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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"Hard to fathom considering I have no idea who you are." But he's willing to play along, it's amazing what boredom will do to someone. "Let's try again, what's this about the sea?"

It knows a name it shouldn't. It knows that name and it attaches the vanished thing to the world we call 'real.' That's a dangerous thing, especially when you do that when reality isn't blinking. It might notice something is wrong. I don't like it.

You really shouldn't be asking these things, Ordered thing. Your words make the teeth of my ears itch.

"It?" He considers that for a moment, "Do you mean Friday? I'm not sure she'd appreciate being referred to as it. Though she also might just accept it."

A soft hiss of annoyance, they'll get her to realize she's her own person eventually.

"I beg your pardon? Your teeth itch?"

"Friday? Oh, no, she's lovely, a masterpiece right there." The tone suddenly snaps into one that's very human, chipper and energetic, before it slips into the otherworld cacophony again.

The sea, the sea, it's something about the sea.

"It itches as much as if you'd have a bee's fuzz under your tongue, except the tongue is your ears and the fuzz is polished metal and none of it is actually there."

It called to me, it called to me. It called to him, the man beyond the mirror. He's coming for me, coming for me, coming to kill me, coming to strike me dead.

"You should tell her that, she seems to have a problem with understanding how compliments work." At least he assumes the masterpiece comment is a compliment anyway.

He looks all around himself, his audio processors having trouble picking up on where this voice is coming from. A constant stream of buffering and processing messages isn't exactly pleasant.

"Well you'll find yourself in luck then, because you can't truly die here. If you're killed you simply come back again. Potentially both a curse and a blessing - and in your case I'm going to assume a curse."

"Well, that's not so different from how things usually are! I've lived and died and lived and died for ages. It's never pleasant, of course, but..."

The cloud of anxiety grows a little more dense, a little more focused.

"Perhaps I should go compliment Ms. Friday. I'd love to ask her more about the workmanship behind her- do you know who built her? Or is she a naturally-occurring atronach?"

"Atronach?" He pauses, it's been a while since someone spoke so confidently about something he can't identify. "I believe the term is construct though I'm not sure how accurate that really is. And the Captain, as she'll most certainly tell you. Multiple times."

Another long suffering sigh. That master/creator relationship makes him glitch if he thinks about it too long.

"Oh then you'll be right at home. Strange how many who've arrived here are from similar circumstances. It's supposedly random, but one does have to wonder just how arbitrary it can truly be, especially after so long. Surely she's been learning.. adapting."

"Oh, construct probably is more specific. Atronach is sort of a catch-all for spirit-beings that are primarily comprised of one particular elemental something. Fire. Mud. Flesh. Some of them occur naturally in the primordial chaos and others are manufactured by binding a spirit to an artificial form. I'm quite particular about the latter, we take sarcomancy quite seriously on the Isles-"

"She?"

"She must be the one who knows. The one who bound me."

"Mud. Dirt. Teeth." He muses softly, "Sarcomancy sounds like something Skulduggery would say and expect me to know what he's talking about."

Hmmm. Now he's torn on how much to say, decisions decisions and he drums his folded fingers against his arms, "Not Friday. The Erda Flow. But I don't think we can simply speak to her when we wish. Or maybe we can, I haven't tried, and have no wish to talk to her ever again. She's told me nothing but terrible things."

"Oh, but that's just typical of entities with availability problems, isn't it? They love to tell you about terrible things. It's like a drug, a bad habit. You can't very well be the one to tell someone something good, because then you give them hope, and then you're partially to blame when that hope gets crushed." He delivers all of this in a casual, cheerful tone, as if he's talking about having had a nice breakfast that morning.

"But crushing that hope would be beneficial for the ship as a whole. It runs off our energy, our emotions, which apparently are represented by... colors."

Yeah he's not gonna talk about 'shrimp colors' with someone he can't even see.

"You're fitting right in, an entity with an availability problem."

"Ah, yes, I probably should have a word with the Captain. I presume he's got some idea of why the Erda summoned me here, unless he doesn't. Not that I pay any mind to what mortals want of me, but I do like to know what they thought they were going to achieve by calling to me."

"You're not another god type are you? Those never seem to last long here."

"Well, I suppose I'm not any more of a god than other gods, if that's what you're asking!"

"Well the one that needed worshipers to sustain himself faded away and both of the ones who were gods of wind must have blown away. So it's not a great precedent for whatever you're supposed to be in charge of. Or however it is gods work." He doesn't sound very impressed with even the idea of gods.

"Hmm, you're right, that doesn't sound promising! But then again, I don't think what I am is going to be leaving the ship anytime soon."

"Oh they didn't leave per se. They're just not physically here anymore. We used to call them ghosts but it's probably more accurate to say they've been reduced to nothing and no longer exist as they once were. I'm told it's horrible."

"Reduced to nothing." A sum of zero, he thinks, and then promptly unthinks.

"And that is a terrible thought, but also rather reassuring. Well, reassuring that other people think and know such a thing. Because it reinforces that I won't be doing that, at least hopefully."

"Won't be reduced to nothing or won't be thinking about being reduced to nothing? Because if you're outsourcing your thoughts I'm very interested in your methods."

"Maybe a bit of both. Oh, it's the usual affair. Put a bit of yourself over here, a little of yourself over there, stop being a person for a little while and exist as someone else's anxieties rather than your own."

He still hasn't settled into a form, or even a consistent pattern of behavior.

Yeah none of that made sense to him. "I'm not sure that foregoing being a person solves much of anything honestly. It makes more problems really."

"Oh, so many problems! More problems than you can imagine. It's not easy, being a bad idea." The air shivers visibly.

"Ggh, why do you have to be so itchy?"

He rolls the metal apertures of his eyes, not deigning to respond to being accused of being itchy of all things.

"Well. In that case, enjoy being a bad idea." Because he's not enjoying the sensation of the air doing things. Time for him to haughtily strut away as if he won this conversation and not that he's massively annoyed and confused.

"I will, Ordered Thing, I will!" he chirps, before he goes back to his wailing, and howling, much more cheerfully than before.

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

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