bakerstreet | The Claustrophobic Horror Setting Meme

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The Claustrophobic Horror Setting Meme

1. Snowed In
Cabin fever, getting "toasty," going stir crazy - call it what you will, there's a special kind of madness associated with the winter months when the outside world is extra inhospitable, and, depending on the snowfall levels, sometimes inaccessible. Even being in a larger indoor space, like a military barracks or a scientific research base, does little to stave off the inevitable breakdown, and sometimes, it just makes it easier for people to become separated, and to mistrust each other if something terrible happens...

2. Space Ship
There's a cosmos of infinite promise out there, but getting there is mostly a trek through infinite darkness. Infinite darkness, however, is not empty: it's full of radiation, micrometeorites, rogue planets, rogue black holes, and a hard vacuum from which you are only separated by a few meters of steel and instrumentation at best. It's the ultimate hostile environment under the best of circumstances, and that's just assuming that you and your crew are still alone in your ship. Who knows what else has evolved means of traversing the vastness of space - perhaps even ones that don't play by the known rules of our reality, ones that might make them inimical to human sanity or existence.

3. Deep Sea Exploration
We know more about the surface of Mars than we know about the deepest parts of our own oceans. For whatever reasons, you've decided it's time to do your part to fix that; and while the alienness of the seafloor is not without its own appeal, it also poses hazards beyond just the crushing pressure and immense distance to the surface. There are an endless variety of unknown things living down there, ones that might be impossibly vast enough to crack your vessel in half, or ones that might be tiny enough to make their way into its water or air filtration systems and inflict ailments whose exact parallels have never been seen on the surface. Then, there are all the remnants of the Cold War and the two World Wars before it - all those ghost submarines still "on patrol," all the remains of nuclear, biologic, radiologic, and temporal weapons projects buried at sea to protect the world and their results from each other. There's no telling what you might encounter in the depths.

4. Oil Rig
Just because you're on the surface, that doesn't necessarily mean you're any less isolated. The kinds of high seas and storms that a large platform is built to weather can make immediate rescue impossible, if the sheer logistics of getting a vessel out to your position don't do that on their own. Whatever the black depths can throw up, you might just have to handle on your own.

5. Cold War Bunker
Those who say that it's impossible to fight and win on a nuclear battlefield are dead wrong - but, fortunately, that's something your country never had to prove. Now that the plans stemming from that concept are a mild national embarrassment rather than a necessity, you've become part of the drawdown team decommissioning those bunkers - or perhaps you've stumbled across one entirely by chance. Either way, the security measures on this place are just as strict as you'd expect from something designed for all-out MAD scenarios, and either you or one of your team has triggered a lockdown. It's only then that you discover, perhaps you're not alone, or perhaps there were experiments carried out in this bunker that are still hazardous...

6. Trapped Underground
There's a certain lure to going caving: the thrill of exploring spaces where few or no people have ever been before, observing unique geologic formations, or maybe even stumbling upon the remains of human proto-civilization - or maybe something not so human, and not as extinct as you thought. Or maybe you're exploring an abandoned mine, in search of thrills or abandoned equipment or the remains of whatever veins or deposits were extracted here that you might be able to sell for a little extra cash, unaware that the things that are in the earth beneath have been here for eons longer than mankind, and always resented being disturbed - and without the numerical superiority of the old days, you have nothing to protect you from their anger.

7. Topopathy
A topopathy is a malevolent, sentient spatial anomaly - like room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel, or the town of Silent Hill. There's no way out, the local geography makes no sense, the few doors that open lead to places you've already been or endless mazes of corridors... and this place is out for your blood. Whether you're sharing the space with impossible phantasms, or whether it's whispering terrible things into your head to try to make you turn your hand against yourself or your companions, your odds of escaping sane and whole are slim.

8. Universe 25
Everything is perfect here - it's 72 degrees F all the time, there's an unlimited supply of clean water and nutritionally complete food, and you get to see all your friends every day - all the time, in fact, because even the artificial sunlight can't disguise the fact that there's no way out, but the population density is still rising. And the worse the overcrowding gets, the more people are inclined to do crazy things...

9. Prison
You're trapped, in a space that might defy or coincide with one of the other categories, guarded by entities whose interests most strongly coincide with you never making it out alive. Whether it's a modern supermax, a World War II-era concentration camp, or a serial killer's elaborate murder maze, escape definitely isn't going to be easy, or perhaps even possible. All you can do is your time, and try to keep the time from doing you (in).

