January Event: Rejection Rooms

[lifeaftr_mods]

JANUARY EVENT: REJECTION ROOMS

Who: Anyone and everyone!
What: Rejecting your Light comes with dire consequences
When: January 25th - 28th
Where: All over Monsun
Warnings: Violence and possible character death; please note any specific content warnings if they come up!

You're Ruled by the Things You Feel

This log is primarily for the Rejection Room portion of the event, for ease and convenience. To quote our event post:

Characters intent on rejecting their Light will find themselves irrevocably drawn to Monsun's shores. They might not even be aware of it - driven by their rage, their paranoia, their fear, or all of the above, and more. Monsun, for its part, is happy to receive them. Its landscape has become so warped over time...and those parts of Monsun consumed by shadow will start to distort, molding into structures that such characters are only too happy to hide within: Rejection Rooms.

Those who challenge the Rejection Rooms need not worry about death for themselves - damage taken within the rooms will simply translate to exhaustion outside of it, with seemingly mortal wounds leading to expulsion from the room itself, and an inability to re-enter.

The same holds true for the boss of each Room. Failure to beat them into expulsion means that the Room will continue to feed from their wildly catastrophizing mind, until there's nothing left to save at all.

So, simply top-level below with your character if they've signed up for a Rejection Room and prepare for whoever wants to gamble a confrontation. We recommend linking to the comment that details your character's Room, for the benefit of others. Remember to communicate; if your character is still trapped in their Room by the event's end, they will suffer a character death, though characters who merely try and fail to free them will not.

If your Rejection Room opt-in comment did not receive any response or additional discussion from the mod team, consider your Room and moveset approved; we want to allow for retroactive edits to your comments and plans, if those become necessary!

---

Some useful links, for reference:

[ ♆ ] OOC Event Post
[ ♆ ] Rejection Room Sign-Ups, for information on what Rejection Rooms look like
[ ♆ ] Deaths Page; death penalties have been reduced for the duration of this event, but remember to let us know if your character is still stuck in their Room by the event's end!

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

yeah cw more of all of that. plus some blood and death

[lesbeau]

[There just isn't enough time.

She isn't familiar enough with the way the hard light blade works, the thought that something like this could even happen. They both crash down and she goes to raise a fist, to slam them over and over and over again and end this, prove she's better than her challenges and these fucking assholes surrounding her that don't know anything. She can win, she has to win--

The hilt presses into her back and her mind reels too late.

The blade cuts through her, bone and guts and blood, pinning them together as her eyes widen in shock. Beau's chest tries to heave, but everything is red hot pain as she does, a burning unlike anything she's ever felt before as her chest tries and fails to expand. There's blood bubbling up on her lips, feeling like it's filling her lungs, like she's going to choke before she bleeds out.

Her eyes drift down just a moment to the Drifter, copper hot on her tongue.]

What... the fuck...

[But she can't go further, because this stage was meant to move, and the archers still take aim. Beau can't run. She can't catch. They were always aiming for her.

She tries to jerk back to avoid it, but the sword merely slices further into her back, and the arrow soars directly into her right temple before it all stops.

And just like that, the room is gone, the two of them in a heap on Monsun with real sand behind their backs. Beau is still breathing heavy and dazed, unmoving from her position, not yet realizing she isn't dead.]

[hyperlit]

[It hurts, of course. It hurts the way all things do. It hurts and they've accepted this as necessary, as an evil they're meant to weather, because they can no longer recall with any clarity what it was to live day by day and not hurt. Every moment that their own sickness has teemed in their heart and lungs and blood, they've tasted its stink on the back of their tongue.]

[A blade through their middle opens a live river of fire, teeming up through their veins, blistering down their spine, igniting the back of their skull in a vibrant pulse of white-hot phosphorescence. For half a second, maybe more, their brain shorts out into a blissful numb.]

[They taste the heat of their blood, and the weight of her crashed down atop them, and there's a sickening lurch when they track the confusion and hurt in her gaze. Their instinct is to stopper it, to smooth it over, to wrest the world asunder to mend it and fix it and make it better because that is what they are and what they do but they're the reason that the blade has pinioned her in place, shot through them both, and there's a flutter of a second where they gag on their own blood as it froths up the back of their throat, missing the exact moment when the room cuts out.]

[They wake.]

[In some ways, this is the most normal thing that has happened to them: getting up on the smooth sand after the trauma of an imminent and painful demise, and rising again.]

