bakerstreet | The Normal Meme

The Normal Meme

The Brought Down To Normal Meme

You are normal. Utterly normal. There are no superpowers in your life, no magic, no action movie fight scenes, no spaceships or dramatic battles between good and evil. The last exciting thing that happened to you was getting a free coffee with your tenth Starbucks purchase. And yet something seems a little...off.

Mental Status:
1. Taken In Completely: You've never been anything really special, you're sure of it. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is obviously a crazy person.
2. A Sense of Unease: You don't feel comfortable in your own life, but you can't figure out why. Maybe you just need to go on vacation and shake that wanderlust off your shoulders--it can't be anything more meaningful.
3. Strong Suspicions: You keep getting flashbacks to a life you once knew and memories you can't completely recover. The picture's not complete, not yet, but somehow you know things aren't how they should be.
4. WTF Is This?: You remember everything about your old life, but nobody around you will believe you. Will you break free of the illusion, or is a peaceful illusion better than a harsh reality?

Normal-Inducer:
1. The Matrix Has You: You're locked in a dream machine that's created an alternate reality for you to live in. A boring one.
2. Reality-Warping: Someone's changed the universe to be more to their tastes, and you along with it.
3. Pulled a Brazil: Your real life is so horrific that your mind has retreated into something more banal. The best place to hide is in-sanity.
4. Please Wake Up: You've gotten yourself into a coma and for lack of anything better to do you've made up an entire world for yourself to live in.
5. Hypnosis: The world's the same, but your mind's been altered to make you think you're nothing but a mere dull mortal.
6. Wildcard

Post your name/canon, write out a brief scenario for your normal character, then RNG or pick an option to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. The other poster can be a part of the illusion, the cause of the illusion, or someone who's been sent in to yank you back out.

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[Billy's dreams seem to come in two types.

In the first he's on a stage, singing to a cheering crowd. In green and purple and it's always green and purple, that's very important, and his voice commands the mob. Those are the nice dreams.

In the second there are wires and cold metal restraints. Someone is holding him down and he's screaming but no sound comes out of his mouth and there's the feeling of something drilling right into the back of his head before he wakes up in a cold sweat. Those dreams he could do without.

Out in the real world he's a struggling singer/theater geek squeaking by with the occasional background part while he pays the bills waiting tables at a restaurant. He wants a little glory, sure, but he doesn't expect he'll be a star anytime soon. Billy struggles through life, aimless, chasing that shining carrot constantly dangled but never delivered.

When his mind wanders on the bus, he finds he's drawn double-notes all over his sketchpad.]

[Scenario 1. Mental Status: 3, Normal Inducer: Please Wake Up]

John Marston is dead. Or at least, that's what he thought. He's awakened in another world, only now he's just a simple rancher like he always intended. There are no guns and the worries of being found by his old gang or the law are far away concerns. You are his wife or kid in this scenario, but he already knows something is wrong. A man doesn't have scars like these.

[Scenario 2. Mental Status: 4, Normal Inducer: The Matrix Has You]

Roaming around Texas has made him a lot of enemies. Some of them with means more potent than others. In this scenario, a witch doctor has placed Marston under a spell as a means of punishing him. In this new reality, John Marston is a factory worker out east in one of the big cities. Only he immediately knows this isn't right, but no one else does. You are also trapped in this dream and in a similar situation. Once the two of you meet up, then maybe you'll be able to figure things out and escape.

Edited 2012-12-06 19:32 (UTC)

[Scenario 1. Mental Status: 4, Normal Inducer: Reality Warper]

Odin has many ways of punishing Thor when he causes trouble. A subtle change of reality is a perfectly valid way to do it. In this scenario, Thor has been dropped into a normal High School where, against all odds, he is a member of the drama club and supposedly a straight As student. Naturally this is a horrible fit for him. You're a fellow high school student. Maybe you were a part of the reality change or maybe some twist of fate has left you in the same situation as Thor.

[Scenario 2. Mental Status: 2, Normal Inducer: Hypnosis]

On of his enemies, in an attempt to get rid of Thor, has him hypnotized and sent to Earth. Now, as far as he knows, he's just a regular guy. However things are starting to be a bit peculiar. After all, he's ripping doors off walls and displaying inhuman levels of strength. He has no idea what's going on, but he's convinced he ought to be normal. You have the special task of helping him realize who he really is.

Edited 2012-12-06 19:41 (UTC)

Billy's having trouble keeping his head up. His sleep has been very restless these last few...he can't remember when they haven't been, actually. The music in his dreams keeps waking him up.

Unlike Thor he's perfectly acclimated to the drama club, almost annoyingly so. He's dying for the spotlight and never seems to achieve it. Even in this pointless mundanity to which he has been sentenced, for crimes he can't remember committing, he is denied his glory.

The club's just disbanded and Billy's curled up on the stage to get a bit of English homework in before his mom picks him up. With his eyelids sliding closed his writing shifts into idle doodling. Double notes, again and again, stretching crudley across the lines of the page and melding together into the letters MM.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Elizabeth 'Buffy' Marston couldn't recall where she'd heard those words, but they floated back to her now as she gently tucked dough into an unforgivingly heavy and solid pie plate. She thought on the nature of apple pies and universes and -- indeed -- of invention for a while longer while she weighted down the crust. She knew the pie had to be finished before sundown or else...

Or did she have some other goal? Some other household task to complete? She stood up straight and brushed flour from her blouse, eyeing up the distant fences that marked the edge of John Marston's ranch. Their ranch. Her lips twitched into a smile; she whirled away from the window and checked on the stove.

And somewhere very far away -- on a distant and separate plane of consciousness -- a frontier-bound Slayer shared a coma dream with a man that should be dead but whose life she hoped to save. So long, of course, as she could remember her mission.

But for now, the only mission in her mind was efficient and systematic apple-peeling. Buffy grabbed a paring knife from the worn, hand-fixed counter and spun it expertly in her hand. Knife skills had always been a strength of hers, whether they were kitchen-based or else out on the ranch, helping her husband skin any manner of critter caught by snare or rifle. She was proud of her strengths. Her small, peaceful life. Her family -- or the family they would have. Eventually. Soon. It was another mission, of sorts.

But for the immediate moment, it was just her and her apples and a universe to invent.

Edited 2012-12-06 20:50 (UTC)

Odin definitely has gotten some kind of knack for giving similar punishments to those who wrong him. It's because of that, a clash between Odin and a being known as the Avatar, that suddenly Thor has a new best friend named Aang.

Same school bus, same drama club, just not as good grade-wise. This morning starts as any other. Aang steps up in his casual attire, with a red headband wrapped around his brown hair, and he greets his pal as his locker as he opens his own adjacent one. "Ready for another day?"

[ooc: mental status 4, open for any scenario!]

[Oswin knows better than to try and shatter illusions by this point, but she's not too sure how much more of this she can take. She's just not cut out for normality, not in the slightest. And being stuck on a college campus isn't helping things.

Asking around's helped, though, and she was quickly able to figure out how to blend in without too much trouble. If anyone asks, she's Clara Oswald, the most average of college students just trying to get by on a day to day basis.

But, she does have an awful habit of sneaking up to the roof every night and searching the stars for blue boxes. But, it's totally normal. Really.]

Edited 2012-12-06 21:45 (UTC)

Scenario 1 - Mental Status: 2; Normal Inducer: Please Wake Up

Aang has suffered a particularly brutal defeat, which has left him in a deep coma, but a very special Spirit World kind. He dreams of a different life - a simple and restrained one. He is a young farmhand living in the Earth Kingdom, with no bending abilities whatsoever. He's never been bald, never had tattoos; wears the simple green of an Earth Kingdom peasant... plus an old headband, just because it felt right. He lives his life according to a rigid schedule that leaves no time for fun or games. And today is one of the most important days in his schedule, when he has to take his ostrich-horse-drawn wagon of crops and livestock over to town to sell. Being 14, he's now old enough to take the trip himself. It's a simpe responsibility in a simple area of the Earth Kingdom, where the Avatar is some old tale that the world outgrew long ago, and war is practically unheard of.

Even so, with all of this, there's something Aang looks forward to one these days where he goes to the village. He likes to take just a few minutes to himself to step over to the docks, look out to the ocean and just feel the breeze. Something about it just feels relaxing in a therepeutic way. And it fills him with some strange longing that he cannot define for the life of him.

Could another be part of this strange world for him? Or is there a way that others can enter this dream, perhaps with the aid of some secret spiritual techniques passed down by the likes of Iroh or The Guru, in order to wake this boy up to himself?

Scenario 2 - Mental Status: 1; Normal Inducer: Other can choose

Who knows how? But here's Aang as a normal 14 year old student in an Earth high school. It's a fairly standard teenage life. He has a nice, average family. His main problems are passing this math test, getting ready for the big track meet and getting ready to ask a potential sweetie out to prom. Everything seems normal and right.

Too normal and right.

[ooc: Just a small note - Aang has hair and no tattoos in all scenarios (unless someone requests such for the second scenario depending on the inducer) but I'll still use icons where he's bald for a wider choice along with my few hair icons.]

Ralph has gone through one of two game-changers:

Scenario 1 - Mental Status: 2; Normal Inducer: The Matrix Has You or Reality-Warping

Ralph now has a ho-hum job as an English teacher in a public high school. It's a boring, dreary lifestyle. It's very rare that kids respect or even cooperate with him at all. A lot of them are busy plaing video games, something which makes Ralph irrationally angry. Most wind up failing his class, which is chalked up to incompetence on the teacher's part. At this rate, Ralph will never earn tenure and be cost his job. Sometimes things seem so... frustrating. So wrong. He wants to let out all this anger bubbling inside him. Part of him just wants to wreck everything. But he remains calm and patient with them. For now, he's stuck playing the wrong game.

Scenario 2 - Mental Status: 4; Normal Inducer: The Matrix Has You or Reality-Warping

Ralph knows. He knows everything's wrong, but no one can see. He's supposed to be a video game character! In a video game! But no one believes him. No one can show him the way home. Instead, he spends his time at the closest thing he can find to a stump in the city, a dumpster in an alley near an arcade. He already tried entering the arcade and trying to force his way into one of the games, only to be forcibly ejected from the premises. Ralph will need to find someone to believe him - some way to get home - soon. Or he could find himself with a game over.

[Mental Status: 3. Otherwise, open to all]

[Ryou had been inside of his soul room for a very long time now. The Spirit had taken full control over him, using his body for his own selfish needs. Ryou himself was stuck inside of the cursed ring, his own soul departed from his body. He can barely remember what it was like to be alive anymore.]

[However, his mind has flashes of his previous life, the one where he was supposedly alive. Most of it is just blurring together now. He wishes that it would all stop. He didn't want to exist anymore. Why do these flashes keep happening? He was okay with living here, why do those flashes keep haunting him?]

[Girl version also available:

whitewizardgirl]

Edited 2012-12-06 23:43 (UTC)

Intellectually speaking, Alice is a good student. She's sharp, she's creative, and she's quite the avid reader when she wants to be. On the other hand her anger control problem is far worse than that of the professor and it's a miracle she hasn't been suspended yet. The other students tend to avoid her.

She does what she can to keep herself afloat. Today she's taking lunch in Ralph's room, reading her Shakespeare in the corner. The new round of pills she's on aren't making her as drowsy as the last set, and she finds it easier to keep attention on her work. The last set was so annoying that she kept not taking them at all...which hadn't been good for anyone that week.

[The world she lives in seems suspiciously...grey. As if something has reached in and sucked all the interest, all the depth, all the flavor right out of it. She cannot shake the nagging sense that something is wrong, but she has yet to realize what. And it's never crossed her mind what might be wrong isn't the world around her but her.

She has memories of times and places she never could've possibly been, but they seem far too vivid to be the imaginings based on a book or a TV show. And at night sometimes she dreams that she is something other than human, hunting in the night with venom and claw. It all seems so real.]

3 strong suspicions; 2 reality warping
Aradia Megido is a perfectly ordinary fourteen year old girl. She lives on the outskirts of the suburbs with her single mother and spends a lot of her time outdoors, going on walks or star-gazing. School is nearly an hour away by bus, since she's one of the furthest stops on the route, but she can always read during the ride, or talk to a seatmate.

Her life is fairly uneventful. And aside from a penchant for action-adventure films and books and an interest in roleplaying games of the tabletop and live action variety, adventure is something that is lacking from her life. Except in dreams; dreams that are almost but not quite memories, or moments where she'll think something that makes no sense in the context of her life. It's an unsettling feeling, to look up at the sky and remember constellations that just aren't there.

For the most part she doesn't mind. She doesn't force the memories, and while she sometimes remembers things about the people in her life that haven't happened in this place, she's more or less happy. Just wistful.

[ Catch her on the bus to school, at school, or on an outing to a local museum, staring at fossils. Or maybe you message her online?

Alternately, choose your own scenario; Aradia will have a 3 mental status in any of them. ]

The Spirit World does and does not follow the flows of time; it's a place outside of the world. And when the Avatar dreams, the Spirit World almost dreams with him. Figments aren't quite figments - one of the denizens of the world Aang has dreamt up is as real as can be, although while she dreams she never remembers her own waking world.

Here she is Ikki, and she's never worn Air Nomad yellows and oranges because she isn't an Air Nomad. She's an Earth Kingdom peasant, and she's good with farm animals and plants, and she likes to climb trees and steal sweets from the kitchen and generally get underfoot. She's seven years younger than her elder brother, and today his responsibilities have been expanded to include looking after her while he takes the livestock and crops to town.

This may or may not have had something to do with a broken stoneware vase and an exasperated mother figure.

Whatever the case, Aang won't have too many moments to himself on the docks. "Aang! Aang Aang Aang Aang! Can we get some candy? Do we have enough for that? Hey, what are you looking at anyway? There's no ships coming in there's nothing to stare at, you're so weird I swear you're the weirdest."

Perhaps it is as a favor to Loki, perhaps it is of her own designs. Suffice it to say Amora is attending this mortal school and is playing the part of a normal teenager quite well. Whether she's here to bask in Thor's misfortune or to save him remains to be seen.

After one particularly amusing locker door incident, Amora steps in. "Now now, big guy. Watch where you're swinging that thing."

Arnold isn't sure what it is, but something always seems wrong. He goes to the same old place to work in the same old cubicle every day. But that can't be all there is, right? He's resorted to organizing the paperclips one day and his boss told him to take some time off. There's nothing wrong with him, no. It's everyone else's fault.

Edited 2012-12-07 03:44 (UTC)

Bruce seems to be the only one that remembers what happened in New York. Everyone else is clueless, the Avengers tower is gone, so is all the devastation of the alien attack.

Bruce has no idea how he got here, working in a college lab, but he can't find anyone to believe him.

Edited 2012-12-07 03:46 (UTC)

It wasn't long after the incident at the beach, Charles suddenly wasn't responding to people the way he used to. He started forgetting things, not paying attention, and believing he was someone else.

Then one day, he didn't come back to the mansion. He was traveling the streets in his chair, like an alzheimer patient who'd forgotten how to get back home. That amiable smile still on his face.

Edited 2012-12-07 03:49 (UTC)

[Mental state 2 on her part, no preference for normal-inducer]

Cassie is starting to seriously consider dropping out once she turns eighteen. She's pretty sure it would work out- Al would let her move up to full-time at the garage, and the Renshaws wouldn't be happy but they wouldn't technically be in charge of her once she was out of the system. She's almost two years behind, anyway, since she's changed schools so much, and the only class she really likes is machine shop.

John Donne isn't helping.

" 'Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you, as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;' " she reads aloud slowly. "Is he saying God is trying to fix him but he wants to be broken? That doesn't make any sense." It feels wrong somehow- really personally wrong in a way she can't quite explain. She's kind of glad no one else stayed for extra help today, even if the English teacher is weirdly intimidating sometimes.

Mag probably wouldn't have gone to school at all if chemistry hadn't been first period. They didn't even use the Bunsen burners after all, just talked about electron orbitals or something. Total letdown.

She snuck out behind the auditorium as soon as class ended and set off for the woods. Precalc was for people who didn't have a lighter and a backpack full of fireworks.

