snowblindrpg | [network] @jwatson; text; Weather Update [Night 308] [open/semi-open] [shadownet]

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[network] @jwatson; text; Weather Update [Night 308] [open/semi-open] [shadownet]

[The second part of the message is OPEN. The first part is SEMI-CLOSED to anyone with access to the Shadownet - a text only app created by Winter. Winter is an NPC that you'll read about in the Survival Guide, but the basic primer is that she's a Russian AI who has been periodically contacting the Snowblind characters and trying to help them to some extent. She has been encountered in multiple events and aided characters in making private messages actually private.

Please see this post about Shadownet distribution. These are also characters who currently possess Shadownet. Anyone traveling with these characters will likely be able to read messages on Shadownet through their travel companions. We're working to get more copies.]

Shadownet Access Only
@dulcedeleche
Winter, it's John. Finally getting you some new information. It's been rough lately. It's always rough, but moreso than the usual, I think. We seem to be stuck at the high school. If there's anything you can do to help, we'd really appreciate it. We were able to get the classrooms open, but inside it's just... nothing. Like whoever was making this world forgot about that piece. I think it might be under quarantine like the building where the converts did those surgeries on the 'sinners.' I don't know what you can do, but anything you can think of after reading this and looking at some of the attached information would really help. Bullet points, as usual, covering Day 290 through Day 308. Others are welcome to fill in the finer details, of course.

Open to Everyone
Hullo, everyone. Dr. Watson here with a summary update of recent happenings. For anyone new, an archive of my previous summaries can be found HERE. I'm heading to work with a patient at the moment, but I'm also available for medical consultation as one of the medics here. Please let me know if you need anything. I'm running an on-again, off-again blood transfusion service for those with severe MN Poisoning. It's only a temporary reprieve from symptoms, but blood transfusions from healthy donors have proven to alleviate MN symptoms for up to two weeks.

As always, the new arrivals continue to trickle in. It's still every nine-to-eleven-day intervals. How do we shut this down? We need to stop dragging more and more people into this. It's not right and the conditions here just keep getting worse. The Admin told us we were running low on supplies a while back and I've noticed it's harder to find items lately. Maybe we're going longer between restocks? We're still running low on pain medication, too. The food situation seems to be stable still, at least. We'll have to hope that keeps up.
Exploration of the new residential area (Residential Zone 3) has been ongoing. We still need to find a way through the bunker. Unfortunately, Robert Miller's keycard did not work (a warning that this is a message from a young man who died overnight).

We've made it into the high school fully after Jim and his mates were able to get the password to the classrooms from some sort of blood sacrifice fire. Using the Eye app while feeding blood to it brought up 'SACRIFICE', and then a series of numbers when it had enough blood.

Rhys and Beckett tried doing some magical/spiritual rituals at the school once they entered the classroom and ended up getting stabbed by something invisible. Please do not try to piss off the data ghosts/spirits/whatevers here unless you have medical staff and appropriate supplies on hand. I would think that goes without saying, but apparently it doesn't.

Additional experiments have been conducted at the high school now that the classrooms are open. Some of the most notable outcomes from all that seem to be that the darkness within the classrooms can cling to you, people branded with the Prophet symbol seem to be able to hear some song while inside, and you can't breathe in the classrooms. Like all the air's gone out of them. Or someone forgot to put it in there in the first place, maybe.
Sherlock and Dr. House tried an indescribably stupid experiment where they put most of Sherlock's blood into a corpse they'd dug up from one of the mass graves. It resulted in Sherlock reviving in the body he transferred his nanomachines to. Unfortunately with a death price that put a man from our universe in the driver's seat. Before anyone gets the bright idea to repeat said experiment, Sherlock's new body died suddenly and without warning about three weeks after he woke up from apparent heart failure or perhaps an aneurysm. We weren't able to check at the time. He's revived again in his real body and the one he was using before seems to have disappeared. Although, it might be in one of the other morgues. We haven't gone to check them.
On Day 293, something strange happened. The longest anyone's technically been here is 308 days now, but with the way things were going off, it started to feel like months longer, then years. We aged. We seemed to age, anyway. All of us were experiencing different lengths of time and we had memories from what had happened in the interim that weren't real. They seemed it at the time. They were all too painfully real. We also experienced dreams of our own universes. They were incredibly vivid and just from what I've spoken to others about, they seem to have centered on us not being there and something terrible happening because of our absence. I'm not sure what that's meant to tell us. That we really are missing from the universes we were brought from? I wish we had more information.

