lifeaftr | May Intro: I'll Be Scrolling Through Your Shrine

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May Intro: I'll Be Scrolling Through Your Shrine

INTRO LOG: MAY

Who: New arrivals, and you!
What: New souls arrive to the archipelago of LifeAftr
When: May 4th and onward
Where: Ensō
Warnings: Mark as needed!

With potentially odd dreams connecting you to people you've never met, in addition to the dream-lecture only recently received from a horned rabbit, LifeAftr surely doesn't need to try to be disconcerting upon arrival - and yet, it somehow continues to go the extra mile. While new arrivals will find themselves upon the now (mostly) safe shores of Ensō, there is one, small problem with where, precisely, they've happened to appear.

Chamber of Glyphs: It Was Written On Your Wall
Within the temple of the Storyteller, one may find a very special room. Betwixt the reality of waking and dreams, the Chamber of Glyphs appears to hold many unique features that allow it to appear wherever one may seek it, both in waking and sleep.

It is not, however, a good room to arrive within. Those seeking out the newest members of LifeAftr's adventuring party - and those who are simply looking to draw - will be greeted, upon entering the Chamber of Glyphs, with the most alarming sight. The small pile of backpacks, unattended, might be the first thing you notice, as well as the fact that they all seem to be adorned with names of those you might not know. Or the names of those that you do, but haven't seen in some time. Perhaps you met them in a dream...

And those of you who are newly arrived, you'll be able to see them searching. Unable to break the barrier between you with sound, you might feel the urge to wave your hands for attention, attracting searching eyes to the walls. Walls that you are now a part of. Hopefully this reduction to the second dimension is only temporary.

Those who took part in April's Test Drive Meme may have the benefit of familiarity, for what is etched onto the walls of the Chamber are never lacking life, regardless of the matter used to draw, paint, or sketch those contents.

With maneuverability somewhat akin to a sidescroller - always left or right, up and down, but never outward - the variety of scenes, animals, places, objects, and more are simply all the more to your advantage. Leap to the vantage point necessary to be noticed, as your fellow adventurers may be able to help you out of this predicament with a simple offer of their hand to tug you off the wall. It's an easy solution to your predicament, at least! All they need to do is take your hand to free you from your two-dimensional containment.

If it proves more difficult...well, at the least they know you're there to point out thanks to a very tired Storyteller, who will be certain to let anyone in the vicinity know that you're in need of help within the Chamber of Glyphs, before one of the many, many monsters that have been scribbled onto stone lay claim to you instead.

What kind of monsters, you ask? All of them, of course.

Ensō: Rain Hell
But maybe you don't wake up written on the walls! Maybe you're just relieved to get unstuck from those walls and need a breath of fresh air. Or maybe you don't have any reason to go poking around in search of new arrivals at all. That does not mean, however, that you won't be encountering a new arrival of your own in the interim.

The sky is clouded over and gray, despite the sun overhead and the generally warm weather. The nights are filmed over with a screen of pale dust. This has little to do with the forecast and more to do with the volcanic eruption that occurred just a few weeks prior, on another island in the archipelago. You don't need to worry about the nature of the ash still drifting on the wind currents - aside from the more standard obstruction of sight and airways, it is, at this point, more or less perfectly ordinary. Though if you've got some fragile lungs, you might want to stay out of it as much as possible.

More important is the creature that the hazy cast of ash and dust has coaxed out of hiding. Perhaps you've heard of it in folklore: resplendent with dark gray, furry wings, and glistening red eyes. Or, perhaps, you're less fortunate, and you've no cultural experience regarding the strange monster known colloquially only as...Mothman.

At over seven feet tall and with a wingspan of about fifteen feet, the Mothman makes for far more fearsome a sight than it does a threat. For all intents and purposes, despite the devilish red of its glowing eyes and its large, hairy stature, the Mothman is ultimately quite harmless. It does, however, tend to inspire paranoia in fear in the hearts and minds of those it encounters. And this smokescreen in the air has created the perfect environment for it to hunt.

