ph_logs | [OPEN] While we're on the subject, could we change the subject now?

[OPEN] While we're on the subject, could we change the subject now?

Who: Jonathan Sims and YOU!
What: Open prompts for the end of summer!
When: August
Where: Around Marrow Isle
Warning(s): Cursed objects, potential descriptions of gore (More warnings pending)

1. Looking towards the future, we were begging for the past

With a sound of effort, Jon drops the last of the tools he'd been carrying too many of, letting out a winded wheeze as he tries to collect himself.

It's been quite an undertaking, collecting ins and odds from Calloway's Curios before they fell into hands, not knowing what they are or what they're capable of doing. He's not certain of the particular qualities of a few of these things, but he's seen enough things and read about even more to know when something is simply here to cause problems.

Sprucing up the unused shed behind his cliff-side home is proving to be even more of an undertaking, considering he isn't especially gifted at carpentry, but sometimes you've just got to make due.

He's so engrossed in his work that he doesn't notice the presence of anyone outside of Grimmly the Dusknoir, the large Pokemon lingering, watching with what can only be described as single-eyed skepticism. The red eye follows Jon as he moves to collect the scattered metal rods of the lock-system he'd purchased, once again trying to carry all too many things at once.

To say the least, he's far too distracted to notice anybody coming up the short path to his home - especially as, with his heavy carry load, he staggers, stumbles, and topples back, dropping the rods in a spectacularly-noisy explosion of parts around his person.

Grimmly bellows with strange, wavering, ghostly laughter, the mouth on his stomach throwing his upper half backwards, with no regard for the daggers Jon glares his way.

"Oh, laugh it up, you shit, very funny. You could be helping with this, you know, you've got two perfectly good hands!"

2. Well, we knew we had the good things

Amid all the bustle he's been dealing with recently, Jon manages to find time to write and hang a flyer on the bulletin board.

Seeking assistance from the technically inclined for a repair project.

I am in possession of three tape recorders, and need someone who could potentially lend me a hand with fixing the wiring within the machines, as well as potentially making their power sources able to plug into a wall outlet. The tapes are in pristine condition, and I will only need assistance with at least one recorder, though all three being repaired would be preferred. Offering a reward of 200B for assistance.

If interested, please contact me via sending stone or telephone. Thank you.

-Jonathan Sims

With a reward like that, it's clear he's pretty serious about getting these fixed. He'll answer just about any call about them - be it someone who's ready to help him fix these, someone with questions about them, or friends with concerns about the devices. (It may be easier said than done convincing him not to fix them, if one even could, though.)

3. But those never seemed to last (Closed to Neil and Martin)

After meeting Martin on the beach, Jon was in more of a hurry than he'd care to admit to get to Neil and confirm dinner plans. Everything's smoothly in motion, and as ridiculous as it feels, Jon's more excited about this than he can rightly recall having been in a fair bit.

He's never been an incredible chef, but he's gotten a handle on home cooking since arriving in town, and throws together a plan quickly enough to have everything just about ready. It only takes a short trip out to the markets to have the supplies for everything: lemon chicken (the citrus specifically chosen for the occasion), mashed potatoes, and supplies for a light salad, hopefully making for something of an exceptional welcome-to-town dinner.

The sun is only just dipping towards the horizon when he's wrapping up, and judging by a quick glance to the clock on the wall when a knock at the door rings through the house, Martin's at his most punctual that Jon's ever seen him. Maybe he's as excited about this as Jon is? (He surely hopes so.)

Leaning as close to the kitchen's doorframe as he can while not straying too far, keen to finish wrapping things up as quickly as possible, Jon doesn't hesitate to call out towards the front of the house.

"Come in!"

4. Oh, please just last (Wildcard)
Want this guy somewhere, sometime? Shoot me a PM here or on Discord to plot, or just go wild and drop something!

[EDITED EXTRA PROMPT]

5. Beneath the Watcher's Eye

The more time passes, the more Jon feels his resolve beginning to slip.

