lifeaftr | October Intro: Louder than Sirens, Louder than Bells

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October Intro: Louder than Sirens, Louder than Bells

INTRO LOG: OCTOBER

Who: Everyone!
What: New souls arrive to the archipelago of LifeAftr
When: October 3rd
Where: Ensō
Warnings: Mark as needed!

The Beach: For All the Rest
The shores of Ensō are far from the tranquil, almost idyllic tropical backdrop that they should be. And so it is that while you fish, or perhaps as you go about your daily business on the islets, the first thing you will note is the persistent sound hammering at the back of your skull.

A drumming.

And it's growing louder.

The source of the drumming will, like it or not, soon become apparent. At the fringes of the trees, wielding slings and hollow, wooden pistols, is a group of large and very displeased simians who have every intent of claiming this spot of beach - yes, traveler, this spot of beach you're standing on right now! - for their own, and by any means necessary.

And they certainly don't look interested in diplomacy.

If you came armed, you might be in luck, because this conflict will require your steady hand in its resolution. If you did not...well, you may be better suited to run, or risk capture at the hands of warriors skilled, cunning, and incredibly vicious. Laugh at their monkey business all you like; they are ingenious fighters and, what's more, they're just as good at killing as they are at capture.

For the uninitiated, this particular brand of chaos doesn't usually sweep across the entire island the way it has. But those who have been here for some time will recognize the monkeys in question, and might even recognize this for what it is: revenge.

Group I: The Squeakquel
Looks like your monkeying around last month has landed you and everyone else in a spot of trouble. The monkeys in question certainly weren't happy to be confronted with others on their lands, nor are they willing to share their territory. While you may have triumphed last time you confronted them, the apes have been planning their revenge in the meantime.

Some of you were unlucky enough to become targets. Overnight, a great deal of them silently invaded the islets. Their blow-dart guns are equipped with a fairly powerful sedative that is more than capable of knocking most living creatures out - and those that were immune were simply snatched up, gagged, and bundled away.

However, it seems that some of their prisoners didn't suit their purposes, for one way or another, and thus weren't retrieved with the intention of long-term capture. Which is why a number of you will awaken in regions of the island that you've already explored.

...the really, really dangerous ones.

Whether it's a Center of Gravity, a parade of centipuppies, a contingent of Lungblossoms, a Fustercluck, or something else entirely, one thing is certain: the monkeys wanted you out of their way.

So get ready to fight for your life.

Group II: Ape Escape
If you're not one of the slightly luckier newcomers that materializes on the shore, then you're one of the unlucky ones that's managed to materialize square in the middle of the jungle. Or rather, in the middle of one of the denser, more populated parts of the jungle. The abodes woven into the canopy are crude, built of mud and sticks, but they're nonetheless sturdy.

And, as an important note - they are also swarming with monkeys. Snarling, baying, armed monkeys. Perhaps they'd be more hostile toward an interloper...if you weren't already in a cage, along with several others.

Fortunately for the newbies, they've all got something the monkeys didn't anticipate, aside from the element of surprise. Most prisoners don't arrive with knapsacks full of newly-acquired gear, and it's a good thing, too - you may very well need it, and the help of the new arrivals, to escape this place. You could always wait for the cavalry to come, but are you really willing to take that risk?

Group III: Pot Luck
As for you, you terribly fortunate third group?

You'll find yourselves suspended in wooden cages as well, though this time, to the hot curtain of whitish steam clouding your vision. It smells an awful lot like smoke down there. An awful lot like something...burning? Unlike your fellows over in the second group, these cages aren't simply a means of containing you, no. These cages are currently hanging over what might be the largest cast iron cauldron you've ever seen. All of this is, of course, for one simple reason:

Some species of monkeys are carnivores.