10. Time Loop
Why be claustrophobic in only three dimensions, when you can be stuck in a day, or a few hours, ahead of some horrific cataclysm that keeps repeating on loop? No matter how far you try to run, or how well you try to hide, there's no escaping the inevitable - as you've already found out, or perhaps you soon will. Maybe there's a way to fight your way out, to find whatever or whoever is responsible for this and put a stop to it, but how do you go up against something that can bend time itself? And what might happen if the outcome isn't as you anticipated?

11. 5150
You've been placed under an involuntary psychiatric hold, and it isn't because the attending thinks you might make an interesting case study, or because the orderlies have it in for you: the danger is completely within your own head - at least to begin with. How do you cope with confinement, overzealous interns who are trying a little too hard to help you, and whatever issues you actually came in with? Also, the building might just be incredibly old, with parts of it (hypothetically sealed off from patient access) unsafe, and it might actually be haunted, so there's that.

12. Possession
There's something inside your head that isn't you, and whatever it is, it's in charge, it's strong, and it doesn't want to let go. However bitterly you fight, the ruination of your life is just a hairsbreadth away - and you're starting to suspect it isn't even your own will tempering that outcome, but rather, the temporary entertainment of whatever is in there with you...

13. Choose Your Own Claustrophobia

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[being stuck for months on a small space ship is pretty much what he's trained for. Or he could be helping train cadets with that situation. Or we can timeline him up a little and have him already captured by the Galra and in prison. Open to cross-canon as well as canonmates]

[ Most interested in 3, 5, 11, but open to all options! ]

[ most interested in 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 12 ]

[ Most interested in 5, 7, and 9 but I'm super flexible. ]]

((7 and 9 are already his canon.))

Edited 2017-11-01 23:23 (UTC)

[Not interested in 4, 5, or 11. INCREDIBLY interested in 10 oh man.]

[How long has Ichigo been stuck in this time loop? Because it's one lasting about 16 hours, from 7 am until a little after 11 pm. Every time he dies in the fiery explosion that destroys this whole city, he wakes back up at 7 am of the same day.

Besides the different ways Ichigo interacts with them, the people in this city go about the exact same routine every single day. The only variation to the day is what Ichigo does, and his effects on people can be seen as a ripple of cause and effect. But still, they are unchanging and entirely unaware of the loop itself.

Until one day, someone shows up that should not be there. Because he has never been there before, or if he has then he has never been visible before. And unlike everyone else, he actually looks at Ichigo and sees him.]

[He hasn't counted the hours - if he did, he'd probably fall to despair.

Not that he wasn't close already.

At first, it had seemed like some sort of vision, even though his powers never included such an ability - a premonition he couldn't shake.

When was it when he realized that he was, in fact, living the same day over and over again? 100 hours? 10 days? 2 years?

At the very least, when he realized, he tried his best to break out of the cycle. Doing everything he could, trying everything from the absurd to the downright insane, trying to not only stop the loop but save the people in the city - the people who kept going how like they would, somehow unaware that the loop was happening.

Sometimes, he ended up in jail. Sometimes, he was shipped off to an institution. Every time, he sunk a little bit deeper into despair at that he couldn't change a goddamn thing, and he was the only one who knew what was happening.

This loop (number 1,300,459, if he was keeping track, an eternity of the same day), he decided to just...do nothing, except act as if it were normal, just like the last loop. Nothing would change, but nothing horrible would happen, either - beyond him sitting at night, staring at the clock as 11pm approaches, the sinking feeling of failure deep in his gut with every tick.

So when he notices something is different, he pauses - and feels his mouth run dry as he realizes what it means.

It doesn't take long for him to catch up to the person he saw, remembering the moment they looked at each other while he was walking past - and soon he's reaching out for the mysterious stranger, the person who he hadn't seen at all in the previous loops, someone who shouldn't be there-]

Wait! Wait! Please!

[When he's managed to stop in front of Watanuki, he's gasping - not from exertion, but from desperation - and it shows through in his voice.]

Who...How are you here?!

[Well, at least this made things easier. And here Watanuki thought he was going to have to spend a few 'days' searching for Ichigo in this mess of a city. Now he can get right down to business without having to deal with the mess of 'dying'. Even if death isn't permanent here- and even without the time loops Watanuki can't die anyway- he still feels that pain, and he would rather avoid that.

