A Spacemas Carol: December's Mod Event Log

[savmods]

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?

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

Comments

[shipsandsealingwax]

[Bill is a smart kid, he picks up easily on Eddie's emotions, and the apparent need to be somewhere safe and secluded before the conversation happens. He follows, but he keeps his hand in Eddie's as they walk, giving him what comfort he can, and himself as well.

When they reach the unit, he takes a seat and tugs Eddie down to sit beside him. Whatever is about to come, it must be pretty heavy for Eddie to look the way he does.]

I'm listening.

[clussy]

(Eddie's hand is tight in Bill's, because this was Important. Eddie didn't feel bad for not having told Bill sooner. He hadn't even meant to tell Richie, but much like now, the subject merely came up and it was the kind of coming up that was too hard to ignore.

He sits next to Bill and folds his legs up so that he could face Bill. He stares at his best friend, trying to figure out where to start. With Richie it had been easy because he had walked in on Eddie smashing his pills.

Thinking about that gives him a neat way to flow into the subject.)

I gave Richie my inhaler.

(Which was important for Bill to know too.)

...Because I'm...I'm not...sick, Bill. I'm...(He suddenly felt anxious that Bill would accuse him of having faked it this whole time for attention, or to use as an excuse, or that he was stupid. But Bill would never say those things. He would never make him feel bad. Not Bill.)

My- mom...She's been telling me I'm sick for so long and I never knew- but that day Henry broke my arm? I'd gone to the drugstore to get my prescription and for some reason...Mr. Keene wanted to- to tell me...He took me into his backroom and...(Eddie stares hard at his lap, still scared by the encounter, but at the same time...Empowered.)

And told me all my medicine was fake. Placebos. Shit to fuck around with my head and make me think I was sick. He said that I didn't have asthma but my head. That day- it changed my life. And when Henry broke my arm, it was weirdly- I can't explain it. I didn't want it, obviously, but it was the first time I was really hurt and it just made me feel...real I guess. I don't know.

[shipsandsealingwax]

[Bill almost jumps to go get it at Eddie's words, but his friend doesn't look like he's having an attack, and Bill forces himself to relax and take Eddie's hand, listening patiently.

They all knew Sonia was too much to put it lightly, and somehow it isn't all that surprising that she would do this to Eddie. Not after what happened to Eddie's dad, or how controlling and paranoid she was.

But this? This is crazy. Not Eddie, but that Eddie had been taking fake medicine all this time. Bill still remembers racing the clock on Silver after a refill for Eddie's inhaler. He had seen his friend go through those attacks, had watched him take his pills on the dot, and listened to his mother lecture him about allergies and illnesses, and all the ways she made him think he was weak and not capable.

Will had never believed Eddie to be weak, he knew how capable he was, he knew how clever Eddie could be, and how much his help had been vital to getting Silver working. He lets go of Eddie's hand, both hands on his shoulders, one heavier than the other.]

They were ly-lying to you. [Not about the placebos, about being sick, about needing medicine.]

Believing their lies d-d-doesn't make you crazy, Eddie. And n-neither does how you felt when you learned the tr-truth. None of that was your fault. [As for the injury. Bill's quiet for a moment and pulls Eddie to him.]

You're strong, Eddie. You've always b-been strong. [A little emotional maybe, but that never bothered any of them.] And you've always been real.

[clussy]

(Somehow, unsurprisingly, telling the Losers about him not being sick was a lot easier to handle than telling someone else here on this station. He had explained his mother to a few people, though not always well, and people didn't always seem to get it even if he did describe her correctly. Some adults seemed to think he was just a child frustrated with an overprotective mother.

None of them seemed to understand the extent to which Sonia went to keep Eddie caged inside her home. Home, a dark sort of word for Eddie, for home was a pair of shackles locked around his limbs that dragged him down in every sense of the word.

Home was where he was poisoned, home was where his mother kept his wings permanently clipped. There was no hope in Eddie Kaspbrak's definition of 'home'.

But that was changing daily. Home was starting to mean Bill, Richie, and Stan in their colorful unit. Home was beginning to mean the feeling that roused whenever Bill would ruffle his hair or tell him he could do something; home was in the way Richie would grab his hand to show him something interesting or how he wouldn't mention it if Eddie got weepy over something.

That was becoming his new definition of home.

But it took time. It took effort. He still could hear his mother on a daily basis, but her voice was quieting the more he refused to be held down by his fake ailments.

Eddie looks up, his eyes large and maybe a little wet, because this was still so scary to him. Something that was both freeing and at once alarming.

Bill's words, much like Richie's, mattered so much to him. He gives a shaky smile.)

Mr. Keene...He didn't say I was crazy but...when I asked him, he didn't say I wasn't either.

(Those blank desert eyes had told Eddie that he was crazy. Eddie doesn't bother to mention that though. It still made him feel better to know that both Bill and Richie didn't think he was crazy. He lets himself be pulled forward. He pushes his face into Bill's neck, and clings.)

I- I don't know about strong...(Eddie's never felt strong. He leans back to smile weakly up at Bill.)

Thanks, Bill.

[shipsandsealingwax]

I do. I know you're strong, Eddie. I've s-seen you be strong. I haven't forgotten all the th-things you've done, or how things were in the s-sewers.

[Eddie might be emotional, but he isn't weak. Bill knows that with a surety as strong as he knows Richie isn't stupid, and Stan isn't a stick in the mud. He keeps his arms around Eddie and smiles back, showing all his confidence.

He had always known there was something off about Sonia. It wasn't hard to see. But the level of it all is something else entirely, that Bill isn't even entirely sure how to handle.]

Mr. Keene is crazy. [All the adults were.] He helped her. That makes him crazy, not you.

[clussy]

(The magic of Bill Denbrough was that he always made Eddie feel so much more than he ever was. He was bigger in Bill's eyes, stronger, more capable, more healthy, than he ever felt otherwise. Eddie forgot to be sick with Bill, he forgot that there was anything wrong in his head, forgot that he was supposed to be anxious about all these things.

He didn't need to be sick with Bill Denbrough and Richie Tozier at his sides. He could do anything he wanted to, and Eddie smiles widely. He doesn't want to mention the way he hears his mother so clearly in his head. He hadn't told Richie about that either.

A part of him realizes that if his friends knew, their tones might change on whether or not he actually was crazy.

But for now, he allows himself this moment of relief.)

Yeah, you're right I think. He was-.

(Eddie's mouth twitches. So scary, he wanted to say. It had felt like sitting in front of a wolf waiting for the lamb to turn its back. But Eddie doesn't complete that thought.)

...Anyway. I just. Wanted you to know. I want to be better. I don't want to become my mom. I'm trying to remind myself all the time I'm not sick.

[shipsandsealingwax]

[Bill takes Eddie's hand again as he talks. Eddie is scared, Bill knows that. They have seen each other at some of the scariest moments in their lives. He squeezes Eddie's hand as he talks, and tries to imagine an Eddie like Sonia. The thought makes him sick to his stomach for Eddie.]

Is that why Ri-Richie has your inhaler? We w-will help you remember, Eddie. It's going to be f-fine.

[clussy]

(Eddie bobs his head up and down.)

Yeah. He's with me most of the time anyway. I didn't want to get rid of it just in case it got really bad, and he couldn't calm me down. But I trust him enough to know when he can't.

(It had made sense at the time. After all, Richie was the person he instinctively moved to whenever something horrifying was happening. Bill sometimes too, but Richie was a first-response and Richie was good at reeling Eddie back in.

He smiles at Bill, feeling honest gratitude. His friends were always there for him.)

Thanks, Bill.