(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

[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.