January Event: Setting Fire to the Sky

[lifeaftr_mods]

JANUARY EVENT: SETTING FIRE TO THE SKY

Who: Everyone!
What: The sun dies, and the creatures of the night emerge from the depths
When: January 21st - January 28th
Where: Everywhere! Ensō, Monsun, Chol, and the Islets
Warnings: Character death, possible body horror and violence. Please mark any additional warnings as needed!

So We Can Take the World Back From the Heart-Attacked

The night of the 21st, the sun begins to dim. It dips in the horizon, sinks to nestle itself in the center of Chol like a star falling in slow motion, where it begins to smolder quietly - massive, smoking, and hot, like a massive egg. The night grows colder, the sky reduced to an inky black. The surface of the surrounding water is still but for the occasional ripple, the odd, strangely subdued wave, with not even the hollow lights of distant stars to glint off its reflective waves.

The Jormun gather around the sunken, dying sun with their scaled hands on their weapons, their expressions grim. They fan out across the island of Chol with arms in hand. Their fortifications have settled around the island's center in a dense ball of bristling weapons. They have been preparing for this. They are ready to fight.

Are you? No island is safe. From the well-trodden mainland of Ensō and its islets to the stark dichotomy of Monsun to the craggy shores of Chol, all manner of strange things have begun to haul themselves, dripping, from the watery dark.

No more preparation. No more running.

From here on out, it is fight or die.

One Maniac At a Time, We Will Take It Back

As the Storyteller has promised, there is sanctuary in their temple on Ensō, which will keep out the worst of the creatures. It will not, however, protect characters from the cold and dark, and so they will have to keep themselves warm some other way.

The Jormun fight fiercely, but they do not fight alone. Aside from the help that the willing of your number have offered, you may glimpse the Storyteller battling alongside the rest in a flurry of strange, shifting animal shapes: a heavy-antlered reindeer, a shrieking owl with outstretched talons, a slavering grizzly bear with the Storyteller's signature tome strapped across a broad, furry back, to name but a few. Those creatures that the Storyteller defeats will burst into a flurry of paper and dark, spattering ink, rather than being felled in the conventional manner. How odd.

As this is an event with a high risk of death, the Storyteller will impose death penalties for one week only. However, deaths succumbed during the event will count towards the character's total.

Then I'll Raise You Like a Phoenix

Come the sunrise on the 28th, the sun will launch itself into the air with a victorious shriek, its wings trailing plumes of fire behind it. The phoenix takes flight, reborn from the ashes. The shores of Chol are littered with corpses, both shadowy and scaled, along with an even smattering of crumpled paper and splotched inkstains. Despite the triumph of the fight, it did not come without its costs. The Jormun gather their dead and prepare to mourn them quietly. Those who perished in the fight will not see the sunrise from this unique perspective, watching the murk of the night tint to soft, milky yellow and pink, and then to a glorious new day.

Munin will greet the survivors with a mixture of solemnity and relief, thanking them profusely for their help. There is not much more that her people can offer you, at this point - they must grieve their dead, and she must return to the sea to prove that she has cemented her worth as a leader in the eyes of the other Jormun - but that does not mean that your stories will part forever.

Event Timeline

[ ♆ ] January 20th: Monthly Storytelling occurs as usual
[ ♆ ] January 21st: The dark arrives, the temperature drops further, and the first hostile creatures begin their assault
[ ♆ ] January 28th: The dark ends and the sun rises
[ ♆ ] January 30th: Those who perished are revived, suffering from a reduced death penalty

Event Specifics

[ ♆ ] If you have any questions, feel free to look over our OOC Info Post.
[ ♆ ] Feel free to make your own logs if necessary!
[ ♆ ] If your character perishes in this event, please let us know!
[ ♆ ] Item trades with the Jormun can be found on the OOC plotting post here! Even if you were only recently accepted, you are free to participate!

LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

Comments

[ungrieved]

I'm almost eighteen. [Yeah, that's definitely said way too defensively to be entirely true. He might look eighteen, but everything from his nonexistent methods of problem-solving to his propensity for making a big screaming deal out of every little thing implies otherwise.]

