September Mini - Ghost of the Past

[pumpkinhollow]

code

GHOSTS

OF

THE

PAST

The Visitor's Center

Just where the sands of Tawny Beach begin to fade into soil, grass, and cobbled roads, there is a new building. Much like the House of Cards, it seems to have appeared from nowhere overnight. A large and round structure of tastefully stacked stone, it seems to fit perfectly in between the town and the marina, with an exterior door facing each side and at both entrances. It reads, "VISITOR'S CENTER," in bold letters.

In mailboxes throughout town, there are flyers, advertising "offworlder visitation" running from September 6th to 19th. "Make appointment today!" it advertises cheerfully.

Regardless of which side you enter, the same receptionist sits at the desk on either side--- a pretty-faced young man with braided black hair, wearing dozens of pieces of delicate golden jewelry. He is working hard on some sort of paperwork or taking some phone call when you come in, but he quickly sets it aside to welcome you. "Hello! Welcome to the visitor's center! Would you like to make an appointment?"

Your host artfully dances around questions regarding the place, its abrupt construction, its purpose, and what your appointment actually entails, assuring you it's "self-explanatory." He'll gladly inform you that "people you know" are here for a visit, but won't say who or why or for how long. But you'll sign up for your appointment anyway, for one reason or another. Perhaps you don't even really know.

At the time of your appointment, you are sat down in a tasteful meeting space of your choosing (the options are listed below) and your guest is brought in. But it is not who you expect. In fact, in all likelihood, you do not know this person at all. But don't worry, they've been briefed, and they'll pass the information along to you if asked.

You see, you are not here to meet someone from your own past, at least not at first---- you're here to meet someone close to one of your friends or neighbors. And they're here to speak about that person to you.

Take as long as you need. The Visitor's Center does not close.

How It Works

Visitors.
Each offworlder on the island can have up to 2 "ghosts of their past." This is not meant to be literal, as these so-called ghosts will generally be no more dead than any other offworlder. Your ghost can be anyone who "haunts" you in some way, which can mean whatever makes sense to you. It does not necessarily need to be someone with a negative opinion of you--- it can be someone who loves you very much! This person can be from any point in your timeline, including after the incident that brought you to Pumpkin Hollow. It can also be a past version of yourself. Regardless, your own visitor is not actually the person you are here to meet. Your visitor will be meeting with one of your friends or loved ones from the island, and you will be meeting with someone else's "ghost."

When speaking to a "ghost", you will notice a few things about them. The first is that they do have a sense of where they are and what they're doing---- they know that they're here temporarily, and that they've been asked to speak about or on behalf of someone they know. They're aware of who the person is that they've come to speak about as well, and they seem to have all of their memories intact aside from being a little fuzzy on the actual process of getting here. The second is that in most cases, they seem to have regular needs like any living person. The upper floors of the visitor's center have hostel-like sleeping areas, bathrooms, a cafe, everything a person might need. The third is that they seem to be weirdly forthcoming when asked questions. Perhaps you're not familiar enough with the individual to notice such things at first, but it becomes evident that they're pretty open about the person they're there to speak about even when they don't seem to want to be.

Want to speak to your own visitor? That can be arranged--- but your ghost must speak to someone else first. But not to worry, there's plenty of time. (Despite the IC dates, OOCly this can be backtagged as long as desired!)

Locations.
There are plenty of places to meet with visitors within the Visitor's Center. If you'd prefer a more public meeting space, some lounge areas have been set up on the beach, or the cafe or recreation area within the center are all available. The beach meeting spaces consist of clusters of folding beach chairs or picnic blankets, and while swimming season is largely over, the view from the beach continues to be stunning this month. The cafe is a quaint bistro on the rooftop of the center with a round serving station in the middle and outdoor tables around the outer walls, which feels both spacious and intimate at the same time somehow. And the recreation room is an interior space on the second floor full of spaces for communal games, some of which are too modern to be there. (Not electronics, but definitely Cards Against Humanity.)

