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Foundation Scions     Usually, when Elites have been shepherded through Laplace Scientific Computing Center, it's been through containment chambers, experimental labs, or the expansive general lobby- but today's study takes them into the bowels of Laplace's Rehabilitation Center, way up on a high floor of the complex- not that you'd know it, as the selected room is none other than a two-story surgical operating theater. A medical cot for each participant sits around the room's perimeter, with beeping consoles and glass fishbowl helmets where the pillows ought to be. Up high, angled glass of the observation deck looms, shrouded scientists with notebooks, screens, and sensor-readouts mull about with one another, ensuring that the theater below is as exposed-feeling as it is antiseptic-sterile.

    Anathemic to the rolling machinery and cots, an absolute rat's nest of electrical cables and arm-width fluid tubes cover the floor from the machines scattered across the operating theater, to a central bed with triple the density of contraptions around it- Flamel's, clearly, the messy array all over the room as structural evidence towards where the participants' dreams will instead be routed. Mesmer Jr. fiddles with the myriad connection ports of the bedside consoles, on occasion disconnecting and reconnecting the hoses only for unsettling silver liquid to spill out from within and fizzle away into nothing before it hits the ground- final checklists and changes picked as an excuse to not be the first greeter to today's test subjects. Instead, that task has been delegated to an uncomfortably-casual scientist with surgeon's clamps tying up two-tone hair.

    Having, apparently, dragged a comfy chair out from an employee lounge to the front of the operating theater, when others start to arrive they hop up with a yawn and a dog-like headshake- and a fidgeting adjustment a blood-filled IV hanging out of rolled-up sleeves- "Yo, Mesmer, the fresh meat just got delivered!" To the group, "What's up? Are you ready to get your nap on? I've been waiting forever, feels like I could use the sleep, hah ha." Scratchy-androgynous, with an ever present sarcastic tone, they sound even more casual than they dress, even with that silly hoodie-hooded labcoat. They stick out a fist to the Elites, offering out a fistbump rather than a handshake. Mesmer turns to look over her shoulder at them, and just glares.

    "Medicine Pocket, Laplace Biology, blah blah- I can't wait to see how this is all going to go down. Let's get you hooked on up to your vital monitors," They gesture to a stack of chrome-and-vinyl wristbands and attached sensors, "It's important for us to know if this somehow makes you kick the bucket, cuz if you do, I've already called first dibs on all your-"

    "It won't come to that. Don't tell lies." Mesmer says, sharp, from over where she's standing by a cot that already has a frail girl sitting on it, who she'd been helping. Taking a more reassuring tone, she mumbles, audible to others but clearly specifically that patient's way "We've thoroughly tested the exit protocols, it's certain to be safe." "Pfft. Spoilsport."
Foundation Scions     Mesmer finishes up what she's doing, and approaches the center of the room to address everyone, tone right to a sour-usual, behind the defense of a chest-clutched clipboard.

    "As I hope you've already been informed, volunteering here today, you'll be exposed to what we expect to be an accurate simulation of 'Storm Syndrome'. To familiarize you with the process, I'll explain in detail- but just once. Using the Artificial Somnambulism equipment here, I've already established the proper parameters for you volunteers to experience joining Agent Parson's curated dreamscape. This is as easy as falling asleep, and following the automatic prompts- "I brought sedatives if sleep's hard, use as much as you want-" "Use the appropriate amount only, if absolutely required. We don't want to skew results by cognition-affecting medications."

    Mesmer coughs into a fist, then winces, and goes to grab an alcohol wipe as an automatic action. "Once all of the connections are established, Medicine Pocket and I will likewise enter, to monitor and initiate the experiment protocol. Neither of us will be participating- as well, internal volunteers have been selected from past Eras, in the expectation that they may serve as experimental controls- do introduce yourselves, please. Now is a more appropriate time for chit-chat, or any questions, after all-" "You heard her! Get to know one another, pal around, better be all buddy-buddy before it's nightmare time, amiright-" "Do shut up."

    Medicine Pocket rolls their eyes in a comically-exaggerated way. "Fine- hey, I wasn't kidding about the vital monitors, though. Put 'em on before you get tucked into bed. You signed all the waivers, yeah? Uhh, too late now, probably, if you didn't! But don't worry, this'll be fiiine!" They pick one up and jangle it like it's a keychain. "Parsons. You're up, you're first. Don't keep us waiting too long." Mesmer gestures towards the central, built-up station- with Mesmer's glare his way, it might be more fitting if she'd assembled an electric chair- but it has more or less the same setup as the rest. Scientists up in the observation deck murmur to themselves, more and more of a voyeuristic audience as time goes on.

    The cots have a chorus of beeping around them, and a dull overlapping wave-hum rings out from the fishbowl helmets that the pair demonstrate how to put on. With any level of relaxing, sleep comes quickly, despite the halogen-bright operating theater environment- and unconsciousness is met with the program-start-

1999+12 SEP 1
>>>PROTOCOL 2.0101.8.MESMER
>>>>>>START
>>>>>>>>SYNC PROCESS---
    (Blink thrice, imagine alcohol flame, and intend without action to stand up.)

    . . .
Flamel Parsons     A new approach for mental simulation! Flamel's *excited* about this opportunity, as evidenced by the way he's constantly bothering Mesmer and the strange surgeonoid. "You two don't mind if I set something up here, right? Just a few extra pieces of monitoring equipment, one psychoastrameter, a few comms bugs, my backup smelling salts, the usual." He jabbers. "Oh right-- introductions! You all already know me or people who are basically like me. The name's Flamel Parsons, agent of a vague yet menacing government organization, and also the vessel for a self-contained extrapolated psychic energy profile of the Storm Syndrome that we'll be using to test the effects of the Storm on hypothetical Era-paradigms to try to get some kind of understanding of what it's doing and why." He claps his hands together brightly. "It should be *very* useful information."

    Settling in for a nap, it's *startlingly* easy for him to sleep. He's well-trained in psychic trances!

    Welcome, for some of you welcome back yet again, to the Parsons Institute. If you've been here before, you know the drill: Vast concrete hallways, enriching areas well-furnished and well-decorated with a once-well-funded federal agency's idea of psychologically-stimulating furniture and plant life would be, helpful posters explaining what to do in the event of psychohazard outbreaks put up right next to helpful pinboards explaining when bowling night is. What's different is is that the researchers, security teams, secret operatives, maintenance technicians, and test subjects are scurrying around, distributing carts of materials and instructions to each other.

    On display screens, one can see:


                        "SIMULATION COMMENCING IN 9:46"                        
                         "MOVE TO YOUR DESIGNATED AREA"                        

                         "UPE-1999 'STORM IN A BOTTLE'"                        
                        "SIMULATION WILL BEGIN SHORTLY"                        

    Look in those carts, check those racks, see what the Institute staff seem to be gathering: Squibs to safely simulate ultraviolence. Plywood containment doors to simulate massive breach disasters. Strategically-placed padding to allow for necessary impacts. One type of Psychohazard runs startlingly rampant here, corralled into cooperation with the protocol by security teams: literal False Alarms, a species of simulatory psychohazards with rotating-light heads, designed to mimic and imitate others, who occasionally flicker between various other types of Nightmare, Inner Demon, and suchlike if you look at them too long.

    Flamel's mind is gearing itself up to withstand, and correctly simulate, what is likely to be a massive psychic rush of violence and damage. Is it all going to be staged? Is there any distinction between something that's staged and something that's real, within the mind? There's no way to know. But, after arriving, mental images of scientific staff are almost immediately handing out guidance brochures and directing people to their assigned secret underground monorails and to the unmarked black surveillance vans. These will distribute them to the Mental Simulations currently being extrapolated from them... What that means, exactly, is not entirely clear yet, but will be much clearer when they're on their way.
Lilian Rook     This is probably a very stupid idea. Lilian can tell, because when she's lost in pencil-chewing thought about the Storm over her Trídéag work, every omen tells her that this is the right move, but when she's busy thinking about Sonetto and Matilda off the clock, the same sixth sense tells her not to. The unfortunate thing is that she knows which of the two is more important, and regardless of how it affects her, is the one she must choose.

    She takes some small pleasure in the fact that it shows Mesmer that she isn't the slightest bit wary of her crackpot Artificial Somnambulism snakewater, though. Walking right into the room as a volunteer manages to warm a small part of her chest with spiteful pride, even as the rest is cold and clenched with nameless dread.

    She glances up at the voyeur deck, gets an eyefull of labcoats and clipboards, and looks away again. It feels a little worse, now.

    'What's up? Are you ready to get your nap on?'
    'Medicine Pocket, Laplace Biology, blah blah-'

    Lilian looks quietly startled on the verge of 'put off' by Medicine Pocket's attitude, but deigns to say "What a pleasant surprise. I thought you might all be like Annika, but it seems someone here still has a little humanity to them." and mostly mean it. "Is that a pseudonym? Ah, I'm Lilian by the way, if you couldn't tell." she says conversationally, watching Mesmer fuss with the pipes. "Silver . . . ? Is that 'dreamstuff'?" Lilian doesn't say the word in English.

    'It's important for us to know if this somehow makes you kick the bucket, cuz if you do, I've already called first dibs on all your'

    "Hmm?" Lilian blinks distractedly. "You should hope not. It'd be very bad for everyone in the building if I did. Ah, though I already know that it's not going to happen."

    'Use the appropriate amount only, if absolutely required. We don't want to skew results by cognition-affecting medications.'

    "As opposed to cognition-affecting sleep." Lilian says, archly, during the pause in explanation. Mesmer's coughing is enough of a pause for her to opportunistically barb, it seems, even with her arms subtly hugged against her chest. "Your experiment is already going to play havoc with my carefully calibrated sleep schedule, so don't demand the unreasonable, Annika."

    'do introduce yourselves, please. Now is a more appropriate time for chit-chat, or any questions, after all-'

    Buoyed a little bit the opportunity to jab Mesmer in plain sight, Lilian turns her head to look up at the observation deck, and waves from her wrist with her arms folded. "Dame Commander Lilian Rook. Paladins Chevalier, Director of the Trídéag Association, O-5 Humanity Immunes corps, as well as a student of Scáthach and betrothed to Tamamo-no-Mae. A pleasure to meet you all, I'm certain." Lilian talks over the act of snapping on her silly little wrist monitor, keeping up the train of descriptors until completion. "If Parsons acts out, I have ample experience putting him back in line, so rest assured." That experience was one time, but it sure was ample.

    'You two don't mind if I set something up here, right?'

    "So don't get any stupid ideas."

    After a moment, Lilian does think to ask a genuine question. "If this is Parsons' dream, then how are you going to get any representative data of our eras? Shouldn't we end up mere observers to his?"
Lilian Rook     Of course she can't get to sleep that easily. Not only is Lilian's entire idea of sleep monumentally misguided, but it'll be hours and hours until she's tired again, and more importantly, she's trying to pass out in a medical theatre filled with staring doctors and a woman she isn't one hundred percent sure won't try anything while she's out.

    This is, of course, illogical and stupid, but the part of the brain that relaxes enough to sleep doesn't really care about what the forebrain knows is already foretold. Lilian shuffles around for a while, makes a few exasperated noises, and finally, does indeed pop the minimum useful dose of benzos before settling back in and closing her eyes a second time.

    . . . . . . . .

    Her reaction to the Parsons Institute is, naturally, a single long sigh, and a bare glance around before saying, "So it's this again." without elaborating. "Well at least he's preparing this time. I don't want to hear any passive-aggressiveness later."
Veronica     Veronica once again finds herself internally marveling at the enormous quantity of expensive medical equipment, only some of which she recognizes. She's quick to notice the literal 'folks upstairs' in the observation rooms, and just as quick to turn her eyes away from them. Accepting Medicine Pocket's fist-bump on reflex, Veronica listens to the doctor's spiel and picks up a vital monitor. She's halfway buckled it in place on her left arm before remembering that it probably needs contact with real flesh and blood to work properly, and promptly switches it over to her right with as much care as a concrete hand permits.

    She has more patience for Mesmer's tense monologue here than she did for Matilda's instructions at her last visit to the Foundation - something about those people in the observation rooms above make her a little more sympathetic to the scientist. Mesmer is part of a larger apparatus, much like Veronica herself and the others who worked under L Corp were, and Veronica knows that the watchful eyes of the 'higher-ups' can be a sort of shackle on one's behavior.

    When prompted to introduce herself, she just looks up and says "Veronica, from the City."

    Fussing with her hair to fit it under the domed helmet, Veronica does her best to relax and let sleep take her despite her discomforts. Blink, blink, blink. Imagine the smell, consider standing up. And suddenly, she's in *another* facility, the Parsons Institute. She barely resists squirming in reflexive discomfort at the sight of it all; Veronica herself has never been to the L Corp Nest, but some of us have, and it was quite a bit like this.

    Eager to replace her surroundings with Anything Else, Really, Veronica beelines for a monorail the moment she's pointed its way. At least the seats might be comfortable?
White Within *The Institute* and with her appearance stabilized, White can't help but look around a little bit, less put-off than maybe she could be. She remembers him talking about 'mindswarms' and how he's not really great with them, but to her having this kind of mental environment feels like it should just be an advanced form of that very thing! Her eyes open back up early on in her examinations, confirming the natures of the psychohazards and thereby soothing any concerns that a sudden change of appearance might cause herself... But she avoids staring at them all the same, indescribably uncomfortable about finding out how they might change relevant to her own 'inner demons' specifically. She doesn't want to know, right now, she realizes. Holding a brochure when it's given to her, she turns it over and flips through it one-handedly (she's a fast reader), never one to ignore free advice about esoteric subjects. "This is... Strange." she finally admits, looking up at the ceiling in particular. "Maybe... My Parallels... Need more space."

After all, she rarely ever imagines them in an actual *room* in her own mental landscape. In fact, that landscape is usually... Shockingly empty, save for whatever temporary props she thinks up for her internal monologues, or the vaguely recurring round-table they used to meet around. When she allowed them more personality, at least.
White White hadn't quite imagined what she'd signed up for correctly, it turns out. Rather than a nice private office, the massive surgical theater with all its onlookers leaves her deeply on edge. Even with her mild expressions, it probably isn't terribly hard to sense the anxiety seeping off of her as she hesitantly follows the lead of others into the room, her posture scrunched inward as if to hide beneath her own shoulders. It isn't for a little while longer that she finally starts to relax again, reminding herself of all the reasons why she couldn't possibly be in danger; she can't be poisoned, she has numerous sub-minds to help correct any damage done to her brain in an extreme case, and she has ways of rousing herself from sleep as well if need be... Though, to enable this, she subtly summons one of her little spiderlings to hold against her chest like a stuffed animal or an emotional support chihuahua before she fully settles.

Labs are awful, she's decided. Before, it was mostly just Potimas-oid researcher-types that upset her, but she's a flexible woman. She can learn to hate more than one thing. The fistbump-attempt from Medicine Pocket is met with a half-closed fist and just the second row of knuckles, like she's nudging something that she isn't sure will be completely dry and clean. "... White." She doesn't do complex introductions.

     After the explanation, White takes her time settling in on a cot, holding the monitor equipment in one hand and her little support spider in the other, pressing her dress flat as she sits, turns, and slowly lays herself down. The spider walks partway up her to settle on her stomach like a protective cat as she gets the monitor on; her readings are probably 'close enough' to human, but with some odd divergences. Her pulse is naturally quick but very stable, her temperature is maybe a degree higher than it seems like it should be, and brainwave readings drawn from her don't seem to quite... Obey typical standards. It's like the individual areas of her brain aren't quite separated by function in the usual way, and the signals it makes probably read a little like multiple different brains' results getting mixed together somehow. That's just the terrible anxiety of ten different little inner voices complaining, venting, and then reassuring each other, don't worry about it!

     Sedatives wouldn't do White any good, and frankly she's rather bad at sleeping normally... But after a few moments of laying there, she actually *opens* her eyes after having them closed this whole time. She looks down at herself and... Beams herself with the Evil Eye of Hypnosis, to speed the process along. The spider on her belly remains wide awake and alert like a tiny little guard dog, but its role is simply to send a signal to her in the event something turns out fishy, triggering her own self-recovery measures in an emergency. That... And it's nice to be protected while you sleep, even if it's by something that might struggle to defeat a gopher.

     But, after finally manifesting in Flamel's hosted mental landscape, White just has to resolve a momentary... Fluctuation in the way she appears there, before she's able to stabilize and put some of her anxieties at ease, ironically. That first moment spent in a primarily psychic-manifestation-based space depends a little more on her self-image than her physical body, and her self-image is itself a somewhat less stable thing; her body briefly seems to manifest with additional phantom limbs while her awareness is still adjusting to the new environment, though they recede and return her to her more familiar shape in short order once she's able to take stock of things and actually percieve herself. It's a little like the shapeshifter's equivalent of forgetting to button your pants up, maybe... Until you see the mistake for yourself, it's easy to miss.
Timekeeper     There's not really any reason for any Foundation-natives to be here. It's hard to say exactly whether this experiment would pull up the original Storm of 1999 for them or fail outright, but it's probably not very useful either way. So, of course, neither the Timekeeper or her assistant are around, but Vertin's interest in seeing this project go well-- and demonstrate support for Laplace-- means that not only was Regulus instructed to play nice, but two more volunteers from her suitcase were sent as well.

    The girl on the cot besides Mesmer is none other than Cristallo, who everyone has at least briefly seen from passing through Vertin's suitcase. Her wheelchair, and the medical machinery that rolls alongside it, is placed by the head of the cot, and the girl herself has her hands folded over a blanket, patiently waiting. Thin, ghostly-pale with white hair and a light green gown that matches her eyes, she looks as familiar being in the surgical center as Mesmer herself does, practically blending into the sterile white walls. On her lap is a large white spider, which she's gently petting with one finger.

"We've thoroughly tested the exit protocols, it's certain to be safe."

    Cristallo smiles weakly at Mesmer's comforting tone. "It's alright, Miss Mesmer. I know how Doctor Medicine Pocket likes to joke. But..."

    She looks off to the side, at the floor beside her wheelchair. Down there, squatting in a fetal ball, is a trembling white bedsheet with eye-holes cut in the front. Poltergeist has somehow been lured out of hiding, and into a situation where she has to meet *several* new people, in a frightening new location, and undergo a strange arcane treatment, and she's shivering like a dog on the verge of a panic attack. There's still not any visible portion of her body under her bedsheet, if she can help it-- you know there is at least *some* kind of body under there, because sometimes when she tugs the bedsheet back into place, fingers that are somehow less ghostly than Cristallo's are briefly visible.

"J-jokes..! Haha-hahaha, y-yeah! Th-that was just supposed to be funny, ri-right?"
"Mhm, there's nothing to be afraid of. I've done Artificial Somnambulism lots of times."
"O-oh God-- they-- they're not gonna be m-mad at me for not laughing at the joke, right?!"
"I don't think so, Polly. They just enjoy saying things."
"I-I-- b-but what if they are, a-and then I go into that weird machine and they get fed up with how boring I am and I'm not being a good enough test subject so they just make me have a nightmare?? O-oh-- oh no, no no no, if I dream of something embarrassing, isn't it going to turn real?! This was such a bad, bad, bad stupid terrible idiotic ideaaaa...."

    Cristallo shifts the spider on her lap, waking it up, and then points it towards Poltergeist. "Would it help if you could hold Shelob?"

    Muffled, with her 'face' scrunched up under additional layers of blanket, Poltergeist mumbles, "Y-yes...." The spider scurries down the leg of the cot, hopping up onto where Poltergeist's knees... probably are? And then she hugs it with her wiggly little arms underneath the bedsheet, as if it's a dog instead of a spider.
Timekeeper ". . . as well, internal volunteers have been selected from past Eras, in the expectation that they may serve as experimental controls- do introduce yourselves, please."

    Cristallo barely manages to raise her voice above a faint whisper, but if people are quiet, she's loud enough to hear when she waves. "It's nice to meet you all again. My name is Cristallo, originally from the era that ended in 1957... although I was transferred to the Rehabilitation Centre months before the Storm."

    Poltergeist peeks up over the arm of Cristallo's wheelchair, visible as just a lump of white fabric. "P-P-P-- Poltergeist. Is wh-what they call me. S-sorry for freaking."

    Cristallo hardly needs any guidance to preemptively ask for the sedatives for herself, and lay down on the cot. She lays out the blanket she brought with her over top, kicking her feet to fold it underneath them at the bottom end. After that, it's just about egging Poltergeist on to be brave.

    Poltergeist shuffles to her feet and tries to take one of the wristbands (it's easier if she's waiting in a line!) but, even though she oddly can sort of physically interact with it, the vital monitor slips off of her just seconds later and falls through her semi-incorporeal body to the ground. She blubbers a bit, squatting down and fitting it over her arm over top of the sheet instead, but then it can't read her vital(?) signs at all. Cristallo works up the energy to clear her throat and point.

    "Polly, Miss Mesmer's got something special for you." "O-oh, of course... s-sorry, it's since I-I'm dead and all, so of course you wouldn't need... hahaha...."

    Once Poltergeist is equipped with an incorporeal-designed monitor, and Cristallo's taken her sedative and Poltergeist has Shelob nestled on top of her legs, they both get fishbowled and fall asleep for the simulation.

    Inside a dream, you might imagine that Poltergeist would be un-blanketed, and Cristallo would be walking, but neither one is true. Moving around, though, Poltergeist's semi-physical and semi-magical touch helps Cristallo navigate Flamel's brain facility, much more gently than Poltergeist was throwing around the chairs in the restaurant. If the 1960's-based mindscape is too retro to be handicap-accessible, then Poltergeist is also able to wobbily lift her up with haunting tricks.
Regulus Of course Regulus didn't sign any waivers but she did agree to help Laplace out in exchange for the right to hold a Psychodyssey Concert in the suitcase. She even promised to ''behave''--that's how much Psychodyssey has been built up for her and her expectations have been through the roof. She's even been practicing a couple songs with the new Watch Band that she made up with Hibiki, Odette, and Tamiel but a name hasn't exactly been picked out iether. Regulus has ideas and will probably throw them out in to the world at any moment.

But she also needs to take a good looksee at Laplace's Warpgate technology so she can build one for Vertin's suitcase. Only then, she reasons, can she truly be free! She has been smuggling, gradually, materials and tools but until she actually gets a good look at this world hopping tech--there's no way she'll be able to figure it out from zero anytime soon. Thsi way she at least gets some idea of what Laplace is like before she unleashes her secret cool badass and totally rocking scheme.

Regulus's shades obscure her eyes as gazes about on the way over. She'll have to be careful or her dreams of the ultimate psychic concert may be dashed forever.

''Fresh meat just got delivered.''

Regulus quietly considers running away but the offer of fistbumps encourages her and she attempts to fistbump Pocket's fist with her own fistbump.

It's fine, Regulus thinks, just a figure of speech.

"...Hallo, Medicine Pocket! And Mesmer! Don't worry, you can rely on this rockstar!" She jerks a thumb at herself, grinning. APPLe doesn't seem to have come along for this particular experiment. Regulus thought it best if only one risk the wrath at sea. If she falls today then it will be up to APPLe to maintain the Regulus website and build what Vertin needs.

"We get to sleepwork?" Regulus is impressed, maybe she had Mesmer all wrong. Being able to work while sleeping means you don't have to work while being awake. Not that Regulus intends to make it a habit but--

Regulus thinks of the effects of Storm Syndrome she remembers seeing. "But we're just simulating it right? We won't really be losing the plot like all those other people that had gone barking mad?"

Regulus decides to pretend that everything will be okay because Lilian said 'she' would be okay. It involves deliberately misinterpreting that Lilian's 'I already know that it's nto going to happen' is going to include everyone and not just Lilian. She didn't explicitely say she was only talking about herself, see.

