deercountry | He's a feral creature (Open)

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He's a feral creature (Open)

Who: Darth Maul and you!
What: Event prompts + TDM overflow
When: All throughout September
Where: Beach and boardwalk for TDM prompts, throughout the city for event prompts

Content Warnings: Corpses of teenagers, stalking behavior

A. Event Prompts

I) Growing Pains

After hearing about the ritual from some of the Trench natives, Maul decides what the hell, might as well participate. While he isn't inclined to believe too much of what they have to say and is still suspicious this would lead to possible harm, he also knows letting go of the past and looking towards the future is nothing but a good thing for him personally. To that end, he is in his front yard near one of the big trees that adorned the house, several items surrounding him for the ritual to be completed.

Maul scribbles down a few words in a large, blocky script on a blank page in journal he's been writing in since it showed up with the rest of his Welcome Bag. While he means for this to be a private moment, anyone around snooping will be able to see what it says. 'Break the chains.' But anyone who comments upon it will receive a glare and harsh growl in return. He looks at it for a moment before dropping it into the hole he's made. Once it is covered with dirt, he picks up a dagger given to him by a dear friend and slashes his palm open. He lets a few drops fall onto the dirt and waits.

After a few moments, a beautiful rose with most peculiar coloration blooms. It remained vibrant and healthy only for a few moments before it begins to wither and wilt. Maul stares at the limp flower for a moment as a frown crosses his face. "Of course" is all that he had to say on the matter. He is not at all surprised his flower would be defective right off the bat.

II) River of Regret

Really, Maul is doing his best not to be surprised about what has happened. He's just been waiting for the other shoe to drop now that he's started getting his bearings here in Trench, so this had been bound to happen. Granted, having a raven feather touch him and then getting swept up in a whirlwind of them only to be deposited in a canoe on a sun-spackled river wasn't quite what he'd had in mind. When he sees the corpses, Maul's first instinct is to throw himself out of the boat and start swimming, but he knows he'd drown with his lower metal half before he got more than a few strokes out. No, he and the other person are going to be forced to sit here and look upon all the regrets of his past.

There are faces, so many faces up there. There is a whole group of teenagers of various species, the most prominent one a young Nautolan with large purple eyes that seem to bore right into Maul's, a strange sort of smile on her face. He can see his family, Savage still with the two holes that had been stabbed through his chest by his former master and Mother Talzin, also with lightsaber wounds in her chest. Some people from Deerington are there as well. Usagi. Xue Yang. Reaper. Ben. Varian. Fern. Luz. Even Darth Sidious is hanging there, his corpse looking as if it had fallen from a great height. Maul pointedly avoids staring at that one as if he's trying to avoid staring into the sun for too long.

Maul's face is set and determined after he is done staring at all the corpses without blinking. His voice has a note of grim resignation in it when he turns to whoever he is stuck with. His hands are tense, claws digging small grooves into the wooden sides of the canoe. "Alright, if this place is at all like Deerington, it wants us to experience some emotions by talking out what's in front of us. So do you want me to go first or do you?" He's been around the block enough times to recognize one of the usual group therapy or friendship building exercises this place was already likely to entail when he saw it. That doesn't mean he is going to like it at all but he knows better than to fight it for too long.

III) Bloodsport

Maul can feel it right from the start of the moment, that restlessness that makes him want to go out and kill something. It's not really different than his usual state at first, so he doesn't really feel like anything is out of the ordinary, chalking it up to being in a new place and trying to be on his best behavior instead of immediately going out and massacring the populace.

He makes offers to spar or train with anyone during this time to help get out all that extra energy and they are completely genuine. If he does get a little bit more vicious than usual during these sessions, at least the curse he's still under is able to rein him back in fairly quickly, preventing him from going too close to the edge of turning it into a potentially lethal fight. He can also be found meditating a lot more as well during these feelings of murderous energy, also offering to show anyone the basics if they want to pull up a seat next to him wherever he might be and learn how to meditate in the ways of the Dark Side.

But he can't resist his feelings forever and so he's eventually led towards the Gate. Despite the handicap of feeling pain when he attacks anyone sentient, he's not willing to back down. His truly terrifying side comes out when he faces the monsters and he can go all out against them, but his brutality towards the Sleepers he faces is only slightly less. He'll twirl around his lightsaber or whatever weapon he currently has in his possession, a cocky smirk on his face. He twirls his weapon around before facing the business end towards whoever he is facing. "I'm not going to go easy on you. So let us get this over with as quickly as possible, shall we?" With those few words, he's on the attack.

[OOC: Maul is still under a magical curse from Deerington where he feels pain anytime he inflicts it upon someone else. He can still hurt someone thanks to the naturally high pain tolerance of a Vileblood, it's just going hurt him as well. For this reason, he likely won't be able to kill anyone.]

B. Newsletter Prompts

I) Moon Flowers

Standing in front of his house in Prufrock, Maul was studying the outside of it with a puzzled expression on his face. The entirety of the still somewhat worn-down old giant house is now completely covered in white roses. While he's confused by this, he's also not complaining given they seemed to be having a calming effect on his mind, which Maul being Maul was always a good thing.

He clipped a few of them off at a time and carefully sliced off any thorns, twisting a piece of spare rough brown cord around them to form them into a tiny bouquet. He sat there outside, watching Venge and Malice the vornskr play fight in the front yard while Slicer the warg slept underneath his favorite tree. When anyone he knew passed by, he'd hand them a bouquet of the roses. "For you," he'd say simply without explanation. Maul wasn't usually keen on being nice to people but keeping a stable mind was always important considering all that he'd experienced in Deerington.

II) Drawn to Palebloods

It wasn't the first time Maul had been drawn towards certain people due to the machinations of whatever was going on around him. At least this time, he seemed to be in full control of his mental faculties, something he and everyone around him could be thankful for. It just felt natural to be drawn to certain people as surely as if the Force itself was drawing him towards them.

Of course, being a psychotic Sith Lord, Maul wasn't always one for the best social niceties. So it would be no surprise to have someone suddenly see Maul watching them from the shadows of a dark alleyway or perched like a sentient gargoyle on top of the nearest building. Actually just talking to anyone seemed to be out of the question for the weirdo. Granted, the minute anyone actually called him out on his strange behavior, he'd be sure to actually approach them, but until then the Palebloods of Trench were going to be having fun with a creepy sort-of Sith stalker.

III) Walking Around The City

Maul had wasted no time in learning the ins and outs of the city. This place had a far different vibe from Deerington and so far he's liking what he's seeing. His Maalraas Omen, Venge, was always by his side. Though with the way they could cloak themselves in the darkness of the Force, he oftentimes seemed to be alone until suddenly there was a monstrous apparition that appeared out of the dark, all teeth and beady eyes, watching whoever was talking with Maul intently.

He'd taken note of certain places that he was sure he would want to investigate further like Ursula's Ink and Earworm. For the most part, he was just absorbing the atmosphere, but what started to annoy him was the way that the citizens of the city kept staring at him for long periods of time, whispering among themselves whenever he passed by. A few of the bolder ones even tried to follow him unobtrusively. He already knew he was a distinctive individual no matter what galaxy he was currently inhabiting but after the fifth time this happened he'd had enough.

Maul, with how little patience he usually possessed, could only put up with this for a short period of time. He whirled on them, saberstaff suddenly ignited in a show of intimidation. "Go on. Be off with you."

This didn't seem to dissuade them at all. One of them was nudged forward to be a spokesperson. "But you are the one we have heard talk of. The ancient Sleeper who wields great power over the Dark. The one with the face of a demon and two hearts, one dark and one light."

Maul was not likely to trust any of the residents of this city anytime soon but the fact they'd heard of him did appeal to the part of him that still had a large ego and a heaping dose of arrogance even after all these years. He stopped trying to make them leave, now a little intrigued. "So you have heard of me. Tell me more then of what you know about me and the other Sleepers."

One could find him then sitting down at a nearby tea shop as he listened to what the citizens had to say about what they had heard of the Sith in their old legends. Though Maul wasn't at all inclined to believe them too much, he had an inkling of an idea beginning to form in his mind. If they didn't prove to be malicious, the people of this city could prove to be very handy indeed...

IV) Wildcard

[Want a customized prompt? Something a little different for any of the above or with a bit more horror in it? Let me know at either

Light_shade or Lightshade#4738 on Discord! I'll match format and tenses. This will also be an overflow post for TDM threads that are still ongoing.]

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Maul looked moody and unhappy as he glanced over at Ariadne, which was really no surprise given the grisly tableau before them. Some of them weren't so bad to look at but he was sure it wouldn't be long before they started talking to him. Sure enough, the Nautolan girl, still pretty despite being impaled on a stake started to speak. "We were friends. How many did you even have in that place? And you ran your lightsaber through my heart."

Maul ignored her, instead choosing to address Ariadne. "No, you don't. They don't feel real in the Force. They're just phantoms." But he seemed to be trying to convince himself as much as her.

He could see ones he didn't recognize and supposed those belonged to Airy. "Why are yours up there?" He couldn't imagine the woman had too many regrets as it stood.

Honestly, Ariadne had an eye that was always drawn to novelty. And seeing the strange array of creatures from Maul's world was more than enough to distract her--perhaps willfully--from the ones she knew. But it was inevitable that they'd be here. That was how Deerington worked. And apparently how Trench was going to work as well.
Slowly, she turned to look over her shoulder, already knowing she would regret it.

And there she was.

