Augustus "Gus" Porter (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
paperclipsong) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
nightlogs2023-09-15 12:39 pm
paperclipsong) wrote in nightlogs2023-09-15 12:39 pm
Entry tags:
[closed] Maze of my Design
Who: Gus, Hunter, Eda, whoever's on the rescue team later on
What: Newcomer mythical witches get the world's worst welcome
Where:
When: Sometime after the initial game events
Warnings/Notes: Children in peril, terrifying cartoon men, illusionary landscapes
Gus doesn't remember how he got here, in this giant gloomy building in the middle of the night. He figures he's probably dreaming. Illusionists have lucid dreams sometimes, a byproduct of their unique magical abilities, and the only thing Gus can do is enjoy the ride.
Probably not much fun for the residents of the Noceda household back in the real world. There's no guarantee the girls aren't getting the weird clanging noises in Luz's bedroom and Hunter isn't going to wake up and think he's sleeping on the weird metal floor. They'll just have to wake him up when they wake up and it'll go away.
No harm done.
If Gus knew about such things, he'd realize he was in the storage warehouse of a factory and that it was making some human chemicals in giant vats. For now, however, he has no idea what the building is. He can only tell it's night by the giant glass windows letting in the moonlight. He can also see what look like towers of twisty little pipes.
...OK, this is actually kind of a boring dream, all grey and metal and concrete and cold and frankly it smells like eggy farts. It's a human place, which should interest him-
OK, it does interest him.
-But it's all wrong here. How exactly is he dreaming about a place he's never seen before in his life? The fact that no one else is here is enough of a clue that he's somewhere he shouldn't be, which is a bad time to come into any dream, and-
And the door just opened.
A man, a human man, is standing in the doorway, all in black. The only details Gus can pick out in the midnight gloom are that His eyes are covered by shades and he's carrying a cane topped with a skull. And he's looking right at Gus.
Busted.
"I'm not typically called upon to deal with crimes as petty as trespassing," says the man, as he slowly walks towards him, "but I don't see a reason to handle this differently than I would back in my jurisdiction."
"Right," says Gus, "letting me go with a warning right?"
Lucid dreams are controllable, so this should be the point where this guy responds to the prompt and stops..creeping up on him. As he gets closer, Gus can see he's wearing one thick, black rubber glove.
"Community service, actually," the man says, "I have a test to run, and you're going to help me...I figured out how to rub out toons once and for all. Time to see if it works on myths, too!"
He reaches for Gus, snagging his jacket like a cobra, and dragging him back towards one of the vats. Gus is nearly yanked off his feet, but he manages to dig his hand under his jacket and grab the small wooden statue he always carried with him.
In his hand, Emmilline softens and twists around his wrist before morphing into a staff.
"Let me go!" Gus screams, and swings his palisman staff as hard as he can at the creep's head.
The scream was loud enough to alert anyone nearby, but...like, who is Gus kidding? If anyone else is even around, they're going to be with his assailant. The hit is where he needs to focus his attention-
And the impact, and the way it jolts his wrists and ripples through his arms, is more than enough to convince him that this isn't a dream.
No matter how much Gus wishes it was.
The creep looks up. His glasses are off. He drops Gus's coat, which came off in the struggle. Something rolls out of the folds and into Gus's shoe.
It's a fake eye. Gus swallows hard and forces himself to look at the man who attacked him.
Bright red eyes, the wrong color and the wrong texture. They're gummy and jittery, and don't seem like they actually fit his face, like they move a fraction of a second after he does. It's a bad illusion, but it's not an illusion at all. The man smiles, and his sclera twists and melts until they're no longer eyes, but two skull and cross bones in the middle of his face. His hands warp and twist until they form a net and a loop of rope.
Gus doesn't wait around for the lasso show. He bolts the other way, clutching his palisman tight, running towards a large...
Garage door! Gus knows how those work! They show up a lot on human TV, he just has to find-
The sound of a rope cracks through the air behind him. He jumps a little, but keeps running.
Buttons. There's a button panel he has to find. He hits the door and rolls towards the small square, slamming his hand on the panel until-
Door's open, just enough for Gus to get into the outside air. Gus slams his hand on the button again and he's out. The door's closing. The man's approaching, almost slithering now, like his body is rubber. Gus trips, falls, scrambles backwards as his vision starts to tunnel in panic. The man steps through and-
There's a howl. Gus opens his eyes.
The man has been crushed under the door.
Gus tries to get his breathing under control. He stands, slowly and shakily, tears pricking the corners of his eyes. He stares at the crushed corpse, not quite processing the fact that he's almost sure he killed this man.
