come_sailaway | it's a war in there [March OTA, including memshare]

Who: Cassandra de Rolo & those visiting her memories / OTA
When: March
Where: Around the Serena Eterna; also Whitestone, at various points in the past
What: Things are beginning to crack
Warnings: Game-typical angst; in memshares, murder, torture, vampirism, mindfuckery both magical and mundane, and potentially noncon/dubcon; other warnings to be added in reply headers as needed

A. you're just like them, you're unprepared

Cassandra's noticed the cracks, of course. Before she brushes against one, they seem alarming and inexplicable; are they a trick, a trap, a sign that this whole little artificial plane is starting to come apart?

(The thought she barely lets herself contemplate: a way out?)

After her first few encounters with them, the nature of them seems more apparent -- although there's no guarantee they aren't also any of her previous thoughts. The first time her own memories double on her, with faces she knows from here appearing in them, she locks herself in her cabin's bathroom and curls up on the floor of the shower, arms wrapped around her knees, struggling not to begin screaming for fear that she might never stop.

[This prompt is for interacting with Cassandra in the present setting! Feel free to run into her anywhere on board, either before or after memshares begin, or PM/ping me on discord to discuss a more specific prompt.]

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B. cause you don't know the terrain

Several cracks about the ship, as it turns out, lead to a world called Exandria and a little city-state called Whitestone. Those who tumble into them will encounter a younger Cassandra at some point in her past.

[Specific pre-discussed prompts are below! If you would like a different one, see the plotting post here or PM/ping me to discuss.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Good," she says quietly. "I'm glad to hear it. I don't seem to have undergone any permanent damage either."

Well. Physically.

"I don't remember the end of it very well. Did they make you feed on me?" There's no change in her tone, or in that deeply weary look in her eyes.

He shakes his head.

"That guy would've planned something personal to keep me in line. You were a stranger, even if you said weird stuff."

Who would they have him attack? Kaori? Poor orphaned Kaori, digging her own grave, convinced that she's being punished for imagined slights...

"They used weakened victims to feed new shiki. If they were willing to attack someone, they were allowed outside. I guess whoever it was didn't hold back."

She shakes her head. "No."

A beat. "I don't imagine Sylas would have either, if not for the ... whatever it was in your blood. I don't understand how it isn't killing you."

"Liquid sun magic. Ebalon left it behind."

Yes he was an absolute idiot for messing with it, moving on -

"It me sick at first, but my body adjusted. You saw how fast I heal."

"Yes."

Eyes slowly tracking down to his hands, back up to his face.

"Because you're a vampire."

He nods.

"They preferred to call themselves shiki. Corpse-demon. But that's just another way to say vampire."

"Have you been feeding on people here?"

Despite the weariness, there's a tension in her now, as though poised to ... what? Fight him? Run?

Natsuno's demeanor doesn't change, like he was expecting that.

"No." Only the ghost that stole his body did. He almost threw up when he came back and realized the taste still lingered. "There's a coffee machine that serves blood in the buffet. I would never attack passengers."

Even if it means to lose his enhanced strength and speed. Some of his friends would donate willingly, but just thinking about it makes him feel sick.

"Have you ever considered doing here what you did back there?"

You know, selling the resistance out. If she pulls another Jenny and sacrifices everyone...

There's a long pause. The tension in her shifts subtly, and then slowly drains away.

(A lie would be more reassuring. She's too weary to lie.)

"Contemplated," she says finally, "is a better word for it, I think. How I could have done it at the outset. How I could do it now. Do you play chess, Natsuno? Or any other sort of strategy game, or puzzle game? Have you ever played for hours at a time, days on end, until you start envisioning pieces and moves at the sight of a tiled floor? Until anything that looks at all like the gameboard makes you think of how to win this time?"

She tips her head back until it's resting against the back of her chair, face tilted upward, eyes closed.

"I played that game every waking minute for nearly four years. I'm sick to my heart with it. And I still can't stop seeing the board."

"When I played, the goal wasn't to win. It was to keep them playing until we could flip the board and break it."

Their circumstances are different, and Natsuno can't relate. He was ready to burn everything to the ground if it meant they wouldn't get their way. Choosing death was freedom, the final fuck you to everyone who thought they could force him to be what they wanted.

"Neither of these will help us here."

"No," she agrees. "And playing for survival ... doesn't mean anything if we come back every time we die. But none of that matters."

She hasn't opened her eyes.

"I cooperated with my captors to keep myself safe and I will not go back to that. Not ever."

Natsuno looks at her like he can learn anything from her expression, but there's no commited passion in Cassandra's words - nor any sign she's lying. She just seems tired of it all.

"Okay," he says finally.

It always comes back to Clarke's words: what's the worst that can happen? He already shared sensitive information with Cass; if he keeps her informed and she betrays them, she's most likely to die last. If he shuts her out, cracks form in the smaller circles of their dissident group, they fail to achieve anything and die.

If both worst cases lead to oblivion, the choice is obvious.

"I don't know if I fully believe you, but that's the best we have."

"Wise of you. On both counts."

She opens her eyes without moving her head, and meets his gaze.

"You never said, when we first talked about it, how your village came to burn down. Is that what you meant by breaking the board?"

"I don't know how the village burned. Anything could've caught fire in the mess. That wasn't part of the plan, but it made things easier."

Even Sotoba's survivors will never know how it came to burn. In the chaos, no one noticed a single grieving mother searching for the father-in-law who rose and took her entire family away. No one noticed how she grabbed a can of gasoline and climbed the mountain trails to the shiki's abandoned hiding place. No one was there to see her set the empty huts ablaze.

"I meant that I didn't care about saving the village. They thought I was trying to help the humans, but the truth is I just wanted the shiki dead. I was going to destroy all of them, and myself, and I didn't care who had to be sacrificed or how much the humans hurt each other in the process.

"But like I said, that's not an option anymore."

He has something to lose now. He wants a future.

She's silent for a moment, studying him in turn, as though she could learn anything from his face.

"I don't know if I fully believe you either," she says. "But ... well. For obvious reasons, I'm inclined to trust the burned hand. I think if you were likely to try something similar again, you'd be trying to convince both me and yourself that you were right to do it the first time."

"Don't get the wrong idea. I'm not saying I regret what I've done." Not like Cass does. "But since this is a different situation, the solution has to be different.

"We need to be able to work together, is all. Not justify our past actions or pass judgment on each other for things that happened in another reality."

Another long beat, and a nod. "Agreed. And I think we can choose to trust each other that far."

it's a war in there [March OTA, including memshare]

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returning to tags through my april hiatus, if it's too late feel free to drop!

never too late!

<3

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