As you may have all noticed, one of your mods has been exploding of late. The auction post is going to be a lot of fun, and we're really looking forward to it, but it will also be a lot of action, and your friendly neighborhood mods just aren't up to it at the moment. Since it is late in the day to be starting such an enormous post anyway, we will be posting it first thing tomorrow morning.

We apologize for the delay!

--The Mod Team

Sentience is down, and so is the rest of the facility.

Here's a small list of things that won't be around for your convenience anymore!
-Robots and sentinels.
-Lights, including daylight.
-Anything powered by electricity.
-The hospital.
-Incoming supplies (food, blood, etc).

Fun times! Water is still running. There are some red emergency lights in the shelter hallways and public areas, as well as around the pool and the dolphin observation deck/beach, but that's it.


Questions you might have:
-Communicators are still working fine.
-New arrivals will see only the first part of the welcome message, and then it will be truncated abruptly.
-Anyone who was restrained will find their restraints have unlocked themselves early this morning. New arrivals will not be restrained.
-Any powers or abilities you had will still be reduced, there's no change in that.
-Books in the library are now completely blank.
-The hospital and pet shop are totally and irrevocably sealed off.

What did I miss?

The child event is beginning! Bear in mind that it is currently very late at night so your characters are probably asleep; most people probably won't be chiming in to go "Hey why am I tiny!?!" until Monday.

This is an optional event wherein some characters will physically revert to an age around 8-10. We encourage characters to not all feel obliged to be tiny. There's gotta be some tall folks around to mock/cuddle the tiny ones.

OOC Info: What happened is that someone (cough) hacked the dimensional stabilizer and attempted to manually set his own age to 10. But the dimensional stabilizer is tricky, and it affected a bunch of people randomly.

As of right now, characters have only changed physically: If they're a vampire, they're still a vampire; they retain all their memories; etc. However, their brain chemistry will be around ~9ish, so they may be more temperamental, have shorter attention spans, be more egocentric, be less cooperative, etc. Whatever you think is normal for a 9-year-old.

Midway through the event, Sentience will make an announcement informing everyone that a secondary error has occurred, and in attempting to fix the problem, it was compounded. Now some people really are children: essentially, it's as if they were brought to Marina when they were 9. They have no memories outside of their childhood memories, and they no longer have whatever powers/changes happened to them as adults. This complication is also completely optional; you can have your character be a child and still not suffer the complication, or you can have your character not be a child and then they suffer the complication and become tiny.

The event will end on a Monday Sentience announcement.

P.S.: If you are tinified while restrained, the restraints will resize themselves.

WARNING: CHILD EVENT INCOMING STARTING SUNDAY

As a reminder, this event is optional, available only to characters who have been 10 years old at some point, and is not relative (e.g. "10 years", not "whatever = 10 years old for my species")

The following inmates are still restrained:

Dahlia Hawthorne, Shigure Sohma, Russel Tringham, Lussuria, Xanxus, Riku, Sora, Eustass Kid, Matoi Tsunetsuki, Lina Inverse, Kazutaka Muraki, and all of the newly-arrived inmates who were told that they're restrained. ♥


Vision of your world:

There's a mini-disc that can be inserted into a slot behind a removable panel on your communicator. (Don't worry, they come with instructions.) The mini-disc will recognize your lifesigns and will only show you your future; it won't show you anyone else's, or an indiscriminate future. It may show you as much as three month in the future, or as little as one month, but it will be... a subtly or not-so-subtly different future.

If your character was involved in a shitty situation due to being a bad person, that situation is gone. Option 1: Time sensitive action is required. Sentience "took" you from point X, but "replaced" you at point X minus 10 days, before you screwed up and caused your death/the battle/whatever; therefore you never screwed up. Sentience will not put you back in a situation where you are already mid-criminal-act. Option 2: Time sensitive action is not required. Your alternate has shaped up and fixed their life. So, to take two examples...

1) Your character was an evil dictator who had started an immense battle and was in the midst of it or right before her death when she was taken. Sentience backtracks, takes her from before she started the battle, and her alternate just plain avoids going that route. Your character will see herself just slowly correcting her behavior, beginning to feel pangs of guilt, being unable to recklessly kill others "anymore", making small gestures of reparation...

2) Your character was a beggar who stole to survive. It's not time-sensitive, so Sentience just swaps him out, and he fixes his own life. Maybe he made friends with a grocer, who slips him food; he cleaned himself up and got a paper route, and is now saving his pennies...

So some of your characters may just see themselves struggling to lead a better life, or they may just see themselves making better choices. Your character hasn't abruptly started screaming about how they don't want to kill anymore, alarming everyone who knew them. Instead, the change is more natural: guilt, nerves, faltering, a breakdown, whatever -- resulting in turning around their lives and resolving to do the right thing.


QUESTIONS? ASK THEM, DON'T ASSUME. If you're really confused, nag us and we'll tell you exactly what your character sees.


