logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: THE NIGHT WE MET

EVENT LOG: THE NIGHT WE MET

characters: everyone.
location: the path from downtown beacon to the harbor; all over town.
date/time: february 16-21.
content: the forest spirits send off their friends to join the aurora. memory opals drop from the eerie green lights above.
warnings: n/a.

i had all and then most of you, some and now none of you.

For most of the day on February 16, all of the town's forest spirits can be found along the stretch of road between downtown and the harbor, clearly setting up for, uh, something. They're piling snow onto the pathway, creating a miles long sled trail that starts outside the Landmark Inn and ends at the very end of the harbor's dock. Not only that, but the forest spirits are also not super willing to explain what they're up to! They're busy, you lantern-havers.

By the time evening rolls around, the spirits have set up wooden railings alongside the snowy path, as well as a warming tent, hot chocolate booth, and announcer stand outside of the Landmark. Oh, and a starting banner for the race! It's dogsled time!

Throughout the event, Beacon's downtown and harbor areas will be completely overrun with forest spirits, all there to bear witness to this holiday celebration—this holiday is for them, though, not you weirdos with your naked faces. Point is, none of the spirits will be hostile at this time! They're more interested in interacting with each other than with Beacon's residents, though if pressed, a kind spirit might be willing to explain what's going on:

The aurora arrives in Beacon for about a week each year, and the forest spirits believe it to be "friends in the sky". The lights are old friends of theirs, it seems! And each night while the aurora shines above the town, the forest spirits send off a handful of friends to join the aurora! The spirits ready to join the aurora build sleds of their own and assemble mighty sled teams, sometimes comprised of dog spirits and sometimes... other stuff. Then, when the aurora is at its peak in the wee hours of the night, the sled teams will ride off one by one, racing down the snow-covered path all the way down to the harbor, where they'll finally rocket off the dock and out over the lake, picking up more and more speed as each team gallops wildly over the water before arcing up into the sky. Once the spirits are barely a speck, they'll hit the aurora and burst into a shower of light. Beautiful stuff!

See, since the aurora is made of light, forest spirits launched into it are killed on impact! Isn't that wonderful! The forest spirits seem to think so! What is death to a dead thing!

All of this information can be learned through handwaved/played-led interactions with the forest spirits during the event. They'll all be focused on saying goodbye to their friends and cheering them on as they stream through the sky, but they're happy to welcome lantern-havers to join in the celebrations. The hot chocolate is free and only tastes a little bit like mud, so. Enjoy!

•••
For the entire duration of the event, the aurora will dance in beautiful silence overhead, lighting up the whole town with its eerie green glow. Every so often, handfuls of opals will rain down like meteorites from the lights above, and these opals each contain the memory of someone currently in Beacon! They can be found all over town, landing on paths and atop buildings and maybe even rocketing straight through your ceiling to crash into your living room. Perhaps a forest spirit decided to hide some shiny rocks in your cereal box or under your pillow... Better hope the Postmaster General doesn't find your opals before you do, though. That spirits sure does love their rocks. Point is, who knows where the opals might turn up?

On that note, if you signed up for a random event, we'll be RNGing characters to receive these random events throughout the event! The event may happen in response to a toplevel on this event log, or we might turn up in your IC inbox... 👀 These events will be entirely random, meaning we could dole out any number of them at any time, so it'll be a fun surprise for all of us.

If you missed signups and would still like to toss your name in the ring, go right ahead! Signups will remain open throughout the event, though we can't promise everyone who signs up will get something.

And finally... Each day, we'll post a list of the forest spirits joining the aurora! What, did you want to know in advance? The forest spirits have never been a particularly organized bunch, so they're winging this—which means more surprises for you. :)

Enjoy the races and the lights and the opals, residents of Beacon, and remember: WHAT IS DEATH TO A DEAD THING!

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What's going on? What is this?

[ the words are out of his mouth before they've really had time to register. before where he is and who he is really has time to register.

easy, octavius, is the reply, and peter feels sick. he's not sure if he feels sick because this is horrifying, or if he feels sick because he's in the body of an octogenarian linked up to— god, whatever the hell this is.

we're doing what you asked, doc. hooking up your life support to these old arms of yours. getting you mobile.

it's the trapster, peter—otto—peter? recognises him. he'd hired him to help him escape prison, and he's — well, he has, but the thought that occurs to otto (no, not otto, peter!) is that he should be doing this, not the trapster, he's not good enough. ]

—Your calculations are off. Carry the eight. [ "ah, good catch." ] Imbecile! [ the words are out of his mouth before he's had time to think about them, and something of peter winces and cringes. that's not him, that's otto. god, he even sounds like him, what is he—?