Castiel's post during this "imaginary" time along with Alfie's and Quark's best illustrate what happened, I think. Quark's particularly. When he made that post, he looked like a man in his twenties, not a little boy like now. We've had errors that have altered our perceptions of our own bodies before, but never quite like this.

Everything resolved on Day 295 with an injection from the Admin. We were able to still remember everything, but our bodies went back to normal and none of it felt quite as real. Just like a nightmare you were woken up in the middle of. I've lost some of the details of all of that, but I'm not sure about others.
On Day 296, Dr. House hosted a discussion on potential experiments. We at least answered one of the questions we had out of that. Or rather, we reconfirmed something Steph and Kunsel had found out earlier and a conversation with Mr. Miller indicated that the nanomachines contain some of the same high entropy alloys that the buildings are constructed from. Is this why anomalies can only interact with us and the rubble? They go through everything else here like it's not even there unless it's been coated in rubble dust.
And talking of more asinine experiments, Mr. Graham and Dr. House decided to share the results of a few of their own. Which again, seemed designed to piss off the data ghosts/spirits. They did find that you can get a Prophet eye mark on your body using the totem in Building 217. Highly useful. And apparently made one of the spirits scream in agony while they tried to burn down the place where Winter was murdered. Good for them.
On Day 300 we had another error. More false memories. This time it wasn't just the future, it was the past. Everything mixed around. People who were never here were. People who'd died were back. Or it seemed like it anyway. I had memories shoved into my head that some people who weren't around to experience certain errors were, or that events went a different way. It was confusing and disorienting and I'm still untangling what happened here form what happened in these "alternate timelines," I guess you'd call them. It's like we were seeing through the looking glass into the hundreds of other possibilities for how things might have gone. People I was friends with were my enemies and vice versa. The Admin fixed all of us on Day 302, but the memories are still lingering. I don't know what this means or why they keep mucking about with our memories like this. It's incredibly frustrating. What's the point of it all? If there's any design here, there has to be a point to it. I know there's some sort of quantum physics thing in effect. Is more of that coming out?
On Day 302, Mr. Hans Christian Andersen requested information on strange happenings by the data ghosts/spirits around town. If you encounter any oddities that bear further investigation, please let him know.
On Day 304, Stephen and his group discovered that the Admin's robotic spiders have returned. At least this means those bloody awful cloaks are gone and smashing your tablet by accident or on purpose won't be deadly. I would strongly advise against trying to smash your tablet, though. You can talk to Angel (@guardian) or Rhys (@dickcheese) if you're in need of some information about what the tablets might contain.
On Day 305, Alfie announced that he and Royce had finished putting up some storage caches around town near the entrances to the maintenance tunnels. Please only take advantage of these caches if you're in dire need and add to them if you can. Contact @ASolomons if you're in need of specific supplies. I also have some spare clothing that I'm happy to distribute to new arrivals.
No new SD Cards and Records have been added to the Public Data App since my last update. Keep an eye out, though!

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Suppose we'll see. Mine last time, it wasn't like that. It was just running away from the Hound at Baskerville, like in the story from my casebook. It wasn't as bad. I'm not sure why it was this time.

Maybe sometimes nightmares are just worse than other nights. The ones I've shared weren't that bad either, I've definitely had worse before. And a lot of things happened lately. I mean, there was a lot on your mind.

[There's always a lot on his mind.]

Yeah. That's probably it. I'm still sorry. I know neither of us wanted that. I can explain some of it so you don't

I don't want you to have the wrong impression about how things are. If you have questions.

[Flynn is about to answer when a certain upthread disaster gets in the way. He really doesn't feel like coming back to this after John's really bad evening™ so this sits until the next day before he answers.]

When you feel like it.

If you feel like it. I mean, of course I have questions, that was a lot, really, but I also know that I wasn't supposed to see any of it and

I just want you to know that I don't think badly of you even if you don't.

Want to explain or talk about it, I mean

[It's a very good thing that Flynn waits.]

Yeah, I think you deserve a few answers.

[After the fight he had to break up.]

[Answers. Flynn would love some answers, maybe some answers would help him control the images stuck in his mind, maybe it would make it easier to let them go. But how do you even do that? How do you ask a guy that you actually like a lot about his darkest and most painful memories?

