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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
His gaze is far away, over the lobby of the library. “Even in Korea, where one body was enough to leave a man with a lifetime’s worth of nightmares, and we processed thousands… we laughed. Quite a lot. We had no shortage of pranksters and jokesters, and I marveled at them. I marveled at the stories of the soldiers who passed through our unit, the lives so different from mine that they lead… language teachers, dam engineers, florists. And all the moments they were so… kind. Even here. Even when everyone was suffering their own battles. Over and over again, I saw people unable to do anything but be kind to another person. It doesn’t feel like hoping when I see beauty right in front of me.”
…
“And there were the insects,” he says, “and the sun, and the rain, and the plants that grew around us, even after the Army razed it with herbicides and pesticides. Each creature a precious child of—“ not Creation, Gaeta’s not Christian, “—of the Earth. The universe. Even in Korea, it rained.”
And then he points. He gestures to the people moving about, to those doing first aid, to those speaking softly to panicked voices, to those running about asking what else, what else can I do?
“Pay attention, Gaeta. Now that you’ve seen the very worst of what the world has to offer, watch the way in which we also choose, over and over again, to offer relief. Hope is the opposite to despair, but the cure to despair is not hope, just like the cure for sick is not healthy. You may fight to hold onto it, but if you’ve lost it, you can’t simply will it into existence; you have to find something else that will get you there. From what I can tell, I believe that the cure to despair is awe.”
no subject
With everyone scarred and strained to breaking, the small kindnesses on Galactica never quite felt like this. Not deliberate acts -- just desperate grasps at normalcy like the reflexive spasms of something dying. Still, he thinks of Triad games in the rec room; Dee and him shooting the shit on a closed comm line when they were both on duty, talking about old TV shows, Dee inventing terrible new plot lines just to make Gaeta groan; stolen moments with Louis in the rare private corners of the battlestar. Little gifts passed between soldiers from the scrap: where are you from? I found this magazine with an article about your hometown. Ishay holding his hand the whole way through his amputation. How incredible, in hindsight, that anyone could be kind at all after such devastation.
"I never thought of it like that," he whispers. Curiosity is a close cousin of awe, and Gaeta has always had a scientist's curiosity for the universe. Just like any scientific breakthrough, it seems the most obvious, natural thing in the worlds, now that he's heard Mulcahy say it. "Of course. I remember -- " A small, self-deprecating huff. "I remember crying when I got on the ferry and could smell the ocean. I felt like that all the time when I first got here. Awe," he repeats, like he's tasting the word. "We're on a whole, living planet. And we're in a frakked-up little town where no matter how frakked up it gets, people still..."
They still smile and say hello. They extend a hand. They shield one another.
no subject
Mulcahy watches them go.
"It's impossible for them not to," he remarks quietly. "Even in the Village, in the smallest ways we tried to offer each other a little relief. And a little relief has a remarkable resemblance to a lot."
no subject
"I wouldn't say it's impossible." No louder than Mulcahy. "But... I guess that makes it even more remarkable it happens at all. It didn't feel like relief on Galactica most of the time -- it felt like desperation, you know? Trying to pretend we were still a society. There were too many calculations to keep humanity alive and no margin for error."
cw blood/gore mention
Wisecracking as they were while the ambulances spilled blood off their floors when the doors opened. Counting how many double-dutch jumpropes you can get as you wait to hear back about a patient whose stomach they took out. Gaeta knows that only half of his nightmares are still about the Village.
"It just makes it all the more important, to be able to do such things when the world tries to make it that much harder."
no subject
"How rare and beautiful it is to even exist." He whispers it, too soft to have much of a melody; a filmy shadow of what he sang in the nightmare. (But still, he sings.) "I'm glad I met you. If there was no chance someone like you would ever be in the Fleet -- at least I met you here."
no subject
"I'm simply glad to have met you at all. Certainly these are the best circumstances I could have done it under. There was... no helping anything that happened in Korea or after."
He squeezes Gaeta's hand back. "Sometimes here isn't much better. I'll have to leave soon, you know. There are others who need help. And I need to close the cemetery."
no subject
Oh, he loves him.
He tugs on their joined hands so he can lay a kiss on the back of Mulcahy's. "When you have to go," he says, "I'll call to check in. Will you be able to come back here?"
no subject
How unutterably sweet Gaeta is to him, even like this.
"I must warn you, I may not always be able to answer; no doubt I'll have to do some sneaking around. But I will call you back the second I'm able to. I can promise you that."
no subject
The smallest, crooked smile.
"My turn to wait. I'll be fine. Just -- be careful, all right?"
wrapping
But today he is here. And being here, he reaches up to hold Gaeta's face very carefully, and not jostling his head, kisses his cheek.
"I will do my best."