EVENT LOG: GRAVES

[inthenightmods]

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.

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Comments

[darkeyed]

<sub>[Invasive. Disrespectful. Needlessly traumatizing for both sides. The argument could be made what M.K.'s doing by choosing to purposely visit others' graves is all three of these things. But M.K. himself doesn't see it that way, not after forcing himself through the first couple of visions. Not at first. The hard truth of it is he doesn't know these people, he's not attached to them, their deaths don't matter to him, but these visions provide information he's intrigued by.

Their deaths don't matter to me. Words he'd told himself, the longer he'd stayed with Pilgrim and the higher the death toll had climbed. Kindling thrown on the inner raging fire that kept him warm, or maybe a reminder. Their deaths don't matter to me.

They had, once. But that was before he'd figured out the key to turning on his power and turning off that traitorous, bruised thing called his heart that kept holding him back. The two had come hand-in-hand--trading pain for soft feelings, strength for compassion.

Hard-heartedness serves him well in this morbid voyeurism. These aren't his people or his memories and he doesn't have to let them drag him down.

But then Kara's grave. Like others before him, he's only curious about the numbers in place of letters on the headstone where a name should be etched, but that turns out to be a mistake when he pricks his thumb like he has so many others and leaves a drop of blood on the ground. Some people's memories have been pitiful. Some strange. Some both. All--physically--painful, but this--

He's not prepared for it. He comes out of her memory sucking in a breath so hard it sounds ragged and burns going in. Are there tears on his face or are they hers? He rubs at his face, and as he does so he unconsciously lowers himself to mimic her kneeling position in her last moments.]</sub>

[chores]

❪ kara recognizes what has happened even before she can see it is her grave that the unfamiliar face is kneeling before. a part of her is angry, upset that her memories are being so easily exposed to the world when she already has so little. a few days worth, hardly anything of worth except for her time with alice. every precious memory with her that she could never (and would never) forget.

she approaches him carefully, glancing down and frowning slightly. is this how she looked on the banks of canada with alice dying in her arms before she decided to shut down? ❫

I'm sorry. ❪ it's all that she can think of to say in the moment. unsure of what else could even be said in such a strange moment. ❫

[darkeyed]

<sub>[It is a strange moment, for how unfathomably inhuman Kara is. Code, and components, and machine-like logic in place of tissue and the colorful chaos of human thought. He doesn't have a word for her in his vocabulary, because there's nothing quite like her in his world. Of course, he could borrow the term from her memories (android), but the closest comparable thing in his memories is a mimic. Except no mimic had imitated human life so well as to be human.

That's the thing, as he catches his breath there on the ground, hand propped on his knee to hold him up. That hadn't just been a mimicry. That had been real. Real human pain. Loss. The same despairing readiness to end it all he'd felt lying on the satin covers of a bed counting the bars of his prison.

The physical pain is negligible--if it had just been that, he could have ignored it, but--

It hurts, and not just from the phantom cold settling into limbs. It hurts in an unprotected way he hasn't let himself feel in some time. A few days. A few days is all it takes to drill into the box he's been stuffing his feelings down into for years.

Her voice takes him by surprise; he hadn't heard her approach. M.K., pale and chill from a winter's day and a swim in frigid water that hadn't happened to him, lifts his head, lifts his head to look at her. Her voice sounds different now that he's back in his own body, but the heavy sadness is the same.]</sub>

That was you, wasn't it?