thecrossinglogs | THE CROSSING #2

Entry tags:

THE CROSSING #2

It's that time again.

For more detail on the particulars of the event, be sure to refer to our info and planning post!

always keep moving

— CLOUDS ON THE HORIZON

The Desert is sprawling. If you've ever gotten turned around in the rolling dunes, it may have once felt endless. But in the weeks and days before the descent of The Crossing, something appears on the horizon: first a dark smudge of storm clouds, not unlike the others that have rolled through before, then growing — wider, darker, and more threatening.

You feel it, too. For some of you the feeling is new; for others it's a reminder of a trial you've been through before. It's a weight in your body, a solidity of your self, a vulnerability to whatever is approaching.

The storm overtakes the oasis. As the first drops of rain begin to fall, The Ferryman speaks in your mind.

It's time. Those who are prepared to pay the toll are instructed to gather on the bank of The River. As for the rest of you... we hope you have a plan.

taking refuge

— THE RIVER OF MUD

The storm hits hard and fast. Even as you gather around The Ferryman, the rain grows from spitting droplets to a desert monsoon. The Ferryman's protection only goes so far: even if you're promised safety from danger, you'll still have to cope with the cold, the wind, and the water.

As before, The Lantern's Light grows dark. As before, The Ferryman gathers memories one by one, consolidated into a mote of light in their palm that becomes the new center point for the growing temporary bubble of safety. But this time— what it was too dark to notice in the Cavern before— you realize that The Ferryman themselves is changing, too. Their form fades as the light in their hands grows, becoming as fuzzy and insubstantial as mist... not unlike the wraiths, outside of The Crossing.

The sparkling white salt flat before you begins to melt and grow murky, exposing the sticky, grasping mud beneath. The Ferryman glides out over the roiling muck of The River, and so do you, your steps as light as if there were still a crust of salt to separate you from the mud before.

You must keep moving, though. Linger too long, and you'll start to sink... and the mud might not let go, this time.

— A HAVEN FROM THE WANTS AND ILLS OF LIFE

The journey is arduous, and the storm is unrelenting. The Ferryman, unfamiliar as they might be in this form, leads confidently through the blur of lightning, wind, and rain. As before, the mote of light created from your memories follows in their footsteps, illuminating the path to follow along the wide expanse of The River.

Even with The Ferryman's protection, it is exhausting work. It's as mentally taxing as it is physically draining. As such, when the path forward begins to shudder and shift, it may come as a reprieve. The wall of wind and rain finally breaks, the Desert around you replaced by... somewhere else. A place you may recognize, or may not.

Whatever stress or fear you may have been feeling from your journey wanes, replaced by feelings of calm, peace, or joy. If the place you are in is unfamiliar, the feelings are muted, as if they don't quite belong to you... but surely this is better than returning to the monsoon? Perhaps you can rest a while. Play a game, recover in shelter, or take a meditative walk through a maze. What's a few minutes, anyway? Time hardly means anything anymore.

Just don't forget: if you linger too long in any one place, the mud of The River will start to suck you down. It's best to stay alert— and to keep an eye on those traveling with you, as well.

storm chasers

— SWEPT AWAY

The Desert isn't designed to weather a storm like this one. Beyond the pounding rain and cracking lightning, those of you who have decided to travel without The Ferryman must also navigate the environment itself. Flash floods sweep through lower-lying places in the dunes, where the sand isn't able to absorb water quickly enough. Creatures that may have been docile before are now panicked, and might impede your progress, or even lash out themselves.

And, of course, there are the wraiths.

They're easier to spot this time around, across the rolling dunes. It's easier to make out just how much they've changed as well: the claws, the teeth, the exaggerated proportions... and the unmistakable pain and fury in every movement, in every shriek and wail.

You are vulnerable to any and all injury during this time, whether from the wraiths, the wildlife, or the elements. As long as you follow your gut, you'll know where to go — but we hope you have a strategy, all the same.

— AN EYE IN THE STORM

At least in the Cavern, you had cover. Nooks and crannies, branching tunnels, rocky outcroppings... But out here, beneath the wide-open sky of the Desert, there's very little in terms of shelter. The odd plateau, or cave entrance, or inexplicable feature might grant you some reprieve, but there's always more sand to cross in-between.

