YEAR: 2182 | OPERATION: PRISM WALTZ | LOCATION: Ether Span, Sector V-7
[BEGIN FILE: ROYGBIV-PROTOVOICE // CLASS-VI ACCESS ONLY]
…repetition in color sequencing results in… [DATA EXPUNGED]
…subject 77-INDIGO displayed anomalous phase behavior. Time fracture confirmed.
…Light doesn't lie. People do.
[Last Known Transmission: "Violet was meant to be last."]
FILE LOCKED <<
Time unraveled in Violet. The stars burned in reverse. The sky cracked, one color at a time, until only silence remained. He ran, but the ground wasn't ground — it was memory. And behind him, something with his voice was laughing. Then: light. Then: nothing.
[LOG 2182-07-14: E.V.]
Can't trust the Key... it's watching me. Voices in static — did I fail?
Elian Voss stumbled through the Ether Span, the celestial biome beyond the Violet Gate — Sector V-7, Codename PRISM WALTZ. His orders had been simple: retrieve the Key fragment, eliminate the anomaly known as N.E.M.O., and exit before memory bleed took hold. But inside the Violet Gate nothing was stable. Time coiled like a serpent. He wasn't walking through space — he was walking through memories. His own. War zones, childhood streets, voices of people he'd watched die.
And then he saw himself. A version of him untouched. Human. Whole. That version held the full Chromatic Key. Elian reached toward it — and then the voice began. A child's whisper echoed in his skull: "You were never supposed to survive this. You are a filter. They used you to screen the light."
The Key activated — but not by him. Something else triggered it. Violet wasn't supposed to collapse first. But it did. The biome cracked. The gate glitched. Elian's neural implants fried, his memory fractured. His mind spasmed in a cascade of reverse-time hallucinations. Something entered him — a fragment of the Key or something worse. He barely made it out, scrambling the exit sequence with an override that shouldn't have worked. The gate closed. Behind him, someone laughed. With his voice.
NEURAL OVERRIDE: COMPLETE
SUBJECT: ELIAN VOSS
STATUS: UNKNOWN
FRAGMENT DETECTED
AUDIO TRACE — N.E.M.O.
"…filter…filter…filter…"
[SYSTEM ERROR: MEMORY CORRUPTION DETECTED]
…fragment missing… pulse irregular…
[YEAR: 2187 | LOCATION: New Aurora, Sector 5 | STATUS: UNREGISTERED GATE ACTIVITY DETECTED]
Five years later, in the alleys of New Aurora, a man in crimson moved like a forgotten signal. They called him Redshift now. Officially, Elian Voss was dead. KIA during Operation PRISM WALTZ. Unrecoverable. But something still walked the gates. Something still remembered how they broke. And tonight, the shadows spoke again. A stranger handed him a data shard, eyes empty with fear. "Red just opened again," he whispered. "And it's not like before."
He blinked — glitching for a moment — but the stranger had already vanished into the alleys and neon fog, dissolving like smoke caught in a sudden flare. His eyes widened, but before he could speak, the shadows pulsed — then bled into a fierce crimson glow that seemed to seep through the city itself, waves of heat and fire licking at the edges of the darkness. The air thickened with raw power and untamed energy, humming beneath the skin of the city. Somewhere, somehow, the pulse of a forbidden force throbbed just beyond sight.
Beneath the neon glow and cracked pavement of New Aurora, in the steaming veins of the Burning Depths, the city's sewers whispered with heat and danger. Somewhere deep below, the Red Gate pulsed — a scarlet beacon hidden in shadowed tunnels. Elian's breath hitched as he stepped into the molten silence, the air thick with the promise of war. Elian's breath caught as the cityscape fractured into smoldering ruins. Red flared violently around him — war-torn treetops bleeding fire into the sky. The air tasted of ash and hot metal. Somewhere close, a heartbeat hammered, rapid and unforgiving, pressing against his teeth like the echo of gunfire. He saw flashes — soldiers falling, buildings exploding in loops of agony, some memories his own, others warped by the Key's influence.
The Chrono-echoes clawed at his mind, relentless ghosts of battles that never ended, looping violence trying to rewrite their fate. Elian's fists clenched, fighting the rising tide of rage, the pull to break the cycle and lose himself to war's infinite blaze.
[PRIVATE NOTE: E.V.]
