logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: DO YOU REALIZE? PART TWO

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EVENT LOG: DO YOU REALIZE? PART TWO

EVENT LOG:
DO YOU REALIZE? PART TWO

characters: everyone.
location: Bonfire Square.
date/time: August 18-19.
content: the party takes a turn for the worst.
warnings: violence, gore, character death.

"but if your lantern's too banged up to fix, you ain't coming back."

Late on Saturday evening, just as the party's hitting its stride for the night, the foghorn sounds. It's a frantic blaring, the deep, hollow bellows of the horn echoing over the trees in some approximation of a song, impossible not to hear from wherever you might be lingering this evening.

It captures the attention of the forest spirits, first and foremost. They drop whatever they're up to as soon as the first note strikes the air, and they listen. You listen, too, though any sense of understanding is lost on you. One thing is clear, though: the time for distraction is over.

•••
The tone of the party has changed, and not for the better. Before, the forest spirits at least seemed to be enjoying themselves, feasting and dancing, wobbling around and entertaining themselves. Now...

Now, the atmosphere has changed. There's tension thrumming through the air.

One's head snaps to the side sharply, focusing on something unseen in the forest. A few moments later, and others do the same: bodies locked in place, limbs frozen, they stare at something out into the darkness. Can you see it? Maybe. Maybe there's something out there... and maybe you'd better not attract its attention. Two pinpoints of green light, glimmering though no light manages to reach its body. It doesn't move, and neither do the spirits in town, but perhaps it's best not to disturb them.

A few aren't so calm. Mouths dropping open, the noises they emit range from low urgent clicks to desperate howls, but all give off a deep feeling of anxiety. Fear, verging into terror, claws digging into dirt and spirits skittering madly over buildings, limbs snapping erratically, the path of their movements understood only to themselves. They don't lash out at others, not yet— but there's a frantic energy to their movements which suggests something is wrong.

Good thing you're disguised as a spirit, isn't it? Although if you haven't gotten to that station yet, rotten luck. Maybe you better get to hiding, because right now it seems like the spirits aren't so keen on things that don't belong.

•••
Ah, but after that initial panic, the foghorn abruptly goes quiet. The lighthouse beam shuts off, too. The thing with the green eyes vanishes, and most of the other forest spirits have already fled or are still stuck frozen in town, but it's now that the others attack. Apparently not all of the spirits were won over by the party's attempt at diplomacy.

The hostile spirits attack with abandon, and can't be reasoned with. The only way to stop them is to kill them or detain them, although you could just wait it out and hope they move on soon. In any case, how you deal with the spirits is up to you. Feel free to NPC them in your own threads if you'd like to fight them or attempt to interact with the frozen ones, though the fighting spirits will continue to fight until dispatched and the frozen spirits won't snap out of it no matter what you do.

As far as what the expedition teams are up to, that's up to them. All expedition teams including the team that's with Winters are able to make it back to town to witness the chaos. What happened out at the lighthouse, though? The Winters crew will be sure to let you all know... soon.

And if you'd like to go after the spirit with the green eyes? Well, go ahead, but do so at your own risk.

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Riku's not looking at the door, not directly, so when he sees the silhouette out of the corner of his eyes he feels his heart skip a sick lurch. It's why his eyes are at first wide when he chases that glimpse with a turn of his head, why his expression shutters in recognition, resigned disappointment. They're gone, Kairi, Sora, Dawn and Daylight... it's like a bad joke, that out of the lot it's the two who embraced Darkness that remain.

Seems a near thing, too; judging from the damaged breastplate, by the glimpse of freshly-mended skin beneath, he would've joined the rest of the corpses littering the ground had he been a little less armed to the teeth.

He hadn't seen a point to toweling off his hair, and the damp that had dripped from it has darkened his shirt around the shoulders, in a triangle over his sternum. He hadn't felt like doing much of anything, but Five's blood was drying on him, a sticky reminder of how his magic had so failed them.

