route666rp | MAY EVENT LOG

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MAY EVENT LOG

Out of the thorn brush, the land still looks twisted and broken. And it turns a lot more jagged as rocks burst up and out of the ground like teeth… And keep reaching upwards, in defiance of all the gravity that should be pulling them down. The further up the rock spires reach, the more they splinter until the stones are free floating. The same happens to the threadbare trees, their branches and leaves breaking off and hovering in empty air. The nature of this place becomes clear: reach too high, and eventually gravity gives up.

01: BATTLE GROUND

The ground grows rougher, pockmarked with craters and rents, like the landscape is scarred. A little further up the road is the source of those wounds. Curious Drifters will find a tangle of rock and metal reaching high up to the sky. It’s a snarl of wrecked vehicles, rock spires… And bodies.

Robotic hunters are half melted into the bones of a giant monster, and the lights have long since gone out of their lens eyes. Many of them still clutch weapons; swords, guns, and bullets by the bag-full. The hunters and weapons remain locked with the corpse of a horn crowned monster with arm length teeth, and it’s clear this tangle is the only thing that keeps the hunters or their weapons from floating off. Drifters can potentially loot the weapons… They just have to be careful about not floating off while they salvage equipment. The footing here is uneven, and the ground looks ready to break with a wrong step.

These hunters also carry prayer screen beads, but the data on them is horribly scrambled. Any attempts to tamper with them cause them to repeat a single message: “I STILL LIVE” before shorting out and shutting down.

02: HEALTH INVERSION 

A building grows out of the valley; a hospital that has been turned upside down, and its foundations reach for the sky like weird tree branches. The hallways inside are all sorts of twisted up, and the building can’t seem to decide if Drifters should walk on the ceiling or the floors.

Twisted as the building is, ruins gutted by time and overgrown with vegetation… There is salvage available. Medical supplies, healing potions, healing herbs, all of it is bountiful in the hospital. The hospital is also rife with Husks, but all of them are inert… Or have already been broken apart long ago.

Then there’s the matter of the hospital screens flickering on in the wake of the Drifters. Warning lights try to flicker on, as old electronics try to scan the Drifters. The machines give up flickers of data, declaring Drifters to be “infected.” The old restraining systems of the hospital are still active, as manacles and straps alike shoot out, trying to restrain Drifters. The bonds keep them inert until they can be sedated and enclosed in what look like holding pens for violent patients. Best hope there’s someone around to help break a Drifter out.

03: SHARED THOUGHTS

The valley is overgrown with strange plants that glow with eerie light. Sometimes in camp stray glowing tumbleweeds roll through… And any contact has interesting side effects. Drifters will find they’re more aware and capable of picking up on unsaid things. These powers can the month. Each glow confers different abilities:

Blue Glow: Makes Drifters more empathetic in a psychic sense. They can register the emotions of those nearby, and may start to feel those same emotions.
Green Glow: Makes Drifters capable of projecting their emotions to other people.
Purple Glow: Gives Drifters telepathy, to hear and send thoughts to others.
Orange Glow: Grants Drifters limited psychometry. (Object reading.) Using it in the hospital or the battleground will yield unique visions and messages. Please comment to the mod/NPC thread below if your character wishes to do so!

Drifters can stack these effects, but this can overload their minds and force transformations. Those with Swarm traits will find it easier to handle psionic abilities. Additionally, ALL DRIFTERS who experience psionics will find themselves susceptible to Events 4 and 5.

04: MONSTER SHIFT, HIVE-MIND

Worryingly, extra contact with the glowing plants can not only stack mind abilities, but also force Swarm traits. The more a Drifter is overwhelmed by psionics, the more likely this is. Drifters will have access to all Swarm traits for this event, and the following:
+Psi Hunger. A need to eat psychic energy in the form of dreams, psi-infused objects (like sage brush) or even psychic minds.
+Psi Senses: luckily, Drifters can glimpse heavy psychic energy in the brush through enhanced senses, and pick out strange brain monsters. These are good eating for Swarm monsters… And there’s an unnervingly high number of them.
+Group Mind: compelled to link thoughts with other Drifters, to share emotions, memories, and achieve cohesion.
+An increasing reliance on telepathy/empathy/etc in place of speech.
+Increasing collectivist mindset. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few; this becomes more evident during high stress situations.
+Compelled to spend more time in the wilds, absorbing power from plants and hunting prey in wilderness. May also be compelled to share this prey with others.
+Gravity Affinity: If possessing wings or the ability to wall climb, may freely hunt/traverse corrupted gravity areas.

