"There it is!" Pouch chimes in, and beneath that chipper tone there's a taut urgency. He's moving, a cool breeze past Eddy and Lionel, a chill at Armani's elbow.
He jumps up and slaps the doorway as he passes through, which is probably a fairly familiar gesture, though when Pouch does it, frost explodes from his fingertips, spills like water over the surface, filling every glyph and spreading to the hanging vines beyond. They turn brittle, heavy, crack and fall to the ground as he passes them.
Steam wafts off of Pouch's iridescent form as he steps into the room, just a few paces and then he stops. He bends over to examine something on the floor. After a moment, he makes a soft, dejected sound. "This is as far as they got with my heart?"
Mary Grace steps up next to Pouch, camera out and recording. Honestly, she isn't sure how much of this is even gonna turn out. Regular ass magic and technology get a little funky plenty of the time. Who knows what old bug magic would do. But she's getting a WizPulitzer for this if it fucking kills her.
"Did you just say your heart?" she asks, stepping to his side and zooming in on whatever he's looking at. "That sure as hell sounds like a good omen."
Standing up straight again, Mary Grace takes another few steps into the basement. She moves to the pinball machine that is, regrettably, not Snoop Crupp-themed, and twists one of the handles.
Edited (wait i forgot the last dumb part) 2020-05-16 23:26 (UTC)
Apparently 'stay together' doesn't apply to party bugs.
There is no smoke and the room, once Pouch destroys the vines, seems to be a mundane, if very hot, storage room. Eddy releases Armani's shoulder, grimaces apologetically, and steps inside.
Judging by Mary Grace's reaction, the immediate grotesque imagery Eddy's mind conjures up when Pouch mentions his heart is not wholly accurate. Hopefully. "Another metaphor?"
It does appear to be nothing more than a basement. Uncomfortably hot except immediately around Pouch, full of dust and a rather offensive rotten egg smell, but, apparently, just a basement.
Except for that thing that has Pouch's attention.
"I mean, my heart don't look like yours, but they used it for this," Pouch says, gesturing with an open palm at the floor. Or, rather, the lack of floor.
A large sinkhole fills the center of the room, its edges jagged, vaguely reminiscent of a jack-o-lantern mouth. The floor surrounding it is etched with more glyphs, these ones different than the rest, even more complicated.
Viola whips around and the cardboard box she'd been rummaging through falls to her feet, scattering papers across the sticky cement floor. She knows that voice. This was the last place that she—no, Mr. Crockett—had ever heard that voice. "You shouldn't have come here," she blurts out, surprising herself.
Lionel (Lovelace) slowly inches around the perimeter of the group toward Mary Grace, ostensibly to examine the pinball machine as he had back at their home bowling alley basement. But when he arrives at this destination, he sneakily reaches out a hand and tries to touch Lionel (Qualls).
Lionel Qualls lets his chin dip, clicks his tongue and shakes his head.
"Nah, I did what I had to," he says, still confident in his choice after all these years it seems. "But this is it, right?"
He shifts, lifting his head and letting it tip to the side. His arm slides across the glass, closer to Lionel Lovelace's reach. "Y'all brought the last keys, now I—"
Edited 2020-05-17 00:37 (UTC)
Re: ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
One second to the next, it's hard to tell what happens. A sharp metallic crack, like windchimes hitting a stone floor. Then a white light, frigidly cold. A zing. A crash.
Lionel Qualls leaps out of the way as a missile of ice passes right through the spot he'd just been standing. It shatters against a shelf, knocking it over, causing more chaos.
"Weeds!" Pouch roars, wings unfurled and flapping fast. All of that good nature shed, replaced with icy fury that seems to radiate out into the air. It's an old and angry hurt that hangs on every surface, grief and unspeakable rage.
Mary Grace throws herself backwards, away from the pinball machine and the ?ghost? boy under attack. Her phone flies out of her hand and her purse is half open, but all she's concerned about is her wand. She holds it in front of her, steady, breathing hard.
