lostcarnival | ⇨ THE GAME CUBE

Who: Everyone who gets caught in the game.
When: Day 97
Where: Hellbound Hallows, the game inside of a cube inside of a city inside of a computer.
What: On Day 97, a massive Game Cube drops on the city of Mainframe, forcing those caught inside to fight against the User for their lives. This log is 100% Hellbound Hallows gameplay. Plotting deets are here.
Warnings: Diablo-esque violence, characters dying, and edgy video game aesthetic gore.

HELLBOUND HALLOWS↴
The Game Cube drops close to the entrance of the carnival - so much so that it will end up pulling a lot of people from it in, out of sheer terrible luck. Alternatively, your character may have seen it coming down and understood what allowing the programs to fail would mean, dashing in to be caught beneath it out of sheer heroism. Maybe you entered the game for some reason in between.

Either way, once the walls of the Cube have passed you, you'll find yourself in a new reality. You find yourself somewhere in the levels of a dungeon crawling game with a dark aesthetic. Some binomes and sprites from the city have been pulled in with you, and all oft them know what to do. It's time to Reboot.

Use the icon button the Ringmaster gave each of you. Tap it twice and say "Reboot", and you'll be able to assume your new form. Maybe it's useful, maybe it's not, but it's probably better than nothing. Probably.

Now, figure out where you fit in to the structure of setting, and wait for the Game to begin.

► LEVEL ONE: Level one is where the Users will enter. With a cold blue aesthetic, it appears to be some manner of underground fortress, filled with many hallways and grand archeways. In a standard game, the enemies here would be theoretically the easiest to defeat, but you are under no obligation to follow those rules. Level one is ruled over by Sora, rebooted into the form of a vampiric overlord. He must be defeated in order for the Users to gain access to level two.

► LEVEL TWO: The colour pallet shifts to purple here, the corridors becoming darker and only lit with scattered braziers and the occasional stream of lava. Banners and tapestries depicting some hellish god line the walls. The traps here are primarily fire based, with lava traps or geysers of flame becoming more common. Level two is ruled over by Yamato, who has rebooted into the form of a fiery hellbeast. He must be defeated to access level three.

► LEVEL THREE: As the colours shift into a sickly green, the Users will reach the final level. The architecture is shaped based on the screaming faces of the damned, and the rooms are large and dramatic, filled with vast obelisks and deep chasms. Subterranean plant life haunts the floors and shadows of this place, and poison traps become deadly and common. Level three is ruled over by the man Gongenzaka, the final boss of of the game. If he is defeated, the Users have won. Do not let this happen.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A stone coffin, propped up against a nearby wall, will push itself open from the inside, slowly revealing a terrifying mummified corpse! Lol jk it's just Sans wrapped in bandages, his body indistinctly melded into the case in a way that prevents him from moving anything but his upper half. It's cool, though. So far he's just been chillin'.

"Eh, it's not so bad," he says, making it obvious that this is Sans if it wasn't already. "You just gotta... think outside the box a little."

They are definitely all going to die.

Edited 2017-05-10 04:07 (UTC)

"I suppose I should treasure the experience?" Strange is still grumpy, still a bit put out about the whole 'I am suddenly a fake treasure chest that doesn't have hands' bit...but wordplay is lightening up his mood a little, even if it's just puns. And besides, this is Sans. He's at least got to make an attempt at a terrible joke!

"Honestly, I'd rather change forms with yours. At least you have hands." This is apparently the sticking point, not the fact that Strange is now a sentient walking fake treasure chest without an actual face, but the fact that he doesn't have hands in the first place.

Sans chortles in appreciation. Really, his face looks no more creepy than normal from what can be seen through the sagging bandages - kind of like the skeleton is wearing a sort of ironic halloween costume.

"Excuse you, chest mimicks are a noble species." No joke, there is probably a type of monster in Sans's world that looks similar to that. "I figure we've got it made, pal. We don't gotta do a thing but wait here for the Users to make their own mistakes."

Sans is already aware of what his attack would mean for the clumsy User. He's kind of excited to see if he gets a chance to do it. He'll worry about the imminent risk of serious death later.

Still not knowing all that much about Sans's world, Strange assumes he's joking about chest mimicks. As such, he rolls his eyes, which looks very weird as they're just sitting in the middle of the black void that is the inside of the mimic chest. Thankfully, Strange has no idea just how odd he looks.

The problem with sitting and waiting is that it involves waiting. Jonathan Strange is good at many things but being patient is not one of them.

"Truth be told, I'd rather go out there and seek out the Users myself. At least that way, we'd all get out of this faster."

Its very odd but, thankfully, not that odd to Sans's eyes. It is weird thinking about it in terms of how Strange is usually a human, though. That's some serious bodyhorror right there. I'm a poorly rendered box, but I must scream.

"Hate to say it, but you might be playin' against your strengths there, Strange. Which kind of box are you more likely to open - one that's sitting around looking inanimate, or one that's coming to say hi to you?"

Yeah, Strange straight up is not getting any of that body horror, partly because he's just a bit of a lunatic, partly because the digital world barely makes any sense to begin with, this is just another thing in the long line of things that he doesn't understand but everybody is taking as perfectly normal.

The problem now is that Sans has a point. He can't just walk right up to somebody. A treasure box sitting in an abandoned corridor would be suspicious enough, a moving treasure box in an abandoned corridor is most definitely bad news.

"Well I'm not going to simply sit still and wait for people to show up!" Mostly because he knows he's rubbish at sitting still and waiting to begin with. "There must be a middle ground."

"Uh." Like, you're really over-complicating things here, Strange. Though, this is probably some kind of metaphor for their differences in personality. "Like what?"

He's just going to leave room here for Strange to vocally strategize, because he's honestly fascinated by whatever the human might come up with.

What happens when a skeleton that's all chill and a magician with no chill try to come up with a battle plan? Chaos, probably. And a lack of an actual plan.

"I suppose I'll explore the dungeon and stop moving when I hear anyone approaching. After all, there can't be that many Users, can there?" It's a big dungeon but it's still an enclosed dungeon. If there were too many Users in here, none of them would be able to get anything done and the dungeon would be too crowded. It makes sense, in theory.

"Pretty sure there's four," Sans says, after a moment. "But sure, I guess. If you've really got that many ants in your pants when why not chase the Users around."

He shrugs.

"Figurative pants of course. Since you're a box right now."

About that whole box thing....

"You and Papyrus would know about this sort of thing, right?" They're skeletons, this dungeon is full of skeletons, Sans made that joke about chest mimicks, it kind of makes sense. (Strange, that's prejudiced, not all skeletons know about monsters). "I honestly can't believe I'm asking this, but have you ever met any boxes before?"

He has no idea how to be a box in the first place. He's got moving. And talking. And...probably he can do something with this disgusting tongue of his? And really, that's about it, Strange is unsurprisingly hopeless.

"Uh, yeah. Pretty much," he says, and if he's offended he doesn't make it obvious. (He's not.) "Monsters come in all kinds of forms, and some of them are sort of inanimate looking, except for the part where they're not. Not that I'm exactly immersed in their culture or anything."

He leans back in his coffin. Hopefully Strange has enough time to sort this out because the Users get in here in time to murder him mid babble.

"Monsters all use magic as easy as breathing, though, so if you can't do that here then what I know of 'em probably doesn't apply. Except for the part where they stand really still and wait for people to bother them."

Well this is Strange, so the likelihood that he'll get murdered by the Users no matter what is pretty high. Still, he lets out a small 'hmm' as he stills, thinking things over.

"I can't access my magic in the Mainframe to begin with, let alone in the game. Standing still might be the only similarity."

Which really ticks him off and makes him hate the Internet even more. Why would this stupid game turn him into something where he couldn't use his magic and needed to remain calm in the first place?!

"Guess we all need a lesson in being humble once in a while, huh?"

Sans does not sincerely hold that opinion about this at all, honestly, and is pretty much just saying it to see if Strange will flip out. Like, whether this game is fair or not, as humans go he's extra cocky, which is saying a lot because humans are just so obnoxious in general.

Some humans are especially obnoxious, case in point, this guy. Strange just laughs as Sans mentions a lesson in humility, a short bitter laugh before he starts bitching and moaning.

"Humble? No, this isn't 'humbling' by any means, there's nothing humbling about me being denied my magic. It's inconvenient, needless, and absolutely horrible." His tone is tight and tense, as if he's just about ready to go on a rant about how this place is awful, the experience is degrading, he doesn't even have arms, and so on and so forth.

"You can't even move by yourself! How is that humbling?"

⇨ THE GAME CUBE

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