The Crossing Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thecrossingmods) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thecrossinglogs2024-11-09 11:57 am
thecrossingmods) wrote in thecrossinglogs2024-11-09 11:57 am
TEST DRIVE #1
TDM # 1
Welcome to The Cavern, wayward souls.
It's good to see you again.
The TDM is game canon and will be active NOV—JAN. For further details about the setting, please reference our current setting page. All the information there is fair game for this TDM.
It's good to see you again.
The TDM is game canon and will be active NOV—JAN. For further details about the setting, please reference our current setting page. All the information there is fair game for this TDM.
arrival
— THE RIVER
The River is wide, black, and deep. It is so deep, and so dark, and so cold, that when you wake deep beneath its surface you may, for a moment, think that this is all there is. An abyss, a vacuum, a void. Nothingness in all directions.
It might even be what you expected, coming from wherever you were Before. The blackness, at least. Perhaps the cold. Maybe even the pain: all-encompassing, all-consuming. If a mortal wound brought you here, it might feel like it's being torn open anew, over and over again.
The current is simply slow, however, not non-existent. And you can swim. (Or, even if you can't, that's more of a procedural problem than anything: you don't need to breathe down here, it seems. Perhaps you don't need to breathe anymore at all.)
It hurts. It hurts so much. But if you can just concentrate long enough to pull yourself up onto the rocky shoreline, or even enough to get your head above the surface of the water, that pain will dissipate, almost as if it was never there at all. When you have the presence of mind to examine yourself, you'll find that you are actually hale and whole, with your body exactly as you expect it to be.
There are others in your same predicament. Maybe they can help you; maybe you can help them. You're all in this together, after all.
— THE CAVERN
Once you do finally pull yourself free from The River, you'll find that there was never any abyss at all. On the contrary, there's quite a lot to see — though your eyes might need a minute or two to adjust.
The Cavern yawns around you, the main chamber alone large enough to house a small town, and the ceiling too high to make out through the darkness. There's some light: you can see the eerie green glow of bioluminescent plants lining far-away walls, and tracing the underside of the land bridge that extends over The River. There are pinpricks up high on the cliffs above The River that are organized enough to suggest intervention, or at least planning.
There's something else, too — something orders of magnitude brighter than anything else in the chamber. Its glow is dim on this side of The River, and it's difficult to discern where exactly the light is coming from, just that it isn't coming from anywhere outside the cave. You feel as though you might be safer if you got closer, but maybe that's just because any light at all is comforting in a situation like this. If nothing else, you'd probably find whoever is holding it.
Either way, whether you follow the light or don't, there's plenty of time to be alone with your thoughts. Or to share them, if you're so inclined, with the others that are here with you, emerging one by one from the depths of The River.
Perhaps you've already accepted what's happened to you. Perhaps you need time, and it will take some discussion with the others to arrive at the one thing you all have in common. Perhaps even after that it's still too much, or you still aren't ready. However you get there, though, there's no way around it: you are dead.
If you have questions, The Ferryman is available to answer them.
KEEP TO THE LIGHT
— THE LANTERN
The source of the light is a lantern — specifically, it is The Ferryman's Lantern, an ornate metal lamp hanging from the end of a tall wooden staff. It's large, weathered from use, and despite how improbably far its glow casts — from the land bridge over The River, where The Ferryman is holding their vigil, up the cliffs above and into the subterranean city's many tunnels — it isn't so bright that it can't be comfortably looked at. The Lantern has an unmistakable aura of comfort and safety (maybe because of, or maybe in addition to, the light it casts), no matter how close or far you are from it.
It's only at the very far edges of the glow, where the last bits of light are swallowed by the darkness, that this sense of safety begins to fray. It's here that you can see them, prowling the boundary: wisps of something that you can barely see. Many somethings, in fact.
They can't cross into the light, it seems. All they can do is wait for you to leave it.
— THE SUBTERRANEAN CITY
Maybe you'd rather stay for now, though. There's plenty still to explore within The Lantern's shroud: to start with, the network of tunnels you can see built into the cliffs above The River.
The biggest hurdle is figuring out how to get into the city. You can spy the entrances, marked by dimly glowing torches set into the open mouths of tunnels, but they're so high up! Surely you're not meant to climb?
Well, yes and no. Some investigation reveals a series of wood-plank catwalks leading up to the lowest tunnel entrances, but it's a long climb. If you're feeling impatient (and brave), there's also a system of pulleys, ziplines, and simple rope elevators connecting the higher levels to the lower ones. The ropes have clearly been here a while, but they're probably safe, right? What's the worst that could happen, you die all over again?
(Too soon? We get it.)
There's plenty to see once you reach the city itself, even if there isn't much in way of a population. (Until now, at least!) The lamps and torches lining the walls are packed with the same bioluminescent plantlife that can be found elsewhere in the cavern, so there's no risk of them spontaneously going out. There are signs placed strategically throughout the tunnel system to point you toward major landmarks, using only simple iconography.
The city itself certainly appears lived in, even if it's currently empty; in fact, if you pay close attention to the signage and the decor, there appear to be layers of activity not unlike the rings of a very old tree. Older tapestries covered with newer ones with entirely different patterns; boxes of radically different table trinkets carefully stored in apartment closets, to make room for new ones on a shelf; evidence of the stone market stalls having multiple different usages, many of them apparently in sequence.
Some of those tapestries or trinkets might even be familiar to you, like they came from a culture of your homeworld. Strange, though, since you didn't arrive with anything similar on you. Where could they possibly have come from?
VENTURE IN THE DARK
— THE WRAITHS
The Cavern is big, and The Ferryman's Lantern only reaches so far. If you want to explore, you'll need to brave the darkness— and whatever else might be waiting out there for you.
You'll have some light, at least, even if it isn't much: the luminescent plants grow throughout the cave system, including its winding tunnels and cramped smaller chambers. As for whatever else might be lurking out there, well... without The Lantern, there's not much you can do to keep them at bay.
The Ferryman calls them "wraiths", if you were curious enough to ask beforehand. They're more what you might typically expect from the idea of a ghost: pale and insubstantial, like mist struggling to take and keep a shape.
And they certainly do have shapes; those shapes are just incomplete, sometimes blurry, like a pencil drawing that has smudged and faded over time. They have faces that seem to have been stretched too long or too wide; they have eyes with no color, unblinking, always staring back; some of them have mouths that never close, while others have no mouths at all; some of them have hands with wispy tendrils of grasping fingers; others' limbs seem to have lost their shape entirely.
There are dozens of them lingering just outside the boundary of The Lantern, and many more roaming throughout The Cavern. They do not speak, or otherwise make any sounds at all. They do not swarm, either, even when one of The Ferryman's souls crosses the boundary. They simply watch, and, seemingly at random, some will choose to follow you anywhere you go throughout The Cavern.
Annoying, maybe. Creepy, certainly. But that seems to be all. Just remember: The Lantern is the only thing that keeps the wraiths at bay. They can't hurt you, out in the darkness, but they will notice you, they will follow you, and they will remember you.
If your exploration takes you to the catacombs, you may find that your wraith shadows get lost just as easily as you in the tunnel system. Perhaps they get distracted? Or maybe they have some curiosity about the tunnels that outweighs their curiosity about you? Either way, it's possible to lose them for some amount of time there— but the wraiths aren't bound by petty things like physics the way you are. They will find you again eventually, either by floating through some wall, appearing at the dead-end of a tunnel, or even just waiting at the entrance for you to emerge again.
If, on the other hand, you find yourself stumbling upon the whispering pools, you'll discover that wraiths gather in droves there, circling the pools, sometimes trying in vain to press their faces to the water. The wraiths that followed you here seem to be the only exception; whatever the pools are saying, it's apparently not interesting enough to draw them away from you.