The crushed man...
...starts to uncrush, before popping out all at once-
A squeaky voice: "That'll be an assault charge too!" The hand twitches, jolts, and grabs Gus's ankle.
And everything goes blue.
Gus can't feel the shock wave that ripples outwards from his head, can't tell when everything changes and warps into an illusion. All Gus knows is that he needs to get away, towards the forest (that isn't there), through the thick underbrush (the pipework) of...green? Red? (both, intertwined, as if the forest of two realms have been forced together), find Hexside, find the Noceda house, find anywhere that isn't here, anywhere with friends.
Panic tangles the real and unreal in his head and in the dome of illusion he's created over the factory, not just for himself, but anyone who enters.
What: Newcomer mythical witches get the world's worst welcome
Where:
When: Sometime after the initial game events
Warnings/Notes: Children in peril, terrifying cartoon men, illusionary landscapes
Gus doesn't remember how he got here, in this giant gloomy building in the middle of the night. He figures he's probably dreaming. Illusionists have lucid dreams sometimes, a byproduct of their unique magical abilities, and the only thing Gus can do is enjoy the ride.
Probably not much fun for the residents of the Noceda household back in the real world. There's no guarantee the girls aren't getting the weird clanging noises in Luz's bedroom and Hunter isn't going to wake up and think he's sleeping on the weird metal floor. They'll just have to wake him up when they wake up and it'll go away.
No harm done.
If Gus knew about such things, he'd realize he was in the storage warehouse of a factory and that it was making some human chemicals in giant vats. For now, however, he has no idea what the building is. He can only tell it's night by the giant glass windows letting in the moonlight. He can also see what look like towers of twisty little pipes.
...OK, this is actually kind of a boring dream, all grey and metal and concrete and cold and frankly it smells like eggy farts. It's a human place, which should interest him-
OK, it does interest him.
-But it's all wrong here. How exactly is he dreaming about a place he's never seen before in his life? The fact that no one else is here is enough of a clue that he's somewhere he shouldn't be, which is a bad time to come into any dream, and-
And the door just opened.
A man, a human man, is standing in the doorway, all in black. The only details Gus can pick out in the midnight gloom are that His eyes are covered by shades and he's carrying a cane topped with a skull. And he's looking right at Gus.
Busted.
"I'm not typically called upon to deal with crimes as petty as trespassing," says the man, as he slowly walks towards him, "but I don't see a reason to handle this differently than I would back in my jurisdiction."
"Right," says Gus, "letting me go with a warning right?"
Lucid dreams are controllable, so this should be the point where this guy responds to the prompt and stops..creeping up on him. As he gets closer, Gus can see he's wearing one thick, black rubber glove.
"Community service, actually," the man says, "I have a test to run, and you're going to help me...I figured out how to rub out toons once and for all. Time to see if it works on myths, too!"
He reaches for Gus, snagging his jacket like a cobra, and dragging him back towards one of the vats. Gus is nearly yanked off his feet, but he manages to dig his hand under his jacket and grab the small wooden statue he always carried with him.
In his hand, Emmilline softens and twists around his wrist before morphing into a staff.
"Let me go!" Gus screams, and swings his palisman staff as hard as he can at the creep's head.
The scream was loud enough to alert anyone nearby, but...like, who is Gus kidding? If anyone else is even around, they're going to be with his assailant. The hit is where he needs to focus his attention-
And the impact, and the way it jolts his wrists and ripples through his arms, is more than enough to convince him that this isn't a dream.
No matter how much Gus wishes it was.
The creep looks up. His glasses are off. He drops Gus's coat, which came off in the struggle. Something rolls out of the folds and into Gus's shoe.
It's a fake eye. Gus swallows hard and forces himself to look at the man who attacked him.
Bright red eyes, the wrong color and the wrong texture. They're gummy and jittery, and don't seem like they actually fit his face, like they move a fraction of a second after he does. It's a bad illusion, but it's not an illusion at all. The man smiles, and his sclera twists and melts until they're no longer eyes, but two skull and cross bones in the middle of his face. His hands warp and twist until they form a net and a loop of rope.
Gus doesn't wait around for the lasso show. He bolts the other way, clutching his palisman tight, running towards a large...
Garage door! Gus knows how those work! They show up a lot on human TV, he just has to find-
The sound of a rope cracks through the air behind him. He jumps a little, but keeps running.
Buttons. There's a button panel he has to find. He hits the door and rolls towards the small square, slamming his hand on the panel until-
Door's open, just enough for Gus to get into the outside air. Gus slams his hand on the button again and he's out. The door's closing. The man's approaching, almost slithering now, like his body is rubber. Gus trips, falls, scrambles backwards as his vision starts to tunnel in panic. The man steps through and-
There's a howl. Gus opens his eyes.
The man has been crushed under the door.
Gus tries to get his breathing under control. He stands, slowly and shakily, tears pricking the corners of his eyes. He stares at the crushed corpse, not quite processing the fact that he's almost sure he killed this man.
The crushed man...
...starts to uncrush, before popping out all at once-
A squeaky voice: "That'll be an assault charge too!" The hand twitches, jolts, and grabs Gus's ankle.
And everything goes blue.
Gus can't feel the shock wave that ripples outwards from his head, can't tell when everything changes and warps into an illusion. All Gus knows is that he needs to get away, towards the forest (that isn't there), through the thick underbrush (the pipework) of...green? Red? (both, intertwined, as if the forest of two realms have been forced together), find Hexside, find the Noceda house, find anywhere that isn't here, anywhere with friends.
Panic tangles the real and unreal in his head and in the dome of illusion he's created over the factory, not just for himself, but anyone who enters.
no subject
The right Human Realm isn't going to just grab her—that'd be too easy. Too simple, too. . . anticlimactic. She was going to have to claw her way there tooth and nail. Eda had already accepted that, ready to rise to the challenge.
She just didn't realise that the setting might suddenly change on her again. That she might get abruptly forced to abandon the children under her care, her job, her—
Panic rises in her throat, but Eda swallows it down and soldiers on. The only thing she can think to do is keep moving, taking things one step at a time. One foot in front of the other. It's too dark for her to really good grasp of where she is, but it already doesn't seem like much to look at. Nothing but large steel buildings, cold and rigid.
Then the sky lights up with a flash of blue.
It's familiar. She knows the magic of another witch without question.
Eda barely has time to brandish Owlbert before the wave of magic hits her and the surrounding area, warping everything around her into tall, thick trees and heavy foliage. This too is somewhat familiar, a twisted version of the forest near the Owl House.
Who was here with her?
So Eda does the only sensible thing to do here, she yells. "Hey! Cut it out!"
This is too public of a display.
no subject
"It's Gus."
Flapjack transforms into a staff, and Hunter reaches into his jacket pocket for one of his pre-drawn glyphs.
"This happened before, when the Emperor's Coven attacked Hexside. Graye tried to brand Gus with a coven mark; he created giant field of illusions that only he could see through."
Hunter starts to run into the field.
"We have to find him! He'd only do this if he was scared. Who knows what could've attacked him here!"
They don't even know where they are. All he knows is he took a step and it looks Eda took a step and then...
no subject
Fortunately for everyone involved, there are more pressing matters at hand. Like Gus.
Hunter is quick to provide her with an explanation and a very good reason to trust his instincts. If the kid was freaking out somewhere, of course they were going to swoop in and get him. Plus that's another kid accounted for.
That's two out of three.
Things are really starting to look up for her and suspiciously much faster than usual. She has a split moment of considering that Hunter could also be an illusion and things could be way more terrible than they seem at first glance, but Eda figures she'll deal with the consequences of that later if it ends up being true. She'd rather just trust him and end up being wrong.
Her staff is underneath her feet in an instant.
"Let's go," she says. Just like that.
Then she's gesturing towards the direction where she first saw the light. If there is anywhere to go, it's probably there.
no subject
He can just about squeeze himself through the facility-turned-forest, turning sideways and horizontal to fit under and through gaps. It's just enough to keep Gus away from his pursuer...
...But just enough. His eyes just won't stop glowing, acting as a beacon for the monster chasing him. But even worse: last time this happened it was in Hexside a place Gus knew well, with wide open hallways and places to duck into. This isn't that, this is a strange place with an unclear purpose and no map. If the monster's progress is slowed, then so is his, and it'd be so easy to-
Corner himself.
The tangle of pipes that became a thorny bramble patch that Gus was certain would be his escape ends in a wall, a wall he couldn't even see because he was certain it was the fence around the Noceda household. And now this weird gummy monster has stuck his arm through the tangle of pipes and turned it, flesh morphing into metal, into something Gus is fairly sure is called a "jack." The lever that used to be his thumb, cranks the neck that was once part of his elbow upwards.
They look like bramble, but they don't sound like it. Instead of making soft snaps, they create a horrible screeching noise, coming in bursts as they're forced out of place by the jack. Gus presses himself flat against the wall, an aura of blue outlining his body where the illusion can't maintain itself. His heart and bile sack seizes in fear and he's not sure what his illusions are going to do if whatever this demon is gets hold of him.
no subject
Hunter doesn't say it aloud when he sees the terrifying man, his arms transformed into tools, because he doesn't want to give away the element of surprise. But the sight of him is horrifying.
