lifeaftr | January Undercurrent: Growing Pains

January Undercurrent: Growing Pains

JANUARY UNDERCURRENT

Who: Everyone!
What: Hey bud, how's it growing?
When: January 3rd to January 20th
Where: Everywhere!
Warnings: This event has a potential for body horror and character death; please mark anything as it comes up!

A Notion Growing Inside Me

Those of you who weren't with us the last time Umui entered the archipelago didn't have to contend with the lethal illness known as the Overgrowth personally, but anyone who remembers it probably doesn't remember it fondly. Fortunately, this isn't quite the same strain of the illness that you had to contend with the last time. It's not unrelentingly and uncompromisingly fatal, for one! That's always nice.

For those that need a primer on the Overgrowth, it is best described as a sickness that overcomes you with floral growth both inside and outside your body that can only be cured by expressions of emotional honesty. Expressions of truths, affections, and admissions of things that you have hidden from yourselves or from others were critical in dispensing of the illness. These could be as simple as admissions of past sins or the revealing of secrets, or as grandiose and overt as confessions of guilt or love. That general idea will remain more or less the key means of curing this strain as well, though the stakes fortunately aren't as high this go around! Which is to say, if you fail to have any grand emotional epiphanies by the time this event ends, you aren't doomed to suffer a character death; symptoms will simply dissipate come January 20th.

So what's this sickness going to be like in this particular instance, then? We're so glad you asked!

You can go the standard route, of course. Adventurers' first brush with the illness saw the following afflicted upon them:

[ ♆ ] Stage One: Germination. Initial symptoms involve fever, coughing fits, numbness to nerves and extremities, and general joint stiffness. Difficulty breathing or performing other basic functions will often occur. Fatigue, difficulty sleeping, and intense weakness or dizzy spells are also liable to occur as the flowers begin to harvest nutrients from the body. This will also generate extreme thirst and periods of intense nausea. Tremors and the sensation of something "itching" from inside are also common. The end of Stage One is usually marked by the act of vomiting or coughing up flower petals or spores, along with a not-insignificant amount of blood.

[ ♆ ] Stage Two: Budding. The floral growths spread more completely inside the body, and begin to grow on the skin or exterior. Difficulty performing basic functions will increase as, for example, airways become obstructed and flowers grow around joints and pinch them still. The site of affliction also yields rashes, blisters, and blood sores as the flowers sprout from the skin. The rate of vomiting or coughing up floral growths will increase dramatically. Flowers often bloom quickly, and very painfully. Numbness in affected areas will increase, oftentimes rendering parts of the body completely inert - a pair of legs claimed completely by blooms, for example, will no longer work.

This was followed by Stage Three: Bloom, which resulted in character death. However, this strain will not advance to this style of Stage Three. All symptoms will disperse by the time Umui resurfaces.

This strain is also rather more erratic, which can make emotional repression more of an inconvenience than a horrifying circumstance. For those who would rather not play around with intense sickness (or who have already endured this once before), you have the option to go that route if you like! With this variant of the Overgrowth, one can become, for example, so embarrassed that they hiccup up a flower. A vicious denial of their feelings may cause them to spontaneously erupt into a rash of dandelion puffballs, seemingly immediately. You might end up walking around with a bouquet for an arm for a few hours. Perhaps mortifying, but certainly not fatal! Isn't that nice?

Unless, of course, you want it to be...

I Can't Fight It Much Longer

Now, while the Bloom Stage isn't present in this strain, it has mutated its progression into a rather nasty end stage. Those of you who succumb a little too readily to this illness, who don't fight off the emotional repression quickly, who don't admit those difficult truths to yourself or confess to whatever you're bottling up, you'll be faced with a potentially horrifying transformation. Potentially, because it is your choice whether or not you see fit to commit your character to that fate - as stated above, this option might simply skip over your character entirely, and the worst they'll have to deal with are cartoonishly over-the-top effects that disperse in due time.

But maybe not all of you will be so lucky. Some of you might discover for yourselves how this particular variant of the Overgrowth has mutated.

We call this mutation Stage Three: Outbreak.

In this final Stage, those beautiful blooms wither and harden into a fungus-like carapace as the illness grows into the victim's brain and shuts down virtually all higher functions. This can sometimes render them almost wholly recognizable, but not always - oftentimes, it's very obvious who this person once was. The victim is reduced to a carrier of the virus, which causes them to act the way you'd expect most viruses to act: becoming intent on spreading. Advanced brain functions such as speech, rational thought, and so on tend to shut off and become wholly inaccessible.

Now that the victim's body is no longer fighting the Overgrowth, the illness lends them increased speed, strength, and durability, making them dangerous foes indeed. They will usually seek to infect others by whatever means necessary - usually via biting or exuding breathable spores - but in some cases, they will simply reduce to base instincts, and just outright attempt to attack and kill whoever is closest.

Unfortunately, at this point, there is no hope of a cure; it's hard to make someone be emotionally honest when they're capable of little more than blunt, animal instinct. At this point, you can either wait for the Stage Three symptoms to disperse come Umui's return, or take manners into your own hands. You can probably guess what that might entail.