Like Ariadne (in her natural form), she had pale green skin, the color of the underside of a maple leaf. There were purple undertones, though. Especially under her eyes. And unlike Ariadne, she had pastel pink hair, streaked with blue, matted and hard with violet blood. She was less lithe than Ariadne, more muscular and solid. But there could be no doubt that the two of them were related. Same facial structure. Same bright, gray eyes.

Perhaps most noteworthy was that the entire left half of her body, and two hard, unidentifiable stumps on her back, were charred and burned.

The woman was propped up on the stakes so that she was almost lying down on her burned half. Her eyes were on the sky. At least they were until Ariadne turned around. And then they shifted, her upper lip raising into a snarl. She hissed, charred, flaked skin spraying in the air.

Ariadne quickly turned back to Maul, a shudder raking her entire body. "I don't want to remember her like that..."

Maul looked over at the woman that resembled Ariadne so closely, despite the very different coloring between them. At a guess, he would say it was either her mother, aunt, or sister. It was a little difficult to discern the age of the figure given that she was half-burned, so charred that Maul figured that had to be the way that she must have died.

Were he a more gentle man, Maul would have offered some comfort to Ariadne, putting his arm around her shoulder or hugging her. But he is not, and especially right now facing all the sins of his past, he finds himself hard and angry. Anger had always sustained him before and he sought out the eternal well of it within himself to keep him from falling to pieces right now.

"What happened to her?" He asked. Might as well get this over with, talking out the worst things that had happened to them in the past.

Wasn't it obvious?

Even as Ariadne thought it, the woman shifted position, the charred stumps on her back stretching out to reveal the skeletal remains of a pair of wings. They flaked and turned to ash with every slight movement, the wind blowing the dust right at them in the boat.

When Ariadne held up a hand to shield her face, she felt the remains of her mother brush against the skin of palm.

It made her whole body shudder.

"She died. When I was ten."

"Ah." Well, that made sense. After a pause, Maul asked a question. "Was it your fault?" He didn't mean it in a malicious sort of sense. Savage and Talzin were among Maul's corpses and he hadn't killed either of them, but he did blame himself for their deaths. So he wondered if it was the same for Airy.

The broken bag of bones that had once been Sidious turned its eyes towards Maul. His voice was like the sound of rattling bones in the wind. "Still so weak, my apprentice. Too weak to protect those you loved from me. Too weak to even try to kill me. You'll never be strong enough. Never..."

"Shut up!" Maul yelled with unusual fervor, his voice raised up to a higher volume than his usual whisper-soft tone. "You don't get to tell me what to do anymore!"

Ariadne grabbed the sides of the boat when Maul started shouting. She'd seen him angry and feral before. But this was something else. This felt...raw. And more personal than when she'd seen him kill the Jedi.

She turned to look in the direction of the body he was shouting at.

Not much to see. But probably a lot of emotions wrapped up in whatever that creature had once been.

"Don't shout," she said softly. "We can't shout at the dead. They can't hear us. Not really." And there was the sense that maybe the shouting was exactly what Deer...Trench wanted them to do. It seemed like the sort of trick to get them all worked up.

Maul turned sharply to face Ariadne, his movements jostling the boat so much that it nearly sent them born toppling into the river. His eyes are full of fury but it's not directed at her at all.

"Perhaps not but it makes me feel better," he growled out, angry and sullen, his voice coming back down to normal levels. He sat there for a few minutes without saying anything, surveying the corpses on shore. Sometimes, one would say something to him, mainly calling him a murderer.

Abruptly, he began speaking again as he gazed on the broken, crumpled figure that was his master's body. "Every other body up there can be traced back to him." He gestured towards the body. It was so disfigured that the stakes running through it were all that was keeping it upright. Mercifully, the black cloak hid the worst of his grisly injuries. But his Sith yellow eyes, the one thing he shared with his adoptive son, stared out from the darkness of the hood.

"I did anything he ever told me without question. I would have killed every person in the galaxy if he'd asked me to. That's how deep my loyalty ran. And he cast me aside like I meant nothing to him!" Maul is suddenly at top volume again, howling out his rage.

Her knuckles tightened, but she made a point of schooling her features, keeping them as placid as an idol. If she'd learned anything about dealing with snarly males, it was that you couldn't let them think--for even a second--that you were afraid or vulnerable. Even if Maul's anger wasn't directed at her. And she did understand the difference.

She listened to his story, swallowing hard when he talked about killing every person in the galaxy.

That felt extreme.

But then, it also sounded like he was treated unfairly.

"Well," she said evenly, "if it makes you feel better..." She turned to look at the corpse up on the stake. "You're a...very, very bad person!" Ariadne shouting was a bit akin to a fluffy, white kitten pretending to be a white tiger. But she was giving it her best. "You're a horrible person and you treated Maul very unfairly you...you...you..." She tried to remember some of the curses Dean had taught her. "Stupid fuck jerk!"

Edited 2021-09-16 01:56 (UTC)

The kitten metaphor was very apt and what Maul himself was thinking about, just thinking of a tookah kitten in place of an Earth one in his mind. Despite the gravity of the situation, it made him feel just a little bit better with how ridiculous it seemed to have Airy's earnest anger directed towards his master's corpse on his behalf.

Really, the fact she was doing her best to understand without condemning him or trying to downplay what he'd been through as less horrible than it was made some of the claws wrapped tight around his hearts right now lessen their grip. He rubbed a hand behind his neck, loosening some of the tension he felt there.

"At least I know he will get what is coming to him. It will take years and years but he doesn't get everything he wants in the end, even if it seems like it at the time." At the end of his life, all Maul had wanted was to be avenged for all the suffering he and Obi-Wan had been put through. It would come to pass, this he knew for a certainty.

Sometimes, being completely ridiculous was the best way to navigate a situation. Ariadne was no fool. She understood how people saw her. She even took advantage of that sometimes. But in this case, the way she thought of it, her absurd shouting maybe illuminated how absurd the whole thing was. And she was pretty sure she could detect a change in Maul.

She settled back in the boat again, turning her back on the corpse and still trying to forget her mother's charred remains.

"Tell me about it," she said, giving Maul the full power of her silvery gaze. "Tell me how it turns out for him." How he clearly got what was coming to him, based on the way he treated other people.

There was comfort in the tale of a tyrant's downfall. Ariadne could imagine the same fate crashing into the Red Dragon's power. And she had to admit, it brought her a great deal of hope.

Maul rubbed a hand on the opposite shoulder, trying to release some of the tension there. Satisfying as his master’s death would be, it still didn’t undo all of the harm that had come before because of him. But Maul would take what he could get when it came to making Sidious miserable. He’d never been able to accomplish it himself, so he had to satisfy himself with just knowing his master would eventually come to a grisly end.

“Someone was in Deerington briefly from my future who told me what occurs to him in the future. He is betrayed by his own apprentice when he attempts to kill the man’s son and is thrown down a shaft to his death by him.” Never had there been a happier day for Maul than when Luke Skywalker had come to Deerington and told him about the future. He had been so elated he’d actually hugged the Jedi and not felt at all self-conscious about doing it.

“To know everything he worked for comes to naught, that the empire he sought to build is undone in the span of one generation, that’s enough for me to take great satisfaction.” Though he wouldn’t live to see it, Maul died satisfied in the future knowing all the miseries of his life would be avenged.

It was oddly satisfying for Ariadne as well. She knew it wasn't about her, of course. But she'd left behind her own empire-builder. And the thought of his empire being toppled gave her some comfort. And more a than a little pride, because if anyone was going to take down the Red Dragon and his machinations, it would be the rebellion that Aunt Lysia began.

Began and had to end without her...

That part was a little harder to accept.

"Well," she said, "that's what you get for trying to turn blood against blood. Father against son."

“He never did understand that the ties of family are stronger than any power he could ever possess. But what can you expect from someone who killed his entire family in his quest for more power?” Palpatine had a large family, brothers, sisters, and parents. All of them had been slain so that he could become a better Sith.

“He thought killing my brother was just the beginning of causing me pain. He didn’t understand that any torture he put me through after that was nothing in comparison. My master couldn’t break me because there was nothing worse he could possibly do to me after that.” Maul simpled refused to break out of spite after that, his hearts so thoroughly broken that experiencing rounds of Force Lightning after losing Savage felt like nothing in comparison.

She made no attempt to hide the look of disgust on her face.

His entire family? His entire family. Hard to say if it was cause, effect, or both. But that didn't truly matter in light of what happened. The Emperor was evil. Simple was that.

And Ariadne rarely believed that people were simple.

She pressed her lips together as Maul continued. It was an unnatural look on Ariadne's face, a face so accustomed to smiling. All the same, what he told her made her want to vomit. "I'm so sorry, Maul," she said.

Not out of pity or sentimentalism.

Just plain compassion.

Maul hadn't told anyone else that, what his master had done to his own flesh and blood. Some people could justify killing their parents or one of their siblings if they were truly rat-bastard people that had done terrible things. But to do what he'd done, massacre all of them in his quest for power...well, if nothing else, that right there showed how evil Palpatine had been from the very beginning.

Maul gave a stiff nod. He was still getting used to separating compassion from pity, the latter of which he couldn't stand from anyone. But he could tell Airy didn't mean it like he was some pitiful wreck who had been unable to save his family from death and then ended up tortured by the one who had done it. She merely meant as it sounded, that something terrible had happened to him which needed to be acknowledged.

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He's a feral creature (Open)

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