TDM 001 ● JUNE 2025

[uruz]

TDM: ONE

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PRELUDE

(content warnings: dream horror, loss of autonomy, mild body horror, cult undertones )


You’ve had this dream before.

A moon cracked wide, spilling tendrils from its craters like bleeding silk. A sky starless and slow. And on the horizon: a wave. Massive. Black. Still. It creeps forward every time like sunrise. It hushes before collapse, but every time before this, you wake up just in time.

But not tonight. You can't outrun it even if you tried— it comes crashing down on you at last, swallowing you like a gaping black hole. Saltless, soundless, the water devours. But instead of drowning, you drift, suspended in velvet dark. And in that dark, her voice breathes.

“You don’t have to fall with it.
Let me in.
I can give you everything you’ve ever hungered for.
A place.
A purpose.
Stay.”

She offers. And you— your mouth, your mind— give an answer before you even know you’re speaking. Yes.

The tide recedes. The dark peels away like silk. You awaken beneath a canopy of gold, in a garden that hums with warmth and longing. Soft grass. Strange trees. Fragrant fruits in every color, dripping with light. And a mask upon your face, no straps, no weight, yet it clings to your skin like it was always part of you. You don't want to remove it. You could, maybe . . . But it would feel like tearing your skin away.

She no longer speaks to you, but her orchard breaths a sigh upon your arrival. A force tugs at the edges of your thoughts, beckoning you to contact the web you're now a part of. Welcome, Vessel.

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YOU CAN THREAD THE NEEDLE

(content warnings: sensory manipulation )

An orchard stretches around you in impossible directions, the horizon blurred like wet paint. Trees curl and arch with an elegance that feels practiced— like they’re posing for someone watching. Their trunks shimmer faintly. Leaves flutter even when there is no wind.

You are not alone. Others stir nearby, familiar or unfamiliar, though that distinction begins to blur. You may not know them, or perhaps you have the feeling you do even if you've never met them in your life. Either way, you might wish to know them.

From the strange branches within the orchard hang fruits shaped like stars, teardrops, or glass bells. Each one pulses faintly, waiting to be plucked. Their effects are subtle but powerful, crafted to cater to your desire and wonder:

🍎A pearlescent orb, cool and slick to the touch, whose taste floods you with a future that might be: a fleeting vision of joy, belonging, or beauty you didn’t know you craved. Whoever is nearby sees a glimpse of it too.
🍎A silver-veined citrus, fizzing like champagne. When shared between two, it evokes the feeling of a first time— first love, first rebellion, first triumph — even if you’ve never lived it. The emotional residue lingers between you.
🍎A blood-orange fruit with velvet skin, which when bitten into, causes your voice to harmonize with another’s— even if you weren’t speaking. You’ll find yourselves finishing each other’s thoughts, or speaking a secret you both forgot you held.
🍎A waxen, translucent fig, which grants you a small miracle: something you longed for appears beside you, conjured from dream. It might be a lost keepsake. A voice. A scent. A face.
🍎A smooth, silver fruit with a mirrored skin. When bitten, it briefly reflects the dreamer’s true self — not as they are, but as they wish to be. For a moment, others may see it too. The illusion clings for a time, making the character appear more like their ideal self in body, presence, or aura.
🍎A dark plum that glows faintly pink, almost heart-shaped, and warm to the touch. Its juice runs red and sticky, clinging to the lips. To taste it is to be filled with longing— for intimacy, for sensation, for touch. The desire may be gentle or overwhelming, but it lingers, tuned to the presence of someone nearby. It is not mindless. It is focused.

At the center of the orchard is a fountain, still and inviting. Its water tastes like clarity— and for a moment after drinking, your thoughts shape your surroundings. What you create might intertwine with what another dreams beside you.

Sleep does not speak in words. She breathes through the trees, hums through the soil, stares through your mask. Her voice, barely a whisper:

“Thread the needle, My Vessel.
Want.
Want, and see what answers you.”

You feel it,— if you resonate with another, something will change. Maybe the orchard will shift again. Maybe it already has.

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THE DAYLIGHT RECEDES

(content warnings: grief, loss, emotional vulnerability)

The orchard is gone. In its place stretches a landscape of ashen grass, supple and fragrant underfoot, warmed by a pale light that doesn’t seem to come from the sun. All around, a soft breeze stirs the fields— endless, loamy, and quiet. The air smells like soil after rain. It is peaceful here. But not happy.

Scattered across the fields are half-buried remnants: old beds, cracked record players, wilted bouquets, melted candles, notes scrawled on napkins— things lost in the moments between love and loneliness. Everything here feels half-remembered, yet painfully familiar. If a character reaches for one of these objects, they may hear a voice whispering a name they have tried to forget, or one they wish they'd remembered sooner.

