interstellar5555 | ☆TRACK V: I WILL TWIST THE KNIFE PT. 2

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☆TRACK V: I WILL TWIST THE KNIFE PT. 2

Who: Everyone in the last part of the log.
What: Everyone has a terrible night.
When: December 7th, 2054
Where: Naomi's ocean side mansion, followed by a secret Pride laboratory.
Warnings: Violence, blood, and at least one murder. Vague gore. NPCs being unhinged in a threatening way, though it's possible to have your character avoid ended up in the ballroom if you don't want to see this mess.

☆I WILL TWIST THE KNIFE

The bubble has burst. The chaos of the night’s violence has finally boiled over into something uncontrollable – blood has been spilt, screams have been heard. No matter where you are in the mansion, you know by now that something is acutely wrong. Multiple members of Pride have been hurt – possibly killed – and you may still have no idea why.

Some will try to escape. Some will try to fight back. Yet, as any rebellion starts to descend, a piercing note - a melodic cry - will summon you towards the ballroom. It can be resisted, in part - but only as far as you find yourself frozen in place instead of moving forward, at least while this spell holds. It's drawing you to the source...if you follow it, maybe you can stop it. The compulsion is strong for members of both labels.

The cry seems to echo long past its termination point, to be heard wherever you are. If followed, it will bring you to Naomi Rivers in the center of the ballroom, her expression creased with strain. Though you may desperately want to strike her, something intangible is holding you back.

"No!" she shouts at any Virgo nearby. "It isn't done! You need to...you need to finish this!" She'll point desperately at the nearby Pride, rendered unable to flee. "Get them now!"

You don't want to.

"Do it!"

The compulsion weighs heavily on you - for Virgo, to act, and for Pride to surrender themselves. All subtly has disappeared. This last effort is unconcealed and nearly hysterical. You feel yourself slipping beneath the soundwaves. Power rolls off of her, the energy thick in the air, like something you can taste and smell.

You can't do this.

"I command-"

The fabric of space-time cracks like a peal of thunder. All at once, the spell shatters.

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Her question brings a rueful grin to Greg's face. How very Luce.

"Ehh. Better than some."

Well, he figures that has to be the case--even if he's trapped in a truly awful, terrifying, helpless situation, so's everyone else. His head hadn't even gotten screwed with tonight. He has to keep things in perspective; it's a little selfish to complain too much.

"I might ask you the same."

'Better than some'. She thinks of Jamie, and Yuffie, and once again her gut twists in desperate hope that they're both alright. Even worse is the strange sense that she's not so much upset about the violence as she is that people she cared about were hurt.

What a mess the night has been.

"Reeling," she says simply, because that's the most apt phrase. "And... more than a little frustrated." Her fingers curl against her dress- she's long since changed out of her bloody clothes. "It was obvious, wasn't it?"

It all sure seems clear, in retrospect. Unpleasant higher-ups, overbearing managers, sudden terminations of contract... Greg had been so ready to brush them off as part of the job.

"I didn't want to see it." To a degree, he still wishes he hadn't. "I thought, so long as the music's fun, and the performances are there, the rest couldn't be that bad."

"Yet even after the basement..." No more trepidation in referring to that event. Luce is determined on this front. She'll talk about it as openly as she can. Or, at least, try.

"I wonder how much we can trust our perception of things, after all this?" A shake of her head. "I can't protect others if I can't even trust myself on that."

The basement... he'd been so ready to blame that on some sort of outside event beyond Virgo's control. Another effort to blind himself. It's amazing, thinking of how far he went.

"I've been reminding everyone what happened tonight wasn't our fault, you know? That the people at that party weren't them." His melody slows, and Greg blinks hard. "But... even still. We don't know stop him from bringing those people back out of us." Greg's optimism tells him to trust in others, but the one person he doesn't trust is calling all the shots. It throws a wrench in the philosophy.

"And he's so arrogant about it too..." It's infuriating. Luce despises feeling so helpless when those she cares for are in danger. They can only be tossed around like puppets, going along with his stupid plans, get tricked by whatever Naomi pulled...

What does an awards ceremony and an eerie basement have in common?

Her words from her conversation from Ankh come back to her, and Luce finds herself clasping her hands together in front of her mouth, murmuring a twist of the question. "What do an awards ceremony, an eerie basement, and a Solstice party gone wrong have in common...?"

There's something to that, she thinks. There definitely is.

That feels like a riddle, or the setup for a joke. Greg falls quiet but for the pull of strings, trying to think of an answer.

"And a fever." Admittedly, not everyone was as sick as he was, but it's the part he remembers best out of all of it. The point is, that day had to be connected as well, doesn't it? They're all building up to something, up to this point, but...

Greg releases a breath he hadn't realized he was holding while thinking. "Feels like the more pieces we have, the less I can put together."

That's right, the fever, but it felt like only a few people experienced that particular symptom. Although didn't Sora...? No. Luce shakes her head again. One thing at a time.

