🏝️ dulces sueños group excursion! 🏝️

[hearthwarming]

🏝️ who: intrepid adventurers (vacationers?) and more!
🏝️ what: ori organized (origanized?) a group trip to the resort! mass memshare ensues.
🏝️ when: fall 9-10
🏝️ where: dulces sueños resort
🏝️ warnings: threads will be marked as needed for memshares.

[ Hopefully everyone had fun on the Arco Lunar! The morning after the boat departs from the docks, a letter arrives to your mailbox: ]

Hello, intrepid adventurer!

I am excited to have you along for a group excursion to the mysterious new island! In two days' time, let us gather in the town square and set off from there! Please be prepared to stay the night. It will be so fulfilling and memorable for everyone to spend a night on an adventure together!

If you have any questions or concerns, please come find me at my flower shop in town or at the forest farm where I live!

Sincerely,
Oriphi

[ If she accidentally delivered it to a few wrong mailboxes, then... Oops!

On the promised day, once everyone (and likely a few surprise tag-alongs) has gathered or been gathered, Ori distributes little paper bags of snacks to everyone. Inside are cookies, oat snacks, and a freshly-picked apple from her and M-21's orchard. Do with them as you please... Just don't let her catch you throwing it into the sea or something. 🥺 ]

Alright. I think we should head out, then! Thanks for coming along, everyone! I hope it'll be a great time. Oh, and please don't forget to drink plenty of water and use this incredible ointment I discovered on this island! It's called "sunscreen!" Tieflings don't really get sunburnt, but you should use it!

[ And with that our intrepid adventurers set off to the mysterious, dangerous, unknowable... resort island! ]

( This is the ill-fated mass extinction memshare event. Please refer to the event for details on the resort and the plotting post for any specific details for characters' memshares! There are toplevels for each area of the resort (and for the memshare). Enjoy! )

Comments

[yourlenore]

( Dust settles through the cold-flickering candlelight, a choking thick in your lungs.

Your consciousness fades into a dim-lit room sealed tight deep beneath the earth, the walls a cemetery cool. How beautifully this room was carved, how precise, as if from one single block of broad obsidian. Holy imagery cut into the walls suggests a holy war, once upon a time. With so little light, it all feels an optical illusion, no beginning or end, a ceaseless, unrelenting void.

About you, there are people; there were people. They are corpses, now. They are laid about you in an orderly fashion, like cards spread on a table, in a semicircle about the room, row after row.

At the back wall, where both ends of the bodies terminate, there is Adelis. Have you seen Adelis, lately? He doesn't look right. Right now, he even seems close to death. Bruised, bleeding, and disciplined, limbs shackled. Still, there is grit in him; he grinds his teeth, and he refuses to feed. This is what all this is: an exercise in starvation; Alexei's attempt to force Adelis to drink from human beings.

You are the latest in the spread of cards, but a desperate ploy; your death would likely drive Adelis over, because you are closer to him than most. You are, like all the others were, so near to death, because you will taste sweeter, more addictive, when fed from on the brink. Your consciousness fades in and out, your vision bleary. But you are not like the others were; though you've been stripped of your weapons and armor, you are clever enough and nimble enough to pick your way out of the locks. You know the layout of this Grand Cathedral. They had left your rings on you, thinking them regular fashion, but one could grant you invisibility.

You'd only have to leave Adelis behind.

"Grand Duke Koshevek asks for me personally?" you had asked. "He has never asked for me before."

Alexei Koshevek, the vampire that rules the Koshevek territory within Ostoya and the father figure to all within Koshevek, only calls upon you as a bargaining piece. You were born in his domain, and you possess the title of Master Assassin in the Ebon Syndicate, a powerful trade and criminal organization. You are convenient leverage to have.

Still, Alexei regards you with indifference. He rarely looks you in the eye. You are not clean enough to be worth the attention.

"Yes, but this is something special," Valerie replies, with a smile. He is Alexei's confidant and your present contractor, and you know he cannot be trusted. "This has to do with Adelis."

You break Adelis loose from his shackles with a pick you keep hidden in you, and you slip the ring onto his finger, and tell him to use it with care. Adelis is somewhere between irate and uneasy in his replies, but he is too weak to fight the attention. Adelis had spotted a loosed stone in this optical illusion of a room, and you tell him to slip through it, while you take the door; you relate to him the floor plan, and tell him what path to take to escape.

Though Adelis protests, you ruffle his hair and tell him to meet you on the hill that overlooks the cathedral. It will take him no time at all, if he follows the path. You'll see him soon.

---

It takes you a long time to pick through the locks of every door, and the padlock on each one, but you manage it, though your breaths shudder cold in your lungs, and blood still oozes from the wounds not yet fully clot. (You still have blood; your curse hasn't won you yet. You have years and years left to your life as yourself, if only you hold on, selfishly, stubbornly.)

The final door leads up a long passage, which opens into an archway. With careful steps, you make your approach, pressed up against a wall, and peer around the corner.

The obsidian cathedral winds, like a snake. The path ahead runs you directly into a wall (a carved mural of a man you recognize as Alexei stretching for the heavens, an angel, his father, reaching down to him from above).

The hall stretches left, and right. You know need go right to pursue your avenue for escape, but you see a darkened figure standing there in the dim candlelight, and they're too vague to see clearly.

This life is yours now. What do you do with it? )

[pactmarshal]

[ When Trahearne sees Adelis--shackled, starving, determined--he immediately understands what all of this is. What it means. Even with the knowledge that he is not supposed to be doing this, he is certain that he would of his own will. And it seems the body he inhabits feels the same way.

They've established this already, however.

He hates the feeling that flesh, this body, this curse affords him. He hates the weariness through his person, how he instinctively understands how the curse encroaches on his being, and how familiar this feels, too. If only he holds on. He has done so before. He will do it again. Last time, it was selfless. This time, it is selfish.

Mentally he steels himself as he comes to the corner, head whipping in both directions. The figure standing in his path is unexpected. He grits his teeth--inconvenient, but he had to face difficulty at some point, didn't he? Nothing was easy.

The temptation to turn left and take a roundabout, longer way is there, but he won't do it. He will forge onward. This is for Adelis, he instinctively understands. He will see him again.

And so he chooses the right path; instinct bids him to walk silently, hugging the wall. What tools he has in his arsenal, he isn't entirely sure, but nothing will stand in his way. ]

cw: body horror involving children

[yourlenore]

( What is it like to be in Mishka's skin?

Busy, in the sense that an anthill is. Your steps are quiet and quick, and throughout your body there is a rush, there is a buzz, there is a sense that your insides are not yours, that they are edging you out, and with every moment it is an active struggle to hold onto yourself, and keep it from dispersing among the insects.

They scurry into the cavity of your body (and your body is an amorphous cavity) from which insects merge into and out of and scuttle about, nesting in the sickening swamplands, the rot, the plague-festering petri dish of your insides. You feel irrationally that, if your skin were peeled back, the underside would not be blood and muscle, but rotted earth and greenery.

Where is your body is busy, though, your mind is quiet, the world about you dim in intensity, in color. There is a distance with which you regard it, as if a beast in human skin; prowling, perhaps, but not engaging, not connecting.

As you approach the figure in the corner quietly, you see that it is several, smaller figures, masked before the largest of the company. These are children. Hazy-eyed and pale, their skin blighted, their fine altar-dress mottled. They each hold a handle upon a holder looped through a finger.

One child looks down with some vague sadness at his dress: it seems something in his chest cavity has ruptured, and split him from the ribcage down the length of his abdomen. Out from him oozes a terrible black sludge from the top of the laceration down, smearing his robes. It is not gory, but it is unnerving, like a pustule popped.

There are four other children beside him, gazing at his error. )

( The boy's voice comes like a sigh: ) Father Weaver will be so cross with me...

( There stands a girl beside him, whose skin seems like it hangs so heavily from her bones it will soon slough off: ) He will eat you, you know... He has just made you those clothes.

( The boy answers, unhappy: ) I did not ask to pop.

( Another girl answers, taller than the other: ) If we can repair it and clean it before he ever finds out...

( Then speaks up an even younger boy, who looks down the hall the opposite direction, and then toward your direction, his small gaze scanning slowly: ) But we have to stay here. What if Father Koshevek's son comes out to play? We have to tell him no...

( But the youngest boy's eyes are strange. As if made of liquid, they seem to be slowly melting from his face, with his features. Though his gaze seems to settle upon where your figure might generally be, it is not clear if he's seen you yet.

These are some of the many residents of Koshevek, midway through their corruption, their curse, overtaking them; until they are entirely gone, too filthy to serve, they remain in Alexei's employ, serving the church. In their case, they appear to be sentries of a kind.

Roll a 1d20 (+10 for Mishka's natural stealth) if you don't wish to approach them, and avoid detection as you pass them; you'll need to hit a 20. If not... the world is your diseased little oyster. )

[pactmarshal]

[ Being Mishka is...awful. In a different way than having a heart and lungs and--

Trahearne at least appreciates the quiet mind, however. So often is his own filled with questions and thoughts and anxieties, even without his Wyld Hunt and without the feelings of his brothers and sisters feeding into him. This, he doesn't mind.

But he freezes when he sees the children. He does not even realize that he brings a hand to his mouth, watching in horror as they seem entirely undisturbed by the way their own bodies fall apart

This is where the Ostoyans hail from? A world so horrid that the children care not when they literally melt?

A need forms in his chest, but he realizes this as his own personal idea.

They are just distractions. Adelis will be beyond. He needs to get past them. So he holds his breath and sneaks. With Mishka's +10, that's 21.

Just good enough. ]