Log:Broken Dolls: Dielle Gets Hugs

Broken Dolls: Dielle Gets Hugs
"Mmmm-m-m-maaaa?"
Participants Dielle, Gisa as ST	30 July, 2017 In which Dielle tries to make friends, and doesn't quite succeed. Part of Broken Dolls.
Location Dreams
Dielle is asleep next to Jon, on the inside of bed. (There's a fan blowing on his body and past to hers, which means that she is naturally air conditioned. He's really useful for that, although what's an asset in summer is a drawback in winter.) She's got a few traps set up around the bed, just in case. (In her case, they're pretty colored bottles that are held by nets made of chains. She does the netting herself, it's her form of what you make as one of the Family of Silent Nights.) As she falls asleep, she starts off in one of her usual places, a peaceful forest grove with a crystal clear pond. It's the perfect place for a unicorn. In her peaceful forest grove, there isn't usually a strange, wailing sound, is there? "Mmmmmaaaaaaa," comes from just outside the grove, or perhaps right on the border. It sounds... weird. Guttural. Is that a kid? It could be a goat, after all. It could be a human kid, too. Along with the strange wailing sound comes a wash of the scent of ozone, the feeling of the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. But there's not a cloud in the sky for lightning to strike from... It could be something worse. Dielle gets up from where she's sitting, turning from equine form to human in the move. As she does, her clothes come into view. There's a lot of leather, and a hood, and the hood shades her face until all that can be seen are her starfield eyes coming from the shadow. She heads towards the sound. The sky cracks open as Dielle walks toward the sound. It cracks open for a moment and then slams back shut again, into the bright blue that it had been before. The sound repeats itself, that "Mmmmaaaaaaa" sound, cracking as if the audio file was having trouble loading. There's a strange skittering sound in the underbrush, and the sound gets quieter. Further away. Further away. Fading. -> >> Dielle to Here << <-============================================ Rolled 2 Successes < 1 4 4 6 8 8 > ===============================-> >> Wits + Composure No Flags << <- In that split second, there's something beyond the sky. What? She can't see. But it wasn't just blackness. There was a pattern to it. Dielle stares at the sky, and then starts searching for the sound. The skittering sound is not comforting, although the fading is. Dielle is doing her stealthy best to keep to the shadows. She's got a hand on a knife that she wears at her side. She's considering trying to climb up to the sky, but first, she needs to find that sound. It continues to fade away until she can't hear it anymore. The silence that takes its place has almost a presence of its own. It isn't simply an absence of sound, it's ... a Silence. It's got weight and heft and presence, like a large, silent cat walking into the middle of a formal dinner and sitting down in the pudding. It's still Dielle's favorite place to start her dreaming, but now it's ... not right. That seems to happen a lot. Well, adventures aren't started if you stay in the comfortable place. Dielle goes to find a tree, since they're all around, and climbs it. Maybe it's the Silence, but she's suddenly wanting to be up, and searching from a height. She nimbly scales the tree, its branches providing a lot of stepping stones, and she searches both sky and ground as best she can, frowning the entire time. -> >> Dielle to Here << <-============================================ Rolled 3 Successes < 1 2 8 9 9 > =======================-> >> Wits + Composure - 2 + 1 No Flags << <- She climbs up the tree, and gets herself settled. Searching the sky gives her only the vague feeling that there's something there she isn't seeing, something that she can't put her finger on. Searching the ground, though? The landscape shifts as she watches it, bringing a Hedge maze into view, a maze of twisty passages, all alike, formed out of long, sickeningly-sharp thorns piled high into impenetrable walls. And then there's the sound. Click click click click -- is that a clock? Is it the sound of a turnstile being pushed through by a million rush-hour travelers? Is it an army of bored students all clicking their pens in unison? Whatever it is, it's far away, and getting closer. And then there's that sound again. That melancholy wail. "Mmmm.... mm-mmm-mmmmaaaaaaaaaaaaa... " Dielle waits until the maze settles, and she tries to memorize it enough that she can thread through it if she has to. Then she climbs back down and starts calling out an imitation of the sound. She manages to sound very goatlike. Well, it's close to equine. And she /is/ a unicorn, sometimes they're rather