018 | Season Spirits

[godsoffortune]

Who: Everyone!
What: Season spirits and spooky things
When: IC August 1-15
Where: The Near Shore and Far Shore
Summary: It's the time for spirits to get a bit more 'lively'.



August is a spiritual season in Japan with many people preparing for the Obon festival but many others get into the spirit in another way. All across Japan, people have begun to share their favorite summer ghost stories. Movie theaters advertise the hottest horror flick of the season, teenagers challenge each other to do trials of courage, haunted houses begin to pop up, and it feels like you can't change the channel without switching to some ghost hunting urban legend special. All of this talk about spirits comes at a cost, though.

July comes and passes easily enough but it's almost as if as soon as August begins, so do the incidents. There's an increase in spiritual activity and shenanigans on both shores. Some of them are harmless spooks but others are much more sinister. Arm yourselves with all of the ofuda and omamori you can find and get out there and restore peace!



Possessed Possessions

Inhabitants of the Far Shore may awaken to find their sheets trying to strangle them and shoes stomping on the floor around them. Others may go about their day and find out their teapots suddenly only serve lukewarm tea or their weapons are trying to take swings at them. They're just playful spirits that will abandon their hosts if you shove any ofuda/omamori at them or yell loudly enough. They aren't malicious spirits... they were only just trying to have some fun.

Spirited Festivals

There's a festival every weekend and some of them have set up haunted houses for patrons to visit. You have your standard haunted house thrills... costume make up, jump scares, special effects smoke, the usual! But it looks like some real ghosts have made themselves at home here. Visitors are going in and emerging hours later absolutely traumatized. It looks like once you enter, the real spirits walk you around in circles and give you real scares. There are some spirits here just to have fun thrills and these are spirits that can be chased away with regular ofuda. But it looks like the more violent ones are actually ayakashi out for vengeance. Be careful in there!

Cursed Charms

There sure are some weird trends out there, huh? The latest one is buying cursed trinkets off the internet and passing them off as gifts to unsuspecting victims whether it be to prank a friend or get revenge on an enemy. Cursed mirrors, dolls, fake ofuda, VHS tapes, and so on are being passed around the Near Shore and spreading all sorts of curses.

• Bad luck. As long as you're in possession of the cursed item, you'll be followed by bad luck to varying degrees depending on the quality of the charm.
• Fear. Holding onto this charm results in intense, crippling fear. The fear can manifest as an intense paranoia at all times or being frozen with fear in the face of danger. Some say you can even die of fright...
• Sickness. This charm is pretty straightforward. Having this charm just makes you feel incredibly under the weather and your health will worsen the longer you have the charm.
• Evil. Holding onto this charm results in you being followed attracting evil instead of warding it. Suddenly, you feel as though you are always being followed, as if something is stalking you and clearly out to get you. You begin to run into smaller ayakashi at first but they keep growing in strength and number until you can't fight anymore.
• Bad romance. Someone's meddled with a romance charm so it ends relationships instead of making them! People stuck with this charm are suddenly hyper aware of the faults of others. Everything gets on your nerves and you can't stand being around that person because they're just that annoying. It doesn't just work on couples! It also works on friends and relatives too.
• Bears? An oddly specific curse. It looks like someone has taken a protection from bears charm and made it so now you attract bears where ever you go. Some of them are nice but others...

You can try to destroy the charms but you will find that unless you have purification powers or rend it, the effects last. It looks like most people have been able to shake off the effects by simply disposing of them at temples and buying another charm to counter the effects.

Haunting Hour

There are reports of violent attacks at night-- people being pulled into alleys and attacked, school children being chased by slashers while walking home from school, homes being broken into-- and all of it is done without a single clue left behind to explain who did it. People are warned to be careful at night and as the sun begins to set, something happens. The hour between sunset and dark is supposed to be the scariest hour them all. At this time, the shadows are suspiciously bigger and darker and you constantly see things just out of the corner of your eye. Suddenly, the wind blows cold and there's a rotten smell in the air like blood. It's Oumagatoki, the hour evil spirits meet. Small time ayakashi and spirits on the verge of becoming ayakashi spill into the streets and begin to terrorize others. Protect the people of the Near Shore and watch your own backs.*

* These are just generic ayakashi! Nothing special, nothing specific. Feel free to make up and NPC your own two-bit ayakashi.

THEN WHO WAS PHONE?

In the evening, everyone will receive a set of coordinates and a message from an Anonymous sender,

I want to talk about the
mysterious things that have been happening
lately.
OF course, i
NEED
EVERYONE to come. so don't be
late! see
yoU.
:)

Everyone receives it and there is no way to track where the message came from. If you follow the directions, you'll arrive at a small temple on the outskirts of a city. A sacred fire is lit on the grounds for people to dispose of any cursed or old charms they may have collected. Hang around a bit and it'll become obvious that no one knows who has gathered all of you here tonight. The only ones around are gods and shinki. It doesn't look like any evil spirits are around so other than being invited to the middle of no where at night... there's nothing to worry about. If you wait around, nothing will happen. So while you're here, you might as well discuss the strange happenings! Or tell ghost stories around the fire.

Wildcard

Choose your own adventure! Feel free to make up your own prompts. Ronald Knox's player (diehardreaper) has offered up their temple as a test of courage in the Far Shore for those who want to try their luck. Check out their description under the Baron's manor.

In Summary:

• Beat the heat by feeling a scary chill
• Deal with cursed and spirit-imbued items
• Keep the Near Shore people safe
• Chat about your scary encounters
• Have fun~

Comments

[redotiertwo]

[Davesprite looks a little like he doesn't know what to think about that, and he turns his head away a bit eventually. It's not something he's all that fond of going into in detail, especially to someone he only just met, but he does have a pretty good idea of the reason he's trying so hard.]

I guess I just don't like seeing other people that down on themselves. It always feels like you could be doing worse than where you are, you know. [Because from where Davesprite's standing, they're all doing better than he is.]

[fortunesmiles]

Hm...I suppose I've never really looked at it that way. [Komaeda muses on this.] I mean, I suppose I would be worse off if I had all bad luck...but then again, anyone who had all bad luck wouldn't really live very long to suffer the effects of it, so I suppose the only way one could be unluckier than I am is to already be dead. But then I suppose I am already dead...so I guess how I should really put it is that the only way to be worse off than me is to stop existing.

Still, though - that's not really how I see it! That focuses too much on the despair of one's situation, doesn't it? It's much better to focus on the hope! My existence may be meaningless in itself, but there's the hope of creating meaning for it by helping those who do have value. And even if I can't do that, just to bear witness to the talented, and the hope that they can create...even that is worth something! Though that's pretty selfish of me, I suppose.

The fact is that a lot of people live talentless, meaningless existences like mine. So why aren't there mass suicides every day? It's because of hope! No matter how empty or full of despair your life is at any given moment, so long as you have hope that you can make it better...that's what keeps people going. It's thinking of how you could be doing better than you are that's important. Even someone like me, who had no value to the world...I never killed myself until my death could serve a useful purpose. To have died without ever having done something to give my life meaning - that would have been true despair. But the way I died justified the worthless life I lived...

[There's a pause, and the slightest touch of uncertainty in Komaeda's voice. After all, for all his faith in his luck...he doesn't actually know the outcome of his final gambit.] ...well, at least I hope it did. It should have if it worked, in any case!

[He smiles.] So please, Davesprite, don't think about things in such a negative way. Don't focus on the despair of where you are, or who you've been; focus on the hope of where you want to go and who you want to be in the future. Someone as kind as you deserves better than despair.

[How, of all things, did this turn into Komaeda giving Davesprite a pep talk? There's no end to how weirdly a conversation with Komaeda can go, it seems.]

[redotiertwo]

[For someone in the kind of position Komaeda seems to be with in his life, Davesprite wasn't really expecting something that optimistic. Though maybe he should have. Living with that kind of good and bad luck would have to be crushing on someone's mental state, and Komaeda is a pretty glaring example of that already.

Still, he kind of needs a moment to properly parse it. Mostly because he wants to be able to dodge answering as much of it directly as he can, but partially because he's having trouble arguing the logic, however bizarre.]

I mean, a shitload of us here are dead, so I guess you could call that most of us being as unlucky as you. [Positive? Probably not really.] And you're a god now, you know. Even if you had no value to the world while you were alive...people have to believe to make a god here, right. So you're gonna have people who believe in you in some sense for as long as you're here.

[As for his own situation, though, Davesprite gives a somewhat helpless shrug.] I just...I dunno, dude. It would be easier if I was like you and I knew the reasons I had for feeling down on myself. Looking to the future and all that good feel shit is actually kinda hard if you don't know where you've come from. [And especially if you can't really think about it at all.]

[fortunesmiles]

[As warped and horrific as Komaeda's thinking is, ultimately, he's at least convinced himself there are things worth living for - as evidenced by his survival for as long as he managed. Granted, just how fucked up he, and how maladaptive his coping mechanisms had to be, is obvious based on the fact that he's depressingly easily convinced that his death can be equally, if not more, valuable than his life...but to some degree, in his particular circumstances, they had passed as optimism. And worked.

It's as if his brain has developed sea legs. For anything except the specific circumstances - his luck - he's adjusted to cope with, the way Komaeda thinks and behaves is nonsensical at best and wildly detrimental to almost everything he does at worst. But what unbalances him in every other conceivable situation is all that manages to keep him upright through the upheavals he's become accustomed to.

Komaeda lets the observations about his godhood pass without comment; it's strange to think about, certainly, but he knows it's true. It's very much an idea he's still adjusting to, though, and doesn't quite know how to deal with it yet...so there isn't much he feels he can say about it. (He does wonder, though, if it's really him that anyone believes in or prays to...or if it's just the good and bad fortune, the hope and despair, that his godly domain represents. Being an aspect of hope and despair does have its own meaning, and being able to control it and use it to reliably help others is more than he'd ever accomplished in life, but...using that as justification that it's Komaeda as a person who possesses worth seems like an off-base argument. Any incarnation of Averruncus would receive the same belief, the same supplicants.

He's not going to get into all that now, though. He thinks Davesprite's talk about himself is much more interesting.]

Well, I can understand wanting to know what sort of secrets there are lying hidden within your lost memories...although of course, since you're a shinki, that's a curiosity best left unsatisfied. But in regards to what reasons you could have to look down on yourself... [He smiles, leaning forward slightly.] What does that matter?

[He asks it so simply.]

Whatever you did, or didn't do...that shouldn't matter to someone like you, should it? If you can accept someone like me - if you know that I've tried to kill people, that I did kill people, that I in fact participated in the Tragedy that essentially ushered in a worldwide apocalypse, and you still think I deserve better than to hate myself...what could you have done that could ever justify your not liking yourself? Even if your past and your person were just as full of despair and meaninglessness as I am...you think I deserve to live and be happy. So you do too, right?

And honestly, the odds of you having a past anything like mine are pretty low - especially when you're so kind. So you probably deserve a lot more kindness than someone like me does.

[redotiertwo]

[Well, in this case, it's more accurate to say Davesprite only has pieces. He knows he treated the last person who actually got to the point of loving him like shit, which seems like a pretty major transgression to him, and for some reason, it doesn't really feel the same applied to him as to anyone else. If he's done something and doesn't remember it to be sorry for, is it any better than having done something and not being sorry for it?

Maybe there's also the sense of lacking that he always seems to have, as if nothing really matters that much anymore. He's served his purpose in being here, learnt that from his last lot of memories as well, and even someone like Komaeda who's done horrible things, he feels, has more sense in being here than Davesprite does. What good can a game guide without a game do?

Davesprite's starting to look more and more uncomfortable with the topic of conversation, though, and he glides a little ahead.]

I dunno, dude. I just...really don't know. It doesn't feel right to me, I guess. [After a slow, thoughtful spin in the air, he settles again.]

I should probably go. Check if anyone else is getting fucked over by the place I picked that charm up. Statistically, most humans are way less good at surviving bears than the undead.

[Partially true? Yes, but also definitely an excuse to escape having to confront the idea that he might not be as worthless as he considers himself to be.]

[fortunesmiles]

Ah...I guess I should get back to collecting charms myself. [Komaeda looks faintly disappointed, but smiles despite that.] I guess we'll have to talk some other time...

[He takes a step back, looking up at Davesprite and smiling.] But just remember, Davesprite - if even someone like me can have hope of creating some meaning for their existence, so can you. If you think you're worthless, then all you need to do is do things that make your existence worthwhile. And our conversation meant a lot to me...in fact, I'd call it meaningful. That has to be worth something, right?

But I won't waste any more of your time. [He waves in farewell.] Good luck!

[And off he drifts.]

[redotiertwo]

[Davesprite was kind of hoping he could escape the conversation before anything else was said, but Komaeda getting that parting note in has him just hovering there for a few more moments. It's hard to know whether he should try to argue that down, or just turn around and fuck off and prove his own point that he's not really worth the effort.

The latter is tempting. Really fucking tempting. But he can't quite bring himself to do it after all that.

He turns away.]

See you around. And...thanks, I guess.

[And off he goes.]