Nothing like the smell of rotting ape corpse in the morning

[ohnehalfte]

Who: Newt and Everyone Who Either Commented or Is Listed in This Post
What: Searching that Monkey Compound
When: 10/7
Where: Everyone's on a D8
Warnings: Rotting monkey corpses? IDK, tag ur stuff, friendos


"Picking over the remnants of that bloody battle will prove quite advantageous, as long as you don't mind the smell. Not only did the monkeys fashion several abodes mounted in the branches of the trees in the compound, but they had quite a supply of various items on hand. For those who may have been concerned about islet over-crowding, it seems they need not worry; most of the homes remain undamaged, and aside from the strong smell of monkey, are completely habitable."

"Investigating the back of the compound will reveal a very small plot of farmland, where several rows of plants with dark green leaves can be seen growing. Anyone with a knack for identifying useful plants - or anyone who's simply willing to take one for the team and give them a taste - will soon discover that these leaves are the plants from which the monkeys drew their sedative. It makes quite a useful anesthetic in a pinch!"

"The sigil etched deeply onto the door itself will, as the Storyteller warned, be quite effective in keeping people out. The door repels any and all efforts to break through it; those sensitive to magic may note that it does indeed exude a very powerful and dense aura that makes its origins difficult to discern. One thing is clear, however: it will take a great deal more than teamwork between mortals to get through it." ( x )

[Welcome to the Mingle Log, Fam. Around you are the rotting corpses of many dead apes. There's also many items for you to lay claim to. Or you might feel like checking out those sweet sweet monkey nests. Or checking out that door. Whatever you feel like doing, leave a top level for people to pester you with. Or pester other people with top levels. The Mingle Log is your Oyster.]

Comments

[ratsinadaze]

Ah, that makes sense. It was a good old revenge plot.

[Had it been the plot of movie, Gobbet would have loved it. As it was, living it had been an adventure she wasn't terribly keen to repeat.]

[In response to the second part, she adds:]

Some people - er, monkeys? - just like violence, man. They might not have needed a reason in their eyes. Reap what you sow, though, I guess. Gonna be violent, gonna get violent.

[prettypurpleparlor]

[She sighs.]

Perhaps. I just hate being wasteful- particularly when it comes to lives.

Besides, violence hardly needs to be lethal. I can name at least three people here who likely would have been perfectly happy to have a good brawl with them off somewhere the rest of us wouldn't have to deal with it, if asked.

[ratsinadaze]

[Violence hardly needs to be lethal.]

[That's something she hasn't considered in a long time. Perhaps when she was younger it was easier to recognize that idea, but...Gobbet's expression turns grim and serious. She fixes Muffet with a hard look that has no right being on a face usually crowded by lazy contentment. At the ripe old age of 19 years she's seen enough violence to know that -]

Where I come from, when neither party is willing to back down and no compromise can be reached, death is inevitable. That's just the way the world works. Whether or not it's wasteful, wrong, or right doesn't factor into it.

[Just as quickly as the grim look appears, it's gone. Replaced by a neutral calm. The weight of her words and the reasons behind them seem to have been straight up ejected from her mind. The sea breeze brings the scent of salt and iron, the sun washes her in warmth. It's a nice day. It's not Hong Kong.]

[prettypurpleparlor]

[Muffet meets her gaze calmly, acknowledging Gobbet's sudden seriousness without being intimidated by it.]

I suspect, then, that I come from a much more gentle world than yours. I confess, I still prefer my home's ways, but not everywhere is the same and I can't judge a culture I've never lived in. My apologies.

[Her tone is unruffled, but sincere: she's long since figured out that other people come from much harsher circumstances, and it's not fair to blame them for what they had to do there.]

[ratsinadaze]

I'm guessing a lot of people here come from a more gentle world than mine. Mine kind of chewed people up and spat them out.

[She says it so casually and with such a slight shrug that one might think she was mentioning the nice weather rather than recalling all the dead and dying back home. Falling asleep to the sounds of crime scenes in the making and waking up to the smell of blood on the wind.]

[The unspoken subtext is simply "Them's the breaks."]

What was your world like? You know, before you got dragged out to this island?

[prettypurpleparlor]

[Muffet suspects that any pity for whatever Gobbet's had to live through wouldn't be appreciated, so she merely gives her a sympathetic nod, taking her at her word.]

A shame, that.

