August Aftermath: Plants Solidify Sunshine

[lifeaftr_mods]

AUGUST AFTERMATH: OVERGROWTH

Who: Everyone
What: You're back, for better or worse
When: August 19th and onward
Where: The Storyteller's Temple on Ensō, and anywhere else
Warnings: Please mark as you go!

Optimism Doesn't Change the Facts

By the end of the 17th, the last of those suffering from the Overgrowth have either pulled through or succumbed entirely. For the next two days, their bodies will decompose and the flowers will feed on their remains, flourishing into bright patches of color.

If you perished and choked on your flowery words, never fear. Come the 19th, you will be stirring awake in the Storyteller's Temple. You will be experiencing a few...side effects, as it happens, while your body readjusts. It will take something like a week for those symptoms to disperse, though the Storyteller isn't around to inform you of this.

What is around? Aside from your own freshly revived selves, there are a great deal of flowers, and all of them are sickeningly familiar. Scarlet gladiolus. Blushing dog rose. Soft yellow buttercups. Garnet-colored geraniums. Dark nodules of fly orchids. Rich violets. Periwinkle hydrangeas. Peppered yellow speckles of goldenrod. Jade green zinnias. Red spears of snapdragons. Pale begonias. Pink spangles of mountain laurel. The very flowers that killed you are now growing all over the Temple, inside and out, in rich abundance, cloying the air with their perfumed fragrance.

Don't be concerned. These ones certainly aren't going to be spreading to your flesh anytime soon.

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If your character died during this event, please let us know if you have not already. Death penalties have been reduced for this event, but we still need to account for them!

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Everybody pile in for the Sad Spider Wake.

[prettypurpleparlor]

[In amongst all the flowers, there's a clear space. With time and stubborn patience, Muffet has managed to clear an area of some of the slower-regrowing flowers, and has lain down a large blanket woven from her own pale purple silk on the bare stone floor. It is plain and undyed.]

[On it, she's put out a spread of various types of her own homemade food and drink, the sort of fresh and tasty monster food that many of you will be familiar with from her work in the Denny.]

[There a small plate of the same food on the altar for the Storyteller as well, set apart for them. They're suffering this, too, in their way.]

[In addition to the food and drink, she's also placed a few smaller, softer blankets for people to wrap themselves in, and any personal items those still living- or, if they asked her to do so before they succumbed to their illness, the dead- requested her to bring for them. She's here to mourn with those who need the company, care for those she can, and offer whatever help she has to give.]

[She sits there, poised neatly in the center of the blanket, offering food and comfort to anyone who comes in, whether they're returning from the roads of the island or the stranger paths of death. Muffet holds her vigil, and waits.]

[They've lost enough. It's time to bring them home.]

[forwearemany]

(They have been here, waiting, since they were informed of the impermanence of death.

They have seen Muffet, but it is some time before they finally approach her.)

Greetings.

(They sit.)

[salschef]

[ Hunk wanders in, eventually, looking tired, drained. He hadn't been eating well since he'd shown up, more worried about keeping his team alive than taking care of himself and it shows in the hollows below his eyes.

Still, he can recognize a vigil for the dead when he sees one, and he slowly makes his way over, nodding at a clear spot on the blanket. ]

Room for one more?

[thermalwind]

[He arrives in the temple to do his own vigil with his pack slung over one broad shoulder. Gone is the dark armor he'd worn before and replaced with white and red. Keith looks visibly older, having crossed the last bridge from teenager to man. He's tall and walks carefully between the flowers as he comes to the open space.]

...Hey. I guess I'm not the only one going to wait. [He sets his pack down and settles beside it. He folds his legs under him.]

Anything I can do to help?

[vagabone]

[How awkward is this going to be, approaching her again after telling her everything? It's not something she's going to forget so easily, just because he puts on a smile and brings back his old chipper ways.

But he needs to ask a favor, for the first time. It's for a good cause.]

What's going on, Muffin?

[catpiper]

[There's probably an incredible lesson to be learned from this whole mess. Something something share your emotions blah blah blah don't lie to yourself.

Anyway, she's ignoring all That and trying to forget that her friends and family also died of this particular disease. It's bad. It'd be easier to push aside if her voice still worked and there wasn't a garden full of reminders in bloom a few feet away that she's pointedly avoiding eye contact with.

Hello, Muffet. She's alive?? And also very hungry. Don't mind her sorta lowkey hovering. Shoo her away.]

