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ph_logs2025-08-17 02:39 pm
[Seemingly's Revenge Mingle] London Fog
What: An opt-out for Seemingly's Revenge, done in a sort of mingle style. All done up because I'm extra. Martin can take people into his pocket dimension, which feeds the Fear that feeds him, all while making you immune to the violent weather. It's a fair trade, if you can stand the isolation. Most of my portion will be environmental storytelling, and characters within the space can also interact indirectly, seeing each other in the distance or interacting with the same spaces but being invisible to one another. All of this is intended to feed into the feeling of isolation. Martin isn't actively trying to harm anyone, so he won't interfere with people's attempts to find each other, but they will require substantial effort! If you want to leave, just call for him. Otherwise, Martin will pick you up after the weather subsides.
When: Anytime during the August event.
Where: The belly of the Lonely, cavernous and empty.
Warning(s): Isolation, unreality
Martin is transparent on what this will entail when he offers. You will escape the weather. No heat, no wind, no flood, no freeze. There is nothing here that can kill you--- at least, not in the time it will take for this event to subside. But in exchange, you will be swallowed by a place apart from Pumpkin Hollow, one of pure, eternal isolation that you will never escape on your own. You must place your trust in Martin to pull you out of it when it is time.
If you accept, Martin takes your hand.
"Good luck."
Your vision begins to swim, you feel faint, and though your feet never leave the ground, somehow you can feel yourself move. When your eyes focus, you are somewhere else. A sprawling graveyard, no more modern than Fall's Promise, but visibly older and larger. Angel statues loom mournfully. In the distance, a stone clock tower consumes the horizon like a monolith, looking like it belongs to some sort of... scholarly institution, if the design has anything to say about it. To the opposite side, the dark and choppy sea and a barren shoreline. Both are blanketed in a thick blue-grey fog, and so distant that you think you could walk for hours before reaching them.
Only one way to find out. Or you could sit tight for however long it takes, but something about that feels unnerving. What will you do?
{ Player characters can see each other in the distance, or interact in the same space but invisible and inaudible to each other. Finding another person will take a substantial amount of effort, aided only by the fact that Martin has no desire to actively deter you. Most of my replies will be as the environment rather than Martin himself. }
noelle holiday | deltarune | ota
She knows the voices aren't real. That's not the problem. The problem is that they are so loud, so constant, that Noelle can hardly do anything but listen to them. They keep her awake. They keep her too nauseated to eat. Over and over again, a facsimile of her sister jeers at her, calling her weak and afraid and pathetic. I'm not gone, the voice taunts. I left. And I'm not coming back.
When this stranger offers her a way out, why wouldn't Noelle accept?
Once Martin drops her off, Noelle begins wandering between the statues, running her hands against the stone wings as she comes across each one. And since she's alone, Noelle talks to nobody at all.
"Do you remember when it used to snow? You used to give me the biggest wings of them all. Sometimes I wish I could just...fly away to wherever you are."
Noelle laughs, soft and a little solemn, and the noise is swallowed up by the fog.
"Sorry. I'm being stupid. I know you're not here. Nobody's here. That's the point."
Are You Lost?
But what can he do? he wonders. He can't change the weather, he can't make them any safer, they don't even need him for healing now that Susie's gotten so good at it. Wouldn't he just be a burden?
No, a voice in the back of his head tries to insist. Kris wouldn't think he's a burden. Susie would yell at him for even thinking it. But...does that mean it's actually true?
Hasn't he seen for himself how willing his friends are to hurt themselves over things that don't really matter, in the long run?
"Oh...okay," he says quietly, holding out his hand. "I'll do it. I'll go." And he smiles weakly. "Thanks for, you know, for thinking about me..."
no subject
It's not the person she's been hearing all week. It looks like someone else she hasn't seen in a long, long time.
Noelle reaches out and touches nothing but cold, damp air.
"Asriel? Is - is that you?" Her voice sounds so small between her ears, so like how it did when she was a child. Maybe that's why she adds on a quiet, trembling: "Azzy?"
Lev/Lyubov Morgenshtern | mid-windstorms | OTA
The first thing Lev does, finding himself in a graveyard, is check that he's not standing directly on top of a grave-plot. Fortunately, he seems to have landed in a thicket just to the side of a cluster of headstones.
He walks towards the nearest one, intent on checking whose name is on it ... and what script the name is in. If this is a Jewish cemetery, or even a cemetery with a Jewish section, he has obligations.
He shivers in the fog. It's not so far from the Talons in the autumn, really, he tries to tell himself. Except the fog back home has never been so thick, nor quite so ... gloomy. He's starting to have second thoughts about agreeing to Anzu's proposition, about taking Martin's offer. He barely knows Martin, after all. Should he really have him? Sure, he frequents the tea parlour Martin's set up, and sure, Martin's Jon's ... partner? Husband? Lev realises he's not even sure of that.
The paranoia, the fear of others, of anyone outside his skull who's not reflected in a mirror, steadily rises. Its sudden viciousness surprises him.
Must be the shock of being transported.
He's reached the headstone; he focuses on the name written there, pushing the paranoia down. It does not do to be uncharitable. Especially not when Martin's vouched for implicitly. But the paranoia writhes at the back of his skull, even as he tries to shut it out.
Lev shakes himself. What has gotten into him?
no subject
Ralsei knows he can't trust these thoughts, but it can't hurt anything to sit and listen to them for a while, can it? He so rarely gets the chance to fully let the mask drop...
And it sounded like his chance was already over. Ralsei sighed, hopping to his feet. "Hello?" he called out, squinting against the thickening mist. Almost as if something wanted to keep him from finding the person who'd been calling for...Asriel?
Oh no.
