uhmani | TDM #4

Throughout the main hub where everyone congregates, a light chiming echoes through the first floor. "Hello, everyone," comes the synthetic voice from when you first arrived. "Please, watch your step since there's quite a few puddles around. If you'd like, there is cake, some refreshments, and some eggs for you in these trying times. If they feel warmer than usual, that's because they're going to hatch soon!"

While the Peacekeeper doesn't elaborate, as usual, simulation inhabitants are free to notice the eggs that either they gathered or are still littering the simulation are now warm to the touch, give off a faint glow, and may even move subtly now and again if watched.

APRIL SHOWERS

Granted, there are bigger things to worry about such as the storm that's rolling in.

Dark, ominous clouds begin to gather over every piece of sky in the simulation and before long blot out the sun. Sheets of rain begin to pour down almost without warning. Hopefully, you've managed to fix those leaks in your house! Or maybe you're finding new ones...

Lightning splits the sky with a dramatic crackle and thunder booms not long after it. The wind howls and the worst of the storm won't relent for a few hours at the least. Even after, the rain will linger for days on and off to varying degrees of severity.

While the weather has taken a turn for the gloomy, that doesn't mean that simulation inhabitants have to be! In fact, it may feel somewhat refreshing as if the rain is washing away any negativity lingering after The Overseer's masquerade. Whether by her design or not, she - nor The Peacekeeper - will say but it does seem that she wants to keep relations as peaceful between the simulation inhabitants and creators as she can.

ONE FISH, TWO FISH...

The constant rain brings water levels of the rivers and eddies up at an alarming rate. Flooding is inevitable and, hopefully, the place you've claimed as your own isn't in the way. If it is, you might want to get the buckets ready or consider a relocation!

Of course, your buckets might not just be catching water. With the rising water levels, the fish that inhabit the simulation's waters are just as confused as anyone else. Even more confusing is the glitch causing them to transform once they find themselves on solid (mostly) ground.

Thankfully, they don't change into anything harmful. Well, maybe to your teeth since an abundance of sweet treats is bound to cause a cavity or two... Not to mention the other odd effects that food here is known to have.

Taiyaki

radiate warmth

Swedish Fish

flexibility

now

Hard Fish Candy

unable to speak

body language

Chocolate Sardines

sweeter

delicious

Eventually, the fish will go back to normal and the glitch corrected; however, any candy collected will remain until it expires naturally.

WHAT'S YOUR DTF STATUS?

If the party and its cake don't appeal to you, that's perfectly fine. This is the perfect time to configure your Digitized Technical Friend or your DTF status. A DTF is similar to a dæmon from His Dark Materials in that it is connected to and a reflection of a character's soul. These DTFs take shape accordingly and are projections similar to the NPCs. Think of them as your own personal Clippy except less annoying. Hopefully.

Once that's set-up, there are other locations of the main hub to investigate! You can still find an (off-key) instrument to play in the music lounge or check out the (algae-ridden) pool.

You can even visit The Peacekeeper themselves on the second floor. They're always happy to have visitors! They're also conveniently where you might place a complaint about that status of the main hub and its amenities.

RAINING CATS AND DOGS

While the fishy foods are odd enough as is, another glitch appears to be occurring throughout the simulation but this time originates not from the rain but The Peacekeeper's humble musings. "Did you know," speaks the resident AI, "that there is an expression called 'raining cats and dogs'? I think that's such a curious saying! It made me wonder what it might actually look like..."

Following the strange, unexpected 'announcement,' inhabitants may begin to notice large globs of water falling periodically from the sky now amidst the regular rain. When they hit the ground with a large splash, nothing is there... at first. The water will burst apart only to reassemble into a canine or feline friend. Well, it's shaped like a dog or a cat.

Due to the sudden nature of their spawning though, some things aren't quite right. Perhaps that cat has only three legs instead of four; a dog may be missing an eye, an ear, or even its tail. And those are the more tame oddities! While the unique animals aren't overly abundant there are still a good number that spawn across the days of rain. Don't be surprised if a dog takes up shelter from the storm on your porch or you come home to a cat you don't own having climbed through a loose window.