[vagabone]

[Héctor's cleared a space of his own, over there with his blanket in a corner where he's both out of the way and able to keep an eye on everything. There's no point in being here and missing all the action, after all. He's desperately curious about how the dead come back... and plain desperate to see one kid in particular.

He's still exhausted from being nearly drained dry only two days ago and from walking here, but he can still smile and be chatty with those who approach him.

And later on, one might catch him pulling up some of the flowers with his bare hands, paying special attention to the buttercups. That's absolutely not what he wants Ren to come back and see all over the damn place.]

[hyperlit]

[The Drifter can breathe easier, now that their lungs are clear. They cannot breathe well, because they have never breathed well since that illness took root in their body - the one they arrived here with, the one that was not so pretty when its symptoms manifested in earnest.]

[They're still coughing slightly into their mantle when they see him: ragged, bony, picking at flowers. Their eyes narrow slightly, onyx slits glistening against the cobalt of their skin.]

[The words flick up neatly on their transparent HUD as it hovers beside them, issued from the sprite at their shoulder:]

some are poisonous

[catpiper]

[She catches him pulling flowers straight from the ground and while she can understand the sentiment, there are far too many to pluck, which is troubling in its own way.

It's difficult to look at him, knowing he called her the last night she was alive. Aware that she ignored his words and-

She isn't sure if he wants to see her, but there's another force driving her to stand by his side. She has to see for herself that there are no blooms covering his body and the only petals touching his hands are the ones he chose to pick himself.

Sup.]

[antepone]

[ The violets are there, and she looks upon them not with fear or anxiety. In fact, she doesn't look like she feels much of anything. She isn't sure why she can't feel anything--her own feelings, anyway--but she can't really bring herself to care much.

She's alive. And that should make her happy, but there's just an absence of anything. What she does feel, though, is the emotions of everyone around her. They're roaring in her head, filling her up and making her ache all over. Her empathy's in full blast, now, and she tries to find some peace somewhere.

She takes up a quiet corner in the temple, her knees pulled up against her chest. Mira feels like she has to protect herself from anything and everything. If she holds herself tightly enough, maybe it'll mute everything she's feeling.

Eventually, though, she hits her limit, after a while, and she leaves. Catch her outside the temple. Of course, she also goes to her cottage. There's a cat she needs to check on and comfort, and she just... wants to sleep.

But she won't turn away anyone who comes to her. ]

catch you on the outside

[everylittlesecret]

[Nari can't get herself to enter the temple. She's never liked them much, and it's not changing now. There's a lot of pacing going on outside of it when she spots Mira.

That's enough to make her stop dead in her tracks.




The dead really were coming back.]

.... Mira?

temple

[catpiper]

[Waking up near her family had been little more than a small comfort, when she really thought about it. They died. A horrific, painful, lonely death that she hoped others didn't experience.

She had started to look for familiar faces, hoping they weren't beside her, finding that most of them were-many of which had joined her in a vehement denial of anything being wrong in the early days of the disease. It's bad. Really bad.

The violets had caught her eye and she didn't think about their meaning, until she sees Mira hiding in the corner. It's heartbreaking, but understandable. The terrifying moments leading up to death and suddenly being revived in a temple of flowers is-

Well, she doesn't have any real treasure here, so grabs a groddy rock from the temple ground, tries to shine it against her shirt and ambles over to her friend.]

tim wright | ota | i'll match your formatting

[postictal]

[Tim wakes with a dizzying wrench in his guts, yanking bolt upright because there's a noose drawn tight around his neck and he can't breathe and there's another jolt when he realizes there's something on his face.]

[He can't smell the sickly fragrance of blooming flowers. He can't smell anything but wood grain and icy sweat. The mask is pressed so close to his face that it may as well be glued to his skin. So, naturally, he works his fingertips beneath teh wood and yanks.]

[His vision swarms out in motes of white. A hot nodule of pain rockets down the length of his spine and arches his back. He'd scream, but the wood has fused to his face; he can't even cry out through the slightly porous wood fibers. He can't do anything but go rigid with the shock of trying to rip the thing away. His spine presses against the aged flagstones. He rolls onto his side. His hands press against the ridges of the carved, smoothed, sanded wood that he spent hours perfecting during his first nights on Ensō's shores.]

[Too much time passes with Tim reduced to little more than a miserable huddle in the darkest, most secluded corner of the Temple that he can find. He shuts his eyes and breathes through his nose and tries to drown out the sensation of wood fused to his skin. His breaths are short, jerky, rattling; hyperventilated premonitions of that incipient and unpreventable panic.]