05: WHAT DREAMS MAY COME

On several nights the wind picks up, and sage brush is uprooted and sent tumbling into camp. The plants trade their prior glow to something more baleful and crimson. With the wind whipping through the camp, it’s almost impossible to avoid unless a Drifter is already secure in the Convoy.

The effects aren’t immediately obvious, until the Convoy sleeps for the night… And that sleep is different. Namely the sleep is connected, showing both memories and dreams from other Drifters.

Memories from their pasts can blend together to form a strange dreamscape, that connected Drifters can travel through. But those dreams can easily turn into nightmares. Those who were exposed to the fear toxin in February will trend towards nightmares and may have their old fears make a reappearance.
If those nightmares are vivid and unsettling enough, they can force a transformation. (This may be either current monster traits, or a Swarm monster!) And then…

06: BRAIN ATTACK 

It happens just before dawn, during the blue hour… Or perhaps it might be more apt to call it the red hour, with how the sky is stained crimson. It’s just bright enough to distinguish something moving in the hills. Drifters can pick out a rustling in the brush; something that isn’t wind. There’s something moving, crawling on claw tipped legs… And looking less like sage brush and more like a brain.

The Intellect Devourers numbers in the hundreds. Their claws scour the ground as they race towards the Convoy and smash into the shield. Numbers start to overwhelm the generator, along with the chaos the brain brush has sown with their psychic echoes.

The psychic echoes increase as they swarm the campsite, trying to drive Drifters into a frenzy with nightmares, fears, and strange visions. The brains are also ready to use those long sharp claws to tear anyone disoriented enough into ribbons, and start feasting on them.

06-A: BRAIN BRAWL 

Hallucinations: The Intellect Devourers try to whip up more terrifying visions. Anything to disorient the entire Convoy, or drive the Drifters into a madness that leaves them transformed and too wild to easily counterattack. These hallucinations may be past trauma, or something a Drifter fears happening; the ultimate goal is to leave Drifters panicking, changed, and vulnerable.

Rally: Still, there’s one thing the Devourers didn’t anticipate: and that is how sharing a mental link has given the Drifters an anchor with each other. With all the psychic echoes spreading through the camp, any and all mental links from before can easily flare back up. Drifters who have shared dreams or some form of mental connection may still transform, but their mental link can keep their minds stable and coherent instead of growing feral.

Scars: Whether through brute force battles or mental link resistance, eventually the Convoy is able to shrug off the attack… But there is still some damage done. The shield generator has shorted out, and the Convoy itself has taken a few gashes and gouges. Not to mention any transformed Drifters will still need to be talked down. Luckily the mental links are still in place to help with that, and there’s a truck full of medical supplies to help with patching up any hurts.

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.

Disorientation: When wandering through the brush, Drifters may experience a swarm of disorientation: their thoughts suddenly scramble, they forget where they were going or what they were doing. They may also come to with a set of gashes along their legs, and a sense that they may have seen something in the sage brush move… Or maybe it was just the wind.

Float: Occasionally, parts of the road just give up their hold on the ground and go drifting skywards. Hopefully those chunks of road don’t take Drifters and their vehicles with them. Tough vehicles can likely survive the drop, while Fast vehicles can speed away before they float too far upwards. Drifters caught outside their vehicles will have to hope they have fast reflexes… Or are either good fliers or good jumpers for the leap back down.

Raining Down: On occasion, gravity will flicker and warp oddly… And that means that other odd things can fall where they used to float; rocks, plants, not to mention the odd bit of hardware and buildings. Watch for falling objects of various shapes and sizes!

NAVIGATION

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If one counts purely by duration, then most of John's remembered life has been spent in Hell. The Dark World. But surely time spent there doesn't count as life, not in the way mortals understand it— so by any reasonable mortal metric, most of John's life has been spent here, in Revan. And in a dim underground pit, trapped within the eyes and hand and foot of a man who hated him.

