multiversallogs | in the woods dark and deep I offer you eternal sleep

Who: Alba, Alexia Swiftdawn, Anna Demirovna, Bruce Wayne, Cliona Donovan, Data, Don Draper, Ilde Decima, Irene Adler, Jae-hyun Kim, Jaime Lannister, Kalinda Sharma, Marie-Sixtine St. Vincent, Martel, Nuray Amedi, Penelope Lane, Odessa Wander, Pepper Potts, Rex Lewis, Seoraj, Shrieky, Sunny, Wolfgang Einhorn, Xas
What: Something bad is afoot, and you must help.
Where: Abrogate Green, Badside, Barrackham, Chnum, Echomire, Flag Hill, Gallmarch, Ketch Heath, Pelorus Fields, Raven's Gate, Sangwine, Serpolet, Sobek Croix, Stoneshell, and the northern woods
When: July 22nd to the 30th
Notes: People are slow right now and a few are on hiatus, so slow-tagging and back-tagging are totally fine. Please check the accompanying OOC post for info and to coordinate.
Warnings: Disturbing content, will include violence, choking, drowning, body horror, and animal death.

Strange events tend to go unnoticed in Baedal, compared to the much stranger things happening around them. People don't tend to be noticed when they go missing, either. The city takes these things in stride. After all, people get called back to their homeworld all the time, or they die. Everyone knows this.

Still, rumors start cropping up around the city about the sudden appearance of twelve identical towers positioned around the city like the face of a clock...

ALBA ♞ Cliona Donovan
DON DRAPER ♞ Pepper Potts, Kalinda Sharma
ILDE DECIMA ♞ Irene Adler, Marie-Sixtine St. Vincent
JAE-HYUN KIM ♞ Sunny
MARTEL ♞ Data, Jaime Lannister
NURAY AMEDI ♞ Alexia Swiftdawn, Anna Demirovna
ODESSA WANDER ♞ Rex Lewis
SEORAJ ♞ Bruce Wayne
SHRIEKY ♞ Xas
WOLFGANG EINHORN ♞ Penelope Lane

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You are offered a beautiful robe made of white feathers from a kind-looking old man. When you put it on, you immediately transform into a swan. he takes you to a tower in Pelorus Fields and puts you in a golden cage with eleven other swans.

There's an old woman pacing outside the tower. How did you get here? Chance, maybe, fate, destiny, whatever you want to call it. Either way, she looks relieved by your presence. "Oh, please, help," she entreats, and explains to you that there's an innocent trapped in the top of this tower, and you must rescue them before something bad happens.

Something very bad.

If you do, you'll be rewarded, she says. But you'd do it anyway, wouldn't you? Anyway, she tells you the key to the tower is with the bird-king in the land east of the sun and west of the moon, but that's not easy to get from Baedal; you'll need to find a cloak of swiftness. Where is it? Oh, well... she thinks it belongs to some huntsman in Sobek Croix. You'd better find it quick; you're running out of time.

Later, she'll be ashamed that it took her so long to realize Alba was missing; they're not quite close enough that Clio gave much thought to an unanswered text she'd sent until she'd been passing by where the other woman is staying. At the time, she couldn't say what compelled her to walk through the door after there had been no answer, but she'd done it, and finding the place looking as though it hadn't been touched for days made her think that maybe there was a reason she'd felt the need to look. The look of the place is worrying enough that Clio leaves her bag by the door, walks back out through the wood and shifts into the familiar form of a fox. She's not hunting Alba, but following a scent trail still works in principle.

Baedal is a mess of scents and tracking isn't something that Clio does often, not to mention the way that magic seems to muddle everything up. In the end, she has a feeling it's something other than the fox's nose that leads her to the tower. It doesn't really matter, anyway, the old woman is there to explain, and she's right, of course, Clio would do it even without the offer of a reward.

Sobek Croix is not far as the crow flies. Forests have always been slightly unsettling, but that doesn't stop her from landing in the small village that the forest encloses. After talking to a few of the locals, she finds someone who can point her in the direction of a huntsman's cabin and she sets out for it, in her own form now. The huntsman may not be friendly and Clio isn't going to reveal all the tricks she has up her sleeve until she has to. If the hunstman isn't willing to lend her the cloak, she'll just have to take it, for Alba's sake.

"No," the huntsman says.

It's a flat-out refusal spoken in a tone that leaves no room for doubt, for argument. He's got his hands on this thing, he's not giving it up to some random person he doesn't know from Eve. (Not that he'd ever know Eve.) The set of his jaw telegraphs this as clearly as if it were tattooed on his face. "Sorry. This one's mine. You'll have to look elsewhere." He turns around as if to go.

"Yours, my arse," another voice says, invisible hand reaching up to snatch a cap off his head which, after he does so, makes him visible again: a similarly-dressed man tramping through the woods loud enough to scare off all the game, and he looks mad. "That's mine and you know it. You stole it from me!"

"You left it right out in the open," the first huntsman says, indignant, turning around with a hand on his axe, vexed half by being accused of thieving (regardless of whether it's true) and half by the fact that all this noise means there's no game around anymore.

"You don't just take things lying around!" the second huntsman says, flinging his invisibility cap down and approaching the first. "Not if you know they're valuable!"

"If it was so valuable to you, you ought have kept a better eye on it!"

They're arguing, maybe about to fight. She can try to talk them around - they don't seem inclined to listen - or she can take the cap to grab the other and leave. It's not stealing if it's borrowing, is it?

in the woods dark and deep I offer you eternal sleep

SWAN PRINCESS.

abduction ♚ alba.

rescue ♞ clio.

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