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ph_logs2025-05-21 07:05 pm
pumpkinhollow) wrote in ph_logs2025-05-21 07:05 pm
Entry tags:
May Event - All Too Familiar
May Event - All Too Familiar
Content Warnings: Walking dead, character deaths, potential for gore | Special Thanks to Meghan and Kalineh
It was a fine spring day when mysterious letters began cropping up all over Pumpkin Hollow. Letters whose apparent senders do not remember writing them, whose recipients or discoverers were harmed by reading them. Eventually these mysteries, though still unsolved, come to a quiet halt as stealthily as they began, but not before a mail carrier in a cowboy hat trots out to Elsie’s tree with a letter in hand, unmarked aside from being addressed to her.
Elsie,
River la Croix has been hiding something in her forge for a while now. It is called the Book of the Dead. In its pages are hundreds of spells from across time and space with the power to give life to those no longer with us.
Your father is doing his best to revive your mother. But this island’s barrier is blocking his will, resisting his magic. I can no longer watch you suffer in solitude when a solution exists. All you have to do is decipher the text, and its powers are yours. Your mother will be returned to you.
River does not want to part with it. She will become suspicious of you if you ask, and it will become harder to acquire it. You will have to take it without her notice by levitating it out of her forge. She, like many others, is fearful of the Book’s power. This fear isn’t entirely unwarranted for them, but for you, your connection to the Feywilds’ magic will be enough to grant you access to that otherworldly power.
Good luck, and all my love to your dear mother when she returns.
Fond regards,
A friend
Could this be it? Could this be the miracle she's been waiting for? Hope swells painfully in her chest as she clutches the note close. She mustn't celebrate too early. She still needs to get the book. At least her mysterious friend has already told her where to find it. Her jaw sets in a look of determination, and she speeds away into the dusk.
It doesn't take long to reach the forge. River has defended it well, but Elsie slips into her own shadow and sneaks beneath the door without so much as a whisper of sound. Only her hand extends from the puddle of shadow on the floor inside, like a disembodied arm hovering before the flames. Mustering her will, she reaches out to the ancient book and commands the winds to lift it. Sweat beads her shadowy brow while she concentrates, the flames flicker and dance around the slowly levitating book. Just a little more, a little more… There!
It's heavy in her hand, and remarkably cool to the touch despite having been pulled from the fire. She retracts her arm and the book back into her shadow and slips out the way she came. Her heart thumps in her chest as she races back to the safety of her tree. To her mother, who will soon be able to wrap flesh and blood arms around her like she once did. All that's left now is to read. Her friends have been teaching her how. Her mother will be so proud of her.
Carefully now, she opens the book, feeling her skin crawl as a sudden unease grips her very core. No, she will not be deterred. The language is unlike any she's ever seen. The letters, if indeed they can be called that, feel jagged and painful to her mind. Still, she will Not Give Up. She screws her eyes shut, thinks of her mother, and holds tight to her desperate hope to be reunited.
When her eyes reopen to behold the page before her, understanding strikes like lightning. Suddenly, she knows she can speak the words. As they escape her mouth, an unknown magic swells into the space around her, then beyond her. The ground shakes. The air turns foul. And as the trinkets in Elsie’s tree chime together in the unsettling breeze, ringing out with notes more sour than usual, it quickly becomes clear that the advice she received was not from any friend.
The forms of people begin to pry themselves loose from the ground all over town, as if emerging from water, leaving the ground unbroken as they lift themselves out of the ground. They bear horrid injuries, shambling along grotesquely, telling a story of death. However, these are not skeletons from the graveyard, housing the souls of long-dead locals. These are things of flesh and blood, however exposed they might be, wearing newer faces.
Much newer.
Since the barrier went up, many people have died, only to have their bodies vanish and replaced by a new one. Those bodies now walk the town, seeking to unleash a wrath brought on by the corrupted magic of the Necronomicon. Anyone who has died inside the barrier will have a violent, undead copy of themself representing each death wandering the island looking to increase their ranks. Which means that there will be many, many, many Yoricks.
Destroyed copies will remain destroyed for the standard overnight period of any other person. But there are too many of them to defeat this way, and their destruction is impermanent. Thankfully, help is on the way!
In the midst of the undead and their attack on the citizens of Pumpkin Hollow, tiny glimmers of hope appear in the form of folded paper birds. The little gold birds flit from fighter to fighter, small whispers promising that if enough enemies can be felled then the High Priestess can intervene. The necessary number is unknown, but if a bird alights upon someone, they will feel their weariness vanish for a short time, and perhaps, should she feel like it, they may receive a temporary boon to use against the undead.
Eventually the High Priestess will show herself, making good on the promises of the little birds. With a smile, her magic will wrap around the remaining undead, returning them to the unseen graves and binding them into Death once more, leaving the living to pick up the pieces.
She gleefully rips open that letter, hoping it's another message from her father. It isn't and, at first, she's crushed. But only until she starts to actually read it.
Elsie,
River la Croix has been hiding something in her forge for a while now. It is called the Book of the Dead. In its pages are hundreds of spells from across time and space with the power to give life to those no longer with us.
Your father is doing his best to revive your mother. But this island’s barrier is blocking his will, resisting his magic. I can no longer watch you suffer in solitude when a solution exists. All you have to do is decipher the text, and its powers are yours. Your mother will be returned to you.
River does not want to part with it. She will become suspicious of you if you ask, and it will become harder to acquire it. You will have to take it without her notice by levitating it out of her forge. She, like many others, is fearful of the Book’s power. This fear isn’t entirely unwarranted for them, but for you, your connection to the Feywilds’ magic will be enough to grant you access to that otherworldly power.
Good luck, and all my love to your dear mother when she returns.
Fond regards,
A friend
Could this be it? Could this be the miracle she's been waiting for? Hope swells painfully in her chest as she clutches the note close. She mustn't celebrate too early. She still needs to get the book. At least her mysterious friend has already told her where to find it. Her jaw sets in a look of determination, and she speeds away into the dusk.
It doesn't take long to reach the forge. River has defended it well, but Elsie slips into her own shadow and sneaks beneath the door without so much as a whisper of sound. Only her hand extends from the puddle of shadow on the floor inside, like a disembodied arm hovering before the flames. Mustering her will, she reaches out to the ancient book and commands the winds to lift it. Sweat beads her shadowy brow while she concentrates, the flames flicker and dance around the slowly levitating book. Just a little more, a little more… There!
It's heavy in her hand, and remarkably cool to the touch despite having been pulled from the fire. She retracts her arm and the book back into her shadow and slips out the way she came. Her heart thumps in her chest as she races back to the safety of her tree. To her mother, who will soon be able to wrap flesh and blood arms around her like she once did. All that's left now is to read. Her friends have been teaching her how. Her mother will be so proud of her.
Carefully now, she opens the book, feeling her skin crawl as a sudden unease grips her very core. No, she will not be deterred. The language is unlike any she's ever seen. The letters, if indeed they can be called that, feel jagged and painful to her mind. Still, she will Not Give Up. She screws her eyes shut, thinks of her mother, and holds tight to her desperate hope to be reunited.
When her eyes reopen to behold the page before her, understanding strikes like lightning. Suddenly, she knows she can speak the words. As they escape her mouth, an unknown magic swells into the space around her, then beyond her. The ground shakes. The air turns foul. And as the trinkets in Elsie’s tree chime together in the unsettling breeze, ringing out with notes more sour than usual, it quickly becomes clear that the advice she received was not from any friend.
The forms of people begin to pry themselves loose from the ground all over town, as if emerging from water, leaving the ground unbroken as they lift themselves out of the ground. They bear horrid injuries, shambling along grotesquely, telling a story of death. However, these are not skeletons from the graveyard, housing the souls of long-dead locals. These are things of flesh and blood, however exposed they might be, wearing newer faces.
Much newer.
Since the barrier went up, many people have died, only to have their bodies vanish and replaced by a new one. Those bodies now walk the town, seeking to unleash a wrath brought on by the corrupted magic of the Necronomicon. Anyone who has died inside the barrier will have a violent, undead copy of themself representing each death wandering the island looking to increase their ranks. Which means that there will be many, many, many Yoricks.
