peckenpaugh | HE IS HERE

Entry tags:

! ic/ooc,
* endgame

HE IS HERE

the vines have run wild

it's over Everything is in shambles. Walls and floors torn and broken from roots and branches sprouting through. They block doors and crowd passages and pulse with sick life. The Thing sits in the center of it all, angry and starving, its trunk both still and moving in ways you catch only when it is in the corner of your vision. Branches that look less like bark and more like skin stretch in every direction, lush with shadowy leaves and dotted with bits of glowing blue. The ruined floor is littered with those little twinkling dots. Seeds. Everywhere, seeds. They hang on boughs, and rest on banisters in the upper levels. The one thing in this nightmare that doesn't radiate that awful, pervasive hunger.

The roof is gone, replaced with a writhing canopy of shadow and muck. Some parts of it are complex spiderwebs of tendrilly shapes, others solid formless movement. The only consistent thing about it is that it is terrible to behold, faintly nauseating to look at for too long. Ash rains down between gaps in its branches, and what glimpses of sky are visible are nothing but swirling gray clouds. What stars still shine are magic, man-made, floated between balconies by prom committee before the dance.

Those remaining begin to stir. Each one of you has heard Pocket's words, "Find the roots." And if you want to save your friends, your family, the holler — hell, maybe even the world — that's exactly what you're going to do.

You climb from protective cocoons of dying moss, push your way past walls of solid ice, emerging into utter destruction. Things move and make noise at the edge of your vision, but for now, at least, all is calm. What to do? Where to start?

it's ruined Among the twinkling maple seeds are the dropped possessions of students and staff, lost when they were pulled away. A compact mirror, a cell phone, a pair of glasses, cups of punch spilling across the floor. A single red heel sits at the edge of the jagged pit that peers down into the Sorting Path. The air here is hot. Too hot. If you jump, you'll surely be boiled alive.

Though locked when everyone tried to flee, vines and roots have torn the doors to the auditorium off their hinges. The splintered remains of heavy oak doors litter the entrance halls and stairwell alcoves, leaving an open path outside. Not that you'd want to flee, by the looks of it.

A cool night breeze is the only relief from the growing heat of the auditorium, yes, but even that is tainted by the heavy scent of flowers. Outside, vines and purple flowers have exploded over every surface. They climb up lamp posts, engulf buildings whole, hang from trees. It would be beautiful if it weren't horrifying. Campus is unrecognizable.

there is no hope Roots and vines clog the way to the Sorting Path, and most stairwells are completely obstructed by the growths of that horrible tree. Up above, something buzzes and wails, a mockery of a cicada's cry, and beyond that the twittering of birds nesting in the tree's highest branches.

Pouch coalesces in the middle of it all, a one-winged magimagicicada, weak and weary but undaunted. Resolute, if not reinvigorated. He bends down to touch a seed, and the moment his obsidian fingers light on it, a blue-white portal to somewhere else rips right through reality. A memory begins to play. Somehow, the bug seems to know what he's seeing.

She gave us what we need, the one who ran says to the gathered students, his voice in their heads as much as the air. Let's all not let her down, huh?

Find your friends. Find my siblings. It's time to fight.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Winter quietly observes Aristotle freeing himself from Tybalt, replacing the vacated space with a crutch, with a smile that she tries and fails to button down flat. "Sounds like a plan!" she affirms, a little breathlessly, lighting her fingers on Tybalt's shoulder as she passes him to start looking.

She moves carefully past the newly bloomed crocuses to examine the rabbit mask girl. Winter has a fairly good guess at who this is, but she'll keep it to herself, for now. Instead, she tries to decide where the girl's line of sight is pointed. Ah, Aris, of course.

"Maybe try the bear mask?"

The crutch is a cold replacement for a human friend, but he can make it work. Tybalt grins, momentarily delighted by this new toy. He balances it in front of him, leveraging it to hop along the ground in wide swings after Winter as soon as she mobilizes him. He’s something of an idiot, perhaps, but Tybalt isn’t stupid-stupid. The girl’s long hair and lilting voice are deeply familiar. He hopes it’s who he thinks. She’d hate being trapped right now.

“Could be.” He comes to a rest near the frozen Aris, contemplating. He’s new to all this. “So what, you just take it?”

Tybalt doesn’t wait for an answer, and does in fact just reach out to tear the bear mask from his dream-friend’s face.

Edited 2020-06-04 16:10 (UTC)

The bear mask comes away easily in Tybalt's hands, somehow leaving memory Aris' hair looking even more perfectly mussed than before, but everything else in the scene remains still.