Oh, did he mean to leave the safety of Eddy's side? That was totally an accident! Once ice starts flying, he squeaks and clutches onto Eddy's hoodie, skittering around to hide behind his roommate and peeking out from his side with his phone still held out to record. Can't miss this!!
Lionel, the wallflower, surprises himself and does something either heroic or very very dumb. He steps in between LQ and Pouch, his body -- and his wand -- facing the magimigicicada.
He wants to give Lionel Qualls a chance to answer Audrey's question.
"I've been down here for thirty years," the mysterious L.Q. laments as he steps up behind Lionel Lovelace. "Watching. Waiting. Listening."
Another loud noise. And light this time. The pinball machine comes to life, bright reds and golds: the words DYLAN & THE DEAD illuminated across the top. The Man in Me starts playing tinny static sound from the old pinball machine's speakers.
"Starving." The mysterious L.Q. stretches, looming tall, tall, taller over Lionel Lovelace. His voice turns thin, reedy, "You gave me a glimpse and tried to shut the door," The mysterious L.Q. is no boy at all, and as he wraps a long vine around Lionel's midsection, his voice changes one more, split and cracked, broken words. Sounds from different voices strung together, spliced like a badly made deepfake. "But I could still peek through. They foundinfinity. They embraced it. And infinity embraced them, too. Whether they wanted it or not."
Tight, tight, tighter the vines around Lionel squeeze.
"Ah...shit hell, man," Pouch groans before he lunges, grabbing a handful of the vines wrapped around Lionel and pulling.
Ice freezes the vines, but just in the front, stopping before Lionel, himself, is chilled. Brittle now, the strange plant shatters easily and with Lionel Lovelace out of the way, the thick tangle of vines behind him descends upon the magimagicicada.
Pouch thrashes and fights, spitting ice and frost and snow in every direction as the vines fall over him in relentless waves.
"Now," says the formless writhing thing that was the mysterious L.Q. in a voice like metal scraping against stone, "The keys, please."
Will Armani ever learn to use his wand and those spells he'd been practicing? Maybe one day. But this time, he reaches into his pocket with his wand hand for the vellum sigil Rex had gifted him.
"May no weeds grow in my garden," he recites, coming out from his hiding spot from behind Eddy to bring the protective sigil closer to the vines binding Pouch.
"Glacius!" Mary Grace shouts as Armani reads his paper, scrambling further back from Lionel and uh... Not Lionel. Ain't no good ever came out of sticking your neck out for a man. "Fucking—Glacius maximus!"
When that thing transforms, a pang of betrayal and loss socks Viola hard in the stomach. She audibly moans as the vines shatter and grow in unequal measures, sucking Pouch into its mass. This had all been a carefully laid trap—what she'd always feared is clear to her now—but how many steps back? Were these weeds what she had been speaking to through the spirit board? The computers? Via candy and butterfly weeds? CARDe-B? Had this been the thing that walked through their patronus practice way back in January? How long has this writhing mass of vines been manipulating her? Is Lionel Qualls even still with them on this earth at all?
Viola isn't ready to consider that the real Lionel Qualls and this abomination before her could possibly be one and the same. Hot, embarrassed tears rim her eyes as she scrambles to action, taking her classmate Lionel by the elbow with one hand to help him to his feet. With the other, she points her wand at the base of the vines and cries, "Glacius!" Again and again.
Pouch's magic freezes the vines wrapped around Lionel's waist, but does nothing to cool his face. Hot and red with foolishness, and then anger in turn. Lionel stands as Viola pulls him away, but he does little else. His wand dangles harmlessly by his side. The shock -- of being so wrong, of being attacked -- has rendered him useless. This is what he gets for becoming emotionally invested in something.
Audrey's first instinct...is not magic. She's not surprised about this. This is almost exactly what she's been afraid of finding, here. Actually finding it. That almost feels like a relief. She's glad she never found a key. Before now. She's frozen for exactly a moment, and then cries out to the only other person she thinks can help.
