auroraexpress | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Who: Everyone
When: Day 20, evening
Where: The train and surrounding terrain

[So after all the earlier excitement.... dramatic organ music starts to play through the cars. There's no obvious source. It's just... There? All around you for a while, before fading.

Of course before the music fades there's more things going on. A mist seeps up from the earth outside the train and within the train simply seems to form like it's produced by invisible fog machines. As the mist grows into a thick fog, you can hear eerie noises. Distant wolf howls, the screech of a fox that sounds like human screaming, owls hooting hauntingly, the leathery flap of bat wings, and other, less identifiable noises of the night, strange and otherworldly.

If you go out in it, breathe it in, the mist will chill you. Make you desire... Touch.

The need to hold another person is an almost growing compulsion, but it can be fought.

However things that are harder to avoid are the flowers, night blooming wisteria in white and purple seems to have grown from nowhere in the train cars, hanging down to brush the heads of passengers with sweet scented blossoms, and the floors of the train and ground around it have become endless beds of gently glowing moonflowers.

The only places the fog and flowers don't reach are team cabins.

Effects:

Mist:

Cold that cannot be dispelled without touch, a desire to touch others.

Wisteria:

Purple blossoms cause an empathetic bond with the next person you touch.

White blossoms cause arousal and a mild to powerful aphrodisiac effect.

Moonflowers:

Share memories or thoughts with the next person you touch.

By morning the mist and flowers will vanish.]

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[naeva made mistakes.

She starts a little, and then huffs a faint laugh, reaching out to tuck a purple wisteria into 80H's hair.]

It is alright. I'm not upset with you.

[She's still bowing so that catches her by surprise and she rises, slightly.]

Still, I must apologise.

It's alright, truly.

[Unfortunately for them both, she decides to pat 80H's shoulder, and.

There is fondness. She doesn't really know 80H very well, and she has no desire or reason to pry into her psyche. She is concerned about the stiffness in manner, about the small dropped bits and pieces but, well, they all have their suffering. And so Naeva leaves it at a surface fondness, curiousity, friendliness. The problem is Naeva's surface levels are intense, a shock directly to the system, far stronger than regular human emotion.

And there's a deeper layer, too, lined with iron control. Sorrow and loneliness and fear, for the places and people she's loved, for all that she's lost, for the uncertainty of their precarious present and dangerous future. She has seen so much suffering. When will it be enough? But she must carry it all, lock it under iron will and hold it deep, as a constant weight and reminder to drown the last layer of--

hunger. Deep and dark and primal. Everything with a pulse, everything that smells of blood, everything and everyone with their life energy taken so much for granted. She fed just this morning, she fed yesterday, it's only a dull crackle right now, but it never goes away, will never go away, and if she ever loses control Naeva knows exactly what she'll become.

Not a jot of that shows in Naeva's tone or expression, only a soft gentle understanding. If yesterday was the Malice's infection, then truly it is no one's fault but their enemy's.]

[80H is not averse to contact, in fact, she quite likes it so goes a little pink at Naeva's shoulder touch, but that is when something else that feels...so familiar and yet so different happens.

Her feelings churn tumultuously beneath a frozen ocean. At times there is perfect calm. Blankness. Denial and discipline. But mostly it is a storm of--

Loneliness.

So profound that you can see, you can feel, you can taste the absence of something that should be there and is not, and the flavour of nothingness has never been so bitter, so acrid. Something is missing why is it missing why was she left here alone why did she ever have anything only to lose it did she even have it was it ever real why why why please come back if she's done something she's sorry why aren't you here why isn't she there how can she do anything anymore she needs you she needs you SHE NEEDS YOU SHE DOESN'T WANT. THIS--

Self-disgust.

She does not have anything because she is worthless filth. Worse than vile. She is disgusting and poison and everything she touches, everything she has ever touched she has ruined. Every. Single. Time. She cannot help touching even if she knows she should burn herself away.

There is something like loud, unintelligle static on this bond. Like there should be more things here, maybe, but you cannot conceive what no matter how you try.

And then it resumes.

Do not let anyone in. (But there are flickers of concern for people not herself) Do not trust in anyone, but trust them to be themselves. Make no friends, make no family. A team is only a means to an end-- Bonds only mean...the discipline returns, and everything is neat. Orderly.

No. She is not hurt. She is fine. Everything is fine. She will fulfill her objectives, nothing more, nothing less.]

Do not.

[Her voice shudders and she swats Naeva's hand away, more afraid than anything else, as if breaking the link now can undo what is already done.]

[Naeva is silent for a few moments, almost contemplatively so. She takes no offense at the swat--in this situation, she'd have done no different, she thinks--but seems to stare somewhere a little above 80H's head.

Oh, that loneliness is so familiar she might choke on it. Oh, that bitterness and hatred are like acid in her throat. Oh, what a despairing, dizzying mix of familiar and startling, painfully new. And in her gaze there is an emotion unguarded, a deep sorrow a century old, no pity but genuine pain, before Naeva's control snaps into place.

She doesn't speak, still, simply steps back, and picks up a moonflower. Much like with Crow, she understands that this fear cannot be quelled with words.

So she takes the moonflower and holds it, in an open palm, and holds the other hand steadily out to 80H, so she need not touch the moonflower herself. A one-way exchange.]

...A secret for a secret.

[It is an offer. Insurance. An understanding that there must be a tangible collateral.]

[She wears masks, but she's never thought nor cared to do it to assuage others, most of the time. It isn't as if she's had many people in her life that she needed to do that for.

But she schools herself into one after a few moments. It's nearly hard to believe she could have ever hit moments ago with how placid she looks, now.

She blinks, unseen, at the offering.]

Why would you do that? It is unnecessary.

[She is a terrible person, she does not resist out of kindness, even if she realises that Naeva is being surprisingly kind in doing so? Why? Why would she?]

...Because I was alone, too.

[A hundred years. A hundred years and neither the few friends nor her brother nor anyone could touch the gaping hole that was fighting to hold together breaking-apart magic that hated her for being her mother's daughter, for being the blood that broke it to begin with.

none of them could touch the decades were none of them were there.]

And I have tasted enough sorrow in my life, that I would give you some assurance that there is nothing to fear, if I could.

I am fine.

[She hears Naeva, but she cannot listen to her. Cannot imagine, cannot sympathise, cannot draw closer.]

I am always fine.

[She has to be.]

So you do not need to give me anything.

Is this what fine looks like to you?

[She wants so badly to force it, to shake her, to yell until she understands, it doesn't have to be like this

but

much like the east wind and the sun, she knows howling will never get her anywhere.]

I ask you only to understand I do not mean you...harm.

As long as I do what is expected of me, nothing else matters. So yes. I am fine.

[She does not want to touch the rest of that.]

[Naeva is quite for a moment. Digesting that. Carefully masking how angry that makes her.

Who did this to you? Who taught you this?

Would knowing even help?]

I see.

But we can discuss you, if you would prefer.

[If Naeva does not want to, so be it. 80H is not above shifting the attention away from her if she must, but she has no true desire to make Naeva discuss something uncomfortable when she will not. She does not begrudge others their silence and privacy when she wields both so readily.]

Discuss which part?

[By contrast, Naeva wields her truth like a weapon, open defiance against things she never chose. Her control is for the sake of people around her, but she does not--must not lie. She refuses the shame of hiding it. You cannot bear a crown with a head already bowed like a beaten dog.

But she expects no one else to understand that.]

Whatever you like.

[As long as we aren't talking about her.]

[Why are you like this.

Naeva considers this for a long moment, and then turns on her heel. She's heading for the jungle...she thinks. She smells geckos thattaway.]

Follow me. You were curious about my magic, before.

[...She considers this but assents and follows behind her.]

[It doesn't take too long. The geckos are probably sluggish from this cold, too.]

...Mm, this will be a little messy. My apologies.

[She reaches out with a hand, and lifts, the gecko awkwardly pulling itself off the tree as though puppetted by its' limbs. There's no need to be gruesome about it, but she does want to make sure this is an understandable demonstration.

With her other hand, she bites into her palm, creating a well of blood that begins to lengthen into something sharp and wicked...it isn't really a knife, just the basic shape of stabbing.]

Edited 2019-04-21 10:44 (UTC)

[Honestly, Amane has a very skewed sense of what is considered "messy", and so she waits for the mess to happen, but she is curious as to the proceedings. They are not unfamiliar.]

How are you doing that?

I have an intrinsic control over vitae. The force that brings life. In most living creatures, this is blood.

[She holds up her hand, the one with the spike, and she has pretty good aim, even without training, so it's not hard to lance it out, like a spike on a chain, right into the gecko, before she snaps her fist closed, causing blood to rush and burst the vessels in the heart and brain.

The gecko collapses, blood pouring from the mouth and eyes, where she'd accidentally burst those blood vessels too.]

Ah, clumsy.

So you cannot control dead, undead, or inorganic creatures?

[These geckos are absolutely towering, and the fact that she fells one that easily does not go unnoticed.]

For the dead and undead, no. That was--is my brother's specialty. For inorganic...hm.

[SHe got a lot of practice yesterday, and it turns out having the ability to manipulate blood is deadly in some horrifying ways.]

I would suppose that means something like a golem? I don't know. I've never tested it. I suppose it would depend how close to 'living', but then that begins to become a philosophical question.

[She listens attentively.]

You have a brother?

A twin. [A long pause.] I...also found out recently my older brother is still alive, and I have a younger half-brother and two half-sister, all by my father.

[You can feel how tired she is about that sentence and she forgot to mention there is another brother by that same man.]

I see. A fair few siblings, then.

[if she knew she was a queen she might be like YIKES because of politics maybe but you know, she don't so it's fine.

Probably.]

And they all can do this?

No. Only I can. A witch's power is unique to them, or at least to their bloodline...I believe none of the rest of my siblings have a witch's domain, only regular magecraft. They have their own gifts.

[She tilts her head, and gestures to her hair.]

The white hair is--a marker of a witch. The difference in how we process mana is theorized to be what causes it.