It doesn't want your flesh, or your bones, or anything so base. It only wants your mind, in a sense; your fear and whatever primal terror it may ignite by preying on your paranoia. It will stalk you, rustling the leaves behind you, snapping twigs to your left, allowing you a glimpse of bright crimson eyes before dispersing into the surrounding, ashy murk. The good news is that once it has you scared, it has no intention of sticking around - and its wings makes it incredibly fast, when it wants to be. Anyone who attempts to attack it directly will discover just how speedy it can be, assuming that the air from its wingbeats don't end up pinning you flat to the ground from the sheer force.

The Mothman can be killed, most likely...but there are a lot of you, and only one cryptid for an entire island. It's not likely to want to stay in one place if it feels it's outnumbered, or that it's about to be attacked by someone who isn't so easily stricken by the fear and suspicion it endeavors to ignite. Those who wish to escape it can at least take heart in the fact that the Mothman abhors open spaces, largely preferring the sanctuary of woodland and greenery; all one has to do is reach Ensō's shores to be largely safe from its influence.

Though you could try killing it too, of course. If you wanted.

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 )

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"Back home, you mean? Or were you somewhere else similar, before you wound up here?"

"Back home. Nowhere like this. Not really like this."

Having finally reached the beach, Garren hopped down from his Slammer's shoulder, running alongside him, his boots making tiny imprints in the sand.

"Used to a bit more..." Tachibana paused, searching for the proper word. "... civilization, than this place has to offer?" he asked.

He'd been thinking more of this strange feeling of unreality that is so different to his dreams these days. But sure.

"London. I live in London."

The problem with that sort of thinking is that Tachibana was already far to used to things being surreal and not quite keeping in with what you'd expect reality to be. Some might argue from even before he had started Traveling between worlds...

"Tokyo," he returned with a hint of a smile. "From around 2015," he added.

Huh, interesting, although what's one more time distortion really?

"2018 for me. March." It wasn't as though he was going to forget the date. He's pretty sure he can never forget the dates of even normal statements, they're seared into him, let alone one such as that.

Tachibana blinked twice. "Huh. As if time kept moving after I left, almost," he reflected with a faint frown. "Since it's been around 3 years that I spent Traveling." It had been a bit hard to keep track of time, in Liminal. His watch would stop when it was in Hammerspace or he was Infiltrated, and there had been some weirdness in Liminal every now and then, so he had had to keep adjusting it based on estimates and how long Jaunts usually lasted.

"Perhaps. I'm not entirely sure how this... world thing works." He's not about to make assumptions on no information. He just knows that this isn't the same place he was before, and it doesn't fill him with the sort of dread he'd expect if he'd wandered into somewhere belonging to another Entity. But he can still feel the Beholding, the ever present sensation of being watched. He knows that he'll have to keep feeding his god.

"I know for our-- my world," Tachibana corrected with a faint frown. "I know that time had to be stopped while me and my friends were Traveling. Kenzaki's absence... would have been noticed."

To put it mildly.

"And my first stay here would have as well." For entirely different reasons.

"But I do know that time seems to run differently in different realities, just based on the ones that Garren and I visited."

"Curious. It makes sense though. Time is... flexible, depending on the influences on it." He's not sure what to make about time being stopped. It sounds like something from a bad sci-fi movie, but then again, his life has quickly spiralled into a horror movie.

"I'm not sure how to figure out if we are from the same reality although..." Although he remembers one of the statements, one about Hilltop Road. "Have you ever heard of the Magnus Institute? Or the Pu Songling Research Centre in Beijing?"

Tachibana blinked a few times, thinking. "Pu Songling... is the man who did that anthology, the one using mythological beings for moral tales, right? The research team did a brief survey of his writing, but I don't recall hearing about a research center in his name. Unless it was founded within the last 15 years or so, since it was an earlier report," he mused with a faint frown.