When Ichigo grabs for him, he manages to snag the sleeve of Watanuki's outfit. It's a rather nice-looking old fashioned garb of some sort, clearly out-of-place on someone who looks like they're 17 at the most, especially in a modern city like this one. But Watanuki does not react much to the grabbing, allowing Ichigo to hold onto him. It's proof that he is there, after all. Ichigo might need that after so many years of being alone.]

The 'how' is a bit complicated, but I can answer the unspoken 'why' for you: people miss you, Kurosaki Ichigo. They miss you, and they wished so loudly for your safe return that I was able to hear them across many dimensions. So here I am.

[This....is real.

This is real.

It's not an illusion or a hallucination, like when he imagined talking to...someone... being right there. Tricks his mind played with him over the hundreds of hundreds of thousands of years, when he wasn't busy being depressed or frantically trying to do something, anything to break the loop, until he'd slid into this dull acceptance at his existence in a day that would never even give him the relief of death. He even forgot anything before the loop, discarded everything that would hurt him because there was no more reason to torture himself and maybe, just maybe, if he acted like everyone else, one day he'd wake up without the knowledge of the loop in his head, and he'd be like the rest of everyone else in the city - blissfully unaware.

It's his first time talking to someone who's as aware as he is, and he begins to tremble even before Watanuki tells him why he's here.

People missed him?

That's right - there were people there once, weren't there? People who's faces have melted away into time, he can't really remember them, but...they were there. There was a life he lived before this, wasn't there?

How could he have forgotten that?]

Ah...aaah....

[Tears start falling down his cheeks without him even realizing it, flopping almost bonelessly to his knees but still keeping a deathgrip on watanuki's sleeve, the expression on his face inbetween disbelief, hope, and grief, before he shuts his eyes and starts wailing.]

[Luckily Watanuki is able to stand his own ground, so he's not pulled over by Ichigo. As noodly as he is, he can hold his own pretty well.

But while Ichigo starts to cry, Watanuki just reaches into his pocket with his free hand and pulls out a handkerchief, which he holds out for Ichigo. He's not going to berate Ichigo for crying, not after the hell of living thousands of years in an extremely short time loop. It's daunting for even Watanuki to think about, and he knows he will only be here for a few days at most.

Part of him feels bad, because unless some serious mind-erasure happens (something Watanuki does not like doing) then Ichigo is going to go home very damaged and broken. Either Watanuki is going to have to compromise on his 'no mind altering' rule, or he's going to have to refund some of the price that has already been paid.

He might be able to work out another option, though. He has a little bit of time to consider it.

Once it looks like Ichigo is starting to wind down with his crying, Watanuki will speak again.]

I can only imagine how terrible it's been for you here. But I need you to hold it together for a little while longer. I may be here to rescue you, but I cannot do it all by myself.

[YEP. Ichigo has to help rescue himself.]

( will avoid ragnarok spoilers/set beforehand unless otherwise requested. )

[Hey, interested in a Loki?]

( Definitely! )

[OOC: Okay, I rolled for Underground! Is that okay? I will set this before the events of Thor for simplicity's sake. If you want me to change anything, please do let me know!]

[It's dark in this place. Very, very dark, darker than the nights of Nornheim with its few, distant stars; darker than the devastated black ash of Svartalfheim; darker even than the primordial winters of Niflheim. This is blackness with a texture, blackness through which you not only can't see your hand in front of your face, but through which it seems obvious that you can't see your hand because the air itself is as thick and opaque as heavy textile. You might as well be the only person in the universe in this kind of dark. It's odd to know that it exists directly under the familiar, bustling halls of Asgard.]

Thor?

[The whispered word breaks the silence as completely as if it had been screamed. In a place this old and neglected, making any noise at all is like yelling profanity in a temple. But it's the familiar voice of Loki, only feet away. The way his voice is muffled attests to how small the space around them has become. The solid rock of Asgard's foundation is closing in around them.]

I think this passage is closing off as well. We should turn back.

[Canon point can vary, I prefer playing Keith from Seasons 3-4 but can work around anything. Will mark any spoilers for 4. No shipping, just testing the setting.

Not interested in 8, or 11, 12.]

Edited 2017-11-03 16:54 (UTC)

[If you asked him what lead to being on a dead in space ship he couldn't tell you. Or, he could try but it wouldn't make any sense and would sound like the unbelievable ravings of a mad man. Instead let us just accept that Komaeda found himself on this ship, and not soon after it stopped functioning. He wasn't surprised, in fact he had been expecting the worst.]