"Kris?" he calls again, trying to make his voice as loud as possible. "Is that you?"
no subject
"Hello!" he calls out to them, his voice nearly swallowed by the fog. "Hey, over here!"
no subject
The voice calls out for Kris. Of course Asriel would do that - Kris is his sibling, after all. But it probably means he doesn't want to see her. As soon as the thought pops into her mind, the fog begins to swirl thickly around Noelle's ankles, as if agreeing.
"No, it's..." What does it matter who she is? Wouldn't it be better if Noelle forgot her own name? "You used to hang out with my sister. You were best friends."
Noelle takes another few steps forward, but the fog keeps nipping at her ankles, trying to pull her down, down.
"I miss you. I miss you both."
no subject
"Noelle?" His eyes widen, and he begins to move more quickly through the fog. "Is that you? Where are you?"
What is she doing here? She's not a Darkner like Ralsei, she's a real person, with parents and friends and a whole life of her own. Why is she here?
And why, Ralsei suddenly realizes, is the fog getting thicker the harder he tries to reach her? Why does he feel slower and heavier, as if something is trying to push him down into the cold grass? Why does it suddenly seem like he's being watched...and judged? Like he's doing something he's really not supposed to...
no subject
Lev, concentrating on trying to read the inscription on the headstone, hears nothing; at least, nothing that's recognisably a voice. A gentle graveyard breeze soughs in his ears, and it sounds almost like a voice.
He almost turns to see if anyone's around, but stops himself. He has little experience with truly flagrant hallucinations, but plenty of experience with the kind of auditory hallucinations that barely qualify as symptoms of just about anything outside of "having a tendency to minor auditory hallucinations". He knows what those sound like.
So he ignores the voice of the wind. In this fog, his peripheral vision — never particularly great owing to the significant diopter values of his prescription lenses — has been almost non-existent. He has a vague feeling that someone might have been wandering around the place just before he arrived, but it's so vague and gauzy that it, too, feels like yet another liminal hallucination, the kind that could just as easily be down to lack of sleep as to psychosis.
He peers at the headstone. The name is in a script like the one used in Pumpkin Hollow, but the name itself means almost nothing to him. Some Emran name, or maybe even some strange lowland Deutsch variant.
John Doe.
Elucidating. As mud.
He sighs. He's in a strange graveyard of a strange people. Figures. All things considered, he'd have preferred to be among landsmen, or at least among such strangers as familiar to him. Hell, he thinks, he would've been upset but not discomfited to see Martin's name on the bloody thing.
"Wert thou rich, then, Herr Doe?" he tells the headstone. "Thou hast a pretty impressive room in the house of eternity."
no subject
"It's me," she chokes out, and prays that Asriel can hear her. "I'm in the fog, by the statues." They loom huge and heavy behind her, the one and only constant Noelle has in this place. "Go towards the angel. I - I can wait for you, so you don't get lost."
She's been waiting so long. Another couple of minutes, or hours, or months or years won't hurt her. Nothing can hurt her here, and nothing can make her scared. That's the whole point of this place, right?
no subject
Is he really this incompetent?
"Sir?" he calls out again. "Can you hear me?"
no subject
Lev hears nothing but the wind, and maybe the rustling of leaves. He's still staring at the headstone.
"John Doe," he finally reads, aloud. "Died alone, buried unmourned. What havoc wreaked this bozo, nu? To land an epitaph like that?"
He shivers, and the fog's got little to do with it. He's getting seriously freaked out. He tells himself that hey, at least he's safe from the winds and from whatever else might be going on. But ... he's safe and alone. Alone, in a place where people routinely write sarcastic epitaphs, as though the dead have not no dignity, and the living owe not nothing to the dead.
He'd gone along with Anzu's plan willingly, but now he's starting to regret it. His heart aches with sudden loneliness, and with yet another jolt of paranoia. Had his bridegroom sent him away on purpose, so he would not get underfoot?
no subject
"Elley." A whispered voice on the wind. A distant shadow peeking out from behind a distant mausoleum. "Elley!"
A quiet gust of wind through the graveyard almost sounds like laughter as the silhouette vanishes.
no subject
Most of the headstones are worn down from obvious age, at least in the first area. The cemetery is heavily overgrown, indicative of a lack of care. How long has it been since anyone's even been here? Perhaps that's to be expected, in a graveyard this old...
Except as Lev moves through it, he'll start to come upon newer graves. Headstones that look no more than... five, maybe ten years old? Still bearing detailed engravings, even with some open graves visible in the distance. But they still look just as abandoned and overgrown. And perhaps more alarmingly, they don't bear any names. Some have text, but none of them have anyone's name. Just a sheer stone surface where a name ought to be.
no subject
"I see it!" He's a little daunted by how far away it seems to be; is this why Noelle's voice is so faint. Ralsei tries to raise his voice even louder, hurting his throat a little as he shouts, "Noelle! Stay right there, I'm coming! Don't move!"
Even though he's not really a goat, it feels somehow natural fix the angel in his sight, put his head down, and charge. It's like knowing a Lightner (a friend of a friend) is out there, scared and alone, has filled him with determination. It doesn't matter how far or fast he has to run, he will reach Noelle.
no subject
Lev kneels down next to one of the newer gravestones, and brushes his fingers across the blank spot where the name should've been.
"Died nameless, or had thy name taken from thee?" he says, conversationally, to the gravestone. He's feeling tired, but not as tired as he thought he'd be. Certainly not tired enough to have been knocked so off-kilter as to speak to a gravestone. He expects not no answer.
A stone upon the ground may talk back, but a worked stone mayn't. And in any case, Lev's getting the feeling that nothing here, not the stones, not any people who might be around, wants him here.
No, worse.
Cares not whether he's here or not.
He shivers again.