Icarel - The Husks of the Other Side
Birdsie
Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy
- Location
- Poland
The Husks of the Other Side
The Shadow Island's villagers were welcome to strangers and offered unbounded hospitality. Dorian and Andrei's strange abilities of warping flesh and creating lightning from nothing prompted no more than curious questions about which Towers they'd climbed and how to find them, or when they activated.
These were answered with innocent half-lies, claims of distant lands that were technically true; stories told in metaphor. It was blessedly considered rude to push the envelope when the matter came to Choices across almost all of this world's cultures, so they didn't have to suffer too much investigation.
Once sufficient money was acquired for part-time work, making bruised knees healthy, dissipating the symptoms of the common cold, and filling batteries and generators with power, they properly investigated the sites of the Towers and made their respective Choices - for now in an informal manner.
It seemed the strange Tower that Victor couldn't identify wouldn't rise until at least a couple of nights from now, so Andrei's was first. He decided upon Midnight. In the absence of Day and its offer of eidetic memory, the ability to view the surrounding world with clarity was an unparalleled skill for an engineer and scientist like himself.
Therefore, the day before his ascension, he went around the village asking Midnights to describe their abilities. All senses were commonly enhanced: an eagle's vision, hearing so fine as to catch a pin dropping across town; even smell like a werewolf's. But even beyond that, the enhancement came with an incisive focus, a sharpness of mind that cut through fatigue and tiredness. 'Like a mental Zenith,' some said, 'making a Midnight able to endure and concentrate for hours or days on end.'
It was fascinating. Naturally, as the evening rolled around and the Dusk Towers started to rise, Andrei and Dorian moved to the site of the former's ascension: it was an hour and a half by foot, and despite being a researcher customarily glued to his work and laboratory, Andrei exercised often and was in good enough form to handle the walk.
They arrived some five to ten minutes before midnight.
Andrei stared at the site of the Tower, the outline of where it'd rise in only a couple of minutes, surrounded by a ring of stones and a manmade fence. It came with an informational corkboard alongside a short list of local people who Chose Midnight here, over three dozen entries long. There was a pen, to add one's name to the record.
There were stories of people standing inside the space where Towers would rise - often resulting in sudden and grisly death. The earth inside the stones looked normal, if one ignored the absence of growing grass or any kind of vegetation.
Then finally came the stroke of Midnight, the sky almost lightless if not for some of the moon's wan rays. The stones rumbled and vibrated as if rocked by an earthquake, awakening with an amaranthine chroma, a calm and nebulous vibrancy as if subtle snakelike energies were coursing inside mundane ore. Then, a beam of indigo rose from the ring, blocks of stone arrayed with toned, dark blue sigils marking them, and this almost caused an earthquake in truth, a vibration of air and ground. It rose and rose, and the vibration of the atmosphere rose alongside it as if threatening to swallow the world. A spire of darkness launched at the night's sky by some chthonic subterranean god.
It came not only from the rising of the Tower but a sound that emerged alongside it from the earth, redolent with awful beauty, a single tonal fracture impressed on the world: a deep bass sound like a monk's throat-singing. Almost as if one of the Street's notes was magnified and expanded to stand as an independent song.
Then it died down as abruptly as it started, the Tower's psalm replaced with a chimelike tingling.
Both Dorian and Andrei stared dumbfoundedly, faces cast in faint bluebonnet from the Tower's sigils.
Dorian's voice was eerily quiet. "This is..."
"...strangely reminiscent of the Street? Yes," Andrei concurred with a nod, calming down a little. "Did you think that sound...?"
"Yes. It was familiar to me, sir, no doubt about it." Dorian continued to stare. "I can't make sense of this, it's beyond strange. Could it be the Towers and Street are somehow related? Either way, you should enter the Tower, Andrei. There isn't a lot of time."
"Yes." The scientist nodded, adjusting his labcoat and clearing his throat, as if preparing for a speech in front of an audience. "You're correct."
Andrei moved towards the Tower with a hurried gait. A single entry archway was on its side, facing northeast. Inside the arch, Dorian couldn't see anything, except a deep impenetrable umbra, and the impression of what might've been the first of many stairs leading upwards.
"Do me a favor while I am out, and study these sigils," said Andrei, a moment prior to stepping through the Tower's threshold.
"I'll draw them in your notebook."
Andrei nodded and entered the Tower, disappearing inside like a wraith made unreal.
Then Dorian waited and did as he'd promised, making a slow circle around the Tower with a notebook and pen in either hand, constantly scratching against each other. The symbols on the Tower were faint and difficult to trace, and shining on them with a flashlight only seemed to make them darker and harder to make out.
After almost two and a half hours, Andrei came out, eyes widened and staring off into nothing as if shocked by some fundamental revelation. He took a couple of steps forward, still staring, and a moment later, the Tower behind him started to collapse on itself, drawing back into the earth as if reversing the process by which it'd surfaced. Even as it descended, Andrei didn't move a single inch, except for the eyes in his skull, rotating as if to drink in the dark environment with greedy understanding.
"So? What's it like?" asked Dorian, hoping to finally break the spell.
"Dorian," said Andrei, so faintly quiet the word could barely be made out, "It was incredible. I am not religious whatsoever, yet I feel as if I'd met with God himself up there, and he implanted in me a small piece of his infinite kindness. You cannot believe the clarity of my eyesight. They understated its effect. Severely."
His face rotated, as he looked into Dorian's eyes. "Even in this complete and utter darkness, I can see every pore on your skin sweating. Simultaneously. Not like a magnified scope, but rather, all at once processing every single millimeter of your face without confusion. I can hear the same. I can smell the same. Touch the same; perhaps taste, too. I can see the subtle movements of the magnetosphere around us, and how our natural bioelectricity affects and is affected by the world. I can see the subtle motions of the air molecules. The pressure of gravity and motion, almost like... colored air without color, if that makes sense. How does one measure perception? This is grandiose."
"Try to remain objective," said Dorian, not in an attempt to be unkind, but rather to bring the doctor to his more metaphorical senses.
Andrei was swift to agree, blinking and shaking his head. "I'm sorry, you're right. I cannot become overzealous on account of this. While, yes, it's a significant change in cognition, in how I process the world, it's not a miracle. To call something a miracle is cowardice. It's all explicable, if we try hard enough to study. Speaking of..."
Dorian handed over the notebook. To aid the doctor's research, he reported the ascent from his perspective as best as he could: the actions and observations taken, the boredom of waiting for so many hours with nothing to amuse himself except exerting Viscerality to slowly improve his own eyesight and fencing practice in the dark.
"Are you certain I was inside for over two hours?" asked Andrei. "I had no way to measure, but it felt much, much shorter. Like a minute at most."
"Didn't you have your wristwatch inside, doctor?"
"No, I didn't," said Andrei, touching a hesitant hand to his left wrist, where the time-keeping implement was still firmly attached and operational. "I struggle to describe the interior, but I most definitely didn't have a material form. It was as if I had discorporated into some pure, dark antimatter. The same Midnight of which this Tower is made. Like a dark antipode to light. Then I ascended on stairs that weren't stairs, but brittle fragments of that darkness. This... condensed nightlit dross. Words truly fail to describe the experience. I was inside of dimensions I don't think my brain can correctly remember. I don't believe we have the psychological or linguistic architecture for that."
Dorian nodded. With a shattered creative core, he struggled to conjure images of what the doctor spoke about. He didn't effort to ask his imagination for help too much, as he'd learned that wouldn't work.
After that, the doctor became inordinately absorbed with researching the Towers: a scientific curiosity became a scientific obsession, a desperate need to accumulate data on every possible facet of their make-up. One otherwise uneventful morning, after studying the other four available Towers on the island, he took a waterproof bag and stuffed his clothing inside, wearing only a swimsuit, and told Dorian he'd move to the mainland for a couple of days and nights, to study the Towers there and return to witness Dorian's Choice. He then dove off a cliff and used Ebbandry to propel himself through the bay at insane velocities like some form of human torpedo.
And on that evening, as the moon was a waxing crescent, Dorian Croft headed eagerly towards the strange Tower.
Only to find it wasn't a Tower at all.
When it... 'ascended,' it made a horrible nerve-wracking sound, enough to drive away birds within half a kilometer away. Not a song whatsoever, but rather, a skin-piercing creaking like broken gears forced to continue work. Like rust on the axle of a wheel. A screech of inhumanity from a devil.
It also didn't create a Tower. Instead, there was a section of flattened dark blue stone, almost like a dais above the earth, and then a stairwell leading downwards to a dark ominous doorway made from crimson brick lettered the same as the Midnight Tower's sigils. Above the ground, on its sides, were two inwards-bending curves of gray stone about the height of five or six men, almost like horns or the impressions of a stark gate. Altogether, it built the notion of some unholy entrance to the underworld; one which man wasn't meant to even contemplate treading.
"That was absolutely terrifying," commented Andrei cheerfully. "Are you sure you want to enter that?"
"You can only make a single Choice," said Dorian, fists clenched. "Let mine be meaningful."
