lifeaftr | June Intro: Let's Sea How Far We've Come

Entry tags:

June Intro: Let's Sea How Far We've Come

INTRO LOG: JUNE

Who: Everyone!
What: New souls arrive to the archipelago of LifeAftr as the island of Ziziphus begins to crumble
When: June 4th and onward
Where: Ziziphus and Ensō...and Monsun
Warnings: Mark as needed!

Ziziphus: At The Start Of The End Of The World
Since Bliss's destruction, the extensive root network they've threaded throughout every inch of the island of Ziziphus has begun to crumble. June 4th marks the beginning of the inevitable collapse of the island as it starts to sink into the sea...coincidentally coinciding with the arrival of LifeAftr's newest adventurers. Between the dead trees surrounding Bliss's empty husk, great cracks in the earth start to widen, the dead god's absent root system leaving vast gaps underground which simply cannot support the life above.

It almost sounds like thunder rupturing from the ground itself, wild tremors preceding each vicious boom until gaping chasms lay between venturing parties and the safety of the mana pool - only water waits below, for those unlucky enough to lose their footing.

And if the immense pull of mile wide chunks of landmass sinking beneath the waves isn't enough to suck you down, the heavy rain of debris from Ziziphus's rapidly destabilizing edges will certainly help. Want to avoid a watery grave? What you need to do is simple:

Escape.

Sorry, newbies. If you showed up on Ziziphus, you're in for a very athletic entrance to LifeAftr.

Monsun: Just Like Every Other Morning Before
Adventurers aren't the only creatures on Ziziphus attempting to outrun its collapse. Creatures great and small, from the largest spindlank to the smallest tigerlily will be heading south in an attempt to escape the worst of the quakes. Unlike offshore adventurers, however, these poor creatures don't have a mana pool waiting for them to escape through. Their extinction, it seems, is imminent.

Unless you have something to say about it.

Already exhausted from their attempts to get through to and then actively dispose of their fellow god, the Storyteller will break their traditional manner of communication to announce a potential solution to this problem with a single broadcast to the Stones of Far Speech in a strained, weary tone:

"The mana pools on Monsun are now open. If you are willing, save what you can."

True to their word, characters will discover that the island of Monsun will be accessible once more for a short period of time. From prey to predator, obstruction to catastrophe - multiple species of flora and fauna can still be preserved, should you choose to do so.

Be wary of the psychological effects of both sides of the island. Those who are new to our setting and wish to explore, the island of Monsun has a peculiar side effect to its stark divide: the eastern half is rich in resources, but brings out the very worst of you, while the western half is a tumultuous wasteland that accentuates your best qualities. More information on said island can be found on its entry on the Locations page, or its introductory info post.

Due to these efforts, the Storyteller will not be available for contact from the 4th to the 18th of June. Item Requests will also be unavailable at this time. They will, however, make a rather strained announcement to ensure all are aware that access to both Ziziphus and Monsun will cease on June 10th.

Ensō: I Wonder What It Means If It's Gone
The native fauna of Ziziphus aren't the only ones on the move, it seems. Those who wander the shores of Ensō will be delighted to witness the appearance of creatures akin to both turtles and dugongs drifting through the waters, gravitating around the island's eastern coast, rapidly gaining in numbers over the following days.

Kaleidoshells have been unlocked in the bestiary!

With spring close to ending in the archipelago, these peaceful creatures are looking to make good use of their natural nesting areas; hope you're open to sharing the beach for a little while. While a few braver individuals will make their way to the shores between C4 and D1 to begin digging nests, the vast majority won't be coming to shore quite yet.

They do, however, make a very fine sight around the waters of Ensō, especially in the evening. Luminescent, their rainbow patterns glow underwater, drifting mood lights for the increasingly warmer evening breeze.

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 )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Here's the thing.

It has been almost a year since Foster has seen a person of anything approaching his racial makeup that wasn't A. an 'elf,' B. a skeleton wearing a glamour or C. a transitory property of the metaverse--not real at all.

He goes stock-still, staring at Kravitz for a solid two or three seconds in silence.

"No," Foster replies slowly, sparing a hungry glance for the scythe, eyes too-bright already.

"Not just that moment, but the expansion of it. The terrible excitement of those events out of your control, the earth cracking beneath your feet. The certainty of its destruction--"

The island's, the world's. As one cell, so the body's whole... eventually. The microcosm, the macrocosm. It's connected, and what are they? Not cells, but the bodies within the cell, scrambling for purchase as a tiny piece of their world expires.

