o5 . bone house mingle!

[necrolord]

Who: necrolord and CR!
What: Several teens move into the horrible necromancy mansion, and sometimes they bring their friends.
When: Early March.
Where: Bone House in Gaze.

Content Warnings: Skeletons, discussions of death and grief, violence where marked, vomit where marked. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

Comments

Late February; Willow, Gideon, Harrow.

[necrolord]

[ He sees her balk as they reach the edge of the property. The stone wall around its edge is a crumbling ruin; the skeletons of batcats stand guard at every corner, like particularly weird statuary. He at least has the good sense not to have the skeleton servants open the door: he does that the old-fashioned way, and leads her into a marble foyer patched with whorls of bone. ]

Home sweet home.

[frogfear]

[It's like some kind of haunted mansion or something out of an old Scooby-Doo cartoon, and Willow can't help but be taken a little aback at the sight of the house, guarded by weird skeletal... are those gargoyles? Cat gargoyles? With wings?

What.

She glances at him, but he doesn't seem to think anything is even remotely amiss, so apparently this is just a perfectly normal state of affairs. She follows him inside, and it's clear from the patches in the marble that her friend, this Captain/Cleric/Teacher - whatever, has some very specific, very unusual decorative tastes.]

Huh... There's, um, kind of a lot of bone... around here, isn't there?

Late February; Willow, Gideon, Harrow; Wolfwalking.

[necrolord]

[frogfear]

[The house is strange, and a little creepy, between the weird skeletons perched on the roof, and the less weird, but disturbingly more human looking skeletons that act as servants on the inside. It's fine, it's all fine - this is all apparently perfectly a perfectly normal state of affairs for this house, even if it seems anything but normal.

Crawling out of the ocean, and figuring out how to be human again makes for a long, exhausting day, so Willow excuses herself fairly early to go get some much needed rest. She settles into the bed in the guestroom and pulls the blankets over her head and before she's even completely settled, she's fast asleep.

In happens in the space of moments. One second, she's closing her eyes, and the next she's reopening them, and she's on the floor, low to the ground, watching herself sleep from outside her own body. It's the most bizarre sensation, and she's not sure how to process it. Some kind of weird blood magic thing? Does she astral project herself now when she sleeps? She looks down at herself and yelps in alarm when she sees she has not hands, or feet, but paws.

Is it a dream guide thing? She doesn't think so - it doesn't feel like December when she took on Puck's form with him riding along instinctively as though they were one. She can't even feel Puck right now at all- if he even still exists in this world at all.

She runs to the door and jumps up on it to try to push it open with her paws, but it's to no avail. She paws at the round doorknob, but without proper fingers or a thumb, she can't grasp it to make it turn. She throws her furry body against the door with a resounding thud, and as soon as one of the skeletons passing by pushes it open, she bursts through, knocking the thing over with a clatter, and looks around frantically. Where is everyone? Surely one of the other people in this house have an explanation for this.]

Early March; Kaworu.

[necrolord]

The Soul Bends

[peripheries]

[It's late. Probably past 1 A.M. or so. The kids when to bed awhile ago, still recovering from being pulled from the ocean to regain their form or just... all the shit they've been dealing with. It's been a lot to say the least.

Suddenly loud thud upstairs, just outside the dining hall and then... nothing else. If the kids were causing mischief then it's never limited to a single incident. It's a series to cacophony of loud banging, depending on what's happening and who is the instigator.

If Jod goes to investigate, he'll find Kaworu collapsed on the ground, just outside of his room and in-front of the stairs. He's sweaty, like he's got a fever, the back of his pajamas is sticking to the back of his shirt. There's puddle of salt water in the corner.]

Early March; Paul.

[necrolord]

March 1st

[terriblepurpose]

A body crawls out of the reeking, gore-slicked sea. Broken black armor covers it everywhere except for the slippery, pale caul wrapped around its head, a thin membrane it tears off with its nails and leaves to dissolve into iridescent foam in the shallows. From a great distance, a self-watching-self observes its progress up the shore, its slow rise to carefully set feet. The way it opens an unslit hand and contemplates the thing it has brought with it, out of the cold, deep places where this body had dreamed.

