April Intro: The Flower Ripens in its Place

[lifeaftr_mods]

INTRO LOG: APRIL

Who: Everyone!
What: New souls arrive to the archipelago of LifeAftr
When: April 3rd and onward
Where: Ziziphus
Warnings: Mark as needed!

A9: Sow the Seed
Unbeknownst to new arrivals, the archipelago of LifeAftr has recently seen the appearance of a new island, as chosen via voting - and they have been unceremoniously placed there instead of upon Ensō, where most newcomers would typically appear. It's probably for the best that the island of Ziziphus is so outwardly peaceful. There are worse places to find yourself, all things considered. The mana pool glimmers with a greenish light, the stone ring containing that peculiar fluid set firmly into the earth. The surrounding land fits neatly into that general aesthetic: rippling fields stirred by the occasional crisp breeze alternate between amber-golden and rich, verdant green in coloration, and irregular patches of color signify the presence of a great deal of flowers of all sorts.

It's a peaceful scene.

We're sure you're all about to make it go horribly wrong.

B9: Reap the Harvest
For the unluckier, or the more adventurous, something far less tranquil awaits. Perhaps you woke up on this particular map square instead, or you saw fit to journey a little farther, just to see what might happen. In any case, you'll quickly discover that this may not have been the best idea, when an ordinary grassy mound abruptly detaches itself from the ground, hauls itself upright on bristling legs, and starts scuttling near.

SPINDLANKS have now been unlocked in the bestiary.
What might initially appear to be a leafy hillock will very quickly prove to be something far more...mobile, if you get close enough. That clump of grass and red ferns will abruptly hoist itself up on six vine-like tendrils, crawling for its prey like a very large, mossy spider. While it's fully capable of swiping at its foes with its massive, leafy arms, the spindlank's favored method of dispatching its prey is simply to scuttle forth until it's positioned directly above you and drop down. If its weight does not crush you and choking on the clods of earth doesn't smother you, don't worry; the spindlank intends to eat you alive with a set of fleshy jaws set deep in its center, buried somewhere in its underbelly.

For despite their appearance, spindlanks are very much carnivorous. Their size can vary from anywhere between six and ten feet tall when their appendages unfurl entirely. They are, in essence, very large plants, and thus can be easily dealt with, if you can burn them.

Just try not to get overwhelmed.

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All new arrivals will awake with knapsacks, their names stitched to the front. The contents of said knapsacks can all be found in your acceptance notices!

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.

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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!

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LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

Comments

[exbarathris]

She doesn't understand why he flinches, or why the little sprite (is it a bug? what is it?) nearby is making a pink light. She step in the approach, lowering the pack and squinting at the figure in the sunlight, 'listening' harder. Uncertainty about herself...?

Her reply is delivered the same way, a mental image flashing almost too quickly that is clearly something the Drifter would never have thought on his own. It's a more iconography of the self than 100% true to life memory, a picture painted in the mind: The Liberator holding the head of some terrible insectile creature above her own own with a victorious snarl, while similarly pale, dark-haired people raise their arms in a silent cheer.

This is in rather sharp contrast to the considerably more placid figure actually standing before the Drifter, here and now. With foggy memories of another mentally quiet person still in her head from the dreams, she points at herself as if it wasn't clear, then points at the Drifter, radiating mild puzzlement.

[hyperlit]

It is communication, albeit of a sort they've never witnessed. A flickering image imposed upon their mind, paired with a sensation of confusion. The context is lost upon them, but the iconography is familiar - it's history, displayed in the form of pictures.

There is no audible or text-based response. They've not encountered something of this nature before, but perhaps it would have been inevitable.

She cannot read.

They switch to speech via hands, their motions slow and precise. They spell it out letter by letter, carefully.

Uselessly.

H-O-W

[exbarathris]

She shrugs at the carefully signed gestures, tapping fingertips to her forehead, then pointing again at the Drifter. Images again: two faces, each one's head with an internal golden glow expanding in a broad radius to touch the other, though the faces are far apart.

Maybe it'll convince them to try to 'speak up' a little, as it were.

[hyperlit]

Their eyes cup down into night-black slits. Issuing thought in the form of speech is utterly unfamiliar to them, but that does not mean they cannot learn. If text and hands will not communicate, then what other options are available?

Their first attempt at mental communication is little more than the telepathic equivalent of a great long concatenation of question marks.

Help.

[exbarathris]

Her reply, externally at least, is a couple blinks, planting the butt of her spear firmly in the dirt and leaning on it. She has a lot of questions, but where to even begin when this person is making signs she doesn't know, and doesn't even know how to broadcast their thoughts? Despite psychic strength, she's not really one of her world's great thinkers, and the Drifter is pretty baffling.

One thing at a time.

She holds up one finger briefly, then with her head tilted slightly to one side, quizzically, picks the pack back up by one strap and shakes it at the Drifter, picturing again the image of them holding it instead of her.

This attempt to determine if it belongs to them or not is only slightly foiled by the sprite catching her gaze again as it floats in the air. Is it a bug? Edible? The Drifter might well catch some of that emotional current as well in the air, curiosity and hunger.

[hyperlit]

Slowly, they shake their head. The entire thing is straining at them, peculiar enough to require their undivided attention.

They have to walk through it slowly, deliberately. It's probably infuriating and almost childlike in how elementary it is, but they take care to wholly conceptualize each thought before solidifying it, cementing it in a place where she can see it.

The bag...is hers. They already have one. If she woke with it, it belongs to her.

The sprite blinks once in response to the subconscious reference to it, and they must then take care to outline that the sprite is theirs, a necessity for communication. In most cases.

Not much of a help here, it seems.

[exbarathris]

She squints again, doing her best to get a sense of what they're on about -- it's less clear than she's used to, but she gets the general idea and finally, shrugging slightly, hefts the pack onto one shoulder. It's not ideal with the intricate tangle of carefully tied together fangs she wears as a mantle, strap catching on a few of them, but it's good enough for now, until she can find a safe place to cache it for when she does need it.

The sprite on the other hand, she still doesn't really get, but perhaps it's just a blue people thing. A lot of unfamiliar symbols. It's always pictures with her, the image of two blue people standing around, while two sprites flash pink light and (nonsensical chicken-scratch, in her mind) symbols at each other. Like that, they mean?

[hyperlit]

The concept of being nonverbal, despite being something that evidently plagues her quite deeply, is a difficult concept to articulate. After a moment of careful thought, the Drifter gestures up at their throat with one hand, miming a cough. The sound is soft and rasping, and is the closest to vocalizing they've ever been able to get in...what is, quite simply, years.

No voice. Then, a gesture at their companion, as it blinks quietly. I improvise.

It's a...complicated explanation, it turns out, because even that simplified version doesn't really spell it out.

[exbarathris]

Look, there's only so much mental energy she can reasonably be expected to expend on these kinds of things. She wishes some of her companions were here; they might have made more sense of it.

Still, she gets the overall gist of it, and moves on to more important questions. Trying to take it slow and visualize clearly, she clearly wants to know if there's others like him; the image of a field of blue people. Perhaps... she adds a few suspiciously Lup-like elves to the mix, trying to recall the hazy details of a dream before they slip away from her.

[hyperlit]

The Drifter shakes their head. It is a motion devoid of any real sadness or regret. There are no others like them here that they know of, and if there were...they would not know how best to accept such a thing. That complicated wealth of emotions, the moment they well up, are immediately put to the side. They are hardly important, now, are they?

A familiar face, now - pointed ears and dark skin and golden manes of hair. The Drifter's response is instantaneous: a warm glow of gratitude as they visualize two elves in particular. Practically identical, twins, and undoubtedly associated with a feeling of safe.

[exbarathris]

Safe? The Liberator seems willing to accept this. Maybe it wasn't just a dream. But if not... then what?

One unusual-looking person here, another two there... all replaced with a horde of people like herself, all pale and somber, perhaps hundreds or more, somber. Encircled by a ring of darkness, but not as if they are engulfed in it -- more that the viewer is drawing away, down a dark tunnel. A person lying on the ground, unmoving, with others piling stones over them, burying the body. Sadness.

Of course she knows there would have been no burial for herself, but the image of death is clear.

Less clear, and the source of a more immediate confusion, if how this all fits into the dream, the other dream of a white rabbit and a campfire. Are all people here different, people who have gone or should have been gone?

She points at the Drifter again, serious, questioningly, echoing the faces of the twin elves as well.

[hyperlit]

They can glean what little they can from the context, at least - from the sense of mourning, from the concept that this person belonged to a great civilization of those of a similar nature.

They've not the best idea how to go about mentally translating the intricacies of a world they do not wholly understand themself, either. They've not questioned the will of the god that dwells here, nor any other god.

