[???] just another dream

"Why else do you think? This is where it all started. Follow me."
Ikin moonwalks down the stairs perfectly, staring at Seth all the while.
"Like our mirrored counterparts, my crew was from a session ran by horrorterrors, and we escaped from it before they pulled the plug on it at the end. I used to know a salty bitch called Eniar. While he went on and on about the power of suggestion and how we hold the keys to our own salvation, he had his own plans up his sleeve."

As they reach the bottom of the stairs, and Ikin trips and falls backwards onto the ground.

A moment passes and Ikin gets back up, dusting off his robe.
"...I meant to do that."

There's quite a bit of empty carpeted space on this floor. A kitchen can be seen far across, and an infirmary quite close by. There's an odd looking car parked nearby for some odd reason.

"...yes." Ikin grins. "Now let's go."

He leads the two of them down a ways, and then turns a corner towards a hallway.

"As I was saying, Eniar, with enough salt to preserve a warehouse of meat, wanted revenge on the horrorterrors that ruined his and everyone else's lives. He got an idea from a ploy they used against us, in the form of 'the common enemy'. Apparently horrorterror-led sessions always have some kinda common enemy scapegoat used to rally the players against that isn't even an actual threat. It's literally just a made-up figure that some of the players are given nightmares about or something. Ours was called 'Ananke'. Eniar took inspiration from our Common Enemy Ananke to design his own harbinger of doom."

They arrive at an intricately locked high-tech door with various identification and lockout mechanisms.
"Here we are, the place where the magic once happened. Good times..." Ikin fondly looks at the door for a moment.

"Easy. Watch this sick move." Ikin turns invisible and walks right through the wall right next to the door.

A few seconds pass, and then the door unarms itself. Ikin is standing there on the other side of the door, visible.

"Mad skillz."

Given that Ikin is only about 5'3", this is fairly easy. He moves to the side and beckons Seth inside.

The room is surprisingly clean, though the walls are covered with an extremely neat array of sticky notes, all with different ideas and reminders written upon them. There also appears to be a whiteboard with a dizzying amount of nigh-unreadable notes and equations scrawled upon it in black chalk.
A desk sits in the corner, surrounded by neat stacks of notebooks. A closed laptop sits there on the desk as well. A wastebasket overflowing with crumpled notes is at arm's length from the desk, as well as a tall filing cabinet.

A freezer sits in another corner, labeled "strap ydob" in small neat letters.
A rather large glass tube, similar to the type found on certain meteors in most sessions is found here. A naked carapace chess person is suspended in a liquid. Noticibly there is no barcode on the wrist.
There is, on the ground against the wall, a stack of magazines with dirty content wrapped in plastic. A single note stuck to them reads "I'm not picking up after you again, Ikin. Remove your magazines from here. No I do not want to use your 'samples'. Put your pants back on and leave."

Most notably however, is the printed out poster with a computer generated image of Ananke on the wall. Sticky notes surround it, but do not touch or overlap with it.

"This is the place. He did all his work here. Pretty crazy stuff, but apparently for good reasons. I don't think he ever slept like, ever. It's here that he worked on his so-called 'greatest achievement'. Project Blackprince."

Ikin walks over to the laptop and lifts the lid. The screen turns on and for a second it's open to a... website that would not be considered safe for work.
"Don't mind that, was just doing some browsing."

Ikin tabs away and opens up --dapeton.

"Project Blackprince was the culmination of Eniar's efforts to create his own Common Enemy to use against the horrorterrors. It was like, a virus or something. He did a lot of computer code but he also managed to compile it into an injectable liquid. I'm not sure how he got that to work, probably another one of his crazy ideas. But from how he explained it, whoever would become the host for the virus would like, gain all sorts of crazy abilities and become driven to despise and destroy horrorterrors. They'd also like, be able to gain the space aspect or something. Fun fact: Horrorterrors are weak against having their full multidimensional forms quantified into our plane. It's like beaching a massive ugly-ass whale so they die pretty quickly after that."

Ikin glances over at the whiteboard.

"Eniar did a bunch of crazy math to make sure the black prince would know exactly how to pull a horrorteror completely out into the open with the use of time and space powers. Apparently you need both to pull it off. Thing to mention though, while the virus is supposed to take over the host completely, apparently it's supposed to use a lot of the host's previous memories and personality to shape itself apparently."

Ikin goes back over to the laptop and pulls up a picture that's surprisingly not inverse looking.

It's Chronos... in a default T-pose. Did Eniar ever pose his models ever? They have no personality to them whatsoever.

"In case you haven't pieced it together, your daddy-o was the final result of the black prince virus's full effects. Most of us didn't even think Eniar's crazy scheme would even work, but it was sorta our only hope at the time. We thought it was a miracle when Chronos appeared in our hideout, before anyone had even sent out the completed virus to a proper host or anything."

Ikin snaps his fingers and the entire room is suddenly on fire. Somehow he's unphased by this.

"turns out it was proof that we fucked up."

The room shifts away to a different one in the same area.
They're in the main room, and it's still on fire. A mix of inverse and non-inverse fire.

Light silhouettes of vaguely familiar people are running away from a dark silhouette that is currently blasting the room with destructive lasers.

"When he arrived... a bunch of the group told him a lot of things, hailing him as their savior and shit. He was having none of that. He was out on a destruction spree and he didn't feel like saving anybody. The others told him that he was made from a virus that was created here to go against the horrorterrors, though they didn't tell them specifically who did it, just that their group had their hands in his creation. he was pissed off at the group for making him for such a shallow unfulfilling purpose."



The Ikin next to Seth narrates the scene.
"I had decided to keep Eniar's identity secret from our visitor to protect him. I didn't know what I was doing really. I'm not sure if that was even the right move, considering he probably deserved to be lasered in the face after what he caused. I didn't even really like Eniar all that much, I just liked to bug him a lot."



The Ikin with Seth falls to the "floor", holding the spot where his counterpart was struck.
"agh... I'm... I'm alright. Just a little phantom pain there. I'm pretty sure that's how I died that one time."

The scene behind them fades to black, and soon Seth and Ikin are back where they started. Ikin sits up.

"I, got better though. Cool dude called Ben brought me back. I'm still wondering if it was worth it tho. Especially since I'm probably gonna die again soon anyways."