[At some point, he gauges the coast clear enough to try and slink into the surrounding jungle, which is where he attempts to spend the rest of the week.]

[He doesn't want anyone to see him like this.]

[lightlessfuture]

[ Oh, there's someone with...a mask?

They watch, vaguely curious at first, and then alarmed as Tim's attempts to rip the mask off are fruitless and clearly painful.

They are not...sure, if it would be polite to touch the mask, but they can at least try to offer some comfort in the face of it. The clear distress he's in sparks a half-remembered facet of a dark memory; the sensation of something being stripped away, being bound into a blank, featureless container-

Tim will feel small hands patting patiently at his own, an almost imperceptible weight as the Knight seats themselves beside him.

There, there. ]

[souldeterminant]

[He may want to hide, but that doesn't mean someone isn't looking for him. Feet crunching on dry leaves and branches as they go, unhindered by the sweat-slicked hair plastered to their neck and forehead. Sometimes, there are more important things to concern themself with.]

[He's one of them.]

[It would be nice to say that luck is on their side for once, except that's never been true. Something small and solid and red is the only thing left to produce a result, hours of walking culminating in sighting his form, not too far away. They don't shout. There's no need.]

[They simply look to him and wait.]

[lightlessfuture]

[ The Knight - wanders. Now that the infection has passed, they've donned their hooded cloak once more. It's a somber grey; it matches their mood, their exhaustion at the past few days.

The moniker they were once given, 'little ghost', never seems more apt than it does now. They're more prone to bumping into others accidentally, or just standing there while people move around them, apparently staring into space.

But those they know who succumbed and returned galvanize them into action; they are almost frantic in their attempts to hold onto them again, to be reassured that they're all here and at least intact enough. (They are familiar with the concept of coming back with a little less). ]

[vagabone]

[What's this? A really, really small kid playing dress up? They've got his attention. This is no place for children, and he can't exactly give them a petal and a blessing to send them home.

And nobody wants anything to do with flowers after all that's happened. Except him. He's collecting the ones he recognizes into a basket, though it makes his hands sting. It's probably wasted effort--he can't possibly get them all before people start to come back.]

Hey, chico.

[forwearemany]

(Legion was among the lucky: they confessed some secrets and avoided death.

They are uncertain of the status of others. Seeing The Knight is thus a relief, and it shows in the smooth movements of their headflaps and the way their lights remain a calm and steady blue white.

They chatter to get their attention.)

[holdmyhand]

[ Luna can be found, resting in a patch of flowers. Asleep? Awake? No one really knows-- not unless you get closer to find out. Ribombee floats around her head gleefully, excited for the sheer amount of beautiful floral deco that just dropped into existence. Like...who wouldn't be? Probably terrorists. It's a good time.

Luna seems distracted, though. Even though she's sitting up, her head hangs low and long, uncut bangs cover her eyes. Let the panic sit in-- she's probably actually dead. She's definitely out for the--

...snore...

She happens to let out a light little snoozy sound that wakes her up enough to fall back into the grass...and sleep some more. Or maybe she's just laying there, secretly awake. Who knows? ]

[yallstupid]

[Guzma had been heading to the temple proper pretty early, once he felt up for it. The thought of welcoming the dead back to life isn't exactly a great one, but her has to see who exactly left the world of the living to all of this, and he has a few fair guesses as to the few he'd know that would rather bite their tongue and die than to spill their guts. To be fair, he would be among them, if not for his stubbornness and the desire to remain here for his pokemon...and those he knows need him to remain.

He finds Luna, in a patch of flowers, and his heart leaps to his throat viciously, much of the color draining from his face. He's just about to rush over to her before he sees her Ribombee frolicking around her, exhaling slowly. No pokemon would dance on the corpse of its trainer - she's fine. ...Though now, he's going to be a little more rough with her than he had previously intended. Scowling, he creeps over as stealthily as possible, crouches down before her, and flicks her hard on the nose.]

Y'all picked the crummiest place to take a snooze, brat. [Timing, you little shit. You're lucky he didn't fling you into the mana pool.]

[savedbyasong]

It took a moment before Shion realised he could move. He came to awareness and realised he was alive, back again and he settled to wait.

But people were moving around him and he realised. He could move as well, no feeling of terror. No inability to move even the smallest muscle. No paralysis at all. He scrambled upright. Of course. Story Tellers Temple not his bed on the Tower. The Islands. The Flowers.

He had died. He had died and broken his promise. Just like he knew he would. He was the worst brother. He squeezed his eyes shut. He shouldn't cry. He had brought this on himself with his inability to sort out the mess that was his mind.

And he wasn't the only one hurting. How many had died in the end? How many had had to watch those they loved die?

He sat up fully. He was no stranger to death. Returning from death was not new to him and this was... Less bad than usual despite the flowers, the reminders of the month growing over the temple.

He got up, looking for anyone he knew. Or anyone that seemed to be alone. No one should be alone, especially after dying. He looked for Aster, he looked for Ceej though he was unsure if the latter would even want to see him.

There was a lot to think about, a lot to examine and he had just proven that he didn't have the slightest bit of mastery over any of his emotions. Not just the anger.

He took out his notepad, writing had become a comfort, another way to keep calm and setting out exactly what had happened might help him understand.

Except when he opened it he couldn't read it. He had written the words before he died but they were just symbols, shapes. He had no idea what they meant or how they went together.

Panic welled up in him. He put pencil to paper but... He couldn't. He didn't know how to write.

There was a clatter as notepad and pencil fell to the floor and Shion sat, staring at it in horror, breathing too fast, hands shaking.

[yourattention]

"Shion?" Connor's voice is quiet, gentle. He's visible for the moment, having approached Shion from the side, but he won't be if - "Hey, look at me. You're ok."

There's something vaguely off about his tone of voice, the cadence of what he's saying - almost like someone else is using his voice to speak. That's not the case here, exactly, but it might as well be.

[journalname]

[There, see? It was no trouble at all.

Asgore seems regal and serene as ever when he revives, unruffled even by the flowers blooming all over the temple. Is he really so untroubled by this? Well, he did just die from the Overgrowth; he's hardly going to start letting on now if he isn't. With so many others coming back, and their friends and family waiting here to reunite with them, far be it from him to make some kind of scene.

The only cracks are when he reaches up and notes the flower crown still sprouting from his head and horns. It doesn't hurt as it did before. His paw comes away a little dusty, yet it is not an alarming amount. Still...he frowns a little as he carefully feels the situation out.

He doesn't linger in the temple long after that, instead leaving to make the journey back home. When he gets back to his hut, he walks around the side to the little garden he's been keeping, and looks at the new patch of goldenrod blooming there for some time. If there's any dust left there amongst their roots, it's impossible to see.

Eventually he just goes back inside, leaving the flowers to grow as they will. Maybe he'll water them tomorrow.]

[souldeterminant]

[Always, we begin again.]

[It's not surprising, anymore. Waking up, it takes very little time to orientate themself from what they last remember, to where they are. Looking towards the entrance of the temple, eyeing the newly sprouted flowers that cluster at every crack in the stone. Staring down at their hands, the jagged, torn sleeves of their clothing. It looks beyond repair.]

[Perhaps it's time to change them.]

[They remain on the floor for some time. Unmoving, until there's the sound of an approach. At footstep or a voice to raise their head towards with dull eyes. Hello, they're here.]

[Time to begin.]

[lightlessfuture]

[ The approaching footsteps are small and light, echoing only softly on the temple's stone floor.

They peer at Frisk, and offer them a small hand. If they're lying there without moving, perhaps they simply want to rest. Death was a tiring thing, after all. But when they're ready to get up, the Knight will be there. ]

kravitz | open and closed | i'll match format!

[deathfindsaway]

i. [closed to ren & taako] ashes, ashes; dust to dust / i think I found a place for us

He awakens with a sharp intake of breath, and a cough.

Kravitz doesn't remember dying. He remembers pain, everything being hazy, something thick in his throat and a sensation like a seize. And now he's here, pulling his eyes open and rolling himself over and feeling like shit on a stone floor. The flowers catch his eye first, and he tenses, an immediate sensation of pulling himself up and pulling a hand to his chest before he realizes they're not his. They're not anyone's.

It's over. Over in the worst possible way, because people don't just go to sleep like he did and then wake up somewhere else, in a temple, under the watchful eye of a god, unless...

His eyes drift over the room as his hands ball into fists, hoping for just a moment not to see anyone he knows. But he hasn't yet noticed the cuts and still-healing marks peppered down his arm, around his forehead and neck, where flowers once stood. Perhaps that's why he's a bit more weary than everyone else who seems to be waking here.

ii. [open; outside the temple] it's down by garden / after dark

[Everything's a mess.

