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

[And when he makes the offer, she gladly falls into it. Somehow, Shiro understands her pain. He knows what this is like, and that there's no real comfort for it. Diana had always thought war would be full of nothing but glory, but it had turned out to be only a well of pain.

She doesn't cry, but her tears soak into the material of his shirt anyway.]

There is nothing more cruel.

[Lost friends, lost love. Diana cannot count the number of things she had lost in that short time. Her naïveté, certainly. She is reminded of that now.]

It's okay... It's okay.

[Not the hurt. Not the war. None of that is okay. It's okay to cry, he means. It's okay to crack a little. Angela... Angela and Hunk had made that perfectly clear to him. All he can do is offer it to her, too. One hand careful at the back of her head, human fingers absent through her hair.]

[It helps him, at least.]

Yeah. I know. [He lets the silence fall for a moment, before he adds, gently as he can:] That's why we're fighting, at least. So it never has to happen to anyone else in our universe.

[Diana clings to his shirt, trying to control herself so she doesn't start shaking. It's all so much--too much. To see it again so vividly, to have someone bear witness to her triumph but not know the failure that had soon followed is overwhelming. Diana focuses on her breathing, on the gentleness of his hand in her hair. He grounds her, brings her back to this reality, the one where there is no war to fight. Where they are all just stranded, trying to get home.

That, somehow, is much easier to endure.

She closes her eyes, listening to their breathing, their hearts, anything to keep herself right here and not back in her memory, back in her pain. Eventually she nods, turning her head to rest her cheek against his now-damp shoulder and exhaling slowly. He's right. She knows he's right. It would be wrong of her to give up now, not after all the time she had spent preparing for this, not after every hope and training Antiope had poured into her.]

I won't stop fighting. [It's hardly a whisper, but she means it.]

[He'll stand there with her for as long as she needs him to. Carefully threading human fingers through her hair. Repeating the words, the assurances. It hurts -- seeing her in this much pain. Seeing Diana of all people. She'd always seemed, well, like he'd said, incredible.]

[And she reminds him of Allura all over again.]

I got you. It's okay.

[It will be okay. If she needs to pour herself out, then so be it. He'll stand here for her. Be the stoic one, the steady one. Arm around her shoulders, the other one making slow and careful strokes through her hair until she speaks again.]

I believe you. [And then, in hopes of helping her:] It makes a difference. That someone is willing to. Even if it's hard to see.

[With Shiro, it's so easy to let herself fall into the pain that she'd tried so hard to avoid, because she knows he'll be able to pull her back out of it. Something in his voice, in the way he strokes her hair, tells her that it's alright to show him the weakest side of her. After a few minutes of quite words and comforting touches, she finds the strength to lift her head from his shoulder. Her face is dry, even if there are rings of pink around her eyes.

Though she realizes by now he would never think it of himself, Diana knows he is an amazing human, a true credit to his fellow man. He is a true leader, and something twinges in her heart as she realizes how much Antiope would have liked him, how much she wishes the two of them could meet. But she pushes that all aside for later--he has witnessed enough of her grief for tonight. She will not subject him to more.]

Maybe some day it will be easier.

[Diana raises a hand to his face, brushing her thumb just lightly over his cheek before dropping it back down to his shoulder.]

Thank you, Shiro.

[As long as it takes, he'll stand here with her. He'll stand beside her. He'll keep hold of her. Just like he would any member of his team. Any of their allies, their friends... someone who needed it. When she looks up, there's no judgment. Even if he felt unsettled by her breaking down a little, it wouldn't be fair to her to show it.]

[There's just a slightly hopeful smile for her.]

That's what we've all got to keep thinking. Right? What we all fight for.

[That it will get better. It will get easier. That other people won't have this kind of pain. That it ends here. It ends with the people who are already fighting.]

[-- she's touching his face. He blinks a few times before forcibly writing it off as just her doing something kind in return. It makes sense.]

Defending the universe means offering a shoulder, sometimes, too.

Right.

[And even though her heart is still raw with the pain of remembering the fate of Veld, she finds herself able to smile back at him. It is probably the smallest smile to ever find her lips, but it is there nonetheless. Diana exhales slowly, trying to regain control of her breathing. Eventually she succeeds, and closes her eyes for a moment to regain her composure before speaking.]

Luckily for me, yours are sturdy.

[A smile is... it's enough. From her, it's good enough. A good enough sign.]

[Still, he waits until she's ready. Keeps still until he sees her visibly recover. Pull herself up straighter like she's gathering some kind of mantle around her.]

Either that or... you're never too heavy for them.

A Spacemas Carol: December's Mod Event Log

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject