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

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

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]

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"Sheogorath," he says calmly. "The ship gives me another name, but it's the wrong name, and you would do well to avoid it." There's a hint of grim seriousness to that warning, before he cracks a cunning smile again.

"I don't suppose you'd like to see for yourself what it's like, to be me, or a tiny piece of me?"

If that's the name he wants to be known by, then that's his name, in her opinion. Very simple. The ship can't get everything right, after all.

"Well, now that you've gone and made such a generous offer...please?"

What's the worst that could happen? A question she asks herself often. If she dies, they apparently come back. If she's forever changed, it's not like it hasn't happened before.

He smiles. He smiles in a way so open and so genuine and so eager that any sane person who understands his nature would be fleeing for the hills right now.

"Are you sure? Are you really? It's going to be awful, you know. It's going to be wonderful. It'll make you understand madness like you never have before. I'd be jealous if I hadn't gone through the same thing."

Any sane person. But her mind is full of holes, full of the unknown and depths where wounds lay and the Urge flits about, poisoning the dream well from wherever its sharp edged hands fall. It is a murky concoction all tinged in red, refusing attempts to clearly define itself. It has been open to all manner of decisions that someone sensible would reject, and they have taken her to curious places.

It's so simple. It always is. To say no and always wonder what might have been, or to say yes and find out.

"I'm sure."

His smile widens- a little too unnaturally wide, some might call it a grin like a Cheshire Cat. He pulls out his dagger and draws it against the palm of his hand. Strange, clear-golden blood wells up from the cut, before he conjures a small wooden goblet (covered in bark, as if it grew directly from a tree) and lets the blood drain into it. Then, he hands it to Fever.

"Drink."

She looks at it for a second, both the cut and the blood, wondering if the gods she knows of bleed the same. But then again, perhaps not, and no way to know unless she talks another god into letting her see. All that said, there's nothing left to do but to drink it.

Somehow, she was still expecting it to taste like blood, not the tree sap that it does. Bitter but sweet, and her head feels a little lighter in a good way - things thrown into sharper relief, color and shadow, a mortal's mind having to adjust to what she'd just placed in her own system. Not so bad. But Fever has enough clarity to know that this has hardly begun, after all.

He fills the goblet again, still smiling that smile.

"Drink."

The second cup brings with it muffled whispered, snippets and pieces of the wandering thoughts and bubbling fears of everyone aboard, none of which are clear enough to here and all of which are loud enough to put a little strain on her senses. Her thirst is now also a need rather than a want, her body crying out for more god-blood. Butterflies congregate at the edges of her peripheral vision as the world begins to dissolve into fancy and fantasy. It's all just insects, isn't it, all just interlocking bodies of a vast and fickle whole?

It pulls her in a thousand directions, her body's needs and the endless murmurs, the sweet and the bitter and the not enough, dizzying in where she goes. Of course there's butterflies. That's how it feels, really, that she might be one of them, floating and requiring the blood that isn't, golden as nectar and perhaps just the same. Is and is not, but to be a butterfly, there is that rebirth. Cut open the cocoon before it's done, and nothing but a slurry leaks out, all the what-could-have left to fall to rot.

Even the Urge isn't free from the effects, the click clicking of bone carapace on itself, shrieking in familiar discordant tones that still come through with the turn on her senses. Yes, she could attempt to rend him limb from limb, and satisfy the needs that way. Yes, it would feel glorious, like it always does to snuff out a life. Easy, subdividing someone into trophies - ah, but no servant at hand to aid the messier parts.

But go back into the fog. Chew on your own tail for a while, and leave the living be, viciously thrown back as she's accustomed to doing when it wants to draw breath. The familiar song and dance where its claws lodge in her temples, bleeding sluggishly from the wounds. That's what the insects need, anyway, to grow, and it's why they flutter so near. Things consume, and Fever knows she's helping.

She hasn't put down the cup yet. Is that the worst there is?

Edited 2023-09-24 21:38 (UTC)

The cup refills on its own.

