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.

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"Tempting, but I don't want to explain to Lovelace why he's dead." Presley takes aim at Patrice, and flicks his wand in a sharp upward movement. "Levicorpus."

A voice in the background offers encouraging words: "Y'all are doin' great!"

"Some less great than others," Presley adds. Now that Patrice has been hoisted into the air by an ankle, Presley turns so he can drag his roommate right through the green smoke again and dump him on the porch. "Someone get the card." Sorry Patrice, he has no faith in your state of mind right now.

Initially, Patrice doesn't like being hoisted up by his ankle, but he quickly realizes it's kind of fun, so he laughs. Of course, that stops abruptly when he's deposited on the porch. He groans loudly, frustrated, but produces the two cards he has and waves them above his head as he lies back. He thinks this will be a fun game of them trying to catch his hand, but in all honesty he's too goofy right now to be overly coordinated.

"You guys are so laaaame."

"He's funny, I kinda like him this way," Mary Grace says and snatches for Patrice's hands. "We gotta ask Wy what kinda smoke he keeps in his dreams."

"Give em up, ya goob," Felicity tells Patrice as she helps Mary Grace pry his hands open.

Edited 2020-06-06 18:19 (UTC)

"Homebrewed vape juice," Presley says, with the confidence of someone who started smoking two hours ago and now considers himself an authority. He walks over to the milk crate table, and sets down the Death card in the "future" spot, making sure to hold it there with two fingers in case the stupid wind starts acting up again.

The third card looks like it tries to glow a little. Or maybe that's just the glint of the setting sun behind them.

"The Death card works!" Presley calls out to the others. "Turns out that you are good for something, Tang." Sure that the card won't budge, he steps back. "Put the other ones down."

Patrice, once the cards are extracted from his hands, rolls over onto his stomach, and then, after a moment of thought, attempts to do a somersault.

"I'm good for a million things!" Even hyped up on green smoke, his ego is intact.

Felicity checks the card she extracted from Patrice. The six of wands. She walks over to Presley and sets it down in the "past" position.

"MG, let's bring our baby home."

Mary Grace hops over Patrice, who she's really happy to see is having a good prom, and slaps her five of cups down on the table. Wait, wrong way. She flips it around so it's right side up again.

With the cards returned to their proper places, the death card glows brilliant gold and the memory starts back up.

"You're not wrong," Cassandra says, "But you need to look at the bigger picture. You need to feel the story, not just tell me what's in front of your nose. Anyone could do that. You need to trust your gut." She looks up at the assembled teenagers, then back down to the cards. Her hand hovers over the six of wands. "In the past, before you even came along, someone made a big gamble, but… they failed. It was egotism, really, that lead to a fall, turned a victory sour."

She moves her hand over the five of cups now. "That loss lingers. Leads to pessimism. It feels like you can't ever get over something like that, stuck in its shadow. But…"

"The death card doesn't have to mean actual dying," Wyatt interjects when they come to his future card. He is overcome with the brief, dramatic frustration of a preteen convinced he's basically an adult who knows as much as anyone else. That southern drawl of his was even more pronounced at this age, when he had barely spent any time with anyone who wasn't family, but it can't hide his plain frustration. He loves his mother and respects her, but her obsession with gloom and doom have made her keep him so sheltered his whole life. That's begun to change since they moved in with Eddy and his mama, and Wyatt doesn't want to slide back to the way things were.

"Yes, but death is an ending. A cycle completing, a transformation. An ending is still a death, though. A phoenix rises again, but first it still—" When her hand touches the card, Cassandra gives a full body shudder, not a shiver or a shake but the bone jarring motion of heavy machinery.

"Mama!" Wyatt says, reaching out to grab her hand. The card tumbles to the floor, which seems to bring his mother back to her senses a little, or at least stop the shaking. A breeze whips the tarot card right off the porch, where it dances in the air. Cassandra lifts her hand as if to reach for it, but it is already too far gone, dancing in bars of golden light slicing between the stacks of single wide trailers. The sky is only visible from the porch in portions, but Cassandra focuses on it now anyway, eyes narrowing as she watches the flittering card and the clouds and the shapes they take, her lips moving slightly as she mouths something to herself like a half remembered song. She's there, but she isn't, gaze a thousand miles away. "Something dark is coming," she says aloud, still distant. Abruptly, she scoops up the remaining tarot cards and shoves them back into the box.

"Night time?" Wyatt replies, scrunching up his nose with the realization that his mom is about to have one of her conniption fits again, and there's nothing he can do to stop it. He'll be lucky if she doesn't keep him cooped up in the house for the next week straight, watching him for possible danger every waking moment.

"Are you smarting off to me?" she answers, eyes back on her boy again, tone warning and sounding more like a normal mom. She crouches down in front of him, face screwing up with worry and desperation, and puts her hands on his shoulders, "I know you think I'm crazy—"

"Mama—" he says, wincing and rolling his eyes, not quite a denial.

"—But just listen, okay?" In the moment of quiet that follows, Cassandra looks up from Wyatt, eyes skirting the porch like she sees something or someone there that he can't. He follows her gaze, but his eyes never focus on Mary Grace, Felicity, Presley, and Uriah the way Cassandra does. "Don't go anywhere alone. And remember that sometimes pretty flowers are still poison, so don't be tempted. And, and..." She's struggling like trying to grasp at a fleeting memory before it slips away. "And stay away from fire, though sometimes fire only feeds what you think it should burn. And—"

"Mama," Wyatt interrupts again, but this time it's with concern. He cups her face with his hands to make sure that she's looking at him and her eyes focus once more. "It's gonna be okay."

She takes a deep breath then repeats, "Yeah. It is gonna be okay." She stands, takes his hand in hers, and then walks back inside through the screen door. Once it slams behind him, the view through the screen is no longer of the inside of the little trailer.

"You got a glowing copy of the card, right Pres?" Mary Grace asks as the memory plays out with Mama Wy and Baby Wy. "'Cause if not I bet Tang can handle that one too."

She's already moving toward the door though. The less time spent in this teetering trailer, the better.

Big Bed has completed the memory "Blackmail"!

Upon emerging from the memory out into the auditorium, the portal snapped shut behind them.

Up on the second floor, Wyatt Webberley was freed! Elsewhere in the auditorium, cottonwood, a magimagicicada, was also set free.

Mary Grace, Felicity, Patrice, Presley, and Uriah each earned 7 Tokens for solving the puzzle and completing the memory!

They earned an additional 1 Token for grabbing the linchpin. Patrice also earned 1 Token for learning to let go and live in the moment.

You can check your token totals in Pouch's shop here, and maybe see if there's anything worth grabbing while you're there!

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HE IS HERE

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