Though it does make sense to inquire as to what her actual job is going to be. "Yeah, didn't you say you needed me for some kind of malarkey, government man? What do you want me to do? Just hang around and be myself?" That sounds like a great idea and something she's got a lot of practice in doing.
Regulus ''Polly. Cristallo.''

Regulus brightens. "Cristallo! Polly! My good mates...!" She turns to face her to pat her on the ... well, where the hand would be. "Don't worry, love, if you dream something embarrassing I will dream something ''more'' embarrassing so they forget all about it." Regulus promises. "And there's nothing boring about you, you're holding a spider." Regulus's logic makes sense to Regulus.

"Don't worry, us 1960s gals will stick together!" Then she winks at Cristallo, "Well time to get loaded up, mm?"

She hooks herself up and then...

"Mm, I'm so terrible at falling asleep on command, I'll just count...apples...szzzzzz..." She didn't even get to one apple.

Appearing in the Parsons Institute, Regulus looks immediately for the 'press this button to let Flamel into your mind' button. It's on the website so it might be in this world too. But eventually she turns around, "Mm? So what now? Just wait for the bad stuff?"

She looks for Poltergeist, intending to move closer to her, humming lightly.
Foundation Scions 'What a pleasant surprise. I thought you might all be like Annika, but it seems someone here still has a little humanity to them.'

    Medicine Pocket looks confused, and vaguely irritated- "Huh? I don't know any 'Annika', and that's a freaking weird thing to say. Like, do I look human?" Their wrinkle-nosed lil scowl fades, quickly distractable- and unhelpfully repeats, "Medicine Pocket. I think I've heard about you? Weren't you in the-" Their next word could be 'calendar'. It certainly could be. The threat of that is high, here at Laplace- "Big kerfuffle with the Storm?" Thank god.

'Silver . . . ? Is that 'dreamstuff''

    "Proprietary flux-moderating medium. Call it what you will." Mesmer doesn't raise a jab off the bat, the busywork evidently serious enough for her to still prioritize it. Intriguing.

'Your experiment is already going to play havoc with my carefully calibrated sleep schedule, so don't demand the unreasonable, Annika.'

    Mesmer's eye twitches at the name. "I've changed my mind. Medicine Pocket? Could you requisition the pharmacy's entire stock of phenobarbital?" "Oh, nah- I'm maxed out for the month." "Excuse me? How? No- actually, don't explain. Just use what you brought. Human ones should work for the off-worlders."

    Medicine Pocket hums, and grabs both pillbottles, and various syringes, from a surgical side-table nearby their out-of-place chair. "Brought a fun sampling. Feel free to mix and match-" "Don't." "Okay, okay, what's got your brainstem in a twist? Jeez." They rattle the bottle of pills.

'Would it help if you could hold Shelob?'

    "Ensure it doesn't get within the helmet, please- it shouldn't, but the calibration of these machines is to tight tolerances." Despite being warding in her words, Mesmer's tone isn't mean, to Cristallo and Poltergeist.

'You two don't mind if I set something up here, right?"

"If you've ascertained that none of it could have conflicting electromagnetic interference, it could be arranged-"
"Do it, yeah! The more the merrier, we'll juice 'em for reference data-"

    Well, it doesn't seem like either would actually stop Flamel from doing so.

'If this is Parsons' dream, then how are you going to get any representative data of our eras? Shouldn't we end up mere observers to his?'

    Mesmer's look of annoyance betrays that it is an apt question to ask- "Under normal circumstances, perhaps- but I've established a protocol I'll initiate once we've secured each connection to lower consciousness bleed-through mitigations in controlled parts of his dreamscape. His dream, overall, but with subdivisions seeded off of you. As you can guess, such a thing would be highly unwanted in literally any other circumstance, I assure you- but I am an expert, and I assume that Parsons is quite hardy."

. . .
Foundation Scions     When Mesmer and Medicine Pocket appear within the Parsons Institute, they're a noticeably transparent compared to the other Elites and arcanists- whatever program they have running for their dreaming must surely be keyed in just for observation. "Just a few minutes? Understood. I had a thought- the incident amongst the Storm of 1966 did, at the very least, ensure that the present off-worlders have experienced Storm Syndrome firsthand," Which includes Flamel, who has done far more than that, "Whether that has any bearing on this experiment, I suppose we've no choice but to find out. Cristallo is, if I recall, our only control subject not to have undergone such, so, Ms. Cristallo- I must specifically note the value of your volunteering."

    "Exit protocol is to tap wrists and ankles together thrice. If it's abrupt, and you're experiencing aspects of Storm Syndrome when you awake- do not hesitate to tell me. We're past the time to play around."

    Medicine Pocket is ambling around, poking uselessly at crates of psychohazards and funny materials- what a novel thing it is! If any bite them, they quite literally snarl and try and bite back.

    As Elites start to move to their designated transport modes, Mesmer picks up a gadget she'd clipped to her belt- it isn't from around in the dreamscape, and thus has to be more representative than real, but when she puts it near her mouth to speak into, her voice echoes out of screens and intercoms present.

    "Beginning experiment- Parsons, I'm adjusting the cognitive terrain to the preapproved parameters, and initializing the subdivisions. Picture moving water, then picture its flow cut by a rock, try to cross your eyes, and try to cross them a way they can't move- we're on synchronization target."

    In vans and monorails, facility-shaking rumbling can likely be heard, as screens are overlaid with Laplace-style formatting and layout, Mesmer's Artificial Somnambulism program taking hold. When the experiment volunteers emerge from transit, each find themselves in a separate, completely-identical pie-slice of amock city, the distant visible walls of some form of Parsons Institute containment chamber encircling it all. It's clearly fake- timelessly vague in construction, material, and layout, the meandering simulated inhabitants much the same. In the city-center plaza each are delivered into, a handprint scanner sits, to beckon in the trappings and cultural context of their home era and world. In Poltergiest's case, it seems to still register her touch through sheet or intangibility.

    Still over the intercom, "Parsons. Once everyone has activated their subdivision, it's on you. We're recording. Begin gradually, please."

    While Mesmer, Medicine Pocket, and the scientists back home aren't sure what the effects of such a simulated version of the 'Storm Syndrome' will be, the way they begin is with subtle changes to behavior in simulated residents, and the overall aesthetic appearances of the city-slices- the 'obsessions of the era' become exaggerated and all-encompassing, like the psychedelics of the '66 Storm, the music, the violence- the fake people of the cities won't notice it as odd at all, of course. Over time, it accelerates and intensifies, and while the vehicles and residents of the city won't directly approach the spots the volunteers sit, there is simply no option but to sit in the thick of it and watch.
Flamel Parsons     It doesn't matter how well-built your city-segment is, once it embodies your Era. What the Storm in a Bottle is doing to Flamel in the center of it is something that has wormed its way into every inch of every extrapolated dream-structure -- as Mesmer hoped, though it would have done without the channels built for it. Without the Storm there to provide the actual psychic force, the Parsons Institute stands in as an approximation for the impulse of the Storm Syndrome. Sleeper agents seeded in every organization and every area of residence will eventually activate, overflowing with a sudden fountain of Pseudostorm Syndrome by grasping every Era-specific and cultural psychohazard and overcharging it to maximum.

    The worst of the anomalies are managed at specific levels. Stolen away by secret agents, the affected are contained, studied, and often made far worse before they're released. The ideas extracted and refined there are seeded into the water and the food by men from an unknown and unnameable organization, who always seem to have authorization but not explanation. Things that start as a social fascination quickly become a massive societal obsession. Focused substances are simultaneously plentiful and hotly contested. Fandoms become cults, cults become societal doctrines, societal doctrines become a law so absolute that breaking it is unthinkable.

    In the center of the city, the Parsons Institute's focus shifts, from a general study of the world and a posture of secrecy, to an experimental obsession with learning every way that certain psychic anomalies work, and a dedication to sacrificing as many lives as necessary to make that happen. Slowly, people start to disappear, becoming test subjects in repetitive and dangerous experiments. Men and women are sent into chambers with threats so unthinkably lethal that the idea of gaining useful data from their moments of demise barely makes sense. There are agents everywhere. There are psychic control systems in everything. The world is a series of experiments in further and further scientific cruelty.

    That's, at least, what the storm syndrome and its effect on his Era means to Flamel. What it means to the others, and how their microcosms of society are affected by it, is another matter. This vast conspiracy works tirelessly to make it manifest -- manually, possessed of the intent but not the means of the Storm. This won't be a way to study its mechanisms, the exact psychic wavelengths and energies, but as an examination of its effects, it's perfect.

    From within the Parsons Institute, Mesmer can see the near-arbitrary way it seems to possess splinter cells, hidden executive committees, and other organizations, slowly but surely driving the Parsons Institute into this state.
Flamel Parsons     "So don't get any stupid ideas."
    "Don't worry! I got checked for Bad Idea infestations before I left, all clean." Flamel assures, good-naturedly. "They even left pest traps."

    One of the techs offers a Dream Fluff to Polly when she arrives. "The chief says you might want something for your nerves." He says. "We've got 'The World Is Safe And My Future Is Secure' flavor! Or 'The People I Don't Like Are Factually Lesser' if you're more of a sour-candy type." Someone PLEASE give Lilian a bowl of those to help her survive day-to-day.

    "Maybe... My Parallels... Need more space."
    One of the scientists, an achingly tall and thin woman with sharp glasses, speaks to White briefly. "We're not parallels." She explains. "There's still only one of him in here. He doesn't really get it. We're more independent. Stray thoughts, mental images. The things you'd normally block out in a real Mindswarm."

    > look immediately for the 'press this button to let Flamel into your mind' button.
    You can't find MENTAL INTRUSION BUTTON while you're already MENTALLY INTRUDING because you don't have the COBB MANEUVER.

    At least the seats might be comfortable?
    Actually really comfortable, yeah. In many ways it's like L Corp's work, in that all of the architecture is designed to exert a strong mental influence, but it's unlike it in that the influence it's designed for is mental health -- at least, until UPE-1999 is activated, at which point, yeah, it becomes almost exactly like L Corp architecture in many key ways.
Timekeeper "Cristallo! Polly! My good mates...!"

    She's a little drained by all the activity, but Cristallo can still manage a smile at Regulus while downing her sedatives dry. They cross paths plenty often while in the suitcase, and it's not very common for Cristallo to be very many other places, so Regulus's weird personality and adventures are something she approves of strongly.

    "Thank you for volunteering for Miss Timekeeper's sake. The people at Laplace really are not anything to be worried about, even if the experiments are scary sometimes. We brought Shelob for Polly," She immediately gets sidetracked by pointing out the pet spider, just before Regulus does.

"Don't worry, us 1960s gals will stick together!"

    "Aheheheh, th-that's true, y-yep!" Even when she's being comforted, Poltergeist can't help but bubble up with nervous laughter that's pretty hard to distinguish from her afeared laughter unless you listen closely. Even with all the time in the suitcase, Regulus hasn't seen under her bedsheet, but Polly's down to bump linen against Regulus's hands.

    "I-It's not me that Shelob makes n-not boring. That's probably Hilma, or M-Miss White-- oh, oh no, she's h-here and I didn't thank her for before! Thank yooOooOouu, Miss Whiteeee...." Her voice wobbles somewhere in the middle between a haunting echo and an awkward voice crack, and she trails off in overwhelmed humiliation for having done so at all.

"Ensure it doesn't get within the helmet, please- it shouldn't, but the calibration of these machines is to tight tolerances."

    "Mm! I'll keep an eye out, Miss Mesmer, but it's very well-behaved. Except when it's being funny."

    Honestly, neither of the two care very much about the details of how the process works. Cristallo is doing her best to listen, but that's mostly out of politeness rather than it influencing her behavior at all-- it's not really like autonomy or consent matter that much, when the stakes are a coma and mind control. Poltergeist, on the other hand, doesn't have a fucking clue what any of this means, but she's sooo doggedly sticking to her guns about volunteering even though she's freaking out constantly.

