DUST TO DUST ❅ EVENT

[nightmods]

DUST TO DUST

It will take them time to discern the cause. After all, all the artifacts brought back from the fight with Project Prometheus were deemed safe or at least contained, only able to have their dangerous power unleashed if people were dumb enough to try it.

The altheiometer is not the real thing. It was created by the belief of a child, after reading a certain book series, and therefore is more of a symbolic object, with none of the real capabilities of the device in fiction. Instead, it had other magical abilities. It was not entirely understood by the Project itself, just kept there to be studied and eventually co-opted for sinister use if possible. But it had remained inert in their company.

At the Pole, it passes the magical scan, since it technically is "safe," then finally activates. It works on a child's logic, after all. A child would think daemons are cool but wouldn't think bad people deserved them. A child would think the device should only activate to let good guys have daemons.

In the study containing the safer artifacts, the altheiometer opens of its own accord. Gears turn. The hands start clicking as they move in circles around its clock-like face, rotating back and forth between different symbols. The hands finally stop, clicking as they meet in the same spot, on the symbol of an apple, with a bite taken out of it.

It's all very metaphorical isn't it. The soul can't exist without free will. In some worlds they think free will only exists because of an apple in a garden.

There is a burst of light and sound that reverberates through the Pole. As the floor shakes, everyone sees a brief glimpse of the wave as it passes through walls - and then passes through each of them. Getting hit by it is like getting hit by a storm wave in the ocean, briefly lifting everyone off their feet.

Alongside the sensation of being briefly levitated, there is also the painful sensation of suddenly being aware of something deep inside, briefly made to feel almost like a splinter in their very core.

Then, with all the subtlety of getting attacked with a giant hole punch, the splinter is removed, excised. It does hurt, but there is also a strange relief. Except...whatever it was, it's still here. Next to each of the Guardians. Still attached, just...an externality now.

The wave crashes to the shore. They're all knocked to the floor again.

If they were alone in a room, they aren't now. If they weren't alone in a room, said room's occupants have now doubled.

DAEMONS
Each PC now temporarily has a daemon. Daemons are the soul externalized, sentient and able to talk. Taking the form of animals, they often shapeshift and change forms during someone's childhood, but settle into a permanent shape during someone's teen years as the person's personality becomes more concrete and distinct.

• Form: A daemon takes an animal form that represents the person's personality. They usually have a gender opposite to their respective person's, but there are sometimes exceptions, sometimes for entirely unknown reasons, or if the person is some flavor of queer. Daemons will know that they're their owner's soul and be able to tell them that.


• Daemon Selection: Here is a page with interpretations of a few animals and what types of personalities they can represent, but please don't take it as law. It's just possible inspiration. The daemons can be any animal. For characters not from Earth, their daemons can be animals that are entirely made up or ones in their canons.


• Link: Daemons are connected metaphysically to their person through an invisible link, allowing that person to still be attached to their soul. Moving too far from your daemon can cause physical and spiritual agony. Suddenly being ripped apart by a great distance can kill someone. Killing a daemon - which is only as hardy as the animal they are - also kills their owner.


• Personalities: Daemon personalities are often similar to their owner's, but sometimes daemons are more willing to be honest about feelings or subconscious impulses. For instance, daemons often instinctually show affection to the daemons of people their owner is fond of. Daemons will remember everything their owner remembers, and was basically there the whole time they were alive, just integrated. Despite being externalized, they aren't something separate from each person, they were always a part of them.


• Physical Contact: People can touch their own daemons without effects and cuddling their daemon can be a positive experience of self-love. Someone hurting their own daemon can feel like they've caused the damage to themselves, and hurts on a spiritual or almost self-hating level. Meanwhile, picking up someone else's daemon without permission can cause incredible discomfort and pain. Alternately, touching someone's daemon with permission can cause comfort, a surge of happiness, or even pleasure, depending on the context of the contact and the relationship the two people have.

OOC DETAILS
❅ Event Length: The plot will last an OOC and IC 2 weeks before they can figure out what's causing the change and reverse it, making the daemons internal again. During this time, allies of the Guardians will temporarily take over their duties and fortunately no major crises will happen. Players can set their own opens during this time as well as play out anything that happens over the whole 2 weeks in this post.

❅ New Characters: If your character is introing at this time, assume they arrived just in time for the magical wave to hit them, or walked into a cloud of its residual energy.

