masked_god | [locked to Q]

hands touching-touching-touching. darkness. pain. don't leave, don't wake. isn't it easier this way? Karakael started, biting down a scream. Nearly a millennia later, and he still had nightmares. But no, he wasn't eight any longer. He struggled for a moment, breaking himself from the light doze he was in.

He sat in the control room of Karuns thinkhive. He had 'slept' here for the past few weeks, after finding it to be one of the few real places on the world. But now...even the thinkhive was beginning to malfunction. It no longer could connect him to the 'internet'. And he hadn't been able to contact Uran S'Varek, even to inform Lady Vara he was alive. The situation was becoming worrying.

He stood and stretched, then adjusted the silver mask. Though he had stopped wearing them ages ago, here one was permanently fixed to his face. It really didn't surprise him. It was just another facet of this 'worst fear virus' that the community had been babbling about.

He strode through the empty corridors of the planetary computer, looking for something anything new. His options were almost gone. Without the internet he could no longer contact the outside world. Without his abilities he could not escape by himself.

Yet if the solution was to overcome his worst fear...that had happened ages ago. And though the first few weeks he had spent on Karun had been painful, this feeling of powerlessness was wearing on him much more than the nightmare made real.

He had fueled his resolve with anger at the being that had inflicted this half-life on him, but even that anger was wearing thin, strung out over the months of waiting.

A door rumbled open in the upper palace. Karakael blinked, and followed the sound. Though he hated going out in the city, something was changing. Maybe it would offer a way out.

Karuns main city was quite different than when Karakael had last visited it. It still had the massive towers of grav-coasters, and the huge, sloping government buildings. Throngs of people still coursed through the streets. But instead of solid, flesh and blood, the people and buildings now held a ghostly luminescence. They shifted and eddied as he passed, sometimes walking directly through him, never noticing his presence.

Karakael stood on the steps of the palace, watching the city change. None of it was 'real'. But that didn't matter. All that did was the rumble of the doors behind him, signaling that something new was coming.

[[Not my best work, but I figured that would be a good set up. Karun was a pleasure planet during the High Inquest, and Karakaels homeworld. Gravcoasters are amusement park rides, and thinkhives are computers that ran almost everything in Inquest. Servocorpses are reanimated human corpses, used for almost any job a programer can think of. (Such as the Theater of Dark Fantasy, otherwise known as necrodrama.)

At the moment Karakael is stuck between two universes, and is experiencing a seriously disturbed reality. He can't touch most things, and is living the same day over and over again. His nifty ability to travel through the overcosm is no longer functioning. Basically, hes in a lot of trouble.

Q-mun all you have to do is have Q show up. Karakael will explain the rest.]]