Punctured Torus: Event OPEN

[mysterium_mods]

Mysterium Tremendum: Punctured Torus

Arrival and Awakening
The world doesn't fall away from you: you are swept.

The vortex opens like an itch behind your eyes, a pinprick.

Its aperture widens, pulls you into the gap, disintegrating your world inside of you like a rupture. Something is letting the air out

You fall into the cut: like a glove of skin turning inside out, you drop into a cavernous maelstrom of organs (your own), a spinning chaos of tissue which drags the space around you to its pulsating core.

You would sink into the earth, but there is no ground left. In its absence, you sink into something like flesh, gristle, bone, something screaming--roaring--with blood. When you struggle to find the muscles that will open your eyes, they pull apart with a fibrous resistance they pull apart with a fibrous resistance, your vision throbbing with the beat of a pulse you can feel: no inside, no outside; only the dreadful certainty of your viscera, now coterminous with you.

There's a nausea of expulsion, spasms of muscles contracting against you, and you find yourself kneeling on the floor as you vomit, arms braced to hold yourself above the pool of living meat and bile you expel.

But your eyesight resolves: what's below you is the pattern of a carpet, the woven wool of a Persian rug, and though your mouth tastes of iron and your throat burns with the traces of acid, there's no trace of the living tissue you know you saw.

You're in some room of a house you've never seen--clean, tidy, antique. A musty smell lingers, like it went too long unoccupied. Once, it might have been grand, but now it looks worn and faded, decades past its prime. And though it's quiet within, you can hear the sound of voices, footsteps, life-signs that you are not alone--maybe there's someone there in the very same room, someone sharing your disorientation, shaking themselves from a nausea of their own.

Can you know for sure what's happened to you? Can there be any doubt it was real? Draw back the curtain if you want to know, and see the familiar view: the miniscule scale of this island on which you stand, adrift in the swirling, spinning, maelstrom of tissue.

The Old Dixon House
The house in which characters find themselves is a four story mansion with a cellar beneath. Its furnishings and fixtures are, for the most part, early 20th century. Those who’ve been living here for some time will notice, however, that in places the house has changed--walls that were once paneled or papered are now sometimes stone. Lights have appeared where none were before or disappeared from where they’ve always been. In places the furniture looks different: the house is still recognizably the old Dixon house, but with a degree of otherness that makes everything about it seem off.

There is, it seems, electricity, though it generates a somewhat eerie and ominous ambiance in the lighting, which flickers occasionally as though its connections are rather insecure. Whatever current is providing the house's power supply, it is useless for plugging in foreign technology--it cannot charge any electronic equipment that characters have brought with them.

If you turn on the taps there is running water, though it smells strongly of sulfur and leaves a slightly slick, oily feeling on the skin.

Ground Floor
The communal living areas of the house are mostly to be found here. The kitchen has a large table in the center and a cast iron oven and stove top as well as an electric icebox--though still cold, everything inside of it smells rotten and any package of food that is removed and opened is rancid, no matter how fresh it might have appeared a moment before.

Characters will have more luck with food that they retrieve from the larder. The contents of its cans, jars, and dry packages does not appear, for the most part, to be rotten. Characters may feel a bit...odd after eating it, if, that is, they manage to get to it. (See item 7 below.)

First - Third Floors
Characters' bedrooms are here. (Whether that's where each character is when the house is dragged into this between-space of carnality is up to the player.) Newly arriving characters can appear anywhere in the house--including in another character's bedroom. But please plot with other players if you'd like your character to be arriving in someone else's room!

Players can take whatever (reasonable) liberties they like with how their characters' bedrooms have been transformed or affected. They might look exactly as they had before, or they might have some fleshy incursion. (See item 8 below for some possible ideas.)

Bathrooms
Although they all smell heavily of sulfur, the bathrooms appear to be unaffected (so far).

Outside
It's easy enough to open any of the house's doors or windows. The problem comes once you do. Stepping out of any egress from the house, characters will be immediately struck by the full force of the swirling vortex through which the house spins. The closed windows and doors, it seem, provide a barrier, a last threshold between inside and out. Even a meager crack in that seal brings the outside crashing in: beyond the stone foundations of the house and the now-unstable wooden floorboards of the front porch, swirls a vast and unfathomable conduit, like a huge artery in which the house is a mere atom. The pressure weighs down thunderously, an omnipresent pulsation of deafeningly volume which reverberates through bone and muscle with a skull-splitting force. It is all but impossible to speak, all sound seemingly stolen away in the roaring rush of movement on all sides.

Any object that is thrown from the house is lost forever. Any person thrown or falling from the house will reappear within, but not before experiencing again the violent rending and inside-out turning which they suffered on their first arrival.

The Main House: Layout
Click Images to Enlarge...

Click on an image for room information

Event Conclusion Teaser
The conditions which will bring about the event's sunset are in-built and linked to a character in the house. They will arise organically (though of course your characters do not know that). That doesn't mean there's nothing for characters to discover though--there's something urgent that will demand their attention as soon as they make their escape, and the information they'll need to know for it is to be gathered in this realm where they're all trapped!

With the Exception of image #8, all artwork used as part of this event are credited to pixiv artist guru.