If you'd prefer a more private space, there are a number of tasteful meeting rooms, including those with tables as if for a more formal meeting or those with couches or chairs. One of the latter sort even has a fireplace!

However, visitors are not able to go further afield than the beach. If they attempt to go into town, their feet will plant themselves firmly to the ground outside. They will not be able to be pushed or lifted to get around this, and anyone who attempts to force it will be summarily accosted by the staff and their appointment will end immediately. They may not be eligible for another.

Rules.
As far as OOC rules go, there are a few perks and limitations worth knowing. Any "ghosts" that you write are eligible for AC bonuses for the characters they are attached to. If you are writing a ghost for another player's character, you may decide where the AC bonus goes, but please make a note on your activity check indicating what you're doing. You may write your ghost from your existing journal (with or without a unique icon for that ghost, just as long as you make it clear), or create an independent journal for the character. As mentioned before, you can absolutely play a ghost for someone else. If you would like to have a non-member friend drop by to play your ghost, you may absolutely do so if you clear it with a mod, preferably by having said friend send the mod journal a PM. Be aware that if you recruit an outside player to write a ghost for you, you are responsible for their behavior, and any AC-length threads on their end will not be eligible for transfer because that will just kill Drake probably.

Characters appearing from Ghosts of the Past can also appear in the Villain's Lounge or be apped in later as permanent characters (but not both, as the two are mutually exclusive) and will have some unique lore from entering the game this way!

Ghosts are not capable of lying and will generally feel more compelled to be forthcoming when speaking to anyone OTHER than the person they're here to represent. However, they cannot be forced to meet with anyone they do not want to see or to answer questions they adamantly do not wish to answer. The compulsions are relatively subtle. They also do not have to volunteer information they weren't asked for if they don't want to. None of these compulsions are present if they speak to the person they are there to see. Their memories are generally accurate to whatever point you bring them from, meaning that they can be whatever you want.

If you're visiting with your own ghost, please be aware that threads between two characters played by the same person are never eligible for AC and this is still the case in this instance.

Staff.
Last but not least, there's a chance that you may encounter the staff of the Visitor's Center around. There are two men and two women--- Daanon, Caspian, Reyelle, and Nephera, respectively. Those here in February may recognize them from Merrymeet. They look fairly normal, generally appearing as humans (or an elf, in Nephera's case), but in reality they are the members of the Court of Betrayal. Whenever they speak about their "Manager," they are referring to Eligos. However, this is not immediately obvious, especially to those not familiar with these particular demons. If you know, you know! [ I will be keeping my demon thread load super light, so please feel free to handwave interactions with them as you see fit! If you want a demon thread, please reach out to me for plotting. -Rose ]

CODE BY MARWOOD

Comments

[apocryphalarchivist]

"They've got a fair few here," Jon notes, clearly a bit fond. "But I do appreciate your time."

He takes a drag of his own, quiet and contemplative, before he speaks. It's hard to pick a place to begin, with so much history to unfold from their end; even with so many statements he's received, it's hard to understand the full scope of what he's trying to see.

"Would you mind starting from the beginning for me? Their hiring, I suppose. What they were like, how things went, that sort of thing."

[restingslasherface]

"Their hiring?" The surprise on her face is mild, but very present. One eyebrow raises. "I can't truly go back that far, that was a few layers removed from my authority or perception. I first encountered Jean when we had the opportunity to request specific trainees for our teams." She looks down at her cigarette, and flicks the remnants into a tray. No sooner is she opening her box of smokes to find it empty than a staff member comes in, cheerful and subservient, to replace it with a new box along with a fresh set of matches.

She watches the staff member leave, expression unreadable. "...I don't think I trust those people," she opines, in that soft, confident voice. And yet she takes a new cigarette, and lights up.

The still-burning match lands in the tray without looking.

"Where was I...right. There were dossiers, which Angela was kind enough to read out for me. Jean scored high in general combat, diligence, and showed an affinity for Fortitude and Justice classifications, suggesting excellent potential for the sort of work the Disciplinary Department does. The background check, though...kid from the Backstreets, looking for a better life, clawing their way out of the blood..."