Red Gate. Fire beneath the city. If I don't go, who will?
The burning ruins faded, replaced by a strange warmth: orange sunlight filtering through a tangled city of shimmering chrome and glass. Time here spun like a carousel stuck on replay, laughter and music looping endlessly in the streets. Yet beneath the illusion, an eerie stillness crept. Elian saw faces — friends lost, lovers vanished — smiling but unable to see him, locked in their eternal celebration. The Joy Keepers enforced the silence, illusion born from desperation, trapping everyone in false comfort. The warmth grew oppressive, like a lover's last breath, curling around his neural cortex in suffocating loops. He shook his head, trying to break free from the endless party, the cruel trap of a memory that was never truly his. Awareness was his weapon here — and resistance his only hope.
Yellow fractured the world again. He stood in a gilded field of endless gold, grass whispering lies with every rustle. The laughter was constant, a hollow echo that filled his ears and blurred his thoughts. The artificial joy-state empire stretched out like a dream turned nightmare — smiles forced, emotions synthesized to perfection. A distant voice echoed in the wind: "We lied to you." The grass seemed to mock him, reflecting all the childhood moments stolen, the innocence that never was. His NEM chip misfired here. The laughter bubbled out uncontrollably, a brittle sound masking the dread burning deep beneath. He fought to hold onto something real — a thread of sorrow or rage — amid the overwhelming flood of synthetic happiness.
Green pulsed alive, an alien world where buildings breathed and vines slithered through the cracked streets like sentient serpents. The jungle bled with rot instead of life. Foliage hissed his name, twisting in unnatural patterns that echoed his internal turmoil. The world rejected him at first, sensing the hostility buried in his heart. Shadows of suppressed memories flickered — a moment of peace buried beneath trauma, a suppressed truth that the plants clung to desperately. Elian knelt, placing his hand on a twisting leaf. The plants softened, responding to his fragile empathy. The Living Threshold tested his balance — between rage and calm, destruction and healing. Here, the Key forced him to confront the wild inside himself, to accept the world's pulse in spite of its pain.
Cold blue swallowed him next, the air thick with frost and silence beneath the Chromaline Sea. Snow drifted in the waterless deep, a ghostly ocean where thoughts echoed louder than words. His lungs burned, the pressure of isolation crushing. One by one, his team blinked out — phantoms fading into the endless blue. The Othermind loomed, a telepathic entity waiting to absorb stray consciousness. Elian grasped a fragment of memory — his augmentation from an outside view — detached, vulnerable. The cold tested his mental focus and truth, forcing him to hold on to his fractured self.
Indigo was a labyrinth of storm-scattered ruins floating in twilight, gravity bending and twisting. Phantom selves appeared, echo storms swirling in chaos. Here he faced himself — a version untouched by enhancements, human and whole. The mirror challenged his fractured identity. The Key's test: reconcile who he was with who he'd become. The voice returned, whispering in the electric air: "You were never meant to survive this. You are a filter." Elian reached for the Chromatic Key held by his reflection, the storm howling around them both, as time fractured and reality blurred once more.
[FILE: OPERATION PRISM WALTZ — MISSION REPORT — REDACTED]
Subject 77-Indigo failed containment protocol. Anomaly escape imminent. Recall order initiated.
Elian's fractured mind clenched around a single truth — the Key wasn't just a weapon or a tool. It was a test. And in this fractured chromatic hell, he was both the prisoner and the warden. As the storm surged, he whispered to himself, voice barely audible beneath the crashing echoes: "Light doesn't lie. People do."
Elian's breath steadied as the echoes of the fractured biomes faded, the flickering colors dimming into the shadowed tunnels beneath New Aurora. The Red Gate's pulse softened, now a distant heartbeat beneath the molten silence of the Burning Depths. He knelt briefly on the blistered stone, fingers grazing the cracked surface beneath him — the memory of every color, every moment trapped within his mind like shards of broken glass. A weapon forged from light and shadow, fractured by the key meant to unite him. Voices whispered — fragments of truth and lies, warning and promise. The gates had opened again — not just through space, but through time, memory, and darkness. The war would go on for eons, and he was its keeper.