He moved down the stairs before any further hesitation could set in. They almost seemed to bob under the weight of each footfall, as if unstable. It didn't bode well, but he continued boldly downwards, dearly and fervently praying this wasn't his last journey. But at the end of the day - Dorian Croft wasn't raised to be a coward - and he trusted the Street. He trusted it wouldn't deliver him somewhere he could die so easily as simply entering this doorway, even if the decision was his own Choice.
He entered the Tower and made the Choice.
And felt agony, as if arms made of steel were ripping him to shreds. Not a uniform and painless dematerialization and rematerialization into some ideal substrate on a level above the physical, as Andrei had described it one evening, but a brutal disassembly that tore off skin and flesh, ripped out organs with spikes and nails. He wanted to scream but couldn't, as the inside didn't have oxygen or atmosphere, nor the idea of sound. He was splayed on some abattoir table, an animal being chopped to bits.
And then, as if flesh were merely clothing for the naked soul, the rest of him was dropped into a vast oceanic vat full of mirrors. The acidically painful mirror-sea perfectly reflected an infinite night's sky, making it so that even as he descended, he was technically climbing upwards as well: climbing a Tower made of pure broken void, each of its steps a warped connective tissue between the physical realm and something that went deeper. Each step along the path meant torment, a pain that penetrated unshielded bodiless corporeality and harrowed the soul directly, a spike made of errors driven into the soul like a weight, yet he couldn't stop... ascending and descending, doing both at the same time and yet neither. Going sideways, yet not to any side that Dorian had ever comprehended. Language failed to describe the truth.
And the more he went, the less it hurt, as if the sensation were transforming into something else. A sense of perverse correctness, as if this all were now forever a part of him, and therefore couldn't harm him. The Tower wasn't operating as it should've, he understood on some fundamental and subconscious level: it was malfunctioning and broken, shattered in some cataclysm beyond the reach of mortal memory. All of them were, maybe, but this one even more than the others; and in return for being even more broken, it somehow paradoxically had more of its former mass to work with, as if breakage here meant only the shattering of limitations dividing mortality and divinity.
And Dorian intended to claim the crown of dark dreams ahead, in the very depths and the very apex of this place. He reached out... and some infinite Light within responded, like a ping, like the same feeling he got when the Street confirmed something for him.
And then suddenly he stood outside again, recomposed. Made of stable atoms and molecules, breathing in air.
"You've come back," said Andrei instantly. "It has been four hours."
"That didn't feel like more than five minutes," said Dorian, as he climbed up the stairs. Behind him, the Tower started to collapse, stones drawn inwards, the ring disappearing.
He didn't feel changed or different, not physically. It was not some grand revelation, showing aspects of reality he'd remained ignorant of. There was only a sense of some internal miasma, a vast and turbulent sea of shadows and mirrors; a quagmire of pure distortion, enough to drown a man with.
He cast out a hand at a tree and released the distortion, with a sound like imperceptible murmur.
It creaked ominously as if under the stress of immense force and glitched out, small squares of blackness disrupting its form; it bent and whipped about as if coming alive to feel the torment of change - making Andrei back off - and then shifted sideways and suddenly straightened out as if it were an electrified muscle. All movements that a tree shouldn't be able to make, as disturbing to witness as a corpse coming to life. Slowly, over individual seconds, it changed: bark becoming dry papery white skin, and the wood underneath becoming red meaty flesh, affectable with Viscerality. It was now studded in small masks, each no bigger than a flat human palm, all of them releasing a quiet song-like scream. Each one emanated a minor font of oppressive Facelessness, insufficient to even craft a mask, let alone to cause a true transformation into a Faceless.
But it was, at least, a good beginning. An indicator of what this ponderous and miraculous distortion could achieve if properly guided. Then came an idea, some inkling of discovery: the target of the distortion didn't have to be a material existence. It could even be something more abstract.
He directed the distortion inwards - and stopped, feeling apprehension. Was this the right move here?
No - have patience. With something like this, he couldn't afford to take risks. He could distort himself later, after consulting the doctor on the matter and taking on the appropriate precautions. The consequences of this distortion could be worse than Facelessness in many regards.
Andrei, meanwhile, was studying the new, screaming mask-tree with mouth agape.
"Your Tower... allows you to transform flora into fauna?"
"No, I'll tell you later." He reached for the dagger on his belt, unsheathing the blade. "For now, grab a knife and help me scrape those masks off. They're perfectly good blank masks, like the ones dad used to make. We can use them for our needs."
