Fetzen
yoshua171
xxjessicaxx
Alfhedil
Knight 7
Eventua
Shienvien
Tuujaimaa@rocketrobie2, @DrabberRogue, please sound off so I know you're still around?
Dark Jack
Member
The Jack of Darkness
Status
User has no status, yet
Bio
User has no bio, yet
Most Recent Posts
“Following? Hey, the lamp'll be there come the day.”
Torquil looked slowly from the woman's face to the hand on his shoulder, to the door leading to the outside, past which Victor would lead them to the Cathedral Ward. But even when the most recently awakened Hunter turned to follow their church-ordained guide, Torquil remained rooted in place, struggling with an internal conflict that felt as though it was on the verge of tearing him apart.
“The lantern'll be there come the day,” the female Hunter had said, as though it was purely curiosity driving him, which could not be further from the truth. Torquil was, at his core, a fairly unimaginative person and was mostly unburdened by things like inquisitiveness and the desire to explore. It was probably a big part of why he so readily accepted the loss of his memories and his new role in life: he did not have the ability nor the desire to imagine what his life might have been like before, nor to conjure up alternatives for what his new life was to be used for. His past was gone? Fine, it was not as though he was using it for anything. He was a Hunter employed by the Healing Church now? Sure. Then that was what he was. He did not second-guess or deliberate over things he had no ability or reason to change. In that respect Victor might have been right: Torquil might actually be considered a simple person. He was content with what he knew and how things were. Simple.
But he was not stupid, nor incapable of making basic logical deductions. Victor could not see the lantern nor the little men, which meant that both of these entities were probably unrelated to him entirely, making them separate actors. Victor wanted them to follow him to the headquarters of the Healing Church to be briefed, armed and resupplied; this was logical. Strategically sound. Conductive of survival on a “Night of the Hunt” such as this.
But Victor was also not there for their sake; he was just here as an escort for the blood saint and had stressed, right from the start, how indifferent he was concerning the rest of them. Rats, just a moment ago he had called Torquil a “mumbling imbecile”! They had found him laying in a pool of blood, on the verge of death, and had saved him by using a blood vial on him... a blood vial that they had only found in time because of the little men.
And the little men... they were an enigma, which had initially caused Torquil to treat them as a potential threat, but since then he had had time to observe them. Though inhuman and scary-looking, they seemed to treat the sleeping Hunters with equal parts curiosity and affection, and though occasionally rude they had always seemed to try to show the Hunters things that were useful. Trapped in the back room, the little men had had insisted that they try to break out, before the clinic had come under attack. Later, when they had decided they needed to find the key for the front door, the little men had immediately endeavored to show them where the key was hidden, along with the location of even more blood vials.
They were the ones that had insisted on the Hunters to examine the lantern, and they had been the ones that had shown him how to light it. They had warned against the blood saint, the blood of which Victor kept trying to offer them, and they had promised that the lantern would offer “safe haven in the Hunter's Dream.” Following Victor towards a safety he knew existed was the logical, obvious choice, and thus the one Torquil would have normally picked without a second thought... but the little men had done nothing but proving themselves helpful and trustworthy. The lantern was an uncertain safety, an unknown; picking it was not logical. It was a decision made on a basis of faith.
Torquil turned fully towards the lantern. Uncertainty. The lantern appeared to actually take them somewhere; the disappearance of the large man was evidence of that much, but they had only the word – which, though it was a word they had no reason not to believe, was still only a word – of the little men that it lead to safety. The other side could be anything. It could be dangerous. A trap.
The big man had gone through it.
He could be in danger.
If Torquil went with Victor, they would travel to the Cathedral Ward. Known. But the big man would be left alone, possibly in danger, possibly unable to return. Possibly safe. Unknown. If Torquil went, he would either rejoin the big man and be there to save him, or he would rejoin him and be safe in the haven promised by the little men.
Stepping forward with determined strides, Torquil approached the lantern, his eyes locked on its glowing form. He clutched the hatchet in his right hand, licked his lips. The little men at the base of the lantern-wielding skeletal arm beckoned him closer, eagerly invited him to traverse its light. He continued closer.
Only once he had gotten so close that he could reach out and touch the lantern if he so desired did Torquil feel had he had felt earlier, the first time he had stared at the lantern; the embrace of the light, the assailing drowsiness. It was quick, yet felt gentle.
And then Torquil, too, vanished from the Hunter's clinic.
Torquil senses a power inside him stir, shrouding his being before dispersing.
Torquil immediately reawakened in a new, strange place, where he immediately registered several things:
The world seemed to be covered in blood, despite it raining.
There were two figures ahead of him, a woman and a Hunter of indeterminate sex, moving towards a house atop a stairway before him.
The big man was right next to him.
And Torquil's hatchet was gone.
Those two ways aren't the only two ways for the characters to get trick weapons, nor are they equivalent; going either place will provide different degrees of freedom in which weapons are available and how willing the ones supplying the weapons are to part with them. Essentially each of the factions in the RP - the white and black Healing Churches, the Vilebloods, the Fire Dancers, the Followers, even the Harrow - along with the Hunter's Dream have the potential to be a source of proper Hunter-weapons, with more scattered across the IC world to be discovered and claimed, including quite a few original and unique ones. The Hunter's Dream is only known concretely to Nigel, and by inference to Morgraine, Torquil and Arcturus, making the White Church the only one actually known to them at the moment.
Do the characters have anything else they want to do at or near the Hunter's clinic, or are you okay with me fast-forwarding a bit, since at least Torquil and Morgraine appear to be opting out of interacting with the lantern? @bloonewb and @DrabberRogue?
(Also, maybe a little something just to give a gist of what Arcturus is thinking about all this?)
Do the characters have anything else they want to do at or near the Hunter's clinic, or are you okay with me fast-forwarding a bit, since at least Torquil and Morgraine appear to be opting out of interacting with the lantern? @bloonewb and @DrabberRogue?
(Also, maybe a little something just to give a gist of what Arcturus is thinking about all this?)
I mean, I don't think I'm spoiling too much by saying that there is currently two venues for the characters to get proper trick weapons: they can get them in the Hunter's Dream, or they can be granted trick weapons by the White Church in the Cathedral Ward.
Glancing sullenly at Adelicia, seeming rather dissatisfied with her presence, Victor shook his blood-soaked head.
“Her name is Adelicia. She's...” He looked around in a decidedly aggressive manner for a moment, as if daring anyone to interrupt him. “She's a blood saint. I'm Victor, and I am a Hunter. I escorted her here so she could give you 'her blessing', but that was before they called a Night of the Hunt. If you want some of her blood, just ask. First stop is going to be getting her to the nearest shelter, then I'm going straight to the Cathedral Ward.”
He paused for a moment before nodding at Torquil, who seemed to have gotten distracted from the conversation and was now staring at the lantern with fascination. “The mumbling imbecile over there said his name was Torquil. He's freshly turned, like you.”
Having said that, Victor turned around and, tugging the box he was holding under his left arm, moved to exit the reception and head outside. Adelicia hesitantly followed.
Great, another chatty one, Victor thought sarcastically, standing up with the ornate box still held in his left hand and turning toward the newcomer fully. She was a strange one. She had clearly come to Yharnam anticipating becoming a Hunter, given her choice of garb, yet she also seemed to have decorated herself with all sorts of curios that were quite out of place on a Hunter. She was brash, blunt and prone to sarcasm, yet strangely polite and cooperative. There were a lot of contradictions in her, which both annoyed and intrigued Victor.
Watching the female Hunter help Torquil – who mumbled something that sounded vaguely grateful in return – back into a more proper stance, Victor took his time to examine her form closely, noting how small she was and how she had emerged from the back room without arming herself. Hardly seemed like the stuff good Hunters were made of; small fighters might be harder to hit and better able to get to vulnerable spots on their opponents, which could be dangerous out in the world, but here? In Yharnam, where nearly everyone had received blood-treatment and could regenerate almost any wound, all that mattered was doing as much damage as possible and making your enemy bleed. Sure, he had seen Hunters with flimsy weapons, like threaded canes, take down beasts, but only through continuously putting themselves in harm's way to inflict one small cut after another until the creature finally succumbed.
Well, it undeniably worked, but it just did not make sense to him. Why take the risk of having to attack over and over again when you could pick up the biggest, most devastating weapon around and hopefully finish the fight in one hit?
Only once the woman spoke to him again did Victor's attention refocus on her, his prior musings forgotten as he immediately realized two things: this Hunter was special, too, since she could see the damned lantern the others had talked about earlier; and he had failed. One of these new Hunters, these temporarily ignorant special Hunters, had somehow managed to find a way to untraceably evade him by, presumably, teleportation. He had heard that special Hunters could do that, but he had no idea that it was so easy that even freshly turned ones could manage to do it.
Fell asleep, she said? Victor had heard that these immortal Hunters vanished when “killed,” only to inevitably show up again somewhere else. Maybe this vanishing also applied to other states of unconsciousness, like sleep? If that was the case, he needed to get these remaining Hunters to the Cathedral Ward as quickly as possible, before they had time to learn the extent of the true power they possessed.
“I have, actually,” Victor replied to her final question, making a considerable effort to stop himself from smirking over the fact that he could make that claim truthfully. “I came here with another Hunter who was taken by some huge and invisible monster, just outside this building. It picked him off the ground and he disappeared without a trace.”
He was pretty sure that the two instances of Hunters vanishing were not comparable, as such, but these people did not need to know that. What had happened to Raine was undeniably terrifying, and it was better if the remaining Hunters were discouraged from trying to follow the missing one's example.
“This lantern you speak of,” he added after another moment, “is also invisible. To most, at least. It seems all of you are rare, special Hunters and can see things the rest of us can't. Stay away from it; we've wasted enough time already. We should get moving.”
There was a pause after Nigel had spoken, with the living doll lowering her gaze from the sky to look at the figure in the wheelchair, who kept their face turned skyward for another couple of seconds. Only when the character lowered their head once more and closed the book in their lap – revealing a cover with big, gilded lettering across the front announcing its title as “How to pick up fair maidens” – did the doll look back to Nigel.
“Of course, good Hunter,” she remarked, moving just her right hand from its place on her stomach to gesture for him to approach the house while simultaneously bowing her head to him in reverence. “We expect more to arrive shortly, but finding their way to the workshop should be simple for them. We can tour the Dream later.”
Beside her, the figure nonchalantly stood up from the wheelchair, their posture neutral and confident rather than submissive as the doll, and simply nodded at Nigel before ascending the stairs toward the building atop the slope with remarkably silent footfalls, completely undetectable past the sound of the rain.
When Morgraine spoke up, Torquil – standing just a few feet from her and already shocked by the sight of Nigel seemingly vanishing from existence – actually jumped in surprise, stumbling away from her and nearly falling over bits of the smashed remains of a chair, his hatchet held up defensively. He spluttered something unintelligible, made even more so by his inability to properly move his jaw, while looking frantically from Morgraine to the lantern.
At the same time, Victor turned his head from his crouched position – having witnessed none of what the others had just seen, since his back had been turned – and briefly glanced at Morgraine before letting his eyes start rapidly shifting around the room once more, obsessively trying to take in every single detail of the environment while at the same time avoiding eye-contact with anyone.
“Oh, another one,” he grumbled, looking momentarily from Morgraine to Torquil, then scanned the room one more time before narrowing his eyes. “Where did the big guy go?”
In case it wasn't clear from the IC-post, I just went with rocketrobie2's statement that Nigel kept staring at the lantern and used that to both give rocketrobie2 a bit more to write about, and to set the scene for Morgraine. So even if DrabberRogue can't find the time to write a post, you should be good to go, @bloonewb.
Upon traversing the doorway, left empty after the shattering of the door, between the back room and reception of the clinic, Morgraine was once again greeted by a destroyed room. Furniture knocked over and smashed in rage left pieces of wood and glass all over, while to her left she would see the corpse of a normal-seeming man, his torso cleaved halfway through diagonally. Past the corpse was another, lying in a disproportionately large puddle of blood; a humanoid that appeared dried up, almost mummified, and distorted in a way that was entirely different from how signs of the scourge of beasts manifested themselves.
Immediately in front of her and to her right stood a man with his back halfway to her, a hatchet held low and loosely in his right hand; a bit on the short side but fairly stout, Torquil was staring towards the center of the room. Next to Torquil was another pair of Messengers with another piece of parchment, though the man did not appear interested in them for now.
On the opposite side of the room, to the right of the only door that seemed to lead to the outside, stood a young woman in the garb of the Healing Church; Adelicia, and a little ways to the left of that door and towards the center of the room (E2) sat an utterly and thoroughly blood-soaked man in what was faintly recognizable as another church garb, though this one armed with a much more remarkable weapon; though the small sword resting on the floor beside him might have seemed somewhat ordinary, the absurdly huge blade-scabbard he wore on his back marked it as almost certainly being the weapon of a Hunter, as no ordinary man would have been able to wield such a massive hunk of metal. Victor had his back fully turned and seemed occupied by an ornate box he handling.
In the center of the room, finally, she would be met by a quite strange sight. Sticking bizarrely out of the floor was an unusually long, seemingly rigid skeletal arm, the hand of which held a lantern that bathed the surrounding area in a soft, blue light. A third man, this one unusually large man in dirty, but well-made clothes; Nigel seemed to be staring into the lantern. A little to the left of the lantern from Morgraine's perspective was yet another pair of Messengers with another scroll.
Another instant passed, and as Nigel felt the calming light enshroud his consciousness entirely, he felt himself fall asleep... and as he did, Torquil let out a surprised yelp and Nigel's slowly slumping form seemed to suddenly lose opacity before fading from sight entirely, leaving not even a shadow in his place.
Nigel senses a power inside him stir, as if pushing the world around him.
Strangely Nigel, rather than experiencing a state of sleep, immediately transitioned from falling asleep to waking up... only when he awoke, he found himself slouching in an entirely new and different place than before. He found himself on an old, rough-looking cobbled path flanked by shrubs and weeds, among which stood scattered, disorderly and mismatched gravestones all over, intermingled with a few mostly leafless trees.
To his right, past a tall, wrought-iron fence was a single, massive tree, the leafless branches of which spanned the area around it imposingly beside a lone house sitting atop the sloped landscape on Nigel's side of the fence, where the path seemed to lead, transitioning to a set of stone stairs to reach its front door, with unusually large, flat and relatively similar-looking gravestones arranged to the right of the stair, each on its own small alter-like platform without raising it beyond reach.
At the foot of the stairs and to the right of the path was a birdbath, which appeared to be overflowing not with water, but with Messengers.
Trying to look to the distance somewhat broke the seeming normalcy of this place, however, as beyond the limits of this cozy little cemetery the ground seemed to simply fall away, instead opening up into a vast span of nothing but mist or clouds that stretched as far as the horizon and beyond. The only indication that there was something below this cover of clouds was strange pillars in the distance, rising far into the sky, and much smaller, jutting wooden poles below and among them, like the masts of sunken ships in shallow waters.
Just ahead of him were two figures right on the path he found himself on, both facing him as if expecting his arrival. One might have appeared to be a tall, beautiful woman in fine, almost noble-looking clothes, with perfect white skin like porcelain... except another glance might reveal that her seeming perfection owed to the fact that she was, in fact, a doll, though an animate, seemingly living one such. She had a submissive stance, her hands folded over her stomach and the gaze under her cute little hat downcast.
Beside her sat the second figure in an old, worn wheelchair, apparently reading a book, though whether this was truly what they were doing would be hard to determine. The figure was clad in a full set of the traditional Hunter's garb, only with the addition of a blindfold that naturally covered their eyes.
Then the atmosphere seemed to change, the air literally coming to rapidly feel thicker and heavier, and the soft white moonlight that bathed the cemetery grew rapidly darker, prompting both the doll and the person in the wheelchair to look up at the sky, their demeanor surprised.
And indeed, the beautiful star-strewn sky above with the remarkably pristine full moon was being subjected to a quite unusual phenomenon. From a spot up there – a spot directly above Nigel – there seemed to rapidly spread huge, swirling masses of black clouds that swiftly grew to encompass the entire visible sky, casting the area in darkness.
Next came the familiar sound of sudden rainfall, along with the sensation of Nigel himself being rained upon with large, heavy droplets... only, it would probably not take long to realize the strong red coloration of this “rain”, or to recognize the smell, and realize that it was actually raining blood.
“Good Hunter,” the doll said softly, breathlessly, as she stared incredulously at this sudden change in weather, “I have never sensed something like this before. We welcome you to the Hunter's Dream, but... pardon my confusion. This is new.”
Eugh, things are getting... a little awkward by now IC. @rocketrobie2, any chance you could predict whether Nigel is going to break away from the lantern or keep looking into it? Otherwise progressing things with Morgraine will potentially end up causing some pretty severe desync.
© 2007-2024