While this might be exactly the addition to your home that you wanted, it doesn't change the leaky roof or broken window in your new place. Or, unfortunately, the fact that there's no extra space for a pet yet. No, unfortunately that will still need to be fixed the peaceful way. If you'd like more lighting or even cozier clothes, simulation inhabitants are reminded that 'peaceful interactions' are very important!

It might be a good idea to stick close to someone you know, for now, since even the smallest amounts of intimacy might see subtle changes occurring where they're staying. Perhaps that broken window is now fixed, the grime and dust seem a little less, or the floor doesn't creak quite as loud.

Larger changes, however, will only come after demonstrating the more powerful peaceful interactions. If you want new hardwood floors or a fresh coat of paint on the walls, you're going to have to demonstrate how well you 'get along' with others against them first.

SEEING PINK

ear the end of the week, the rain finally relents and temperatures continue to gradually increase. Those May flowers can't quite seem to wait though since several of the trees lining the edge of the forest bloom brilliant pink blossoms that a DTF will be able to identify as love blossoms. While the blooms won't last very long, they certainly are using all the time they have to take over.

The pollen is one thing. It may start out as just a tickle in your nose or stuffy head but eventually turns into something much more lovely. You're tickled pink about almost everything, it seems, and want to share that happiness with others. And who needs rose-colored glasses when almost everywhere one looks there's a string of love blossoms blooming?

These invasive flowers are in your garden, along the vines in the city, and even sprawling through the main hub! It actually seems almost impossible to avoid them. The Peacekeeper assures inhabitants that it isn't purposeful and just the natural cycle of the love blossoms.

Enjoy the mood-lifting and groin-tingling effects while they last! The love blossoms will only linger for a few days, at most, before receding back to the forest line and eventually falling dormant again until next spring.

SEXY STAMP CARD

If you're wondering about these 'peaceful interactions' that keep being mentioned or what the kinks of the month are for... Here's your answer! Upon arrival, all characters will receive a digital copy of their very own sexy stamp card.

Sexy Stamp Card

Issued by: The Peacekeeper

1 2 3 4 ♡

6 7 8 9 ♡

❤

<div style="width:100%;padding:10px 10px 0;font-family:garamond, georgia, serif;font-size:20px;font-style:italic;letter-spacing:2px;text-align:left;">Sexy Stamp Card</div>
<div style="width:100%;padding:0 10px 10px;">Issued by: The Peacekeeper</div>

<div style="width:100%;display:flex;flex-wrap:wrap;justify-content:center;align-items:center;gap:10px;font-size:16px;font-weight:bold;color:#13336b">

</div>

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<div style="max-width:300px;width:100%;margin:-10px auto 0;text-align:right;font-size:10px;"><a title="code credit!" href="http://10billionghosts.dreamwidth.org" style="text-decoration:none;color:#eee;">❤</a></div>

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Completing peaceful interactions (i.e. kinks) will reward characters with stamps that they can turn in for re-gains and many other things! While the example one here is the standard issued card by The Peacekeeper, players are more than welcome to customize it how they see fit. Have fun with it! NOTES

★ The kinks of the month have changed! Be sure to check this post for what the new ones are. Also, give a congratulations to Corrin (

fatefulprince) as the as the new leader of the sexy leaderboard! 🎉

★ The effects of the strange fish candies can, as always, be as heavy or light as you'd like! It can be chalked up to differences in resistance, non-humanity or not, etc. etc. Also, they can mixed-and-matched! Have fun with that.

★ The flora and fauna page will be updated. It's also still open for player suggestions! All you need to do now is link your check-in (or player claim) comment to make a submission!

★ Make sure to dunk your questions/feedback in the thread below!

NAVIGATION

F.A.Q. ★ RULES ★ CHARACTER CLAIM ★ LOCATIONS ★ MAIN NAVIGATION

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Earning...right. What Fenrir was talking about, being...intimate with people to improve their situation. Cloud's just not going to think too hard about that.

"You figured a mop was more important than clothes? Is there seriously no way to just make gil and buy things around here?"

