EVENT LOG: Leave a Light On

[pluviosamods]

LEAVE A LIGHT ON

You aren't scared of the dark, are you?

The dark is safer than the light. It's the light the reveals the things you'd rather not know. It's the light that's essential to knowledge and to growth. It's the growing things you should be worried about around here. They've been waiting for you for a long time.

... Of course, so has everything thing. But it's the growing things that have the opportunity, now. No matter how dark and stormy the night, morning always comes.

This is the event mingle post for Leave a Light On. This event includes general content of rapid plant growth and the possibility of infection by the Growth (plant-related body horror element) for participating characters. The IC duration of this event is the afternoon and evening of Day 4.

This is not an event with heavy moderator involvement. Players are welcome to make their own top-levels on this post.

Further information on the event can be found here.

Comments

Freedom

[astraldownpour]

After being freed himself, Childe had torn through a nice chunk of the ship, looking for other trapped passengers, but also as a means to clear away the plants.

As time stretched on, the fatuus' mind slowly cleared, having spent the last while in a sort of dissociative state, between here and a distant threat he's faced, a mindset all too easy for him to slip into if he only allowed it.

Tired, full of plant sap and juice and debris, the Harbinger makes his way back to the lounge to clear it out the rest of the way.

Exhaustion has set into his frame, having had his nap very rudely interrupted and spending what felt like ages slashing through plant matter, and his mind not quite here nor there.... It was a lot in one day.

The redhead's dead eyes find another person in the lounge, one he hadn't spoken to yet, but does vaguely recognize. Whoever it was, did not seem overly pleased. Join the club, buddy. Some sort of yellow cloth that draped their being, long, too long, something-- things writhing beneath the yellow robes, Childe thinks. And a mask.

Childe is still wearing his own, he realizes. He keeps it on, for now.

"You good?"

[aureatefantasia]

John's only answer is a low, rolling snarl. At first, anyway: he's satisfied himself, telling off the plants (as if they have ears, as if he thinks it'd be perfectly reasonable if they did—he can't be sure, so he chooses to be open to the notion they might) quite colourfully, so there's little more than a dull heat to it. But that almost unenthusiastic teeth-baring sound is followed shortly by what can only be described as a petulant grunt.

"Better if these..." But then that masked face and the body supporting it goes very still, featureless porcelain tilting to peer at the redhead, and the statement falls dead. The face behind the mask sucks in a breath past its teeth, yellow tatters and too many limbs curling in like the balling of a fist. Preparing, almost. And maybe the sight of him is altogether something that might unsettle the mind, too much in too little space and straining against it, but comfortably enough settled within the same body. Conflicting.

His face seems to turn minutely, as if tracing something with his eyes and choosing to let his curiosity be known. Masks have only ever meant one thing that he's encountered, but this stranger's doesn't resemble the ones he's familiar with. Red, for one, and much too sharp-edged. There's a moment's pause as he considers the make of it before he's distracted again.

When he speaks, it's almost guarded, low.

"Are you?"

[astraldownpour]

The man's(...?) voice starts as it ends.

Childe notices the other freeze, looking directly at him-- the mask on his face, in particular, it seemed. Curious? Confused? The fact that they both had their faces covered made it difficult to read. The other's limbs, body? Something, moves beneath the yellow fabric, tattered robes that seemed both too tight and yet just loose enough, allowing whatever was within to writhe.

Luckily for John, the man before him is all too familiar with things that might unsettle the mind, having spent the last ten years in a dance between the world that he was born in, and the Abyss that made him. Childe deigns not to stare, leaning towards politeness. He might have been ushered into the military at all too young of an age, but he was still his mother's boy. Th redhead's eyes settle on the mask of the other, as if much of his own were visible through the slits.

"Me? Could be better."

Could be worse, too.

The one in yellow seemed almost cautious. Childe doesn't quite need to wear his mask right now, and decides to take it off, hoping it might help ease the guy's mind. He cards his spare hand through his sweaty bangs, sweeping them back and out of his eyes.

"Bit of a workout, huh?"

Childe, at least, feels a little more himself.

[aureatefantasia]

If Childe intends on making eye contact in how he looks on, he'd find it somewhat difficult: nothing rests behind the sockets in John's mask, only a too-deep black, it seems, though John is clearly not un-seeing. Shadow settles across the brow of his mask, making brows appear somewhat furrowed. That's only the light, though, surely.

He'll not be following Childe's example.

"Hm." Something thick and coiling settles in that single sound, an unwillingness to give an answer more definite. He doesn't want to think about it, doesn't want to think about what's come before this. The darkness on arrival had been enough to make him completely fucking sure of that. This had been... had been annoyance or nuisance (once the panic settled, anyway).

Still, he just... studies the redhead for a moment more. He's not going to get an answer to the question niggling at him right away, even as John catches his mouth opening to pose it now. Right? Most people avoid talking about the strange things around them. (He thinks of Arthur, of course he does, and the way the man had pulled away from prying questions.) Enough has been happening that John doesn't further flinch or recoil from what he sees, at least; he thinks that's an improvement—or maybe it's all just too fucking familiar. A little mad. And there is power in the people trapped here that makes it less startling than it could be, but...