I wonder how long untill life support cuts out as well....

It's not going to. [Keith had ripped the panel off and pulled out a small scanner to get a better look at the circuits. Training had been teaching him how to do minor repairs. He frowns at the results and reaches for his belt. He can keep life support going.]

I've got it repaired. We need to make it up to the bridge to find out why the ship's power cut out.

For now.

[Anything coukd throw it out, electrical were delicate and micro particles coukd pass through physical objects easily. Really it was more amazing they didn't have more problems.]

If it's not a mechanical or software failure, it might be a hijacking.

This ship could have crashed into something too. We don't know enough yet. [He'd be fine on his own. But he can't leave a human stranger alone in an unknown ship. He can't think like a Blade this time. Keith turns off his mask and pulls his hood back.]

We need to see what supplies we can get our hands on. If there's any kind of damage to the hull along the way to the bridge. You'll need gear to survive it.

[He runs through the scan types on his scanner and adjusts it to a wider search. There's a suggestion of a way to go. The path from this room leads to an intersection and down. He needs to find an undamaged terminal to access a ship map from the backup power.]

Let's go. [He opens the hatch and floats through the gap landing on the hallway wall across from the doorway. Keith shifts to make room for Komaeda while glancing about for any threats.]

So endless possibilities await before us!

[Though he said it like something to celebrate he still managed to lather his words in sarcasm enough to drip down.]

How exciting.

[ He at least followed without protest.]

Edited 2017-11-04 21:06 (UTC)

[Keith only spares Komaeda a sharp look. He checks his scanner and uses the railing to guide his feet along the less damaged areas of the wall. The ship is utterly silent. It seems a bit like a trap but a human is here. The Galra Empire hasn't hit Earth.

Or have they?]

Keep a lookout. We don't want any surprises. [He eases himself to the edge of the hallway and leans out to see. Further down he can see a light. The intersecting halls have some markers but he can't read them...He glances back at Komaeda.] Do you remember how you got here?

I'm still playing through DA:I. I haven't done the DLCs yet, nor have I read the non-game materials yet. So keep that in mind plz.

There was something about the ruins they’d stumbled across in the Exalted Plains that put Iona on edge. At first glance it was nothing more than ancient elven ruins, of the sort they’d come across more than once before. But there was something... not quite right about them. As though someone had attempted to replicate elven ruins but wasn’t elven in any way and didn’t get some of the details quite right.

They were wrong, somehow, and it bothered her. And the longer they were there the more certain she was that they shouldn’t be there. They needed to leave. They desperately needed to leave. Despite her best attempts to keep the tension and the unease she was feeling from showing, she was fairly radiating it.

“We’ve been down this path before.” It was impossible, but it was the truth. They’d been here before.

"Shit, I think you're right," he groaned, looking around for the 837479424th time.

Just on cue, the walls started to ooze a little.

"Oh good, because this place wasn't creepy enough."

Oozing walls. Great. That was new. And both creepy and disgusting. “I. Hate. Our. Luck.” They were going to get out of this mess, hopefully avoid finding their way into any OTHER messes on their way back to Skyhold, and they were stealing some of Dorian’s wine and drinking this whole... experience away.

They just had to find their way out of the ruins, first.

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The Claustrophobic Horror Setting Meme

Shiro | Voltron: Legendary Defender | pre-Kerberos

Kara Danvers | Supergirl | OTA

Elizabeth | Bioshock Infinite (Burial at Sea) | OTA

Yu Kanda // D.Gray-Man

nadia | pandorum

Eren Jaeger | Shingeki no Kyojin

Tseng | FF7 | ota

Bruce Wayne | Batman | | OTA

Walter Sullivan | Silent Hill 4

Furiosa / Mad Max: Fury Road / ota

Ichigo Kurosaki | Bleach | OTA

TIME LOOP TIME LOOP

YEAAAAAAAAAAAH TIME LOOPS

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Wanda Maximoff | Marvel Cinematic Universe

thor odinson ⚡ mcu ⚡ ota

Re: thor odinson ⚡ mcu ⚡ ota

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Keith | Voltron: Legendary Defender | OTA

2

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Spoilers for season 4

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The Rat King | TMNT (2012)

Varric Tethras - Dragon Age (OTA)

7.

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