"Yet I'm certain that they can be put together. We're just getting them in a very confusing order, and someone hid the box art so we don't know what picture we're even making." She's pretty sure who to blame for that at this point.

Tapping her fingers along her knuckles, Luce suggests, "Let's go back. When was the first time strange things started happening, do you remember? Like, things we couldn't ignore."

The first time...? It's hard to be sure. He's been in denial so long, he ignored a lot more than he should. Now, it seems like echoes of it go back longer than he can remember. Though, "longer than he can remember" is a rather vague length of time.

"The basement... that's the first time I started getting really wigged out." To say the very least of it. Luce had certainly seen him at his worst. "There'd been weird stuff before that, but it's the first time something really happened to us, wasn't it...?"

"Then that's somewhere to start!" Which is better than nothing. Luce is actually glad that she has Greg to talk with here. The clause that Juno had given them all doesn't apply to each other, does it now?

Flexing her fingers one by one, she lets herself think. "Let's make a note of everything that happened. First, Juno gathered us all, didn't she? I don't recall getting a notice about it beforehand, what about you?"

With how that night ended, it's difficult to remember how the whole thing started. He picks at his strings, trying to replicate what he'd played in that surreal, disastrous performance.

"No... she just came up and asked me to go with her, and I couldn't think of a reason not to. That's why I thought it must have been something sort of last minute."

As he starts to try and mimic the music from that night, Luce looks over to him almost as if expecting more of those strange occurrences to happen. For someone to get possessed, like Ivan, or for those strange balls of light to show up.

"Yes, that would make sense. Right after that, the lockdown happened, too... I wonder if they're correlated?" Something to keep in mind. Nothing can be easily dismissed. "Anyway, then down to the basement and we were separated into those strange groups. "

That's the part that makes Luce shrug her shoulders with a sigh. "I still don't understand how that worked..."

The groups... He'd nearly forgotten that bit of it. It really made no sense.

"I sort of noticed everyone either stopped caring about anything, or completely wigged out. I wonder if that had anything to do with it." Still, there had been four groups, right? With Weasel off by himself.

"Everything started when we were performing, didn't it? I don't really... remember it clearly." Imitating the tune from back then brings back the memory of wisps of light, and then... someone shouting... everything from there on was locked under a haze of emptiness. Greg starts playing a little louder, chasing the echoes of misery away as best he can.

"Ivan started yelling and broke his shamisen in the middle of it all. Us playing." It's a quiet confession as she rubs the back of one hand nervously. With recent events, she's now even more worried about the implications than ever before.

"I remember clearly, because... We had to wait for a new one to be brought in. And during the latter half of the lockdown, he just- went missing. I asked around, and I heard he'd been taken away because he wasn't well and had to be treated. I just thought it was because he'd caught something when we were all down there... But Yan had to be taken away too, didn't he?"

"Yan..." Greg's eyes go wide as he remembers. "They pulled him out for... for asking questions. About the memories. Said they had to do some sort of emergency surgery..."

He'd thought it was strange, but at the time Greg had been more worried about what it meant for his own mental health.

Surgery. As if she had to be more worried about what had happened to Ivan.

One of Luce's hands curls into a fist, and she tries to hide it with her other hand. Taking a deep breath, she tries to calm herself down. This tells her something, at least. "So... Whatever these visions we're getting are... Blanche doesn't want us having them."

Yan had been so convinced it was for his own health. Was that his own thinking, or had they forced it on him?

"So there's what we're doing already.... what Blanche wants us to do... and what he doesn't want us to do...?" He shakes his head. "How're we supposed to tell them apart? It makes my head hurt."

"If only I knew." Sighing, Luce leans back and starts to rub at her fingers. It's all one big mystery, and not a fun one either. People are dead, after all.

"Not going against him is probably at least one thing he's interested in, at least."

"That's the big one, I can tell you that much." Blanche made that crystal clear. "He doesn't want any of us getting any bright ideas or whatever after all this." Greg's never been much for bright ideas in the first place.

"With a display like that, no doubt he's thinking it'll keep everyone in line." For once, Luce's smile isn't bright and cheery, but darkly sardonic. "Yet if we don't try to figure things out, us and those we care about are still in danger of getting hurt."

"We're in danger either way." That means the logical thing to do is to try and press forward, but...

"You know what they say: knowledge is power." Reaching over, Luce gives a squeeze of Greg's shoulder. It's pretty heavy. The whole night is, with everything that went down. Any reassurance she could give would seem like lip service...

"I'll talk with some of the others and see if I can figure out anything. I'll tell you if anything pops up, alright?"

Sure enough, Greg can only think of more worrying things that could happen to Luce with such a goal. She's smart, resourceful, connected, and brave, but Edward Blanche is... himself.

"Be careful, all right?"

"You say that like little old me could get in trouble." More seriously, she nods to him. "But don't worry. I won't be reckless, at least certainly with no reason to be."

The problem is there surely will be reason for recklessness before long. In spite of his reluctance, Greg returns the nod. "I'll hold you to that." She wouldn't be Luce if she did any less.

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