lifeaftr | April Intro: The Flower Ripens in its Place

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April Intro: The Flower Ripens in its Place

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.

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.

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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Myia stares at the dead monster, breathing hard, hand over her chest as if to still her heart. She's killed plenty, at this point. It's just a drop in the bucket, and this thing doesn't even have a proper face.

The thing is, it also doesn't seem to have much more than dirt and grass and the occasional flower to it. Its monstrous form doesn't really lend itself to consumption the way that plants in her world tend to. She rests her chin on a palm, looking down at it with a confounded expression on her face.

"...We should eat it. Right?" It makes sense. After all... "We killed it."

Uh.

That's...not really his first instinct, when he comes up against something like this, but you know what? That's fine. It's plenty valid. Especially considering that she just turned up on a relatively deserted island with a pack full of dubious goods with no guarantee that anything edible might be forthcoming, from her perspective.

Tim rakes a hand up through his hair to push it out of his face. It's getting too long again.

"Doesn't look edible," he says, skeptical. "I mean, I guess it makes good fuel if we need to light a fire again."

"Not too... fleshy," she agrees, tilting her head at it. "Not fleshy at all."

Though accompanied with her flint and tinder in the knapsack she was gifted, it may still provide some form of edibles in one way or another.

"Could use it for a fire. Got flint and tinder. Make real food. Must be fish in the ocean. Got a pole."

She holds the fishing pole in her hand up.

"Wait. Do you live here? Are there houses? Don't see buildings on this island. Haven't seen none at all."

"...no," he says at last, after a moment of due contemplation. She's getting her bearings still. That's...normal. "There's other islands all over, but right now we only have...two. The other one, Ensō, that's where most people live."

On the islets just off its coast, but - details.

"This one's a new island. They, uh...come and go. I know it doesn't make sense. Just go with it."

One day he'll be good at this.

Myia blinks at the man. So the islands are temporary? But Ensō isn't, or no one would live there. Myia doesn't know shit about geology, so for all she knows islands could sink or reappear or whatever. She's only just barely learned that things exist outside of the Metropolis and its surrounding forest. She only barely knows the ocean is real and not some kind of fairy tale.

So yeah. Temporary islands. She shrugs.

"Makes sense to me. Go with it, go with it," she agrees. Multiple islands puts into perspective the information about flower-porting or whatever that she heard in her dreams from that strange Storyteller rabbit.

"And who're you, man from Ensō? I'm Myia."

"I'm not from - " He abandons the attempt to correct her before it's even fully formed. Does it matter? Not particularly, since she doesn't have a frame of reference for what Alabama is, most likely. "...Tim. I'm Tim."

Myia. Well, she won't be easy to forget. She kinda stands out.

"You're gonna wanna be careful. Some people might think you're...uh, something from around here." He gestures loosely in the direction of the heaped mass of spindlank, limp in the sand. They might attack her on sight for looking kind of insectoid, is his point.

Myia narrows her eyes at Tim. Then follows his gesture to the lump of burnt nature on the ground. Then looks back up at him.

"...Wwwwwwhy? Just a fly. You don't have flies here?? Flies are everywhere. Don't lie to me. You're lying. What are you anyway?? Some kind of plucked chicken?"

She inspects him a little too closely, looking around him to try and find what wings he may or may not have. He looks like a lot of the other people she saw while dreaming. Which is nothing more than the word "weird". She has no name for why these people are so ugly.

He flinches.

It's incredible, the way the word can still get to him. The way it can jab in like a sliver of a knife between his ribs, because it's like a pale twig of a man crammed in the corner of Tim's living room spitting out you're a liar with all the venom he can muster, some shadowy, vengeful remnant of what he used to be, and it all hurtles back.

He is a liar. And he has a lump of a brown hoodie shoved down at the bottom of his pack to prove it.

"I'm - " He can't finish. What semblance of rationality he could cling to in scraps has dissipated, and he shakes his head. "I'm nobody."

Well, that doesn't answer her question at all. That's very annoying. He's not being very helpful, is he? She squints at him for a few more seconds before folding her arms around her fishing pole and deciding she's pleased enough with this much.

"That's fine! Don't care, don't care at all. Making talk like I'm a plant monster, when I'm just a fly and you're just a nobody, pointless anyway! You're a very rude nobody, Tim."

And then, only because he apparently stopped to help her out of... the kindness of his heart(???), she offers, "So, do you need fish? Good at fishing. Caught adults and children. Taught by an old fisher bear. Very good at fishing."

Edited (consistency) 2018-04-14 03:36 (UTC)

"I'm not saying I would." Clearly he doesn't and wouldn't, given that he just did the opposite of that, but logic be damned, right? "Just that some people here shoot first and ask questions later. It's not like I want - "

Fuck it. Again, he discards the thought before it can properly manifest, and shakes it aside. What's it matter? If her mind's made up, then her mind's made up.

He'll do the easy thing. Play along. He can always manage that.

"...sure. Sure, I need fish."

Honestly, the better thing to do when dealing with Myia is to play along. Fighting her on every fool thought that enters her brain would get real tiring real fast. Emet learned to pick their battles very quickly into their time living with her.

Of course, she still makes it difficult to actually pick battles in any sort of meaningful fashion, with how quickly she talks circles around people with no form of logic along for the ride.

"Good! I can get the nobody fish," she says, pleased with herself as she grabs her fishing pole. "This isn't good for catching adults 'cause they're so heavy, but we're only two anyway. Won't need that many fish that won't go bad 'fore we can eat 'em. No freezers! What a stink island."

Without ceremony, she plucks a piece of vine off the burnt spindlank corpse and attaches it to the hook for makeshift bait's sake, and walks off towards the edge of the water, casting a line expertly into the sea.

He's just gonna be "nobody" forever now, huh?

He can live with that. That was how he was supposed to live, technically, until he was yanked laterally along the edges of his world and dumped into another, apropos of nothing. He sure as shit isn't nobody now, no matter how much he's tried to the contrary.

"You're gonna wanna be careful," he says tiredly, with the expectation that this won't necessarily yield anything but more annoyance on her end. "Sometimes there's dangerous stuff in the water, too."

Myia shrugs in response, waiting for something to bite.

"Dangerous stuff everywhere. Who cares? I got a shiny knife and fish'll get gutted. Sharks too. And you, if you gnashed your teeth at me."

She turns back to him, as if she didn't just threaten to flay him.

"Are the fish like the plant monster? Not people?"

"Tigersharks. Part tiger, part shark." And all dangerous, and all pointy. He doesn't even know if she has tigers in her world, but he's not sure that particularly matters. He figures the context might fill her in enough about the genuine threat.

He doesn't know nearly all the dangers that hang around in the shallows, but without any fire to help, he's pretty sure he's next to useless.

He's not fond of the water.

"That's... exotic. And impossible-sounding." Yeah, Myia's never seen a tiger, but she's aware of them enough that she knows they've got everything a cat's got and more.

Though her version of a tiger or shark is certainly different than anyone else's.

"Fish with teeth are the worst," she decides, squatting down to rest on the beach as she fishes. "Are there normal fish too, or just pointy ones?"

"There's normal fish too, yeah. I mean, we've kinda been living off fish for a while." Fish and fruit and whatever they could grow in the gardens. Most of the prey animals on Ensō are gonna need some time to start repopulating after those first few months.

A pause, and a frown.

"I mean, normal from my point of view. Everyone's worlds kinda...vary, a bit."

"Hmm. Normal. You're very not normal, so the fish are probably not normal."

She feels a little tug at the line, and she jumps up excitedly to start reeling it in. It struggles with her, but she doesn't really get the same sort of feel from it that she normally does with fish. It's almost... too easy. Not as much splashing.

When she finally reels in the line and pulls a perfectly normal looking, idk, trout or whatever, she stares at it.

And squints at it.

And sniffs it.

She holds it up for Tim to view.

"What the heck am I looking at."

"Well, that's a fish," says Tim, without missing a beat. "Which kinda proves my point. That's normal where I come from. Or...it looks normal. I'd kinda wanna make sure it isn't poisonous or anything before we eat it, but that's how fish look where I'm from."

He is also, point in fact, how people tend to look where he's from, but he's pretty sure he's already made that clear from the get-go, and Myia is no closer to actually believing that.

"Like I said. It's kinda...subjective here."

Myia stares closely at the fish.

"This isn't a person. At Maahi, fish are people. They have gills and live in the water. They have ugly eyes and scales, like this. But they have heads, and hair, and torsos, and arms. Maybe where these armless fins would be. Right here, right here."

She wiggles the fish's fins. It doesn't appreciate it, flopping around, unhappy to be in the air.

"This fish can't breathe air?" It looks like its gasping. Fish at Maahi breathe air. That's what makes them so dangerous. But Myia can handle them. She's been trained by the best fishers in the harvesting department.

She feels, suddenly, very alone. Alone in an alien world, moreso than before.

Well, this is going just swell. It's not unthinkable to assume that people where she comes from would have...all manner of attributes, and not merely insectoid ones. He blinks, glancing from fish to fly, watching the thing in her hands die slowly, gasping.

"They...no. They live underwater. So it's kinda, uh, suffocating right now." Is that a problem? Jesus. "There are kinda...fish people around here, but they live underwater too. They do just fine on the surface, but it'd probably be pretty rude to try and, uh, eat them."

Relations with the Jormun are good, and it wouldn't do to jeopardize that.

"Sometimes you gotta eat people, weird man."

That's just how it is??? Fruit is hard to come by, as tasty as it is. Myia, being a fruit fly, would prefer to have just berries and melons at all times, but that's just not how things work. And her digestive system does just fine eating majority fish, now that she's a fisher.

Besides, there was that thing about a "well balanced diet" that was in the training video when she went to harvester orientation. She probably would know more about that if she went to school ever.

"These fish are pretty pathetic, but smaller portions can be useful. Don't have to share so much or waste any," she concludes, watching the fish slowly die in her hands as it wriggles around.

She then offers it up to him. "...Set another fire?"

"No," says Tim, drawing the words out slowly, now eyeing Myia very carefully. It's the offhand way she says it that arrests him - the idea that cannibalism is just well and good where she comes from. Then again, she is a bug. Isn't that pretty...common, with bugs? The eating of their own dead, their own young, their own mates?

Fuck, okay, he is cutting off that thought right there, thanks.

"No, you don't sometimes gotta eat people. Not here you don't. We have mana pools and farms and - and don't eat people here, okay?" They are on good and friendly terms with the Jormun, holy shit Myia. Before he starts a cooking fire, at minimum, he is going to ensure that she's not about to try and eat the Jormun.

Well, that's just rude. He's completely ignored her offering of free food in exchange for a small fire. And after all the effort she went to! And doesn't he like setting fires? All because she stated a truth of the world??

"Well, sometimes you don't have things so easy as having weird non-people monsters to snack on! Lucky you!"

She drops the fish unceremoniously in the sand and lets it get all nice and dirty. Have fun with that. She'll be throwing a tantrum, thanks.

"Grown woman, I can eat my own eats. Lucky I'm not a regular harvester anymore."

Great, okay. He's now pissed off the cannibal bug lady by remarking that eating people is not an ideal thing for anyone to set out doing here.

"I"m being serious here," he says, trying for firm. If her attitude of him suffers for this one bitter truth, then fine. He can take one person being pissed at him if it means that no one here gets eaten over a roasting fire. They dealt with that shit with the monkeys already, and a near miss was enough for Tim, thanks.

"We're not...we don't eat people here. And the Storyteller is really not gonna be happy if you just start doing that, so just - keep that in mind, okay?"

"Fine! Monster eating! Keep Storyteller happy! I don't care!" And if that was almost mistaken for conceding, she quickly adds, "We run out of monster food, remember what you told me. Not a harvester anymore, but I still got my knife."

To prove her point, she pulls out a golden sheathed jambiya -- real gold and gemstones, this time -- and unsheathes it, pointing at the fish on the ground. It's mostly settled down to slight twitches, by now, nearly dead.

"You know how to gut monster fish?"

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