my mast ain't so steady | august catch-all

[terriblepurpose]

Who: Paul Atreides and Ortus Nigenad et al
What: Closed and open starters
When: Last week of July through to end of August
Where: Various

Content Warnings: gore, body horror, eye horror, imprisonment, kidnapping, psychological torment

Comments

falco grice | there's an endless road to rediscover

[terriblepurpose]

the great turkey fillet. cw: gore, body horror & harm to child in this thread

[grice]

[ this is a video call from un: falcogrice, but once it’s open— it isn’t exactly for conversation. the camera angles are chaotic and in nonstop motion, battered by the desperate calls of a tiny, squeaking falcon. the world is being seen through perle’s eyes, landing on and off an uneven golden surface. the blurred peripheries focus enough to relay location: grass. a someways distant barn. a handful of fashionable hens clucking and foraging back and forth with their clutch of equally fashionable chicks. it seems that falco has relocated to safer grounds ever since mariana’s oceanic nightmares began spawning by the beach— he simply didn’t have much time to make it known. in a frenzied, bouncing take-off, the frightened perle manages a better view, steady for only seconds before her landing. the boy’s titan vessel dwarfing a nearby tree, rolled onto his side with jaws completely slacked apart. he’s unresponsive to his omen’s diving and even her pecking against the bone mask. the giant’s frame is giving off wisps of steam like an exhausted machine would. it’s overheating from the inside out.

perle’s cries become more panicked, painful with the occasional contortion onto her back and kicking her orange talons for surface to grasp. she cries and reaches out for desperate help intwined with her shrieks much like a crazed mother trying to get her child out of a burning, crumbled building would. she may not be near the fire— but she is burning like her sleeper. ]

[terriblepurpose]

[One of the most crucial skills that a young human can learn is not to panic in a crisis. Moments of crisis are a guarantee in life, whatever universe you happen to inhabit, and Paul was instructed in proper behavior at such times at an early age.

Seeing Falco like this, his Omen in terrified riot, Paul has his education tested to the limit. The only way he can proceed is to disconnect from the first shivers of reactive fear, and so his voice remains steady and controlled as he answers Perle's plea.]

We're coming.

[He sends the message to the rest of we, the other members of the House that's taken Falco under its wing that he can reach in time, who also have the knack of handling themselves in an unexpected crisis.

It doesn't take long for him to arrive after that, kitted out in blood-resistant Hunter cloth armor, a filtration mask dangling around his neck. He recognized the terrain, and narrowing down the precise location of the farm with the intermittent flashes of prescience that arc across his eyes was all that he needed after that. He sends that information along too, Sophia firing it off in a burst as they hurry to Falco's side.]

[grice]

[ the steam isn't too thick, there aren't any open tears to let them out in full, but it is already very hot. his feathers are fickle and easily pulled from their pores, and once they fall, they too steam— they evaporate and combust from the heat generated, and disappear into thinness that lies of them ever being there in the first place.

within the empty sockets of falco's mask are drooping eyes rolled to expose the whites and fluttering nystagmus when the lower curve of an iris retracts before disappearing. perle zips high and then dives with her loudest chitters. her flight is erratic and keen with acute dips and sudden turns until she's left bouncing on the titan vessel's limply splayed shoulders, and speaks herself— she only ever speaks when she truly needs to. ]

Oh, Paul! Paul, quickly, get him out of there. It's awful, it will be awful. I can't wake him.

[terriblepurpose]

[The heat troubles Paul less than heat should, but it's still so much, Perle's panic more than justified. Falco's healing ability had cast off heat like this, when he'd taken that hideous wound on the winter beach, and Paul understands well how fevers kill. Is the principle the same here? Is it something else, a disease of the body from Falco's home, or from this place? Poison, curses, and every other malady under the sun go through his coursing thoughts.

Perle says to get him out of there. She says it will be awful. Salt flakes and lime peels inside his mouth, intuition tracing a cool finger down the back of his neck.]

Tell me how.

[He's already unshouldered his pack and let it fall to the ground. He doesn't touch Falco, doesn't dare, but Sophia operates by different rules. She bounds to his side and swells to the size of a sheep before she leans against him, her ears open and listening for the disrupted rhythms of life inside this ailing body.]

the imprisoned | you know what flows here like wine

[acidjail]

cw: body horror, medical horror, kidnapping, imprisonment

[acidjail]

i. capture

Much of the time, with the correct precautions, it's possible to ignore the sewer system that runs rampant under the city. Its great looping circuits, its dead end pockets, its drains and channels and gutters, and the Beasts that stalk them all in the darkness may go overlooked.

The floods change that.

Wide, flat pools form over clogged storm drains in the streets, while the plumbing inside buildings gurgles and spits up gouts of filthy seawater as the sewer system struggles to keep pace with the fury of an angered god. As in any flood, it is not the water alone that causes danger - it is everything that it brings with it, debris from the minute to the towering, the mad mishmash of the refuse that settles low in any civilized place only to be lifted up all at once by the wild violence of a storm.

Some of the wreckage is more dangerous than others.

What brings you below the street level is your own affair. Perhaps you lost something to the tunnels and wish to see it returned; perhaps you hunt one of the many Beasts you make it their home and are disturbed to wrath by the flooding of their territory; perhaps you catch sight of something through the slats of a gutter that intrigues you. It does not matter.

What does matter, when you are far enough away from wherever you came in that your screams might be difficult to trace, is if you see the tentacle snaking through the dirty shallows at your feet.

ii. imprisonment

Let it never be said that the Second Saint to serve the King Undying was not industrious.

The challenges of containing such a diversity of captives are many, beginning from the necessity of avoiding any circumstance where they might interact. This is not so much to forestall conspiracy as it is to avoid having to speak to more than one of them at once, but she rarely does anything for only one reason. The spacing required to maintain an acceptable buffer means that each cell ends up a modestly irritating distance apart, given that she travels to most of them on foot.

Another issue that arises swiftly is the tedious insistence on escape so many people have in the face of even the most humane imprisonment. Each cell, beautifully latticed taut sinew and taut muscle fiber sheathing curved bone, tightly bundled prehensile tongues anchored at their thick bases, must be made new, then meticulously encircled in wards of her own painted spit, then matched to each prisoner by their demonstrated strength. Some she can permit movement within the claustrophobic, sometimes twitching walls, but others need to be fully restrained, which adds another burden of care to her shoulders.

After all, she doesn't want to kill any of them. She would be so blessed as to only want that little. No - unfortunately for her (and perhaps, to some indifferent degree, unfortunately for them) the Saint of Woe remains committed to her mission of mercy.

It's distressing. A vast and growing number of things are, and it is in this mood that she bids a cell to flare one of its exhaust vents so she might peer inside the pinkish insides.

The light cast by her Omni only goes so far. (She's taken theirs, as a precaution, with strictest instructions to her constructs to confiscate anything of the sort that might manifest again.) It still shows more of her than might be reassuring to see, the darkness perhaps preferable to her off-kilter seething glare of rust-colored irises ringed by green-flecked whites, framed by loose strands of pinkish, unkempt hair escaped from a carelessly bound low ponytail.

She doesn't seem on the verge of speech.

ii

[distant_one]

There are times when walking into a trap is the easiest way to deal with it. D could have spent time wandering around in the tunnels following a mix of scents and sounds. But when the moment came, he'd allowed himself to be pulled along by the tendril and put up no more of a struggle than an ordinary human of his height and build might put up.

There's a familiar feel to the magic animating strange flesh and running his left hand along it confirms the similarity. It's not Gaius from what they can tell, but the same or similar dimension.

D is completely unbothered by the dark or the faint light when the strange fleshy prison opens up. The dim light only enhances D's unusual appearance as a creature of the night. Dark eyes and dark hair closer to the night itself than any color against skin that almost looks more like living stone than flesh.

[acidjail]

The woman purses her lips, her eyes narrowing as she scores them across his body like a scalpel, and a flash of inexplicable emotion clouds her already stormy gaze. It does not seem to skew towards the positive.

"Well?" She says, sharply, with a curdled edge, "Anything to say for yourself?"

Inside the cell, one of the tentacles stirs, reaching for nearest patch of uncovered skin. It is a dry, slim thing at the tip, a tongue devoid of the lubrication of salivary glands, pebbled and faintly rough.

[distant_one]

"Shouldn't I ask you that? You're the one going around capturing strangers," D counters, his voice calm and slightly cold. The only uncovered patches of skin D has are his face and his left hand.

While he's been fairly docile so far, D leans away from the tongue and grabs it with his left hand to keep it from going for his face.

"Is that really necessary?" Even D has his limits and letting a rogue tongue go for his face is apparently among them.

II

[slightlytaller]

This wasn't his first time in restraints.

The man that was more bone than flesh hung limply in the bindings that held him against the wall, his arms outspread to prevent any tricks-- as if he were a mage far more impressive than the vessel of petty feats of mana that he was. He had only ventured outside for a quick trek across Cellar Door to get more tea and wine, two essentials to help his household deal with the stress of the repetitive flooding the had besieged Trench. He had places to go and plans to attend to--

When his omen, a black cat he called Gray, wandered off into the sewers after an unknown prize. He had given chase, because he was not in the mood to fight against the whims of Mariana for a simple shopping trip.

It was absurdly easy to catch him off guard and knock him down.

A migraine had settled in, stabbing a pick through his temples and gripping the back of his skull like a vice. Even the dulled flicker from the handheld light caused pain and nausea to ripple through him... And Waver Velvet groaned in discomfort.

"... Another five minutes," he muttered, as if he had been asleep, and he peered up at his captor through sticky, brine sodden hair.

...

Somehow, he knew that woman hadn't been so kind as to return to the sea.

[acidjail]

"I don't think so!" She says, cruelly high-pitched and piercing, with a serenely unpleasant little smile neatly in place.

Unlike some of her luckier captives, Waver is not left untouched by the tentacles. Four of them are wrapped snugly around his torso, and they constrict slightly, the bumps of hardened tastebuds whispering across his clothing.

cw: tongue-tacles?

[slightlytaller]

--Fucking constriction.

His first impulse was to panic, but he had read up enough about constriction to have an idea of what to do in case his enemies ever decided to pull a fast one. Determinedly, Waver took a deep breath and expanded his chest cavity as much as he could. The options he had were limited with his arms restrained-- the only thing he could do for the moment was keep himself still and avoid struggling.

Gritting his teeth against both the eerie sensation of the creature exploring his lanky, bony body with that sickening tenderness as well as the continued bite of his relentless headache, Waver lifted his head and stared impassively at the woman.

"With the way you were howling, I'm surprised you didn't go back to the sea." He said calmly, not at all surprised that it was her. The heart-rending rush of adrenaline that flooded his system mere moments after he had escaped the beach nearly dropped him right there in the street. The dizzying effect had left him breathless-- and well aware of her undying fury.

He had offered actual prayer to whatever gods bothered to listen that this horrid woman would return to the sea. Everything he saw of her was well beyond his pay-grade or recognition; he couldn't even tell whether she was on the same scale as a Servant, a part of the Fae, or even a Deity.

All he knew was that she was a danger to everyone.

a willing intruder (cw: blood, gore mention)

[robussy]

[ it happens when 2B walks through the district of prufrock, donning new vestments that closely resemble what she is used to, now as an accepted hunter— black and easy to move in. it fits finely with trench's deep shades and driery skies. what does not fit in with most of these burly, combat-ready soldier types had been the moment 2B's eyes shot up a glowing ice-blue light, causing her body to constrict within artificial muscle and show her—

hollowed chambers. the drip of muck and seawater. the crack of light from thin metal bars.
sloppy, wet tendrils gathered around the wrists of limbs, up and down.
the scent of— she couldn't identify them.
a smell that is not obnoxious, but light and fleeting, almost nothing. it flows white through a tube-like structure. there's more.
rust. black, but like the sky and thousands of stars. blue, like a pale moon over a pond's reflection.
they all pump through conduits, into bodies.
of wildflowers, like the overgrowth on earth. deep green and streaked with crimson.
of something pungent and sharp. hot. cold. sweet and tarty.
sweat sticks and beads over the sharp curvatures of jutted jawbones, shining at her temples and cheeks, a delicate face that doesn't play the part of delicate.
a flash of pink, of fixed brows and puckered lips always sour.
ill, wrong. viscous green fluid slips from her nose and stains her scowl.
a pinkish growth buds where pale, nauseous skin is exposed and dots her complexion.
"WHY STOP IN HER FERVOR WHEN NO ONE THINKS TO LOOK?"

the words ghost her lips by the time her frame slacks and she catches her weight in a balancing stagger. she throws it to her heels, clicking harshly on rough cobblestone floors until she can catch her breath, and rest her hand on her chest, then her eyes, both sides of her head. her vitals were at a battering high. if that had been a vision, as palebloods "get", she remembers—

2B catches the shadow of thin metal bars on the ground, once overflowing and cleaned by the rush of a flood. it drips, drips, drips down to the sewer's empty tunnel system. she becomes highly aware of it as if a moving target, and with the perfect picture of mercymorn burned into her memory, she begins to move to its closest ladder leading down. it is easy to hear the android: clack, clack, clack went her measured steps, echoing through the tunnels and matching the flashes of what she saw as a sign to continue. there were beasts down here. beasts, and apparently unruly women. she takes the blade of virtuous contract and slaps its face against the wall, sharp and dry.

if there was anything down here, they would come, and she would slice whatever looked like a throat to get to her destination. ]

[acidjail]

[ There is quiet after the sword striking stone.

The tunnels do not fill with the answering cries of a Beast. The unclean flow of water reverberates off the curved walls alone, except for a singular distant splash, which could be anything. 2B's heels click neatly along, unaccompanied - until what looks like the tip of an extended human tongue pokes itself above the waters, twitching at her approach.

It flicks itself at her. Somehow, despite being a tongue (one that is, already, too long seeming, stretched improbably past the limits of a mouth) it conveys a distinct sense of dismissal. ]

[robussy]

[ an elegant start ends with an elegant stop, even on the surface of a mask of water at the middle arch of the tunnel she paces across. her eyes target the movement within inhuman moments (it's close to a cat's predatory reflex for something in motion), and a better analysis determines . . .

it is a prolonged, fleshy tendril. a tongue. a human tongue, and that is what saves it from a deadly swipe of the ready blade. 2B scrutinizes the strung-out organ with an unphased gaze. she does think it can be something worth following. with a nudge of the type of her boot, she hopes to see a ripple and a way to go. ]

ii

[lipochrome]

[ Gideon wakes on the floor of an underground cell, with a shit-eating necromancer making a weird face at her, and she almost feels homesick. The nausea she's experiencing could be a kind of homesickness, for sure -- this place is disgusting. Awful vibes in every way.

Gideon immediately reaches for her sword, which is, of course, dumb. You can't imprison her without taking it. The next thing she goes for is her Omni, to request backup from her House, but even that goes nowhere.

Only one option remains: be so fucking annoying that this lemongrab nightmare will let her go. ]

Hey. [ Gideon sticks a hand out and waves. ] Yoo-hoo. You wanna go ahead and let me out now?

cw: ableism

[acidjail]

[ The Saint of Woe wrinkles her nose like someone opening a sack lunch, only to find what's inside has gone off, and is covered in crawling, biting things. ]

Tell me - is damage to the brain a new fad on the Ninth? [ She asks, as someone not at all interested in the answer. ] You've all gone dotty for self-inflicted injury to your already undeveloped frontal lobes? Or has malnutrition finally caught up to you?

[ Her mouth hardens, and then she bursts out, apropos of nothing: ]

I told her, you know! I warned her about stars! Too far from the center - impossible to hold, I said - but she always thought she was cleverer than anyone else!!

cw: ableism, past child abuse

[lipochrome]

[ That's a fairly typical reaction to finding Gideon Nav in your murder basement, all things considered. Just look at the entirety of the Ninth. This type of back-and-forth is something Gideon knows well. It's easy for her, even if she doesn't especially like it. ]

Oh, yeah. I had a "brain malfunction" [ air quotes and everything ] when I was six.

[ If Mercymorn's first comment is familiar, her second is anything but. Who the fuck is she? Why do stars even matter, here? ]

I, uh. Hate to break it to you. [ Gideon is relishing in this. ] But the Eighth is, like, practically right next door? You guys aren't even close to Dominicus.

cw: body horror and imprisonment, claustrophobia, etc

[itknowsyou]

The cells are matched to each prisoner by their demonstrated strength, yes, but this prisoner has demonstrated very little of the sort: only an ineffectual sort of panic. Whenever he draws too close to the bars, the tongues might brush his ankles, and the man she's captured— short, terribly skinny, a Vileblood of no evident power— gasps in jolting horror. He always recoils to the back walls, then flinches from that wet mucosal sheen and stumbles forward again.

It is almost darkly funny to watch, his ping-ponging from one fleshy horror to the other. He was not difficult to take. He put up a fuss, of course: shouting, swearing, frightened. That died out somewhere in the night. With the warm and living walls around him, he has not truly complained in hours.

She will see it clearly on his face, when she stops to inspect her captive. In the moments when he isn't skittering away from the wet body of his cage, he regards it with— not revulsion. The man stares with an almost trancelike fascination at the fleshy twitching of the halls. When she peels open her portal to look in, he watches the unfurling of that pink flesh as though he is watching a flower bloom.

As though he's a witness to something strange and beautiful.

Then he seems to truly register that his captor has come to talk with him, and fixes her with a glare.

"I see my host has finally arrived."

As he speaks, there is a shiver of smoke behind him: an Omen begins to manifest in the cell, something with dark feathers and luminous yellow-green eyes.

cw: body horror and imprisonment, psychological horror, eye horror, suicidal implication

[acidjail]

This is the longest she has stayed out of the water since it first spat her out.

She does not remember how long she has bobbed beneath the surface of whatever this world purports itself to be, but the rare instances she broke through have always passed swiftly before. Death rolls in, death recedes, and it is only at the bottom of each trough she is subjected to the horrible immediacy of being.

With every instant she has endured it, she has known there is something terribly wrong. Each joining of ligament and fascia aches. She barely sleeps, and the sleeplessness hurts her. Hideous oxidized iridescent half-circles pool in her eye sockets and stick. She found herself gnawing on her own knuckle as she stared unblinkingly at her work. The wound has not healed.

The face that looks in on him is a worn one, her mouth and eyes sharpened to the razor thin intensity of the insomniac. The extension of his soul boils up behind him. The extension of her will slaps a tentacle across his torso with a meaty thud, cool muscle coiling loosely, like a sash, from hip to shoulder.

"If you are about to try to be cunning," she says, with the charm of an alarm bell, "Or brave, or defiant, or in any way, whatsoever, difficult, I am terribly afraid that I might lose my temper."

izuku "deku" midoriya | we glow so dim

[wannasmash]

Midoriya likes the beach. The black sand beach is very different from the one he used to visit in his own world, but it still evokes memories of training with All Might. He fights to keep that association instead of newer and more terrible ones that soaked the sand with blood and death. It's not the beach's fault. He visits regularly to clean up trash and check in on Cloverfield. The Lost Pthumerian is nowhere to be seen today.

Instead, the ocean continues its trend of doing strange things. Midoriya had observed the uncanny bioluminescence(?) before Paul brought up exploring it. (Midoriya would not have. Very literally entering the domain--perhaps the very lair--of Mariana is not high on his list of things to do with someone who helped royally piss her off.)

But he is a protector above all, and it's dangerous to swim alone. He stands waist-deep in the water and apprehensively eyes the calm path cutting between the waves. He doubts they'll go out too far. (He is wrong.) He wears all his gear, as the weight will be no hindrance to him.

"Float saved me from drowning during the storm." Impossible to do this without talking about that day. "If something goes wrong, I can use it to save us. Let's stay close."

[terriblepurpose]

Paul still doesn't know where they stand, he and Midoriya and Kaworu. The process of reunification has been tentative and fragile, conducted with greater caution than he entered into with in the first place. He'd already handled them like glass; now they feel like barely clinging sand sculptures, impossibly breakable.

It's an odd thought to have looking at Midoriya in his full gear, as battle ready as Paul has ever seen him. He's dressed himself more lightly, a breastplate of blood-hardened scale and a simple pairing of knives on his hips. His filter mask hangs around his next as he stands slightly farther out along the path, fingers trailing in the water.

"I won't go too far." He looks away, out towards where the glowing leads. "First sign of trouble, we go."

He doesn't want to test her patience. This is, after all, another kind of reunion. He begins to wade out further, casting a look back to make sure Midoriya is following before he fixes his mask over his mouth. You never know what's under the surface of these waves.

forgot to mark this entire thread for spoilers

[wannasmash]

For the two of them, Paul and Kaworu, Midoriya always tried to have a hand ready and open, even in the midst of a storm of turbulent emotions. It was the best way he could think of to keep them with him. He could easily have lost them both that day. They could have left him forever and turned only to the purposes for which they were made. He's tentative about being overly familiar with them again, but his hand at least never hesitates. His UA family taught him that.

Like a hand extended, he gives Paul a small quick smile when he looks back at him before moving forward. Midoriya stays to the side and just behind Paul, thinking it will be harder to maintain this formation if they swim, but determined to do it anyway.

His mask doesn't filter water, so he leaves it around his neck until he might need it to protect against blows. He hopes he won't. He fixes swimming goggles to his face instead. He swirls a curious hand just under the water, watching the lights.

As often happens with the tide, Midoriya misjudges an errant wave and receives a faceful. His hair flattens to his head and curls irritably at the ends. He is prepared to cough and splutter, but it is as if it filled his nose with... air.

"I can breathe--Paul-kun, there's something weird about this water. I mean, other than the lights."

[terriblepurpose]

See the smile return to Midoriya's face has been one of the greatest gifts Paul has had the privilege of receiving. He returns it in kind, fondness shaded through with wistful hope, before his mask hides his face and he's turned back out to the sea. That lasts until Midoriya speaks up again in surprise, and he twists to look over his shoulder with faint crinkled happiness around his eyes.

"So it's true," he muses, still above the surface, before he tilts forward to plant his face in the waves and take a tentative breath. The transition-that-isn't is the startling part, an expected shift that instead is absence, and when he lifts his head water streams back out through his mask's filter slits.

"I'd heard a rumor, but I wasn't sure - I hope it doesn't wear off once we get deeper." That would be unpleasant, although thanks to present company, not fatal. "That's why I didn't bring the hat."

"Thank you for that, again." He adds, a quieter coda. He keeps walking at that, seemingly finished speaking until they're both under the waves, the chill and strange waters closing over his head like sealing lips. "It helped."