The wreckage of a canvas tent is where the body curls up, knees tucked to chest, sitting underneath a black-blood stained shred of cloth still hanging limply from a snapped pole like the battle standard of a vanquished army. It faces out to the sea it came from in the drowning light just after the setting of the sun, the polluted waters shimmering with strange refractions of unspeakable colors.

Everyone is reborn new, their blood purified, their hearts husked. The self-inside-self looks at the thing in its (his) hand, barbed and fission-white.

(He's not coming back.)

As the last traces of day fade from the sky, a radiant emanation blooms on the sand, soft, smeared arcs of light bent around the huddled, dreaming self. Buried shrapnel pulls itself from the sand in a shivering ring under this false aurora, each jagged tip pointed inexorably inwards.

Early March; Faith & OTA

[slayerskiss]

[Faith's been having a... difficult time ever since the Leviathan fight. She hasn't been fighting monsters, out of fear of the state she'll put herself in if she leans into the rage that came with everything that happened. (Out of fear of sinking her teeth into the veins of the beast and drinking her fill.)

Dr Bones, as she's decided to call him, did make an offer for her to come beat the shit out of some skeletons, and that's sounding more and more appealing at the moment, so she drops by.

She can be spotted in the hallway, hands in the pockets of her leather duster, looking at all the extremely over the top décor with faint amusement. She's not actually sure who's living here at the moment.]

[frogfear]

[In spite of the creep factor that comes with staying in a house where necromancy is a perfectly normal practice, it hasn't been a terrible place to recover. It feels safe enough, and she's even getting used to the sounds of skeletons clattering about, looking after the place.

What she doesn't expect is to come out of the guestroom where she's been recovering to find Faith in the hall. Particularly since she had no idea the Slayer was in Trench to begin with.

The last time Willow laid eyes on Faith was back in Sunnydale when she Freaky Friday'd Buffy, and who knows what the last thing she knows from home is. She is abundantly cautious when she finally manages to find her voice to speak up.]

Uhhh... Faith? What - what're you doing here?

March 2nd; Gideon

[terriblepurpose]

It should be dark in the kitchen. The dawn is still buried below the horizon, the lights inside dowsed. There isn't even the dull red illumination of heat on the stovetop coils, or in the guts of the oven.

What there is, instead, is a pale impossibility: a localized aurora, a sheen of ionized particles drifting in slow blue-white, half-real ribbons around the black-clad figure sitting at the kitchen island with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. A starker blue radiates from his eyes into the cool darkness of the room, shining out like the beacon of a lighthouse as he looks at nothing in particular. Besides the rise and fall of his even breath, he's motionless.

Paul hears footsteps. He straightens his back. He doesn't turn to the door.

(She told him to stay away. He should have. No matter where he looks in the black seas of the coming moments, he still can't find what to say to her to make that right.)

"Gideon," he says, with a hundred strangers' tongues, (with a hundred strangers' empty hearts, with a hundred strangers' distance), "It's me."

"Don't be afraid."

[lipochrome]

Gideon always tells herself, when she journeys down to the kitchen at late hours like these, that she's not here because she can't sleep. She's just taking advantage of the ability to have a midnight snack, something that was never possible on the Ninth, due to its lack of snacks and also its lack of midnight.

(She waited for all of them, for as long as Harrow let her. She told the sea that she thought libraries were stupid, in the hopes that it might have brought back both Paul and Palamedes, and then apologized when it occurred to her that it might make them stay away.)

Paul doesn't need to face the door for Gideon to recognize him, nor does he need to say anything. She's from the Ninth House; she sees well in the dark. That's Paul's tall-ish, slender frame, his long hair. Even if the voice is wrong, it's still him.

(She does not think about how he got here, or who brought him.)

"I know." Gideon makes a sound, something like a wet, choked half-laugh. "I'm not afraid of shiny lights, genius." She is not afraid of the voice that is a hundred voices. Harrowhark is two hundred souls, and Paul has always reminded Gideon of Harrowhark.

Then, to prove just how not-afraid she is, Gideon crosses the distance and gives Paul's hair a good ruffle, as embarrassing as she can make it. It's horrible. One for the ages.

She's missed him so much.

OTA- Early March

[peripheries]

The first few days

[The day after Kaworu arrives in the bone mansion and the afformented "salt water dinner incident", he almost completely vanishes, unable to do nothing more than sleep as his soul tries to readjust to the waking world.

Afterwards, he seems little more than Paul's shadow, only following and doing what the older boy tells him. He moves slowly, awkwardly as though he struggles to navigate his body within a space. There's a struggle to say upright, weak on feet like a newborn foal.

Currently, he's sitting on the couch where Paul deposited him, gentle running his hand down the back of a giant lizard that's sitting next to him with its head on the boy's lap. He seems more aware of what's going on when his fingers brush the lizard's skin and then like he starts to slip away when the contact vanishes. He coughs wetly and sea water, with a haunted radiance, drips down his hand.

If someone enters the room, he'll slowly turn towards you, like he has to exert great force simply to turn his head and raise his eyes. He blinks. Is that Paul? No...]

Who are...?

Later days

[After a few sessions with Teacher, Kaworu begins to resurface as a person. He no longer sleeps all day or follows Paul around. Instead, he explores the house with a playful curiosity, asking everyone what they're doing at all times, devising ways to help Paul climb onto the roof of the building, practicing his piano playing and more...

Then the pollen sets in. Suddenly, his nose and eyes are leaking all the time even though he's not crying and constant sneezing interrupts nearly everything he does. A constant state of miserable itchiness.

So, like any normal angel trapped in a human's body who has never experience hay fever before: he collapses onto the floor in the middle of the kitchen, clutching a box of tissues and sniffling extremely dramatically so everyone CAN PLEASE be aware that he's miserable.]

I hate this. Just... throw me back into the ocean. This is worse than death.

[He caps that thought by blowing his nose extremely loudly.]

later days

[lipochrome]

[ Gideon has joined Kaworu on the floor, because she is a drama queen and also it looks pretty comfortable! This primarily has the effect of draining Gideon's sinuses back into her throat, which she will occasionally attempt to snort back up into a tissue. Lovely. ]

Yeah, it really is. My death was cool and epic but this shit? This is the grossest way of not being able to breathe.

later days

[terriblepurpose]

[Paul stares down at Kaworu. It is a long stare. It is significant. It portends.

When this has no effect, Paul turns his eyes towards the ceiling, and heaves a sigh of long-suffering forbearance.]

No, Kaworu.

[And at that, Paul turns on his heel and exits the room. If Kaworu is feeling well enough to ask to be thrown back in the ocean, he's well enough to pour his own de-congesting herbal tea while uttering horrifying reminders of recent events, thank you.]

the first few days

[necrosaint]

[ Her footfalls are softer, her presence smaller, and yet lots of people do initially confuse Harrow with Paul, so Kaworu wouldn't be alone here! ]

It's Harrowhark. [ Normally harsh, Harrow's tone is surprisingly modulated as she can tell that the boy is suffering. Her voice is gentler, quieter: there is a soft, almost nurturing quality to it.

The Black Anchorite speaking, the Reverend Daughter ministering to the sick and dying. ]

Does your chest hurt?

I CUT THE BREAKS. WILD CARD BITCHES CW: Home Invasion???????

[strikefirster]

[Johnny was still on the hunt for more students to train. Luckily he had a new lead thanks to Gideon. Some nerdy kid who she had been helping to "train." That was something Johnny Lawrence could work with.

The morning seems peaceful enough until there's a loud crash as Kaworu's door is kicked opened. Johnny enters the room spikes a bundle of fabric at Kaworu who was likely just sleeping innocently.]

Rise and shine, nerd!

[Don't mind him as he continues toward the bed to grab and flip the mattress.]

Life has come to heel kick you in the balls. Time to learn how to kick it's ass right back.

Backdated to March 1st or thereabouts

[frogfear]

[The last two days in February, Willow spends recovering from her deep sea adventure. The newness of being human again wears off slowly, but steadily, and finally the last of her wobbliness seems to disappear entirely. It ends up being replaced with a new problem, although at first she doesn't realize it's actually a problem and not just something weird happening in the house itself.

