in the woods dark and deep I offer you eternal sleep

[aarnethompson]

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

Comments

[yeouiju]

When the maddened beast's shadow comes rolling around the corner, Sunny sinks into the shadows almost literally. He feels the aftermath of powerful magic like heat, the baking noon sun still felt in concrete after dark, and for a moment, simply waits in his indecision.

Finally, he moves. Jae had called him beautiful, it's true, and yet there is still an instinctive part of Sunny that calls for doing this kind of thing alone. He is immense, barely tangible, snaking through the shadows of the tower after the sound of the monster. When it's encountered, the death is pretty quick -- teeth as large as something prehistoric pierce gauges into its thick neck and crunches bones that collapse like sticks, and it's still.

Sunny is clean of gore when he is on two feet and moving for the doors. He is gentle and careful to undo any empathic lashback that he might get hit with, or at least, this is his intent; he is not as practiced at magic as some.

But fortune favouring him, he'll-- knock. And say; "Jae?"

[boomvox]

Inside his tower room, Jae is on fire.

Not real fire - no heat, no ash, no smoke, but if anyone was in the room with him, that's what they'd have to think. He's sitting on a chair with his hands in his lap, staring unfocused straight ahead, surrounded by a blinding red-gold corona, like a saint painted on a glass-jar candle.

When he hears his name his hands twitch, and at the same moment, the dark ropes of his magic do too. Sunny might feel something swirl around him (familiar-curious-checking-confirmed-relieved) and then as sudden as oxygen being sucked out of an airlock, that spell recoils back into its point of origin so fast and tidy it seems like it should be accompanied by a cartoon popping noise. Inside, it's choreographed unwittingly with Jae blinking back into focus, finding his vision blurry even through his glasses for a moment, having no way of knowing his eyes have melted from bright amber and vertical black lines to his mundane brown.

Mere heartbeats after Sunny knocks, there's a sound from the other side of the door, unlocking. "Sunny?"

[yeouiju]

Yay. Not terribly off-put by that sensory brush of magic, Sunny's hands against the door patter against it like a drum roll before retracting again as he says; "Not a cloud in the sky." Look, if no one is going to make stupid jokes about his name, he will.

He's also a little manic in his relief that Jae is really okay, sounds okay, is capable of opening the doors levels of okay. This may be a pre-emptive diagnosis, granted, when it comes to the internal workings of his boyfriend, but the physical is important, too. The door will open to a rather plainly dressed Sunny who has a bright smile ready and is holding a silver looking glass held absently and neglectfully in a hand.

Sunny who will promptly swoop in and steal a hug if allowed.

[boomvox]

He's very allowed - in fact, as soon as Jae gets the door open he's meeting Sunny halfway, arms around his shoulders immediately.

Jae looks tired, but all in one piece, and he doesn't appear to have been crying, or anything. That tiredness is bone-deep, though, doing nothing to mask the sort of prolonged misery that the chemicals in his brain produced by reactions to stress and fear can't help but make. It's a cruelly clinical assumption that's starkly at odds with his reaction to what happened at the fashion show disaster, but it's just the other end of the roller coaster - he's plateaued, unable to do anything right now besides simmer in apathetic misery.

The fact that he can't remember half of what's gone on in the past few days plays a factor there, too, probably.

Jae pulls back enough to look at Sunny, one hand raising to touch the side of his boyfriend's face, caring, delicate. Whatever shrieking spell of GO AWAY he was emanating just moments before is gone, and now all that can be felt from the taller man is relief, gratefulness, and aching exhaustion.

"What happened?"

[yeouiju]

"I don't know."

Well, he doesn't-- still doesn't, because jesus. Sunny keeps his arms circled around Jae even as the other man pulls away just enough to touch, that smile dimming into a little less now that the immediate surge of relief is ebbing. "No, I seriously don't. You were missing, and it took-- a while. To find the tower. You're in a tower in Chnum."

In case of that much, Jae is not aware. "There was this old woman who was all 'you can't go in there without the looking glass and the looking glass is guarded by a thing' and I was like well okay I'll go get the stupid looking glass and that's how I knew to get up here but you're kind of a self-rescuing princess in this narrative."

Breathe. "Hi."

[boomvox]

"I'm in a tower in Chnum."

It's a slightly dazed echo, and the more Sunny talks the deeper the wrinkle between Jae's eyebrows gets. His fingers curl in against his shoulders a bit, tensing a little but not quite panicking. (Yet?) Something about it all is making his skin crawl. 'Something', yes, like perhaps being abducted and held captive in a tower with a monster isn't bad enough, but he can barely remember it and he knew the second he heard Sunny that it was safe outside. Sunny wouldn't bring him anywhere where it wasn't. It's the one thing he's sure of, right now.

"I don't remember. I was shopping, and I was buying a flower from this guy, because I felt bad. And then I was in a room here, and that thing was inside with me. I remember getting really mad and... then I heard you."

Jae has been missing for days, and all he remembers is a handful of minutes? That is.. actually extremely concerning, and he looks guilty and confused.

"Can we get out of here?" Please. "I just- I know I should be freaking out but I want to go home, and make you lunch or whatever time it is, seriously, I don't care if you say you want a peanut butter sandwich and a blowjob for dinner, you rescued me from a damn tower."