So you have a kid?

So you killed a kid?

Everything is awful about this and Flynn starts typing several times, deletes, stares at the screen.]

Was it true? Did these things really all happen?

[Maybe they were just that – bad dreams. Or at least some of them. Some of them had to be, right?]

Yes. They happened, unfortunately.

[Just short and direct. He can do this.]

And the things that happened here, that was the city, right?

[He isn't going to put it into words. He probably couldn't if he tried.]

I'm really sorry.

[Right to the heart of it.]

You don't need to apologize.

Luna and Quark were Norfinbury. Dr. Stein, the man with the glasses, wasn't well before he came here. Sherlock was desperate.

[Sorry, John.]

I think Ecks mentioned Dr. Stein to me once. Sounds like he was pretty awful.

I don't understand why Mary was under the bed.

[He may or may not feel quite awful about kicking her in the face.]

I'm sorry I kicked her. I just wanted to get you out.

He was a very bad and very disturbed man.

And that wasn't Mary. Not the Mary you know here. You don't need to apologize for hurting her. She would have hurt you. That was Rosamund, the woman Mary used to be. Or what I imagine she used to be, her line of work.

I don't really know her, I mean we haven't met, but, you know. I know she's here and you guys are a thing and all that.

Right, the thing with the gun. I wasn't going to ask about that, it's not fair to her but... are you guys okay? I mean, are you okay? With that?

We're as okay as we can be. I didn't speak to her for about seven months after that. I moved back in with Sherlock and he kept in touch with her. She was pregnant with our daughter, though. Sherlock invited her to his family's Christmas party and we made up. We needed to make up. I forgave her not telling me and told her she didn't need to tell me anything about who she was before Mary Morstan because that's who she is now.

You have a daughter?

Sorry. That was stupid. I saw the cradle. I'm glad that you guys made up though that sounds like a very complicated situation to be in. You must love her very much.

Rosamund Mary. Rosie. Mary picked it out. Guess there was a piece of her past she wanted to hang onto. Or reclaim, maybe.

I do love her. I wasn't always a good husband, Flynn. Or a good father. It's complicated all around. She was--she is--a complicated person. But that seems to be what I'm attracted to.

I'm sure you did your best. I mean, you've been through so much and you're only human. And you're doing so much for everybody here, I'm sure you did the same thing back home.

I understand. The women in my life were very complicated, too. We're human beings, we can't help who we fall in love with. I'm very sorry you're stuck here and can't be with your daughter, I hope we'll find a way home soon.

['You're only human.' It's the mantra his therapist had thrown at him. It's one that other people have offered as comfort. John can't help curling his fingers tight around his tablet reading that. It's an excuse for him. It's failure dressed up in kinder terms. He's certainly not going to hold everyone to the same standards that he holds himself to--that would be mad--especially when he can't even live up to those standards, himself.

Will's arguments had hit at some of those wounds, ripped them open. It's why John had snapped and snarled like an injured wolf. He's inadequate. He tries so hard to be the man that Mary and Sherlock and people like Flynn think he is, and he always lets them down.

That's maybe a little heavy to share on top of everything else, though.]

I'm sure we will. Seems like we have a lot of detectives here who are on the case. And librarians.

[It's funny how some of the common themes align. Holding yourself to standards, feelings of responsibility. Feelings of inadequacy. Who Flynn has to be, why he is who he is and how he could possibly ever live up to the faith people back home put into him – yes, if they were breaching these particular subjects he might have been able to empathize quite a bit with John.

At least in theory, since talking about these issues is next to impossible for him and he really prefers not to. Maybe they have that in common, too.]

Yeah. Not to forget the doctors.

Not a bad mix I think.

Everything balances out in the end, sure. Not a bad thing to believe in, in a place like this, yeah?

[It's amazing how easy it is to pretend to be okay over a text medium.]

Not a bad thing at all.

So are we okay then? I mean, we're cool, right?

Practically frozen.

[He's making puns! That means he's fine, or something.]

We're cool, mate. I'm still sorry you saw any of that. Might be best if you try to forget, right?

[That brings a small smile to his face and actually puts his mind a little at ease. Your ~~dad~~ puns serve you well, John!]

I'll try. And I swear I won't tell anyone about it.

Librarian's promise.

Thanks, Flynn. I'll talk to you later. Have a safe walk today and keep warm.

You too, John. I'll see you around.

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