There's mushrooms of all different shapes, sizes, and colours imaginable and they seem spring up everywhere. It's not until she tries to brush one off a skeleton's shoulder, and it explodes into a shower of smaller, rainbow coloured mushrooms that seem to float through the air like dandelion fluff that it occurs to her that something just doesn't seem right. These don't behave like normal mushrooms.

She reaches for whoever's closest to try to get their attention as she watches the tiny fungi float through the air.]

Hey. Hey, you're seeing this too, right?

[terriblepurpose]

[Uncomprehending radioluminescent blue stares at Willow from under a lank fringe of still-wet dark curls, the glowing eyes of the latest drifting ghost that their mutual host has collected from the seaside.

Obediently, Paul turns his attention to where the stranger is looking. There's a drift of copper-colored spores in the air, perhaps produced by the cords of mottled black fungi that seem to have colonized the skeletons of the house. He doesn't remember them being there before. He thinks he would remember if they had been.]

I think so.

[His voice is a soft blur of overlapping other voices, too many to distinguish or count. At the sound of it, he grimaces faintly, pulling the dark blanket he's wrapped around himself closer.]

OTA. Early March, but not too early

[wannasmash]

Semi-closed to whoever opens the door
Midoriya, known to some as the hero Deku, doesn't come over to people's homes uninvited. He is expected. A young man, high school age, short but solidly built, arrives at the door wearing a faded blue jacket hoodie and his backpack. He has the hood up over his dark green hair, which bears signs of damage and is in need of a trim. He wears a simple black cloth mask stretched over his lower face and neck. Facial coverings are sometimes a fashion statement among Trenchies, but it's unusual on Midoriya.

It's just a precaution. He remembers, a lifetime ago, when he and his friends snuck off to Kamino at night, and he crossed his arms in front of his face, comically trying and failing to be covert. He wishes he could ask his homeroom teacher for real tips now.

He's probably overthinking it. Just in case, he needs to ask a small favor of anyone he has met or will meet.

Sitting (OTA)
If the curtains are open, he sits out of view of the windows, politely occupying his square of space. The residents keep their shoes on in this nightmarish dystopia of a house, but he removes his red sneakers unless told not to. He's pocketed his mask and unzipped the jacket worn over a plain black shirt.

His thick curls are scraggly and uncharacteristically coarse. There is still a sleepless roughness around his eyes. Despite receiving magical healing, a few scrapes mar his skin near the back of his jaw. His face is not twisted in Corrupted sadness like it was when the month changed over, but it is restful, serious, and worn. On the face of a person who lived his life looking at the world wide-eyed in wonder, surprise, and earnestness, it is a drastic change.

"I'd like to ask you a favor if that's all right," he says in a quieter version of his usual politeness. "It's a small one, but it can be easy to forget."

It's 3 AM, where are you? (OTA) cw: scars
Midoriya is standing silently in the dimly lit kitchen, a victim of a sleep schedule he ruined over multiple weeks. He's wearing his pajamas (T-shirt and basketball shorts) and a voluminous bedhead. The large, blotchy scar on his well-muscled upper arm and the ones on his hand are old ones from home. Since November, he's been covered in even more scars, but they pale next to his new ones, ragged slashes still redly fading.

He hopes to find a midnight snack without disturbing anyone. In his hand he examines a box labeled Cap'n Trench.

3 AM

[peripheries]

Unlike Midoriya, Kaworu isn't used to sleepless nights. At first, after returning to the Trench from the ocean and then the catacombs, it felt like all he did was sleep. But recently they've been creeping up on him. He can blame allergies to some extent but the truth is, he can't stop thinking about the Old Man and his letters.

Sometimes, he wakes and reads the words over and over by the light of his omni. He probably doesn't even need to read it anymore now that the words have seared into his brain. Which is good as the paper in the notebook has been dotted with (allergic, he tells himself), causing the ink to blur and fade.

He pads down the stairs so silently it's as though he's floating. He tells himself it's to grab a box of tissues but silently he hopes to see Teacher. Instead, in the kitchen he finds Midoriya, someone he almost forgot was there despite being keen to invite him over.

