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rubilykskoye mods ([personal profile] rubimods) wrote in [community profile] rubimemes2024-06-18 01:02 pm
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SUMMER TEST DRIVE MEME

⚰︎ ⍢ ⌲ ⍚ TEST DRIVE MEME:
Welcome to RUBILYKSKOYE — a dark, horror-smut game where player choices will drive a mod-run storyline about the world and its NPCs. This test drive meme provides a medley of prompts evoking the game's general tone.

THESE THREADS CAN BE GAME CANON if both players are accepted into the game and agree to it. However, if players who'd prefer to start fresh are welcome to reuse these prompts in their own personal logs upon acceptance into the communities. Note: the universal test drive arrival prompt will not be repeated on the coming event log, but players are welcome to reuse the prompt.

CONTENT WARNINGS for this game include: monsters, body horror, dub-con, non-con, religion, blood/violence, and marking/branding, loss of autonomy/self, and mental influences. This log additionally has warnings for: nudity, D/S mechanics, public sex, aphro, death, missing persons.

If you have QUESTIONS about the test drive prompts, please ask HERE. Questions about the game itself or the general setting should be directed to the FAQ.

FAQSETTINGCALENDARRESERVESAPPLICATIONS



IN THE WOODS SOMEWHERE

The chirping of partridges in the treetops rouses you. Light barely filters through the canopy, just enough to suggest daylight. By the time it reaches the forest floor, the light has taken on a sickly green. You lie amongst the frost-covered mosses and ferns, the frozen soil cold and just a little damp on your bare skin.

Wherever you were before this moment, whatever you were doing or wearing, when you awaken in this forest, you find yourself naked and helpless as the day you were born. As you sit up and get your bearings, aside from a brief wave of disoriented nausea, you seem to be no worse for wear than you last remember.

You seem to be alone. The gnarled oaks and moss suggest no sign of civilization or sentient life. Just flickers of movement from curious squirrels or brave lizards emerging from a temporary retreat from the wintry weather. With your feet under you, and you'll find the wood is filled with berry bushes and nut trees, though much of the fruit has been picked clean. The freshwater stream that runs north-south, populated by both poisonous toads and delicious crawdads, is running actively again as the weather warms back up from the recent snowstorm.

As you explore, you may run into others with stories just like yours. Some may have already formed clumsy nudist groups, others may still be processing their confusion, with no memory of how they got here. Now is a good time to overcome any hang-ups you have about modesty; it's going to be a long hike, and the weather isn't quite amenable to your lack of.

Turn your back to the darker, shadowy parts of the forest and eventually the glow of manmade lights and the curve of a dirt road may come into view. At the edge of the wood, you'll find a town surrounded by a fifty-foot wall of beige stone. The only entrance is an iron gate positioned on the southern edge. When you arrive, the gate is already open, welcoming people inside.

This quaint, historic town of five-thousand has cobbled street and signs lit by gas lamp. Wooden shutters protect otherwise open-air windows on the buildings, which are all under three stories with gabled roofs. A number of businesses hug the main street — a clockmaker, a cobbler, a grocer — while residential homes sprawl outwards towards the wall. At the far end of the main street, visible about a mile to the north now that the trees and the enormous wall is out of the way, sits a castle with three towers.

When you enter, the streets are full of people, but despite any efforts on your part to hide or make excuses, they don't seem offended by your nakedness. Even families with children don't gawk or look twice. Those determined to find proper clothing regardless will find that modern clothing stores aren't available — the closest this town has is a tailor's shop and a stand in the central marketplace selling scarves and blankets.

breaking and entering
If you intend to have your character break into someone's house or yard to steal some of their clean laundry, please review the info about game laws on the FAQ and give the mods a heads up HERE.



Fortunately, the people of the town are very generous! Anyone who ask the locals will be directed to the boarding house for both clothes and a place to stay. Accessible through an embellished iron garden gate and obscured by hanging plants, trees, and vines, beyond an overgrown yard in the residential sprawl of the town is a bright-red door, which opens to a spacious cottage of several stories. Parts of the house still bear the dust of disuse, gathered on various furnishings — bedding, sofas, curtains, wooden tables. However, it's already full of people! Anyone who's already appeared in the village just as you did today lives here. Once inside, you may notice patchwork repairs have been made, and some scorch marks still linger from a recent fire, and some furniture is still lying around in splinters.

Tonight, a few of the townspeople will help out with the new arrivals. They stock the kitchen and prepare a communal dinner of parsnips, pheasant, and squash. During dinner, they (and those outsiders who've already begun to settle) sit down at the enormous wooden dining room table and help orient the newcomers and answer their questions.

finding roommates
Don't spend too much time in the dining room going for seconds, though. You'll want to claim a bedroom quickly because each one only has two full-size beds, and there aren't enough spaces for everyone. The last people upstairs will need to double up to squeeze in. Roommates will not be mod-assigned; players should coordinate directly with one another to determine their living arrangements.


Get a good night's rest. By the light of day, locals will help get the new arrivals set up on the coal stove with breakfast. You may notice they're dressed in a way you would almost call normal — at least, in a manner befitting 19th century Eastern Europe. As you find your way around town to get your bearings, folks are eager to help you find a place to apply your skills so you can contribute to your new home.


writer's block?
If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try: naked hiking, acquiring clothing or other inventory items, asking questions at dinner/orientation, or staking your claim on a bedroom!



THE FESTIVAL OF SUMMERTIDE

Summer is in full swing, which means it's time to take advantage of the warm weather! Around the town, various games are being played, some sport-based and some more concerned with creativity, problem-solving, sex, or 'fun'. Each round begins with a prayer to the Duchess. Not bowing your head in prayer may get you a few stares from locals, or worse-- opponents may be extra motivated to defeat someone so disrespectful to her Grace.

Each Thursday, buildings are festooned with wreathes of wildflowers, tables are laden with food and drink, and everyone is given colored sashes to wear over their clothes. Festival goers are not allowed to enter the main events unless they wear a sash, and to get a sash they must reveal their curse marks. Those marked with the curse of Wilk receive blue sashes, Diabel get red, Skala receive green and Niez are as ever adorned with grey.



Summertide, the locals are eager to explain, is a festival about adapting to the needs of others, and accepting things as they are. What perhaps isn't explained nearly so well is the expectations placed upon festival goers. Each event has a goal to be achieved, balanced on the point of competition or participation.

Tables overflow with refreshments, especially drinks and chilled fruit to cool the summer heat. Rubeans traditionally spice their foods with aphrodisiacs, something that is so culturally normal to them that they don't feel the need to mention it.

  • An outdoor feast starts the festivities, with commanders, who are expected to give orders, and followers, who must follow the whims of commanders, whatever they decree. Who commands and who follows is decided by the curse-marked sash participants wear. But there's a twist-- every three hours, a horn blows, and the roles switch at random; commanders become followers and vice versa. Many festival-goers, now in a position of command, are eager to get petty revenge on the followers now at their mercy.


  • Fencing! For health reasons, any cut must be properly cleaned, and kept free of contaminants; for this reason, fencers are expected to compete fully naked. Otherwise, you might get some cloth in your cuts!


  • Wrestling! Wrestlers are well-oiled for the matches, making it hard to keep your grip on a slippery opponent. The winner of the match is declared when they have their opponent pinned... and at that point, the winner can do anything they like to the loser until they can get away, if they even want to.


  • A game going on throughout the town, regardless of whether someone consents to participation, is something the locals call Lock and Key. The rules are explained after you are grabbed and tied by your wrist (or ankle, whatever was available) to someone else: the locked binding tying you two together is blessed to be unbreakable until you each draw one another's blood... or find the key, stashed somewhere in the town. Good luck!