❅ Opt-out: Anyone that doesn't want to play in the plot or have a daemon can handwave Vasilisa's magical defenses caught on to the power surge and her glowing charms protected at least some people in the Pole from the transformation. You can ignore this and thread as if there's just a little extra chaos around the Pole.

❅ Jack Frost: There will also be a network post with Jack explaining what Vasilisa has magically discerned has happened. It will take time to find the source, as the altheiometer is very good at cloaking its readings and registered as "safe." (Technically, it is safe, it's just...inconvenient.)

Comments

[bringinghopewithme]

Acacia sits criss-cross applesauce and keeps grooming through Antony's fur, grunting an approving sound as he speaks up for himself. Bunny shoots her just the slightest narrowing of eyes and she hits him back with just the slightest shrug as she finds another area on Antony's fur to groom out to smooth perfection.

Bunny turns back to Elle. "And you, what, did a lot of work to become something more yourself?"

[millenyal_pink]

Antony doesn't show it, but he leans further into Acacia's space with a smug air about him. His tail swishes in time with her touch like he wants to wag it, but is trying to keep his composure. Elle almost liked it better when he was practically showing his belly. (It's a relief to see evidence that he really is her reflection, even if it's equally painful.)

Elle suppressed a deep, frustrated sigh. She schools her expression, clenches her fist, straightens her back, and steadies her voice. If she's going to do this, she might as well do it properly. She moves her eyes to somewhere on the wall. She moves her arms to her lap, not wrapped around herself like she wants, and she forces her fist to unclench.

"A mage tore apart the threads of my existence and rewove them in a new shape."

[bringinghopewithme]

Elle takes this so seriously and personally that it wouldn't do to treat this as anything but a big deal, a personal detail that she ought to have confirmed by magic instead of refuted, ought not to have to have exposed to a bunch of near strangers. But it just doesn't land with whatever context it has to her on Bunny.

He could say about the same about himself. Well, not himself really, but his mother, who was first generation. Eos desired companion animals, so she took rabbits and unmade some of the ways Gaia had made them, patching her own designs in to let them be people. It isn't the same at all as what Elle is inferring, but the way she calls it tearing and not something softer, an unweaving or a detangling before reweaving threads into a new shape suggests that some would have called what she did a mutilation. Maybe in some way, Elle thinks of it that way.

The end result is that Antony offends her and exposes her in a raw way she's rejected. Bunny nods, thoughtful, digesting what she's saying. He pats her knee. "You do what you gotta."

"He's not bad, though," Acacia puts in bluntly, scratching Antony under his chin with both hands, and again Bunny shoots her a Look. She shoots a shrug back.

[millenyal_pink]

Antony leans into Acacia even more to take the comfort that Elle refuses to seek for herself.

Elle slumps forward and goes to rub her hands across her face, only to be met with air on her left side. She moves the stump back down and rubs her eyes with her right.

"I asked him to. I made that decision for myself," it was the only decision she could make for herself at the time. Everything else had been taken away and put in someone else's hands. But she's became a Bastet and that's hers.

"I don't know how much Stacia's told about the Garou where we come from, but very few of them were happy with my choice." An understatement.

Elle looks at Acacia and Antony, then away. "It's not about him. It's about what that-" she gestures to his form "-means."

"We've had to prove ourself over and over again to show that we made the right decision," Antony explains. "The only reason we weren't killed on the spot is because we were under the protection of someone too powerful and too well-connected to mess with."

"But that's- it wasn't a cosmetic change. The very essence of our being was reforged. Our spirit is one of a Bastet."

Which is why she can't wrap her head around Antony being a wolf. Antony doesn't understand it either, she can feel his fear and confusion from across the room.

[bringinghopewithme]

Acacia coos soothingly again and offers Antony her lap. Every step Antony makes towards asking for more comfort, Acacia opens up space for two more steps.

"Right, well, I can see why it doesn't make sense," Bunny agrees. "Is this going to turn into something the nongs back home are going to use against you?"

If she's truly in danger, he has to think of something other than how to validate her identity and her sense of offense at the same time, and that's already complex.

[millenyal_pink]

Antony happily drapes himself across Acacia's legs, nuzzling the underside her chin to give it two delicate licks of gratitude and affection. He has to hold back the instinct to properly greet her by licking the inside of her mouth.

Elle has decided, for her own sanity, that she is going to ignore her daemon's behavior right now. They'll talk about his completely unfiltered emotional display later.

