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ARRIVAL
Arrival Protocols
No explanation. No permission. One moment, you were living your life and the next, you were somewhere else. Between those two points: flickers of fluorescent light, the press of gloved hands, the distant hum of machines. You were restrained. Drugged. Something was inserted inside you and you don’t know what.
You might remember a voice, cold and urgent, demanding a choice. You had five minutes. Five minutes to sever a part of yourself: an eye, a tongue, a finger, whatever you choose. Refusal meant destruction of your home, your planet, everything you ever knew. The words made no sense, but the threat was clear. You might have said “yes.” You might have refused. Doesn’t seem to have made a difference, does it? Except you may be missing a piece of yourself, and the memory of losing it is vivid. Painful. Even if the wound is healed, that part of you is gone.
Or maybe you have a new weight added to your shoulders; the weight of a planet, its people. Your home. Just maybe you even have a secret. A mission. Sabotage and manipulate those who might call you friend.Phase One: Detachment
Everything familiar is gone. No family, no friends, no technology that works. You’ve been cut loose from whatever reality you knew and dropped somewhere entirely new... though “new” is generous. This place is old. Rotten. Like it’s been waiting.
Phase Two: Disorientation
You awaken fully on the side of a weather-beaten road. Clothes intact. Items gone. Skin itchy where the needle went in. You might feel watched. You might hear a soft buzzing just beneath the sound of the wind. There is no welcome sign. No map. Just the town ahead. And others, equally lost, crawling from the roadside dust.
Phase Three: Containment
The town offers no clear boundaries, and yet you can’t leave. Every direction out ends in an invisible wall, a force that refuses to let you go further.
Arrival Conditions
- Characters arrive without knowledge of who brought them or why.
- They retain broken memories of being drugged, restrained, and operated on.
- They recall being forced to make a brutal choice with a ticking clock.
- They do not know what was placed inside them, only that something was.
- Some characters will be quietly "chosen" for a secondary, hidden role.
The Traitors
A small number of arrivals were asked a different question. Not that they knew it at the time. For reasons unknown, strength, cruelty, luck, or sheer proximity... they were marked.
These individuals will be tasked with operating on the inside, pretending to be fellow test subjects while secretly sabotaging and making life worse for everyone.