  • Anyone who refuses to play along will be ejected from the festivities, and made to run through the crowd while being whipped with thin wooden sticks.


  • Throughout all of this, some of the implementation of these games may occasionally come across as either overly cruel or overly kind. The common people of Rubilykskoye are of two minds when it comes to the treatment of newcomers: some think you are beneficent, sent to fix their problems and free them of your woes. These people, called Blackguards, will do their best to make sure your participation in the games is not marred by cheating, excessive violence, or pain. But others, called the Zlatniki, think little of the outsiders coming into their lands, and will do their best to twist their native traditions toward cruelty and vindictive unfairness when it comes to the Void-touched.

    writer's block?
    If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try participating in events, having your characters go against opponents, be drafted into the games against their will, or watching others perform!


    NIGHT OF THE HUNTSMEN

    Rumor moves through town quickly: two nights ago, a hunting party went out into the wood, and no one has seen them since. Anyone who wants to prove their worth to the community is encouraged to join the search parties going out to look for them; in Rubilykskoye, those who provide food for the community are highly prized, especially when they brave the woods to do so.

    You see, the woods aren't entirely safe. Near the town, it's nothing to be alarmed by, and of course the search parties find nothing there. They must delve deeper, and that's where you end up. At the outer edges of the forest, shadows grow long and the air grows thick. Though the sun never grows warm red-gold with sunset, the wood darkens. Birdsong is replaced by the click of mandibles and the skitter of many legs. Anyone who ventures out this way will soon find it difficult to see before them, even in the middle of the day — eventually, even the brightest magical light source or darkvision cannot stretch further than a few inches.


    Many peel off, going back to the town proper. The searchers become fewer and fewer. Maybe some of them are going back home, but maybe they're getting lost. Eventually, you walk around a large tree, and you're alone. It's just you and the Void.

    The air feels heavy, as if it were not air at all but some more solid mass. Almost like liquid-smoke, it presses down upon you. Slowing your movements. Characters who push too far into the void may stop being able to move at all, and find themselves given over to insanity if they collapse, unable to draw themselves out. This is just one of many dangers.

    Monsters thrive this far out. Huge, blood-red spiders the size of hunting dogs drop from the treetops. In addition to their venomous bite, which contains a fast-acting paralytic, these creatures are clever: they attempt to use their webbing to entangle any trespassers, binding limbs together or to trees. If you're unfortunate to become fully cocooned, you don't have long before this forest will be the last thing you see.



    Those who seem lucky enough not to run afoul of the monsters here are in for a worse fate. The void can play tricks on your senses. As madness sets in and you lose all sense of direction, you may also lose control of your body — what is that steers your hands to turn against your friends? Why does it sound like your own voice whispering?

    Yet the further you go, the more convinced you become that the missing hunters are near by. You're sure you can hear them on the wind, their voices calling out between the trees. Did you just see something out of the corner of your eye? You have to find them. You have to make all this darkness worth it.

    writer's block?
    If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try fighting a monster, hallucinating your worst nightmares, and/or attacking a friend or stranger! Feel free to find the bodies of the missing hunting party-- or hallucinate that you did.


    RELEASE YOUR INNER BEAST

    Something's wrong here.

    The marks worn by all residents of Rubilykskoye aren't just cool body art, as it turns out. The town is full of rumors, whispered in shadows and over candles of a starving creature hiding in the dark corners of your chest. Feed your inner beast, they say, before it finds a way to feed itself.


    Alas, its emergence is inevitable — sooner or later, the horrible things that happen here pile up and make someone repulsed by the idea of human contact. Someone holds themselves back, bites their tongue, or simply does not believe the stories. Today, for one reason or another, that creature is coming out. Someone hasn't been keeping it sated.

    Symptoms escalate over weeks, from monstrous irritability to full-blown body horror transformation, where people physically shed their human forms and evolve into the monsters this place made them. Once a person becomes something more (or less) than human there's only one way to go back — sate the beast.

    someone else transforms
    Early one morning, alarm bells are rung. The people of Rubilykskoye are quick to explain while boarding up their windows and locking their doors: The Szymanskiy brothers have all transformed! Their inner beasts - duchozweirz, the natives call it - take the form of creeping, skeletal horrors. The beasts hunt and to kill, ripping their prey apart, but that's not all they can do.

    Those who are lucky enough to escape one of the Szymanskiy triplets will leave feeling... changed. The psychic residue these monsters give off cause the afflicted to seek out danger with reckless abandon; they will run toward the monster, into fights, and refuse safety when offered. They must be restrained in a secure location to wait for the pheromones to wear off.

    (There are other monsters lurking in every townsperson — feel free to invent your own npc monsters and scenarios!)


    you waited too long
    At first, as you hide yourself from your darker impulses, a subtle itch develops under your skin. An irritability that makes you snap at the person who bumps into you on the stairs because all those fleeting emotions that you've been repressing bubble to the surface. Every dark thought you've had about being here, all the fears of never getting home, of being surrounded by ticking time bombs, the anxiety of wondering who you might hurt or what relationships you might betray by doing what you have to do. The anger. Oh, the anger.

    Maybe you shut yourself in your room or run into the woods to hide away, but there's only so much you can do to deny the itch that grows into hunger like a spark catching and growing to wildfire. Someone comes to check on you. That knock on the door or crunch of leaves in the wood that fills you with dread at what you might do and hope that you will be sated.

    As claws and fangs and scales and spines and fur grow and your body transforms with a sickening crunch of bones and peeling of skin, so do your appetites. If you won't sate them, you'll lose yourself to your beastly impulses sooner or later, mauling friends and taking your fill. Is it better or worse if only your claws get inside of them?
    reckonings: (028)

    [personal profile] reckonings 2024-08-20 12:56 am (UTC)(link)
    Of course not. That would just be too easy, right? [ some part of her still says trap, screams out that this is their way of catching her off-guard, and yet, she's grateful for the gesture, to have found ... someone. even if they didn't come with answers. ( now, it's a matter of getting the fuck out of these woods, finding a place to gather her thoughts, get clean. ) she exhales air from her nose, a noiseless, sardonic chuckle. ]

    Not if I can help it. [ then: ] What about you? [ she cants her head toward the weapon. ] You look like you were ready for a fight. [ the first thing she's understood since her waking up here. ]
    poleaxed: joke; hand (living life when)

    [personal profile] poleaxed 2024-08-20 12:59 am (UTC)(link)
    Well, it would've made you uniquely fucking situated for this goddamn place.

    [She picks the polearm back up from where she left it, leaning against a tree. There are shadows between the branches, and she stares up into them a second too long.] Don't freak out, but there's, like, giant spiders out here? I think they eat people. Small dogs at least.
    destinysgrave: (🌟 shot in the dark so i can dream)

    [personal profile] destinysgrave 2024-08-20 01:01 am (UTC)(link)
    It feels familiar to be kissed that way specifically. It soothes her. She wants it all the time, forever, but that can't be a surprise. What would really be a surprise is if she knew anything about universal flux (fluces?), but mercifully she's as clueless as ever about that and just lets Kafka talk for a bit.

    She chimes in again, though, when Kafka mentions the crew getting on without her. And she hates to um actually this, but... "I didn't have a Stellaron inside me before all this," she says, keeping her voice down in case anybody might overhear. "If something goes wrong here and nobody can stop it like they had to during the Antimatter Legion attack, this whole universal flux is going up in smoke."
    l933012000020002010004: (patience is all you need)

    [personal profile] l933012000020002010004 2024-08-20 01:06 am (UTC)(link)
    "Do I need to remind you," she purrs, one of her hands slipping up under Stelle's shirt, pressing itself flush against the middle of her chest. "That I am the one that put the Stellaron inside you? You think I can't handle myself around a Stellaron or twenty?"

