![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
premise.
We're sorry, your number could not be completed as dialed...
Your cell phone dropped a call. Your email bounced. A payment didn't go through. Your radio gets fuzzy. Somewhere along the way, lines got crossed, and crucial information vanished into the ether. What if the same thing could happen to you?
You may already know the universe doesn't work the way you thought it did. You've already woken up in a strange place. You tripped through time, slipped sideways into another reality, got drawn through a portal or abducted by a strange corporation or signed on for an adventure without reading the fine print. No matter what you did, whether you asked for it or not, you're a universe or two (or more) from home. Because the universe isn't just one place, it's a network, and you are just one signal of thousands, a blip that can be copied or rewritten. Maybe someone promised you that you could get back home. And maybe you could. But sometimes you send a fax and it doesn't go through. So where does it go?
And what if that fax was you?
No one knows the how or why of who ends up in the colony of Anchor. No one knows to which universe the planet it's stationed on originally belonged. It is just as out of place as you. Stuck in the same universal lost and found as everything else that disappears from one universe or another without a trace. All anyone really knows is that while the space around the planet, and the people on it, may blip in and out of existence, the planet itself remains the same. Tethered to the unknown. Is Anchor the center of the multiverse, or is it the cosmic junk heap? When it sucks people, places, and things in, can it spit them back out, or do they simply cease to exist on the other side?
Was your signal lost, or was your connection purposefully intercepted?
Part colony, part research facility, Anchor was built by those who came before you. The disappeared. Maybe they found their way home - or maybe they didn’t.
Maybe you'll survive long enough to find out.
about the game
REDSHIFT is a pan-fandom CRAU-focused survival game with elements of horror, set on an unnamed planet that exists in the dead space between universes. Player-driven and exploration focused, the colony of Anchor's facilities and story can be unlocked piece by piece through character actions.
Given the focus on CRAU, it's possible to find multiple versions of a single character in-game. Creatures, places, and things from other universes may also make appearances, temporary or permanent, by plot or player suggestion. The way things go is largely up to you.
Given the focus on CRAU, it's possible to find multiple versions of a single character in-game. Creatures, places, and things from other universes may also make appearances, temporary or permanent, by plot or player suggestion. The way things go is largely up to you.
no subject
The planet itself was a natural occurring phenomenon, observed by a highly technological alien race from a distance until a war between their population and another broke out, and it was felt the planet could be used to their advantage.
The planet's tactical value lay primarily in its position in the 'centre' of so many galaxies. Aassuming that if the planet was able to suck people, places, and things in from other worlds, it could spit them back out to a tactical advantage and provide them with valuable resources that could help combat their enemies.
As an 'academic' people whose primary focus was on science and knowing the secrets of the universe, the race itself did not believe in war, or at least in participating in said wars. If they were going to protect their vast resources and technology from their enemies without getting their own hands dirty, they would need soldiers to do the fighting for them, while they safely avoided combat in a galaxy far, far away.
After several failed attempts to lock onto the location of the planet, resulting in much sacrifice, they finally managed to get significant resources and manpower onto the planet's surface. They used these resources to build several scientific research, protected from the shifts by special forcefields. Each of the research facilities had a specific purpose - the first to recruit, the second to research, the third to train, and the fourth to act as a hub between worlds for their manufactured military to operate from.
The process was 'simple.' Open the gateway to other worlds, timelines, and universes. Take stock of the available resources and residents. Research their abilities. Test them. Make the selection. Those who don't make the cut are funneled into different service positions and rewarded for their contributions to the cause, those who are rebellious, or deemed unfit for duty are 'recycled.'
What no one expected was for those who died in testing, or who were culled to make room for more promising subjects, to come back through the portal. Sometimes with with different abilities, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, sometimes from an entirely different time, or with no memory.
They also didn't expect their subjects to be their undoing.
When it looked like they were on the cusp of discovering the portal's secrets, a rebellion broke out across the colonies. Subjects who were able to communicate to one another telepathically planned to escape their captors, or take them down with them. Some escaped, many were killed. A few were recaptured. And with that recapture came their prisoner's true revenge: a plague brought back from the shift, which wiped out most of every colony, except for those few unlucky enough to wander undead, waiting until the day the colony collapsed for their bodies to wither and decay into the planet's red sands.
Unwilling to risk more when they had already lost so much, the alien academics abandoned the project, and left the colonies to rust. Anyone who was unlucky enough to be pulled through the portal lived a short, lonely life before they starved alone, were killed by one of the shift's many dangers, or sought more permanent ends to their suffering.
A hundred or so years later, a new group of people were unfortunate enough to discover Anchor. These were intrepid explorers who, in another lifetime, might have starred in a TV show full of suspiciously attractive sci-fi characters. However this group, while photogenic, were not quite as lucky.
Their ship was pulled through a shift mid-warp, crashing directly into the planet. They sought shelter in the Colony 1, the 'recruitment' colony, and with their numbers and native technology, were able to survive, and even thrive, while trying to piece together the colony's origins and purpose. They turned what was once a manipulated environment of forced cohabitation into something like a home, and welcomed whoever came through the gate as both a citizen and comrade of Anchor, led by the noble and righteously hot Captain Sidra Able.
Day-to-day life was spent securing Anchor from outside threats, supporting their newfound community, and making the best of a shitty, dangerous situation almost entirely beyond their control. Any additional energy was spent poring over incomprehensibly coded data, attempting to make rhyme or reason of the colony, its purpose, and their seemingly random imprisonment, or contributing to the creation and construction of the explorer's biggest priority - a way out.
That way out relied on the preservation and repair of their homeship and only escape route, the CGS Apogean. After two decades, the Apogean was as ready as it would ever be for launch, and all of Anchor, no matter where they were from, ranging in ages from the now elderly captain to the colony's newest additions, a set of infant twins born to colonists from different galaxies who found love against all odds, in the most dangerous of places.
It should have been a success. The Apogean was airtight. The crew was experienced. They were supported by a powerful AI capable of maintaining the ship in difficult times. The hopes of most, but not all, were high. The Apogean flew high and true, pierced the sky, and...was shaken to its core upon hitting the solar winds around the planet, the radiation skewing every instrument, computer, and warping the minds of the people aboard it. The Apogean took months to slowly fall from orbit, spiraling its way downward while the atmosphere tore at its shields and then its hull, the people inside slowly losing their minds, starving and poisoned by radiation until they were little more than animals attacking each other and struggling to survive.
Eventually, the ship and its crew, the entirety of the second population of Anchor, was lost to the sands - at least until it would reappear again, decades later, as a mere ruin for the colony's latest inhabitants to explore.
What the original creators of Anchor and her sister cities would have called-
No one knows how or why the portal became active again, or to what purpose, but it could have something to do with a resurgence of another war in a higher, more evolved universe.
And that's where you come in.
Whether you break the cycle of tragedy, or contribute to it is up to you.
And to the Shift.