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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i!

[hexrot]

[ jayce knows this feeling all too well. it spurred his attack on silco's shimmer factories with vi, it made him swing a weapon that shattered bone and bodies to their death, putting blasts into ogres fit into body armor, pumping them with enhancements. they were simply that, at the time: enemies. monsters. bad people. the problem filling his shoes and making him lose sleep with concern, for his own safety, for the safety of others— and the shattering expectation put upon him that he needed to act. he was expected to act in a role he never wanted, but did his best to fill. to provide. eventually, that pathological want to do a bit of everything for everyone who mattered would break him apart in the worst way.

and it started when one of his blasts, in his frenzy, in his rampaging euphoria filled with a power none of them had but he did, constructing it from his own brilliance and handiwork (indeed, it was god-like, dangerous. hextech would destroy them in a war if he were absolutely mad enough), that jayce struck a child. that child died. all that wild barricading came to a screeching halt, and he didn't know what to do with it. with himself, with the body, with the other hundreds of displaced children who then looked at his notable face, once on posters. not a golden boy, not a man of progress. not even someone who was doing the right thing. just a killer.

no matter how many times he shook, or cried, or woke up in cold sweats from the night terrors haunting his hours of rest, he was still a killer, too. nothing was going to change that.

jayce finds himself overwhelmed with the feeling, but not registering that he was suddenly too close to this man, and hooking an arm under his to steady his descent at the very least. moving on his own. going through the appropriate movements. overwhelmed in a sense that he just— nearly shuts down. there are no tears, no shame, not even a grimace. just an empty, floating sensation of detachment, that he was not here despite being quite grounded, on his feet.

it started with the child and grew into this fucked up formula that had to do with survival, that he vaguely has a sense of, but seems to far away to be in touch with. ]

I can't judge you.

cw references to body image issues, discussion of civilian casualties in mosul

[faa]

[ The sudden human contact burns like white phosphorus, an intimacy too blindingly bright in the current moment to behold directly. But he doesn't shake it off, either, lets the man get an arm under him in his copilot's place, just enough to keep him from falling to the ground in the moments before his legs regain their stability. Then, once his tendons feel like they've resolidified and returned to their normal tensile strength, he separates himself; he'd rather people didn't touch him most days, didn't feel the weight and bulk and softness of his body. It's a slow starvation, a gradual hypoxia. He used to like being touched.

Freddie lets out a shuddering, unsteady exhalation. The guy's looking at him like he knows, like vets look at vets, and that could be why he says that, but it could also be because that's what civilians are conditioned to say—and if you know you're standing next to someone who got a high off of killing, wouldn't that be the safest thing to say in the situation? ]

It wasn't... that wasn't like me. I'm not like that. I wouldn't just... I wouldn't go out and kill without a reason. A very, very good reason. These people were... they were monsters.

[ Nine to eleven thousand bodies in Mosul, up from the Iraqi government's official estimate of about 2,500, weren't. They were just women, children, old people. Men in wheelchairs. He tries to redirect his thoughts to the man standing in front of him. He wishes he could leave and shower and scrub himself until the water runs cold. ]

[hexrot]

[ people? plural?

jayce's hold here is clinical; it serves a purpose. to get the man up. keep him on his feet. as soon as he no longer needs it, his hold is no more, also quick to retreat. he'd always been affectionate, always been quite easy to throw them around to those he enjoyed, but— the reason for his creases that has aged him beyond his years has made him more cautious with and when he extends such devotions.

there's something about these words that twist an irritable bubble in jayce. the kind thing to do was comfort this man, or maybe the kindest thing was to tell him the damn truth. what he sees every day he looks in the mirror, how his clean shaven, boyish wonder has been sapped right out of him. he shakes his head at first, silently, his lower lip jutting into his top, the longer he keeps thinking he's still good and justified is time wasted in place. no progress. ]

The second you choose to kill, that's what you are, too. Reason doesn't matter.

cw discussions of killing and IS group perpetrated SA, snuff, torture, murder

[faa]

[ The words hit him like an electric shock, like ice water dumped down his shirt. There's discomfort and immediate, knee-jerk resistance, some mechanism of self-preservation even in the face of the similar thoughts that have sprung up with ever-increasing frequency in the back of his mind with the passing of every additional month separating him from Iraq, from Mosul and Syria and CHUs and the fuselage of an enormous metal bird engineered with the sole purpose of killing.

I'm a killer, they said in basic training, over and over again. I'm a killer. If you say it enough times, maybe it'll be true when ISIS starts shooting at you and you have to shoot back. They watched the masturbatory carnage of Full Metal Jacket and Saving Private Ryan and Jarhead and Black Hawk Down over and over, whooping and roaring and howling when the blood started to flow on their laptop screens and American GIs like them started spraying bullets and mortars, caught in the erotic thrill of the power behind the whipping blades and huge door guns of American helicopters descending from the sky to Ride of the Valkyries like dark sinister birds of prey and imagining themselves harnessed into the pilot's seat, opinions on the Vietnam War be damned.

If he's a killer, it's because he was engineered to be one. But so were they. And the insurgents in Iraq and Syria were more than just killers, they were something else. ]

No. There are killers and there are monsters, but they're not the same. These people were—subhuman. Rapists. Torturers. They beheaded people in the name of their religion. Have you ever fucking—seen a terrorist snuff film? Seen someone just—hack up a body for sick kicks? They murdered women and children from their own country, their own religion, in cold blood. So I chose to kill them. We all chose to kill them, because the alternative was letting them own half the Middle East and go around raping and murdering whoever they want. There has to be justice.

that's a wrap for new things!

[hexrot]

[ there are certain words being said here that jayce knows the meaning to, of course, but the actual context of all of this is . . . lost. it is being thrown up and babbled in a quick attempt to cover. this man is rigged with trauma and guilt for something he . . . admitedly, chose to be a part of— and jayce has enough of those two things with his own problems. ]

You chose. There's nothing else to be said.

[ if this stranger is worried about judgement, he shouldn't have to worry about it cominng from jayce. perhaps he's the only one being judgemental of himself, it seems. he wasn't even there— what could he say about anything?

jayce was a scientist. a man thrown into the role of leader and defender when the people looked to him for it. when he had to be. but military, enforcer— he wasn't any of that. ]

If you need to justify it to progress, [ the dream glitches, whispers his last words as the world around them distorts, and jayce could feel his presence waining until he's only left words behind in this dream: ] that's on you.