stresstokens (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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etrayalogs2024-08-05 12:05 pm
stresstokens) wrote in etrayalogs2024-08-05 12:05 pm
OPERATION: YOUTHFUL DISOBEDIENCE
WHO: Members of the grand curfew-breaking plan!
WHEN: During the Moorecroft event.
WHERE: Various Moorecroft locales.
WHAT: A bunch of youths have gotten together to break curfew in tandem to get to the bottom of the mystery at heart of this place -- but what they find leads to more questions than answers.
NOTES\WARNINGS: Probable violence, death, emotional trauma, cursing. All the fun stuff! I'll be putting the log headers for pre/during/post-curfew breaking logs in the comments, so just hang tight while I do that, though all members are of course more than welcome to post their own logs if that suits their tagging style better.
WHEN: During the Moorecroft event.
WHERE: Various Moorecroft locales.
WHAT: A bunch of youths have gotten together to break curfew in tandem to get to the bottom of the mystery at heart of this place -- but what they find leads to more questions than answers.
NOTES\WARNINGS: Probable violence, death, emotional trauma, cursing. All the fun stuff! I'll be putting the log headers for pre/during/post-curfew breaking logs in the comments, so just hang tight while I do that, though all members are of course more than welcome to post their own logs if that suits their tagging style better.
no subject
The only one, yeah. Everyone thought I was just a weird looking human for the most part. It got a bit frustrating having to explain it repeatedly.
[They never really took the fact that her experiences were altogether different seriously. That she couldn't just leave everything behind and pretend to be a wholly normal person in between life or death struggles.
There's a pause and she raises her hand to her chin as she considers what he said prior, like the great riddle of whether superheroes are giant dicks is something she's given consideration. Eventually she gestures towards him.]
See... I'm pretty sure our world's variant of 'superheroes' would just be you guys. No stupid costumes, no dumb nicknames, but you have the whole 'children being given copious amounts of power to go perform acts of extreme vigilante violence' thing going on. [Somewhere in the deep stretches of the multiverse, Tim Drake is probably seething. Something, something, murder, something.]
And we definitely do have aliens and world ending calamities, so I think that counts as a bingo.
no subject
[ But she's Aelwyn, and he's Riz. If he ever has the chance to fly under the radar, he does. Even after what happened with Kalvaxus, he uncomfortably shrugged off any extra attention even though the Riz Gukgak on the first day of Freshman Year could have only ever dreamed of that sort of admiration. But Aelwyn always seemed to thrive on being the person who shone brightest in the room. Brightest in her family, brightest among her peers, unflappable and hot and so much better than you in ways that completely concealed the familiar whispering in her ear the whole time. They're just two different ways of hiding.
He's always been good at hiding himself. He's still working on learning that other people's idea of hiding is very, very different from the literal sense.
But as for what she says next... he doesn't want to say it. It feels like giving too much of himself away. He hasn't said it out loud to anyone yet, not while he's been meandering around, considering everything they do in the course of their adventures, the sort of violence and chaos they willingly spread, the sort of violence and chaos that Riz whole-heartedly plans on continuing to spread. He's not as good as other people seem to think he is, maybe. ]
I've had... similar thoughts, to be honest, [ he winds up saying, honest to a fault. ] I wouldn't call it a one-one parallel, and at least we're not pretending to be any less violent than we are. The superheroes I've met have even been wigged out about me killing a gibbering mouther, which...
[ He shrugs, careless. He doesn't love the amount of collateral damage they do. At the same time, he's never regretted a single death at his hands. ]
Eh. Dude needed to die.
no subject
[She's learned very quickly how it's easier to run with assumptions than to go through the effort of correcting them one by one. They assumed she was like everyone else, fine. They assumed she was a bloodthirsty monster who operated on nothing but bloodlust, also fine. It's part of the reason that she became one. Why bother with the pretense?]
You'll hear no arguments from me. I've been on the receiving end of all those arguments even when I was acting on my best behavior. One such vigilante got real pissy with me over property damage and mild fear tactics, because people might be late or work or something. [They disagree on a few key factors in this equation but the necessity of execution isn't one of them. The idea that Adaine left her alive three times is still baffling to her.