Compelled to stare, the doctor nonetheless grabbed a knife from his backpack and moved forward alongside Dorian.
Then came a different sort of butcher's work. Prying the masks off took the better part of the night; it was almost dawn by the time they were done. Then they killed and burned the 'tree' organism so it didn't release Facelessness anymore, and took a rest to eat breakfast before returning to the village.
---
You've made an amazing harvest of sixty-eight (68) blank masks, each one with 1 nebulous Potential stored. Their weight and volume make them a little problematic to carry; between you and Musorov, they barely fit in your backpacks.
You've accessed the GamalielȒ̶̢̻͌͜e̶͎̭̖̮̊͋̒̿ś̷̛̫͇͔̪͗u̶̍s̷c̵̚ì̶̗ẗ̷̳́̈́̐̑à̷͙̟̃͋t̵̤̲̘̙͂͗͋͝i̵͔̥̫͌̃͘ǒ̴̝̘̤͝͠ǹ̴͓ Contamination Protocol.
You can distort matter and phenomena. This essentially renders the affected into something else; a form of fundamental transmutation. Depending on the target, it can be impermanent. For instance, changing iron into cobalt will likely be a fast, easy, and staying change, but shifting gravity into something else will be swiftly undone. If overly concentrated, this manifests as 'visual glitches' within the world, distortions as if reality was failing within the area. This ability is largely uncontrolled; training and skill can refine the results and eventually even achieve replicable and consistent techniques on a lower scale, but more grandiose or sweeping changes will seldom be as manageable.
Distortions will universally attempt to manifest unconscious or unendorsed desires and thoughts. It's difficult to steer them outside of this scope; easier to steer them within the scope. As stated, smaller and slower changes are easier to control, but everything will always bend to the shadow within.
As an additional corollary, repeated uses, especially over a short time, render the target more 'unreal.' This unreality wears off over a varying length of time, depending on target, intensity, duration, and number of distortions imposed; at sufficient intensity, over-radiation can cause unreality to leak into the surrounding terrain and people and infect them, or become fully permanent. Depending on the desired results, this can be either positive or negative; unreal matter or phenomena are more easily remade or subjected to change by real matter or phenomena. For instance, when used on people, it renders them more internally hollow, able to be shaped by others' expectations, or even possible to dispel as if they were illusions. It's not recommended to distort matter and phenomena you care about, such as the air you're breathing.
Knowledge or comprehension of what you're targeting isn't a prerequisite for using the ability; you can theoretically affect someone on the other side of a wall or even a city on the other end of the valley. However, effect strength diminishes with distance, as does the predictability and usefulness of changes made.
---
How do you explain the ability to the doctor?
[ ] Be Honest
[ ] Lie - You can downplay the ability to make it seem less impressive, such as claiming it can only affect matter.
What shall you do now? By default, it's assumed you'll spend your entire remaining time on Icarel divided equally between whatever activities you choose. Furthermore, no matter what action you take, Dorian will take some time to recarve his trusty Artificer's Face from one of the blank masks and start wearing it while doing other maskcrafting work, in order to reimbue it with its old Potential.
[ ] Rest and Relaxation - The Shadow Island's an excellent and popular vacation spot for the nation you're in. Explore the famous Phantom Cave alongside a Midnight tour guide, enjoy a quiet night at the tavern while a Dawn songstress puts on a show, and see what else Icarelians have to offer.
[ ] Interact with Andrei - Learn more about your companion, the excitable researcher Dr. Andrei Musorov. What were the Divided Sanguine Socialist Republics like? Why did he emigrate to the Federation? Why doesn't he use Viscerality himself?
[ ] Train Contamination - Try to refine your control and power.
[ ] Train Viscerality - Viscerality - Novice [1.0]
*Expected Results (monofocus): +.15
*Potential (Critical) Results (monofocus): +.3
"Viscerality has two components: a tactile magic by which the body of any being can be altered, and a facility for manipulating the passions that rule the body."
Next Level: Apprentice [2.0]
*Improved regeneration speed; unemotional baseline healing speed is now six times that of a mortal.
*Reduced basic needs. Requires only half the food, water, and oxygen to operate at optimum as an organism; raw survival instinct and desperation once deeply starved means death can be postponed for potentially as much as months.
*Can make more drastic alterations to self; while remaining humanoid, can become a muscular giant, or resize to something reminiscent of a child or halfliing. Minor physiological improvements; +.5 to all Physical Attributes.
[ ] Train Skill - Lots of Days and other Chosen are willing to tutor you for a cheap price. You can learn premium singing skills from a Dawn, too; or practice fighting against a Zenith conditioned to handle that sort of punishment.