[They stand because it is instinct, and not because they should. And then, they end up on one knee again, reaching down to lay a hand just beside hers. Not touching. Not quite.]

it is ok

[lesbeau]

[Before Lifeaftr, Beau had never died. She had come close- felt the way acid ate through skin, the breaking of bones over and over, blood pouring out of her as she swayed closer and closer to demise. Most of these wounds leave no scar- partially from blunt force trauma accounting for at least a quarter and possibly because healing magic has almost always been there in the worst of the worst. Beau knows the slow healing of bruises and beat downs from the monks, injuries someone might incur on a drunken Saturday night. But the snap back from death, the reeling slam from something to nothing to something again has only ever been here. She shoved it down during the Trial, falling into pits of spikes, torn apart by a beast in the maze, electricity reeling through her heart and mind until they both stopped.

She's beginning to wonder when her luck will run out. When it'll finally be real.

Beau doesn't open her eyes in time to catch their text, but can hear them, cracking open an eye when they seem to settle nearby.]

... So if that was a dream. It was a fuckin' realistic one.

[She's nervous to flex her back, move her limbs, so she immediately does in an act of protest. She sure feels like she's been thrown off the top of the temple, but... it all still works like it didn't before.]

Where the hell are we?

[hyperlit]

monsun
beach

[They answer immediately, because it's not an uncertainty. They had made the trek here, seen the construct for themself, and had done what they always did, in the face of unknowable terror: draw their blade, and stride for it for a confrontation.]

[It is fortunate that this one ended the way it did. Painfully, but not in death.]

[That is already better than so very many other confrontations they've had.]

[She seems rattled, but unhurt. Good.]

[It is never fair to gamble with an ally's life.]

you ok?

[lesbeau]

[Beau flexes her hands, feels the sand underneath before pushing herself into a sitting position. Everything feels like hell, but when she was pretty sure she was going to die, any movement at all is a victory.]

I'm breathing. Hell of a move you pulled off back there.

[It all had seemed so real. At first it was just outrunning this nice version of herself trying to infect all her friends, then it was thinking about why she should even be around when they had that Beau to keep them busy. She thinks she was trying to go to the Monkey Compound, hide out for a bit, but ended up at the mana pool...

It's too blurry, between fatigue and whatever magic overtook her. She looks around, trying to find any sign of the library and coming up empty.]

So... you knew it was fake, huh. Don't I feel like a moron.

[hyperlit]

[Their hand only briefly runs down along their front, but they are unhurt, save for the hurt they always carry in the center of them. It is not the first time, after all, that they have died in service to a greater purpose. Not the first time that they have embarked on a self-sacrificial mission. Not the first time they have died at all.]

[I'm breathing is the closest thing to I'm fine that one could ask for. She is, mercifully, unhurt. Their maneuver did not prove lasting outside of the context of the room, built from shadows and murk and compiled into something they did not recognize.]

you were not you

[She was not in her right mind, that is, but that's the closest they can come to saying it.]

[lesbeau]

[She looks at their words, pulling them apart in her brain. Not her, huh? She finds that hard to believe. If her Shadow was the person reveling in the kill, enjoying taking apart the world, and even her Light didn't disparage a spar--

Maybe it's just in her blood. Maybe being chained like a rabid animal and let loose on whoever dares get too close is just her birthright. Look where it's gotten her so far.]

Yeah, sure.

[That's just not a conversation she can have with herself. She rolls to the side, pushing herself up on her knees and then her feet.]

I guess I owe you one, huh? Call it if you need it.

[hyperlit]

[They can't call it paying it forward, because they don't know the terminology, but that's the general gist. They cannot change the fact that they are dying, approaching an end that will someday come. They can only do all in their power to ensure that when they do pass on for good, they leave the world, and all that it entails, better than when they found it.]

[Kindness is a finer weapon than any blade, but harder by far to wash clean.]

[They don't feel the need to push any points with her. They'd be the wrong one to, in any case. But they watch her get to her feet, and...she's alive.]

[That's what matters.]

owe nothing

[The hypocrisy of this sentiment strikes them, but they ignore it. The important thing is that they are pouring this out forward, and not doing it with the intention of exchange or reward.]

[lesbeau]

[You can only pay so much forward until you either run out or someone gifts you more, Drifter. Let her lend it when it matters.

Or when it doesn't. Whatever.]

Gonna give it to you anyway.

[It's just that simple, a blank little response that says she cannot and will not accept criticism.]

C'mon, let's get the hell off this terrible fucking island.

[hyperlit]

[They're not one to protest something like that. They can recognize the gravity of that oath, and the sincerity of what it entails, and they can respect it. The Drifter only nods, once, and looks out across the sweeping expanse of island, the blots of it polluted by disparate fringes of shadow.]

[They will have to pass through the forest to get back. But they think that they can do so quickly.]

ok