And then his mouth opens anyway, because he is impatient and he is curious and he is put off by this and John sometimes exemplifies his nature as a fragment of a god (impulsive, demanding, inconsiderate).

"There are... shadows." It's a guarded sort of curiosity, but laced through it is the difficulty in finding words, like "shadows" doesn't feel like it's enough or quite right for what dances around the man before him like a shroud, some kind of aura.

[astraldownpour]

Childe notes that there doesn't seem to be anything actively... Distinguishing, in the sockets of the other's mask. Interesting. He makes a quiet note of it, he was not unused to this sort of thing, having spent a considerable amount of time in a world full of masked beasts, creatures that might seem human, if he didn't know any better.

The other seemed... Apprehensive, at least. Studying him. Posing... not really a question. A statement, an observation.

Putting two and two together is not overly hard. The man in front of him seemed to be relatively not quite human. Childe himself had his own thing going on. It wouldn't be totally out of the realm of possibility that the stranger could see the abyssal corruption clinging to him. Like a shadow.

Like many of them.

Childe collects some of the energy in his hand, concentrated and much more noticeably purple, dark and swirling.

"Oh, uh, this? I fell in a hole."

It was.... a Deeply reductive way of explaining his experience in the Abyss, but he's not sure the average person from Teyvat would understand it, let alone someone outside of it. There was a reason he had few friends: the experience warped him into a person and also a thing that most people are not quite equipped to understand. It was something Childe had long made peace with.

"Er. Not here. I would hope there aren't any holes on the ship that could do this."

That's a very bold lie. He'd be the first to jump in.

[aureatefantasia]

While facial expression is difficult when one wears a mask, John has plenty to spare in terms of body language, apparently.

(Which, truth be told, isn't great if half your existence is based in deception? Then again, he's also a bit too earnest anymore to be a good liar, either.)

He hunches forward some, attention clearly fixed on the gathering wisps of purple; the move is almost catlike, a pop up-down-forward that sends tendrils fluttering and curling, fluid but sudden, and his hands pull not quite to his chest (how many hands does he have, how many fingers on each?). And it has to be the light above them imperfectly scattering between the plant-life that's shot upward that makes the eyes set in his mask look so wide, as if molded brows raise in surprise. Maybe it's the angle of his head and the soft gasp through a set jaw that gives a convincing impression, ties sound to image.

But that has to be the light and shadow, and it's over in an instant; the mask is as featureless as before, though John tips his head to focus on Childe when he speaks after that little display.

"A hole?" It... There's a rumble in John's chest not unlike a dryly amused huff alongside a sort of disbelieving shock, but just a touch off. Off-kilter, unbalanced. It's not that he's comfortable with this conversation, but it touches on something familiar that pulls on... if not positive, then memories tied to something cherished. His posture straightens, relaxed. "A more dangerous obstacle than many would give it credit for."

John's adjusting, little by little, and he isn't a complete idiot. But he's not going to chase what clearly is not the whole truth just yet. This is... It's nothing John recognizes, but he's sure it's not something a person can just happen upon. A tome, a weapon, a talisman—that, sure, but something as Other as this? Not hardly.

cw: animal death & eating raw meat

[astraldownpour]

Childe takes the opportunity to study the figure, on some level. Perhaps something did lie behind the mask, perhaps there were more limbs than the normal amount(What was normal, to him? To anyone, here?), perhaps there was a mouth through which sound and breath passed through. Perhaps beneath those tattered yellow robes were hundreds of long, squirming things, undulating eternally, something mimicking the vague shape of a man.

The other does gasp, a soft sound. And his voice is tinged with something, a level of disbelief, possibly, as he parrots the idea of a hole in and of itself causing this level of corruption.

"It was a really spooky hole."

Childe keeps his elaboration short and sweet, to the point. He couldn't allow himself an avenue to think that perhaps his life could be anything other than this. That his penchant for ultra-violence was not normal, that his destiny had been twisted and altered, that he had come home wrong. That he was not in fact that same boy from days earlier, who had received his first knife.

He was the same person, of course, but how do you explain that to a mother in mourning, in shock, when she finds her sweet, lost boy gutting a deer, biting into its warmth with his teeth? Where would you start, what lines would you draw? Where does the boy end and the monster begin?

The other seems to relax, before confirming that holes are in fact a dangerous issue to face, easily overlooked, underestimated. Childe knows the stranger in yellow doesn't wholly believe him, not really. But it was better than getting into the nitty gritty of it, and left Childe wiggle room, if he wished to lie and redirect.

"Dangerous is an understatement, in my case. But uh. That's where it came from. I mean no harm."

But Childe wasn't harmless, wasn't without fang and blade. He was very much armed at all times, ready to fight at a moment's notice. A finely honed weapon.

He'd add that he wasn't likely to infect anyone else, but... Truth be told, he didn't know that.

"I haven't seen anything like it here, but uh. We'd have bigger problems, in that case."