towerofanimus | I am not Eye

I am not Eye

Characters: Anyone (Animus and Destiny Strings)
Setting: All the levels, with the cafeteria, stairs and the dorms as the safe zones. You can find more about the event here. Remember the stages of insanity for the Animus characters!
Format: Any, start your open posts.
Summary: The tower appears to be overcome with a strange mist.
Warnings: general horror warnings for now

A strange, primordial scream. Perhaps something that didn't seem too out of place for this tower, yet there was something...off about it.

Then came a small series of rumblings. Something was stirring up in the tower. Thankfully the dorms seemed seemed fine. It was when you started to walk down that you realized something was wrong. There was dark mist everywhere. It wasn't natural. Even with a light, it was hard to see past the staircases into the levels, causing even more confusion. Thankfully, the stairs seemed to be safe and if you walked down the entire hundred levels, you'd notice that the cafeteria was safe too.

But that seemed to be it. Everywhere else, the mist was thick and seemed to hang on to the clothing and hair.

Then another noise rings out in every corridor, a laughter musical but somehow diabolical, not quite male nor female, asking a single question;

"Are you enjoying yourself?"

It looked like someone was wanting to play a little game with you.

[OOC: Start your own threads and all the rules about this event can be found here]

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[First hour:]

When the voice spoke and the mist first appeared, Sephiroth took it upon himself to go looking for people he could help. So your character might, at any time, suddenly see a small white-haired child appear before them, sword in hand, green eyes bright. The whispering in his ears hasn't truly begun to bother him yet. His world is destroyed, it says. He's more concerned with his duty. "Hello. It isn't safe here."

[Third-Fourth hour:]

He's more subdued than before. He can hear the professor clearly. Saying he's a failed experiment. Saying his performance isn't good enough, that his combat skills are lacking. That isn't true. He knows it isn't. He's superior.

But worse than that, he hears another voice, unfamiliar, rasping and almost feminine. It's not the voice from before, the first one that spoke about his world being gone. That one hadn't bothered him. This one gets under his skin somehow, telling him he's failed. But at what? That he's forgotten. But what?

The third voice is one he'd overheard before, at home. A man's voice. It's a monster, he had said, speaking about Sephiroth when he'd thought Sephiroth couldn't hear. A monster. "I'm not a monster," he says, both to the voices and to himself. "I'm not a failure. I want to remember..." There is something he's forgotten, something very important. "What is it?" he asks. He seems to see the streets of Edge before him, and he hurries ahead, hoping he can find whatever answer he seeks there. Maybe he can find Mr. Valentine there. He might know. Someone has to know more about him.

[Fifth-Sixth hour:]

Sephiroth has gone beyond emotion, though there's a smile on his face. His eyes are wide and blank. They seem to see both everything and nothing at once. The slightest movement draws his attention, but when he focuses, there's no comprehension in his gaze. Everything that moves is a threat. He's already splattered with blood, and his sword is dark with it. He's killed before, whether monsters or something else, it's impossible to say.

Oddly, a single wing has sprouted from his back, black and feathered. With it, he can fly, which serves only to make him more mobile and thus more dangerous in combat.

"And you." Nesir turned around, pointing a dagger at thin air, "You do be shutting up. You do no be real. You do just be them getting inside my head." The girl spotted the young boy and started walking over to him, something weird was going on, and though she didn't care in the slightest about helping the kid she didn't want to give their captors the satisfaction of trapping more people in their games.

She growled again, "You would have been doing the exact same thing in my place. You did no be blaming me at the time and you do no be blaming me now, it do be a trick and you do be dead so you can be going away and leaving me alone."

"Are you alright?" The last seemed directed towards the boy and not at whoever she was hearing.

"Nobody did be asking you for your opinion."

Sephiroth's sword came out when he was approached, but this seemed to be another of the Tower's inhabitants, like himself, not a monster. So he didn't attack.

"I can't remember," he said to the strangest, rasping voice, the one he couldn't name. "I don't have any parents. I don't know what you want me to do."

When he was addressed by Nesir, he was able to talk to her, pushing the other voices aside. They were insistent, but he had a strong will. "I'm all right. I can operate independently in the field." He said this, but he had his doubts now. The mist had changed everything. Nothing was familiar anymore. The voices and images made it hard for him to concentrate. It only seemed right to ask the same question in return. "Are you all right?"

Nesir blinked at him as he spoke to thin air... to figures only he could see. His words about parents had jolted her, but she soon had other worries as another voice joined the one of the little girl in a faded dress who had been following her.

Waste of fifteen years, this one's defective too.

Nesir closed the distance to the boy, he was so little... She hadn't had much contact with children since she herself was a child, the ones in the temple didn't have much contact with acolytes.

Should have terminated her when we did the other, three more years wasted. Nesir's eyes hardened, she didn't argue with this voice like she had the other. No one argued with Elena, not if they wanted to come out of the encounter with their tongue.

"I do be alright," She spoke to the child, they had to get out of this fog...

Happy now Culbu? All this struggling against me, I knew you would fail, weren't worth our time.

"We do be getting out of here, you do be keeping up." Spoken to the boy again.

Edited 2013-02-27 09:39 (UTC)

"I don't have a mother," said Sephiroth, to the voice that almost sounded like a woman's, but was different, not quite human, more like a hiss in his ear.

He nodded at Nesir, speaking to her. "Something is wrong. This must be a test."

But the mist was everywhere. How could they get out of it? For once, he was uncertain. He didn't know where to go. At the suggestion that he keep up, however, he focused on Nesir again. "I will keep up." If there was one thing he could do, it was keep up. Sheathing his sword for the moment, he hopped toward her with one of his quick teleport-jumps.

Well that made Nesir blink, people didn't manifest powers until they were at least twelve in her world, so seeing a child with magic was a little unnerving.

"It might be, or it might be just a way to be torturing us."

He didn't notice Nesir's reaction to his teleportation, following along calmly.

"Torture can be a test, to see how the body responds to stimuli." Sephiroth knew all about tests.

"Yes, and it can be training too. But I do no be thinking they do be wanting to be making us stronger."

She could see the staircase now.

"...That's right. Nobody has the right to call another a failure."

Rei mutters, stepping in front of the running child. Like him, her vision is flickering. However, she's had much better practice with resisting voices in her head.

Sephiroth pauses as Rei steps in front of him. "I'm not a failure," he says, though whether it's in response to her words or someone else's, it's hard to say.

His sword is out, but it's not raised to attack. "I'm trying to get to Edge. Do you know where it is?" He can see the city sometimes, but sometimes he can't.

He hears Mr. Valentine's voice, then. We don't want you here. You're a monster. He hasn't heard Mr. Valentine speak that way before. This is enough to stop him completely. "I'm not a monster," he says, before turning to Rei and asking her, "Who are you?"

She shakes her head.

"I don't where Edge is."

She brings her hands up to her ears as she hears her mother's voice saying she had wasted her time on the girl. That she should have just let her grow up as the monster that she is instead of neglecting Shinji in favor for some flawed copy.

"And you're not a monster. I'm not either. I'm just...Rei."

"It's near where Midgar used to be," says Sephiroth, although this will probably mean very little to Rei.

You're so weak. Remember your mother...

But he didn't remember anything about her. Maybe he'd known, once.

"Hello, Rei. I'm Sephiroth."

"That's a nice name!"

It sounds just a little familiar, but it's not the name of any Angel that she can recall.

"It is?" He doesn't care about the niceness of his name.

"I have no parents," he says, speaking to the strange voice again. It sounds so close to him. He can almost see a figure standing beside him for a moment, tall and pale and strange.

"Not even biological ones?"

How curious. Even if Rei had been grown in a lab, she still had parents.

He hadn't meant to say that to the woman, but he answers her question anyway. "I don't know who they were." He frowns. Is that part of what he can't remember? The voice is telling him he has a mother. His mother... "There was only the professor."

"Did he take care of you well?"

The question distracts him from other concerns.

"No," the answer comes easily. He'll never think of the professor as a good caretaker. "Before him there was Professor Gast, but he left." And maybe it was his fault that Gast left. Maybe he hadn't been a successful enough experiment. He doesn't know.

"Do you have parents?"

Her smile shrinks just a little.

"I'm sorry."

But she cheers back up as she remembers her own parents.

"Yep! I've got Mommy and Daddy and Shinji and my seven sisters."

"There's nothing to be sorry about." Sephiroth doesn't seem sorry, even though he doesn't like the professor and didn't care for his caretaking. He doesn't know how things could have been different.

"I don't have any family. Mr. Valentine was appointed my guardian. But he isn't here."

"Then who's taking care of you here?"

Rei can take care of herself, but Rei is also a teenager. This kid seems too young to be without a caretaker.

"No one. I can operate independently in the field." Or so he thinks, anyway. ~~He could be wrong.~~

"The voice says she's my mother." He seems very uncertain about this. He doesn't know who his mother had been, but there is something convincing about the voice. Didn't he once know...?

"There's a voice that sounds like my mother as well."

She looks around. No mothers of any sort to be seen anywhere around them.

"The voice doesn't sound like my mother. I don't have a mother. She says she's my mother."

No, there isn't anyone to be seen except the two of them and the mist. "She wants me to remember something. What does your mother say?"

She twitches, a little nervous. She can do her best to not let herself be affected by the voices, but repeating what they say still makes her feel uncomfortable.

"Nothing important. Just that she should've changed some of the things she did back when I was a kid."

Not technically a lie, since Yui's voice is telling her that she shouldn't have adopted Rei in the first place.

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I am not Eye

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Gymnasium floor (third/fourth hour)

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meadow, 3-4th hour

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extra account for serious!Rei icons