hugtopia_logs | ♥ September Event Log

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♥ September Event Log

a wide green pasture at dusk with a red-leafed tree in the foreground

September (Ohnir) Event Log
Ohnir is in full swing now and the weather, while still boasting hot days, is starting to cool slightly at night. The residents are recovering after the lightning storms from the previous month and, curiously, most of the robots that had been damaged in the storms are back. They don't look the same as before, but they seem to act the same, still happy, still thankful that the offworlders are here. A few even thank those who carried their bodies to the temples with small gifts of painted stones. Havenwell continues as it always has and welcomes their new arrivals with a few rather odd changes...

❥ PROMPT I: Robot Crossing

a farmer holding a bountiful box of vegetables

Now that all the new and old arrivals have mingled and met, the robotic natives start pointing everyone toward the VR cafes. The bright lights and cozy insides have been decorated with fake leaves and carved and painted plaster approximations of fruits and vegetables in odd colors. When an offworlder comes in, they explain that back when they were still in their flesh bodies, the month of Ohnir was one for harvest and celebrations of the summer bounties. Now, without any real farms or need to eat, they've translated the Harvest Festival into a game, so why not play?

Logging in with another character will net you a little farm and a variety of games to choose from:

Pick and harvest as many Aellyn vegetables and fruits as you can before the timer runs out! The more you pick, the better your score. Work together with your partner to clear the field in any way you can. Strangely, once you finish clearing a tree or a field row of their bounty, they seem to magically refill when you turn your back. Oh well, at least you won't run out before the timer hits zero and with the sheer number of levels and combinations of trees and fields with obstacles in your way to make harvesting a little more challenging with each new level, you certainly won't be running out of things to do.
With a partner, use the giant slingshot to launch comically large fruits into a garden patch of other colored fruits. Match a line of 3 or more similarly shaped fruits to clear it from the field. The more fruits you can clear, the higher your score - aka welcome to Fruit Crush. Stack lines of 6 or more to get shining clear diamond fruits that clear the entire row and snag yourself some bonus points.
You and your partner(s) are given a magical golden pumpkin and it's your job to grow it into the largest pumpkin possible. Why? There's a county fair of course and the largest pumpkin wins! But how do you grow this pumpkin? Well, there are a lot of methods! You could gather up materials and work together to stick it to the pumpkin until it absorbs them and grows. You could do a song and dance routine together to encourage the pumpkin's soul to grow big and bright. You could hold hands and share stories and entertain the pumpkin until it feels encouraged enough to grow on its own. The possibilities are endless, so get to work making the best pumpkin that (digital) fair has ever seen!

As always, when playing the game, the picture and quality seems to increase as long as you're in contact with another person. Once the games are over and your scores tallied, the cafe attendant walks over and asks to see your communicators. To the winners, he or she attaches a little floating charm in the shape of one of Aellyn's weirder fruits. It looks like a cross between a blue rambutan and the hala aka puhala fruit, and it's called the sikheen fruit here. The sikheen are extremely rare nowadays, but their appearance is so unique that Havenwell residents still like to remember it for the Harvest Festival. Enjoy your prize!

❥ PROMPT II: Paint by Number

The new arrivals get to enjoy Havenwell in all its glory for about a week before suddenly, one day everyone wakes up to find the entire city has gone gray. And not a natural, nice gray either, but a strange dull, lifeless gray. Everything from the sky to the houses to the grass to the native people have all turned the exact same shade of graphite gray. Even the natives are confused and the devout flock to the temples while the science-minded head to the labs to study this new phenomenon. The only ones who seem spared from this strange color drain are the offworlders and the statues of the gods in the center of town. Or, well, at least most of the offworlders are spared. A few people might notice that their colors aren't as bright as they once were, or that parts of them are starting to turn gray as well. Those offworlders unlucky enough to lose some of their own can touch another player character to regain what was lost easily enough. Overall though, no one seems harmed by this sudden loss of color, but they're certainly perplexed.