[Not that he quite realizes it yet.]

I'm not a baby.

[...but, yeah, he's still going to follow out of a paired sense of vague curiosity and pure instinct.]

[He always tends to trail after those who might need him most, so to speak.]

[yourattention]

Oh, I'm sorry: you're a manbaby.

[Connor rolls his eyes, although the gesture is kind of meaningless in the shadowy light given off by their respective necklaces.]

That's so much better than being a regular baby. Seriously, drink your cider - you do have a growler, right?

[ungrieved]

A what?

[He kind wanted to drink the stuff, but now that he's being told to, every petulant instinct is making him very, extremely unlikely to actually comply.]

It's better like this. [He can use it as like, an abdominal-region warmer. That's legit.] And you're a jerk.

[yourattention]

Growler. It's a refillable jug.

[Technically, it's a refillable jug for beer, but. It's the closest word he has for "magically refilling jug."]

Also you're a rude shithead, but I'm still helping you so I'd say I'm allowed to be a jerk. [For once in his life, Connor isn't actually in the wrong??? Mostly??? Let him bask, ok.] You want me to explain the science behind why you should drink that? Because I do know it - I wasn't lying about knowing how to treat hypothermia.

[ungrieved]

[All of Gabe’s acquired slang is courtesy of Natalie and, more recently, eavesdropping on her and Henry both. Unfortunately, most of that slang pertained to the good kush and little else.]

Froze to death before, huh?

[yourattention]

Do I look like I spend my time running around in the cold wearing a t-shirt like an idiot?

[He is That Asshole who will wear a black hoodie in summer. Catch him wearing a hoodie in hell.]

I have first aid training. I used to get recertification every summer - at least in CPR.

[ungrieved]

Can you bring back the dead? [says Gabe, like a jerk, because apparently CPR isn't impressive enough for him. It wouldn't have saved him when he was dying, and therefore it's completely beyond the scope of his interest.]

Or maybe that's just what you're trying to do.

[yourattention]

Dead things should stay dead. [He says it firmly, because there is nothing he would like more than for that to be true.] I'm just there to fix things before they get that bad.

[Nobody is more aware of how ironic that statement is than him.]

[ungrieved]

[Then you came too late.]

[No. No, that's not true. Not when the cold bites at him the way it does, the way he apparently needs to eat and drink in a way that he can barely remember needing to.]

What if you can't? What if things aren't fixable?

[yourattention]

[Completely deadpan:]

With all dead there's usually only one thing you can do: go through their pockets for loose change.

[He doesn't mean that, but if he doesn't answer seriously then that means he doesn't have to think about it. He doesn't have to think about how people are literally trusting him with things he wouldn't even want if the situations were reversed.

He doesn't have to think about how he's not even equipped to take on the burden of other people's pain, but he's doing it because it needs doing and sometimes if he works hard enough for long enough he can forget that he's the one that's fucked up.]

[ungrieved]

You're assuming a lot about who they are. About what they'd be.

What if they died young?

[That's not a worrying statement at all, thanks Gabe. It's said with just enough of a detached flatness to imply no, really, he could be talking about Just Anyone, but that might have more to do with the cold and a lack of energy than it does any genuine ability to mask his cunning, on his part.]

[yourattention]

Bury them in satin, maybe. [It's said too immediately to be a real answer.] Lay them down on a bed of roses and sink them in the river at dawn.

[He doesn't want to think about a real answer, because several months of reflection have left him with the knowledge that he can joke about death for days but it's a dangerously unstable coping mechanism: the second he thinks too hard about death, he gets way more fucked up than he wants to be. Nobody ever asked him this kind of shit before he died, so. Funny how when you're dead people start listening.]

Sending them away with the words of a love song might be a little bit much, though.

[ungrieved]

Just don’t forget them.

[Haha, what? Must be the cold getting to him. He’s not an abandoned memory, no matter what anyone says. He’s just a distant one. He’ll come back. He has to come back. He always does.]

