logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: GRAVES

EVENT LOG: GRAVES

EVENT LOG:
GRAVES

characters: everyone.
location: Bonfire Square.
date/time: July 12-19.
content: mysterious shrines appear and bring visions of death.
warnings: likely violence and potentially gore.

time to pay your respects.

It happens when no one is looking, when most of the town is asleep and the rest are inside. A makeshift cemetery has come to Beacon, taking up residence in the middle of Bonfire Square. Each monument, shrine, and altar is dedicated to someone who now resides here, a memorial of their previous life.

Some may be drawn by curiosity, others by fear, and some may simply have to pass through this strange graveyard to get to the Bonfire itself. Whenever a person gets near, the altars beckon with a mysterious urge— an urge to approach, and an urge to leave something behind. They will feel compelled to make offerings at the various shrines, but doing so has a curious effect; it causes one to experience the death of the person whose grave they've honored.

Whether you resist the compulsion or give in willingly (or something in between), you'll also have to wrestle with the fact that a grave exists for you. Will you let your death be known, or try your best to keep it secret? Destroying it sure won't work, as it will return— with a duplicate somewhere else in town.

However you choose to deal with this, one thing is hard to ignore— this a tangible reminder of your death, and the fact that it's probably permanent.

QUICKNAV
comms	\|	network • logs • memes • ooc
pages	\|	rules • faq • taken • mod contact • player contact • calendar • setting • exploration • item requests • full nav

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Made him strong. He knows that phrase all too well. Often when one grows physically strong, their ability for empathy grows weak. That's what all assassin's train for. The ability to lock away their emotions, their humanity, their weaknesses.

It was never something that Kuai was very good at.]

I hope that they do.

I had a student who fought much like you. I'm the Grandmaster of the Lin Kuei, they're .. [He pauses, tilting his head a bit as if the memory is just hitting him.] They were a clan of warriors, protecting our realm from another that was constantly seeking to invade.

I'm always armed. Because we're always fighting.

_{[Me, too. But of course, he'll never know. That's one of the harder things about being here--not knowing who won. If Sunny still walks free.

The hardest might be grappling with how glad glad he is that Sunny isn't here. If he were, that would mean Pilgrim won and killed his mother's murderer. But it would also mean being stuck here where death is meaningless, and the man could come back again and again no matter how many times he killed him. As traitorous as the thought is, he'd prefer having Pilgrim here, even if it meant knowing his defeated.

How twisted is that?]}

Oh yeah?

_{[A master of an order of warriors that used to be. There's certainly something familiar about that.]}

What happened to them?

They were killed. By my former student and the previous Grandmaster.

[He looks down, haunted by the memory of what happened to them. It was the second time the entire clan had been massacred. Truth be told he was almost pleased that he'd ended up here and not needed to make the difficult decision to not rebuild it. To live out the end of his days in an empty temple with only the ghosts of memories to accompany him.

No, dying a warriors death was far preferable.]

I was the last. The clan of the Lin Kuei dies with me.

_{[Well.

As far as reactions to revelations of mass murder go, M.K.'s might fall on the reserved side. His movements slow and his eyebrows quirk, but he goes on wiping down the back of his neck, eventually letting the towel fall to drape around his neck.

And for a few moments he simply stares as if weighing the merit of the words as well as their meaning.]}

Did you see my memory?

_{[It's mild, but the speck of accusation is unmistakable.]}

No.

It seemed improper to watch the deaths of those I'm not acquainted with. An invasion into things I should not know of or be seeing.

[For someone as honorable as Kuai, the thought he'd accidentally seen Rosinante's was going to haunt him forever.]

_{[This place would seem to disagree. Why else would it compel them to interact with the memorials, allow them to view what should be impossible? Strip away the sentimentality, and it's no different than the mirror chamber, or seeing a friend fall in battle; the difference is in how much of an ugly truth the viewer can take.

In the present, M.K. holds a steady gaze.]}

Why did you say that, then? That I reminded you of your student? The same one that ended your clan?

_{[He's given a nugget of information away in that, in the connects he leaps to make, but he focuses little attention on his side of things. Just because people can peer into his memories at the moment doesn't mean he's eager to rehash the whole story.]}

The way you train, movements you make, the style you use. The way you carry yourself and your attitude in dealing with others. You're very like her in that regard.

Not the end of it. She was consumed with ambition and made poor choices, but there would still have been hope for her - even then.

