ioduanlogs | [EVENT] RIPPLES ON THE WATER

Entry tags:

[EVENT] RIPPLES ON THE WATER

Characters: All
Date: September 15-30
Location: Aifaran and surrounding areas
Situation: The barrier is displaying increasingly strange behavior.
Warnings/Rating: In individual threads - please remember to warn!

The barrier that surrounds the archipelago is designed to keep the chaos of planes at bay, to safeguard the last great bastion of life in Konryu. The magic that created and sustains the barrier is immense - but not infallible. And a question that few have dared to ask in anything but a hushed whisper now descends upon the city: what if something stronger crawls out of the abyssal dark?

SHIMMER AND SHAKE

All month, the barrier has been markedly more visible than usual with swirls of rainbow color shifting across its surface, giving it the appearance of a giant soap bubble. This happens from time to time, and initially is of no great concern. Researchers prudently keep a close eye on it, recording the barrier's behavior in detail, and everyone carries on.

The first ripple appears at sunset on the 15th, warping the fading colors of the sky and spreading up and across the horizon until it vanishes. There is no outright panic in response - Aifaran is accustomed to strange events - but tension and uncertainty settle in quickly.

The Aisling Tower releases a statement in cooperation with the Ioduan Academy assuring the city that there is no indication that the barrier has weakened appreciably, nor any immediate danger. The best minds the archipelago have to offer are studying this event and advise citizens to avoid speculating about the cause until they know more. Apprehension diminishes some, helped in part by the coordinated efforts of the Tower, the Academy and the Sentry providing a unified front of calm and reassurance. Over the next few days, more ripples interrupt the cloudless skies, and no one can quite tell if the phenomenon is a physical disturbance or if the play of light and shadow merely makes it seem that way. The epicenter of each wave moves erratically, but it doesn't take the keenest of observers to notice they are marching slowly towards Aifaran.

A NIGHTMARE LOOMS

At midday on the 19th, a nightmarish figure of legend becomes visible on the barrier and sends panic through the city. Although never confirmed to be real, nearly everyone recognizes the writhing mass of darkness atop too many spindly legs: the Night Fisher. It towers high enough to be seen for miles outside the city. For half a minute, Aifaran and the surrounding lands are cast in eerie, shifting shadow as the abomination spreads tendrils questing over the barrier. Something beyond the edge of hearing sends a cold shiver down one's spine despite the warm afternoon.

And just as quickly as it arrived, the image disappears and sunlight returns to streets that are hastily emptied. City hall and the Aisling Tower are hounded for answers, while temples are packed by terrified followers seeking guidance and comfort. Hours go by and the skies remain clear. Cautiously, fearfully, people return to their homes.

The following day, researchers report that a swath of coral reef that begins off Shuyul Bay (which Aifaran overlooks) and extends beyond the barrier suddenly and mysteriously died off. Calls for skilled volunteers to help investigate are issued.

WAKING DREAMS

Another strange phenomenon that comes after the Night Fisher's first appearance is what the experts at the Aisling Tower are calling the Dreaming Sickness. Something in the Dreamfolk, and the native inhabitants of Aifaran who are sensitive to the Dreaming will find that they initially have trouble distinguishing dreams from reality. They may feel constantly fatigued and disoriented - with chronic migraines being a staple of the symptoms. As things progress, they will find they can lucid dream, and their dreams may even manifest in reality.

For example, if they were having a nightmare about a giant boot with teeth chasing them? It may just appear down the hall. Having a dream about soaring through the air? Anyone around them may also sprout wings. Fortunately for others, these visions don't manifest much further than a radius of about 30 feet, only last a few minutes, and the harm they can do is negligible at best. Experts at the Tower are unable to find an immediate solution to this problem, though they remind the public that these things tend to resolve themselves after a little while.

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OOC Notes: The Dreaming Sickness is an opt-in event if you do not wish your character to be affected. This log covers the latter half of September and you may post starters dated anywhere in that time period. Have fun!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The ripples had grown worse, culminating in the vision on the barrier. The following headaches, dizziness and fatigue drove Valdis to the beach, a place she could close her eyes and listen to the sea. The water soothed the pain, and she at least hadn't experienced anything like some of the other Dreamfolk. The scent of blood pulled her from her empty meditation. Thick, fresh and sharp. Her eyes opened, fear shooting through her mind at the sight of the bloody heart held in the hand of a man all too familiar.

"Fascinating," he said, examining it closely, "Does any connection exist between the organ and the soul?"

He squeezed the heart, blood dripping down his arm and onto the sand, and Valdis could have sworn she felt the heart in her chest clench painfully. His eyes filled with an honest and dark curiosity that sent shivers down her spine, and she felt frozen under the gaze. Disappointment flashed across his face as the heart turned to dust in his hand.

"Pity," he said, "I'm going to need to take another one now."

The Void screamed at her to move, and move she did, lurching to her feet and racing toward the treeline, but the ground erupted into flames, so hot she felt she might burn despite her usual immunity. She spun, searching for another route only to have Amos appear in front of her. Strength left her legs and she collapsed, clawing at the chains around her wrists, drawing blood with her nails and shrieking with the Void.

Help us, the sharped hissing plea would ring in the head of the closest person.

Dark magic lashed out at the archdemon, breaking the chains and swirling around her like a barrier built from death. She screamed with him as the magic washed over the ground and over him.

But the magic didn't stop, killing the flames and everything in its path. She had to rein it in. She pulled at the sensation, trying to drag it back, to squash it entirely. The city suddenly seemed closer than it was before, people were going to die if she didn't do something. Panicked, Valdis pulled a dagger from her belt. It had worked once before, and the fastest route was between the fourth and fifth rib.

The gentle shh-shh of the waves on the shore at night was calming for Miles, and he needed that calm lately. After the problems with the barrier and that - thing - he'd needed to calm his blood, and the sound of the ocean drowned out the static in his brain. The static was getting harder and harder to ignore, the Walrider singing in his ears with his anxiety. There was probably some pharmacy he could go to around here for some anti-anxiety medication, but what would even happen? Would the Walrider reject the drugs as a toxin?

The crash of the waves on the shore was white noise to combat the white noise that was already in his blood and ears and brain, and it seemed to be working.

Then: Help us.

His heart rate spiked. The Walrider didn't talk, but if it did he was pretty sure that's what it would sound like, freezing rain and an angry cobra. He was about to try and figure out where it came from when there was a woman's scream, and before he knew what he was doing he took off, stumbling in the sand, losing his footing and practically falling down as some of the smaller dunes shifted beneath him as he ran.

As he got closer, he could see someone - Valdis? - and someone else taunting her, his arm covered in blood. But the man disappeared, and Valdis pulled something from her belt. The light glinting off of it showed Miles that it was a knife, and unless he was mistaken, she was planning on turning it on herself.

His heart pounded in his ears as he sprinted at her, pushing the sound of the static down, and he grabbed her wrist, pulling it and the knife away from her side. "Valdis! What the fuck?! Stop!"

The sand shifted, but she saw nothing apart from the swirling and spreading sensation of death. Suddenly her arm was wrenched away from her, she snarled, the sound completely inhuman and foreign to a human throat. She tried to jerk away from the invisible force, but Miles' voice came sharp out of nowhere and with it, the darkness and death vanished as if it had never existed. There was no burned landscape, no blood where Amos had stood. No Amos. But the scent of blood still stung her nostrils, her arms were covered in long gashes that failed to heal. They hurt, but she didn't release her restricting hold on the magic that would have healed them, terrified that it might spring forth and consume everything.

"Miles?"

The tension left her muscles, which were now free to tremble. Valdis let the knife fall out of her hand, still confused and still feeling the remainder of the adrenaline that had kicked in. Her gaze moved up to Miles' face.

""The magic, I couldn't control it" Her voice wavered, "It was going haywire."

Edited 2018-09-18 21:11 (UTC)

When she snarled, something in him - the long-ingrained hunter-gatherer's predatory instinct that the Walrider amplified to a ridiculous degree - wanted to snarl back and prove that he was the more dangerous one here. An alien emotion, and one he didn't particularly like, so he shoved it down.

"Yeah, it's me," he said, trying to sound calm, but he knew that he couldn't hide his pounding heartbeat from her, at least. "What magic? I mean, I'm not the local expert, so you're gonna have to explain like I'm five. And who was that guy? I thought I saw someone..."

The barrier rippled in the distance, strange colors twisting in the sky, creating patterns that shifted and moved as if they were alive, but Valdis kept her eyes on Miles, afraid that whatever nightmare she had experienced would return. His heart raced as quickly as hers did, a remnant of their own adrenaline which she could almost scent on the air.

"Death magic," she whispered, worried that the mere mention of it might make it come back or give the darkness strength. Valdis felt half present, as if part of her still slept or stayed within a dream state, a state in which the nightmare held power. "He wants to control it. To control me. I can't let him. I can't go back."

Her voice went higher and higher, her fear outweighing her logic.

"Don't let me go back."

Miles didn't want to lie to her, because he wasn't sure how she'd go back, or be taken back, or whatever the flipping hell was going on, but she needed his help, and he knew that he was more than capable of fighting.

He would have said 'fighting anything', but there were more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than were dreamt of in his philosophy. At least - they were before he came here.

