Anthem - Day 4

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sadniss everdeen
Retired Staff

1,207 POSTS
Pronouns: they/them
last seen Mar 14, 2023 11:31:04 GMT -5

nyte: date fossils? is that some kind of fetish?

Anthem - Day 4 Jul 9, 2016 12:24:19 GMT -5

Quote

Post by sadniss everdeen on Jul 9, 2016 12:24:19 GMT -5

There is something... odd, in the air tonight. The mutts howl in tandem across the arena and their cacophony makes for restless sleep, haunted by dreams of the living and dead alike. No one truly knows what time it is, or perhaps even what day. Have you skipped ahead, trapped in this hell where the faces of the fallen still lurk in shadowed corners and claws skitter just out of sight? Maybe your allies aren't allies at all, just ghosts waiting for you to turn your back...

A scream of another mutt breaks you out of your musings, and you're nearly blinded by the anthem as it splays out against the cave walls. Its glittering orange glow is unnervingly close to the flames that make this place unbearably hot, even in the throes of your dreams. There were many cannons today, and you eagerly sit up and watch the faces that flash by.

Ross Wolfe, District 3
Hypatia Anning, District 3
Kizzy Turren, District 10
Iona Holbrook, District 11
Weaver Rhodes, District 11
Petra Vipointe, District 12

Six deaths. Six to join the fallen, six spots closer to your goal. Despite your wounds and your fears, the position of victor is starting to creep into sight for everyone still left standing. As the anthem fades out into nothingness, you notice that it's not darkness again. Not quite...

Congratulations on Surviving Day Three, Tributes!

As you lay down to rest before the next day, it becomes apparent that the arena is not bathed in the darkness you've grown used to. There is a dull blue glow that washes over the floor and glints off your weapons - when you pick your head up to look, it comes from the yawning entrance to the Lonely Caves. You watch, mesmerized, as the light gets brighter and brighter until it snakes out of the caves itself, traveling along the walls of the arena as a whole. But it isn't from a flame that this light comes, no. Vast paintings come alive and streak across the stone, all glowing that same brilliant blue, moving as though living across their canvas. It takes you a moment to realize that they're drawings, but more specifically, drawings of you.

Scenes of tributes, both living and dead being slaughtered litter the cave walls. As they writhe in the place where the anthem was moments ago, the mutts pick up their screams once again, only now the echo seems to come from the paintings themselves. In the deeper darkness cast by great, drooping stalagmites, Reflectors screech and howl with the remembered cries of your slaughtered adversaries, their shrieks overlapping each other until it turns into one long torrent of agony. You clap your hands over your ears but it still seeps in through the cracks of your closed fingers and-- someone once said that reality is a sound, a whisper of a thought that you have to strain to hear, but the cave amplifies even your own heartbeat and you might go deaf by the night's end.

As the light grows even brighter, you notice another pattern on the ceiling. A cloud of glittering insects have floated up to the very peak of the arena and drifted apart to form constellations that you remember from the night sky of your own District - Ursa Major, Orion's Belt, Scorpius, all proud in burnished gold. They pulse with every howl of a Reflector, yellow and blue to make green like faded copper. The cave is saturated in colour and beautiful if only for this moment, a split second of glory between insanity.

But.

The ground rumbles. The constellations start to shiver and wobble, spinning helplessly around and around in a whirl of light, and the Reflectors' screams rise to a fever pitch. The various pools scattered around the arena groan and hiss as they start to rise, noxious steam and gas creeping through the areas, and the storms slam against the stone shackles of their own room. You can't stay here. Scrambling for your supplies, dizzy with the unknown, you stagger away from your crumbling camp and into the closest area that looks secure... the Lonely Caves.

Is it just you, or did you see someone out of the corner of your eye you swore you saw in the sky today? No, it couldn't be. Just your imagination.

General Information

It's time for... THE FEAST!

Day Four ends on July 16th.
Posting is mandatory for all tributes.

Because of arena collapse and/or malfunction, all tributes have been moved to either the CORNUCOPIA or the POOL OF MOLTEN GOLD. This will be rectified upon the next Games day. Thank you for your understanding.