"Probably not. No one can say anything if they don't know about it, and I'm not gonna be the one to tell them."

"I'm sorry," Antony's nose scrunches up as he goes to clarify. "Or, I'm not sorry, because I didn't have any control over this. I am sorry, though. This is- it doesn't feel good for me. What we went through should've been enough. I shouldn't look like this."

Elle's flinches at his words as guilt overrides her frustration and fear. She's been so focused on herself and what this means for her, she completely failed to realize that this happening to Antony too. He's just as hurt and scared as she is.

He is her, in almost every way that matters. They're two-of-a-kind-- a matched set-- and doesn't that just drag up an older, entirely different wound. Antony's hides his face into the crook of Acacia's shoulder like he had the same thought.

Elle looks back down at Bunny.

"I'm sorry. This is just... a lot. And bringing up some stuff that I thought I had dealt with already."

[bringinghopewithme]

The affection Acacia showers Antony with is rather a relief to her, and to Bunny, feeling what she feels, that Antony being willing to ask for and accept every act of comfort and kindness is something he has always been concerned Elle is not so freely able to do. Acacia mutters to Antony, patting his neck and his flank and rubbing her cheek against the top of his head, "hey. You deserve this. You got that? People love you no matter what you're shaped like."

"Well it would, wouldn't it?" Bunny agrees, patting Elle softly on the knee. "I can't guess what it feels like to go through this, but it's not a failure on your part if some foreign magic can't make sense of who you are."

"It's not his fault either," Acacia pipes up, from where she's pulling Antony entirely into her lap.

"Look, wouldya let us hash it out?" Bunny finally admonishes her.

"You look, let's hash it out together!" Acacia demands. "Our shapes say something about what you people are like, but that doesn't mean that, I don't know, Dan's part ferret or Sam's part hawk. You're not even part human, you just got a real weird personality for a rabbit."

She's correct, he does, and Bunny doesn't take it personally. "She might be right. Or the magic could be slow catching up here," Bunny says to Elle. "If it helps, nobody here is going to think you're anything but yourself for having a daemon that isn't shaped like you'd expected. Everyone knows you as a bastet first." He'll let her fill in the 'girl with a wolf daemon second' for herself.

[millenyal_pink]

Elle kind of hates the way Antony is able to seek out and receive physical assurance. It's every reigned in instinct and want she keeps oh-so-carefully controlled, all laid out to bare. But she can feel the echo of Acacia's hands buried in Antony's fur, too, and that's-

She doesn't need it to get through this but. It's nice.

Both of them look startled at the reassurance. They know that logically, but having to hear it in words is a lot to process. He doesn't move away from Acacia, though.

Elle can't help but be amused by Bunny bickering with himself. It's very... Bunny.

"She knows it's not my fault," Antony assures the not-human. "We know. We just had to feel the emotion first."

"He's right," Elle sighs. "I don't blame him. Neither of us are at fault here. And it's not completely out of nowhere-- I don't know if it's because I was taught by a bunch of Garou, or if it's leftover instincts, or what, but I'm pretty fucking weird for a cat, myself."

"We're still Pumonca," Antony says softly. "This doesn't change that. Isaac, mom, Thunderbird, Selene-- none of them would've accepted us if we weren't."

Elle nods. She knows this, but it's nice to hear aloud.

"I shouldn't hold out for it being magical lag. I need to figure out how to accept it. I need to be okay with this." Anything else would be denying a core part of herself and she refuses to do that anymore. She's not sure how to get there, but she'll have to figure it out.

"But Stacia's probably going to have Questions." Her tone makes the capital 'Q' very evident.

[bringinghopewithme]

Bunny nods at the wisdom of feeling. "Sometimes you've got to," he agrees. "Couldn't tell you how many mountaintops I've screamed on over the ages."

Acacia hums her approval as she pats Antony's flank, glad that they've reached some state of equilibrium.

"You want us to head Stacia off at the pass?" Bunny offers. "She and Benedict will probably be looking for us. She's seen this happen before." He gestures briefly at his depleted self, his own frustration leaking in.

[millenyal_pink]

They both seriously consider the offer. It's far more tempting than it should be.

"No," Elle sighs. "I know better than to try and avoid the local Ragabash. I should talk to her myself."

The offer is a very sweet one, even if Elle has some doubts about Bunny's ability to truly redirect Stacia when she's caught a scent.