He can't find it in himself to be happy about any of this. There's joy in people embracing loved ones, taking people home, like the arrival of a train to a new town. But this isn't that. It's people picking up the pieces. It's him, sitting on the edge of it, struggling to figure out how to feel. He's thankful to be alive, but he shouldn't be. It's not that he wants to be dead, but that's the price people are supposed to pay for-- for life, at all.

But at the same time, he's so, so thankful Taako and Ren aren't dead forever, either. For once, it's become a place he wouldn't be able to follow.

It's impossible to hide what happened, not with how he came back; lacerations and new scars dot over his arms, up his neck and to his head at his hairline, more hidden under his shirt and clothes. Everyone else seems to have come back at least physically whole, but-- not him. Not this. Not with it all feeling so fresh.

He doesn't want to break up any of the greetings with this, but he's obviously conflicted, leaning his head into one hand and sitting quietly away from the festivities.]

[catpiper]

It wasn't silent.

She thought it would be. Had banked on it, by finding a quiet place to hole herself up in while the flowers took away her vision, her mobility, ate away at her heart to the point she thought she could hear someone's voice coming from the rock she had forgotten to take out of her pocket. The pleading hadn't been entirely external and she remembers wishing-

Pleading. Hoping that the please help me please help me that echoed through her mind wasn't loud enough for anyone else to hear.

She wishes it had been quieter, like now. The silence of whatever room she's in as her consciousness floods back only broken up by the sound of a familiar cough. And she's terrified that the disease hasn't run its course. That someone found her. That people are around her are covered in petals and blood and it's that thought that makes her squeeze her eyes shut.

The fact she can do that is what throws her off and she curls her her fingers into her palms, wiggles her toes, turns her head to face the ground and-

She presses her hands against her eyes, slowly fanning her fingers and squinting through the breaks between them to soften the view of whatever she's about to witness. More flowers-more flowers she's going to ignore because they're not on her body or something she wants to think about ever again. It's the man in her immediate line of sight that grabs her attention. It's someone she can't-won't-ignore. Battered and bruised in a way she doesn't seem to be, but he's not sick and that's what makes her push herself up, hurry to his side and press her face into his back.

[pidgeypidge]

The first coherent thought that crossed her mind was that she felt... fine. Alive. Not sick.

Pidge's eyes snapped open and she sat up a little quicker than was probably necessary. But even that didn't seem to bother her. She remembered how it had been before. The flowers. How, supposedly, being honest about things would have just reversed whatever the flowers were doing to her. And she'd wanted to believe she could do it. But in the end, it hadn't mattered.

And so she'd wandered off to find an out of the way place to spend her final moments. And she'd had the mental clarity to leave behind everything but what she'd been wearing.

How long ago had that been? She had no idea.

How fitting that the first thing she laid eyes upon was an expanse of mountain laurel. The pink and white flowers had never given her pause before, but now she couldn't help feeling a little uneasy. There were other flowers, too, and for whatever reason that seemed fitting.

When she emerged from the temple a few minutes later, there was a somber air about her, and she'd tucked a particularly large laurel blossom behind her ear.

It wasn't the laurel's fault, after all.

[ooc: I'll match format~]

[braceforimpact]

The sprouting flowers break skin and they hurt.

It's not just the buds, either, the splitting of flesh in his palms and the soles of his feet--he drips blood onto the grass, weeping it like tears out of the openings the flowers make for themselves. It's the thorns, pricking him and cutting the already-wounded flesh, adding insult to injury. He can force them out, and does: his AT Field is just a shimmer of light and they're ripped out of his body and ejected into the sea with a spatter of blood and shredded skin, roots and all.

But they'll grow back within an hour or so, and until then he's left bearing open wounds, wounds from which new buds will soon grow. It's so frustrating--no--yes, frustrating, he's irritable and sore in every sense of the word, and they just grow back but he can't stand them when they do.

No one, hopefully, was accusing Kaworu Nagisa of handling this with maturity.

Because he's definitely not.

[forwearemany]

Maturity is not required: it would be irrational to expect proper behavior from a child in this situation.

Legion themselves is doing better than many of those on the island, even if they aren't perfectly well: flowers spill from their chesthole but they feel no pain, only elevated temperature and some confusion. Additionally, those flowers seem to be... wilting? They're looking decidedly less vibrant and healthy than Kaworu's, at least. Occasionally, a crimson petal falls.

They see their young ally, and decide to approach.

"Kaworu."