[She wonders briefly how to explain what her home is like, and decides to summarize the main points:]

As for my world... it had it's flaws, certainly, but I'm still quite fond of it. There are two major species in my home- humans and monsters. I'm sure you can guess which one I happen to belong to. A very long time ago, both species lived on the Surface peacefully, but one day war broke out between them.

Monsters lost- quite badly, I'm afraid- and the survivors were sealed underneath a mountain by a magical barrier. Not the most pleasant situation, but we made the best of it. I grew up underneath Mt. Ebott, and living in the Underground was as good a childhood as any.

Still, the Barrier finally being broken in the last year was a great relief to many. It's been a bit tense between our peoples, but things seem to be going well thus far.

[ratsinadaze]

Sucks that you got yanked out of a happy ending, then. Sounds like a unique kind of world.

[Upon reflection, Gobbet isn't sure if she left at the beginning or end of a story. It sounded like Muffet's world had resolved a problem and settled into a calm. Her world would carry on in a new way.]

[It sounds pleasant compared to her own home.]

[prettypurpleparlor]

It was a rather pleasant situation, if an imperfect one- but one makes do with what's at hand.

[Muffet's fairly calm about it, even under the circumstances- she's not happy to have been brought here without her consent, but getting upset about it won't fix the problem, so she'd rather just keep working at it.]

As for unique, it could be that, but I have to wonder if there are any worlds that aren't unique, from somebody's perspective. We've certainly found examples from a very wide variety, here.

[ratsinadaze]

Hey, if we're going to count the possibility of multiple universes, we've gotta accept the possibility of infinite universes. There's bound to be some doubles, maybe even triples, out there.

[Gobbet looks to the sky as if she'll see some sort of answer up there. In reality, she's imagining all the worlds beyond her own. Peaceful places, war-torn places, places that haven't reached young adulthood in the cosmic sense, places that are ancient even on that scale...There's got to be another place out there with SINs and trideo, at least. Those can't be original concepts.]

I don't know if that's good or bad, really. Can't imagine a second Kowloon without getting sick to my stomach.

[prettypurpleparlor]

Hm... My first instinct is to wonder if one could go around doubling up on all the good things, and leaving the bad things behind them, but it seems unkind to leave some other universe without anything more pleasant.

[ratsinadaze]

[Gobbet blinks.]

You mean like...hop from world to world and freeload on all the good parts? I guess it depends on your idea of what's good in a world. I think a little danger and dirt makes life worth living, but that inevitably puts someone on the losing end. To be honest, I've stopped trying to imagine scenarios where everyone wins.

[prettypurpleparlor]

[Muffet smiles wryly.]

Perhaps it is a little much to want everything pleasant and insist that no one else suffer in the bargain- but I must admit, I've always been a terribly greedy person. One can't always have both, but it doesn't stop me from trying.

[At least she's self-aware about her flaws, even if she doesn't sound particularly ashamed of them.]

[ratsinadaze]

Ha, I like the way you think.

[Gobbet gives a half-smirk to Muffet's wry smile and pauses to take stock of her surroundings. Headway has been made on clearing the place of ape corpses, thankfully. The smell seems less suffocating now. The sun is high and merciless, though. It's only a matter of time before the rot accelerates to intolerable levels again.]

Man, there were a ton of these things. We probably caused some damage to the island by killing them off, you know. Might have made resources a tad less scarce, but the land must have relied on them for balance for them to thrive like this.

[It was a valuable part of her skill set - reading the lay of the land like this. If she was right, they had just decimated the local ecosystem. Her grin turns to a hard frown.]

[prettypurpleparlor]

[Muffet nods ruefully, grimacing at the thought.]

To be entirely honest, a sudden influx of visitors from other dimensions was probably causing a bit of an imbalance all by itself, let alone with this thrown in the mix.

...Although, one does have to wonder what having a local deity actively involved with things does to the function of this island's ecosystem. There may be entirely different factors involved that we're unfamiliar with.

[ratsinadaze]

Fair enough. Gotta be real, it's above my paygrade to figure out the specifics. I was just making an observation.

[The downside of saying what's on your mind is that sometimes you don't have anything to follow up with. Gobbet tries to think of something else to add, settling on:]

It kind of depends on how involved the local deities are, though. A lot of god-like beings don't like the interfere too directly.

[prettypurpleparlor]

I'll take your word for it, I think- by the standards of my home, the Storyteller is very involved indeed, but the standards of my home were essentially never seeing any gods in person at all.