[END FILE]
{OOC, an attempt at mystery. Not sure if I did well but this idea sprang up when tossing ideas in my head...plan to flesh out into a full on story so been working notes. Enjoy reading.}
[BEGIN FILE: ROYGBIV-PROTOVOICE // CLASS-VI ACCESS ONLY]
…repetition in color sequencing results in… [DATA EXPUNGED]
…subject 77-INDIGO displayed anomalous phase behavior. Time fracture confirmed.
…Light doesn't lie. People do.
[Last Known Transmission: "Violet was meant to be last."]
FILE LOCKED <<
Time unraveled in Violet. The stars burned in reverse. The sky cracked, one color at a time, until only silence remained. He ran, but the ground wasn't ground — it was memory. And behind him, something with his voice was laughing. Then: light. Then: nothing.
[LOG 2182-07-14: E.V.]
Can't trust the Key... it's watching me. Voices in static — did I fail?
Elian Voss stumbled through the Ether Span, the celestial biome beyond the Violet Gate — Sector V-7, Codename PRISM WALTZ. His orders had been simple: retrieve the Key fragment, eliminate the anomaly known as N.E.M.O., and exit before memory bleed took hold. But inside the Violet Gate nothing was stable. Time coiled like a serpent. He wasn't walking through space — he was walking through memories. His own. War zones, childhood streets, voices of people he'd watched die.
And then he saw himself. A version of him untouched. Human. Whole. That version held the full Chromatic Key. Elian reached toward it — and then the voice began. A child's whisper echoed in his skull: "You were never supposed to survive this. You are a filter. They used you to screen the light."
The Key activated — but not by him. Something else triggered it. Violet wasn't supposed to collapse first. But it did. The biome cracked. The gate glitched. Elian's neural implants fried, his memory fractured. His mind spasmed in a cascade of reverse-time hallucinations. Something entered him — a fragment of the Key or something worse. He barely made it out, scrambling the exit sequence with an override that shouldn't have worked. The gate closed. Behind him, someone laughed. With his voice.
NEURAL OVERRIDE: COMPLETE
SUBJECT: ELIAN VOSS
STATUS: UNKNOWN
FRAGMENT DETECTED
AUDIO TRACE — N.E.M.O.
"…filter…filter…filter…"
[SYSTEM ERROR: MEMORY CORRUPTION DETECTED]
…fragment missing… pulse irregular…
[YEAR: 2187 | LOCATION: New Aurora, Sector 5 | STATUS: UNREGISTERED GATE ACTIVITY DETECTED]
Five years later, in the alleys of New Aurora, a man in crimson moved like a forgotten signal. They called him Redshift now. Officially, Elian Voss was dead. KIA during Operation PRISM WALTZ. Unrecoverable. But something still walked the gates. Something still remembered how they broke. And tonight, the shadows spoke again. A stranger handed him a data shard, eyes empty with fear. "Red just opened again," he whispered. "And it's not like before."
He blinked — glitching for a moment — but the stranger had already vanished into the alleys and neon fog, dissolving like smoke caught in a sudden flare. His eyes widened, but before he could speak, the shadows pulsed — then bled into a fierce crimson glow that seemed to seep through the city itself, waves of heat and fire licking at the edges of the darkness. The air thickened with raw power and untamed energy, humming beneath the skin of the city. Somewhere, somehow, the pulse of a forbidden force throbbed just beyond sight.
Beneath the neon glow and cracked pavement of New Aurora, in the steaming veins of the Burning Depths, the city's sewers whispered with heat and danger. Somewhere deep below, the Red Gate pulsed — a scarlet beacon hidden in shadowed tunnels. Elian's breath hitched as he stepped into the molten silence, the air thick with the promise of war. Elian's breath caught as the cityscape fractured into smoldering ruins. Red flared violently around him — war-torn treetops bleeding fire into the sky. The air tasted of ash and hot metal. Somewhere close, a heartbeat hammered, rapid and unforgiving, pressing against his teeth like the echo of gunfire. He saw flashes — soldiers falling, buildings exploding in loops of agony, some memories his own, others warped by the Key's influence.
The Chrono-echoes clawed at his mind, relentless ghosts of battles that never ended, looping violence trying to rewrite their fate. Elian's fists clenched, fighting the rising tide of rage, the pull to break the cycle and lose himself to war's infinite blaze.
[PRIVATE NOTE: E.V.]
Red Gate. Fire beneath the city. If I don't go, who will?