It was reasonable for Arthur to hate him, at the time. And Arthur did... did try to die for him, at the end, in a way. So he can't have hated John entirely. They were still friends. Still: for much of that long stretch, John had little in the way of warmth of pleasure. The highlight of his day, the measure by which he privately kept time, was when Arthur recounted his dreams.

Clear blue skies. A gull wheeling, white and serene, far above. The glitter of the light on the ocean, just past the vibrancy of the beach. He has dwelt on that secondhand vision so long he knows it better than many of his own memories.

But he'd never imagined the salt tang in the air. The sound of the waves, a layered rhythmic roar. The way it all glitters. He stands entranced on the shoreline, gazing out breathless upon it all.

The beach.

It's a pleasant dream that Serph has held on to ever since he woke to his emotions, blood in his mouth and the sound of ocean waves crashing upon a shore he's never seen. It's a dream that had slowly filled out as he collected more and more fragments of his memories. A beautiful ship -- a cruise liner, not a battleship like Gale had hypothesised -- floats at sea in the horizon. A house -- mansion -- settled somewhere further up the shore.

But the vision is incomplete. Serph doesn't know what lies in the spaces between. It's a void in the environment, the type of thing that eyes would simply slide over.

Serph is beside John, wings tucked in close, gaze turned up towards the sun. Unlike his other dreams, the sun is... normal, bathing them in warm, gentle light. "This Nirvana. The one I've sought since the beginning of my existence."

"It's beautiful."

He means it, even as he begins to catch upon the missing details. The gaps, the uncanny liminal nothingness at beauty's edge. He has known landscapes like this in the Dreamlands. It is not the sort of sight one finds on Earth.

"Is this what the Convoy is seeking?" In moments like these, John holds strangely still: he forgets the ability to turn his own head, and simply basks in the vision as presented. "Or... or just what they want us to think we'll find?"

Serph shakes his head. He originally held hope that the Convoy's destination would be this. But as they travel he's more and more certain that his image of Nirvana and the Convoy's Nirvana are not the same. In all likelihood, it's the same false promise that had been dangled in front of him.

Still, the real Nirvana must exist, surely? Why else would he have these visions of a blue sky and a beach? The sound of ocean waves washing up a shore he's never seen must come from somewhere.

"Ever since I gained my demon, I started to see this place in my sleep. A blue sky. Ocean waves. Things that didn't exist in my original world." He casts his gaze out towards the water. "The promised land of peace."

John nods with a new certainty. He cannot confess that he doesn't dream, not usually; he is the sort of entity that inhabits dreams, and that is how he knows they can be just as real as anything else. This must be part of one such realm, out beyond the wall of sleep.

"Then it's a place beyond your world, and beyond the world of the Convoy. If you still dream of it just as vividly, then perhaps it's still out there."

He stands quiet for another long moment, simply watching the movement of the waves.

"I'm glad I get to see it."

Edited 2025-06-04 15:44 (UTC)

Serph nods, quietly watching the waves with John in comfortable silence despite how awkward things had been between them since the moon warp. Yes.... Nirvana must exist somewhere. This place, the fact it is in his memory when so much else is missing means it must exist.

Before the silence can stretch for too long, Serph turns his gaze towards John.

"You're not human." It's said calmly without a hint of accusation in his voice, a simple statement of fact. "What are you?"

John goes very still.

He does not dare to meet Serph's eyes. Instead he holds himself taut, silent, gaze fixed out on the dream's horizon. Is it a trap? Did Serph bring him here intentionally, to a familiar domain, so that John has no escape from questioning? It's what John himself would have done, in an earlier life. It's what the King did to Arthur.

His throat works in silence for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is very level.

"I'm not... just human." It's what Serph said to him, out under the moon, with gore slicked all down his chin. In the moments before they hit the water. "I used to be something else. But I've been changing." He hesitates a moment, then presses, more softly: "I am trying to change."

Something else turned human, then? He can understand how difficult it is to grapple with doing something that goes against everything you once were. Even now, he struggles to conceive of non-violent ways to spend his time.

Jack, John, himself... they make for a strange collection of people, don't they? They all have a side to them that craves the hunt.

"I'm not angry. I want to know, so I can understand." His voice is soft, as calm and even as ever. "I had my demon before my arrival. Violence is all I knew. But I don't want to keep being that way, too."

"It's not easy to explain what I was. It's even more difficult to explain what I am."

This is a thin avoidance. Countless beings have their own term for Great Old One; the concept is widespread, older than entire worlds. Before he was John, he was something eternal.

"But..." He hesitates, and then looks from the sea to Serph, searching his face. His gaze lingers on the sigil stamped there, just as the Yellow Sign curls down from his own eye. It's jarring to reconcile Serph's ever-mild expression with the demon's teeth, and there's some relief in that: John can only hope that he seems so distanced from his own worst self. "Perhaps you do understand. Better than most. Because I... I was much the same."

He lifts his hands, his-and-Arthur's hands, and frowns down at their harmless human fingertips. Flexes his fingers slowly, recalling claws.

"It was more than violence, more than mindless hunger. All I knew was cruelty. And I don't want to be that way anymore."

That was the monster John could be. The one who saw prey trying to escape and dragged him further down the oasis' depths. The one that held him beneath the surface to watch air leave his lungs and life choke out of him in gurgling gasps.

"For us who are man and monster... I don't know if we can escape our natures."

His demon's hunger is unending, but there is a thrill of satisfaction at a successful hunt, a pleasure at the sensation of warm meat and blood sliding down his throat. In this world, he has to hold back the roar of triumph that once marked every kill.

And he knows well enough that those feelings aren't all from his demon.

"But if we were just monsters, who we hurt wouldn't matter." Maybe it's Jack's influence, but Serph steps forward to carefully take John's hands in his. Jack had spent most of their conversation holding his hand, and Serph had found it strangely grounding. "It was the part of you that's cruelty who tried to take my life. But it's the you who is trying to change that gave it back."

From the first touch of Serph's hands on his, John blinks up at him, eyes gone wide and bright. His fingers tense and hesitate, then relax into Serph's grip.

He still thinks of himself, even now, as Arthur's left hand. He has possession of all the rest, yes, but he does not have claim to it— not without Arthur here to work alongside him in thrilling moments of symbiosis. The hand has felt... earned, in a sense, since he let Arthur take the joint between his teeth. That pain was his. That blood was his.

This pleasure is his. Serph's gentle thumbs smoothing over his knuckles, the warmth of Serph's palms against his own.

"Yes." His voice comes soft and low. "We can try to become better versions of ourselves. That's what makes us human."

Serph nods, running his thumb over the back of John's knuckles like Jack had done when sitting with him. "I'm sorry. For hurting you during the moon warp."

Even though John had been the one to pitch him into the oasis (and the one to drown him), Serph hadn't exactly been particularly gentle in his response after having life breathed back into him. He'd torn into John, cut into him over and over again, partaken of his flesh and blood alike.

But Jack had said John had liked it?

The memory of that conversation completely derails his original train of thought, instead replacing what he was going to ask with, "...But you didn't seem to mind?"

There's an uncertain lilt to his voice, a small furrowing of his brows that sometimes happens when faced with some new human concept he finds particularly perplexing because it's so at odds with his understanding.

The effect is immediate: John melts under the gentle movement of Serph's thumb. All the tension drops at once from his shoulders.

It jolts up again full force at the question.

"I'm sorry as well." He stumbles over the apology, fixes Serph with a pained look. "It was... freeing, I suppose. To fall back into old ways. But— I mean, we can be better than that. Both of us." Jack had entirely the wrong idea, he's sure, when he suggested they'd want to do it again. "I don't blame you, Serph. We weren't thinking straight."

Serph keeps John's hands held in his, his wings relaxed as he speaks, shaking his head.

"It wasn't all pain and hurt." He had been hungry. He closes his hands over John's. "I liked it." A pause before he adds, "When you weren't trying to kill me."

He didn't like that part.

What was it that Jack had said again? That desire wasn't a bad thing, as long as both of them wanted it?

He keeps his gaze on John's face, as if he could beam the fact that he did not dislike most of what had happened during that moon warp into John's mind. "I was willing."

He might feel guilty about the consequences of what they did -- letting Jack down and allowing the wolf escape -- but as for the actual act itself, he doesn't exactly regret it, if John had been willing, too.

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MAY EVENT LOG

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