route666rp | APRIL EVENT LOG

APRIL EVENT LOG

The grassland gives way to rougher terrain, green fading to cracked red earth with scraggly sharp-edged plants dotting the landscape. With no trees, the sky overhead feels massive, and almost oppressive with how the sun and moon shine down. It’s entirely at odds with the biting wind that often whips across the flatlands. The ground occasionally breaks open into crevasses or rolls along in arid hills, but it remains stark thorn brush for as far as the eye can see… Save for one strange, ominous tower on the horizon.

01:TOWER OF TRANSFORMATION

The tower looks like a giant fang, trying to bite the sky. A strange pressure emits from it and rests on the skin. Drifters can get closer to the tower, but the terrain is covered with puncturing spikes and sharp thorn brush. It will take a TOUGH vehicle to get close without getting cut. Anyone who bleeds within sight of the tower discovers their cuts are transformed; a monster’s form waits under their skin, and transforms them one injury at a time.

It takes several days to get close to the tower via Convoy, with how the road snakes and winds towards it. Drifters won’t be able to reach it without offroad vehicles until April 15th. Getting close to the tower reveals that it is formed out of a strange metal much like the Husks… And that numerous creatures have been melded into the tower’s surface. A strange red ichor seeps out from these forms. Coming into contact with it heals wounds and can revert one transformation.

Drifters can take some of the fluid with them, if they have means to carry it… But only one extra dose; any more makes the fluid unstable and neutralizes the effect entirely.

01-A: TWISTED MONSTERS

The land here is still littered with Husks, ready to break open to fight… But these monsters are more twisted than usual, and seem to be composed of multiple organisms. Prowling cat-centaur esque brutes called panthera protectors, ungainly catoblepas, reptile energy draining bloodhound dogs, and flying lion-bird anzu are all ready to attack with tooth and claw, to make Drifters all the more like them.

Given the influence of the tower, Drifters can feel their forms twisting, the more wounds they take, and the more the moon begins to form into something almost whole. By April 15th the wounds and moon are almost impossible to resist without either vials or message mementos. And those wounds are determined to drag a change out of Drifters. (Of note, Drifters who took on Harpy or Naga traits last month will find those changes can come back to them unnervingly easily, and blend with other creature changes to become a true chimera.)

These changes grow worse until the moon glow and shards reach their absolute peak on April 20th. At this point Twisted Land occurs.

02: ROAD ATTACK 

A week into the thorn brush, chaos starts at sunset. The first warning is a metallic howl echoing down from the hills, followed by a rumble that could almost be thunder… If not for the fact that the sunset stained sky is completely clear. A swarm of metal sweeps over the hills, heading straight at the Convoy.

Running at the lead are more of those canine robots. The Convoy database again identifies them as ‘chromehounds’ and these are clearly in better repair; their fangs and claws are all razor sharp, and they are swiftly closing the distance. Close behind the hounds is a scattered assortment of scrap metal vehicles. The creatures driving aren’t quite human but also aren’t quite monsters; instead they are mechanical forms with just a few remnants of flesh on them. Robot riders and raiders, determined to harry the Convoy.

The goal of the raiders is to crash their vehicles into the Convoy, to slow or halt them. Drifters will need to either fight at a distance… Or hope that their monster side is tough enough for close and bloody combat!

02-A: ATTACK AND AFTERMATH

The attack patterns of the raiders depends on who they are targeting and how transformed the Drifters are. More monstrous Drifters earn full fury, and the vehicles blare with static and a patchy message: “…Purge… Corruption… By steel.” The raiders are determined to kill monsters, even at the cost of their own lives.

By contrast, less transformed Drifters may be overlooked, or only looked at suspicion. But if examined long enough, the raiders will eventually conclude less changed Drifters as still corrupt and attack them, especially if they are associated with the more monstrous!

Afterwards, mechanical salvage can be found to bolster the Convoy vehicles. The machines display a moon stabbed by a sword. It is the same as the symbols on the trap cars from February. Several raiders also carry odd talismans that resemble a rosary formed of tiny computer screens. Many of the screens are broken, but a few carry flickering text: “Your charge: To hunt the Warped. To purify the broken land, purge all sickness that twists us. Only then can Nirvana be opened, and the world reborn without corruption.”

03: OASIS

Just off the road are scattered oases, shining like blue gems in a red wasteland. The waters run surprisingly deep, with monstrous statues submerged in the depths. These statues resemble all 13 types of monsters, some of them even coloring the water depths into shades of green, purple, and red.

The oasis waters can’t fix or restore physical transformations. But it can cure any heat exhaustion with just a few sips, and restore lost strength. Red water can heal wounds, green restores magic fatigue, and purple can stabilize mental exhaustion and strain.

The statues also create a strange resonance on Drifters’ Sigil marks, particularly when Drifters submerge in the water. The statue resonance can’t completely revert transformations but they CAN spread out the transformation between two Drifters and lessen the potency.

04: MONSTER SHIFT, CHIMERA

Peculiar flowers bloom along some of the thorn brush. Drifters who bleed from the thorns will find that their cuts turn into Traits belonging to either Chimera or Unicorns. Chimeras typically appear from red flowered plants, and become increasingly tougher as they gain more traits. The following is also available:
+Tower focus: if growing extra eyes or heads, vision becomes disorienting. Focusing on the tower will help sharpen vision and provide clarity.
+Thermal flight on new wings, as the hot air coming off the ground helps them soar.
+Territorial hunter vs other fully shifted monsters/enemies.
+Blood taste/frenzy: becomes more savage as blood is shed, whether that is their own or others. If it is their own or an enemy, more aggressive; if it is an ally, more protective.
+An increasingly carnivorous and voracious appetite. Plus a craving for raw meat, and a drive to go hunt it personally; the fresher, the better.
+Tough hide. As 3 or more Chimera traits become active, the skin becomes increasingly tougher and harder for cuts and new transformations to occur.
+A sudden roar that cuts into words, easy for conversations to turn into a shouting match.

04: MONSTER SHIFT, UNICORN

As with Chimera, getting cut and bled by flower bearing thorns will impart unicorn traits on Drifters. This typically comes from thorn plants with white flowers. Unicorns have a knack for stabilizing the more violent changes… And perhaps even stopping transformations from bleeding. The following is also available:
+Horn Resonance, a ringing in the horn or forehead the closer one gets to the tower. Can result in either disorientation, or a boost in healing.
+Shift Healing: At the cost of taking on another unicorn/current monster trait, may heal another Drifter of one active trait. This can only be used once per character.
+An increasingly vegetarian diet, including the flowers off various thorn bushes.
+Increased pain or disorientation in the forehead as horn grows in. May also experience pain in feet (hooves) or back (wings or tail) though healing magic can alleviate pain.
+A compulsion to heal the injured or protect those who can. Similarly, a compulsion to protect the virtuous and aid them.
+Fight or Flight response: more likely to bolt at the sign of trouble with increased speed. If fleeing is not possible (or others are in danger) ready to fight to the death in desperate frenzy.
+Urge to run and be outdoors, gains an almost euphoric sensation when running at full speed.

05: TWISTED LAND

Finally the Convoy draws close to the tower and the moon glows balefully overhead, signaling an imminent Moon Warp. Shards of the tower fall away, exposing something encased in the surface. A chimera monster is pierced and pinned to the tower by swords. Elemental blood streams down, glowing in reaction to the Drifters, and causing the blades to glow in turn.

If Drifters make contact with the swords, they explode in a hail of shards, causing more wounds and damaging the tower. The shed blood twists the landscape. Deserts, forests, and swamps all shift together. With them come the hazards of those environments; quicksand, falling trees or strangling vines, terrible draining heat, all blending and switching without pattern. Such twisting weakens the tower. Further fragments break off and turn into monsters, aggressive and ready to fight. The Convoy braces against the twisting, but warning screens say that the shields are low on power. The shields occasionally waver, letting in the Moon Warp and monsters.

With the damage Drifters inflict in their battles, the environment twisting, and the sword shards, the tower crumbles away. It emits a burst of energy that disperses the land twisting, and ends the bloodshed transformations.

06: SALVE

In the aftermath of the warp, the tower has cracked and broken. A column of wavering light takes its place, reaching thin tendrils up towards the moon.

The red ichor leaks out of the tower in rivers, and any Husk it comes in contact with breaks open without transforming into a monster, instead releasing another glowing shard that travels upwards. Drifters can still harness this ichor to undo one change, though the limits still apply. Submerging in the ichor does not undo more than one change… Though it will stain Drifters with red.

The ichor can also heal wounds, and repair those quite thoroughly, acting as a good salve to mend Drifters from past battles.

MICRO ENCOUNTERS:

PLEASE NOTE! These are small bits of set dressing for players to include in threads if they wish, rather than full fledged prompts or events. You may handwave your exploration of these areas, or thread them out.

Twisted Creatures: Local fauna (flying rabbits, jackalopes, gorgons wandering in from the grasslands, etc) gets caught in the thorn bushes and begins bleeding, and turning into a monster. The process is slow and painful, giving Drifters enough time to get away from the scrub brush and the monster if they wish; or enough time to try and dispatch the creature.

Thorn brush: Clumps of thorn brush line the road. A time or two they even grow over the road and need to be hacked through, in order for the Convoy to proceed. The brush is almost like razor wire, with how sharp the thorns are, and how ready they are to slice up skin.

Watering Hole: Rarely, one can find a small oasis in the bleached land. Unfortunately, many of the twisted creatures want a drink from this place as well; it’s a task to grab water and avoid getting on their bad side.

NAVIGATION

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The raider is damn heavy compared to something else of similar size, but his demon is strong enough to grab its arm and swing it into two of the other raiders about to attack him.

"Can you still drive?"

He hopes the vehicle isn't damaged that's it's rendered immobile. Even if it might be out of the frying pan and into a fire -- he doesn't have time to think about that turn of phrase -- moving with the rest of the Convoy and other Drifters would be safer than here, surrounded. With a new person that's so obviously non-human showing up, some of raiders' and chromehounds' interest in Jolie appear to be redirecting towards Serph.

"Uh-- yes!" She throws the car in reverse, but waits for him to give whatever his signal is before gunning the engine. Because she's definitely going to run into more chromehounds and a dismounted raider when she does, and she wants to make sure he's handling as much as possible.

As chrome hounds jump for him, Serph lets out a loud hiss, pillars of ice forming a wall that prevents the raiders and hounds from reaching Jolie. It can only hold them back temporarily at best -- as it is, great cracks appear on their surface as a raider slams the pommel of its sword into it -- but temporary is all that's needed to give the other drifter the opportunity to flee.

After the fighting is over, Serph decides to search for the drifter he had helped. He's back in his winged human form so he can drive. When he spots Jolie and her vehicle, he pulls up alongside and leans out the window. "Hey. Are you alright?"

The demon, Jolie hadn't seen before. Serph with his six wings, she has, albeit from a distance, so she doesn't stare at him. She got all that out of her system a few days ago, and no longer thinks he's actually an angel or anything. None of them are actually anything from Earth.

She does blink at him, vaguely baffled at the question, but then she realizes he might have seen her car get surrounded. She rolls her window down to answer him. "Yeah. Some big guy with no face came and knocked me a path free. With these big walls of ice. It was super cool."

The corner of Serph's mouth curls up into the smallest of smiles, expression softening. "That was me."

He is the cool guy.

Jolie pauses, narrows her eyes at him, clearly trying to interpose the big faceless guy with this angel-guy. Not that an angel-guy isn't cool, too, but there's not a lot of overlap. The voice sounds... a little like that voice? Maybe?

"How did you do that?" she asks bluntly. "Is it like the guy who can turn into a big purple tiger...?"

...The guy who can turn into a what?

Serph's confusion furrows his brows briefly before he nods, replying, "I can turn into the big guy with no face." And because he doesn't want to be referring to Varuna as the big guy with no face in any future interactions -- that's just ridiculous -- he adds, "That's my demon's form."

Look she met V really early on and they were in full-on panther form. And the way the sun shone on their fur made them look kind of purple.

"Oh," she says, blinking at him. "So it kind of is like the guy who can turn into a tiger. And don't demons not usually have forms? That's kind of the point-- I mean, if they exist, they're invisible tempters who try to make you do things that aren't right." A pause, then an allowance for people from other worlds since that is a thing you have to allow for, "At least that's what I was taught. Maybe it's different where you come from."

Sorry, Serph, she did kinda grow up Christian, and she hasn't quite grown out of it yet.

Hm, that's sort of what Faith had said about vampires. Though the corner of his mouth curls up in mild amusement. In a way, she isn't exactly wrong about what Varuna is like.

"I'm not an invisible tempter who will try to make you do things that aren't right."

At least, not intentionally?

"What's a tiger?"

Definitely not from her world, then, if he doesn't even know what a tiger is. "Uh. A really big cat with stripes. Like... this big." She holds her hand out along the window ledge of her car to show a tiger's shoulder height. "Usually they're orange, but that one was a kind of purplish black. Said their name was V."

Serph blinks in recognition. Oh! So V's form looks like a tiger? He knew they looked like a cat, but he hadn't known there were other kinds of cats. Not that he's really seen a variety of cats to begin with... Just the one black cat with the silver ear and eyes that always looked like they saw right through him.

"I know V. Yes, we're similar." Though he adds to clarify, "My transformation is from before my arrival here."

Strangely, he's seen some monsters that look exactly like demons from Nirvana. But there's no sign of human intelligence behind their eyes; if monsters like the Anzu were truly once human, they're gone now.

"Were you always like that?" Jolie asks, tapping her fingers idly on the car door. "Like, was there a horrible curse that turned you from a normal person into a person who can turn into a demon, or were you, I don't know, born like that? Is there a species of demon people?"

Hah. Curse. Gale had called the Atma virus a cursed power, his first emotional outburst since they gained their demons.

The dubious title of 'normal person' isn't exactly one that sits comfortably with him. So he elaborates, "I wasn't born. I was created. Then infected with a virus that changed me."

Jolie's brows go right up to her hairline, and she leans a little further out the car window towards him. "Created how?"

Nevermind that sometimes Serph will refer to newly made rookies as being born with the rain. Was he born with the rain? Surely he was? Do people normally remember their birth?

He doesn't exactly know the details to answer the question. But... "My original world was made by another. It was virtual."

"Whoah. Like an AI?" She leans out even further, looking intrigued and maybe a little bit delighted. She's had very good experiences with AIs, and while she knows that Ed is not necessarily representative of them in general, so far Serph has proved to be pretty cool.

Though: "How did you get a body? The AI I know doesn't have a body, unless you count, I guess, the computer system he does his processing from. It doesn't look anything like yours, though."

Serph nods -- yes, exactly like an AI -- before shrugging at the second question. "I've always had a body."

He doesn't know the exact mechanism of him having a body in a non-virtual world though. Maybe it's because the line between virtual and real is like crossing the boundary between their home worlds and this one.

"I kept it when I crossed between worlds." He gestures to himself in a sweeping motion with one hand. "This is all flesh and blood."

"That's so weird. And also cool. I wish I could get Ed a body," Jolie says wistfully. She misses Ed. And her family. And the ocean. Ugh. She shakes herself a little. "Anyway, it's nice to meet you. Kind of meet you. We haven't introduced ourselves."

She fixes this by sticking her hand out of the window in his direction, for a handshake. It's a very adult way to introduce yourself, okay, and she's trying to be grown up right now. "I'm Jolie."

Oh! A handshake. He understands what that is (now). Last time it wasn't exactly something done via a window but Serph's determined not to make a mess of it this time.

Similarly reaching out through his window, Serph grips her hand (not too tightly) and shakes it... twice. Twice seems like a more reasonable number than what Fred had done.

"Serph." He lets go of her hand. Did he do it right this time??

It's a good handshake! Jolie grins up at him with less maturity than she'd been aiming for when he does it, too, and shakes back firmly exactly twice, too. "It's nice to meet you, Serph. And thanks. You know, for saving my butt back there."

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APRIL EVENT LOG

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