logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: BURY A FRIEND

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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She shakes her head, "Can't. I'm not sure why, but we can't go around without them." She also had that thought, of locking up her lantern. "I tried doing that with mine, but the moment I stepped few meters away from it, I almost fainted. I think it's our lifeline, of sorts. Too far away and it will break and we'll die here." So leaving the lantern behind is a no go.

"Huh?"

Xayah glances at her wing and her fingers curl into a fist, and she shakes her head.

"I... think I knew once how to." Before she was forced to hide and pretend her wing is part of her clothing. "Now I don't- I don't know. I can jump really high and float in the air for a moment, but flying the distance- not my forte." She tries to sound casual about it but it's certainly a topic that bothers her. What kind of bird doesn't fly?

"Oh."

Crowley has spent centuries not flying, but he's always known how. It's always been there, in the back of his mind, the how of flying. He literally couldn't imagine himself not able to fly. It would be tragic, he thinks, to forget how. That must be how Xayah feels.

"That sucks." He looks back over the town. He could teach her, he supposes. He could show her how to use her wings and fly. It wouldn't even be hard. He looks back to her. Would that make her happy, flying again? She seems to really like it when he flies her places.

Oh, but it would be so nice of him, wouldn't it? He cringes a little inside.

"I could----you know---if you wanted---?"

That's- not an offer she expected from a human. Well, sort of a human. He looks human and acts human but he has wings too and he can fly. She stares at him wide-eyed for a long time as if having a hard time to believe that offer leaving his mouth.

Is he nice to her?

"That's--"

Yeah, now they are both stumbling over their words. Great. But the thought of flying, on her own above everything else, is terrifying. It's not just leaping, but proper flying.

"I-- I mean-- don't you have a dock to rebuild?" She doesn't want him wasting time on a flightless bird. "Also- I'd- I'd need time to shapeshift this wing back into two wings..."

Crowley makes a face. "Right, the dock. Aziraphale's got plans on rebuilding it, I've promised to help with it."

All the same, it's not like he's really doing much else besides moping---not moping, just thinking very hard about the failures of the ferry hijack.

"Whenever you want," he says. "I can make time, I suppose."

Can't be too nice.

Well, they probably can't make much progress with these visions that keep happening but- she's impressed that he's staying true to his word.

She nods:"I'll shapeshift the wings while you're working on it. Then when you're done, I'll come find you."

Shapeshifting takes a lot of energy and magic to do. She needs to mentally prepare herself for it. It takes some time... when was the last time she had both of her wings on her back?

"We go drinking once we're done."

To be completely fair, if he'd promised anyone except Aziraphale, there's only a fifty-fifty chance he'd have actually kept his word. But he can't deny the angel anything. One of Crowley's curses.

"Yeah, that's all right, then," he says. "Work on it a bit every day, drink a bit afterwards. Give me something to make sure Aziraphale doesn't stay on the docks all night long. And he would, if you let him. He shouldn't be feeling as guilty as he is."

Shapeshift the wings, though. Crowley can shapeshift into a snake, do a bit of shapeshifting to scare people, but nothing as intense as moving his wings around the way it sounds like she can. Such an odd bunch they have in this town.

They all have their curses. Despite her complaining about it, Xayah wouldn't be able to say no to Rakan either. Then again, he never said no when she asked for something too so fair was fair. She is sad, though, that she couldn't see Aphae waterfalls again.

"Sounds like a plan to me," she nods. The odd sounds are starting to pick up again and she shivers, curling into herself a bit, trying to ignore the crawling over the wooden planks just left of her. "He doesn't drink?"

Shapeshifting came as a blessing with her magic, or that's what her tribe taught her. If you respect its freedom, the magic will reward you. She just needs to set her mind to it and focus for several days- her travels forced her to hide her wings like a cape to blend in easier with other humans. Less harassment. Bigger advantage for a sneak attack.

Edited 2019-10-21 22:20 (UTC)

"Oh, no," Crowley says. "Aziraphale will want in on it, too, I imagine."

She shivers and he turns to look at her. He doesn't hear anything, but he looks out to the town, to see if he can hear anything out there. Nothing. So many strange things over the last few days, it's really a wonder he's escaped them this far.

He's terrible at comforting anyone. Never knew how to do it his whole life. He can't even really remember being very good at it when he was an angel---though to be honest, that was a very long time ago. What would Aziraphale do? Be his charming self, Crowley imagines, and that would be enough to make the person he was with feel light and comforted. Crowley isn't like that at all.

