(event) SHATTER & DECAY

[vestigemods]

EVENT LOG: SHATTER & DECAY

JULY 21ST - 27TH

► IF THERE'S NOTHING BUT PAIN, PUT IT ON ME

On the morning of the 21st, the sun dawns peacefully over the crystalline lake just as it has every day for nearly three weeks now. Birdsong melodies soften the crisp edge to the morning air, and woodland creatures retreat from many a cabin backyard, unhurried but unwilling to contend with the cabin's residents as they wake. It's... peaceful, more so than one might expect after such a dire fate spelled out in the pamphlets upon your arrival. Perhaps, after many such days, it has managed to lull you into a sense of something like security.

Today we'll be learning a valuable lesson on why that is, in fact, a mistake.

Sometime between the 21st & 22nd, you begin to feel a bit... off. Perhaps the source is apparent at once, the ends of your fingers or toes going stiff and crystalline or swelling and blooming in small rotting sores. Perhaps the source of your discomfort is a bit less clear as your senses begin to sharpen or dull. But make no mistake, this is only the beginning.

As time passes, your situation only worsens. The glass or decay carves a slow but steady path up your limb or limbs. Your sharp senses begin to overwhelm you. Your dull senses muffle altogether. Soon, you may not be alone in your own mind, bombarded by the omnipresent thoughts and feelings of those around you in a way that you can't seem to hide from. Or worse - maybe there's no one around you, and yet you hear whispers in your mind all the same... Whispers which turn to yelling and screams and sharp violent emotions and imagery you can't simply close your eyes to because it exists inside your head.

But there is a solution.

It's detailed inside your new coffee-table centerpiece, a book bound roughly in leather and written in a language none here know or can recognize. All you know is that this book was not here last night. Not far from the book's front cover, you'll find two pages of illustrations with a page of text between them. One depicts humans holding their heads as if in distress, then cutting themselves or one another, then no longer holding their heads in distress. The next depicts much the same, but instead of a their heads they hold a discolored arm or leg... and instead of simply drawing blood, it shows them rubbing one another's blood on their discolored limbs. Skimming the rest of the book will find a dozen or so pages roughly torn from the bindings. Perhaps those were further illustrations. You may never know.

Besides - you have more pressing issues to attend to. Like bleeding, or finding someone else to, in order to make this stop.

You who only suffer the mental effects are lucky, in a sense. Your condition is deeply uncomfortable but it almost definitely isn't fatal. If you've found your limb crystallizing or rotting away, however, you have little choice but to seek a solution or resign yourself to a distinctly unpleasant death.

Regardless of which effects may be lingering, you'll find blessed relief at midnight on the 27th. Over the course of an hour, your senses will fade back into their proper strength, the unwanted guests will evacuate your mind, and the glass or rot will recede from your limbs to leave them just as they were before this veritable nightmare of a week.

Now, it's time to breathe, to recover, and to lick your figurative wounds.

► MOD NOTES

• This log is a general dump for all log threads pertaining to July's Shatter & Decay event! Feel free to utilize vestigenet for any event-related network posts you'd like to make.
  
• The event takes place from July 21st - 27th. All characters begin to experience effects by mid-22nd at the latest. Any event effects lingering at midnight on the 27th fade away over the course of an hour, in much the same way as they would if provided sufficient blood during the event itself.
  
• All event information (in detail rather than the flavortext I've provided) can be found on the July Event Infopost!
  
• Important semantics reminder! While you can have a character experience both psych and body horror within the event, both must be either rot or glass, not mix and match.
  
• Limbs lost or irreversibly damaged to this event reappear next time your character sleeps (as early as right when the event ends) unless you OOCly choose for them to retain the loss, in which case they instead regain the limb upon their next death + respawn. (If your character doesn't sleep, they go offline/fall unconscious and return to consciousness with the limb fixed.)
  
• Any questions can be directed to this top-level or, for a quicker response, to Trace on discord/plurk.

Comments

OTA - starting 21st - rot

[legbreakings]

When his right leg starts to hurt and feel hot and infected starting at the foot, Jiang Cheng doesn't give it much mind, determined to ignore a weakness he won't permit himself. It isn't until the sores start, large and ugly and infected, followed by the skin turning blackened with a foul stench to it, that he realizes this is something that can't be ignored through sheer willpower.

He's still not going to ask anyone else for help. He can handle this by himself, handle it in the way of a cultivator.

So he can be found sitting at the edge of the lake by the boathouse he lives in, doing for hours and hours on end something which he usually keeps to the required minimum: meditating. Meditating and trying to use his cultivator's self-healing to fix the decay to his body faster than it can spread.

It is a doomed battle, one during which he feeds all his spiritual energy into the decaying wound yet it seems like the rot is only spreading faster for his exhaustion, and soon it leaves him weak even beyond the rotting limb - feverish, swaying, struggling with even the smallest effort. He still keeps the rotting limb stubbornly hidden.

"Don't be ridiculous!" he snaps, swaying in place. "I'm not infected! I have a golden core, I wouldn't be rotting away where I stand!"

[deferences]

Sizhui's own rot hasn't quite made it past his knuckles yet, but that hasn't kept him from wrapping his entire forearm up to the elbow, just in case it starts spreading faster than he has time to cover it. So far, his condition hasn't been anything too noticeable, simply the faintest spike in his temperature, which is easily ignored and remedied by less clothing.

And by less, that means a ridiculously oversized t-shirt coupled with some pastel blue jeans he'd collected from the gas station. It looks a little odd having his one wrapped arm in full view, but the half-sleeves of his top at least reach somewhat past his elbows.

The only reason he knows Jiang Cheng's suffering from the same condition is because he's seen others with the same problem. Calling him out on it might not have been the best idea, though as soon as he watches the other cultivator wobble like that, Sizhui steps forward, reaches out and catches his shoulder without hesitation. “I'm not the one being ridiculous, Jiang Cheng, you are.” Following a brief head-shake, his grip tightens somewhat then he gestures toward a nearby chair that'd likely been leftover from the beach party however long ago.

“Sit,” he urges gently. “Before you end up falling instead.”

[legbreakings]

"As if I'm going to fall, don't be ridiculous," he huffs, but his fingers tighten on Sizhui anyway, actually needing him to steady himself - and how humiliating is that? So he hobbles over to the bench, and that hobble is humiliating as well, surprise surprise.

He feels far more relieved than he would be willing to admit when he is finally sitting; the pain doesn't lessen much now that he can stretch out his right leg but every little bit helps. Although he prefers the pain in his leg to not feeling anything at all anymore in his foot...

"I'm fine," he repeats, sizing up the junior Lan with narrowed eyes instead. "Don't think I don't see your bandaged hand." A beat. "And your clothes are ridiculous."

[deferences]

He's not being ridiculous, just truthful, but Sizhui is glad for the fact they're both too focused on getting Jiang Cheng somewhere he can sit down that it shouldn't be too noticeable when he rolls his eyes. And while he feels awful about the fact they have to struggle a little, that's definitely not something he'll address.

Once he's sitting, the Lan boy kneels down, reaches toward the leg Jiang Cheng had been favoring, only hesitating whenever the older male insists he's fine.

“Well, that's certainly a lie,” Sizhui sighs, shaking his head and meeting that half-glare with his own steely sort of look. “Glad you noticed,” an extended pause of his own then he tacks on, “My clothes, mostly, but also the bandage since I wasn't trying to hide it.” Okay, now he's telling a small lie, though it's better than admitting any cowardice about the unfortunate necrosis.