hadriel_logs | Event Log: The Beach Episode

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Event Log: The Beach Episode

Who: Everyone!
What: The event log for the transition to our new planet!
Where: The city, which has now been fragmented onto four separate islands.
When: May 27th-June 10th
Warnings: Surf's up! If by 'surf', you mean separation from your friends, weird sea creatures, and cold rainfall.

The sun and the sand and a drink in your hand- well, it all sounded pretty nice when you voted for the island planet, but ultimately what you're getting is a bit less glamorous.

The transition takes place instantaneously, with very little noteworthy shakeup, though those of you who are particularly in-tune with the supernatural may feel a bit dizzied or nauseated by the sudden movement. And that's exactly what it is: for those of you who are outside, the change is fairly noticeable, as in the span of a single blink, what used to be miles of desert is now rocky ocean. The city is simply in one place one moment, and then somewhere entirely new a second later.

And that somewhere new is exciting! The islands have plenty of landscape to explore and weather conditions to adjust to, fish to catch, and- wait, how do you get to the other islands? What if your friends or your home or the bar is on these other islands? Enjoy having to figure out who is where and how you're going to get by with only a small fraction of the city to work off of- hopefully those boats will come sooner rather than later...

► This log covers May 27th-June 10th.
► Feel free to make your own logs as well!
► Please tag headers of threads with content warnings where they apply
► Please put your character's name and open/closed in the subject line of your starters!
► If you drown or get eaten by an alien shark, let us know here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Orchard

Quentin believes, in a very powerful way, in life going in circles. He finds himself in an orchard, and decides that yes.

He spends a day there, dawn to dawn, all the way through. He eats fruit from the trees and lays down in the grass when he needs to sleep.

He cracks circumstances. It's a brute force process, and he does a lot of it with his eyes shut, his hands in the grass. He needs the shape of the planet, the texture of the air. He needs magnetic fields, he needs leylines, and a sense of the orbit around the sun, the paths of the moons.

He's there to be interrupted, even if he does move a bit like a sleepwalker.

Hotsprings

When there's little else to do, Quentin washes up at the hotsprings. It feels like a shame to use showers when you have a place like this to come to.

Quentin is a fighter in nerd's clothing- when he shrugs the star trek t-shirt and cardigan and ill fitting cuordoroys off, his body tells a strange story. He's got muscle to him, he's got scars, he's got a vicious burn in the centre of his back, and it's ringed by a complex tattoo of a pentacle that the initiated may recognize as a demon trap. One of his shoulders and one of his knees have each been replaced with prosthetics. They're wood- not in the sense of pirates and peglegs, but living wooden skin, like a carved statue has come to life. He's been hit with a sword or two- and weirder stuff besides.

He slips into one of the pools in a hurry, and immediately curses, loudly;

"Shit!"

He's forgotten his glasses, and they're now in the water. Quentin lets out an exasperated sigh, and begins patting.

As Quentin makes his way through the garden, enjoying those fruits and edibles that have ripened since the last harvest, he will find something curious. There is a track of sorts, leading through the greenery, created by the footsteps of one person passing carelessly through rows of flowers and cultivated beds rather than going around them and leaving them untouched. In the wake of this path, grasses and leaves are brittle and withered, and some are so dark as to look burnt. They crumble to ash.

Should he follow, it won't take long to discover the source. At the base of a tree, whose crown is blocking the thick mist that threatens to become rain, sits Caedra. Beside her is a pen and an open notebook with pages covered in writing done in a foreign script, all at angles and curves so that it's hard to tell where each line (if line is even the right word) is supposed to begin or end.

But she's not writing now. She's sitting, smiling to herself. Enjoying her surroundings, as dessication slowly creeps up the trunk she is leaning against, turning the bark ashen and brittle. She hears footsteps and turns her gaze to the one who wanders closer, not sure if he has seen her or not. He too looks very absorbed in his surroundings.

"Lost?"

"No."

He answers, when she speaks. It's been a long night, yes, and he's more han a little tired, and wrapped up in what he's been doing thoroughly enough that it feels like it's completely appropriate to answer;

"I'm where I'm supposed to be."

He normally can't abide cosmic pronouncements, but this time it's true.

"What are you doing to that tree?"

"Nothing."

She is of course aware of what is probably happening to the tree. But she isn't doing anything to it; rather, the tree is dying of its own inability to tolerate such an intense concentration of evil. For some demons, animals turn rabid and violent in their presence, or the ground becomes boiling mud, or disease follows in their footsteps. Her effect on the world is quieter than some but no less destructive.

"You look like you've been awake for days. Or perhaps, like you died and kept walking. Are you a zombie?"

A joke. He doesn't look entirely pale enough to be undead, even if he comes close.

"If you'd ever seen a zombie you wouldn't have to ask that. It's never ambiguous, you don't have to wonder about the slavering undead."

In Quentin's opinion, anyways.

"I'm an academic. It's both more and less different than one might think."

"Oh, so you've met a few! Good. Well - only good in that most everyone else here says they have nothing of the sort where they come from, and their worlds are full of humans with machines and nothing else. The lack of variety gets boring."

She considers him for a moment. Yeah, okay, academic explains a few things about his appearance. Those types never seem to make it outside their libraries and colleges often. Although - he doesn't look completely bookish either.

"What do you study?"

"Magic." Although that's a bit of an oversimplification. He's too naturally pedantic not to clarify. "Reversing entropy, and other sub-sections of mending and repair."

"It's difficult to transfer from world to world."

A slow, small smile creeps onto Caedra's face. "Reversing entropy, hm? Isn't that sort of futile?"

As someone from an entire race of creatures whose life goals involve reverting the current state of the worlds back into a state of chaos and destruction and complete violence, she figures she has a pretty good handle on the value of his chosen field of study. Which is to say, not much.

"Well, it inevitably rereverses itself, but it can be extremely useful in the short term if there's something you need whole."

Shrugging; he has half a mind to try it on that tree she's leaning against.

"All right, I can see your point. But basic mending is a fairly simple task. Even a novice can piece back together his mother's accidentally-broken vase. So. What is it that you repair?"

Because either this guy is really full of shit (he could be, he doesn't look nearly old enough to know much about the deeper arcane arts) or he's alluding to something more than just patching up cracked ceramics and torn clothing.

"I work a different system of magic from you, where this isn't a task a novice would accomplish without killing themselves."

He says, shaking his head.

"Makes sense; different universes, different schemas."

"Well isn't that a shame, then. A lot of novices must meet untimely ends just trying to undo bad haircuts."

It sounds like a very punishing system, if he's being truly forthcoming. She doesn't trust that he is, but what a funny thought that what she considers something as simple to do as breathing might be a life's work in some other world.

"That seldom happens. It isn't accessible enough information that children can access it."

He says, and rests his hands on the small of his back, stretching the kinks out.

"I never know how people survive in worlds where adolescents access powers."

"I just meant people new to learning the arts, rather than children - but it's true, I've seen children with some powerful abilities. A few rare bloodlines create natural sorcerers."

Like, oh, hers. Or rather, that of her son's father. Her boy had struggled to realize how extensive his abilities were, though, and she had had to discourage his use of them. A cruel thing to do, perhaps, but the city already looked poorly on the boy with horns. Had he learned he could command others to do his bidding much earlier, he would have gotten himself into a lot more trouble.

"Nightmare."

Says Quentin, shaking his head, with deep and prickly disapproval. Everyone under the age of thirty strikes Quentin as a maniac who shouldn't be given the responsibility of even cat sitting.

"I'm Quentin, by the way."

Yes, she's starting to get the sense of who this fellow is. An academic would find the realities of the world messy and distasteful, she imagines. She can't wait until he meets Hayden. She just chuckles at his reaction.

"I'm Caedra. You must be one of the newer ones here, aren't you? I can't say I recall seeing you around before."

"I'm new as of this month."

He agrees, inclining his head.

"Just trying to get enough context to get my shit working properly."

"So that you can go around, undoing entropy," she states, still finding the concept amusing.

"Tell me, aside from fixing a cracked mug, what sort of things can you do? Once you have your bearings."

"That's just what I teach. It's not the whole scope of magic."

He admits, with a tiny, reluctant smile.

"I don't know what I could do. I think it depends on the problem I'm presented with. Beating back the monsters, to start with."

"Well, presumably you can't accomplish the whole scope of magic on your own anyway. So, beating back monsters - a good start. You have offensive abilities, then, do you?"

This one seems too quiet to want to participate in the arena fights, but it certainly would be fun to see him get utterly trounced by someone more confident with their powers. And even more fun if he took them all by surprise, perhaps, and showed greater skill than someone might expect. It's time to really start selling the idea to people, more than she has been, now that they have finally resettled.

"So let me ask you a question, then."

Something that's been on his mind.

"What do people do here? Are they trying to build a community? Are they trying to get out of here?"

He doesn't have a purpose yet, and he doesn't like it.

That was a question dodge if ever she had seen one, and she fixes her eyes on him curiously. Sure, she had phrased it somewhat rhetorically, but many would boast, or alternatively downplay the assumption. Irritating, but maybe that's just the sort of person he is. An irritating one. He's in good company with most of this city, then.

"I don't know. I don't pay attention to what they do. A few of us do actively want to find a way out. Perhaps others take sides in the fight between the Null and their 'parasites'. Most seem content to simply waste time."

"Whose parasites?"

He asks, not up yet on the most imaginative local jargon.

But that aside;

"Are there other magic users specifically committed to the break-out effort? I'd like to help, and that's probably where I could accomplish the most."

"First, then: what the Null call 'parasites', most everyone else here will call 'gods'," Caedra explains, with a heavy dash of sarcasm on the latter title. "They're a race of magically-inclined people who feed of emotion, but gods they are certainly not."

Thieves, kidnappers, self-centered assholes - she has many names for them. They might even be celestials of some sort for all she knows, but that doesn't make them deities and she refuses to give them the satisfaction they seek with what seems to be a self-appointed name.

"And as for a break-out effort, yes, I'm sure there are several." Such as her, for instance, but she isn't going to take someone on that she doesn't even know. "What do you think you could do to help?"

"I've killed gods before." He says, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He's extremely matter of fact about this. But it's not a literal deus ex machina, because;
"It might take a couple of years, but it's one potential avenue."

Nothing that big is ever easy.

Event Log: The Beach Episode

Quentin Coldwater: OTA

Orchard

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