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.

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

Ellever drops her hand after another few passes of her fingernails, the itch satisfied, and smiles slowly. With flesh comes pain, and there is such a diversity in pain tolerance among those with flesh. Her own is middling, she knows, from lack of experience. Before coming here, bullets had bounced off of her.

Her armor has been stripped from her. It's an irritation, but it stings less when she can watch others bear pain so magnificently. This one bears it like a shadow, draped across him.

"This is what I am," she says simply, flexing her fingers. "It was folded away when I was small, only to emerge when I'm angry, but now it's free."

Normally, there's a careful and measured cadence to her voice. But now it spills out of her like a river, without hesitation.

"Your lantern is like mine?" Ellever asks, gesturing at where hers is sitting, on top of the piano. Angry, dark red, cracked.

The other half. The part that isn't human. ... huh. The Soldier wanders in further, not frightened, but curious. Their scale for "creepy" and "dangerous" is badly warped: potentially eldritch being who kills people with bad luck is less scary than the round-faced angel or the angry teenager. "It's red. And broken-looking. It didn't free anything in me except a bunch of metal attached to my spine, though."

Probably because despite the serum, they're still pretty much human.

"Are you all right." Because of the scratching, which is still the most worrisome thing in this conversation.

She nods ⁠— the movement slow, calculated, almost mechanical, watching him as he draws closer. "I'm well."

That's mostly true, at least. She feels a pull to the rest of Beacon like she hadn't had, even two days ago. A connection to the darkness that surrounds them all of the time, like she's always being hugged. It's just the flesh that surrounds her that's getting in the way of complete bliss, but she can live with it.

Forty-two years and it's never bugged her this much. Ellever's mind has been pulled so far by her physical transformation, though, that she can't recall when she was at peace with having a physical form. It feels so wrong.

"It's not broken," she goes on. "I can just see through it. Windows, not splinters. Others have been changing colors, too. Seems like everyone."

"Not everyone. But a lot." Their handler, the Inspector, hasn't been affected, that they've seen. Crowley, sleeping in his cabin, hasn't been affected. "I'm glad you're all right."

Even weird and inky, and acting slower than usual, she's still their friend. They're not necessarily going to trust her, because they don't trust anyone not to hurt them (possible exceptions being Crowley and Misty, but nobody else has hit that point yet), but they trust that she wouldn't do it without reason. So they come to stand at her side by the piano.

Sitting on the floor would be too difficult, with the shards, and they're not invited to share the bench. "What do you see through yours?"

Ellever looks upward at him as he walks to stand next to her. This close, she can smell the blood on him. Blood is another substance foreign to her Other half and found only in the parts that have become the being who prefers to be called Elle. It's a strange substance, but it carries so much importance — life — that the Other knows it needs to be preserved and used carefully. It's precious.

"The void," Ellever answers, with the same lazy and comfortable tone. "The nothing beyond the void. And the eyes beyond that."

Part of her wants to laugh. Perhaps Dewan had just never given into the Other enough to see where the Nine dwelled, perhaps he was too scared of his own abilities to ever trust them again. She can see them. Not here; the world is too dark here. But she knows, in her heart, where they were.

She stops playing her slow notes, still looking at him. It's hard to see where she's looking exactly, because of the nature of her eyes.

"Have you not tried to bandage yourself?"

Eyes beyond the void. Huh. That sounds like something that suits Beacon, but it doesn't sound like she's talking about Beacon.

The concrete question gets their attention first, though. "There's no point. Every time I move, the spines cut me. They would shred bandages." They half-turn, so that she can see the metal protruding from their back, from shoulder blades and spine, from ribs. Their clothes are a ruin, between the tears in the fabric from the shards and all the blood, dry and fresh. But they're keeping with these clothes, so they don't ruin more.

Slowly, Ellever leans back to look at the metal coming from his back. It looks painful, in the way flesh always seems aggravated by metal. So fragile, flesh; always nicked or cut by something. Not the best of designs. She frowns.

"You're right," she agrees softly. "That would be difficult."

If she were fully in control of herself, she would have moved over by now to let him have a seat on the bench. But as it is, she can't see the point. Standing, sitting. Flesh never seems uncomfortable unless it's fallen.

