rp: ooc [PLEASE READ!!] Exploring the Backrooms -- What to Expect

[Aura]

Please read this thread for a more thorough understanding of the setting this roleplay will take place in. While many aspects of this roleplay are left up to the imagination, certain rules will still hold in order to maintain consistency and ease of understanding within the club. If you take nothing else from this thread, just please remember that separate threads are entire separate stories, the same character can be in multiple threads at once, contradictions and pre-established facts don't really matter at all, and characters must wake up in a new area at the start of each thread. There will also be no NPCs. Any unprecedented allusions to mysterious figures will be chalked up to hysteria and nothing more.

There are no hard limits to what you can and cannot find within The Backrooms, but this is a thread detailing the kinds of things you can expect to happen.

1. What you see is what you get. The Backrooms exists in a void.

The first thing to keep in mind is that The Backrooms is an infinite space, and endless maze. There is no sound outside of the constant hum of the lights. There is no air conditioning, but the rooms aren't particularly hot. Temperature wise, the rooms are a bit on the cooler side, but the lights offer a gentle, comfortable heat. The rooms all appear in a similar manner to the ones you see in the images used around the club. Yellowish rooms with faint lights. It looks somewhat like a vacant house or office building but with a surreal amalgamation of walls that, coupled with the ominous silence, lead to a strangely unsettling environment. Some rooms are large and spacious, others are tiny and compact. If you managed to break through any of the walls, you'd just end up in a neighboring room. Trying to dig through the floor, you'd be met with a solid foundation of concrete that you'll never dig past. It would be difficult to reach, but if you managed to break through the roof of a room, you would find yourself in a far more ominous black void with an endless plane of insulation and steel girders lining the entire maze. The atmosphere is far colder and it is strongly advised that you do not stray too far from the place you exited from or you may have difficulty getting back down without breaking through the roof again and risking injury from the inevitable fall.

2. No powers or supernatural abilities.

Your character may have vivid memories of having supernatural abilities such as access to magic or superpowers, but they will always find such powers will fail to take effect here. It's also entirely possible a character that normally does have supernatural abilities will simply not have any memories of having such abilities at all and never even question it. It is up to you how your character will respond to this problem and how dangerous this might be for them.

3. Liquid Time

This roleplay uses what is called liquid time. This means that the "canonical" order of events is never clear. Characters will even begin to dream entire days out in The Backrooms so some entire threads may even just be dreams and you would never know. A convenience of liquid time in terms of roleplay is that one character can participate in multiple threads at the same time! Due to the mysterious nature of the world contained in this RP, discrepancies and contradictions between the flow of events can easily be explained away as faulty memories or a misunderstanding of the order of events. Due to the infinitely random nature of The Backrooms, it's also entirely possible that two separate locations coincidentally looked exactly the same, the same characters woke up in the same positions, performed the same actions, and two characters remember two completely different counterparts of the exact same journey. The nature of true randomness inevitably leads to bizarre coincidences like this.

4. Every thread is a new beginning.

Every thread will focus on a different journey. Your character has woken up in a completely different area of The Backrooms than any other area they'd previously been. It's up to you whether or not they have any memories of previous experiences or if they retain no memory at all. Material possessions may be retained, completely different, or absent entirely, again, at your own discretion. No two threads will ever directly cross over, but characters from two separate threads may appear in a brand new thread and retain all their memories of their previous adventures.

5. There is a method to the madness.

Some things are always consistent when you start a new thread! Every character mysteriously wakes up in an unfamiliar part of The Backrooms that has never previously been explored. You will never be teleported while conscious. You may fall asleep or pass out without waking up in an unfamiliar place, but you will never appear in an unfamiliar place without falling asleep or passing out first. You cannot wake up in a mysterious area without being asleep first. This is very important. No character will also ever disappear from a thread unless everyone in the thread is asleep. Again, everyone falling asleep doesn't necessarily mean that the thread is over, but the thread cannot be over unless everyone is unconscious. 

6. No need for food or water.

Despite there being no food or water throughout your time in The Backrooms, you will likely never starve or thirst to death. A strange side-effect of the way this bizarre world makes the passage of time extremely difficult to follow. Much like a dream, you may never get hungry or thirsty at all. However, if your mind is focused too much on finding food, you may catch yourself getting hungrier by your own hand.

7. Furniture and Items

Although the rooms are mostly empty, you may find seemingly random pieces of furniture strewn about. Some key points to take note: Drawers and shelves will usually be completely empty. However, they may still contain certain items. Fate has a funny way of helping one to explore their desires. Often, if you find yourself really wishing you had something, you'll probably be able to find it by searching a container in a nearby room. If things are getting frisky, you may be able to find a bed, desk, or other stable piece of furniture and a little bit of poking around may even lead to the discovery of sex toys if your characters don't already have any on their possession. It's also quite possible batteries in devices like these may not be drained, but will mysteriously drain if removed from the device. In general, it's not a good idea to tamper with the gifts fate has given you. Clocks will always be broken and display an incorrect time. Digital clocks will have dead batteries and analogue clocks will be missing the internal mechanisms allowing the clock to move. Furniture will usually be brown in color and fabrics will be shades of white, yellow, or green that match the walls.

8. Anomalies

Due to the infinite nature of the labyrinth, you're bound to come across the occasional oddity. Not every room is identical to the standard square. You might find a room that is circular or even rotated 90 degrees with furniture bolted to the "wall." In general, these anomalies will not be noticeable from a distance. Whenever you look in any given direction, you should see nothing but an endless void of similar-looking rooms. You'll always need to at least turn a corner to find an anomaly. Please do not try to rely to heavily on anomalies to make your story interesting. The whole purpose of this roleplay is to get you to focus entirely on fleshing out your character rather than relying on the surroundings to make things interesting. If you find yourself constantly jumping from anomaly to anomaly, perhaps you need to work on making your character more interesting? Ideally, you're going to want a character who can keep things interesting even in a completely empty, square room. 

9. Your characters are alone. Period.

Certain characters may fear the presence of some sort of monster, criminal, etc. lurking through The Backrooms and stalking them; but there will be no NPCs in this roleplay. The only characters you will ever interact with are other player-controlled characters. No monsters or characters will be roaming the halls of The Backrooms unless they are created by a player and submitted as their own playable character.

10. The psyche is powerful.

Just because the above rules are in place doesn't mean your character knows that. I think as you roleplay here, you'll find that your character's mental state may vary widely depending on how they view their situation. This can also affect their physical well-being. Like previously stated, if your character is worried they'll starve to death, they'll definitely end up starving for food and might even pass out due to a lack of energy. Alternatively, if the thought of food never crosses their mind, they could go months without a bite. Likewise, if you become worried about disease or injury, you will be more likely to encounter these issues as well. The way you view the rooms will be reflected in how you feel inside of them. If you see it as a pleasant escape from the stresses of reality, you will be much more at peace. If you see it as a horrifying prison that you have to escape from, you will be under incredible stress. Just keep in mind that, no matter how confident you are, you will never escape The Backrooms. Not through conscious effort alone, anyway.

Any further information necessary to express will be added here. I hope it wasn't too much of a bore to read through! I may clean this thread up a bit to make it easier to digest.