thisavrou_log | A Spacemas Carol: December's Mod Event Log

Who: Anyone and Everyone
When: December 19 onwards
Where: Avagi... and beyond?
What: Your past, someone's present, and potential futures.
Warnings: Body horror and an associated image in the second part. Otherwise, label your content.

While the Ingress may have been destroyed, the energy powering it remains alive and well. The residents of Avagi know this intimately: from their own arrivals, from the portals that have appeared, and the short-lived changes (as well as longer-lived possessions) that have cluttered the station over the last few months. Recently, whatever force is manipulating this has even gone so far as to revive the dead—demonstrating, perhaps, an unwillingness to relinquish those it has brought to this place.

To say this entity is seasonal would probably be a mistake. In the heart of Avagi's storms, there are no stars to mark the seasons, much less connect them to a certain planet's holidays—or the literature thereon. Still, from luck or from intention, the current fluctuations comes with a certain theme...

Past

It starts at the turn of the station clock's midnight. Flickers at the edge of one's vision. Indistinct whispers, ghosting through walls and down corridors. Those who are sleeping will be untroubled, but the wakeful and wary can watch the light build: from flickers to pulses, from pulses to pools. Over several hours, silver mist fills rooms and corridors, varying from a thin veil to dense, obscuring fog. If you step into the mist, you'll feel a sense of displacement; of sound and color, energy and a shift of life. Ingress travel.

Except... not quite.

Shortly after entering the mist, you'll find yourself free of disorientation and apparently free of physical form, unable to interact with your surroundings. As a quasi-ghost, you've been transported to somewhere and somewhen—a location from the past, back on a world of someone’s origin or from any place you've been since first arriving through the Ingress. While these experiences can vary wildly, some things remain consistent:

The past matters: These visits to the past are not repeats of idle afternoons—each has emotional significance to someone currently on Avagi.
The past cannot be changed: As real as any given scenario seems, you're fundamentally incapable of altering it. The past event will play out as it did in real life and dissipate when it reaches an ending.
Trying has consequences: Attempting too hard to interfere increases the emotional significance, and will consequently draw onlookers further into the scene. You may find yourself anchored to any participant in the scene: first physically (experiencing the scene through their eyes) and then emotionally (experiencing their emotions and thoughts). If drawn in too deeply, you may lose track of your own nature during the experience, drowning in the sense of being someone else..
You are not alone: While immersed in a scene, you'll see nothing but the history playing out. However, at the its conclusion, the fog will once again displace the world around. As it melts away, you'll find themselves back in Avagi's halls—and face to face with whoever else was also viewing that piece of the past.

Present

Whether through one memory or several, eventually, the fog disperses. Only a faint mist remains, gathered in corners of the station's halls. It's simple enough to avoid, and nothing obstructs efforts to return to your rooms, your friends, or any other destination. Nothing, that is, except finding them.

The layout of the halls has shifted. The clutter you so painstakingly cleared is back. The GPS on your ACE mistakenly reports that you are floating off in space far outside the station, and any efforts to locate or call your companions results in glitchy static. Something is interfering with your calls—more effectively than the distance between worlds.

Inference and intuition are all you have to put together the pieces. The layout has changed, but the construction stayed the same. You're still on the former Ingress station. But not the same area that you called home. This is a different section of Avagi.

An inhabited one.

Dank, warm air pulses in and out of the vents in odd rhythms. Water damage stains the walls, and some seep dark liquid. There's an odd symphony in the distance: four notes, hummed to a pattern that buzzes in the back of your head. It's possible to wait it out. But if you do explore, you might come across your friends. And together, you might find the source.

Further in, a wall of flesh fills the pathways, rising and falling with intermittent, massive draws of air. A fluid wash of features glues it to the bulkheads. Claws and eyes, hands and faces: half-made bodies shifting in and out of recognition with each pulse of breath. And always with the same gold glow beneath the skin. It's a familiar shade, to those who witnessed Thisavrou's destruction.

It's the being who destroyed it.

Those who flee will escape her notice. Those who wait may watch in secret for a time. Mother's focus seems to be elsewhere...or, perhaps, something else is hiding your presence here from her.

Any attack on Mother's flesh shape, or any overt effort to draw her attention, will meet violent, immediate reprisal. You'll experience an immobilizing psychic force before the flesh consumes you. But whether you hide or fight or run, your time on this section of the station will end in the same way: a burst of brilliant, clear light providing transport back home.

Future

You flash back to reality amidst a burst of light—but this time, you recognize your surroundings. You have returned to the Avagi you know, and the silver mist that filled the halls has cleared.

Over the next few days, most of Avagi will settle back into a state of normalcy. The ACEs are working properly, and station residents will have all the time they need to compare notes on their experiences—and, perhaps, on any plans to act on what they've learned.

Avagi is not as empty as it seemed. And one place in particular will remain changed in the wake of the event. The Ingress Memorial, once inactive, has come to life, emitting a swirl of silver light that shifts and flickers, like the light of the portal it once contained. For the next five days, it will offer a vision to anyone approaching it: a single, brief scene from their potential future.

Players have the following options:

Canon future: Your character catches a glimpse of their future if they were to return from Avagi to their own world. This consists of a canon event.
Avagi future: Your character catches a glimpse of their own future on Avagi. This can be a short-term future (i.e. an actual vision of a future scene you plan to play out), or a potential longer-term one in which they stayed on Avagi for months or years.
Storm future: Your character catches a glimpse of themselves as a Mirtos—a desiccated husk and incarnation of the storm's hunger. As seen in Thisavrou's destruction, these creatures are carried by the storms and destroy all they come across.

The visions can observed by any present when the Memorial is approached. And while the past is fixed, the future is always capable of being altered. What will you do regarding yours?

[OOC: Check out the OOC post for more information!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

PAST 1 : YOU ASK FOR FACTS. (MOON CELL)

[ Set scene: a metaphysical space in a virtual world, far removed from a tangible planet earth. An illusory coliseum, flanked on all sides by an empty space that shifts as if the floor is falling, twinkles in an oppressive blue-black of a well without a bottom. It's a stage with no audience. An island floating in the middle of nowhere.

For a while, Karna is alone. Bare heels on cold tiling, posture upright. Counting absences.

(Even here, trapped together, his Master doesn't have the courage to stand beside him. Even here, waiting for salvation or punishment (or both), his Master refuses to speak to her Servant about the things that are really plaguing her soul. Even nearing the end of his tenure as her guardian and protector, she remains closed to him.

That's fine, he thinks. She can only be herself, after all.)

Time passes, and fresh faces join the fray— a taciturn young woman and her own golden Servant. This is an intervention, they say. They've come here to find Karna's Master, to right the wrongs that she'd presented. To straighten the facts. Settle the score.

And of course, Karna does his best to explain his Master's shortcomings. How the other duo's persistence will frighten her. How the thought of penance or forgiveness is abhorrent to her. But he's interrupted by his Master's sudden appearance from her perpetual state of hiding, by a flurry of fists against his chest. Hummingbird-light and hurricane-fierce. ]

"Stop it! What are you doing?!

—Can’t you just hurry up and do what a Servant’s supposed to?! You’re really really really such a failure of a Servant!"

[ He passes his next few minutes in silence, even as the interrogation by the other duo blazes on. Intensifies, really, now that the accused has shown her face. The situation is incontrovertibly against their favor; his Master won't fight sense with sense. She knows when to cut her losses, so she follows her gut. She condemns herself. ]

"—You're right, I'm hopeless! You should just kill me! I’m not scared— I mean, everyone dies in the end!"

[ His Master doesn't look to him for counsel, so Karna says nothing.

The debate crescendos without him. His lips are still knit, even when his Master slumps and her breathing turns ragged, desperate. ]

"No matter what— no matter what we do, we won’t be saved! Even if we regret things now, nothing and no one, not my papa, not my mama, not my time, will ever come back! ...I don’t need anything, anyway!"

[ That's a lie. Karna can see it in the tremors that shake her, her downcast gaze, her blown-wide pupils. But he stays where he is, waiting for her to say the inevitable. ]

"...Karna! Throw them out! Erase them from the world so they never come here again!!"

[ And Karna, in all his infinite acceptance, draws his spear.

(he doesn't regret many things, but he know that this— his silence and his acquiescence, regardless of the outcome— must have hurt her, must have pained her, only made her detest herself further.

but she asked, and he answered.) ]

PAST 2 : WELL, I'LL GIVE YOU PROOF. (MAHABHARATA)

[ Okay, that other scene might be a little devoid of context, so here's something quick and straightforward: a battlefield, two chariots, and two men engaged in combat.

The progression of events is quick. One chariot gets stuck in mud. Two men understand the terms of a fair fight. One man steps off his chariot to dislodge its half-sunk wheel from the mire. One man breaks the terms of the fair fight. One arrow flies into one man's neck while he's knelt in dirt.

Karna is the one who bleeds enough for two. The look on his face before his half-brother kills him is a gentle smile. ]

WILDCARD : (HERE'S THE TRUTH.)
[ wwwwwildcard! are these overdramatic and dumb and hard to work with?? let me know here:

deuil! i'll be more than happy to set up something more lighthearted/enjoyable for you! ]

[When the rules get broken, Nate tries to react, tries to draw a gunblade that isn't actually on his hip, tries to cast a spell -

[And instead, he anchors to the one who got shot.

[When the memory fades, Nate is left touching his own neck, remembering pain that wasn't his, remembering:] That was your brother?

[ His death wasn't a memory that Karna would've wanted anyone to see— not because it's particularly revolutionary or surprising (in all honesty, he finds it all very predictable), but because it's a piece of history that's done and over with, a bygone grudge that should have ceased to bring pain to others for being involved in it.

The wasteland recedes, but Karna still tastes dirt between his molars. He closes his eyes, breathes, and sets his focus back on Nate. ]

Yes. Arjuna, the Awarded Hero.

[ The man who wished for Karna's death so fervently that he was willing to grind his dignity into mud. Karna almost smiles at the thought of it. ]

Sorry. Did it hurt? [ Because he felt it too, of course; the arrow, the blade through his jugular. A familiar flash of heat. ]

Yeah. [Nate withdraws his hand from his neck and shoves it into his pocket.] Why would he do that to you? [Beat.] That wasn't what he got awarded for, was it?

A Spacemas Carol: December's Mod Event Log

karna | past | cw: death and tl;dr

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