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

Those words hang in the air for several long moments, jarring at Frisk in a way they don't quite understand. It's not that they want to keep pushing, to have to struggle and work and try over and over and over, just for all their efforts to mean nothing, but...

They've known nothing else for so long.

"Then...what?" What other path is there? What other choice is there, other than to try until all options have been ticked away? What can they do but wear themself to a thread, in the hopes that one choice might mean something for everyone?

Then what?

They know then what.

Lavellan implied as such, did he not? Live the best possible version of yourself. Live as the person that you want to be. That, they know, is an impossibility in the literal, most direct translation of the words, but in the long-term?

They know exactly what counts as the best possible version of themself.

The version that never managed to hurt anyone at all.

They straighten, slowly. Adjust the corners and edges of their sweater with short, neat jerks, smoothing the edges down, straightening the lines, lifting their chin.

"I find another path."

It sounds so simple, when they say it. Simple, though they know it can't be--to veer away from their own natures, to turn against the colors woven through their very being.

And yet...

Frisk watches Chara rise, crisp and assured is ways they never can be, and push themself awkwardly to their feet. A slight stumble when they straighten up, and Frisk pushes a longer chunk of their bangs back out of their face. It's getting long again...they wonder for a moment if Shepard will be the one this time to try and tame it again. But for now they just nod, giving Chara a small, encouraging smile.

"Okay. I'll--" They stop, swallow, and fist their hands up into the fabric of their sleeves. "I...if I can help, I...if you want it, I'll. I'll do what I can."

They have no idea, what it is they're planning to do.

The thought strikes them peculiarly, ironclad and rimed with an uncertainty they've never been very fond of confronting. They've always assumed that...it's still strange, is the thing, the idea that they might operate on separate wavelengths, that they would not be privy to an exchange of thought and feeling in the strange, swirling amalgamate of two awkwardly conjoined SOULs.

Their expression twists at that one, shuttering, lips pressing together.

They shake their head.

"No."

It's not said - unkindly. But it is firm. Of the two of them, Frisk is the one with the life to go back to. They're the one who has been allowed a chance.

They would like to think that they are not so cruel that they would strip that away from them.

"You have better to do."

Their smile falters, shoulders falling by a tiny fraction. For a moment they don't even notice the differences, only feel the pang of yet another rejection, another failure--but they can see too the tight line of their mouth, the way their eyes flick away. Whatever this is, it's not anger.

"You don't know that." A quiet murmur, weak but pushing, not willing to give way just yet. They know they should relent, but they've never been good at letting go. "I'm not...'s not like I've done anythin' someone else couldn't."

Frisk moves a little closer, eyes locked onto Chara's face as if they could divine their thoughts if they simply focused correctly. "What're you gonna do?"

To say anything more would open a window for investigation. They know Frisk, and they know their capabilities - and they know that if they leave that door open, they will follow. They will, and as low as the fallen human as stooped, as low as they have sunk, as low as it is possible for them to be, they will not facilitate another child's self-destruction.

They smile serenely, feeding one hand up to the golden lump of the Locket resting beneath their sweater.

"I'm sure I'll think of something."

It's the farthest thing from an answer. Chara has some kind of plan, they can tell--why else would they be so cryptic, assured but silent? But whatever it is, they don't want to share; but is it because Frisk would stop it, or because they would join? Both could so easily be the case, and with trust so fractured between the two of them...

Maybe they shouldn't be so surprised.

Frisk huffs out a small breath, looking away with a sullen expression. They're far from giving up, but pressing the point now isn't going to do much good. "Fine. ...just...be careful, okay?"

"You know me." It's as bitterly eloquent an answer as any one might expect from them, and in the end, it hardly says anything about them at all.

They've learned there's no such thing as a clean break. There's no such thing as tearing away like ripping a band-aid from the freshly scabbed wound, and expecting everyone to come away unhurt. When you're filled with determination, pressing forward comes as a second nature.

So you leave no ground to go to. You play along.

You don't let the red flag raise.

Frisk stares at them for several long seconds, expression going from despondent to flat in record time.

"That's why I'm sayin' it."

Chara just tried to stab a fleshy psychic goo monster to death, their record is not exactly fucking sterling.

Then what, pray tell, did Frisk exactly expect when they asked them to be careful? Lo and behold, has Chara seen the light, and solemnly sworn to never meddle with such dangerous affairs again?

As if.

"And yet, you never struck me as someone to waste their breath."

A Spacemas Carol: December's Mod Event Log

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