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Vanyel's Map: Blackavar Island
Characters: Vanyel and any others who signed up here! Feel free to use the CR meme to plot.
Summary: During the late-summer fair, Vanyel acquired a means to create a map, which in turned showed the existence of an island that no one has seen, despite flyovers and long-distance scanning. He has now organized a party to explore it. This log is for casual interaction, camping, and hiking, as well as mod-run plot factors that may affect the "war."
Date(s): October 5-8
Warnings/Notes: Potential minor injury, booby traps, etc.
All aboard Tony Stark's jet, except for those of us who have flight capability and prefer to go it alone. The airship still looks battered and lacks a weapons array, but can carry eight passengers easy, and most daemons besides. It's a smooth flight over the water, that you may wish to spend chatting with your fellow passengers. Reassuringly, the sensor feed seems to match the map that Vanyel generated exactly, including the shape of the coastline, the location of the city, and the distance to the wall of light opposite the land the interdimensional membrane. All that's missing is the island.
However, as the ship approaches the expected location of the island, the light and water begin to distort, flickering and shredding like a mirage. The next moment, the island emerges, swirling with strange mist. Just like the map shows, it isn't big— a couple miles in each direction at most, but it's steeply mountainous and heavily forested.
There's a variety of weird shit to look at. The Island Effect is exaggeratedly strong here, primarily regarding the fauna.
The bald, pointed-eared fairies that are merely finger-height on the mainland are as tall as adult humans here, and you might see them peeking through the trees then darting away, unwilling to communicate. In the meantime, the green-backed bison are pygmy, coming in at hip-height, and rambling around beyond the treeline. Likewise, the massive sea dragons are down-scaled to the size of dolphins. Still aggravatingly aggressive, though.
Fortunately, Tony parked further up the beach.
It's warm. Far more humid here than on the mainland, thanks to the churning mist, the flora more jungle-like than deciduous sort back East. The trees press in close, and the incline is steep, promising a challenging hike, albeit one filled with interesting and picturesque natural discoveries. Plenty to bitch about, as you have a look around.
Fortunately, there doens't... seem to be anything particularly creepy to worry about as you break camp for the night, at least in terms of nocturnal predators and the like. The fire will keep away animals who are otherwise attracted to the scent of s'mores.
As the search progresses, four stone ruins are scattered throughout the forest. The architectural style bears unmistakable resemblence to the temple at the back of the city, although these are smaller, masked by rotting, toppled trees and half-submerged into dirt. Most of these are marked on Vanyel's map, with a symbol:
✞
But while you're poking around empty arches and derelict rooms, watch for booby traps here or there. Arrows, pits, nets. All of them brittle and rotted now, more liable to drop you on your head than break anything you can't spare— but traps nonetheless. You may have to help disentangle your fellow man from some of that.
For some reason, the only door that looks proper sealed looks almost identical to the one that led to the Memory Share chamber. However, instead of the same jet-black stone that characterizes much of the Temple, this one is a warm shade of brown, coarse, and the elaborately graven surface has held up well to the test of time that defeated most of the traps elsewhere.
No handles, no locks. But when you speak, the carvings begin to glisten oddly.
Summary: During the late-summer fair, Vanyel acquired a means to create a map, which in turned showed the existence of an island that no one has seen, despite flyovers and long-distance scanning. He has now organized a party to explore it. This log is for casual interaction, camping, and hiking, as well as mod-run plot factors that may affect the "war."
Date(s): October 5-8
Warnings/Notes: Potential minor injury, booby traps, etc.
BLACKAVAR ISLAND
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
OUTBOUND FLIGHT
However, as the ship approaches the expected location of the island, the light and water begin to distort, flickering and shredding like a mirage. The next moment, the island emerges, swirling with strange mist. Just like the map shows, it isn't big— a couple miles in each direction at most, but it's steeply mountainous and heavily forested.
TAKE A HIKE
There's a variety of weird shit to look at. The Island Effect is exaggeratedly strong here, primarily regarding the fauna.
The bald, pointed-eared fairies that are merely finger-height on the mainland are as tall as adult humans here, and you might see them peeking through the trees then darting away, unwilling to communicate. In the meantime, the green-backed bison are pygmy, coming in at hip-height, and rambling around beyond the treeline. Likewise, the massive sea dragons are down-scaled to the size of dolphins. Still aggravatingly aggressive, though.
Fortunately, Tony parked further up the beach.
It's warm. Far more humid here than on the mainland, thanks to the churning mist, the flora more jungle-like than deciduous sort back East. The trees press in close, and the incline is steep, promising a challenging hike, albeit one filled with interesting and picturesque natural discoveries. Plenty to bitch about, as you have a look around.
Fortunately, there doens't... seem to be anything particularly creepy to worry about as you break camp for the night, at least in terms of nocturnal predators and the like. The fire will keep away animals who are otherwise attracted to the scent of s'mores.
INDIANA JONES AND THE MYSTERIOUS RUINS
As the search progresses, four stone ruins are scattered throughout the forest. The architectural style bears unmistakable resemblence to the temple at the back of the city, although these are smaller, masked by rotting, toppled trees and half-submerged into dirt. Most of these are marked on Vanyel's map, with a symbol:
But while you're poking around empty arches and derelict rooms, watch for booby traps here or there. Arrows, pits, nets. All of them brittle and rotted now, more liable to drop you on your head than break anything you can't spare— but traps nonetheless. You may have to help disentangle your fellow man from some of that.
At The Stone Door
For some reason, the only door that looks proper sealed looks almost identical to the one that led to the Memory Share chamber. However, instead of the same jet-black stone that characterizes much of the Temple, this one is a warm shade of brown, coarse, and the elaborately graven surface has held up well to the test of time that defeated most of the traps elsewhere.
No handles, no locks. But when you speak, the carvings begin to glisten oddly.
no subject
He supposes only time will tell. When the lines start to light their way, the faintest of smiles comes to his lips. Blue. No doubt Amanda could have gathered by now he's partial to the color, his armor and sword both blue gilded with gold and silver. Maybe a good omen for their expedition further into the tunnels. He's not foolhardy enough to say as such, however, in case he 'jinxes' things. "At least the caverns were kind enough to give us a guiding light," he starts, an attempt to make conversation. Them talking had worked to open the door so it only makes sense to try the same now.
"I have to wonder what the energy source is. Or if it's perhaps organic somehow?"
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She chuckles a little, nodding. "I was wondering the same thing," she says, sounding not exactly distracted but--focused on something besides her companion, definitely. It's the problem of being an academic who had studied alien cultures before coming here, her attention is drawn to every little thing that might be a clue as to what this place had been. "I was in a place that collected energy through the physical contact from its inhabitants, before, so anything's possible. It could definitely be--the stones, maybe?" She gestures a hand vaguely back towards the direction of the door. "I'm not a geologist, though, so I definitely wouldn't be the best one to examine that."
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"Nor am I too well versed in a miner's work," he admits. Era was a botanist but he wasn't sure if she dabbled in mining all that much. He'd have to ask one of these days. "Though this place you mentioned, how did they extract the energy from physical contact?" A lot in this place sounds foreign to him but he admits that concept isn't one he has come across yet. Era had mentioned a handful of people coming from a city like this - with denizens from all over the 'multiverse' - but hadn't caught its name or any of the details."
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"Ah. Yeah, a couple of us have mentioned it, I think, but I guess we all sort of forgot that it would be foreign to everyone else." She bites her lip for a second, carefully kneeling to take a better look at the soil and rock. "I didn't ever take the mechanisms apart to really figure them out, but there were these panels on some of the buildings, sort of like glass? And they...gathered something that people released when they were intimate, even it was just talking with a really close friend, it went into the panels and...powered things. I think it got more from things like kissing and sex, but I didn't probe that much."
Mostly because it had been overwhelming for her, for a lot of reasons.
if any of this is super f'ed or you'd prefer something else, please contact a chinatown
But soon they come upon a door. Round and stone, just like the one they'd passed through earlier, though not quite as large. This new one gathers the continuous stream of blue light in its carvings instead of the white they had encountered earlier.
And there's a woman by the door.
She's crouching against it, her back slumped, her sleek black hair tumbled forward, over her shoulders, down her face. Her clothing is not familiar to Aymeric, tawny but splotched with brown and olive green, fatigues cut utilitarian to her lean frame. But the look on her face is nigh universal when she looks up, her lips white and tears running down her =cheeks.
no subject
"A unique machination to these types of places, I suppose. Our realm has aether as a source of energy but that doesn't seem to be the case for most people's worlds. I would have to ask Era about the details of some aspects of it but-"
The man stops short; he immediately lifts a forearm with palm open. A gesture for Amanda to stop and stay behind him. The Lord Commander puts his other hand on the sheath of the sword at his hip in caution. He wasn't expecting another person to await them in these tunnels. Was she another misplaced denizen of the multiverse that had lost her home? In that case, why did she arrive at this island instead of the beach? Questions buzz through his mind but he keeps an impressively level head despite this.
"Ma'am?" he asks, carefully keeping a few paces away. Then she looks up and he feels a small sway of compassion. Enough that he relaxes just a fraction but doesn't completely drop his guard.
"Might you require assistance?"
no subject
And then the figure lifts her face, and Amanda feels her stomach drop, palms simulatneously sweating and chilled.
"Shit."
One of the few times she actually swears, and Kavnisky isn't there to hear it. She'd laugh, any other time. Right now, she's trying to convince herself that this is one of the insane results of the multiverses meeting in a way they were never intended to, like with the people who had looked almost-but-not-qute identical in Eudio. She tries not to be to obvious about clearing her throat and dropping her voice back down to something closer to it's usual gentlness.
"Hey. A--" Are you from the Destiny, are there others with you, it's an actual struggle to bite those questions off, the words that would make this more than a crazy conicidence and into the thing she's been half-terrified of since leaving Eudio. "Are you hurt? It's okay, we're not hostile."
She isnt sure the woman would believe her if she looked at Aymeric, but Amanda knows she at least looks like the perfect harmless geek. Who had maybe seen this woman's face in a mirror, once.
no subject
"Are you talking about physical pain? You don't think, just because you have no injuries, it can't hurt."
Slowly, she starts to rise out of her crouch. The fabric of her uniform rasps slightly against the carved stone behind her. Despite her choice of words, incriminating hint in them, it doesn't seem to be anger in her face. Her dark eyes shift to Aymeric for a woman. "Does he know what kind of person he's allied himself with? Do any of them know?"
no subject
"There is much I don't know about my companion," he answers, easily. "Just as there is much I don't know about you." He doesn't know Amanda well enough to say that she's a worthy ally but she's not given him reason yet to doubt her. There again, neither has this strange woman.
"But she's correct. We aren't hostile and any hurts you might have, physical or otherwise, we would be happy to try and tend to."
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Becuase that voice leaves no question that this isn't a nearly-but-not-quite doppleganger. Amanda had heard that voice ringing in own ears--foreign, even though she'd tried to tune it out and only hear herself--for weeks. Her mouth is suddenly dry, and she doesn't know whether she should move forward towards this woman who is certainly from her world to pump her for details, or to run away from whatever is in Camile's eyes. She might not have seen the woman except perhaps in the briefest of passing back before Icarus, she doesn't even remember--everyone but Nick had only been incidental, people she interacted with when she absoultely had to--and she'd only really seen that face in reflecion but something in that gaze is making her blood run cold.
So she stands still aside from the fingers that, halted in the act of reaching out, are twisting around themselves, body suddenly feeling strange and almost wrong again in a way it hasn't in over a year. She'd never really thought about what it would be like, to face someone who had least known of her before, much less someone who had quite literally been in her skin. She swallows, finally, forcing herself to speak.
"Camile, I don't know what you're saying," she says, voice low as she works to keep it from cracking around too many fears and questions. Did something happen, after she left and before the world fell apart? People had assured her that things would freeze, sort of, when she went to Eudio but what if it hadn't. What if she'd been needed to repair the ship again and hadn't been there because she'd been so selfish. She pushes past that fear, even as her heart is racing. "And it doesn't matter right now. There's a place that's safe, and we can get you and...anyone else, we can get you back there." The rest of the crew sticks hard in her mouth. They can't be that lucky, and she wants to scream from that alone. "I won't say it's okay, obviously none of this is, but it's better than staying out here, I promise."
Why she thinks her promises will mean anything to Camile, she doesn't know, but they're all she has now. She doesn't even have real proof that the city is safer, so all she has is her word and she has to hope that's enough.
no subject
"I don't need your h-help, Amanda." Steeling herself visibly, the woman looks away, casting a look around the stone tunnel. She stares briefly up the incline that the two had come from. "There's nothing to fix. You know what you did, and it can't be undone. I need to be rescued much as you need to be sent on another Long-range Communication mission." Her voice is sharp, but she could have chosen a crueler example, probably. "Don't you have anything to s-s—say t-t--"
And suddenly, the image of Camile stutters like the afterimage of a photo flash. When she snaps back into focus, she isn't the Chinese woman anymore. Instead, she has been replaced by an Elezen standing there, with pointed ears and a long, flowing beard, as white as his elaborate clothing— all of it so pale that it's almost luminous in the half-light. Tall, but not monstrously so.
"Did you do it?" he asks. His voice is deep. Resonant. "Did you bring peace in my stead?"
no subject
It's both and neither. The man's breath catches quietly and his politician's poker face fails him for the first time since they'd begun exploring this tunnel. His eyes widen a fraction in... fear, mostly. He remembers fleetingly not the man that stands before him but the primal that he had become. Aymeric remembers why he had to be slain.
But this isn't the monstronity that Thordan had morphed into, this is- This is his father. Pain, guilt, disbelief are all mashed in his expression as well. It's what the image of Thordan asks, however, that truly rattles him. Had he brought peace in his father's stead? He closes his eyes, takes a moment to compose himself. When he opens them again, he's Cortheas cold with an ice blue gaze directed at the vision of Thordan.
