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imeeji_frontstage2022-08-07 12:02 pm
rosetograce) wrote in imeeji_frontstage2022-08-07 12:02 pm
Flowers of Heaven II: Star of Bethlehem
Who: lost(?) idols
Where: ???? a mysterious courtyard
When: day 490
[ You awaken to the feeling of cool stone at your back, and a night sky overhead.
All around is a courtyard—a wide circle of marble tile, alternating black and white, interspersed with stone benches and flowerbeds and ornamental trees, all lit by the lambent gleam of strangely vivid starlight.
It is beautiful. And it is decaying. The stone is cracked; the flowers wild and overflowing between the cracked stone; the trees bent and twisted with age, the ground around them littered with fallen fruit. There is a fountain in the center of this space, but it too is broken-down: the water sits stagnant, and nothing remains of the design except a basin and the shattered base of a once-golden sculpture.
—And surrounding it all are not walls, but dense mounds of kudzu, climbing over itself until it towers as high as any watchtower.
How did you get here?
The last thing you vaguely recall is a sudden fit of drowsiness. There’s no sign of any guide or host around, and your powers don’t currently work either. In fact, if you have any corruptions, whether mental or physical, they too are … gone? No, perhaps that's not quite it; you can still feel them—faint, like a phantom limb. Invisible, and unable to affect you.
But there is one notable exception to the rule: all wings, corruption-induced or not, remain in place, as natural as the starlight.
There are other idols around you, all waking up the same way. Is this meant to be some kind of game…? ]
Where: ???? a mysterious courtyard
When: day 490
[ You awaken to the feeling of cool stone at your back, and a night sky overhead.
All around is a courtyard—a wide circle of marble tile, alternating black and white, interspersed with stone benches and flowerbeds and ornamental trees, all lit by the lambent gleam of strangely vivid starlight.
It is beautiful. And it is decaying. The stone is cracked; the flowers wild and overflowing between the cracked stone; the trees bent and twisted with age, the ground around them littered with fallen fruit. There is a fountain in the center of this space, but it too is broken-down: the water sits stagnant, and nothing remains of the design except a basin and the shattered base of a once-golden sculpture.
—And surrounding it all are not walls, but dense mounds of kudzu, climbing over itself until it towers as high as any watchtower.
How did you get here?
The last thing you vaguely recall is a sudden fit of drowsiness. There’s no sign of any guide or host around, and your powers don’t currently work either. In fact, if you have any corruptions, whether mental or physical, they too are … gone? No, perhaps that's not quite it; you can still feel them—faint, like a phantom limb. Invisible, and unable to affect you.
But there is one notable exception to the rule: all wings, corruption-induced or not, remain in place, as natural as the starlight.
There are other idols around you, all waking up the same way. Is this meant to be some kind of game…? ]
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
[She'll figure out the gravity later. For now, she leaps towards the water, attempting to get through? the bars? Or--hell, just to make any sort of contact. She'll figure out that part later, too]
1/3
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
Nemesis, you too are—!?
[ but then the ripples on the water's surface twist into rising tendrils like kudzu. they wrap around her arms—and pull her beheath the surface. ]
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
—and then, when she finds herself surfacing again, she's at the top of the stairs once more, somehow bone dry, with the courtyard just at her back. ]
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
[But before she can even properly freak out over being grabbed and pulled under, she's at the top of the stairs once more, looking around for how in the world she just got here]
No--no! Elly!
She was so fucking close--
[With a frustrated grunt she makes back for the bottom of the stairs to try again, before it's too late]
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
This time the swords are missing from the rack on the wall. One seems to have fallen a ways down the stairs—and where it hit the stones, it shattered, leaving a jagged edge at the hilt and a spray of gold across the wall nearby. As if the blade itself had become no more than a wound. ]
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
If Nemesis thinks hard enough—something about the environment might remind her of past ventures into other people's hearts: the way the world seems to be more grounded in symbolism than nature. ]
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
However hopeless the fight seems, it can always get better, too.
[Which feels way more something Cross should be saying than herself, but it's still true, and if somebody's gotta hear it, she'll make sure it's said]
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
It will never ̦͇̩͚̞m̪̯̙̯̼a̗̟͎̬̘̪t̲͓t̪e͈͚̹͕͇̯̮r, in the e҉̯̰̕͞ṋ̢̦̮͖d̬̟̪̥̞̖̥͢ͅ.
Maybe it's just a trick of the dim light, but it almost seems like oily black liquid is weeping from the stone walls. ]
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
...You don't know that. You gotta live through it if you wanna find out.
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
What if she fought, and sacrificed, and watched those she cared for sacrificed, and it all came to nothing?
What if it came to worse than nothing. What if the ones she fought for—who all had fought for—had never cared at all?
To live through it... would something as pathetic and lonely as that even matter? The answer as meaningless as the empty fight.
The space around Nemesis feels vast and cold and thick, like the air itself might turn to that dark sludge. ]
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
[By the end she sounds closer to pleading than anything. Xia of all people isn't going to discount that much fighting and suffering and loss and loneliness.
But by that same token, she forces herself to keep going. If not for people pushing through darkness for her, Xia wouldn't even be here. She should owe as much to others.]
Hey--c'mere. It's too dark to be hanging out in here alone.
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
Just the fathomless emptiness. And it's so dark—like she said: too dark to be in this place alone. The liquid seeping up the legs of her trousers has the too-familiar consistency of old blood and the too-familiar smell of rancid oil. It feels like nothing so much as irrelevance.
And if she really is alone—if everyone is gone; if the cause itself never even fucking mattered...
Is there even anything left? Why continue. Why not just let it all be done? ]
Re: EXPLORE THE COURTYARD?
[She takes a long breath, voice serious]
'Cause if none of it mattered, ain't that even worse?
Don't it feel better to at least know you went out doing what you felt was right, corny as it sounds? Ain't there at least one or two people still worth fighting for--worth making a space for yourself for?
That's what I like to think, anyways.
[She splashes on further through the blood and oil and who knows what else, looking around again for any signs of light. Or signs of anything, honestly]
...I don't like the dark much. So I wish you'd come out.