He tears his gaze from the scythe--Kravitz has no idea how lucky he is that Foster no longer drools with excitement.

"Or is there something you're here to do?"

Well, luckily or unluckily for Foster, this was a skeleton until the Storyteller saw so fit. His ears do have a subtle point- a little elven blood in there from god knows where- but right now Kravitz is mostly just staring him down, following his line of sight not to him, but his weapon. What is he planning here? He's not some of the native fauna here, is he? Part of Kravitz wished he explored a little more of this place.

When their eyes finally connect, he snaps back into it, straightening his posture somewhat.

"I was-- I was simply trying to get as many people off this place as possible. It's very dangerous. Perhaps less so now that the local god isn't running around kidnapping people, but the ground falling into the sea isn't much better." He holds out a hand towards him. "Do you need help getting somewhere else?"

Foster blinks once. Looks from Kravitz to his scythe and back again.

Smiles.

"That depends on where I'm going."

He doesn't move from his spot. Another, shorter shock splits fissures into the earth, fissures that fill with sand or seawater.

Local god.

And what do you know about gods--?

"So is that blade for me? If you're here to help--" He pauses, words and eyelids weighted with the implication. But his eyes behind their lids are brighter, his smile sharper, his tone... well, it's just more, in that way that's either excitement or threat.

For being a Reaper, Kravitz imagines he would be more used to people who look on death as reverance, who make sacrifices and await the day they get to the Astral Plane. But he hardly ever deals with them- his division is people who cheat death, who refuse to die, who pull others from the brink. It's almost unsettling to see his fixation on what he can assume is his purpose, and much less himself.

Too bad Kravitz is just as trapped as the rest of them.

"It's-- I can't bring you anywhere from here. We're trapped in this system." He squints, trying to determine what level he's speaking on here. Especially with a flesh body, he isn't used to being recognized, seeing as his role typically calls for a skeleton. "Do you know who I am?"

The irony is that had they shared a world, Foster would have been Kravitz's problem anyway. There is more than one way to embrace death; you can love something so much that you break it. Or it breaks you.

Foster cocks his head slightly--or at least he turns it away slightly, so that his covered eye is angled directly at Kravitz, his usable eye on the right looking past the shelf of purple mushrooms in study.

Kravitz has brought up multiple topics in one reply and Foster has not been able to to coherently respond to that kind of situation in half a decade.

"I know what you can do," he says. "If you want me to know who you are, then show me. Go on--put that blade to my neck." He steps forward, just one hoof at first. "Slit my throat, my belly, cut me down! Show me what you are--show me your power, show me your power, show me it--!"

He's coming to find that an awful lot of things are becoming his problem as worlds cross- who the hell was managing these other places' Astral Planes? Certainly someone a lot sloppier than Kravitz, that's for sure. He opens his mouth at the request, closes it again, and then opens it once more before any sound comes out.

"I. I'm not-- I'm not here to kill you, actually, I was hoping for the opposite. The lack of death, or needing to be dead, because things don't work properly here and there's hardly a reason for this sort of-- thing. Yes." Mhmm. Great. This is going wonderfully. "I can get you out of here. You don't have to die."

'Actually, he was hoping for sort of the opposite?'

Foster's brow creases slightly; he regards Kravitz with a flatly nonplussed sort of stare, the seconds ticking. He does not interpret that to mean that Kravitz was hoping to try and save him. He assumes, immediately, that Kravitz wants Foster to kill him.

The rest is... blather. Half-started sentences; tepid, incohesive deflections--

--is he offering Foster a bribe to murder him?

That recognition is what actually triggers a reaction from him--a very sudden burst of hollow, raucous laughter.

"You want me to kill you? And in exchange offer me--offer me life?" He continues to laugh at least for another second or so, then reverts to flat sobriety.

"No. The universe wants me dead; that's my only deserved fate, as a worthless corpse--its own vile, disgusting mistake! Everything I do is a waste. I'm an abomination, an obscenity... I should not exist, I should not still exist."

In speaking, his reply again grows mountingly passionate and excited, mountingly intense, fervid even--all without allowing Kravitz a word in edgewise.

"It birthed me dying and still the insult of my existence dragged itself through Creation, crawling contaminant towards my purpose. That's why we are here now, like this."

Of course, if you want him to kill you, he can. But it's a bit odd, isn't it?

Even if Foster had given him time to respond, he probably wouldn't have figured out how to do so. That isn't even close to the meaning he was going for here, and hopefully the look he casts Foster makes that very, very evident before he finally finds words.

