logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: WHEN THE NIGHT IS OVER

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EVENT LOG: WHEN THE NIGHT IS OVER

characters: everyone.
location: Everywhere
date/time: March 15
content: The World Eater arrives.
warnings: probable violence, gore, death; mark threads as needed

Everyone here was brought to Beacon for this one reason: to try and find a way to strike back at the thing that threatens to end the world entirely. You've spent the entire time learning, preparing, and for many, making this dead world your home. You've made friends with each other but also with the forest spirits, you've discovered much of the town's past and have set out to ensure its future.

This is the moment that every decision, and every person, shall finally come together, or be lost forever.

i feel the weather change

At the missile silo, Weaver and those helping her have been busy for over a week straight hammering scrap metal into place, wiring the controls to the launch system, and running new cables from the silo to Solis' lab to get the place set back up onto the Beacon power grid - a feat possible only because several batteries were recovered from the power station some time ago. Disassembled drone pieces lie scattered for easy repurposing, and networked tablets allow easy network chatter between the silo and anyone at the Helix Station who has offered to observe from the lake.

In the distance, those around the missile silo begin to hear an eerie droning hum. Weaver's eyes go wide and her ears lay back against her head. "It's here," she says with a shudder, then quickly bounds over to the control system. "That's the sound that the lighthouse used for the reset. If I don't need you down here, get up top, and get ready to fight."

At ground level above, the snarls and warbled growls of spirits call back, but immediately, there's rapid movement in the trees and some of those calls are cut short with a gurgle. Masked figures with green eyes dart through the brush, giving the silo a wide berth as they move in to fight, but those who would be allies must be outnumbered as aggressive forest spirits, both green-eyed and otherwise, break through into the clearing and seek out the people of Beacon. Their many-eyed leader has been kept occupied, but these ones are still looking to pick off every creature with a lantern. It's time to stand and fight before they make it to those still below, who are preparing to aim and launch the largest bomb Weaver has ever built. If this wasn't difficult enough, the green-eyed spirits are up to their usual tricks - you may find yourself suddenly fighting someone who looks just like your best friend, or perhaps your own animated, dismembered body - a cruel vision of what might soon come to pass. They are fast, they are ruthless, and only with the effects of the potions will you be able to shake off these horrible visuals, so make good use of them.

i hear the river say your name

Those at Helix notice it first - the droning hum that had first been noticed as a minor vibration in the hull swells in volume until it can be heard throughout the station. Thanks to the tablet network, they hear when those at the silo do that the sound is the speech of the World Eater - and it must be very, very close.

Inside the station there's little means to act directly against it; however, you'll find yourselves plenty occupied anyway. The little spirits (and the large corpse-wearer, shrouded in decaying bodies) that had previously been docile and had tucked themselves into hidden corners in the station scurry boldly out of hiding, with teeth and claws at the ready to devour and dismember anyone they find. And proximity to the World Eater once again has its effects - you may feel nauseous, disoriented, or despairing; you may find that it's hard to breathe, that your fingernails fall off their digits, or that sabotaging your fellows is the only way to survive. The potions help substantially, even if the effects aren't completely removed, so drink up, stand your ground, and keep an eye on those tablets to help let those at the silo know when to fire, and if they've succeeded.

Because eventually the creature itself is visible against the night sky over the lake, a void in the place where stars should be, and that means it's close enough to be targeted.

i watch the birds fly by

Soon, Beacon Square and the harbor as well as the general reaches of town become a dangerous place to be, but perhaps you feel you need to brave the run - to get supplies, to check on your friends, to flee and hide as spirits emerge to do the World Eater's bidding. There aren't many, thankfully - for those who care commanded by the many-eyed spirit are busy fighting those at the silo and the green-eyed allies, and nearly every friendly spirit seems to have gone missing. But alone and in the open without anyone to back you up if you need help is a frightening prospect, made even worse when you see the distant figure silhouetted over the lake, vastly taller than anything else you've seen since arriving.

The disruption from all the fighting must have delayed the launch, or perhaps something else went wrong. Just looking at the World Eater from a distance creates a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach as it takes one long stride after another, drawing nearer to the town and singing that eerie song that drives the spirits to hunt you and to destroy everything you've built.

And then, suddenly, you hear something else. A counter-drone, a song like birds, like cicadas, like howling wolves and the strange whistle-warbles of the spirits, all merging into one. It's sung from every tree all around, and it drowns out that jarring hum of death.

The spirits so bent on drawing blood and viscera slow, and listen.

The World Eater slows, one foot raised into the air, then swings its head, seeking the source and finding it everywhere. And that's when it happens.

At the missile silo, Weaver has been successfully defended, but just barely. One of the spirits got to her before it could be killed, and a horrible gash has ripped through her clothing and the fur of her back. Her lantern is flickering desperately when she presses the button, and the makeshift missile roars and arcs into the sky.

From the square or the lakeshore, or for those watching monitors at Helix, the streak of vapor from the bomb's tail vanishes somewhere high above. And then moments later, it drops - landing not on the World Eater, but into the lake at its feet.

Rather than a blinding light, the tablet monitors go fully black as an intense roar and rush of water fills the audio channel, and the Helix Station shakes horribly, creaking and groaning as the rush of water from elsewhere in the lake strains every element of its construction. The noise and the confusing darkness persist for several minutes. It feels much longer.

But eventually, the darkness diminishes as stars shine through the mist and ongoing falling rain. There's still a tall column of water vapor in the air over the lake - it stays for nearly half an hour, slowly dissipating as powerful waves smash into the shore, triggering a small series of tsunamis that swallow the harbor and threaten, but never fully inundate, Bonfire Square.

The towering void has buckled where it stood, and only a few pitch-black spines jut out from the surface of the lake before they are slowly swallowed by its returning waters.

i see an emerald in the sky

When the spirits stop singing, the rain persists. Clouds billow up into the sky over the lake, and fall back down. The droplets are warm - warmer than the frigid air, than the ice and snow that surrounds the town.

The damage has been limited - most of the buildings still stand, for there were too few spirits that sought to attack, and those that did now sit in place or pace around curiously as if they hadn't just tried to tear out your intestines and dismantle The Invincible - which, actually, hasn't even seen a single scratch, as suits its optimistic name.

Many of Beacon's people may be injured, and many may be dead. But those whose lanterns still burn bright now find themselves in a slowly thawing world, as the deep and endless winter seems ready to launch into a new spring. Cautious and curious, spirits watch from the trees, then point out at the lake and chitter with excitement.

There is light in the water. It funnels upward from the foam left by the bomb, and with each ever-gentler wave, it touches the shore. And in a few tiny patches of sand, sheltered between rocks, green grasses begin to sprout.

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The destruction of the shotgun makes him frown, struck by an unexpected sadness at its loss. There wasn't much left of Winters already, and now it's only his tablet. Wherever that is. Even the one who had it is gone, now.

"Chewed off and blown up? Not at the same time, I hope." Not that it matters, since whatever caused it is dead. For good this time. "I'm sure Winters would've appreciated that you used it to shoot off some monster's face." He's assuming there was at least a little face-shooting.

"... Pity he isn't here to see this." He tries to keep the emotion out of his voice, and mostly succeeds. It's not as if he and Winters were friends. They barely even worked together, and only then because they had to. He doesn't feel like he owed the man, exactly, for convincing Robin to call off the spirits. Truth be told, he doesn't know what he feels. But the least he can do is bring the memory up, right? The physical objects are gone, but that's still there.

There was indeed face-shooting, as confirmed by his nod and his smile before he nestles his head a little more firmly against Will's shoulder. It was a mess, the whole moment, but he's here and he's alive. Minus one gun.

A gun belonging to a man they both admired, even if Rosinante barely came to know him. Winters' leadership and courage can't be denied.

"Wish he could know we did it," he agrees, and casts his eyes upward toward that star named after the man. "Him and a lot of others. Robin, Pluto, Dr. Solis..." He stops, not for lack of names but to keep from choking up. It's hard to balance elation at their victory with the grief of what it cost to get here. Will's presence here and now is a much-needed comfort.

