BONFIRE LIGHTS IN THE MIRROR OF SKY.

[wastemods]

WHO: Everyone in game.
WHAT: Our first event log!
WHERE: Anywhere in the world core.
WHEN: After the storms begin.
NOTES: Expect surreal horror and possible violence. Please use common sense when warning for other content.

Photo by drainrat

PREVIOUSLY, ON THE WASTEYARD.

The world remains divided into a land where either a hazy sun shines muted light above or a full moon casts silvery shadows below. They hang fixed, as if nailed in place, more like theatrical props than far-off heavenly bodies. And you can still see only one of them, depending on which side you arrived.

Meanwhile, the storm rages.

On both sides of the world, the rain starts and doesn't stop. The temperature drops, transforming torrential rain into icy snow. Gusts of wind become gales and spin detritus into shrapnel, man-made disasters turned natural. Shadows spin wildly—almost comically—in cyclones, before bursting into nothingness; if you aren't careful, the winds will snatch you, too. Out here, the only protection you might have is cooperating with each other.

Indoors, it's certainly warmer, but that just means water doesn't freeze. Buildings flood with chilly water that rises no matter how many stairs you climb. Architecture groans under the pressure of earthquakes, sending more water cascading through the ceiling before it disappears into cracks below. Is anywhere safe?

Well, yes. One place, splintered into many. The mirrors in ash-gray frames stand sentinel, scattered throughout the world. They emit warm light from the other side; sunlight spills moonside and moonlight reflects sunside. Water impossibly flows around and away from them, leaving behind untouched earth that stays still and silent. Standing in front of them gives you a respite, a tiny bubble of safety to wait out the worst.

INTO THE LABYRINTH.

Once you plunge indoors—unless you're really that determined to take your chances in the storm—you'll find every building with electricity experiencing a brownout. The overhead lights flicker and radios crackle with static, warbling broken news reports and tunes. They eavesdrop on strings of Morse code and private confessions on ham radio. If it's ever been broadcast on the airwaves, public or personal, you might hear it if you tune to the right station; you might even hear yourself, replaying a conversation you've had or will have. And sometimes the audio seems pointed, preternaturally so, as if tuned to your own thoughts and words.

Meanwhile, the waters continue to rise. The halls stretch long, seemingly infinite and twisted into knots. In some of them, no matter how far you walk, it seems like you never get any closer to the end; in others, you hit one dead end and can't stop hitting dead ends, no matter how many times you retrace your steps. None of that's unusual.

But if you delve deep into dark enough recesses (whether accidentally or intentionally), the world calms. The water recedes. Mirrors materialize in the dead ends, scratching out an "X" in the frame before your eyes. If you touch one, the glass falls away in ribbons, flowing like quicksilver and fleeing farther into the darkness. It reveals a hole on the other side, so deep a black it looks flat. Wherever it goes, it's so dark you can't see the other side.

And that's when you hear a sound like someone inhaling and then exhaling, steadily breathing around you. No...you feel it. A presence that has no form no matter how hard you look, but follows you in creaks and groans. It feels like being stalked by a monster in a maze.

Running from it only intensifies the feeling. Attacking makes it even worse. Calm acceptance is the only way to lessen or even neutralize it, but that's something you'll have to discover for yourself. In the end, there's no way to defeat it. You have to trust your instincts and believe it's there, despite the fact that you can't see or touch it.

CHANGING SIDES.

Elsewhere, it starts as a smell.

As the ground shudders and cracks, the stench of rot comes from the fissures. Mirrors and windows melt off walls, and a strong sense of vertigo comes and goes, like cresting waves. Looking out a window shows buildings and bridges breaking off of the labyrinth and drifting—or plummeting—away. They dissolve into nothingness as they vanish into the abyss, like they were bathed in acid. The already fragile world is falling apart.

