January Event: Fade to Black

[lifeaftr_mods]

JANUARY EVENT: FADE TO BLACK

Who: Anyone and everyone!
What: Your true self comes to roost
When: January 21st - 23rd; January 25th - 28th
Where: All over!
Warnings: Dark subjects such as violence and self-destruction are likely to come to the forefront - please mark your content accordingly!

Down in that Darkness

This log is primarily for the Shadow and Light portions of the event, for ease and convenience. Your Shadow can be either the Persona-inspired sort - a "brutal, bitterly honest recreation of a character's worst flaws, darkest fears, and deepest secrets" - or the edgier, more laughable variant. The Lights, on the other hand, will do their utmost to convince their real selves of their best qualities, no matter how little they want to hear them.

Remember that the Shadows will be present from January 21st to January 23rd, and the Lights will be present from January 25th to January 28th.

On January 25th, we will post a separate log for Rejection Rooms!

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Some useful links, for reference:

[ ♆ ] OOC Event Post
[ ♆ ] Rejection Room Sign-Ups; remember to note your interest in these as soon as possible!
[ ♆ ] Deaths Page; death penalties have been reduced for the duration of this event, but still do let us know if your character dies regardless!

Event Timeline

[ ♆ ] January 20th: The monthly Storytelling occurs.
[ ♆ ] January 21st: Shadows of both initial variants appear.
[ ♆ ] January 23rd: Shadows of both initial variants disappear.
[ ♆ ] January 25th Lights and Rejection Rooms appear.
[ ♆ ] January 28th: Lights and Rejection Rooms dissipate. Those still trapped in their Rejection Rooms by the event's end will suffer a character death.

LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

Comments

This is the second Shadow he's tried to fight, I swear to god

[hurricane_clown]

Honk?!

[Karako leaps backwards so fast he's just shy of fucking teleporting, but part of his alarm is rooted in the anticipation of the lighter being thrown at him. Instead, it lands in the bushes, which begin to smoulder immediately--Karako doesn't know anything about non-Alternian flora, and has no idea if everything in there is supposed to catch light that quickly, but he surely doesn't like it.

He glances at Tim with a look that fleetingly borders on betrayed before he launches what is becoming the standard response to everyone's misplaced avatars of darkness--]

Honk! HOOONK!!

[Attack.]

i mean, it's a valid course of action

[postictal]

[The Shadow grins. It's a strange and unnatural look on the face of someone like Tim, who seldom emotes in such extremes. A crescent of white gleams against skin sunburned darker than it already was.]

[The fire starts eating up the undergrowth at once, tearing through the brush and dead leaves underfoot with greedy abandon. The Shadow isn't unarmed. It isn't armed to the teeth the way the real Tim is, but it draws a flip-knife, small and glinting steel in the firelight.]

[And it knows how to navigate through smoke. Call it instinct, if you want; the Shadow would call it practice.]

[It leaps back several paces, retreating to force Karako to plunge deeper into the flames to face it.]

[hurricane_clown]

[Luckily (or unluckily), Karako is no mere goldblood, no rust coloured, warm-hued example of the physical weakest Trollkind has to offer.

Karako is a highblood, a purple blood, a motherfucking clown, and he plunges headlong into the blazing brush with hardly any heed paid to the growing conflagration.

Where Tim's Ringmaster Shadow slips into the smoke and moves with practise, finesse even, Karako sprints barefoot into the fire with both knives already slashing, a tiny hurricane of unstoppered rage.]

[postictal]

"Keep moving, bud!" [The Shadow sounds elated, and keeps moving, back and back and back. Winding this kid up was just way too easy, and it knows how to thread its way through the maze of rapidly rising infernos in an effort to keep something terrible at bay.]

"Just follow the sound of my voice - or burn to death. Whichever comes first!"

[hurricane_clown]

[Karako does keep moving. He lunges after 'Tim,' stumbles, lunges again; it's honestly a good thing he doesn't have any Faygo left, or there'd be significant risk from the cans exploding. As it is, he's actively on fire. His tank top and his unwashed mane of hair smoke and burn, he has the sense to roll, even if it's forward, and leap into the air again, trying to land a successful blow.

He misses again, rolls again, lunges and stumbles again--

The smoke isn't great for him, though, and neither is actual contact with fire. He's already starting to flag.]