"I still have the stock. From the shotgun, I mean. Dunno if I can salvage any of it, but if you think of anything..."

"Unfortunately, woodworking is not among my many talents." The stock is the wooden part, right? Guns are also not among his many talents, even if he now knows how to point one in the right direction. "But I'll keep it in mind." Maybe someone will decide to take up whittling. It won't be Will.

Truth be told, there are a lot of people he feels absolutely nothing about having lost. It's too exhausting, trying to find room among the guilt for everyone. Yes, he's generally unhappy with how many died, but he's already got a lot on his conscience and it wasn't very big to begin with.

He also doesn't have any comforting words about them going on to some brighter place and looking down on the survivors. Because that's all sentimental bullshit.

"Well, they're not stuck here anymore, at least." That's about as far as he can go. "The rest of us unfortunates still have to figure out a way home."

"Home, or elsewhere," he says with a slow nod. "Can't say I'm especially in a hurry to go back. I miss the sea, but I wasn't exactly in anyone's good graces when I left the place."

Except Law's, but. Law is here now. And Will is here, at least for now, but:

"You want to go back home?"

He's careful to ask neutrally, to keep the worry from affecting his voice, but he's not about to presume he'd just be invited along.

He might never get used to stopping before he speaks, pausing to think about how his words might sound to someone else. Because unless he's been trying to cut especially deep, he's never really bothered.

"Well... I don't want to stay here." Maybe the threat is gone, or maybe they've just bought themselves another few years, but either way this place is too full of bad memories. And it's still dead.

"I suppose we don't have to go back to my world, but wherever we end up, this high-gravity nonsense has got to go." And weather? Whose bright idea was that? It doesn't occur to him that he's using we instead of I. Mostly because it doesn't occur to him that they might not be going somewhere together.

Of course Rosinante won't leave him behind, because he's important. And the same thing applies in the reverse.

Will says we and it's as simple as that, and Rosinante's smile grows with each word. It's as simple as that, then. Of course, the we will have to include Law also, and hopefully Will is aware of that by now. But the feeling of being just naturally included, like there's obviously no other alternative worth thinking about, fills him with warmth.

"I want to make sure this place will be all right long-term before we go anywhere," he says. "And I still think we should make sure other places understand that the world eaters are a possible threat, and that they should be prepared. If there's a way we can arrange to go different places, that would be nice, and then maybe you could see where I'm from for a short visit before anyone notices I'm there."

Now he's just going to end up daydreaming, because suddenly the opportunities seem endless. Traveling across the sea of stars, using portals or ships, visiting new worlds like islands in all that wide-open sky, is the most incredible journey he can think of.

He thinks for a moment, turning over those goals.

"So either we find some way to create a multi-universe broadcast message, or we find a way to take the portal with us." The second one sounds much more plausible, oddly enough, since they have at least the start of the process. The portal exists. Inter-world radio does not.

Of course, it'd be even easier to just pick a destination and go. Get out of this hellhole once and for all without a single backward glance. The fact that he's even considering Rosi's "before we leave" checklist says a lot about how the last year has affected him. At the start of it, going home was all he wanted, everyone else be damned. Had nothing changed, he might've already done so by now, choosing that option instead of staying to fight.

But he did stay, and the threat has been destroyed, and now they have time. Now they can solve their other problems at their leisure, instead of under the shadow of certain oblivion.

"If we manage the mobile portal, we can theoretically go anywhere we want. Though effectively warning them against the World Eaters might present a challenge." How would they even get their warning out? Would anyone believe them? Even if they went back to their own worlds to try—

"Do you suppose we're still dead?" The question derails his entire train of thought.

Managing to convey the severity of their warning and be believed is a problem he's been mulling over as well, and not one he has a good answer for. While he's trying to put together a response, Will continues, and - well, that derails his thoughts as well, but it's a good question.