"No, no ab-- absolutely not, I do not want you to kill me." Let's start there, maybe, even if that hardly seems like a good point to start anything. "No, I was asking if you needed saving from, you know, the ground ceasing to exist."

He kind of figures this is going to need more explanation, so he continues as quickly as he's able. "Whether you should be dead or not is a matter I unfortunately have no hand in. But if you die here, you will simply wake back up again. It isn't permanent, even as I'm loathe to it." Kravitz is beginning to feel for the Storyteller, sure, but he is still kinda mad about that whole death thing. "I think there are consequences, even though I know not what, but-- I'm not here to kill you."

The earth quakes again, crumbling under Foster's hooves and dropping out from under his hind end--he scrambles out of the growing crevasse, kicking stones and sand into the ocean with only a short, almost indifferent backward glance.

The glance he gives Kravitz is a bit less dismissive--but coupled with how much closer he chooses to get, it might be considered provocative.

Honestly, Foster would have felt kind of... weird about killing this guy. Not because of the scythe or whatever, but for the other half of the reason he was excited to see Kravitz to begin with.

He would have been glad to have some kind of.... focus, some kind of action to take here in the end times of the ground they stand on, something to really mark the occasion. But that's not off the table. Just the one that would have been kind of weird.

Because if Kravitz is expecting Foster to be... deterred by, discouraged or perhaps disbelieving about the lack of permanent death on this island, he's going to be disappointed.

"In that case, why would you want to save me?" That's the worst argument Foster's ever heard, and that include's Tim's deluded, circular logic about knowing what he wants despite clearly knowing nothing about the things he claims to want.

"Either way it's wasted effort!"

This is intimately more difficult than he thought this was going to be. Kravitz is not a people person- his job is death, but more than that, it's a set job. There's a direct, any means necessary goal, and it's much easier to kill a person than it is to save them. He plants a foot down steady as the ground moves, trying to keep himself properly upright, but this is not going the way he planned. Usually he has strategies, a survey of the area, some goddamn idea of where he's going. Technically speaking, he probably shouldn't have done this at all. But for once, he was going to do something nice. Just be a stand-up kind of guy.

God, he hates being alive again. At least it sounds like that's something they share, albiet in very different ways.

"It's not nice to die! It doesn't feel good!" That was great and descriptive, he thinks, but of course regular logic doesn't seem to be working on them. "I came here to help evacuate the island. This-- this scythe can open portals that we can use to escape through, now do you want to go or not."

Kravitz isn't certain if he should force this guy- can think if plenty of ways to trick him, if he really needed- but he's beginning to think he started something he has no idea how to finish.

"Of course it hurts." Foster's response is frank. Blunt in the same way a brick is blunt. Like a bludgeon. "That's how you know you're dying."

A painless death... a peaceful, ignorant death he'd been promised. How kind! What a comfort, what a reassurance!

No. Death was never to be a kindness, not unearned--!

Blink and you'll miss it, though--never mind how creepy that was. He keeps going, because he cannot stop himself--

"This is exactly where I want to be. Where I need to be. To bear witness to the end of something that was once permanent--to bear witness as the earth itself splits and crumbles, as the firmament breaks apart around the very roots it once anchored. I need to be here not just to see, but to feel as the earth gives way, to experience that end in every sense. With every sense!"

A pause.

"Anyway, if I wanted to leave--"

He would be a coward. Ignorant and a coward.

"I would already have left."

He isn't sure if Foster isn't getting it, or he's just getting himself so intimately that convincing him to another point of view would be utterly impossible. It's hard to say what his world was like- where was his reaper, frankly, must he do everything around here- but thats certainly not something Kravitz has the power to fix with a swing of his weapon. As powerful as he can be, he doesn't want someone turning up to be angry with him for any, even well deserved, murder here. He can't afford to make enemies.

Kravitz sighs, looking towards Foster with resolve. "You can still see that without dying. Not everything must involve death to be meaningful. Death is the natural end to a life, not a goal to achieve. There has been enough of a forced end here. Besides, this is one island of an entire world. The world is not ending. And if you want to see the rest, you're going to come with me."

Actually, Kravitz would make at least one friend by cutting Foster down where he stands. Two, if you're counting Foster himself.

Then again, Foster is not a friend anyone really wants to have.

He definitely hears what Kravitz is saying, but at this point it's old news. He doesn't care about the rest of the world. He cares about this part--the part that is reaching its (un)natural end.

There is no natural end to a life like his. Or rather, the 'natural' end is all there is to his life--there was never anything to his life but its ending. In that vein, Kravitz's words are on the borderline between the obvious and the offensive.

"I know it's not the whole world," he retorts, his tone disdainful.

"My death is only natural. There's nothing here I want to see but this." Not right now. Maybe later he'll find the rest more interesting, a bigger puzzle around a single self-destructing piece. Or maybe not. But the potential is there--

Foster, no. Foster, absolutely not.

Kravitz gives him this look that's one part tired and one part utterly exhausted.

"You know, I'm trying to make this sound like you're not acting like an idiot, but-- this is a preventable death. I know death, very well, actually. And this-- this is pointless." He gestures to the crumbling ground, keeping his grip on his scythe.

"You will simply wake up again, or lose more and more of yourself the more deaths you experience, at which point you'll only be a danger to yourself and others. So you should get out of here, and see the life in this world rather than simply it's decay."

It's like talking to a wall. This isn't an unusual experience, so Foster can't pretend he's surprised, or even disappointed. Most of the time, he has the distinct feeling that he's speaking an entirely different language from other people, a language that shares the same sounds and even grammar, but somewhere between his mouth and their ears, the meaning gets lost. Sometimes he senses that it's the other person's problem, not his. Sometimes, it feels like there's a defect in him, an essential flaw that's incapable of function in the world of people. You are not responding correctly to the situation.

Most of the time he knows both are true.

Anyway, the feeling now isn't disappointment. It's disillusionment. He had, for some reason, hoped that this man, this other person with whom he had one thing in common, would not be...

Mmmmm.

Ha ha. That was stupid of him.

"The life in this world... in all worlds, is by nature in decay. You said it yourself. Towards death. But the living are already there. To bear witness to life." As if they would. They shield their eyes from it, believe life to be static. Constant. Stable rather than entropic.

"As Creation loses to the Void, inch by inch... they become particle to a dying whole. Do you understand? This is what I am here for. The point of rupture... cataclysmic decay." He has tried his very best to explain, but he knows already the battle for understanding is lost. It's a bitter feeling, sour. But also... freeing.

If this man doesn't want to understand, then he never will.

This is so-- he had thought this was bafflement, anger, but Kravitz is finding he's mostly annoyed. He knows the power of death. Understands what it means to witness something's end, the unique crystalized power in something where life crosses over into death. He also knows those things, those magics, are incredibly dangerous. To bear witness is one thing. To harness, another. And he wonders-- no, he worries-- that Foster is here for entirely the wrong reasons.

Kravitz narrows his eyes, but holds fast.

"There is always decay in the world. There is always the entropy of the universe. But death is simply another part in existence. A shifting of energy from one form to the next. There are more endings than you can imagine." This man does not want to be helped-- it's no matter. Kravitz tries to remind himself this isn't his domain, his laws, even as he wants to uphold them. "I abhor you to remember that death is a piece of a whole. Not a great and final bell as you seem to wish it so."

In that light, Kravitz's temperament makes a lot more sense. It's no mless frustrating, but he can see the misunderstanding. Which is unusual for him, so he seizes onto it with enthusiasm.

"Oh! Hahaha. No. No, death is not the final bell... just one of many echoes before a greater, true finality of silence. A part of Creation that will end as Creation itself fails."

Foster is restless, though--he did not come to Ziziphus to talk.

"Do you understand? You already think about it a lot. I can tell that much." A pause, then:

"Good."

He smiles briefly. Almost... appreciatively, if thinly.

But he doesn't want to keep talking--he wants to keep seeing, to keep moving, racing the destruction of the island to its dizzying, cataclysmic end...! He just can't contain it, not right now. He can't be still. So, his hooves already stepping high, his claws pulling free of his hairline with blood at their blunt tips--!

He whirls, breaking into a fast trot before sprinting up the fissure, a gait that culminates in a hot canter as he races towards higher ground.

He opens his mouth as Foster speaks, but can't find the words. He-- of course he knows these things. He's possibly the last person here who needs to be told this. Kravitz looks at Foster with bafflement, but as soon as he thinks he has a response, the man is off with a florish.

He just ends up rolling his eyes. That man better not be a necromancer, god help him.

(He finds out later, and screams into his hands.)

Kravitz waves his hand off the direction Foster leaps before turning and heading off the other way. He has a mission to complete. Perhaps, if he sees him again, he'll be a bit more forceful in getting him to the mana pool.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

June Intro: Let's Sea How Far We've Come

Oh heck yes

/o/

no subject

no subject

CW: graphic... ideation

foster please

He's just getting started, Kravitz

god help them both

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

He'll bail next tag probably lmfao

rip

no subject

no subject