Carcosa, pt. 2

[polymods]

✖ Carcosa

Ⅰ. CARCOSA
You Are Still Here.

Another month, and you’re still in the city of Carcosa! Isn’t that just wonderful?

You still have access to the city’s temple and the High Temple.

The side effects you may have suffered from throughout the month of May are now at an end - if you had a pesky mask glued to your face the whole time it will now fall off. You might need a little moisturizer, but otherwise you’ll be just fine.

You could sit around inside the relative safety of the temples, of course, but why not get out there and explore the city some more? Come on, grumpypants!

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Ⅱ. SPEAK EASY
CW: Optional alcohol consumption.
What kind of pet shop is filled with rambunctious yahoos and hot jazz music at 1 AM? That's right - the best damn pet shop in town! Sidle up to the back door of Curly's Pet Shop and a panel will open enough to reveal a pair of eyes. "What's the password?" you'll be asked. Whatever word first comes to your mind, well, that apparently is correct because you're let in at once.

The front of the building definitely does indeed house fish and birds and kittens, but the back room is definitely not a good place to find a new animal companion; you find yourself in a crowded little room with low lighting and a small bar crammed into one corner. There's seats and some tables, and most importantly there's a band playing jazz music across from the bar.

Why not take a seat and have a drink? It's probably not paint thinner. Probably. Maybe you'll spot some of your fellow Travelers and you can sit and have a chat. Make a new friend who can hold your hair back if you party too hard.

And you better hope that the place doesn’t get raided!

Notes:
1. The drinks are all era-appropriate - you’re not getting Redbull with vodka here - and even if your character has non-human physiology they will work the same as they would on a baseline human. That’s right, your magic or your healing-factor or your vampire blood is no match for these Gin Rickeys!

2. If Curly’s does get raided while you’re there, you can run and hide or choose to engage with the police, who are armed and not too shy about opening fire if you go on the offensive. As with the rest of the regular residents of Carcosa, the officers are human and can be killed. Killing them may affect the colour grading of your Scrywatch depending on the situation. (Is it beneficial to personal growth to kill in order to save someone else, for example? You tell me!)

3. Did you want a pet from the front of the building? Well, just remember that baby turtles and alligators might SEEM like a good idea, but they grow up! Also any animal you take will not travel with you to the next island. So sorry.

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Ⅲ. EXPRESSIONISM YOURSELF
CW: Optional paranoia, hallucinations.
If you wander the streets at night, you may find yourself getting turned around. You'll find that the streets have lost their many lights, and the beautiful and delicate art deco architecture has given way to something much more stark and heavy. The buildings are block-like, but they curve in exaggerated ways that hurt the eye if looked at too long. All are in blacks and whites and greys. Nothing looks quite real, but you can walk along just fine. Probably better not to go off alone, though.


Periodically you will encounter that pesky sign of some sort painted on the walls. If you follow the sigils, you will eventually be led to a long staircase that winds down and down until it finally terminates in a large white room lit by a few electric lanterns. There's black paint there, with brushes. Maybe you're feeling creative?

Notes:
1. You’re pretty sick of this stupid sigil, aren’t you? In fact, you consider yourself QUITE the detective and have been searching after its meaning! Or maybe you played Call of Cthulhu a lot in college, you nerd!

Painting the sigil on the wall will cause you to feel disoriented and paranoid until you leave the white room. From that point on you can discover a copy of a play entitled The King In Yellow anywhere in the city you choose. Reading the first act of the play has no effect on you, however if you choose to read beyond the first line of the second act you will spend the rest of the month suffering from periodic hallucinations, often of a tall man in a pallid mask.

2. While there is no compulsion to paint, choosing to work out any of your character’s issues through art therapy can be reflected in your Scrywatch colour if it is significant enough.

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Ⅳ. AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER, I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A GANGSTER
CW: Optional gun violence, injury.
Art? Theatre? Music? BAH! Boring!

Maybe your tastes are a little more on the dangerous side? Whatever this island may be, it seems to offer plenty of opportunities to get into the seedy underbelly. Maybe you feel the need to steal a car, rob a bank, transport some illegal hooch for a smiling fellow in a yellow fedora. Grab your tommy guns, kids, it's time to outrun the Feds!