If he's working that hard at getting into the space behind the pipes he can guess who's there.
There is a familiar flash of a yellow form, a familiar face that can be seen behind the horrible monster and then a spell glyph on paper is slammed against the floor. Vines shoot out of the floor, wrapping around the creepy guy and shooting him up on a column. There's room around the column.
Hunter peers in the hole and sees he's right.
"Gus!"
He flash steps in, wanting to get Gus out quickly in case the man can escape, keeping bowed over in the small space, grabbing him and flash-stepping him out.
"It's okay, I've got you. Eda's here, too."
no subject
Hunter's presence helps. A lot. Gus reaches up to cover his hand with his own as he's lead into a slightly more open area.
What doesn't help is hearing that Eda is here. Or seeing that she's here. It should help, he should be overjoyed to learn that Eda is alive and well after the months he's spent worrying about his home. Maybe he is- no, he definitely is- but it's buried under something a lot more complicated, though right now can he only feel an undifferentiated blob of fear and panic.
"How's Eda here?! No, back up, how are we here?! And where's here? Are we still in the Human Realm or-or is this what The Collector did to the Demon Realm?!"
The blue glow in his eyes pulses with his heart, still in a state of out of control magic.
no subject
One: knock off the head of this bozo who thought it was acceptable to chase children.
Two: comfort Gus and help him get himself under control.
Between the two, Eda already knew which one fell to her. While she likes to think that she has started getting better at it—she knows that she's not the best person to comfort someone. Especially not a distraught child in a delicate situation.
Yeah, no, her track record has too many blemishes for that.
Good thing she is so fantastic at knocking heads. And good thing Hunter is fantastic at comforting others. Really makes this divide and conquer strategy work out.
While Hunter moves ahead to retrieve Gus, a task that he's already gotten some practice at, Eda advances on the individual who had been hunting the witchling. Her move is a fast one, flicking out glyphs to send pillars of earth shooting up from the ground.
One, two, three, four . . . more and more until her opponent has been encased in a rock gaol.
Then there are other glyphs to send those columns back down, disappearing underneath the ground.
"Whew! Alright!" she says, making an exaggerated gesture of dusting off her hands. The best way to handle problems like this is just to remove them entirely!
no subject
He holds up one of his hands.
"Remember?"
He breathes in, counting down, then out, to encourage Gus to do the same. The trick Gus showed him. The trick Willow showed Gus.
But then...he hears something that sounds like rock being slammed over and over with something hard and metallic. The place where Eda had buried the creepy guy suddenly explodes upwards in a torrent of rock, that makes Hunter grab Gus to shield him with his body.
When the rock stops fly, he draws slightly away, turning to look at something he doesn't even understand with wide eyes.
The Judge climbs out of the hole, holding some kind of device with a metal chisel on the end (a jackhammer, not that Hunter knows it) upward. He moves it behind himself, as if putting it in a pocket and it disappears.
"I'd say that'd be an longer time on your sentence," he says. "But really it'll be shorter. Any last requests?"
With that, he flings his arms in both directions, stretching them out impossibly. A boxing glove is on each of them, one aimed Eda and one aimed at Hunter. The one aimed at Hunter moves fast enough to catch him, punching him in the side and sending him flying right into the gym wall with a cry. He slides to his knees, still conscious, but dazed.
no subject
He almost gets to three.
His rhythm is interrupted by a rapid-fire ringing noise, a noise that doesn't make sense until the Judge explodes out from a trap that should have been inescapable.
That was stupid Augustus, you knew he couldn't be crushed, why didn't you warn them-
Then he's on the ground, and Hunter is against the wall. Did Hunter push him out of the way? Did he get hit? Did it matter? He's running towards Hunter, a sort of twisted side-stepping motion as he tries to keep an eye on Eda too.
"Eda, look out!"
He reaches Hunter, crouching next to him and and putting one hand on his arm, squeezing slightly. "Are you OK?"
no subject
In the distance, Hunter cries out and her attention immediately snaps over to the boy's crumpled form. Which is wrong. That's not how this should be going. Didn't this guy know he's supposed to politely stay in his prison until they leave? Who raised this mongrel?
"Hunter!" she calls out.
Then her gaze locks back onto her opponent. Without thinking, her claws have begun to pierce into the upsettingly soft flesh. Biting, biting, biting as unusually coloured liquid oozes out from the wounds. It's this that wins something of a howl from their opponent, pained and furious.
It wins her his complete and total attention, now suddenly advancing on Eda.