At first, it's simply accidental, compelling people for statements when they're not looking to share. It sustains him, he feels terrible about it, and there's another sore spot to try to navigate around on this cursed island. The more time that passes, however, the few statements that are offered by the call of his bulletin-board posts simply don't provide like they used to. More often, the fatigue hangs heavy on his bones, even without the work to wear him down. Thinking grows difficult, and simple ordeals feel as though they've gained ten new steps overnight.

He tries to fight it off; he really, truly does. The itch sinks deeper into his bones with each passing day, though - no amount of reading old statements or reading books on things that had happened in town scratch it.

There comes a point with all itches that you've simply got no choice but to scratch it.

He adds his flyer to the bulletin board once more, crisp and neat. Sending stone calls are acceptable, events that have happened within Pumpkin Hollow are valid pieces of information to offer, and anything of any magnitude will be heard. The net is as wide as he can possibly cast it.

Waiting for the net to fill is an impossible task, however. Despite himself, he begins to hunt.

His search doesn't have the physicality or brute force of a Hunter seeking prey - but in energy and approach, they're shockingly alike. He's patient, calculated, and mindful. He stays out late during the nights of shore leave from the Mipha's Grace,, finding new haunts to insert himself into. Restaurants, taverns, bustling public events, and coffee shops are his most frequent targets; if he finds the perfect candidate outside of one of those spaces wearing marks that are heavy enough, though, he won't be picky.

Once he finds scars adequate enough, he sinks into action. The approach is simple and polite: if there's too many people around, he'll ask to step aside. If it's a quiet space, he'll move to stand near, to sit across from, to linger by whoever he's got his eyes on.

And then, he'll speak. The supernaturally inclined feel static begin to build in their ears, and even those who aren't get a sensation of their own, unnatural and tingly, something akin a sleeping limb beginning to wake up.

"You have seen something great and terrible, something beyond comprehension. Tell me your story."

[Extra notes: this is my general prompt for Jon taking statements! You can play this any way you want to. If you want their CR to stay positive, your character can show up at his house and deliver their statement normally, talk afterwards, whole nine yards. For anyone who'd prefer negative CR, though, or want to have Jon take a statement but have characters who would keep that to themselves, put him wherever your character might be and have him compel it out of them!

Additionally, closed to close CR: characters are welcome to bust him compelling statements out of someone! He is doing it fully intentionally this time, and while he'll generally see himself out while emotions run high from the person he took it from, he can be caught by someone who knows what's happening. He won't target people he's friends or generally friendly with intentionally, but it can happen accidentally. Hit me with anything! \o/ ]

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The push adds a terrible, additional wave of dampness to his shirt; he makes a face trying to peel it off of his skin. He considers lying, either entirely or about the nature of how he'd received the statements... but that hasn't exactly gone smoothly for him. He isn't keen to get on the business end of whatever "ways" she's referring to.

"...I do have people recall their experiences of terror and hardship, yes," He starts - short and to the point, but he continues. "I take no pride in doing so. Hearing people recount the horrors they've witnessed, to chronicle them into my own library of terrible happenings, sustains me. It's been likened to a 'curse' by some others, to tie it to things of this world; should I fail to do so, I get weaker by the day. Long enough, and it may kill me. If not, I'll certainly wish I were dead. I only do so as often as I truly need it."

The more days he indulges his "bad habit," the less that last part remains true, but that's not something he's even gotten to the point of admitting to himself yet.

"Okay." She still sounds quite terse. "But you're forcing it upon people. Like some sort of weird predator."

"Haven't gone full Pine Devil, at least," He tries to deflect, albeit weakly. "I take voluntary statements where I can. I'm sure it won't shock you terribly to hear that those don't exactly come frequently."

Mairi takes a deep breath. "Okay. I'll tell you what. Let's make a deal, carrot and stick. I'll give you a statement, a real juicy one, of my own free will, so that you're off the hook from prowling for a bit. I do this out of the goodness of my heart, as a food provider for the town. Alright?"

However, she steps toward him again, squaring up. "But if you fuck with Phil, Dimitri, John Rambo, or anyone wearing one of these---" She holds up her hand and gestures to a pewter ring. "---I will make you regret it. I know where you live, and I know you hang around West Dream Analytics sometimes. I will find you, and when I do, I will pull all of the water out of all of your blood and I will drown you with it. Am I clear?"

