multiversallogs | we can watch the world devoured in its pain

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we can watch the world devoured in its pain

Who: Balthier, Nazca, Rodolphus, Dean, Sonja, Idle, Katniss, and a boat.
What: A mission to see if there's a way out of Baedal over the ocean.
Where: ... The Ocean.
When: Dawn on ~~Tuesday~~ Misdi ("This morning" for those of you in the western hemisphere) and continuing on for several days.
Notes: This is an experimental format, so bear with me here. It's going to be a bit like a party post with some structure. Different happenings (new days, important stuff) will appear in new comments with corresponding headers - please keep related threads under each of the base comments. ... It is possible there will be a second post later but for now we're going to try and do it this way to see if it works. lmao.

● DAY 1. (Free for all comments.)
● Nightfall. (Tag the base comment.)
● Trapped. (Free for all comments.)

Warnings: Eventual violence and disturbing imagery, possible triggers; will edit as needed.

Perhaps it's fate that they leave on a Misdi - "Mist Day", the day of mists and fog, the second day of Baedal's seven-day week. It's dull but clear, the white light not quite warm but not particularly cold, either. Empty, almost, like it's waiting to make up its mind.

The boat is, fortunately, not the downtrodden thing that Balthier won in a card game, but a proper research vessel outfitted with a power source of glowing stones. It has a collection of clockwork equipment, a small kitchen, a smaller bathroom, and a few bunks, though most of the thing is dedicated to workspaces. It'll be cozy, but not inhumanly cramped - unless you like your space, in which case, it's still going to be a headache. There are two life rafts, and an anchor with a mermaid carved onto it. It is called the Winged Lamp, and her owner doesn't think they're going to get anywhere, but has been talked into lending it, For Science.

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Dean smirks a bit, nodding. "Yeah. The koolaid vibe. Not a fan myself."

He notes the shifts in her attention, how it goes from sharp (almost uncomfortable) focus on him to drifting out over the water. He's not sure what's up with that but he wonders if she has to rely more on her other senses. Maybe she needs to watch everything more closely.

"And I haven't been here long, either. Just got here with a lot of this cohort thing I'm in."

"Not a shark. I don't think so. They--" Dean gestures vaguely at the hunk of whatever with his gun. "Tear up their prey. They're all teeth and they bite and slash to cause blood loss, then they go back and maul their prey once it's weak from blood loss." Pause. "...Shark Week. Never miss it."

He glances around at the rest of the people gathered. "Anyway. This thing's cut up way too neat to have been a shark. And maybe I'm a pessimist but I'm kinda thinking whatever did this and a shark hanging out by this boat is too much of a coincidence."

And then his eyes are on the water, gun at the ready.

Though Balthier is quick enough to hop back on the boat proper, he manages to find time to spare Rodolphus a slightly withering look. He knows you're not mute, buddy.

Another twitch somewhere out in the water - far from where Katniss spotted it - then another, some yards away. He shifts his feet, wondering. "Maybe it's just drawing in scavengers," he says, even though he doesn't sound terribly convinced. "I don't think if another being killed this, it would have any cause to be modest."

"Maybe it was something...environmental," Sonja says. "We don't know what's out here."

As if to helpfully chime in--and provide a suggestion as to what might be out there--a noise kicks up. At first, it's faint, faraway, like perhaps it could be the wind howling (the way the wind can sound like a woman's screams)...but the air is so still, so that's not it. As it approaches, there are more of those intermittent ripples in water--something great in length, almost serpentine but not quite, flickers up and down. Catching sight of those nearest to the boat's ledges, maybe.

It's not a scream. It's keening. It sounds otherworldly, akin to metal being torn in half over and over and over. It's also incessant--no pause for breath.

Sonja is still, listening. Blood in the water. Of course there's something else now.

"...now would be a good time to stay away from the railings, everyone."

'Cause it would be just their luck if whatever that is knows how to jump.

Edited 2011-05-15 06:54 (UTC)

"The same." The same as her, she means; the cohort network was how Balthier collected this crew, so they are both literally and figuratively all in the same boat right now. Maybe it's just convenient that they're all fresh enough to not yet be ground down into unwillingness to try something this mad. (Ilde thinks she could never be so far ground down, and she has experience to draw the conclusion from.)

Glancing back at Dean, she says, "I'm here with Sonja." Here on the boat, here in general - from her tone, Ilde would follow her just about anywhere.

Even Ilde is bothered by the incessant nature of the new keening, as she moves back further from the railing - it's low and indistinct to her ears, but it just keeps going like her ears are ringing and ringing and ringing. She frowns, barely, an expression that the earlier death-cries hadn't managed to draw out of her-

"Not scavengers," she says, her voice a little loud (like she's misjudging how loud she needs to be). "Predators."

Though it's clear that Rodolphus caught Balthier's look, there's no indication that he's taken it to heart and he doesn't apologize. He also doesn't back that far away from the railing. He listens instead, head a little tilted, gaze distant.

Something thuds against the boat, the impact distinctly more aggressive than chunks of flesh bumping against the hull — it doesn't sound damaging, the ship is pretty solid, but it does sound like something sizable.

Glancing at his companions, he weighs the consequences of what he's about to do. None of them are really in the position to act because they don't know what they're dealing with. And while he'd been conservative with the light before because he's sure it will draw a lot of attention from anything that might be down there, there's no getting around it, really.

His voice is moderate, unlike Ilde, but it undercuts the keening with its unexpectedness. "Be ready."

... a suggestion, just like the throat clearing. Rodolphus moves to the railing purposefully and points his wand. The ball of light that darts into the water without so much as a splash brightens and swells beneath the waves, illuminating its contents with a sickly glow.

Nazca's gone taught, like a bow string, though her facial expression is steady and even. Still, a knife comes to hand - clearly for use against anything that jumps on deck, obviously - as the magic and the keening aren't well calculated to leave her unmoved. She mutters something in Therin, under her breath.

She'd have known how to treat sharks.

Katniss stays close enough to the railings so that she can see what's going on in the water, startling a little at the illumination she still doesn't know how to explain but being grateful for it all the same. She can't shoot what she can't see, and she sees them, now -- definitely not sharks. Not that she's ever seen one outside of a book, but those things in the water are definitely different. She sucks in a breath, her tension evident.

She feels curiously calm, as frightening as they are, because their wrongness is almost familiar to her. Like muttations, she realises -- they look like muttations. An impenetrable mystery fog is one thing -- the waiting for it was agony. But monsters, something solid, made of flesh and blood? Monsters, she can fight.

Frowning deeply and doing her best to ignore that keening screech, she glances at the other passengers. "Whatever those things are, they were strong enough to tear that--" She jerks her thumb at the hunk of dead flesh that was helpfully brought aboard, "--apart. Can they damage the hull?" It's Balthier's boat, or at least he's the one who acquired it; she gives him a questioning look. Her hand goes behind her, brushing over the arrows in her quiver. "I don't think I have enough to get them all," and even if she does, she won't be able to retrieve her arrows afterwards. She really wishes she'd brought more, but she hadn't been counting on extradimensional monsters when she went out hunting yesterday morning.

"Let's not provo-" he's speaking to Katniss and stops dead, as one of these things - too slick and wiggly to be a shark but shaped similarly, longer - bobs out of the water with disturbing, gravity-defying ease, heading right up to the bubble of light that Rodolphus had cast.

".. I don't think they did that, but I don't think it'd matter, and yes, I think they could, if they were properly motivated." He's still watching the things in the water as he speaks - there's more visible now, all gathered about the light. The keening, screaming sound is increasing. "Send that thing away from the boat, if they're so fond of it."

A creature nearest to the side of the boat, still within the spill of light, looks up at them with bizarrely intelligent eyes - curious.

Not a friendly curious.

There's a wriggle, then. More eels press into the glow of light, shuddering all the while, their bodies contorting like something within them is pressing its hands to their skin from the inside. The keening grows to a constant squeal, as though they are in pain, but they all cluster around that light, anyway, until the moment builds to what should be unbearable--Sonja lifts her hand, preparing to strike out telekinetically just to shut those things up--

And then instead of that awful nails-on-a-chalkboard sound, there's a soft series of waterborne pops echoing over the air. The eels who got close enough to the evidence of magic burst into two halves, separating cleanly in a burst of inky black; maybe it's their version of blood. They absorb the light completely during this process, and seem satisfied by it, glittering eyes keen and bright.

One of the new halves, however, seems not quite right. Its tail is misshapen. It bobs in the water weakly, turned in another direction to the others. The remaining eels flicker in unison under the water, and then they descend abruptly, with the swiftness and unadulterated viciousness of swift predators. More black blood flies into the air as they descend up on their misshapen kindred, devouring it bite by bite--it cries out, thrashing, but there are too many, and it was born damaged, to boot. The process takes them further under the water, making them difficult to reach, but they can certainly be heard.

Then it stops again. The eels rise up to the surface again. They stare (halved, but whole) at the humanoid beings above them, up on that boat, and for a second it seems like they might leap.

Instead, they disappear back under the waves, into the black and the fog.

But occasionally, tempered beneath the buffering weight of water, there's still a sound like metal tearing. Hidden, but not gone. Waiting.

"So we're gonna have to kill some of those," Sonja says, flatly.

The ocean isn't Ilde's world; in her own waters, she is one of those predators that inspires a second thought before venturing further, and a part of her is irrationally affronted by the rising dread of being in that water with those eels. It's almost conceptually offensive to her, though she knows better.

Still. The idea of killing a few of them is viscerally appealing.

She only realizes she's all but baring her teeth at the water when she goes to speak- "I wonder if I could make them kill each other like that." Her tone is thoughtful, mostly, only a little bit savage, and carefully quieter than before.

He'll shoot them, he thinks, shoot something. But his attention is diverted by what's going on before them; even if he wasn't caught so off-guard by what was happening that he needed to just stop and take it in, there's more than one target, no one clear place to aim.

The barrel of his gun raises and lowers, small slight movements, as he tries to work out just where the hell to start. And then they're gone--or they just want to be believed to be gone, because while he doesn't see much anymore, Dean can still hear them moving about, waiting. He's sure of it.

"Getting them to turn on each other would solve a lot of our problems right now," he says, the end of his gun lowering a bit again. "That kinda thing possible?"

In a different situation, he might stop to ask how, or why. But Dean's a practical guy--how and why can be set aside for a moment in favor of saving their asses, if they have to be. Survive (and he's got the feeling these things don't want them to) first, ask questions later.

Edited 2011-05-19 04:36 (UTC)

"Right. The network."

Dean has lived his life jumping from one instance of "trying something this mad" to another. Fresh or not, there's little that would stop him. He's glad for this, glad to be doing something proactive rather than just sitting in that inn hoping for answers.

He nods. "You two come through together?" he asks, making conversation to focus on something, anything, but the knot in his gut that tells him he shouldn't be here alone, that he should have come with someone too.

"Her first, me a few hours later." If it had been anybody else that opened the door to her, she very likely would've tried her level best to gut them; it's better that she's here with Sonja. Safer. (Safety, of course, immediately became moot or relative when they embarked on this particular journey out.) "We didn't stay at the inn for long. Mixed accommodations are- strange."

The boat - ship? boat. - is different by necessity, although not pleasant for reasons that have less to do with the fact they're sharing space with men than the fact living like sardines is going to be unpleasant regardless of the gender identity of those aboard.

He notes the mention of "mixed accommodations" but he lets it go--he's been bounced around the multiverse enough by now to grasp that not everyone is from a similar time, place, society, or set of social parameters as he is.

Besides, something else has his attention anyway. "Did you get here from the same time and place?" he asks. He purses his lips a moment, trying to figure out how to explain. "Okay, so, when I got here, there were a few people I recognized from the last place where I was. They vanished from there before me. But some of them got here before me, and some arrived after me, and they hadn't missed any time in between. I went on for a few more months with them missing but in the meantime they appeared here like they'd only just left."

He wants to know if there's a pattern.

Because he's not a man who puts much stock in hope. He won't hope that these weird arrivals could mean something for him someday, but he can allow himself to look for a pattern that might bring him more people he needs.

Balthier swears, something artful and vulgar and about saints no one here has ever heard of. There goes the idea of just sending the biggest lightning spell he can muster into the water. (But, then, good thing he didn't do that on a hair trigger.)

"I'm going to try and steer us away from the remains of whatever that is," he says, turning and heading back to the boat's controls. "Keep an eye on those things - if they start going after the hull shoot to injure, see if they'll eat each other." Further off, he calls over his shoulder, "I don't think I have to say NO MAGIC!"

Navigating through unstable water and not knowing how large, magic-eating sea creatures will take to having their current source of entertainment slip away (and possibly nudge them about in the water) is somewhat nerve wracking, but that's just the way life goes. The speed at which they travel takes them away from the gore floating alongside them, but the creatures keep pace, only appearing every so often to keen or shriek, as if entertained.

It's not comforting.

Tension mounts in the air, the water stirring in an increasingly choppy fashion, until quite suddenly, it evens out - even the wind falls to complete stillness, leaving the boat and their unsightly companions to make the only sounds, as if the blackness of the sky and the water is some kind of void that they exist in without true substance.

Without warning, a great, deafening noise thunders from ahead of them - like a terrible groaning explosion somewhere deep in the water, so powerful that not even the depths can contain the noise. The water shudders and then spasms into violent, ringing waves that strike the boat with such force that it seems impossible for anyone to have kept on their feet for its start.

The stone-powered engine coughs, lurches, and dies, as if frightened to death. A tense feeling gathers in the pit of Balthier's stomach and he pulls out his CiD - dead. He's about to call out, Heads up! or some other utterly pointless warning to herald the impending feeling of Oh this is not good at all, but the words never make it anywhere audible.

Before them - close enough to be terrifying in its scope but far enough away not to crush them immediately - a massive, pointed object bursts through the water's surface. For one horrible moment it seems there in the dark it might be a monster the size of a building, and that's it, party's over - but the moonlight casts just enough fuzzy illumination for half a moment to reveal that it actually is a building. Enormous, not of Earth, and big enough to sink the boat in one rectangle window, it pushes up and up out of the water, as if it has roots in the seafloor itself, causing a torrent of unstable water. Further off, another horrible too-loud sound breaks out, but this one is followed by the ear-scarring sound of twisting, snapping metal.

All around them, the smooth, reflective surface of the water drags in things from other worlds - broken, huge things that can't find a place in the city. It's a torrential storm of fog and chaos, and they're in the middle.

In the midst of the birth of all these things, something throws itself at the back of the boat. And clings.

"Not when they feed off magic," Sonja cautions Ilde--she wouldn't have a hard time dropping something enchanted into the water, but she suspects they'd only grow stronger.

"We need bows. I'm going to get mine, and we're gonna have to wait."

Eye of the storm, Sonja thinks. They've gotten to the dead zone. Even if that were a monster rising from the middle of the depths, Sonja would give attacking it a go, judging by her stance, but buildings....they just have to figure out a way to navigate around. Admittedly it'll take a good amount of time.

Especially since that dull smack of something hitting the edge of the boat is accompanied by one-two-three-four--countless more. She stands on deck, feet flat on the ground, ready. And through all this noise of groaning skyscrapers sliding up from the depths, there's a sound like a keen, a metallic scraping cry, and she knows that the waiting is over.

Anyone near enough will see the worst thing about her reaction: the satisfaction in her eyes. And the distant pride; clever little monsters. Not sapient level intelligence, but they're good at being beasts, and she appreciates that quality even if it won't stop her from doing what she does.

Which is to say, 'kill'.

Sonja's posture is loose, not tense, in her habitual misdirect of building fight-related anticipation. She lifts her chin. She hears something slither and then the wet slap of that black blood splattering across the deck's floorboards; she does not turn her head, but she knows something is approaching. She waits. Patiently.

And then just before anything can touch her, she whirls with the snakelike speed she occasionally demonstrates, and slams her sword through the eel that was seconds from striking. The blow pins it to the the wooden wall she was near the corner of, and up close, she can get a better look at its face. It has innumerable glittering eyes that make up a circular pattern on each side of its face, giving the impression, from afar, of only two. It also has rows and rows of sharp, sharp white teeth, at least three that she can see, with a fourth developing in back. It's grown about a hundred pairs of tiny low arms for the purpose of travel on land, making it not so much of a proper eel any more and more some kind of demented flesh-eating sea millipede, but she's less interested in its classification than killing the fuck out of it right now.

It's dying, but not totally dead yet. Might as well take the opportunity to watch. Sonja's expression is intent, but otherwise difficult to read. She slowly tilts her head with an unnerving kind of calm, meeting the eel's many many eyes as it begins to list to the side.

Then in one brutal jerk, she twists the blade. The thing she stabbed sputters in one last whimpering keening sound of animal desperation, and dies. Sonja pulls her sword back, exhaling.

"We've got company!"

For such an ordinarily soft-spoken person, she can yell like a drill sergeant.

Edited 2011-05-20 08:42 (UTC)

And company they have. Balthier is confined to attempting to carry on steering at first, but is forced to give up - there's no helping it; at some point he'll shout at Nazca to see if she can make heads or tails of anything to do, but he's more useful fending off the creatures come to find a meal.

They're perfectly adapted - low, twisting bodies clinging to every surface with ease, utterly undeterred by the rocking of the boat, unlike the two-legged passengers. He's rarely been more thankful for the Masamune, though gods only know how it ended up in his possession. He isn't going to shy away from using something that slices through flesh and bone like water.

When he ends up near Sonja, it's to kick something back into the water from over the ledge. Something like thunder rolls, deafening everything for a long, unsteady moment, and waves crash over onto the deck, carrying with them more eels. He swears.

Sonja briefly considers that armor wouldn't have gone awry here, but it wouldn't help her legs right now, anyway. The MO of these beasts on a land surface is to knock its prey down by targeting the feet ankles, as that's what is easiest to reach, and they're really pretty interesting in regards to their evolutionary qualities.

But what's really important right now is that they're mortal.

"They waited until we stopped," she observes, not even really yet out of breath, to Balthier. She wonders how many other boats have fallen prey to these creatures--not that she intends to be among their number. She moves quickly and efficiently, as though she's done this hundreds of times before. There are a lot of them, and maybe that'll be a problem eventually, but she's not tired yet, and that's what'll risk them all in this particular fight: exhaustion in the face of superior numbers.

"Yes, they're complete bastards." He just sounds annoyed, which is likely too petty an emotion to be appropriate, given context, but if any of them expected their fellow travelers to be sane or 'normal' - particularly the man whose idea this whole damn thing was - then there are some deluded minds, present.

Something slithers at them and he swings low, splitting it in two horizontally. Thick red blood pours out and it squeal-gurgles in death, the stench of it bleeding through even the saltwater. The ship lurches again, and he grabs the railing with his off hand. "They're probably nearly sentient."

"Oh Warden's Balls," she mutters in Therin. They were going to capsize if something wasn't done, and everyone had their hands full. Nazca doesn't wait to be asked before leaping up and climbing in the rigging. Ordinarily, she'd be ordering others to do this, but she doesn't have the others, or the time to explain.

The water's too hazardous for them to risk speed, not without a better pilot. They don't have any wind anyway, and with the sails fully open, they'd be buffeted by every new emerging hazard.

She won't take them down completely, but she can't leave them open. If she can keep her grip and get this done, she'll worry about steering in a moment.

"Might I," Rodolphus asks softly of the group in general, "borrow a weapon from someone."

There is actual emoting going on, by god, an undertone of annoyance. That's right, Mr. Wizard didn't bring anything but his wand. Doing this shit by hand, how common. It's not like wizards from his universe use their wand for everything, but they can be excessive with the spells that function as specialized telekinesis in lieu of actually using their hands, unless they were born among non-magic users.

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we can watch the world devoured in its pain

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Re: Nightfall.

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Trapped.

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