logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: TURN THE LIGHTS OFF

EVENT LOG: TURN THE LIGHTS OFF

characters: everyone.
location: around town.
date/time: january 20-29.
content: the lanterns begin to malfunction.
warnings: body horror and psychological horror. please cw tags appropriately.

you'll become one

January 20th arrives the same as all the days before it. There's no great pulse of warning that throbs through the air, no ominous wind that causes the bonfire to shudder. The spirits are neither agitated nor do they hide. You could almost miss the change, if the lanterns weren't always by your side. There's no explanation that comes with the way that it's changed, but it's impossible not to worry when it's happened so suddenly.

Maybe it takes a few days, or maybe it only takes a few hours, but suddenly it isn't just the lanterns that have changed. You, yourself, have become somehow different. It's possible that you won't even have the right state of mind to wonder how long it will last. At the very least, it appears you aren't alone. All across Beacon, lanterns are changing, and changing the people with them.

Out in the distance, the lighthouse's beam has turned green.

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"Jason?"

Masaomi jumps to his feet, wide eyes hastily searching the dark. That shout... That's Jason, right? That's Jason howling like a damn dying animal.

"Jason!"

He nearly bounds right past his target, but when he sees his friend's shape in the dark, he twists his forward leg and skids to a halt, kicking up bits of gravel as he does.

"You-!"

...don't look so hot, dude.

That's one way of putting it. The form Masaomi stumbles across is far less normal teenager than usual. Jason is on his side, curled into a ball, but his legs look twisted in all the wrong ways. At first he might think it's just a broken leg, an unfortunate accident. However, one of Jason's shoes has come off and the deep red from Jason's lantern reveals it is not that simple. Instead of his twisted leg ending in a foot with five toes, it has shifted into a cloven hoof. It's thick and now it might make more sense that his legs aren't broken but have restructured themselves into the type of legs one might usually see on a cloven animal, like a cow or bull. Although, given the rest of his appearance, minotaur might be more accurate.

Much like the initial eruption of his horns, the pain is overwhelming only at the initial shifting. He really had felt like he'd broken his leg and as he lies on the ground he can tell something is even more wrong with his body, but he hasn't seen his legs yet. One minute he'd been walking and the next the snap. He almost doesn't register someone is there until the light is in his eyes and he hears a distant, though familiar voice.

He groans as his only response. It was one thing to have something pierce through your skin, it was an entirely different experience to feel both your legs snap beneath you. You're going to have to give him a minute.

Horns and tails are one thing. At least Masaomi's had the chance to see one or two others with similar maladies already. They're frightening and painful, but they're manageable. They're something Masaomi can help distract from. To blink through the darkness and realize that his friend's legs are still very much misshapen and bent the wrong way and changed...

The vision of a hospital bed swims before him, a girl with casts traveling up the entirety of both legs.

He gulps back the growing lump in his throat. This is way beyond his high school dropout resume.

Masaomi drops to his knees and reaches for Jason's shoulders, hoping to support him into a sitting position. Apparently, he's not one for patience.

"Shit, are you with me? Jason?"

Welcome to Jason's wild world. Hope you still want to be friends, cause he kinda needs one right now.

Jason feels something, no, someone next to him. His eyes move behind his eyelids, but he's slow to open them. The pain is still so intense and just now starting to receed a bit. Gods he would kill for some ambrosia right now. He swallows and tries to remember what that even tasted like. Maybe just thinking about it will help a little, like a trick.

It doesn't. His whole body hurts now and not just his legs, but he does at least start to come to a bit more as Masaomi moves him.

"...Masaomi?" There's silence and Jason looks up at his friend, he still sounds pretty out of it, "You know...I don't. I don't think you're supposed to move someone if they're injured."

Apparently demigods deal with pain and trauma through sass. It's a shared trait.

The indecipherable noise that follows Jason's helpful advice might be a mix between a scoff and a snort. Or it might be an attempt to hold back tears. Either way, Jason is not only awake but talking back. Masaomi can breathe again.

"Dude." He sighs in relief, unable to combat the half-hysterical chuckle that follows. "You're not injured. You're just a cow."

You're just a cow.