Vanitas approaches and Riku exhales, squaring his shoulders like he anticipates this getting physical from the start, but Vanitas stops, and that makes Riku curious.

"The lighthouse keeper? Yeah," because who else could he mean? Not Kairi, why would he care about Kairi? "Not up close. Something tells me you're not her type," he says, flicking a hand through his damp fringe.

The jab goes right over Vanitas' head, and part of that is solely because Vanitas doesn't have the social vocabulary to know what it means. Unlike Dawn, the only one remotely like him, he doesn't have a wealth of memory to draw on. All Vanitas knows, he knows from watching others. Given his staunchly isolated existence, it means that no matter how verbose or haughty he might sound, simple things like this— like connection— fly right passed him.

His gaze doesn't leave Riku's face, unblinking. It doesn't matter to him what Riku has been through, that he's favoring one leg, that he looks tired and bruised and battered. It doesn't matter to him that he might have interrupted what Riku was probably hoping to be some quiet time, or that he's disappointed that Vanitas isn't Sora.

Vanitas, after all, had seen Sora before he went into the woods— so the only thing that's been occupying his thoughts is the mission Winters had convinced him he couldn't come on.

"What do you mean not up close?" There's something prickly in Vanitas' stance, like he's a dog at the very end of his leash. "She didn't talk to you?"

He sees it, the unblinking lack of reaction, and doesn't know enough about Vanitas to understand why. Did he just not get it? Robbed of the fleeting satisfaction of needling him, Riku lets his eyelids fall and snorts through his nose. What is he going to do with him?

He's not Sora.
Riku won't lie to himself to claim he doesn't still experience that instinct to test his mettle, to be tested, but he's too tired and too scraped thin by grief to act on it.

"I mean at a distance," he counters, unhelpfully. "She didn't leave the lighthouse, once they finished hooking up the cables, we had company. What's it to you, Vanitas?" Pushing himself up out of the arm chair, he limps past the other boy, his jaw tight and expression just this side of openly irritated.

Looking to fill the void?
Make that two of them.

He turns, not chasing Riku but keeping his whole attention on the other boy, made obvious the way he keeps facing him no matter where he goes. Vanitas tracks his movement, his eyes boring into the back of his head, like he could see through all that silver hair and decipher the expression Riku isn't showing him anymore. Or maybe like he could reach into his head and pry the answers he wants from it just by look alone.

"You went all the way out there and you didn't even try to get inside?" He sounds angry about it, incredulous. Vanitas just can't wrap his head around the fact nobody else seems to understand what he does: they might live in the town, they might have the bonfire, but the real base of operations must be that Lighthouse. It must be the woman that runs it, that single-handedly holds all the power over them, life and death, the only other source of light.

He has no example to measure what the keeper is, or what she might represent, beyond the examples he's been shown through Xehanort. To his mind, she must be just like him.

It might just be the fact he half expects to find Vanitas staring at him, single-minded in the object of his focus, so often Sora until his disappearance, or paranoia, but Riku thinks he can feel his gaze tracking his painstaking progress towards the bar. He's searching behind it, to be sure, but not for anything alcoholic.

"Guess it never occurred to me while we were fighting for our lives," Riku grunts, stooped over and rummaging. He finds what he's looking for, a can of juice (pineapple) tucked way in the back among dusty bottles and expired cans.

Fighting for our lives. Riku snaps the tab, exhaling hard through his nostrils. They're dead, and at first that had been its own hurdle to overcome, but they at least were overcoming it together. And now...

"Going inside was never the goal," and he wonders, that curious side of him that hungers to know, to discover, what's so important about the lighthouse keeper that Vanitas would come to ask him, of all people. "What's eating you?"

"No wonder you idiots were so easy to manipulate," Vanitas snarls, pulling both hands into fists, an unusual outward display of his frustration. He still hasn't stopped tracking Riku, the way he paces the room, behind the bar. His eyes don't move from his face, despite all the movement, not even glancing at the beverage he's popped open.

"You just move from one mission to the next, never asking questions until they're right in front of you, so easily distracted," Maybe it's too obvious, and maybe his Master would be irritated with him for laying it out so plainly— but Xehanort wasn't here, and none of those facts are working in Vanitas' favor now. That woman was the only person with any answers, and none of them bothered to try and get any when they had the chance.

"There's a reason Winters didn't take you along," Riku bites back, putting the can down without drinking from it. Turns out for the best, because he can smell it, that pungent, too-sweet aroma of something that's started to spoil. He shoves it aside.

"Not that I blame him," and there's nothing Riku could say that could approach the horrors that Xehanort had visited on Vanitas, but it's still angry, it's still unkind.

He knows better.
He knows this isn't going to help anything.
And he's stronger than this, he shouldn't get sucked in like this and start snarling in some exasperated back and forth with Vanitas.
He could stop this right now.

...Or he could give Vanitas the fight he always seems to be looking for.

"Who'd want to babysit you?"

Vanitas sharpens right away. It's something in his stance, it's in the sudden brightness in his eyes— like a shark scenting blood in the water, a newfound intensity in his focus. Vanitas takes a half-step forward, aggressive.

"And what did you do better?" His mouth pulls back, but his expression looks less like fury now and more like a manic kind of glee. He isn't happy— what does Vanitas know about happiness?— but excitement, Vanitas clocking what he perceives as some sort of outlet for all his impotent frustration. This is what he's good at, after all. Tapping into the darkness and letting it spread out like rising water.

"He's dead now. Him and that other guy. What use were you in the end?"

Vanitas takes to the escalation like a serpent coils in preparation to strike. There's an echo in how Riku draws himself up in spite of his injuries, in spite of the fatigue, his teal eyes feverbright around the slow black yawn of his pupils. Neither of them are happy. But maybe the both of them crave the outlet, something different from the frustration and the misery. Something simple and ugly.

Riku exhales.

He takes the guilt, the anger, the despair, he takes their shadows in his heart and drinks them down until his fingertips tingle and his blood races. The Darkness is its own venomous rush, an all too familiar high. He can smell it radiating off Vanitas, can feel it saturating his every muscle fiber with a strength he knows is only temporary.

It's a little like adrenaline, he scarcely feels the protesting twinge of his sprained ankle as he steps around the bar, speaking low.

"Hmph. That the best you can do?"

"Yeah," Riku continues, "I couldn't protect them. That what you want me to say?"

He can feel it, not as his own but almost as an extension of himself, a sort of sixth sense attached to all his darkness. Vanitas feeds off that negative emotion, it was why he'd felt so powerful when those grave were around— all that despair in one place, circling him like water in a drainpipe. Vanitas' pupils dilate, and he doesn't straighten, but his center of gravity shifts in preparation.

"You can't protect anyone," He launches back, venomous and aiming for the lowest, most vulnerable point he can.

Riku steps around the bar and opens himself up. There aren't any tables or chairs between them. Vanitas could lunge forward without anything getting in his way— but that won't give him the satisfaction he's craving. Feeling, watching, others cave to their darkness— that's so much more potent than striking first. Vanitas spreads his arms, taunting.

"Everyone said you're immune to darkness, but I don't think you are, Riku."

Edited 2019-09-01 00:25 (UTC)

Riku said it first: I couldn't protect them, like he could rob the words of their sting before Vanitas can try to surprise him with it, with mixed results. He can't really say it doesn't effect him, not when Vanitas amends it with anyone and he can see it all over again, Wanda's lips as she formed the words when she told him Kairi was dead.

The silence in the boat house he couldn't abide, so he went out again and again in search of his friends.

As if making a point, Riku doesn't lurch across the space between them in a lunge, he propels himself forward on the very power that Vanitas evokes, a smudgy purple-black ripple and then Riku's there, his fist leading. Riku shouldn't. He's worked hard at his own self control, but damn if it doesn't feel good to do something with all his hopeless anger.

"Wanna test that?!"

Immune to the way the Darkness could corrupt, could make him into a vessel suitable again for Xehanort, yes. But there's the thing about striking a balance between the light and dark parts of himself - all his light doesn't nullify the darkness. Neither does his immunity protect him from the influence of the everlasting night.

Are any of them truly prepared to deal with that?

He's quick, and Vanitas expects it, so it's difficult to say if Vanitas is faster or not when he moves half a beat later. Riku's fist narrowly misses connecting, but only by a breath. Vanitas can feel his hair move, caught in the breeze created by the full swing. He's spent hours fighting, he's had a spirit put it's hand through his midsection— but the sharp, caustic excitement that comes from the promise of a fight still surges through his blood.

"Come on!"

Vanitas doesn't summon his Keyblade. Some primal, vicious part of him taking their sudden close quarters as a different kind of bait. Instead, he makes a grab for Riku with both hands as claws. They're in the middle of the Invincible, surrounded by tables and barstools. Maybe a spirit would have stopped them, if they hadn't been so rattled by all that just happened.

As it stands, Vanitas makes to get his fists into Riku's torn jacket, prepared to reverse their positions and throw the other boy up against the counter he'd just shadow-stepped away from.

There's a strange exhilaration, a cathartic release in being able to just take that swing, even if it doesn't connect. Impotent frustration doesn't suit either of them. Vanitas offers a challenge and Riku cleaves to it like he's been waiting for one such opportunity, like it'll be the thing that saves him from the despair he's been staving off, looking and looking for Sora.

Neither of them bring to bear the weapons that might make this quick. All of this is happening fast, the first lunge and the counterattack, any bystanders probably only just now starting to realize a fight's broken out, and by then Riku's back has hit the edge of the bar. He arches into it, one sharp inhale sucked through his gritted teeth, his back one great bruise.

His hand grasps, not at Vanitas, but at the bar stool nearby. He finds the seat, flips it, and, grasping it by one splintered leg, swings it at the other like a bludgeon.

Vanitas follows the momentum, like a feral dog, coming after Riku even after he's blown the distance and slammed into the counter, rattling all the glasses still sitting on it. With his single-minded intent on closing the distance, he enters the space the same moment the stool comes up and it cracks him across the face— loudly. Flecks of broken wood splinter off against the metal edges of the remnants of his helmet and scatter into the air.

The edges of his helmet, still cleaved to his jaw, take the worst of the blow— but Vanitas' head still snaps to the right and he feels his teeth go through his lip, the searing pain, the taste of copper that floods his mouth. He recovers fast, enough that Riku is still finishing the motion of his swing when Vanitas snatches the leg of the stool, wrenching it toward himself.

He might not pull the furniture out of Riku's hand, but it doesn't matter. It pulls them closer together and will let Vanitas pivot and get behind him, plant his boot against the other boy's body to kick him into another table.

Riku is fast but Vanitas is faster, moving like quicksilver, smooth and oil-dark, poisonous and volatile. He catches the blow with what remains of his helmet, catches the stool Riku swung at him too. The savage yank tugs Riku forward but not exactly off balance, what puts Riku at a disadvantage is that his mobility is limited by his own injuries.

Still, as Vanitas pivots Riku tracks the movement, his lips peeling back from his gritted teeth, angry and aware. It isn't enough to be aware, to keep up with his eyes alone. His boot connects with Riku and knocks him into a table. Something crashes to the floor, unseated by his upper body laid out across its surface.

He twists, knees bending, kips back up with a swing of his legs and a push that turns the table over onto its side when he launches off it, meaning to knock Vanitas flat to the floor.

Overeager, Vanitas is mid-lunge when Riku springs up unexpectedly. The whole weight of him connects with Vanitas' chest, both boots against his broken armor, and it knocks the breath out of him as much as the legs from beneath him.