A few days later and round silver platforms start showing up around the city, dragged out of storage by the natives. The first arrivals might remember these as the fireworks platforms that are activated by people standing and holding hands on them. The temple priests and scientists encourage the offworlders to stand on the platforms again and to hold hands or engage in some other sort of physical contact on them and wait.

When characters do as asked, the platforms shoot fireworks like they did before - in brilliant colors instead of the dull gray everywhere. And wherever the sparks fall, color starts returning to the world in splotches. The natives are overjoyed and move the platforms all across the city, asking the offworlders to find and use them wherever possible to return the color to their town.

❥ PROMPT III: Sharing is Caring

a book open with images and words popping out

Ohma's temple is particularly lively during Ohnir and the priests are busy cleaning and sweeping, decorating it with rolls of parchment and digital inkwells and quills that write as if they were actually fountain pens. The natives, especially adherents of Ohma, start to make pilgrimages to the temple in little processions, some playing music, others flying banners. It would probably be far more impressive if the colors weren't still so gray and splotchy, but they're trying their best.

Anyone who chooses to follow can observe the natives going up to the altar and sharing stories with one another. They talk about things they did over the past year or things that are far, far in their past. Some of the stories are happy and result in the procession laughing and some are...well, not everyone came back from the lightning storms. The priests diligently write every story down on those parchment rolls and deposit them onto the waiting altar, where they're summarily lit on fire to the cheers of those present. The more emotional the story it seems, the brighter and bluer the flame that it emits and the louder the procession cheers.

As the file out, they notice you watching and urge you to go up with someone else in the temple to clear your heart and offer up your own stories. They can be stories of home, information about your worlds, or stories about your life. It seems the more personal the story, the brighter the flame though and the more Dora that will mysteriously show up in your account at a later date. If the priests are asked about this donation later, they're just as perplexed. No one they know would have paid anyone for an offering to Ohma, so where could it have come from....?

❥ PROMPT IV: Sleep Sweet

With Ainea's temple familiars finally back where they belong, quiet returns to the city at night. We're sure that first long uninterrupted sleep felt heavenly, right? Although there may not be color in the city, the world of dreams at least is fully technicolor and safe. Which might be weird for some characters in case they don't normally dream or remember their dreams because now everyone is dreaming at night. Most of the dreams are the usual variety that your character always has, but every so often in the midst of a pleasant dream about home or a funky one about flying pizza (whatever it is you usually dream about, we don't judge), there's a glitch.

Out of the corner of your eye or just on the edge of your vision, a person appears. Their face can't be seen and their arms are longer than they have any right to be, but they appear and stand there, watching. Trying to focus on this person causes them to flit away and it's easy enough to dismiss as a random event, until it keeps happening. And it keeps happening, and it keeps happening, and every time you see this person, they get closer and even less distinct. Waking up and talking to or holding someone might help calm that disquiet in your heart, offworlder, so hopefully there's someone around to help you.

This event will run from September 16th to September 30th. Click on each prompt's title to see the text. If you have any questions, feel free to direct them to the FAQ or to the Mod Question thread on the OOC Entry.

Feel free to also use the OOC Plotting Post for planning what your character is up to!

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As you knew, hmm? She seemed rather distraught over precisely the inverse of that, quite recently.

[He is not, after all, trying to be subtle. It is the oblique of politics, in which everyone involved in the conversation knows exactly what was meant, but can pretend, to an outsider, that they do not.]

A curious layer added to the puzzle, no? That we two are of the same, but you a half-step out of sync. Were all three the same, or even all three different...

[A hypothesis that is contradicted is infinitely more interesting, to his way of thinking, than one that is confirmed. As another person steps up to tell their story, Emet-Selch falls silent again for a time, his gaze on the storyteller.

This one, it seems, is brief, and when it is finished, he looks back at the Exarch and there is something of...

To call it expectation would be giving it too much certainty. To call it a challenge would be too adversarial. But there are elements of both to his gaze, as he lifts a hand briefly towards the stage.]

I should find it interesting to hear of your hero sometime, if you were willing.

[If Emet wanted to see his surprise, his shock, his pain at knowing he had upset a legend whom he had adored since their first meeting, well, he wasn't about to see it firsthand. Too long had he spent saving face before men and nations to see a small piece of what remained of the First live out its days as content and comfortable as it could, even under the blinding eternal Light of the Flood. Whatever he could do to help the world that would save his own, his work dedicated itself to that cause.]

[One hundred years later, he had learned silence and stillness quite well, and that was what the Ascian received now as the Exarch seemed to consider the stage without considering any of it at all.]

Curious, yes. One can but assume that we hail from alternate realities of the same worlds, or perhaps different shards within our own. [Realistically, he didn't know and couldn't know. What had the Thirteenth suffered before it fell to the Void? Who had lived their fragments of a life there, and how could any of them save Emet be sure that where they had come from was not the First, or what the Exarch and Warrior knew to be the First?]

[Too many questions without answer, too many branches of possibility and no sure way to cross them.]

Regardless of which it may be, you should know the hero of my own time, in soul if nothing else. If we are not alive to you, as you said once before I do believe, why does an individual journey of such a soul interest you?

Well, I can hardly be certain of that without seeing for myself, no?

[Arms upraised, he shrugs and tilts his head.]

You've not the Sight enough to tell, and you're the only one fortunate enough to have met both parties.

[He allows his arms to drop.]

That the soul is the same does not mean the result will be, for flesh and circumstance both change a person. To see such differences is one of the few ways in which mortals do interest me. To compare lives in such a way... It is not the core of anything in particular I study, but I've picked up certain patterns regardless, in who steps forward to heed the call, and who remains behind.

[In a moment more of silence and a soft hum, he conceded the point. Within a soul, there would be similarities across its life cycles, but nature did not always outweigh nurture. In his youth and more and more now that he knew of the worlds what he did, he had wondered now and then on the alternatives. What would he have been in another time? Would he still have gone to Sharlayan had he not been shunned so? Who had his reflection been on the First, what sort of person?]

[So many questions, none of which he thought he would ever know, but he couldn't help his mind's workings. His hands found quill and ink before they found the bow - it was who he was, as he was then and now. One example in a crowd, a single drop in the ocean from which all souls originated and to which all would one day return.]

[As much as it fascinated him on a purely academic level, to relate what he knew of a dear friend in the light of an object of research bothered him. That he and others spent literal centuries focused on research around the same man did occur to him, but to save the Warrior rather than carry on singular personal observations. Notes in a tome, pages in a history. It felt wrong, and yet he didn't doubt that whatever else the Warrior was, there was a part of the puzzle he himself was missing in all of this, some missing link, some transition in the tale yet untold.]

[Curious as he might be, the Exarch held no delusions that Emet would readily part with the knowledge, for as much honesty as he had put forward in their time on the First. Another question without an answer, but one that he held a part of the key. He had no intent to use it as insurance - the Ascian wouldn't care, and the Exarch would not defile his friend - but all the same, he was not ready to speak of it yet. If ever he would be. So he nudged the focus in another direction.]

I suppose not. Souls only have so much influence on a person. My past lives may not have any bearing on who I am now; I will never know.

[And those words rouse Emet-Selch to the sort of alertness that is only seen by what it is not. For he does not particularly look at the Exarch, nor particularly look away, nor have any particular kind of expression on his face. It is a cultivated sort of disinterest that only someone who has taken the time to observe him would recognize as indicating that there is nothing more interesting to him in the world than the man beside him.]

And if you could, would you even want to, I wonder...?

[The words are phrased as mere idle speculation, but there are no words he speaks without purpose. Even idle wonderings remain in his head where they belong, unless he wants them to be seen.]

[Through their many and various meetings, one-sided though most were, he has learned more about the man and less than he could or should know by now, he wonders to himself at times. An entire culture, an entire people lost to the ages, who now only exist in fragments and pieces scattered to the corners of the universe. As a young man, he had spent hours upon days upon weeks, months, years of his life researching a people who fell to extinction, not in the same way, but all the same.]

[So yes, the Exarch is curious about this Ascian, who he was and what his people had been. Making his way through the flames of Amaurot twice, once in a hurry, the second time in pain and soul weary, had not been the most educational experience. Had they not been so at odds, he wonders what they could have accomplished working together - truly - without limitation. But it does him no good to dwell on the what ifs. Not in his world. Not anymore.]

[And yet.]

To know who I once was, in another lifetime? My path was set long ago merely by virtue of who and what I am long before I was ever the Crystal Exarch. But it might be an interesting deviation to see if who I was is anything like who I am now.

[Silence, then, for another long moment.]

A scholar of the aspects of life most people took for granted - but one uninclined to take credit for any achievement he could lay at the feet of others. A man of keen insight, who preferred to use that insight to shepherd others into the fulfillment of the potential he saw in them.

[A pause. The carefully manicured, almost passionless tone turns to something wry, a secret shared only with himself.]

And to mercilessly tease those unfortunate enough to call him friend, of course.

[It is too on the mark to be simply his observations on the man in front of him, and even if it were not, the wryness, wistfulness, exasperated almost affection... He does not need to say in what lifetime he knew this unnamed man, for there is only one he could bear such emotions toward as he is now.

But then - a tilt of his
head, and a smile sharp enough to cut.]

Might I ask a strange question? Were it not for the Allagan eye you bear, would they, perhaps, be green?

[There was something to be said for the similarities noted between what he heard of a past life he could no longer remember, never had known, and the reality of the life he had lived. The resemblance would have been uncanny if he believed every word Emet relayed, but even in this relatively calm moment between them, he held his suspicions, and rightly so. It was hard to take on blind faith the words of a man who had once destroyed everything the Exarch had ever known.]

[Still, what would it hurt to humor the possibility? His resolve had never been stronger, and his heart was sure and steady. The past was past, and whoever he had been once before might have been a friend to him, could they meet in another life or another way, but the circumstances of that past life were not the circumstances of his current life. What that man had done then, the shape of his heart and mind might not be the same if he had lived the same way G'raha Tia did. What G'raha Tia did in his own time might have been vastly different had he lived as his past self had.]

[More than that, his curiosity had the better of him, triggered by a small but significant revelation within Ascian's words, his tone, his question. The moment was telling, perhaps misleading, but an opening all the same. Emet-Selch had once known him, whoever the Exarch had once been.]

A shade of green, yes.

[A simple nod, like it was precisely the answer he expected.]

A surviving snippet of a phrase, that the eyes are the window to the soul.

[At least in Amaurot, they were, eyes as many-colored as the strong souls within them. The light but distinct gold of Emet's own eyes takes the Exarch in, and then flicks away.

Like water added to dye, diluted but unmistakably the same shade. Once the colors were too washed out to interpret anything of meaning, and among the shards, of course, they remain so. But in those of the Source - especially those few, the Exarch, the hero, and the child of Hydaelyn's voice, who are eight times Rejoined instead of seven - the color grows more distinct, identifiable.

He would never claim to remember every color of Amaurot, and her sister cities housed people whose souls he had never even seen. But some he knows, in a deep way that no amount of second-guessing himself will shake off. As some might recognize their childhood lullaby does he know the color of the man before him.

Unsurprising, of course, that fate would throw the both of them together, into his path. And little as he may like it on the surface, there is also no one else that he would have succeed him at his immortal watch upon the affairs of the worlds. She was certainly never the type to observe.]

[He knows the phrase, words shared with him in a lifetime he had lived that no longer existed. A scholar of Sharlayan, a friend to him, a student all the same as he would become but a few years more advanced in her studies. The words struck him a chord with him then, having just recently come from a land and a people who shunned him for the unusual color of one of his eyes, the very reason he had packed his bag and bid his father farewell and traveled to learn what he could of a past his predecessors could no longer remember but for songs and tales that were as bedtime stories to a kit.]

