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]

"Where I come from, there are some very simple rules." They would present their own for his surveillance, but...ha ha, what sort of guarantee do they have, that one even exists? It's never been extricated for the purposes of a FIGHT, never been turned blue or sapped thick and heavy with the pink cling of KARMA.

So a perfectly verbal explanation will have to suffice.

"Human SOULs are more resilient. Monster SOULs are not; they fade not long after death. A human cannot absorb a human SOUL, and a monster cannot absorb a monster SOUL. However, if one is quick enough - if one is a very particular type of monster, whose SOUL lingers after death, a human could conceivably absorb it, and be transformed into something extremely powerful." Theoretically, anyway; that has never happened, according to all the history books.

And now it never will.

"But if a monster were to take a human SOUL, well...that would transform them into a being of incredible power."

And what did monsters have perfect access to, might you ask?

A human.

A human SOUL.

[lavelly]

A pall falls on the conversation. As one always seems to do, when it's one of theirs.

He kneels, as he frequently does. He stays a good distance away, enough to be described as a distance, because Chara doesn't like these things and, as much as Lavellan appreciates information, what he really wants is a way for Chara to expel whatever it is that weighs on them, makes them distrustful of and hostile to everyone else. Maybe then he won't feel like pulling open his own head whenever they exchange more than two words.

Wouldn't that nice.

And maybe it is that he cares, and is reluctant to admit it, the same way that they do. Maybe part of him hurts that they hurt, wants to protect them the way that children should be protected and that they never were. Wants to prove to them that they are still a child, can still be a child, still has time to return to that innocence.

His face is perfectly blank.

"Did they take yours?"

[inconsequence]

Did they take it?

Their smile widens. Widens, because if it didn't - oh, if it didn't, it would ache. It would grow thin and pained and blistering and it could never be sustained.

"Monsters were trapped Underground, you see." The words are sticking; why would that happen? It makes no sense. They ought to have told this story sooner. "It would take the power of seven. Seven human SOULs to shatter the Barrier, and let them see the sun once more."

One hand creeps up to their sweater, works its way around the heart of a golden locket on a chain lumped beneath.

"The monsters had been nothing but kind to this human. And what could the human possibly give in return? How could they ever pay back to these people, who had taken them in and treated them as one of their own, treated them like family? Why, the King..." The word rasps in a manner that threatens to turn into a tremor. They convert into a cough of a giggle, try to continue. Try to always, always - Continue.

"The King even called them the future of humans and monsters. They were the future of a world of peace. Peace between a species that was kind, that was loving, that was compassionate, that would take in their greatest enemy and treat them well because it did not occur to them not to, and a race - " The words wrench, thickening like slurries of scarlet. "And a race of those that would see a child dead, that would call it a demon, that would score it and scar it and destroy it until nothing, NOTHING was left."

[lavelly]

He waits, and he listens, and he does not flinch or react. Long seconds pass where he makes no movement at all, in sharp contrast to Chara's own frantic motions, their agitation.

If their behavior is a reflection of their own mental state then so is his. He feels nothing in particular, just a dawning kind of understanding, like waking up from a dream.

Nothing about this is actually a surprise, he realizes. It is the same thing Chara has always said, in different words.

"This story doesn't matter, Chara." His voice isn't unkind. "It doesn't change anything.

"It doesn't matter who or what you are. You don't deserve that. No one does."

[inconsequence]

They laugh. It rasps, weak and gravelly.

"The story isn't done." It's syrup-sweet and poison-slick, like arsenic clogging their veins. Their eyes sparkle with something unshed, swollen like a raincloud. But instead - laugh. Laugh, until there's nothing else to do but laugh even harder. Rip it all out, a shiv through the heart.

Do you understand now, Lavellan? Why they call themself "demon"?

It isn't merely something you believe.

It is something you are taught.

"They had one SOUL. One human SOUL for the taking, and a family too gentle to rip it out from them. So they hatched a plan." One hand up and over their mouth, miming the taking in of those toxic, beautiful blooms that pitted their fingertips, that stained their skin in red and yellow, that blistered on the way down. "One day, the human got very sick. They got very sick, and their final wish was - "

A bubble of inappropriate mirth swelling up in their throat and bursting, to be hastily swallowed.

"Was to see the flowers from the Surface; those golden blooms they had so loved."

[lavelly]

He closes his eyes and lets out a slow, indulgent exhale.

This is pointless. He knows it is pointless. He and Chara will continue to talk in circles the way they always have, neither of them giving an inch from sheer stubbornness and spite.

But he wouldn't be him if he gave up, and they wouldn't be them if they did either. He couldn't live with himself if he didn't at least try, even if he already knows how it all will end. The problem is he doesn't know when to quit.

"Do you really think they would have wanted you to do that? To take you in and give you a home, only for you to destroy yourself?"

[inconsequence]

Pay attention, Lavellan. They're telling you something precious few have gotten to hear before. Did you want to know why they are like this, or didn't you?

Because if it really is all pointless, perhaps you ought not to have bothered.

"Are you going to let me finish, or would you prefer to keep drawing your conclusions before my tale has seen its end?"

[lavelly]

He simply sighs, apparently fascinated by his hands.

Fine.

"Say what you need to. I won't interrupt."

1/3

[inconsequence]

"The monsters wished for nothing more, you see, than to witness the Surface once more. They desired nothing more than to once more step into the sun."

They will make this as apparent as they need to, the foundation of their actions. Were they correct? Assuredly not; not when Frisk was more than capable of accomplishing what Chara never could, without the need to damage a single SOUL.

Except for the eight children that died, of course. Just for the story to start.

"Consider this, Lavellan, if you are so inclined. Consider that it was a war between humans and monsters that trapped them Underground in the first place. Consider that humans still populated the Surface, in even greater numbers, now. Consider that humans were still proud, were still violent, were still destructive, and would sooner attack a monster on sight than seek to understand their nature.

"Consider that this child from the world above was to be a symbol of hope; that their life would be an indication that humans and monsters could live in harmony."

A pause.

Are you getting it now, Lavellan?

2/3

[inconsequence]

"Consider that the King of all Monsters brought this child before all of his kind, and dubbed them the 'future of humans and monsters,' for all to see."

Consider that, if you will.

The future of humans and monsters. The angel from above, who had to be the savior that monsters were dreaming of. Who had to be the solution to their problems. Who could not bear to see these good people suffer, when humans above - humans who did not deserve the world they cast the monsters free from - roamed freely.

It was anathema.

3/3

[inconsequence]

"Imagine that the pressure of an entire race's hopes and dreams now rest on your shoulders. Imagine that you have one option that might truly make that critical difference between life in misery and darkness, and a future in the light."

Not that he would know anything about that, now.

Would he?

"Would you stand idly by?"