September Event - Waltz of the Harlequin

[pumpkinhollow]

**Plain text version here.

WALTZ OF THE HARLEQUIN

ACT ONE: MAKE AN ENTRANCE

{ CONTENT WARNINGS: None }

SCENE: Leeds Estate Ballroom, night. Music can be heard from a small string band in the corner. Enter PARTYGOERS, stage right.

The estate is beautifully decorated, as it always is, in vivid blues against dark wood. Flowers made from blue and golden silk adorn the walls and furniture. Candles burn in tasteful centerpieces on the round dining tables. Delicious-looking foods can be seen on the serving tables, ready to be claimed and devoured. A member of DAHLIA’S diligent staff tends an ornate bar near the door and dancers in fine clothes twirl on the dance floor to upbeat string music.

DAHLIA can be seen in the center of the room, wearing a golden gown embroidered with roses and surrounded by her ENTOURAGE, which consists of DAISY, LAIOS, RADAR, and JEFF. All of them wear the colors of House Leeds---- blue and gold. She welcomes the PARTYGOERS warmly.

DAHLIA, going for an appropriate greeting for the person she is speaking to--- a handshake, a hug, a kiss on the cheek.
Welcome. So glad you could make it. You look ravishing. Please help yourself to something to eat, and enjoy your night.

It is a beautiful night. Formal only in appearances, the energy of the Gala is casual and light, if not a bit decadent. All seems well.

ACT TWO: ALL IS REVEALED

{ CONTENT WARNINGS: rotten food, blood, forced body transformation, unreality. }

SCENE: Leeds Estate Ballroom, one hour later. The party is well underway. When the grandfather clock chimes, it sounds strange and distorted.

The sound immediately draws the attention of DAHLIA, who grows concerned. The sour chiming continues. In the center of the ballroom, a plume of sickly yellow smog bursts as if from a smoke bomb, flooding the room and causing PARTYGOERS to stagger and cough. When it fades, the environment has changed.

Enter MENDEL, from the smoke burst.

The decor in the space has changed drastically. Where once the space was deep, cool browns and shades of blue accented with gold, it is now filled with ruddy browns, jaundiced yellows, plummy purples, and searing reds. The bundles of silk flowers are replaced with bouquets of decaying fishing nets, bloody gauze, and rotten fruit which seems to bloom from splitting bruises. Tattered swags in mismatched patterns line the walls, and each PARTYGOER is now in a masquerade mask designed to fit with their outfit.

DAHLIA, lightly panicked.
What are you doing here?

MENDEL, laughing raucously.
Surprise! Oh, I do so hate to cut in, but I simply could not go another year without doing something special for my favorite niece.

He wraps his arms, which look like graying, exposed meat, around DAHLIA.

MENDEL
You see, everyone---- Darling Dahlia here has been lying to you. Her whole life, even! Can you believe it? You see, her father was never Japhet Leeds. The man couldn’t stand her! Jane Leeds was still her mother, oh yes, but her father---

DAHLIA attempts to cut in, but MENDEL grips her tighter, clamping a hand over her mouth as he presents her to the crowd. His claws dig into her arm and her cheek. He continues to snicker as he speaks, and DAHLIA struggles.

MENDEL
Her father is my own baby brother, Prince Aster of the Dark Feast! Isn’t that a funny prank? But I think the joke has overstayed its welcome. It’s time to show your little friends who you really are, isn’t it, princess?

In a swift motion, MENDEL pulls DAHLIA into a twirl, as if dancing, sending her spinning toward the crowd. When it ceases, DAHLIA stands before her gala, changed. Her complexion is blue now, and her hair, raven black. A pair of bat-like wings adorn her back, and a crown of antlers like that of a deer wreath her head.

MENDEL
Ah, no, that’s not quite what I was going for. Let me try again.

With a snap of MENDEL’S fingers, DAHLIA changes again, her body shifting against her will. Her well-kept black locks morph into wiry ashen hair which covers her body. Her face extends into that of a cow-like skull with sharp teeth. Her hands become clawed, and her feet become cloven hooves. Before the crowd now stands THE PINE DEVIL.

MENDEL
There’s our birthday girl!

THE PINE DEVIL (DAHLIA) attempts to lunge at MENDEL, but with another snap of his fingers, his streamers and swags lash out at her like vines and lash her tightly.