a switch is flipped and otto screams. peter screams, he's not sure if he's ever known pain like it, which is ridiculous, of course he has, and then there's white, blinding, and—

sun. trees. houses, and that's it! he's home. it's forest hills, but he's never seen it quite like this. it's like there's a street party, and he's dressed like he's seventeen again: slacks, and a shirt, vest jacket and those glasses.

he sees tim first, tim harrison, riding his little bike down the street, the way he used to—

hey pete! wonderin' when you'd show up. you're going to love it here! it's the best, he says, and peter feels dizzy, nauseous, like he's in the middle of a very unfunny joke that everyone else except him gets.

there's a second voice then, russian, and peter doesn't even need to turn to look to know who it is: it's aleksei. the rhino, and— ]

They're dead. [ it's weird, he thinks he should feel sick. sad. horrified. something, but he doesn't. he doesn't know what he feels. ] Is this Heaven? Does that mean I'm—

[ he starts to ask, and sable says "no". he doesn't notice that his clothing's changed — he's older, no glasses, but still an ugly shirt and a questionable cardigan, and the next voice he hears does send a chill down his spine but it's—

peter doesn't hate it and he's not sure why. it's captain stacy. it's gwen. there's a flash of happiness, just for a second, and she kisses him on his cheek. you never faltered from the right path, stacy says, and gwen says that everything worked out in the end.

had it? ] Gwendy, I— I failed you. I let you both down.

[ but then someone else speaks up and peter doesn't recognise the voice, not at first. it ends with son and he turns to face them and he realises, quickly and suddenly, and with a feeling in his chest that he's not sure he'd be able to put into words, that it's his dad. it's his mom. he's dressed, now, in his uniform for horizon labs, and he barely has time to acknowledge the fact that his father just told him he's proud, because—.

he's spider-man now, and there's yet another voice. peter hopes, privately, that it's the last because he's not sure how many more ghosts of the people he's lost he can face. this one, though, this one's different. it's the voice he'd heard as a child telling him to go to bed, to stop messing around, to go outside and play with the kids down the street.

it's the voice that had told him to be kinder to others. the voice of the man that had helped peter become a man his aunt could be proud of.

peter thinks he might cry. ] —Uncle Ben! [ the man before might have been his father, but this is his dad.

oh, peter. I hate to say this, but you have to go. you can't stay here, ben tells him. peter doesn't understand. the words feel like a crushing weight on his shoulders and his head and his heart and his chest. ]

What? [ he mumbles, uncomprehending. ] I don't get to—after all I've—. [ a pause. oh, he gets it. he wants to run his hand through his hair, he wants to run away and cry.

instead he speaks again, voice quieter and softer, defeated. ] It's that mistake, isn't it? When I let you down... [ a breath of a pause, more a moment to take a breath and try not to let the tears spill down his cheeks. ] But I've tried, Uncle Ben, I've tried so hard—.

[ he thinks he must sound like a child, like a lost little boy pleading with his parents, but really, isn't that what he is? he'd tried so hard to make up for his mistakes but it had never been enough. he'd always known it would never be enough—.

that's not it at all, my boy, ben says, and peter looks up at him, vision blurry from a mix of unshed tears and his hair curling and falling down into his eyes. you've more than earned your rest and any other time, I'd give you my blessing.

ben lifts peter's head, and peter feels like it was only yesterday that ben had died. he doesn't need to study ben's face to know where the laughter lines begin and end, doesn't need to look at his left hand to know that the cold metal pressing against his cheek is ben's wedding band.

that first year, the first time that peter had gone to visit ben's grave, he'd been late. he'd been late and he'd been afraid he wouldn't know what to say, but that had been ridiculous.

ben continues and peter stays silent.

but you can't leave a man like otto octavius running around as spider-man. or peter parker.

you've built an amazing life, don't you dare let him destroy it.

ben's right, because of course he is.

peter hears a noise, and he's not sure if it's his own thoughts or if it's something or someone else entirely. get up! you need to get up and fight one more time! is what it says. c'mon, peter, get up!

as he comes to, he feels dizzy and nauseous and he thinks there's probably a joke or two here, but for the life of him (oh, there it is, that was almost funny), he can't quite form the words. instead— ]

There's not a moment to waste! [ it's his words but otto's voice again, not his. not peter's. ] We have work to do. [ everything hurts and peter can barely think straight. he doesn't know if that's because he's in otto's rapidly failing body or because he's in otto's body and the horror, the sheer horror of otto being in his is that awful that he's having a physical reaction to the thought, but—.

oh, who's he kidding, it's all of it.

he needs to fix this. he needs his body back before this one dies.

(he's going to die. it didn't work.)

peter remembers his life and he knows otto's seeing it too: wheatcakes for breakfasts, annual trips to watch the mets. getting bitten and being told that his uncle had been murdered.

STOP! otto yells, but the voice is peter's. I don't want this!) peter would laugh if he could, but it's taking every last bit of his-strength-in-otto's-body to talk.

(is this how he really looks from this angle? god, no wonder new york thought spider-man was a public menace, the mask is terrifying.) ]

You wanted to be Spider-Man. Well, guess what, it's more than the powers. [ "I'll kill you!" otto says, and peter knows he won't because he's wearing the mask now. he's spider-man. he has peter's memories. peter wouldn't kill and he knows, now, that otto won't either.

otto asks if peter would do it all again: the pain and the loss. he asks if peter would still save otto, knowing everything. and peter says yes, it's who I— ] —who we are.

[ ("yes.") ]

Edited 2020-02-16 23:08 (UTC)

[ perhaps it's poetic he'd picked up an opal smattered in various shades of deep red and a warm grey-black by the edge of the town, where he'd thought he'd seen a thick spider crawl its way up the bark of a tree and disappear into its higher branches. kol wipes his face with gentle hands then a harder touch, knowing that the wetness he finds doesn't quite belong to him. it's peter's.

the intense storm of emotions that had whipped up inside of him and almost knocked him over lingers. that's the curse of being a vampire; he feels everything much more intensely and at a heightened level than anyone else. it lingers in a way he wishes it wouldn't, like the intoxicating and acidic taste of blood. some of peter's memories reminds kol of how magic had made him feel—like he could take on the world and be the world itself. those memories of uncle ben, aunt may, and gwen inspire him to not hide this opal and what he'd seen from peter.

kol does hesitate in finding peter's little abode. when he walks, he watches his footfalls, eying how strong and wide his strides are as he wonders if they're his own. when he looks at that opal in his hand, he thinks of that man who had inspired warmth in his chest and how he would think so poorly of kol for all the cold blood he'd shed over his years.

uncle ben. otto octavius. gwen stacey. aunt may? peter parker. spider-man. kol ensures to remember those names in a bid to separate himself from peter's memories. those emotions aren't his. what happened to peter did not happen to him. he did not do anything similar to that.

after years of manipulating the memories of innocent people, he knows exactly what had been handed to him. after centuries of denying responsibility for half of his own torture, he knows that he's trying desperately to turn a blind eye to what peter's memories have innocently reprimanded him for.

he can't help but tap out a childish rhythm against peter's door. ] Spider-Man.

[ just in case peter doesn't feel like answering, that should be enough: the uncertain tone of voice, the flippancy in how he singsongs it. who the fuck is spider-man, really? ]

[ peter had remarked to quentin that he'd taken to being a hermit and it's only half a joke — he hasn't in the sense that he spends all of his time indoors. he's never been much of a homebody in that fairly traditional sense, but he is disinclined to spend too much time outside where he could just stumble across an opal.

he'd seen one of jason's and that, really, had almost been enough. he imagines his luck — the good old parker luck — is enough that he'll end up seeing another, entirely inadvertently at some point, but he hopes not. he hopes he can avoid it, hopes he gets to miss out on the deeply invasive happenstance of experiencing a memory important to someone else.

which means, then, he intermittently holes up in his room in the invincible. it's not that there's anything particularly interesting or exciting in his room — aside from having a (probably not so) temporary roommate in the form of gwen stacy, he uses it more as a workshop-slash-lab of sorts: somewhere to try and figure out answers to questions he's more or less failed to answer up to this point.

(it's a distraction, in other words.)

at the rhythmic tapping on the door, he pauses. he thinks, just for a second, that it might be gwen, and then a voice — a man's voice — utters the name spider-man and peter freezes.

he freezes because he's not sure if he wants to pretend he's not here, or if he wants to dive to the door, swing it open and—

panic, basically. he panics.

so he does that second one: he scrambles to the door, remarkably gracefully for someone who hasn't quite decided how they're actually going to answer the door. how they're going to greet whoever's stood outside it who knows that name and knows that spider-man lives here. or can be found here—

(oh, maybe that's it, maybe they're just—

no, that's stupid. that's stupid hoping.)

he swings open the door and there's — kol? peter pauses, staring at kol slightly blankly. they've spoken a couple of times, in passing more than anything, and peter knows of him simply by virtue of them both having been here for a while.

spider-man, he'd said, and if peter was a cursing man, he'd swear. kol must have one of his— ]

—You just missed him. [ is what peter opts to say. ]

Did I? [ kol says it with a smile, only playing along for a moment. ] I didn't hear a second pair of footsteps.

[ it's not public knowledge that kol is anything close to being a vampire, but he does have the edward cullen stalking down pat. hopefully it's common knowledge throughout beacon that kol is useful and nothing terrifying at all—capable of moving heavy things like they're simply feathers, moving at super speed, and an array of other things he labels under "i'm a witch (but not really)".

it doesn't matter. there's an easy reason for why he'd hear another pair of footsteps beyond the door and peter's embarrassing commotion on the other side. it's obvious to kol that this is something he doesn't want people linking to him. that's one thing he can understand about what he saw and felt.

looking at peter with an expectant raise of his brows, he opens his palm and shows him the opal. there's really no point in going through what's bound to be a circular and pathetic conversation. peter's attempt at a lie gets him 5/10. ]

I didn't realise you had a spider fetish. Not that I'm judging. I have my own questionable fetishes.

[ see? don't say "who's spider-man" or he's going to really go into detail here. ]

[ peter opens his mouth to respond to the first comment — it had been going to be a slightly defensive explanation of the fact that, you know, spider-man doesn't need to walk and he'd left through the window, but then kol gives him a look.

it's a look peter's seen a couple of times before on different people — at home, not in beacon — and something in his stomach drops, just a little, and then—

kol holds open his palm. oh. that would explain that.

peter freezes and just stares at the opal for one second, then two, thoughts racing through his mind — the biggest question is what kol could have seen, but there are a — lot of contenders. he's only spent almost every day of his lift since he was fifteen dressing up in spandex and swinging across new york city.

(hey, shouldn't his spider-sense have warned him about someone, somewhere figuring out his identity?)

(—no, but it'd have been nice.)

knowing his luck, kol probably just saw a memory of him in his apartment getting dressed or something.

he sighs and groans all at once and pushes the door open a little wider; waves a hand vaguely behind him and says— ] Look, there's a reasonable explanation. [ "it's not a fetish", is what he means. it's said in the tone of voice of someone that's had conversations like this more than once: it manages to be long-suffering and tired, with more than an edge of trepidation.

he doesn't entirely look behind him to see if kol accepts the non-verbal invite to come inside — he assumes he will, if he wants to get rid of the opal. peter's not going to touch it whilst they're stood in the doorway and run the risk of reliving something horrendously emotional compromising, or — more likely, he thinks — utterly embarrassing where someone could just walk by.

(oh god, what if it was the time that he regained his body and was suitless? and he'd had to make some pants from webbing for the sake of decency?) ]

—He crawls walls, you know.

[ fortunately for kol, the cabins lack a privately owned lease. he easily steps into peter's cabin, crossing his arms against his chest as he glances around as if expecting to see cobwebs in the corners. what he searches for is something to connect the physicality of the memories to peter. can you blame him? he enjoys detail. each time he manipulated someone's dreams and thoughts, he tried to ensure it was a great experience. ]

Does he?

[ he looks to peter, not appearing incredibly impressed. honestly, if he knew who spider-man was beyond those memories… he'd be a fan. instead, he's a little weighed down by what he saw. it's still a convoluted mess of aunt may, uncle ben, otto, otto-and-peter that he still requires a moment to untangle it all.

perhaps spider-man can help. ]

Look, Peter, I don't really care who Spider-man is. [ does that sound right? he doesn't know, but he trucks on. ] But I wanted you to know that I knew. It seemed like maybe that was meant to be a secret.

[ alas for kol, peter's room leans less towards cobwebs and more towards the inadvertently non-personal, by sheer value of the fact that peter doesn't spend masses of time there — there's a small collection of books (science — a mixture of biology and chemistry) in a haphazard pile on a desk, and an equally haphazard scattering of paper next to it.

peter hums a noise of vague acknowledgement at first the question, then stiffens a little at the admission that kol knows who peter is but doesn't care. a mixture of doubt and hesitation crosses his face and it's punctuated by an inhale of breath before he sighs. ]

—Yeah. [ he says finally, with a degree of resignation. he doesn't elaborate whether it's an answer to the 'does he' or the 'it seemed like it was meant to be a secret'. there's a beat and peter lifts a hand and waves dismissively. ] I've been thinking about issuing membership cards, you know? Welcome to the Spidey not-so-secret secret identity club. [ a quirk of his lips — almost a smile but not quite. kol might not care, but that still doesn't rule out someone caring, which had been the point. still, the longer he's here, the less feasible keeping it secret seems to be. ]

Proportionate strength and abilities of a spider, [ he half elaborates, before gesturing at the opal. ] You're giving that back, right? [ a beat and he runs a hand through his hair. (god.) ] Man, I don't know if I should apologise for whatever you saw or— try and come up with a ham-fisted joke-slash-excuse to try and explain it all away. Probably both.

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EVENT LOG: THE NIGHT WE MET

—kol, cw: death, body swapping

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