"We've got 'The World Is Safe And My Future Is Secure' flavor!"

    "F-flavor?" Poltergeist's eyes (or, rather, the cut holes in the bedsheet-- don't think about it) widen. She looks both ways, down the hallways of the Parsons Institute and at the doors, as if someone is going to fucking Get Her, and then back at the psychic image man. "It'll-- it'll make me feel that way? With some kind of arcanum? Y-- yes, yes, please, aheheh. C-could I have two? Or-- or a few?"

    It's such a good thing that Poltergeist was not ever cool enough to be offered drugs. Not even a cigarette, even once, even though almost every single one of her classmates smoked! But, she never got offered a piece of gum, either....

    The handful of dream fluffs that Poltergeist yanked up is the only reason she remains normal once Cristallo and her are sent to separate slices of the simulated world. She telekinetically wobbles one around the hem of her bedsheet, looks around like a mouse afraid her cheese will be stolen, and then there's a fluttering of motion underneath the blanket like she's cramming it into her mouth. Only a few seconds later, there's a quiet sniffling and sobbing muffled from underneath the sheet, and her soft "W-- weehhhhhhh..." fades away as she's taken away in a windowless black van to experience hell.
Timekeeper     Everyone here knows what the Storm Syndrome of 1966 was like. It's never been tested before what effects the Storm Syndrome would have on a *ghost*, but Poltergeist seems to know what's coming with a heavy amount of dread. She shuffles her way into the center of her bland cityscape, and hesitantly presses her sheeted hand to the reader, before the familiar effects from the recent Storm return.

    Psychohazardous guitars pop into being, causing dizzying strums of psychedelic color to radiate off of them when they're played. Flamel's simulated guys in the city become obsessed with either continuing or preventing the music, and the moment they start resorting to violence, Polly shrieks and tries to run away from them. She ducks on the ground, eyes squeezed shut, while the sky and the broadcast screens in her slice pulse and distort in colors, and cars swerve around into pedestrians who are desperate to kill themselves. Nothing's, really, happening to her. She just hates it a lot!

    Cristallo, meanwhile, rolls up to her scanner with a certain amount of morbid curiosity. The Storm is all anyone talks about some days, and not only has she never seen it-- well, no one but Vertin really has-- but she's never even seen the *lead up* to it. What's possibly the single most defining feature of the entire world for her past few years, even though everything she's heard makes it absolutely horrifying, is something she still has the urge to see for herself.

"Cristallo is, if I recall, our only control subject not to have undergone such, so, Ms. Cristallo- I must specifically note the value of your volunteering."

    A little guilty smile. "I will do my best, Miss Mesmer."

    The houses in Cristallo's city are sectioned off by jagged, stark-white fences-- not as environmental features, but as psychohazards in of themselves. The fences grow, and grow, and grow taller, while those fake people in the city begin to turn on each other, section out demographics of 'us' and 'them', infinitely fractally small and increasingly hated. Cristallo grips the arm of her wheelchair and winces, as a group of people in front of her that had just until a moment ago been united in throwing rocks at another cluster of imperceptibly different inhabitants abruptly turns on one of their own, tearing them apart like animals.
Lilian Rook     Lilian would be a total liar to say she isn't jarred by Medicine Pocket's reaction. Being favourably compared to someone annoying and unpopular by a stranger is, like, the easiest icebreaker in the world. She tries not to look too taken aback, but has to be a little quick and smooth with her wording. "I beg your pardon, but it's a figure of speech, and also, I've no idea how I would tell apart at a glance. If there's a cultural sensibility to it, then I haven't yet had enough experience to absorb it." she says, then sounds off a short sigh. "I was, indeed . . . induced to action by the Timekeeper. I do mean that it's nice to meet you, though." Nailed it, clearly; she didn't even stare at the IV line!

    'I've changed my mind. Medicine Pocket? Could you requisition the pharmacy's entire stock of phenobarbital?'

    Another bullseye! Wahoo! "It's a little late to change your mind, don't you think?" Lilian says, slightly echoing Medicine Pocket's 'Too late to sign a waiver!'. "I'd certainly hope you aren't implying what it sounds like you are; in a professional setting and in front of your colleagues, no less. Ah, but I do understand that you're sometimes clumsy with words, so I'll let it slide."

    The second Lilian stops talking, she falls into a pensive kind of quiet, staring at nothing in particular in the lowest left corner of her vision, and thinking about the concept of dosages, uncomfortably.

    'I assure you- but I am an expert, and I assume that Parsons is quite hardy.'

    "Then it'll be a grand opportunity to see if he can take what he dishes." Lilian says, unconcerned.

    'We've got 'The World Is Safe And My Future Is Secure' flavor! Or 'The People I Don't Like Are Factually Lesser' if you're more of a sour-candy type.'

    Lilian side-eyes Flamel a little too suddenly for it to really be 'suspicious'. Her the general sense of intense thoughtfulness about her intensifies by the time she registers Mesmer's existence again. "And I'm really not joking." she says, a moment later. "I know you aren't being serious, but it's a very bad idea."

    . . . . . . . .

    'Just a few minutes? Understood. I had a thought- the incident amongst the Storm of 1966 did, at the very least, ensure that the present off-worlders have experienced Storm Syndrome firsthand'

    "I recall what it looked like, yes." Lilian says, missing the point. "The runny technicolours and musical suicides; I suppose you want to ensure everyone is mentally braced for what might happen?" A pause. "Isn't that a little . . ." No, don't be patronizing. "You're quite brave, Miss Cristallo. You have my admiration."

    Getting into the silly little monorail transport, Lilian spends the short commute time 'to' the simulation examining herself. The last time she was here, she and Persephone encountered Flamel's representations of them in his mind, being studied by his lower level consciousness; this hadn't really unnerved her in any way, being entirely inured to thoughts about how people study each other in their minds, but it has given her reason to check herself over to see if her dream-self has in any way been distorted to resemble that representation.

    Thirty seconds is enough to confirm that even the outfit she picked out this morning is the same, and the minuscule fracture at the edge of her left thumbnail that's been bothering her for an hour is there too. The specificity of this makes her contemplate her own awareness of the state of her appearance for one minute, wonder privately how it compares to the average person for two, and then mentally vault it before she draws any conclusions.
Veronica     As Veronica presses her hand to the scanner, Firefly Dam unfolds around her, writing itself over the generic cityscape. She breathes a little easier, for a moment, before it's time to begin the experiment.

    ---

    It starts, as it often does, with a good intention. The old power plant comes back online, and the whole town is lit up for the first time since the White Nights. Its energy supply restored, the town really comes alive. Construction equipment runs day and night, widening the streets, replacing ruined houses with new, cookie-cutter apartment blocks. Fewer and fewer people linger in place, especially where others could see.

    Veronica, standing now on the corner of Baker Street and Seventh Avenue, watches as walls go up around the town, bristling with automated defenses to keep us safe from anyone who'd want to take what these hard-working people have earned - just make sure to get inside by curfew. She feels the people around her changing - they smile more now, and are better dressed. They have less time for their friends and families, but without our work ethic we'd be left right where we started.

    Machines grind away behind her, showering her with sparks. She turns around to see a bona fide skyscraper going up, built in time-lapse as the changes accelerate. Peering down the street she watches as Roscoe's Family Diner shutters and, after some remodeling, opens as a new CrunchBurger franchise. It doesn't have the family charm it used to, sure, but the deals are unbeatable. Besides, who has time to sit down for a meal anymore? There's work to do!

    The skyscraper finishes construction, emblazoned with an enormous 'L' - for 'Labor', to remind us how we got here. Veronica stares in silence as her aunt walks by, dressed in a snazzy brand-new suit. The aging woman flashes her niece a smile, but that's all she has time for - work starts at seven, and she can't afford to be late. She walks into the new office block and disappears from sight.

    A pair of salarymen pass going the other direction. One of them says to the other what everyone's been thinking: "Isn't it great to finally have what we've always wanted?" His coworker nods. Neither knows the other's name.
White Not uncommonly, some try to rejoin the line and become one of the antlike many again... Only to be recognized as unbelonging. It takes mere moments for the seemingly oblivious lines of people to turn on these attempted rejoiners, mobbing them and tearing them apart without a second thought, despite having no reaction at all to individual members of their group being entirely stolen away by what could only be called *predators* so frequently before. Then, the lines return to their orderly fashion and carry onward in their endless, aimless forward march.

     The 'ants' will always outnumber the rest, no matter how many are taken from them. And to the 'idols', they're an endless resource. Neither side needs to acknowledge the other directly at all. It's only the predators- the *spiders* perhaps- that want to try being an ant that suffer for it. The idols are spiders too, waiting for their prey. They just know better than to wish for that to change. Eventually there are enough of these idols- and heroes, and would-be gods- speaking and singing from their stages that their music and monologues blend together into awful, grating noise. Then... Their followings turn on each other, for nothing but the right to hear their own ideologue speak louder than every other. The streets were bloodied before, from the random acts of individual predation... But it's only now that you truly can't see the asphalt beneath all the blood.

     Ultimately, it isn't a complete image of an era. It's an amalgamation of the brutal, individually power-driven world she was reincarnated into, the apathetic and barely-understood modern society that her original life's human memories originated from, and plenty of substance drawn from her own inferences and alien understanding trying to glue it all together. It makes more sense to her, to see the modern world through the lens of its own kind of 'Labyrinth'... Full of unnoticed monsters, natural hazards, and where if nobody pays any attention, the people right beside them can vanish forever without society noticing the difference.
White White's ride by monorail carries her away from the others after a brief wordless wave of farewell. The ride itself, despite the outside noise, is relatively peaceful by her standards. Being alone to steady herself and arrange her thoughts helps her deal with the anxiety of the process of getting to this point. Unfortunately, her faulty understanding of the method of today's engagement will come back to bite her again shortly. Stepping out into the simulated public is a *small* spike in her anxiety, but it's all fake enough to tamp that back down and pretend that she is still completely alone, like nobody else exists in this little playground world. With that in mind, it only takes her a few moments to feel 'ready enough' and step toward the scanner, delicately laying her palm against it. She doesn't know if her handprint would even be the same every time she has to replace said hand, but... That feels like it probably doesn't matter, in a cognition-world like this? So surely it's fine.

     What isn't fine, though, is the inside of her head. Or rather, the information drawn from her about her 'era' and 'world'. There's no better word for it; it's a complication. Having lived effectively three different lives, across two different worlds and lifetimes, missing large chunks of lived memory and having nearly a dozen individual mental forks with slightly different perspectives does *not* make it easy to create a cohesive singular simulation.

     the aesthetics of the city itself struggle with each other in the background, unacknowledged by the residents of the simulation-city; rough, half-naturally carved out stone walls like those of an underground cavern start to creep into the periphery, just close enough wherever you look to see them closing in from either side, but always too far to focus on when looking directly at them. The buildings become taller and shorter in uneven amounts, jabbing up into the sky like manmade teeth from amongst stout, too-small homes that look barely large enough for one person to call it a 'hiding place' at best. Clear views of the sky- or the ceiling, rather- all but fade away entirely before long as buildings and walls consume more and more potential lines of sight.

     The people, then, start to behave less like city pedestrians and more like insects. Some of them more like ants, moving in unnatural single-file along streetsides in seemingly endless lines, where each group is impractical to even count and there isn't even a clear leader to be seen at the head of any line. Outside of the ant-like lines are others behaving more contrarian, wandering through streets with oncoming cars, climbing the sides of buildings, and doing everything else in their power to wander away from the organized lines. Eventually, as things worsen and become exacerbated, those individuals acting contrary to the rest split into various types; some attack the members of the 'lines', ferally savaging and dragging them away from their group with nothing but their own teeth and hands, with no notice taken by the people right nearby. Others seem to take to stages, singing and performing just like popular idols, luring people away from the lines and inciting an enflamed fervor in the crowds they draw, growing larger and louder as the adoration grows.
Lilian Rook     The mock city slice might be the strangest to Lilian of all people here, really. 'Timelessly vague' corresponds to her walks around the First Circle territory of a few Urban Centers, most often preserved from some original city, but it has no real relation to Post-Onslaught construction, obsessed with efficiency and self-sufficiency using new and cheap technology. The backdrop is lightly fascinating enough for her to wander around the city square and ponder it. Hands clasped behind her back, she meanders here and there, eyes upturned to high windows, thinking. She leans over the edge of a generic fountain to stare at her reflection, and then lightly kicks the leg of a public bench. She tilts her head, curious, and blinks.

    'Parsons. Once everyone has activated their subdivision, it's on you. We're recording. Begin gradually, please.'

    Lilian looks around in a full circle, unhurried, but questioning. Her voice is strangely gentle, and a little confused.

    "Hm? Recording what?"

    . . . . . . . .

    The moment the bridge connects Lilian's own sleeping subconscious to Flamel, there is a sharp, immediate change to her surroundings. After the 'Storm in a Bottle' has been uncorked, yet before it's had the time to be poured out, the city that she occupies undergoes an instant pulse of harsh visual distortion. It flickers like a glitched image, disconnected and jarringly non-transitional, clearing up quickly enough to be disorienting for anyone.

    The aesthetic corrections that must have appeared in the gap seem strangely irrelevant to the Storm. The fountain is bereft of generic coins at the bottom. The benches have subtle anti-homeless armrests. The lane markings on the roads have faded off. Small cameras bristle from building corners for nebulous purposes. The simulated people walking around, soon to be stricken with simulated madness, are afflicted with blurry and indistinct facial features that they don't even seem to notice. Observing one intentionally enhances the resolution only temporarily; enough to reveal the curve of a jaw until one also tries to observe the shape of an eye. Lilian doesn't remark on any of it, only turning to seat herself on the edge of the fountain.

    She doesn't seem to notice the alterations to her look, either. Her hair isn't tied up to get under the fishbowl helmet, and the vital monitor bracelet is replaced with a soft plastic band, white with a single wide black stripe and a thinner red one. Her carefully chosen outfit is reduced to a one-piece black dress, vague in design, with simple shoulder cross-straps and a nondescript waist tie, matched by old-fashioned leather sandals. A pitch black imprint with the exact shape and size of Night Mist is implausibly affixed to her hip without a belt. Only her hairpin and her body have stayed the same; save for the constant presence of faint visual 'noise' around her; erratic stippling at the edges of her silhouette that is persistent enough to be just about ignorable.

    "Am I dreaming?" she says out loud to nobody in particular. She waits for conversational-length pause, and then says, "Oh, it must get annoying." and, after a shorter one, "That makes sense." The water in the fountain to her left ripples as if lightly disturbed.
Lilian Rook     The residents are not nearly so impassive about their situation. As the 'Storm in a Bottle' is released, the changes to the environment happen in a slower, more gradual 'second wave' all around her. Faint blue lines spread from window frames and roof corners, balcony joists and foundation seams, and connect to each other with the regularity of fine blueprints; the impression is reinforced by the gradual leeching of colour, turning the city slowly more pale in a way that makes the blue lines stand out more sharply. As time goes on, the change starts attracting the attention of the people who ostensibly live here, which would be incongruous with how the Storm Syndrome works if they didn't clearly have bizarre intent.

    And appearance. The people are no exception to the phenomena. Each of them is haunted by a pale blue, digital-seeming number, hovering over their heads. Seemingly random, none exceed five digits, and all of them are gradually ticking down, globally refreshed at exactly, even atomically accurate, one second increments; numbers that they glance up at every so often, making them more fretful and hurried each time.

    Rather than tearing each other to pieces, they're unified around a single endeavour; or rather, uniformly fixated to an unnatural extent. Each and every person around is consumed by the overpowering urge to hasten to their homes, or place of business, and hustle back with their personal possessions; a few small things at a time for those with high numbers, but heftier loads of more valuable items when brought by those whose numbers are trending low. Each of them stops at the edge of the plaza, and with little care at all, hurls their belongings at its boundry-- at which their assets halt in the air, and then fall, practically like tetris pieces, into surreal interlock.

    After a few minutes of the constantly flowing crowd piling up their things, the general impression emerges: they're building a wall. One that cuts off the city from the plaza, which seems to slowly be growing bigger over time. Each time a citizen hurls some of their belongings onto the wall, their number ticks back up. The more important the object is to them, the higher the value ticks. The steady decline, continuing all the same, means that they're only allowed a brief reprieve each time. Unable to stop moving, the anonymous, everyday people are forced into a non-stop circuit between their homes and the wall.

    Lilian watches the wall grow higher all around the plaza without moving from her spot. The improbably airtight barrier of random clutter quickly grows to knee height, then chest height, then begins to slow down around head height, as the slow, cancerous growth of the empty space in which nobody lives gradually reveals its square, rather than linear, delta. The pattern is clear to any observer; that the citizens bring things they won't miss when their number is high, and resort to appliances, heirlooms, medication, even pieces of plumbing and heating, when it gets dangerously low.

    All of them grow more nervous by the minute, but they barely make a sound, united by a kind of tense, desperate silence. They avoid eye contact with each other as much as possible. Their heads all turn towards those with numbers at four digits or lower, focusing more intently the smaller the figure is, like wolves eyeing a sheep, and then lose interest once the subject of their fixation manages to increase it again. Through little gaps in the wall, those with the luxury of time stop and peer into the plaza, casting uneasy gazes on the slowly growing space, and hustle away more fearfully for the sight.
%
Lilian Rook     No wonder. It's changing strangely. Up between the flagstones sprout ghostly white-translucent grasses and eerie weeds in carbon black, followed by unsettling metallic blossoms, foliage like ancient curling ferns, and fruiting bodies like glass filled with blood red fog. The water in the fountain turns dark, until it looks like shiny ferrofluid. The shadows stretch away in all directions, even though the light is dimming and reddening. As it reaches the walls, the citizens stir into a whimpering panic, taking apart chunks of the buildings themselves, which pop out like lego bricks, hastening to accelerate the wall's growth ahead of the climbing shadows and uncanny dark vines.

    Lilian isn't oblivious to any of that, at least. She leans back to stare at the dimming red sun and slowly emerging stars, and closes her eyes, kicking her feet lightly against the side of the fountain. Running her hand through the glistening black water, she looks with mild surprise at a human tooth she seems to have dredged from its depths, and then tosses it back in, washing the residual blood from her thumb and finger. "Were you expecting something more dramatic?" she says to nobody, standing up and looking back over her shoulder at an empty space. "I guess it is pretty predictable, huh?" There's no answer.

    Stretching her arms above her head, Lilian's tattoo is briefly visible between the arch of her back and her hanging hair, revealing a smouldering glow within the dull gold lines. "I don't think she's here." she says, and starts to walk, going up to the outside of the wall. "Isn't this nice enough? It'll be really peaceful when it's done. And it's not like we'll get bored." There's still no response. But as she goes pacing a leisurely circle around the wall, trailing her fingers over the exterior, leaning down to peek through the holes at the scurrying citizens-- which immediately sends them shrinking back-- the grass next to her depresses with the vague regularity of meandering footfalls.

    For no reason, Lilian's head whips around, and she stares, searching, at eye-level empty air. "I don't think we should do that, actually." she says, trailing off.
Regulus ''Thank you for volunteering for Miss Timekeeper's sake.''

"Of course, it's the least I can do." Regulus goes out of her way to seem a little larger than life than the reality is for her and it's not JUST ego. She wants to encourage all her fellow suitcase buddies. She'll bemoan the fate of poor Regulus freely but put people who have actually suffered and she'll immediately be their cheerleader. "And you're helping out too, right? So thank YOU, Cristallo!"

Regulus hasn't indicated a desire to look under the bedsheets, but it's normal for ghosts to be wearing bedsheets right? It's actually kind of heartening. "Yeah. we've totally got this." She smiles at the ghost.

''You can't find the MENTAL INTRUSION BUTTON while you're already MENTALLY INTRUDING''

"Something's wrong. No no no, Flamel! Your brain isn't set up right! The button's missing! You gotta fix this and put it back in! It's not matching the vibe of the website at all." Regulus calls out. "How're we going to do the test if it's missing the ... I mean, we're in your place right now, you're not in ours, there--there should be the click to invite me like... on a console somewhere."

She starts moving to her area as she's handed a brochure. "Okay, okay, I'm just saying that if we want the simulation to be accurate, the missing buttons is pretty serious. Oh Polly! Let's share an unmarked van--"

She eventually finds her way to where she's supposed to go. Regulus's era's Storm Syndrome was pretty directly observed, so there might not be much new there for Elites.

Just because Regulus experienced this first hand and didn't lose her mind (as far as she knows) during the whole shebang, it still isn't easy for her to relive. She takes a steadying breath. Is singing to try and soothe Poltergeist's nerves helpful in this situation? Regulus doesn't know, but even if she can't stop her from being terrified, she should at least try to keep her from being spooked alone.

"I'm picking up good vibrations o/~, she's giving me excitations o/~, I'm picking up good vibrations o/~..." She sings, instrumentless, as she gets a second look at her world falling apart.

She feels so distant from it, even when it's her own world, now. A cold sensations fills her stomach. Is this how it is to be with the Foundation? To be ever more disconnected time after time with each passing storm. Before she was in the thick of it, but now she feels like an outsider.
Foundation Scions 'If there's a cultural sensibility to it, then I haven't yet had enough experience to absorb it.'

    "Yeah, yeah, it's whatever." Later on, when Lilian actually uses Mesmer's name in a pointed direction, Medicine Pocket finally puts together who she was talking about- "Damn, wait, what? Did you, like, nickname Mesmer? Oh man, that's nuts. Nobody's gonna believe this..."

'Ah, but I do understand that you're sometimes clumsy with words, so I'll let it slide.'

    Tense, narrow-eyes, Mesmer stares Lilian's way- "Of course. Simply a mistake." It doesn't seem like she's on her petty-escalation grindset today, un(?)fortunately. "Medicine Pocket? Sedatives. Don't dally."

'Then it'll be a grand opportunity to see if he can take what he dishes.'

    Mesmer exhales, and gives Lilian a clear little nod. "Either way, any harms can be remedied after the work is done. If he understands or not- well, I don't think his answer will matter."

'The people at Laplace really are not anything to be worried about, even if the experiments are scary sometimes.'

    As if to say 'Hey, I can be scary!', Medicine Pocket puts fingers into a claw-posture on the sides of their face, and makes a tongue-out monster grimace- their teeth kind of really look sharp, but they break the expression off into a silly snicker. "Ask for a lollipop afterwards, kid. Fixes fear right back up." Does it?

    . . .
Foundation Scions 'Hm? Recording what?'

    Intercom-crackle, "Excuse me? This 'Storm in a Bottle' experiment, as Parsons has decided to name it. I'm surprised you decided not to pay attention to the entire briefing." Mesmer Jr. hearing her means that the little city-sections themselves (or at least, the reserved parts of Flamel's mind that they're taking up), are monitored down to a fine detail by Mesmer- and clearly, the dozen-and-a-half scientists up in the observation room (in reality), and their many many screens and tickertape readouts. "Parsons, you didn't already begin, did you? If you have- I'm marking down forgetfulness as a symptom."

    "If you begin, personally, to experience Storm Syndrome affects within the simulation, state it for recordkeeping." Prompted by slight concern that Lilian somehow is experiencing acute affects, she pipes up to give a general precaution for the full study. Over a crackly-struggling intercom is, frankly, a perfect place for Mesmer's constantly-somewhat-irritated voice to ring from. Whatever semi-outside effort she's trying to utilize to keep communications together is struggling against, in general, the breakdown of the Parsons Institute, itself a Storm Syndrome-affected isolate.

    As the effects of the Storm in a Bottle take hold, Mesmer is quiet on the intercoms for quite a while, social patterns sharpening and becoming more exaggerated all the time, motifs abstracting further, until it starts to take on 'end of the world' fervor, but at the gradual rate it's been going, it clearly isn't to the height it can be.

    Finally, over intercoms again, "-And Medicine Pocket, make sure you annotate the recordings with collected background info. Parsons? The effects are clear, and perhaps it's to have been expected, but the readings for the Storm of '66 appear to be congruent with gathered data, and likewise with the Storm of '57. Don't consider that a proper analysis as of yet, but do continue on with the program. It's clear we have no pressing need to abort. I'm giving the go-ahead to approach full Storm-cusp intensity."

    "Ms. Cristallo, 'Polly', 'Regulus', check in, please? Sights, sounds, expectations, strange effects you've been noticing, we'll compile this for cross-reference. We'll continue if no sign to abort is given. We'll conclude when we've reached similar conditions to the data Parsons provided from the '66 incident- and then we'll conclude the simulation."

    Nobody else, actually, gets any direct check-in from Mesmer- it clearly isn't from fondness, since she's asking Regulus for elaboration, but perhaps more an apathy for other Elites potentially struggling in the circumstances, or perhaps an expectation that they can hold their own through whatever- or curiosity what will happen when their quadrants are pushed further.

    "Wait- before that, Parsons, if you can get readings, Lilian's quadrant, and the spider woman's- another set of eyes on what's happening with those sections? Parsons, you read me, correct?"

    After the go-ahead for the experiment to progress, the effects of the Storm Syndrome drastically intensify- further down the same patterns already present, but towards complete societal collapse and incomprehensibility, as the world (metaphorically, here) unravels itself away. In as much as the Storm's reversing of the world is an apocalypse, the end extent of Storm Syndrome is one as well.
Flamel Parsons     "For those who are not currently aware of our existence, we represent the organization known as the Parsons Institute. Our previous mission centered around the containment, study, and destruction of psychohazardous objects, entities, and other assorted phenomena. This mission was the focus of our organization for more than thirty years.

    "Due to circumstances outside of the control, this directive has now changed. Our new mission will be the complete annihilation of stable thought until the arrival of the Storm.

    "There will be no further communication."



    So is heard by every mind in every region, at one point or another, shortly after Flamel's bottled Storm reaches its full pitch. Once it's time for the Parsons Institute's work to "go loud", it does so without hesitation, and having done so, it doesn't slow the Pseudo-Storm Syndrome that has taken hold. It aggravates it; where the Storm would normally reach its fever-pitch magically, the organization manually inflicting it reaches its own fever-pitch to worsen the manifestations, emulating the final moments you would see in the hours and minutes before a Storm fully reverses the world. The Parsons Institute seems to think it will happen, affected as they are by the Storm in a Bottle. Though in this case, they're completely wrong.

    In the central segment, where the Parsons Institute itself resides, a hundred different psychohazards breach containment simultaneously. Personal Demons rush and blast apart screaming researchers, Panic Attacks freeze and eviscerate masked security teams that desperately hold to their original duty, Emotional Baggage duplicates and duplicates until they bury chambers entirely and kill the technicians inside, Nightmares emerge from corners and snatch innocents into realms unknown.

    The Parsons Institute goes into full red-alert. Contingency self-destructs fail, lockdowns break. And the psychic influence leaks into a thousand era-specific psychohazards in every somnambulic paradigm, agitating the whole ecosystem into overdrive. The Parsons Institute is no different -- manifesting the era-specific habits in their most exaggerated form, breaking into mass violence and a lethal embrace of the archetype. The world is full of threats; any object might kill you or worse, any being is a hostile predator or parasite of humanity, the world is just a vast playground where supernatural forces and superscience overwhelm any sense of structure, and any sense of structure exists to overwhelm common human decency. Psychic anomalies are a fulcrum around which the world rotates, and the only thing that rotation ever seems to decide is who's suffering the consequences of an experiment or a containment breach at any given time.

    If there was ever a hope of using this method to find the Storm's motive, its reasoning, its psychology -- this fully disproves that. But there's still more to learn and more to find....
Flamel Parsons     The Parsons Institute is in every era. Sleeper agents incite scheduling mishaps that work men to death doing and undoing and redoing each others' work in Firefly Dam. Electronic torture hidden in leisure deters organization or agitates management, strange chemicals are seeded into labor supplies, food, drink. Worsen it, and spread it, and most of all, make any attempt to break from the labor result in more. The Parsons Institute is doing its best to make sure Firefly Dam manifests its pre-storm dysfunction fully, with hidden agents and subliminal torture.

    They're trying to personally brainwash heroes in White's vast Labyrinth, trying to craft perfect MK-Ultra Idols who will surely worsen every aspect of this apathy and predation, who won't understand why a code-word spoken from a shadowy figure is enough to make them kill someone else in front of their masses and incite them to do the same -- whatever they can, to make this behavior reach a supernatural peak.

    The wall-builders in Lilian's Era will soon find their personal resources seeded with psychic anomalies, their homes affected by strange astra-spatial phenomena, and their efforts to build that wall exaggerated at every turn. Agents and researchers who experimented with certain construction elements will exploit them to worsen the system, create more demand artificially, and just see what the masses are forced to do when more demand is placed on them. How does this get worse than it is?

    Someone tries to electronically manipulate Lilian using remote radio voices, but sitting in his van full of esoteric electronics, he finds that someone else is hogging the frequency and he can't kick them off.

    In 1966, Poly and Regulus are forced to contend with false rockstars, killed and replaced by clones who use their position to worsen the mass obsession with music, the seeding of ever-more-anomalous guitars, but in Cristallo's era... They're inventing words, chanting them, screaming them. Memetic cognitohazards designed to meaninglessly worsen divisions, to make people think more and more in this us-versus-them way. Whatever the peak of this behavior is, whether this fractal hatred can spiral until even individuals are cutting off their nose to spite their face, they'll find it out with mass info-manipulation and cognitohazards.
Veronica     In the new L Corp Nest - its former name already forgotten - business is booming. Towers gleam by day and and shine by night, drowning out the stars in an ever-expanding glow. The drive for more productivity, more wealth, more *success* sparks a renaissance in the augmentations market, eased along by the Parsons Institute's technologies. The human body is a jack of all trades, master of few. The natural form's abandonment is embraced with gusto, cybernetic surgeons replacing limbs and senses with specialized components even as they, too, are operated on to enhance the ability to ply their trade.

    Soon the push to enhance and specialize the physical form expands to a movement of optimizing the mind as well. Ambitious employees have the 'unproductive' parts of their brains scooped away, replaced with siloed processers endlessly crunching numbers to calculate the Wing's optimal path of advancement. It takes shockingly few successive generations of hardware advancements before the last unaugmented holdouts are fully obsoleted in the rush to improve the Nest, or eliminated covertly by Parsons Institute agents lurking among the increasingly mechanical worker-swarm.

    Next to go is the land itself, dug out and paved over and tunneled into, mine workings stretching deep into the earth to feed the gleaming spires that reach for the heavens. Construction accelerates by the minute, sprawling outward and upward into a forest of steel and concrete.

    In the absence of a Storm to wash the world away, the work only continues, growing to apocalyptic proportions. Culture and selfhood erode in the name of progress. New workers are made and not born, assembled in factories. Machines building machines, onward and upward, forever.

    At what point did we stop being human? It's impossible to say, and too late to change.
White As her little facsimile of the worlds she knows deteriorates further into cultish urban wars between rabid idol-fans, ambiguously holy men, soldiers following barely-comprehensible figureheads and wild, cannibalistic human-hunters... White remains quite still. She's hardly moved a step at all from where she began after touching the scanner, and her eyes have been open the entire time. In a space like this, there is uniquely little she can't see; it's her native environment after all. A mutated distortion of the kind of world that she could become the apex predator of, herself. But that means she has to take in every bit of the bloodshed and despair, too.

     Because she chooses to see some of it, she necessarily ends up seeing just about all of it. It's easy to believe she's hardly shaken at all by watching, this way, and she's certainly invested in pretending as much... But she is barely blinking. She knows it isn't real, and she has her own little circle of perfectly familiar personal therapists inside her head, ready to crack jokes, make exaggerated performances as horrified Victorian noblewomen (which happen to be spiders wearing dresses, in her imagination), and take numerous other constant steps to let her keep up the effortful distance she needs from the simulation. She's very, very familiar with being the impassive observer, witnessing everything and only acting on what she sees a need to. But this... It wears on her. Her gaze is steady in the way that one can feel morally obligated to completely witness a horrifying tragedy, to memorialize something in a way that might give it at least a hint of lasting meaning. But she's frowning, and she isn't moving.

     She always reassures herself that it isn't her responsibility to be everyone's hero. She tells herself, over and over, that she only has to do what she can for the people she thinks deserve it. That that's *enough*. It isn't her fault that she's a god, now. It wouldn't be fair to take on everyone's expectations when she knows she can fail. But it's still hard to watch, even knowing and accepting that it isn't real. Flamel's institute's influence on those banding people together around their voices is maybe the most difficult thing to watch out of all of it... She starts to manifest a spell at one point, unsure in the moment if the impulse is to protect the people trying to guide others, or to just blow everything up so that she doesn't have to look at it anymore. Fortunately, she isn't so forgetful that she doesn't realize the futility, neither can she act when torn between the choices in the first place. So, she goes back to watching. It feels like the only safe thing to do, just like it usually does.

She starts to remember why she keeps appending 'technically' whenever she has to call herself a God. One of her Parallels jokes to her that she's a great god; seeing everything, killing people with a mean look, and doing as little as possible. Then she mutes their voices, and remains in silent observation without her quippy little mental support troupe for a while.
White But, it's not White herself that's being studied by Mesmer and the rest. It's easy to ignore her stock-still staring as long as you don't count her blinks or notice the small moments where she's especially tense, and she's not paying attention to the intercom enough to acknowledge what's being said, while it isn't even directly aimed at her. The labyrinth-city devolves in predictable fashion with the outside interference psuhing things along; numerous different smaller, more specific groups of people clash in the name of their ideological leaders, tearing each other apart in the streets, fighting around the ant-like marching lines of deliberately uninvolved people, like the line itself is just a wall to fight around. Eventually, those groups whittle down to just one, and the very last one finally takes it upon themselves to stand at the head of the endless line of humanity, grasping the front ranks by the shoulders and dragging them from the sidewalks. The line follows, each person staring at the back of the next in front as their new, self-appointed leaders walk them headlong toward a growing hole in the center of the city. Rarely, those in the middle of the line look ahead and hesitate, only to be pushed along by those behind them. Those at the rear of the line might break away and escape, but they are too far back to see the hole that their line is marching into, and there are endlessly more people joining at the back of the line to push them along by the time they notice.

     The people fall. Their 'leaders' smile encouragingly, watching it happen with encouraging words; maybe if they fell in instead, the others would stop? The thought makes White's fingers flex and a spark of magic flicker between them before the impulse is pushed down again. But there are no real heroes there anymore. The scenario stabilizes, in the way that a doomed ant colony ceases to become interesting to watch; it's only a matter of time before the world's growing, empty pit has nobody else left to take. There's no need for more bloodshed, because the only people left are the ones that will march over the cliff all on their own.

     She doesn't like the feeling of recognizing things in fake people. It wouldn't mean anything if she lashed out for them. She doesn't want to try and fix their little fantasy world. And besides; this had to have originated from her own lacking understanding, right? She'd basically be trying to fight figments of her own imagination... *Again*. Even Dustin wasn't trying to lead his flock to their doom on purpose. Maybe if she keeps telling herself that it isn't real, she'll start to believe it more and not less, eventually.

If her mental state is being monitored directly, it certainly paints a more intense picture than her blank staring and frowning does. Even with her distant emotional perspective and her attempts to reassure herself, it seems to be stressing her out *a lot* more than she'd let on, to not be able to do anything at all. It's practically her entire way of living, that she listens to her feelings and acts on them even when it's impractical, so...
Lilian Rook     'Excuse me? This 'Storm in a Bottle' experiment, as Parsons has decided to name it. I'm surprised you decided not to pay attention to the entire briefing.'

    Whatever is going on with Lilian doesn't seem to be so simple as forgetfulness. The grainy visual noise surrounding her in the dream is mirrored in the machine-readings of her brainwaves and the recording of the program. The tone of voice she uses is very different; somehow 'too-relaxed', in a free-dissociation way, but also more lucid than when she's awake; every word she says has an uncomplicated clarity of purpose that can't ordinary be experienced with the awareness of another person's existence.

    "Who's that?" Lilian says, glancing at the spot next to her. Her idle walking around the perfectly circular walls continues at lackdaisical pace. Her eyes are fixed on a specific spatial coordinate, rather than the distance, and saccade back and forth in small increments. "Hm? That's strange. Why would she want to know that?" Lilian's fingertips skim over a smoothly conjoined curve of blueprint-fused roof tiles, and skim thoughtlessly around the edges of a tiny gap, avoiding it on instinct. "I don't think we should do that either." Lilian reaches up on tiptoes to pluck a glistening red 'fruit' from a vine made of black fibonnaci spirals as she walks. She bites into it as one might a peach straight from a tree, and wipes a drop of red goo from her chin.

    "Mmm?" She blinks, attentively, at nothing. A short wait, where she wipes her fingers off on the screen of a television, and swallows. "Yeah, even if I won't remember anyways." Another searching pause. "Something's different than usual. Did that question back then really stick with you so much?" Again, silence. "No, no, it's . . . nice? I'm glad you gave it some thought."

    'Due to circumstances outside of the control, this directive has now changed. Our new mission will be the complete annihilation of stable thought until the arrival of the Storm.'

    "That's a shame." Lilian says, thoughtfully apathetic. She stares into the inside of the 'fruit', now steaming lightly as she walks, as if carrying a censer of coals. "The humans aren't going to live long if they can't think." The imprints in the 'grass' next to her speed up, form a lopsided spiral, pause, and speed forward again, looping back around in front of her. "Something can be a shame even if it's already overdue, you know." Beat. "Mm. Humans have it rough in their own way too."

    The radio crackles in the Parsons Institute spy van. Instead of hearing Lilian, the mental figment agent instead hears a voice almost exactly like hers, harshly static distorted, saying §<There's no need to feel guilty. Fifty thousand years is a good run. Let's take a deep breath and savour the moment.>§

    "That's true. It's not as if it's my fault."

    §<Mhm~ Hey, what does it feel like when the raindrops go back to heaven? I was barely there.>§

    "Mmm . . . Like after the very last exam of final year? Or more like the very first dose that worked."

    §<That's such a cute metaphor. Like 'now all I have to do is wait'? It's so funny that the total destruction of time makes it feel like our ally.>§

    "Isn't that the only way it can be?"
Lilian Rook     'Parsons, you read me, correct?'

    When the simulated Storm Syndrome kicks into high gear, even Lilian seems to take notice, if absentmindedly. Biting into another chunk of fruit, making a squelching glass-crackling sound, she peeks through a gap in the wall as bedlam ensues. People panic as their possessions become unusable, and go stumbling into their neighbour's homes. Brawls over limited resources ensue, and people scramble to rob one another blind, stalling the decline of their number value at the expense of others. Entire buildings are stripped down to the foundation; libraries, then schools, then hospitals, then apartments, rapidly leaving only police stations and army barracks intact. Pipes and wires are ripped up out of the ground.

    When the first number declines below 100, the blueprint lines spread over the unlucky soul too. A look of panic, then cold acceptance emerges, and just like that, they pop their entire arm off as if they were a plastic doll. Throwing it on the wall gives them a tremendous spike of value, causing a wave of observers to all frantically begin doing the same, but now with only one arm, their ability to work is more than halved. Their number values spiral towards ruin. They set upon each other, scrambling to remove the body parts of those next to them.

    The Storm Syndrome intensifies so severely that the creeping overgrowth in the plaza matures to the point of sprouting trees. All signs of the flagstones have been erased. Black fluid overflows the fountain and runs through the earth as a wild creek. The approximation of a sun is replaced with an off-crimson moon. Rime forms on the outside of the walls, and coalesces into sheets of ice.

    Despite her breezy clothing,Lilian doesn't evince that she's felt any drop in temperature; she hums pleasantly to herself as ferns are trumped in height by fractal-branching hedges, and those in turn by liquid saplings that grow all the way up into double helix trees, turning even the moonlight into dappled shade, and creating a ceiling of hanging red jewels in a dark sky. "Oh. Didn't this happen before?" she says, to a place beside her that crackles with ghastly visual grain on observation monitors in the vague shape of a person. The radio squeals, and sounds like §<Countless times, but it's best if you don't think about it.>§ Lilian says "You're probably right." and finishes the last bite of her surreally unpleasant wild-picked treat.

    As Lilian hops between rocks in the shining black creek, like the bone white remnants of ancient ruins, the people on the inside of the walls, now towering illogically high, go verifiably mad. Despite the fact that the wall is already vastly higher and thicker than it has any right to be, utterly dwarfing the still-expanding 'outside' to an absurd degree, the hysteria surrounding it reaches its peak. The first number reaches zero as the water splashes four feet behind Lilian; a man who has lost his arms and legs, and it seems even his internal organs. The crowd hoists him up, climbs a dizzying zigzag of impossible stairs, and hurls him over the wall; cast into the outside like something diseased. He lands with a wet crunch somewhere in the trees, and vanishes from view.
Lilian Rook     "So that's what he meant by 'stable thought'." Lilian muses to herself, staring in the direction of the fall. Meandering to a halt near the edge of the creek, she reaches for a low branch, effortlessly pulls herself up by one hand, hops up from it to another many meters above, overshoots on purpose, and twists around to sit with her legs over the bough before she falls back down to it. Reaching for a hanging fruit above her head, she examines the spiral of glittering lights within the perfect sphere, like an entire galaxy in miniature. "I feel sorry for them. It must be ugly inside the Circle."

§<Really?>§
"No, I suppose not."
§<I suspected as much.>§
"Do you?"
§<A tiny bit.>§
"Goodness. Really?"
§<I think so.>§
"I never would have imagined."
§<It's not as if it's the same thing as 'sympathy'. Not like you would describe it.>§

    The asymmetrical conversation in two places continues; creepily 'talking to herself' near Lilian, and creepily 'haunted radio possession' in the spy van; all the way up until the electronics finally blow out and fall silent. It doesn't at all reflect the urgency of the situation within the sharp demarcation of civilization. People savagely compete for what resources remain, desperate to sacrifice them before others do, just to increase their own value. People above the 100 point threshold show blueprints earlier and earlier as the wall rises. Soon, even those in the thousands are removing fingers and ears whilst weeping. Those with no value left are hurled from the walls in scattered places at first, then in a constant stream.

    Not long after, a bucket line forms to keep a constantly steady flow as society implodes, those passing off screaming humans to one another each turning their eyes down and shutting the sound out as their values flicker at barely stable thresholds for participating in the continuous mechanism of social murder. Those that fall into places clear enough to see typically die on impact. Some survive, but are injured enough to be unable to resist the foliage slowly overgrowing them. Some lucky few retain their mobility, and sprint off into the wilderness, doomed to die a slower, more miserable death in the near future.

    The phenomena intensifies until those with only a few points left are leaping over the walls on their own. Desperate to escape with their bodies intact, carrying a handful of possessions they've safeguarded or stolen, they flee ahead of the grasping hands of the crowd and slip down the ice-covered exterior, much like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Lilian and her non-existent company, subtly flexing the branch next to her, watch those close enough sprint terrified into the dark woods. One by one, they go abruptly silent, but Lilian doesn't seem to mind. She doesn't move at all, save for idly swinging her legs, until a stranger with a backpack and gun manages to rappel down the wall near her on a rope made of tied bedsheets.

    When he freezes up running past her, staring into the branches-- not at her, but beside her-- Lilian slides her weight over the edge and lands in the grass near him. She stares at the man's indistinct face as if she's forgotten what he's supposed to be, but says, with an unusual tone of easy honesty, "Do you need help?" The Storm Syndrome afflicted man, already covered in blueprints, screams, unholsters his gun, barely aims at Lilian, and fires.
Lilian Rook     She frowns at him. The bullet stops a few inches in front of her face, pinched firmly between the fingertips of a pitch black hand floating in space; ostensibly made of solid metal, angular and abstract, every joint replaced with empty space. It's the same kind as which hold the man frozen in place, too; dozens of them, squeezing around his arm, clamped around his sides, pinch holding his jaw, pressing down on his feet, pulling back his eyelids, and even holding back the gun's slide with a hooked fingertip.

    "This is a stupid dream." says Lilian, swatting the bullet aside with the back of her hand at the same time the floating one releases it, allowing it to tumble end over end and splash into the creek. "Can't it skip to the nice part?" Her fingers drum thoughtfully on the solid impression of a sword at her side; the only thing that isn't flickering. "Who was it that was controlling it again? I forgot her name." she says, her eyes slowly tracking a moving spot of air in front of her. "Can't we ask her to skip to the nice part?" Again, the response is privately inaudible. "Huh? Why would anyone want to watch me? I'm the only one who's still normal." Lilian says, dead wrong. She clambers back into the tree, and leaves the survivor below.

    Then the man's throat erupts into a spray of scarlet gore. Or it starts to, then stops dead, blooming into a messy kind of stain-pattern and dribbling back down. The black hands release him all at once, permitting one convulsion, then two, before he goes totally limp. His corpse is dragged away, up into the tree, by visual noise so intense near the apex of the 'Storm' that it becomes visible. "Don't do that." Lilian sighs, as if a sudden inexplicable death were someone's minor bad habit. "Just because it's a play doesn't mean you have to volunteer to act, you know. Besides, that's dirty. Who knows what's happened to it? I thought we were going to take it easy and watch?"

    The dead body jerks in place a few times, draped over the branch while Lilian talks, new rips appearing in its front, then goes still at the words 'we were'. In the conversational silence, the sheer processing load of psychic distortion makes the simulated city crackle and lose coherence for a passing moment. As if revealed by a stroke of lightning, the place Lilian stares at is, only for an instant, host to a figure like a pure white shadow that is an identical mirror of hers, blinking at her with vantablack eyes and speaking inaudibly with a vantablack mouth. Sans dress or sandals, the shadow crouched in the tree is soaked in vivid crimson stains up to the elbow and from lips to chin, standing out against pure white. The moment is too short to lip read more than a single word, and Lilian sighs once more at the end of the silent, invisible pause that ensues.

    "I knew I shouldn't have taken those drugs to sleep." is followed by a strangely half-fond. "This always happens. You're impossible." and then after a break, then a quiet laugh, the dead body's number finally reaches zero, and it turns into paper white and dark cerulean blueprints, falling to pieces into so many bits of draft paper along pre-cut lines. "See? Now don't get distracted again. Or you'll miss the rain!" says Lilian, breathing out deep, kicking her feet up and staring expectantly at the sky.
Timekeeper "I'm picking up good vibrations o/~, she's giving me excitations o/~, I'm picking up good vibrations o/~..."

    In the slice of 1966, Poltergeist ends up hunched over on a curb, the obvious visible articulation of her knees and hip underneath the bedsheet making the fact that she's underneath a bedsheet at all kind of ridiculous. As the Storm Syndrome sets in around her, with a crowd of people throwing beer bottles at a guitarist standing on the lip of a statue in a fountain a short distance away, she manages to overcome her shock and horror at the first sight of everything happening and settle down. There's a shuffling motion underneath the sheet, while she definitely shoves another Dream Fluff into her mouth.

> The World Is Safe

    Poltergeist coughs weakly, with an ugly little rasp to it. Voice unsteady, she starts babbling to herself, and Regulus since she's there too. "I-I... if all this thing does is make what people already feel worse... then all of this... it's no sweat, right? P-people being angry a-and cruel, and even hurting each-- each other... th-the world's always keeping on after that anyways, isn't it? I-- I d-didn't really see it h-happening before, but...."

> And My Future Is Secure

    "B-but th-this is what went down, right? Y-you saw it, Miss Regulus. Th-that means everyone I knew, too... all my classmates must've flipped just like this, a-and then...." This is Poltergeist's amount of mental instability even without being influenced by the Storm Syndrome, though readings indicate that-- surprisingly-- she isn't actually *immune* to it, though it's hard to say whether that's just because it's a psychic mimickry. This is also her amount of mental instability while actively scarfing down psychic emotional buffers-- someone get this girl some fucking Lexapro.

    "Ms. Cristallo, 'Polly', 'Regulus', check in, please?"

    Poltergeist startles upright and sniffles, surprised by the use of her nickname. She floats/staggers to her feet, and left behind her on the pavement is a smear of gross wet sea-slime, for whatever reason. "S-sorry! I got distracted; I'll look at them... there's lots of colors, like tie-dye, and people playing music... but they're not v-very good at it, ahehahah! People are getting... excitable, I think they're going to h-hurt each other."

    Cristallo is, in this environment, maybe the most diligent researcher Mesmer could've expected. She's murmuring to herself almost constantly once she gets over the shock, and since 'volume' isn't really a mental concept that's relevant here, she's even audible. She rolls her chair up to the groups of people, hiding her face if it seems like they'll start aggroing on her too.

    "They are all... trying to shield themselves off from each other. They look... afraid, I think? One of Mr. Flamel's little creatures has brought a bucket of whitewash, and some of the people are fighting over it... eh?"
Timekeeper "Our new mission will be the complete annihilation of stable thought until the arrival of the Storm."

    Cristallo's eyes widen. "E-eh?! Is this part of the simulation?" She wheels herself back nervously, but she's effectively invisible to the simulated townsfolk. They're far too caught up in splintering the groups they managed to form apart further and further, shouting words at each other and tearing them apart to make them come true.

    She adapts quickly though, and keeps reporting on what she's experiencing in a constant breathless stream. "They've started tearing apart their houses too... no, they're tearing off anything with color. No one seems to be getting along anymore, but they keep trying to copy whatever the person in the yard besides them is doing, and then attacking whoever is too slow to make it. I-I... um, a man is drowning himself in white paint, it seems, and some of them are attempting to climb up the walls in order to attack Mr. Flamel's red alert alarms."

    Meanwhile, Poltergeist doesn't take the escalation as well! The person playing the guitar on top of the fountain rapidly turns to only receiving boos and hateful jeers from the crowd, so he steps backwards and falls off of the statue to crack his head on concrete. Poltergeist covers her eye-holes with her sheeted hands and shakes her head. "Nooo... I'm not chicken, I'm not. I-I'm helpful. I-it's all fake anyways, right? It's sc-scary, but it's all already happened by now, and it's just the same as Miss Timekeeper and Miss Regulus s-said."

    A frantic little giggle slips out of her again, causing her shoulders to shake. "Ahahaha... that's s-so screwed up. Everyone from back home had th-this happen to them, b-but guess who's the most alive of all now, h-huh? The flabby pale skag th-that no one liked and no one listened t-to and even though I went and *died*, n-now it's just me left! Auuuuawawa...."
Flamel Parsons     "Wait- before that, Parsons, if you can get readings, Lilian's quadrant, and the spider woman's- another set of eyes on what's happening with those sections? Parsons, you read me, correct?"
    "I am so, so scared right now and huddling in an office actually!" Director Parsons of the Parsons Institute might be seen on one or two displays, peeking up over a desk. "But mostly simulation-y. I *can* get a good stream of data, but it's all warped, because engaging the Storm in a Bottle means getting my mentality back into that paradigm..."

    He briefly signals "time-out" to a haunting, sinister, hunched-over monster bearing a freakish mask. "Hold on a second." He whispers, and it briefly stops while he runs to check some chart recorders and what seems to be a complex array of security-camera VCR records. He gives a thumbs-up to the PA system, tears off some of the charts and swaps out some tapes, and says, "Data's good!" Then he goes back to huddling behind the desk and signals to the Nightmare, which is actually a False Alarm that is currently checking alerts on its phone. "Alright, good to start again."

    The monster resumes haunting. Flamel resumes huddling behind his desk in the Director's Office of the Parsons Institute.
Regulus Regulus brightens all the same when Mesmer asks for a check-in. "Ahh, see, despite appearances--we're still very close to everyone else!" She brings her hand up to her ear--miming like she's speaking into an earpiece, she figures, will make it more likely to reach Mesmer. Like a real secret agent! ... Not for the government though of course, a freelance secret agent! Yes that's better.

"Hallo hallo, this is Regulus. Um, the floating guitars seem new though maybe I just didn't notice that last time... Other than that it feels real similar, lots of people trying to stop people from playing music!" Regulus is also obsessed with protecting music but that's normal for her so she doesn't think to point it out as strange. Oh bloody hell--people are running into the path of cars." That's not new either, that's just Regulus being stunned by seeing it in a much more up close and way less distracted manner.

The idea of music being an obsession does finally become a realization for Regulus when Flamel's fake people start murdering fake musicians and transforming into them and becoming more consumed by music as a result.

"W..woah, is that--those are people Flamel made right? Is Flamel's ... people? ... supposed to be exacerbating everything in here?" This is Regulus's first Psychonauts adventure so she's getting a bit flustered. She sits down next to Poltergeist--realizing that in this specific scenario maybe outing herself as a musician will only draw trouble Polly's way.

"Y..yeah..." Regulus is shaken enough that she doesn't quite manage her usual bravado but then she shakes herself out of it. "And we're keeping on keeping on too, we survived after all." The irony of Regulus saying this to a ghost doesn't seem to hit her because she's thinking of her first conversation with Vertin.

"I... Yeah, they might've. Though I saw people who didn't flip their lid too. Maybe the Storm just makes more and more people flip their lid until the world decides to follow consensus."

Regulus startles at the giggling. Her thoughts turn to music again but--

"Hey, hey, hey--Polly, c'mon... Don't say that about my friend--" Regulus frets, on the verge of tears. She can cheer people up, sure, but this kind of in depth sincerity, the way of speaking the truth and not making it seem so bad, that's Vertin's whole deal. She wishes she were here right now. She doesn't like seeing a girl cry like this and giggle in this sort of self debasing way.

She wraps an arm around her, "Yeah, you're real brave, love. Real brave."
Foundation Scions 'They've started tearing apart their houses too... no, they're tearing off anything with color.'

    "Congruent traits to the Storm of '57." That Storm, Mesmer was exceptionally familiar with- the treatment of those affected with Storm Syndrome often falls specifically to her, and that Era was not so long-past that she wasn't carrying the department in that regard even then. "Good job, Ms. Cristallo. You've kept a rational head this far. There isn't much left, it won't get much worse."

'Nooo... I'm not chicken, I'm not.'

    "Please calm down, there is no tangible danger to you. We're nearly at the end of the simulation." Whatever sympathy or gentleness Mesmer holds towards Cristallo isn't exactly shared towards Poltergeist.

'I am so, so scared right now and huddling in an office actually!'

    "I see." Intercom-crackle. "Unhelpful, but if the data is all fine, so be it. That's all. So long as whatever is going on in those quadrants won't-" The comms crackle off, with Mesmer truly uncertain as to what the way Lilian is behaving could be from, if not some form of Storm Syndrome bleed-through, the events in her quadrant utterly baffling to her. At least(?) it's all, from as many modes as there can be, recorded for further study.

    Barely any time passes before Mesmer addresses the group again- "We've hit measurements analogous to recorded arcane fluctuations and electromagnetic baselines in the recent Storm- that's it. We've got the data. Ending the simulation in 3, 2, 1-"

. . .

    Mesmer cuts the program- and it really is a sharp cut, each hooked-up machine ejecting the volunteers from their shared dream immediately. Mesmer, hurriedly standing up from the desk she'd sat at to interface, lets a similar Artificial Somnambulism fishbowl helmet fall to the ground, luckily without cracking or shattering. She looks like she's so close to pacing out of the operating theater for a cigarette- and misses, the first time, that she tries to grab up her clipboard to check one thing or another. Medicine Pocket, nearby, is a bit slower to rouse, blinking awake and stretching like they woke up from a normal, stress-free nap- this ends the moment they remember about Polly's stress, and they do, as promised before, grab a little jar of hard candies to bring over to her.

    Up on high in the observation deck, curtains have been drawn- but there is, through shadows and motion, clearly a buzz and a ruckus amongst the data-munching scientists. Nurses linger outside, motioned in by an exhausted Mesmer with one arm braced on her desk to keep standing, to check and re-check vitals they've been watching the readouts for- a few flock towards Lilian, to hassle with baseline Storm Syndrome questionnaires- 'The shape of the sun, how rain falls, what is edible', questions not unlike she's heard asked of others before.

    There's no celebratory debrief for the volunteers, for Mesmer, for Flamel, or Medicine Pocket, just clean-up, and the brusque assurance that once numbers have been crunched, people will be told whether this really did go well, or not- but not until they've done the work to know how to quantify it all, as a very tired, exceptionally-drained Mesmer makes sure to impress to the filtering-out participants.
Lilian Rook     "Already?" Lilian says, this time unclear whether to no one or 'no one'. Having briefly closed her eyes to breathe in the scent of the 'forest', whatever it is, they flutter open again in the dream. "What a waste of time. I'll make certain to have a dream with rain in it later." she sighs. "No, it was nice talking. Sorry if I keep being shocked about it for a while." Lilian says, smiling.

    Lilian wakes up in the real world not two seconds later, with a faintly nauseated groan. Rather than opening her eyes, she scrunches them tighter shut, tries to roll over, and then realizes she can't get her hands under a pillow because she's wearing a stupid fishbowl helmet. Muttering disappointedly, her eyes flutter open just like they had in the dream, then she bonks the glass with her knuckles trying to rub them, having already forgotten. Finally, she slides herself out from under the Artificial Somnambulism scanner, the last one out of bed by a good margin, most likely.

    Rubbing her temple with her head lolling to one side, Lilian mutters "Perfect. Just long enough to be sleepy but just short enough to feel atrocious. Why did I take pills for this again? I feel like I just blacked out for fifteen minutes." She blinks around the room for any sign of a clock with an unhappy expression. "Thirty . . . two minutes and . . . sixteen seconds?" she says, not seeing one, and must be wildly guessing with odd specificity.

    Then she's being swarmed by researchers.

    'The shape of the sun'

    "W-what?"

    Glancing from face to face in confusion, Lilian tries her level best to seem remotely composed. "Spherical, I suppose? Why?"

    'how rain falls'

    "From the clouds? Until it hits something solid? What are you--"

    'what is edible'

    "Well that depends on your point of-- Hey! Hang on!" Lilian raises her voice, taking on a huffy tone. "Why is it only me?! I'm literally the only one you don't need to ask!" she whines, prevented from shouting by the possibility that Mesmer set this up. "Did I just not even have a dream at all? Ugh, I knew that sedatives were going to screw with the readings; I should have tried to tire myself out first."

    Obliviously emphasizing a long-suffering sigh from deep in her chest, Lilian rotates her arm, hand on shoulder, to work out some insignificant stiffness. As she does, the baseline level of arcane fluctuation in her vicinity goes from 'minimal' back down to 'none', like before she'd fallen asleep. "As long as it's to put an end to the Storm . . ." she says, like a mantra. "Oh look at me. Complaining about taking a nap. I'm just feeding the people calling me a workaholic more ammunition."

    "Is this questionnaire going to take long?" she says, finally looking around at the other cots. "Christ. Everyone but Cristallo looks awful. And Medicine Pocket, I suppose. Was it really a good idea to include people this inexperienced?"