It comes with a pervasive sense of wrongness, perhaps ironic in a world where everything is already wrong. But that's when it happens: You look up and realize you're no longer where you started. The sun or the moon, whichever you expected, is no longer in the sky. Instead, on the horizon lies its opposite.

It's a phenomenon unique to areas with high concentrations of ash mirrors and hallways, particularly when there's someone else on the other side. Sometimes the instability flips your positions, so one of you is now in the dimension where the other previously stood, while other times it drags you both together into the light of the sun or moon. It's like you resonate, magnets attracting or repelling each other in little pockets of peace.

THE LOCKED ROOM.

Amidst the chaos, as the world shifts and there's no telling where or when you are, you slip through a crack. Or maybe you're a weirdo who climbed through the hole left behind a mirror.

In either case, the fissure is both literal and metaphorical, influenced by the unstable world and your actions. Maybe you step through a door, crawl through a crevice, close your eyes, or do something else to take you between here and there. Whatever the case, you find yourself in a room unlike any others you've seen in this distorted world. Well...once you look closer, anyway. On the surface, it may just be another kitchen, ballroom, or cellar.

But in these rooms, it doesn't matter which side of the divide you were on. Not only because you can't see whatever lights the sky, but because they lie between dimensions. There are no windows and no doors; you'll only find walls the same mottled gray as everything else in this place. Attacking them gets you nowhere. Any damage is there and gone, like the erased moments between flashes of a strobe light. There is no easy way out.

But there is a mirror. Hairline cracks run through its surface, shattering a single reflection into multitudes. Set in an ash-gray frame like so many others, it's left somewhere in the room, whether hanging on a wall, haphazard on the floor, or leaning against some furniture. It emanates the skin-prickling sensation of being watched. Turning away doesn't help; you can feel it gazing at your back.

The haunted feeling only subsides when you stare back. And you should stare back, because these mirrors are your escape route. Staring into them will reveal someone on the other side with the same predicament. Surprisingly, you can hear each other when you speak. It even comes translated if you don't speak the same language, although your mouths still sync to your native tongues. It's like a poorly dubbed movie.

Touching the mirror gives you the impression it's somehow leeching off you, trying to fill those cracks. Try to pull your hand away and you'll find it's a little difficult, like unsticking your tongue from a cold pole. Moreover, you'll feel a compulsion to tell the truth, to do something real.

THE GREAT ESCAPE.

For those of you left behind where the sun and moon still shine, keep an eye on your own mirrors, especially broken ones that seem to be influenced by something invisible. They display a room that most decidedly isn't your own, acting more like a window than a mirror. And whoever's inside, trapped, might call on you for help. You won't be able to hear them, though, so how are you with body language?

Meanwhile, for escapees...

No matter how you escape the rooms, you might notice something a little strange once you get back to the labyrinth. Well, stranger. For a brief window of time (one that grows longer with each room you escape), you'll discover the sun and moon occupy the same sky. The area you've entered is a temporary nexus of sorts, one that fuses the dimensions into something that almost seems stable.

It feels right, but the world isn't strong enough to hold itself together for long.

( COMPANION OOC POST )

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Comments

[snikthatch]

Logan gives her a brief smile, pleased he's got at least one thing right since arriving in this place. Resolves to make her more when he can.

"Yeah," he raises a hand, palm inwards. "Sometimes these come in useful for things besides hurtin' people. Glad you like it, kid."

He scratches at his stubbly cheek, glancing around the room. Not particularly surprised that there doesn't seem to be any doors or windows, besides whatever the mirror has become.

"Gettin' real tired of endin' up in places I didn't mean to be in."

[ascocarp]

Not even really realizing it, she holds it close to herself, ignoring how the antlers poke into her jacket. Logan is right; she's never really had a toy before. Only ones she stole from other children, that were stolen in turn. The boarding school didn't care much for play.

"You gotta teach me how, when we get outta here." It sounds like a good skill. There's so much waiting, so much ugliness. It would be nice to actually create something. "I'll pay you back," She says, and pulls out a single nondescript can, roughly the size of, well, a beer can.