But he knew death, and people wanting to control it, and control someone who could harness it for their own twisted purposes, and his skin prickled and the static raged in his head. She had her own personal Wernicke.

"I won't," he said firmly. He had barely a clue what she had experienced, but he knew better than to tell her that it was all in her head. That didn't mean it didn't hurt or it wasn't scarring. He'd had months' worth of dreams to drive that lesson home.

Valdis didn't even consider how her facade had broken so completely, or if she still dreamed. Feeling half here and half somewhere else, she broke eye contact, shaking her head, trying to re-associate and find some sort of center. His reassurance should have been empty, she knew that none of them had any control over who stayed and who left, but it did help the world stop twisting so much. She took a shaky, but deep breath, blinking away tears.

"Thank you."

She glanced at the knife laying harmlessly in the sand. It wouldn't have done much lasting damage, wouldn't have affected anything in the long run, but it may have caused a problem for whoever stumbled upon the scene later. Valdis almost laughed at the morbidity of that thought, but it seemed highly inappropriate considering what had happened.

"I feel crazy," she sounded calmer now. Her arms stung as she still strangled her own magic to prevent it from rising.

Miles laughed a little, because it was all so absurd. "You're not the only one." Then the smell of blood properly hit him, and he squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. The static in his head spiked.

He shook his head and glanced down at her arms. "Jeez, Valdis, what, did you get in a fight with a gyroshei or something? You're all scratched up." His tone was light, but he knew that wasn't the case. Those were nail marks. "You'd think getting all bloody would enhance death magic, right?"

"I was trying to get the chains off," she replied quietly, though now she knew there had never been chains. And now she did laugh. The sound held no joy, but it was better than crying. Nothing had been real, the archdemon, the fire, the magic going haywire...all in her head.

She started to wipe the blood off, hissing in pain as her hands irritated the gashes. "Blood has nothing to do with my kind of death magic," she laughed harshly, "We kill without a trace."

Miles opted not to say that he killed by exploding people from the inside out at the cellular level. Not really the time. "Chains, huh? I don't blame you." He felt a phantom of Trager's restraints on his wrists, and mentally shook it off. He'd have clawed himself bloodier than he'd already been to get free, if the second one hadn't popped.

"No, don't wipe it, you're just gonna get it everywhere...you're gonna wreak havoc on my wardrobe, y'know that?" he said, and shucked his shirt off. "Here. Hold still, I'll push on it to stem the bleeding for now. You moving is just gonna make it bleed more. Pinky promise this isn't an excuse to show off my abs." He grinned.

He may not blame her for clawing herself to get away from chains, but she certainly blamed herself for getting so caught up in panic that she couldn't tell truth from the lie. She'd shown too much weakness in that moment, she was still showing weakness. Valdis knew one couldn't be strong all the time, but she hated feeling afraid and she didn't even know why the fear lingered. Amos wasn't here.

The archdemon didn't play games the same way Bobby did. He wouldn't use others to get what he wanted, so friends were the one advantage she had. They were a strength, not a weakness. Valdis took a breath. It was fear of what faced her upon her return to her world, a world where she had no friends, that plagued her. She forced a smile at his joke

"They are nice abs." She replied, eyeing the scar on his chest. All these people had physical marks to show their suffering. Scars that somehow made it more legitimate, or at least more easily visible and worthy of sympathy. "That scar...where did it come from?"

"Thank you," he said, before the smile on his face went brittle. Hiding under a hospital bed, trying to calm his ragged breathing, and then--

'Somebody has to win and somebody has to lose here, I don't make the rules!'

Trager's freaky Variant strength, dragging him out by his arm, then stabbing that goddamned pair of shears through him - not quite his shoulder, not quite a debilitating wound - before he can wrest himself away with a cry and run towards the elevator.

"The same guy who made it so I can only count to eight and a half on my fingers," Miles said, a little too smoothly. "But, you know. 'You should see the other guy', and all that."

How To Make Trager Juice. Step 1: Squeeze.

"Let's take a look," he said, lifting his balled-up shirt off of the scratches. "There. They look better now." He took her arm to look a little closer, and then--

--there was a brief glow from his hands, and the wounds sealed up.

He almost dropped her arm in shock; he did drop the shirt. "Hey, uh, you did that, right? You did the healy thing?"

Her attempt at a joke seemed to have fallen flat, because his face fell at her question, destroying the mood she had been hoping to preserve. Miles might have been able to answer smoothly, but the jolt in his emotional state told her she'd stepped on something delicate. Valdis didn't press, not that he gave her the chance because he redirected the topic of conversation to her injuries.