"And Dan," Antony adds. His leg twitches when Acacia hits just the right spot on his hips. "We should be the ones to tell him, too."

Elle nods. "And Dan. If you see him, you can let him know that I'm okay but don't please don't mention..." she struggles to put a word to the situation.

"Me," the daemon finishes.

"Are you okay?" Elle's been wrapped up in her own shit, but not so much so that she hasn't noticed that Bunny's struggling. It's a genuine offer to talk about what's going on even is she doesn't expect him to actually take her up on it. She's still firmly in the 'child' category in his eyes.

She wonders what Bunny's reaction was when he learned she cut off her own arm on Halloween. It can't have been good.

[bringinghopewithme]

He wept. He kept it brief, and private with Dan, but he did.

He doesn't avoid looking at her cut off hand now, though, any more than he makes an effort to look directly at it. It's done, it's being undone, at least as far as it can be grown back. Elle will always carry having done it, and that's the scar that he's still sad over.

Anyway, he's confident in his rapport with Stacia enough to assume he can just ask her nicely and she'll do what he asks because she likes him. Perhaps that isn't enough, but he doesn't yet know otherwise.

But Elle's asked him not to, and so he won't. "I'll get to Dan first," he assures her. "We've got enough to talk about without getting into your specifics." He looks at her with a flat, grim expression of absolutely not being okay. "I'd tell you I'm fine, but that'd just be disrespectful."

Elle's a child, and there's a limit to what he'll unload on her emotionally, but she has better than basic powers of observation. Merely basic ones would do in this situation. "You may have noticed I'm a little more vulnerable than usual," he sugarcoats it.

"I hate this so much," Acacia pipes up, sugarcoating nothing. "It's so much easier to defend ourselves when I'm all armored up inside him. Imagine having to rip some person's throat out yourself to defend your person, and you've got to touch them to do it." She shudders with revulsion.

[millenyal_pink]

Elle made the Easter Bunny cry. If she knew, she wouldn't be sure whether that's something to be proud of or feel bad about.

At "I'd tell you I'm fine..." Elle very carefully doesn't react except for a twitch at the corner of her mouth. Antony snorts loudly.

"Is touching a problem?" Elle asks as her daemon shudders in horror.

There's something strange about the two of them-- a distance that goes beyond the emotional. They don't seem to be all that connected, like some of the 'link' that should be there just... isn't. Not severed, but blocked or tangled.

Elle doesn't seem to notice. If Antony does he isn't showing it.

[bringinghopewithme]

Acacia is less subtle about her emotions than Bunny is, but not by too much. He already doesn't do a lot of concealing his feelings, but Acacia looks between Antony and Elle several times where Bunny only looked once.

This isn't their first rodeo being distinct, but despite their bickering, they're in sync so completely that Elle and Antony are only making them now realize how much about daemons they took for granted being automatically conferred. The minute Acacia manifested Bunny knew her having to endure physical contact with anyone he didn't love and trust implicitly would be an abominable violation.

He takes a good breath before responding. "It's an . . . intimate thing, touching a person's soul." That's about all the depth he feels the need to spell out, thinking about the times that Acacia has had to glove up and defend him anyway. "From a stranger, even from a friend it's . . . disorienting. It feels wrong to the point of being painful."

Unless it's Dan, but Bunny feels no need to walk Elle through that layer of intimacy.

"Most of the time, any pain she feels, I feel too," Bunny adds, moving the conversation on. "So - try not to let him get injured, if you can. You should find out how much of your power you've retained, if any."

"Hey, so should we," Acacia points out. She slaps the ground beside her, and nothing happens. Bunny taps the ground with his foot experimentally, and a tunnel opens up. Hey! It's a good surprise for once. He lifts his tiny fists in victory as Acacia punches the air and they both cackle at still having some measure of split power.

[millenyal_pink]

Elle nods and files the information away. Hopefully that won't be a problem. She'll deal with it if it is-- she's dealt with far worse. In fact, being capable of tolerating that kind of contact could give her a leg up in an emergency.

After Bunny and Acacia test their powers, Antony speaks up. "We can't shift."

Elle freezes.

"What?" this is the first time she's addressed him directly since telling him to shut up.

"You can't change forms. I'm your spirit and right now we're separate entities."

Elle stares at him in horror, because what the fuck? That's not- that shouldn't even be possible!

She's starting to feel nauseous. She's beginning to panic again.