Mission 40 Debriefing: We Have to Go Deeper

Location: Eroz Facility, The Moon
Active Agents: Marge, Inkwell, Ace, Positron, Xu.
Mission Prompt: Marge had no idea about how and why she knew the location of the entity now known as XenoKeith, but had a suspicion the information might be locked away in her subconscious. She asked people to enter her subconscious by dream hacking.

Blow-by-Blow:
After an explanation of how dream hacking worked, Marge was tenderly KO'd and shoved into the hacking rig. Everyone else was quickly followed in their dream forms; Positron looked like Positron, Inkwell looked like himself but in an Air-Tight quality suit, Ace looked a bit smaller and weaker, and Xu was just a giant blur, as if he was being censored.

The group started in Marge's apartment and looked around for the tell-tale glowing doors or out of place objects. It was even more safe and beautiful than real life, with a very jaunty looking turret in a huge cowboy hat sitting in the living room. Inkwell found a closet monster, but he astutely shut the door and nothing bad happened. A large wooden door built into the side of Marge's massive computer rig. This led to the library of her subconscious.

Inside, Marge in the center of the room--looking busy and tired--was filing and sorting a massive mountain of papers into folders and books. To the sides of the room there were massive, stories high bookcases extending into darkness, as far back as anyone could see. Exploration of the shelves revealed there was no rhyme or reason to the books, though there were inter-indexed. Cyrus looked up himself and found a photo book, and then looked up a book in intellectual theft and found a hefty tome which, when opened, felt very angry and upset. The name Travis was referenced constantly. Inkwell decided to save Travis' name to the DCRT rig.

Further exploration found that no matter how high you climbed on the ladders up into the darkness, you never appeared very far from the ground. No matter how deep you walked into the shelves, you ended up back into the center of the room again, on the opposite side despite not turning at any point. Marge was working on separate projects, including something with three people, a xenotech cybernetic, Tex's re-emergence, and XenoKeith. There were represented by solving puzzled. There were also some locked filing cabinets that subMarge was not looking at and even avoiding. There were heavily marked and labelled TOP SECRET.

After some effort and a failed attempt by Xu, the cabinet Positron opened revealed some further data on Eroz's xenotech. The second cabinet was full of.. a steeply sloping rabbit hole, which the team immediately went down.

They ended up in a WF mall.. THE WF mall, the one Tex emerged from. Expecting a bomb, the team moved through the mall against an increasingly eager crowd of people moving away from the center. Close investigation revealed it appeared to be the same 16 or so repeating figures and the Mall's stores were vague and indistinct. The people didn't seem to notice them or interact at all. At the center of the mall, Tex was indeed there... protecting a terrified Marge from inhuman and ghostly horrors which felt of loss, isolation, and the void. Tex was a perfect image of himself in all ways, complete with his gun Justice and Justicia, except for a large key ring at his waist. Despite attempts at subtlety, Tex spotted the group immediately and ordered them to leave. Ace apologized sir, sorry sir, right away sir, and turned to leave.. And found after walking a short distance he was back in the center of the mall. Tex grew increasingly upset, as Marge got confused. Didn't she know these people? A fight ensued, where Xu dove into a Cappali store and immediately assumed the role of an obscenely rich dream NPC. Positron was able to take the keys in a moment of daring do while sliding across the floor, while Ace tried to absorb bullets. Ace was injured a fair bit but in no way as injured as he should have been for facing Tex. The crew moved to a strangely out of place and boarded up store named "Vacuum Repair."

The door, when opened, was indeed full of vacuums, and sucked in a few members of the team. Paper and small bits of garbage were being sucked in. A dizzy and stunned dreamMarge tried to follow Tex and asked him why he was shooting people she knew, and he grabbed her and dragged her bodily away from the vacuum in the mall. A group of mall security showed up and began to start looking for interlopers. Xu, pretending to be a normal dream NPC meandered slowly to the vacuum and was sucked inside.

On the other side of the store, there was.. an air lock. The team found themselves on Marge's fardrive ship she was stuck in for years. On the ship Marge was being chased by the undead and possibly zombified remains of former crew. She ran weeping from place to place, too terrified to talk or do anything but run and cry. Positron took this moment to look at the Fardrive itself, but found it full of nothing useful since Marge had no idea how it worked.

Following Marge found that various crew chased her, covered in plasma burns on the arms in face, consistent with ships consoles exploding on people during damage. A crew manifest showed that everyone but Marge--five people--were dead, and there was a non-human life form detected... And wouldn't you know it, that's exactly what they found; a prawn looking clawed 9 foot tall mother fucker, who then engaged in combat with Xu. After being stabbed a few times, and shot with some screaming wormy-fish-gun Positron manifested, the alien ran. His glowing blood led to a weird plastic looking door that was nothing like the Ai-Jinn ship, and led to a weird.. ..memory.

In this alien world, the team found them selves reliving the memory of an.. alien, similar to the one in Marge's ship with less claws, less menace. The alien walked into a house, and into a room.. Where it saw its alien-it-felt-strongly-positive-towards and another alien engaged in what was copulation but possibly just some taboo, illicit, something it should not have been doing. In a fit of anger and betrayal the alien whose head the team inhabited grabbed and ornament and beat the head of the interloper in. And then the dream dissolved, and the crew ran quickly to the door they entered in, hovering in the air.

Back in the ship, it was making horrifying angry noises, and the team left through the escape pods. Of course, the escape pods were even smaller and more isolated than the ship, and a sobbing Marge was shoved in to her own with the rest of the team. They then woke up. A few minutes later, Marge did too.

Marge's Thoughts:
I.. don't really remember what happened? Except I have some residual emotions and I think I remember the location of another AXE facility, though I'm not sure how I know? And i'm not sure why you had to dig up some stuff on Travis. Some stuff should be left in the past, where it belongs. But even still.. thanks for trying guys. I appreciate it.