come_sailaway | beaufort wind scale [open]

Entry tags:

beaufort wind scale [open]

Who: Phil and you!
What: January open; having a bad one, having a decent one, and Bird Monster Time
When: through January
Where: bellona theatre, library, sports deck, bobby b's, the sky, pool bar, around
Warnings: non-suicidal self-harm thoughts, compulsiveness, probably prior Village stuff will come up

smoke drift indicates wind direction, wind vanes still (cw: avoiding self harm) [rooftop]

This can't be good.

It's the first thing his mind jumps to, when his heart starts racing or the stress builds in his gut, that need to hurt something, but he can't let himself do that. He couldn't before and he especially can't now. He won't. He won't. Too many people care about him. Too many people depend on him. He'll do anything before he relapses like that. The idea is terrifying.

In his cabin he takes a sharpie and draws on himself. As many species of swirling plants and darting animals as he can remember, tangles of geometry, cold fronts, polar coordinates and bad math equations that would probably crash a calculator, as many numbers of the Fibonacci sequence as he can remember; all of it traces up his wrists and his thighs, though no one will see the latter. He can't ruin something like that. He rips a notebook from the bric-a-brac to shreds and painstakingly colors it all red in marker. Tape, too--there's tape in the bric-a-brac and the Sundries, and that he lays on his skin, especially where there's body hair, and tears it off. It doesn't take up hair that much, but the sting is there. That satisfies. That sates. That's safe.

And he runs too. Falls into a dead sprint until his legs burn, then takes off into the sky until his wings and his whole torso does too. It's good cardio, he may as well be productive. Some might spot him soaring in circles above the deck. When he lands, it's onto a familiar rooftop perch, and his legs dangle as he sits to take some weather measurements.

wind felt on face, leaves rustle, vanes begin to move [bellona theatre, library]

In the library, or occasoinally alone in the theatre, a voice can be heard, quiet and low.

"When I heard the learn'd astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; when I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured wh--when--"

A soft but vicious swear. And then he starts again.

Phil sits with pages and books of literature and poetry in front of him, reciting carefully. He... seems stuck.

small trees in leaf begin to sway [sports deck]

It's not at all unusual to see Phil up on the sports deck; he works out regularly, he keeps up diligently with his sword and combat training, has for over a year by now. And he's a strong sort of guy; the impacts he make aren't without force.

But he starts showing up more often, and for longer. Phil goes at the dummy with a dull training blade with an unusual aggression and speed; the impacts are vicious, and the drills are repetitive, and there comes a point when he strikes and the blade snaps apart, the shattered pieces flying.

Phil stops, breathing hard, and goes to sit and take a water break.

twigs breaking off trees, generally impedes progress [around]

Sometimes he has his earplugs in; often he doesn't, because despite how much he hates the noise, he hates being vulnerable more. As Phil passes through the ship he keeps tabs on his surroundings, carefully avoiding any eye contact so as not to be caught glowering at anybody. No one deserves that from him, but he's not willing to tamp it down, either.

But if someone seems to keep his eyes on him for too long, he'll look right back at them and grumble, "Is there something you need?"

whole trees moving, resistance felt walking against wind [bobby b's]

The routines the same. He drags himself into the bar. Sometimes he gets a cigar, but he always grabs a whiskey. Never by the bottle, though, and for each new drink he gets a new glass. He. Needs to keep track.

He's here more often than he was before, and for longer. But... he has water, and food from the Drunken Sailor, so...

slight structural damage occurs, slate blows off roofs (cw: compulsive behavior) [around, in quiet places]

Preening while he does other things is routine. Usually while he reads, which could be in the library or the lounge or the cafe, or while he's just sitting around in a restaurant or a bar or the pool deck. But these days, sometimes he just--he gets stuck. He'd meant to get up and do something else half an hour ago, maybe even an hour, but his talons still run through his feathers, running and running and digging and pulling and--he's breaking barbs, snapping quills, running his feathers torn and ragged, but that's just as well. That's how he knows it's real. Ugly, but real, and the mistakes he makes stay.

... This is probably an issue, though, isn't it.

seldom experienced on land, trees broken or uprooted, considerable structural damage [around]

Phil takes a deep breath. And--

... There's something new slinking around the cruise. It's bigger than a polar bear and twice as vicious-looking, taller than most people at the shoulder, but it only seems to be winding carefully around the library shelves, or up and down the stairwells, or poking through the Tommy Bahama. It's not thrashing, or making a racket, or attacking people. The most it's doing is trying to use a register with its giant bird hands. Or sleeping on the roof of the pool bar. Or struggling to get out of some Bahama clothing racks that he got stuck in without breaking anything.

(Those who are even passingly observant might see why: those wings are familiar. So are the eyes: the left one clear, the right one slashed and cloudy with cataracts. And perhaps even the sallow white light is familiar, and the cool breeze that blows about it.)

very rarely experienced; accompanied by widespread damage [after the probe launch; rooftop]

Phil slowed down on his weather tracking a lot. Once every other day, maybe every three days. Nothing has changed since July of last year, after all.

But now he thinks it'll be much more useful than not to have someone keeping tabs on the atmosphere. So. He'll be there on the same rooftop spot he always takes. New paper on the clipboard, neatly dated and partitioned. At nearly all hours of the day and much of the night, he's taking readings as close together as 15 minutes and no further than two hours apart. Sometimes he'll fly out over the sea just to scan the horizon. He's made a real nest up there to make the long haul tolerable; cushions, blankets, food and drink, books... plus Erin's sword and the cursed dagger close at hand, and the antimagic ring on his finger. And always wearing his lei. (It's invisible in the daylight, but in the evenings, there's... a strange fluorescent cast of light on him. Like most white fluorescents, it doesn't do him any favors, only serving to make him look more sallow and pale, as though he was ill.)

Sometimes he's up there in that big bird monster shape too, struggling to manipulate the pen in his weirdly dexterous bird hands. It'll be useful to get used to this shape now that he understands what it is. It came to him so close to the eve of potential disaster. It's the same thing as when he got these wings two months before the apocalypse happened on Prismatica, and he used them to race through the collapsing city to rescue and evacuate civilians with Henry.

It's a Hail Mary.

It also means they might live.

devastation [wildcard]

(( hit me on discord or here. ))

Threaded | Flat

It's while Fio's reading in the library that she realizes she's not alone. Something else is here. Something bigger than her and slinking about the shelves that she can notice from the corner of her eye.

Setting her book down, she stands to follow to get a better look. And when she does... there isn't a hint of fear. Not because she immediately recognizes the wings or anything. She's just... never been really afraid of monsters. ~~Unless they attack her.~~

"Woah, a birdie!" she exclaims a little too loudly and excitedly. A bird, sort of? She clasps a hand over her mouth, realizing a second later how loud she is in the library of all places.

[ There's a large, dark shape up in the nest that Darcy and Phil repurposed over the couple of days of Christmas.

He hasn't been sleeping there since, preferring the coolness and homely smell of the kitchen, but he'd brought a number of his belongings up there that he's yet to bring back down. So.

This is a problem. ]

HEY- [ Darcy calls, knowing that help is only another call away if he needs. ]

"What did that sword ever do to you?"

It's a semi familiar voice, though they had only introduced themselves at the last moment, and Fever has her staff in a hand - the sigils give a soft glow, but there's no magic in the air. She'd barely made a sound as she'd slipped up to the deck, observing the last few seconds with a critical eye. Now she makes herself known, going up to the dummy and nudging a piece of the broken blade with her foot.

Arthur is shaken out of his reading by... something.

There's something large here. Arthur isn't sure whether he heard a too-strange footfall, or felt the air move, or whether that movement brought a smell that he couldn't quite place. But there's a chill down his neck and he's certain he isn't alone in the library.

For a moment he hopes it's (what he halfway thinks of as) the library's cat. Wouldn't be the first time it's teleported in, as cats do, and surprised him. But the cat would have announced its presence: it would be here for food, or fuss, or both. It's not the cat.

He stands, rather carefully and quietly. His weight is on the quarterstaff that he's using for a cane these days; it's reassuring to remind himself that he's not completely helpless. His stance isn't aggressive: this might be something completely benign and friendly. Hell, it might just be a person moving around. But he's tense, and he's listening hard, stopping himself on the brink of asking who's there. Maybe he should just say something. The Village has made him nervous. What he wouldn't give for one of John's overlong descriptions.

(He's reminded, forcibly, of all the times that he thought there were things with him in Number 2's therapy room. Monstrous goats and tentacled eyes and things under his skin and laughing dancers who stabbed him repeatedly, but also things he never met in reality, that were free to be as terrible as his imagination could supply. He's forced to wonder if he's imagining this, too, and then he tries to stop wondering it, because the idea scares him shitless.)

She hasn't managed to fly in awhile, when the magic powering the ability was so dependent on her maintaining happy thoughts. It had been nice to train and reward herself for positive thinking, to jumpstart out of her mood slump. But it's also rendered it completely useless these last several months of perpetual anxiety. Self-induced and otherwise.

And now every day looms over her as potentially the last. She's restless. Uncertain what to do. Doesn't want to go out so miserable and useless. So she climbs up on the guard rails of the upper deck, as she had the first time she was recklessly training herself. Focuses on everything she's so thankful for in her life.

Ava manages to fly for a few feet, up and over the side of the ship, the feeling of weightlessness always provides an extra boost, up up. But reality quickly closes back in, her fears clamp down, and Ava begins crashing down toward the waves with a small shout.

Oh well, she thinks.

"Care for company?" comes a familiar chime, and Ossie doesn't really wait for an answer because he sees the number of glasses and is not leaving Phil alone.

"What are we drinking?" he asks, cheerily.

"So it blocks the magic or renders it ineffective? Or does the distinction not really matter?"

The ring doesn't exactly give her a bad feeling, more just...an odd one. Something subtle in the air. But she's seen his hands before, and took note of when one ring moved off his hand, and now there's just that one. Call it actually using her perception every now and then. Him explaining it as a ring that simply says no to magic, it's a rare find indeed.

"You've got something any intelligent lord would give their left hand to own."

Threaded | Flat

bird monster (around/library)

Phowl wildcard-ish

sports deck.

BIRD TIME (before the probe plot)

very rarely experienced

whole trees moving