When Mairi steps forward, Jon steps back on instinct, a jolt of panic quickly attempted to be quelled. A few people to try to steer clear of, a clear identifier to note, and a deeply impactful threat to cement all of it firmly in his mind. Even if he didn't want to agree, what choice did he have?

"A-alright. Alright," Jon says, barely more than a breath, swallowing thickly. "I'll--- leave you and yours alone. You've got my word. I don't want to harm anyone."

A half-true notion, really; he's not a Hunter, he doesn't rend, tear, or kill. It's easy, that way, to pretend that the impact of the nightmares and emotional turmoil that lingers like tar on the mind isn't actually hurting anyone.

"Good. Now, where should we do the whole statement thing?"

Jon hesitates, glances backwards, before vaguely gesturing towards his front door.

Mairi shrugs, letting herself in.

She takes a seat in his living room, waiting for him to sit across from her. Her posture is stiff. "Where do you want me to start?"

"Well, there's... a process to it."

With the supplies available to him at home, Jon takes the opportunity to gather a pen, paper, and a book to write on, taking a seat across from Mairi. He briefly tests to make sure the ink is flowing well before he speaks again - and once he's satisfied, he looks up.

As he speaks, he writes. The scratching of pen on paper underlines each of his words nearly-perfectly. He no longer looks at the paper; he stares straight ahead, directly at her.

"Statement of Mairi Miann, regarding her encounter with the aboleth in the sewers of Waterdeep."

Mairi looks at him strangely, about to ask him how he could possibly know that. She never gave him her name, much less any details of what she's about to say, and as far as she knows, he's from a world where Waterdeep doesn't even exist.

But instead, she's drawn to speak.

When I set out with Red's Rovers for the first time, I thought I knew what "adventuring" was. I'd been on the road for almost a year at that point, travelling Faerun in search of... something. Gods? Answers? Myself? I guess all of the above. So by the time I met with Red-Handed Robin, Dorin Ironfist, and Jack Page in the Copper Cup Fest Hall in Waterdeep, and they asked me to travel with them to assist with their quest to settle the Ordning of Giants, I thought it'd be more of the same but with a little more... direction. A little more destiny. I don't regret going with them, in hindsight, even if it did get me killed, but if someone had told me what we'd be doing on that first quest, I might have thought better of it.

It was afternoon when we were approached by a man in search of his missing partner. I don't really remember his name, the one who recruited us, that all seems like a lifetime ago. But in the grand scheme of things, as much as I hate to say this about a person's name, it... wasn't really important. I do remember that his partner's name was Reimi, a fair-skinned human man in his 60's with white hair. I remember that not because of how many times we talked about it, but because it would become so relevant later. We spent a good bit of the day running around the backstreets of Waterdeep, asking questions in shady bars and back alleys, trying to figure out where he'd gone. Eventually, we figured out we'd need to go below the city, into the sewer system. So... down we went.

I'll spare the details about the crab monster. It was nothing special. In hindsight, it almost feels like a warmup for what was to come. A messy, rancid-smelling warmup, but uneventful. I'd fought hostile giant animals before, so it's not like the fetid water down there made this fight particularly life-changing. No, that's what came after.

We trudged through the narrow sewage tunnels toward what we hoped was a rescue mission, following tiny symbols etched into the wall. There were tiny walkways where you could walk outside the water if you crouched, but--- Well, I don't know about the boys, but as far as I was concerned, I was already caked in filth. I wasn't going to risk a sore back during a bigger fight to get out of it. And it was around this time that Jack started to get sick. Like--- really sick. One minute we were wading through foul water, joking dryly about when the real adventure was supposed to start, and the next we're stopping every few minutes because our wizard can't stop violently throwing up. It seems like that was the first sign that we might have been out of our depth. At the very least, it was the first sign that Jack was about to have a really, really awful day. Not that the rest of us would be having any better luck.

As we reached the end of the tunnel, we came upon a junction between yet another slimy, filthy sewer tunnel full of a horrible sludge that could supposedly be called water, and the first dry passage we'd seen since the stairs. It looked like the dry tunnel may have once had the symbol we were advised to follow for directions, but Red, our ranger, pulled us aside and expressed that he might like to check out the opposite tunnel before going in, partially in the interest of being thorough, and partly for strategy. As is the way with these things, we were expecting enemies, and finding a way to flank or pincer them was going to be useful for keeping us alive. I stayed out of the conversation, mostly. I was pretty new to genuine combat, especially in tight quarters like this, so I left it to the experts. Ultimately we decided not to split up, at least not yet, and follow Red's leadership down the first tunnel. Eventually, the darkened hallway lead us to a wooden bridge, a little aged but sturdy. Clearly someone was taking pains to take care of the infrastructure, but I doubt it was the city. Regardless I was glad that the bridge was steady--- it led over a chasm separating two of the sewage pipes that dropped off into dark oblivion, carrying it's disgusting cargo out of the bowels of the city and off to... someplace else. It's funny how you don't really think about what happens to your water after you use it and dump it. Out of sight, out of mind, right? Easy to forget. Seeing it felt like becoming privy to a nasty secret. But even here, in the guts of Waterdeep, the lifeblood of the world which we abused with our own gross bodies still flowed off to destinations unknown.

Across the bridge, there was another junction, this time a T-split, and we decided this was the point where we ought to break into teams. Dorin, the muscle of the group, recruited me to go with him. He was a dwarven man, an old soldier and a blacksmith, dark-skinned with a dark brown braid running down to his knees. He was small, even for a dwarf, but sometimes it seemed like that only made him more dense. He hit as hard as anything, and I felt... well, not necessarily safe, but as safe as I could be with him. Jack and Red went the other direction. Red complained, but considering Jack's condition, I didn't feel like the reasons I was being squabbled over were anything to do with me.

Dorin and I turn left, taking the route into a dark, wide room with straw-stuffed mattresses. Someone was living down there, and it didn't take them long to make their presence known. A man and a woman rose from two of their beds at our entry, looking for all the world like--- Well, no, it was clear that they were dead. Undead, rather. But not the sort of half-skeletal undead you find in catacombs and graveyards. These people distinctly looked drowned.

Chaos erupted. Down the hall, we could hear Jack and Red getting into their own fight as Dorin and I were waylaid by these sagging, drowned people. I panicked. At the time, I still wasn't used to fighting things that look like people, and even though they're already dead, the idea of using the kind of burning, crunching, rending attacks that Jack, Red, and Dorin use to fight still turned my stomach. On instinct, I cast a spell called Hold Person. It's--- cowardly. I can admit that now. Even as I was quipping at Jack to actually do something useful for once, I was casting a stunning spell and leaving the real work to Dorin while I ran off to see what Red and Jack were doing. But before I could get too far, a confused Dorin stammers out a question. Should we kill them, or should we leave them? I... had no answer for him. My whole life, I'd been raised a pacifist. My family and I worshipped Eldath, the goddess of groves and rivers, and I grew up being taught to value peace and mercy above all else. But here I was, face to face with two creatures that I'd stunned, temporarily helpless but potentially mere moments from breaking loose and hacking me and my companion to chunks, and almost everything in me is screaming at me to just leave them so I don't have to face the reality of killing. It would be so much easier. But there's a part of me, an animal instinct, that wants them dead so I can stop feeling like prey. I gave Dorin a guilty look, and he made quick work of them. And I walked away, leaving him to it.

In the next room, Jack and Red were fighting this... horrible thing. A man, or what used to be one, whose skin is sort of a... soft... gel texture. Almost like a... Gods, I hate to say it, because it always ruins desserts for me for weeks after I think about it, but it almost looks like custard. Mushy and easily broken. Under the surface, there are things wriggling, moving the skin in squirms and jolts. They're large, fist sized foreign objects. I'm almost entranced by the horrible sight, before a familiar tabaxi comes barreling out and shouting at me not to look. The moment he's past me, he turns to me and fires his arrow directly at my face, and with a shriek I duck out of the way before realizing he's fired a seeking arrow, which careens through the hallways and lands in its target with a wet thud. Unfortunately this leaves an already struggling Jack a few paces behind.

