Islander meeting!

[savedbyasong]

Who: Everyone!
What: An information gathering meeting, mingle log style!
When: 13th as advertised Here!
Where: Big tent, islet 4 (sorry Ardyn!)
Warnings: Keep an eye on subject lines for warnings!

[The tent is a good place to have this. It's sheltered at least. Shion has collected strawberries and also water. He hopes that people will turn up, there's a lot to discuss. About this place, how they are here and how to leave. But also surviving here. Helping each other make the most of being here.

They had done such things in the Tower and it was a good way to get things organised. He knows he has questions and he thinks other people probably do as well. If it's anything like the Tower then people all have different bits of information that will fit together eventually.

He greats people as they enter and will encourage anyone who looks less than certain to enter and offer them strawberries.]

((OOC: So I'll put up a subthread for mingling before the meeting, then discussion points can be posted as a reply to this main thread. I'll do a few for things Shion will bring up but feel free to post your own points as well! Tag around, do breakout threads, discuss all the things. Don't worry if things go off topic. Have fun!)

Comments

Other worlds

[savedbyasong]

"So... before me and Aster were here we were somewhere else." Maybe not the most clear start, Shion took another breath. "A place that wasn't the worlds we started on."

He figured they probably weren't the only ones. "It was a bit like these islands, in that it was full of people from many different worlds. Where did everyone here come from? Was it your own world or a different one?"

He will make a tally chart. Or something.

blasts the madoka ost through speakers | ota

[crosslaced]

[Please ignore the weird plant tiger he drags in. The Tigerlily starts sniffing the corners of the tent, ignoring anything Laurent says.]

Don't- nevermind. The cat doesn't eat meat, don't bother it. [Anyway. Where were we?] I came from somewhere different.

When people make a wish, a creature offers to take your soul in exchange for granting a miracle. Magi, as we're called, must hunt for- monsters, I suppose, or demons- to sustain ourselves. If we don't, or otherwise succumb to despair, I'm told we become what we hunt.

[This is absolutely second hand knowledge and nothing he has experienced personally.]

[savedbyasong]

Oh it's like Cobweb! You found one too! [Distracted by animals, always. Also plants. Animal plants are the best distraction. Especially when he realises that the person he has just enthusiastically answered is Laurent and where and how exactly they last met.

He blushes, looks ashamed, Laurent probably thinks him some kind of mad murdering psychopath... which he probably is but he's not thinking about that and Laurent is talking and so he's going to listen and write notes. More souls. Except a creature had taken Laurent's, which opened another thousand questions but Shion started small]

You become a monster if you give in to despair? [He is checking that he understood that correctly.]

[crosslaced]

He found me, really.

[His reply is perfectly neutral; other than a look that lingers a little longer in recognition- ah it's this guy- there's no indication that they know each other at all, let alone beat each other up in a burning city.

Anyway, he's going to do a glance around to make sure Damen is not here and will not find out his boyfriend’s racked up more Tragic Backstory.]

That's my best guess, we weren't exactly given a handbook. I believe there were parties experimenting to find the specific circumstances.

[savedbyasong]

[He nodded, wrote that down. Tried not to dwell on how horrifying that was. He didn't exactly succeed but he was still focused.] A creature took your soul?

[Souls, his own world didn't even really have a concept of them. Souls were not scientific. It didn't make sense. Your emotions came from, from neurotransmitters sending signals across your brain. It was all science, being a person.

But he had come to understand that there was a lot that could not be explained by science, that a lot of what he knew was wrong. It was terrifying, but he could cope with that. But this, this challenged his understanding of something that he had only had understanding in the last few years.]

Where me and Aster were... we were only souls. We didn't have our bodies... Not really anyways. We... what we consider souls is our very being, our emotions and personality and what makes us ourselves. Is that what you mean when you say soul? [Shion might be intimidated by Laurent, but Laurent is clearly a person, with emotions and everything else that makes a person. Laurent drew horses on ancient walls and had befriended a cat plant. How could he have no soul?]

[crosslaced]

[Laurent? A soul? Sounds fake.

For a long moment he's silent and still, because he's in public and to betray his indecision is foolish. Another magi could confidently say that they still have their personality, their personhood, but he doesn't have that luxury. ]

I'm not sure. Magi have artifacts that stand in for the soul, and if that's corrupted they… do lose their sense of self. My group had no way to reverse that.

[He remembers Hoshiko Ohka, screaming as their transmission shattered. Yamashita telling Kakyoin you would make an excellent Witch.]

I doubt I'm human any longer, that's as far as I can say.

[savedbyasong]

An artifact that is your soul? [It's so strange, so... terrifying but he is still focussed. It's no stranger than a soul housed in a wireframe. Just different.

A corrupted soul meant losing their sense of self.] Those whose soul... artifact was corrupted... they became monsters too? Or were they just... were blank? [He's imagining the retrieval units, no personality or person hood.

He doesn't comment on the last. Being human is... Shion's not sure exactly what he would class as being human, it's complicated]

[crosslaced]

....

The Standing Water is a reflection of the city, yes? It's along those lines. A Witch keeps superficial mementos of the magi they were- similar abilities, or their Labyrinth reflects what they valued in life. But ultimately it's a Standing Water that has to be put down.

[savedbyasong]

[Breathing, his hand tightens around his pen at the comparison. The Standing water, a reflection that was wrong. A person who was a mere shadow of the person they should be. That was what happened when a soul was corrupted.

Destroying a soul was worse than death, because death didn't mean anything in the Tower, apparently it meant nothing here either. Corrupted souls became... Witches?

It was the word Laurent had used, Shion figured it meant something different than the kind of witch Akko was.] Their Labyrinth? [His voice is quiet, but he's focusing on writing]

tim wright | ota | i'll match your formatting

[postictal]

He's antsy. It feels inconsiderate to start smoking in here, but he doesn't have any idea what to do with his hands, so he jabs them into the pockets of his jeans so he doesn't spend the entire time fidgeting like a moron.

He'll probably end up doing that anyway.

"Castle in the Mist, they called it," he says wearily. "Sol Raveh. Allegedly there was some kinda...war between shadows and light, but I never really caught onto it. Wasn't there for too long, but it sure as hell wasn't where I was from."

Was it a slight improvement over Alabama?

...nominally, actually.

[savedbyasong]

Shion blinked at Tim, him too? He writes it down, Castle in the Mist. Sol Raveh. A war.

"How long were you there roughly?"

Because 'too long' could mean anything, really.

[postictal]

God, he doesn't know. He has to count, slowly, tracing back the days in his mind.

"Couple months. Three? Four?" He scratches at the rough beard that's begun to darken the lower half of his face. He keeps forgetting to shave, reaching that standard-issue unkemptness typical for people who have sunk into a dissociative haze for a couple weeks, or maybe who have been grappling with island survival. "My memory's not too great, so I can't say exactly."

[savedbyasong]

Three or four. Shion writes that down as well. Three or four months was long enough. Enough to effect someone.

"That's alright, don't worry about it." He smiled, "Did... did you escape there? I mean... I know you ended up here but did you manage to escape the Castle in the Mist first, or were you trapped there and then trapped here?"

[postictal]

"Trapped there, and trapped here." He shrugs. No big, right? "People came and went all the time, so I guess it wasn't much of a shocker."

He's leaving out the part where he was stabbed to death. And also the part where it was a small child who stabbed him. And also the part where he is living with said child now, and also the part where he was both willing and grateful for the fact that they were responsible for his death.

It's complicated okay.

[savedbyasong]

"Whatever pulled you here pulled you from there..." Perhaps that was the fate of those who disappeared, pulled to another world. He knew in the Tower people who disappeared ended up on their dead worlds, their soul slipped from Zo's grasp, sometimes they came back. But some people never came back, had anyone been pulled into another world?