Aren't you lucky?
Image credits: 1, 2, 3 + stock imagery unless otherwise noted
The River is wide, black, and deep. It is so deep, and so dark, and so cold, that when you wake deep beneath its surface you may, for a moment, think that this is all there is. An abyss, a vacuum, a void. Nothingness in all directions.
It might even be what you expected, coming from wherever you were Before. The blackness, at least. Perhaps the cold. Maybe even the pain: all-encompassing, all-consuming. If a mortal wound brought you here, it might feel like it's being torn open anew, over and over again.
The current is simply slow, however, not non-existent. And you can swim. (Or, even if you can't, that's more of a procedural problem than anything: you don't need to breathe down here, it seems. Perhaps you don't need to breathe anymore at all.)
It hurts. It hurts so much. But if you can just concentrate long enough to pull yourself up onto the rocky shoreline, or even enough to get your head above the surface of the water, that pain will dissipate, almost as if it was never there at all. When you have the presence of mind to examine yourself, you'll find that you are actually hale and whole, with your body exactly as you expect it to be.
There are others in your same predicament. Maybe they can help you; maybe you can help them. You're all in this together, after all.
— THE CAVERN
Once you do finally pull yourself free from The River, you'll find that there was never any abyss at all. On the contrary, there's quite a lot to see — though your eyes might need a minute or two to adjust.
The Cavern yawns around you, the main chamber alone large enough to house a small town, and the ceiling too high to make out through the darkness. There's some light: you can see the eerie green glow of bioluminescent plants lining far-away walls, and tracing the underside of the land bridge that extends over The River. There are pinpricks up high on the cliffs above The River that are organized enough to suggest intervention, or at least planning.
There's something else, too — something orders of magnitude brighter than anything else in the chamber. Its glow is dim on this side of The River, and it's difficult to discern where exactly the light is coming from, just that it isn't coming from anywhere outside the cave. You feel as though you might be safer if you got closer, but maybe that's just because any light at all is comforting in a situation like this. If nothing else, you'd probably find whoever is holding it.
Either way, whether you follow the light or don't, there's plenty of time to be alone with your thoughts. Or to share them, if you're so inclined, with the others that are here with you, emerging one by one from the depths of The River.
Perhaps you've already accepted what's happened to you. Perhaps you need time, and it will take some discussion with the others to arrive at the one thing you all have in common. Perhaps even after that it's still too much, or you still aren't ready. However you get there, though, there's no way around it: you are dead.
If you have questions, The Ferryman is available to answer them.
KEEP TO THE LIGHT
The source of the light is a lantern — specifically, it is The Ferryman's Lantern, an ornate metal lamp hanging from the end of a tall wooden staff. It's large, weathered from use, and despite how improbably far its glow casts — from the land bridge over The River, where The Ferryman is holding their vigil, up the cliffs above and into the subterranean city's many tunnels — it isn't so bright that it can't be comfortably looked at. The Lantern has an unmistakable aura of comfort and safety (maybe because of, or maybe in addition to, the light it casts), no matter how close or far you are from it.
It's only at the very far edges of the glow, where the last bits of light are swallowed by the darkness, that this sense of safety begins to fray. It's here that you can see them, prowling the boundary: wisps of something that you can barely see. Many somethings, in fact.
They can't cross into the light, it seems. All they can do is wait for you to leave it.
— THE SUBTERRANEAN CITY
Maybe you'd rather stay for now, though. There's plenty still to explore within The Lantern's shroud: to start with, the network of tunnels you can see built into the cliffs above The River.
The biggest hurdle is figuring out how to get into the city. You can spy the entrances, marked by dimly glowing torches set into the open mouths of tunnels, but they're so high up! Surely you're not meant to climb?
Well, yes and no. Some investigation reveals a series of wood-plank catwalks leading up to the lowest tunnel entrances, but it's a long climb. If you're feeling impatient (and brave), there's also a system of pulleys, ziplines, and simple rope elevators connecting the higher levels to the lower ones. The ropes have clearly been here a while, but they're probably safe, right? What's the worst that could happen, you die all over again?
(Too soon? We get it.)
There's plenty to see once you reach the city itself, even if there isn't much in way of a population. (Until now, at least!) The lamps and torches lining the walls are packed with the same bioluminescent plantlife that can be found elsewhere in the cavern, so there's no risk of them spontaneously going out. There are signs placed strategically throughout the tunnel system to point you toward major landmarks, using only simple iconography.
The city itself certainly appears lived in, even if it's currently empty; in fact, if you pay close attention to the signage and the decor, there appear to be layers of activity not unlike the rings of a very old tree. Older tapestries covered with newer ones with entirely different patterns; boxes of radically different table trinkets carefully stored in apartment closets, to make room for new ones on a shelf; evidence of the stone market stalls having multiple different usages, many of them apparently in sequence.
Some of those tapestries or trinkets might even be familiar to you, like they came from a culture of your homeworld. Strange, though, since you didn't arrive with anything similar on you. Where could they possibly have come from?
VENTURE IN THE DARK
The Cavern is big, and The Ferryman's Lantern only reaches so far. If you want to explore, you'll need to brave the darkness— and whatever else might be waiting out there for you.
You'll have some light, at least, even if it isn't much: the luminescent plants grow throughout the cave system, including its winding tunnels and cramped smaller chambers. As for whatever else might be lurking out there, well... without The Lantern, there's not much you can do to keep them at bay.
The Ferryman calls them "wraiths", if you were curious enough to ask beforehand. They're more what you might typically expect from the idea of a ghost: pale and insubstantial, like mist struggling to take and keep a shape.
And they certainly do have shapes; those shapes are just incomplete, sometimes blurry, like a pencil drawing that has smudged and faded over time. They have faces that seem to have been stretched too long or too wide; they have eyes with no color, unblinking, always staring back; some of them have mouths that never close, while others have no mouths at all; some of them have hands with wispy tendrils of grasping fingers; others' limbs seem to have lost their shape entirely.
There are dozens of them lingering just outside the boundary of The Lantern, and many more roaming throughout The Cavern. They do not speak, or otherwise make any sounds at all. They do not swarm, either, even when one of The Ferryman's souls crosses the boundary. They simply watch, and, seemingly at random, some will choose to follow you anywhere you go throughout The Cavern.
Annoying, maybe. Creepy, certainly. But that seems to be all. Just remember: The Lantern is the only thing that keeps the wraiths at bay. They can't hurt you, out in the darkness, but they will notice you, they will follow you, and they will remember you.
If your exploration takes you to the catacombs, you may find that your wraith shadows get lost just as easily as you in the tunnel system. Perhaps they get distracted? Or maybe they have some curiosity about the tunnels that outweighs their curiosity about you? Either way, it's possible to lose them for some amount of time there— but the wraiths aren't bound by petty things like physics the way you are. They will find you again eventually, either by floating through some wall, appearing at the dead-end of a tunnel, or even just waiting at the entrance for you to emerge again.
If, on the other hand, you find yourself stumbling upon the whispering pools, you'll discover that wraiths gather in droves there, circling the pools, sometimes trying in vain to press their faces to the water. The wraiths that followed you here seem to be the only exception; whatever the pools are saying, it's apparently not interesting enough to draw them away from you.
Aren't you lucky?
Image credits: 1, 2, 3 + stock imagery unless otherwise noted
no subject
Dulcie would have pushed him back into the River, anyway. The thought almost makes Pal smile.
Dutifully, he hands his spectacles over to the cavalier, his half-blind gaze skirting over the expanse of water beside them. Where is Cam? If he’s here, then she must be too; they had considered briefly, if not seriously, that their transformation would require some sloughing off of what one might call the individuality of their souls, but if they’d done it right, and that’s what happened to him, then the same would have happened to her--
“Tern, have you considered how strange it is that you’re here at all?”
cw: cannibalism, tridentarii
He works a line of embroidery cord from the end of his sleeve and worries the sealed end into a clump of bristles with his thumbnail instead, then begins to meticulously brush the sand from inside of the hinges of the glasses, one tiny brush stroke at a time.
"Not in the slightest, Master Warden," he drawls, pettishly, "I don't trouble myself with things above my station, do I? What kind of cav would I be if I went getting airs?"
It's not just a dig at Camilla Hect for the sake of getting one in. It's a dig at the whole sorry lot of them, except Asht and good old Dyas. All of them too much in their necromancer's work, like it was their place. Of course any decent cav knew their necro's field of study, but you didn't go parading it around like you knew anything about it. It wasn't done.
"Why would I be wondering how I'm talking to you on the banks of the River instead of being digested eternal?" He says, darkening bitterly. "Not like her to spit up anything she swallowed. You know, she didn't even - "
The words catch in his throat, the way he caught in hers. Years of obedience and secrecy swell up to strangle him silent, because there's a line they don't cross, however much it looks like they do. That's all part of the play of it.
"She didn't even look at me," he says, and in the moment loathes, thoroughly and completely, a long list of things: Ianthe, her schemes, her goddamned backstabbing, her greedy little gut, her nasty little teeth, that decrepit old mausoleum of a House on the First, the riddles, the tests, the whole God-damned universe, and Palamedes Sextus, for being here to hear him whinge like a kicked dog. "Sat there telling the whole damn thing to Corona, and she wouldn't even look me in the eye. She ate me her whole goddamned life, and she wouldn't even look at me."
He doesn't expect Palamedes to understand the betrayal. How could he know, him and his cozy little cav? He'd never taken a bite out of her, the way he'd paled when she got hurt. And he certainly didn't know what it was like to be eaten. To be made a part of someone else, bit by bit, consumed and transubstantiated into the coals of someone else's power. The way it binds you to someone. The way it ought to bind her back.
Palamedes looked at him. Naberius remembers, even if he doesn't know how he remembers. He was already dead, halfway down Ianthe's neck, clawing and kicking.
"Here," he says, thrusting the glasses back at Palamedes, making sure the necro gets his bony fingers on them properly before he lets go. It'd be a waste to drop them in the muck again and have to start all over.
no subject
It’s not a condescending sort of pity, either, which would probably at least be familiar to the Third cavalier. It was sadder than that, and sorrier. Naberius was and is obnoxious, preening, and cruel. But he had had a terrible life, and a worse afterlife, neither of which had been of his own making. Palamedes wonders if he ever had a chance to make a choice for himself at all.
Who even cares about Babs? Coronabeth had said, crying five feet from her cavalier’s dead body. The next time Palamedes had seen the princess, she had been wearing combat boots, fatigues, and the radiant smile of the newly righteous. Palamedes wonders if, in the midst of her political transformation, she had ever spent a moment thinking about Naberius Tern.
He takes his glasses back with a quiet thank you and slips them over his ears. “Then you do see the contradiction at the heart of our predicament.” Despite glossing over a hell of a lot of horrifying shit, Palamedes somehow manages not to sound cold or dismissive. If anything, it’s like he’s welcoming Naberius in. “If this really is the River, then everything we thought we knew about the nature of the soul is wrong.”
no subject
"Serves her right," he pronounces, after a moment of wrapping his mind around the apparent fact that ten thousand years of settled truth was incorrect. "Her and her damn 'liminal superpositions'."
There are two hers, each easily identifiable by tone even when the context isn't so blatant. Naberius huffs churlishly, nostrils flaring, and favours Palamedes with a glare interestingly torn between disdain and grudging servility. Then his look cracks, his jaw working again in a tense struggle around an unaskable question, his eyes flickering with as much turmoil as Ianthe's did as she swallowed him, sans the flashing change of colours.
"The princesses," he says, tersely, "They're not here."
no subject
“No. I wouldn’t expect to see either of them anytime soon. Ianthe and Coronabeth made it out of Canaan House and are,” a dark sort of smile flickers on his lips, “each living their best lives.”
no subject
They made it. He doesn't want to know more than that.
(He wants to know like it's gnawing at his guts, teeth gnashing and pulping up his sinews, but he's not asking Master Warden Palamedes Sextus.)
"They always had a knack for knowing when to leave a party," he says, crisp as a freshly ironed pleat, "Right, then. I don't figure you want to spend the rest of your sane existence floundering in the mud, so maybe we ought to make like a blastocyst and split."
He offers Palamedes a hand with the brusque distemper of someone asking a loathed cousin to dance at a formal debut.
no subject
He keeps quiet on the subject for now and takes Naberius’ hand. “Thank you,” he says with perfect politeness, as though the other man weren’t looking at him like something he scraped off his shoe. Yet he doesn’t leave the riverbank yet, gaze skipping over the water.
Where is Camilla?
no subject
He clasps Palamedes' elbow with the same tin-plated purposefulness, and stops, watching those pale grey eyes flick out over the water like Palamedes' attention is a stone he skims over the choppy surface.
Of course he knows who Palamedes is looking for. He has eyes. Had eyes. He supposes they're socketed unflatteringly in Ianthe's dreadful excision of a face now. And she already looked so much like a collection of the offcuts of her sister.
Naberius elects not to contemplate Ianthe with his eyes further. Instead, he scoffs elegantly, cocking his hip languidly to one side in a way no one will appreciate as he tips his head back.
"Or we can stand here until we start gibbering," Naberius says, archly, but the tragedy is that he means it. He feels curiously like a lead around his neck has gone slack, and something in him has gone limp with it.
So, when in doubt, defer.
"If this isn't already me gone gibbering," he adds, with snideness evidently confused about whether it's inwardly or outwardly directed, "Though I'd like to think I'd imagine someone besides you. Fuller bodied. Less...intellectual. "
no subject
Time works differently here, he reminds himself. Tern’s presence beside him is proof enough of that, isn’t it? And when she arrives, she will find me. She always does.
“We haven’t gone gibbering,” he says matter-of-factly. “And we aren’t likely to just by standing beside the manifestation of a water metaphor. But I take your point.” Palamedes straightens his shoulders and pointedly turns away from the lightly lapping waves.
“Hm. And what would Coronabeth make of our new situation, do you think?”
no subject
"She'd be searching up the host of this shindig and asking Him to introduce her around," he says, with the pointedness of a drawn blade kept lowered, "But she's never seriously entertained dying. It hardly interests her."
That's not strictly true, but what Coronabeth entertains and what she entertains seriously are things that overlap like oil on water, an ever shifting state that's as deceptive as any scheming her sister ever came up.
"What's with the curiosity about my princess?" He asks, unironically, which is something only achievable when princesses are a day to day concern. "Thinking of trying out some new approaches, Warden? 'Cause you ain't got the eyelashes for it."
It makes him shudder to think of those lambent eyes gone simpering and liquid. Ghastly thing to picture. Nearly distracts him from studying the water for who else might turn up. He wouldn't hate to get a look in on Dyas again, speaking of the fuller bodied. Even Asht, grisly as he was. The man had excellent shoulders, on the one occasion Naberius had a chance to give 'em a once over.
no subject
Turning away from the muddy banks, Palamedes skims his gaze over the rest of the cavern, where distant walls glow faintly. High above, he sees a prickle of steadier lights that suggests a city built into the cliffs.
“But you brought her up. In fact, you keep bringing both of them up.”