"You always end up where you don't wanna. Make the best of it. Find something to survive for."

[snikthatch]

Logan watches her hands, the way she clutches at the crudely carved deer, and thinks now there's a kid that needs to learn what being a kid is like. He isn't sure he can teach her -- even without decades of mind-wipe scarring it's been a long time since he was a child -- but maybe he can help a little.

He raises his eyebrows when she pulls out what's clearly a beer can and might have made a joke about it, but her words are sobering.

"Took the words right outta my mouth." He eyes her thoughtfully. "Where'd a kid like you learn a philosophy like that?"

[ascocarp]

"Uhh," Now he gets to see her being a little shy. She bobs her head behind the buck's antlers. "The guy I talked about. He said it, and I can't frickin' stop repeating it."

Mixed emotions are, well, mixed. She doesn't want to be like him, but he taught her so much... she wonders if being like him is just... inevitable now. If she has no choice, no chance, but to turn into a murderous monster, a liar, a lonely but ultimately trustworthy provider, a protector.

[snikthatch]

It's not easy to see her expression in the mazed cracks of the mirror's surface, but it's clear enough that she's not exactly pleased to be remembering this guy.

"Ain't so easy when the thing you're survivin' for turns into somethin' painful," Logan says after a moment, thinking about the way she's talked about this guy and taking a guess. He knows that feeling well enough. Being the Wolverine's loved one doesn't tend to come with a long and healthy life.

[ascocarp]

Ellie sighs, drooping a little. "...Yeah," she says, a voice spiked with weariness. She should be sad. She should be angry. She just feels tired and disappointed. Maybe that's what growing up is like.

"Sometimes it feels like the only good people're dead."

[snikthatch]

Her words hit Logan hard. He thinks of the cold impassive feel of a stone statue under his fingertips; rainy afternoons attending too many services for too many friends who didn't even have a body left to bury. They used to joke about death not being able to keep a grip on the X-Men, carefully not talking about the way that uncertainty eats at you. About how it still hurts, every time.

And he'd come back himself to find them all gone and Scott dragging up the tatters of their family, all the odds and ends that fate had turned aside from this time. Logan catches himself wondering if they've found their way back yet, or if this is really it, this time.

He hadn't said goodbye. That regret surfaces in the back of his mind, pulling at him with black claws. Ororo, Kurt, Peter, Kitty. Laura. All of them. They'd lived for months with his death. Now he was alive again and they weren't. How's that for fuckin' irony. All the good people, gone. And creatures like him allowed to survive.

But that's his burden. He won't let Ellie share it.

"Yeah, sometimes it feels like that. But there are still good people out there, kid. They might be harder to find, but they're there. All the darkest parts of my life, the times I thought I was beyond hope and beyond savin'.. there's always been someone there at the end of it, reachin' out to me." He grunts to himself, bitter amusement. "Even when I didn't exactly deserve it."

[ascocarp]

She settles down a little, tired with the stress of everything (she always feels tired lately. Is she eating enough? Probably not) and rests her chin on the buck's back. "What if the people reaching out are bad?"

It's a vulnerability she doesn't offer up easily. There's just an urge to be... honest. True. She's sleepy-headed and doesn't question it.

[snikthatch]

It's a decent question. One that Logan's asked himself more than once, and he finds himself offering Ellie the only answer he's come to.

"I don't know, kid." He rubs his thumb over his bandaged knuckles, trying to scratch an itch that isn't there. Thinks about all the people he's known over the years, countless names that have been closer than friends one minute and a bitter enemy the next.

"Sometimes they are. People bein' people ain't somethin' you can control. Sometimes somethin' you think is good ends up bein' bad. Sometimes the things you think are bad, ain't, or at least they're not for you." He sighs, tipping his head back a little to lean against the edge of the tub. "Mostly I think it ain't always about bein' good or bad.. life ain't that black and white."