On occasion, however, you may spot a strange sort of wraith watching you at a distance. Some of you may even recognize it: an eerie, dissembling creature that some have dubbed the Smart Wraith. Its form, like the others, has solidified into something grotesque and painful, as if its body has been plucked like clay by a particularly spiteful child. Unlike the others, though, it does not attack, or even approach. It simply watches, as it always have.

If you have the presence of mind to notice, however, you may find that there are occasional reprieves from wraith attacks, especially across longer stretches of dunes. They're brief, but often crucially timed (such as when someone is significantly injured, or when a flood has just rolled through), and always correspond to a moment when The Wraith can be found watching from some far-flung vantage point.

It's odd, certainly. But do you have the luxury of looking a gift horse in the mouth?

stormbreak

— CLEARING SKIES

Eventually, the storm calms. Your body lightens. The atmosphere realigns.

The Crossing ends.

The thick, sucking mud of The River has become shallow and waterlogged. It's easy to wade through now, if a touch... unpleasant. Fibrous plants and reeds line the sloped banks, inexplicably dotted with bright orange flowers. Light is low, though the sky has cleared, as if wherever you are now lingers in perpetual dusk.

If you were traveling with The Ferryman, the mirages that dogged your journey finally fade and stay gone. If you were traveling on your own, any wounds you sustained heal rapidly on their own. As before, the healing is natural, but on fast-forward, and thus may not always resolve perfectly.

For both groups, memories bleed away from you - perhaps literally, perhaps not. Anything you found in the Desert, unless given to you by The Ferryman, is gone from your pockets.

When you look again, The Ferryman appears just the same as they were before The Crossing began. Let's take a break, they say. It's been a long journey.

It certainly has.

Image credits: 1, 2 + OMORI'S STORY, and stock imagery unless otherwise noted

code

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Because we've got gryphons? Yeah, those were fantasy for us too, until we started getting people who really understood biology and had endless resources to pour into 'making myths real' and giving themselves legacies.

[a little bitterness there in the sarcasm, Need?]

Nowhere belongs to me, kid.

When you say it like that, it makes you sound like a very cool, lone wolf wanderer! [Very fitting for a fantasy novel! Though he is going to circle back to that gryphon thing, hang on.] So gryphons were bioengineered? With magic or technology?

Hah! No, I go... I went nowhere alone. I just never stayed with anyone, or in one place, long.

[by Need's standards anyway.]

At a high enough level they're the same. A scientific understanding of magic gives it more options, more predictably. Not that the intuitive approach isn't valuable, but when someone was creating a whole species that's supposed to live on after their death, predictable, replicable results were important so the whole team could use them.

It started with just modifying animals. Then someone - don't remember the name - had the bright idea, hey, what if grasswolves had brains modeled after humans? and making a new species of people who loved you as their creator became a fad.

If you understand it that well, can you even call it magic anymore? [Of course you can literally, but then it really is just another kind of science. Of course, that must be what Need means by them being the same at a high enough level.] Something like that... In my world--not that we have magic, but theoretically--someone with that much skill would almost certainly be said to have a talent. Their accomplishments would be lauded. But it doesn't sound like you think that.

Of course you can. Understanding magic doesn't make it something else, you're still reading the world and manipulating it without using hands and eyes.

[She's aware of some 'modern' people, like her final bearer Firesong, who struggled with the idea that magic could be understood with numbers and formulae and felt it was cheapened by the effort. Need had felt like that herself once, a long time ago.]

Hah. One very powerful mage can warp an animal this way and that and maybe the changes will breed true for more than a generation, but 'uplifting' animals to make new species that reason and talk takes a lot of cooperation. Maybe a few names get famous off it but the actual work takes dozens, hundreds of people to help, working for years. Or it took. I don't know if anything like that will ever be possible again.

I'm not saying it wasn't an incredible achievement each and every time. I just... [Need shakes her head, feeling tired. There are a lot of reasons she just, and she's not sure if any of them will make sense to a fanatic who thinks some people are valuable and some are worthless.] It was all very self-congratulatory. Not to mention most of the people who commissioned or helmed these projects and tried to have their names live on like that were forgotten pretty quickly after the Cataclysm.

[Nagito does, at least, seem to be genuinely thinking about what Need says. It's easier when it's not his own world--he can tell himself the rules are different, the same way some of the others' worlds have things like magic.