She remembers staring up at the ceiling after killing the Oracle and her entire crew, aimless and lost in... guilt? Was that what it was? There were a lot of people on board. A lot of innocent people.
What a joke. She should have sunk Fallinel into the ocean and killed the lot of them.]
You were the one that killed Daybreak, right? [She smiles faintly.] You know, I'm pretty sure everyone involved in that plot had a plan to get rid of him before prom. Penelope and Zayn did, at least. The world's better off without that sack of shit.
[The world's better off without Penelope too, no matter who killed her. Nobody would dispute that, not her parents, not Aelwyn, not even the girl she 'loved' and sold out anyway. They shouldn't. She half wonders if any of them knew they killed her on her birthday.
There was always a level of heartbreak whenever she thought about her, when she was still a mortal. Unwilling, on some level. She knew what Penelope was. Now... it's nice, knowing that she destroyed her life for nothing and died miserable and utterly alone after being plunged into everything she was ever secretly terrified of. She can appreciate the artistry of that cruelty. It makes her salivate just thinking about it.]
no subject
[ Penelope was kind of shitty, granted, but he'd figured that her and Dayne were true-blue partners, not just partners of convenience. They'd been good together in a manner of speaking, and Dayne was just the sort of guy that people like Coach Daybreak preyed on best. In retrospect, Riz has a lot of regrets about how he'd handled Freshman Year.
He hadn't done his due diligence on Penelope and Dayne, dismissed them as just your run-of-the-mill high school bullies for too long. If he'd stopped long enough to do some proper detective work, he would have figured out so much more. Like them wanting to get rid of Daybreak, and how they could have used that to their advantage before she went full Prom Queen Murder Teen on their asses. (The rhyme is bad. He needs to workshop it.) ]
I guess Kalvaxus was the one they really put their weight behind. ] But -- wait, how'd you know I was the one to do it? By all rights, it should've been Kristen.
[ It wouldn't have been. Not ever, Riz thinks. For all that Daybreak had abused her trust, Kristen is too sweet, too forgiving, too faithful in the idea that anyone can change in a way that she certainly hadn't gotten from the Helioic Church.
Not Riz. That's why he merc'd the son of a bitch. ]
no subject
A pistol shot to the head. We needed to do a speak with dead spell to figure out how much he'd told you, and the cops gave Goldenhoard a basic report on the specifics of how he'd died - while they were trying to build a case against you. It was hardly magister level thinking.
Dayne was all in with them, but he wasn't exactly the brains of the operation. I don't think a single independent thought rolled through that head of his. [She shrugs.] With Daybreak out of the picture, Kalvaxus figured they'd have an easier job of controlling the Harvestmen in the short term and getting rid of them in the long term.
The Harvestmen had a fairly incompatible... 'ideology' in the long run. Daybreak went off script shortly before you killed him.
[They put their weight behind power and greed, striving for the things they all wanted above all else. Kalvaxus would have offered that, until he wouldn't have. It was convenient for the lot of them that people like Dayne, Zayn and Biz either never knew what they wanted or were never going to get it. In the end nobody got what they wanted.
Except Aelwyn in a way. And Kalina, who always gets her way.]
I'm surprised your investigation didn't reveal all this. [It's not quite a dig. It's not quite not a dig either though.]
no subject
Still. Riz doesn't have a lot going for him, and he knows it. What he has to rely on is his unshakeable belief in his own abilities, or at least in his own potential. If he didn't, he may as well just lay down and die now. ]
If I were to do it all again, it'd go a lot differently. [ He considers this. ] I still would've killed Daybreak, though. Fuck that guy.
[ His friends had been some combination of appalled and shocked when it happened, but even now, he can't seem to manage even a scrap of remorse about how that went down. ]
no subject
Adopting a continuing tone of casual and aloof friendliness, she inclines her head before nodding.] Generally speaking, you only want to leave an enemy alive long enough for them to give you what you want. After that, they become another unpredictable variable that'll almost always come back to bite you.
[They should have killed her too, obviously. She's sure they'll regret not doing so before she's finished getting what she wants out of Echo and Aurora.]
With a few exceptions, obviously.
[Maybe.]
no subject
[ He refuses to. When others are willing to kill him, he thinks it's absolute madness not to be willing to kill them in return. That's not nobility. That's just inviting them back to try to pull that shit again. ]
I'm not actually, like, pro-killing? But if someone's trying to kill me, generally speaking, I'm gonna return the favour. [ ... ] Unless they're unkillable robots, apparently.
[ That's a skill issue on his part. Boy, he'd sure like to rip out their wiring. ]
no subject
Or is that just how she remembers her own feelings? She's not sure anymore. Did she feel bad? She thinks she must have, but she can only barely remember why. They were strangers. Names on a page. Who cares if they all die?]
I don't think "pro-killing" is a particularly coherent philisophical outlook to begin with. Unless you're an insane death cultist or whatever.
[Even the End was a bit more complicated. She flexes the hand with the blackened veins in memory of that sweet experience of love and rot as she died on the inside and the outside.]
Do you feel bad about anybody that you killed? Or anyone you let live?
no subject
Riz flexes his fingers, considering how bad he actually feels about any of it, and simply winds up shrugging. ]
As for if I feel bad about killing anyone... I mean, it's just one of those things, you know? I've never killed anyone who wasn't directly trying to kill me or the rest of my party first. I don't believe they all deserved to die, but that's different from regretting killing them. It would have been nice if they could've survived. But if it's me or them?
[ He's a pragmatist. He's always been a pragmatist. Sometimes it worries him a little, that he goes too far, too quickly; he wants to wind up in Heaven with his own dead, not trapped in Hell with Bill. But he still thinks the scale's weights are in his favour. For now. ]
Eh. How about you?
no subject
The words almost slip from her tongue. Entirely lacking in subtlety. When she was alive, she hid her own guilt and shame behind bravado and mockery, sneering at Adaine and waving off the many people she murdered. She doesn't feel proud - that image of cartoonish villainy still doesn't exactly fit the lightless flame in her chest.
If anything, she feels ashamed at how much time she wasted.]
I should have killed my parents years ago. [She shrugs. That's about the summary of it, the amount of feelings she has towards this conflict that don't reach past what is acceptable for her to feel.]
Beyond that, not really. I'm probably supposed to but... [She shrugs. She can't imagine 'I didn't know them enough to care about them' would go down particularly well with this kid, but it's true. She's allowed many people to suffer over similar logic. Although she pauses, thinks some more.]
I didn't really have a role in it - I only found out after the fact, but I felt a little bad about Zayne. Don't know why, he was kind of a cunt, but he was good at spellcrafting.
no subject
[ He didn't expect for Aelwyn to truly voice any real remorse over what she's done, more as a defense mechanism than anything else. But as he watches her work out what to say, it occurs to him that it doesn't look like a mask. Not really. It doesn't seem as though she's bothering to lie to him, the same as he's not bothering to lie to her. What's the point?
But that's what he'd expect her to say. It's not what he's been led to believe by Adaine. To hear Adaine speak of it, Aelwyn has felt true remorse over getting caught up in everything - even if it was largely about how she'd treated Adaine - and had made a real effort to change for the better. It's not that Aelwyn's being particularly awful right now, especially not when she's right here helping the rest of them, it just... doesn't add up.
Something happened in between when Aelwyn is from, and when Adaine is from. Things didn't happen. The path of Aelwyn's destiny has changed. He wonders how much Adaine has caught onto that. It's troubling. Everything but the claim about her parents is troubling, because at least that much, Riz can get on board with. ]
Technically, he lives with you too. The others told me you wound up living at Mordred with everyone else for a while. [ Maybe that's what changed her. Absolutely criminal lengths of time spent in proximity to Jawbone a man who, while immensely likeable, is entirely too much for Riz.
He wonders if this Aelwyn is bitter about it. If she wishes she could be that Aelwyn instead, recovering in the peace and comfort of her forgiving sister's arms instead of sent off to deal with some other apocalypse. If she did, he's not sure she would ever tell him. ]