Cloud shakes his head and follows Zechs up the stairs. Once there, he starts stripping off his wet clothes - scarf, pauldrons, and greaves first, then his jacket and undershirt, then boots and socks. His pants stay on, but he does unbuckle the bottoms to let them air out to dry as best he can. With all that done, he busies himself with toweling himself off.

If Zechs is paying any attention, it won't be hard to spot a thin but deep scar just under Cloud's ribcage, and a matching one in the same place on his back, as though something slim but incredibly sharp had pierced right through him.

“I don’t know why a mop appeared while my fiancé was getting this place rebuilt,” Zechs smirked wryly. “He did ask for his clothes as well. I have not been here quite as long, as I mentioned - the Peacekeeper is considering my first requests presently.”

Zechs glanced at Cloud with curiosity and a hint of interest, though - he would politely turn away when Cloud continued to dry himself off. He did note the scar. Curious.

He went to go and set a fire to get a kettle of water boiling. “Unfortunately, as of yet, the only method to obtain most items is from the Peacekeeper. Were I a tailor, I could open my own shop and change the situation with clothing - but my skills lie elsewhere.”

Edited 2022-04-25 04:22 (UTC)

"Hm." Cloud may have brought it up, but now that he thinks about it, he hasn't really given much thought to what he'd want besides his--well, Zack's sword. He has no idea how this works, but maybe since he was the last one in possession of the Buster Sword, he can request it for Zack?

Other than that, Cloud doesn't own anything. Not anymore. Not for a long time, now. Even the clothes he came here in aren't his - they're not even his own uniform. So what would he even request for himself?

Doesn't matter. He's never done any of the things necessary to make those requests anyway. He'll think about it later.

He rubs a towel vigorously over his hair, which has already started to spike up again as it dries. Once he's about as dry as he's going to get, he spreads the towels and his wet clothes out on the floor or whatever convenient surface Zechs might volunteer, and then leans against the nearest wall and folds his arms, looking sort of halfway between cool and awkward.

"In battle. Right?"

Zechs was not attempting to be intrusive - and he’s certainly not going to shake any item of clothing too hard to get a hint of what’s in their pockets, feel the shape of them for weapons. No matter how his paranoia might’ve asked him to.

No, he just helped Cloud drape the clothes along chairs and the like to dry them, making certain it wasn’t dripping onto anything carpeted or upholstered. He could easily clean anything else.

And he planned it so there were two chairs remaining to sit once there is tea. There were multiple uses for a tactical mind, no matter how mundane this was.

“Battle. Tactics,” Zechs nodded as they waited for the kettle to boil. “I’ve picked up a few other skills in peacetime, and since I was first kidnapped - none of which I excel in. Fishing. Caring for horses and chocobos. Cooking. Given the luxury of not having to fight, I have attempted to improve myself in other areas.”

"Kidnapped?" Cloud might have said more on that subject, but he ends up with something else to react to right away-- "You raise chocobos? I haven't seen any here."

A brief coalescence of green motes of light heralds the arrival of some kind of chocobo-wolf hybrid with bright, vivid eyes, small patches of blue bleeding through the intense green of them. Wark! it says, half-avian call and half-bark, looking huffy. So what am I, chopped liver?

Cloud glances down at it with a slightly irritated grunt. "Yeah. Chopped liver."

Zechs actually blushed, ever so faintly. "Ah. I wouldn't say I know how to raise them. That would be overstating my skill, I believe. On the Nameless Island - the place I was at previously - there were chocobos. I helped to care for them and I learned to ride them. My own reality didn't have any."

The sudden appearance of Cloud's DTF caused Zechs' eyebrows to raise, slightly - hm. Interesting. But he otherwise ignored it. (Zechs' own digital friend, though - a tiny robot - peeked out from around a counter and waved at the chocobo-wolf hybrid.)

"I don't know if there are chocobos here. I haven't seen them," Zechs informed Cloud with a note of regret. "However, I will say they are magnificent creatures."

"Your reality didn't have chocobos? What did people ride?"

