multiversallogs | the sky is falling.

Who: Everyone.
What: Part two begins.
When: Evening, a few hours before the end of the 24-hour siege period.
Notes: Feel free to thread in comments here or make your own posts! NPC your own monsters, team up in locations anywhere you like, and feel free to plot things at the plotting post, which has the relevant details. Remember that this is city-wide, so you are free to do what you like with locations.

Just after dark, the air of Baedal seems to change. While it was tense before, with the stand-off in Mafaton, a new kind of electrical energy begins to spread through the city, leaking from the sky itself. The horizon is clear tonight, even starry where the city lights don't obscure the view, but soon enough it begins to blur with color, and at an alarmingly rapid pace. Bright streaks of pink and green begin to spiral across the sky, in an approximation of the auroras, though it is much nearer and brighter than any common demonstration of an aurora should be. The geomagnetic storm swirls and dances, initially beautiful, but its intensity is ominous.

It's also growing. Most geomagnetic storms stay to one corner, but this spreads across the entire sky, green-purple-pink-red illuminated and inching further into the dark, leaving the city of Baedal tinted with a dim, eerie glow. This continues for about a half an hour, until that tension reaches its breaking point.

The magical boundaries holding Mafaton crack and then completely shatter. It is audible, and the backlash sends flying many of the Candlelighters trying frantically to preserve the borders of their siege. A few of them are killed by the backlash of their spell's combustion, but more are simply shaken; having one's magic work so thoroughly broken is not a pleasant experience. The sound covers another tearing, this time a metaphysical one that rips the heavens open in places the common eye can't see. Those whose vision allows them to observe different layers of reality will notice, but others will only see the incoming flood of creatures from other universes.

One siege has ended, but another has just begun, and this time, it's not just Mafaton at risk.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

In three thousand or so years of fucking with humans, Balthazar knows from experience that people who have never before encountered anything the slightest bit supernatural, and even some who have, often start experiencing a sort of animal-like existentialism. They are reduced to clutching their faces and whimpering, why is this happening to me? What's going on?

Since his rebirth in fire, Balthazar hasn't wondered that. He knew. He was allowed to see the inner workings of the universe, and became one of the terrible cogs in it. He was a thing that happened to other people. There were most definitely many higher powers, and no one could claim to understand God, but he knew. He understood. He was the magician's assistant who disappeared or drowned or had knives thrown at them but was in on the secret.

Not for the first time since arriving in Baedal but now in a most unpleasant way, he's forced to confront the fact he no longer knows or understands anything. It's possible he can see more than your average Baedal citizen, but seeing no longer brings any answers. Why is the sky glowing and whirling? Why is it ripping open and allowing creatures from other places — some more dark than he's ever seen, and he has seen darkness — and giving him a blinding headache? At first he hides. He has been a general in Hell's army but he has never been a soldier. That wasn't the fucking point of him.

And then he can feel them, the seplavites. They are calling out in their mindless way, confused at their arrival, sniffing around for a leader the same way he sniffed around too his first day here. They know he's here, but in his absence, they just do what they do, which is hunt.

He could get out there and command them. It's his birthright. They must do as he says. That's their birthright. He could save people, or command them to attack either of the two House Ecumenal churches, just because.

After a long hesitation, he begins walking toward Mafaton, a mere shadow to anyone unable to see past his illusions: scentless, soundless, barely there at all. The seplavites join him in trickles, unable to resist his presence. And they can't hide themselves at all, curiously well-behaved despite being slavering, brainless corpses.

Unaware of Balthazar's illusion, Benevenuta's first concern, when she catches sight of the surreal procession, is how creatures like that identify prey. Her second thought is that they're moving in a direction generally more 'towards' than 'away from' the original chaos-- but if patterns hold, soon that initial source won't matter worth a damn. Her third thought, after she's swung around behind a building (not into an alley, Christ, she's not stupid), is that since she hasn't engaged them and she has this quiet moment here--

--well, she's already fishing her CiD out of her coat pocket. The footage she takes around the corner is necessarily brief before she tucks it away again and tries to choose a direction, assesses whether or not she can get away with crossing behind the way they're moving.

During the day, she dreams of violence, a confused mingling of images: the Candlelighter she'd killed the night before dies over and over again. Sometimes she is coursing him through an old forest, and he dies to the teeth of her hounds: Kindred dreams respond violently to violence, and the mixing in of the Huntress hasn't helped.

She wakes at dusk; some part of her feels the rending in the magic of reality, and it rips her from sleep. Or maybe it was just the noise.

Deacon's bar had been a good enough shelter for the day, but she isn't about to stay there now. She's in the process of heading out of Mafaton when she sees the procession.

Part of her reels back in disgust (the worst part, she thinks, is how they look as though they really might have once been human, if they weren't so horrible -- and how did they see), but there's another part of her mind doing the equivalent of of pricking up its ears. Well, there are monsters falling from the sky, now: some things are so much easier when her mind is True Fae. This is a time for letting the Huntress ease to the forefront. And isn't that all this is? A kind of endless hunt? -- and she does so love a challenge.

There's a man leading the strange misshapen things (they're a bit charming, really, in their obedience to him), she notices now. No, not a man, with his rotted face; something else, and powerful. But not Fae.

Things just keep getting more interesting, don't they?

"What are your hounds called?" she asks, something like politely. She's approaching now, smiling with bright teeth.

the sky is falling.

NOW WITH FIRST PARAGRAPH I'M THE BEST RPER

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