He gestures to Xayah to come closer. "Come here," he offers. "I don't see anything, I'll let you know if I do."

"Ohh, a drinking party then," she snaps her fingers. All she knows about that Az person is what little she remembers from the other night when Crowley and she got drunk. Which is not a lot. She can't draw proper conclusions with a boozed-up brain.

Again, Crowley surprises her. She's not weak she, she can handle these hallucinations and auditory tricks, it's fine, it's... fine. It's fine until wood cracks loudly and her ears go up and head whips to look at the spot it came from. She's wary as a person but this will make her full-on paranoid.

So, okay, she accepts the offer... for now, and scoots closer. "I know they are hallucinations, you know." Say 'thank you' Xayah, you used to know how to say it. "Just- just wood breaking, that's all." Yeah, and ominous feeling that the roof will cave in even though she knows it won't.

Crowley puts an arm around her shoulders. That's comforting, right?

"Should've seen some of the things I saw," he says. "Thought my whole cabin was engulfed in Hellfire. It felt completely real."

He didn't stop believing it was real until the hallucination stopped. And at the time, Aziraphale was there, and it looked like he'd become a demon. The whole thing still brings a shiver to Crowley's spine.

"Aziraphale nearly killed himself over his hallucinations," he adds. "So as long as you don't go trying to out your lantern, we're good. Because I'm not about to risk my leg again to save you."

Hellfire huh... well at least he saw some kind of light, not creepy-crawlies.

And yes, the hand is a comforting weight, a reminder that it's just another night in this godforsaken place and that there's nothing threatening them. Pleasantly distracting.

"What?" That's a huff. "Do I need to remind you who tried to dunk us in the lake an hour ago?" She squints up at him.

Crowley runs his free hand over his hair. Definitely not embarrassed or anything. Definitely didn't almost get them both killed. And death for Crowley means a bit different than it does for Xayah. Crowley can't survive resurrection in a church.

"Hallucinations look real," he says, firmly. "Impossible to tell the difference between them and reality."

She just chuckles at his expression and nudges his ribs with elbow- just teasing here. She knows just how realistic the hallucinations are. She's not aware that he can't be resurrected though, and she definitively doesn't see this church in Beacon as anything sacred. Just a place people get revived at if they die.

"Well, keep repeating that they are just hallucinations until they stop happening. Which is, hopefully, soon," she leans very slightly against him with a tired sigh.

"It might not stop," Crowley warns her. "Until we make them stop."

He turns his gaze out to the Lighthouse. He's certain these are punishments for the ferry, of course. What else could they be? Punishing the whole town for what Crowley did. Hardly fair, but when are people like the Lighthouse Keeper fair?

"Do you think we could fly up there?" he asks, nodding to the Lighthouse.

She was about to argue and ask 'make who stop', but then she catches his gaze and looks over as well. Lighthouse Keeper. It does seem like something that Keeper would do, especially after finding out how young she is and that she can be a quite petty and sore loser.

"If she's the one torturing us, she's doing herself a disservice," Xayah mutters. "Remember how she needs us to remain sane and capable to kill World Eaters? If we don't get a replacement for Ferry, we are her last hope."

Fly up there... She doesn't know if she can even do it.

"I'm not against trying." It's probably not advised. Her eyes turn to the skies. "Hopefully there's nothing in the air to stop us. Falling into the Lake and losing lantern in it will mark a 'game over' for us..." Because nobody would be able to retreive it.

"We'll need to get you flying first," Crowley says. "Then we'll get the three of us up there. You, me, Aziraphale. If something happens to one of us, the others can go retrieve the lantern. Can't catch all of us."

Crowley's full of half-formed plans, isn't he? Always up for trying something.

"She just can't keep doing this to us. Torturing us as long as she sees fit."

He is. She looks over at him and gives him a serious, long look- she knows he means well, but this can terribly backfire at them.

"I have nothing to lose," Xayah says quietly. And it's true- here she has no one. There's no one from her world, she cares little about humans so this endeavor will be like an adventure.

"But what do you plan to do to her? To tell her? What if Lighthouse collapses because we try to land on it? Remember, Lighthouse is Robin's lantern. No one knows how it got that way, but it did." She looks extremely serious, "If we end up destroying the Lighthouse..." the world will fall apart and they won't even need World Eaters to do it.

