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

[lavelly]

No, you're not.

[It's said with a finality. It's a statement, not an argument.]

You're just a child who's known too much violence. And I hope one day you'll realize it.

[There's nothing more he can really say. He's done. They're done.

But if nothing else, he's convinced himself: he has a choice, as well. Yes, he is selfish. Maybe not in the way he thought he was, but selfish nonetheless. But it's only because he made himself that way.]

Just remember that the next time you decide to be cruel to someone. And if you do anyway, if you decide to try and drive them away, don't be surprised when it works.

[And to himself, as well, take note.]

[inconsequence]

Do you think I haven't tried?

[The words tear themselves from their throat before they can stop them; before they can swallow them away or choke them back. Wrenching like broken glass, like fragments of bone lodged in their gullet.]

I was the future of humans and monsters. I was the angel that everyone believed would free them! I was - I -

[They tried.]

[They really did. They tried to be good, they swear they did, they tried, and they were going to do exactly what they were meant to, and look at how it ended up.]

I did everything I was supposed to.

[lavelly]

[Fuck. It really is like talking to himself.]

I was supposed to be chosen by the bride of the Maker to set right the world, and I was given a whole army to command to do it. All I managed to do was play right into someone else's hands. Maybe I even just made everything worse than it was before.

[His own twist with discomfort. Even now it's hard to talk about Solas, even in indirect terms.]

Sometimes we're not what we think we are. Sometimes we're not even what other people tell us we are.

[Not the Inquisition. Not the intermediaries. Not Chara's monsters or whatever else.]

[inconsequence]

[So...]

[So what, then?]

[Is that it?]

[Do you just spend your entire life searching for some reason to be something other than what you are? Do you just spend every day muddling to find some purpose, some scrap of evidence that you haven't ruined everything in your vicinity? Is that not simply its own form of denial? They accepted it. They accepted what they are! That's - that's what they're supposed to do.]

Then...

[The question forms with difficulty. It tastes bitter, like acid stuck to the roof of their mouth.]

How is one meant to find out?

[And how does one go about finding out, when every failure to do so will be so catastrophic?]

[lavelly]

If I knew that, do you honestly think I'd be here?

[Does Chara expect a simple answer? How is Lavellan meant to explain possibly the most unanswerable question in the history of existence?

Well, he did present it, after all.]

I don't know if one ever finds out. When I was young, I thought adults had all the answers, and my Keeper especially--it was why I'd wanted so badly to be her First. Then when I got there, when I knew everything she did, I realized there were still more mysteries, and being First was never what I'd wanted at all. It seems like every time I think I understand the world, something happens to upright it. And [here he laughs] I never take it well, do I?

[These are thoughts he's never spoken aloud to anyone. He's hardly even admitted them to himself. It's fitting, somehow, that Chara would be the first to witness.]

Maybe I need to stop looking for something I'll never find. Maybe we all should.

[inconsequence]

[Then what’s the point?]

[He insists they change, claims they can be better, dangles the possibility in front of them, only to confess to its esoteric, apparently unknowable nature. What’s worse: the lack of a solution, or one so obscure that it may as well not exist at all? Or maybe - ha! - maybe they’re too stupid to understand it! Maybe that’s what he’s getting at!]

Then why bother to change at all, as you seem to believe I can?

[lavelly]

[Insists? No. He just wants them to really understand that it's an option. If Chara really desires to stay the same as they've always been, then he will not force the issue. He'll just consider it a tragedy.]

If the answer isn't something that can be found, then I suppose we have to come up with one ourselves. We can try to be the kind of people we wish we were, instead of the ones we are.

[inconsequence]

[The person they wish they were?]

[The person they wish they were does not exist; the person they wish they were died in a mouthful of buttercups and perished to claim six SOULs for the surface, and did not linger after. The person they wish they were never got a chance to be, and that should have been the end of it.]

[It was not.]

[Is there a way to rectify that, even now?]

And what is it that you wish to be, sir?

[lavelly]

[He'd asked himself so many times who he was. What kind of person. And nothing ever came to him. But this question he can answer instantly.]

I want to be worthy of the faith people have in me. If people are going grant me importance that I don't deserve, then--the only thing I can do is try to deserve it.

I don't know how, yet. But I know it's not by being the kind of person I've been.

[inconsequence]

[A person shaped by the expectations of others. Why are they not surprised? They did say that he and Frisk were eerily similar, in some respects.]

I did not ask what you think other people want you to be. I asked what you want to be. [They are trying not to sound exasperated, and largely failing.] Do you have things that you enjoy doing? Do you have anything at all to separate yourself from the unattainable ideal you apparently still believe you must be?

[lavelly]

[He makes a face in turn. Sorry for not adhering to your pedantic terms, Chara, god.]

I want to--do better. [He smiles, a bit self-deprecatingly. There's no way to say this that doesn't sound ridiculous.] I want to help. I just want--everyone, all people, my people to be able to live in peace. Anything that's in my power to make it happen, I want to do it. To make the world a little bit better any way I can. That's all I've ever wanted.

[He pauses, and looks away, and--shrugs, almost sheepishly.]

You can think of that what you want of that. It's true.

[inconsequence]

[Even his answers all have to do with other people - his people. To make the world better, at large.]

[It's irritating. They cannot even fault him for being selfish. Contrarily self-pitying and inherently self-martyring and selfless and...he is so very much like Frisk, sometimes, that it is unfairly vexing.]

Surely there is more to you than what you can do for others.

[lavelly]

Sure there is.

[It isn't sarcasm, just an acknowledgment. Of course there are other things he does, that he wants, that he enjoys. But what he wants from life, in general?]

But it's not worth anything if I only live for myself.

[And there's no convincing him otherwise. This is something that's been a part of him for a very long time--before the intermediaries, before the Inquisition. It's what made him leave his clan, what drove him to become his Keeper's apprentice in the first place.]

What is it that you want, Chara?

cw: oblique suicide ideation

[inconsequence]

Living for yourself at all is not selfishness.

[And what is it you want, Chara?]

[...]

[They know the answer to that query, but they also know that he would never accept it. If this is their fate, if this is their purpose, if this is their End, then...]

[Then they'd better hasten to achieve it.]

[He is right, in so many ways. They cannot flounder and try to force a reality that will not come to pass. They cannot attempt to make themself better through sheer force of will. We can try to be the kind of people we wish we were, instead of the ones we are.]

[Only one person in the history of their world has achieved that, and he achieved it in the loosest possible sense, because he no longer ever existed.]

[They smile. It's softer, than usual.]

[For once, it...]
[For once.]

[For once, they can - they can say that they are at peace.]
[And for once, they whisper an utter lie.]

I suppose we shall have to find out.

[lavelly]

[He looks at them, the lines falling from his face, taking in their posture, their expression--they're so young. Of course he's known that, but now it hits him all at once, how young they are to talk like they do, act like they do. Despite everything, they're still a child.

He's hit with a wave of--worry, all of a sudden. He doesn't know what he can do for them. But he wants to do something. Even through all their antagonism, Chara deserves better than what they have.

His voice is uncharacteristically soft.]

I hope you do. Maybe it won't be soon. But I hope you do, eventually.

[inconsequence]

[He means well.]

[He means well, and he sometimes makes things go wrong. Perhaps, at last, they can stop being the cause of that. At last, they can reduce the very worst of their presence; the damage they inevitably inflict, and inevitably cause.]

[To say that they will soon, that would give it away. And so they simply...smile. And they let it fall away.]

...perhaps, yes. Perhaps there is hope for us yet.

[For the first time in a long time - ]
[There is HoPe.]