Open [Seasonal Event] Benshira Jones and the Crystal Skulls

[Merevaika]

Merevaika

The Benshira had seen a farm boy. She had lived as a farm boy. She had experienced his memories. So Merevaika wasn't the only one. The tight feeling in her heart loosened, and she let out a sigh of relief, glad she wasn't the only one touched by this strange magic. Venthris was different to the farm boy, a horse not a human. But were they real, or just figments of someone's imagination? Were those real skeletons turned crystal, or real crystal turned to skeletons? Did it make a difference?

"I saw a strider," she said simply, trying to keep to Merevaika and block Venthris, however noble the mare was. At the moment, she had to be human. Perhaps later, she would let the emotions and memories sweep over her, learn about the wild strider way of life, but not now. Now the other woman was gesturing wildly, flinging her arms around with mocking tones in her voice.

She was angry, confused, scared and violated, and exclaimed several more things, shouting and moving away with confused movements, the events clearly disturbing her more than they had Merevaika.

But Merevaika was always calm. Not calm, just unnerved by things around her. The Sea of Grass, after all, was a pretty dangerous, strange and ever changing place. Things happened there that bothered others, but the drykas had build up a shell to it, a layer of protection against feelings.

And it wasn't just that. "Calm because this is normal. Calm because similar things happened." Normal? In what world was this normal? Merevaika had never experienced things like this before, despite experiencing weird things. This was one step further, one step more supernatural or divine or whatever the magic was. But recently, it did feel like normal. Her hand traced down to where, imprinted on her thigh, lay a pair of gilded antlers, marking her gift out from the rest. The gift of transformation, the gift of an elk's body to assume. That day was the first of the weird days. She had been thrown into a world of Alvinas and elks and hunters, a world she didn't know, a world so divine.

And Alcor, it must have been, had given her this strange but amazing gift through it, through death itself. She was marked by the gilded antlers.

And then, after that, was the water, red like blood but tasteless, changing her form to one of a man's. That was even worse. As an a elk, she could survive, knowing there ways. But men were more foreign to her than the rarest of race. She had been changing and shifted, her life turned upside down twice, and this, this was nothing. More memories wasn't bad, considering that she believed that she would have had to spend her life as either elk or a man. This was nothing.

"We aren't mad. Riverfall is," she replied to the final statement, "Not noticed strange things? Very strange - less than this."

She hoped the woman would calm down. It wasn't good for her to act like this. Her suggestion had been a better way to act; tea calmed troubled souls, she knew that. Better to sit and drink tea than think she'd gone mad. That all of them had gone mad. Because they hadn't.


"Pavi"
Grassland sign
"Common"

[Zephari]

"I wouldn't exactly say it's normal, but she is right, crazier stuff does happen here." Zephari replied, remembering the alternate version of riverfall she had suffered through. But the third girl did have a good point. Heading back to the city was probably a good idea. This type of this was something a person needed to be in a calming, peaceful place to contemplate.

"She does have a point, we should head back to riverfall before anything else happens. I know I need to get some rest after that..." she sighed, being truly drained by the experience. The hike back to riverfall was gonna suck.

Normally Zephari would have waited for the other two to respond out of respect, but she simply didn't have the energy to bother. Instead she headed straight back for riverfall along the coast, the now sun warmed sand making her feet grow hot with each stride. She didn't even look back toward the other two as she walked away, her mind too rattled to think about them. The boy was so sad... She was so sad. She needed to sort this out before it took over her.

MemoriesOk so i'd say this is finished unless you two want to continue this back in riverfall, but I want to wrap up the details of the lives we have inherited. They are PERMANENT. They cannot be removed save for powerful magic by order of Gossamer, and they are with us till we die. We can try to block them out or investigate and learn them, that's for each of us to decide. These don't necessarily need to ever come up in roleplays again, but i have tried to create characters for each of us that will give us an interesting an engaging writing dynamic for our characters that we maybe wouldn't otherwise address. Thankyou for letting me moderate this, it's been a blast.

This is the color of speech.
This is the color of others speech.
This is the color of thought.

[Marion Kay]

Normal? Normal? Marion might've accepted that years ago, before she had seen the world outside the illusion-tainted grounds of Alvadas. But she knew what normal was, now, and this was not it. They did have a point, of course, considering the strange happenings over the past few seasons, first the madness in the air when she had arrived in winter, and now it was if that madness was manifesting itself into a new reality for summer. But every city went through odd times, and spring had been relatively peaceful.

And Marion's reasoning railed against their placation.

The fact that insanity was wreaking itself across the land was no reason to roll over and let it sweep them with it. That was idiotic. She would not simply shrug and go about her day simply because "stranger thing have happened." Marion knew that -- she had lived through events far stranger than this by the time she was three years old. That didn't make this experience any less disturbing, having a dead man's psyche crammed between her own. She could handle bizarre occurrences, but this was more than bizarre, and it was more than an occurrence.

It was an invasion, and even now, as she drug her feet through the sand and struggled to keep the flood of unsavory emotions from spilling forth, she could feel memories pulsing through her mind. She tried to erect a barrier, focusing on the present moment, but one thought seeped through, words of advice she... no, Kelrin had gotten after a violent fit of youthful frustration. His mentor had followed him to the rocky crag the young inarta had considered as his place of solitude, and said, as they looked out across the eastern bay,
'If the sea can calm itself, so can you.'

In the same moment, Marion's gaze swept to the waves before her, to the waters breaking on the sand, somehow gentle in their resolve, and a soothing touch seemed to grace itself over her mind. But it was only a moment, and as it faded a tick later, Marion's rage spiked once more. Shut up! she screamed internally, her fingers sliding to grasp at her hair with a painful pressure, as if she could rip out the memories.

If this was the result of some kind of magic, perhaps she now understood why mages were so feared and hated. Warping her body, compared to this, was a cakewalk. To warp the mind? It was some fresh agony. The distant part of her that was tuned in to the ebb of her djed fed back some dull ache, like a wound she could not reach, a scar on her soul, though whether the sensation was real or imagined was impossible to tell in her current state. There was a dead man inside her body. And for the other women's non-reaction, she could only assume that their experience, whatever they had been, was far less intense than Marion's own. It was the only reasoning Marion could allow herself to entertain, rather than admit to the possibility that she was actually emotionally inferior.

The first woman, with the solid build and strikingly foreign features, departed without a backward glance, and rather than standing in silence with the other girl, Marion decided to follow her lead. She took one final survey of the wreckage, then swung her gaze to the other who remained, fixing her with a wordlessly scathing look as she took real note of her for the first time -- from her proud form to clever green eyes and loose locks. With all the morning's excitement, she hardly taken a chance to get a good look at either of her unwilling companions. An air of wildness hung about her, and Marion couldn't help wondering if they might have been better acquainted under different circumstances. Nonetheless, she crossed her arms and tore her eyes to the horizon not a chime later, letting her bone-weary legs carry her away, setting off in the opposite direction that the other woman had taken.

Once she'd rounded a corner, she slumped into the sand, resting against the stony face of the cliff. It wasn't even noon and she'd already been through enough for the next few days. Kelrin's life washed over and through her, sapped of whatever energy she might've had to keep the unwanted thoughts at bay. Who are you? she wanted to ask, though she knew the answer. She knew more than she ever could have wanted to know about the man who called himself Kelrin Evrith. But she wanted, with a new desperation, to be able to speak with him, to know that he was a real person and not a product of her imagination, to be able to say 'These are your memories, not mine.' She needed him to exist so she could tell him to go away.

She sat there longer than she cared to measure, watching as Syna trailed higher along her path and the sea wore tirelessly on. And as she sat there, the heat of sun-soaked stone creeping though the fabric of her back, a memory struck her -- one she recognized as her own -- of a child's voice weaving its way through her mind. A season ago she had morphed, and the new form had breathed life into something within her. And now, as she conjured the contours of Kelrin's face to the forefront of her mind, she knew exactly what she was going to have to do.

But first, rest.

oocI had a great time with this thread, and you did a great job moderating, Zephari. I'm stoked to push Marion over the edge a bit, and I've already sketched out a plot about her efforts to investigate these memories. I love it when something unexpected shapes a character's path. Sorry about my rambling internal messes.

[Konrad Venger]

Zephari Grade Withheld due to Inactivity for five months Merevaika XP: Investigation - 2 Lore: Riverfall Beach: Respite from the Heat The Memories of Venthris Riverfall , Summer 515AV: Strange Events Afoot Marion Kay Grade Withheld due to Inactivity for ten months Click Me! : Again, it's a shame nothing more came of this, since it was an interesting concept. If you guys ever come back and start playing again, PM me and you'll get your goodies, too. Oh, and please make sure you go back and edit your post in the Request Thread to reflect the fact this one is now done and dusted. PM me with any questions and later 'tater!