Valdis hissed softly when foreign magic touched on her senses, closing the slashes as easily as her own magic might have. Miles seemed shocked, dropping his shirt and recoiling. It was enough to push what remained of her fear into the background. She released her death grip on her magic, letting it flow back around the slashes on her other arm. There was no light to accompany the healing, no strange magic.

"No," she replied, sounding confused, "I think that was you."

Miles shook his head, bewildered. "No, not me, I don't do the magic thing. I might be the least magical person here, and--oh, goddamnit." He reached up to rub his Talent mark on his left shoulder. "So that's what that is, huh? Took me long enough." Not like he'd exactly been trying. He'd been a little busy, and besides, he hadn't wanted to have something else added to his avalanche of abilities, all of which he hated.

Okay, the 'coming back to life' one was pretty useful.

"So...now I can heal people. Fan-tastic." He sighed. "Well...at least it's not something bad, right? How's your arm?"

Valdis arched a brow, but chose to examine her arm instead of commenting right away on his skepticism. The wounds had healed to the same level on both arms. His talent was as good as her own ability, though his used a far less precious resource. Miles didn't sound pleased though.

"Healing is better than destroying," she murmured, "And it feels fine now, thank you." She reached over to grab the knife out of the sand.

"I mean, you're not wrong," he said, still looking a little sour. "It's just another log on the fire of things-I-wish-I-didn't-have. Not everyone's excited about magic." He would have been, back before the whole Walrider thing. He just wanted to be normal again, though. No magic, no Walrider. Just Miles, whoever that had been.

"You're not gonna mess with that thing again, are you?"

Creation wasn't always better than destruction, but it generally held more light than darkness. Though, if what Amos had done could be considered 'creation' was up for argument. She picked up the knife and returned it to her belt.

"I'm always messing with weapons," she replied, "This isn't even the only dagger I have on me."

She didn't need to go around armed, but a weapon could be a deterrent, even if she had no intention of using it. She could disarm and neutralize without lethality if she desired.

"But no," she admitted, "I'm not going to stab myself. It would be pointless considering I'm not currently a danger to anyone."

It was only the belief that she was putting the city in danger that had triggered the desire anyway. She was lucky Miles had been nearby.

"Is the number of knives you have on you greater or less than five?" he said, deadpan.

"Good. Stabbing yourself would be messy, and I don't know how well this...thing...works." Miles wiggled his fingers, or what was left of them. "So you're not gonna go all Super Saiyan again, yeah?"

Valdis sighed, "I have the one on my belt, one in my left boot and a small one disguised as the charm on my necklace. So less than five."

Her brow furrowed with confusion, "I can self heal, I just...sometimes when my magic is out of control, I can draw it back by...doing that."

Solemn for any conversation.

"I'm afraid I don't know what 'Super Saiyan' means."

"Sure is a shitty way of bringing yourself back to yourself," Miles said, but then again, he really couldn't talk. No matter what he did with the Walrider, it'd end up causing him pain at the end. Stupid nanites.

"Uh. It's from an anime. Forget it." Miles waved his hand, trying to dismiss the topic.

"With magic as potentially devastating as mine," she replied slowly, "It's...necessary."

But it had been nothing more than a waking nightmare, an illusion brought on by the chaos of the planes.

"I should have seen through the illusion," Valdis added bitterly, "I thought I had better control than this."

"It still sounds shitty," Miles said. "Just because something's necessary doesn't mean that it doesn't suck." Killing Billy had been necessary. And in his moral center, it had sucked. Fuck it all. Break it all. He has to die.

Self-preservation outweighed high-handed morality every time. Not that he felt good about it.

"And hey, we all make mistakes. You can't just beat yourself up about something that didn't actually happen. No harm, no foul, right?"

"It's not ideal," she replied softly,"But I'm functionally immortal, it wouldn't have lasted."

Not that it had made it better for anyone else. She had lives to spare, yet her friends didn't seem to understand that.

"I suppose I'm just lucky you were here."

"Hey, so am I, and I've died before, so I can counter the 'not lasting' argument with 'it's really shitty so I try to avoid it if possible'," Miles said dryly. "So I'm on the same page as you, and I can say for a fact that I hate it and I wouldn't want to wish it on someone else, even if they're immortal."

He shook his head. "Yeah, even if you were gonna come back...well, like I said. Dying sucks."

"I've been immortal a bit longer than you, Mr. Upshur," Valdis pointed out. "By a few thousand years actually."

It was the same argument each time. Didn't anyone have a better one?

"I do appreciate your concern for my life, but it's unnecessary."

She stood up, ready to leave this particular spot behind for awhile.

[EVENT] RIPPLES ON THE WATER

Miles | Waking Dreams | Night at the Shore | CW: Violence, Death Magic (?), Blood

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the newseum means a lot to me okay

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