She starts to play again, but it still doesn't resemble a typical song. Some of the notes sound a lot like her voice, as she climbs through her lazy sentences.

Describing blood is, suddenly, just out of reach.

"It looks bright."

Edited (words words) 2020-01-28 05:36 (UTC)

"I've always thought of blood as dark. But here maybe it is brighter. Like we're actually alive." They settle back around to mostly facing her, though their eyes go down to her fingers on the keys. Apparently they're getting philosophical today, but then, if you have an eldritch being in the shape of a young lady trying to converse with a murder machine, maybe that's just par for the course.

"You bleed," Ellever reasons.

Perhaps they're a kind of 'alive'. Her body has healed, instead of staying clawed-up from the green-eyed spirits. This is clearly a complicated state of being that they find themselves in, one that she doesn't have the tools to fully diagnose.

She wishes she did.

"Blood is full of life," she goes on. "When flesh is involved, at any rate."

They heal. Hair grows. They eat and (one presumes) deal with the aftermath of eating. It's a weird kind of death. Really, the Soldier's just trying not to stress about it too much. There's enough else to stress about.

Like blood in general. It's always kind of been a negative thing, for the Soldier: it meant someone was hurt or dying, not showing life. But maybe here it's different. "Maybe. The spirits bleed, too. Sometimes." They have cut enough of them, themselves, to know as much. Plus, they read about dissecting the rat spirits.

"...yes."

Ellever squints, for the first time in this conversation looking less than completely serene, as she thinks back on November. But the expression soon wrinkles out as she goes back to plunking away slowly at the keyboard, transcribing the voice she can still hear, beyond the void.

Or at least one that she thinks she hears.

"There was goo, when I stabbed one," she explains, looking back down at her fingers and recalling the unpleasant texture. "For you, as well?"

"Killed a lot of them. Tore one of the green-eyes apart," they say. "Was at least kind of like blood. Not all of them had it-- rock spirits were just mud and shards." They watch her fingers, too, and finally have to ask, "What are you playing?"

"A song," Ellever answers calmly, as she mixes a few more notes into it. Like the rest of the melody that occurs, none of it sounds like it belongs, and yet it sounds cohesive. She tilts her head to the side, considering. "A sentence," she adds. "Or a paragraph."

To her, at present, all of that sounds like the same thing. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. She's on the bridging thought between two halves, one of whom who knows about music and one of whom who knows about phrases that get into a mind and embed themselves.

Earworms, some call them. Ear parasites. Phrases that dig in and won't let go, phrases that take over the rest of the mind until it can't think about anything else.

This isn't such a phrase. Ellever is too young, and too sheltered from her kind, to know about them. Hers are simply... odd. Unsettling.

"You've killed rock spirits?" she wonders, in the same serene and distant voice.

That's really good, Ellever. Keep those ear parasites entirely to yourself. The Soldier already has so much shit in their head, they really don't need something else burrowing in. "Like the spirits. Music as sentences. Only theirs is kind of prettier." Sorry, Ellever, it's true.

"Most of the time, anyway. The rock spirits mostly squealed and made obnoxious noises. Had to use a grenade at close range or they would've taken the Invincible." Which predictably did not end well for the Soldier, but eh.

A wrinkle appears over Ellever's face when he calls the spirits' language prettier. But the confusion and puzzlement disappears as quickly as it came. Pretty isn't something that really computes. What is pretty, why is it important?

But, unusually, she doesn't pursue that line of questioning.

It doesn't matter. Creatures made of flesh are always strange.

"In November?"

This time, the flicker that passes over her expression makes her look far more like her normal self. Memories flood in, getting past the thoughts that have clogged her ever since she's been unable to think about anything but her black eyes and teeth.

"That didn't feel good, I imagine," she says, wryly.

Pretty music is better than creepy music, that's just the facts. The Soldier is very into music, but it really does need to be a music with a decent melody and notes that actually go together. (A good beat doesn't hurt, either, and she's got nothing like a decent rhythm going on here.) They're not going to say any of that, though; just seems kind of mean, like making fun of her attempts at making music.

They smile a bit wryly, themselves. "Better than some deaths I've had. At least it was over quick. And it stopped them."

