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

Lydia ambles up and onto the entrance of the ball pit, sitting cross-legged on the ledge and just bordering on helpful. She lets the ball impact off of her chest with a hollow thunk of sound, already winging one back in Tybalt's direction.

"I guess we could try the doll first," she concedes, but reaches down to run her fingers across the top layer of colorful plastic anyway. Just in case.

Tybalt has no great excuse for this. He's seen the aforementioned star battles film, even. But it was a long time ago, and caution has literally never been his strong suit. He grins at Lydia's efforts, and it becomes sunnier with the ball bonking into his head. No, he doesn't have a wand or any usable line of defense. Why should he need that.

"Oh, the doll." he turns that grin to Winter, a genius, and without further thought on consequences, sticks his entire arm in the direction he last saw it go.

Edited (not a sad icon moment?) 2020-06-06 17:00 (UTC)

While doubtlessly gross, the ball pit doesn't seem any different from a standard ball pit. It's even a little sticky from where some baby slobbered on one of the balls earlier. Whatever terrible leviathan surely lurks beneath the surface must be preoccupied elsewhere, though, because nothing surfaces as more of the students come to the edge of the pit.

Tybalt wades toward the spot where the doll disappeared, and finds something fairly quick while groping around. It's... a pacifier. Hm, close but no cigar.

After the encounter in the bowling alley basement that cost Pouch his wing, Viola learned her lesson about charging in blindly. It's probably best that someone hangs back outside of the ball pit, in case shit hits the fan. Or, in case Tybalt hits shit on his next dive.

"Are any of our teachers happily married?" she muses, as she paces along the edge of the ball pit, searching for the doll.

Edited 2020-06-06 18:29 (UTC)

"Dr. Huang is. And... I think..." Winter starts as she gingerly wades through the sea of plastic, stopping to try and decide if she should even finish the thought. She does, the statement raising up high when it ends, "I think Trullinger and Ms. Treetops were...ssssomething?"

She pushes some of the balls aside to help Tybalt search.

Winter finds a very old mascot head for some sort of rodent, maybe a vole.

Winter puts the mascot head right back where she found it.

Oh. So, okay, it turns out this isn't going to be an simple and straight-forward claw machine victory. Straight in and straight out, eyes on the prize. It's rigged with a bunch of bad (and vaguely horrifying) options.

"God, I'm out of the loop on teacher gossip." Lydia pulls her feet back underneath her and crouches, readying herself to wade in and help if something worse than a beheaded rodent turns up next time.

"What kind of something?" He prompts, because he, too is behind on teacher gossip. Tybalt flicks the pacifier out of the ballpit like it's maybe going to burn him.

"...Wonder what the junk to ball ratio even is here."

He sighs and starts a new method; trawling up items from the depths by kicking his feet around, sending balls flinging to reveal what's beneath.

This probably creates more of a hazard, but they'll be here all day, otherwise.

Colorful balls go flying. There's a lot of eclectic stuff down here.

For instance, Tybalt finds a cricket bat. If he touches it, he will find it feels different than anything else here. More solid. More real. If he removes it from the memory, he will still have the cricket bat.

He grabs this bat immediately and he will never let it go.
He does the favor of not swinging it at his companions' heads, because he likes them.

"Of course, Dr. Huang would be the only one capable of avoiding mess," she comments passively as she strolls back and forth in search of the doll. It quickly becomes clear that her vantage point is functionally useless. The appearance of a vole head and a cricket bat in a children's playpen confirms to her that this is a magically altered space which it will require more than just keen eyes to escape.

Sighing, she steps out of her celestial themed pumps and climbs into the ball pit. "Speaking of Ms. Treetops," she muses as she digs through the colorful plastic balls, "Are our teachers still possessed? Or did we solve that one while I was asleep?"

Viola's foot lands on something round, too firm to be one of those ordinary plastic balls. It's a potion bottle full of teal green liquid. There are enough Potions students around to identify it given a whiff: it's a Vitamix potion. [When imbibed, it will give the drinker just enough speed and strength to land a guaranteed critical - 10 Roll - on an attack.]

This potion definitely doesn't belong here. If it's removed from the memory, Viola will still have it in her possession.

"They didn't seem right this morning if you ask me, but I haven't seen any of them but Lukashenko all night," Winter says as she kicks around in the ball pit, around where the doll was tossed. She watches a yellow ball soar through the air and hit an employee in the face. Whoops. "Not that Lukashenko's on staff anymore."

Well, if everybody else is jumping off this very specific bridge.

Lydia hops off of the ledge with a short breath through her nose, landing in the sea of plastic and wading over toward her classmates. "Potentially possessed, failing in their romantic relationships," she says, sweeping balls to both sides of her with cupped hands. "Adulthood's looking real promising."

"I better get possessed by something hotter than plants."

Tybalt muses, and now that all of his friends are in this pit as well, he does what his lizard brain (rat brain?) has wanted to throughout all of this, and crouches down, full head and shoulders covered, into the pit. He does keep a hand on his cricket bat.

Lydia's sifting through the gross plastic swamp nets her a plastic skipping rope. This could come in handy, maybe—good thing, too, because it seems like she'll be able to take this out of the memory with her.

Winter's kicking eventually proves fruitful, she finds a little purple terrycloth doll with cat ears and one eye. As soon as she brushes against it, it starts to glow gold. The linchpin has been located!

And with that found the memory begins again with several people jumping into the ball pit at once. It's a party! Kinda. Ms. Kwan, a be-polo-shirted employee, and the parent of the bully (who immediately wrenches her son away as soon as he's within arms reach) all head to the center of the ball pit. Between Ms. Kwan and the poor teenager just trying to help, they sift through a fossil record's worth of junk, eventually find the missing doll, but it's lot of gingerly poking round in ball pit hell before the teen girl in the red striped polo triumphantly pulls it from where it'd fallen, right in front of Winter.

Ms. Kwan thanks her profusely, scoops up her daughter and wades out of the ball pit.

Someone is laughing. Even though it's not that awful, it feels awful, and the source is immeditely evident: Ms. Kwan's husband.

With her daughter clinging to one arm, she brushes past him, knocking him in the shoulder with the other. The blow is both unexpected and far more forceful than it seems, because he topples over, face first into the ball pit as Melody Kwan walks out through the front door.

It stands open, now, leaving a way back to the auditorium.

[MEMORY COMPLETE! You may continue to thread here or leave through the portal.]

Tybalt, by the way, finds a sigil that plays smooth jazz whenever the holder is in a liminal space. And apparently this is a liminal space, because the paper emits some real Kenny G-esque shit.

Winter uses Ms. Kwan's toppled over ex as a ramp to step out of the ballpit. She wipes her bare feet on his back before jumping back down to the extremely 90s carpet and heading for the Chuck-E-Cheese-Wiz front door.

Lydia, Tybalt, Viola and Winter completed the memory "Ballpit"!

Upon emerging from the memory out into the auditorium, the portal snapped shut behind them. Any of the items they found inside remained on their person when they left!

Elsewhere in the auditorium, Administrator Kwan was freed!

Lydia, Tybalt, Viola and Winter each received 5 Tokens for completing the memory!

They received an additional 1 Token for finding the linchpin before leaving!

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

HE IS HERE

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit

MEMORY: Ballpit - TOKENS!