In the distance, a shrouded figure walks the fields, unhurried, always just out of reach. Their back is turned, but their presence pulls like gravity. Some may choose to follow. Some may wait. And some may realize they’re walking beside someone else— a stranger who seems to carry a memory they, too, once held.

This is a moment of reflection. Interactions blossom from shared worries, slow confessions, or uncanny synchronicities. Characters might recognize something in another, such as a gesture, a phrase, a scent— and feel that thread begin to tug. Best follow its lead . . . You won't be able to leave unless you do.

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EVERYTHING WE LOVE RESETS

(content warnings: body horror, transformation, loss of autonomy, psychological horror, cosmic dread )

You awaken— or perhaps you never truly slept. The orchard is gone. The fields have withered. All is silence now, and the air is soaked in dread.

A still, uncanny plane stretches out before you: rotted soil, stagnant pools, shattered glass trees that hum with an almost-familiar voice. Echoes of what the dream once offered—sweet fruit, blooming things, beauty— remain only as scars on the land. Their pleasures have fermented into menace. The dreamscape is collapsing.

Sleep, ever present, ever watching, does not weep. She has already taken what she wants, and you see her teeth stretched too wide in the shadows. In the reflection that splits back at you. In the soundless breeze with much more bite and possession than the gentle caress of invitation. She whispers, from the shadows between dying stars:

"You said yes. Now let me see what you become."

The mask on your face tightens, no longer decoration. A binding. You are no longer merely dreaming— Your skin may change fluidly, or break down through the bones violently. Your flesh may split, brimming with power, or your blood could burn like lava oozing through your veins. You may even experience it again, and again, and again; a different beast or burst of magic each time. Whether painful or painless, You are now either Token, or Offering. You may not yet know what that means— But your body does.

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EVEN WHEN WE RUN WITH DEATH

(content warnings: body horror, fungal infections, parasitism, loss of agency, cosmic horror, violence, death, cult imagery)

Your surroundings bend and break with growing instability: The sky splits open, revealing a bleeding red moon, weeping tendrils like raw nerves. It feels wrong in a way you have no words for. It sees you. And it beckons for blood.

The dream does not want peace now. It wants performance. It wants pain. And above all, Sleep wants you all to herself. She watches from the broken heavens, humming in delight as you run, as you fight, as you fracture under the weight of your becoming. Perhaps you turn on each other, frightened with what you have become or too frazzled to control yourself, or the newfound power you possess.

There are other things to look out for, though. Creatures stalk this unraveling plane: malformed creatures with mutated faces and fungal blooms bursting from their orifices, or tendrils slithering from what were once mouths and eye sockets. Once Vessels. Hosts. They may speak with familiar voices. They may try to barter, or bite. Those with hands and fingers may try and force your eyelids to part, to tilt your gaze to the sky above you, chanting in tongues that drill into your brain stem. Hushing in song. Whispering Look at her. She is Beautiful.

If you are caught, if you gaze up at Her for too long— you too will suffer the same fate. Fungal bursts and tendrils will spurt from your mouth, invade you from the inside and reach out to her in sacred reverence. It's a horrible way to go. If this is an end you find, you too, despite your pain, may begin to smile. You might have even more reason to attack your fellow Vessels. They too, must see Her beauty like you do.

The song stutters. The dream recoils when you succumb to the worst of Her parasitism, even though you don't lose consciousness. It is not Sleep who speaks next. In your last few seconds of awareness, you hear in your ears, in your mind, in your soul, snarling and thick with fury:


“What have you done?”

The world begins to scream. You begin to fall.

The dream is over.

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NOTES

➤ Welcome to Somnia’s first TDM! All TDMs will be considered game canon.
➤ You are free (and encouraged!) to experiment with the Tether mechanic as well as Vessel options and the Network to your liking; this is a dreamscape, so multiple/different situations for you to really test which option you like most is possible.
➤ All TDMs take place within a dreamscape, meaning characters can interact with the setting without needing to apply. Come have fun with us!
➤ Mod invited players may currently extend one invite per player. Interested players who do not have mod invites or a friend to get an invite from may comment to the appropriate top level to solicit one, or, solicit one from the mod here. Please keep in mind that soliciting an invite does not guarantee one.
➤ Questions? Please direct them to the designated questions comment linked below!

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Theseus | Hades

[deltastrike]

[Existence in the Underworld can be compared to a dream. It is a place where no one is born to or taken from, where Shades reenact simulacrums of what they remember for all eternity and even gods find themselves bound to the adamant shackle of unending work. But no Shade truly knows Sleep, while in Hades. They might know his unreliable servant Hypnos, or befallen a trick of the same, but it's an imitation of what they knew from life just like everything else a Shade experiences.

Theseus is certain that not only did he somehow fell asleep, he isn't waking up. After all, if he's awake, he still be back in Elysium.]

THE DAYLIGHT RECEDES
[Theseus did not drink from the Lethe when interned in the Underworld. He felt that every memory of his life was one worth honoring, every past glory and old story. A recollection not just remarkable, but pristine, possessing no dark spots which he wishes to rid himself of. But that's not to say he doesn't understand why people partake in the Lethe at all.

It's hardly rare for Theseus to be in a place ruined and waning, when those words can be used to describe much of landscape of Hades, somehow always ancient and persisting. But something about about this newly born field, fresh like newly tilled soil, draws him to thoughts that have not bothered him for a long time. They had eventually become distant from ever growing passage of time that got between the present and his life, but they never left him.

As for who comes to mind, the names and faces to the impressions, it's mostly relatives. Dear family which Theseus can't bring himself to face. Wives which . Princess.

This is unlike him. Theseus, still the type to beset on what's troubling him and aggrieve them back, wracks his mind trying to identify the cause why, when it dawns on him.]

If only one of these visages could be Asterius, that would be the first worthwhile personage to be found in this dream.

EVERYTHING WE LOVE RESETS (Offering: Daemon)
[If this is a dream, Theseus is going to be very cross at his subconscious when he wakes up.

His hands go to crown of his head, touching with his fingers what he can already feel as a living part of himself, fed with blood and nourished by his heartbeat. If he could see his reflection he could tell their color, jet black and almost glistening just from moonlight, but the last thing he wants is to see right now is himself. He might possibly want that even less than he wants others to see him like this.

It's long after the last bits stopped growing but Theseus remains frozen, never having got up from where he fell when the jagged, potent bone pain cut through him like a saw. He continues muttering while near motionless, hands kept over his face.]

No, no, no, this can't be happening...

[He starts to consider ideas which would seem maniacal if this is anything other than a mere dream...]

EVEN WHEN WE RUN WITH DEATH (cw: self-harm)
[Pain traveling on the nerves reserved for the simplest and basest of impulses instantaneously alert Theseus to the realization that this was a regretful decision to make in this dream, nay, nightmare. The pain is more intense than the worst he could experience as a Shade or Human. But the hammer he took to the point of his horn stays on its course, announcing itself with the grotesque cracking, crunching of something collapsing and breaking inward.

The pain is too much to stay cognizant, overriding all thought for raw, violent instinct. In his mania Theseus is not much different from a walking disaster: terrifyingly thoughtless and awesomely strong.]

[He's not become a Host to Sleep, but maybe even more erratic with the unpredictability which he directs his aim to. Crowds of Hosts are cut down, but he doesn't notice them, or you.]

You all die now!

everything we love resets

[eepyrean]

[The truth is, Trina's barely handling things any better. She's been so badly rattled by the changes in her form that she can't stop to think too hard about them, lest she end up consumed by another panic attack.

So, instead, she does what she knows best: Tries to reach out to help people. If she can distract herself with that, she won't have to deal with the horrifying reality of what's happening inside her own self.]

Are you alright?

[Maybe an rhetorical question, but it's mostly just to get his attention.]

[deltastrike]

[In one of the vanishingly rare mercies that Trina will find tonight, Theseus is currently too self-absorbed to form much opinion on her appearance either way. He's entirely withdrawn to himself, until he's become blind even to the nightmare or the disintegrating landscape that spells the destruction of everything around them.

It's the registering of a voice, any voice, that gets him to change his focus. Not because of what she asked, but the sheer terror of the entrance of a person who might see. ]

No! [He catches himself, too late to stop an impulsive outburst but enough to consider his words after. ] I mean, it's nothing at all.

[He vainly moves his hands higher up to cover his face. It's the most he can do to hide when standing is still out of the question.]

[eepyrean]

[Of course, a rhetorical question answered with a lie. It's a usual reaction, but at least she has his attention.]

If you say so. [It's that kind, soft tone of I-don't-believe-you-but-for-your-own-sake-I'll-agree.]

It's quite the nightmare, isn't it? Can you stand?

[deltastrike]

[It can be easy to get Theseus to hold up a unspoken collective agreement, if it benefits him. This is one of those times. He has little desire to engage in dogged interrogation to tug out the shadowed implications they are hiding from each other to light, so lost in his own misery he is.

Theseus had tried to run away when he first felt that voice exert control over his body, but it soon proved futile. The girl's reminder incites him to try for the first time since. The slow movements of his shaky, unstable legs show how not much has changed.]

I...I'm not sure.

[eepyrean]

Well, you don't want to be caught lying down, do you? [It's a bit more Miquella of a response than she actually wants to give; inviting him to action with a leading question that may just poke at his ego is something Miquella would do more, she thinks, especially after he seized that Great Rune and everything... changed. But if it works, then it works, and she can feel bad about it later.]

... This nightmare is... it's probably just going to get worse before it ends.