interstellar404 | ☆RESCUER TEST DRIVE: DIGITAL LOVE

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☆RESCUER TEST DRIVE: DIGITAL LOVE

☆WELCOME RESCUERS

"" (Watch on YouTube)

Welcome to Interstellar's first ever RESCUER TDM! A part of the Interstellar plot that has just opened up, this covers the entrance of those recruited by the lone space pilot Shep to join him on a mission to the planet Terra to rescue those held captive by Pride Records and Virgo Entertainment. Rescuers will not suffer any memory loss and will enter the game as they are, in contrast to the memory loss/force humanization of the musician half. Powers will be nerfed to a certain degree upon entering the game fully, but during recruitment they will remain at full power.

☆A DREAM ABOUT YOU
These prompts are designed to be game canon, for both rescuers and musicians both new and already in game. For those in game, they will start occurring around New Years in the form of dreams. The dreams will be very clear while happening, but after waking, they will swiftly fade away into something barely remembered. For rescuers, these dreams will occur very shortly before they are approached by Shep or other already recruited rebels to join the rescue squad and go save the people being held captive in Vista City. Rescuers will remember these dreams as clearly as something that actually happened in real life.

Both of these prompts take place in the dreamscape, ostensibly, and the surrounding will appear as whatever fits those taking part in a scene. It can shift and change as a thread goes along, as well, and may resemble things from a captive's home, the game setting, or anything else appropriate.

►A1) FOR THE CAPTURED: The kidnapped musicians of Vista City will dream of being themselves - in a way more true than they have been for months now. They'll dream of themselves as they're meant to be, in physical form and manner of dress, and their personality will align more easily with their true nature, even as the confusing influences of their programming nag at their mind. It could alarm them, or it could feel somehow natural. Either way, their memories will still be gone, except for what they've recovered - but they feel somehow much closer to reach, like they may break through if only given the chance to dig just about deeper. They may dream of home, they may dream of Vista, but either way...when the morning comes, their memories of this experience will be all but wiped away. Including the memories of the strangers that promised that they would find them and take them home.

►A2) FOR THE RESCUERS: The dream is the first sign of something being wrong. You'll find yourself somewhere else - either a scene from your home, or someone else's, or an alien world you've never seen. In this dream, you'll find a person. Perhaps it's someone you recognize, someone you love dearly, but that doesn't remember you. Maybe it's a stranger, lost, confused, and desperate for help. Either way, you find yourself reaching out to them - but outside of this dream, you are helpless to save them. The dream will fade but stay with you in your memory, and may be a key component in you choosing to believe and join the other rescuers when they come to your door. Something has been taken, and you will take it back.

☆MAKE THESE DREAMS COME TRUE
These prompts are design to be kept as game canon after acceptance, and can be used as the official story of how your character entered the game. Importantly, the technology used to enter your timeline causes massive time distortions, which means that the outcome of this scenario will stagger and replay itself multiple times before settling on an outcome. This means that after the fact, you character may remember being encountered multiple ways, or going in more than one direction, before the timeline settled on a final path.

►B1) JUST SAY YES: Soon after these dreams, rescuers will find themselves in a strange situation. Time will abruptly stop for every part of the world except for them, and fade into a ghostly vision of its former self - just in time for them to be approached by some mysterious strangers. Whether your rescuer chooses to run, fight, or talk, eventually they'll be told the truth - people of the multiverse have been captured and taken to a universe far away to be harvested for their souls...in the form of forcing them to becoming rock stars. You heard it here first, folks.

The people recruiting you will mostly be other player rescuers that have already been recruited (regardless of whether or not that's been threaded out - you can assume your guy got recruited by someone if you want to recruit OTHER people.) The pilot and owner of the space ship doing this appears to be a blue man named Shep. He's the guy that's apparently in charge of this whole thing, but he's so busy with the dimension hopping that he's kind of hard to find and talk to. He presumably recruited some of the first members personally, but things have been sort of getting more complicated since then.

►B2) INTERSTELLAR DISCO: After you've agreed to come for whatever reason - to save you lover, friend, some guy, whatever - you're be taken upon the guitar shaped spaceship to wait out the tide of the temporal distortions picking you up has caused. It's a long journey back to Vista City, and you've got plenty of new comrades to get to know. This mission could take a while, so you better get comfy. You're in for the long haul now.