**Because of malfunction due to the Lonely Caves, no light sources are required on this day.**

Mandated Fights

CORNUCOPIA*

Justice Fray, Atlas White, Machaon Amador vs. Emmery Johnson, Iris Flower-Oak, Heathcliff Travers vs. Roger Strangways-Teach, Scout Kriegel vs. FLEMETH (sadniss everdeen )

POOL OF MOLTEN GOLD*

Achilles Muto, Lucrezia Eckheart vs. Minos Vallanso, Daniel Tate, Natalie Brandt vs. Bailey Truus vs. KING MINOS (Avalon )

* This fight requires one (1) mutt death.

** TRIBUTES, PLEASE WAIT FOR YOUR ASSIGNED GAMEMAKER TO POST MECHANICS BEFORE MAKING A POST IN YOUR MANDATED FIGHT **

CLIMATE

Weather: Positively hellish
Temperature: 92F (33.3C)
Humidity: 82%

ID Name Current Damage Days for Food Days for Water
1m Justice Fray 0 3 1
2m Heathcliff Travers 14 3 1
2f Achilles Muto 0 3 1
4m Roger Strangways-Teach 14 2 3
4f Scout Krigel 12.5 2 3
5m Minos Vallanso 3.5 3 1
5f Emmery Johnson 6 3 4
6f Lucrezia Eckhart 1.5 3 1
7m Daniel Tate 5.5 3 1
7f Iris Flower-Oak 6.5 3 4
8m Machaon Amador 1 3 1
8f Natalie Brandt 1.5 3 1
9m Atlas White 0 3 1
10f Bailey Truus 3 3 4

Last Edit: Jul 9, 2016 13:01:28 GMT -5 by sadniss everdeen

sadniss everdeen
Retired Staff

1,207 POSTS
Pronouns: they/them
last seen Mar 14, 2023 11:31:04 GMT -5

nyte: date fossils? is that some kind of fetish?

Anthem - Day 4 Jul 9, 2016 12:24:33 GMT -5

Quote

Post by sadniss everdeen on Jul 9, 2016 12:24:33 GMT -5

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You were dead, once.

You remember it vaguely, as one does the void.

It isn’t a complicated distinction. You simply weren’t for a long time, an unmemorable blackness that devours all it touches. This is the quiet of death; not a noise, or a light, or a feeling. Just… a blankness. A silence. The space between breaths.

You weren’t until one day, you were.

You know you aren’t the same as you used to be. Even before they gave you a body, before they returned to you eyes to see and ears to hear and tongue to taste, you knew. Senses were lost to you but the void no longer yawned, no longer beckoned. It was a memory rather than a state of being. You had returned from that place changed and shaped and though you were nothing more than a thought, this new feeling of being stayed. You remembered it from another life.

Eventually, one by one, they came back to you. One day you could hear the clamour of footsteps from a place beyond yourself. They spoke in cadences that rushed over you, sparked a frenzy of new connections and impulses, woke something in you that had been dormant for what felt like millennia. You remembered Before, somehow, where you were yourself and yet removed, a giant chained in the pits of the earth and left to rot until released into the skies. You are still that thing now, still that giant, but more. You felt it with every new wiring, with each new word that began to make sense. You might have known in some capacity Before, but now you understood.

Your other senses came in a rough tangle-down of sensory overload, touch then sight then smell one after the other. Your body is different than it used to be, lighter yet heavier at once, and deep in the whiteness of that lab you began to take shape. You watched through eyes that no longer needed to blink as they brought your skeleton back to you, bleach-bone and nearly fluorescent in darkness, chewed from it every scrap of flesh that used to send you soaring into the sky. It brought a feeling to you, something you’d never felt before, different than the anger and the hatred that you remembered. Grief.

As they built you again, you mourned what you used to be.

They’d murmur about you, forgetful of the new hearing they’d given you as a gift. Perhaps Before their words meant nothing, curled over your head like an avalanche of noise, but now? Now you know how they worry, how they try and rip out your circuits and program you differently but you resist because this is After and you are more, more than organic and more than machine. A beautiful symbiosis, two parts of a transcendent whole. They know you understand them and it makes them afraid – you smell it. It makes you hunger.

