⇨ KERNER ISLAND

[ringleaders]

Who: Anyone who fits the stipulations below!
When: Day 160 - Day 169
Where: Kerner Island
What: Remember the Spectres? Now's the time to meet them, if that's something you want to do for some reason.
Warnings: Individually marked!

A GHOST TOWN↴ [This is a selective mingle log. Note: characters who are young, have flying dæmons or no dæmons at all, and/or have angelic aspect can come to Kerner. Others will feel the presence of Spectres too keenly to set foot on the island. Ask Joysweeper if you want to see what your characters find or talk to NPCs. ] Kerner Island is covered in plants and animals not local to the reality, let alone the area. Most noticeably it’s absolutely overgrown with a version of kudzu which produces fuzzy kiwifruits. The vines half-choke trees and splay across buildings, creating deep cover for various animals, including shy, harmless rabbit-deer-rodents sporting tiny antlers. There are a few windows to other worlds scattered about, and during the day a couple dozen children ranging from ten to their mid-teens can be found ducking in and out of them. The oldest of them stays night and day unless persuaded to leave. The biggest concrete danger comes from blue tektites ranged in size from softball-sized juveniles up to beachball-sized adults. The children kill them whenever they can, seeing them more as a nuisance than a real danger - a twelve year old and their dæmon and a big stick can easily defend against several at once. To children and unsettled teenagers the tektites and any new hostile creatures coming from other worlds are the only danger on Kerner. Teenagers closer to settling will feel a sourceless unease, and their dæmons will see things out of the corners of their eyes. The closer someone is to settling, the more they will be able to perceive Spectres, and the more Spectres will notice, passively leach from their souls, and be drawn to them. The Spectres are intangible, insubstantial, noiseless, and nearly invisible even to adults. They seem formed out of tenuous things like mist, heat-haze, smoke, light reflecting on water, and have twelve-foot-tall shapes that are usually read as columns, or trees, or humanoids. Adults and settled teens can sense a Spectre’s effect on their soul and and pinpoint it by the feelings of nausea and wrongness. Spectres are mindless, drawn to consume souls in the same way fire is drawn to consume fuel. If they can physically reach a dæmon it only takes a few minutes to consume it; if they can’t they feed passively on the internal soul or the soul’s connection to the body, which takes hours to a day to complete. A Spectre’s passive range is much wider than their physical reach. Having an adult soul and being anywhere near Kerner is unpleasant. Even a few minutes of passive exposure to Spectres leaves the soul worse off. It's more obvious with dæmons, which go quiet and appear to be in pain, but their bodies, and anyone who still has internal souls, feel it too. Most people experience nausea, disgust, weariness, and mounting despair often coupled with a desire to hide it and pretend nothing’s wrong. Even when safely away effects linger, but creating or building things, or spending time around other people, helps restore the soul. Different kinds of magic can lure and direct some Spectres out of the way. They can’t be damaged physically or by most magic. Angelic magic has some effect on them directly and might destroy a few, but the Spectres are so thick on the island that staying to fight is just going to result in being overwhelmed. This is not a place of glory, unless you’re a kid.

Comments

[joysweeper]

From the air, it can be seen that the largest building on the island has three sort of wells or pits sunk into the flat roof, all of them open to the sky. The kudzulike plant covering most of the structure has overtaken it to the point where from the ground it looks like some kind of steep hill, like most of the other buildings here.

There's a cry and some kind of commotion, and a big black vulture-dæmon flies up out of one of the empty skylights, climbing fast.

Two things are strange about that: he flies quickly and strongly out of the normal dæmon range, and one of his wings doesn't look like flesh and feathers, or even like a normal dæmon wound. It's a thick concentration of golden motes held in the shape of a vulture wing, by will or magic. With every wingbeat some of the Dust composing that wing scatters and dissipates, and he lurches, rocking in the air.

Seeing people who aren't children, he cries out "Oh! -oh, help! She'll die!"

[amusicaladventure]

"Oh jeez." A dozen responses leaped to Ash's mind all at once, but even if she could stitch together the poor thing with her magic, it wouldn't solve the greater problem. Also it might be a trap, but she really didn't think so, and quite arrogantly she assumed she could handle a trap were it to be sprung on her.

She stuck her hands up and waved, heedless of the attention she might attract. "Hey! Hey, lead the way!"

[stillwinningthehardway]

The vulture turns in the air and stars wheeling in tight, agitated circles over the building. Grimacing Scout lets the boat run aground and steps out onto the wet sand, not feeling the cold of the water that's welling up along her hooved toes. Spectres are pressed in against her, all around. She feels it like this unpleasant prickling pressure along her skin and tries not to shudder. The more she stops to think about it the harder this will be, she tells herself.

Hand on her lightsaber Scout starts forwards, sticking near Ash and anyone else here on foot. If there were proper paths here they were swallowed by the alien kudzu, and only trails are ones she has to assume were made by the children going from place to place. It's probably the right assumption, given that there's a little girl riding her mountainous bison dæmon over there.

"You gotta get outta here. You'll get et," she protests, and retreats back. It's a common theme right now - there are kids, and they seem dismayed to see these non-children, and they get out of the way.

There are also big blue bouncing Tektites here, ready to leap at the potential food. Even with the distraction Spectres cause, if the children don't usually have a problem with them, neither should carnies. Right?

[amusicaladventure]

"Yeah, maybe," Ash muttered, not entirely convinced that the kids were trying to scare them off just because they were adults. Beneath her glamour, her claws were at full extension, and her mind kept skipping from song to song like a warrior testing blades before choosing one to take on a foe.

The kudzu made for miserable terrain, though, and Ash picked her way through it as carefully as she could without taking her attention off the giant spider-things. Rather pointlessly, she groused, "This place is weird."