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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[Molly catches her hand and a laugh bubbles out of him.] Well, hello to you too. And that's a fascinating fashion choice you've got going on there.

[If he weren't so damn optimistic and cheerful right now, maybe he'd feel a pang of sudden remembrance of the mines, but he doesn't. She just looks like a girl with a blindfold.] Unless it's some sort of new game I'm not privy too. Sort of feels like a bad idea with the darkness and all, but I don't judge.

[ It's almost jarring.

Not his catch, though that does make Ellever visibly jump, too. But his behavior. She's run into a number of people lately who all seem out of sorts. She, too, is starting to feel that way. Lost in the metaphorical, not literal, woods. While it's almost nice to hear someone being cheerful, it also runs against everything else in her head.

Ellever pulls back her hand self-consciously to run a finger along the sides of the scarf, making sure it's still taut around her head. Painfully so. ]

Oh, uh. Thanks. [ She manages the tiniest of strained smiles, her other hand clutching her reddish-hued lantern. ] I can see enough, but I'm... a little distracted. Sorry again. [ Wait, is she off course? ] ...Did I get side-tracked away from the village somewhere?

Just a bit. [Without permission, he takes his hands and puts them on her shoulders and sort of adjusts her so that she's facing a different direction.] You want to go that way. Or I could just help you along, if you like. I've got nothing else better to do.

[And he rather enjoys having company. Everything is weird and he just wants to be around other people.]

[ Finding herself suddenly and abruptly moved, Ellever makes a noise in the back of her throat. It starts out as a sound of uncertainty, nnnnn, but then, for a second, is joined by another sound right alongside it. A deeper rumbling, approaching a growl, that shouldn't come out of someone who looks like a blonde twenty-something.

She freezes where she's put for that second before, slowly, relaxing and clearing her throat. No. No. That can absolutely not happen again. She has to get some control over herself. Why has all of her control evaporated in the span of a day or two? It's fine, everything is fine. This person's just trying to help her. ]

...Thank you. I, uh, wouldn't want to side-track you. But you can come with me if you want.

[ Perhaps it'll be good to have someone with her. Some people have been acting... very odd. ]

I'm Elle.

[Either Mollymauk Tealeaf is tapdancing around a death wish (possibly) or he just can't work past the cracks in his lantern that make everything so damn delightful to care (also possible). Either way... Totally nothing odd here. Happy demon person and growling young blonde woman just out for a stroll.]

You'd have to have a track to get side-tracked. I'm Mollymauk- Molly for short. Pleasure to meet you.

Nice to meet you, too.

[ Though her voice is still vaguely tentative, Ellever does mean it. Beacon isn't exactly a huge place. It's always nice to meet someone new and get a better feel for how they all fit together, like puzzle pieces. But her confidence has taken a bullet recently with the change to her eyes that just... won't go away. ]

I guess you're right. [ She lets some amusement seep into her voice, as she starts to slowly walk again. ] It's rare we have any kind of track here. And whenever we go, it usually disappears.

Or you end up somewhere with more questions. I just got back from somewhere a lovely person from the Night Market set me up with, and I still don't have a clue what all I was looking at there.

[In his defense, Percival de Rolo's descendants have not invented the atomic bomb and therefore he has no context for nuclear testing.

He knows it was something bad though. He just can't seem to care.]

[ Ellever lets out a sympathetic hmm. ]

That seems to be all of our recent discoveries, lately. We have to piece it out for days or weeks afterward amongst ourselves and then it just... yeah, creates more questions about why this place exists and how.

[ Part of her, the part of her who looked up cryptids back home, enjoys it. But it would be a lot more enjoyable if she were on the outside looking in. Not deep into it, forced to live in it. Or not live in it, as the case may be. She shrugs her shoulders. ]

I like mysteries as much as the next person, but Beacon can be pretty ridiculous. [ Glancing at him, she smiles slightly. ] Was it at least interesting, this place?

There were these sculptures made out of metal and shaped into dragons. That was interesting. I do enjoy a good bit of art.

[He chuckles a bit, which then turns into a laugh as the thought gets funnier.] We kept talking to them! We thought maybe they were golems or automatons.

[ Part of her perks up at the idea of a dragon golem, and Ellever has to remind herself that this probably isn't a real thing. It's something that she would give an arm and a leg to read about. Her curiosity presses forward, as she avoids stepping on a root jutting out of the ground. ]

But they weren't?

[ How disappointing. ]

Huh, somehow I never pictured Beacon as a place that would decorate with... dragons. But I guess they could be old sculptures. Did they seem old?

[ At least her early emotional turmoil is, for the moment, forgotten. ]

Nope. Just statues. Very nice ones. But definitely old...ish. I'm not really an expert. And, honestly, I'm not sure what they have to do with the rest of what we found. I mean, they weren't all dragons. The best one just was.

[It was a nice dragon statue.]

Fair enough. [ She laughs quietly. ] I would have thought the same thing.

[ Ellever grew up with nonhumans, in a world full of humans, so the 'unusual' has always been home to her. Still, this makes her wonder about the rest of the buildings in Beacon. ]

Maybe you found someone's old art collection. Maybe one of the spirits likes to carve statues. It's so hard to figure out anything around here.

It really is. None of it makes sense and it feels like when we find new information, it's just making what we already have more complicated.

[That is not how information works, and yet... Why does he sound so happy about this?] I wish I could say I hate that, but I don't really feel capable of hating anything right now.

[He laughs, in spite of himself.]

[ There's just so much that they still don't know, and the big picture is clearly bigger than they can imagine. And they all have pretty big imaginations. Some more than others.

Ellever smiles slightly, avoiding a large rock in the path as it comes into her veiled view. ]

Anything? Not even leg cramps?

That's so specific. [He giggles a bit.] I wanna say no, and that that would be my hard limit, but I also don't have any right now, so it's a bit hard to imagine.

[He pauses and then reaches down to check on the lantern hanging on his belt. The cracks and strange light are intensifying.] Incidentally, is yours doing anything like this? I'm normally a fairly easy-going person- that's not that strange, but it's very intense right now. Might be related. Or maybe I smashed it against a rock and didn't realize it.

If you smashed it, I think you'd know about it.

[ Granted, Ellever hasn't damaged her lantern yet, but she's heard about it from other people. It seems unmistakable. She treats her lantern quite gingerly at all times, out of paranoia. Yet... ]

...and yes.

[ Ellever pauses, too, in her steps to be able to take a look at his lamp, since her vision is so impeded at the moment. She lifts her lantern up to be better seen. It's a wrought-iron, ancient-looking thing, with thick glass that's normally yellowish in color. Now it's clearly red and getting more red every hour. ]

The light isn't this color normally. It's — weird.

[ Understatement. She hesitates before she offers, ]

Mine changed me. Maybe it's changing you?

What? And making me more delighted by everything? [He wrinkles his nose.] I suppose there's worse things it could do. You say it changed you? Is that why you...

[He gestures.] ...have your eyes covered like that?

[ Ellever makes an indistinct noise in the back of her throat, fingertips of her right hand reaching up to briefly brush the scarf. ]

...Yeah. Not in a good way.

[ She lets out a soft, but genuine, chuckle. ]

You know how you can get tired of laughing and it eventually hurts? I hope that doesn't happen to you.

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EVENT LOG: TURN THE LIGHTS OFF

January 22

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