[yeouiju]

Sunny is still in that zone of being both talky and giddy that he laughs freely at this, even though the current of negativity is not something he has to squint to see beneath wordplay. He's just relieved it's over. This isn't enough to supersede some awareness, though, his free hand going out to take Jae's in a tactile reassurance that everything is fine.

They're still in the tower, granted. "I don't like when things take my stuff," he agrees, bringing Jae's hand up to kiss his knuckles. The looking glass is kept, almost unthinkingly, tucked against Sunny's side in a clasp like he's carrying along a book.

[boomvox]

Jae has a lot to unpack in his head about what happened over the past two days, but the most important part is indeed that it's over.

There's a sudden surge of pleasure at Sunny calling him his and he presses forward to kiss him, intent and maybe a little needy. (His nerves are, unsurprisingly, shot to fuck.) He pulls back, still close enough so their noses brush, then kisses him again just as deliberate, but more relaxed. He still feels anxious and unsettled, but he doesn't think that's going to stop until they get out.

"Can we--" Leave? Jae clings, slight.

He uh, has no idea how to get out of here, he's been trying for a while with no luck, man, Sunny's going to have to be the trail boss.

[yeouiju]

"Yes."

That they can definitely do, and Sunny is already tugging Jae from the room for all that he is certain that Jae needs no encouragement. Although a perfect memory means he should be able to find his way out easily, Sunny consults the mirror for which corridors and corners they need concern themselves with. He doesn't trust the geography to actually stay fixed and consistent.

Flashes of reflection of anything else is just-- instinctively kept to a minimum.

At one stage, the great hulk of the dead beast makes a shadow on the other side of an arcing hallway, almost shapeless in its slump in the shadows, but second glance reveals the shape of an ear, a slack paw, the gleam of unseeing eyes. It is dead, violently if efficiently, and Sunny steers them away from getting too very close to it.

Down and down, until fresh air greets them, the rolling hills that border Chnum visible and a reassuring distance to the claustrophobic nature of the tower.

[boomvox]

When Sunny first takes the mirror out properly, Jae feels a sudden jolt of fear so unexpected that he actually jerks back a bit - his head hurts from it, staring at the twisted hallways that hold no truth, and the mirror makes it worse. He mumbles that it must be his own illusions freaking out at not being able to deconstruct anything, and spends the bulk of their journey out from then on clinging to Sunny's hand slightly behind his shoulder.

The sight of the dead creature puts him, contrarily, more at ease.

As soon as they can breathe again-

"I've never been this happy to be in a canton that'd kick my ass for showing up." At least he's out of the fucking tower. His voice is shaky with relief, like he'd been holding his breath without realizing it, but he's already less miserable being out of there.

[yeouiju]

The only reason Sunny does not find a way to discard the mirror once they're out is both a lingering curiousity for its properties and a reluctance for anyone else to get a hold of it. He folds it up in his jacket, though, half-consciously thinking back to that first moment of Jae's kneejerk fear and knowing now is not the time to press. Not now, while they're standing at the base of the tower, the lingering aftershocks of Jae's spell still keeping it moderately clear of people.

It had been the teeth marks. Those, Sunny hadn't wanted Jae to think about too closely. Not like this, anyway.

"Yeah, and it's kind of a hike. Think they'll mind less if we're going in a leaving direction?"

[boomvox]

If Jae could remember what the fuck had gone on, he wouldn't be so conveniently naive, right now - instead, his worry is centered around the gaps in his memory. They aren't uncommon for PTSD sufferers, and he's certainly experienced them before, but he hasn't had one this bad since-

Well. Since he got out of the facility.

What did I do? He doesn't want Sunny to think of him like that. Like some mindless creature, like - the one left in the tower behind them, dead.

"Skyrail?" He dips his head against Sunny's shoulder for a brief moment. "Quicker than hiking, it'll work out for everybody." There's the view too, sure, but Jae wants to spend the spiraling ride back to the beach making out with Sunny and telling him how badass he is, personally. (That'll probably annoy the shit out of other patrons but whatever, that shit happens in every subway in every reality.)

[yeouiju]

"Ooh." Because of course Sunny thinks of the view first, but the notion of sitting out and chilling with Jae next to such a view and ignoring it completely has its appeal too. An intense amount, in fact. His arm wraps around the skinny waist of the other man, tugging him into his side with that familiar if alarmingly athletic confidence of strength he ever so occasionally hints at. The bundled up mirror is clamped to his other side beneath the folded wing of an arm, ignored.

"Good idea. I knew I kept you around for a reason."

[boomvox]

"What would I even do if you didn't?" He likes it when Sunny does that. If he thought critically about it he'd be surprised at himself - liking that possessive talk, that demanding pull. Jae presses a kiss to Sunny's temple. "You're like my knight in high tops."

Flippant, but truthful. He'd have been eaten several times over by now if not for Seojin, something that he never forgets.

Presumably somewhere in between getting out of the tower and getting to the Skyrail, they are stopped by that old woman again and - according to the powers that be (aka editor's notes), they are given a solid gold rose. Jae doesn't have the same recoil instinct from the rose as he does the mirror, but he's still bothered by it. Maybe it really is just the magic of his captor subconsciously irritating him.