they'll be increasing those emotions very quickly! MORE ON THIS SOON. Nightmares affect ALL SENTIENT LIFE. If your character can think, they get a Nightmare. Being made of magical space flowers will not save them.
2. Alex will have a Silent Hill Field following her around. Things will get very creepy and very foggy. Buildings will appear decrepit and run down, trees will be dead, water will be befouled, weird sounds can be heard, and you might see things out of the corner of your eye. This field will grow slowly until it is Hueg. Getting within 50 feet of Alex will expose you to high winds and an effect a lot like TV static.

DAYS ONE AND TWO

Nightmares are invisible, and will generally just be producing a sense of unease and fear. For some characters, their natural propensity towards anger will go WAY up. Get into fights, break shit, be an asshole. For others, they'll become massively paranoid, for still others, they'll sink into black despair. Often this will manifest as running thoughts, just repeating stuff in your mind ("THAT GUY MAKES ME SO MAD" "OH GOD THEY'RE ALL WATCHING ME" "OH GOD WHAT DID I DO D:")
On Day One, Alex's Silent Hill Field covers only a football stadium; on Day Two, it covers an entire neighborhood. When sleeping, characters will have horrifying nightmares about the things they fear the most (to the point that sleeping will be difficult.)
Note that Nightmares WILL encourage people to attack each other, giving them hair trigger tempers and paranoia. Got a rivalry that's been brewing? Well it's PROBABLY going to come to blows now.

DAYS THREE AND FOUR

Characters with Nightmares already attached will start to experience mild hallucinations of the thing they fear / hate the most; people who get new Nightmares attached will get Day One and Two effects. Characters with psychic or magical abilities, or robot characters with EXTREMELY advanced sensors (we're talking technobabble type sensors, ie "Detects tachyons" or whatever) can start to see other people's nightmares as blurry black and white shapes latched onto people. If they try to focus on these shapes, they'll get their own Nightmare! WHEE.
On Day Three, Alex's field now covers an area the size of a small city. On Day Four, it covers an area the size of New York City.
Also on Day Four, Alex will be approaching people and asking them if they want their pain to end. A "yes" will mean that she'll cut out their hearts (FUN) and replace said hears with a Nightmare. Much like Alex, the people in question will lose all their emotions, become black and white horror creatures fused to animalistic manifestations of their own despair (in Alex's case, a zombie raven), and go around spreading Nightmares. They have 10 ft radius Silent Hill zones, and aren't nearly as strong or fast as Alex. They'll also have to return to Alex's Zone every four hours, or go off and turn to ash (in which case they can respawn JUST FINE AND NORMAL!!! WHEE)
She'll keep doing this until Day 7.

DAYS FIVE AND SIX
On Day Five, the field will fill a full quarter of a zone; on Day Six, it will have reached its largest size, a half of a Zone (about the size of half of Massachusetts. Seriously.)
The Nightmares are now physical, complete entities! When in their natural state, they look like chimeric, constantly shifting black and white creatures with red elements (usually the eyes). What kinds of parts they have... that's up to you, pick random assortments of stuff (coffee maker heads? whatever). Nightmares don't usually look like that, however! When they approach or latch onto a person, they transform into whatever that person fears or hates the most.
Note that this doesn't have to be an individual: a Nightmare basically takes people into dream-worlds, which then people can enter. So, let's say that Bob's worst fear is seeing his city burnt to ashes: his Nightmare would create an illusion of his own city around him, burnt to ashes, one that he'd completely believe. For the individual in question, these hallucinations seem 100% real; other people can see them too, but they can ~~make a Will save to~~ disbelieve if they have enough willpower. Unfortunately, approaching a Nightmare means it's likely to split into two, with one half latching on to YOU. WHEE.

GETTING RID OF NIGHTMARES

By Day Five, Nightmares CAN be physically attacked. They don't function too well outside Alex's Silent Hill Zone, but never quite go away outside that zone (they just slowly revert to their Day 1 state). Weapons based in BRIGHT LIGHTS (like lasers!) work best.
The problem is that the Nightmare has to be in its natural form to be attacked, not its Illusion state. How do you get there? Focusing on happy thoughts, good memories, and joining up with friends is actually the best way to fight them off. Being alone? Surefire way to get lost in your own horrifying nightmare. Finding a friend to hold onto you and be all I KNOW YOU ARE IN THERE SOMEWHERE and IT ISN'T REAL will break the illusion. think of it as a Journey to the Center of the Mind thing.
The Nightmares themselves are VERY strong and quite fast when attacked, however, and will fight back physically. Note that they usually wont' kill a character, however; they'll fight until they aren't being attacked anymore, then shift back into their illusion forms.

DAY 7

Day 7 works much like Days 5 and 6, except HEY IT'S TIME TO GET RID OF THE SOURCE OF THIS PROBLEM: ALEX.

I'll be looking into what people want to do here, but my initial thought is a two-pronged battle: characters who have broken free of their nightmares can physically attack her to distract her on the physical plane. This... will be hard, as in this form she's extremely strong, extremely fast, can teleport, and can create Nightmare Illusions same as any other Nightmare. She'll also have characters converted into creatures like her as bodyguards, AND she'll still be making that offer to people! Whee.

On the other side, a journey to the center of the mind can happen. even if your character doesn't normally have psionic abilities, they can piggyback with other characters into Alex's psyche to try to find what's left of the real Alex and separate her from the Fury (the Nightmare that's fused with her.) Not sure how this will work yet! I was hoping to plan it out with interested parties.

Killing Alex is probably the EASIEST way to take her down, but killing the Fury inside her mind will also stop her. Note that she'll pretty much be a zombie after that though. without the brain-eating.

QUESTIONS!??!?!?

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Plot and also Canon Update

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:55:42 GMT

In Alex's canon, she is very shortly going to be killed by her mentor, Iris de Hautdesert, for Knowing Too Much about the universe. This is going to be done by throwing her off a building. Whee!

The thing is, Iris miscalculated, and Alex is a powerful enough Deva (reality-warper / god) now that her consciousness doesn't completely die, but instead she leaves enough of an imprint in the Dreaming to survive. That is, in her own world, she continues to exist in the alternate universe that everybody taps into when they sleep.

Unfortunately for her, the traumatic nature of what just happened does leave her mind mostly broken, and she ends up in Nightmare, the layer of the Dreaming where all the subconscious crazy shit goes. Nightmare's ALSO one level above the layer of reality called Chaos, which is a seething soup of everything that possibly could be.

So the supposed Big Bad of Somnus, the Nightmare Queen, finds the shattered bits of Alex's consciousness, quietly puts Alex's mind back as best she can. While she does this, she gives Alex the rest of the truth she's been missing: both Alex and the Nightmare Queen were experiments on Iris' part to create superweapons that would destroy humanity's emotions and reason, as part of a plan to end all war and to keep Reality nice and quiet. She also confirms Alex's suspicions that Reality is, in fact, a prison plane designed to keep everyone trapped and ignorant of the true nature of reality.

The Nightmare Queen very carefully structures her arguments to bring Alex around to her way of thinking, but also gently leaves out most of Alex's higher mental processes and ability to be reasonable about things. She then takes the Fury, a living incarnation created from humanity's collective rage, and implants it into Alex, while at the same time destroying the rest of the artificial limits on Alex's power (the same limits most of humanity has)

(I could explain why the nightmare queen can't break her own limiters but man I only have so much time here)

This means that Alex can just waltz right back into her broken corpse, fix it, and be alive again, which the Nightmare Queen hasn't been able to do for Reasons. This ALSO means that Alex is the Nightmare Queen's personal death-bringing reality destroying hellbeast because she's now 50% the collective rage and despair of all humanity oops.

Alex / Fury then proceeds to try to break reality and actually succeeds at destroying a large part of Boston. Thanks to Iris' work, she's actually too powerful for the local Sentinels (the reality police, who keep people from waking up to their true power, usually by murdering them) to handle, and they have to call for backup.

MEANWHILE! Aaron de Hautdesert finally stops moping because Alex's friends go and kick him in the butt until he gets off it and realizes that he really should stop kicking himself about the whole oops I lost the war that got us into this situation in the first place, and he explicitly goes on the run, breaks a lot of rules by coming out of the Dreaming into reality, and also breaks most of the limiters on Alex's friends (Andrea and Jasmin) so they can, y'know, actually do something about this

the three of them fight back against Alex's gozilla stomping of Boston and manage to fix most of it, and subdue her enough that they can abscond to another layer of reality before the Sentinels get there to murder Alex. They end up in Kalliste, the former capitol of all reality, a broken wasteland of shattered and warped glass and weird reality storms where there was once a city that defied imagination.

There, they end up in a place where they used to test fledgeling Deva and teach them their powers, and there Aaron, Andrea, and Jasmin all do a whole journey to the center of the mind thing with Alex to get her sane again (and remove the Fury from inside her soul), THEN they go putting her mind back, and FINALLY she goes and ends up taking a test to come to terms with herself

ONCE SHE FINALLY COMPLETES THAT (it'd take like a lot of pages, if this were a book, and be totally awesome, or something) Alex is finally at peace with herself, and comes into her own powers as the new Deva of Fire, the first full-fledged Deva to come into existence in about a billion years. She then removes the rest of the limitations on Aaron's power, restoring him to as he was before the war, and finally Jasmin and Andrea end up Ashura (fledgelings) under her.

AND THEN THEY GO TO FUCK SHIT UP AND BE LIKE FUCK YOU STATUS QUO but also to fight the Nightmare Queen because even if they want to save her she's still trying to you know destroy reality

so tl;dr -- first alex is a reality destroying hate engine, then she's a god

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Alexander Wilson

NIGHTMARE PLOT

Plot and also Canon Update