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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( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

Comments

[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.]

[postictal]

[He's been trying to stay hidden. Buried in the woodland (where he belongs), like he's turned into something masked and inhuman in earnest. There's something to be said for trying to catch handfuls of hours of sleep when every nerve is alight and buzzing with white-hot nodal swarms of that old hyper-paranoia.]

[To say nothing of the sensation of wood being glued to your face. His breaths are ragged and rasping.]

[It's fitting that when he sees them, it's not immediate. They...blend in. They're never very big or notable about their entrances. They're simply there one moment, in a way that stops him dead because he doesn't remember seeing them get there.]

[But they're one of the people who already knows it. What he can get like. So he stops, stares (silent, muted, muzzled), and wonders how much of his absolute misery can be communicated through the defeated bend of his shoulders alone.]

[He can't speak. He can only raise one hand, fingers curling into his palm, in a sort of resigned, ashamed little wave.]

[Hi.]

[souldeterminant]

[Near automatically, they raise their own hand to return the gesture, only then deciding to step forward as the person beneath the mask remains the same as he's always been. The very same who had been in their corner, so many times before.]

[Time to be in his, if only for a few minutes. Raising their head, they can see red marks, at the edges of the mask. Scratches and gouges in the skin, left behind by frantic fingers.]

[Their brow furrows. Raising a hand, they crook their finger at him. Come down here, please.]

What have you done to yourself this time, mister Wright?





[Sup, fucko? uwu]

[postictal]

[That's the wrong voice, issuing from the wrong mouth. His mask has frozen his features indefinitely. All he can manage is a slow rocking back of his weight, a slight shift that crackles the leaves underfoot.]

[So neither of them are who they're supposed to be, today.]

[He moves forward slowly, hating the way that he has to walk - hating that he walks the way that freak would, with a strange, unsteady gait, head tilted slightly back so he can keep track of his footing. But he hunkers down eventually, crouching until they're roughly at eye level. Until they can see past the dark pits bored into the wood: a pair of eyes, pinched and uncertain.]

[He never learned to form his hands into the right shapes. He settles for pointing at them, and holding up two fingers.]

[Are you both there?]

[souldeterminant]

[They hesitate before slowly turning their head left, then right- slowly relaxing into a proper shake of their head as the motions come easily. Tim... they knew they could rely on him to recognize this. Just as well.]

It's just me. [Chara confirms, stepping to the side in order to get a closer look at his injuries. They frown.] If you leave these as they are, they're going to become infected.

[And scar. An outline of a mask that he won't be capable of taking off.]

There's a first-aid kit, back at the hut. I'd take it you don't intend on returning there.

[postictal]

[What about Frisk? They don't seem worried, but he was always worse at reading the quieter of the two - in part because Chara tends to telegraph how they feel about any particular thing, and often very loudly, as if that would place the onus of disregarding them on those who would acknowledge and then ignore them deliberately.]

[He can't speak. He can't do anything but...]

[He needs his body back. He needs everything that was on it.]

[So he nods. Yes. He'll follow you there, if he can.]