bakerstreet | Dollhouse AU

Welcome to the Dollhouse

The Dollhouse. It's luxurious. It's beautiful. Enough so to remind any visitor of a spa: there are little ponds, arranged rocks, sliding doors that disguise massage facilities, gyms.

But the Dollhouse isn't a vacation spot. It's a twisted, high-brow brothel.

Inside, the Actives, blank, erased, and docile. Their handlers, charged with protecting the Dollhouse's assets. The programmers, who create whole new personalities to imprint on their blank slates.

And outside: the clients, ready to pay for people made to their exact specifications.

HOW IT WORKS:
1) Comment with your character and their canon in the subject line, and any preferences on roleplaying in the comment itself. (You can use this opportunity to select a role for your character.)
2) Comment around on other characters, select a role and perhaps use the RNG to select a situation!

THE ROLES
1) Active - For some reason, you have signed away years of your life to be someone else's fantasy. Paying debts? Running away from something? Or were you forced into this life?
2) Handler - It's your job to keep the Actives healthy and happy. Their life and their well being rests in your hands, and they're more helpless than a child before you.
3) Head of the Dollhouse - You keep the whole thing running. Negotiate with the clients, approve the jobs, and make sure all the financial items stack up.
4) Client - You're here to have your fantasy come true, or to buy the perfect tool for the job.
5) Doctor, programmer, attendant, security or other Dollhouse personnel - Your job is secrecy, or it's to heal the Actives when they come back from their engagements, or it's to pick out costumes and props or create the imprints themselves or work on technology.
6) Other - maybe you're the hero charging in to the rescue, or the detective investigating rumors of this underground slave house. Maybe you're something completely different - this one's a wild card!

THE SITUATIONS
1) In the Dollhouse - a yoga class, a carefully prepared meal, a massage, arts and crafts time, or heading down to sleep. Maybe they're coming back from an engagement or heading out on one. Maybe they're new here.

OPTIONAL HIJINKS:
- Security breach! Everyone go into lockdown, we have intruders.
- Staffing problems: Maybe a handler's abusing the actives, or there's a mole in the Dollhouse. Either way, someone's going to get fired.
- Injury: Someone got wounded on their last engagement.
- Bleedthrough: Perhaps two Dolls remember each other, despite having their minds wiped. Perhaps a Doll is speaking of things that happened to them before they were here. Either way, there's a problem.
- Nightmares: They should feel safe in the sleeping pods, but sometimes the subconscious has other ideas. Hopefully there's another Doll or a handler there to comfort them.

2) On an engagement. The Active's been imprinted, and it's time to take them to the client.

TYPE OF ENGAGEMENT:
- A romantic engagement: Who are you - a student, a rich prince, a motorcycle enthusiast, a dominatrix?
- An illegal engagement: The perfect burglar, or assassin, or thug.
- An altruistic engagement: You're there to read books to kids in a hospital, or to assist the Red Cross, or to reform a soup kitchen.
- Other: Could be a chef, or a wedding planner, or a security consultant. Maybe a doctor or midwife. Maybe something truly off-the-wall, like an ancient barbarian or a specific historical figure. Sky's the limit!

OPTIONAL HIJINKS:
- Disaster: the Active is lost/kidnapped/trapped.
- Programming Flaw: an unforeseen personality trait surfaces, or the programmed life has some unexpected drawbacks.
- Successfully completed: the Active now needs to come away, relax, and get taken back to the Dollhouse.
- That was NOT according to plan!: the Active goes off-book.
- Who's watching?: The handler is killed or incapacitated. What happens to the Active?

3) Becoming a Doll - Someone's selling away five years of their life. Why? What happens?

OPTIONAL HIJINKS:
- Forced: It's not your choice. You have to sign away your life.
- Willing: All you want to do is escape.
- Last moments: What do you do with your last few moments as yourself?
- The grand tour: What do you think of all those empty Dolls everywhere?

4) Returning to civilian life - Your tenure as a Dollhouse Active is over. You've lost five years of your life. What's next?

OPTIONAL HIJINKS:
- Do you meet another doll? Do you recognize them?
- Memories begin to surface. Memories that aren't yours.
- Someone on the street recognizes you, but you don't know who they are.

5) Apocalypse - Everything is Jossed all to hell. Dollhouse technology is loose and it's destroyed the mind as we know it. Only the Actives are safe.

OPTIONAL HIJINKS:
- Same brain, new body: You've transferred yourself to a new body, so as to live longer.
- Mindless: One of your friends has become mindless and feral.
- Sanctuary: You've built a town in the midst of the ruins.
- Reset Button: Time to put everyone's mind back the way it was - but at a price. No one will be able to remember what happened since the apocalypse. Is it worth it?

6) Other - Wild card! Any other situation you'd like to explore.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

[Active or handler-who-used-to-be-an-active are most likely, maybe also a client, possibly the team is looking into the Dollhouse in regards to a case?]