Jason sits (or more accurately lays sprawled on the ground) with that for a moment. It does explain a lot about his legs and what just happened. He already had the horns and the tail, so sure, why not add cow legs to the mix.

"Bull."

Which at first might be taken as Jason saying Masaomi is a liar, because there's a pause, but then he adds.

"Male cows are called bulls." Jason snorts as he realizes what he's just said, because he's either got to laugh about this or freak out about it...and laughing seems like the better option at the moment.

He takes a deep breath. And another. The pain is definitely fading faster now. He thinks he can figure out how to stand up and at least now he knows they aren't broken. "Okay...okay wanna help me stand up? Cause I'm not sure I know how to get up with them like this now."

Masaomi bites the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing further. This has just not been anyone's week, and hysterics aren't going to make it better.

"Bull then," he concedes after a deep breath of his own. He doesn't hesitate to support his friend's back, throwing one of Jason's arms around his neck in order to gently guide him to his brand new hooves. "Until you find an udder."

Jason appreciates your concession. The relief doesn't last long though and he groans, "Please don't even joke about that. This is weird enough as it is without thinking about that." He really hopes it doesn't come to that and silently swears to whatever gods who have been ignoring him that he will do ANYTHING to prevent that from happening.

Still, the thought keeps him from focusing too much on his current changes. Which, might not be a good thing because he needs to focus on standing right now. It'd be a lot harder without Masaomi's help though, so he's not going to begrudge him too long for the comment. Once he's more upright he gets a better sense for how his legs bend.

He's hesitant, after all there is still some pain, but he knows he's a LOT heavier than his friend currently helping support him. It's a strange sensation, one he can't properly articulate, and it's not even that his legs are bent in a different way. The really strange sensation is the feeling of hooves and not feet, the ground has a different texture that's firmer.

"Hey, I didn't want to think about it either, but now that I'm not the only one, I feel way less funky about the whole thing," he drawls like he's not still silently wigging out inside his head. "Win-win."

Masaomi's shoe scrapes gravel as he slides it behind Jason's hoof for better balance, and he squares his shoulders against a weight he's not entirely sure he can handle. That doesn't stop him from trying his damnedest to handle it anyway. He absolutely cannot drop Jason. He can't let go or slip or flinch. If the guy lands on one of those horns the wrong way...

Well, there are a lot of things Masaomi doesn't want to think about a whole hell of a lot more than udders.

His gaze drifts down to those hesitant hooves. "...How's it feel?"

"Lose-Lose might be more accurate," he mutters. He can understand though. He has to remind himself that Masaomi probably isn't used to quite the level of weirdness as Jason.

He really does his best not to rest his full weight, but instead focuses on finding his own balance. It doesn't feel like he should be able to stand on legs like this, but he'd seen fauns and satyrs do it and even climb faster than most demigods. Granted, those were goat legs, but he knew the minotaur was a real monster out there. Jason's legs were still the same as far as thickness and proportional to his body, they were just bent and ended in hooves. He's probably shaking more from fear and panic than anything. He needs to get a grip on that and trust himself. This new self anyway.

Jason swallows and steps forward and then steps again, releasing his grip on Masaomi. He's still shaky, so he doesn't go far, but he can already tell that while the muscular and bone structure have changed, the legs are functioning. What he's really noticing is that since his pants don't quite fit right any more it makes it harder to walk, but he'll not be changing his wardrobe any time soon.

"Weird. Just really, really weird. But they work...so I guess I have to be grateful that it isn't snapped."

Masaomi keeps his arms at the ready just in case, hovering behind Jason's back as he takes his first steps forward. It's jarring, really, to watch Jason move like this, to see him struggle with not only balance but basic muscle control. Equipped with horns, hooves, and tail, Jason looks like the damn devil, yet he's shaking like a newborn fawn. That's one hell of a gap.

"Sure, grateful is one thing you can be feeling right now," he offers wryly, more just to fill silence than to actually advance conversation. "It doesn't... still hurt or anything? You don't need to walk on all fours? I'm not gonna have to find you some horseshoes or something?"

Oh he's feeling a lot of things right now. Grateful is only there because he thought he'd broken his legs. Now he finds out that, no, they aren't broken, just incredibly and utterly (why'd he have to use that word) wrong. Each step is easier though and he's starting to figure out where his weight rests.

"No. It's not painful, just uncomfortable in every other way," Jason looks over his shoulder back at Masaomi in the hopes of reassuring him. Of course, that probably just serves as more of a reminder on how much Jason's lantern has transformed him since he has the pair of bull horns growing out of his forehead.

He scoffs and holds up his perfectly normal human hands, "I'm not fully bovine yet, dude. I can walk upright. Fawns and satyrs do it all the time...and minotaurs." He looks away and tries turning around back to face Masaomi. He has to pay attention to where he places the hooves, but he manages. "I think...I think that's what I may be turning into. The horns, the hooves...it's very Greek myth 101," he admits.

He then gives Masaomi a blank stare and then laughs. He looks down at his hooves and laughs a little more. Yeah, no, this is too much. This has GOT to be the wildest day of Jason's after life and he might have just cracked a little. "No. No you don't need to find me horseshoes. We established this already. I'm not turning into a cow. I'm not turning into a horse. I'm turning into the fucking minotaur."

Oh gosh, he really is cracking. And all Masaomi can do is laugh right along with him because anything else would just be a reminder of what serious shit they're actually in.

"Okay, minotaur," he concedes again, his lopsided grin a tad bit forced. "That makes things easier. Now we know what we're up against. And since I'm not about to offer you any virgin sacrifices on a plate, I think it's time to limp back to the Invincible for some Greek salad."

And y'know. Sitting practice. That doesn't require walking on backwards animal legs.

Good plan. Let's not think too hard about this. Jason shakes his head, though stops doing that because it makes him feel even more light-headed than before. These horns have gotten much heavier over the past few days and yet he still sometimes forgets they are there.

"I think I'll pass on the salad too," Jason replies, making a face at the mere suggestion of a sacrifice, virgin or otherwise. He slows a bit, thinking of who he had seen before Masaomi. He hadn't planned on returning to the Invincible given Ambrose's reaction to his form and general dour disposition, but it wasn't like he was going up to their room. What were the chances of them running into Ambrose again anyway.

Jason stops shaking his head, and before he can even take a minute to reorient himself, Masaomi swoops in close once again, palms not an inch from his friend's shoulder blades. If he has to catch the guy with his own damn body, he will. None of them need anything extra to worry about right now.

"You're at least having some jello. Even if you don't eat it, you can still look at it and feel better knowing that you're not the wobbliest dessert in the afterlife."

A very gentle push follows, more to remind Jason that he's got the guy's back than to make him move.

"Think you can make it the whole way? Or should I go recruit another crutch?"

Did Masaomi just call him a dessert? Jason huffs a short laugh, not sure how to feel about that at the moment. "Do we even have jello? I've never looked." The idea of jello is at least a little more appetizing. Perhaps not his favorite dessert, but it's a more pleasant image than anything else they've discussed so far. "Just...not red okay?"

His footing is coming a bit more easily now, though Jason isn't sure if that's a comfort or not.

"I can make it. I think it's easier if I just don't think about it...who really thinks about walking, you know?" So, please, continue to distract him from the change in his body because it's a lot easier to make jokes and discuss jello flavors than anything else.

"Lemon lime is superior anyway," he assures with all the confidence of someone who also has no idea whether there's any jello in Beacon. Masaomi remains one step behind Jason every uncertain inch of the walk back, happy to ramble if it keeps both of them distracted enough to speed up the process. "It's like eating alien rations."

The alien rations comment actually gets a chuckle out of Jason. It's not the broken laugh from earlier, this one is more easy and clearly a little amused. "I never considered that before. What makes you compare it to alien rations?" Masaomi is really good at this distraction thing.

Laughter is good! As long as it doesn't throw the poor guy off balance, Masaomi will be quick to encourage it.

"I mean, isn't it obvious? Picture outer space, a distant planet. Now picture the lowest form of alien life on that planet." He pauses for extra effect here. "It's jello."

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EVENT LOG: TURN THE LIGHTS OFF

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