JANUARY (MINI) PLAYER PLOT: I'LL SEND AN S.O.S. TO THE WORLD

[sailmods]

[After their return from the Village, many of the Serena Eterna's inhabitants have been taking time to nurse their psychological wounds. Arilanna Tayrey was no exception, until she was reminded that there was still work to do. Still hope of working towards the escape that she longs for.

The space probe. After months of preparation and testing, on the fifth of January, it's ready. The probe itself was found by Sparkles, and it carries a wealth of encoded information about the passengers (or 'prisoners' depending on whom you care to ask) aboard the ship. Ari and Cassandra collected the letters and videos contributed by the population, and through careful selection and editing, present a picture of a group in desperate need of rescue by anyone – or anything – that might find their message. Also affixed to the probe is a long-range emergency distress beacon, from Ari's home universe via Sundries.

The rocket which takes the probe to the heavens is a remarkable blend of science and magic. Ari and Crichton, Rita and Fever all used their expertise to put it together, but as Sparkles warned them, the success of the launch depends on their ability to distract the Captain and Friday.

This group know how to cause some appropriate chaos. To split Friday's attention, a grand distraction takes place. You may notice some of the following:

- signs around the ship declaring that there are no more rules, and daring you to do something forbidden – smoke wherever you like, 'steal' from a shop, start fires...
- mutiny banners, assorted fires across the ship (mostly courtesy of Natsuno), unknown sigils scrawled on walls
- also look out for a text message from a friend on the space probe team, either inviting you to join them in mutinous mayhem, or, if they don't want to show their hand or don't see you as the mutinous type, to participate in a mass rule-breaking experiment

And as Friday has all this to cope with, the Captain has an unexpected visitor on the bridge…]

Comments

Grace | OTA

[moonlesstides]

Building Presence [Around]

The building destruction of the ship proves...inspiring. Grace wanders around, at first merely gawking, and then starting to join in; slashing chairs in the theater, upending the tables at Sand Dollars, repeatedly stabbing the floor in the Promenade to evidently no real effect but look at her, she's having so much fun with it. Join her?

Tunneling [Promenade, Fate's Design, Topy, Helena]

Eventually Grace gets tired of random acts of destruction and starts focusing in. She may require some supervision, since right now, after a month of worrying and fretting over her loved ones being gone, she is not thinking of some things she previously thought of.

For instance, at the Promenade, Grace is determinedly chipping away at the ankles of the Mayor Quimby statue. Here's the thing - before, Grace avoided doing this out of concern that it toppling might hurt people on the deck below when it plunges through the floor. Right now? No thoughts. Head empty. Only kill.

Fate's Design was going better until Grace realized that things here could be lit on fire. It is now on fire. It is very on fire. Tables? On fire. Cards? On fire. Gambling chips? Being thrown into the fires. Chairs? Also being thrown into the fires. Grace swims above the flames, smashing light fixtures with a mute snarl on her face.

Topy isn't on fire! That's great right? Hope you don't like wine though. After trying to take a bottle down so she could throw it and getting shocked all to fuck, Grace is now slowly, carefully, and very patiently, stabbing the bottles of wine and sake, one at a time. Watch the puddle of alcohol! It's full of shards!

Somewhere between these three, Grace sends a text to Helena, which reads:

🐟

t e a s t o r e

Throwing [Deck Zero]

Still furious, and yet exhausted in a way she can't name, Grace makes her way to the bottom of the ship and kneels on the deck. And there, she starts stabbing.

And stabbing.

And stabbing.

And stabbing.

Her harpoon isn't very sharp, but it is invulnerable; what starts as a scratch in the hull will, in time, become progress in making a hole. You know. A hole in the bottom of the ship. Where the water is.

deck zero

[goodweather]

Phil finds her. There's a distant frustration in his expression, a deadness behind his eyes and an exhaustion set in his shoulders.

"You're not doing this," he says, in a way that is soft but leaves no room for argument.

[moonlesstides]

~Yes I am.~ Grace's mental voice is distant, tired.

Clang.

~You left. Radiant Helena left. Regal Cassandra left, and the dream-witch Ash left, and almost everyone left. You left and were harmed.~

CLANG!

~You will leave again, and be harmed. Culled like prey. You will return desperate, as they prey of the Manor do, and think to yourself: I can become better at being harmed.~

CLANG!

~But this prison, with its gates barred and guarded, only repairs itself once a month. You cannot return from death with no cabins to return to. I will sink the ship and dwell in silence, and watch. I will watch, and I will wait, and when it has repaired itself you will all return whole, and calm, and you will not LEAVE. ME. AGAIN!~

Grace's harpoon sticks on the next stab. She's making progress.

[goodweather]

"I--"

The noise.

"I AM WHOLE!" Phil howls, and the raw noise that claws out of him is--he didn't know that was there. "They ripped my wings off, Grace, but I have them back, returning made me whole!"

He grabs the harpoon. One. "You are not sinking this ship! If I have to watch us all go under again, I am not going to do it knowing you did this!" Two. "It's not going to be because someone I care about sent us to the Nothing!" Three. "If I have to watch my children drown again, watch Darcy relive her first worst nightmare right on top of her second, it's not going to be because of you!"

He's breathing hard. Four. "Grace--you are not doing this to me." Five. "I don't want to leave you. But you don't get to call the shots for the rest of us." Six. "You d--don't--you don't get to tell me how I can or can't die. You... you understand that."

Seven.

"You don't get to drown me like they drowned you."

Eight. He lets go.

[moonlesstides]

She freezes in place when Phil shouts. Grace can't even bring herself to try and rip her harpoon away when the gentleman grabs it; all unintended, she holds it firmly, her webbed hand beneath Phil's talons on the instrument of death.

Good eye wide and locked on his. Mouth open in horror, and in disbelief. But old habits die so very hard, don't they? Grace's free hand counts the seconds, precise as a metronome, in tune with Phil's own tally. The moment he lets go she hurls the weapon away to clatter, unheeded, against the door to the crew cabins, her ribbon spooling out behind it with its unlimited bond, and Grace grabs the front of Phil's shirt and presses her forehead to his.

~What were you thinking? You could have been hurt, you know not to touch - not to - not to touch -~

She has no tears to shed. Things that are not dead do not weep; to mourn is a thing for the living.

But her face needs those tears. Her grief doesn't look complete without them.

[goodweather]

Phil is remarkably slack when Grace grabs him, his strength going to keeping him upright and on his feet. And to the hand that comes to rest on the back of her shoulder. The touch of her skin, dead and cold, is familiar.

"Of course I do," he murmurs, soft and slow as empty embers compared to the fire a moment before. "It's the same thing. I--I know what happens when I touch your harpoon, and I know when I need to pull away before I--before I die. When I... when I go--I'm putting myself in harm's way. I'm going to be in danger, I know. I'll get hurt. I might die there. But I still keep going on those trips, like I keep holding onto the harpoon. Then I let go."

The hand on her shoulder rubs gently in place. "But you can't... the Captain is one thing--we know he doesn't care about us, we know when he does something like that it's to keep the engine running. But he lets us come to the harpoon. You--you can't be the one to thrust it into us, not when you have a choice. I am not going to let you make an enemy of my friend."

Topy

[configuration_birdwatcher]

Bastion is ambivalent about this mass reign of destruction; it's not something they personally find gratifying, and they have some concerns about what the cleanup is going to be like, but after the prolonged stress of the excursion – even for those who hadn't been in the Village themselves, where everyone had been stripped of any means to exert force above the human baseline and then punished harshly for everything from swearing too much to returning to their lodgings too late at night – they can see why it would be cathartic.

They take down a bottle of wine which purports to be made from gloomy mushrooms and set it on the bar to see what Grace does with it.

[moonlesstides]

Grace approaches the wine slowly, cautiously. She circles the bar like a shark, sometimes glancing at the bottle, then Bastion. She reaches out to touch it -

- And gets shocked again immediately, seizing up her body in silent agony. The moment she has control of herself again Grace baseball swings the harpoon at the glass.

~Did you know that would happen???~

[configuration_birdwatcher]

Bastion flinches back in surprise and distress, more at Grace's convulsions than the glass shards and thick inky black liquid subsequently going everywhere. // No?!?

They had assumed that the effect preventing unauthorised access to the alcohol supplies was a property of the shelves and storage areas, not the bottles themselves.

// I thought the wine would be safe if I removed it. Sorry. They're not exactly in a hurry to get another one down and try again.

[moonlesstides]

~Mmm. I believe you, mechanical one. Join me. Cast down the forbidden fruit of the vine! It is very satisfying.~

By way of demonstration Grace slashes her way through a row of bottles, grinning in malicious joy.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

Either the harpoon is non-conductive, or it doesn't count as part of Grace when it touches the wine bottles, they observe.

Well, it doesn't bear a close resemblance to the kind of thing they'd typically be doing on the battlefield, and there's already a huge mess in here. They select another bottle of fermented mushroom beverage from the same shelf and, with an experimental air, throw it overhand across the room. It hits a stool, which wobbles back and forth when the bottle breaks against it.

The act itself doesn't really move them. The satisfying part is knowing that Number 2 can't stop or punish them for their act of vandalism, as would have been the case if they entered an eatery in the Village and threw its stock onto the floor.

// If I throw one, would you hit it in midair?

text.

[decrypter]

Teastore

What do you mean?

Re: text.

[moonlesstides]

Grace summons all of the focus, intent, and malicious power she learned in the Manor, and applies it to sending a comprehensible text.

COME

TO

SAND

DOLLARS

AVOID

THE

DEVASTATION

[decrypter]

Grace, what are you doing currently? Why do we need a sanctuary?

[moonlesstides]

FRIENDSHIP

ACTIVITY

theater (drive by)

[neverleave]

[The entire line of chairs she slashed start screaming. The rips have human looking teeth.

This may have something to do with the mouth-shaped sigil someone drew on the bottom.]

[moonlesstides]

Grace loses several minutes seeing if the mouths will chew on her harpoon and then Many More peacefully playing pretend at being a dentist.

driveby

[astrogator]

Topy wasn't on fire when Grace was there, true.

Tayrey swings by afterwards to fill a holdall with bottles of the strongest alcohol she can find. Then, after double-checking that there are no people or creatures around to get hurt, she's going to test out her plan.

Stand at a safe distance. Strip of fabric. Light. Her bottle crashes down amid the spilled alcohol and glass shards. Look at that miniature fireball! That puddle? It burns merrily.

Tayrey's already gone, running off towards her next target. Friday had better prioritise this one.

Fate's Design

[theotherright]

Oh that's a lot of fire. Crackling, blasting out heat, popping bulbs.

Arthur's fully prepared to stay the hell out of here, especially with his free arm full of bags of flour -- but then he smells the water. Not the sterile sea around them, but water thick with rotted wrack and red rust, the way the banks of the Miskatonic used to smell at low tide.

So he hesitates in the doorway, because there are a number of reasons to be in a room on fire, ranging from 'starting it' to 'being trapped in it'. People are wilding out a little. He wants to make sure--

"Grace...?"

[moonlesstides]

~Gentleman Arthur! I have defeated the lowly vice of gambling!~

Topy - isn't on fire YET

[angelofthenight]

Is it her birthday? Because the sight before her seems like a gift. Grace is all alone in the wine bar, stabbing bottles and spilling their flammable liquids all over the place. And here is Demona (in the guise of Dominique) holding two bottles of rubbing alcohol with fabric wicks hanging out of them. This couldn't be more perfect.

Demona pulls a lighter from her pocket and readies it. Then she calls into Topy, "Grace! If you value your life, you will flee that bar. You have 5 seconds. 1...2...3..."

[moonlesstides]

Grace's answer is her harpoon sailing just past Demona, trailing puddles the entire way.

~Bold, prey-thing. How do you know me?~

[angelofthenight]

She doesn't even flinch when the harpoon sails past.

"That does not matter. My vengeance cares not if you know me." She lights the wick in her bottle as she says, "Five! Prepare to die!" she throws the bottle in.

[moonlesstides]

The harpoon comes flying back at the same time Grace surges forward from behind the counter, connecting the puddles into an Abyss.

Do you remember what it felt like to drown in the open air, Demona?"

[Not Here]

[knotawolf]

Amidst Grace's clanging on the hull there's the background sound of inhuman constant screaming with no stops going back and forth down the halls and up and down the stairs.

He doesn't have to breathe and that's everyone else's problem.