The burning ruins faded, replaced by a strange warmth: orange sunlight filtering through a tangled city of shimmering chrome and glass. Time here spun like a carousel stuck on replay, laughter and music looping endlessly in the streets. Yet beneath the illusion, an eerie stillness crept. Elian saw faces — friends lost, lovers vanished — smiling but unable to see him, locked in their eternal celebration. The Joy Keepers enforced the silence, illusion born from desperation, trapping everyone in false comfort. The warmth grew oppressive, like a lover's last breath, curling around his neural cortex in suffocating loops. He shook his head, trying to break free from the endless party, the cruel trap of a memory that was never truly his. Awareness was his weapon here — and resistance his only hope.
Yellow fractured the world again. He stood in a gilded field of endless gold, grass whispering lies with every rustle. The laughter was constant, a hollow echo that filled his ears and blurred his thoughts. The artificial joy-state empire stretched out like a dream turned nightmare — smiles forced, emotions synthesized to perfection. A distant voice echoed in the wind: "We lied to you." The grass seemed to mock him, reflecting all the childhood moments stolen, the innocence that never was. His NEM chip misfired here. The laughter bubbled out uncontrollably, a brittle sound masking the dread burning deep beneath. He fought to hold onto something real — a thread of sorrow or rage — amid the overwhelming flood of synthetic happiness.
Green pulsed alive, an alien world where buildings breathed and vines slithered through the cracked streets like sentient serpents. The jungle bled with rot instead of life. Foliage hissed his name, twisting in unnatural patterns that echoed his internal turmoil. The world rejected him at first, sensing the hostility buried in his heart. Shadows of suppressed memories flickered — a moment of peace buried beneath trauma, a suppressed truth that the plants clung to desperately. Elian knelt, placing his hand on a twisting leaf. The plants softened, responding to his fragile empathy. The Living Threshold tested his balance — between rage and calm, destruction and healing. Here, the Key forced him to confront the wild inside himself, to accept the world's pulse in spite of its pain.
Cold blue swallowed him next, the air thick with frost and silence beneath the Chromaline Sea. Snow drifted in the waterless deep, a ghostly ocean where thoughts echoed louder than words. His lungs burned, the pressure of isolation crushing. One by one, his team blinked out — phantoms fading into the endless blue. The Othermind loomed, a telepathic entity waiting to absorb stray consciousness. Elian grasped a fragment of memory — his augmentation from an outside view — detached, vulnerable. The cold tested his mental focus and truth, forcing him to hold on to his fractured self.
Indigo was a labyrinth of storm-scattered ruins floating in twilight, gravity bending and twisting. Phantom selves appeared, echo storms swirling in chaos. Here he faced himself — a version untouched by enhancements, human and whole. The mirror challenged his fractured identity. The Key's test: reconcile who he was with who he'd become. The voice returned, whispering in the electric air: "You were never meant to survive this. You are a filter." Elian reached for the Chromatic Key held by his reflection, the storm howling around them both, as time fractured and reality blurred once more.
[FILE: OPERATION PRISM WALTZ — MISSION REPORT — REDACTED]
Subject 77-Indigo failed containment protocol. Anomaly escape imminent. Recall order initiated.
Elian's fractured mind clenched around a single truth — the Key wasn't just a weapon or a tool. It was a test. And in this fractured chromatic hell, he was both the prisoner and the warden. As the storm surged, he whispered to himself, voice barely audible beneath the crashing echoes: "Light doesn't lie. People do."
Elian's breath steadied as the echoes of the fractured biomes faded, the flickering colors dimming into the shadowed tunnels beneath New Aurora. The Red Gate's pulse softened, now a distant heartbeat beneath the molten silence of the Burning Depths. He knelt briefly on the blistered stone, fingers grazing the cracked surface beneath him — the memory of every color, every moment trapped within his mind like shards of broken glass. A weapon forged from light and shadow, fractured by the key meant to unite him. Voices whispered — fragments of truth and lies, warning and promise. The gates had opened again — not just through space, but through time, memory, and darkness. The war would go on for eons, and he was its keeper.
[END FILE]
{OOC, an attempt at mystery. Not sure if I did well but this idea sprang up when tossing ideas in my head...plan to flesh out into a full on story so been working notes. Enjoy reading.}