logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: WE ALL STILL DIE (PART ONE)

Entry tags:

EVENT LOG: WE ALL STILL DIE (PART ONE)

characters: everyone.
location: around town.
date/time: june 14-15.
content: make masks, play music, and enjoy the festive atmosphere!
warnings: n/a. please cw tags appropriately.

success is a song of the heart

Hear that? When you awake, or first go outside, there's a constant, cheerful chatter outside from the spirits. Their excitement is infectious as they babble to each other - and to you - while dragging around logs, clearing empty spaces on the ground, ripping the sheets off of beds, and then converting the open spaces around town into what looks like a very wild crafts fair.

Piled high on these surfaces are strips of bark, colorful stones, grasses and branches and some of May's strange flowers. Among them also are things that might once have been owned - scraps of clothing, broken ceramics, discarded jewelry, and more from the things swept out of buildings during the flood. There's paint, too, though the spirits look like they're mostly smearing their hands (and tails, and noses) all over rather than using brushes as they create examples for you all and line them up alongside pan pipes, simple flutes, blocks of wood to beat with sticks, and empty cans full of pebbles. Instruments, to go with the masks!

What are they doing? One or two who get the gist of the questions point at the fire, and then at the sky, and mime huge circles with their hands. Big! Bright! And then point at the lanterns and swipe fingers in the air as if sealing the cracks in them. This is a party to bring back the sun - or in its absence, a party to celebrate the arrival of summer! And some have even heard that a group went out to the Doctor's house deep in the forest and that you may finally be able to fix lanterns, and if the sun doesn't deserve a party, that sure does!

There will be a big spectacle in a couple days and everyone will get to celebrate together, so get your masks ready and practice your best songs and dance moves! Have an impromptu jam session, have a picnic with what remains of the meager food supplies, and put your best creative self forward.

You may not even notice the smallest, slowest changes yet although they begin to take place. The more you wear that mask, the more you want to wear it. The dancing and music are addictive, aren't they? It's not so bad here in Beacon, in the dark. It's kind of starting to feel like home.

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"Ha. Only if your eyesight was as bad as mine," Stone counters, but with an amused grin. "Aeriat Raksura are not known for our. Artistic talents. You should have seen Moon try to draw a boat. It looked like a rock with a triangle on top of it. No idea how the rest worked out that's even what it was supposed to be."

But his voice is fond. Moon is someone he does miss, from time to time. More than his species in general, which he misses all the time, Moon was special.

"I can see the resemblance as long as the rock is shaped the right way. I'm not much better."

And that's not just him being modest. Okay, so he's all right with color and basic patterns. He can do a straight line and some curves. Makeup? Getting better every day. But his boats are not much better than rocks with triangles either, he figures - the walls of The Invincible can attest to that.

"You can sing though, right? Seems like they're just as much about the music as they are about us wearing masks."

Stone reaches over to give Rosinante's knee a pat in solidarity for poor artistic skills. "You think they'd like Raksuran singing?" He considers that, then shrugs. "It's probably more like their language than anything else around here, I suppose."

"Either they won't mind, or they'll love it. Nothing to lose there," he says as he looks around at the gathered spirits, all making their own wild noises, only some of which really qualify as music to his mind.

"Worth a shot, I bet. Let's hear it."

After giving Rosinante's knee a little shove, next, Stone thinks through the various songs he remembers from the court. "All right. This is a presentation song. What the court sings the night after a new clutch is presented to the court."

And he raises his voice in a surprisingly high-ranged song, wordless like before, still oddly haunting and definitely alien with an odd vibrato at unexpected places, but unlike the song he sang for the sending off of the boats, it's in something close to major key and has a nearly spritely tempo. It's less sad, less grieving, and more hopeful.

The foreignness of it is exciting. The music he's heard here from Earth already sounds exotic, while it must be so mundane to those from that world, but even then it has some things in common with what he's used to. Humans, and the human-like races in his world, still have some elements in common given they all hear in similar ranges and have similar vocal abilities, and only so many hands and fingers with which to play instruments. Stone may look human right now, but Rosinante knows he isn't, and the song is clear evidence of it.

He's grinning as Stone finishes up, and even offers some applause. "I love it! It's so different. I think the spirits liked it, too."

A number of them have drawn closer, and as Stone finishes, some attempt to mimic the sounds he made with their various warbles and cries. It's almost cute.

Stone looks around, turning his head more than normal to catch things in his good eye, and grins lop-sidedly. "You should hear it with a full court. I can't do all the harmonies by myself, and the call-and-response doesn't work as well when one person sings the whole thing. A good colony song is a conversation, not a monologue."

"I wish I could. Sounds spectacular."

And maybe he will, since periodically this place likes to let them peek into each other's memories and nightmares. It's something he enjoys when it means he sees moments from others' lives, but he's far less enthusiastic about others seeing parts of his own, so he won't wish for it too hard.

"Did you have any way of recording music at home? Or was it always just sung?"

"There might be a groundling culture out there with the means, but my people don't have any kind of technology beyond simply jewel-crafting, weaving, and basic gardening," Stone says, shaking his head. "Everything here was very strange to me when I got here. Even the groundling cultures I've traveled through didn't have most of the shit here."

"Kind of eye-opening, isn't it?"

Even if his world had technology well beyond Stone's, it still lags behind what some of these people have in some aspects. In others, though, he's certain they're more advanced - for even if he's not up to date on the specific details, he knows his government has done extensive lineage factor research thanks to the devil fruits and their ability to modify a person's inherent traits. And they have the snail phones, which is a mixture of biology and technology that doesn't crop up here often at all.

"I know there's probably no way for us to send things backward through the portal to our home worlds. If it was possible, Dr. Solis would have worked it out. But I wish I could."

"I know the mentors would love the tablets. Merit is very fond of math and how it intersects with magic in groundling cultures, he'd love trying to work out how they worked. And I know a warrior or two who would love your projectile weapons. Closest we've ever seen are things that kind shoot disks on wires, and then send fire down them to whatever the disk's hit." The fire-rifles were pretty impressive, if limited in range.

"No guns? I suppose I can see why, though. Not sure how they'd work if built to be usable by someone your size when you're in your winged form." With the teeth and claws and all that, they're sort of their own weapons.

Then again, humans and fishmen, and probably plenty of other races, have always sought to make themselves more dangerous even when they have their own hands and feet and teeth. So saying the Raksura look like they don't need projectiles probably doesn't matter. It sure hasn't stopped people in his own world from making deadlier tools.

"No domesticated animals, no metal-working beyond crafting jewelry, no transportation beyond climbing and flying." Stone shrugs lightly. "Maybe my people will start making that kind of thing as we interact more with groundling cultures. Maybe we won't. But we haven't changed much in the several hundred turns I was alive, so I'm not holding my breath for it."

Some of this he knew, but having it all said at once really drives home just how simple their lives must be - not that they lack social or political complexity, but they go without so much technology and culture that he just takes for granted.

"Maybe... living that long is part of it," he suggests, though it's still sort of a question. Speculation at best. "If you live that long and are comfortable with how things have always been, maybe you're less likely to change them. So if your whole culture is made up of people who think that, I can see how that stability would just keep going."

Not in itself a bad thing either. Change doesn't always improve people's lives.

"I lived that long," Stone corrects, with maybe a little less levity, looking down at the mask in his hands. "Not all my people. I'm a line-grandfather, a fluke of the bloodlines with a longer lifespan. It's why I'm so big, we keep growing throughout out lives." He sighs, sitting back and looking up at the dark sky, the scattered stars. "I outlived my queen and all my children and all my grandchildren. The current reigning queen is my great-granddaughter, and she's already considered old."

"...Sorry. I didn't realize," he says with a frown. "Thought maybe it was typical of your people."

How awful, to outlive even his own grandchildren. A father should never have to bury his son, as the saying goes - a burden he ended up placing on the man who raised him, but one child must be easier than everyone Stone watched die. At that scale it becomes real tragedy.

"It's fine, I probably just never got around to telling you." He shrugs. "It means I was around to save my court a couple times, help out, raise a bunch of babies right. Managed to bring us all home, nobody else remembered the old colony tree by the time we needed to return to it. Just not pleasant, that's all."

It's a personal enough thing where it isn't likely to come up in casual conversation. Even though he's known many here around a full year now, he still finds there is plenty to learn. Not a surprise, of course, given how little he still says about himself in return.

"Glad you were there for them, then, to pass that knowledge down. Forgetting history like that is a real tragedy."

"I was barely even an adult when we left the tree," Stone muses, sounding distracted. "We're lucky I remembered the way, after so much time." He might have had to do some hunting when he went back by himself, before bringing the whole court.

He shakes his head, looks back at Rosinante. "Sorry, I'm getting nostalgic now."

"That's all right. We all think of home sometimes."

It's normal enough, and probably nice for most of them. As refreshing as it is in some ways to be away from those things that troubled him at home, Rosinante certainly misses his world. Dreams of it plenty, knowing he'll never see it again with his own eyes.

Right now, though, with his mask and the celebration around them, that seems all right. Beacon is good, too. Beacon can be home.

"Got all this here now, though," he says with a wave of a hand and a smile audible in his voice, even if the mask hides it. "Wonder what the biggest tree here is? We'll have to keep an eye out. You might have to help, since it's hard to see all the way up there from the ground."

Stone has to laugh, at that. "There are no mountain-trees here, Rosinante. I've looked. A fully grown mountain tree is bigger around than all of Beacon, from the docks to the Invincible." He glues another couple leaves onto his mask, haphazardly, just for something to do. "There are a handful of trees that could hold me if I climbed them, though. I'll show them to you sometime."

"Sure! I'd like to see them." Sounds like fun. He hadn't expected any as large as what Stone was describing, of course - a tree as large as a mountain must be an awfully unique thing. Then again...

"How far out have you flown, though? They might have mountain-trees here somewhere on some distant island." Or distant type of other landform if this place doesn't have islands. "Not that I mean you should go flying for weeks by yourself," he adds. "But I do wonder sometimes about what the rest of this world is like."

"Only as far as has been explored. Can't get enough height to get over the trees in most places, and going out over the lake got me killed, so." He looks annoyed at the reminder. "Maybe if we fix this place, and we don't all die again from it, I'll go exploring. I did a lot of that on my own world. I'm probably the most well-traveled Raksura there is."

"Yeah, be careful for now. Wouldn't want what happened over the lake to happen again," he says, frowning beneath the mask. That was harrowing enough to witness; he doesn't want to imagine experiencing it.

"If we fix this place, I'll come with you. It'd be nice to see more of it."

"It would be. I'm getting pretty bored of flying the same path every day. Even in the colony tree, there's new things on all the branches, every day, and neighboring mountain trees to fly across to and explore." Stone squints down at his mask, then picks himself up again. "Think this is as done as it's going to get. I'm going to let it dry before I try putting it on my face."

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callada - 2020-09-03 01:36 (UTC) - Expand

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EVENT LOG: WE ALL STILL DIE (PART ONE)

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wow I super failed at keeping up with Stone

rip it happens

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