(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

[mannerless]

( he'd hoped it would work as such, that she'd hear or even sense that she's been deliberately given a bit more distance, and the smile has his own grin broadening even if she can't quite see it.

funnily, as far as names go, the OA doesn't strike him as terribly odd. it parses even more simply for wei wuxian than it might for others, as he (and his friend and family) come from a place in which family name (first, always) is one syllable, given name is another, and courtesy name - the formal name, the one you might give to a stranger you meet in the woods - is two more. 'the OA', family and courtesy name, however different she looks from anyone he has ever met back home. it's oddly comforting, like a line from an old familiar song.

'would you walk with me, wei wuxian?' he nods, then remembers himself, lips pressing together ever-so-patiently as she speaks until her gentle joke curls them once more at the corners. )

I can't promise I'll know it when I see it, ( he says. ) It's terribly sneaky, creeping along the dirt - but I'll certainly give it my best. ( which means yes, he'll gladly walk with her. he leaves a pause there, a space reserved for her to indicate the direction they'll walk in, and then he falls in step beside her. should she actually desire such a thing as arm-holding guidance, he'll certainly provide, but he's not one to touch a woman unasked.

nor is he one to leave a silence properly unfilled. ) My home has the lacquer tree, ( he muses, back on the 'poison ivy' topic. ) It sounds much the same, what with the itching and burning nonsense, but at least it has the self-respect to look you in the eye before it ruins what remains of your week.

[hierophante]

[Among the benefits of being forced out of relying on one's eyes -- and there are many; if asked, OA could list a fair few more -- is that, freed of the need to watch where she's going, she can instead simply listen. As poor a substitute for a proper white cane as this makeshift staff is, the wood is dry and light and resonant enough to allow her to walk with a certain amount of confidence. It reads the terrain for her in gentle sweeps. Where it skims a little more easily, the path. Where it sticks, undergrowth.

All the rest of her attention seems to be focused on her new companion, her head angled to him. At terribly sneaky she smiles around the soft, voiceless huff of a laugh; my home provokes the sympathetic quirk of of an eyebrow, the smile ebbing and then swelling again at his assessment of the lacquer tree's character.]

Mm, they do what lets them survive. Sometimes that means being sneaky. Trees at least have the luxury of other trees -- they feed each other, keep each other sheltered and safe. The ivy has to find whatever space and sunlight it can, and keep it.

[There's a soft wistfulness in her voice as she speaks and she turns her face up to catch the dappled sunlight for a desperate few seconds. At least there's this. At least this time she, too, can stand in the sun, breathe the outside air. She takes it in, a good lungful, and lets it out slowly before she speaks again.]

What's it like? Your home.

[This, now, is familiar: telling stories in the dark. Rachel's voice swells in her memory, unbidden: If I ever get out of here... I'd want to sing something. For my little brother.]

[mannerless]

( yes, well. soft and sunlight, the ivy can have. the skin of his ankle? less so.

his mouth opens to say as much, but in the corner of his eye he catches her face turned skyward, sunward (at least what bits of it filter through the branches) - and so he closes his mouth again, watching her a moment more before smiling faintly and turning back to the path they've chosen.

'what's it like? your home.' they take a step, then another, and then - ) Have you heard of China? ( wei wuxian has found that rather than describing it in the details it holds, it's often much simpler to take this route. ) I grew up there, the Yunmeng region. But, ah, from my understanding it's ancient China to many of the others here. Funny how that works out.

[hierophante]

I've heard of it.

[There's a bright note of fond amusement in her voice. Given everything, it's almost quaint to hear someone speak of something and somewhere... well, half-familiar.]

Though I don't think I've ever been.

[If she has, the visit isn't nestled in the set of memories currently accessible to her. It wouldn't be the only one. There's a whole world in there just out of reach, sleeping beneath the surface of her consciousness where it waits for those waters to rest untroubled before it may rise ripe and dripping to the fore, ready to be tasted.

Moscow. Paris. New York. San Francisco, when it was kind, before Treasure Island, Dr. Percy, the jacket, and the cage.

None of that can be helped now. Besides, there are things that the OA knows that Nina Azarova never could: how to navigate this brilliant, sunshine darkness, for one. Other things they both know: how to take strangeness on their tongues and take nourishment in it rather than allowing it to poison them.

Ancient China. That may be. They've all been flung out of their own parcels of spacetime; it's no more bizarre an origin place than her own -- except perhaps to Wei Wuxian. She angles her head to him again, towards the soft sound of his footfalls, her brow knitting in concern.]

This must be strange for you. It's strange for everyone, but... you have to grapple with the size of it. All that time. All the things the world has gained, all the things it's lost. Especially the things it's lost.

[mannerless]

( she has heard of it, and at least that's something. it seems like many have heard of it, even if few have actually been there, which makes all of this quite a bit easier in a sense. at the very least it has given him a simple means by which to offer context for what further details he explains about where they're from - cultivation, for example. china, others seem to have heard of. cultivation, less so.

'this must be strange for you,' she goes on to say, and wei wuxian is entirely prepared to lightheartedly agree - but the more the OA goes on to elaborate, the more gravity the statement takes on. those who've known wei wuxian for any real length of time have come to recognize him as one who can always be counted on to deflect such things, probing questions or exploratory statements or anything really which asks him to genuinely admit that anything is a struggle. such a thing is precisely how he and the OA met - he was struggling, he deflected it with friendly banter, and now they're sharing a walk.

a walk which so far seems to distract him enough to ignore the voices? spirits? whatever they are dragging claws along the inside of his skull.

perhaps that (and his gratefulness thereof) is why he decides to answer. )

It feels - surreal, I suppose is the word. Like made-up stories about that which comes to be, except here we have proof of it, even just in these phones, or the refrigerators. ( a beat, and a quiet crisp laugh. ) I'm still deciding if I want to ask what it's like, this future-China everyone seems to know.

[hierophante]

[OA appreciates the honesty as much as she appreciates the wry humour. The sentiment is... as comprehensible as it ever could be to someone who isn't experiencing what he's experiencing directly. She smiles with him, nodding emphatically.]

Yeah. All of it is new, and even the things that are recognizable aren't quite like you imagined.

[It has the cadence of something spoken from experience, from half-fond memory, and a sense of distance in no way lessened by the aimlessness of her gaze. She's been a stranger in a strange land too. In many, in fact, some less alien to her than this place must be to him, but others...]

At least, that's how it was for me. The impossible looked nothing like I thought it would.

[The consideration of his last statement troubles her, though, a seriousness which lasts only until the sole of her shoe catches a patch of ground raised a little higher than she'd thought it would be. A scuff, the barest stumble before she catches herself, and all is... well, not right with the world, but at least absurd again.]

Oop-- I'm fine. It's okay, though, the balancing act. Wanting to know, not wanting to know.

[A beat. If he wants to linger on the tightrope, she'll let him, save for this much:]

Where I'm from, it's alive.

[Vibrant, she means, but also just that: her future-China is a still-living place, still peopled. The land's occupants are still being born and dying and, in between the two, creating and destroying, weeping and laughing. That thread is still being spun.]

And beautiful, I've heard.

[mannerless]

( that's how it was for her. was, not is, so something not unlike this has happened to her elsewhere prior? he means to ask, but that's when she trips and he's at once occupied by the reflex to reach out and catch her by the arm and the distinct recollection of how much more at ease she was when he chose to give her distance a bit earlier. ultimately he fails to make contact, so it's quite fortunate that she catches herself.

hands withdraw from their abortive reach, clasping his flute behind his back again, just in time for her to shift topics again. to china, it seems. china, which is alive and beautiful. )

It is. ( words shape like the fond grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. ) Or was, when I lived there. I'm glad to hear such a thing hasn't changed.