![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strove) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
meadowlarklogs2020-03-15 01:25 pm
[open log] mama, put my guns in the ground
WHERE: Around New Amsterdam, as well as her dreams. There is also a prompt for other people to play with independent of Clarke.
WHEN: Over the next month IC and OOCly.
WHAT: Dreams, Clarke's time management, drawing, etc.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: Loss of autonomy and control, experimentation on humans (torture and mentions of it), genocide (and the decisions to partake in it), paranoia, mentions of suicide, mind-altering status effects.
If you have any questions, please hit me up on plurk (
[To say free time is fleeting for Clarke Griffin these days would be an understatement. When she's not at PRESERVE or what she intends to keep as her day job (interning as a medical assistant), Clarke spends many of her evenings trying to check in with Red Wings. Stephen manages most of the day-to-day operations, but Clarke can't leave it all to him. The expeditions to the gates proved as much on this front.
Sometimes, it gets to be too much, though. Clarke takes to parks, to various cafes, and even a booth in the back of Red Wings to draw. It's obvious from the stylus in her hand that it's what she's doing, even if someone else can't see what she's working on. Her gaze flicks up toward her surroundings: digitally, she's holding on to memories. Trying to keep it all in one place. Now that the weather's getting better, Clarke can be found in numerous parks throughout the daytime trying to find some peace. She'll lean up against a tree, inhale deeply, and get to work.
In the late, late evenings at Red Wings, Clarke pulls out her sketchbook. When it's not a game night, it's mostly empty, and she doesn't have to explain why she has a book full of paper, some scrapped together and tightly nestled, while others hang loose, ready to be pulled free.
Her gaze remains focused, forehead soft and unconcerned, until she notices someone close to her. Clarke's left hand stills in what it's doing, and she looks up at whoever's there.] Would you like to see what I'm working on?
[Clarke Griffin is a person with too many responsibilities because she puts too many burdens on herself. It's how she's been her entire life, perhaps more so after her father risked himself wanting to bring an answer to the people of the Ark so that they could band together and help one another, a choice that ultimately got him killed and Clarke locked away in solitary. It began here, but it continues now for a single reason: Clarke is meant to do better. Clarke wants to do better, desperately craves that, but knows it's never as simple as just doing it.
As a result, Clarke is rarely home. Her days are segmented and carefully scheduled—even though "carefully scheduled" is a misnomer. It's more chaos driven by guilt and a need to do right by people. Here, back home. Anywhere.
a. medical work Her job and her volunteering gigs are focused around the same kind of work. PRESERVE's headquarters are primarily set up to work in tandem with the world's medical systems, and the further that that New Amsterdam gets away from the EMP in early November, the calmer it is there. They're no longer offering emergency beds because the hospitals were full, but that just means that PRESERVE's volunteers are focused on other tasks: providing for people in need, offering a bed to someone who doesn't have a home to return to after a medical procedure that would otherwise be routine in nature, and trying to identify areas where people can get extra help so they can return to work. Free healthcare helps the people of this world a lot, but not if they can't work or keep themselves well. PRESERVE's focus between disasters is stabilization in New Amsterdam, but they can only do so much.
When Clarke isn't at PRESERVE, she works at a walk-in clinic as a medical assistant. She's only an intern, but she works full time and may be the person taking someone's blood pressure and checking their temperature. That's her gig, a way to feel useful in the storm of inadequacy that first followed her when she arrived in this world.
b. red wings work When she's not drawing at Red Wings and trying to keep an eye on things, she's either using that back booth to do homework (noise canceling headphones over her head to keep the sound out) or she's back in the kitchen trying to help out Nill. Clarke is looking to better staff the kitchen. She's a manager, but clearly flightier than Stephen, in part because her schedule is so damn filled that she can only be so reliable.
c. yoga Sometimes—when she's not drawing—Clarke still makes time for yoga in the parks. She has a mat, a pair of exercise leggings, and a determination to do good. Unheard by anyone around her is the instruction of a video, pulling her through downward dogs. Clarke makes time for this because it's something she picked up from Bobbi Morse (known to all as Katelin Phillips, including Clarke) back when she was stressed.
She's always stressed is the real problem, but yoga is another thing she tries to make time for in her busy days.]
[specific content warnings: human torture and experimentation, genocide of an entire people, piles of dead bodies, and the choices leading to each of these things.]
[When you arrive, the room is suffocating with a single, tangible emotion: guilt. It fills your pores, fills every part of your being. It may even distract you from the room around you at first, turning your stomach and bringing emotions to your eyes. Though your chest doesn't glow from the empathy bond, there's a sense that this sharing is due to the link you have between her and yourself. Whoever she is, assuming you don't know Clarke at all.
a. bargaining Eventually, the room will come into focus. There are numerous security screens, all in black and white, put up around the room. There is a dead man on the floor, killed by a bullet wound. (You'll know, intrinsically, that this is her fault. The residual effect of her desperation.)
