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

(Eddie knew all about Georgie. He remembered when Bill first told him what happened, and he knew instantly afterwards that Georgie became something that Bill did not want to talk about. Eddie wasn't so sure if 'denial' was the best word, since there was no real denying putting that little boy into the ground. Eddie had been there at the funeral, had stood by Bill's side as they lowered that eerily tiny casket (smaller than Eddie, even) into the earth. It had stayed closed the entire time. Eddie knew why.

He had hugged Bill so tight that day. He had seen the way that Bill's parents had looked like someone had glazed over their minds and put them up on a shelf out of reach of their own remaining child. Eddie doesn't know if they had even said a single word to Bill that day. It was beyond him, truthfully, but all it did was make him stick by Bill's side until late that same night.

This was a lot different. Seeing Georgie again after having been used to the idea of him dead was startling. Like seeing a ghost, sitting inside of Bill's head and watching Georgie's cute face smiling at Bill. The worst part wasn't that though. It was feeling everything Bill felt. How he watched Georgie leave, and God, Eddie wanted to cry out a warning. Tell Bill to stop Georgie!

He tries to even, can hear his own voice in his head louder than even his mind-mother's screaming for Bill to stop Georgie. Crush that boat, pull his little brother back into his room and tell him to never go outside to play alone. Jesus- Georgie don't leave....!

But Georgie left.

And Georgie died.

Georgie hadn't been his little brother, but Eddie felt a strange connection to him that he had never quite understood. Maybe it was purely through Bill. Either way, he felt not only his pain flaring in his chest, but the pain of Bill when Bill finally discovered what had come to be for his little brother. The anguish crashed into it, and Eddie thought fleetingly of his own father's sunken face in the hospital bed before he died, and then it was nothing but a cacophony of a child's death . The screaming wail of all those dead children that It had taken from the world, all of that pain, all of that suffering. God why had no one in Derry ever cared about any of them? Why were children so easy to forget?

By the time Eddie surfaces from the memory, his face is wet with tears. Tears for Georgie, tears for poor Eddie Corcoran, and most of all, tears for Bill Denbrough.

He covers his mouth, feeling his lungs squeezing into wrinkled, useless things, and he thinks hysterically for a moment that he needed his inhaler. His fingers spread apart, getting wet on his tears, and he stares at Bill shaking. That's when everything had begun. With one little boy in his yellow raincoat getting ripped apart.

Eddie throws himself into Bill with all the ferocity in his small body, and he squeezes him tightly, his face pressed into Bill's chest.)

God, Bill. Jesus I am so-.

('Sorry' felt shallow. 'Sorry' didn't bring back Georgie, didn't bring back their childhood, the other children who died. It didn't bring back all those nights that Bill had spent hurting over Georgie, how he had been isolated in his own room.)

[Bill closes his eyes, overwhelmed by his memories and his emotions, and wraps his arms tightly around Eddie. He buries his face in Eddie's hair for a quiet moment and just lets himself hurt, the ache in his chest growing rather than lessening. Georgie has never left his mind, but during the summer he had had things to focus on, and other emotions to counter the utter loss and emptiness of the Georgie-shaped hole in his heart.

It's a long time before Bill responds, and there's a choked quality to his soft, stuttering words.]

You s-s-saw that t-too?

[Worse things had followed his sitting alone in his room. His parents had barely looked at or spoken to him, and when they had, it was to blame Bill for what had happened to Georgie. It was his fault Georgie went out alone to play in the room, his fault Georgie died, and his fault they became zombies, and he became the ghost in the house.

For months he ate alone in the deafening silence of their kitchen, cried any time it rained, or Für Elise began to play, berated himself for his parents when they were not speaking to him. Bill accepted their blame, and believed it.

Georgie was gone and it was his fault, and his parents never looked at him directly again. Sometimes he would lay in Georgie's bed and cry himself to sleep, or sit numbly at his window, as if Georgie might come skipping up the sidewalk, boat in hand.

Bill swallows thickly and rests his good hand on the back of Eddie's head, grateful for his presence.]

Yeah.

(It's as simple as that. He wasn't going to lie to Bill. Not ever, but especially not about Georgie. Bill deserved more than that. He deserved a whole lot more than the summer they had gone through. They all did, but Eddie had been angry for Bill since the day they buried Georgie, and the day Bill's parents seemed to forget that they had a second son. Maybe Eddie didn't seem the memories that followed, but he didn't have to. Not when he had gone over to Bill's house after and seen the evidence himself in the way his mother had ghosted through them. Not even saying hello to Eddie, let alone glancing at Bill when he said they were going to go out and play somewhere.

Bill's parents weren't perfect before or anything, but they were better parents than most in Derry. Not anymore. Not after Georgie.

He keeps a tight hold of Bill, and sways them slowly because the momentum felt a little bit like rocking. A comforting thing for Eddie, and maybe a comforting thing for Bill. Eddie doesn't know.

But seeing the memory impacts him in a way that Eddie hadn't anticipated. The sadness, sure, Eddie saw that coming. But how connected Bill was to the events of that day. Eddie had known that Georgie had gone out to play that day. Just not...All the rest of it.)

Georgie loved you so much, Bill. He wouldn't want you hurting like this. You're his hero. You always were.

[Bill hadn't spoken much on the details of the day. It was hard to talk about what happened to Georgie, without bringing up the fact that both Bill and his parents blamed him for it. Georgie wouldn't have been playing outside if Bill hadn't made him that stupid boat, and if Bill had just gone with him, maybe he could have protected Georgie.

Feeling all those emotions again after reliving that day again, as if it had just happened, it just made the hurt fresh and raw.

But Eddie's trying, and Bill forces a sad smile, letting Eddie rock them. It's hard to feel like a hero when he knows he failed Georgie. He can't say that to Eddie, especially not when he's holding him like this.]

Thank you, Eddie. [It's soft, and he squeezes Eddie tighter. It does mean the world, to hear Eddie believe in him, to have those reassurances in place of the things his parents had said. It would take a long time for Bill to stop hurting, if he ever could. He didn't want to let go of the pain for fear of letting go of Georgie and forgetting him like the rest of Derry had. But Eddie was right. George wouldn't like this. He repeats his words before he can even think to stop.]

Thank you.

A Spacemas Carol: December's Mod Event Log

Georgie Learns to Float

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