meadowlark | @stephen.strange | via morningstar network, a couple of days after cassius' post

[ It isn't real. That's a fact upon a fact: none of it is real, but this even less so.

Usually, knowledge matters. It had for a while here too. Taken him from staggering frantically down part-collapsed tunnels over obstacles whose names he didn't know, calls giving way to bellows, in search first of life and then just of obstacles whose names he did know— to sitting quietly, raking thick air into his lungs, body too beleaguered to be good for more than waiting for the day to end.

And eventually he'd slept. And the day did end. And when he woke and turned on his flashlight to gear himself up for greeting the millions who ought now to be staggering back down into the tunnels, fresh from their reset - he'd found them exactly where he'd left them.

This will not be ending soon. This will not be over until somebody makes it so. But his thoughts won't be gathered into shape. The wall at his back is still hot from the blast. The air is cloying. His skin sloughs under his touch.

The quiet is too heavy. He needs the reminder. ]

Talk to me
Please

[ ooc: for those in the sim, none of the things described in the above brackets will be visible to anyone but him, but Stephen will have been seen by some about half a day before this post searching haphazardly around the tunnels, calling both in general and then specifically for people, then staring very intently with varying expressions of grim hopelessness at patches of nothing, and eventually giving that up for sitting very quietly on the ground in a tunnel somewhere. He's non-responsive to attempts to interact with him throughout and wouldn't previously have been replying to any attempts to contact him via the network either.

Feel free to assume your character has spotted him or been aggressively bumped into by him or heard about him being Weird, or on the flipside to have no idea he's been acting like he's having a really bad trip. ]