Destroyed copies will remain destroyed for the standard overnight period of any other person. But there are too many of them to defeat this way, and their destruction is impermanent. Thankfully, help is on the way!
In the midst of the undead and their attack on the citizens of Pumpkin Hollow, tiny glimmers of hope appear in the form of folded paper birds. The little gold birds flit from fighter to fighter, small whispers promising that if enough enemies can be felled then the High Priestess can intervene. The necessary number is unknown, but if a bird alights upon someone, they will feel their weariness vanish for a short time, and perhaps, should she feel like it, they may receive a temporary boon to use against the undead.
Eventually the High Priestess will show herself, making good on the promises of the little birds. With a smile, her magic will wrap around the remaining undead, returning them to the unseen graves and binding them into Death once more, leaving the living to pick up the pieces.
no subject
"Yes, yes, I brought as much as I could carry from the clinic and it's not depleted itself too quickly so far. I'm used to making things stretch."
The 4077 had their fair share of supply shortages, you learn to make do. This is no worse than that.
There's a short stretch of quiet where she considers what or how to say anything, before for now simply settling on, "How are things going out there?"
no subject
no subject
"Good. Or— no, not good, of course, but better than I feared. If what they dead would do was easily predictable they'd still be dead."
Even a few months into being here she's not quite adjusted to the supernatural, undying nature of it all, and this flies in the face of even the few things she'd started to wrap her head around.
"It really is one thing after another with this town, isn't it?"
no subject
no subject
"Things were definitely non-stop back in Korea, but it was a familiar sort of non-stop. This is a far cry from the chaos of even a MASH unit. It's all so— strange."
An understatement, really, but she can't find a more fitting word right now.
no subject
no subject
A hum of acknowledgement. "At least in this case the solution seems fairly simple. Just kill the things. But things like those— performances and dreams..."
At least she didn't end up having to perform anything. She dreads to think.
no subject
no subject
"My thoughts exactly. It was grim enough watching everybody else. By far the worst show I've ever seen on stage."
Is that a joke? Honestly hard to say.
"I'm sure they'd have thought of some nonsense for us all given enough time. Thankfully they didn't have it."
no subject
(No, she doesn't really expect that.)
no subject
"Wouldn't that be nice," Margaret says, also not at all expecting it to be the case. Things are rarely that convenient.
A long beat.
"What you witnessed, before. There wasn't so much as a sliver of truth in it."
This is, of course, true only on the technicality that it wasn't based on any actual concrete events.
no subject
"In," she pauses, "the nightmare, you mean?"
no subject
"Yes, that," Margaret confirms, with a perfunctory sort of nod. "It was pure nonsense, I can assure you."
no subject
"Okay," she says. "You don't owe me any explanation, you know. Dreams are weird."
no subject
Some sort of tension eases, just a touch. It's probably not hard to see that Margaret is a rather— prideful woman, and that dealing with this is something she'd rather not do. But leaving it hanging was about as uncomfortable.
"Yes, well. It felt odd to not say anything at all. I've had a lot of odd dreams over the years but having people inside them is another matter entirely."
no subject
no subject
"Like being made to read someone's diary. Except it's all the parts that someone wouldn't even write down."
That's actually a little more revealing a choice of description than she intends it to be but so be it.
no subject
"Anyway ... seems like we sort of skipped the whole small talk introductions part, didn't we? I don't even know where you're from, aside from the MASH unit in Korea." A pause, and she volunteers "I'm from New York. Very very early twenty-first century."
no subject
Right, yes, this is much more agreeable a topic. "Oh I was an army brat. I was born in California, but I've been bouncing around army bases for as long as I can remember. 1950s Korea is as accurate an answer as to where I'm from as any other, at this point."
no subject
no subject
"Yes, that would be very close to how I grew up. Sometimes the army and the church aren't so different; our army chaplains still follow us to the ends of the Earth." Mulcahy, of course, being the one she's known a little better than most of those before. "I've at least visited most states and lived in—I'd say, about a third, though we didn't always stay for very long."
no subject
no subject
Margaret nods. "I've never known anything different. Even ending up here feels rather like just another deployment, if... well, an unusual one. I think I'd find it odd to be anywhere longer than a couple years."