[ ] Craft Masks - Craft more masks! Specify what kind of masks you're aiming for.
[ ] Write-in
Of course, you can always instead choose to either...
[ ] Leave the World Now
[ ] Stay Here
The Shadow Island's villagers were welcome to strangers and offered unbounded hospitality. Dorian and Andrei's strange abilities of warping flesh and creating lightning from nothing prompted no more than curious questions about which Towers they'd climbed and how to find them, or when they activated.
These were answered with innocent half-lies, claims of distant lands that were technically true; stories told in metaphor. It was blessedly considered rude to push the envelope when the matter came to Choices across almost all of this world's cultures, so they didn't have to suffer too much investigation.
Once sufficient money was acquired for part-time work, making bruised knees healthy, dissipating the symptoms of the common cold, and filling batteries and generators with power, they properly investigated the sites of the Towers and made their respective Choices - for now in an informal manner.
It seemed the strange Tower that Victor couldn't identify wouldn't rise until at least a couple of nights from now, so Andrei's was first. He decided upon Midnight. In the absence of Day and its offer of eidetic memory, the ability to view the surrounding world with clarity was an unparalleled skill for an engineer and scientist like himself.
Therefore, the day before his ascension, he went around the village asking Midnights to describe their abilities. All senses were commonly enhanced: an eagle's vision, hearing so fine as to catch a pin dropping across town; even smell like a werewolf's. But even beyond that, the enhancement came with an incisive focus, a sharpness of mind that cut through fatigue and tiredness. 'Like a mental Zenith,' some said, 'making a Midnight able to endure and concentrate for hours or days on end.'
It was fascinating. Naturally, as the evening rolled around and the Dusk Towers started to rise, Andrei and Dorian moved to the site of the former's ascension: it was an hour and a half by foot, and despite being a researcher customarily glued to his work and laboratory, Andrei exercised often and was in good enough form to handle the walk.
They arrived some five to ten minutes before midnight.
Andrei stared at the site of the Tower, the outline of where it'd rise in only a couple of minutes, surrounded by a ring of stones and a manmade fence. It came with an informational corkboard alongside a short list of local people who Chose Midnight here, over three dozen entries long. There was a pen, to add one's name to the record.
There were stories of people standing inside the space where Towers would rise - often resulting in sudden and grisly death. The earth inside the stones looked normal, if one ignored the absence of growing grass or any kind of vegetation.
Then finally came the stroke of Midnight, the sky almost lightless if not for some of the moon's wan rays. The stones rumbled and vibrated as if rocked by an earthquake, awakening with an amaranthine chroma, a calm and nebulous vibrancy as if subtle snakelike energies were coursing inside mundane ore. Then, a beam of indigo rose from the ring, blocks of stone arrayed with toned, dark blue sigils marking them, and this almost caused an earthquake in truth, a vibration of air and ground. It rose and rose, and the vibration of the atmosphere rose alongside it as if threatening to swallow the world. A spire of darkness launched at the night's sky by some chthonic subterranean god.
It came not only from the rising of the Tower but a sound that emerged alongside it from the earth, redolent with awful beauty, a single tonal fracture impressed on the world: a deep bass sound like a monk's throat-singing. Almost as if one of the Street's notes was magnified and expanded to stand as an independent song.
Then it died down as abruptly as it started, the Tower's psalm replaced with a chimelike tingling.
Both Dorian and Andrei stared dumbfoundedly, faces cast in faint bluebonnet from the Tower's sigils.
Dorian's voice was eerily quiet. "This is..."
"...strangely reminiscent of the Street? Yes," Andrei concurred with a nod, calming down a little. "Did you think that sound...?"
"Yes. It was familiar to me, sir, no doubt about it." Dorian continued to stare. "I can't make sense of this, it's beyond strange. Could it be the Towers and Street are somehow related? Either way, you should enter the Tower, Andrei. There isn't a lot of time."
"Yes." The scientist nodded, adjusting his labcoat and clearing his throat, as if preparing for a speech in front of an audience. "You're correct."
Andrei moved towards the Tower with a hurried gait. A single entry archway was on its side, facing northeast. Inside the arch, Dorian couldn't see anything, except a deep impenetrable umbra, and the impression of what might've been the first of many stairs leading upwards.
"Do me a favor while I am out, and study these sigils," said Andrei, a moment prior to stepping through the Tower's threshold.
"I'll draw them in your notebook."
Andrei nodded and entered the Tower, disappearing inside like a wraith made unreal.