"Yes," he answers, resolute. "Not the way you had envisioned it but how we did." The vision for a peaceful future that belonged Haurchefant, Ysale, and the countless others that lost their lives fighting for an end to a war seeding from the beginning in corruption and lies perpetuated by the very man that stands before him. The peaceful future that Era, Estinien, Lucia, and himself strove to ensure. Though if he still sounds bitter that's because he is.
no subject
The knot in her chest loosens, although it doesn't quite go away, especially when she notices the change in Aymeric. Still, now that she knows for sure that this is something mechanical--the flickering stutter makes her think it's a projection, although she can't find the source yet--it's easy for her to shift to being professional in her own way.
"It's just wearing his face," she says softly. "And I wouldn't trust anything it tells you that you don't already know. Or tell it anything more." She only has faint ideas about where it might be getting its information from and what it's trying to do, but it can't be anything good.
no subject
He doesn't tear his gaze away from the imposter wearing his father's face but gives a small subtle nod to let Amanda know she's been heard. A silent thanks almost for bringing him back to his senses in this moment.
pls describe emotions in your next tags :3
Thordan doesn't seem to notice.
"And you think this peace, forged by light touches and soft hands. You think it will last?"
no subject
"You know, it would have been a lot smarter to keep that projection running until you'd worn me down." It might even have happened, if it had said the right things. But as it is, now it's just a program she wants to pick apart until it behaves the way she wants. She rocks back a bit, trying to look out of the corner of her eye at the room while keeping up some pretense of looking at the figure mocking them. The light is impossible to ignore, but its function is still alluding her. "It was a good attempt, though."
no subject
"Even longer than your millennia of lies and corruption," he doesn't quite spit back but just barely keeps his tone level. "But you aren't him," he adds, more to himself than to Amanda or the hologram itself. A reaffirmation. "Telling you this is fruitless."
no subject
The blue light emanating from the door brightens no further, although it pulses patiently at the sound of Amanda and Aymeric's voices.
In the meantime, the old patriarch seems to skate right past his alleged artificiality. "I am but the dead, who may thwart you and your missions no further. Had I been in my right mind, I would have mourned. You are my son. You were my heir. I did not wish to elicit your wrath."
no subject
And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because this is a program or at least something very close to it, doing what it's been made to do by something or someone, and as much as she would love to be fascinated with it and pick it apart, right now she just wants to shut it down and make it stop.
She sees that the lights aren't getting any brighter, and isn't sure if that's good or bad. If it's gotten enough of whatever it wanted from them--their anger, maybe, it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that it could be feeding off that.
Like how Eudio had been powered by positive connections.
She could kick herself for not thinking of that sooner, considering. But Camile had thrown her off her game far too much.
She swallows, stepping back close to Aymeric. "I think it did. It wanted to upset us to...wake itself up." She says, softly. She knows the thing can hear them, but it's instinct to drop her voice.
no subject
And he did, but at a much heftier cost than he could have ever fathomed. So to hear his false father say that he was his son, he was an heir, he was... everything he wanted to be to him snuffs out the flames of anger and leaves only a bitter sadness in its wake. "I believe you're correct," he answers, directed at Amanda. That's easier than trying to continue speaking to the image of Thordan before him.
It succeeded, he thinks but doesn't say. Still, he's definitely not as frosty as he was just a moment ago. There's a resigned slump to his shoulders, something melancholy. Pained. He's grieving, maybe, for the father he wishes Thordan could have been and all that was lost.
no subject
And like that, the blue glow begins to brighten, like somebody grabbed the dimmer switch and spun. Just like before, there's a grinding clunk and scratch of stone parts moving around within the door. And the stone slab slides aside, revealing within a chamber.
The patterns of light that had marked the hallway walls and the door, now continue into here. They run across the ceiling, move across the floor. Inscrutable patterns that look like a language of some sort-- none that either Elezen and his companion recognize. In the meantime, the figure that represented their torment seems to have vanished.
Instead, there's a glowing beam of blue light up ahead, in which something tiny glints, floating. And there's a new figure resting against the far wall, face shadowed, distorted by the intervening light.
no subject
Come on. It can't be any worse than...that.
[wishful thinking, probably]
no subject
He takes notice of the new person (?) that is behind the chamber's doors as well as the object glinting against the light. Someone that had been waiting for them? Were they the ones responsible for all the tricks and traps?
"Greetings," he starts, just in case. "I presume that you might have some explanations for us." Ever the diplomat, even now.
no subject
not quite.
And as they get nearer, the figure resolves into an old man. "Indeed. Congratulations," he says. "You have completed the empathy game. A high achievement. That is your prize, much good as it'll do to you."
no subject
Still, she can't help being a bit snippy]
If this is how you help people, I'd hate to see how you hurt them.
[but she's also looking curiously at the bit of glass, barbecue she's a scientist even when she's really, really angry]
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