Tentacles emerge from the creature, wrapping around Jack's face. He struggles, but it puts its mushy, bloated lips to his, and it grunts, and gags, as it pushes these slimy, squishy, white globs into Jack's mouth and forces them down his throat. Jack wretched, but more and more of them shove their way into his mouth, forcing him to swallow. I slipped, tentative and cautious, back toward him. Bum rushing the thing would have just earned me or one of the others the same fate. I was able to use a Guiding Bolt, but by then... it was too late.

With a coordinated effort, we were able to put down the monstrous thing, and we decide to rest and heal our wounds before we moved on. But Jack... He doesn't get anything out of the break. In fact, he honestly looks worse. See, he'd been using this armoring spell called Stone Skin. But sometime during the hour-ish we'd stopped to rest, the spell faded, and his veneer of marble coating vanished. And the moment this happened, all of him just... sags out. Like a bag full of pudding being set on the floor. And there's pockets of writhing growths all over his body, pressing in on him so that by the end of that hour, he was struggling to move. Even breathing looked hard. But we couldn't turn back. Not yet. As we move on, I quietly explained to him my family's tradition. A small ritual to offer passage into the next world whenever someone or something in our grove passed away. Jack knew what I was getting at, and grimly accepted.

In the next room, the energy in the halls... changed. So did the quality of the water. Where once there was filth and grime, this looked more like an underground lagoon. The water was still dark, but it took on a more natural sort of murky, like brackish water. Whatever we were looking for, we were most likely going to find it here. Jack took a potion of water-breathing and took to swimming through here, while Dorin and Red used Red's Water Walk spell to get a different vantage point. And in we went. And as we got closer to the center, the area where the water was the deepest, we started to see the bodies of men strewn about the shallows. All of them pale, human, white-haired. Whatever this thing was that took Reimi, it clearly had a profile. We had been expecting bandits, or assassins, but what met us in that lagoon was like nothing we'd ever seen before.

Water parted over the top of the creature, pale and hulking but somehow graceful, sliding off the steep slope of its face like silk falling away from a hard surface. A single dark eye opened as it broke the surface tension of the water. Jack and I ducked down below, trying to avoid its gaze, only to be met with more eyes. More and more. At least a half dozen just on its face, and a string of them down the side of its massive, lithe, pallid body, fins and tentacles hanging like ragged cloth off a dynamic, powerful, slender body. And in my head, I could hear a quiet voice speak to me in Common.

"I can hear the call of my spawn. The one who is spawning will die, but perhaps we can make a deal."

I'm not the only one to hear a voice, but there's little time to discuss it. Even as lazily as it drew toward us, we weren't about to take any chances, and we braced for combat. Before I could do anything, Jack reaches out a hand and touches my shoulder, casting Greater Invisibility on me as the thing draws forward to meet him. I felt so guilty for the amount of relief I felt in that moment, hating myself for scolding him for always running when his first instinct was to protect me, and for how grateful I was that it was more interested in Jack than me. Jack scrambled back out of the water to get away, climbing up onto the shallows to turn and fight, wand raised. I couldn't see Dorin or Red-- I think Dorin was looking at something on the shore, and Red must have seen the thing, because a bright arrow lined in spectral flame sailed into the water, striking the monster.

I can hardly describe the awe I felt, looking up at this... monstrous thing, all covered in eyes and shrouded in the dark murky water, as the ruby red spectral flame wraps around its silhouette like a sunburst, suddenly casting the whole thing and the lagoon around it into dancing, glittering scarlet light from Red's Faerie Fire. But in that moment I could truly see the creature before me, and something about it felt... primordial. As old as the world. As old as the stars. From my hidden, invisible corner of the water, I spoke out to it in Aquan, hoping against hope for answers. "Vath ertu?" The answer that came was in a voice so low and so guttural that it set my teeth on edge, but told me nothing, the even more ancient language incomprehensible to me. I had asked what it was, since I'd never heard of anything like this thing before. But it would only be much later that I'd learn this was an aboleth.

