Wilderlands Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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wilderlogs2018-03-13 05:30 pm
wildermods) wrote in wilderlogs2018-03-13 05:30 pm
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THE SQUAD DOES AN INTRO: GROUP MEET UP - [modplot] [event] [free-for-all]
THE SQUAD DOES AN INTRO: GROUP MEET UP
The Green's binding spell finally works out its kinks and the entire group is teleported into the same area in the center of the city, near the statues of the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow.
Everyone in the group feels a tingling sensation as the magic sets in place and binds them. Anyone that tries to leave will now find themselves being teleported back if they wander too far. The group will have to try to stay together when it moves now.
They have a little bit of time to figure things out.
✦ Post in actionspam format. Plots and mod-run events in the game are meant to be in actionspam format to keep a brisk pace.
✦ Free-for-all Post. This event will be in "free-for-all" format, meaning that threadhopping is encouraged and that threading should be treated in the same conversational way as network posts.
✦ By now, the language magic should be fully in place. By now, everyone should have magically learned Sylvaen so that everyone can speak it fluently and understand each other.
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She still feels as if her heart has been torn out of her body, like her blood is freely pouring out of her, taking her rage, her effort, everything she put into her failed, failed quest to save the all that mattered to her in the world with it.
Hanzo died in her sight all over again, murdered for the crime of being her love, and the afterlife has not given her the kindness of a reunion.
Kubo may be dead, or worse, punished for the crime of being better than heartless, and the afterlife has not given her the kindness of even a window to know whether or not this is so.
The afterlife has instead set a task before her, and the idea of being asked to care about any of it, to stand around and be calm and reasonable like a whole person, relating to these strangers who aren't already dead and yet still dying of grief all over again - they might as well ask her to muster up the strength to rebuild this entire city by herself.
The others are gathering, as heroes ought, but Sariatu has fallen into silence, her sorrow and her rage burned all out. Her shoulders shake, silently, as she curls in on herself, her sobs quiet but wholehearted.
Once she never would have wept in front of strangers, but there is nothing left in her to care about showing vulnerability.
Everyone she has ever loved is lost to her. Her face is not even her own anymore. How can she care about losing it?]
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The sounds are strange, but the body language is so clearly despairing. Phos pauses for a moment in front of her, hesitant and uncertain, but eventually crouches and leans in with a concerned expression.]
Are you okay?
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No.
[Does she look like she's anywhere but in the depths of despair? Will she ever be anywhere else? She doesn't feel like it.]
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It's still better than circling the drain back home, he guesses. But he needs company. He's going to just crawl out of his own skin if he sits here thinking. He lights up one of his cigarettes and paces around, then sees the monkey who threatened him earlier. He doesn't know if she's actually a person, but there's a way she's weeping that's entirely too human. It's something deep and broken.
And you know, there's a certain comfort in finding someone even more miserable than you.
He takes a deep drag and comes over, taking a seat down next to her. The whole way he sets down is like someone cut a string holding him up. Holding his limbs together seems like it takes effort, rather than being the natural construction of the human body.]
Hey. Sorry for calling you Mexican earlier.
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I'm Japanese.
[Well . . . by marriage, but still. Did he really call her Mexican? Does he really think calling someone Mexican is something to apologize for? How many levels can she unpack to this stupidity?]
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I don't see how I'm supposed to know that, given that you're a monkey. Monkeys don't exactly have that Japanese face. [He awkwardly fidgets with his cigarette, feeling like he's digging himself a hole. He nearly gets up and just wanders away to save face, but decides to give it another shot, because something seems familiar about that broken pain.
When he does speak again, it's gentle and tentative.]
I just came over because it looks like you had a shitty day. It's not like I thought you were crying because I called you Mexican, it just looked like something else.
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Are you going to describe 'that Japanese face' to me, or are you just going to assume I know what you're talking about?
[But there's no getting away from this grief, not with any quantity of ignorance.]
My sister murdered my husband. Then she killed me.
[Now it's in words. She is dead, Hanzo's dead, again, and she's here, with these people who are too calm to be dead.]
If my son didn't escape, then she's blinded him and taken him to his grandfather's house to -
[No - she's found the words she still simply cannot say. The ideas she still cannot bear to consider, the ways that her family will mutilate her son body and soul unless he can run, and run, and keep running, for the rest of his life - she chokes on the words.]
So yes, in fact, I have had a shitty day.
[And the last day she ought to be having. Yet here she is.]
Thanks for asking.
[It's too sarcastic to be genuine thanks.]
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Pretty sure it would make the situation worse if I did, [Dixon mumbles, looking a little abashed. And then she goes spilling her pent up frustration-
-no, frustration is too mild a word for whatever she's feeling. Frustration is when you can't get the shower dial to the right temperature. Frustration is being stuck at a red light when you're running late. Frustration is a small word for small problems that can be shrugged off twenty minutes later, transgressions not even forgiven but straight-up forgotten.
What Dixon just got the slightest taste of was the rage that comes from grief, and that is common ground that hits him like a fist to the gut. He's quiet a moment. he stares at the grass.]
I'm sorry.
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[It comes out soft and vulnerable, like an admission, and for so many years of her life it would have been - an admission of the weakness that was caring about someone's life out of love - but she has no more fear left that would make her mask her vulnerability. Nothing can hurt her worse than she has already been hurt.
Certainly not anything this clown has to say. She goes on with a trace of the darkest humor.]
What exactly could you do that would make this worse? Really?
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Do you need someone to sit with you? [He's pretty sure he doesn't have anything else to offer, but he does want to provide her with some comfort. He just knows that there's not much you can do to take the edge off grief.]
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[She says it in the way a mother might say "you made this mess, now clean it up," with no trace of humor. There's no sign, except for the sign of her commentary, that she wants the distraction.
She pauses a long while before answering.]
I would like for someone to.
[There is a world of difference between 'need' and 'want,' but the difference feels less when what one wants is available. She has lost enough now to admit it.]
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I could give you a speech about how everything happens for a reason. Those always make it worse.
[He's going back, digging up after his dad died when he was a young man instead of the most recent loss, where everyone was a bit too stunned at him defenestrating someone to talk about how God needed another angel or whatever.]
Or about how suffering makes you stronger. That one's awful.
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If suffering made you stronger I wouldn't be dead.
[But there's a curiosity that's needling at her, penetrating through the thick numbness of her grief.]
I thought this was an afterlife. But no one else is acting like they just died.
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[He feels strangely calm with that idea. He even wonders for a moment if it’s been the morning before coming here that was the dream, that maybe he really did blow his brains out last night. If this is the afterlife, he has some people he needs to give a piece of his mind and then hug.]
But I’m guessing the rules don’t apply here, so you might be dead, I might be alive, none of it really matters anymore.
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And yet, something has been claiming to matter since she first realized she was falling somewhere other than to the afterlife she expected.]
Did you hear the same words I did, when you showed up here? Something about a 'Green.'
[Why has she been asked to care? Why has she been asked to care about anything?]
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[The 'lost in the forest' thing was kind of on-the-nose accurate for Dixon, to the point where even he drew a connection and felt a little insulted over it. But it's true; he's very lost, very unmoored, keeling around in a storm just trying to keep the boat from flipping over.
Anyway, it's something to talk about besides dead kids. Dixon figures if she's talking about that then she's at least using a tiny bit of her mind to think about something besides whether her son is still alive. Even just a tiny bit means it isn't all-consuming, at least for a second.]
You think we're going on an adventure or something?
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[She asks it from the deepest part of her heart. It's not the dismissive casting-off that one usually asks that with.]
Why should you care, for that matter? Why should any of us care? Who decided to ask me?
[Who made this decision? Who did it? Who thought that the right person to go on their quest was someone they'd have to pluck from between life and death, consumed by grief, with the fate of her son an oppressively unanswered question?]
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[It comes out so fast it's like he was waiting for her to ask it; he's had the answer long before the question occurred to him. He slipped into caring about this before he realized he could have opted out.
It gives him something to do when he has no purpose, no point left, the very last bit ground out of him.
Who knows? Maybe she's in the same boat, now that her reason to live is gone too. Maybe she isn't in it today but she'll join him there, in a futility that makes any destiny offered up a blessing from heaven.]
Maybe you finish whatever it is we have here and at least you can figure out what happened. [His voice gets gentle again.]
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Instead - she gets this. This quest. This sword. This conversation with someone else who has no reason to care, either, but does.]
What else indeed.
[There's agreement in her tone.]
Maybe I can.
[It's enough to get her to the next day. Not happily. But he isn't offering her the possibility of happiness, thankfully. He's honest. The best hope he's offered her is answers. It's all she's willing to hope for, too, and she wouldn't have even hoped for it if someone else hadn't suggested.]
Thank you. For sitting with me.
[She pauses, before adding with unusually unguarded honesty -]
And for talking. It did help.
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Talking to her has made him feel a little heavier, but also steadier - the way something does when it's pinned down when the wind is blowing, tethered and bound but safer, centered, less apt to go whipping away. Like he knows a little more what he's doing but also how difficult it will be.
Feeling as if his use here has been spent up, gets to his feet. He considers dropping the stub of his cigarette to the ground and smothering it out under his shoe, but somehow that seems disrespectful, so he keeps it going a little longer.]
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Not if he's one of the assets she has on her search for answers.]
What's your story?
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But, as with many things, he settles on the most straightforward.]
Well. I was on my way to kill a rapist and fell asleep in the car. And then I was here.
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The real question -]
What's a car?
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He pulls out his pack of cigarettes, taps it against his palm and gets another one.]
It's a metal box that takes you places. I don't figure monkeys got them, but I also didn't figure they talked, so I don't know shit. Actually. We find one around here I'll give you a ride in it.
[He's a little slow on the 'medieval-era fantasy' uptake. Like really slow.]
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[And there, again, is yet another point of frustration and horror, building up pressure inside her.]
This body wasn't supposed to last more than a week.
[Maybe it still won't. Maybe she'll just fade away in a few more days. Maybe that's all the time the Green has to hold on to her.
She doubts it, somehow.]
But here I am. Still a monkey. Saving the Green and all set to take a ride in a 'car,' whatever that is.
[She doesn't want it. She doesn't want any of it. But they've been over that already. She's sad and horrified and doesn't want this life, but she has it, and they've been over that already.
The only distraction she has now is an awful one, but -]
The rapist you're going to murder. Who did they assault?
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