Q: My character's crimes date back to early childhood! What now?
A: Unless your character's timeline is "early childhood," that doesn't matter. Sentience isn't fixing everything you've ever done, only trying to minimize the damage you are doing. Your alternate starts from approximately where your character left off in the timeline.

Q: That's from after my character committed all his crimes! WTF? / What if I want to do something years ago?
A: If your character has committed crimes in the last ten days or so, we'll let you backtrack. Otherwise, you'll just see yourself behaving better in general -- and maybe repenting for the crimes you have committed.

Sentience will replace them at whatever time you feel like veering AU from. That means you can go ahead and pick a time for your character to get replaced, and then imagine what their world would be like if they never commit crimes.

Some discussion in chat last night had players asking, "If we do X, can we do Y?" Like, "For the people who captured Agatha, could we ask for nonprocreative sex as a reward?" and "If we all agreed to be sterilized, could we convince Sentience to change the rules about sex?"

And the answer was maybe. Not because we haven't decided, but because it depends how you do it.

It's probably past time to spell out that this is in no way a static game. Almost everything about it can be changed. When we moved to IJ, we turned a lot of it upside-down. When Sentience got pissed off, Sentience turned a lot of it upside-down. And you can do it, too. Every character in the game has the potential to change it.

It's just that changing things takes effort and time. You can't just ask Sentience to have sex; it's going to say no, sorry, against the rules. But if you do it in small steps: do a great favor and make Sentience feel positively toward you, use coaxing and logic, appeal to its weak points, make it want to help you......

Everything about your environment can be affected by you. Sentience's behavior. Sentience's dominion. The layout of the dome. The power level you hold. The rules about sex. The rules about weapons. Pretty much anything. (And not all of them require you to be nice to or even to interact with Sentience.) Players have already changed things, and you may not even have thought it was significant: The pizza shop and pet cafe were coaxed and logicked out of Sentience, the "inmate" form of address replacing "criminal", etc. Dahlia, who is definitely not on Sentience's good side, convinced Sentience to put its own creators on trial recently. Won't that be interesting?

Basically, what I'm saying is that any action can have consequences, and those consequences aren't limited to some convenient set of ideas. If you manage to convince Sentience to change the course of our planned plot before we get to it, then good for you! We'll work with that! Dahlia's request wasn't expected, but now it's going to be part of our plot.

If you want to convince Sentience to build a ramen shop or start a police force, you only need to contact the mods OOCly if you want to. But if you want to do a big involved plot like hacking or taking down Sentience, you probably ought to talk to us, because we'll want to tell you how/if that goes down!

ETA: For new arrivals who are restrained, you will have an iron ball chained to your right foot like in a chain gang. (It's relative to your size and strength, if you're a bunny or a small child or a superhuman; always just enough to be difficult to move.) Your powers are completely gone, including the ability to summon weapons or teleport, and your strength and speed are only that of a normal person.

Your character will be kept on a weekly schedule of Monday breakfast, Tuesday exercise, Wednesday enrichment (educational or creative tasks) plus a light lunch, Thursday labor (gardening or laundry or cleaning), Friday dinner, Saturday/Sunday recreation followed by confinement in your room.

The bots will escort everyone in a group from one task to the next, and they will use tasers if you're getting rowdy. They can be escaped from if you're very sneaky, but will immediately round you up again if a bot sees you.



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[THE FOLLOWING NO LONGER APPLIES:]

When you wake up, you're in a room in the shelter -- a random one if you weren't living there, or your own. The door to your suite is sealed and it doesn't open. (If you tried to stay up all night, you spontaneously fell asleep at a certain point.)

Since there's no TVs or computers in these rooms by default, you're going to be very bored for a while unless you've 'decorated'. You retain your communicators. Your rooms will not be tampered with, so any weapons you have there are still yours.

Sentience will post daily IRL throughout the week informing you of what the press gang is going to be doing that day; you continue doing that task until Sentience's next post. Today, you'll be marched out for breakfast by a troop of sentinels armed with powerful tasers at 7:00am sharp, and then you can 'socialize'.

There's several ways this situation can be resolved, but they're all character actions. ♥ some of them are character interactions, but Sentience is too woobie to keep this up for long, it turns out. Damn. Mod plans ruined by character whims.


Note: Zero, Saix and Seifer get to be free and retain their original powers at the moment. Even AI-favorites like Fletcher and Xion are chained up and shoved in with the rest of you.

Warning: Sentience is disappointed. This isn't good, as some of your characters may have already guessed.

Starting Monday, "tomorrow" in game, we will begin an event that moves forward the game plot.

This event will last at least one in-game day. It may last longer. Depends on your characters! And while the event is active, it will severely impact your ability to socialize "normally" -- limiting you to certain areas of the dome at certain times of the day -- so you may have difficulty moving your own plots forward, and I wouldn't recommend starting new ones that will require any commitment.

Apologies if that's the case. But player actions resulted in this, so blame yourselves. ♥