"She's not the only thing holding this world together," Crowley says. "Just because she thinks she is."

He hopes. Crowley doesn't like being under the thumb of one person. One unstable child who can't seem to keep her finger off the trigger.

He glances at Xayah. She has nothing to lose, she says. Crowley's been there, of course, feeling like he's got nothing to lose. But he always had Aziraphale, didn't he? Six thousand years, he always had Aziraphale on his side. But Xayah only has herself here. What would it have been like if Crowley came here by himself? He'd be doing a hell of a lot more drinking, which is actually sort of saying something considering.

"It won't fall just because we landed on it," he theorizes. "It's been stormed before."

"We don't know." They don't know anything except that they will be devoured. And the more she thought about it, the less she liked the idea. She might not have gotten them to reset now, for destroying the ferry, but three people, swooping down from the skies at her Lighthouse?

That sounds kind of a bad idea if she's going to be honest.

"What if she pulls the switch on the Beacon when she sees us?" From what Xayah could tell, the girl killed? begged? the previous one just to survive.

She shakes her head, "We need a better plan than this. If she sees us come at her from the sky, she'll sic the forest spirits at the town." Even as a person that has nothing to lose, going to the Lighthouse gives her a strange twist in the stomach. That huge building is too unknown for them to blindly storm. She wonders how Robin did it in the first place.

"We make sure we're not seen," Crowley says. "Shutter our lanterns, stay close to the tops of the forest. Come up only when we're climbing the lighthouse. I can teach you to fly like that."

He's just sick of all the waiting, all the moping about, all the playing house. He wants to do something, he wants to make a difference. He wants to make things better here and then get the fuck out of here as fast as possible.

He looks back out over the town. "If we think she's nervous about a few visitors, then maybe she shouldn't be in charge of the reset button," he says. "Maybe we should have a tete-a-tete with her."

This still sounds pretty dangerous to her but- it won't hurt to check it out? She prides herself in being pretty determined when she's set out to do it so, if they run into any trouble, she'll make them turn around and go back. She's always been the careful one, biding her time to strike. Well, she's been sitting around for a while and nothing came their way.

Time to go out and find it.

"If," she points a finger at him, "we run into any trouble, even the most minuscule one, we are turning back. Got it?"

He holds up a hand. "Promise," he says. "First chance, absolutely. Turning back."

This is, for those who have not been paying attention, a lie.

But that's not all that important right now. Right now, Crowley has an ally who is willing to go with him to fight the Lighthouse. All he has to do is teach her how to fly, which he was willing to do anyway. Teach her to fly, then have a word with this Lighthouse Keeper. Better than trying to talk to the Almighty, who never spoke back.

"The Lighthouse isn't far," he says. "She won't be expecting us. We can get there without any problems, I bet. Problems once we get there, maybe, but not on the way."

She does give him a suspicious look, as if she doesn't trust him (and she doesn't- she's always 50/50 with everyone), but leaves the topic be.

More importantly, she needs to start gathering energy to start focusing on her shapeshifting. It's going to be an ordeal during this hallucination infested days, but she's stubborn. And hallucinations won't win! She'll get to fly!

"Fingers crossed that she doesn't reset the village."

Speaking of, she needs to update that journal of hers. Just in case something goes horrible on this adventure.

"We'll stop her before she gets the chance," Crowley promises. "Maybe this time we'll actually get some answers."

Maybe, he thinks, he should do what Aziraphale would want, which is to ask the network for help. Or to tell other people about this plan. He won't, of course, but he does think about it for at least three seconds before discarding the idea.

"Start tomorrow on flying?" he offers.

At least he thought about it.

She rolls her eyes and pokes his cheek, "Slow down. I'm more eager than you, trust me. But I need to do the transformation right or I might drop from the sky and die." Giver her some time to shapeshift, man. No one wants to fly more than she does and she's really looking forward to this.

"I'll come find you when I'm done. Alright?"

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sauntered_downward - 2019-10-23 02:00 (UTC) - Expand

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EVENT LOG: BURY A FRIEND

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that offer sounds so ;D haha

LOL!

XD (also I'm doing research if xayah can actually fly in lore, it's never stated if she can or no)

If you can't find a yes or no, let's assume yes cause I wanna see this girl fly

there's a heated debate but I still didn't find anything solid e.e

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