☆TRACK III: THE STREETS ARE EMPTY

[interdimanagers]

Who: Drafted Virgo Members
What: Juno makes everyone do a seance.
When: October 21st-22nd.
Where: The basement of the Virgo residential tower.
Warnings: Ghosts, apparently.

“You can't shake the feeling. Be quiet not one sound. But the wind seems to speak, Something's here in the room with me.” ☆THE STREETS ARE EMPTY Juno arrives without notice. In fact, you can’t even really remember seeing her approach. One moment you’re doing your business, and the next she is telling you that you have to come down to the basement with her, in order to complete a “task” you’ve been assigned. This sort of thing would seem preposterous to a normal person, but even if you don’t realize it, you aren’t one. As Mr Blanche’s personal assistant and sometimes second in command, her word seems to carry almost as much weight as his does. You don’t really have any choice but to agree. “Bring whatever instrument you know best,” she says. “You’ll need it.” She snaps up every one of you that she sees in her initial sweep, and soon she has a whole pack of Virgo newbies following her down to the lowest floors of the residential tower. It feels weird, but it’s like you can’t quite articulate why. No one else seems to be able to either. Most of the lights are turned off on those lower floors, but it’s easy to tell it’s a place you’ve never been before. It’s strangely...hospital like, down there, in both aesthetic and a sense of sterility. Maybe some kind of laboratory setting? Which seems like a super weird thing to be in the basement of an apartment building, but this is yet another thing you can’t quite bring yourself to ask about. Juno leave most of the lights off, except for a few central features. The ambience is dim and cold. She tells you not to stray, and you don’t. The thought of going against her becomes somehow repulsive, like you don’t even want to think about it too long. You try not to think about your surrounding too hard, either. She lines you all up, and then after some strangely intense eyeballing, she starts breaking you up into some incredibly lopsided groups that seem to have nothing to do with your actual bands. In the end, she looks disappointed with resulting teams, but carries on regardless. Each “group” is given some complexly timed sheet music and a funny looking mobile speaker. She says that you have a half hour to compose a group piece to play alongside the sheet music , and that it needs to be good. Then, she wanders off to start pacing the basement in a strangely arcane series of movements, and leaves you all to it. Only among your peers do you start feeling like you can voice any of your previously stowed concerns, but make sure Juno doesn’t overhear you – occasionally she’ll come by to bluntly critique anyone who is performing inadequately. You feel lucky that she doesn’t have a whip with her, because you’re almost certain that she’d use it without much remorse. ☆THE SEANCE The performance is about as awkward as you’d expect, given the set up. The four groups are set up so that they’re facing each other, as if standing at the corner of a square. Each speaker is set up in the center of its group, and the precisely timed electronic beat that plays from them is what you’re supposed to perform along to. Odds are that you do your level best, but, outside of your control...something goes wrong. “Have you ever felt... Something evil, Lurking around? The moon is full, The streets are empty. Shadows cover the town.”

Comments

[nibelungvalesti]

Touch was not normally a thing Meril dabbled in -- neither welcome nor unwelcome, it simply had little presence in her life. But in this moment, the touch of another person felt phenomenally solid, real as the darkness and the wisp and the lingering pseudo-memories were not. The contact brought her into sharper focus, her eyes shifting in a minute degree as she became more alert.

"For a moment, I felt... as if I had been taken apart, and put back together with pieces missing."

[faithfulflame]

"What? What do you mean?" Rei's voice held more than a little concern, and the touch intensified as she pulled Meril against her. The woman was slighter, and contact was definitely how Rei operated when she was concerned. She'd always heard it reassured someone, a physical reminder of not being alone.

"Because...I felt the same way. Only...I still feel like something's missing."

[nibelungvalesti]

Wait, what? That might be a bit too much touching, though Meril had no response to the tug except to go still and a bit wide-eyed.

"The pieces now... don't fit as they should. But I do not know if that is good or bad..."

[faithfulflame]

Deal with it. At least Rei has no designs of romance, Meril.

"When did it happen? What was going on around you? Did you touch anything?"

Because she's definitely wanting to fix this...

[nibelungvalesti]

These questions, too much for her brain to handle after its scrambling. Fire and energy, compared to her. "It is -- it is hard to remember." She lifted a hand to her chest, trying to draw attention away from the ache there with the pressure of her fingers, only for her hand to bump the wisp that had clung to her.

"What is this?"

[faithfulflame]

"I don't...know?"

Rei let go enough to shoo the wisp with her fingernails, only as she does, the little light bobs happily towards her and she staggers backwards, falling flat on her backside with a pained cry. Wide eyed and staring, her thoughts swirl and swirl, a spiraling vortex of thought and memory..

That same castle, the one Meril had seen, all white marble and gleaming spires stands out starkly in Rei's mind's eye. Only something was different this time. There was no soft light, no gentle glow, only the harsh reds and oranges of fire and death. Bodies lined the floor, the perspective swooping through shattered gates to an interior room, and standing at the center of it all was a grim looking young woman, holding a deadly looking spear. When she speaks there's a hint of command there, the voice of someone ancient, powerful, and terrifying.

"I am the Harbinger of Death. I am the Endbringer, the Herald of Silence, the Guardian of Saturn. And I have come to put a stop to this."

And then, all she does? Is simply drops that spear. The weapon falls to the tile floor, and there's not a single sound as it impacts. Absolute, perfect, silence. And then the world seems to come apart at the seams, the palace and surroundings crumbling away to dust. There are screams then, the sounds of death and dying, a furious bellow from somewhere deep inside that palace. And then it was all gone. Everything. Gone. Ashes to Ashes...and Dust to Dust..

"W-What?!" she chokes back a gasp, her stomach suddenly feeling very, very unsettled. "Who...was that?!"

[nibelungvalesti]

"Rei." If she had been whole, that dull word would have been a cry as the girl seemed to take an invisible blow. That Meril even made it at all in the absence of Duty spoke to those buried other emotions within her, barely embers but still glowing faintly. "Are you well?"

[faithfulflame]

"I..." Rei swallows and looks up, surprise and fear in her eyes...

"I don't know. I'm seeing things. Things I shouldn't...things that don't make sense..."

[nibelungvalesti]

"A crystal castle?" So much more power quivers behind that bare description, for the image had thundered into Meril's mind and cut itself a permanent home there through weight and force. But there wasn't enough of Meril left to give that memory the true color and shape it deserved.

[faithfulflame]

"You saw it too?"

Rei blinked, surprised at that. Had Meril seen the same thing? How? That didn't make any sense. How was that even possible?

[nibelungvalesti]

"I thought I was dreaming," Meril said, but the coincidence would have been too much. "These wisps..."

Yet again, she did not have the strength to continue the thought, to examine the circumstances. Or rather, she had no reason to.

[faithfulflame]

"Are...unsettling. Meril, did you...what did you see when you touched that wisp, exactly?"

Following a hunch.

[nibelungvalesti]

"A castle," she said promptly, the answer giving her much-needed focus. "Great and towering, white or silver. A great crescent stood atop it."

[faithfulflame]

"That's...what I saw at the party..." Rei shuddered. "Maybe it has something to do with these lights?" She gestures to a wisp.

"Maybe you touched the one that came from me?"

[nibelungvalesti]

"At the party?" Here, a sharp note of surprise should have made Meril's voice slice. It barely managed to manifest. "You saw something there?"

[faithfulflame]

"Yes?" Rei blinked in befuddlement. "That castle, with the moon on top..."

[nibelungvalesti]

"That makes no sense," Meril said flatly -- very flat indeed, in her current state. "How could we both see the same image? Is it a deception?"

[faithfulflame]

"Maybe? But it feels different." Reis' voice began to firm, a hint of command and fire reentering it. "Did you see something strange of your own at the party?"

[nibelungvalesti]

"I -- did." Lying didn't occur to her, even now. "I thought it was just stress. A reaction. Certainly no one else saw it."

[faithfulflame]

"What did you see?" Rei's voice is earnest, eager even. She feels like she's onto something.

[nibelungvalesti]

"It was a monster. A corpse that was moving on its own, and I felt -- not only revulsion, but anger. That made no sense." The vision had been brief, the emotions intense to the point of madness but only for that moment.

[faithfulflame]

"That sounds...dreadful. I'm sorry, Meril." But...that seemed no more far fetched than her own. "And do you feel...off? somehow? I'm starting to have a strange idea. And that's that these feelings might somehow be tied to these lights."

[nibelungvalesti]

"That seems impossible," Meril said, flatly. Not 'that IS impossible' -- she couldn't deny that Rei's theory fit the available evidence, even though it had the slight problem of being impossibly fantastic.

[faithfulflame]

"Perhaps we can find yours? Since you clearly found mine. I...didn't feel like myself until I touched it." Rei reasoned. It seemed fantastic but she was starting to think it might be just that.

[nibelungvalesti]

"I did not feel... quite myself, but I felt something when I touched that light. Are you certain they each belong to a person?" Beyond fantastic, insane, and Meril couldn't believe she was giving credence to this theory.