isleofavalon | EVENT ✨ Wolf's Moon

QUICK NAV: LOGS ⚔️️ NETWORK ⚔️️ MEMES ⚔️️ OOC ⚔️️ NAVIGATION

This is the event log. If you have questions about y event, reply to this comment HERE. Click here to view top-level comments only.

The Fairy Queen sends out an invitation for all otherworlders to an eccentric party with ulterior motives that aren't necessarily bad.. after all, they're protecting players from a ritualistic curse cast by escaped convicts from the Elphame prison. But that doesn't mean it's the party's entirely safe either.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

1st Prompt: Mild elements of body horror in the fairy queen's description (paragraph starting with "Opening the message"); this paragraph is description only and may be skipped without loss of content.
2nd Prompt: Ball prompts include reference to drugs, alcohol, smooching, and fake murder.
3rd Prompt: May have potential for mild body horror depending on player preference, as it features cynanthropy/lycanthropy.

The night before the full moon, a message is sent out to all the otherworlders in the land. In each person's inbox, the message sender reads simply "ELPHAME" and appears to have a verified account, despite that looking into it doesn't seem to reveal much content. The profile pic is simply a picture of a mushroom. Opening the message will reveal a video recording. For the first full minute, a woman simply stares into the video through one pure white eye and one wholly black eye. Her hair is white and fair and longer than can be seen in the video of her torso. Her skin is sallow, gray more than any other color, and her décolleté is peppered with what seems to be shells of mushrooms growing out of her flesh like they would on a tree, patches of bleeding tooth mushroom creeping down the side of her neck.
Atop her head, a headpiece made of platinum formed into the tiniest branches, filled with leaves of precious stones- diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and moldavite trailing down in long chains that keep her hair out of her face. Her lips are just slightly parted, painted in what seems to be an enchanted design that shifts patterns as she moves, as if they were a green screened galaxy in real life. There is a stud in the bow of her lips, and the top of her clothing appears to be colorful, but is only visible toward the top of her frame, as her top is low-cut to account for the fungi. A number of small stitched scars are visible, but largely healed. She tilts her head slightly. Even though it's only a video recording, it feels as though she is looking directly at your character. "You are busy bees..." A soft voice speaks, almost as if the wind itself is whispering in your ear and not from a recorded video. "Busy bees could barely bother, but bother is basically all you do. I bequeath you busy bees a bidding. Bother blithely, busy bees, in Elphame as bristling beauties are bound to do. A ball before you, beneath the Wolf's Moon big and bright, betwixt burgeoning fae blooms. Do not baa, do not bray, bruin nor boar will keep big bad wolf at bay. Bop and bounce, ballet you may, or brawl your basest behaviors in my ballroom before break of day. Broadcast not your boorish bumf, though, or busy bees will be broken brisker than bats banished from Beelzebub's borders and bound. Bless my bestowal and with bated breath I shall bade you betokened truth, if truth be told." Whether or not your character understood what was actually said or their brain shut down in the middle of those barely benign instructions, they may additionally notice fairy circles made of tiny mushrooms start to crop up regardless of where they are in Avalon.
	Once night falls, if a character dances in them they will be transported to a costume party within the ballroom of the fairy queen in Nicnevin. Costumes will be magically applied upon arrival, based on a favorite childhood fantasy. (Did they want to be an astronaut? A dinosaur? A cowboy? A cat? That's what they'll appear as.) You can choose from any age of childhood for your character, depending on whether you want to go funny or more serious about their later childhood dreams. Whatever your character chooses to do as part of the party, the following party happenings should be noted:
1. If your character or anyone they know uses your character's name or reveals enough information about themself, they will become unable to disobey the fairy queen in future events. They've technically been warned about this in the fairy queen's message, even if it wasn't easy to understand. B. Alternately, you can have your character's name be captured by a more mischievous party guest fae and play with that as you will. You can be released either by someone else killing your captured fae for you, or the fae saying your name backward. So if your character's name is Stevie, they would have to trick the fairy into saying Eivets. This option to NPC your own fae captor is endable on your own terms, but 1a will be on the fae queen's terms down the line. 2. The party itself is a protected area; refusal to attend or leaving the party before sunset will subject characters to the Wolf's Moon, which has been put under a ritual by a prisoner group released from the fae prison during the previous dark web quest, Banyanished. This ball is being held as a gift to otherworlders to protect them from the second part of this event. (See below for details.) Characters will be told that they are in a protective area if they try to leave and to trust the fairy queen, but will not be forced to stay against their will by the fae. The only people who may try to stop your character from leaving beyond telling them this information are other player characters. 3. Dancing, food (fairy food), psychedelics and drink will be provided to those of age who want them throughout the night. If the partygoers don't seem to be having a good time or the party grows dull, the fairy queen (dressed in the award-winning submission to the Elphame Trader's contest some time ago) will make a demand participation in a party game*. If your character is standing around and not participating in the general activities, they may be coerced to participate. Anyone may join willingly as well, of course. The following party games will be played throughout the night:

a bottle on the floor

Spin the Bottle, Elphame Rules:

Fairies are quite randy creatures at times, and the first game played is none other than spin the bottle. The rules are as such: when it is your turn, you are blinded by fairy magic and must spin the bottle. Once the bottle stops spinning, the person the bottle lands on will kiss them. The person who is kissed must guess who from the circle kissed them; a correct guess will mean they stay in and the blindness spell will be lifted. An incorrect guess will eject them from the circle and they will wander around blind for the duration of the game until a winner is declared. Feel free to play out gameplay or your character needing assistance after being ejected from the game circle.

Truth or Dare:

The standard game of truth or dare. Don't forget to be very careful, as certain truths may have dire consequences. (See point 1, be very careful.) You can play issuing and completing dares or asking and answering truths with other player characters or receive dares from NPC'd fairies, which may escalate to dangerous and magical lengths. The only solid rule is that no dares are permitted to require exiting the party to complete, and lying during a truth gives permission to fairies to steal your tongue from you if they discover your lie at any point, even after the party is over.

a woman gasping dramatically with subs that say "Escandalo!"

a woman threatening a balloon with a knife

Balloon Game:
Everyone loves a good murder game! Everyone is outfitted with a single balloon. You may secure the balloon to yourself for 2 minutes before the start of the game. In the center of the game circle is a pile of close-range weapons varying in usefulness from binoculars and pots to knives, slingshots, axes and more. Magic is also permitted. If your balloon "pops" you are "dead" and will float to the ceiling to fly around until the end of the game, out of harm's way. Do not commit any actual murder or the balloon of the deceased will immediately wrap around you in a full rubber bodysuit and imprison you until the fairy queen can deal judgment. (If this happens, notify a mod so we can discuss Queen Elphame's judgment with you OOC.)

Helping to empower otherworlders to improve their chances of saving the world is the kind of task that can be a little.. subjective. A little questionable when it comes to consent, at times. After all, no one is here with their consent and no one was bonded with their familiar or given magic with their consent. What's a little more empowerment? Certainly, a group of imprisoned lycanthrope wizards seem to think they have something of a solution to increasing other worlders' potentials: a ritual using the Wolf Moon of January's full moon cycle to transform unprotected otherworlders into fellow cynanthropes or, in layman's terms, werewolves and other types of weredogs. Anyone not protected (at the party) will be affected by the curse ritual.

dog in front of full moon

Cynanthropes in Avalon have the following characteristics:

Character is now able to transform into a humanoid dog or wolf form to the extent the player chooses (go ears/tail or full-furry)
Experiences enhanced strength, enhanced sense of smell, night vision, blood lust, and characteristics similar to the character's dog or wolf breed.
These effects are only applicable the day before, the day of, and the day after the full moon from sundown to sunrise on each day.
Note that new weredogs/wolves do not have control over their instincts for the first few months of transformations and will behave aggressively. If in an emotional state, they can lose control of their transformed form regardless of how long they have been cursed.
Though characters can be killed by normal means throughout the month, they can only be killed by silver bullets during the 3-day full moon cycle
Full-time side effects include cravings for meat, animal mages having mild influence over them, being able to eat food from Elphame without being bound to the land, and the occasional hair ball.
It is up to players how painful they want the transformation to be/not to be; you can play this how you want and chalk it up to ritual reaction variation.

Cynanthrope ritual curses are particularly strong and require at least two siphoners working together to break the curse, a counter-curse potion (only available through events), or a deal with a powerful being such as the fairy queen or Morganna.

If your character did not attend the party, left the fairy queen's party, or wasn't at the Red Springs (protected by the mysterious crystals that turn it red during the full moon-- conveniently for your excuse not to participate in either prompt if you want to opt out!) they will become a werewolf or weredog.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Not at all!

[He groans at the dismissive wave.]

Who? No. I wasn’t trying to be anything but myself, but I ended up in this tacky thing…

[The pinstripes always remind him of his dad. That’s the only thing he can think he’s dressed as. His dad. Not cool.]

You know— that human actor guy! Who's so suave and handsome! He's famous, you know 'im! I Soliti ignoti... La Dolce Vita... Divorzia all'italiana... Matriomonio all'italiana...! That one has Sophia Loren in it, too. I named my lizard monster after her. Cuz of her eyes. You know her, right?

[ He says like he's some expert on celebrities... He knows, like. A handful of names. Alberto has only seen a handful of movies, in the first place. But three of them have starred the pride and joy of the Italian silver screen in the '60s, Marcello Mastroianni, whom Alberto was already enamored with even before ever seeing one of his movies; even a sea monster child on a deserted island raised in total isolation who'd never met a human before knew of Marcello Mastroianni!

But he never did really bother figuring out if he and Gokudera were from the same time period in Italy... He's been too busy annoying him for fun. So the generational gap might be considerable, despite the actor's enduring stardom as a Golden Age classic. He certainly lost some celebrity over the years compared to his time in the limelight likely 2-4 decades before Gokudera's time. But if any of the names dropped ring a bell, it's likely a strong cue that Alberto might be from a very different time than Gokudera, indeed... which... might surprisingly explain a lot, actually. Not everything, cuz the kid's a weirdo no matter what, but... Some things. ]

[Gokudera is a Italian-Japanese millennial who spent the majority of his life trying to appeal to mafia families. Knowing much about celebrities from the ‘60s wouldn’t likely do him much good. Considering he comes from a different universe, he may know similar actors and actresses with similar roles in a similar film, but most of this is going over his head. He shrugs and frowns. Why is this kid still bothering him?]

There are a lot of human actors and actresses, Lizard.

Uuuughhhh, I know, but Marcello's, like— the actor! Of all actors! And probably the handsomest guy ever? Everyone knows him! Even I knew about him before I ever even saw a movie...! Any movie! That's how cool and famous and handsome he is! You know him~ You just don't know you know him. Here, look, look, look, I found him on the Everything Machine—

[ Alberto whips his phone out of his pocket as he speaks, taking to AOL with a fiercely focused look. This is a matter of great importance, why, exactly...? After a moment, though, he shoves the phone at Gokudera, even letting it go slowly expecting him to take it in his own hands (or else, uh, drop it, ha), with the AOL Image Search results for "Marcello Mastroianni" pulled up for him to scroll through. Whether or not anything rings a bell to Gokudera, with timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly alternate universe things at play plus an entire generational gap and totally different exposure to such things due to different life experiences, now that there are photos shoved in his hands, it kind of doesn't matter whether Gokudera knows him or not anymore. Alberto's just showing off. As he so often is.

Most of the photos are in black-and-white, but the colored ones have that certain Technicolor tint that almost certainly plants Alberto in the 1950s or 1960s, just to see the style. The clothes everyone is wearing in these photos check out as being era-specific, too, the man in his messy but well-tailored suits looking about as suave and masculine and moviestar-like as Alberto had boasted. And indeed — the actor is smoking cigarettes in more than several of the photos... looking quite cool doing it, yes.

There's something obvious about the way the guy holds himself, the unbothered and seemingly lighthearted looks on his face in many of the shots, even the pompadour, that makes it somehow less surprising now, seeing him, that this is someone who would dazzle Alberto, even with what little Gokudera knows of the kid... What's more, though, Alberto keeps unintentionally harping on how good-looking the man is, which... maybe most boys his age from this time period probably wouldn't focus on so much, one might assume...? There are pictures in the results labeled as being with Sophia Loren, the two having starred in well over a dozen films together, both considered the top-tier sweethearts of the Italian silver screen, and she's a bombshell even more than Marcello is, arguably (so what an honor to have a lizard named after her um???)... buuut Alberto doesn't seem to have much more to say about her good looks and fame and all that, despite how much more famous she is than Marcello Mastroianni, in fact. It's always an interesting insight to hear about someone's ideals of physical beauty, but even wearing a suit like Marcello's, it's not quite sounding like Alberto wants to be him, exactly — that'd take on a different tone; no, his praise is maybe more reminiscent of how preteen girls might fawn over a handsome moviestar like this. It's subtle, something Gokudera may or may not even tune into, something Alberto hasn't even tuned into, but could certainly be read into, like the "silence" of a dog whistle. ]

Edited 2022-01-22 14:58 (UTC)

[Gokudera accepts the phone and scrolls, humming. He recognizes the actor, but only vaguely. The actress more so, but it’s a deja vu sort of feeling. An alternate universe. They look familiar to old movie stars from his own world, but not exactly, and he’s spent years around aliens. Some old time human cinema stars aren’t getting much of a reaction from him.

The enthusiasm from Alberto is notable, but Gokudera isn’t trying to read the kid. He hands the device back.]

Whatever you say.

[He doesn’t seem unimpressed, but reverting back to his usual grumpiness.]

[ He shoots him a flat face, unimpressed by how little reaction he got. He takes his phone back with a showy little snatch and a huff, narrowing his eyes, then shoves it back into his pocket with some haughtiness. ]

Anyway. He wore a suit like this. I've never had clothes like this. I look cool.

[ Nobody argued that you didn't, kid, pipe down, calmati... ]

It suits you very well.

[He nods in approval.]

Very suave.

EVENT ✨ Wolf's Moon

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject