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Animus Moderators ([personal profile] animusmods) wrote2013-08-05 08:27 pm
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Plot Guide

This post is where we will be chronicling the plot-related events at Tower of Animus so far. This includes both moderator-run events and actions by characters that are significant to the development of the plot or have revealed information in some way. Generally links will contain whole entries, though any especially notable threads within the entries will be linked directly below them.

Players are free to contribute to this guide! If there is something that we've missed, or something that you believe should be explained/linked in greater detail, please fill out the form below and post it in a comment.

Event: The event that the thread you are linking to was part of. If it did not take place during an event, use pre-[event] or post-[event] as appropriate!
Characters/NPCs involved: Self-explanatory; the player characters and NPCs involved in the thread you are linking.
Reasoning: Why do you think it should be added to the plot guide? Just a sentence or two is fine for this, but please note that we are only adding threads that reveal or hint at things about the Tower of Animus plot. This is the reason that not all player plots are included on this guide.
Link to thread: Link to the thread in question!



JUNE 2011
The Tower's rescue operation began. Four of the five administrators -- Dax, Riki, Jason, and Zo -- were available to answer questions from the new residents.



JULY 2011
On the first of the month at midnight, the Tower was given its first expansion, which had unintended side-effects for staying on the new floors.



AUGUST 2011
Zo promised to bring back people who had disappeared from the Tower, and rescue those who had never come, as well. During his announcement on the network, he had an altercation with Dax and Jason, and the entire tower subsequently suffered from a blackout. Deadly phantoms appeared in the Tower that spoke in the voices of the residents' loved ones. Another Tower expansion followed, and the suggestion box was added.



SEPTEMBER 2011
A leash experiment was conducted. Characters were linked to each other and made to share emotions, sensations, and deaths. The Tower expanded once more, completing the first block and adding wheelchair ramps and an elevator.



OCTOBER 2011
A meeting between Dax and Riki on the 17th floor foreshadowed what was to come this month. The experiments continued, though they became much harsher. This marked the first major surgical experiment. Characters were divided into five groups: Obedience, Paranoia, Sensory, Sloth, and one designated for grotesque surgeries. The four named groups suffered varying effects, though all four culminated in the desire -- and attempt -- to kill those who had been surgically experimented on.



NOVEMBER 2011
The results from October's experiment were posted. Strange audio files and corrupted text were leaked onto the network. The first infiltration of the administrative levels, led by Signless in response to the October experiments, took place, proving that the main elevator could be hacked. However, the characters did not discover anything else before dying in the administrative levels. Ruana later took control of the Tower and promised to send everybody home, but the homes that characters travelled to turned out to be mere imitations of their home worlds, created from their memories and warped by their worst fears.



DECEMBER 2011
Characters that remained in the Tower for the "Is This Home?" event were asked to travel into the nightmare worlds to save those who had been sent "home" at the end of November. Ruana revealed that the worlds had been created from the characters' own minds. Late in the month, footage of a collared Zo being attacked went live on the network, and monsters began flooding into the Tower.



JANUARY 2012
On an out-of-character basis, the move to Dreamwidth and the importing of the communities happened this month. In the Tower, all of the levels were briefly removed to conduct repairs while the monsters raged, leaving the residents to contend with the full extent of the invasion on the first floor. The Tower was stabilised afterwards, fully repaired with new floors added. Though the Tower was fixed, the monsters were there to stay.



FEBRUARY 2012
Characters were infected with an illness that bore symptoms similar to the plague, and were given stuffed teddy bears to take care of, with notes that described their circumstances. Infected characters had to play two games to be cured. The first game was the Midnight Game, where characters were taken to dark, empty duplicates of the Tower to avoid the Midnight Man. The second was Hitori Kakurenbo, a violent game of hide-and-seek where players had to avoid the teddy bears they were given at the beginning of the month. On Valentine's Day, there was a brief interlude where the characters were given chocolates that briefly alleviated their illness, but caused psychotic behavior in exchange. Dax had a conversation with Ruana, though at the time she was not public knowledge.



MARCH 2012
Characters were given different collar colors, which caused them to lose control of their powers and feel as if they were trapped by or barely inside their own bodies.



APRIL 2012
April Fool's Day pranks started off this month, ranging from harmless to deadly. Halfway through the month, a question was posed to the network asking what characters were afraid of, and characters were compelled to answer honestly. Near the end of the month, Jason sent out a letter to certain Tower residents informing them that they would be rounded up for experimentation at the beginning of May. Dax informed the Tower that they had switched to a monthly rotation, and that the residents should be wary of Jason.



MAY 2012
Jason's experiment turned out to be a last-man-standing fight to the death between many residents of the Tower, set in a huge labyrinth. Characters outside the maze were able to watch the proceedings and sponsor characters trapped in the labyrinth, at the cost of having nightmares proportionate to whatever favor they chose. On the third day of the event, a small group of characters broke in to the administrative levels for the second time, though this simply ended in Jason catching them and killing them instantly. Halfway through the month, Jason posted a Q&A on the network; during this Q&A was the first time any character had their collar removed. Near the tail end of the month, a feed was leaked onto the network showing the administrators fighting amongst themselves.



JUNE 2012
The altercation between the administrators escalated into full-out infighting. A huge portion of the Tower populace was moved into pods, each overseen by an administrator -- one by Dax, one by Riki, and one by Jason. They were competing to see who could run the Tower the best, and the competition was presided over by Ruana, who finally made her first official appearance in front of the characters. Characters in the pods were made to compete in challenges; winners of the challenge received points for their pod, and losers had to vote someone out of their pod. Voting off meant death.

In the fourth week of the event, a group of characters broke into the control room of the Tower in an attempt to take leadership. This attempt ultimately failed, but it ended the event competition early.

The Tower was neglected while four of the admins were otherwise occupied; collar check-ups were foregone, to consequences such as loss of power control, and food was in extremely limited supply. Zo was the only one watching over the Tower during this time.



JULY 2012
"Escape. You have five days. If you do not escape, you will be killed. Good luck." Eleven groups of residents woke in a dorm room that was not their own, with roommates who were not their own, and did their best to escape while isolated from the rest of the tower.



AUGUST 2012
Something was on the outside, and it wanted in. A massive, mutated space whale breached the fog protecting the tower and then breached the tower itself, causing a destruction of the dormitory levels and many other levels of the tower besides. Monsters from the outside made it into the tower and begun to wreak havoc. All came to an end at the hands of the administrators themselves, hinting at the true extent of their powers. The tower was repaired and the 39th through the 43rd floors were added. The residents were thanked for their assistance -- and consoled for the loss of some of their possessions -- with a feast containing dishes from their homeworlds.



SEPTEMBER 2012
Some characters found that they had woken up in a body that was not their own. They suffered various side effects, and Jason taunted them as the clock ticked towards their all but inevitable deaths. Shortly after his taunting, a video appeared on the network depicting one such swap. The residents then searched for clues as to how to reverse the process, and found them. Jason, in a fit of childishness, made it so that there was no food -- just water -- in the cafeteria from the 23rd to the end of the month.



OCTOBER 2012
The residents were pulled into a crazy game of Trick-or-Treat, and the stakes were high. Those who awoke in costumes found that their costumes would constrict on them to the point of death if they didn't meet quotas for candy-collecting each day, and as time passed, the quotas grew higher and the amount of candy available grew smaller. Many residents died, and in the end only a handful of people were able to survive - by stealing candy from others who were still playing the game or by taking it from those who had died.



NOVEMBER 2012
The Tower expanded again, with the 44th through the 48th floors appearing on the first day of the month when residents who had participated in the game the month before woke up. Later in the month there was a glitch with the tower's translation systems, and some residents found that they were speaking languages they never learned but were unable to comprehend their native languages. The administrators attempted to fix the glitch, though their efforts were somewhat hampered by radiation that had been unleashed as a part of an experiment by one of the residents. Finally the network was rebooted and communications were restored, but two files were inadvertently released on the network...



