EVENT LOG: BURY A FRIEND

[inthenightmods]

EVENT LOG:
BURY A FRIEND

characters: everyone.
location: around town.
date/time: october 9-17.
content: the hallucinations begin...
warnings: psychological horror. please cw tags appropriately.

it's probably something that shouldn't be said out loud

October 9 feels like a normal day at first, save for the red lighthouse beam cutting through the darkness overhead. You know by now—or you've heard—that the lighthouse is only active during ferry arrivals and events... And there's definitely no ferry docked at the, er. Beach. The town is quiet, the forest spirits behave business-as-usual, Rastus doesn't know what's up. Whatever's going on, you'll have to figure it out for yourself.

And you will, though the hallucinations are subtle at first: objects moving when they shouldn't, people's proportions looking just a bit off, voices in an empty room, and so on. Is it just your mind playing tricks in the darkness? Might be! Will did warn you all about the effects of living without a sun and a proper day/night cycle.

As the days go on, the hallucinations are harder to ignore, no matter how much you may wish to wave them off as flukes. What's wrong with everyone's faces? When did all the howling start? Who do you hold onto when the world drops out from under you? And those hands...

While you might know it can't be real, it certainly feels real. But at least it can't last forever!

...Right?

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Comments

OTA

[scarsolderthanyou]

I. First half of the event

Stone doesn't really see that well, except at a distance, and distance vision doesn't do shit when everything's dark. So, it's probably not surprising that for several days, he doesn't know what the shit has gone wrong with everyone else in this damn village. He perches on roofs and in trees in an attempt to get a better look from higher up, he calls down, "Hey. You okay, kid?" Even if the person he's talking to isn't actually a kid.


II. Second half of the event

Then the hallucinations ramp up a little, and the hands are more like vaguely distracting fluttery things he swats half-heartedly at, occasionally one worms its way into his own hand and he spends a few minutes holding a wrist no one else can see and... smiling a little. Because that feels right, holding somebody's wrist as he eats dinner or walks down the path.

But the worst part is the scent. Stone is sitting at the shoreline, minding his own business, when the wind lofts the scent of Fell at him. He surges to his feet, and into his full winged form-- spines all flared like a giant dragonic porcupine, tail lashing, wings mantled like an angry hawk. The water and vegetation next to him literally vibrates with the depth of his growl.

After that, smells keep popping up at random times, and sometimes he realizes they're not real and just growls low in his (still groundling-sized) throat, but sometimes they send him prowling through town in search of the source. Just in case something needs tearing apart to protect the town. Once it makes him stop short, hitch a breath, and make a low, keening sound in the back of his throat.

Most of the time, though, he's fairly steady, and ready to say to anyone who looks like they're having a hard time, "What do you see? I'll tell you if I smell it, if I don't smell it, it can't be there. All right?"

I

[knifecollecting]

Jo isn't sleeping well. Unfortunately for her, her vision is good. She's seeing all kinds of things she doesn't want to see.

The hands are disconcerting. No one looks right when she looks at them.

For a moment, she thinks the voice is another hallucination. She doesn't recognize it, but that doesn't mean it isn't fake. Still, she looks around, just in case.

She sees a lantern and relaxes just slightly. It's real.

"Maybe. Why are you up there?"

[scarsolderthanyou]

The lantern looks like a purple glass flower. It's rather pretty, to be honest. The person attached to it, slightly less pretty: just a tall, gangly old man with shaggy hair and one blind eye. "I'm trying to see what everyone is acting twitchy about," he says. "But it's not really any better from up here. It looks like people are jumping at nothing."

[knifecollecting]

Jo writes off some of the height as whatever tricks her eyes have been playing on her. His words make her even more curious.

"At nothing? You're sure?"

[scarsolderthanyou]

"Nothing I could see. That's why I climbed up here. I see better from a distance, but I still don't see anything. Or smell anything," he adds with a grumpy expression.

[knifecollecting]

The smell isn't something Jo had thought about yet. She isn't certain it would help her, but it's a good point.

"But you're not seeing anything?"

Is it all fake?

[scarsolderthanyou]

"I'm not, but you people obviously are. I don't know if it just hasn't hit me yet, or if it's not going to because I'm not human," Stone says, frowning up in his tree.

[knifecollecting]

That makes her freeze again. While she knows better than most that there's always a chance for someone to be not human, she doesn't like it. She does rest her hand on her knife, but she won't run just yet.

"Why would that make you immune?"

[scarsolderthanyou]

"I haven't found a groundling drug that affects a Raksura the same way it affects one of you," Stone shrugs, apparently quite casual about the whole "not human" thing, though he did notice her sudden movement and the hand on what looks like might be a weapon. He's going to be glad he's up in his tree. "Or affects a Raksura at all. There are drugs that affect us, but they're not the same, and they don't cause hallucinations. They just knock us out and keep us from shifting."