[postictal]

[The Shadow has managed to scramble up one of the trees; the trunk is lit up in a burst of conflagration, raining sparks from above, but the Shadow doesn't seem to mind. Perhaps it knows that, without the real Tim around to do something about it, it can't really die.]

[Perhaps it's just as destructively fatalistic as the man himself.]

"Looking a little singed around the edges there, pal." [The trunk groans, dangerously close to toppling outright.] "You know what lumberjacks say before they chop down a tree?"

[Another creak, and the tree starts to tip forward with an almighty crack of disintegrating wood.]

[The Shadow cups one hand around its mouth with all the cavalier audacity of someone with nothing left to lose:]

"TIMBER!"

God this might be Karako's first death penalty

[hurricane_clown]

[Bewildered, infuriated, desperate, angry, confused--

Scared

Karako doesn't know what a lumberjack is! He only knows, as of right now, that it cuts trees and yells a synonym for wood when it does that.

He's feeling more than a little crispy now, winded and burnt and choking on smoke, but he barely has time to wonder about his fate--he dives out of the way and barely makes it, struggles to find it in him to get back up but knows if he doesn't he really won't survive, knows he might not survive anyway--

It's too late to run now.

So he does the only thing he can: he runs back in, honking raw fury to propel himself into a frenzy.]

HOOONK!! HOOOOOOOOONK!!!!

WELP 1/2

[postictal]

[The Shadow crashes to the ground in a skid and tumble of flying embers, ash, burning plant matter. It's laughing, low and rasping, sounding exactly like someone would with their throat full of smoke and their mouth full of dust.]

[It doesn't seem the least bit afraid of what might happen to it. It knows what is required to its end.]

"That's right." [The words are mangled by smoke and by laughter. The sounds it's making shouldn't be possible.] "Come and get me, pal. Don't worry about the fire!"

2/2

[postictal]

[The smoke was like a fucking beacon. A dire indication that things were incredibly, terribly wrong somewhere, and there's only one person Tim knows who fights with fire this consistently.]

[That's how he gets there. Tears the word into a furious snarl:]

HEY!

[There's a pauldron strapped to his shoulder. A ghostly flare of scarlet wings propels him forward, hopping across the empty air. He catches himself on the ground, straightens, hatchet in hand.]

[This is bad.]

More violent efforts

[hurricane_clown]

[Karako barely has a microsecond to recognise the real Tim's arrival, and it's not enough to slow him down even a little bit. Not that he could, not that he dares to try.

If the shadow of Tim will let him, he'll slam directly into it, knives leading the way. If the shadow will let him, he'll sink both knives into its body up to the hilt and rip them back out, will become a veritable hurricane of razor precision and clownly chaos.

If the shadow of Tim will let him.]

cw: gore

[postictal]

[It lets him.]

[It's laughing, still. It's watching the knives open gouts of red in unwieldy arcs. It's laughing wetly, blood filling its nose, its mouth. The fire catches the inhuman, animal shine of its eyes.]

"How many times can we die by stabbing, Tim?" [The words sound choked, strangled; it's probable that Karako has punctured something vital inside of it.] "Will it kill us first - "

[A tree creaks overhead with a flurrying spray of sparks, threatening to topple.]

" - or will the fire?"

[Tim doesn't hesitate.]

[He jumps, kicks off the empty air with a flare of ethereal crimson, hurdles a spark-fumed log spitting flames, ducks a roar of hot air that nearly takes the skin off his arm, tries to catch Karako by the arm.]

[It's too hot to breathe. It's too hot to speak.]

[He just tugs, viciously, knowing it probably won't do a damn thing. Come on.]

[Leave it.]

CW gore

[hurricane_clown]

[Karako is barely startled by the colour of this Tim's blood. In the distorted, high-contrast, red-tinted light, everything looks different anyway. But he doesn't let up, and he doesn't stop, not until Tim--the real Tim, not Tim's Ringmaster, not this... this unexplained reflection of Tim's immorality--seizes him by the arm. Which hurts, actually. His grey skin is hot enough to nearly blister, the muscle underneath already feeling the ache of heat before the force of his hand closed over it, and he experiences a flash of blackness in his vision, not even a second long.

This is now the second time Tim has attempted to rescue Karako.