It was weird. He could remember knowing Ikki all her life. It felt like not that long ago that she was a baby that he liked to carry around everywhere. But something about her, it always felt so... new. And refreshing. Like he was always getting to know someone special. That's why, even though looking after Ikki during this trip was huge responsibility on top of his current one, he couldn't help but feel glad for the quality time. A strange sense of pride and honor in looking out for his little sister.

Aang was unique in that his nerves seemed immune to his sister's endless chattering. It reminded him of the wind, after all. So instead of disturbing his little ritual at the dock, it oddly... complemented it. Aang felt something ancient and familiar calling out to him, at the same time as something new and unknown. While she talked, Aang did not try to speak yet. He had gotten into the habit of being patient and waiting until Ikki exhausts her train of thought before responding. As he spoke, he reached into his pocket and counted the coins left in his hand. The earnings were about as modest as always.

When he spoke, it in a calm and collected tone. "Yes, Ikki. We have enough to get you some candy." He'd just get himself a smaller meal to make up for it. "I'm just looking at the sea. It'd be nice to see ships, but there aren't any yet." Aang turned to face Ikki with a fond smile; he stooped down towards her and patted her hair. "Are you sure you're not the weird one, weirdo?"

At least Ikki didn't wander off too far when Aang was the one looking after her. She'd always followed him around for as long as she could remember. There wasn't any layer of strangeness to that, not for her. He was just her big brother, and the most fantastic person she knew, always coming up with games or showing her how to ride the various animals around their home. Even if sometimes he did stare off into space like he'd forgotten something like a weirdo.

Besides, he really was the most patient person she knew. Keeping up with Ikki was a chore and a half, but Aang had never seemed to mind. He even listened to most of her chatter, which was pretty rare in and of itself.

The confirmation that candy is in her near future is met with an abrupt cheer, a little spin going with it. She's light on her feet and always has been - although the spin is abruptly aborted as Ikki puts her hands on her hips, mock-glaring. "Am not! You're the weird one! I'm the cute one, remember? Anyway, the sea's always there!! We don't get to see this many people that often though. Maaaaaaaybe if you get a move on we can see a puppet show, too! I heard from one of the kids on the dock that there's some sorta party going on in the center of town!! Well, it's more like some kinda holiday for something."

The puppet show is apparently free; she wouldn't have mentioned it otherwise, right after asking for sweets.

He rubbed his head with a grin and replied with some sarcasm to her correction of his roles. "Oh, silly me. How could I forget? Alright, cute one. A party and a puppet show? We do have time to spare, so we can check it out!" He then took a moment to glance back towards the ocean. "But... before we leave, there's something I'd like you to try."

Whatever, Aang. Ikki just sticks her tongue out, effectively ending the argument - well, in the mind of a seven year old, at least. But her play-fighting turns to honest curiosity at the request, and Ikki answers pretty immediately. "Sure! What's that?"

She probably should have asked before agreeing, but she has no reason not to trust him.

Chrome is, if anything, more confused than Bruce.

She's still missing an eye, but her powers are not working and yet she has internal organs.

Also? How did she get to America and why is she on a college campus? She's thirteen.

However labs might have x-ray machines, so teensy illusionist rap-a-tap-tapping on a door and peeking around.

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Page 1 of 12

The Normal Meme

Music Meister | Batman | 2/1

John Marston | Red Dead Redemption

Thor Odinson | Tales of Asgard

Scenario 1, Mental Status: 3

scenario one; buffy will start off at a mental one but will slowly gain lucidity

Scanario 1 - I'll also start off at 1

oswin oswald • doctor who

Aang | Avatar: The Last Airbender

no subject

Bakura Ryou || Yu-Gi-Oh! DM

Scenario 1, Mental State: 3,

Katerina | Original/Folklore | Mental State: 3

Aradia Megido | Homestuck

guess who rolled a 1

Scenario 2

Arnold Rimmer | Red Dwarf | 2 - 2

Bruce Banner/Hulk | The Incredible Hulk movie and MCU | 4 - 1

Charles Xavier | Xmen: First Class | 3 - 3

Want another student for scenario 1?

Mag Sands | Space Opera OC | OTA (1 - 1 or 2)

was it lucy

and ikki by proxy

what a dorky duo

aang is never not a dork in a duo

no subject