"Drink."

The third cup tears her between the urge to keep drinking and the need to stop and breathe. It's the sweetest, most delightful, most divine nectar she's ever tasted, and her motions of drinking and swallowing are almost involuntary now, as the god-blood creeps its way into her body and mind and soul. But the next time she absolutely has to draw her mouth away from the cup to take a breath, she finds that she can't, her lips having fused to the goblet's rim, flesh grown into wood and wood grown into flesh, and the gentle urging from the Madgod becomes an echoing compulsion in her head.

"Drink. Drink. Drink.

The blood floods her system, as she drinks until it hurts. The edges of her physical form begin to shift and break. Like the caterpillar that she is, her skin hardens, thick bark growing in patches that meet and merge and give way to new branches. Muscle fibers rot and morph at once, fibrous mycelium eating away at everything left in between. There's a cacophony of voices in her head, screaming, laughing, crying, begging; they are her voice, and they are not her voice. Her legs collapse beneath her, and she drops to the floor and scatters as spores and climbs up the wall as creeping, clinging vines. Fruiting bodies, each a separate eye, sprout from the sprawling network that she is, her vision a disjointed kaleidoscope overlaid by vivid hallucinations.

This is Sheogorath. This is Sheogorath as he has the potential to be, in every mortal mind, whispers a voice inside her head.

He is within you. He is you. There is no escaping it.

Coherent thoughts are hard to string together, each one struggling to form quickly shattered by clamorous sound or gobbled up by hungry insects and reaching fibers and thirsting roots, her own ecology preying upon itself in a frenzied, marvelous cycle.

It's a fight not to sink down, down, down, into a place that isn't...

It's all consuming, flowing inwards and outwards, meeting her own essence and warping it, being warped in turn. This is no simple system, this is everything layering on itself, and it's fortunate that no one else is there but Sheogorath, lest they fall victim to the all-that-is, stripped down to bone and cracked apart, so nothing remains. Everything here wants to be fed in mortal blood, and with only one source, so does it move inward, the unblinking and jagged shadow of what is/was, the noblestalk that blooms in one of the wounds in her head. One from the many, a myriad sense of being, and everything felt at once, a euphoria and fear and the range between.

Instinct that bites, laces the heart of the storm with no control, dispersing the lightning across the whole of what is now, changing and changing in fluctuations like breath. Magic and the unyielding desire for slaughter, for life, that lost the concept of escape around the time that the third leaf sprouted. Ideas like the self or vital organs or parts, all scattered and recombined in the spores, joining to others to create new-old alignments and a poison gone citrine gold under the sway.

But there is still something there that rejects and refuses to be overcome, an indomitable something that takes all attempts to be changed and lashes out, something deeper that even stripped of flesh and bone and marrow, will still be there. Something that hates and fights and writhes, uncaring of where it hurts itself so long as it can keep moving in time to a pulse. Kept in check by the chaos of all that surrounds it, it can't find a foothold to slam its head into the wall. Still alive, so long as a single muscle can so much as register a feeling, a single cell. Fever and not Fever, bearing the inexact edges of where fingernails scrape and tear and pull, no surgeon's blade but the tearing that comes from pulling off every binding that might try.

It's too much for a mortal mind to bear, even the most stubborn. She sinks as falls as feathers do, into the place that is not, where all that noise may not be.

When she wakes, it's to the feeling of hewn stone against her back, as Fever rises out of, funnily enough, a fever. There's the sound of machinery all around her, steam and interlocking gears and the rattle of parts that have not ceased moving in an unthinkable length of time.

The stone around here seems to rearrange itself when she's not looking... or perhaps her memories are just flawed? Either way, if she tries to navigate her way out of these ruins, she'll find that the place makes no sense in terms of Euclidian space.

She's a single person again, maybe, and the stark contrast is enough that she presses her hands to the stone first, makes sure it's not going to give way under her as she sits up. At this point, if it's hallucination, dream, or otherwise, it doesn't matter, but she has control over her own limbs again and that is sufficient.