NOTE: If you want to see the interior of the spaceship (or if you want to see Shep dance) watch the music video posted up top. It's going to be a fair bit bigger in Interstellar to accommodate the big crew, but the essence is there.

☆HELPFUL INFO
► Follow the mod plurk for updates: interstellar5555
► Check out the game NAVIGATION
► Check out the MUSICIAN TDM
► Reserves open on January 2nd at 12:01AM EDT
► Applications open on January 11th at 12:01AM EDT

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Frisk pauses, head tilted slightly in obvious confusion. "Yeah...?" Why would he ever not look like that? Amnesia makes you lose your memories. It doesn't make you think you're a different species, does it? They think it would make more sense for someone to believe anything was normal if they'd just lost all their memories.

Maybe it's because they were the first one to find him, and they've got skin. "You're a monster. I'm a human. But monsters look all different ways. You and Papyrus are skeletons, but my mom's big and furry, and Grillby's fire." Oh wait - he probably doesn't remember Toriel either. She's gonna be upset too when she sees him like this. Normally they don't really offer people explanations about their family, but they don't want to confuse Sans, so they add: "I'm adopted."

Okay, well, that's fine and all - but it doesn't really fit with the reality he's come to expect from his own life. God, just being a skeleton here had seemed surreal but fine, yet somehow applying a narrative to it just makes everything so uncomfortable. A whole family of monsters, living underground - it's not even that it's ridiculous, because he doesn't really care about that conceptually. It's just that it feels wrong.

Or at least, something is telling him in very stern words that it should be wrong, and that going down this path is a bad thing for him all together.

"That's the thing, kid," he says - it can't hurt to more properly explain the subject of his distress. "Last time I checked, I was human, too."

Frisk very deliberately looks Sans up and down. Skull, hand bones, leg bones, ribcage.

"No." Sorry, Sans. That's just dumb. "Why?"

Has he been talking to somebody else? The first person to come to mind, down here, is Flowey. He shouldn't be able to do anything to anyone's memories now, but he could tell people they were humans if he wanted. It would be a stupid prank. Mean and stupid, but almost less mean than they'd expect.

Thanks buddy, that really clarifies thing for him.

Seriously, though, the sheer lack of comprehension is enough to make plenty of implications. Okay, so, this kid genuinely thinks he's a skeleton and always has been. What of it, is the question.

"Mainly because I remember growing up as one," he says, shrugging helplessly. "New York, Americana. Put the kaputs on a promising career in science to eventually wind up under Vista's most murder friendly record label." For all the blips and inconsistencies, his mind just scrolls right over them.

Hey, Sans. It isn't Frisk's fault if you believe things that are obviously wrong.

"I dunno where that is," they comment with a frown. Americana isn't even a real place. It sounds like the kind of thing Sans would make up to mess with them. They wish he were. This isn't just amnesia. They've seen people lose their memories before, in a few different ways. But what makes you remember something that never happened?

They have no idea. So instead they just ask, "You mean music?" They're friends with Mettaton; of course they already know what a record label is. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. Since when is Sans the musical one? They've never even heard him sing. He just does incidental music for comedic effect...

"...you play trombone professionally?"

Okay, well that part catches him off guard. He would have thought that with everything else he's saying being a mystery to the kid, that guessing what instrument he plays wouldn't be that trivial. He raises his brow in mild surprise.

"...Yeah. Got it in one." He is obviously put off a little by that guess. "Is that something did before inexplicably becoming human and growing up on the east coast?"

"What's with that, anyway. Did I die or something?"

Frisk just shrugs. "Not for real. Just for jokes." Literally all they've ever heard out of Sans's trombone is wah wah wahhhhhhhh. They've never even really seen him walking around with it; he just appears, plays it, and ducks away again. It doesn't strike them as particularly weird. They're used to him doing things like that. Papyrus says that he plays pranks across space and time.

"No. That wouldn't happen." The kid seems entirely confident in saying that. If Sans died, they'd just reload to a time before that and fix it. They know they could do it. Their last save isn't even in the Underground anymore. It wouldn't take very long.

