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logsinthenight2020-09-19 02:02 pm
nextnightmods) wrote in logsinthenight2020-09-19 02:02 pm
EVENT LOG: HUNGER AND THIRST
EVENT LOG:
HUNGER AND THIRST
characters: everyone.
location: around beacon.
date/time: september 19-30.
content: some new friends - or enemies? - seek offerings, and offer something in return
warnings: memories may involve violence, death, grotesque body horror. please cw as appropriate.
pining for the things i could have been.
Recently, the forest spirits have been agitated. The crooners, those that remain, chatter noisily and strut with purpose. The lunch lady hunches over their station and holds claws to their face, miming peering through dense brush. The skunk judge murmurs about the ones from the countryside. Word has passed beyond the reaches of Beacon's light - there are people in town, and they are mostly good this time. These lantern-bearers have lasted longer than most. They may even want to help.
Seems these spirits will have to see these people with their own eyes, and test those rumors themselves.
For the first two prompts below, please feel free to NPC spirits yourselves. However, if you prefer, you may post your toplevel under the MOD-CONTROLLED SPIRITS header and we will do our best to drop in and out with interactions as time permits. These are not intended to be one-on-one threads with spirits written by the mods, and you will likely not always want to wait for a mod reply at every step and may find yourself doing some minor NPCing all the same, but we will do our best to keep up with you and your thread partners who tag in!
In that header, please specify whether you want a friendly or antagonistic spirit, or if you want a surprise, you can always say "surprise me!"
ALL MY JOYS.
You come home to find spirits in your wardrobe, with socks on their hands and pants tied in daisy chains from wall to wall. Abruptly they squeak and dive for cover, or crash through windows in their attempts to escape. They steal things that are yours, only for you to find them days later, floating in the lake or buried in the greenhouse. Can you chase them down alone? Maybe you need some help.
Not all spirits are so troublesome. Maybe you turn up at The Landmark kitchen to find that one spirit has already gotten the coffee pot started - well, except it has poured instant cheese powder from a box of easy mac into the pot. But at least it's trying to help! Maybe you can show it how the machine works. Others wind up at Solis's labs where they thumb rapidly through books and peck at computer keys, and more than one takes samples from the shelves and shoves them in your face. Did you need this alien foot in a jar? No?
A pack of roving... branches? crawls around town. They have no mouths with which to speak, but instead vibrate and clack their many tangled limbs together. They grow in number and size, making a thicket of live wood that bars you from a doorway, completely fills up a section of the tunnels under the town - or makes an impromptu and convenient bridge, if you think that climbing on someone's limbs is appropriate. Is it?
Largely these spirits seem neutral, even benign. Confused. They might ask for your help, or try their best but they struggle to communicate even more than the usual forest spirits do. They have no sense of what your personal space is, though, and more than one will reach for a lantern to bring it closer and investigate. Awfully uncomfortable, so what are you going to do about it?
ALL MY GRIEF.
At any moment, the above interactions can go south fast if you meet the wrong spirit. The one who took your lantern? Decides to run off with it, leaving you gasping for air and with very few options if you are to survive. The branches constrict and crush you, or drop you suddenly in the river. Are they here to harm you, or just to test your limits?
Others will be malevolent no matter what. The scrapyard dog snarls and pulls at its chain as it watches the thing that stalks and hunts. A small herd of soft, wooly spirits crouch low to the ground, whimper and pant as if sick or starving, only to turn on you with vicious teeth once you seem invested in assisting. Better hope you have someone nearby who can help you fend them off. Or is it better to try to distract them and make an escape? Will they be convinced to stand down, or will they wear your face as a new mask?
ALL MY BONES.
You are directed by the local spirits to the dense curtain of trees where torchlight fades to darkness. The ones you are familiar with hang back, but nod for you to continue ahead alone, or with a friend or two if you prefer. The more people who go together, the stronger the connection - as indicated by the spirits grabbing at your hands and linking them together, and giving a very serious nod. Bring your offerings whether they be food, stories, gifts, or memories of your own, and hope they are sufficient. Place them on the forest floor, or hold them out to the air. The new spirits will find you, they promise; this is not a trick. Make yourselves comfortable on the damp, mossy ground and wait for the sound of footsteps in the leaf litter.