Almost idly, rather than a conscious movement, Ellever's fingers drop to rest on the keys of the piano and stay there. It's as if the voice she's transcribing is taking a deep breath, or has stopped talking for the time being. The silence feels especially heavy, given how long she's been at this.

She peers sideways up at him.

"How many times have you died?"

Ellever remembers blinking her eyes open, her lids heavier than usual. She remembers seeing the black barrel of a gun in front of her face, the grim and resigned expression on Circe's own face as she'd held it. She remembers trying to move her limbs, to move her head, anything, but feeling as though her blood had been switched with sand. And then she remembers... nothing.

Before the ferry light, swinging overhead, and the lights in the water.

They hesitate a moment, between the silence and their own attempts at remembering. "I don't know. Enough that I know what procedure should be for when I die. Handlers collect the body, technicians revive it. I'd wake up either coming out of cryofreeze again, or on an operating table." They don't shrug, but the slight tilt of their head and the lift of the knife-warped metal hand suggest it. "Usually I think the deaths were part of experimentation. Testing serum effects. Only a couple times on a mission. I don't normally fail my missions."

Another pause. Then they correct: "I didn't usually fail my missions. Don't have a lot of missions, these days." What with only two handlers, one of them just barely that, and the other making very sure they don't kill anyone. Most of their tasks lately are expanded idle activities and patrols.

Her head tilts to the side. This isn't quite the answer she was expecting, but it doesn't show plainly on her face — like most of her emotions, right now. It's as though she's looking at them through glass.

Regardless, she'd meant Beacon; it hadn't occurred to her that he had died multiple times where he's from, and that he'd been revived more than once. Dewan had once noted, with his usual wry smile, that death is not an absolute where she's from. But trying to pry meaning and information from his dry, carefully-worded statements is not something that she'd like doing even now.

"They brought you back." It comes out slowly, like she's tasting the words; her next words pick up slightly. "Did it feel differently there than it does here?"

"Yes." There's no comparing the two, honestly. "Before I was either frozen, and freezing, or in pain. This was. Almost nice. Wake up quiet, alone, in the candle-lit church." Retroactively, knowing it was done by someone with the official title of "doctor", elicits some horror... but it's only natural, too. Doctors do the resurrecting in HYDRA, as well, after all. And if she made any experiments on their body before bringing it back, they don't remember it.

"Here, I've only died the one time," they add. "No changes yet. No damage left over. That happens sometimes."

Ellever would grimace, if she had full control of her mind. But she doesn't. Instead, she absorbs the information with the same serene expression as before, recalling how she'd felt when she'd woken up on the ferry. Bloody, drugged, but with her head intact. She isn't keen to relive that confusion.

"On the ferry I could barely stand," she recalls. "Do you think it's done by the same person?"

Something occurs to her, but it's a thought she can barely wrap her mind around. It's on the tip of her figurative tongue. Death... repeated death... a cycle... No, she can't quite get it.

Perhaps it's a thought not meant for her.

It's going to be a thought for neither of them, then, because the Soldier has no real idea what she's thinking and probably wouldn't think to wonder, anyway. They're a fairly prosaic, down-to-earth sort, even in death. "It's possible," they say thoughtfully. "Maybe even likely. Unless the portal does it somehow automatically, as far as we now there's only one person on this planet that can make and repair lanterns, so. Could be them."

Her head tilts until it reaches a sixty-degree angle with her right shoulder, amber eyes far away as she considers that answer. So many pieces to a big puzzle that people have been trying to solve for years. Over twenty, perhaps.

"We're all going to have a lot of questions for them," she notes, tone neutral but pleasant.

Back to distant instead of the focused Ellever people know, thinking of the bigger picture instead of being grounded by memories of discomfort and pain.

"Have you met them?"

"No." Daylight is going to, but Daylight made them promise not to say anything about it. "No one has. Far as I know." Which isn't a lie! Daylight hasn't met her... yet... The Soldier is not great at lying, but they are amazing at omitting. "Might be wise of them, though. They're the reason Ingram's group all tried to murder each other."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

EVENT LOG: TURN THE LIGHTS OFF

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

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject