EVENT LOG: DAYLIGHT

[nextnightmods]

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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Comments

[paletteswap]

"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."

[worthallthis]

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.

[paletteswap]

"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.

[worthallthis]

"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."

[paletteswap]

"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."

[worthallthis]

"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."

[paletteswap]

"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."

wow so sorry I missed this D:

[worthallthis]

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?

No worries!

[paletteswap]

"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."

[worthallthis]

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."