Desperation is still there—but it's faint, distant. Guilt suffocates it. It's omnipresent.
Clarke nods to you as she walks past, beginning to speak to Monty Green: "Monty, can you do it? Can you irradiate the level?"
"I can do it."
"Wait a second, Clarke, we need to think about this. There are kids in there." This is Bellamy injecting his say, hoping that he can help stop this.
"I know," Clarke says.
"And people who helped us," Bellamy goes on.
Clarke looks at him, panicked and concerned, but also grounded somehow. It hasn't happened yet, but it already feels like a foregone conclusion. "Well, then please, give me a better idea."
Even if this isn't a scene you know, a situation you know, you understand a few things: irradiating the levels will kill nearly everyone on those screens. People dressed in civilian clothes, trying to live their lives. But there are people chained to a wall, people being drilled into for—for bone marrow? This is all intrinsic knowledge, but not explained beyond that.
Clarke looks to you. "Help us."
Stop us, she seems to say. There's a sense that it may be impossible. But she's asking, anyway.
b. the choice Or perhaps you arrive too late. The room is as in focus as it would be if you'd gotten here sooner. On the screens, the experimentation goes on. The room is still swallowed in guilt, but with a sense of inevitability. Normally, it would be Clarke's mother on the table, anguished pain rocking her body as a drill continues to pass into her leg, trying to drag out bone marrow against her will.
But maybe it's someone you know, you care about, someone you're forced to see die. Maybe you know all the faces in that room, ready to be put in line, ready to be used and discarded. There is a small pile of bodies off to the right, people who will be discarded later once they can no longer handle the strain of the drill colliding with their bones.
Out of the corner of your eye, Monty stops. Clarke, worried, says: "Why are you stopping?"
"Because I did it," Monty says. "All we have to do—" his hand moves to a lever, indicating it. "—is pull this. Hatches and vents will open, and the scrubbers reverse … pulling in outside air."
Off to the side, Bellamy notices something on the screen: a guard named Emerson trying to plant an explosive outside of the door to blast his way inside. "He's gonna blow the door."
"Clarke, we're out of time," Monty says, urgency hitting his tone. In response, Clarke's hand falls over the lever.
Bellamy, watching his sister on the screen be surrounded by the people of the Mountain, "My sister, my responsibility."
Clarke, resolved: "I have to save them."
Bellamy meets her eyes, and his hand covers hers. "Together."
It hasn't happened yet, though. Will you allow it to, or will you try to stop them? This is a memory, but the feeling in the room is suffocating.
All those people will die.
All of them.
c. the aftermath "Let's go get our people," Clarke says. It's over. The people of Mount Weather are dead, covering the ground, having died from radiation poisoning on the spot. None of them were prepared to survive. All of the people in the mountain have been killed. There were around 300 of them, and no matter who they were, they lost their lives that day.
You'll walk with Clarke from the security room, out where all the bodies wait. It's too soon for there to be a smell, but you know it will come eventually. You know this to be true.
But it had to be done, didn't it? Didn't it?]
[For the few who were here before, the room itself is familiar. It's many rooms, however, interconnected to show the life of Clarke Griffin. Most of the images are new, however. Some are from Clarke's time in New Amsterdam: holding a gun to Markus' back, taking OA's hand as they walk toward a gate, or even dancing with Eugene Hicks at the music festival. There are many from home, too: Clarke's daughter, Madi, walking with her while she carries a fish to a bucket, Clarke holding a gun to someone's head as they stare at Madi in reverence, and Clarke kicking Josephine Lightbourne down. They're all sketched on the wall carefully, rarely intersecting in any organized way.
Off in the distance, you'll hear a message playing. The words won't be clear until you seek it out, but once you get there, you'll see a picture of two older people talking in the year 2184, with it entirely coming into focus on the greeting:
"Hey Bellamy, Hey Clarke. We wanted him to wake you first so we could talk. Earth … isn't coming back. You've been asleep for over 28 years, and it's as dead as the day we left. I'm working on a plan "B," though. If you're awake, that means I found it. I'll see you again when I do." Monty's about to turn it off, but Harper stops him.
"Wait, not yet." A pause. Then Harper looks into the camera seriously. Take care of our boy."
The video cuts out for a moment, right before playing again with Monty coming into focus, much older. It's now 2206. Monty begins to speak: "Jordan, your mother died today. She was pretty sick the last few years. Clarke, you were right. Her dad's genetic condition finally got her. We had a good life. Sometimes … I know she wanted to be with you guys. Maybe I did, too. But if we did that, we wouldn't be able to show you this. Son. It took me thirty years, but I finally cracked the Eligius Three mission file. Turns out it wasn't a mining mission. After sucking the Earth dry of oil, they went looking for another planet to tap. I set the coordinates a week ago. If I'm right, you should get there in 75 years. I'm tempted to put myself in cryo to see it, but without Harper … Anyway, it's in the Goldilocks zone of a binary star system, but that's all I know. Eligius Three never radioed back, or, if they did, it was after apocalypse one, so no one heard it. Can you see it? Is it beautiful? It is in my dreams. I hope we do better there. I hope Jasper was wrong, and we aren't the problem. I hope your lives there will be as happy as mine has been. Be the good guys.
May we meet again."
A panel opens up to the side, showing the world below. But the picture is unfocused. It's both Sanctum, the world Clarke knows back home, and Meadowlark's Earth, with the continents having shifted and changed, covered in water as she knows it in this version of 2512 Earth.
"It is beautiful," Clarke says, suddenly there. Or perhaps she always was?
There are two routes from here: talk to Clarke or return to the memories in the other room. Of course, both is also available.]
[specific content warnings: suicidal ideation, loss of control and autonomy.]
[additional note: I wanted to also offer people the opportunity to use the Red Sun effects and use it as a staging for some trauma, violence, etc. In the show, the Red Sun causes people to be paranoid in various ways. They hear voices from the past, they have shared hallucinations, and they also hear voices telling them to kill themselves. They also go Jack from The Shining on each other. There is no cure but time, but dream time is dream time, so you know how that goes.
Here's a promo scene where people are affected by it, but you do you!]
[Overheard, there are two suns in the sky. Within minutes, there's just one: an eclipse has come to play, changing the very foundation of where you are. What you don't know is that the air you're breathing is due to infect you. It's due to make you paranoid, and perhaps turn some internal hatred that you keep subdued into something very, very real.
Clarke is nowhere to be found at the moment.
a. If this is where someone arrives, they won't even know that this is Clarke's dream. In fact, the location is in a seemingly peaceful looking little village. There are several houses, along with a large, castle-shaped building off in the distance. It seems unreachable.
On the playground in front of these houses, there's a book that lays open, showing simple art and a story. Each line is a separate page, detailing what's to come:
Trees and plants give us shade.
We eat them every day.
When the stars align and the forest wakes,
it's time to run away.
For two days,
heaven is hell
and friends are foes.
So few are safe once they're exposed.
There is no cure but time itself. If you've ended up in this dream, you can only hope that you'll get out safely. Alive. In one piece.
b. Of course, this may not be where you start. Perhaps you're inside one of those houses, chained up to a wall, waiting for the time to pass. You've been infected already. Across the room, you see someone—is it someone you know? Hard to say.
c. Or you'll hear a conversation that Clarke is having. On the other end of a radio, there's a voice: "You're a cancer, Clarke, and you know what we do to cancer. Cut it out. You want to do better here, but you can't. Now kill yourself. Put us out of our misery. Finish what you started!"
d. or perhaps you've gotten free. It's time to find some people, to tell them what they need to hear.]
no subject
he tips up his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose with his fingers. (they're getting a little steamy.) ]
You said something about your people.
[ he'll take the invitation. ]
no subject
We're a group that once believed that we were the last surviving remnants of humanity. ["Believed" being the correct wording here. They quickly learned after hitting the ground that they were't.] The people we met who told us otherwise called us Skaikru. [It's a start, right?]
no subject
Sky crew?
[ that's an interesting name. there are all types of people here, and it's new to learn about them and the circumstances that surround them in their own worlds. ]
What happened to humanity? I mean, before you learned otherwise.
no subject
[That's not something she knew before, but she knows that skips things to the end.]
Don't worry. I'm all right now.
no subject
That's really loaded.
[ completely and utterly scifi in the way that he expects this to be a storyline from a giant robot anime. it's a real thing that Clarke lived through, but also he's learning that there are certain things that Clarke has a tendency to be cagey over.
but really, who is ever okay after something like that? ]
But you implied that you weren't the last ones.
no subject
no subject
[ that kinda rhymes, doesn't it? it doesn't really look like sky anything offhand, but somethings could change. ]
You can decide if you still like the name after we sell out of it.
[ which gives it a timeframe for her to get rid of it, if she wants to. ]
no subject
It needs to be more vegetables than meat. The meat should be an add on, if we're getting into the spirit of it.
[Clarke never ate meat until she reached the ground.]
no subject
Got it—we'll find a balance that's good.
[ he almost seems to perk up a bit.
it's stew time. ]