The acrid scent of smoke is already hot and rancid in your nostrils; the pyre beneath you has been lit, and the hungry flames are beginning to boil the water below quite eagerly. We'd suggest you hurry up in freeing yourself and your fellows - being boiled alive is not a particularly pleasant way to go. At least the monkeys weren't expecting quite so many main courses so soon, which allows you the element of surprise.

As a final note to those who participated in the Test Drive Meme, bear in mind that those threads, if all parties involved would like, can be game canon in the form of dream-like memories involving a place very much like this one, though the layout is considerably different.

All new arrivals will awake with knapsacks with their names stitched to the front. The contents of said knapsacks can be found below!

Feeling a tad adrift? Make sure to check the Locations Page, which has details regarding the starting areas and a handy map for those who feel better with a bird's eye view!

LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

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[Nobody should have to.]

[Nobody should have to.]

[Perhaps that's the difference. One can embark on such a treacherous journey, such an endeavor doomed to failure, unaccompanied and expecting no aid. One can, but one will fail...until such a time that someone helps them to their feet. A drifter with a kindness shielded by their great helmed head, a jackal god with the pale white flicker of a rhombus humming with that strange and unknowable energy.]

[They had never really been alone.]

don't need to care for the whole world

["Anymore."]

just stay alive

[In his last moments as himself... he'd talked with Frisk. Tried to make it a farewell they could feel good about. Tried to fit making up for a million timelines of dying and judgment and sparing into a single conversation.

There are a lot of Floweys out there, Frisk. It's not as nice as it is down here, Frisk. You can't always expect there to be a nice solution. You can't expect to solve everything with a smile and a flirt. You can't be an angel.

The best you can hope for...]

Don't kill, and don't be killed.

[He'd tried so hard to sound much wiser than the scared, lonely kid he was. He'd tried to give them the objective moral, the universal truth, the big final lesson. But... deep down... he's not as certain as he tried to sound.

It's nice to hear the world echo that budding belief back at him.]

It's enough to care in little ways. It's enough to just live your life.

The world gets a little better when you take time to just... like being in it, too.

[A tree grows because you kept emptying out cups of water. A music box plays because you gave a statue a little shelter from the rain. There's an ant-sized frog in a crack in the wall. Through determination, you've mastered Ball Game.]

I mean... this is a little bit fun, isn't it? We've got a cool hideout. This tree is the biggest one I've ever seen in my entire life. It smells really green, and you can hear bugs chirping and distant birds.

[And the crackle of fire, the pop of coconut guns, distant shouts. It - it falls apart a bit, yeah. There's no completely forgetting how dangerous this world is. But it's... there's still room for happiness here, right? Is this enough? He's looking his hardest for "enough."]

We're not fighting anymore, but this... this is a little bit important too, right? You're not breathing hard anymore. I'm not scared anymore.

[They're not breathing as hard anymore. It's true. Their heart has started to beat a fair bit slower, now that they've the time to breathe. It does not change the fact that they're dying, that they will die inevitably, and leave him behind. It would be safer to simply leave things as they are. Get up, and leave. If he grows close to the creature sitting before him, however impossible it may seem...he will have to learn to lose them.]

[Perhaps he has learned to lose already. Most living things do.]

[As they did. Even as they struggled, fought ever so hard - to not get attached.]

should find someplace safer

[It's perhaps a bit too matter-of-fact, a bit too dismissive. But what else are they meant to say?]

[That's their problem; they like the world too much. Even shattered as it had been, blistered and broken through by the Immortal Cell that so corrupted the world, they had never fathomed for an instant what it might be to not live in it. That was their crime and their curse. They'd wanted to live so very badly.]

[What creature does not want to live?]

[It's what all creatures must want.]

[It's an abrupt answer. Maybe there's just a character limit on their robot friend's projections.

Maybe Asriel's being a bit too childish.

This isn't really the time to be all sunshine and daisies, is it?]

Oh, um, yes! You're right.

[He looks around hesitantly, scanning his surroundings. Utterly unfamiliar, all of it. He couldn't tell you the names of the trees growing around here. He's never seen an ocean. The little peeks of sky coming out from gaps in the canopy are still a stunning novelty.]

Er... maybe you should lead.

[Now is a time for action. Even if the sounds of combat have faded, they cannot rely that they will always. Too many times the Drifter had relaxed, the immediate area cleared of hostile intentions, only for a low-pitched ululation to herald the scuttering emergence of the Crystal Wolves that moved so very quickly, that bit and tore into their blue flesh and sprayed pieces of them across the ruined stones. They moved faster than even the Drifter had been prepared to acknowledge, and they would never let their guard down like that again.]

[Particularly now, with yet another young charge in their care. The Drifter straightens, briefly consulting their map - projected from their companion in the same general way their text projects. The square they narrow in on is marked danger, at least according to the Drifter's personal abstruse key. After a moment's consideration, they nod.]

[It will offer protection. That much they can grant.]

[At a somewhat slower pace than is typical for them - Ren has taught them to move slower in the presence of children, as opposed to their usual brisk trot - they begin to lead confidently.]

this way

[Asriel actually has yet to let go of the Drifter's hand, so both keeping up and staying close prove pretty easy to do. His eyes linger curiously on the little drone that follows the Drifter just as closely as he does - the partial map it projects is the closest he's come yet to anything that could help him get a feel for this place, so he does his best to make that fleeting glimpse count.

Of course, the fact that one square on the grid that seemed to be especially centered upon was marked "danger" kind of strikes him as... worrying. But it's probably fine, right? They might not even be going there. They're probably just going around it.

Even so, the quiet feels sort of... oppressive. Maybe his nerves are getting to him, but every snap of the undergrowth or rustle of the bushes makes his fur prickle. Quietly, he pipes up, hoping maybe something to talk about will make the walk seem a bit less scary.]

Um... I like your robot friend. I used to know somebody who built robots.

...I don't like her work as much as your thing, though.

[Friend?]

[...it takes them less time now to discern that he means their companion sprite, as so many have now pointed it out as unusual enough to warrant commenting upon. They glance at the sprite with only desultory nod in its direction.]

requisite drifter's equipment

[Particularly for they, who lack any other means of communication save for sign language - which is not always a surefire shot, given how overjoyed and surprised Tibia had seemed to be able to communicate in that avenue.]

intuits what i need

[They use a few words that he struggles with a bit - requisite? Intuits? He has to guess a little bit. Being Flowey gave him plenty of time to read every book in the Underground, but he never was as good at fancy vocabulary as Chara or Mom had been.

He doesn't want to ask them to use simpler words, though. He already looks dumb as it is. If he makes himself into even more of a slow, useless deadweight, then he won't be fun to play with anymore. He just has to guess from context, that's all. He can do that.

...He sort of can't. He has no idea at all what the second sentence means. So he just... focuses on the first.]

Oh. So there are more of them out there...? Where did you get yours from? Like, who gives them to drifters?

[For all their devotion to the lives and protection and well-being of children, the fact remains that the Drifter knows shockingly little about them. Including the advisable sort of vocabulary one uses around them.]

[The questions are a little odder, and considerably more difficult to answer given that drifters do not, by nature, have anything given to them. Found, stolen, bartered, borrowed, traded, or bought - but nothing is ever free for a drifter.]

found on remnants of drifters past.
from drifter to drifter all things go

Oh! That's kind of sweet. It's like they're looking out for you. Like family heirlooms, only you don't have to be related at all. You can just be a stranger who wants to offer a little help to people who come after you - to people you may not ever even meet.

Drifters must be pretty nice people, if they're trying to carve out the path for the ones who come after them like that.

[He wants to say that he could have done something like that. That the choices he tried to make were to build a future where humans and monsters can get along. Only... seven tiny coffins in his basement sort of imply he did the complete opposite of that, huh?]

I have a friend who had to face a lot of the world all alone, and they did something like that. The human children who came before them... they took their weapons and armor, so they could have a better shot at surviving.

