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apocalypsehowcomm2023-12-23 04:54 pm
Event - Apocalypse How
(cw: spiders, manipulation, brief physical control/restraint)
All at once, it's over. The last room–you know it is the last–and whatever lies beyond it. You and your companions or you, by yourself, open the door and find yourself faced with a grand, circular ballroom. There are too many doors leading off from it–around the walls, in the floor, in the ceiling–and they all seem to open simultaneously to reveal the other off-worlders who entered this house. The ones who are still alive, anyway.
The space you look upon must once have been host to extravagant balls and feasts… if it ever actually existed. Now, its gold and blue gleam are smothered beneath thick, ropey webbing. At the center of the room is an archway of webs along with two familiar faces: Reyes Amador and Bonnie Gale, the latter with a half-healed cut over one eye. The pair are hugging one another, but pull apart as they find their solitude broken.
Reyes flexes their fingers and for just a moment, your body is not your own. You can see faint strands connecting to each and every person to their fingertips. The spider silk simply holds people in place, rather than forcing them to do anything.
"My friends," Reyes says. "We have found it. We have done it. We have created a way to get out of this place. To get home. Thank you for coming when we called. When my Bonnie and the house called." Bonnie raises her hand awkwardly before wrapping it around Reyes' arm. "Witness now. We are ready to make this happen. I learned from someone who came to this world the same way we'll exit. I know what we must do."
They take a breath, then turn to the archway. Reyes raises the arm Bonnie isn't holding and speaks, their voice reverberating unnaturally in the space as the webs vibrate and hum and seem to draw something from everyone.
"Upon a wide and open plain, there sits a house that once was famed for fifteen windows tall and thin, designed to let intruders in. Twisting round this white-washed frame are vines and thorns and metal chain… and links that rust in dusty brown and burn and bite into the ground. Come to this house and see inside, all ups and downs and side-to-sides. And feel the things we fear the most in broken self and time and ghosts. Come here upon this hallowed ground and hear my voice, my call, my sound. Hear me now, oh, dreadful things, the blood that sings inside my veins:
"Hear me now, you things that bite,
And rot and dig and flee and fight.
And burn and hide and change and know
And bleed and fade and spin and show
A side that is not truly there
And stretch the endless, cosmic tears.
Hear me now, you things that weave
Who pull the strings to let us leave!
"Hear me–hear us. And exit!"
A deafening sound rips through the room at the same time everything is overtaken by a blindingly white light. The power holding people in place is gone, severed with the burst. When sight and hearing return, the ballroom is shaking, the webs straining and snapping in places, but at the center, in the archway, is a bright, sickly glow of deep purple energy. Bonnie is holding Reyes where they seem to have partially collapsed on her shoulder.
Reyes lifts their head. "My friends… go! We must go while we can."
- GENERAL - Players may speak with Reyes, Bonnie, and/or each other here. Ultimately, they are going to have an ICly limited amount of time to make a decision about what to do. You may tag in for NPC threads until 11:59 PM Pacific Time on 8 January. Players are welcome to tag in for threads with each other beyond that!
The choice is to stay or to leave. For those who wish to leave, they will be able to do so before anyone can stop them. If your character would choose to stay ICly, but you OOCly want them to leave, easy enough to say a friend pulled them or the power of the portal dragged them in because they were too close.
For those who wish to stay, effort will need to be made to get out of the house before it collapses or you may find yourself dead. If your character would choose to leave ICly, but you OOCly want them to stay, easy enough to say the portal destabilized before they could get through for one reason or another. There's no fear gauntlet to face on the way out of the house. All of the Entities are pressing at the barrier to the places beyond this world that have opened up. However, it is still dangerous as the house falls down around your ears.
A final post will be made after the results of the poll that will provide an overview of the world anyone who stays will be stepping into. For those who leave, your ending is your own to choose, whether that's another DWRP game, going back to your own reality, or going to a different reality. Regardless, if you leave, you are marked and you carry some piece of the Dread Powers with you to infect the next world you arrive in. Perhaps they get there before you or perhaps it's after, but they will be present in this new reality now, whether or not your character lives to see their rise and potential fall.
Please be sure to vote in the OOC POLL so that we know where characters will be going to decide the endgame state. The date to respond to this poll is the same as the NPC tag-in cut off: 11:59 PM Pacific on 8 January.
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"Nia would've never what? What did you do with her?"
Anger is not something Raine had ever been drawn to easily. But the pain, the The glow of the portal, the grand speech and lack of control made something stir in Raine that was a deep seated feeling of alarm that had become to the stairs, to Zyrian, to the museum, to what they'd left at home.
"Martin told me they'd follow us through. You're okay with it, then? Dooming countless other people to these things? Causing us- causing people you know, people you consider friends to suffer-"
Raine doesn't necessarily get louder, but anger seeps through their tone.
"I had to put Eda back together after she was pulled apart by some horror for your fucking need. To be selfish?"
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She's shaken, though, less confident in her justifications than she was before she heard of Nia's fate from Rue. "We did what we could to help you get here, to make it to the center."
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And, well, if she wasn't worried about Nia before she certainly is now! How things have changed--she used to trust these two more than the Warden.
"You tried to help us... but you made us go through all those rooms? When you could have--could have stopped us, or warned us?"
Maybe it would have been worth it, for some of them at least, if they'd been prepared... but they should have had a choice. They should have been told everything.
"Doesn't feel much like you did anything for us right now."
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Raine attention cuts between Bonnie and Reyes.
"Because this wasn't done for us. It was done for our parasites. None of us chose this or asked for this- you lured us in- used all of us without us knowing for what! And now Nia is dead, and we have the option to doom our own homes."
Raine touched Eda's arm, gently, and gave her a pleading, we need to stop this mess, look.
"This isn't right. I.. Don't want to be responsible for possibly making things worse at home."
no subject
"I regret Nia's death. I carry that blood in my soul. She was a good woman." There are tears that edge at the corner of their eyes. "But her sacrifice. That is a thing I will not waste, either. Nor those who have fallen.
"If you do not wish to go, then stay. Do not make it worse in your world. This was simply a choice. One that we make to go. You and others may choose to stay, to find a different way. I wish you the luck of the gods, but I will not stay here to see that done. We need to get home. To a place that I believe can fight these things better than this world could."
no subject
Eda wants to go home. She wants to see Luz, and King. She wants to fight Belos. She wants above all, right now, to stop being here. But that doesn't make it a choice she can actually force herself to make.
And she's bristling.
"Yeah? And how does making more worlds like this help the people the ADI killed? What makes you think you can fight these things better at home? Or that we're just... going to watch you doom a place you say you miss?"
Or that she's going to watch them go home when she doesn't get to. There's a part of her that wants to stop them for good reasons, and there's a part of her that wants to stop them for petty ones, too.
...And there's a part of her that wants to tear them apart. Along with Bonnie, and the portal and the house. It would be easy to let someone who doesn't think so much take the wheel right now. Someone who doesn't care that Reyes and Bonnie used to be Eda's friends.
no subject
"When this happened before another world, when the Entities left through the hole that was made--I think it closed behind them. That this will close the hole ADI couldn't. That more people won't be brought here. Those people who died here won't be joined by any more after today."
She lifts a trembling hand out to Eda. "You don't have to go. But please...I just want to go home."
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"The people of this world never had those things without the Entities. They have no way to reach them, to fight them in their own den. We do. And we have people with the abilities to do it."
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"You're putting faith in hypotheticals. You really. Honestly expect people to just cooperate with you bringing monsters into their home. Or to not take advantage of that."
They leaned against Eda. They're beginning to find this frivolous, and they try to rub her shoulder for comfort. They don't like how it's upsetting her, and they worry about how said upset could escalate.
"That's... A poor decision to make, knowing what we've experienced here. But if you can't see it's poor maybe it's your poor decision to make."
Raine exhaled.
"I only have sympathy for the people in your world. You're dooming them to the same fate as the rest of us. If not worse."
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Part of Eda feels bad about how angry she's getting, when Bonnie reaches out. But part of her bristles even more, resenting the sympathy in this particular moment.
"Our powers didn't... used to come from them either," she says, finally.
Because yes, maybe people in other worlds would be able to fight better. But then again maybe the Entities would warp whatever magic existed there the same way they have for the people who came here. They don't know and she isn't sure the chance is worth it.
Not that she's in a place to explain her thought all that eloquently. She shakes Raine's hand off her shoulder with a huff that sounds suspiciously close to a growl as she takes a step back and tries to steady herself with a deep breath.
no subject
"I know," she says. "I know what it's like to come here and have your powers twisted up in Them. And I know that we're up against a lot, and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't want to bring this fight back to your own world. If you don't--if you don't come through, you have to run. This place is going to come down when the portal does."