[ratsinadaze]

Well, back home the closest things to "gods" we have are totems and idols. They're animal avatars or powerful spirits that grant shamans their powers. I follow Rat, personally. Totems don't really directly interfere with the world, but they do give us gifts that let us get the upper hand in a lot of situations.

[Gobbet shrugs.]

For example, Rat can - could, I guess - tell me where to go if I was in a maze or an unfamiliar place. But she wouldn't like. Appear before me in a firefight and turn the tables in my favor, you know?

[prettypurpleparlor]

Hm, still more involved than ours, I think- the various deities from my world weren't proven to be definitely real or false either way, the last I checked.

May I ask more about what Rat is like, out of curiosity?

[ratsinadaze]

She's clever, I'll tell you that much. Rat has gotten me out of some pretty tight places before.

[The ork smiles faintly, remembering narrow escapes and lessons learned. Her eyes meet two of Muffet's and for the first time since their meeting she looks truly comfortable. All the awkwardness of just meeting and being stranded on an island and what not sort of melts away in the face of fond memories.]

She doesn't directly speak to me, but I do have a special kind of connection with her. She takes care of me and I've always done my best to take care of her, too. I don't feel her as strongly out here but. Well, she's taught me things that distance can't take away, you know?

[prettypurpleparlor]

[Muffet smiles at the expression on Gobbet's face, happy to see the genuine warmth in it. There's something comforting, about knowing people have fond memories to hold onto in the midst of all this.]

She sounds like an excellent mentor to me. I'm sure she'd be pleased to know you took her lessons to heart.

[ratsinadaze]

If she wasn't, I don't think I'd be able to use my magic at all.

[Gobbet holds up a hand and focuses her attention on her palm. A small cloud of sickly green mist swirls to life and pitches in time with the sound of the waves below them. A light breeze picks it up, dissipates it. She's pretty much running on fumes magic-wise, but the display serves a purpose. Confirmation that her totem could still reach her, even if just barely, way out here on this mystery island.]

Shamans get their magic from their totems. All they ask for in return is that we use their gifts to further their influence in the world. For Rat, that's basically meant surviving any way I can.

[It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the abbreviated version that Gobbet passes along when people ask.]

[prettypurpleparlor]

That seems a reasonable arrangement, to me.

[Muffet nods, looking curiously at Gobbet's display of her own magic.]

Does the color of that mist signify anything, if you don't mind my asking? We classify our magic by color, at home.

[ratsinadaze]

Eh, not really? That was a very weak acid fog spell. Burns the skin and usually lingers wherever you put it, even in the wind.

[Gobbet cocks her head to the side in thought. She'd never really thought about the colors before, or what they could mean.]

I think shamanic spells are usually green and hermetic magic is blue or red, though. You classify your magic by color, huh? How does that work?

[prettypurpleparlor]

[Muffet explains, as she has a few times before on this island:]

Basic magic, the easy and instinctive kind we all can use, appears white. More advanced skills come in seven colors: blue, green, gold, cyan, red, orange, and purple. In theory one can learn any of them with sufficient time and effort, but in practice people generally stick to one or two that they happen to have a talent with.

Each color represents a different set of abilities, and is associated with a specific virtue. For example, green is the magic of shielding and healing, associated with the virtue of kindness.

[ratsinadaze]

[Gobbet is listening, even if it looks like she's scanning the area and paying Muffet no mind. It's all very interesting stuff, it's just. She has a short attention span. Don't take it too personally. Besides, she focuses better when multi-tasking. In this case, scanning for exits and entrances to the compound, evaluating the state of the remaining nests, and half-counting the remaining corpses serve as her secondary tasks as she absorbs the wealth of info.]

[When Muffet finishes speaking, Gobbet sets her hands on her hips and turns to face her proper. She lets out a breathy laugh and shakes her head.]

Yeah, the spells I know do more hurting than healing and shielding, I'll tell you that for free. I mean I do know a healing spell but it's colorless. It just sort of. [She waves her hands vaguely, scrunching up her nose as she tries to visualize the spell in action.] Works.

[Usually she's casting it in combat, so she rarely pays close attention to what it looks like. She just waves her hands, calls on the power, and next time she looks, her allies aren't bleeding so bad.]

What's the virtue and color for combat magic? Like slinging fireballs and stuff.