Aris releases a breath he hadn't noticed he'd been holding when Tybalt takes the bear mask and nothing happens. He wants to figure this out. But that doesn't make stepping through this familiar memory any less surreal. Especially with the sense that he knows who the girl in the mask is becoming more certain all the time. Hesitantly, he moves to join his friend by the figures sitting in the grass and reaches out to gently touch the ear of the rabbit mask. It's the other obvious option and as long as he's careful they can rule it out without having to remove it.

"...Just in case," he tells Tybalt, then adds with a lopsided smile, "Gonna put it on? I bet it'd suit you."

Edited (Sorry for the slow. Work happened. ) 2020-06-04 18:23 (UTC)

Nothing changes when Aris touches the rabbit mask.

"Hm, not the masks, then? It's supposed to glow gold, right?" Winter's assuming based on what she's seen other students stumble out of closing memories with, like that bizarre golden vape Presley had.

She squints at the frozen Aris with that same faint smile, observing, offhandedly, "Your hair looked very nice that day."

It had seemed to her that the point of their not-quite-mystery girl's attention would be the linchpin, but perhaps that was assuming too much. Just in case, Winter reaches down to pluck one of those freshly grown crocuses.

Winter is able to pull the bloom of the crocus from its stem but its stalk remains rooted, giving the slight sensation of resistance. In her palm, the crocus bloom immediately withers. On the stalk at her feet, a new purple bud grows and bursts open, releasing a heady floral scent into the air. Different in shapes and sizes but familiar, nonetheless.

The rest of the crocuses follow suit, dropping their blooms and growing new ones. Within seconds, the aroma is overpowering. It makes your head swim and your heart race. The longer you breathe it in, the more difficult it becomes to remember why you're here. Aren't you supposed to be with your loved ones right now? There's no time to waste! This may be your last chance to confess your feelings.

Oh, that can't be good. As soon as Aris spots the purple flowers blooming to life, he drops the crutch he's carrying and reaches into his pocket for the temporary wand. While he'd been intending to cast Glacius, two things hit him at once: the realization that Winter is in the way and a hint of that sweet floral aroma that...isn't natural. His mind is instantly pulled to Viola and he can feel his heart leap. His focus starting to slip.

Before it leaves him entirely, he lifts his wand, "Ventus!" With any luck, scattering the scent will stop...whatever this is in its tracks.

Edited 2020-06-05 00:02 (UTC)

Tybalt does not have his wand. Which is...unfortunate. He simultaneously yelps, which he'll deny later, and places the bear mask over his face, poor protection. The aroma is overpowering. And strange. He tries not to let his mind wander. There's someone who isn't here who he's worried over. But he tries to not to let himself examine who.

Instead, he takes out some of that energy on the flowers, crushing them underfoot with the crutch, his one line of defense.

Aris' cyclone catches a cloud of thickly scented mist and propels it away from the group, out over the Greentooth River. Better catch your breath while you can.

The reprieve is short-lived. As Tybalt (rolled 6) smashes the flowers (rolled 2) beneath his crutch they explode like puffball mushrooms, releasing a burst of perfume so dense that it shimmers a pearly white. The effect is intoxicating and disorienting. Tybalt will have a hard time focusing on anything other than that someone who isn't here for a while.

Winter is, unfortunately, at ground zero of the strange pollen smell. She makes a gagging noise, covers her mouth with her hand, but what comes up isn't vomit, "I feel completely alienated from all my peers," she blurts on a gag, "And sometimes I feel more like an anthropologist than a high school student."

And then, to add insult to injury, she turns and gets a faceful of Ventus and falls off her feet, right onto a vine while shouting expletives.

The vine is squashed flat under Winter's tush (rolled 9) and retreats back into the ground with second-hand embarrassment.

Taking advantage of the distraction, another vine (rolled 5) snakes out and wraps itself around Aris' ankle, attempting to pull him from his feet. We can all be humiliated together.

Aware that the leeway the wind bought them may be brief, Aris pulls in a breath and holds it, intending to grab the other two and pull them away from the flowers so he can get another shot with Glacius and-- These grand plans are interrupted, however, when the vine catches him by the ankle and pulls him off his feet with a startled yelp. He lands on his back with an audible oof!, dropping his wand somewhere among the grass and flowers.

There is no dignity here.

Edited 2020-06-05 01:45 (UTC)

It's overwhelming. He's never wanted to say what he's felt before, full stop, ever. But the urge to do so now is so entirely overpowering that he's standing, vines around everyones' ankles, staring, and helpless. "...I don't know what I did wrong. I thought I liked someone, but...I've fooled everyone into thinking I don't care so fucking effectively that....oh shit."

That's when the weed pulls Aris away. He's pulled into action, and yet compelled to give Winter just a tiny little kiss on the crown of her head as he runs. Reassuring. They can talk more later. Or, ideally, never, not about this. There's more pressing matters. He grabs the weed holding Aris and pulls back with all the muscle in his woefully birdlike frame.

Edited 2020-06-05 01:55 (UTC)

"Blech," Winter says, about the unintentional admission and not about the forehead smooch, though that may be unclear. It's fine. She'll apologize later. For now, she knows that tug-o-war is an oft successful tactic (she has the war trophy to prove it), so she hops to her feet and joins Tybalt in trying to yank the vine off of Aris.

For effect, just in case, she does another battlecry.

The vine holds tight despite Tybalt (rolled 1) and Winter's (rolled 3) best efforts and begins dragging Aris toward the Greentooth River.

While Aris makes a few flailing attempts to find and grab his wand out of the grass, it's soon out of reach and there's nothing for him to grab onto as the vine pulls him from his friends. He makes a few futile attempts to twist away before beginning to to riffle desperately through his jacket pockets. Fortunately, what he's looking for hasn't fallen out.

The drum stick.

In a moment of impulsive inspiration, he snaps the tip off to turn the blunt end into a jagged one and tries to stab it into the vine.

Edited 2020-06-05 03:32 (UTC)

The broken end of Aris' drumstick (rolled 5) punctures the vine but it only winds further up his leg with crushing force (rolled 2), threatened.

The grip around his leg goes from firm to sharply painful and Aris cries out. Now out of weapons and ideas, he tries again to grab for anything he might be able to hold onto and casts a desperate look back at Tybalt and Winter. His wide eyes linger on his roommate.

Edited 2020-06-05 04:30 (UTC)

Oh Christ. See, he'd never live it down if Aris's helpless puppy eyes were the last thing he saw. So Tybalt winks in return, and yells out, "JUST...HANG ON FOR A SEC."

Easier said than done, but whatever. He dives off of the vine, reaching to grab his roommate's discarded wand. It's probably dangerous, the way he aims it at the vine that's holding/being held by his friends, but it's the last resort, and the only thing he knows that works. "GLACIUS."

Edited 2020-06-05 04:43 (UTC)

A bite of frost encircles Aris' calf as the vine turns as cold as ice and begins to splinter and crack, falling in chunks into the grass. The the same time, the purple flowers closest to the group drop their petals and sag. For the moment, things seem calm.

Winter hops to her feet, embarrassment momentarily forgotten in this gap in the chaos, and hurries over to Aris to check him out and lend a hand. "How's your ankle? Think you can stand?"

Breathless but finally still, Aris allows himself to lie back in the grass and close his eyes for a moment. It isn't until Winter speaks that he opens them again and tentatively lifts his aching leg enough to give the ankle a careful turn. He's always been an active guy, so the throb isn't entirely unfamiliar to him. It hurts. But he'll manage. "...Yeah. Yeah, I think so," he answers quietly, smiling a little in earnest gratitude, "Thanks you guys."

He doesn't sit up just yet, though, instead asking, "Could one of you do me favor and try the thimble?" It may not be the root, but with his mind cleared by the moment of panic he's suddenly certain that the girl in the mask is Viola and that he'd given himself away by talking to her about the thimble. So maybe...

Edited 2020-06-05 05:49 (UTC)

Tybalt has launched to his feet, vibrating with adrenaline and embarrassment both, so an errand is welcome right now. “I got it!” Comes as he is already loping away in long strides, remembering to throw Aris’ wand back at him, as he goes. Tybalt rushes over to memory-Aris (still weird), and plucks the thimble out of those beautifully long fingers.

Tybalt pulls away a golden replica of the thimble, leaving behind its iron counterpart.

The memory of Aris begins speaking again. “I dunno… do those romantic rom-com scenarios ever actually happen? I feel like if they feel the same way, it’d be exciting no matter what as long as you meant it,” Aris continues on, lowering his eyes and restlessly tapping his shoes against the grass.

Viola leans forward, sets her elbow against her knee, and props her temple against her knuckles. She looks up at Aris, clearly smitten. “But what if they just don’t feel the same way…” she pauses, leans closer. “Yet?”

Nearby, pulled onto the banks of Greentooth is a wooden rowboat that wasn’t there before. Down a ways, the river bends and you can just see that the banks are longer paralleled by the river walk but instead by the ruined auditorium of Peckenpaugh School of Magic.

[MEMORY COMPLETE: NPC defeated. Linchpin recovered. You may continue to thread or move back to Peckenpaugh by taking the rowboat through the portal.]

HE IS HERE

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