DECEMBER 2012
Early in the month, a fairly large group of characters incited a riot and began killing worker NPCs en masse. These characters were taken into isolated cells for punishment, where they experienced terrifying hallucinations. Jason decided to spread a little holiday cheer afterwards by performing an experiment and infecting residents of the tower with a deadly illness -- it started as a flu and slowly developed more and more drastic symptoms. For Christmas, everyone got something from home, and residents who took ill during the month also received a basket of food.



JANUARY 2013
The residents came to believe that they had been in the tower for much longer than they truly had during this month; when they discovered that this was just an illusion, they also found that quite a bit of construction had gone on during the time when they were distracted. Later in the month, the wedding of Reno and Elena drew Ruana's attention, and Ruana and Zo attended the ceremony.



FEBRUARY 2013
Ruana appeared in a post on the network, citing that something coming up would be interesting, though Riki insisted that it would also be dangerous. A few days later, a large group of people from the city of Hinoto-Ri appeared in the tower. The administrators -- sans Ruana -- hosted a questions-and-answers session in the cafeteria. Near Valentine's Day, tape players appeared in the tower, and listening to the music they played made residents and visitors alike behave strangely. Ruana's games continued as per the norm for her months, and both the residents and the visitors from Hinoto-Ri took part in three games over the span of a few days.

Late in the month, the elevator to the administrative levels was left open, and a group of tower residents took the opportunity to take it down, where they explored the domains of each of the administrators. A strange fog appeared in the tower, causing side-effects when people wandered into it for too long; the visitors from Hinoto-Ri found themselves navigating a maze. Finally, Nyarlathotep -- the one behind the visitors' appearance in the tower -- attacked Zo, though Riki defended him and the two appeared to hold their own. Ruana confronted Dax, who was responsible for letting the residents into the administrative levels, and killed him, eating his body to absorb his powers. With control over order and chaos at her fingertips, Ruana expelled Nyarlathotep and the visitors from Hinoto-Ri from the tower, never to be seen again.



MARCH 2013
The hundred-and-first floor was added, and Zo oversaw the operations of the residential levels for the first time. Unfortunately, his inexperience led to some rather temperamental weather. Later in the month, Ganondorf enlisted Richtofen and the Riku Replica and made a grab for power, trapping some of the residents on floors that had been converted to the Dark World -- a distraction so that another team of Ganondorf's allies could infiltrate the administrative levels.



APRIL 2013
Early in the month, Zelda and her allies infiltrated the lower levels of the tower while Jason implied that he was busy. Following this, the residents start to vanish when they're on their own, but reappear a little after midnight on the fifteenth. Unfortunately, they've been brainwashed, and in many cases physically altered. Much trauma ensues, and when the residents are returned to normal, the horrible truth comes out: one group had been brainwashed into spying for the administrators, and many things that the residents had hoped to keep secret became known to them. As a result of this, residents who were deemed to be a "threat" became tailed by retrieval units, the 77th floor became manned by worker units, floors that drained powers became patrolled by retrieval units, and a video taken by John Egbert was erased. Residents began being taken to be brainwashed to spy for Jason without bodily modifications.



MAY 2013
Rumors appeared on the walls of the tower, and also appeared on the bodies of those who wrote them. As people see the rumors, the rumors begin to come true; much chaos occurs from this. Meanwhile, Zelda enlisted the help of others in the tower to plant the contents of a box of microchips -- the spoils from the month prior's infiltration -- around the tower, and hosted a ball on the masquerade floor to warn people that something may happen soon. Dax's chosen and their allies began referring to themselves as "Pandora."