"...Pocket??"
She remembers herself and freezing charms after that, joining the others in their chorus.
Gertrude Judith McGilliguddy has definitely never frozen under pressure in her entire life. That doesn't happen to brilliant people like her. No, she isn't at all surprised by this outcome and she was definitely just waiting on the opportune moment to spring into action.
It only takes her a moment to summon a happy memory once she's decided on her course of action. The others have the ice front pretty well covered, she supposes, so instead she summons her patronus. The deinonychus burst forth from her wand in a burst of silvery light and charges into the fray.
Maisy lets out an undignified shriek, and continues to shriek and scream for the remainder of this scuffle, like she's just realized there's a spider on her clothes and she's hysterically trying to bat it off. But unlike Trudy, with her well-thought-out patronus or even everyone else with their somewhat tactical freezing charms, her gut instinct is to start throwing reductos and throwing them in whatever direction she can, careful only to avoid the other students in the room.
The writhing mass hisses and screeches in the face of Armani's sigil while in his hand it ignites, burns white like flashpaper, and dissolves. A few layers of the vine go slack, wilt and die, while the rest whip around trying to avoid his sigil. A horrible, sickening darkness falls over everything, leeching light from every source, but even in the shadow, it's clear: that writhing thing is not impervious.
From the mess, Pouch frees one hand, grasping out into the air.
Whipping wild, one vine strikes Mary Grace, another tries to pull Maisy off her feet but gets instantly shrunk for the effort. Freezing spells fly in all directions, vines shrink to ineffective size or turn to ice, fall and shatter as they flail and grasp. Mary Grace and Eddy rip a hole right through the center of that snarl, as though forced apart by will as much as frozen with magic.
The only thing louder than the awful things wails (of pain? or is that anger?) are Viola's repeated cries of "Glacius!" Each one punctuated with a bright flash of blue-white that burns away new vines before they can form.
That horrible oppressive feeling keeps growing though. A sense of wrongness, of not belonging, each student knows, without a doubt, that this thing in the room with them doesn't even belong on this world, on this plane. It is something else. From somewhere else. And it fights seemingly without end.
More vines spring up from shadows. They shrink and shatter against slung spells, bend away from Eddy and Armani, protected by the sigil from the Lepidopterite prince. The rest shoot for Lionel, for Trudy, for Audrey.
And that's when Audrey calls the party bug's name.
Something grows warm in Audrey's pocket, something she'd brought for good luck. It grows and it grows and it grows, bigger, warmer, not just heat, but feeling. Love and care, protection. Moss grows over Audrey's chest and arms, covering every fingertip. Somehow, Audrey knows, a part of Pocket is here, and the vines cannot touch her.
When the writhing mass screams this time, it is in pain, not frustration. And blown apart by countless Glacius charms, there's a perfect opening...for a dinosaur.
Trudy's patronus charges forward, strikes not the vines, but the magimagicicada still struggling inside. Pouch's obsidian skin shines, each golden fleck a star twinkling, glowing brighter, burning into a supernova. He lifts his head, peering out from the mess of vines, looks at the students fighting and smiles, then slams his hand against the ground.
What happens next, is hard to say. For just a second, each student is overcome with unbearable, permeating cold, and the last thing they all see before everything goes black is that jagged maw in the floor — the seam spitting smoke and orange-red flame.
Moving like ice is a strange feeling. You are water and air at once. Terribly cold, unable to breathe, but somehow the experience is comforting, and it's over before you can really tell what's happening at all.
Each of the students coalesces at once on the floor of the caves behind Elflock Falls. As they regain their barings, blink back to awareness, Pouch joins them, hunched over, clutching his arm, missing one wing. He breathes a laugh that fills the air with steam, a half-crazed, completely exhausted sound.
And then, from a television in the back of the cave, other students begin to exit Pocket's Party…
[WE WILL PICK UP AT THE END OF THE NIGHT SECTION AT POCKET’S PARTY. Shortly we’ll also be letting everyone know what items they lost. NICE JOB EVERYONE on kicking some weed ass! Thank you so much for this adventure. :)]
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peckenpaugh2020-05-15 01:28 pm
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
He jumps up and slaps the doorway as he passes through, which is probably a fairly familiar gesture, though when Pouch does it, frost explodes from his fingertips, spills like water over the surface, filling every glyph and spreading to the hanging vines beyond. They turn brittle, heavy, crack and fall to the ground as he passes them.
Steam wafts off of Pouch's iridescent form as he steps into the room, just a few paces and then he stops. He bends over to examine something on the floor. After a moment, he makes a soft, dejected sound. "This is as far as they got with my heart?"
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
"Did you just say your heart?" she asks, stepping to his side and zooming in on whatever he's looking at. "That sure as hell sounds like a good omen."
Standing up straight again, Mary Grace takes another few steps into the basement. She moves to the pinball machine that is, regrettably, not Snoop Crupp-themed, and twists one of the handles.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
There is no smoke and the room, once Pouch destroys the vines, seems to be a mundane, if very hot, storage room. Eddy releases Armani's shoulder, grimaces apologetically, and steps inside.
Judging by Mary Grace's reaction, the immediate grotesque imagery Eddy's mind conjures up when Pouch mentions his heart is not wholly accurate. Hopefully. "Another metaphor?"
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
Except for that thing that has Pouch's attention.
"I mean, my heart don't look like yours, but they used it for this," Pouch says, gesturing with an open palm at the floor. Or, rather, the lack of floor.
A large sinkhole fills the center of the room, its edges jagged, vaguely reminiscent of a jack-o-lantern mouth. The floor surrounding it is etched with more glyphs, these ones different than the rest, even more complicated.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
Lionel Qualls, looking very solid, now leans on the pinball machine beside Mary Grace.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
Shouldn't have come down here. Thirty years ago.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
What? He's gotta know.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
"Nah, I did what I had to," he says, still confident in his choice after all these years it seems. "But this is it, right?"
He shifts, lifting his head and letting it tip to the side. His arm slides across the glass, closer to Lionel Lovelace's reach. "Y'all brought the last keys, now I—"
Re: ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
Lionel Qualls leaps out of the way as a missile of ice passes right through the spot he'd just been standing. It shatters against a shelf, knocking it over, causing more chaos.
"Weeds!" Pouch roars, wings unfurled and flapping fast. All of that good nature shed, replaced with icy fury that seems to radiate out into the air. It's an old and angry hurt that hangs on every surface, grief and unspeakable rage.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
Audrey doesn't need more confirmation.
She does need something else.
"...Some things need to be sealed. Tell us what happened. What really happened."
Her voice is still soft, calm, but insistent. "Now."
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
He wants to give Lionel Qualls a chance to answer Audrey's question.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
Another loud noise. And light this time. The pinball machine comes to life, bright reds and golds: the words DYLAN & THE DEAD illuminated across the top. The Man in Me starts playing tinny static sound from the old pinball machine's speakers.
"Starving." The mysterious L.Q. stretches, looming tall, tall, taller over Lionel Lovelace. His voice turns thin, reedy, "You gave me a glimpse and tried to shut the door," The mysterious L.Q. is no boy at all, and as he wraps a long vine around Lionel's midsection, his voice changes one more, split and cracked, broken words. Sounds from different voices strung together, spliced like a badly made deepfake. "But I could still peek through. They found infinity. They embraced it. And infinity embraced them, too. Whether they wanted it or not."
Tight, tight, tighter the vines around Lionel squeeze.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
Ice freezes the vines, but just in the front, stopping before Lionel, himself, is chilled. Brittle now, the strange plant shatters easily and with Lionel Lovelace out of the way, the thick tangle of vines behind him descends upon the magimagicicada.
Pouch thrashes and fights, spitting ice and frost and snow in every direction as the vines fall over him in relentless waves.
"Now," says the formless writhing thing that was the mysterious L.Q. in a voice like metal scraping against stone, "The keys, please."
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
"May no weeds grow in my garden," he recites, coming out from his hiding spot from behind Eddy to bring the protective sigil closer to the vines binding Pouch.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
Is that a real spell? Guess we'll find out.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
But hopefully not the only thing he can do.
When he calls out "Glacius!" it's with all the strength of a fuck yeah.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
Viola isn't ready to consider that the real Lionel Qualls and this abomination before her could possibly be one and the same. Hot, embarrassed tears rim her eyes as she scrambles to action, taking her classmate Lionel by the elbow with one hand to help him to his feet. With the other, she points her wand at the base of the vines and cries, "Glacius!" Again and again.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
"...Pocket??"
She remembers herself and freezing charms after that, joining the others in their chorus.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
It only takes her a moment to summon a happy memory once she's decided on her course of action. The others have the ice front pretty well covered, she supposes, so instead she summons her patronus. The deinonychus burst forth from her wand in a burst of silvery light and charges into the fray.
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch! (Open to all ⛓️)
ELFLOCK LANES: Down the hatch & back, again
From the mess, Pouch frees one hand, grasping out into the air.
Whipping wild, one vine strikes Mary Grace, another tries to pull Maisy off her feet but gets instantly shrunk for the effort. Freezing spells fly in all directions, vines shrink to ineffective size or turn to ice, fall and shatter as they flail and grasp. Mary Grace and Eddy rip a hole right through the center of that snarl, as though forced apart by will as much as frozen with magic.
The only thing louder than the awful things wails (of pain? or is that anger?) are Viola's repeated cries of "Glacius!" Each one punctuated with a bright flash of blue-white that burns away new vines before they can form.
That horrible oppressive feeling keeps growing though. A sense of wrongness, of not belonging, each student knows, without a doubt, that this thing in the room with them doesn't even belong on this world, on this plane. It is something else. From somewhere else. And it fights seemingly without end.
More vines spring up from shadows. They shrink and shatter against slung spells, bend away from Eddy and Armani, protected by the sigil from the Lepidopterite prince. The rest shoot for Lionel, for Trudy, for Audrey.
And that's when Audrey calls the party bug's name.
Something grows warm in Audrey's pocket, something she'd brought for good luck. It grows and it grows and it grows, bigger, warmer, not just heat, but feeling. Love and care, protection. Moss grows over Audrey's chest and arms, covering every fingertip. Somehow, Audrey knows, a part of Pocket is here, and the vines cannot touch her.
When the writhing mass screams this time, it is in pain, not frustration. And blown apart by countless Glacius charms, there's a perfect opening...for a dinosaur.
Trudy's patronus charges forward, strikes not the vines, but the magimagicicada still struggling inside. Pouch's obsidian skin shines, each golden fleck a star twinkling, glowing brighter, burning into a supernova. He lifts his head, peering out from the mess of vines, looks at the students fighting and smiles, then slams his hand against the ground.
What happens next, is hard to say. For just a second, each student is overcome with unbearable, permeating cold, and the last thing they all see before everything goes black is that jagged maw in the floor — the seam spitting smoke and orange-red flame.
Moving like ice is a strange feeling. You are water and air at once. Terribly cold, unable to breathe, but somehow the experience is comforting, and it's over before you can really tell what's happening at all.
Each of the students coalesces at once on the floor of the caves behind Elflock Falls. As they regain their barings, blink back to awareness, Pouch joins them, hunched over, clutching his arm, missing one wing. He breathes a laugh that fills the air with steam, a half-crazed, completely exhausted sound.
And then, from a television in the back of the cave, other students begin to exit Pocket's Party…
[WE WILL PICK UP AT THE END OF THE NIGHT SECTION AT POCKET’S PARTY. Shortly we’ll also be letting everyone know what items they lost. NICE JOB EVERYONE on kicking some weed ass! Thank you so much for this adventure. :)]