[A mixture of his ever present optimism, and his opinion of himself as a teacher that he still thought he could reach her even after all she'd done. It was far too late now.]

Should I have watched your death?

[He arches an eyebrow, is M.K. also responsible for ending the lineage of an entire clan?]

_{[Except you don't know me that well, he's on the verge of saying--but then he must allow that that could be the quality Kuai is talking about. Peevish argumentativeness. The chafing need to rally against the boxes people try to put him in.

He bites it off. There's something more pressing to ask, anyway.]}

You'd still forgive the student who wanted you dead? _{[That surprises M.K.]} Why?

_{[Big words, those, and ones that require a generosity of spirit he doesn't have. Forgiveness. Such a strange concept to try and wrap his head around after the single-minded hostilities of war driving them all to hotter tempers and greater brutalities.

As for whether the man should step inside his head, it's not his place to say, though some perverse part of him thinks there'd be no better way to tell if he's indeed like the person Kuai knows than to live his thoughts in those final moments. His silence speaks for him. Gripping the towel by either end, he looks off over the water.]}

I had a Master once, too. I killed her and helped destroy her order. _{[Finally, he speaks, and with the same firm, clipped frankness underlying previous snippets of his life he's shared. But he seems to be taking great care in picking his words.]} That's why I thought you'd been in my head--me and this student of yours have that in common. But it wasn't ambition for me. The Master thought keeping our people in chains was the only way they could live--the clan she built was built on lies.

She was blinded by her ambition, if she can see sense, then she can be forgiven. The future has many paths, and though we are shaped by our pasts - we flow forward away from what was. I still see the potential in her.

Saw the potential. It matters not now. I am dead, and she was incapacitated.

[He'd forgiven far worse transgressions; making an alliance with the man who murdered his brother, and constantly trying to reach the inhuman wraith that his brother had become.]

The Grandmaster before me thought that as well. He believed that being human made us weak, that emotions were a hindrance. So he removed them.

You were able to free your people?

_{[We flow forward away from what was. He narrows his eyes without being consciously aware he's doing so. Kuai talks about setting aside the past, while he chews on the sentiment from his position as someone who's felt more like a snowball sent rolling into the future, acquiring more burdensome weight along the way rather than shedding it.

He's not sure he believes the rest. The other just finished saying this person assisted in betraying him and wiping out his people. If he loved even one of his Lin Kuei clansmen, that's not someone you forgive. Is such a thing even possible without betraying the memories of the slain? All the more to chew on.

He's even less sure what that says about him now that the connection's been drawn, and the overlap makes him uncomfortable.]}

You're generous in death. Does thinking you could have stopped them make you feel better?

_{[Is that judgement? Maybe a little.]}

How do you remove emotions? _{[That's a new one.]} I did. I've made mistakes, but that's not one of them--and if that makes me like your student, so be it.

_{[His victories feel few and far between, but he won't regret watching those horrible needles slide out of abused flesh.]}

She didn't give anyone a chance to decide for themselves what they'll be. No one in the Badlands did. It's why Azra was destroyed, and so many people wanted to train me to fight on their behalf: control. Controlling our power. I'm a dark one.

_{[If Kuai at all recognizes the term, he expects that'll solidify just what he's talking about.]}

Feel better? No. What I feel is irrelevant in any case.

[He looks at him curiously, it's an odd question. Thinking about what might have been would drive him mad, and while he dwells on the past far more than he should - he doesn't fantasize about being able to change the outcome. What has come to pass has happened, and he's seen too much time distortion to think that going back and changing his actions would make the outcome any more favorable. It would likely make things worse.]

He turned his warriors into robots. It may have made them obedient and emotionless, but it did nothing for their fighting ability. A warrior's intuition, their spirit, is what guides them in battle. Removing them makes an unthinking automaton that is easily defeated.

[He should know, he was one. But as M.K. continues he pauses, wondering if he's understanding what he's truly saying. Without the context of the world he's not sure he's following.]

Because you were a skilled fighter? Or for some other reason? I do not know what a dark one is.

_{[The Grandmaster's intuition for sarcasm could use a little work. He extricates himself from the quicksand trap that is the subject of home, betrayal, and teachers and students with a wrinkle of his nose and a shake of his head.]}

What are robots?

_{[It's easier to address the rest because, quite frankly, he doesn't entirely understand what it is he's addressing. "Robot" isn't a part of his everyday lexicon any more than it would seem "dark one" is part of Kuai's.]}

Those of who descend from Azra are special--we can do things other people can't. _{[But he could repeat everything Pilgrim had ever explained to him of their history and it would only go so far, wouldn't it? The differences between worlds--a thing he's still wrapping his brain around--complicates matter. Maybe Kuai has already seen the gift and calls it by a different name.]}

It'd be easier to show you.

_{[An implied offer he wouldn't make to just anyone--but it might be interesting, to see how easily this man scares.]}

A mechanical creature with no free will or humanity. Metal and wires and electricity.

[It's a broad overview, but it's honestly the best he can do because he doesn't really understand how they work and he was one. How did the cybernetics factory function? Why did the robots need human brains? How did they manage to rip out peoples souls and put them in metal casing to begin with?

He has no clue. In fact he'd rather not think too hard on it.]

So you have powers then?

["Dark One" sounds like it might be some sort of shadow power, the way his brother has. Coraline seemed to have something similar. He and Cao Pi seemed to be the odd ones out with ice powers.]

If you wish. You do not have to prove anything to me.

_{[One brow arches higher than the other.]}

I thought you meant a figure of speech. You mean he literally turned your people into... metal?

_{[That's a hard one to swallow, even after watching some of the others' memories himself. He isn't so rigorous in upholding the boundaries of privacy.]}

You're right, I don't. _{[He steps forward so that his face is visible in the moonlight, reaching up to loosely hold either end of the towel still slung around his neck.]} But unless you plan on getting inside my head to see my memories, you'll understand what I'm talking about if you see it.

_{[And memories are the key to unlocking his power, as he's come to learn. The most painful, miserable, enraging of his memories, the ones that hurt enough to stir the power sleeping inside. He doesn't have to think back far--his grave has put one on display for all to see.

Inwardly casting out for feelings of heartache outwardly releases the darkness into his body in an immense flood of dark chi. As Kuai watches, it announces itself in his face, changing its terrain into something terrible, coating brown eyes in oily blackness from sclera to iris and flushing the skin around them with a pronounced latticework veins. Even his voice, when he speaks, is deeper, reverberating with it.]}

This is what it means to be a dark one. Ever seen one before?

_{[He lets go and the darkness retreats, fading away.]}

Not many people can match a dark one's fighting ability in that state. They can be dangerous if they can't control it. In my world, people either fear this power or want to use it for themselves. Even the Master was afraid, and she was one. If she were here to speak for herself, I bet she'd agree with your Grandmaster--except it wasn't emotions she removed, it was power.

[Whatever he was expecting, was not that. There's an actual physical change in him and as he watches it seems as if tangible darkness is manifesting in him, at least in his face anyway.]

No, I have not seen such a thing.

[The power is foreign to him, unlike the shadow that his brother controls, but there is certainly a power there, one that it seems M.K. has to channel from within himself somehow. If what he's saying is true, then he'd likely be formidable when in this state, not the Kuai is interested in sparring right now.]

She wanted to strip you of this? To make herself more powerful by making the others weaker? Or for some other purpose?

Looks like you know as much as I do about your robots.

_{[He can't decide if he's disappointed or relieved at the lack of recognition--and even further undecided on how he should feel. After his features return to their normal hue, a kind of darkness remains, lingering in the shadow of his brow, how he looks away and takes his time in responding.

Although he'd started it, a part of him is uncomfortable dwelling too long on the Master. As much as he can't forgive her or agree with her, he has to admit she may not have been as wrong on as many points as he once would've liked to believe.

At the very least, that he, himself, wasn't guilty of as many wrongs as her.]}

What I just did for you, not everyone can. Stay in control. Letting the gift take over is like... _{[He closes his eyes briefly.]} It's like the better parts of you are drowned out by the darkness. Novices will attack anyone they can until they wake up from it. That's what she was afraid of.

But no amount of learning to keep that from happening was good enough for her. I don't know how many dark ones she stole from their families because she didn't believe they could ever be safe there without hurting someone. She killed my friend when all he wanted was to use his power to protect his people. She made her disciples feel like they'd never be better than monsters unless they lived her way. She locked the ones who tried to leave away like a dirty secret.

Maybe she was right about some of us--I got what I deserved in the end. But you talk about free will, so maybe you'll understand why she needed to be stopped.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

EVENT LOG: GRAVES

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject