EVENT: ~*~Heat Wave~*~

[trainmasters]

Who: Heroes! Old ones, new ones...!
When: Day 42, afternoon
Where: Around the train

[ Good news, everyone! Those pesky cicadas are gone at last! You might have even had a chance to relax, except....

Except for the heat wave.

It's like the worst parts of the last dregs of summer come to torture you with excrutiating heat. It's heat so bad you could swear that you've started melting yourself the second you step outside. It's terrible. At least with the cold you can add more layers on, how are you supposed to deal with heat?? You can't just walk around naked??

(That's not a suggestion.)

Here's the thing about the heat, though: It's bad enough that it's causing mirages-- mirages of people you may even recognize, people who are lost in the dark. People who will try to lead you into danger, people who don't want what's best for you after all....

That aside, you may or may not have noticed that there's some new teammates on the train! The notification appears cheerfully on everyone's Chains:

WELCOME NEW HEROES

And you may find yourself wearing a label you can't seem to remove until you've spoken to at least one other person: "Hi, I'm ______! Talk to me about ______!"

There's a mischievous giggle in the wind that you may recognize as the same one that ran the plants and secrets game. ]

[[ NOTES: You're welcome to make team posts if you like, or intro directly into this mingle if you haven't already. Until next month's placements, the heat wave will persist. Characters stand the risk of seeing castmates not in the game until that point, mirages from the heat. Enjoy! ]]

Comments

[daydreamshimmer]

...is that....normal?

[learnedfool]

It's not unheard of where I'm from? But not normal, no.

[daydreamshimmer]

And only one heard?

That's different.

[learnedfool]

Only one?

[daydreamshimmer]

Usually a creature with more than one mind has the number of heads to match.

Chimeras, Cerberus, Orthros, Hydras. Things like that.

[learnedfool]

If it helps, we have two souls. Or one soul and a roiling mass of chaos that works like a soul.

[daydreamshimmer]

Rolling mass of chaos. You do know that sounds really bad, right?

[learnedfool]

Oh, we are very aware.

[This voice is still using Pen's voice box, but the accent is different]

It's destructive. But you would be amazed what can be done with controlled destruction.

[daydreamshimmer]

[She raises an eyebrow at that.] I was thinking more chaos as...well, chaos. Destruction can be used constructively, but it seems kind of predictable if chaos was just breaking things.

[learnedfool]

It's...

[and cue a (short) silent consultation between Pen and Desdemona]

It does involve breaking things. We call it 'downhill magic'. But a demon or their rider can learn to control where and what is broken. Things like fire or rust tend to come easy. Using it for delicate work can take lifetimes for a demon to get the knack of it. So can not leaking chaos everywhere.

It helps that a demon can't exist in this word without a body, and we aren't entirely chaos.

[daydreamshimmer]

Fire I can see, but rust is certainly unexpected. [A pause.] Though, I guess that could be chaos. Rust would either be a time manipulation, or manipulation of fortune for those particular cells being the ones going bad right then. Forcing entropy instead of letting entropy do it's thing in a isolated time bubble.

Fire is a lot more straight forward to start, though control is certainly important and harder to do which still seems counter intuitive to the chaos thing.

So a demon is like on another plane of existence?

[learnedfool]

They come from the Bastard's Hell, but they live in our world, or the space in our world where souls dwell while they are in bodies.

I don't think I know the word entropy.

[daydreamshimmer]

Bastard's Hell?

Your souls...aren't in your bodies?

Entropy is basically what you call the death of everything due to the passage of time.

[learnedfool]

Well, they are, but not in the same way that your liver, or lungs are in your bodies. In a non physical way, but definitely linked. Human souls are designed to persist outside of bodies, in this world.

[daydreamshimmer]

Persist how? Like a ghost or afterlife-y?

[learnedfool]

Er... sorry, I meant not persist. A ghost is what happens if a soul tries to stay in the world instead of joining the gods in the afterlife. They lose form and memory. The oldest are little more than wisps.

[daydreamshimmer]

And demons fit in how?

[learnedfool]

They come from the realms of the gods, but like human souls, they can't become 'people' until they have a body in the world. Unlike humans, they don't grow their own bodies; they attach themselves to a body. They also can do it again, when the body they are attached to dies.

I'm Desdemona's 11th host. Well, 11th human host. Demons usually end up in animals first.

[daydreamshimmer]

Why can't they grow their own bodies?

[learnedfool]

Perhaps because they don't have parents? I know humans and many animals grow inside their mother's wombs. Birds, frogs and fish lay eggs.

[daydreamshimmer]

Most animals do. Even magical creatures....

[learnedfool]

Right. Wait, magical creatures?

[daydreamshimmer]

Yes?