Getting up to wander, the place offers no obvious exits, nor can she truly map it - but that's not a huge concern at the moment. Exploring is more important, and if she can't remember what goes where, then it really shouldn't be a surprise. Of course, there are moments Fever's confused, she's frustrated, but the stone won't answer back. All there really is, is to keep going.

The hallways of stone give way to grated hallways filled with cooling steam, and heavy brass doorways. Somewhere in the distance, she can hear whistling, of a distinctly biological variety. Someone else is here.

That's something quite different.

The doors won't run away, or they will. But she follows the sound, listening intently, trying to find the source of that whistling.

It doesn't take long for her to come across another half-elf. He's dressed in a long, fanciful tailcoat, his dark auburn hair slicked back and tied in a little ponytail. Though he stops in his tracks when he sees her, he doesn't seem too terribly surprised. He raises an eyebrow; they're oddly mismatched from his hair, white as snow and expressive.

"You're new," he comments, in the obnoxiously-cultured tone of a high elf.

"That I am," she agrees, wondering where he might have crawled from in this endless mechanical realm. "Where are we?"

It's a better question than who are you when she half expects anyone here to become something else, or for the world to alter again. Her physical body's probably still enjoying being an ecosystem for the time being.

"Nowhere, as far as I'm aware. Which is different from not being anywhere, but that's a rather lengthy explanation, and I don't think the poet is actually here to handle that for me." He gives a little sigh and shakes his head.

"I'm not entirely sure why nowhere has changed in a way I can't explain, though."

"...Could it be that nowhere's gone and changed locations on you?"

Since Sheogorath got elected to the demiplane, same as her, but who's to say?

"That's not a terrible explanation, actually. And it might explain why so much of nowhere is missing."

He turns away from her, looking down the hallway.

"Normally this place isn't quite so empty. I usually have the company of the Poet. The chamberlains. My Husband. But they've all vanished, into another sort of nowhere."

He turns back to her.

"Which makes your appearance here all the stranger."

"Me being here...I can only guess as to why, and it's a bit of a strange story. But I'm sorry they're all missing. All my companions are separated from me as well."

It's a disorienting thing to be alone like that, when you're used to people around you. Sure, there's the others on the ship, but they aren't the same as bonds forged in battle and blood and the quiet moments around the campfire. But still, if he's here, then the loneliness might be more acute.

"I'm sorry to hear that."

There's a long pause, the hiss of steam and clatter of gears a muffled rolling thunder below and around them.

"I'm guessing Sheogorath sent you?"

There's a look on her face that says she's trying to determine the answer to that herself.

"No? But yes? I think it was more of a side-effect from drinking his blood and transforming into a whole system than the exact intended purpose..."

So, your guess is as good as hers, mysterious half-elf.

He cups his chin in his hand.

"Partaking in Lord Sheogorath's blood isn't usually what brings a mortal here. Such is more often the way they hasten the merging of their soul into his being. No, what brings one here is usually the process of becoming someone else; this is where the former identity resides, when someone decides to become someone entirely new. The resting place of the old ship's ghost when every one of its parts has been replaced, if you will."

"I'm not sure I understand."

Either part of it, really. The whole soul merging deal - there's a lot to unpick and unpack there, but the idea of becoming someone new? She hadn't signed on for that.

"I'm still me. I haven't decided otherwise - I don't think that's why I'm here."

But she's not sure, all the same. That's one of the troubles with a brain full of holes - certainty is harder to find.

"Interesting. Well, I suppose not everyone here decided to be someone knew, but it happened to them one way or another."

He tilts his head, smiling.

"But I think you're right that that's not what's happening here. Call it a hunch. I tend to have some small inkling of what Lord Sheogorath is thinking, and I don't think a new chamberlain is in the cards for him right now. Or a new him."

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cw: self-induced bleeding, ingestion of blood

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cw: addiction-like effects

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cw: loss of autonomy, transformation horror

just more of the same

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