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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Smart of him to step back, though by now such foresight doesn't surprise him. Cao Pi is more clever than he seems at first glance. Arrogant enough, but not too much to his detriment, and at least part of it is a facade. He might have gone on to rule again after his father passed had he not died instead.

At the comment about royalty, though, he gives a short huff, an exhale that isn't quite a laugh. "Yeah. I'll admit to that. I never got to know any kings or queens personally, just followed the news now and then. Had to stand guard as part of a unit once or twice, when I was much younger. It's interesting drama, I suppose."

And a lot of that drama does need to be taken quite seriously, but he's content for now to pass off his reaction as amusement instead, as if the actions of the nobility were some sort of real life soap opera rather than the negotiations that could lead to peace or war for entire islands.

If only it were mere drama, and not a crucial means of staying one step ahead of potential threats. "How fortunate for you. Even in my early career as a mere officer serving my father, I never got to enjoy the simple pleasures of staying out of it.

"So." One word with so much weight. "You have now seen my father in action. Something almost no one here knows about. Even the Grandmaster doesn't remember enough of his history lessons to know more than a few passing facts about the Hero of Chaos, and yet you have seen him yourself."

"I suppose I have," he nods. "But I imagine it holds less meaning to me, as someone not from your world, than it does to him. Which isn't to say I'm not interested, I just... The succession of kings and emperors in your world is probably a little like me telling you the history of Marine leadership in mine."

The important parts are not Cao Pi's father himself, but what Cao Pi's reaction to all of this is. He's bothered, he gives it a great deal of importance. He almost certainly resents the man. Cao Pi is someone who had power and who willingly gave it up for the sake of his own political survival. All things he'll file away in his mind, should they become relevant later, but knowledge of his father is slightly more... academic.

"I'm sure," Cao Pi agrees, "but that wasn't what I meant, exactly. The idea that people who have heard of my father are not yet privy to such intimate details as you have managed to glimpse through a stone."

Eh but it's neither here nor there, really. If Rosinante ends up taking away mistaken impressions, Cao Pi isn't about to correct them. If anything, he's merely annoyed at how rude it is for stones falling from the sky to reveal anything of his precious, private feelings. That said...

"...you asked for a vulnerable detail of mine, before. I believe you now have one."

"That I do," he says with a slow nod.

It's how all of these have gone, though. Perhaps Cao Pi hasn't found many - no doubt partly because of how thoroughly Rosinante and some others are searching - or perhaps few of his own have been returned to him and he hasn't been subjected to this awkwardness much yet. Rosinante can surely sympathize with how it feels, having private thoughts and moments suddenly made available to others, and so he won't completely brush it aside. But nothing he learned was particularly shocking or novel. It isn't Soldat tearing apart a room full of doctors trying to put him back down. It isn't Will, a child, struggling against the gravity of murder he committed. Hell, it isn't even what Cao Pi saw him doing. Few would be very accepting of a man who destroyed hospitals and surely killed a few doctors purely out of rage at their treatment of one boy.

The life of an emperor is a privileged one, even here. How typical.

"At least here you're given a new opportunity, I suppose. You won't have your father breathing down your neck. You can live on your own merits."

Ah, but there's the rub, and the reason Cao Pi turns back with a wicked smirk. "I have never not lived on my own merits. What other people wish to think of me matters nothing to me, I go my own way."

That, perhaps, is why he shrugs off what he sees from other people. How terrible could he consider such murders and other darkness when he himself has brushed aside equally-terrible actions?

"Then you're very fortunate."

So very, very many people can't simply do what they wish. Can't just choose to ignore what others think. Have to work hard to keep up, have to fit in, have to obey the system they live in because anything else will bring ruin to their lives.

But this isn't something he wants to lecture Cao Pi or anyone else about, especially not right now, so he shrugs and acts like it's meant to be a compliment. "And here, I've seen that, I suppose. Despite resistance toward leadership, you've gone on to hold meetings and help make decisions. I think it's slowly paying off. Getting people to pay attention to each other and think more about how they fit in as a group together. It takes confidence to pull that off."

He'll totally take it as a compliment, too, with an incline of his head. "I would just chalk it up to doing as I am accustomed to do, but I suppose you have a point."

He itches to finally break his silence and tell Rosinante something of what happened with Dr. Solis, but now's not quite the time. There's a lot going on. But it comes to mind, if only because he wants to talk about something else besides memories - and also bolster his efforts toward befriending this intelligent fellow by offering him a scrap that no one else is privy to...

Ah, maybe later. When things calm down and the ferry comes. "Then, have you learned anything enlightening by finding this stone? Or am I to simply cast it aside, and focus on keeping the ones brought to me that feature my wife? You may look at one of those if you like. I have no pictures of her otherwise, as some do with their phones."

"You don't want to keep it?" He asks, raising an eyebrow. Weird, but all right. Tossing it means someone else will probably find it and that seems like an odd choice to him, but he doesn't have any use for it that he can think of.

"Either way, I wouldn't mind getting to see your wife, with how highly you speak of her."

There's a lake out there where things go to die...

"I don't need to remember my father," Zihuan says easily, honestly. "My filial duty ended in death. My wife, on the other hand..."

He has them in a pouch, what probably was meant to be some kind of coin purse in the general store, crocheted and flowery but hey it works. He has to roll each opal in his fingers to figure out which one is which, and then hands Rosinante the one Hughes brought to him, of his fair lady playing her flute. It's quite a nice representation of her, and them, almost as much as their first meeting.

Suit yourself, Cao Pi. Rosinante shrugs and accepts the second opal, content to have the opportunity to learn more.

He comes out of the memory smiling faintly. It's good that some of these people have such vivid memories of pleasant moments and people they loved. Balances out some of the darker things he's come across. "You're very lucky," he comments. "I can tell you care for each other a great deal."

Zihuan nods once in appreciation. Others should love his lady as much as he does. "It is true. I admit that much of the time I remain guarded, so that my feelings do not betray me, but Lady Zhenji is the one true crack in the wall. I cannot hide how I feel about her."

He may consider his father far more of a vulnerability, since that can be used against him, but maybe that's only because unlike some, his wife has never been used that way. Heaven and hell could not save the man who decided to kidnap or assassinate Zhenji around him.

"Shame I'll never meet her myself, but thank you for sharing this," he says as he passes the stone back.

Well, all right, there's probably some slim chance she'll end up here. Sometimes the portal likes to bring in people known to others here - it's a common enough theme. And the fact that it can select from across time, not just space, means there are opportunities for people like Lady Zhenji to arrive after having lived a long and successful life, as opposed to having died young. But given the sort of things that happen in Beacon, Rosinante isn't entirely sure if the second shot at life is one everyone should be subjected to.

Cao Pi takes it and puts it back in the pouch with the others. Chances are good the opal presently stashed in his armor will actually be chucked in the lake and not added to them, but he's not making that decision here and now.

"All things considered," he says dryly, "I would rather no one here got to meet her themselves. This is a small token of good will, I can accept being able to see her face whenever I want now. It's better she stays in the land of the living." And gets to enjoy a nice long stint as Empress Dowager, yes. "Although with the number of memories of her I've collected, there are now a fair number of people who know my dark secret...that I have a soft spot."

It's a much better dark secret than some of the ones around here, not even including himself. Honestly, it's no wonder Cao Pi is making sure he saw this - he'd be handing it out himself.

"It's a good thing," he says. "If people found you intimidating or difficult to speak with, it makes you more approachable. Or if they were put off by how different a time and culture you come from, it's probably something they can relate to."

Aw c'mon man don't reveal all his secret strategies! Cao Pi sniffs a laugh. "I have little care for what others think of me but I suppose, anything in the name of cooperation toward our goal." And yet, he's not about to let that image of his father get around. There's vulnerabilities and then there's vulnerabilities. He turns his back, intending on continuing with his day. "If you find any more of my father, feel free to toss it in the lake. It isn't the dead who need to remember the living."

"Noted." He's not sure he agrees with that statement, and if he finds any more opals with memories like that one he may or may not actually toss them, but. It's the thought that counts.

"And if you come across more of mine, please do return them." He would certainly prefer to keep his in a known location if possible.

"Of course." And he wouldn't even hesitate, even though these stones could give him a glimpse into the tight-lipped commander's world. Savor, and then hand over gladly. He'd want the same from someone he trusts.

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EVENT LOG: THE NIGHT WE MET

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