They're not leaving anybody else behind.

Besides, dying wouldn't make Sans turn into a human in an imaginary country. They don't know what happens to monsters after they die, but probably not that. "Look." They take a few steps back, holding their hands up in front of their chest as if cupping the air. Obviously they don't really want to fight him, but some of the monsters they met didn't really want to fight either. They just didn't always get that they could hurt humans like that. So Frisk knows the trick to it now, even if there's no fighting anymore, and it's only a few seconds before the red glow of their soul becomes visible.

"This is what human souls look like. Monster ones are different." Reincarnation where your soul changes that much isn't even reincarnation. He wouldn't be Sans.

Okay, well. Sans doesn't know how to make his soul come out, but that's cool. He seems a little surprised, but pointedly not shocked. Why would he be shocked with everything else that's been going on?

"Pretty neat trick, kid," he says, staring at the red glow with a vague feeling on nostalgia. He doesn't really question the idea of him playing trombone just for jokes. Honestly, a lot of the time he still feels like he only plays the trombone for jokes, and when the stage feels so...

It feels like something special, to be certain.

"If I knew how to project my soul out of my chest I'd return the favour. Unless it's just knocking around in here somewhere already." He lifts his shirt to check out his rib cage. It's not immediately visible, anyway, even if there is a certain feeling reassuringly warm pressure in the hollow there. "You see anything? I guess I just don't have the heart to look any closer."

Frisk leans in seriously to inspect the rib cage. Nope, no soul visible. No heart either, but then they knew that already.

The pun makes them smile. Ah, there's a bit of Sans! "You could find it. If you put some backbone in." Papyrus would hate this.

Honestly though, they don't see anything, so they back off again and perch on the edge of one of the nearby chairs. They're a little too short for it, leaving them to kick their legs idly. "It comes out when you fight. But I dunno about monsters." They've only seen monster souls appear when they die, and even that only happens with Boss Monsters. Maybe that's just because it was always the monsters challenging them to fights? They don't want to fight Sans. Their own soul has been hovering in place, but they press a hand over it again and it quickly vanishes.

Sans finds himself grinning with genuine mirth at that response, and something about it feels peaceful and right. Yet, when his own reaction occurs to him, he finds himself inwardly doubling back. He's leaving himself really exposed to this person.

As they've just reminded him, fighting is definitely something he remembers them doing, the glowing soul included. So while he keeps on grinning, as he always does, that genuine lining of pleasure fades off.

"...Say. This might be crude to bring up apropos of nothing, but...truth is, it's been rattling my bones for a while now." His stance settles into something more guarded, his hands tucked back in his jacket, ready to move if the response is negative. "You really seem to have this all figured out, don'tcha, kid?"

The lights in his eyes seem to go dead.

"Mind telling me why I remember killing you?"

Frisk watches his amusement fade with disappointment, and drops their gaze to their feet. They don't like this. It's knotting up their stomach in a totally new way - there's none of the adrenaline that goes with the scariest things they've seen, and no explanation like with their big reset. At least when everyone forgot that time it was for a reason, and they didn't lose their whole lives.

The question makes them look up again. They draw back slightly at the empty eyesockets. So, it's this again.

Taken aback as they are, they don't look scared. The concept of their own death doesn't seem to really move them; they just furrow their brow in confusion. "You didn't." Of all the people, Sans? He's never even fought them. "You told me you might've, but you didn't."

At least he remembers a little something. Even if it's totally wrong. Frisk considers leaving it there, but this seems like it could use a little more explanation. "You were a sentry out near the Ruins," they expand with a sigh. "You're supposed to stop humans who come through, but you were friends with my mom and she asked you not to. So when I came, you didn't."

He doesn't even realize he's done it, this time. He's just not accustomed to having eyes that shut off with his mood.

Frisk's answer doesn't make any sense. Or that's what he thinks at first, until he remembers his own line of reasoning - the shattered flow of time that he remembers so clearly. Just because Frisk, at one point, seemed to be pulling the strings...it doesn't mean that this Frisk would know. Does it?

Are they even the same person.

A lot of this has seemed like a novel challenge up until this point - the first interesting thing to happen to him in perhaps his entire life. Yet, the more clearly he remembers certain things, the less it seems all that entertaining or fun. He looks away from Frisk, and back towards the door they just entered through, something eerie trailing through his mind.

"Not that time, I didn't," he says blankly, knocking his knuckles against the door as if in a daze. "...Who's your mom? How good a friend are we talking?"

He hates making promises in general. Making promises to friends is even worse.

Neither time is the answer that immediately springs to Frisk's mind. But they don't voice it. They're very good at not voicing things - there's a lot they've never told anybody, and the resets are at the top of that list.

Does Sans know?

He's always been weird, but they never seriously considered that he might actually know. They thought only Flowey remembered. Really remembered, not the kind of half-memories everyone else had and just as easily dismissed. Sans never said anything. He didn't even really act all that different the second time around, did he? They turn their head to stare uneasily at the empty bar. What else might he have known?

"I dunno." They pause for a second, weighing their words. "You only used to talk through the door - it was locked then. You didn't even know each other's names. But it was still important." It must have been. They remember finding Toriel's book of jokes in her room before they even knew what that meant, and Sans wouldn't have made a promise like that to just anyone. "You hang out a lot more now. Her name's Toriel. She's really tall and white."

After another moment of consideration, they add, "I guess she kinda looks like a goat."

He doesn't know much about white goats, but he does know the name Toriel. His non-existent heart sinks at the exact moment that name is spoken, and for that moment, it all feels so clear.

She'd been there. Only for such a short while, but she'd been there. When she left, he hadn't even really thought about it, at first. On to new places. He'd waved it all off. But now, he thinks about a door.

Dully, he raps his knuckles against the door and says:

"Knock knock."

Frisk turns to look at Sans again, canting their head to one side. That's right! He's got it!

...he seems sad.

There's a moment of silence as they thoughtfully drum their fingers against the edge of the chair. But in the end, there's really only one thing to say. "Who's there?"

"What, you forgot me already?"

The punchline is delivered with a melancholy, ironic kind of humour. It's more appropriate than he'd like to admit - on more than one level. He's forgotten a lot, it seems like. For some reason, the idea of it bums him out a lot more than it ever had in the waking world. He snickers sadly.

Then his pounds his fist against the door - once, heavily, as a show of frustration. And that's it.

"She was here too, y'know. Not here, I guess. Wherever I am. But she's not anymore."

That isn't funny.

Frisk forces a smile anyway, small and brief, before dropping their gaze to their feet again. The pounding makes them tense up, but they just as quickly realize it's not a threat and relax again. Whatever Sans says, getting attacked by him is the least of their worries. They don't think it'll happen; if it did, they'd handle it.

"She was?" Toriel hasn't left. They would have known. Except that they didn't know anything had happened to Sans either.

Well, she's safe now, anyway. Sans is not. "Are you still in New York?" New York, Americana, he said. It doesn't mean anything to them now, but they'll remember it. They can find out later. Maybe Toriel will know something.

It's totally funny. In fact, it's hilarious. Instead of melancholy, his grin becomes sharper, something hardened by spite. He still doesn't look at them.

"No. Moved to Vista City for this sweet record deal. Except...you never really expect some of the small print in these things, y'know? Pretty sure she didn't. Just another 'human,' like me."

His obviously distracted, his focus somewhere else even as Frisk prompts him for information. He can't stop thinking about Toriel. He can't stop thinking about her smile during the Music Fest, about her visiting his trailer, about how he never saw her again despite apparently knowing her for years. Unbelievable.

"Does anyone know where they go?"

"She's at home now." They don't offer it like a real answer. It's not. There's no way of telling if Toriel returned home from Vista City, or if she hasn't been yet, or even if that was some weird timeline of Flowey's now long gone. It's just the only thing they know about this, about her, right now.

They don't know enough at all about this. It's fine. They'll work it out like they always do.

Weird dreams are unfamiliar territory, so they're taking pains to make sure they remember what they need to. Apparently that consists of taking notes in their phone. It keeps them from having to watch Sans avoid looking at them too. "We'll come get you," they say, as casual as if they were promising to pick up a friend from school.

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☆RESCUER TEST DRIVE: DIGITAL LOVE

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