If you decide to put your Overgrown friends out of their misery, this will count as a character death. If it comes to that, be sure to let us know on the Deaths page! Death penalties, however, will not be reduced for this event.

Try to Get Through It

Of course, there's a lot going on in the background as well. You're free to use this log as a catch-all for the duration of January's Undercurrent Event, as well as any of the other minor events listed on our Monthly Rundown post. And, of course, you are always free to create your own individual logs and posts as needed.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them over on the Questions header on our Rundown post!

January Timeline

[ ♆ ] January 1st: "This Sucks" begins and lasts until January 10th
[ ♆ ] January 3rd: "Growing Pains" begins and lasts until January 20th
[ ♆ ] January 11th: "No Water is Safe" begins and lasts until January 19th
[ ♆ ] January 20th: Umui returns to the archipelago
[ ♆ ] January 21st: "Impawsible Geometries" begins and lasts until January 31st

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( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Should he be surprised that Church has been hit with this shit too?]

[He's honestly not sure what's worse: knowing full well what he's got weighing on his mind and simply not knowing how to admit it, or the possibility of plain not knowing what there is to admit. Is that what's tearing Church up? He has no idea. He doesn't recognize the flowers poking out here and here from the armor. They're yellow, whatever they are.]

What's it look like?

Being a god damn idiot. What else is new.

Doesn't help, does it?

Not really, no.

[He looks at the rinse of red now running down one arm without much expression.]

I lived the last time, you know. Not sure how I managed it, but I did.

Maybe cuz you dropped some truthbombs on people? Just to hazard a guess.

[He glances over, then away again. The blooming might be beautiful if it weren't completely horrifying and accompanied by blood and sores and weakness and all else.]

Should've saved all the horrifying revelations for just such an occasion, maybe. [He wants it to be funny. He doesn't have it in him to make it sound funny.]

I guess.

[What's eating at him now? Well, he can take a fucking guess, maybe.]

This is your first time dealing with it, isn't it? I mean, you...weren't around the first time. So what's on your mind? [Again, he can...guess...but that doesn't feel like it's in the spirit of curing this shit.]

[Church does not, technically, need to breathe. He does intake air, much like a computer whirs with fans, but breathing isn't really a thing. He does it anyway. Makes the sounds. It makes him feel more human. Because he's used to it, thinking of himself like human.

So he audibly breathes a few times, while he still can, before any of his internal motors and fans and gears all lock up completely. Mulling over an answer.]

I dunno, I guess we could talk about you dying some more. That always feels...relevant.

You gonna dump your feelings out, or are you gonna just suck it up and die? Again.

I didn't die last time. I'm just...not sure what this place wants me to talk about this time. Do you even want to hear half of that?

[Not for nothing, Church, but there's a reason that their conversations now have a safe word, and that's because it feels like a good fifty percent of the time, Wash ends up dredging up something best left forgotten.]

If it would help you not get strangled to death by--is that rosemary? You smell like you're a pork chop, dude.

I could...I could go first. If you'd feel better. But I guess I don't...always know what to start with, either. We're a real fucked up pair. Conversations with you are like trying to make my way blindly through a minefield. But, safeword, right?

Or we sit in relative silence. Or we find Tex and make her, I don't know, deal with our emotions. Or Carolina. Or York? I don't think I'd get into it with him, but he seems pretty cool, actually.

Yeah. It was last time, too. The yellow ones're new, though.

[He's not sure why the rosemary, but hell if he's ever gonna be able to eat anything with rosemary again. The yellow...he doesn't know the name of it, but he knows who they belonged to.]

You met York. [He sounds...well, he's not sure how to feel about that, really.] You two getting along already?

Well. He seems pretty chill, for a Freelancer. Talked to him a bit. I don't...know...what he thinks about me? I mean I told him who I was. Name-wise. Which.

[Leonard Church isn't exactly a name easy for a Freelancer to just pass over. Not sure how to take that! Maybe he just was a little overwhelmed and didn't want to get into it first thing?

He shrugs a still functional shoulder rather than trying to complete the thought in words.]

He's not homicidal, maniacal, or righteously angry. He doesn't seem super fucked up or deeply traumatized on sight. So, 's a pretty good start. And what with him being Carolina's partner, and she's all right, as far as Freelancers go.

He was probably one of the nicest guys in the program. Well, kind of.

[Kind of. Because he had a tendency to mouth off, to crack jokes at inopportune times, to take things a little too lightly. But in spite of that - well, most people got along with him. Past tense. He needs to stop thinking about these things in past tense.]

He was paired off with Delta, to start with. They worked well together.

[Delta. Probably one of the easier fragments for Church to talk about, he'd guess, considering that they actually met for a time.]

Most of us just knew the Director as...well, the Director.

Any partner of Delta's can't be all that bad. I liked the little green guy.

[Probably because Delta had been part of himself. Why he always agreed with everything Delta said.]

...Hold on, wait, are you saying you guys didn't actually know the Director's name? Not even as, what, like, Doctor Church or anything?