MENDEL
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some catching up to do with my darling niece. And you all have a party to enjoy! I leave you in the care of my talented assistants.

He starts to turn away, but then holds up a finger to shake and turns back. Oh, one more thing, I almost forgot. I’ve left all of you some party favors in those masks. Have fun!

MENDEL grabs a bound and helpless DAHLIA and disappears once more in another plume of smoke.

Enter BLANCHE and SEEMINGLY (GLEE MASK), opposite sides of the stage. The pair of them meet eyes, and pantomime tugging on an invisible rope in opposite directions, and suddenly the ballroom expands as if unrolled like a scroll, becoming a sprawling labyrinth of tiny ballrooms, winding corridors, and secret alcoves. The PARTYGOERS are separated from one another. At the same time, the magic in their masks activates, inflicting one of the following curses:

• Leaky Bucket: deprives the party goer of their short-term memory. They know who they are, and why they're here insofar as understanding it's Dahlia's birthday gala, but all new information tends to leave their mind after a few minutes. (Think Dory from Finding Nemo.)
• Amnesiac's Lament: deprives the individual of long-term memory. All new information is retained, but they have no idea who they are or why they're here. How distressing this is can be at the player's discretion. Perhaps they despair at the memory loss and are trying to find a way to escape the ball, perhaps they don't see anything wrong with their lack of context and are just trying to enjoy this weird party.
• False Friend: the opposite of Zone of Truth, those with this affliction will be unable to tell the truth and can ONLY tell lies. Any fact from the most mundane to the most complex can only be lied about. Whether or not the person is cognizant of their new habit is the player's choice.
• The World Revolving: those afflicted suffer frequent bouts of vertigo which makes the space feel as though it is spinning, sometimes very slowly, sometimes very quickly.
• Dirge of Delusion: this particular curse will cause the mask-wearer to struggle to perceive reality correctly. Objects will appear as other objects, people as different people, rooms as some other place, or even the entire ball as somewhere entirely different. These disorienting visions will come and go at times.
• Feeling Funny: the wearers of these masks will find that their emotions are completely out of control, sometimes bursting into fits of laughter, tears, or abrupt paranoia, before going completely numb for a while.

All PARTYGOERS will find their masks incapable of being removed. Those with infernal resistance from NEIL or the HOUSE OF CARDS will find their masks are less impactful, but the resistance is imperfect. However, ALICE DYER and SAMAMA KHALID will find that they have absolutely no effect from the masks at all, due to the BOON OF DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY acquired by ALICE.

The party resumes.

ACT THREE: Dance with the Devil

{ CONTENT WARNINGS: rotten food being eaten, imprisonment, impending violence }

SCENE: a distorted Leeds Estate, time unknown. As the party devolves into chaos, a clandestine meeting is arranged to locate the host.

Somewhere in the distorted estate, ALICE locates JEAN. Once she gets the Golden Wolf Mask in their hands, JEAN will be able to remove their current mask to wear the new one, which has a unique effect---- the ability to see the path of MENDEL through its eyes.

JEAN and ALICE, along with anyone they are able to recruit for help, will find MENDEL and DAHLIA on the second floor, which has transformed into a large theater balcony overlooking the party. DAHLIA is caged, and MENDEL seems to be enjoying the view as he eats half-rotten tomatoes as if they are apples.

MENDEL’S assailants choose how to make their approach. When he is destroyed, the party will end.

GRAND FINALE

{ CONTENT WARNINGS: fire }

SCENE: Leeds Estate ballroom, late night. The stage has returned to its prior state, and we are left to the aftermath.

When MENDEL is at last destroyed, the ballroom is restored to its normal size and coloration, as if the events of the night never occurred. Masks fall away, and DAHLIA stands center stage, looking exactly as her friends and neighbors remember her. However, the memory of what has occurred here tonight cannot be wiped away, as evidenced from all the onlookers around her. Are their expressions concerned? Angry? Fearful? Hurt?

Does it matter?

DAHLIA, quietly.
Get out.

There is a moment of stillness and consideration, before she speaks again, louder.

DAHLIA, shouting.
GET. OUT.

As she speaks the second word, a massive burst of blue flame erupts behind her. Glass breaks. Tables topple. DAHLIA’s hair flutters in the force of the blast. She stands stiffly, unafraid as the hot, raging blue flames consume her ballroom, peeling the wallpaper and cracking the wood. She means to chase everyone out, even if it means bringing the room down upon herself.

When everyone is gone, the flames seem to retreat, as if sucked up into their original blast point. DAHLIA, spent, collapses to her knees in the burnt shell of her own birthday party, and sobs.

Blackout. Curtains fall.

After the event ends, Dahlia will be absent from town and her home only open to close CR until further notice. She will not be answering her sending stone or her phone calls.

Comments

ACT FOUR-- wait, four?

[cacophonish]

(CW: unreality, body horror, brief allusions to fire/burning and self harm)

The room begins to spin.

Or maybe he's the one that's spinning. Maybe they both are, circling each other in a swirling waltz: the avatar and his reflections. With every spin, the world splinters into kaleidoscopic fragments and repetitious fractals, an infinite ballroom, seamlessly existing in reality and reflection.

He spins, surrounded by himself in various stages of being.

There he is, bloodied, flayed, and beatific, wrapping himself in a cocoon of his own skin.

There he is, arms swaying like branches, his feet splintering into roots, with skin like wood grain and bark, and he's becoming something.

There he is, contorted into a twisting impression of a person, with limbs that don't make any sense-- are his joints on backwards? Does he have too many fingers or not enough? Why do they curl the way they do?

There he is, but his face isn't a face; it's a sound. He sees himself becoming a symphony of cacophony, while his body smolders and leaves stardust for ashes.

And there he is, split open from the underside of his jaw, down to his sternum, skin peeled back to reveal six strings, running the entire length of his throat. His neck's too long. He plucks a song from his own body.

He spins, and all around him, in the infinite ballroom, the crowd grows. Figures, anonymous strangers with faces like migraines, take each other's hands and spin in a joyful, delirious dance. And oh, how he wants to join them, but every time he reaches for them, his fingers brush against the cold, flat surface of a mirror.

The party isn't here with him, it's beyond him. It's his destination. He knows this, even though he knows nothing about himself, where he's been, who he was before he became (becomes?) a what.

He stops spinning, though the dance continues and the room swirls like a whirlpool. The mirrors can't all be mirrors. He just has to find his way in. He sings a song that's nothing more than muscle memory, with no care or reverence behind it, no real magical intent. He sings to find his way--

--a mirror shatters.

He picks up a shard and he knows, without knowing, what he needs to do. His other selves are still, watching him, tracking him as he moves from one mirror, to another, and another...

And they all grin as he stabs the glass into his own reflection. It begins to bleed-- they all begin to bleed-- and he knows this is it. He's so close now. All he has to do is keep on stabbing, cutting, slicing, until he can peel away the stifling, suffocating boundaries of truth and knowing and step inside.

And that's exactly what he does. With his palm split open, and his beautiful white jacket stained red, his head swimming with delirium (or blood loss? when did he start to bleed, too?), the thing that was Jeff steps inside the mirror, to explore what lies beyond this reality and join his other selves.

A week passes in Pumpkin Hollow. A figure, distorted, its face blotted out, though it may resemble one of the many possible iterations of the avatar, may at times appear in reflections, though it never lingers.

It never lingers.

Until, one day, it appears in Leeds Estate.

In the edge of the mirror where the image fades into imagination…

[blindwatchersees]

There are colors here with no names, one that do not exist for the human eye. Along the mirror’s narrow edge, along the inside of its silvered surface, something runs adjacent to the Never-There.

Do you know where an idea goes, when it becomes something else? It isn’t truly dead, because the shape of the thing made anew relies on what once was. The existence of a vanished thing is traced in its footprints and its fingerprints, and in a world of ideas, the vanished become an idea of an idea. They are firmly defined as something Never There.

The well-dressed mer sits at a tea terrace, watching Jeff with some curiosity through a haze of dream-like fancy and a twice-distorted song.

[cacophonish]

He doesn't question the presence of the elf-looking guy sitting at the tea terrace. He doesn't even question the terrace, itself. It's here, and seeing as he doesn't even know where here is, who's he to say what 'should' and 'shouldn't' exist?

Jeff-- and he is Jeff now, in some hazy, half-remembered way-- approaches, pulling the mask from his face and tossing it aside as he pulls up a chair.

"Is this it?" he asks, laughter and wonder in his voice. "The belly of the dream."