[ascocarp]

"I know, I know," she says, eyes dropping to the bottom of the mirror. "The only thing that matters is surviving. But that's fuckin' stupid. Surviving's just breathing. If you don't... fucking... do something with it-" she looks up at Logan, emphatic and questioning both- "what's the fucking point?"

[snikthatch]

"You're askin' all the right questions, kid," Logan replies, a wry smile twisting up the corner of his mouth. "Wish I had better answers for you."

Still, he thinks he ought to help her towards figuring it out, or at least not waste her time with platitudes.

"Truth is, I've been askin' myself that question for.. a long time. Still haven't figured the answer. I thought I had it once, but now.." He looks down at his hands, loosely clasped together. "I ain't so sure."

[ascocarp]

Ellie is now resting her chin entirely on the buck's back, watching him with careful eyes. He's... strange. He calls himself a mutant like Ruth (do they know each other? But if they do, why's he got eyes?) and talks about weird bullshit, but when you cut out all the nonsense, it's the same stuff she's seen. She wonders what his dimension is like. His homeworld.

She hopes it's not ruined yet.

"What was your answer?" She says, "I thought I could..." The truth is pulled out of her at a speed she isn't prepared for. She bites down in it, her eyes sliding away. "I thought a lot of shit."

[snikthatch]

She's not so quick that he doesn't catch it, but Logan lets her go. He's not going to pressure her to talk if she doesn't want to. He was never comfortable being that kind of teacher. Easier to create a space where talking is easy and wait for it to happen, if it ever does.

So all he does is flex his fingers a little, open and closed, feeling the tightness of the bandaging against his skin.

"People, was my answer. For a while. Those people that ain't always good and ain't always bad, but they kept comin' back for me. Kept by my side. Kept chasin' me down even when I was doin' my best to drive 'em away." He smiles to himself, remembering. "For a long time, that's why I kept goin', kept tryin' to stay on the right side of things."

He glances up at her through the mirror.

"It's hard, kid. You know it's hard, I know it's hard. Sometimes you just want to throw it all in and be selfish for a while. Just survive for the sake of survivin'. I tried that, ended up hurtin'.. a lot of people. Innocent people. Sometimes havin' an answer, even if it's hard, is better than no answer at all."

[ascocarp]

You know it's hard. Something about how he doesn't act like she's some dumb kid who hasn't seen shit feels like breathing for the first time in a year. He hasn't even seen half of what she can do, he just accepts it. She wonders if he knows, or if this is another form of manipulation. When he starts telling her to do things, that's when she'll know what kind of man he is.

Everyone orders her around eventually.

"I don't wanna do that..." She says. Even when she was with Joel, she was surviving for a cure, so she could give a part of herself to help everything. It was the tiny nugget of hope she was clinging to, to make everything worth it. And with that gone, however it disappeared... She takes a breath, steep with emotion held back. "It's not... like that, where I'm from. People don't come for you. But... maybe it's like that here?"

What did he say? Gotta help everybody survive.

[snikthatch]

Logan's constantly surprised at the fact that no matter how old he gets or how many people pass in and out of his life, he still can't turn aside from a kid that's hurting. It's what drove him to look out for Idie and the Lights, to open the school even though he had no business being in charge. No matter how beat up and sour he gets, he can still be stopped in his tracks by it.

Maybe, he thinks, it's because pain took his chance to be a kid (and to care for his own kids) away from him, or maybe he really is just getting soft in his old age.

Either way, it's hard to see hear her speak about how people don't come for each other in her world and not be able to put a hand on her shoulders. Instead, he feels the truth rise up in his throat.

"Maybe. All I know is, I'm here for you, kid. And I ain't goin' anywhere. At least not without one hell of a fight."

[ascocarp]

Ellie looks straight at him, her chin still resting on the back of the wooden buck he carved her. She thinks she trusts him. But he could turn at any moment. Everybody does. It's not even personal, most of the time. Or they die.

He can't hurt her here, though, and he's not in any danger. Maybe that's what's pulling the truth out of her. Maybe it's something else.

"Why?" She says softly. "Why do you give a rat's ass about me? I'm just..." Ellie shrugs. She's got no idea what she is anymore.

[snikthatch]

Logan meets her eyes through the hazy cracks of the mirror's surface.

"Because you remind me of my kids," he says, before he realises he was going to say it. Regrets it immediately, wincing, for being both too much of the truth and not enough, since it won't mean anything to her. "And because you seem like you need someone to give a crap about you right now."

[ascocarp]

So, yeah. She's just another replacement kid. There's something sour in her voice, when she says, "'least you're honest about it."

She rubs at her face a little. "Fuck, I mean, I'm not any better. You remind me of the only guy who never died or passed me off. Not that he didn't really fuckin' try."

[snikthatch]

Logan frowns at that, taking the hit he's pretty sure he deserves. It feels about as good as he expected it would.

He tightens his fists until the bandages dig into the sides of his palms and takes a moment before he speaks again, marshalling his words, though there's still that feeling like he should be honest with her. Not only because she deserves it, but because it would feel correct.

"Guess we can't help tryin' to fill the spaces we've left behind," he says, eventually. "Not sure that's a bad thing."

[ascocarp]

"I don't wanna go in circles forever," she says, her voice more reedy, whiny than she means it. "But- guess you don't get a choice."

She closes her eyes for a moment, feeling... something. Needing a second, probably. She needs to muster her thoughts a little, iron out a line of reasoning, a path forward.

And yet, something is bright even through her closed eyelids. She looks up, and notices the cracks in the mirror have faded. There's no reflection on the surface, either. She reaches out to touch it, and her fingers hit... nothing.

"Logan?" She sounds more worried than hopeful. Sudden, unexpected changes are rarely good. "Are you- is it doing this for you?"

[snikthatch]

Logan sees the light wash over the mirror's surface as Ellie speaks and climbs warily to his feet, one hand automatically going for her copper pot in case everything starts to splinter and yawn underneath him.

"It's doin' somethin' all right." He reaches out to touch her hand, expecting to feel smooth glass and getting warm air on his fingertips instead. The feeling of rightness tugs at him, compelling him to move forward, into it. He frowns and pulls his hand back.

"This is either gonna take us out of here or make things a lot worse."

[ascocarp]

The fact that Logan's still there-- close and whole and she can touch him, her fingertips brushing against his-- erases the remainder of her fear. She doesn't want to think about why, so she shoves that acknowledgement deep down and focuses on the now.

It's fucking magic.

She starts stuffing her shit into her pack. "Only one way to find out. Maybe you'll even fucking get your beer, dude."

[snikthatch]

Her attitude is infectious. The possibility of actually getting out of the damn maze, into a place that makes some kind of sense, makes up for the rest.

"Only if you look out for all those shadow monsters while I drink it," he points out.

[ascocarp]

The fact that he remembers makes Ellie outright beam. She packs her things away and scrambles into the mirror.

And what she finds is a hallway. It looks basically endless, and every inch is stuffed with windows and doors. It's strange, but also... good? It feels safe. Ellie can't shake the feeling that it's safe.

Especially with Logan here with her.

[snikthatch]

Logan curses and follows close on Ellie's heels, not wanting her to get lost in whatever the mirror turns out to be. He expects it to be like all the other times he's walked (or been thrown) through a portal into another life, that swooping headachey sensation of a universe being rebuilt around you. Instead, it's more like taking a step through a doorway into another room.

Another hallway. Except this one is brighter, quieter. Full of windows, doors, more possibilities. There's no distant howling storm, just calm and sun-warmed wood.

And Ellie standing there, as real as she was by the fire.

"Hey, kid. Here." He holds out the copper pot for her to take.