[This is no good. He seized the first impulse he can to disrupt that particular chain of thought and swallows a gulp from his stupid jug, ignoring the way it blisters in his throat.]

There. Happy?

[yourattention]

No one deserves to be forgotten. [Connor says it quietly, like he doesn't mean to say anything and it slips out anyway. Then, louder:] Good. Don't chug that.

[He's trying to find a distraction of his own when he realizes they're already at the monkey compound and his house is just ahead. He did not think this entire chain of events once they arrived through, honestly. His vague plan was to leave Gabe outside while he grabbed the poncho, but also he feels responsible and shit now so.]

. . . You wanna come in or?

[ungrieved]

[The problem with spending all your time antagonizing literally everyone is that when someone does say something that resonates with you, it takes a few minutes to register, and a few minutes more to figure out what to say in response. By the time he's really processed it, the subject's already changed.]

[Maybe no one deserves to be forgotten. But most people are, anyway.]

...is it warmer?

[He's not, like, conceding that he'd like to be less cold or anything it's just an innocent question don't look at him like that]

[yourattention]

Yeah. Well, marginally.

[He doesn't have a space heater or anything, but he did spend a lot of time fixing it so it wasn't drafty.

As it is, Connor picks up a log of the sort he keeps around expressly so he can cross the stake pit and use the ladder if he needs to. Setting it across, Connor makes an exaggerated gesture.]

Babies first.

[If you thought he was gonna give that up, you underestimate Connor's dedication to being an asshole.]

[ungrieved]

[He might be shivering violently, but he can still flip a bird like no one else can, pausing to glance at the surrounding...stick-balls that constitute the rest of the surrounding living space, before relenting and starting to climb the ladder.]

[He definitely notices the sign, thanks, though he's not about to mention it.]

Does no one else live here?

[yourattention]

Not that I know of. [While Gabe is climbing up, Connor moves the log so it's not across his stake pit anymore and lights the torches he's put in for the week.] Don't touch any of the shit to the left - it's not mine, someone is storing it there - and don't touch any of the baskets.

[Welcome to Connor's shitty house.

To the left is where he's keeping the stuff Muffet gave him to stockpile. To the right is a bunch of baskets of varying sizes - they mostly contain various kinds of food, if Gabe wants to snoop around - with an axe leaning against them and the messenger bag he arrived with hung above them. He doesn't have a lot of furniture besides the baskets, though. There's a hammock strung up toward the back, but that's about it.]

[ungrieved]

[He kind of wants to touch it, just because Connor said not to. But then he takes note that there is yet another axe inside the house, because apparently the dude just really fucking loves axes, and having received an unpleasant wake-up call that he's not quite as invincible as he'd first assumed, he'd kind of like to refrain from the admittedly new experience of getting a hatchet buried in his back.]

[It's not warmer by much. Maybe if there were wind, it would be. For now, he's content to curl up and eye the baskets, which is at least a step up from touching them.]

Are they explosive?

[yourattention]

No - why the fuck would I have explosives in my house? The fuck is wrong with you?

[Connor comes in and pulls a hand crank lantern and the poncho from one of the baskets. He tosses the poncho, which is exactly the same as the one he's wearing but in blue, to Gabe and proceeds to crank the lantern.]

Put that on and give me back my jacket. Do you want something to eat? I have [uhhhhhhhhh] dried clams, blackberries, and mushrooms? I think I still have mushrooms.

[Setting the lantern into a groove in the wall, Connor starts looking through the baskets. He does still have mushrooms. They're even edible and not hallucinogenic, wow! Does he only have them because he thinks the drug joke is funny? You can't prove anything.]

[ungrieved]

You have axes in your house, [he says, as though that's an explanation. Clearly one destructive potentiality is interchangeable with another.]

[The fabric whumpfs down across his front, and he manages to regard with apparent distaste before peeling off the jacket and discarding it in a careless heap on the floor. For all his disgruntled insistence that he is not wearing a poncho, he doesn't seem to care to protest very much now when he yanks it over his head.]

Anyone ever tell you that you're kind of a weirdo?