[blindwatchersees]

“Ha. The dream of the dream, more like. Or at least, that’s where I am. You, I’m not so sure about. Go on, sit down. You look like you’ve been on your feet for a fortnight.” The chair opposite him scoots out from under the table with an audible croak.

[cacophonish]

He drops the mask to the ground-- to what passes for ground, in a non-place like this-- and doesn't even watch as it drifts and sinks into the surroundings as if taken by water. He takes a seat, fingers tracing over it, over the table, testing them for existence.

"I lost myself," he admits. "Or... a piece of myself..." Jeff hums in thought. "Feels like I've been lost for years."

[blindwatchersees]

“Then, perhaps, you are in the right place. If, of course, you can call this realm a place.”

Despite the dubious reality of this place, everything feels as real to Jeff as he himself is.

“This is a place where things go when they don’t exist, but they need to be. Think of it like the subconscious of the subconscious.”

He extends a hand.

“Macaelius Athatel. Former Duke of Dementia to the Daedric Prince Sheogorath.”

[cacophonish]

"Jeff." Just a name, as though there's nothing more to him than that. He shakes the man's hand, even as he struggles to find any way to define himself. "Bard, guitarist, lead singer of..." Does it even matter anymore? The band's long gone. Jeff's long gone.

Anyway.

"I know him. Sheogorath. He's like..." Jeff smiles faintly. "A teacher. Inspiration."

[blindwatchersees]

Macaelius smiles faintly.

“He is those things, yes. I… well, I would say I owe him a great deal, but a mer who doesn’t exist doesn’t really owe anything to anyone. I suppose that’s one advantage of all of this.”

He drums his fingers on the table. They’re long, slender, ever so slightly alien in proportion, fitting with his pointed ears and his angular temples.

“Might I ask how you misplaced yourself? No one seems to come here with a trivial tale.”

[cacophonish]

"I think..." Jeff's eyes drift to the drumming fingers, and how uncanny they look. Human enough, but beyond human, as well. He uses them as a point of focus, listens to the light tap-tapping as his mind drifts back. One year, two years, twenty-five.

"I started losing myself when I let it--" No, try again. He didn't let Ziggy in; he called it, whether he intended to or not. On some level, he sought it out. He's always been. "When I invited it in. This magical, beautiful... thing. In here." He drums his fingers on his temple, then traces them down to his heart. "That's when I started to see things that no, um, mortal? No real, living, flesh and blood thing was ever supposed to." There's a rueful smile now. "Not without going mad anyway."

The way he says it, it's like he's trying to stifle a laugh. It sounds so ridiculous, doesn't it?

Jeff places a hand down on the table, then, and after a few seconds, lifts it, revealing a flower growing out of the surface. He plucks it without a care, almost viciously.

"So I guess I was going mad. It lived in me for a year, and then.... Then I was plucked from one reality and planted in another." One by one, he begins ripping the petals off and tossing them aside. "And it was gone. Just like that."

It was gone, but the pain of Ziggy's abrupt absence felt infinite and vast, impossible to overcome. Funny, he used to hate it. Its endless presence was like torture, one bad trip that wouldn't end. And the silence, the return to normal and real, was even worse.

"Something else grew in its place." New petals begin to blossom on the ragged flower, twisted, spiraling outward. "And it was... Different. Wrong, I guess. But it was in me, and... and it was what I--" Deserved. "--needed, so I tended to it. It is me, and I am it, and then I died and woke up and died again and my body walked into a mirror, and here I am."

A beat.

"That last death was metaphorical."

[blindwatchersees]

He leans back, deep in thought, staring up at a sky made of shifting stained glass panes loosely formed into brass-framed flowers. There’s a wistful smile creeping onto his lips.

“I used to think so little of madmen. I thought them wasteful and weak, so unable to search for sense in the world that they had given up. Ironically, it was only when I accepted that the world would never make sense that I felt free. All my life, I had chained myself to the idea that there was a normalcy to the world, a way things ought to be, a sensible undercurrent in a churning sea of delirium. Perhaps I feared what would happen if those waves of chaos dashed me against the rocks and broke me. But when I did break, I found I’d kept quite a lot trapped inside of me. It gladdens me to hear that you took that chance, even if the consequences weren’t exactly what you were ready for.”

He drums his fingers on the table again.

“Looking glasses seem to have a strong connection to madness, but I couldn’t tell you why. I know Lord Sheogorath could still see me in the mirror for quite some time, even after my vanishing.”