Lucas Stirling - Awakening

[Anthr4xus]

There was surprisingly very little on any serious news site about anything like Marty's experiences, but as Lucas expanded his search to more fringe reddit and blog posts he found a few scattered reports of similar sightings, although it was somewhat difficult to sort out from various stories of hauntings or alien abductions. He could find links to supposed footage, but it seemed that these links were farily universally dead.

OOC

That's all you can get for free, but you can give me a Wits + Investigation roll to try to dig up more stuff.

 

[Gremlin]

OOC

Tried to add my roll to my previous post, clearly I've still not got the hang of the new roller. Then I forgot to label the roll.🤦‍♂️

 

Edited March 24 by Gremlin (see edit history)

[Anthr4xus]

Having plumbed the public web with little result, Lucas turned to the deep web. Even another hour of digging through Tor servers and less and less trustworthy hidden sites yielded very little more real evidence, although he did find a couple of videos that were similar to some of the less conspicuous examples in Marty's collection. Finally, on some deep and disreputable layer of the onion, he found a video, supposedly from nearly two decades ago in Rio de Janeiro, of another rip in the air.

The video is short, just over a minute, and obviously a dub of a dub of a dub, probably 8mm or VHS originally. Fifty seconds of that is just a couple of mangy street dogs fighting over a bone. Suddenly, just like through Marty's window, the air seems to shift and rip. Lucas can tell that it is the same kind of effect, yet the video is of such poor quality that he can make out none of the details that he could see in real life. At the very end of the video clip whoever was holding the camera drops it, the rip in the air twisting even more strangely for just a few frames before the clip ends.

Lucas pulls a copy local and opens it up in a video editor to go frame by frame. In the third from the last frame he finds the clearest shot of the whatever it was, although it was upside down in the shot. The detail wasn't there, but as Lucas continued to stare at it, suddenly it the image seemed to move. The fine two or three pixel edges of the rip began to suddenly and impossibly expand. There seemed to be a flash of movement and for barely long enough to register Lucas had the impression of seeing angles of the favela from the video. The purple black and blue of the maelstrom surged out, seeming to engulf and fill Lucas' office. He could feel a deep tugging from within himself up and away into the storm, but also a firm anchoring of his feet on the floor and his mind trying to put this into context. He felt a pending decision, although not one that he could understand. He could yield to the storm, or he could hold his ground.

[Gremlin]

When the image leapt from his screen, it was everything Lucas could do to not fall out of the chair. He wondered what, if anything anyone in the communal kitchen would see if they looked his way. That became less of a concern when the storm began to rage around his office. Briefly, he wondered if the lightning strokes would damage the building's electricals and if he would be blamed, and therefore billed for it.

 

That too faded into insignificance when he felt the storm's wordless call. Feeling a similar urge to what some have named 'the call of the void' and despite the rational part of his brain telling him it wasnt possible, Lucas stood as if to grab a thunderbolt before it vanished. What he might do if he was successful and survived, he had no idea.

Edited April 5 by Gremlin (see edit history)

[Anthr4xus]

Lucas stood, his chair shooting out behind him, completely unnoticed. He heard Lisa, a freelance UI Designer that had been one of the first other renters of the shared space he had met, call out in alarm, but her words were lost by the sound of the storm that seemed to swirl and twist not only the air around him, but the very ground and walls themselves. His arm raised and his mind open, his surroundings seemed to wash away in the rush of the storm.

A resonant chorus of divine power swelled behind the sound of endless rolling thunder and crackling lightning. Lucas did not feel the floor fall away with the rest, but suddenly he was alone, suspended in endless void. The storm was still there, but invisible. He could feel the crackle of power still swirling about him, but something in the void seemed to sap at it, pulling it further from him. While Lucas could see nothing in the void around him, he could feel things, terrible and unfathomable, moving there. Or was he moving and they were still?

In the nothing he turned and twisted with each motion, and just as suddenly as he noticed that there was something else there in the void with him. And as soon as he realized that, it seemed to sunder the void and fill it with a cataclysm of elemental forces. The storm that drew him into whatever this is was nothing, nothing compared the power that surged around him. A grand fiery landscape expanded around him in all directions, rent with lightning and force and motion. Nothing was still. Everything was chaos. Power, raw and ethereal, yet somehow more real that anything he had ever experienced wove connections through the tumult. Strands of it shot around and through him as he continued to plunge on and on through incomprehensible forces. A voice that spoke not in words for his ears, but a thrumming surge of understanding deep within his soul. The very essence of the divine spoke to Lucas, taking on forms of his own religious and philosophical understanding. What he somehow knew was the very fundamental units of power fell like rain through the chaos around him and Lucas felt more alive and enervated than he ever, ever had.

Suddenly there was something else of Substance here with him. A great tower, shining with a golden holy and divine radiance of it's own emerged from the fire and stir, its solid existence the most fundamentally Real thing he had ever seen. More real than New York, more real than his work, more real even than he himself perhaps. Lucas reached out and he could feel pure creative power and energy coalesce around his hands. Impossibly given the scale, yet evidently real, he saw a small keyhole in the grand edifice of the tower. It beckoned to Lucas and to the power that gathered around him, practically calling to be unlocked. Lucas knew with the same sure reality as the Watchtower itself that his name belonged within.

OOC

Sorry for the delay on this post. I got severely blocked on it and it took me a little bit to work around. Hope you like.

You have approached the Watchtower, what do you do?

 

[Gremlin]

Lisa and her concerned cries were quickly forgotten about when Lucas was faced with the tower. When the tendrils of power passed through him, he flinched, expecting the pain of an electric shock or worse. Instead, he somehow knew that it had simply made him more.

A quick look told Lucas that there was no convenient mat, rock or garden gnome with a key hidden beneath it. With no other option presenting itself, he reached out towards the keyhole and, without knowing where the thought came from, willed some of the energy within him into the lock.

[Anthr4xus]

The churning chaos around him made it hard to focus and control himself, yet even with that Lucas held on to his humor and himself with a firm grip. It was impossible to tell how long it took, but piece by piece he built his will into a shining golden key that stretched through the flexing distance between himself and lock on the great tower. With a gasp the key turned and suddenly the seizing tumult around him vanished, to be replaced by a calm, cool stone antechamber. A golden lock bearing his name was set in the stone wall before him. Similar golden locks were set in the wall around, yet the names on them were blurred and illegible. Lucas's focus was drawn to HIS lock again, and the golden key in his hands was practically burning his fingers.

[Gremlin]

Lucas' natural curiosity took over as he approached the locks mounted in the wall. When he was within arms length of it he focused on a couple close to it, trying to force the names into clarity. His reward was a painful jolt of electricity that ran up his key and caused him to stagger a few steps, along with the sense that those names were none of his damned business.

To his horror, the key he had fashioned began to melt away, forcing Lucas to ignore his now numb arm. He took the hint and returned his concentration to maintaining the key's form, inserting it into his own lock.

Edited Thursday at 06:31 PM by Gremlin (see edit history)