"Is there anyone else from there here?"

[postictal]

"You'd have to ask for yourself." That's an evasive answer, and it's pretty transparent that such is the case - but he's not about to go treading on anyone's cover story. How many people does this make, who came from Sol Raveh before ending up here? Four, or five total - but some have gone, now, and some aren't supposed to be familiar with it at all.

Shion's free to ask, but Tim won't be the one to trip and tear away the curtain, if he can help it.

[savedbyasong]

Shion nodded, "Well I have asked about different worlds. I guess the people who are happy to tell me will speak up."

It makes him wonder why people might not want others to know where they were before. It might be that they dislike speaking about it and Tim fears that Shion will bring it up to them, upsetting them. It might be ... well he's not sure. But he drops it anyways.

Aster (Xion) | OTA

[attheclocktower]

"And if... anybody wants to ask any questions, I can answer," Aster adds, once Shion is finished.

"The place we were from was called the Tower of Animus. There was... a girl there, named Ruana. They'd performed experiments on her, and all kinds of other kids, to try to achieve immortality. It worked, but...at the cost of all life on her world.

In the end, she decided she couldn't handle being alone. So she went to other realities and repeated the experiment.... and brought the survivors back to the Tower with her."

Which... obviously, was them.

[want_to_belong]

"Came here straight from my world. Pretty sure that goes for Iggy and Noct, too."

At least the Noct he'd known. But it didn't hurt to gather information, so he didn't mind telling Shion what he knew, and he felt pretty comfortable speaking on their behalves about that. "It's kind of weird to think that people could be plopped on another world over and over again."

[savedbyasong]

Shion writes them down in the column for arriving straight from their universe. Or Universes.

"It's worrying, I knew there were other worlds that pulled people into them but..." He shrugged, "We didn't think about it. When we escaped the Tower we didn't factor this in."

[want_to_belong]

He was quiet for a moment before asking, "What are the stats looking like right now? Are there a lot of people coming from secondary places?"

He didn't know what that would mean but it did seem like it'd be bad somehow.

[savedbyasong]

"I think most people come from the world they started in, but there are a few people from other places." So far. He looks at his notes.

"Have you and Ignis figured out if you are from the same world? Or a similar but not identical one?"

[want_to_belong]

"Wha-"

That was not something he thought was a possibility and struck him off guard. "How could Iggy and I be from different worlds? We've known each other for years! At least partially, through Noct."

[savedbyasong]

Shion blinked at him and reached out to touch his arm, to calm him. He doesn't want to scare him, he's scared him before and though he didn't seem to be upset at him because of it... He's being careful.

"There are lots of worlds. Probably infinite amounts. Some are very different, like mine and Aster's. Some are very similar even almost identical to one another. In the Tower where we were before... Only one person from each world was rescued." A breath, checking to see that Prompto was following.

"But people still saw people they knew, we thought the administrators were lying for ages. There were a lot of people from Aster's world for example, they had the same memories as each other for the most part. But sometimes things were a little different, one person would seem to be from further in the past than another."

It had been terrifying to get his head round at first but now it was... normal. As normal as anything else.

"It turned out that we all were from different worlds, just some are very similar. I had a... friend who woke in the Tower from my world. Except we remembered slightly different things and in his world my eyes were dark purple, not red." The tiniest difference in a whole different universe.

"Here... our worlds aren't destroyed and no one has claimed we are all from different ones. Me and Aster are from the same place..." Unless there were infinite versions of the Tower as well but he is not thinking about that because that is headache inducing.

"You and Ignis are the only people I know that come from what is potentially the same world. So I was wondering if everything matched, you remembered the same things."

[want_to_belong]

"Everything has always matched up so far..."

Nothing had ever seemed off in their talks. "Except, Iggy doesn't remember as far as I do."

He wasn't rejecting the possibility, but his tone made it clear that he didn't like the idea. "But then if we were from different worlds, then Iggy would actually be friends with a different Prompto."

As if he needed more of him out there.