JUNE 2013
The fruits of Pandora's labors came to pass, and at the beginning of the month the power cut out. The tower's glamour system -- a careful blend of technology and psychic powers that tricks the mind into seeing and feeling things that are not really there -- also failed, and the residents saw for the first time what they really are: souls, trapped in imitation wireframe bodies, as it is only their souls that the administrators have saved from their dead worlds. During this time, Enoch recovered a message left from Dax, and the first excursion to the ground floor of the Tower was made by a character.

Ruana, in a fit of rage and despair, informed them that they have one year left to live before beginning her next game, where she caused some residents to transform into monsters and stalk the tower at night, hunting down friends and strangers alike, though they had no memory of it come morning. When everyone returned to normal -- or as normal as they could possibly be in the tower -- they regained their memories of everything they'd done.



JULY 2013
Sephiroth called for a boycott of the collar checkups at the beginning of the month. A few days later, an anonymous post appeared on the network calling for anyone who was skilled with hacking computers. Dax's message was finally decoded, and copies of the message were spread all around the network and all around the tower. Zo visited the residents in the cafeteria to talk with them. A group of computer hackers -- led by Xion, who took the reigns after the mastermind behind the hacking plot vanished -- made an attempt to break into the tower's systems, and were punished for it a day later.

With time to think about whether or not to join in, a large group of residents took part in Sephiroth's collar boycott, resulting in enough chaos that fourteen containers of collar fluid were taken from the infirmary. Jason was not pleased, and his displeasure was seen in a leaked post to the network. Near the end of the month, the disruption in collar checkups allowed the residents to wake up during the night when time was stopped, and also allowed them to regain consciousness while drugged and working in the administrative levels. After this, Enoch and Ganondorf joined plans to stage another infiltration into the lower levels of the tower.

While in the lower levels, Zelda's group was informed by R-037 that something called psychoradiation was filling the Tower and poisoning the residents. She also told them that the "key" Dax mentioned in his letter to the Tower populace was the collar fluid that the residents had obtained. Jason deactivated the local glamour on his floor and revealed his true form to Yu and Xion.



AUGUST 2013
An explosion occurred on the eighth of the month, for which Jason blamed the agitators of the Tower population. Three days later, Shadow Children-- the corrupted remains of the characters' friends and loved ones from their home-worlds-- appeared in the Tower proper, following residents around and tortmenting them with belligerent figures from their past, present, and future , all the while draining them of their energy until their collars were emptied-- unless they were fortunate enough to be saved by the new bonds they'd formed within the Tower.

Jason was able to remove most of them by the end of the month, but a small number of them still remain.



SEPTEMBER 2013
Riki visited the residents to answer their questions. However, in the middle of the session, a series of explosions erupted from the lower levels, devastating the structure’s integrity and blocking off the dorm levels from the floors below with damage and debris. Characters were either trapped in the dorm rooms above, or allowed to aid in the relief effort to clear the path and rescue those trapped. Riki returned to the lower levels to fix the damage and send the trapped characters emergency supplies. Residents stuck upstairs began hearing and seeing strange things from the other side of their doors, as if they were in a medical facility, and were implored by voices to be quiet, with consequences if they were not. Residents helping downstairs aided in documenting the floors and dealt with a psychoradiation leak.

On the 30th, the residents were able to break through the block and rescue the trapped characters, with gratitude from Riki for assisting.



OCTOBER 2013
On the twentieth, participating characters were implored to gather candy after reading a note left for them by Ruana. For the next five days, participants could gather candy around the Tower, and store it in bowls in their room. From the 26th onward, they were visited by shadow children, asking for candy in the form of riddles, with consequences if the riddles was answered wrong. Tricks ranging from mental trauma to death were played on those who denied the children candy.

Those who gave the children candy successfully were rewarded with bags of candy that could replace a meal's worth of food in exchange for attracting the normal shadow children.



NOVEMBER 2013
The collar research teams received new members to the effort, and the retrieval units trailing characters became fixed, chipped units instead of the rotating drones.

On the Twenty-Fifth, Zo opened a carnival for the residents on the cafeteria floor. Two days later, a series of explosions turned the normal, festive summer carnival into one that was old, decrepit and broken. Characters that explored the Tower encountered visions and ghosts from the past, providing a window into Tower life and its inhabits before the game began.



DECEMBER 2013
A handful of residents held a meeting to discuss the visions they’d witnessed during the carnival the previous month in an attempt to piece together the Tower’s history, and Richtofen assembled a team of allies to help him infiltrate the administration areas by exploiting a glamour glitch. On the fifteenth of the month, R-037 (named Aria by Zelda, Ruler and Arturia) contacted the populace with a plan to help them, beginning by temporarily cutting off the administrative surveillance of the residents Tower area. A void appeared on the then-accessible twenty-third floor, unleashing plague doctor-esque creatures to in response to attack the populace. Aria welcomed characters to speak to her in the bunkered-down Infirmary, during which Ganondorf spoke to her about receiving Zo’s assistance in fighting Jason.

On the twenty-second, Jason appeared out of the void in his unglamoured appearance to attack the residents himself while Aria asked others to help defend the infirmary and get supplies to other assisting retrieval units. Ganondorf’s assembled teams confronted Jason on the eighth floor; the teams were defeated, but thanks to Zo disabling Jason’s psionics, they succeeded in injuring him before he retreated. The rift was sealed and the plague doctors were removed shortly after.

With the residents’ assistance, Aria and the retrieval units succeeded in constructing the hidden floor linked to a teleport on Floor 101, where Aria now resides.



JANUARY 2014
Another series of explosions was set off within the Tower, completely exposing the spine of the structure and dangerously damaging the power core, accelerating the loss of the already dwindling power supply. When the damage doesn't repair itself as it usually does, Riki spoke to the residents over the intercomm, revealing that Jason was the one setting off all the explosions, and imploring the Tower residents to help him repair the power core. Willing volunteers were taken to the lower levels to provide extra power to the Tower so Riki could repair it. Those who volunteered remained unconscious during repairs.

A few days later, Riki announces the plan a success as the Tower begins to repair itself again. Those who volunteered to help power the Tower lost access to their powers (as well as facing other symptoms) for the next month.



FEBRUARY 2014
As always, it was Ruana's turn to run the Tower, which meant a game for the residents. From February 13th to the 16th, selected characters received notes informing them that they had been chosen to participate in a hunt game; Ruana's tone was not as cheerful as usual, but characters were not to find out the reason why until later. On Valentine's Day, the seasonal game echoed the Hitori Kakurenbo game from February 2012. Characters had their hearts stolen by the familiar bears, and as a result, their positive emotions towards others turned into hatred. Characters who did not have their hearts stolen had to help these characters retrieve their hearts from the bears to return them to normal. A special bear also appeared on floor 14, found by Ion after seeing the matching note in cell 037 on floor 43.

On the 16th, characters were taken into a labyrinth, reminiscent of Jason's May 2012 experiment. The characters in the labyrinth were divided into hunters and prey, with hunters being provided with special motivation to participate in the hunt. Hunters were de-powered and given weapons, but prey's abilities were swapped out for powers exhibited by the children seen in the November 2013 event. The struggle between hunters and prey went forward as normal until February 20th, when Jason was dropped into the labyrinth. Hunters were provided with new abilities, and both hunters and prey were told to find Jason and kill him. In the Tower proper, Aria sent out chipped units to gather a rescue team for those trapped in the labyrinth.

After a collaborative effort between all of those in the labyrinth, Asch and Zelda struck the final blow to Jason. But this was not the end of the conflict; once Jason perished, Ruana made her first appearance of the month to taunt his dead body, calling him a traitor and a liar. And then, she ate him to absorb his powers, as she did with Dax the previous year. Ruana changed physically after consuming him, appearing as a little girl instead of a teenager. Aria helped the characters escape Ruana's dangerous psionic power surge.

The entire event was broadcasted on the terminals and in the media room, but none of the footage was preserved afterwards. Ruana took over the revival process for the characters after the events of the labyrinth.