Fenrir's tail - despite being a bird's tail, and not a wolf's - begins to wag when the robot waves, and he waves a wing back. Cloud ignores them just as much as Zechs is.

"They're okay, I guess." Cloud doesn't mind chocobos, but animals in general have never seemed to like him very much, so he's never really gotten close to any. Fenrir pecks at his leg, which he also ignores.

"What kind of soldier were you?"

“Horses, in times past. And for recreation in the present. Generally, they’ve been replaced by more mechanical methods,” Zechs informed him.

He didn’t know the level of tech that Cloud’s reality had, after all.

“I am a mobile suit pilot,” Zechs informed him. “Was that a technology that your world possessed?”

Edited 2022-04-29 03:49 (UTC)

"Horses are real in your reality?" Sure, Cloud's heard of horses, but only in stories. "We have mechanical methods, too. Cars, motorcycles, helicopters. But only for people who can afford them, and the military. Where I grew up, we rode chocobos."

At the question, Cloud shakes his head. At the very least, they don't have anything they call that, so Cloud's not entirely sure what a mobile suit is, although he can hazard a guess. "Mobile robots, sure. But piloted by AI, not people."

“Hm,” Zechs considered that, thoughtfully. “In my reality, in a reversal, mostly it was the wealthy who own horses. Unless the area was very remote, I’d suppose. It’s always interesting to compare the differences between realities.”

Zechs nodded. “We also had mobile suits piloted by AI, but they weren’t … they were often inferior to the best pilots, and a cheap means to expand war’s reach while not considering those caught in the crossfire. Our mobile suits were large enough to fit their pilots and a variety of armaments - my last suit was almost seventeen and a half meters tall. I hypothesize your robots, never having human pilots, may have been smaller?”

Cloud tries to imagine someone like Tseng or President Shinra on a chocobo, but the image is too ridiculous to even conjure.

He shakes his head. "Some, but there were a few on that kind of scale. Mostly experimental. Superior human fighters are SOLDIERS, instead. Uh, capital SOLDIER. The best of the best. Enhanced with mako to give them superhuman abilities." The look on Cloud's face as he describes this is conflicted; pensive. He just tries to keep Zack at the forefront of his mind and forget about everything else.

The conflict on Cloud's face was easy to see - and Zechs was mindful of how they'd met in the rain, thank you. Enhanced, Zechs considered that word. Experimented on? Was it a painful process, itself traumatic to endure? He didn't know. And it's possible that it wasn't - the mere battles Cloud lived through were enough to cause that sort of expression.

"If you aren't comfortable speaking of it - I won't pry," Zechs told him quietly. "In my reality, there were rumors that some young soldiers might have been enhanced as well, but the men responsible who would have been able to testify and confirm that were killed before the war's end. I can imagine being given additional abilities to increase your utility as a soldier brings ... expectations, from the ones who had given such abilities to you."

Cloud closes his eyes briefly and turns away. He can't tell Zechs that his own enhancements were just...a side effect of his capture. That he never had what it took to make SOLDIER. That the only one with any expectations of him was his best friend, who was everything Cloud failed to be.

"I'd rather not." Speak of it, he means.

“That’s all right,” Zechs told him with a small nod. No coaxing, no negotiating. Cloud lay down a clear boundary. He wouldn’t step over it.

“Onto our original topic - as lovely as chocobos are, I will also say that horses are magnificent creatures,” he told him. “They exist in this simulation, if you should like to meet one.”

It's for the best that Zechs doesn't keep asking. With the storm still raging outside and the way Cloud's thoughts seem to be spiraling a little as it is...well. It's for the best.

"They do?...maybe. Animals don't usually like me much." Cloud never really gave much thought to why, and he doesn't now, either - he's distracted by something Zechs said. "Can you lay off using that word for this place?"

Simulation. Cloud doesn't want to think about it. Doesn't want to acknowledge that if this is all simulated and they're all just data, someone is running that simulation. Doesn't want to open the door to the possibility that he and Zack never actually left Hojo's lab. No, he can't let that thought take hold. That might just ruin him.