It wasn't common knowledge. Some of us figured it out - I did, for obvious reasons. But almost everything about him and the Counselor were kept confidential.

[He shrugs slightly.]

Same reason that almost all of us only ever knew each other's callsigns. I knew maybe...one or two of the other agents' names, if that.

For real? Did that seriously not throw up any red flags for you people? Everyone should know their CO's name.

I was about to say 'that's fucked up', but I mean, that's Project Freelancer's motto.

Were you guys...you and York, I mean. Were you two friends? Are there gonna be any problems? I can't imagine someone who got on with Delta would be bad news.

Everything was confidential. We weren't even allowed to talk about any previous deployments.

[That wasn't always a surefire thing, though. The Dakotas, for one, definitely knew each other's, so there was that out the window right out the gate.]

You could say that, yeah. We were.

[And then the last time he saw York, it was rigging up his armor to detonate.]

Edited 2020-01-15 23:18 (UTC)

Wow. Little baby Freelancer not-David definitely-Washington. Being friends with people.

Hard to imagine.

Believe it or not, there was a time in my life when I wasn't a complete asshole.

[Just...you know. Enough of an asshole to get paid to kill people in strategically important ways.]

Kid Maine was kind of a cute shit, too, from what I remember.

...'s weird that I kinda miss the big lug. Guess I miss...a lot of people.

He was...

[A friend? A good soldier? Everything he feels like he has to say about Maine feels like it falls short.]

I'm glad you and him got along. He knew that you were...you kept us alive, back in Freelancer. Even if you don't remember it. That made you one of us.

...It doesn't, but. I appreciate the sentiment all the same.

What, uh...whatever happened to the Director anyway? I only ask because. Hoo boy. That dual icy and fiery hellscape island? The one that I don't even know why it would exist and there is literally, genuinely no reason anyone should ever go there? I say this because I went there and there's nothing. It's ice and lava. It's the worst island. It's uselessness island. We have got to find a way to sink some of these places.

--anyway, dude with his voice was following me around Siberia-side. Did anyone ever find his ass and bring him to justice? Did he get off scott-free?

That's...you saw him.

[Does he count as someone's worst fear if he can't remember it? Apparently so. The surprise is evident in Wash's tone only slightly before he recovers.]

[And maybe giving Church some of those answers he's asking for might count for something.]

Carolina tracked him down. I don't know about "justice," but...he's been dead for a while now. I think for him that was easier than having to come to terms with anything he actually did.

[There's no small amount of bitterness there. In some ways, he did get off scott-free. He went out on his own terms. Never had to face the authorities for any of it.]

I saw...someone. But he definitely had the voice. I remember the voice. Maybe I picked up the look from your head? Or some...vague weird memory I still have buried deep down somewhere.

...He kept wanting me to come back. Like. Like he could fix me. I...

[He trails off. Is it weird, the idea of being fixed, of made whole again, is it weird that it's terrifying? He'd like it if it were possible, but at the same time, what kind of person would he be then? He wouldn't be himself, would he? Or would he be himself, just...better?

Either way, he wasn't going to trust anything out of the Director's mouth.]

Anyway. Good. That he's dead. [It's not victorious or angry or anything, just. Flat acceptance. The Director of Project Freelancer is dead, and Carolina had a hand in it. He might have to thank her, later.]

What he did outlived who he was. I'm not sure how we're supposed to feel about that.

[The voice. That was the thing that stood out most. Even the Freelancers heard him more than they saw him, most of the time. And if there were any part of him left in the vestiges of Church's memory, it'd make sense that it'd be those.]

[It also makes a dark sort of sense that he'd be who the Alpha would see, when he imagines the worst case scenario.]

[The man who tore him apart.]

Did it...I mean, hearing that must have been...hard. [He's trying not to overstep here, but the idea of something you don't remember telling you that he could restore parts of yourself you also don't remember sounds more than a little unsettling.]

Scared the shit out of me. Yeah, I admit it. Him trying to tempt me back in the fold. Calling me by--that name.

God, and it's not like it's not tempting, in a way. He even had a good point. I told him, I screamed at him, the rest of them are gone. They're...y'know, they're dead. And he said in a place like this? With all of time and space flexible, you from the future, me from the--me from where I'm from? We could find the others. Or they could show up.

[He grows quiet for a few long moments, and pulls his knees up to his chest. It involves much more labor than it should, and yeah, he kind of regrets it, and he can only hug them with one arm, the other hanging fairly heavy. It's weird to be so vulnerable with Wash, and yet, easier than with anyone else in a way. What's there to hide, when Wash is the one that knows it all?]

I'd never trust that southern fuck.

Well, you've got better instincts than the people who gave him all that power in the first place.

[It's a weak joke, maybe, but...talking about this kind of stuff is supposed to help. And he doesn't want to spark something he can't take back.]

...better instincts than a lot of people, honestly.

I mean, telling him to go fuck himself even if you literally came from him isn't nothing.

[Not even Carolina was that strong. Not at first.]

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