Then Dorian waited and did as he'd promised, making a slow circle around the Tower with a notebook and pen in either hand, constantly scratching against each other. The symbols on the Tower were faint and difficult to trace, and shining on them with a flashlight only seemed to make them darker and harder to make out.
After almost two and a half hours, Andrei came out, eyes widened and staring off into nothing as if shocked by some fundamental revelation. He took a couple of steps forward, still staring, and a moment later, the Tower behind him started to collapse on itself, drawing back into the earth as if reversing the process by which it'd surfaced. Even as it descended, Andrei didn't move a single inch, except for the eyes in his skull, rotating as if to drink in the dark environment with greedy understanding.
"So? What's it like?" asked Dorian, hoping to finally break the spell.
"Dorian," said Andrei, so faintly quiet the word could barely be made out, "It was incredible. I am not religious whatsoever, yet I feel as if I'd met with God himself up there, and he implanted in me a small piece of his infinite kindness. You cannot believe the clarity of my eyesight. They understated its effect. Severely."
His face rotated, as he looked into Dorian's eyes. "Even in this complete and utter darkness, I can see every pore on your skin sweating. Simultaneously. Not like a magnified scope, but rather, all at once processing every single millimeter of your face without confusion. I can hear the same. I can smell the same. Touch the same; perhaps taste, too. I can see the subtle movements of the magnetosphere around us, and how our natural bioelectricity affects and is affected by the world. I can see the subtle motions of the air molecules. The pressure of gravity and motion, almost like... colored air without color, if that makes sense. How does one measure perception? This is grandiose."
"Try to remain objective," said Dorian, not in an attempt to be unkind, but rather to bring the doctor to his more metaphorical senses.
Andrei was swift to agree, blinking and shaking his head. "I'm sorry, you're right. I cannot become overzealous on account of this. While, yes, it's a significant change in cognition, in how I process the world, it's not a miracle. To call something a miracle is cowardice. It's all explicable, if we try hard enough to study. Speaking of..."
Dorian handed over the notebook. To aid the doctor's research, he reported the ascent from his perspective as best as he could: the actions and observations taken, the boredom of waiting for so many hours with nothing to amuse himself except exerting Viscerality to slowly improve his own eyesight and fencing practice in the dark.
"Are you certain I was inside for over two hours?" asked Andrei. "I had no way to measure, but it felt much, much shorter. Like a minute at most."
"Didn't you have your wristwatch inside, doctor?"
"No, I didn't," said Andrei, touching a hesitant hand to his left wrist, where the time-keeping implement was still firmly attached and operational. "I struggle to describe the interior, but I most definitely didn't have a material form. It was as if I had discorporated into some pure, dark antimatter. The same Midnight of which this Tower is made. Like a dark antipode to light. Then I ascended on stairs that weren't stairs, but brittle fragments of that darkness. This... condensed nightlit dross. Words truly fail to describe the experience. I was inside of dimensions I don't think my brain can correctly remember. I don't believe we have the psychological or linguistic architecture for that."
Dorian nodded. With a shattered creative core, he struggled to conjure images of what the doctor spoke about. He didn't effort to ask his imagination for help too much, as he'd learned that wouldn't work.
After that, the doctor became inordinately absorbed with researching the Towers: a scientific curiosity became a scientific obsession, a desperate need to accumulate data on every possible facet of their make-up. One otherwise uneventful morning, after studying the other four available Towers on the island, he took a waterproof bag and stuffed his clothing inside, wearing only a swimsuit, and told Dorian he'd move to the mainland for a couple of days and nights, to study the Towers there and return to witness Dorian's Choice. He then dove off a cliff and used Ebbandry to propel himself through the bay at insane velocities like some form of human torpedo.
And on that evening, as the moon was a waxing crescent, Dorian Croft headed eagerly towards the strange Tower.
Only to find it wasn't a Tower at all.
When it... 'ascended,' it made a horrible nerve-wracking sound, enough to drive away birds within half a kilometer away. Not a song whatsoever, but rather, a skin-piercing creaking like broken gears forced to continue work. Like rust on the axle of a wheel. A screech of inhumanity from a devil.
It also didn't create a Tower. Instead, there was a section of flattened dark blue stone, almost like a dais above the earth, and then a stairwell leading downwards to a dark ominous doorway made from crimson brick lettered the same as the Midnight Tower's sigils. Above the ground, on its sides, were two inwards-bending curves of gray stone about the height of five or six men, almost like horns or the impressions of a stark gate. Altogether, it built the notion of some unholy entrance to the underworld; one which man wasn't meant to even contemplate treading.