[knifecollecting]

Jo doesn't like this very much. She can't remember anything called a Raksura, but that doesn't mean much. Though she researched as much as she could, a lot of lore just doesn't exist outside of its home country. It sounds vaguely Asian to her.

"Shifting?"

If he's willing to talk, she's willing to listen from a safe distance.

[scarsolderthanyou]

"I'm a shapeshifter. That's what my species is," Stone answers readily. He's got nothing to hide, really, not from the groundlings living here with him. "I could show you, but my other form is pretty big, we'd have to move out of the trees." He cocks his head, grins a bit, and suggests, "A lot of you humans have been calling me an alien? Or a dragon. Sometimes both."

[knifecollecting]

Jo doesn't like the idea of either of those things. In her world, shapeshifters are chaotic and dangerous.

"You're really not experiencing anything out of the ordinary for you?"

[scarsolderthanyou]

"Not yet," Stone says. "But I might just be missing them. Like I said, I don't see very well." He does tilt his head at her. There's tension there, sweat. Is she actually upset? Afraid? Ah, shit, he doesn't want people to be afraid of him. "Please don't tell me you think I'm going to eat you. You human people have been doing so well with not thinking I'm going to eat you."

[knifecollecting]

He's perceptive, she'll give him that much. Jo shakes her head, looking back up at him.

"There are worse things you could do." The shapeshifters she's heard of back home, they torture you and your loved ones.

"Not all monsters just eat people."

I

[isochrone]

Startled out of her musing, Elizabeth just sort of... sighs in resignation at being addressed that way. Her lantern, as always, is pressed closed to her chest.

But it would be rude not to answer... whomever is up in that tree. "I had hoped that getting away from the busiest parts of town would help with the hallucinations," she admitted.

[scarsolderthanyou]

It's just a long-limbed old man, with skin so colorless it seems to pick up the purple tint from his lantern. Harmless-looking, really, if maybe a little too tall and skinny. His expression is surprised, but then calculating. "Hallucinations? Is that what's got everyone so twitchy?" That. Explains a lot, actually.

[isochrone]

The young woman is surprised by his reaction (and a little by his appearance, but she keeps her good manners forefront). "Have you not seen or heard them yet?" she asks. "They seem to be affecting everyone. Sometimes just from the corner of your eye, and sometimes you can look right at them."

[scarsolderthanyou]

"I don't see very well," Stone admits. "Blind in one eye, or close enough to it, and I'm not made for seeing things close up. That's why I'm all the way up here, hoping I could actually see shit on the ground. That's not gonna work if it's all hallucinations. What kinds of things are you seeing?"

[isochrone]

"Hands," Elizabeth says immediately. "That's the most common thing so far. They're very ghastly, reaching out of the dark, grabbing at people. But also sometimes people, things that can't possibly be here, but your mind can barely tell the difference..."

Then her nose wrinkles as well. "It's not just seeing things either. Sometimes I catch the scent of something truly noxious, or hear voices, or... it's just been very stressful."

[scarsolderthanyou]

"That sounds pretty bad," Stone agrees, not without sympathy. "I'm going to hope it keeps not bothering me. Maybe it won't, I'm not human like most of you people are."

[isochrone]

"If you're somehow exempt from the effect, you're very lucky, but I'm glad for you," she replies. From most people, the assertion might sound trite, but from Elizabeth it's genuine.

"You're not human?" she asks. True, she's met a few people here who've proven they're not, but it still catches her off guard.

[scarsolderthanyou]

"Nope. I'm a Raksura. I'll understand if you don't know what that is, no one around here seems to, not even the other non-humans. I'm not from Earth, but some other planet somewhere." He's getting used to explaining. Really, he's okay with it-- explaining means he gets to talk about his people, which is always nice.

[isochrone]

Elizabeth has indeed never heard the term before, and she shakes her head, though her eyes light up in surprise and wonder when he says he's from another planet. It's not the first exposure to the thought of aliens she's had, though science fiction is hardly a flourishing literary genre in her original time, there are a few.

"That's amazing," she effuses, both because it is, and because it's something other than the strange apparitions to focus on. "Was it terribly strange for you to be here? Although I'm not sure how Beacon might be taken in context to... well, anywhere else on Earth."

[scarsolderthanyou]

"I've lived among groundlings before," Stone shrugs amiably. "That's what we call people who live on the ground, rather than in the sea or the sky, where I come from," he adds. "Groundlings, sealings, and skylings. But I'm used to being around a bunch of species that aren't my own. The only real weird thing is that there's so many of only one species, the humans. The rest of us are a very tiny group."

[isochrone]

Elizabeth has to smile a little bit at the naming scheme that Stone offers. "So Raksura are skylings," she echoes, and then laughs a little bit at the irony.

"I suppose you might say I'm a little bit 'skyling' myself... the city I'm from, Columbia, it flies."