ph_logs | [Plot Open] Seeing Red

[Plot Open] Seeing Red

Who: The Cult of Nyarlathotep and YOU????????? (Intended for a somewhat small group.)
What: Weird magic
When: It's complicated
Where: The cabins in the woods
Warning(s): Cult activity, religious ecstasy, ritual sacrifice, blood, unhealthy and probably uncomfortable opinions about madness. Your character will also die by going on this quest, but you will receive unique plot information. And who knows, maybe you can have like a ghost party or whatever.

-I don't need your roses, I like men on their knees.-

It's not long after Tarantulas and Valdis find Linette and her body is laid to rest that further investigation begins. The information forwarded to them about the cult is, of course, useful. But with the knowledge that a strange cult was performing monstrous rituals is deeply alarming.

Information is spread like wildfire, the paper running an article describing the grisly scene of Linette Brenning, a woman who went missing years ago, turning up at the bottom of the Fall's Promise well. The cult involvement and the ties it must surely have to the barrier and to the cursed book retrieved by River and Angel some months prior. The constables fan out across the island, investigating the cabins in the woods and the well in which Linette was found.

But even so, nothing of note turns up.

Until one day, an assortment of offworlders seemingly chosen at random receive a note in their mailboxes. It's written in a tight, curling hand that is unfamiliar.

Gather in the square tonight at midnight. More friends will be there. But bring a lantern anyway, and do not be late. Once midnight strikes, go to the cabins off the path in Lockwood Forest and speak the words upon the wall of the furthest. If you can be brave, you will see the unobstructed truth.

Perhaps not everyone who receives this letter attends, but if you wish to see more, you must be one of them. And so you go. You gather among friends, or perhaps strangers, but ultimately those like you. And from there you proceed into the woods, following first the trails, then the desire path leading to the sodden and rotting old cabins where Linette's locket was first found nearly a year ago. Per the letter's instructions, you go to the furthest cabin from the road, and you enter.

-Praying up to their god, seeing visions of me.-

After much clearing away of natures attempts at reclamation of the building, the words are visible on the wall, etched in a thick white paint that almost glows in the lantern light. Do you raise your voices in unison to speak the incantation, or is it left to just one brave soul? Regardless, the words are spoken:

We are the seekers of forbidden knowledge. We are the witnesses of the vile divine. We are the wanderers of the black dream desert, navigators of starless skies. We beseech you, O Chaos; we stand in your circle and ask in reverence to behold your revelations of bygone days. Grant us your unholy nightmare that we may see. Ia! Nyarlathotep! Eater of Souls! Let your truth be thusly seen!

And once the words are spoken, the world begins to change.

The sensation, for those who can recall, is not unlike wandering the collective dream of Pumpkin Hollow in years gone by, but this time you have arrived here by choice rather than by sleep. The cabin around you dissolves like sand, falling away in particles to reveal... something else.

You find yourselves back outside, still under the cover of night. Each of you is now garbed in a red robe and a black mask, and you are surrounded by others wearing similar garb. The world around you is nearly silent. You are standing just inside what is a manor house, elegantly decorated, somberly making your way into the depths of the house with the rest of the group. You are led into what is apparently some sort of meeting space with a large, round table with a tasteful assortment of charcuterie foods laid out. No one says a word as you enter, but some members of the group seem confident as they file into place around the table and take a seat. You should probably do the same.

Far off in the distance, you hear the clock strike 2AM. One of the members of the group, apparently the de facto leader, speaks as soon as the third chime silences. Based on the voice, you presume this person to likely be a woman.

"Bare now your true faces and forfeit your names to your brethren and to our Dark King."

And so they do. Each of them doffs their mask and lowers their hood, revealing their faces. All ages and all sorts, it seems. They go around the circle, speaking their names, starting with the woman in charge.

"Chloe Albright."

"Ingmar Strömberg."

"Nora Winterbottom."

"Christopher Larkin."

"Archie Brenning."

"Maude Brenning."

"Brahm Aberdeen.

"Richard Pirnach."

"Lucy Calloway."

Before you have time to take in these names, it is clear from the expectant glances that all of you are meant to introduce yourselves as well. But once this is done, the woman whose name is Chloe speaks once more.

"Thank you all for your offering of identity. And thank you, Christopher, for once again allowing us to take our meeting within your lovely home. And of course, we thank all of our intrepid new inductees for joining us tonight. We appreciate that the lateness of the hour will take some... adjustment. As we await the blessing of our Master in his hour of greatest strength, that we might perform our ritual to bear witness to the vile divine, let us take a simple meal together in fellowship. Both to know each other and to speak of more mundane business, as well as to educate our new siblings. Shall we, brothers and sisters?"

All at once, your true mission becomes clear. Speak to the members of this cult, learn more about their identities, rituals, and crimes, and bear witness to this so-called "vile divine", then return to your own time with the information you receive. It's unclear how you'll get back, at the moment... but surely it will make itself apparent when the time comes. Hopefully.

-Say I'm your favorite preacher.-

[The thrilling conclusion to the cult gathering will appear in the comments over the weekend! For now, focus on talking to the cult members, or to each other. Maybe you can even sneak away to look through the house!]

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One, two, one, two. There’s a specific range of tempos that one can walk at without arousing too much suspicion by itself, and 4077 is very careful about maintaining that pace on the lower end. A stroll’s pace. It gives them time to look around. As Gaeta’s gaze rakes one wall, 4077 looks to the other. And the floor, and the ceiling, of course.

“Oh, yes.” His tone is similarly off-handed. “It’s a lovely thing, though; all the better to share this experience with.”

"I agree."

Step, step. They pass a door, slightly ajar; Gaeta's eyes flick to the gap to try and make out anything inside.

"And it's nice to meet some of the others I'd only heard about before now. The Brennings, Winterbottom, Calloway..."

"Ahhh, Calloway. Our illustrious curio merchant."

4077's gaze finds and follows Gaeta's, and he begins to surreptitiously step ever so closer for a better look at the same time his eyes scrape the surrounding area for traps. The littlest pinpricks for laser tripwires, normal tripwires, any hint of the door being hollow before he tests the weight of it himself, bells and strings, hell, even for a tin bucket balanced on top. Let his experience in navigating 2's insidious traps, in ripping the hidden bugs and wires and cameras out of his house day after day, come in handy here.

"I spoke with his wife, Lucy. She's a marvelous lady. I have got to tell you all about her when we're done here--remind me to talk to you about the Crystallizer of Dreams."

Gaeta lifts his eyebrows. "I've never heard of anything like that," he remarks. "Sounds fascinating. Is it a magical tool?"

He's tuned into every movement as if he were studying a DRADIS screen. As Mulcahy moves closer, Gaeta takes a step to the side under the pretense of leaning his weight against the wall, just beyond the partially open door.

"Sorry, I need a minute." He injects just the right mix of apology and tired frustration into his voice. "My leg's acting up tonight."

"Oh, no, it's no problem at all. Take the time that you need."

They're not gonna get a decent look without actually opening doors and touching things, are they? No. If they're going to snoop, there's no way they can disguise the action of looking for something. The least they can do is obscure what they're snooping for.

"Perhaps we can find you a support of sorts," he hums. "Either a cane, or a walking stick, or something, just for tonight. There ought to be something around here."

He putters about this part of the hall for a little while, talking as he does. "The Crystallizer is some kind of tool, yes, and very much magic. It's how old Gil gets all of his stranger artefacts--though most of his business is merely by trade, of course."

Then he stops, sighing unhappily. "I don't see anything here. You don't suppose that old Mr. Larkin would mind too much if we had a look around, do you? I'd hate for you to be limping all night like this."

Gaeta, who is burning every single one of his stealth points for the next decade to keep up the current pretense, has to take a mental step back and think, holy frak, he's good. He wouldn't have expected this kind of work from a priest.

(It's... a little unnerving, honestly, for reasons he pushes aside the instant he thinks of them.)

"I doubt he would," he says, with a slight, easygoing smile. "And I don't want to bother him with something like this, either. He's working hard enough to host all of us."

Gingerly, he eases himself away from the wall and approaches the slightly-open door.

It's the smell of blood that hits him first.

When the surgeons put a patient on the table, they open his jacket and cut through his shirt. They slice into his skin, through whatever earthy tone he's been blessed with, and a plume of humidity escapes, and underneath it all is red, bright and dark red. He's seen it a thousand times. Red that bleeds, red that shines, red that's still alive and twitching, moving, even as the surgeon's hands poke and prod the man back into shape, staining that white ever more red. Red that spreads.

They open the door, and a certain humidity escapes, and it's red, all red. It smells foul with fluid and bile. For a moment Mulcahy thinks they've found a (the) stomach, the door a stoma, and that it could eat them both whole. (In a house that is both alive and hungry, every room is a mouth.)

Chains. Candles. Some kind of bloodied ritual circle in the middle of the room. But immediately in front of them is some kind of massive stone obelisk or effigy, towering before them in this deep place like the Beast in the pit.

Mulcahy almost laughs. It's cartoonishly horrific. The stuff of comics and fiction and fear-mongerers. How anyone this flagrantly perverse exists is beyond belief, but so are the last six years of his life, and here they are, standing in a shrine to a devil in which blood has already been shed. He has a mind to suspect they'll be next.

He doesn't break, he lets go. Damn anything that might be watching him. Mulcahy crosses himself and says, not a little derisively, "If we can't find a cane, they may have a spare leg for you."

Edited 2024-07-01 02:20 (UTC)

Gaeta, on the other hand --

"Oh, frak -- " He claps a hand over his nose and mouth, reeling backward. His other hand shoots out to clutch the doorframe: whether to keep himself from falling, or stop himself from leaning over his knees to dry-heave, even he's not entirely sure. He barely hears Mulcahy's quip through the blood rushing in his ears.

Blood. It's always blood. Take away the room's ridiculous occult trappings and this is Raptor 718, the ship's hull neatly dissected and laid flat for the viewing of every smear and spatter. Even before the air dwindled, Gaeta could barely breathe through the smell of it. Four corpses, three of them bled out, hours of inhaling that tainted air and waiting to die. Hours of hearing the Eight's words ringing in his head as her body cooled six inches away from him.

When did it get so cold? How the frak can Mulcahy be so calm?

(Gerry was right. They're going to die here.)

He thinks he hears his pulse thumping, but for all he knows it's the soft blip of a countdown clock. "We have to get out of here," he rasps.

"Steady, son." The words are reflexive at this point.

Mulcahy looks at the room. He looks at Gaeta. Their task so far has been clear: learn what happened. Turn over the stones of this foul place and discover the infestation that has rotted the island. Mulcahy would walk into that humid room and soak his shoes in a stranger's blood if it meant finding more; death is no obstacle. But Gaeta cannot, and Mulcahy cannot leave him alone.

He pulls his friend from the doorway and shuts it. No need to look the mess while they talk.

"Gaeta. You're alright. I'm here. Listen to me." A breath.

"Go if you wish; you know the way back. I will walk you there." They'd been led down here from the front room of the mansion, after all. "But I will not leave if I cannot take the others with me. And I will not ask you to follow me inside that room, but I want to read that book they have. I believe it may tell us things that no one else can."

Edited 2024-07-01 06:05 (UTC)

Felix, you have to open your eyes.

His hand moves down to cover his throat. He swallows, hard, to fight down the bile. He's here. Mulcahy's here. He's not in the Raptor. He's probably somewhere worse, but at least it's not the frakking Raptor.

The chill doesn't subside, but he's able to look up, meet Mulcahy's eyes. The man has the unflinching steadiness of years in the service; Gaeta lets himself lean into Mulcahy's voice as the hallway gradually resolves around himself again, even as the stink of the room lingers in the back of his throat. Gods, he used to be stronger than this. Once upon a time he could flip the switch reading soldier and do whatever needed to be done the instant someone asked it of him.

Mulcahy isn't asking anything -- he's doing the exact opposite, in fact -- but a prickle of shame spurs him in the ribs anyway.

You have to see what the world is really like.

"I'm all right." It's still hoarse and shaky: Gaeta is patently not all right, but he's white-knuckling past the nausea and shivering to what's important. He wets his lips. "Look, I came here for information, too. We might not even have a way out. Not until they kill us."

Because there's no use in pretending they'll make it out of here alive, after seeing a room like that.

"I'll go with you."

Ah. So he suspects the same thing as him.

"You're very brave," Mulcahy asserts, reaching out to squeeze Gaeta's shoulder. "What we do tonight will help the rest of this island. Our time is very short here. We must use it while we can." He straightens. "Remember: all fires burn their lot. You've survived plenty of them yet. This, too, shall pass."

He turns back to the door, putting a hand on the knob. "Are you ready?"

Edited 2024-07-01 18:58 (UTC)

Gaeta takes one more breath of clean air. He thinks of being escorted into Tom Zarek's brig cell, sitting down with him, and letting all the vague notions of mutiny coalesce into an actual plan. The resolve he'd needed to take that first step -- no matter how difficult -- in the hope of setting the world right again.

It slipped for a moment. He won't let it slip again.

"Ready," he confirms, low, and draws some of the robe's fabric over his nose and mouth in preparation.

If he's being honest, it's a little like opening the doors of a bus full of wounded. Mulcahy walks forward across the threshold and makes no move to protect his face; it's foul, possibly fouler than anything he's smelled before but not by much, and like this he'd rather get used to it than spend the whole time floundering in trying to protect himself.

He steps neatly over the worst of the blood, circles around the giant stone icon and around the ritual circle, straight for the altar at the back with the book and the scroll. No point in wasting time. He doesn't know how much they have. They can do a more thorough sweep of the room after they clear the most pressing matter first.

The book lays open on the desk, displaying a page full of harsh, strange text and eerie sigils, rendering the page largely unreadable. But its sinister intentions are clear. The scroll is largely the same, aside from being all text. Unsurprising that people like this would speak in ciphers and code. The most noteworthy bit of information here is that the stone hoop-like apparatus in the front of the room is featured in a drawing in the book, as well as the design of the stone circle.

Then, behind Gaeta, there is the distinct click of a rifle being cocked.

"You're early."

Edited (goddammit) 2024-07-04 01:54 (UTC)

Gaeta freezes.

But tellingly -- unlike when he was confronted with all the blood -- he doesn't flinch.

The hardest part is lowering the cloth over his nose and mouth. He braces himself, but the stink still hits like a punch to the temple, briefly making his head spin before he steels himself. He turns around to face the gun. Lifts his chin, meeting Mrs. Brenning's eyes. He does not raise his hands in surrender.

(It's only one gun. He stared down six in his last moments alive.)

"Well," he says blandly, "you know what they say, ma'am. Early is on time."

Mulcahy doesn't flinch either. He doesn't even move, still scanning the page, memorizing what he can. Not all, but a few of the symbols he thinks he faintly recognizes from moments here or there in his studies from when he was still in seminary, even if he doesn't remember what they mean. He certainly knows what the lot of them are. Alchemy and Christianity have a long and tangled relationship, after all.

The text, though, remains indecipherable. Some parts of it look faintly... Arabic? Other parts look almost Greek. He's almost certain it's encrypted. He traces a finger over a single letter once, then twice.

"These are some terrifically esoteric texts," Mulcahy remarks, as if he were doing nothing more than commenting on a scholar's work. What're they gonna do, kill him faster? (... He can think of a lot of things they can do, actually. His ears remain alert, and he's still keeping tabs on Gaeta.) "Where ever did you find these? Or perhaps they were a gift?"

"You two are funny." Her tone is deadpan. She's well past over this. Maude closes the door behind her, leaning against it lightly. "Not like you can hurt that thing. Read all you like if it makes you feel better. You'll still bleed red when the others get here in..." Casually, she checks a pocket watch. "Mmh. Five minutes. Enough time for a cigarette."

She supports her rifle one-handed, and with her free hand she produces a cigarette and lights it with magic. It's almost comical that a mage would prefer firearms to magic.

"You're stuck with me till then. I'm not strong enough to detain you, but I am fast. And I'm a good shot. Look if you must, but if I see anything that even remotely looks like sabotage I'll just shoot you dead without checking. And if you come too close to me, same deal."

Gaeta glances sidelong at Mulcahy, who's still absorbed in the book. From the sound of it, he might understand more of the writing than Gaeta himself; best to let him handle it.

His leg is genuinely starting to hurt a little by now, though. Carefully, casually as he can, he leans against the desk, folding his arms as he regards Maude. (And positioning himself so he's... well, nothing so obvious as shielding Mulcahy, but so if Maude takes the shot, Gaeta's an easier-looking target.)

"Tell you what," he says. "If we're going to die in five minutes -- sorry, uh -- " He makes a show of checking his wrist, even though he doesn't have a watch. "Four minutes and fifteen seconds, why not fill in some of the details? What's Nyarlathotep going to give all of you in exchange for our blood?"

"Ponies and a pot of gold," Maude answers snidely.

Just as sarcastic: "Well, frak, if you'd told us ahead of time, we could've brought them as a housewarming gift and saved you the trouble, ma'am."

Also sarcastic: "Ah, and the ponies will make a very fine sacrifice too."

He keeps flipping through the pages of the book, and it's largely more of the same. But there's many, many pages in here. There could be something notable and new.

"Do they usually send you ahead, Miss Brenning?"

"Mrs. Brenning, thank you very much. I go where I'm needed. Quickest shot on Marrow Isle," she boasts dryly.

After flipping quite a few pages, there is a symbol of interest that may be used to identify Nyarlathotep's workings. Perhaps this image will start appearing elsewhere.

Gaeta's jaw sets.

"And is that what you're planning to do to your daughter?" he asks. "One quick shot?"

Maude laughs. "You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, sugar."

"You're right. I don't. That's why I came here."

Tucked against his side, one hand balls into a fist.

"But no, I guess it wouldn't be a quick shot." He lifts his chin, indicating the space around them. "Rooms like this don't exist for one quick shot. Gods that call themselves the Crawling Chaos don't ask for one quick shot. It'll be agonizing, right? Your own frakking daughter's probably going to die screaming, tortured by the family she trusts."

There's a darkness in Gaeta's eyes now. He has no idea how transparent he can be; how easy it is for anyone to tell, by the merest glance, how close such a betrayal hits to home.

"And for what? Power? That's all this is really about, isn't it?"

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lovethyneighb_or - 2024-07-06 18:06 (UTC) - Expand

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[Plot Open] Seeing Red

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narration of house horror & medieval xtian depiction of hell in last 2 links

cw: emeto mention, ptsd flashback, description of gore + dead bodies

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