Which makes no sense, really, and he blinks at Tim, the real Tim, just once.

Then he rips the knife out of Tim's shadow, and makes a valiant attempt to bury it in the shadow's eye.

And then--lets go? Wherever the knife actually lands, he leaves it there.

He doesn't want to die.]

[postictal]

[Tim doesn't hesitate. He starts trying to lead Karako out - get them both the fuck out of here.]

[The Shadow isn't done.]

[Hot fountains of scarlet run down its eyes, across its abdomen, in shimmering trails, catching the firelight. Its smile is stained red. It doesn't look the worse Tim's ever looked but it looks close and Tim meets its eyes (its...eye, the one remaining eye he can look at) and watches as it reaches up and pulls one of the blades out by the handle.]

"Dropped this."

[And abruptly tries to wing it straight at the pair of them, with more dexterity and agility than someone who's been stabbed and bleeding out should be capable of.]

[Tim lurches to try and duck the projectile before it takes his ear off.]

[hurricane_clown]

[Karako, in another future, in another series of choices, catches a great deal of knives in his own tiny body before he succumbs to the inevitable consequences of that.

But in this life, here, right now, he has no such experiences, and so has only the fact that Tim--the real Tim, the Tim who tries so hard, the Tim who is, maybe, just possibly, a friend--is potentially about to eat knife to the face and the fact that he, Karako, provided the other Tim with the means to do that.

So he does a completely reasonable thing, which is to say, a completely unreasonable thing.

He musters the last of his fading energy, musters his soot-caked lungs and too-hot, blistering, peeling skin, and jumps to throw a hand up, taking the knife directly through his palm rather than let it take Tim in the face.

Tim might get a little blood on him, dark purple and currently rather warmer than it should be. It's one of those really jagged knives.]

H--onk--!

[Yes, that motherfucking hurts.]

[postictal]

[Oh, hell.]

[The blood catches the firelight, looks purple, almost black in the warped lighting. He doesn't have time to process it. He doesn't have time to process anything but the Shadow, its grin crooked in the crackling light.]

[Ignore it.]

[It's time to get the fuck out of here. He'll deal with his Shadow later, when they're not both fucking running for their goddamn lives, when they're not at risk for being eaten alive by the flames, when the Shadow isn't laughing like something fucking possessed.]

[He's going to try to just...scoop Karako out and book it now, if possible.]

[hurricane_clown]

[It's not very hard to scoop him. Karako has, in the past few minutes, whirlwinded his knives with all the speed and strength in his tiny body, buried blades in Tim's Shadow and had one buried in him, dodged flames and run right through them... and that's not counting whatever he was getting up to before he mistook one Tim for another.

Trolls are famously hardy, and highbloods infamously so, but sometimes a five year old clown is just a five year old clown, and all the sugar-laden drinks in the world can only add so much energy to that.

He's spent.

He's wiped, worn out, wasted, wrung out and whatever other alliterative turns of phrase equate to being absolutely fucking done with being conscious.

Because by the time Tim gets his ass out of the (very literal) fire and someplace a little less fraught, he'll find that Karako has conked right the hell out in his arms. His face is buried in Tim's shoulder, his oversized horns probably clonking Tim in the side of the head--not to mention the fifteen knives strapped all over his body.

Fourteen. Fourteen knives. One is still in his hand.

But he's still breathing, and that's what matters.

Sweet dreams.]

[postictal]

[Don't look at it, don't listen to it. Don't pay any attention to the sounds of its laughter, low and intent and ragged. Don't think about the way he knows how to weave between the tall sweeps of the flames that gnaw hungrily away at the blackening trunks of trees. Don't worry about who's going to put out this mess - fire won't get far with half of the undergrowth soaked and dripping from natural humidity, from the cooler weather. Don't think about the instinct that keeps him light enough on his feet to evade the worst of the heat.]

[He's coughing by the time he staggers from the thick of it. There are places where embers have caught at his hair, singeing the tips, and he can tell because burning hair smells sickeningly bad in the way that few other things do. The kid is passed out, all but dead to the world at this point, though not, he thinks, dead in the literal sense, which is what he was going for.]

[There's only one place he knows to go from here, but there's shelter, supplies to make sure the kid doesn't bleed out, a place to hide away until he can deal with his Shadow later.]

[It's a bumpy road back to Denny.]