goaty, too. "Mmmmm-mmmmmmaaaaaaaaaa." The noise gets a little louder, and are there two voices, now? Three? There are definitely more now. "Mmmmmaaaaa.... " Dielle can hear that clicking sound getting louder, and getting louder quickly. "Mmmmaaaa.... " The greenery rustles right before her little glade is, for lack of a better word, invaded. Hundreds. Of mismatched Things. THey looks like slightly de-rezzed Sim toddlers, as if someone's computer froze halfway through rendering the thing, and then they somehow got smashed together with a sickly puppy and piles of spare machinery. The things -- because there are no other words for them -- form neat little lines as they cross into the clearing, falling quickly into formation of sorts. They clutch their seven-fingered hands together in front of their chests. Each chest's ribs are cracked open. Dielle can see hundreds of little mechanoid hearts pumping, papery bellows lungs expanding and contracting inside the wire frameworks with which their ribs have been replaced. Six legs on one, twelve on another, and thirty on the next, but the things all march in a strange sort of unison. They're all a mix of sprockets and bones, and blood drips from the side of one, and leaks from the nose of another. "Mmmmmmaaaaaaa," they stutter, the single syllable broken up. "Mmmm-m-m-maaaa?" with their ever-so-many legs and too-many fingers. Some have no eyes at all and pointed, translucent ears as big in comparison to their heads as a fennec fox's, some have noses more pronounced than an alt-right-drawn antisemitic caricature, some have eyes quite literally as big as saucers set in their pale faces, held into place with rivets ringing their scleras. The one in front reaches its arms out toward Dielle, bleating, "Mmmmaaaa?" -> >> Dielle to Here << <-============================================ Rolled 5 Successes for an exceptional success. < 2 3 3 5 5 7 8 9 10 10 10 > =======-> >> Wits + Empathy.Friendly_Shoulder + 2 - 3 No Flags << <- Dielle looks down at the front one, then kneels down and picks it up. "Hey, there, little one. What can I do for y'all?" She cradles the one she picks up. This could either be VERY bad or VERY good. Then she sits on her butt, and opens one arm, welcoming them all in, trying to project lots of positive emotions. -> >> Dielle to Here << <-============================================ Rolled 0 Success < 4 6 > ======================-> >> Presence + Persuasion - 3 No Flags << <- "MMmmmaaaa? Mmmmmmmm-mmm---mmmaaa?" They start to gather around her, stretching their arms out toward her, sharp little fingers spreading out as they all attempt -- at first -- to hug her at once. Until one of them gets a really good look at her, up close, and that single syllable becomes accusing. "Mmm-mmm-mmMmMmaaaa?!" She doesn't have to speak their language to know that whatever else it might be trying to say at any other time, what it's saying right now is 'you're not whoever I thought you were. You are not my mother/master/creator/whatever I'm looking for.' That uncertainty spreads through the crowd like a ripple of worry, followed by utter fury at the deception. She can feel it happen the same way that she would feel her stomach dropping out the moment she goes over the top of the first hill on a roller coaster, cold sliding up her back like a slice of steel. Oh. No. That was one of the sharp fingers of one of those things as it cuts the clothing -- and the skin -- on her back. Then another. Then another. Another finger, another slice, as they close in on her like ants swarming over a sugar cube. The pain is instant, and indescribable. The last thing she sees before she startles awake is the face of the very first one who approached her, opening its mouth far, far too wide, a snake unhinging its jaw. Rows and rows and rows of shark teeth close over her face in a sudden flash, and then her eyes open, and the ceiling of her bedroom's there instead. As things go sour, Dielle is whispering to herself, "You don't belong here. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. WAKE UP, DAMMIT." The waking doesn't happen before the eating, and when she wakes up, she's in a cold sweat. Worse, she's yelling "WAKE UP!" as she does so, which probably awakens the Jotun sleeping beside her. Of course, she's feeling her face, trying to make sure it's still attached and not bleeding. It's not. It was just a dream, something she's going to be whispering to herself a few times in the dark. -> >> Dielle to Here << <-============================================ Rolled 2 Successes < 1 4 4 5 8 10 > ============================-> >> Intelligence + Wits No Flags << <- -> >> Dielle to Here << <-============================================ Rolled 1 Success < 1 4 6 7 9 > =============================-> >> Intelligence + Wits 0-Again << <-