"Yes, that's him. But the research centre has been around for a while. Longer than fifteen years." At least where he was from. He supposes that answers the question though. Not the same world. And now he wishes he had his files available so he could look up more about Hilltop Road, and the woman who insisted that the Magnus Institute didn't exist where she came from.

"Then we likely would have known about it when we did the research report," Tachibana nodded. "Especially if they are at all focused on mythology and the creatures contained within."

"Yes, that's pretty much exactly what they research. The esoteric and the paranormal." Jon wonders if he'll need to go back there sometime. He wonders how embroiled they are with all of this, or if they think their mission statement is the truth.

"Someone we likely would have approached when we were looking for research and monitoring partnerships, if they'd existed back home," Tachibana nodded. "BOARD's focus is similar, but very tightly focused on a specific Existence."

"What exactly do you research? What kind of Existence?" It comes out a little sharper than intended, thick with curiosity. He needs to know. He always needs to know.

"The Undead -- immortal creatures that as far as I can tell are unique to our world," Tachibana explains. "They were created at the beginning of the world to fight each other to determine who's species would dominate the Earth."

"That's a little disconcerting." Familiar. He wonders if they're somehow analogous to the various Avatars. There's certain competition to see who will dominate reality. "What created them, do you know?"

"The Battle Fight Master, I assume." There was a definite scowl on Tachibana's face with that answer. Goddamned Sealing Stone was the source of all of Kenzaki's and Hajime's problems. He didn't care if it counted as a god, he hated it with a deep loathing for all the suffering the damned thing had caused.

"Most people aren't really aware of any of it," he assured, trying to push away the miasma that hovered around even just thinking of that situation. "If it weren't for the discovery of the sealed Undead and an... unfortunate accident that released them, it would just have been another bit of mythology no one gave much credit to."

"That's usually the case. People are generally very good at rationalising away the supernatural." He'd tried to be, had tried to dismiss and trivialise the statements as much as he could out of fear of what was watching him. Not that it had done him any good in the end.

"People just get dragged into things by accident."

Tachibana let out a deep sigh, nodding. "Yeah," he agreed, expression growing distant.

Had his timing been just a bit different... it would have been someone else who wound up being Garren, if they would have been able to find anyone else at all in BOARD's employment that had been compatible after Kiryuu had been rejected. No, it was fine that it had been him, in the end. That fate... he wouldn't have wished on anyone.

He had nearly been one of those random accidents, a statistic and a meal for the Web. And that one event had led him here. And looking back, he hates realising that Elias was probably right - he might not have known what he was choosing, but he had very much chosen it.

"We should keep moving. No sense waiting for whatever it is to give up playing."

Tachibana blinked a few times, pulled out of his flashbacks.

"If it is still following, we'll be able to see it clearly here," he pointed out, nodding at the open space of the beach around them where the only signs of life were Garren's tiny footprints and the sandcastle the small pog was now building. "And luring it out into the open will make it easier to dispatch it, if it attacks."

But he was fairly sure most things would run back into the woods at the sight of an armored man aiming a flaming drop kick their direction.

Or it could try to drive them into the ocean, but he doesn't want to think too hard about that. He's not sure if he can drown, but he feels no real need to test that hypothesis.

"If it attacks, I'm more inclined to run away than try to fight it."

He isn't sure how well pulling a statement from it would go. He doesn't know if he'd be able to do that again and it had exhausted him so much.

Garren looked up before pumping his ams to show off his non-existent muscles and then striking an over dramatic pose, much to Tachibana's amusement.

"Feel free to if it does. Garren and I can take care of it, if need be," he assured.

He knew 100% that he wouldn't drown. Even before the ichor had made it impossible, he had survived the ocean once before.

...plus, there was always his seahorse form, much as he was loath to use it.

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