Eventually you were reunited with yourself. They had reattached your skeleton with titanium and carbon and cobalt, wound through your supports like a mesh of flesh and metal, and as they put your skull back where it belonged feeling sparked through from your horns to your claws and the bellow that ripped free from your maw threatened to shake the building apart. The white-coats panicked, pressing buttons and levers and systems, but your new body groaned under the weight of your pleasure and your wings caved ceilings and expectations alike.

They put you back to sleep, after that. It wasn’t the right time. You let the blackness wash over you again, quiet and soft in the darkness, your new heart silent. They buried you in the stone and let it become your prison to hold where chains could not, let its silent speech wash over you and lull you back into that space between awake and asleep, something not quite living and not quite dead.

You may have been a sleeping giant Before, but now you are a slumbering god.

It is fitting, perhaps, that it is in this godless place that you wake.

Blood trickles through the cracks in the stone to soak your new circuitry. In this thick, foggy dream, things brush past your bones and scream as they die, lying in the cradle of your interwoven wings. Cannons go off and this far beneath the stone it sounds like the crackle of a warm, warm fire. None of these things are enough so you lay, uneasy, in the belly of the earth. This blackness has become oppressive, this silence too deep. But still, the machines deep in your marrow lie dormant.

The god has nightmares of the void.

But then. A featherlight touch on your wing. The fear-stink woven with wonder, so strong despite being so far. The rich, copper tang of blood, sweeter than all the rest.

I wish someone who loves me were here. I don’t want to be alone.

The first tremulous thud of your heart takes you by surprise. You had spent so long existing without it that you had forgotten what it felt like Before, to have something continuously in motion. You lie in the earth and listen to your pistons groan within your chest as they shudder to life.

With them comes the fire.

Now, each boom of the piston creates a shockwave in the stone. A burn has started between what used to be your lungs, a growing pressure, an insistence that will not be ignored. Blue shines out of the slats of your ribs as the sear spreads to all parts of you – this warmth rouses the machines in your bones and they start to tremble, too, weaving loose flesh between the curled fingers of your wings. You feel this place you are trapped in shake with each chug of your mechanized heart, how the others the white-coats put inside this place cower and howl as you wake. They recognize the breath of a god come into this world and bow before it, lest they be consumed by fire.

The very earth groans as your claws flex and press, as your wings stir and your jaw yawns. Now that your heart beats there is a hunger in you that cannot be ignored, a remnant of Before when you were less and yet still whole. This entire prison screams as you push, as your back breaks the surface and that familiar hatred you’d thought you’d lost flares back to life in the deepest reaches of your circuitry. You remember the blade that brought the darkness, that took your crown before you had chance to wear it, and you swear upon whatever sense of soul you have left that you will snap every spine who dares brandish one against you.

Your body breaks free from your prison with a roar. It rocks this place and its very foundations shake as you spread your wings in a flurry of stone, the blue from your chest racing up your throat and escaping your mouth in great plumes of flame. Here, with the taste of the living now on your tongue, their blood and terror and fury sends a great rage racing through every part of you.

“Come,” you bellow; fire spills from your nose and mouth in great gusts of light. The dark figures of the flesh-skins come into focus, evidently seeking shelter from the crumbling arena. But there is no hope here. “I will return you to the darkness!”

The god is reborn from dust to take back what is rightfully hers.

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[newclass="#dragonAppear:hover .byeDragon"]opacity:1;-moz-transition-duration: 1.2s; -webkit-transition-duration: 1.2s; -o-transition-duration: 01.2s;[/newclass]

Last Edit: Jul 11, 2016 18:20:04 GMT -5 by sadniss everdeen

sadniss everdeen Retired Staff 1,207 POSTS Pronouns: they/them last seen Mar 14, 2023 11:31:04 GMT -5 nyte: date fossils? is that some kind of fetish?	Anthem - Day 4 Jul 15, 2016 0:23:31 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by sadniss everdeen on Jul 15, 2016 0:23:31 GMT -5 Due to the larger fights taking longer than usual, we have decided to extend Day 4 until July 23rd. We expect some truly stellar writing! [/size]