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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Sora is more than welcome to return to the topic, though for the moment Jason doesn't mind talking about Hades and, by extension, Nico. Although, if he knew that Sora was imagining Nico and Leo together he would lose it.

"Heh, well, that part isn't too different. Hades wasn't really honored as one of the 12 Olympian gods, despite being related to pretty much all of them. He didn't even have a cabin at Camp Half-Blood until Percy got the gods to agree that they should build cabins for all of the gods -- before that if you were a demigod child of a god other than one of the twelve then you were stuck in the Hermes cabin." Which, while nice in terms of having lots of people to hang out with, meant you often were over crowded with demigods you didn't necessarily relate to. It was probably the one aspect of Camp Jupiter that Jason preferred, they didn't sort by your godly parent there. "Hades could feel bitter sometimes, but he's certainly not evil. I'm told he was pretty important in turning the tide in the Second Titan War -- savior of Olympus I think -- and in our battles against Gaea later on."

Camp Jupiter hadn't seen that part of the Titan War of course, fighting their end of it without much help from gods and doing it on the west coast. Still, Percy and Nico and some of the other Camp Half-Blood demigods had filled in a lot of the gaps as far as the east coast front was concerned.

"If I find any more stones with Nico in them, I'll be sure to share."

Sora feels like he should be keeping notes - honestly, so much of this has been going right over his head - but he at least grasps that there were two separate camps, and Jupiter was for the Roman gods and Half-Blood was for the Greek. (He still can't quite get the duality of the Greek and Roman sides of the same gods out of his head. It's a little haunting.)

"Okay, pause. Pause, pause pause." Sora is going to start putting up fingers, because he thinks he gets Jason's wild mixed up amnesiac half at one camp half at another camp sort of story, but there are definitely some parts he knows he's missing. "So, you started out at the Roman camp - Camp Jupiter - when you were little, and that's where Reyna and the other cohorts were. But Thalia's your sister, and she's from, um... Actually, I don't know which camp? And you told me Percy was in the fifth cohort, but he was also at Camp Half-Blood? Was he like you? Did he lose his memory?"

Sora is so insistent about his pauses that Jason actually stops walking for a moment. Sorry, was he getting ahead of himself? Apparently Sora wasn't the only one with stories that made for confusing information dumps. He smiles slightly, waiting for Sora to ask his questions.

"I grew up at Camp Jupiter. I was their praetor -- a camp leader. Percy, well, he didn't grow up at Camp Half-Blood, but he was taken there when he was about 12 I think. He also became a leader-figure at the camp. Juno took both our memories so that we could be a kind of...peace exchange between the two camps. I'd be sent to Camp Half-Blood to introduce them to the idea of a Roman camp, while Percy was sent to Camp Jupiter to serve as their introduction to the Greeks. According to her, she had to take our memories or else it wouldn't have worked out so well."

He glances up at the sky, thanks to the aurora it's harder to see the light of the moon. He rubs at the wrapped stone with Thalia's name on it. Sora had already seen it, so might as well talk about this now, "Not long after I was left in the woods, Thalia went to Camp Half-Blood -- she was a daughter of Zeus, not Jupiter. She's not at the camp any more though...she took a third option. She joined a group called the Hunters of Artemis."

Sora's eyebrows are disappearing behind his bangs in his disbelief. "Better how? Was everyone else in on it too? Did you agree to that? Like, was it your choice?" This sounds... alarming to Sora. For someone with a Swiss cheese memory, making an exchange like that sounds unimaginably cruel.

He isn't sure why Thalia left, but if it was in reaction to all of this, he doesn't blame her. He can't imagine how painful it must be to lose a brother like that, only to get him back in such a convoluted way, like he was a pawn or a toy who just happened to be in the same place at the same time. What a way to realize that your destiny was out of your hands, that it was up to people who you've never met and didn't really have your best interest in mind. The more distance from that, the better, as far as Sora's concerned.

Aaand all of this concern is not getting voiced, but it's definitely showing. He's not exactly paying attention to what he's telegraphing, but he's at least trying his best to not seem, like, pitying. He's just... not happy for Jason's sake, and he's not bothering trying to hide it.

Jason sighs, looking away from Sora, "Juno acted on her own," which had been part of the problem as far as Jupiter was concerned, "So no. No one agreed to it or even knew what was going on until I showed up at Camp Half-Blood. One minute I was going about my life at Camp Jupiter and the next I was waking up on a bus with no memories of how I got there or even who I was." He doesn't say how Juno had even taken an extra step, planting false memories in the kids who were on the bus so they wouldn't think twice about Jason suddenly being in their midst -- especially a certain pair of demigod children who had extensive false memories of hanging out with Jason at the school they were coming from on the bus.

He glances back at him and frowns.

"Oh come on. Don't give me that look. I didn't like it either, but...I dunno...I wouldn't have met Piper or Leo if it hadn't happened." Or Percy, Nico, or Annabeth. "I certainly wouldn't have found out my sister was still alive. And I wouldn't have discovered that I have two homes instead of just one--where I didn't always feel like I belonged anyway. I have my memories back now and while I'm certainly not going to thank her for what she did, well, I'd be a very different person if it hadn't happened."

Sora... nods cautiously. He understands where Juno came from - after all, he relates with having two sides that just want to be whole again, no matter the cost - but that isn't a solution he's particularly happy with. It's too close to what happened to Roxas.

"Good came out of it. That's... what's important." He looks down at his sleeve, picking at the cuff. "But that shouldn't have happened to you. People aren't tools. People need to talk to people like people, not get used without their permission." Sora's very sure about this, if nothing else. "It doesn't matter what needed to happen. There had to be a better way."

Sora has a point and Jason knows he does. It's not like it was in the prophecy that it had to happen that way. There was always a chance that, even with his memories of Camp Jupiter, he and the Greeks could have met without bloodshed. But, just like everything else, they were thinking hypothetically and it could really go either way in that regard.

"Juno...really all of the gods...don't generally ask for permission." As far as they were concerned, the demigods and mortals and basically anyone not a god themselves was considered a tool to be used. Jason didn't like it, generally didn't agree with the idea, but there wasn't a lot that could be done about it either.

"It's in the past now, Sora. There's not really anything we can do to change that." If there was, well, Jason had some other changes he would make first. His hand drifts to the front of his shirt. He hadn't rubbed at the spot where he'd been stabbed in a long time, but discussions like this made him think about it and made it difficult to stop himself.

Sora could. In fact, if Chirithy remembers him, Sora is trying to get the gumption up to see if they can't do it again. That's neither here nor there, though.

He does look a bit rebellious at the idea, though. "We can remember that things shouldn't have happened that way, and not do it again. That's what memories are good for." It's the reason why Sora keeps the pain around. It reminds him to be better. Otherwise, he'd be perfectly willing to just toss those memories away and have some fun for once. He needs those memories to be him. These reminders that other people feel pain as much as he does.

He does try to lower his hackles a bit though. Jason's right. Being mad at those gods of his here and now won't accomplish anything except get him mad. (Which is actually an accomplishment in and of itself! It's pretty difficult for Sora to feel anger, even for the sake of others. It's cathartic, a little, being able to be angry for the right reasons.)

"You're worth more than a tool. Way more." Sora shrugs. "If she wanted to do something, she should have just asked you. I bet you'd've figured out what to do right away."

Edited (I KEEP EDITING MY REPLIES SORRY) 2020-03-04 07:57 (UTC)

Jason can't help it. Sora's words bring a smile to his face. Possibly because it implies that Jason would have known better what to do than Juno did in those circumstances. It's hard not to be pleased at that idea. It would be very dangerous for Sora to say those things in front of Juno, but as Jason has learned over the past few months the gods aren't exactly coming to his rescue or to punish him.

They aren't here at all.

He nudges Sora, "Thanks. I'll keep that in mind."

"You better." Sora mutters a little to himself. Jason is so good at things. He's so good at everything, possibly. Juno must be nuts. Sora's gone 1v1 with titans and gods before, he'd give Juno a piece of his mind.

"Anyway. Tell me more about Thalia. What was that group she joined? Something about Artemis?"

Please do not tell Jason of your plans to take revenge on Juno. He will spend the rest of his afterlife worrying about that. One does not simply challenge the queen of the gods.

He appreciates the shift back to his sister. While that came with its own awkward conversations as well.

"The Hunters of Artemis. She's only been with them a few years now, but she's already one of their leaders." That sort of thing tends to come naturally to children of Zeus, so it's not so surprising to Jason that even among an immortal group like that Thalia would take the lead. "They're a group of young women who have dedicated themselves to following Artemis. Artemis is what we call a maiden goddess -- unlike the other gods she's never been interested in having children or having a romantic relationship with anyone. Any girl can swear an oath of loyalty to her and in exchange they are granted eternal youth as long as they are part of her hunt."

Sora, despite all of his hangups, is still very much Sora. He does what he wants! And what he wants!!! Is to yell at Juno!!!!

Eternal youth, huh. Sora nods along, absorbing all of this. "So... does that mean she'll outlive everyone outside of the hunt? Guess it'd make sense not to date." They'd just outlive potential boyfriends or girlfriends, after all.

"What were they after?" What could be so valuable that the inevitability of outliving all of your friends would be worth the trade-off?

"Yeah. Unless she dies in combat or falls in love. It's part of their oath." He knows why Thalia took up the oath, but sometimes he wonders how long she'll keep it. He'd never really had much time to think about the ramifications of it since, well, he's dead now. So she outlived him anyway.

Jason tilts his head, "What do you mean what were they after?"

Sora takes in a deep breath and holds it, looking up at the aurora. "Like, did they have a goal? Or were just, uh, a traveling camp? I guess?" He shakes his head. "Guess I wonder why anyone would wanna outlive their friends, is all. Must be an important reason."

Which is a super grim thing to say, and he winces internally as he says it... but hey, if not now and here, then where?

He's not entirely sure, but he has a guess. "They often went after monsters and beasts of legend. Either protecting humans or just because Artemis is the kind of goddess that likes to hunt."

He gets a better idea of what answer Sora is after though, he wants to know why Thalia might have left everyone she knew for these Hunters. "I think each Hunter has their own reason. It's a pretty serious sacrifice after all. Thalia...she did it to avoid being part of a prophecy. I don't remember the exact prophecy, Thalia and Percy both told me about parts of it, but it had something to do with a demigod of the Big Three reaching 16 and making a choice that would either save or destroy Olympus. Thalia didn't want to have to make that choice and she was lucky enough to have a third option since she was a girl. She took the oath and never turned 16."

Sora gets quiet at that. "That's a lot to deal with when you're sixteen, yeah." No wonder Thalia took a third option. That on top of her family, and her brother, and Juno, and Hera and Zeus and whoever else... Yeah. He'd be pretty done with it too. He supposes that that means she's safe, wherever she is. Just alive. Forever. Outliving all of her friends. Outliving Jason by quite a bit. That's such a nightmare to Sora. He'd really, truly rather just die.

"What about you? I mean... you weren't the son of Zeus, right? Just Jupiter. So did the prophecy have anything to do with you, or was it a - a Camp Half-Blood problem?" That was the name of the camp, right?

Jason makes a shrugging gesture like 'welcome to the life and times of demigods man.' This is the kind of shit they have to deal with more than he would care to admit. Especially children of the big Three.

"This prophecy was unfolding when I was 15...so it didn't really apply to me since the events unfolding around it were happening a year before I was going to turn 16 anyway." At least, that's the best he can figure -- after all the prophecy hadn't applied to Nico either as far as he could tell. "Of course, while they were dealing with that Camp Jupiter had its own problems to deal with on the west coast."

"What kinds of problems?" The stuff about the prophecy sounds interesting, but Sora's one track mind is more interested in Jason's side of the equation. He has so many questions to ask Jason, it's sort of unbelievable. Jason's lived quite a life.

"The Titans. The prophecy revolved around their king, Kronos, returning to power after he defeated the gods. The gods resided in New York, so the Greeks were dealing with protecting Olympus. I didn't know that until later, but at the time we had discovered that the Titans had built their own base on Mount Tamalpais, though the Titans renamed it Mount Othrys. It was near our camp, so of course we were charged with taking care of it by a sign from the gods."

Octavian had actually been the one to give them the approval to set a campaign in motion to tear it down, having received the blessing from his patron, Apollo. Jason realized now, in hind sight, that the gods must have timed Octavian giving them approval with Percy's efforts to fight Kronos in Manhattan.

"We led an assault on Mount Othrys, taking on an army of Scythian Dracaena led by the Titan, Krios. It was during all that I was made praetor."

Sora snorts in the middle of the explanation, softly and mostly to himself. It's nothing bad, it's just that it's always New York, isn't it? Well... Okay, he lived in a world where it was always New Jersey, but hey, historically, New York's the place where things happen. Figures.

"So the Titans... were attacking the Greek gods in New York, and you guys were attacking their base. At the same time." Sora looks up. "That was... on purpose. 'Cause they were split up and things were easier." And Jason was made praetor at around the same age Sora woke up for his second adventure, he thinks. A bit younger than when Sora took the Mark of Mastery exam. Bombed it.

He scratches the back of his head. "Scythian Dracaena. That's a mouthful. Guess you guys won, huh?"

Jason nods at Sora's assessment, "We didn't realize it was coordinated at the time...but it was definitely set in motion. Camp Jupiter was led to believe Kronos disappeared after the fall of his throne and Camp Half-Blood was told that Kronos' fortress had collapsed after he was destroyed. Of course, after the camps found out about each other we learned what really happened."

Jason smirks, "They're basically snake people and yes, we did win."

"Guess they found a pretty good praetor." Sora puts his hands behind his head and leans back, watching the stars instead of the aurora. There should be so many more of them, even while it's this bright. (Oh! Sora should take a picture of the whole town while it's this bright! That's a good idea.)

"That's a lot to deal with. You guys weren't even upperclassmen." Sora pauses. "Wait, you guys didn't go to high school, right?" It just... doesn't seem like a life where you could, really, if it was so dangerous to be out and around as a demigod and all.

Jason tries to hide a smile. He didn't always feel it, but he takes pride in what he did. Sora's words make him feel pretty good about it too.

"Some of us did. We had to take precautions of course, and weaker demigods could go unnoticed by monsters if they were careful." Basically legacies and anyone not from the big Three, Camp Jupiter wasn't quite at the same disadvantage as Camp Half-Blood though, "but there were options in New Rome as well. We could stay there year round and get our education that way."

Sora sees that smile, bud. He'll smile back. Bro, he means it. (Gotta keep up with him. There's gotta be some responsibility material in him somewhere!)

Sora tips his head a little, thinking. "But you were at Camp Jupiter since you were a baby, right? Which means you probably stayed there, at least when you were really little. Which one did you go with?" Sora figures that, were he in Jason's position, he'd want to be wherever his friends were, but he isn't going to assume Jason's the same way.

"When I was younger, mostly New Rome. I didn't really see the need to go out and see what was out there." Plus, he was expected to lead Camp Jupiter and possibly even New Rome someday -- and that influenced a lot of people to encourage him to stick around. "It wasn't until I was in my teens that I started looking into schools in the nearby area, wanted to look at what ideas existed outside of New Rome. It was probably for the best anyway, demigods attract trouble and until I could handle myself I could have put a lot of people in danger."

He still had to face monster attacks -- creatures that sought him because he smelled like a tasty treat -- and usually they got more than they bargained for.

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arsarcanum - 2020-04-13 05:45 (UTC) - Expand

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