"That was absolutely terrifying," commented Andrei cheerfully. "Are you sure you want to enter that?"
"You can only make a single Choice," said Dorian, fists clenched. "Let mine be meaningful."
He moved down the stairs before any further hesitation could set in. They almost seemed to bob under the weight of each footfall, as if unstable. It didn't bode well, but he continued boldly downwards, dearly and fervently praying this wasn't his last journey. But at the end of the day - Dorian Croft wasn't raised to be a coward - and he trusted the Street. He trusted it wouldn't deliver him somewhere he could die so easily as simply entering this doorway, even if the decision was his own Choice.
He entered the Tower and made the Choice.
And felt agony, as if arms made of steel were ripping him to shreds. Not a uniform and painless dematerialization and rematerialization into some ideal substrate on a level above the physical, as Andrei had described it one evening, but a brutal disassembly that tore off skin and flesh, ripped out organs with spikes and nails. He wanted to scream but couldn't, as the inside didn't have oxygen or atmosphere, nor the idea of sound. He was splayed on some abattoir table, an animal being chopped to bits.
And then, as if flesh were merely clothing for the naked soul, the rest of him was dropped into a vast oceanic vat full of mirrors. The acidically painful mirror-sea perfectly reflected an infinite night's sky, making it so that even as he descended, he was technically climbing upwards as well: climbing a Tower made of pure broken void, each of its steps a warped connective tissue between the physical realm and something that went deeper. Each step along the path meant torment, a pain that penetrated unshielded bodiless corporeality and harrowed the soul directly, a spike made of errors driven into the soul like a weight, yet he couldn't stop... ascending and descending, doing both at the same time and yet neither. Going sideways, yet not to any side that Dorian had ever comprehended. Language failed to describe the truth.
And the more he went, the less it hurt, as if the sensation were transforming into something else. A sense of perverse correctness, as if this all were now forever a part of him, and therefore couldn't harm him. The Tower wasn't operating as it should've, he understood on some fundamental and subconscious level: it was malfunctioning and broken, shattered in some cataclysm beyond the reach of mortal memory. All of them were, maybe, but this one even more than the others; and in return for being even more broken, it somehow paradoxically had more of its former mass to work with, as if breakage here meant only the shattering of limitations dividing mortality and divinity.
And Dorian intended to claim the crown of dark dreams ahead, in the very depths and the very apex of this place. He reached out... and some infinite Light within responded, like a ping, like the same feeling he got when the Street confirmed something for him.
And then suddenly he stood outside again, recomposed. Made of stable atoms and molecules, breathing in air.
"You've come back," said Andrei instantly. "It has been four hours."
"That didn't feel like more than five minutes," said Dorian, as he climbed up the stairs. Behind him, the Tower started to collapse, stones drawn inwards, the ring disappearing.
He didn't feel changed or different, not physically. It was not some grand revelation, showing aspects of reality he'd remained ignorant of. There was only a sense of some internal miasma, a vast and turbulent sea of shadows and mirrors; a quagmire of pure distortion, enough to drown a man with.
He cast out a hand at a tree and released the distortion, with a sound like imperceptible murmur.
It creaked ominously as if under the stress of immense force and glitched out, small squares of blackness disrupting its form; it bent and whipped about as if coming alive to feel the torment of change - making Andrei back off - and then shifted sideways and suddenly straightened out as if it were an electrified muscle. All movements that a tree shouldn't be able to make, as disturbing to witness as a corpse coming to life. Slowly, over individual seconds, it changed: bark becoming dry papery white skin, and the wood underneath becoming red meaty flesh, affectable with Viscerality. It was now studded in small masks, each no bigger than a flat human palm, all of them releasing a quiet song-like scream. Each one emanated a minor font of oppressive Facelessness, insufficient to even craft a mask, let alone to cause a true transformation into a Faceless.
But it was, at least, a good beginning. An indicator of what this ponderous and miraculous distortion could achieve if properly guided. Then came an idea, some inkling of discovery: the target of the distortion didn't have to be a material existence. It could even be something more abstract.
He directed the distortion inwards - and stopped, feeling apprehension. Was this the right move here?
No - have patience. With something like this, he couldn't afford to take risks. He could distort himself later, after consulting the doctor on the matter and taking on the appropriate precautions. The consequences of this distortion could be worse than Facelessness in many regards.
Andrei, meanwhile, was studying the new, screaming mask-tree with mouth agape.
"Your Tower... allows you to transform flora into fauna?"
"No, I'll tell you later." He reached for the dagger on his belt, unsheathing the blade. "For now, grab a knife and help me scrape those masks off. They're perfectly good blank masks, like the ones dad used to make. We can use them for our needs."
Compelled to stare, the doctor nonetheless grabbed a knife from his backpack and moved forward alongside Dorian.
Then came a different sort of butcher's work. Prying the masks off took the better part of the night; it was almost dawn by the time they were done. Then they killed and burned the 'tree' organism so it didn't release Facelessness anymore, and took a rest to eat breakfast before returning to the village.
---
You've made an amazing harvest of sixty-eight (68) blank masks, each one with 1 nebulous Potential stored. Their weight and volume make them a little problematic to carry; between you and Musorov, they barely fit in your backpacks.
You've accessed the Gamaliel
You can distort matter and phenomena. This essentially renders the affected into something else; a form of fundamental transmutation. Depending on the target, it can be impermanent. For instance, changing iron into cobalt will likely be a fast, easy, and staying change, but shifting gravity into something else will be swiftly undone. If overly concentrated, this manifests as 'visual glitches' within the world, distortions as if reality was failing within the area. This ability is largely uncontrolled; training and skill can refine the results and eventually even achieve replicable and consistent techniques on a lower scale, but more grandiose or sweeping changes will seldom be as manageable.
Distortions will universally attempt to manifest unconscious or unendorsed desires and thoughts. It's difficult to steer them outside of this scope; easier to steer them within the scope. As stated, smaller and slower changes are easier to control, but everything will always bend to the shadow within.
As an additional corollary, repeated uses, especially over a short time, render the target more 'unreal.' This unreality wears off over a varying length of time, depending on target, intensity, duration, and number of distortions imposed; at sufficient intensity, over-radiation can cause unreality to leak into the surrounding terrain and people and infect them, or become fully permanent. Depending on the desired results, this can be either positive or negative; unreal matter or phenomena are more easily remade or subjected to change by real matter or phenomena. For instance, when used on people, it renders them more internally hollow, able to be shaped by others' expectations, or even possible to dispel as if they were illusions. It's not recommended to distort matter and phenomena you care about, such as the air you're breathing.
Knowledge or comprehension of what you're targeting isn't a prerequisite for using the ability; you can theoretically affect someone on the other side of a wall or even a city on the other end of the valley. However, effect strength diminishes with distance, as does the predictability and usefulness of changes made.
---
How do you explain the ability to the doctor?
[ ] Be Honest
[ ] Lie - You can downplay the ability to make it seem less impressive, such as claiming it can only affect matter.
What shall you do now? By default, it's assumed you'll spend your entire remaining time on Icarel divided equally between whatever activities you choose. Furthermore, no matter what action you take, Dorian will take some time to recarve his trusty Artificer's Face from one of the blank masks and start wearing it while doing other maskcrafting work, in order to reimbue it with its old Potential.
[ ] Rest and Relaxation - The Shadow Island's an excellent and popular vacation spot for the nation you're in. Explore the famous Phantom Cave alongside a Midnight tour guide, enjoy a quiet night at the tavern while a Dawn songstress puts on a show, and see what else Icarelians have to offer.
[ ] Interact with Andrei - Learn more about your companion, the excitable researcher Dr. Andrei Musorov. What were the Divided Sanguine Socialist Republics like? Why did he emigrate to the Federation? Why doesn't he use Viscerality himself?
[ ] Train Contamination - Try to refine your control and power.
[ ] Train Viscerality - Viscerality - Novice [1.0]
*Expected Results (monofocus): +.15
*Potential (Critical) Results (monofocus): +.3
"Viscerality has two components: a tactile magic by which the body of any being can be altered, and a facility for manipulating the passions that rule the body."
Next Level: Apprentice [2.0]
*Improved regeneration speed; unemotional baseline healing speed is now six times that of a mortal.
*Reduced basic needs. Requires only half the food, water, and oxygen to operate at optimum as an organism; raw survival instinct and desperation once deeply starved means death can be postponed for potentially as much as months.
*Can make more drastic alterations to self; while remaining humanoid, can become a muscular giant, or resize to something reminiscent of a child or halfliing. Minor physiological improvements; +.5 to all Physical Attributes.
[ ] Train Skill - Lots of Days and other Chosen are willing to tutor you for a cheap price. You can learn premium singing skills from a Dawn, too; or practice fighting against a Zenith conditioned to handle that sort of punishment.
[ ] Craft Masks - Craft more masks! Specify what kind of masks you're aiming for.
[ ] Write-in
Of course, you can always instead choose to either...
[ ] Leave the World Now
[ ] Stay Here
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