Zechs would speak more on the subject of horses - it seemed like far safer ground, for Cloud, to travel - but he had to keep himself from frowning at the second request.

Neutrally, he nodded his head. “As you will. Though, I wouldn’t try and ignore that truth entirely. This will happen here that … wouldn’t be possible otherwise. It’s dangerous to walk forward while unprepared for that.”

"Don't care." Half the time, Cloud's not sure whether what he's seeing is really happening anyway, so what difference does it make?

He needs a change of subject.

"Tell me more about your mobile suits," he says, a little abruptly.

"... All right." Zechs had no reason to object to that request.

He folded his hands in front of him, and began to explain, "Mobile suits were a natural evolution from the development of machines to aid in dangerous tasks - construction, bomb demolition, rescue, and so on - and the development of weapons in warfare."

"The first of the latest generation of mobile suits, however, that I am more familiar with was Tallgeese. This prototype was larger, faster, and more powerful than any mobile suits used previously. It became the standard in which future suits were built by, even if they did not match its size or firepower," Zechs told him. "It also completely ignored the safety of its pilot."

Cloud nods along with the explanation - Shinra's developed all those things, too, other than the mobile suits themselves. Maybe with the ability to create SOLDIERs, they didn't need such things.

He gives Zechs a slightly alarmed look. "And that's the kind of suit you piloted?"

Zechs nodded once, ignoring the look of slight alarm. Perhaps Cloud had already guessed what he was going to say. Or, perhaps he’s projecting too much of his own thoughts.

“Yes. I first was trained on and then piloted mobile suits developed after that prototype - they took into account the pilot’s safety,” Zechs told him. But then, eliminating that reassurance, “I also piloted Tallgeese itself. I learned first hand what it was like to master such a machine.”

Well, at least they fixed whatever the problem was with the prototype that made it dangerous for the pilot. Cloud half-expected they wouldn't bother if it would help them cut costs - whoever 'they' are - although if it takes significant resources to train pilots, they would probably want to keep them alive.

"Why did you pilot it, if it still had that defect? Sounds like just asking for trouble."

"It was necessary," Zechs told him, though his conversation with Lorenz on this topic did weigh in the back of his mind. He pursed his lips, but decided not to elaborate on how hastily he'd jumped into it. How much he risked himself.

Instead, he told him, "My enemies had either numbers on their side - those mass-produced, weaker machines, that an experienced pilot in Tallgeese could defeat ... and, on the other side, I had opponents with custom-built, powerful mobile suits more faithful to Tallgeese, that also did not keep in mind their safety."

"To meet both challenges head on, it was vital I master Tallgeese," Zechs told Cloud. "And eventually, my skills outpaced it, and I chose a more advanced suit. In war, as you're doubtless aware - the weaponry involves escalates indefinitely until peace breaks out."

And perhaps best not to mention the force necessary to convince those of peace, either. Zechs was omitting a good deal. "I can assure you my world had seen peace before I was abducted from it. And may war never return, to visit even more terrible weapons to it."

"An arms race...yeah." Cloud may not have fought in Wutai, but he's aware of how many of Shinra's rapid advancements were spurred partially or wholly by the conflict. Who knows - maybe even SOLDIER was begun or perfected for that reason. "Glad the war's over, at least. Good job surviving it. You must be a pretty good pilot."

“I’m likely the best one you’ll meet,” Zechs said, confident and matter-of-fact. “There were few who could match me - and only one who could best me. But my survival had nothing to do with my skill.”

Or he would’ve succeeded in dying, frankly, as he had intended. Zechs wasn’t going to bring that up.

They’re largely avoiding the subject, but he still found himself asking, “What of you?”

"You're probably the only one I'll meet."

Cloud shrugs; there's a slight hesitation before he responds. "Nothing that exciting. The last war was over before I enlisted. Mostly just got sent on whatever random missions they needed someone like me for. Armed escort, reactor inspections, catching fugitives..."

...Zack's voice, distant and indistinct, saying something about the price of freedom...

"...that's it."

Of course this isn't going to satisfy Zechs, who already knows there must be more to it given how they met, but Cloud just stops there.

TDM #4

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