[The culture of a nomadic, homeless, wandering people with an unspoken code - a code that, even then, did not fully protect them from the disgust of peers who did not take kindly to the tint of their skin and the darkness of their gaze. Isolation even in the broader circle of an inherently isolated people is a difficult thing to achieve, and achieve it they did.]

[The child's preconceptions are based off descriptors so vague that perhaps he cannot help but draw the most pleasant possible conclusions. Either way, it would be a cruelty to shatter those worldviews. And so they say nothing to the contrary.]

[They know, now, the meaning of "human." Recognize it as a label to be applied to a great deal of the people here.]

great many humans here

Yeah. It's... kind of weird, huh? All these worlds and all these people out there, but that nice bunny in the dream seems to have picked a whole lot more humans than anything else.

[Maybe... a lot of worlds are like his own? Maybe there were other races like monsters out there, but their own humans feared them, killed them off, sealed the survivors where the world would forget all about them. Maybe the Storyteller only brought so many humans because humans are really all that's left out there.

That's... kind of a dark line of thinking, actually! That's maybe not very Asriel of him at all. He decides maybe he shouldn't share that theory with Mx. Drifter.]

[The moniker of "nice" appears to be a fierce point of debate on the island, and one that they're certain Asriel will come into contact with inevitably, one way or another. It is not their way to sow unpleasantries and pointed cruelties, particularly toward deities. Gods are to be respected and worshipped, regardless of one's acceptance - or lack thereof - of their personal philosophies.]

the ways of gods are beyond those beneath

[But...]

[There is a but; a creasing at the edges of their eyes, and something that might, beneath the cloth smoothed over the lower half of their face, possibly be a smile.]

but
it is nice to not always be alone

[They have felt increasingly isolated for reasons separate from that to which they are best accustomed. Not merely due to the tint of their skin, but a gap wider than the natural gulfs that existed between the ragged collection of survivors in Central.]

It is, isn't it?

[Did Chara ever feel alone, being the only human in the Underground? Humans may have vastly outnumbered monsters, but with the two segregated so utterly by the barrier, that mattered little in the small, enclosed world they had to live in, didn't it?

Ha ha... how silly of him. Why are they always the first thing on his mind? Why does every little thing that he sees always seem to remind him of them, of their smile, of their mischief, of their sorrow. Not so good at letting go, is he? Goes to all the trouble of making a big, wise, speech, and yet... is he really all that different from Flowey now? Still not past the aching longing for someone who understood what he felt. For someone who knew what it was like to be hurt so bad it hollowed you out.

The only human in the Underground, the only monster on the Surface, neither human nor monster in a world where the kind of soul you had defined you... they were never just that to each other when they were together. They were only... friends.]

There really is something to be said for being able to look at even just one person and say "I'm not the only one who's like this," isn't there?

If... you ever do feel alone... you can call for me, you know. That's what being friends is about, right? Making the sad things not feel so sad.

[I'm not the only one who's like this.]

[They'd known they were not. They'd known they were not the only one with the cobalt tint to their skin, that others like them were beaten and cast out and left for dead. They'd known they were not the only one whose blood spilled out from behind clasped hands, soaking the ground in speckles of pink as they coughed without seeming end.]

[They'd known they were not the only one, but they still walked in solitude. Not being the only one, it seemed, was not quite enough for others to be less aloof; even those in Central, their clothes stained with the telltale sickly pink that signified the presence of the same illness that chewed on the Drifter's lungs, shackled over their heart, would not so much as look at them if they could help it.]

[Perhaps the child has simply never experienced that manner of isolation. They can only hope that he never will. It would not do to disparage a fantasy such as that, no matter how appropriately childish it may seem.]

and you i
i will guard against whatever there may be

[The implied idea that it will surely be a physical threat goes unspoken.]

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October Intro: Louder than Sirens, Louder than Bells

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