"They reminded me of myself, so I put in the request for them at headquarters. My own team, in Disciplinary."

[apocryphalarchivist]

Jon watches the staff member in, taking no care to hide the fact that he's a bit perturbed by how quickly they appeared, knowing just what she'd need, and vanishing. At least Gebura doesn't trust them; that bodes well for her not simply being some sort of demonic copy of herself.

"That makes two of us. I haven't got a clue what they are, but as long as they're being lovely for now, I'll take it."

Once more, music scratches at the back of his mind. He isn't sure what of Jean's world causes that to happen, but it's clear that it's not just them, at least. He rolls over everything she's said, connecting bits and pieces where he's able. Each part begins to paint a clearer picture of the City, in all it's truly gruesome glory.

"If I may backtrack, to get some context directly from you, though I've got a decent idea already... what were the Backstreets like?"

CW child endangerment, child death, suicide, death, violence, medical torture, enslavement

[restingslasherface]

Oh no Jon. You know this look on someone. Maybe the barrier will keep you out of her nightmares? But then again, maybe it won't. It's meant to concentrate harm, after all. Either way, right here, and right now, for at least the few weeks she's here, you will know the...

Statement of Gebura, Patron Librarian of the Floor of Language, Regarding Her Origins And The Lessons Learned Therefrom

It's so telling. This is a woman of few words, even the Eye can see that, and the cadence of her voice is alien to her as they start to spill forth.

"We speak of the Backstreets as if they are one thing, but they are not. Each District contains a central Nest, controlled in turn by its Wing, the corporations which rule it and set its taboos. But through malice or negligence or incompetence, there are domains beyond the Nests, and these are the Backstreets, where no law but that of the Head reigns unless the desperate citizens decree it so. I believe Jean comes from the L-Corp Backstreets, which are known, culturally, for their plethora of cannibal chefs, once to include the famous Eight Chefs, who are now dead and fallen. That such gourmands are both despised and profitable may paint you more of a picture than I ever could."

Some nameless urge encourages Gebura to finally find a seat. She flicks her half-smoked cigarette into the tray - it lands perfectly, sliding rather than bouncing - before immediately lighting another. Her first long drag, with the faintest tremor in her hand, obscures her face in smoke when she exhales.

"Two lifetimes ago, I was born on the Backstreets as a girl named Kali, with no one to look out for me. I think...I think I was six years old, when a grown man as desperate as I was attacked me. It's a common story, in life on the Backstreets, but I won. He died at my hands, and I took from him what I needed to start renting an apartment, where I could escape the Night on the Backstreets. The people there were kind to their small neighbor. Maybe another kid dying would have been the final straw on their sanity. They gave of what little they had so that I could eat, and I was grateful, so grateful. I resolved to become a Fixer so that I could protect them, and give back."

A pillar of ash falls from the cigarette onto the back of Gebura's hand, burning the skin there. She does not flinch. Perhaps she does not even notice.

"When I grew older, my neighbors broke into my apartment. Tied me up, and searched my home for money. How outrageous. How ungrateful. That's what I thought at the time. They picked through my garbage like vermin, trying to take me for all I had. I was an adult, then, or adult enough, a callow thing who couldn't understand their betrayal. I understand it now, but then...then I broke my bonds and then their bodies, leaving them alive and in terror. But I couldn't bring myself to kill them. I took my things and I vanished into the press of humanity, to make my own way. That's when I met Carmen."

"How to describe Carmen..."

Another soft drag. Gebura's voice changes, becomes strange - distant, wondrous, but also, just ever-so-subtly, terrified.

"Life on the Backstreets is cruel. It is violent. It is harsh. What few laws exist are set by criminal Syndicates, and the Night on the Backstreets is prowled by the monstrous Sweepers who eat all 'refuse', here to include whatever human prey cannot find shelter or a safe place to hide. But Carmen strode those streets unarmed, and unafraid. She spoke to hardened killers, and they wept at her feet, and begged to join her cause. She was radiant, glorious, like basking in the sun itself. Everything she said made sense; every expression of care and solidarity was said without the faintest trace of irony or manipulation. She saw a protector in me, like I had wanted to be, and offered me a chance to be that person. How could I say anything but yes? How could anyone? When Carmen spoke, disagreement was unthinkable. So I followed her, further than the Backstreets, outside the City walls and into the truly lawless Outskirts where monsters and exiles reign, to the lab of a startup that would become Lobotomy Corporation."

She taps ash onto the table, and in it she draws a logo, with remarkable skill. Another drag; this cigarette has not survived long, and is immediately succeeded by another.

"The mission statement of Lobotomy Corporation, helmed by Carmen and Ayin, was to 'cure the sickness of the soul' at the root of all human cruelty. I worked security; I was not told much, and understood less, though...I understand more now. What I knew at the time was that we contained dangerous, inhuman things known as Abnormalities, and could extract the substance necessary for the great work from them. These 'Cogito' experiments were slow going for our primary goal, but along the way 'aspects' of these Abnormalities could be extracted, and formed into useful technology. I was given a prototype of the weapon now known as Mimicry, extracted from the Abnormality whose name is Nothing There."

"Nothing There is a sad, pathetic thing. An amalgamation of skin, parts, organs, orifices, eyes, set in a bovine mockery of humanity, weeping and crying and carrying on. Left unattended, or mishandled, it will hollow out a human being and wear their skin as a shell while it attempts to blend in with us. However, Nothing There can only repeat simple words and phrases, and struggles with context. It is, inevitably, discovered, and when it is it morphs its shell into a towering mass of bare, bleeding muscle in a humanoid shape, with which it goes on a sorrowful rampage. I'm sure if you have been associating with Jean, you know by now that equipment derived from Cogito technology - E.G.O. weapons and armor - forms a connection with its originating Abnormality. So it was with the prototype of Mimicry, through which Nothing There babbled constantly into my mind, an endless stream of nonsense and distractions."

"Until it wasn't."

Her eyes only left Jon's to draw that symbol earlier. They stay steady now, but her expression, already stoic, becomes, if anything, harder. More blank.

"It asked me: don't you want a human shell too? And by that question it did what no one else ever had. It destroyed me. In a single moment I was forced to re-evaluate everything that made me who I was. The bitterness that drove me from my home, the violence that I cultivated to feel safe, my desires, my fears, the despair that had been bolted to my bones like cybernetics. It was a teetering, shattering moment, a knife's edge between glory and destruction, and I found glory. Something inside of me was what Lobotomy Corporation had been looking for, and it crowned me in armor forged of my deepest and most heartfelt desires. A warrior's regalia, fit to protect even the weakest of souls. Eminently useful for testing. In the time that I explored this power, the City named me the Red Mist, a warrior beyond classification, while Carmen's experiments advanced. Until it came crashing down..."

Slowly, deliberately, with every sign of intent, Gebura stubs her cigarette out against the back of her hand, leaving a perfectly circular burn.

"There was a boy, in Carmen's care. Enoch was his name. He volunteered for a Cogito experiment, an attempt to awaken in him what had awoken in me. And he died. It broke Carmen, it broke so many of us, but Carmen...she slit her wrists in a bathtub, and her loss destroyed Ayin. He vowed to bring her back, to remake her as a machine. It all went to hell. Machine-minds are forbidden by the Head, and their hunters came to us, even as there was a mass breach of the Abnormalities. I gave battle to one of the terrifying Arbiters, the both of us weakened and dying from the Abnormalities, while everyone I had sworn to protect screamed their last, begging to live, begging for someone, anyone, to help them. Begging for me to protect them. But I didn't. The Arbiter and I died fighting one another, and I awoke in a machine's body, to be told that I was the Sephirot Gebura, Head of the Disciplinary Team, at Lobotomy Corporation Headquarters. Such were the circumstances in which I chose your comrade to be my subordinate."

She lets out a breath, and if you pretend just a little, it's not even shaking. And then she blinks.

"...I don't normally talk that much."

[apocryphalarchivist]

There is a dawning terror in realizing what he's done as Jon listens to Gebura lay her entire life out before him, a stranger who hasn't even so much as shared his name. He hadn't meant to, he really hadn't--- but intention meant nothing when it was already happening.

The least he could do was listen, commit it to memory, and bear the weight of that world right along with her.

Bear it he does, finally having that true and complete image of Gebura, not as a manager, or even an ally, but a victim of this place, of it's vicious systems that tear and rend people for ounces of profit in its wake. To an extent, he's sure now that there's few who aren't victims of this place. It's a difficult thing to conceive of, but it's not all that different from the distant course charted by his own world, is it?

That's a harrowing thought. He shelves that for now.

"It's alright," Jon murmurs. His own cigarette has long since burned out, and he opens his hand, sweeping the fallen ashes from the table, dropping them into the ash tray. "I appreciate you sharing that with me. It... helps to paint a clear picture, of everything that comes as part of having been from your and Jean's world. All the loss associated with that."

He isn't going to share that the statement was his fault. She doesn't know that such a thing as he exists, something that can steal her grim past through her own lips, and he'll spare her from that knowledge for as long as he's able.

[restingslasherface]

"Yes. Loss. Sorrow is our true companion, more faithful than any lover. Its embrace is hard to leave." Gebura closes her eyes, to steady herself. To cease the shaking at her core.

"...They aren't returning to me. Are they?"

[apocryphalarchivist]

"I don't know that they are, ma'am."

Jon can, at the very least, be honest with her about that part.

"I'm sorry. Were it in my control, I'd offer you a place here, as well. Quite frankly, I think the entire lot of you need a separate world to jump ship to."

[restingslasherface]

"...No. We need to clean up our own mess. Removed from our circumstances, collectively, we would only make them again, by force if necessary. Probably even if not." Her fingers brush the fresh burn on the back of her hand, and Gebura's eyes open, finding Jon's with a soft, unstoppable intensity, as cutting as her blade.

"I don't know if any of Jean's other companions will deign to speak to me. I must seem like a beast to these people, with their glorious lives of peace, and of love, a life I have not earned for myself yet. So...permit me to burden you with a request, friend of my friend, who may never know that I call them that in the silence of my heart. Tell them that I release them from all obligation owed to me, not because they are unwanted. Not because they are unworthy. Not because they are weak. But because I can think of no higher honor than to do whatever little I can to help them pursue their truest desires, to touch their inner glory that has been denied them but still lives there, undimmed and unconquered. Will you do this for me?"

Wrap?

[apocryphalarchivist]

Oh, what a weight of guilt her concerns come with. It wasn't that long ago that Jon was among them, someone who wouldn't have wanted to speak with her, or who would have had some misguided choice words for her. He won't let her know this, either. That's a burden he will have to bear in the stead of the one she feels she's putting on him.

"Of course. I'll tell them, word for word, and do all I can to make sure they understand. It's no burden to me. It's the least I can offer you, really, after all you've told me."

He stands at last, slow and deliberate. He thinks to bid her farewell there, to give her the space she's well-earned, but he lingers for a simple moment more. He knows that, as soon as she returns, it's back to everything she's described. That the life they have here is so far beyond her reach. But still, he speaks, quiet and genuine.

"I hope you're able to earn such a life for yourself, and when you do, you don't feel undeserving of it. Even if it feels like it's come to you when you're certain your suffering shouldn't be over yet."

Wrap

[restingslasherface]

She smiles. It is not like Jean's smiles in their three dozen shades of practice, each suited for a different occasion; it is small, and unfamiliar to Gebura's face. It is confident, and it is unconscious, unknown to the one who smiles it.

"If I am truly skilled at anything of real worth, it is being born anew. I will take your hopes with me."

She lights up again, and makes no move to stop Jon from leaving.