"I... always assumed so," he admits. "But I guess that doesn't mean that's right. If we go other places, even with lanterns, will we just be ghosts? Will we disappear? Will we be just fine?"

And whether they're dead or somehow now-alive those are possibly all still valid results, unfortunately.

"If anyone chooses to leave, they'll be the first to find out, but I don't know how we'll learn what happens to them. I used to assume when I was reading Dr. Solis' old notes about her going and grabbing things through the portal and observing things there that she meant she did so literally, in person, but I guess now I know that probably wasn't the case."

Will doesn't like a good two-thirds of those options. He doesn't want to just disappear, and he knows ghosts don't exist in every universe. They certainly didn't exist in his. But then, being just fine sounds too good to be true.

"My theory was always that we'd been taken from our worlds at the exact moment of death. Time being relative, we would eventually return to that moment, whether we were brought here physically or not. If we are able to travel to any world we want, that theory doesn't exactly hold up."

There were plenty of holes in it to begin with, but he's not going to point that out.

"Unless we now exist in a separate timeline. There could be a version of our worlds out there where we did die, and there could be an infinite number of worlds where we didn't." He sighs, partly to stop himself from going on an hours'-long tangent about theoretical quantum physics. "While I'd love to learn the truth in that department, it does pose some potential problems."

While on the one hand he does love listening to Will's brilliant ideas, he's also struggling not to get lost. Most of the words are understandable enough, and now after all this time he grasps some of the basics of the concepts, but what's all this about time?

Better not to ask right now. It's peaceful to sit here with him even if the problems they're left to grapple with are beyond him. He lets a few seconds lapse as he considers it all as well as he can, then turns his head to face Will as well as he can manage without breaking from the comfort of resting against his shoulder.

"Well, do you think we have time to work on it? We can always stay here and try to understand all that better before we go anywhere. It's not the worst place. If the light grows enough to make it down into the water, it might get safe enough to sail on the lake. I'd like to take you sailing."

Stay here. He hadn't really considered that. Not that Rosinante is suggesting they remain in Beacon forever, but being content with that lot for any matter of time, playing the game of 'wait and see', that hasn't even been an option. More time is nice, yes, but he'd planned on spending that time, nearly every minute of it, trying to find a way to leave here safely. He hadn't planned on getting comfortable, on waiting for things to grow back. On going sailing.

But time is relative, right?

"Well... I suppose so. We've as much time for that as anything else." He looks out over the lake, trying to imagine it as anything other than forbidding. It's not so hard. Just like terraforming, really.

"I think I'd like that. The sailing. Though I don't think either of us know how to swim, so you'd better not sink us." It's half gentle ribbing and half statement of fact. "And I'm afraid it will be a while before I can reciprocate. My world's version of sailing is perhaps a bit more complicated."

"I'm in no hurry," he says with a smile as he tilts his head to look back out at the water, then closes his eyes to simply focus on the pleasant warmth of Will at his side. "If we don't age anymore, and if I understood what you mean about there being different timelines, then... then we have all the time in the world now for things like that."

He's still not sure he does understand, but it doesn't feel like it matters right now. Will sounds sure about it, and he trusts what he says. And he likes the idea that perhaps finally, at least some of the time, he can look forward to doing things that just sound like fun. They can have a life together, and it doesn't have to be about surviving an existential threat.

"I'll make sure we have something that floats," he then says, a bit belatedly. "...Does that work in space, too? Floating?"

All the time in the world. Are they functionally immortal now? Yes, they can be killed, just as easy as when they were alive, but with time to learn how to repair lanterns, with the World Eater gone, and if they're not aging... He'd always planned to live well into his 200s, up until either his body or his mind started to fail him. But here, there might be more than that.

Rosinante's question gets a snort. "In a manner of speaking. Things drift because there's no gravity holding them down, so they appear to float, but there's really nothing for them to float on the surface of." The particulars aren't something he feels like getting into at the moment, but that's the gist. "You'd think not having to fight a current would make it easier, but it's quite the opposite."

He's quiet for a moment. "Do you really suppose we've got forever?" It feels like a childish question. "I've always thought that was impossible, but it looks as if we may have found some sort of loophole."

It's a question he's spent a fair amount of time considering without reaching an answer. How could he possibly know? They're neither alive nor dead but something in between, and while he hopes that means they might have reached some unexpected equilibrium between the two, hopes shouldn't be though of as certain reality.

"I don't know," he settles on saying even if it's an unsatisfying answer. "Everything that's alive dies some day, but we've already done that. I guess I'm going to go on like I'm living until something slows me down."

Better not be any time soon, he thinks as he curls an arm around Will. He has a lot of living he still wants to do.

He tenses up a little at the arm; his chest still hurts like a bitch. But of course Rosinante doesn't get anywhere near the injuries, and tensing up just makes them hurt more, so he tries to relax. It helps to reach over and grab for Rosinante's hand with his own.

"Well, there is always the inevitable heat death of the universe. Probably all universes. Entropy and all that. So I suppose we don't have infinite time." He always has to just pick everything apart, doesn't he?

"But you're right. It's no different from being alive in the first place, just continue on until you can't anymore." Whether that's because your body dies or because your will to live does, but he doesn't voice that part. He's not giving up anytime soon.

"After all, we still have quite a lot to do." Sailing, sure, but other things too. Now that the existential crisis portion of this thought train has passed, his hedonistic, survivalist brain is almost giddy with the idea of infinite lifetimes to try infinite things. Learn infinite things. Try infinite experiments. They could basically become gods and— let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet.

He feels Will tense, of course, but he's gentle and careful. For all his clumsiness, he can absolutely be delicate too, and he waits a cautious moment to make sure Will is all right and that he hasn't done something stupid by mistake. The hand on his is all the reassurance he ends up needing, and he chuckles softly against Will's shoulder when he starts talking about things like heat death and entropy.

"Lots to do, lots to see. I still want to know if anyone else in this world survived. Gotta be a big place, right? What if Dr. Solis wasn't the only one who had come up with a way to get around death? Maybe we'd never be able to get to them, but with things like computers and radio..."

Yeah, he's not actually sure if that's realistic, he's the wrong person of the two of them to have a clue. But it sounds nice.

And there are plenty of smaller things to experience, too, that he's looking forward to. Being in a relationship, working and traveling and having fun side by side with someone he loves, that comes with all kinds of joys he's never really had the opportunity to savor before.

Will shrugs and then instantly regrets it. So much for worrying about Rosinante accidentally hurting him, he's going to do it plenty himself.

"I suppose it's possible. Everything we've found suggests they had ample time to prepare. Perhaps we'll stumble upon a cache of frozen people." Horrifying thought, actually. "Or maybe something more like the Wild Hunt." Holed up in some mine shaft is a lot more palatable.

"It would be nice to know we're not alone, but even if we are—" A whole cascade of silly, stupid things come into his mind, like at least we have each other. He holds them under the proverbial water until they stop. "We'll be fine."

It is nice to know he's not alone, though. A strange thought considering how often he's wanted to just push everyone away, burn his bridges and escape from all human (or non-human) contact. But this, well, this he could get used to.

Frozen people makes him grimace just a little, but yeah, it's realistic enough and he's seen worse here. Just a bummer. The Wild Hunt, well - something like that anyway, that could be all right. It would give them someone more to talk to, to compare ideas with, and hopefully they wouldn't all be bent on the end of all life as some kind of preferred outcome. If they are? Well, too bad for them. The little, weak bit of daylight out there is a promise that more will come in time.

Will's sentiment has him smiling again soon enough. It's true, and it's sweet. "We'll be fine," he echoes in agreement, and gives a gentle squeeze of his hand. The two of them will be fine, but so will everyone else who pulled through.

"We've made it through all of this, so we can probably make it through just about anything. Whatever comes next." He'll leave it just as ambiguous as Will had a moment ago whether he means all of them, or just the two of them. He thinks both are good interpretations anyway.

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EVENT LOG: WHEN THE NIGHT IS OVER

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when you use the word 'time' too much

what even is time anyway

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