For this prompt, you are welcome to describe your arrival to the site if you like, but all that is required is a comment with the names of the people involved, and the offerings you bring. Characters can make multiple offerings and visit multiple spirits as many times as they wish.
Afterward, a spirit will lead you back to Bonfire Square and encourage you to tell others what you've learned from your new guests. No fair keeping the goods to yourself alone!
LEFT IN THE LONG NIGHT.
After connecting with spirits, you are led back to the bonfire, to recover and recuperate from the joining of hearts, minds, and memories. You will find yourself weary, in a way the flames seem to help. The glow of the campfire is comforting, tempting. It might be difficult not to fall asleep or try to draw others into enjoying the comforting lull of crackling firewood along with you.
The weariness does fade, after some time around the fire. You're not the only one resting from the experience in the glow of firelight — and there's likely things you've seen to share. Ideas and memories and pieces and figments of past to fit into place like puzzle pieces. Now is a good a place as any to share it, isn't it?
Lastly, those that approach a spirit in tandem will find an unseen consequence. A link between them that isn't so easily shaken by a short stay at the fireside. Characters will find that feelings and sensations seem to move from one to the other without warning. Fear, anger, mourning, resentment, joy, love. Touching makes the link stronger, but even distance isn't enough to stop it. Did you want to share night terrors, even a mile apart? Or to taste coffee, even though you're in the middle of brushing your teeth? Well, too bad. The effects will last for two weeks, whether you like it or not.
| QUICKNAV | |||
| comms | | | network β’ logs β’ memes β’ ooc | |
| pages | | | rules β’ faq β’ taken β’ mod contact β’ player contact β’ calendar β’ setting β’ exploration β’ item requests β’ full nav | |
Stone | OTA
Joke's on that spirit, Stone has very little in the way of wardrobe. He's got a lot of loose pants and tunic-like shirts, mostly in drab gray and light blue, and one coat. No shoes or socks. Nothing fancy.
So when the spirit digs around, Stone watches from the window (he'd been out on the roof of the Invincible) for a moment, amused more than anything else, then shifts up into his winged form to block the exit. And rumbles mock-warningly. Anyone passing by can see the great pale dragon crouching by the Invincible and wonder what's going on... or ask. Feel free to ask.
II. Grief
As soon as Stone cottons on to some of these spirits being unfriendly, he keeps to winged form a little more than usual, and does a lot of prowling around the various Beacon locations looking for sources of trouble. He's not super into diplomacy-- he's spent his whole damn life doing diplomacy-- but he's very good at protecting.
Also, after a few weeks of lessons with the metal-armed fellow, he can make some of the spirit language sounds, and he can make them in winged form. They're an octave lower than they should be, but hopefully they're still understandable when he growls, "No hurting them. Or I will hurt you."
III. Long Night - for Fitz and Klaes in particular
The two people who shared spirit-memories with him are going to have a fun time. They'll get flashes of fuzzy monocular vision of looking across Beacon from high up (Invincible's roof, probably). There's the overwhelming sensation of smelling and then sifting through the smells to find one that says "person" and one that says "food" and one that says "home". Once a day, they're treated to splashing in cool, pumpkin-smelling lakewater and feeling it on six appendages rather than four, plus a tail. Ever wanted to know what it feels like to fly? Here's your chance, Stone does that at least once a day, too.
He's quick enough to work out what's happening, at least, and tracks down both of them to make sure they know, too. And, you know, to apologize for any weird dreams they might get. "You okay?" is how he starts it.
III
"A'right, yeah, groovy," he says, clearly over compensating. "The flying thing's a bit...I flew on a dragon once, I've never been one. So that's pretty amazing. How're you?"
With the smoking and guitar playing and poxy human bollocks emotions. And maybe mundane, near-dreamless sleep.
no subject
He's not much use with the sorting, given his poor vision, but he does tap a stack into a neater stack for him. "You said that pretty quickly, though. You sure you're okay?"