Then, the water began to turn and roil, churning like a stirred vat in a sucking, spiraling current to draw us to it. I just barely managed to get out of the water before being pulled in, but even in the shallows I nearly lost my footing from the intensity of the maelstrom. I was almost too busy trying to stay upright to see Jack drop, felled by this thing that had become so enamored with him. I blinked back into visibility, Jack's efforts dispelled as he fell unconscious, and I felt the creature's eyes turn on me.

The rest is a blur of commotion. It didn't take us long to realize that we couldn't fight this thing. We had to get Jack out of there. If the aboleth didn't get him, his condition as an incubator surely would. It was only by some incredible miracle that Dorin managed to find Reimi still clinging to life among the sea of discarded, similar-looking bodies. I almost didn't make it out either, swept up in another maelstrom as I tried to go for Jack. I am a very, very strong swimmer, but even with all my experience, I felt my strength fail me under that current. In the end, it was Red summoning another of his familiars that got Jack and I out of the water, and we fled into the night.

There's a sigh of relief as the compulsion of Jon's strange power finally, finally allows her stop speaking. Mairi swallows roughly, searching in vain for a glass of water she would not find. She hadn't been polite enough to her host to receive one. Not that he deserved it.

Edited 2024-08-12 15:49 (UTC)

Every second she speaks, each of her words is accompanied by a perfectly-matching scratch of pen on paper. He listens, entirely rapt on the story, able to see what an aboleth truly is in his mind. It's interesting, how something so foreign can feel so at home among every other monster he's seen. There could have certainly been one of those under London's streets, a horrible thing of Corruption, spreading it's terror beneath the skin of people for miles upon miles, and Jon wouldn't have thought a thing of it.

When she finally stops, he lays the paper and pen together on his coffee table. He knows exactly what she's searching for, and it doesn't matter that she wasn't polite enough to ask, nor that he hadn't warranted her to be any less brusque with him - he stands, raises a hand, and steps to the kitchen.

He returns with a glass of water, and offers it over; the step away finally returns his gaze to something less intense and drawn in to her terror. Now, he looks bright, alert, but... concerned, even if she had just been threatening him only a short while ago.

"Here. I probably should have grabbed a glass for you before we sat down, that's my mistake," He offers, no trace of the firm certainty in his voice from when he'd compelled the story out of her. "Thank you for sharing that with me. If I may ask, your friend--- was he alright, after you escaped?"

"Oh, um. Thanks." She takes it, taking a long drink to relieve her dry throat. She hums into the glass at the question, swallowing and setting it down. "Yeah, Jack was fine. It was a little touch and go, but we took him to the clerics at the Temple of Selune. The parasites had to be drawn back into his stomach and--- well. Expelled the way they came in. It took all night, and he didn't sleep. But he made it."

Jon scrunches his nose in disgust--- a clear, noteworthy change from his unmoving face during any of the other especially horrible parts--- but gives a short nod.

"Good. I don't envy him for experiencing it at all, but at least he didn't have to experience any of the later stages of that. I can't imagine that would be pleasant at all, or particularly moralizing for your team."

"No, they'd--- lost someone else, a while before I joined. And for all the shit I gave him, Jack is a good guy. I... miss those three a lot." Mairi sighs. "...Anyway. I've taken up enough of your time." She rises. "Remember what I said. I held up my end of the deal and gave you what you were after. Betray my goodwill, and I'll make sure you regret it."

"I won't forget." How could he possibly forget being threatened to be drowned with his own blood? "...I'll, um. Be seeing you, then, and, ah--- sorry again. For your friend."

"Yeah," she says flatly, heading for the door. She lingers in the entrance, pausing another moment before departing. "I hope you know--- this place is a strong community. We would have helped you of our own volition, if you'd given us the chance."

And then, the door closes.

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[OPEN] While we're on the subject, could we change the subject now?

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CW: emeto, unsanitary, body horror, parasites. !!THIS STATEMENT IS VERY GROSS!!

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cw: more emeto

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