logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: DAYLIGHT

Entry tags:

!endgame,
!event

EVENT LOG: DAYLIGHT

EVENT LOG:
DAYLIGHT

characters: everyone.
location: Everywhere
date/time: April 1 and onward
content: Light, and its changes, begins to creep back into the world. What will you do next?
warnings: spirit suicides

With the World Eater truly gone, light begins to slowly make its return. The glow that took over the lake spreads to the shore, giving life to all it touches.

For some creatures, this will mean their end. The spirits, as seen in the aurora, cannot exist in a place with light. But those still trapped between death and life, held to this place by the light in their lanterns, can continue on.

Beacon isn't fully healed. The darkness will take time - months, if not years - to recede. In those remaining dark places, green-eyed spirits and other strange creatures will continue to lurk, to push back against the light. The many-eyed spirit is nowhere to be found after the vicious battle, but the people of Beacon now know that as long as there are violent, destructive spirits remaining, there is still a risk that one could muster enough strength to grow and change and plunge the world into darkness again.

But the light has its allies in all of you. Help the new plants grow. Take care of the land and each other. Speak with the remaining spirits who are reluctant about these new changes, and help them move on - or destroy the ones who only want death and ruin to prevail. The future is yours to shape.

The prompts below are just ideas, as always. Feel free to use this post to thread out any future character actions, or make your own logs if you prefer. The communities will all remain open from here on out. Thanks to all of you for taking part in this remarkable adventure!

i come alive, alive, alive, every time

In those first few days of April, forest spirits bound back into town, energetic and elated. They helped!! They sang, and they bought you all time!! They want to throw a party, because that's what they love best (well, some of them) but thankfully, partying seems to already be in the works by the efforts of a few of you lantern-folks. There is food and music spread all around Bonfire Square and beyond, and spirits eagerly hand out balloons - though where they got those from is anyone's guess.

daylight, with the sun I'm in now

The sun eventually rises.

The light is still faint at first, though already growing from a dim blue twilight to something pinkish and golden. For months, the glow never really manages to be more than that, but by early June the clear shape of a yellow-white orb breaks over the horizon for a few hours each day, and grows ever-steadier from there.

Over the course of those weeks and months, spirits do the other thing they love to do. Familiar faces, old friends - among them the Rat King, the Baubledook, the radio-loving Handy and finally, lastly, even the Postmaster General and the Librarian - approach the leading edge of light as it reaches up the lakeshore, and dive in as spectacularly as if they were jumping into the water itself.

One by one, those spirits evaporate, bursting into glittering particles and showering Beacon once again with opals. The small stones will forever litter the lake's shore, even long after the spirits have gone, and the casual wanderer may find their own warmest memory or that of a friend's here in Beacon, or even the lost thoughts and memories of the spirits themselves, as they were in life before the world went dark, or after.

It may be sad to see them go, but they're happy to do it, to keep themselves from holding back the return of the light to your growing world. After all, what is death to a dead thing?

wanna let it in from the outside

As temperatures warm and the lake thaws, and once her injuries have healed, Weaver returns to the Helix Station to make sure it's all still in working order after the bomb - which, thankfully, it is. The water absorbed most of the shockwave, and though a few things have been knocked loose and fallen to the ground, the machinery is all still operational.

The portal, most crucially, still works.

For those who want to leave, she'll be here to see you on your way - if that reverse-engineering she came up with actually works. "I can't make any promises," she says. But she's confident enough in the actual math of it all, and someone's got to be the first to test it out, right?

(It's not a requirement to address Weaver at all, if you'd prefer to thread your goodbyes out among each other! If you want to just assume she'll be there to take the controls, feel free to do so.)

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I. Party

Soldat is not... great at partying. Unless it's for serving food or dancing. Thankfully, both those things are available at this one.

Everyone who wants gets a turn out on the "dance floor" beside the bonfire. Everyone who wants gets plenty of food, whether from the big grilled fish Rosinante summoned through the portal or from the more vegetarian salad and pasta options, or from the wide array of desserts.

When there's no dancing to be had or people who need help with portions, they're just kind of off to one side, quietly watching the spirits as much as the lantern-bearers. Things are so up in the air now, and they're... worried. And uncertain. And, frankly, afraid of losing even more friends now.

II. Plans

In the end, Soldat has nothing to go home to, and the thought of trying to start over again anywhere else is too much. They're staying. They have no other options that feel possible. What they're going to do while they're here... they don't now. Work with Weaver and Rosinante to come up with a strategy to save the rest of the universe, maybe. Do repairs on the radio tower to try and boost the signal, see if any other pockets of life remain somewhere on the world, maybe. Read every book in the library in an attempt to learn enough to rebuild a world alone. Find Rye-Mother's farm. (At least "leave Beacon to try and map out the rest of the world" is scratched off the list early, when Stone makes his intention to do that himself public.)

They don't know what to do, and they spend time sitting out by the growing light over the lake every day with a notebook trying to list out pros and cons of every potential plan. It's not really helping much. Somebody come talk them through this? Or just make a decision for them, that's fine, too.

III. Parting

They were right: more friends are being lost. The planet is going to be empty soon, but for those few of them remaining behind with the portal. Soldat spends some time every day just making as many different origami shapes as they can for all their spirit friends. If a couple animals wind up ruined by a little salty dampness, well, there's plenty of paper, they just toss the tear-stained one in the fire and start again.

They try to visit them all daily, on their patrol, before the spirits go. The Junkyard Dog, the tech-shop bird, Handy, Flesh Horse, Rye-Mother, the Librarian. "I'll miss you," they say in the spirits' language. "Thank you for everything. You're my friend and I'll never forget you."

IV. Plowing

In the end, Rye-Mother's farm it is. Soldat looks it over with trepidation. They have no idea how to farm. They have no animals, yet, to populate it. They just have a handful of people left on the world.

But they did promise Rye-Mother, and it's... reasonable. They need to support themselves, and this is a step in the right direction. They sigh and turn to their companion. "Where do we start?"

Soldat isn't exactly a social butterfly, but Kuai is used to seeing them around doing patrols (which aren't exactly necessary anymore but Kuai is still doing them out of habit) and the fact that Soldat is spending the majority of their time on the beach with a notepad is a change.

Kuai comes up to the side, trying to not glance at the writing, instead looking out at the dim sunlight, feeling the weak warmth on his skin and the metal parts of his armor.

"Working on something?"

They've been doing their own patrols, too, but there's less work to get done with the silo complete, the bomb off, and everything a lot quieter now. They look up from their notebook, resting on one knee for them to write in, and give Kuai a wan little smile.

At the very least they can all enjoy the first sun they've had in a year and a half, weak or not.

"Trying to decide," they answer. "What to do next."

"Ah. Yes, the future holds many options now, I hadn't dared to think that far ahead, and now we're here and I don't have a plan either."

He'd honestly expected, and perhaps even hoped, that he'd die in battle. But here he is; alive, and, not precisely well after having half his body burned by some not very pleasant sprits, but far better than he thought.

"I suppose we have plenty of time now."

Soldat is pretty pleased the guy didn't do some kind of meaningless sacrifice thing. Good job, Kuai.

"That's the problem. I. I'm not good at making big decisions," they admit with a wince, feeling kind of stupid about it, to be honest. Is anybody else having trouble with still being alive? With not knowing what to do? They've never even really thought beyond stopping the World Eater.

"What are you deciding between? Staying here and helping the world come back to life, or going back to your home?"

Those are the options Kuai is considering anyway, but there's probably other options he hadn't even considered. Even he knows that he tends to see things in black and white instead of the healthier shades of grey.

"I. I can't go back where I came from. There's nothing for me there." They killed Steve, they're pretty sure. The only thing left there is HYDRA, and while the thought of hunting them down and destroying every last handler and tech is appealing in a kind of distant, Asset kind of way, they don't think they trust their remaining scraps of programming to let them. "But I can't stay here if there's no. No people. No spirits. I don't want to be alone."

"Is it possible to go with someone else to their world?" He hasn't talked to Weaver about it extensively, and hadn't considered that with a portal to dozens of dimensions they could literally go anywhere. "I think many will stay. In some places death is final so they'd be returning to their demise. In mine, death is another realm and one full of those I know."

"Well. It's also been a lot of time, for some of us. For most of us." It's been months since the portal pulled in a new person. "Might not be that we'd be going back to the moment we died. And we've got these." They tap the end of their pencil against their lantern's shutters. "Might not go back and die again. I guess maybe I could go somewhere else. I just. It feels like. This is home."

They've never had a home before. The bases in Russia, the bank vault, none of those were ever home, and the feeling of it is long gone from the time when they were a person.

"So it's a hard decision," they rally a little. "And I'm not good at decisions. So I make lists to try and help."

"I guess I never considered that it having been two years here might potentially also be two years later on my homeworld. When my brother arrived he was from several years before I died, and I'd seen him just a few days prior. Time is fractured in my world, where people's younger selves are appearing and being brought forward in time or sent back or even banished from the timeline all together. For all I know I'll return and there may be several versions of myself, though I hope not." He wouldn't deal well with another copy of himself, he can barely handle his brother.

"If this feels like home to you, then you shouldn't abandon that feeling. It's quite rare."

They chew a little in the end of their pencil. "But will it still feel like home if there is no one left here," they say more than ask. They also know they need people. And they already know the spirits are leaving-- they're already starting to leave. And Kuai is leaving, he just said. Who else will go?

"Not if everyone leaves, no. Solitude has it's virtue, but isolation can drive people to madness." It's a concession he doesn't make lightly, especially as someone who spends a lot of his time brooding in a temple accessible only by a deadly mountain climb through ice and snow. Living there completely alone did him no favors, even though he'd convinced himself he deserved it as some sort of twisted penance for crimes committed.

"I don't think everyone is leaving though. Some will want to stay, now that the light has returned, here might be better than their homeworld."

Solitude would drive Soldat to do their best to die for good, they think, and they don't really want that. They'd rather take their chances back in their own world than stay here alone. "I hope so. I. I really do. But I can't ask people to, if they have somewhere they want to be, either."

"Not a clue."

Rosinante stands with hands on his hips, looking over the field in the meager golden light. They have an hour or two of it before it slips under again, but every day the light grows a fraction brighter and lingers a few seconds longer. Hope, rendered visible.

"The only farming I've ever known is helping feed some animals," he explains. "But it can't be too hard to figure out plants first, right? Do you have seeds?"

"That's more than me. I've never fed any animals. Unless you count the Junkyard Dog." Who is already gone, and who they miss deeply. Everyone is gone now, almost. It's awful.

But where else are they going to go? Misty is still here, at least. Rosinante will be for a while. They'll manage. They have to.

They start out across the field, mostly full of dead-spirit-grass and some few shoots of new growth, and a lot of rocks. It seems like maybe they should get rid of some of those rocks. "Misty has seeds. From the greenhouse. Maybe we can bring some actual plants out from there, too."

"Maybe they'd like the fresh air," he agrees as he follows alongside. Stumbles over a rock briefly, but recovers his balance without faceplanting, so that's a stroke of luck.

"I can't wait to have fresh vegetables again. Actually fresh, not... whatever comes through the portal. It's all right, but this'll be nicer."

Not that he's sure he'll be here to enjoy it all when it's ready to harvest, but he can hope. If Will can work out how to easily go back and forth with the portal technology, and if they can consider this a home base to return to, then Beacon will become a welcome sight with its new greenery as things grow.

"I grew up with a goat around the house," he adds as a belated attempt to explain his minimal animal experience. "Well, and sometimes birds. And that gorilla that used to stop in."

"The. Gorilla." Soldat pauses at where they'd stopped to nudge another rock out of the ground to kick it away, and blinks a few times. They do at least know what that is, but the location doesn't really compute. "There was a gorilla? At a farm?"

The goat at least makes sense. (We should get a goat. We don't know if we can bring something alive through the portal yet. Well, it's a thing to think about.)

"Well, it wasn't exactly a farm," he explains with a shrug. "Animals sort of turned up around Sengoku sometimes. They came and went freely. The goat stayed."

He knows he's mentioned Sengoku once or twice, but admittedly never really talked about him in detail. So there's a lot he probably never explained beyond the fact that the man raised him for most of his life, and even that much he might have skimmed over.

"Some kind of power?" Soldat guesses. "Animal communication?" They drop to a crouch and wedge flesh fingers under a bigger rock. "We're gonna have to clean this field up. Before we can really plant anything," they say, looking out over it with a frown.

Time to get hauling, he agrees. But even if he can lift pretty heavy, he's sure Soldat has the advantage with that arm.

"Something like that. He has a mythical fruit that makes him a living Buddha," he explains. "I think animals are drawn to him for their own reasons because of it."

Not much of an explanation, but he doesn't have anything better. He frowns at a rock, then announces, "I'm heading over to the shed. They must've had a wheelbarrow, right?" Then he and Soldat could clear rocks a whole lot faster than carrying them out one at a time.

"I don't know what a Buddha is, Rosinante," Soldat points out with a little amusement. They pick up the rock they were digging at, and give it a hurl, all the way off the plot of land and into the trees they left. "But the shed should be. That way?" They gesture closer to the little house, which is also going to need fixing up before it's really liveable. "I didn't look for a wheelbarrow. But we could probably make one if we wanted. We've got time."

"Oh-" Well, he can explain in a minute. Wheelbarrow first. He stumbles his way to the shed in the low light, then pushes the creaky old door open and peers inside. There's an awful lot of dust in here, and many of the tools are scattered, or piled up in a corner - thanks, no doubt, to bored spirits as well as the flooding that thankfully didn't just knock the whole building down.

There's a wheelbarrow leaning upright against a wall, but as he reaches to pull it toward him, the wheel crumbles free of the frame and the body of the wheelbarrow crashes to the floor. There isn't much left of the rubber on the tire, so he's not even sure it's worth fixing, but he drags the metal shell out by a handle and sets it on the ground. Maybe it will at least work as a sort of sled?

Sure. Good enough. He drags it with him as he returns. "How about fixing one? That's probably easier than making one from scratch."

By then Soldat has trudged most of the way across the field and has mapped out the worst of the rocks, and is inspecting the ruined house at the other end. They look back Rosinante's direction, and wince at the poor wheelbarrow's condition. "Yeah, we can pick something up at the scrapyard. In the meantime, I can just drag it around." Just having something to load rocks into will help.

"Come here and have a look at this," they add, motioning to the farmhouse. "Think it's salvageable?"

He drops the wheelbarrow onto the rocky patch of soil and eyes the farmhouse with a sigh. "Maybe. Let's have a look inside."

At a guess, it's going to be a lot more work than fixing up the buildings around Bonfire Square. But it's not a bad little project, either. He could use something to keep him busy while Will fusses with portal stuff for the next who-knows-how-long.

Walking straight into a dark, ramshackle building still makes him nervous even if the town is far safer now than it used to be. Some things just won't sit well with him for a long time after the last couple years. Instead, he approaches a window and peers inside. The glass has been reduced to a handful of shards, with half scattered on the ground and the rest strewn across a dirty kitchen floor. A rusted refrigerator door hangs off its hinges, the sink is covered in grime, but -

"It has potential," he decides. "The ceiling's holding up."

"It's closer to the fields," Soldat says. "If we're going to be here more than one growing season. Ought to have a house out here, too, maybe." They can work on the house once the field is tilled and sown. It's going to be a long-term project, because this house is in much worse shape than the ones in Beacon proper.

But it's something to do. And it's practical. Keeping busy is going to be the name of the game for a while. "Field first, though," they sigh, turning back to it. "Maybe we can convince Stone to come back and help for a week or two."

"And I'm sure Law could get rid of these quickly. How come we're the two guys standing here, instead?" he says, amused. "Sounds like we're better off getting that house into better shape, and letting the others handle the rocks."

Not that Law especially enjoys being volunteered to use his powers for something this tedious, sure, but also, he puts on more of a show of being annoyed than actually being bothered. Honestly, he and Stone can probably sort this out faster than he and Soldat could repair the wheelbarrow.

"I'll message them," he says as he pulls out his tablet. "I guess Stone might be out of range, but it's worth a try."

"Do the tablets even have an actual range? I don't think we've ever tested them." They do know they'll reach from here to Beacon proper. How far can a dragon-thing even fly in the three days he's been gone? "Doubt the field will take as long as the house will, either way. Even without Stone."

They have to smile a bit at the idea of Law using his fancy magic surgeon powers to cut up or transport rocks. "Think Law will be willing?"

"Dunno about the range," he comments. "But we can start trying that out. Should be safer with the light coming back." It would be nice to know what the network is really capable of. And some day, he'd like to see more of this world as it comes back to life. The way Will speaks of his terraforming projects has him dreaming of barren ground bursting with little flecks of green everywhere - much as it is here, closer to the bonfire, but over vast distances. There's something inspiring about the idea, he thinks.

A journey for another time perhaps. The field and house are the immediate concern, and a farm is a more reliable source of that inspirational greenery that can do double-duty in keeping them fed with real fresh food grown by their own hands. He retrieves his tablet and looks up the last messages he'd traded with Law.

"You know, Law's willing to do a lot more than he lets on. He'll grumble and frown and act like it's below him, but he cares. I'm sure he'd help. If he ever acts like he doesn't want to, just appeal to his doctor sensibilities. Fresh food's good for everyone," he replies with an affectionate little smile as he types out a sentence or two.

"At least you won't have to worry about weeding for a little while."

1. Farewell Spirits
Kuai hadn't enjoyed the aurora any of the times he'd seen it. While he understood far too well the knowledge that dying was a better outcome than becoming a monster, and he'd even tried to do something similar to himself, it wasn't a good feeling to be on the outside looking in. It might have been hopeless, but Kuai still felt like there had to be a way to save them. To let the spirits live on somehow without corrupting eventually into something horrible.

But there wasn't. And the spirits seemed determined. To force them to stay against their wishes seemed cruel in the face of those who had helped them over the years.

If nothing else, he can do them the honor of witnessing their passage, standing on the treeline by the beach to protect himself from the rain of opals. But he'll watch each and every one. A silent vigil overseeing their journey into further death. Even for dead things.

2. The Cleanup
It feels good to be able to clean up after the wreckage and know that this time it feels permanent. The small amount of sunlight casting soft shadows and while the warmth isn't tangible yet, it can almost be felt just from the joy of seeing it again.

Kuai still does his patrols, a creature of routine he'll never be able to break that habit, but now they're really more like walks. Seeing the green bits of grass poking through the ground, the way the light shines orange and soft against the trees, a world being born anew.

It's the most hopeful he's ever felt.

Pretty quickly, on one of the first patrols after the earliest rays of that faint sun touch the ground, Kuai runs into Rosinante who is crouched as low as he can get to study one of those first few green shoots.

He still has his pistol at his hip, of course. There are still threats in the world. But little by little, things are changing for the better. And at his side, on the ground, is a crate full of tools.

"Hey, Kuai," he says as he waves him over. "Does this look different to you?"

Look, he's no plant scientist. That's Will's domain, but Will isn't here right now. The little shoot is just about the sort of thing he'd expect after their long winter, and it's not that different from the first spring they had here, surely, but this one is growing in the faint light of that sliver of orange sun.

He peers down at the small green stalk doing it's best to strive towards the light, weak as it is. He knows next to nothing about plants, but it's reminiscent of the little shoots that struggle up through the snow of the mountains of Arctika come spring time.

"It looks alive, which is a welcome change from the rest of everything." It would be a sign of hope should this bring forth a field of flowers. Even the most seasoned warriors can appreciate the beauty of the scenery.

"There's a few more, as if everything is coming back to life after a winter's slumber.

"Yeah. It's warmer, all that ice melted fast. And I know we have plants every spring, but this one..."

It looks alive, that's exactly right. It's in the light, rather than mysteriously carrying on in darkness.

"Living plants," he says with relief. "Might be the first actual living things here in over a hundred years, right?"

"It would be. The place may be dead, but at least some of it was in hibernation, waiting for the light to return."

There's something uplifting there. A kind of reward for what they achieved, that the the plants had persevered lying dormant until a potential return of the sun.

"The plants that came up previously seemed like they had already died, like they'd been reanimated and were going through the motions rather than sprouting. These are actually growing." He kneels down, brushing the snow from the leaf of a nearby green shoot, that will be a shrub one day. "Do you think animals will return too? Real birds would be nice to hear."

"I hope so. Birds would be nice. And fish. I miss fishing."

Especially given what happened the last (and first, and only) time he tried.

"If they don't come back on their own, maybe we can bring some through the portal. Maybe there's a way to get them to spread and survive with enough light. Will would probably know. That's what he used to do, bring life to dead places."

Which is some sort of poetic parallel, he figures. And while Rosinante's main concern now, long-term, is protecting other places rather than restoring this one, making this world flourish again sure isn't a bad thing.

Kuai is still traumatized by the Sea-sanate. "The last time you fished what you caught was less than ideal. Though if we had fish here, I imagine they'd be those deep sea ones with many teeth and bioluminescence."

Maybe the foam clone was a fangly fish in disguise.

"Plants are a good first start, we'll need them to nourish everything else. And maybe some of the things in the greenhouse can be transplanted once we know what weather is like here."

He assumes there'll be weather anyway, there's the sun and tides, there might even eventually be real seasons and not boiling hot followed by completely covered in ice.

"Yeah. With sun... Everything might change." In good ways, he can only imagine. Warmer, more stable seasons without the strange torrential floods and overwhelming snowfall.

"I don't know how long I'll be around to watch it change. If Will knows someplace he can get work done more quickly, or more efficiently, when it comes to figuring out what the other World Eaters out there in the sky are capable of and how to let people know about them, then we might go there. But I hope I get to come back every now and then, if we do leave. I'd like to see this place months and years from now."

In some ways that sounds even better than staying. Incremental change is slow and hard to perceive, but stopping in once a year? That would be incredible, he imagines.

"What about you?"

"A solid plan. It's commendable to want to wipe these out so no other world suffers the same. I'm sure there'll be some here that will help you in that task."

But it won't be him, he has other plans.

"I plan to stay for a short while, just until I can be assured that everything here really is reviving. It already seems to be, but I think a few more weeks and I'll know for sure. Then I'll return home. Death in my world isn't final, it's another realm, and it's filled with many I know. And many I miss."

He glances around at the familiar path that he'd spent years now patrolling. The sun actually allowing him to see further than he ever could and making it seem like a real town and not a cluster of buildings in the darkness. "I'll not deny there's some part of this I'll.. not really miss but I've become accustomed to."

Many he misses, indeed. Rosinante knows exactly who Kuai is talking about, but he doesn't call him out on it, simply smiles and nods.

"It'll be sad to see you go, but I know you have a lot waiting for you back there. You've been a big help to all of us."

Hopefully the portal will work as intended. He doesn't bring that up right away, it really doesn't feel like the right moment, but it worries him. Weaver and Will are surely going to be working on making sure everything is safe before anyone leaves, but someone is still going to have to be the first to try it. If it works, or if it doesn't, how will they know?

The best he can do is trust the people who know what they're doing, though, and trust them he does.

He knows that Rosinante is aware of exactly who he's talking about and appreciates the discretion of not mentioning it.

"Thank you. And while there's always more that could have been done, I have to be content with what's been accomplished. And seeing it like this... it makes it feel worthwhile. Maybe those who we've lost along the way - their sacrifices meant something, even though we'll forever wish we could have prevented them from whatever fate awaited them."

Some people died and came back while others simply vanished. He can't pretend to understand it and isn't going to begin to try, but at least now it feels alive and more 'real'. Not like a horrific nightmare they were all trying to wake up from, but like a real place that's beginning to start anew.

"It'll be a while before the portal is set to work in reverse, so I'll still be here should anyone need anything else."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

EVENT LOG: DAYLIGHT

Bucky/Soldat | OTA

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wow so sorry I missed this D:

No worries!

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4 | feel free to ignore this if it's a million years too late lmao

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wow it's been even longer than I thought, so sorry D:

aw I'm glad you got to it eventually! <3

Kuai Liang | Open

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