"They're good." He comments, voice raspy with sleep and congestion. Cap'n Trench is one of the few foods not made by Paul that Kaworu will eat.

Open Door

[terriblepurpose]

The door opens carefully under the hand of a boy with simply blue eyes, a shade closer to a desert's cloudless skies than a pale star. They're set in a pallid, reserved face, and they shine only with the hesitation he keeps out of the rest of his expression. He's traded his usual sharp blacks for soft ones, a loose t-shirt and something he's been told are called 'sweatpants' for reasons he's still not clear on.

Paul knows who it is. It's easier to recognize him with his features obscured. He can pay attention to the way the visitor holds himself, the way his footsteps fell on the doorstep.

"Midoriya-kun?" He asks, anyway, in a soft, singular voice.

Late March, OTA

[unsheathedfromreality]

Illarion's Omen Iskierka--strange combination of bird and moth that she is--has been in and out of the House of God for much of March. She has left some of her notes lying about the place, heaped on tables or pinned to skeletons or tucked under pillows and couch cushions. Otherwise, she has been largely inert--crouched in Paul or Kaworu's room like a gargoyle, or drifting through the common areas upside-down or right-side-up with no more animation than a balloon.

Sometime in the last week of March that changes. She becomes far more animated, far more interested in the doings of the household, its comings and goings. Much of her time is still spent in ceaseless red-eyed watching, though she'll often whistle a query when someone's doing something particularly interesting: Will they tell her about it? More rarely, she might steal a pen or a button or a toy to relocate somewhere else in the house--or spend her time hanging upside-down from towels and draperies. Further woe betides anyone in the kitchen--Omens don't need to eat, but she'll expect a share of whatever they're fixing, if she happens to be lurking around. At least she sings prettily for her dinner.

[terriblepurpose]

"Iskierka," Paul says, gently, "I need that one back."

It's Paul own fault for leaving the box out. He'd even looked at it on his way out of the bedroom to check on a noise (nothing more alarming than Shinji-kun, the Omen, attempting to play with Shinji-kun, also known as Fido the First, also known as a lizard who is very much still among the living), but he'd already had one foot in the hallway, and he'd only be gone for a few minutes.

It did only take a few minutes, but it clearly took Iskierka less time than that to get bored, because she's holding one of the pencils in her beak.

(He doesn't want to think about the fact she gets bored, now.)

"I'll trade you," he coaxes, plucking up a red pen from where it lies under a partially constructed collage of words on lined notepaper.

Late March | OTA

[justoscar]

There is a stranger outside of the Bone House.

While this itself might not seem unusual, the nature of the stranger was. A young lad with a mop of disheveled hair tied back into a little tail, wearing an orange flannel button-up and sunglasses in the afternoon light looked around for a moment--as if bemused by the number of intact skeletons rather than the bones themselves, before shrugging and knocking at the door.

Whomever answered would meet one (1) Oscar Pine, waving awkwardly with a nervous smile.

"Uh... Hi. I'm Oscar, and... Paul invited me over for dinner?"

Feeling awkward, he held up the package he brought, the rainbow icing on an 18 pack of cupcakes obvious though the window in the packaging.

"I brought cupcakes?"

... And himself, a not quite sixteen year old boy with the souls of hundreds attached to his in a conglomeration that was hard to define the individuals within.

[necrolord]

"Well, if you've brought cupcakes," says God.

The kid he's looking at is a marvel. The kid is a bastardized nightmare of a soul melange. He can't even count the threads, but he can see the off-kilter way they fit together, as though this boy has left half his soul somewhere else and borrowed half of another's—

It isn't lyctorhood. It can't be. The dead-star burn of thanergy generation isn't here; this is something thalergy-bright, all life and soul and— incomprehensibly— more life. This is, in short, deeply fucking weird.

All that shows on his face is a furrowing of brows, an expression of half-unsettled, all-startled interest, and then the man in the doorway steps back to let Oscar inside. He doesn't look like much, really. Simple black clothing, no weapons to be seen... but his eyes are wrong: a burning white light on black sclera, monstrously dark.

"Come on in."