(And maybe there are some things in his world--some experiments--that had brilliant results but still probably shouldn't have been done at all. It's not something he can approach consciously, but it swirls, nebulous, in his mind regardless.)] I think your world is very different from mine, Need-san. But you had a Cataclysm, and we had a Tragedy, so maybe it's not entirely different.

[That's about as much as he can allow.]

[Need wonders if that's a diplomatic answer to placate her. Probably not. There doubtless are a lot of depths to Nagito and he does clearly put on a front but she doesn't think he's actually perceptive and intuitive in that particular way. If he actually is, he's not going to show it for a situation like this.

She takes off the bandana on her head, revealing thinning gray hair flattened against her skull by rainwater, and shakes it out of its molded-on shape so she can re-fold it and tie it back into place. It's really just something to do with her hands. Need knows she should move on before she's forced to, but that sense of exhaustion is still there.]

Yeah, well. Sometimes it's like that. Anyway.

All this was part of a city once. I don't know which one. There were a lot of cities back then. This would have been somewhere central or industrial, since there's black paving underfoot and there are this many treated pillars. If not for them, nature would have claimed this by now and there'd be little sign anyone was here at all.

Now, people whose ancestors fled west return and build houses in it. There were several, last time I actually saw it.

[Black paving and treated pillars... Nagito can't help but imagine something akin to a modern city in his own world, though he knows logically it could very well be quite different.]

They're rebuilding some of the cities in my world. But there are fewer people to live in them now, so maybe some of them will look something like this someday.

[He's--not sure what the right way is to feel about that. It's one seventeenth his fault, right? But somehow that feels far too boastful, to suggest he was anywhere near capable of an equal amount of effort compared to the others, and surely that's not the right emotion at all.

He just has a very strange, vaguely bitter look on his face, as a result.]

[The way the black stone surfaces have been melted and cracked and the pillars scattered as if knocked over by a careless hand makes it hard to picture exactly how they'd been set up, but it's not a totally alien arrangement. Lots of right angles, maybe not quite so grid-focused as a city with a layout planned on Earth.]

Give it time. Populations tend to rebound and they'll recolonize any ruins that don't obviously harm them to venture into. [this is absolutely not guaranteed in Velgarth, where there are still magic-irradiated regions that warp life, especially unborn life.] Things will be different. But eventually hardly anyone will think of all that was lost and be haunted by it. It will just be the world.

[Yep. Nagito's had something to do with this Tragedy that's not just 'it disrupted his life and killed a lot of people in his orbit'. The best case is that he'd had a chance to stop it and failed. She's not going to bet on that. Need, of course, has had something to do with the Cataclysm, though she doesn't hold herself responsible, exactly.]

The Cataclysm fucked things up to the point where after a couple of thousand years it started to echo. I'm not going into why, it's complicated. I'm here because I was one of the ones trying to stop it.

Ah, a death like that-- [Something in Nagito latches onto that, in the mood he's in.] That's one of the best kinds of deaths, I think! One that means something, that works to create more hope in the world! Mine was pretty useless by comparison.

[He'd really wanted to die being useful. But he knew that was just him being selfish and greedy again.]

[It's an unexpected reaction and she laughs.]

Kid, the thing I've been sealed into turned to a white-hot mist and just about exploded. I tried warning them but one of the living was blinded. My bearer preserved his sight but he was badly burned. If he hadn't taken up with a nice kestra'chern boy I'd be worried about him.

...But it was a good death, yeah. I didn't think I'd live through a second Cataclysm. If I joined in trying to stop it, there was a chance I'd make it, and if not - I wasn't afraid of dying. I was afraid of going without a fight.

How much warning did you have before you died?

Years. I died of a terminal illness. They gave me six months to a year to live at the time I was diagnosed, but well--I was lucky. [That's just how it is with him. Lucky enough to survive for years with the illnesses in his body, unlucky enough to die in a useless way that helps no one. But you wouldn't be able to tell he feels any way about it at all from the smile on his face.]

[Need gives a low whistle. It's a sympathetic expression, without stopping to spell it out. She's thinking he was managing with medications and that luck, and this tragedy cut off the medication source and eventually the illness caught up with him.]

That's why you're not in denial or squeamish about admitting you're dead.

Any symptoms stuck around? I've got this stab wound from my first death but I think it's because when I made myself a spirit-body to look alive I included it. It left kind of a big impression on me.

[she touches her chest, though her leather apron is intact and hides the wound.]

Ah, my hair. [Nagito tugs on a lock of it. The very ends are a sort of pinkish brown, but it's not the sort of thing someone would really notice unless they were particularly observant or it was pointed out. Still, the implication is obvious now: it wasn't always white.] Though I think some of that was from stress. I learned how to accept my luck eventually, but when I was a child I wasn't as good at it.

[As if that's something to be fondly embarrassed about--a childish mistake, to be so upset about horrible things happening to you.]

And back home people were always saying I was too thin. That seems to have stuck around.

[But he doesn't think he'd recognize himself if he looked any other way, honestly.]

[yep she's getting a picture here. when someone's helpless to change a terrible situation they sometimes end up regarding it in very strange ways to try to lessen the pain of being in it.

This does not in any way apply to Need, who struggled tremendously once but became genuinely fine with an existence that she's aware is objectively awful.]

Hm. Do you feel more tired during the Crossing? Are we closer to life generally, or life as we were alive?

[they've been here a good while and at last, the thin soil is showing spots as the first fat drops of rain start to patter.]

I was stuck in a hospital bed near the end, so my state now is better than it was at the end. [His eyes flick to the rain. They'll have to get moving soon.] I'd say my stamina is about what it was before things really started coming to a close. Luckily, I got used to doing a lot of walking, or Crossings might really be troublesome!

[You know, aside from the memory stuff.]

[Need adjusts the way her legs are arranged. She knows she should stand, she should go. Even the emotional contagion, however faded it is compared to the peak earlier, is basically an encouragement to face what needs facing. It's just...]

Yeah, you're too tall to easily carry.

[Celehar is a whole head shorter than Need and she'd faded fast under his weight. She's only got two or three inches on Nagito, even if she is built like a blacksmith and he's clearly very thin under the clothes. It's her age. Closer to her prime, she could have picked them both up and not run out of strength for hours.]

So, is that 'I've learned to ignore fatigue and weakness' or is it 'I'm actually fine'?

I'm fine! It would be embarrassing to have to be carried, after all.

[But really, he doesn't actually know the difference between those two options Need suggested.]

Don't say that around my prelate, I'm not having anyone mock him for it.

[She raises her eyebrows.]

In one, you're probably lightheaded and can feel your heart beating at least some of the time. It's harder to do things than if you were sitting around. The pain gets worse. Tunnel vision. Shortness of breath. Having to lock your knees now and then, or leaning on things to keep from collapsing. You may pass out. Any of that sound familiar?

In the other, none of that happens. You get a little strain going up inclines or after too long out and that's about it.

Ah, well, if I let things like that stop me I'd never get anywhere during a Crossing! [Passing out he really can't do much about, but he really is used to having to walk long distances even with his body the way it is.]

[By now watery mud is pooling on the ground, far faster than if it had merely started raining in a real place. Need sighs.]

Fine. I'll keep an eye on you. Shouldn't be hard, you're like a mop out there.

[Nagito zips up his jacket and tugs his hoodie over his head. It does very little to disprove the mop allegations.]

Really, you don't have to do much. Just dragging me would be fine, if it's really necessary!

[Just drag him on the ground. It's fine.]

Dragging would exacerbate my arthritis. I'd bind your wrists and get you on my back, make you into a really ungainly knapsack.

[would that actually be any better. Need looks at the water and sets her jaw, getting to her feet slowly. She's so reluctant to leave, but having to look strong is more important.]

Glad you're not trying to tell me to leave you. You should stick around for a while. [Need narrows her eyes.] It's always possible someone really awful will wash up with us eventually and have to be dealt with. If I floated a hypothetical of, hm, not paying my next toll so I could break such a person's ribs et cetera and make them less of a problem, I'd just shock all the others.

Yes, that sounds like the kind of suggestion that would start an argument. Better to just do it without saying anything, if something like that needs to happen. [It's an entirely matter-of-fact response. Nagito's tone is nearly always sincere, and it doesn't change here.

(She thinks he should stick around. That's a rare attitude to take when it comes to him; the sentiment sticks somewhere beneath his own ribcage.)]

I'd bring it up at all because I wanted people to think, not to get permission.

[Need's voice usually has a mordant, sardonic aspect, this suggestion of challenge and amusement and a level of detachment, which can be stronger or more muted. Putting it down entirely, sounding earnest, takes a conscious effort.]

All right. It's time to go.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

THE CROSSING #2

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject