lifeaftr | January Event: Setting Fire to the Sky

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January Event: Setting Fire to the Sky

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 )

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His jump surprises Ritsuka too, making him flinch backwards. He hadn't meant to scare him. Actually, he hadn't even thought anything could scare him or at least that's the impression he had given to him from their last meeting.

Are you fake, too. That question is sharp and slithers under his skin like an icy needle. The corners of his lips are drawn back along his ears. But he doesn't know the weight of his words, Ritsuka reassures to himself.

"You're the one with tricks." He sighs and takes cautious step closer. "What happened?"

"I got stung. Like - like a bee. Don't pretend you don't know if you do." His tone pitches up sharply, high and terrified, before he smooths an irregular patina back over it, a spasmodic jerk of the corners of his mouth ticking upward. Smile. Smile until everything else stops aching, and the shivers stop eating away at him.

Smile.

"It wasn't like dying. Dying hurt. It was like freezing. Lying there, and you can't move. All you can do is wait. Wait for something to eat you alive."

"How would I know?" A touch of defensiveness creeps into his words. Still, he makes sure not to sound accusing or impatient. This guy's looking really scared right now and it'd be lying to say that it didn't affect Ritsuka a bit. Distress is contagious.

"But you can move now," he comforts clumsily. "And I have extra blanket if you're still feeling cold."

A trick? A trap? The last one didn't...talk, so much. Just looked like her. Maybe that means that this is fine. That this is safe. He stares for several long moments, peering at the facsimile of Ritsuka and waiting for him to change.

He doesn't.

"Okay," he says slowly. "But if you touch me, I'll - just don't touch me."

He stares back to him, holding his frantic gaze with his own calm eyes. Closing his hand into a small fist he waits as the other person looks at him, letting him to search for whatever he needed.

When an.approval comes he doesn't say a thing and turns around to fetch the spare blanket. No touching, he can do that.

After a minute or two he comes back, carrying a blanket that's bigger than him on his arms. "Here!" He shouts a warning before tossing the cloth at him.

He catches it clumsily, flailing to bundle the cloth around himself without seeing it slip and fall to the ground in a useless sprawl. He hunches underneath it desperately; he’s not wholly realized how cold he was until this moment.

It still is cold. Or maybe he simply never stopped shivering.

“Why’d you do that?” he fires out, a challenge barbed in open suspicion.

"You didn't want to be touched." It's a question that's rather vague and Ritsuka decides to take the easy route with his answer.

"And you said you were cold so."

With his tail swaying behind him Ritsuka watches the other guy wrapping the blanket around himself. For a moment he had thought it to be bad thing to lose a good blanket like that, since one couldn't take things like heat and beds as granted anymore but now he's glad he did it. This person needed it more.

"But it's yours, right?" His eyes gleam with an odd spark. Curiosity, or paranoia, or any number of things. Either way, his expression is fixed, unblinking. He won't look away.

It didn't act like this before.

"You didn't have to give it to me. You could've just left. But you didn't."

Ritsuka takes a deep breath and places his hands on his hips.

"Just because you are a bully doesn't mean I have to be one too. I have another blanket so I'll be fine."

"But I would've deserved it. I would've deserved to be left to freeze." Sorry, Ritsuka. Gabe has the power to make this a Thing, so he's going to persist in making it a Thing for as long as possible. He's not tired of engaging in pointless, cyclical debates about semantics and the hopelessness of his general situation just yet.

"I would have just died again. I've already died, right? No harm done."

That loud and unwavering certainty makes him balk, press his lips tightly together while knitting his brows into a brow. He doesn't like this. The way how he sees his own suffering as righteous makes his stomach turn cold.

"No."

'Why are we born? Why do we suffer and die?' There had been a time when such questions roamed around his mind constantly, pressing and demanding his attention. Death is still mysterious like a deep pit -- but despite all his curiousity and confusion it hadn't felt like it wasn't deserved.

"It wouldn't been right. You are awful but don't deserve to die. No one does!"

“I didn’t deserve to die when I was eighteen months old, either. Still happened. Took a long time, too. I cried and I cried, and the doctors missed it. They said, ‘allergies’. They said, ‘babies cry’. They said a lot of things.”

But the medicine failed, and the doctors lied. His smile turns wistful, softened at its edges.

“People die all the time, whether they deserve to or not. Even when they’re as innocent as a child.”

There he goes again and again with the grim words that make him feel even more uneasy and heavy inside. He doesn't need to hear about this -- at least not now. "Then why did you say you'd deserve to freeze and die again?"

It might be against his better judgement but he squats down so that he's in the same level as he. Despite the bad feelings inside him Ritsuka makes sure that his stare is stern but not unkind. "Besides none of that matters now, right? It's in the past and now is now. And right now you are freezing."

“Because it’s all I got to be,” Gabe whispers. “It’s all I ever was. Tragedy. Cautionary tale. Sweep it under the rug, and forget I ever happened. What older brother? I don’t remember an older brother. Do you?”

Happy birthday, Gabriel. To celebrate, we got you a headstone no one will visit, and a birthday cake no one will eat.

“Everyone else wants to forget it. I can’t. Not like the rest of them.”

"That's not true!" He argues and allows his voice grow stronger and confident. Ritsuka isn't sure of all details about what happened or about him. But he still thinks he understands. He's no different from Soubi. Both looking like adults but still hurt and scared like a child, tied into their past and fate.

People who need support and care.

"You are more than that! You're here are you not? You grabbed my ears so that I wouldn't forget about you. It was real."

He takes a pause after his outburst, breathing in and out. "I- I had an older brother." The deep pit is present again, this time covered with cobwebs of lies. Had. Have? He's not sure which one to believe and what's real -- but that's not important now. Gabe doesn't need to know.

"He's dead -- murdered. No one knows why and my mom.. she doesn't want to remember. But I do. I'll never forget."

He had an older brother.

Gabe goes still, his smile sliding from his face like oiled silk. He had an older brother. Not just dead, but killed. Not slipped away out of a stupid oversight, because the doctors missed it, because no one could do their jobs, but murdered, taken, robbed from a family that now wants to forget that he exists.

He leans forward, almost eagerly.

"Do you still see him?"

"In a way." It's weird to talk about Seimei with a person who doesn't know about him. His chest feels tighter than earlier, like a heavy boulder just started to move.

He sees and is reminded of Seimei every day. He's present in Soubi, in the scars that form grim word 'Beloved', he's reminded of him by the empty room next to his. It's absurd how it's the absence that keeps him present. He was left with his legacy -- his name, murder, lies and mystery. How could he not see him?

"There are lot of memories."

“Those are the most important things.” For once, Gabe even seems painfully sincere as he says it, almost wistful. Whatever weird world involves people with cat ears, it’s clear that some things stay the same. Sometimes people are forgotten. Even when no one deserves to be.

“He should be happy,” Gabe adds, as though it’s normal to anthropomorphize the concept of a deceased family member, “that someone still remembers him. My kid sister just wants to forget.”

"I think so, too." That much he can agree with him. Seimei and everything about him is clouded in confusing mess but he still wants to remember him with love and care. He wants to return the affection he had been given and keep his memory alive. No matter what.

"That's.." He starts, ears drooping down and his eyes turning tender and soft. 'That's awful', is what he was going to say but leaves it to be. Ritsuka wants to comfort him that there's no way he'll be forgotten, that they're going to keep his memory around but Ritsuka knows that's not true. Sometimes you forget things and then it's over.

"Sometimes the harder you try to forget the more difficult it will be, you know. There are things you can't escape."

“I thought so too.” His fists curl into the borrowed blanket, tight and then tighter, wrapping the fabric all the more securely around himself. It helps. Helps him remember that he’s real. He’s real, he’s real, he’s alive, and no one can really take that away. Not forever.

Not forever.

She remembered him, mere moments before. The sounds of a music box shattering into sad little wooden fragments on the floor, Dad cursing at the top of his lungs - and Mom, looking right at him st long last.

“But they electric shocked it out of her.” The words twist, bitter and disgusted. “That’s doctors for you. Shocking who they can’t save.”

His gaze is pressed down on the empty spot on the floor between them. Ritsuka's not sure what to say or how to feel. He's always wanted to trust doctors. They are important and they know what to do when others don't, they help and cure. That's why he's been seeing Dr. Katsuko, so that she'd allow them to cure him with the electric shocks. That's why his mother took pills whenever she had to, because doctors had said it'll make her better again. Less angry.

But still Ritsuka can't help but thinking the cold night he had found her lying in middle of hallway unconscious after taking too many pills.

Doctors should be trusted.

"If you tell me your name," he starts with a small and unsure. "I'll tell you a secret."

Secrets. He’s never had to barter for them. He’s always known them, slipping in between the cracks of every life in that bitter household, watching every altercation and every murmured doubt. He’s always simply known.

Names lose their power when you’re the one to speak them aloud. But then, this isn’t like Mom, who couldn’t remember. Not like Dad, who remembered but would never admit it. It’s someone who wouldn’t know at all.

Perhaps it’s little more than a moment of weakness. He sniffs, once.

“Gabe,” he whispers. The word wavers and breaks. “Gabriel.”

"I'm Ritsuka," Ritsuka nods his eyes staying fixated on the floor for a little longer before.

"Or so I think, I'm not sure. I don't remember." He whispers. But Gabe knew about that already right? Last time he had heard him curse about losing the memories inside the camera. "I don't know what happened but two years ago real Ritsuka disappeared and then it was just me. I don't have any of his memories so." Another pause. He feels a nervous cold sweat pricking the back of his neck. Back at home there is already good number of people -- friends -- who know about his lack of memories but so far he hasn't told the following to anyone.

His tail is swaying next to his feet in unease when he finally looks up. "So I'm seeing doctors. They can hypnotize me or use electric shocks to make real Ritsuka come back." To make him disappear.

"I've already told them I'm fine with it. So is my mom."

His eyes lock onto those belonging to the boy in front him him. There are similarities there, no doubt - just enough for it to register why any of what Gabe said landed, that first exchange. People can laugh him off. They can ignore him until it burns in his veins and he screams at the unfairness of it.

Gabe starts to shake his head, almost at once.

“They’re lying,” he hisses. “That’s what makes you forget. They’ll take away everything else that’s left. Doctors make mistakes - do you get that? They don’t know what they’re doing half the time.”

How do you think he died?

"It's fine." Ritsuka reassures with a heavy sigh, trying to convey tranquility into his voice. It should be fine even if he were to forget -- no matter how much the thought of it scared him. But that's selfish fear. He has to think mother's feelings too.

"If I forget everything then maybe Ritsuka will come back, you know? If you erase everything that's in his way he should be able to resurface." At least in his mind it made sense. In worst case scenario yet another Ritsuka would come out. He's not sure how to feel about third person being in this body. He really wouldn't want anyone else to go through this nightmare.

January Event: Setting Fire to the Sky

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