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

[hellawrath]

Lup exhales a breath almost like a sigh, knowing there's no way around bringing up fricking crystal death bonanza now. Not that she was gonna leave it out, it's important, it's just, not super great to talk about or really think about at all actually? Oh well.

"I think-- we didn't ask for islands, that wasn't up to us. The rabbit uses some of the story juice we give them for our requests, but I think a lot of it goes into just, their general powers? And they do with that what they want, pretty much. The voting is a thing now cuz they learned to listen to us." And what a fucking rough lesson it was. Lup chews on her lip thoughtfully, kinda torn between her remembered fury and hurt, how she still doesn't forgive them, and how much faith she does have in them now. Maybe just start at the beginning.

"So when we were exploring Enso, that first, second month here, we found two locked doors engraved with some sigils that were keeping the Storyteller out. One up on the top of the mountain, the other one in the old monkey camp, down on the Southern shore. They had no idea why it was keeping them out, or what it was keeping in, and they became so damn convinced the answer to us washing up here was behind those doors that they-- They locked us in there with a week's supply of food and left us." There's no keeping the bitterness out of her voice now, especially since she'd fucking warned them not to do it, beforehand. She'd seen the disaster coming a mile off and their esteemed god of fucking storytelling, of shit literally going bad for their protagonists like all the time, didn't give a single flying fuck.

"And by us I mean all of us, it wasn't fucking optional." Every child, everyone scared or unsuited to a mission into probable danger. Nobody deserved what was coming for them, but it's so much worse that way.

[savedbyasong]

Shion listened and wrote down what Lup was telling him about stories and the power the Story Teller had.

As Lup continued with her story, as the bitterness sounded in her voice he tensed, in worry of what she was about to say.

Shion's experience of the Story Teller had been a god that was trying to help. But he was not surprised as Lip told her story. They had locked the islanders behind doors that they could not sense behind. Because they wanted information. An experiment.

"Beings of power rarely ask for volunteers." He didn't sound bitter himself more... Resigned. And his voice was gentle as he spoke again, acknowledging that whatever had happened behind those door was probably an awful thing for her to recall.

"What happened?"

[hellawrath]

The boy's comment actually gets through Lup's bitterness and she blinks down at him for a sec. Shit, so it's not his first rodeo either. Guess that shouldn't come as a surprise, seeing how pretty much all the kids here have been through some kinda wringer before all this. It just still sucks, every time. At least that means she's not about to like, ruin his faith in the Storyteller forever or something.

"There was-- Well at first we just found a bunch of ancient buildings carved into the caves, which is weird enough on its own? Nothing much was even left, and those sigils were everywhere. But there was this, this glowing crystal cropping up everywhere. And the further down we went, the more of it there was. And then uh, big crystal golems started attacking us. Took some doing to take one down, but once you did and you really, you properly looked at it? You could tell there was something inside. Somebody." Fuck, no more talking around it. No thinking about how, how Taako could've been one of those things if he'd-- if she and Chara hadn't found him. The conclusion is inevitable, and her voice shows it, growing hard and flat for what's ahead.

"The crystal was transmuting people. Like an infection. Most people had touched it, used it for lighting or, or blew it up to get at the sigils, breathed in the dust and-- It, it grew so slowly. I think some people survived by cutting the crystal out fast, but-- Lots of people died, down there. Horribly." And that's all she's gonna say. That's all she has to say, to get the point across. No reason to paint a fucking word picture here of the suffering of the infected, and of those who-- who could do nothing for the people they cared about, except to make it quick.

"The Storyteller got us out once the last of us left had destroyed all the sigils. Revived the dead a couple days later. They were... horrified at what they'd done, and they promised they'd never force us to go anywhere against our will ever again."

[savedbyasong]

Shion listened carefully, writing notes but not looking away from her. He could write without looking at what he was doing, it would be messy but he wrote a lot in pitch darkness, easier that way for thoughts to hit the page.

"Parasistic crystals." People trapped inside rocks, it sounded awful. It was awful that they had had to see that, fight that, witness their friends die to that. People died horribly. Other people had had to watch their friends die. Having been on both sides of that Shion knew that the latter was always worse.

"They didn't want to actually kill you..." Or were very good liars. But why lie? They were a god. They didn't have to lie. "Did they keep their promise?"