Antarctic Termite

Ʌ D V E N T

Standing under a small and blackened patch of sky with his hands clasped loosely together behind his back and a bubble of quiet comforting his ears, Shadrach did nothing, watched intensely, and saw no humans. Not in the way that he had perceived humans before. There were definitely two kinds of people wandering the wreckage in human bodies, but his perception had changed, and now he could see a difference.

Most were the people he'd expect to see in an event like this. Police, paramedics, firefighters. Victims. Casualties. The dead. One of them approached him in a uniform and asked if Shadrach was alright, waited for a response and received none; Asked for him to stay out of the way if he was a bystander; Then finally, having gained only silence, asking if Shadrach could hear him. He couldn't, but he could perceive the vibrations of his voice outside the bubble, and Shadrach bent the streams of light around his body long enough to walk out of the nurse's view while he was invisible. These people- If he looked closely enough- were puppets. Fleshy vehicles, driven by something that flickered and flowed inside them like a mute pilot, that bubbled around the skulls of the dead, residue of an extinguished life. There were so many of them nearby. Were these the inhabitants of Avernale? The world?

He beckoned to one of the translucent globules of puppeteer that drifted in fragility between the ashes of the dead. It flew to him, and he inhaled it; It smelled of tears, of smiles, of wisdom and regret and money and sex. Of life. He let it sink into his lungs like a sick goldfish, and cradled it there. ...It doesn't actually matter. I think I realise that now. They looked like humans, spoke like humans, feared and rejoiced like humans. I guess I'm just not a practical man, to be wasting my time looking at souls, thought Shadrach, with a laugh. Ironic, to admit something he'd known since he was a toddler.

And then... Then there were the other people. Very few of those. They looked like him- Acted like the human he'd once been, a body without a pilot. They felt normal. Companions on a small world. So why was it that they were doing such strange things?

One of them, a woman in a segmented costume painted in metallic greys and violets, was airborne, inhaling the tenacious petroleum flame into her hand; Another, a fragile-looking young man with a placid expression, was lighting them again, striding out among the corpses in a clean-blasted path. Shadrach had an idea the two opposites would soon see each other and collide, and gave them both a wide berth, sinking into and out of invisibility as he liked it. One was close among the people with souls, putting back together the broken ones where even a doctor would struggle to stop that bubble of spirit from detaching. One of them was alone, spinning a die and kneeling beside a destroyed human with a face that might be panic. And yet others. Shadrach didn't make the realisation until he saw the thin girl with the dyed hair, who, like himself, was playing with glass.

The young man laughed softly, hand in front of mouth. Ah, hell... Isn't it always oneself that's the hardest to read? No wonder I can't see the puppeteers. These people are liquid! Just people with a big imagination. Doing nothing stranger than I am, even. Shit, that means I can't trick them out of my visibility, either. Well. "Catch," he announced to the girl in the dress, lightly tossing his own halo of glass into her shifting cube of it, his hands unmoving. "Have fun."

It was surprisingly peaceful, between the flames and the smoke and the charred flesh and puddles of human spirit. Shadrach was coming to see that, so long as he kept his body safe from the heat and the worst of the noise, the only thing he was really afraid of was a crowd. "Hey," he opened to the tall, snow-haired young man with the dice, ignoring his distress. About his age, though the two looked nothing alike. "This yours?" He reached into one of the bodies, melting the burnt meat and lifting up the skull. This one didn't have a soul nearby, and Shadrach had a feeling that the teenager-entity was why, though he still didn't chance on the thought that his death was the reason he looked so stressed. "Yeah, yours for sure. The one you're using still has skin on it an all, but the bone's the same. So you're dead, huh?"

@The Ghost in Black @Vocab

Ʌ D V E N T

I'm probably going to do my next post on Thursday, by the way. Feel free to start messing with each other once you've made a starting post. Try not to barge headfirst into your own realm too quickly, though! There's still plenty to do around here.

:')

For a moment I mixed up the link on this thread with this one and got really confused

Post pics of your hands

Hider

Ʌ D V E N T

@BytheSpleen @The ghost in black @ZB1996 @Bai Suzhen @Vocab @Ryuzaki @lady horatio @BubbleGumKing @Keyguyperson @PolkaDancer


A few notes note on post standards, pacing, and setting before you begin (Respectively).

First posts in a roleplay, whether by GM or by players, pretty much always end up disproportionately long compared to what's needed from later posts. And that's ok. But don't set permanent personal standards for length by your or anyone else's first post. Having standards that are too high will make posting more difficult than it needs to be, and no one wants that. Stick to the essentials, which is this: Does my post respond to other players, if necessary? Does my post give something for other players to respond to in their own ways? Do I feel like I've put enough effort into my post to make it worth reading? Are the unique and interesting parts of my character and my story arc being explored in this post? If you can honestly answer yes to all of those questions, length, ultimately, doesn't matter.

On in-game time. Time will run semi-linearly in this roleplay. I'm asking you to use discretion here (but feel free to ask if you have a question). Two gods in conversation with one another obviously will be interacting on the same time scale, which will be pretty slow (doesn't take an hour to say a sentence). However, gods working on their personal projects will usually take longer, and to keep an interesting pace, in-game time in these posts will be pretty fast. Try to maintain a balance between interactions that take place quickly and actions that take place slowly, so that characters don't get left too far behind. This will have to be a team effort, to some degree. If you make a post that details your character taking a long while to produce something big, you may have accidentally shot ahead of the others a bit, so ping your Sense of Attraction and slow down to interact with other characters. If you've been debating with other characters for a while, the participants may get a little left behind time wise, so have them do some time-consuming divine acts in the space of a single post or so to get up to speed. Don't stress too much about it, but I'll be keeping an eye on you all to see if you guys ever need to speed up or slow down relative to one another. If everyone's doing something fast or something slow at the same time, then perfect, but that won't always be the case.

Lastly- Your character can appear anywhere nearby the wreckage. They might remember their death, or they might not. You may actually want to write up their death, and that's ok, but don't drag it out too long. They may take to their powers like a duck to a pond or they may not even realise the extent of what's happened. They may do something rash with their powers. That's cool, but try to give other players a chance for their characters to finish their internal monologues and start interacting with one another before that. Gods can tell the difference between humans and other gods, mostly by the fact that gods don't have souls (at least not in the way that humans do). Gods will be able to sense and remove the soul of a human, but they'll see one another as humans see each other. Feel free to shoot me any questions. If I don't get any questions I'm probably the smoothest GM the world has ever seen.

@darkwolf687 Yep, he's still good.

[@Antartic Termite] Just wondering, would there just be one huge thread for the entire roleplay or several locations in which the players can interact?

@PolkaDancer

Mostly this thread. If it blows itself too far up size wise, I might look at alternatives, but I strongly doubt that'll happen. Of course, you're free and encouraged to make collab posts, so long as you can complete them quickly and use them only when necessary- For example, for a fast, close conversation between gods or when they collaborate to make something.

Ʌ D V E N T

The heat, the light. The roaring noise. Black cloud writhing its way upwards from the ground. A little yelling, a lot of running, and the faithful comfort of sirens. Shadrach noticed none of this, and all of it.

The man sat cross-legged on a bitumen road now littered with glass and fragments, hands in lap, gazing. His eyes were unfocused. He didn't need them right now. But he was still watching, still observing the air before his face. He couldn't see it, but he was aware of it, just as he'd always been aware of his own body, aware of its substance, its shudder of vibration as sound pulsed through it from all around, aware of the light that penetrated it every which way in more colours than an eye could ever see. It danced between itself, atom bouncing on atom and simmering with heat. Fluid. Chaotic. Gorgeous, thought the man. Shapeless.

He was still aware of his body, too, and it also was fluid. Beautifully shaped clay- Not much more. Still soft enough to submit to a sculptor's touch. Still moving with his thoughts like it always did. Shadrach felt supple, today. In all his other memories he'd been so stiff and rigid. Everything else felt supple and limber, too. The air in his lungs, the air on his skin, the clothes on his arms and the black-grey road under him. He focused his eyes on the ground before him and stretched his arm, child-like, towards the dust of this world. He picked up a piece of the concrete curb before him as if it was sand, and like sand, it slipped from his hand and through his fingers in grains. He lifted it back up into his palm again, tensing the solid matter like a muscle of his own body. It contracted like flesh, and when he dropped it, it splashed onto the ground in drops. Shapeless. Malleable. Just another part of himself, subject to his imagination, like everything else.

Stretching his arm brought it to Shadrach's attention that the collection of molecules he liked to think of as his body was, in fact, experiencing considerable discomfort. An instant of panic ricocheted through him, and he stood up rapidly, already taking inventory of the parts of himself and how much exposure they'd received. He was hot, sweating profusely, and his ears were quaking under the reach of the noise. In moments, the air around his head stilled its rushing sound, and the ugly darkness of sweat in his clothes flicked itself into a cold mist resting on a cool body. His heart was beating a little too quickly, so he gentled it; There were some particles of smoke in his lungs that he didn't like, so he unmade them, dissolving them from this world like a breath of wind. ...Where did they go? thought the man, though he knew they were simply destroyed. He would investigate later. Shadrach was not the type to leave empty spaces unexplored.

There was one empty space that Shadrach had ignored, though, and that was a gap in his memory. He'd been... Done with work, for a day. The sun was setting. It was down now, though there was still some light from the sky. He'd taken the wrong bus, a southbound bus, one that ran almost into the inner city. He knew he often slept on the back seat, but couldn't remember doing so. And then he was here, and the world was like this, soft and loose around him.

For the first time since waking up, Shadrach put his bodily eyes to necessary use, using them to receive light from the places that were just a bit too far out of his reach to sense. Took in the blackened mass of wreckage, still burning, though a team of firefighters were close, and beginning to unload. Cooled his body temperature again, and reached down to gather a handful of glass shards from the ground until he found what he suspected- A single fragment, stained by a trace of human tissue. Skin and blood. Not his DNA, but he didn't know whose, either.

"I'm gone, then." The man sighed. Not with regret, nor with relief. An acknowledgement of an ending.

Ivo Shadrach thought that, on another day, in a rigid body, he might have tried to calm himself with a cigarette. But right now... He'd never cared to smoke so little in his life. He didn't feel gone at all, and perhaps that was why the idea of his death suddenly meant so little to him. He was here, really here, for the first time. And he felt comfortable. He felt like himself. The world around him was paint, and his body within it was clay, and he could see it all as perfectly arranged as a gallery, piece for piece.

He tossed the glass shards into the air, and they dipped and swerved smoothly in the air, splintering into fine flakes that spun and orbited his bubble of quiet in a glittering silica halo.

What's your favourite or most often used reaction image?

Mole hunting

Enjoy the accent.

double post, huh?

Well I mean yeah

Smug feelings when your party realizes that you're actively working against them.

Fate is fun times.

@Azarthes

As a GM or a party member?