"Which way ought I go from here?" [Open and one Closed]

[blindwatchersees]

Who: The Daedric Prince of Madness and YOU!
What: Who knows? Could be anything!
When: Mid to late September
Where: Various
Warnings: Body horror, general existential dread, transformation horror, other warnings to come


 "You must be mad, or you wouldn't have come here" [Atrium]

There's a new gentleman about the Serena Eterna. Or perhaps he's something other than a gentleman. Perhaps he's a cat, or a cloud, or a bad idea. The face he wears is different for whoever he meets.

Currently, he's leaning against a balcony railing, looking down into the atrium of the Serena Eterna, whistling like a mockingbird. Do you approach, coaxed or driven by fear and fancy?


"Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast" [Closed for strangearchitecture]

"Helen!" he slides up beside her, holding a plate as if it's a steering wheel. He, of course, does not actually have a vehicle; that would be against the rules. His appearing next to her is inexplicably accompanied by the sound of a window being rolled down, however, because comedic effect.

"My dear semi-sinusoidal seductress, I don't suppose you've heard the rumors of the infinite cheese shop on board, and the fortress of cheese that lies within its depths?"


"A grin without a cat is the most curious thing" [Hallway outside Stellar] [CW: potential body horror]

Amongst all the flowers, a fungal grotto has appeared in the hallway outside of Stellar. It's a strange sight indeed, filled with curtains and irises of fine, wispy mycelium and dotted with fruiting caps of vibrant yellow-oranges and metallic purples. There are also woody roots and stumps, out of place in a fungal environment, that periodically release clouds of green, sweet-smelling spores. If you pay close attention, the bursts of spores almost seem to come and go at a rate suspiciously like someone breathing.


"At least I know who I was when I got up this morning" [various] [CW: transformation horror]

The Prince of Madness is in a frightfully fickle mood, and without much warning, perhaps not having even given you a customary greeting, he brandishes a staff in your direction and lets loose a blast from it. In a peculiar sensation, rather like becoming water and going swirling down a drain faster and faster, you find yourself stretched and squashed into a new form. Perhaps your mind is unaffected, or perhaps you immediately begin wondering if you've always been this way, and the thing you were before was but a dream. In either case, it's going to be a weird couple of hours while the effects wear off.

(In particular I'm looking for at least one person to become a sentient pinball, but I'm up for anything, in the direction of both something harmless/inanimate and something large/dangerous. The suffering can go both ways here)


"I can't explain myself, for I am not myself" [stern, various] [CW: general existential dread]

Across the stern of the ship, in various places, there's a sound like a man howling and weeping, and the sound of fingernails scratching against metal and chalky paint. In a twisting line, the words "The sea knows what isn't. The sea knows what can't. Is the sea a thing that is? Am I, because it is?" are being scratched into the paint and the metal of the ship over and over again.

"A most uncivil offer" [Sports Deck]

Oh tarnation! Oh tribulation! Here he is in a place where he might ply his craft with sword and crossbow, yet he's brought neither. But perhaps someone eager for a sparring partner might offer to lend him one?

"Is it labelled 'poison?'" [Wildcard]

Comments

[blindwatchersees]

He scoops up the pinball, giving it a little toss.

"My, my, you're awfully restless, aren't you? Why don't we take you to the Playback, so you can let out some of that energy?"

And just like that, he tucks the pinball into his pocket and starts making his way to the ship's arcade, whistling a jaunty tune, acutely aware of what might be running through poor Victor's scrambled mind.

[kingoftheanthill]

Of course he's restless, Victor thinks. Even accounting for being moved around, this is the longest he's sat still in... oh, generations. Longer than his word-of-mouth memory has even been passed down.

Wait. He has generations? Do pinballs have offspring? Do they even have the parts? Isn't he, right now, in many ways just a colossal single egg -- oh god, are eggs also just a product of his lack of imagination? Did he invent the idea of hatching into thousands of bodies, with thousands of angles and moving parts, to cope with the ennui of being smooth and still and a single thing?

Is this all there is?! Oh god!!

[blindwatchersees]

"You see, this is why pinballs really shouldn't think. It gives them anxiety!" he quips, audible to Victor despite the fact that Victor is a pinball and might not even have a concept of what something being 'auible' means in the biological sense. Or he does, but he probably imagined that with his lack of imagination, too.

[kingoftheanthill]

But thinking is what he does, he thinks, in vague distress at the thought of not thinking. It's what separates him from his base and primitive ancestors of a couple of years ago! (Maybe. If he had them. The jury, such as it is, is still out on that one.)

Thinking is part of being a person, and he's pretty sure that he's trying to be a really good person. Or... was he trying to be a really good pinball?

Wouldn't it be sort of silly for a pinball to try to be good at being a person?

It might be easy to mix them up. They even start with the same letter.

[blindwatchersees]

"Now, now, don't go tying yourself up into knots. That's most unbecoming for a pinball, you know. Not to worry, we'll get you feeling right and proper as soon as we get to the arcade. Which is now, actually."

There's a distant sound(?) of arcade machines chirping(?) and screeching(?) and making all the noises(?) that arcade machines usually do, and shortly thereafter, the pinball can vaguely hear(?) the sound(?) of someone making a few grunts of effort while fiddling with something unseen. Seeing? Was seeing another hallucination? Everything in the larger world is rather muted and metaphorical in the seemingly impossible mind of a pinball.

Then, all at once, there's the creak of a spring plunger, a THUD against his body, and suddenly Victor's world is filled with color and sound and life as he's launched into the chaotic and vivid landscape of the pinball machine. It's at once a wild dream and a roller coaster ride and a sensation of racing through an urban landscape, effortless and unhindered. It's a lightning-fast, mind-boggling parkour through a world that only a pinball knows.

[kingoftheanthill]

There's something promising about the muted sounds of the arcade -- and sounds there are; so why, Victor wonders, did he have to invent the fantasy of feet to hear through, when his smooth and spherical shell does that job already? Have his dreams always been so humble? Did he not name himself with the two coolest and most ambitious words he could think of? Didn't he--

No time for any of that. Something strikes him, and Victor is suddenly exactly where he's supposed to be: a rocket launched through a baffling nebula, a cannonball battering wall after wall. It's painful, chaotic, exhilarating; if he had breath, he wouldn't be able to catch it. Each individual noisy moment is the only moment that exists.

[blindwatchersees]

For a while, he flies through his miniature cosmos, unfettered by concerns such as concussion or whiplash. Then, quite without warning, he slips between the life-giving bumpers, into a place of suffocating dark and quiet. He is dead. The ball is dead.

But hope is not lost. Some unseen mechanism, some harvester of pinball souls, raises him from that place of death and puts him back on the plunger, which launches him into euphoric chaos once more.

[kingoftheanthill]

Victor knows this has happened before, this death and rebirth, though he can't remember the details. It must mean that he's been here before, spinning through this machine before. What else could it possibly be?

This time, when he's launched, it's with preparation and above all with determination. He is going to be the best god damn pinball he can, and he's going to get the best score this machine has ever seen--

Oops. He's fallen back through the bumpers.

AGAIN. Send him out again! He'll win this time, he can feel it!

[blindwatchersees]

And the machine sends him out into the great vast cacophony again, while Sheogorath's attention is raptly fixed on this game of pinball, and on the pinball's increasing enthusiasm.

After a few more rounds and QUITE a high score, the game finally ends, and Victor finds himself settling into a deep sleep.

[kingoftheanthill]

Victor drifts off with visions of high scores dancing in his head. He's long since forgotten the last dream he had: the one about legs, and scurrying, and speaking out loud.

Pinballs, as a rule, don't snore, but this one is putting out some real peaceful vibes, some real honk shoo mimimi energy.

Thread Split

[blindwatchersees]

(And I figure anyone is free to come in and play pinball here and maybe realize something is off if they have magical senses, but I also want to keep this thread going later on, so I'll sort of use this reply as a splitting point.

Sheogorath leaves the arcade, leaving the pinball to sleep amidst his pinball dreams and pinball thoughts. In a little while, the ants should turn back into ants, and he'll be curious to see what they have to say once they realize what he's done. But for now, the pinball is a pinball, and it can remain a pinball for as long as it wishes to be.

He'll be in the Windjammer. Ants tend to go where there's food on offer.

[kingoftheanthill]

If you're in Playback, you can pinpoint the moment when Victor wakes up. It's the same moment when an entire colony of ants spills in a line out of the coin slot of one of the pinball machines, and starts in great confusion to ball up and try to roll itself around the floor.

After collapsing several times into more of a prolate spheroid, Victor remembers that legs can be used for walking, and starts with rather more success to shuffle out of the arcade. He gives the pinball machines a wide berth. He doesn't think they're the cause of the anomaly that just happened -- he definitely remembers a dude talking -- but looking at them kinda gives him a feeling like the floor is moving under him.



All things considered, by the time Victor inevitably arrives in Windjammer, he's bounced back admirably. His pinball experience was a lot at the time, but it wasn't half as weird as some of the anomalies he was nicely asked to help test back in the bunker.

The worst part, honestly, was how his queens and everyone else he prefers to keep tucked away somewhere got pulled into it as well. But by now, they've been escorted home, and it's his usual raiding party of about a thousand ants that swarms into the buffet.

He thinks for a moment, then starts to climb the legs of the dessert table, all thousand ants laughing a quiet mischievous hehehehehe. If April catches him doing unapproved table time, then he can surely convince them he's traumatised by being a pinball and deserves special consideration.

[blindwatchersees]

There's something about brown-sugar-and-molasses cookies that feathers his brain right now, and he wastes no time in moseying on over to the dessert table, plate in hand, and he begins to stack up a leaning tower of brown, cakey confections.

"You know, they really ought to make plates in a wider array of sizes," he comments to one of the ants. That particular one. That ant over there. Yes, that ant.

[kingoftheanthill]

"I'm allowed to be up here!" Victor says immediately, and then: "Heeeeey..."

Heeey, there's something familiar about that smell! And voice! And guy!

"Hey, did we meet earlier?"

[blindwatchersees]

"Yes! Yes, we did! Why, we had a ball, in fact! Or rather, I had a ball. You were the ball. What did you think about that, might I ask?"

[kingoftheanthill]

"No way!" cries Victor, in a 'what a coincidence' tone of voice, the kind you might associate with running into an acquaintance from school.

"Um, I wish you asked first, but it was mostly fun! But, um," And he hopes Flan and April are proud of him for approximately remembering this, "was it an experiment? Or were you just doing it for fun? Um, because I think, um, I'm not supposed to work on experiments outside the union!"

He isn't 100% certain if he's remembering that right, but he tries anyway, because dangit, if it's important to his coworkers, it's important to him.

[blindwatchersees]

"I can't say it was really one or the other. It was really just a whim. Madness, chaos, doing what it does, not necessarily what it will. Except I do do what I will, but I don't always know what I will. Do I need to file something with your union? I wouldn't mind. I don't like filing things, but I do like unions! They change things! They're a lever to shift the status quo. And the power to change, that's a most precious and critical thing. Yes... speaking of... would you be interested in becoming a pinball again sometime?"

[kingoftheanthill]

This guy makes exactly little to no sense, which makes Victor warm to him immediately.

"Um, I don't know," says Victor, who hadn't even begun to think that far ahead. Then an exciting idea occurs to him. "Oh! Do you do requests?"

Then, with most of his mouths full, as several parts of him get up close and personal with a bowl of cherry trifle, "And I'll ask April and Flan about the paperwork, they're in the union too and they know basically everything!"

[blindwatchersees]

"Requests? REQUESTS? YOU'D DARE ASK A GOD TO TAKE REQUESTS? Of course I do, what do you have in mind?" He goes from a furious roar to a jovial lilt in the same breath.

"Oh! Well, if it's April I'll be handing the paperwork to, I don't mind at all. Perhaps I could shape the paperwork into lots of tiny umbrellas, and deliver it via drinks!"

[kingoftheanthill]

For about fifteen seconds, the shit gets startled out of Victor, and all the parts of him run around in frightened circles until he realises that Sheo has calmed down again. Then they run around for another couple of moments, in confused circles. Then they stop running in circles at all, and clear their throats*, and try to look as if Victor was never startled by anything in his life.

"I think they'd love that!" he says, a little squeakily. "I mean, I don't think they'd read it, but they would love it!"

Aaa now he's on the spot. "I was thinking like a human guy! For a bit! To try it out!"

*They don't actually, because ants don't have the right kind of throat, but it's a damn good impression of it anyway.

[blindwatchersees]

"A human? Really? With their internal skeletons and their lack of a larval stage and their inability to fall a long distance relative to their size without their knees ending up next to their ears?"

[kingoftheanthill]

"Yeah!" Victor makes no apologies for this. He is cringe but he is free. "Like, I wouldn't want to live there, but I want to visit! Flan and April would totally lose their minds!"

[blindwatchersees]

"Well, in that case, that sounds like a wonderful idea! Would you like to transform on or off the dessert buffet?"

[kingoftheanthill]

Oh he's excited! He's so excited!

"Dealer's choice!"

[blindwatchersees]

"Dealer's choice!" he echoes, turning around, pulling the Wabbajack out of hammerspace, and aiming it over his shoulder. Whichever ants he hits will determine where the human pops into being.