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

[inconsequence]

"I don't regret feeling as I did. I don't regret wanting them dead." They still do. Now, more than ever. Their only comfort, in knowing in how much time has elapsed since the plan's failure, is the knowledge that none of them must still be alive. None of them, that called out the wrong name for the body lying among the flowers, who shed tears as though any of them cared and any of them knew them as anything more than a nuisance, who used that stillness in the grass as an excuse to take a swing at the monster they could look in the eyes - their eyes, looking out through Asriel's, at a man with a shotgun and a flinted quality to his stare.

They would not regret destroying them now. They would not regret destroying every last one of them, for what they did before and what they did after.

Irredeemably awful is all they've always endeavored to be; a mental justification for every lesson they'd always been taught. If you're good, you'll live forever. If you're bad, you'll die when you die.

Unless, of course, it's the other way around.

"If there were a way - if he would not need to be involved, and suffer as he did - " Asriel, trying to be brave through his tears because big kids don't cry, snuffling pathetically when they choked on their vomit, and then smiling patiently when he was struck with blow after blow -

"I would do it all again."

[clussy]

To some extent, Eddie could understand wanting someone dead. Most days, he wanted Henry Bowers dead. It wasn't something he could ever conceive himself doing, though unbeknownst to him, he would one day be the person who winds up killing Henry Bowers. But that was a reality not yet known to Eddie, Eddie who now could still barely imagine what it'd be like to stab someone.

Irredeemably awful is what they failed to be, in the end, for Eddie Kaspbrak. There was complexity to Chara that he couldn't wrap his mind around, simple as it was, not quite as detailed as Chara's own. But in his simplicity he understood the basics that most people overlooked.

There was no genuine evil in Chara's existence. There was just too much there for such a thing to exist.

What cements this fact inside of Eddie, this fact that Chara was genuinely good in nature, was the fact that Chara would put themselves on the line for a friend. It is something that Eddie can relate to at the core of his own being, that his eyes sting momentarily before they harden, his entire resolve growing steadily more solid.

"You're a good friend," Eddie says at last, anti-climatic though it may seem, it was hardly as such in his own mind. There was no bigger compliment he could afford someone.

[inconsequence]

"Oh, yes." Why is this happening to them? Why is he insisting upon this...this dishonesty? Killing is wrong. It's a sin. It's an atrocity. It's unforgivable. They were willing to do it, too - to themself, to six nameless, worthless humans, and then to all of monsterkind and all of humanity, as they saw fit. Judge and jury and executioner. No better than any other.

They've heard that lie a thousand times. You're a good person. You're a good friend. You're not a demon. You're tolerable, we swear to you.

They've heard it before.

Why is it so much harder to hear it now, from him? Is it the fact that they know he must mean it?

Whatever it is, it closes a fist around their throat. Makes it hard to speak. Makes it hard to choke the words out, press them past the burning in their chest and the heat beneath their lids.

"I'm such a good friend that I get everyone killed."

[clussy]

Killing is wrong, Eddie would never deny that. But he also registers, to some extent, and in some situations, that killing was the good in a bad situation. That sometimes death answered for the awful things that happened in the universe.

It would be easy to lie, wouldn't it? Unfortunately for Chara, Eddie is naturally genuine, and he's more genuine now than ever before. There is a special place in his heart for his friends, and Chara has inevitably found themselves there.

"Friends make mistakes too," Eddie says softly, and then smiles a little, pointing to himself. "Haven't gotten me killed yet. So you can't actually say everyone."

[inconsequence]

Yet is the key phrase there. They're certain that, one way or another, they'll end up damaging him in some irreparable sense. No matter how susceptible he thinks himself to be, there surely must be something they can inflict upon him anew. That is their nature, is it not?

Why is it that they never met humans like him, before now?

Did they simply not look hard enough?

"And if I do?" It's hardly a whisper, if that. They come back here. Allegedly, everyone does, except for the ones who don't. But death tends to be a separate beast, from that permanent disappearance without promise for return.

[clussy]

"If you do then you do. I'm gonna get hurt whether or not I know you. I'm weak, and people like to point that out in all sorts of ways," Eddie says rather simply. Maybe Chara would lead to him getting hurt. Maybe Chara would wind up with him getting tormented...But.

"I think it's more important if you want that to happen or not. We can't prevent stuff, but as long as it's not what you're doing to me intentionally, it isn't really fair of me to hate you for bad situations." If Chara wasn't making a choice directly to do something bad to Eddie then why would he resent them for it?

Eddie looks rather focused then. Something occurred to him then...Because he felt it worth mentioning. "If you ever did somehow accidentally wind up causing my death...If you want my forgiveness, you can get it by making sure my friends are okay." That's all that Eddie cared about at the end of the day. His friends included Chara too, but he still felt it worth saying.

[inconsequence]

Some part of them rebels at that. What does it matter, what they might wish? Wishes never get one anywhere. Wishes mean nothing, just as intention means nothing, because apologies and I didn’t mean tos do not negate the fact that you did. It will still hurt. It will still land like a fistful of nails, and it will still have consequences that need bearing.

They have never been above consequences. Never.

“And if I end up hurting them, as well?” Is it not a very real possibility? They’ve destroyed the world. They could destroy so much else.

[clussy]

Maybe that was true. And honestly, Eddie might even feel differently in the future. That didn't matter right then though. He wasn't talking about this to make Chara feel worse about themselves. He also wasn't saying this with the notion of fluffing Chara up with insincere confidence.

Eddie, at the very least, did truly believe in Chara and he felt like that had to be worth something somehow. Consequences were okay, and he wasn't fully saying there shouldn't be any, but he was saying that forgiveness existed to some extent.

"Then I'll come back from the dead to kick your ass, obviously," Eddie says simply. Not that he ever could do either of those things- come back from the dead or kick Chara's ass, but he gives Chara a gentle nudge.

[inconsequence]

That...

It cracks the patina of self-imposed melancholia, if only briefly. It generates a hint of a smile, inappropriately timed, because most things about them are inappropriate and unwelcome by default, and the urge to laugh, equally inappropriately, nearly overcomes them.

"You are an odd person," they say, at last. "For a while, I've not been able to settle upon whether or not that is a good thing."

Oddities do not arrest them. They live with several robots and programs and various others they do not care to name, but oddities in colocalization with humans is more difficult to grasp.

More difficult, because this was never their experience with humans.

"You are very lucky to have the friends that you do."