Vanitas lands hard between two tables, knocking two unoccupied chairs askew. One if his arms tangles through the legs of a stool and Vanitas grunts on his inhale. It might not have winded him so much if he weren't already fatigued, if the burn of Elden's magic didn't still simmer in his chest.

Vanitas clambers to his feet, using the tables and chairs go assist him on the way up. He laughs, breathless and angry, and pushes himself away from the table to launch himself at the other boy again.

Elden had been upstairs trying to recuperate some of his own energy from all the fighting. It's unfortunate though that it wouldn't be happening anytime soon with all that noise coming from the first floor. What was going on? Had spirits broken in? He's already on his feet, grabbing his shield from his bedside to at least offer himself some protection if he had to get involved.

What he finds is not a spirit fight but a fight between two very angry looking teenagers, one of which Elden had to team with. He's doesn't take long to move into action himself after he see's Riku squarely kick Vanitas in the chest. As he watches Vanitas throw himself towards Riku, Elden throws his own hand out and yells "ENOUGH!" He feels the spell energy surge in his hand as he directs it towards Vanitas. The other boy would feel a tightening on his mind, as if chains were trying to curl around it and bind their body in paralysis. There was a chance Vanitas might throw the effect of the spell off, if his willpower in this moment was sufficient, but Elden's hoping the feeling at least will grab their attention to stop.

He then shoots a look towards Riku as well and says "The spirits already killed a bunch of people we don't need to start doing it to ourselves!" To him, it didn't matter who started this fight, he was ending it now.

Riku is already starting to sprint after Vanitas, one fist raised as if he intends on pressing the advantage won by knocking him back--

A voice shouts ENOUGH and that's not what makes him stagger to a halt so much as the prickle of magic making his skin pebble, so much as the whisper in his heart telling him this has stopped being a fair fight.

His fist drops. Whether Vanitas takes advantage of the opportunity or not is up to him, but for the moment, Riku is calling a truce with the sag of his shoulders, the shocked stare in Elden's direction.

Elden's magic has a specific feel to it. Even if Vanitas hadn't experienced it before, he would know it was foreign when it hit him. The clench in his head is familiar, familiar like his Master's magic, but burns like the midday sun in the desert. He's trained for things like this, but he is inherently weak to the Light, and with his complete and utter focus on the Keyblade wielder across from him, it catches him off guard.

He staggers sideways into a table mid-lunge, his legs catching under the paralysis before Vanitas can really get them under himself. One hand hits the countertop, but the other goes to his head. Vanitas shakes it like an animal, like he could shake the spell off with that gesture alone. When it doesn't catch, he pushes off the table, something in the gesture suggesting he's trying to run away from it, or get out of the area of effect. With his equilibrium off balance, he staggers right into the person he'd been intent on causing physical harm just seconds before.

At least that got their attention. His mouth thins a bit in anger as he moves quicker towards them. From the looks of it, Vanitas already seemed like he had had enough and Riku didn't look like he was going for it. Even if it didn't look like they were going to get back into it, Elden was going to step inbetween them. His hand reaches out to grab Vanitas shoulder to both steady him and to move Vanitas away so Elden stood in the gap between.

"Look, I don't get what the hell is going on with you two, but that's enough. If you guys beat each other senseless and the spirits get in you'll have made an easy job from them to gut you," Elden says simply. He looks to Vanitas though this time his eyes narrowing a bit. "Also, what's with you and having to start a fight with everyone? Do you just DECIDE to pick the worst moments possible for it or is that just a habit?" Seriously, first with the defense group now this? What's this after world coming to?

That's a stagger, but the timing of that shout and the way Vanitas seems to be fighting with the collapse that eventually crumples him is too conveniently close to the prickle of magic in the air. Despite how Vanitas meant to hurt, he falls towards Riku.

It says something that Riku's instinct is to catch him before he hits the same floor Riku's been trying to launch him into. That he hefts him up, for a moment peering into his face with his mouth a troubled flat line.

He knows all kinds of magic, not nearly as many spells as Elden might. There's magic that can induce sleep, that can turn the blood toxic, there's even the old, old magic, the kind that can hit pause on time itself.

Could be any of those things, but Vanitas had tried to shake his head like that, and Riku's so strongly reminded of his own echoed gestures and their causes - no, their one cause - that he feels his skin go hot and cold at once.

It's all grit teeth when Elden steps in, angry; it'd be more controlled if he wasn't exhausted in every level, if he didn't have the instinct to fight still boiling in his veins - that adrenaline crash will be something, all right - but instead a hand bolts out to try to grab at Elden by a fistful of his shirt to yank him close.

"What did you do?" Like he isn't breaking anything up, like he isn't doing the right thing, just reacting to the method, "What was that?!"

Riku pulls him up and dizzy, Vanitas looks into his face like he doesn't quite recognize him— just long enough for Elden to get in the middle. The movement jostles him back into the present, lets him shake off the remainder of the spell in time to look Elden in the face when he tries to dress him down.

Vanitas snarls wordlessly at him and violently slaps the hand on his shoulder off. It gives him the space to take a single step back and take a breath, even as his chest is heaving, even as he feels the echoing burn of Elden's Light in his body. He curls his hands into fists and turns his face, spitting blood onto the Invincible floor as his eyes stay trained on the other two boys.

He's taken aback when Riku yanks him forward like that. He had come here to stop a fight but now it seemed like there was another one just about to start with him involved. Is this what he gets for trying to intervene as non violently as possible? Looks like.

He brings up his hand to grab hold of Riku's to at least try and loosen it so his shirt wasn't cutting into his neck as painfully as it was. At the demand he looks confused, perhaps it wasn't obvious to them? Either way he lifts up his other hand trying to placate the other "It was a spell! Hold person. It's just meant to paralyze someone temporarily," Elden says quickly.

He looks to Vanitas frowning a bit as he watches them spit blood. "Don't give me that look. You've been having a go at just about anyone today."

Poor Elden's just trying to do the right thing.

He doesn't deserve the way Riku's grip stubbornly tightens, the way his mouth presses into an angry curl, eyes hard and suspecting. His explanation, however, stays his hand from doing something Riku might regret later, once he's backed away from the reflexive rage at the hint that something might have stolen into someone's mind or heart.

It tracks. There are spells that Riku's aware of that do the same thing. None of them involve the sort of thing he suspects.

Riku releases his hold, using that hand to flick at his own silver hair, "You're right. This isn't the time or place," he relents, turning to narrow his eyes in Vanitas' direction. There's no way it's not coming down to another altercation, if they remain in each other's presence.

Which is exactly why Riku chooses to remove himself, taking a few limping steps away, too proud to apologize.

Riku looks at him and Vanitas' mouth curls. It would look like a smile, if there weren't so many teeth, but maybe that's par for the course. Even with Elden there, acting as a metaphorical and physical barrier between them, Vanitas can't help the burn in his blood that hungers for more. The sheer nature of his being, thriving off all that negative emotion.

But then, maybe it's also because this is just all he knows.

"Coward," He snarls, teeth bloody, as Riku puts space between them— but their fight, at least for now, isn't going anywhere. Vanitas isn't interested in going toe-to-toe with a Keyblade Wielder and another denizen of Light, especially injured as he is. And maybe, some deeper part of him, shies away from the effect Elden's power has over him.

He sneers at Elden, but doesn't bother trying to argue the point. This guy doesn't know anything about him, and just because Vanitas owes him his life doesn't mean he's going to treat him any differently. A vindictive part of him wants to say I should have let you die out there, but he swallows it in favor of pushing passed him; violently knocking their shoulders together as he makes his way for the stairs.

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spitefullight - 2019-09-21 20:12 (UTC) - Expand

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equinoctials - 2019-09-21 20:54 (UTC) - Expand

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EVENT LOG: DO YOU REALIZE? PART TWO

Re: II

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the move everyone hated in KH1

UGH

the move that made you lose 100 matches

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i lack a many angry icons

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