Naturally, you could wind up injured having all of this fun, but surely you could get some help from your fellow Travelers, either directly or by having them haul you to some sort of underground doctor. These doctors do exist, although it might take a while to get referred to one by a local.

You might also find yourself under arrest and stuck in an old-timey jail cell for a month. What fun!

Notes:
1. As was stated in the first prompt, the regular residents of Carcosa are normal humans. Killing them is possible and may affect the colour grading of your Scrywatch depending on the situation. Any weapons you find are era-appropriate.

2. You can break out of jail if you’re resourceful enough.

3. The underground doctors aren’t working in a real hospital for a reason. In fact, some of them might be less doctors and more, well. Vets.

You still jamming to that Carcosa playlist?

Network · Logs · OOC · Memes · Plurk

Comments

III - A

[unkindled_madness]

[Sephiroth reaches the bottom of the staircase in time to see Alucard hurl the paint. He lets out a noise somewhere between a laugh and a scoff as his feet carry him into the room.]

It's an improvement.

[He doesn't like the white walls, he doesn't like whatever magical headgames have led him here, so he appreciates what he perceives as the other man's rejection of the whole thing. Even if it doesn't get him anywhere. A little violence is still an improvement.]

[cryptsleeper]

Hardly.

[The one word response comes with folded arms, Alucard glaring accusingly at the splatter. There's a thick, oily drip running down the wall, spilling out onto the floor and spreading from there. It is a mess.]

The only improvement would be if walking through a pitch black hole got one out of this nonsense.

[unkindled_madness]

That sort of thing only happens in fables.

And I doubt it would lead us anywhere we wanted to go.

[That moment of vicarious satisfaction was fleeting. Sephiroth lets out a frustrated sigh and starts a slow circuit of the room, as though closer inspection will reveal anything more than the white walls. He never quite turns his back on the other man though, keeping him somewhere in the periphery of his vision.

What's expected of them this time? More secrets?]

[cryptsleeper]

Most likely.

[To which part? Both? Neither? It doesn't matter. Alucard walks over to the thick, black puddle that is now on the ground and carefully taps his foot against it.

Solid floor all the way through. But he pauses, then takes the toe of his shoe and smears some of the paint off to the side.

Now that is satisfying.]

I imagine now that one is here, one can choose to leave.

[unkindled_madness]

Do you? The earlier games sought to force us to engage.

[But he glances at the stairs. This one could be different... maybe. Is he going to play along now just because not doing so went badly for him before?]

[cryptsleeper]

There were games?

[Alucard, wrapped up in his own head and depression, had avoided much of the night life in the city. He was happier on the forlorn shores, up until the zombies showed up to make everything more complicated.

The dhampir shrugs it off. Moves his foot along more. Another thick, black streak of paint follows.]

Try then. The experiment is easy enough to test.

[unkindled_madness]

[Did he actually manage to avoid them, or does he just object to calling them games? Sephiroth eyes the other man for a moment before striding towards the staircase.]

If any sort of mask should appear while I'm gone, I suggest you refrain from touching it.

[He's gone for some long minutes, back up that long staircase and down a few streets. He could just leave and not come back, but something seems different about this scenario. As long as he isn't trapped, he's more inclined to investigate, so he returns, eventually.]

[cryptsleeper]

Noted and taken under advisement.

[In the time Sephiroth is gone, Alucard has gone from using his foot as an experimental brush to taking an actual paintbrush in hand, smearing thick, broad strokes over the wall. There is no design, no artistry or consideration to it, but the action feels good. All consuming, focusing.

Alucard's terrible at getting out of his own head. Yet this seems to have done what so many other things could not.

But isn't so lost in the meditative state to miss the reappearance of the other man. He turns, paint splatter on his face and in his hair.]

--Well?

[unkindled_madness]

There seems to be no barrier to leaving.

[He looks the other man over (really, you're getting it in your hair?), then past him to the brush strokes he's added to the wall. If they're meant to depict something, he's not seeing it.]

...do you feel some compulsion to do that?

[cryptsleeper]

I do not.

[It is all utter nonsense. That makes it a little easier, choosing to do this.]

It's simply here. Why not use it?

[unkindled_madness]

[A soft laugh.]

A simple way of looking at it.

[This place is making him paranoid. Maybe it is just a room, just paint, just a man who avoided being caught up in the earlier spells through sheer luck.]

But I doubt I could add much to your... artistic vision.

[cryptsleeper]

[There's a shrug from the dhampir. Simple, yes, but right now that helps a myriad of anxieties.

Artistic vision though? That gets something close to a laugh. It comes out as a cough, like he's forgotten how to make the correct noise for laughing.]

High praise for throwing paint around for no reason. [No reason other than he can.]

It's that or risk those petty games, or else sit in that temple doing nothing at all.

[unkindled_madness]

[It's rare that Sephiroth's jokes get a laugh out of others-- even as rough a laugh as that. He'll take it.]

...there's a decent library. [But otherwise he'd have to agree. He's never had so much time to fill. Time to take up art? It's still an absurd notion.]

If you called it "abstract" and invented some tale to explain it, I'm sure someone would pay gil for it.

[cryptsleeper]

It's...a fine library. [It isn't a compliment. If anything, the word fine is begrudging. Alucard's encountered better because he has better.]

I'm not sure one would have to invent a story for it. The truth of being forced into a weird alley and presented with only paint feels like a strange enough event to justify whatever nonsense someone else sees in these splotches.

[unkindled_madness]

[Look, he said it was decent, not the best library ever. As a point in its favor, though, it contains nothing but books Sephiroth's never heard of before.]

I suppose that might do well enough. It could easily be taken for some cryptic metaphor.

[His gaze has dropped to the other paintbrushes, though. He's trying to recall if he's ever so much as held one before. ...... He's pulling his hair back first though.]

[cryptsleeper]

Art is rarely a metaphor where I'm from.

[1400s pre-Renaissance art? It is all about teaching bible stories, and the Renaissance doesn't exactly hit Wallachia anyway. That's what the Ottomans are for.

Alucard shrugs, and he takes one of the thicker brushes and draws it across the wall in one swoop, tapering off only when he hits a corner of the wall.]

There must be something more compelling out there than this though.

[unkindled_madness]

I don't know.

[Hair safely tied back, he picks up a brush and just... holds it for a moment, paint dripping onto the ground in front his feet. No, he doesn't think there's any compulsion. He could put it down if he wanted to.

Instead he walks to a relatively white section of wall and paints a slow line down it, seeing what it feels like.]

I don't much care for this city.

[cryptsleeper]

[Alucard's eyes remain on his own work. He drops the broad brush, exchanging it for something with finer bristles. From that streak little lines are brushed out. Not veins, not tree branches, just more abstract lines.]

Being this close to so many people is far too unnerving. [adrian you grew up in a giant castle in fuck all nowhere for most of your life] The decor and art though. That I like.

[unkindled_madness]

[Sephiroth shakes his head. While he's never enjoyed crowds, he is accustomed to city life. But he's used to his city being a little less... polished.]

The people themselves are unnerving. They hardly seem real.

[cryptsleeper]

Did you encounter any of the walking dead on the shoreline?

[What a casual way to ask about the topic.]

[unkindled_madness]

[Seems perfectly normal to Sephiroth. How else do you ask about the undead?]

Yes. More than once.

[Which apparently is neither distressing nor remarkable, as he's still contemplating his line on the wall. Sort of reminds him of Wutain calligraphy... He'll start adding a few more lines.]

[cryptsleeper]

They're probably the most real thing on this island.

[Alucard doesn't look up from his work.  There are more thin lines meandering from the tip of his brush.]

But I hardly find myself caring about their origins.

[unkindled_madness]

Why should anyone be concerned with their origins? Corpses are easy to make.

[Not so commonly animated, in his experience, but that they should exist to be animated is just how things work.]

[cryptsleeper]

Real corpses from unreal people though. That should be a point of concern, I think. Death shouldn't work like that. Neither should necromancy.

[He sighs, deciding he hates these lines. He reaches down, taking the broader one again and scribbling the work out.]

[unkindled_madness]

I know little of necromancy, but maybe they aren't the corpses of unreal people.