In the end, they settle for focusing on a spectrum of varying faces - Ren, child-sized and silver-haired; Guzma, dark-eyed and irreverent; the Knight, horned and silent; a pair of children with striped sweaters. They join the elves to form a disparate crowd, before the image snaps to a tableau of several rafts rocking in the ocean waves, propelled slowly and steadily toward the shore, heralding the crowd of motley travelers that stumble out of them, one by one.

[exbarathris]

She frowns. It doesn't truly clarify much, but she gets the overall sentiment; a motley group of people of all shapes and colors, and though their origins may be unknown, they are all thrust into this world together.

Scratching the back of her head and appearing deep in thought... doesn't mean that those thoughts are private, by any means. Initial confusion and awe have, in light of this 'conversation', given way to a swirling mixture of curiosity, mild frustration, and concern and overlying that lingering hint sorrow and an odd resignation.

Where are the others, she wonders, picturing the field - her only view of the island so far - surrounded in a dark and murky fog, the faces she's been shown floating out there in the mist.

[hyperlit]

They're growing better at this, they think - even if they're not quite on the same level of clarity that their partner in mental conversation is, but they're learning, and that's the important thing. A mental divide turns into a far more articulate one - the grass-rippled bluffs of the island they're on now widens out to expose a second island, far more varied in texture. Spiked with ruins, pocked with strips of beach and dense jungle.

Ensō, they think with as much firmness as they can muster. If she cannot understand language in a textual sense, perhaps she can parse it in the ideological. The idea of assigning a label to something.

Ensō. That is where they dwell.

[exbarathris]

It's a kind of second-hand understanding; symbol and sound that doesn't mean much to her, but through the Drifter's experience of it, she can get a hint of the idea. Face scrunched up a little - why wouldn't you just picture the place as needed - she gives a kind of slow half-nod, a little dip of the head.

Another island, with still more greenery and life. And the hunting? The animals in her mind's eye aren't quite a match for anything familiar; a small deerlike creature, something else more like a rabbit. And how can she forget from that first, dreamlike maybe-not-dream: delicious fish on a stick.

[hyperlit]

Their mental picture of said animals is much more varied: hyena-like creatures with elongated bodies and far too many legs, a hybrid of a tiger and a shark dripping with water, turquoise-furred beasts that resemble caribou. Nothing that immediately resembles her mental images, but perhaps adjacent.

More mental screenshots are flicked through with more rapidity, information being funneled directly toward her with a minimum of context. A tigershark's pelt, scraped and dried and used as a rug. A large, serpentine creature with a sandy, scaly hide being carved into strips of meat to be cooked over an open flame. Animals that fly and screech and lay eggs that can be poached from nests, and then poached for real.

[exbarathris]

She doesn't quite lick her lips when thoughts of meat and eggs reach her, but it's close.

Still, she scrunches up her tiny nub nose a little and looks left to right, huffing a small sigh. Although it's not really a directed thought, her mental 'voice' is loud, and the feeling of disappointment and sadness returns alongside the image of all her people in a barren, rocky landscape. It's good to have found such a heavenly place, but without everyone else...

[hyperlit]

The Drifter more or less fires off a line of question marks, their head tilting to one side. Everyone else is vague enough to imply that she merely has people she knows, friends she must have made, and they have to order their thoughts to be directed forth in a relatively intelligible fashion: the sensation of not being bitterly alone, here, of having made friends in abundance despite all odds, warring with the idea that others from one's world have been known to manifest in the archipelago as well, on occasion.

Perhaps the impression she receives is confused and muddled as the Drifter is, but if she can parse it, perhaps that will be some consolation.

[exbarathris]

Clear as a muddy stream, but there's a hint of understanding. People, of some sort, from some unknown place and unknown past. Even if she's left some people behind... maybe they'll be okay now, without her. And maybe, as was the impression she had in that dream... there was still more to come and more stories to be told.

She points, hand half open still, off and away in the direction of Enso, echoing a less cohesive view of the jungle and ruins from the Drifter's mind. If there are others here... she'd like to meet them.

[hyperlit]

That, at least, is easy. The Drifter beckons with one hand - a universal gesture for follow me, though the impression of wanting her to follow probably shines through regardless - and starts haring off in the direction of the mana pool. The mechanism through which such a thing functions may be atypical in many respects, but at least it will be easily communicated by doing.

They will have to do their best.