[He hadn't put much stock in it then, only finding it curiously relevant to his own journey on a passing note. Now, hearing it from Emet, he wondered how much of that might ring true somewhere beyond ages. What did it mean for Emet's eyes, as liquid gold? What did it mean for Era's with her startling blue, or his own Warrior's who held a shade of blue in one but green in the other?]

[Did it mean anything at all beyond mere coincidence?]

[It merits some manner of research in his idle time, when he has a quiet moment to spare and indulge the historian within him, but those are still moments few and far between, less so now that he knows what pillar will sustain his crystalized form - though not how - and can use that energy to his advantage to study the world around him.]

By your words, that must have been a truth long ago, before the majority of your people were split and sundered. Were all of their eyes the very color of their souls, I wonder?

Near enough, though few were those with sight enough to know it. The Sundering washed out souls until they were near transparent in comparison, and yet even then some scrap of color persisted.

[That liquid gold looks the Exarch over once more, before the man shrugs.]

Of course, in those of the Source now, the correlation is far from perfect. Genetics plays a far greater role for you than it did for us, who could use our own aether to reshape our bodies.

[Which explains at least how it is that he had a Garlean form in the First, but mortals are indeed far more limited by their flesh. Just another of the things that he finds sad about them, really.]

Seven times rejoined. [His voice had softened in thought, musing to himself, though his blood red gaze remained on the next person to take to the stage and relate their tale. Before they knew what the Calamities were, before they knew what the Rejoining was, matters of the souls were still only hypothesis.]

[After all, eight times rejoined now and a survivor of two calamities, he felt no different and neither had those with him on the Source before he left it. But would he have noticed? His memories remained intact, even the ones passed on to him through the Allagan blood. His body had not changed, and certainly his eyes had not changed, even while the world around him remained in pieces and falling farther and farther apart by the day.]

[In that lay a question, one he would not find an answer to now or perhaps ever. He could have asked, just to put voice to it, but knew he would not like the answer, so he remained silent after and gave his ears to the tales from the stage.]

Eight, in your case, but six when you were born, which is generally more relevant. I've never heard of a Rejoining altering one's physicality, though I suppose I should not exactly rule it out.

[He had also not exactly heard of someone rejoining themselves, after all, in such a personal state, but Hydaelyn's Emissary and Champion both had proven him wrong on that account. He's no stranger to the unexpected, but that still caught him by surprise.

A pause to clap politely, as the most recent storyteller descends the stage.]

Cognitive ability has been known to do so, but being whole myself, I can only but speculate to how much. It is impossible even for an Ascian to crawl inside another's skull and know all of his thoughts, after all.

My case is but an anomaly. I have not known a lifetime to endure more than one or two Calamities in total, barring yours. You understand why I do not dwell on such things.

[They had, of course, more interest in stopping the events from ever happening and in saving as many as they could to make life worth living until the next thing arrived. Convincing people to hold out faith was still a daunting task, but his people believed in him and had since he'd been named the Exarch he was.]

We did not know then what caused such events, and even now that we do, I would not ask or examine any of its survivors for the condition of their soul. [Not when it was plain enough how much pain they were in, how miserable and deeply into agony they had fallen. He had a feeling Emet would, but didn't voice it.]

There are none, save the dragons and us; the next longest-lived race is the viera, and their centuries are not quite long enough.

[Dragons are a strange matter in themselves, as the souls of Midgardsomr and his brood, being not of the Source, are in fact whole in their own right. A curiosity, but one the Ascians have generally been wise enough to avoid.

Or at least, Emet-Selch has been wise enough to avoid them. Lahabrea's trick with convincing Tiamat to raise a primal of her beloved did work out for them in the end, but it still feels supremely risky to him.]

It is something I rather cannot help but see, personally.

[To that, the Exarch responded with a soft hum and not much more. He could be diplomatic on so many fronts, but on a scant few, he still tended to skirt the subject. On this one, his limits had been touched, and so he redirected.]

No, not with your eyes. I can only imagine what the world must look like to you, even this one. [Then, a pause. And a question.] What do you see in the natives?

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♥ September Event Log

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