Solo Think and Feel

Practise makes perfect.

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Considered one of the most mysterious cities in Mizahar, Alvadas is called The City of Illusions. It is the home of Ionu and the notorious Inverted. This city sits on one of the main crossroads through The Region of Kalea.

Think and Feel

Postby Madeira Dusk on March 8th, 2017, 1:37 am

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20th of Spring, 517



There was classical music playing in the background.

Madeira latched onto that one sense, the sense of sound, and tried to use it to lever herself back into her body. She let every note of the concerto piano hit her like a lightning strike, let it cleave through her body until she could find the edges of her soul. But there was something in the way. Something that wasn’t letting her soul align properly in her body. It was crowding her out, tucking her away in her own mind. She had lost all her senses one by one, sound was the last one left.

“You’re not listening Maddy.” a voice echoed faintly under the music. Uncle Frode. “Let the music be your guide. It’s the wee little fairy lighting your way.”

Madeira tried to speak, but all she could manage was an angry gurgling sound. Blood was pouring out of her nose and into her mouth, but she couldn’t summon the muscle control to spit.

“Clear that tone, young lady. Children who think they know it all are really annoying to those of us who do.”

The pressure of the soul was wearing her down. She could barely hear the music through the roaring in her head. Her soul was paper thin and full of holes. And just like that, without her volition or her permission, her body lifted itself and preformed a graceful pirouette.

Damnit. Damnit damnit damnit.
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Think and Feel

Postby Madeira Dusk on March 8th, 2017, 1:38 am

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Madeira had lost. Seething with frustration she threw down the remaining mental defences that the ghost had so thoroughly blasted through, and let the thing spin her possessed body elegantly around the richly appointed parlour of the Craven manor.

“Oh, lovely Renee.” Frode Varlet-Craven clapped his papery hands as the ghost did an arabesque that sent a line of fire down Madeira’s thighs. “You wear that body better than my niece, apparently. Enough now, come.”

All at once the ghost left Madeira’s limbs. And without that extra support, the Spiritist crumbled into the plush carpet. She laid there for a moment, letting her blood and sweat smear across the rug that probably cost more than her seasonal earnings. They’d been doing this for bells now, the three of them. Madeira found her eyes and let them roam up to the leather arm chair on the other side of the room, where her Uncle was rewarding and replenishing the ghost of Renee the Dancer with a vial of his quality soulmist.

Renee was his servant. Or something like it. She was the quiet, well-behaved spirit of a young actor that her Uncle would feed his soulmist to in return for favours. Her uncle himself was an old man decades past his physical prime, though it might be that his vitality went into his impressive curl of a moustache and his thick steel-grey hair. He was still a master of the arcane arts, however, and a force to be reckoned with.

The polite would call him ‘eccentric’, Madeira called him mad. Yet he was still one of the very few members of her family she actually liked. Though at the moment she couldn’t quite remember why.
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Think and Feel

Postby Madeira Dusk on March 8th, 2017, 1:38 am

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Frode noticed her looking, and laughed his wheezy laugh. “No napping on my watch, girl. On your feet.”

"Uncle, you're going to kill me." Madeira stated plainly as she got woodenly to her feet. She stemmed the nosebleed with her sleeve as the parlour in front of her wobbled dangerously. She felt strangely detached from her body, now that so many people had been living in it. Her muscles seemed to respond half a tick after she expected them to, making her movements thick and clumsy. Tiny, involuntary muscle spasms flickered in her eyelids and fingertips.
 
"Nonsense!" Frode wheezed indignantly. "If I was going to kill I'd do it in a way that didn't have you gushing so many fluids on my carpet. Again!"

She saw a flash of colour as Renee blinked away from the leather armchair, and Madeira had less than half a tick to steel herself before the newly replenished ghost seeped into her bones.

She was starting to recognize when a certain spirit would try to possess her. If Renee had tried to sneak up on her, she was fairly certain she could still identify her spirit by the way she slipped quietly into her body like a disease. It was not at all like the murderer from the Crooked Playhouse, who would slam into her soul and take her by brute force. Or Djamila, who had a desperate, frantic sort of energy to her possession. This was almost elegant. Renee would wrap herself in her blood and bones like a new dress, and bend her gently but irrevocably to her will.
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Think and Feel

Postby Madeira Dusk on March 8th, 2017, 1:39 am

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The music! The music. She had to focus on the music.

Madeira mentally shook herself. Already the trembling in her hands had stilled, but that was because they were no longer her hands.

The pressure was back. It was crowding out her mind.

Focus.

The piano was was moving too fast. She couldn’t keep up. She was chasing after the melody, trying to catch each note. In her mind she took the music apart until it was nothing but meaningless noise. While in secret parts of her body the ghost was stretching itself through her muscles, easily uprooting the tired, used-up soul that was desperately trying to keep it’s claim.

Focus.

The orchestra was picking up, and Madeira lost the notes of the piano in the noise. She swam through the din, trying to find the only thing that was letting her hold on. Where was it? Her attention was divided between the music and the battle, and the ghost could sense it. Renee pulled back and rushed forward like a wave, pushing Madeira aside.

There was a crackling noise that shot through from her knees to her skull. Her posture bent backwards, from stiff and straight to delicate and graceful. Her feet screamed in protest as Madeira put all her weight into her toes, and her arms arched over her head.

“No!”

The sound erupted from her lips, coming warped through her deadened mouth in a snarling sort of hiss.

Madeira didn’t conceded defeat this time but threw herself back into the silent fight, fuelled by a flash of white hot anger. She mentally clawed at her body without focus, leaving the music far behind as she tore into the soul that was stringing her along like a puppet.

Taken aback by the sudden ferocity, Renee’s grip loosened and Madeira’s body wobbled on it’s feet.

Frode’s usually crazed, laughing eyes narrowed as he sensed the change. There was a creak of leather as he leaned forward in his chair.

But it was too late. The sudden energy burned it’s way though the fortitude Madeira had left, and she could no longer sustain it. Renee renewed the hold on her body as the fire in her soul guttered and extinguished. Black spots gathered in front of Madeira’s eyes, and she lost consciousness as her body began to dance.
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Think and Feel

Postby Madeira Dusk on March 8th, 2017, 2:13 am

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Madeira came back to consciousness in bits and pieces. Her head was ringing, her body stiff, and there was a wetness on her lips that could either be drool or another nosebleed. She blinked herself awake, and found herself face to face with the sculpted mahogany legs of her Uncles chair. In her delirious state she wondered why someone would put such detail into the feet of a chair. It was only when she was practically rubbing her cheek on them that she could appreciate the detail of the handsome claws.

She blinked again, regaining another small piece of her consciousness, and her gentle musings suddenly curdled in her brain. Why was she looking under her Uncles chair? Did they… Did they just leave her on the floor?

She rolled to her back. And there, grinning madly above her, was Frode Varlet-Craven. The Master’s legs were crossed, his hands steepled under his chin, looking like the epitome of patience as he waited for his lazy niece to awaken.

“So, what went wrong this time?” her uncle invited her to speak, sounding halfway like a proper teacher, even while she was lying prone next to his shoes.

“I-“ Madeira rolled her tongue over her teeth, trying to bring feeling back to it. “I didn’t focus hard enough. On the music.”

“No no no”, Frode shook his head vehemently, causing his elaborately curled moustache to droop slightly. “Don’t focus. Feel. You live to much in your head, girl. Live in your body and maybe it wont be so easy to take from you!”

“Now, that last possession,” he crossed his legs the other way, and the shadow passed over Madeira’s face, “right at the end, what happened?”

“I-“ Madeira’s cheeks started to burn. “I got frustrated. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“That’s right, you weren’t thinking!” Frode agreed in a much different tone. “You were feeling, and that was the closest I’ve ever seen you successfully fend off Renee. Don’t try to ‘logic’” -he said the word with a curl of his lips, as if it had done him personal offence- “your way out of a matter of the soul. You’re mind is not at war, it’s your soul and your body. And you need both to fight together in order to win.”
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Think and Feel

Postby Madeira Dusk on March 10th, 2017, 4:10 am

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"I understand, Uncle." She didn't understand.
 
"Excellent. Hup, hup, on your feet. You're wasting daylight."
 
"It's the twentieth bell, Uncle."
 
"Exactly!"
 
Frode didn't offer Madeira a hand and she climbed laboriously to her feet. But she didn't expect him to. He was not the kind of man to let politeness get in the way of a lesson in self-reliance. If she couldn't at least pull herself to her feet, he would have ended the lesson right there; just leave her lying on the carpet as he shuffled out with a cough and a bad joke.
 
At his instruction, Madeira rewound the metal cylinder in the music box and made sure the teeth of the comb were properly aligned. He dropped terrible puns each time her possession-fatigued hands fumbled with the delicate mechanism and laughed his wheezy laugh. While her back was to him she indulged herself in a slew of eye-rolling as he did, but there was a ghost of a smile on her mouth, too. 
 
Finally the music was cued and Madeira stood in the middle of the parlour, head high and neck stiff even as her hands twitched and jumped like their were trying to flee her wrists.  
 
"Remember" her teacher held one liver spotted finger up as if to mark a passage in her mind. "This is not about the head, it is about the body. Use the music."
 
”But how?” Madeira blurted out, exasperated. “If you don't want me to use my mind to concentrate on it, why is it here?”

“If I have to tell you, the point of the lesson will be lost. Use the music. Listen to it. Now, again!”
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Madeira Dusk
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Think and Feel

Postby Madeira Dusk on June 10th, 2017, 5:37 am

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The disease was back, sparkling and new on the borrowed power of Frode's soulmist. Madeira listened to the music, let it crash through her and felt it in the hollows of her bones. But she was listening to Renee too, and she listened to her damaged soul as it struggled to hold to her tired bones. Body and soul. Body and soul. Think and feel.

Everything smelled like iron and salt through the blood in her nose, and her toes dug themselves in the plush carpet like it was physically rooting herself to the room. The tips of her fingers were numb, put she pulled her hands into a tight fist, leaving ten crescent dents in her palms that welled with of blood. And through blood and the soft carpet and the pain she could feel, in a way that Renee couldn't. The ghost was just a puppet master. Thats why possession was so dangerous. They couldn't feel it when their vessel was hurt.

But she could feel. That's what made this body hers. The bumps and the bruises and the pleasures were what tied her to herself. She was the only one who could feel it.

The thought rocketed through her body, lighting every nerve on fire. The sense of ownership she had never thought to experience brought every sensation to painful, brilliant highlight. But it wasn't enough. Renee was weeding through her, deadening her senses. She needed more.

Of her own volition, Madeira raised her hands above her head. She breathed the music until it was as much a part of her as the blood hammering through her veins. And then she started to dance.

She slammed her numb feet into the floor, and let the jolt travel up her skinny legs. She twisted her arms and arched her back, following the rising and falling notes of the piano. She made herself feel every strain of her muscles, every crack in her joints, and let the feeling of it roar into her soul. She found the edges of her body, the cusp that separated herself from everything around her, and expanded to fill every crevice of it.

Renee became a small, incessant scratching on her soul; a foreign body she could push against. Madeira turned inward and shut her out, and danced her crazy, stumbling, shameless dance. This was her body and it was gloriously, tangibly hers.

Under the music there was a fragile, dry clapping as Frode Craven stood and applauded. Distantly, Madeira realized that the pressure on her soul had vanished. She stopped spinning and clapped her hands on the back of the velvet settee, legs shaking and her breath a wheezy, wet rattle in her chest. Beside her uncle's chair stood Renee.
Her face was carefully indifferent, but the set of her crossed arms (an old habit from life) betrayed her huffy annoyance.

"Excellent work girl! We might make a proper Craven of you yet." Frode was nodding his approval, his crazed eyes a thin crinkle under the pressure of his smile.

Madeira wobbled where she stood. "Oh. Thats good", she managed to get out with a thin answering smile of her own, before the bright pattern on the carpet rushed to meet her. With a heavy thud Madeira passed out on the floor, where she stayed until morning.
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Madeira Dusk
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Think and Feel

Postby Chameleon on July 30th, 2017, 9:25 pm

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GRADE


XP
  • Spiritism: 3XP
  • Observation: 1XP
  • Endurance: 2XP
  • Dancing: 1XP


LORES
  • Possession: Using music to overcome it
  • Renee: Frode Varlet-Craven's servant
  • Possession: Different ghosts feel different
  • Possession: Falling unconscious after fighting back
  • Possession: Using feelings to overcome it
  • Possession: Knowing why it's your body


OTHERS

This was a great read! I loved seeing Madeira and Renee again, and having Madeira go through the process of struggling to learn makes the success so much better and more interesting. Let me know if you have any problems or questions, and don't forget to mark this thread as graded!

  
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