    While it was true that none of the Hunters were very confident in their ideas of what made Stelle's core special, she knew enough- she was willing to take the risk, potential planet cancer and all. Her thumb brushes the skin under Stelle's breast as she hums, tilting her head. "I know I didn't erase your common sense, darling. You hear the word 'Stellaron Hunter' and assume I haven't thought about these things long in advance."
    clawandfang: (limbs lost to a dead wait state)

    [personal profile] clawandfang 2024-08-20 01:17 am (UTC)(link)
    He dances back at the arc of flame that bursts forth from the earth, fur all on end. Khoriya is being a fool, and he knows it. Even upon the battlefield, he would have had to pick off mages from afar through stealth or cunning. Not this... head-on approach, reserved for the bold and foolhardy. Not when the heat emanating from the man is enough to crisp the tips of his ears, and red embers are already beginning to smolder from the wood beneath him.

    "No. By then it will be too late." But it catches at something within him, this man's attempt to warn him off. To protect the innocent. Like a hook twisting in flesh, and Khoriya's snout creases in equal parts sympathy and contempt - at the man, half crumpled to the ground, at himself, for refusing to turn away.

    An unfamiliar face and an unfamiliar scent. Transformation under duress. The answer should be obvious, isn't it? Pain or pleasure, to calm the monster.

    "Strike me if you will." ...Pain it is. But the river still seems their best bet, and for this he will need hands. Khoriya stalks forward as a nauseating blur of shifting fur and flesh seems to overtake him. Within the span of two breaths, he is up upon two feet, but still undeniably wolfish in every way. "But be warned that I will not hold back."
    destinysgrave: (🌟 you and me getting out)

    [personal profile] destinysgrave 2024-08-20 01:19 am (UTC)(link)
    Stelle would like to protest. She has some thoughts she wants to make known about this, about the assumption that she hadn't thought about what having a Stellaron means, about the idea that she's asking questions that lack common senses.

    But Kafka's touching between her tits under her shirt and it makes her want to melt completely in her hand. Thinking is hard when she's being treated like this. And she knows Kafka knows that, too, and she knows it's on purpose, and she really doesn't fucking care.

    "I don't know what it means to hunt them," she says, eventually, once her brain mashes enough neurons together to think again. "I don't know if you're destroying them or collecting them. I don't know anything about what being a Stellaron Hunter really is."
    l933012000020002010004: (smug contactless)

    [personal profile] l933012000020002010004 2024-08-20 01:30 am (UTC)(link)
    Her eyes flicker. "Maybe one day you'll find out for yourself," she says quietly, her hand sliding down Stelle's front slowly, lingering a few inches under her right breast, remembering the scar that she thought may still be there from when she got torn into by an IPC guard's spear during a mission ages ago.

    She could list all her crimes, sure. Every Stellaron that she had a personal hand in destroying, every instance Silver Wolf's hacking providing a back end for a Stellaron to escape containment, every time SAM or Blade had ended up on the brink of death to bring home some trinket that was supposed to cause the planet an indestructible cancer. But was there a point in that? Stelle had the idea that Stellarons were just objects of Destruction, and, well, while it was technically true, that didn't mean they didn't have their uses outside of such matters.

    She licks her lips. "The IPC must have told you some fun anecdotes about us, I'm sure," she says, musing on her highest bounty in the universe.
    noburden: (pic#16759649)

    a place to go

    [personal profile] noburden 2024-08-20 01:36 am (UTC)(link)
    She's lost track of how long she's been walking, picking her way through the forest, careful not to step on anything sharp by way or thorn or teeth. Her hands are free--an improvement--and she wraps her arms around herself, exposed and confused. How did she come to some unfamiliar woods when she was only just in the belly of the Einherjar? A trick of Odin, perhaps, but she sees little point in having her aimlessly wander the wilds when a cell did the job.

    In the distance, she thinks she can hear running water. That's better than wandering in the dark, with no path in sight, alone. It makes her pick up the pace. But the ground nearer to the water is looser and wetter than she expected, softer despite the cold, and when her foot sinks into the mud she goes down with a yell of surprise.

    She takes a moment to simply sit, wrestling with the overwhelming urge to let the misery win.
    rosarianoath: (doesn't it feel like time is running out)

    [personal profile] rosarianoath 2024-08-20 01:50 am (UTC)(link)
    Clive takes a moment to lift himself up on an elbow, and when his balls continue to throb, he thinks he might like to take a moment longer, if he wasn't soundly pinning this perfect stranger. He manages to ease himself up onto his knees, still bracketing her hips. If he didn't feel like someone was trying to yank his intestines out from the inside, he might tell her: See? You were no match.

    Instead, he has a square look at her, frozen, as he is supposed to... do whatever he likes?

    He looks at the referee as if this is going to give him any answers.

    He says, dumbly, mostly to her: "I've only just arrived. What am I meant to do?"
    destinysgrave: (🌟 standing dry in the pouring rain)

    [personal profile] destinysgrave 2024-08-20 01:55 am (UTC)(link)
    There are too many scars on her body that she can't pinpoint. Really, she's just assumed this whole time that they'd been picked up in the middle of beating the Stellaron out of Cocolia, or when Numby had gotten too eager with his cheerleading during the Aetherium Wars finals, or somewhere in the false awakening that Sunday had lulled her into before they literally ran the Express into him 47 times in a row. Maybe it's better that she's making up stories like this.

    "I like the Stonehearts I've met," she says, even though Jade had been more frightening than most in exactly the kind of power she claimed to hold over people. "But I know enough to not put too much faith in what they think of you. I know that whatever Stellaron hunting is, it's for the good of the galaxy." She traces a few lines up Kafka's arm. "Because that's who you are."
    rosarianoath: (surrender love)

    [personal profile] rosarianoath 2024-08-20 01:59 am (UTC)(link)
    "Strike you...?" He's confused, and as the wolf approaches, he finds himself digging his heels in harder as if he could back up any further than he already is, head falling back to watch the creature shift tall. Man-like. Clive's clawed arm bleeds molten orange, the heat rippling on the air around it. He blinks through smoke from the greenery. Frost wolf or man or somewhere in between, the being does not look like it can endure Ifrit's flames.

    His head is spinning. He reaches into his own mind, desperately searching for a response to a persistent question: how can he control the beast again?

    "Must I slay you to sate him?"
    l933012000020002010004: (wine)

    [personal profile] l933012000020002010004 2024-08-20 02:04 am (UTC)(link)
    "You think so highly of me," she hums, her hand falling from Stelle's shirt and squeezing at her hip again. She leers up at her. "That's good. I wouldn't want anything to affect your image of me," she says, echoing something she'd said to Stelle back on the Luofu. "I am still a criminal, however, and the IPC hates yucky little thieves like me. Ironic, isn't it?"

    She knew much, much more about the IPC's crimes than Stelle ever did, choosing to focus their studies on basic knowledge and common sense rather than 'the state of the universe,' but Kafka was pretty sure her crimes didn't hold even a birthday candle to the size of the IPC's universal crimes.

    She just had the misfortune to not be able to commit genocide on an entire planet to get rid of the evidence.
    poleaxed: tired; emb (in hell.)

    [personal profile] poleaxed 2024-08-20 02:05 am (UTC)(link)
    Joan is scrambling to sit up, wondering if bolting is too big a sign of weakness. All of this feels tentative, delicate. She was winning, she was sure she was winning, but she didn't know the rules were for pussies. It's not like this is boxing. Wrestling doesn't have real rules, or Hulk Hogan wouldn't have a job.

    "Everything here is a sex thing," she says, her heart rabbiting in her chest. "They want you to do whatever you want."
    rosarianoath: (that no love can spare)

    [personal profile] rosarianoath 2024-08-20 02:11 am (UTC)(link)
    The shout calls his attention. It isn't hard to: he's alert to everything, moving through the trees with the sense that danger could lurk within any copse or behind any rock. He isn't afraid, not exactly –– there are few limits to the magic he could call upon to defend himself –– but it all carries with it a sense of foreboding.

    Whatever brought him here is powerful, too.

    He moves towards the sound, and when it gets muddy, he firms the ground where he steps, the earth coming together under his feet. He spots her from behind: Jill, he knows, immediately. He'd always know. But Jill is an ocean away.

    Clive says: "What trick is this?"
    Edited (fuck u shiva) 2024-08-20 02:16 (UTC)
    destinysgrave: (🌟 etched into the inside of my skin)

    [personal profile] destinysgrave 2024-08-20 02:12 am (UTC)(link)
    "And that's why you and I have each other, and they have to risk their lives to ask each other out on dates."

    Now, there is no way Stelle should know that stuff. She's really just making jokes and assumptions in equal measure, and she's doing it because she thinks (or hopes) that it'll get a laugh out of Kafka. She'd do anything to hear this woman's bell note of a voice, which is not the order those things usually go in.

    "I wish you'd told me about Firefly in advance, though," she teases. "That could have saved us all a little bit of confusion. She really did amazing in Penacony."
    l933012000020002010004: (so true)

    [personal profile] l933012000020002010004 2024-08-20 02:19 am (UTC)(link)
    She does laugh lightly at that, her fingers trailing shapes into the skin of Stelle's hips once more, closing her eyes as she smiles. "I told you when you called me at the park, I was busy. And it wasn't my decision, you know; Firefly is very serious about keeping her identities separate. It all worked out in the end, didn't it?" she asks, and even if she didn't have the full details of what happened, she got the jist of it from Silver Wolf and Firefly's various texts during the events.

    Kafka smiles again, warm and surprisingly fond. "She is an amazing girl, isn't she?" she hums, and she's lamenting the fact that she never got to open the coat that she'd bought for her from Penacony before she was whisked away to this place, with Stelle.
    rosarianoath: (low red blossoms)

    [personal profile] rosarianoath 2024-08-20 02:19 am (UTC)(link)
    He eases off her, lifting a knee just enough to let her scoot out. She's an arrogant creature, he knows, and a mean one at that, but he can see her practically vibrating.

    He's trying to catch up, even as his balls continue to throb. He's seen people fucking, hammering away at each other in alleyways and in shockingly unsheltered places, and certainly heard them behind the thin walls of the boarding house. But where else do people secret away to in the warm months, without the privacy afforded only to nobles?

    And is he to...

    "What? Rape you?"

    There's tension on his voice.
    noburden: (pic#16759761)

    [personal profile] noburden 2024-08-20 02:25 am (UTC)(link)
    Jill abruptly turns, startled, and very aware she's weaponless. She does not wish to resort to magic, still exhausted from her quick loss to Barnabas. A loss that came as she hoped to give Clive an opportunity to escape. And here he is, whole. Jill stares at him with bright, wide eyes.

    "Clive?" Free of blood... and all clothing, just as she is. She doesn't hurriedly cover herself, but she does slowly reach a hand to her shoulder, to at least have her arm covering her breasts. This very well could be a trick, as she first suspected. Still, she can't help but hope. "I don't understand. Where are we? How are we here?"
    poleaxed: joke; gent; sad (rock and roll)

    [personal profile] poleaxed 2024-08-20 02:28 am (UTC)(link)
    She wonders if Lyubov is in the crowd, or her stalker. She wonders if this is how Mavis felt. She wonders a lot of things, looking in this guy's eyes, and sees absolutely nothing looking back but confusion. She's not in the mood to trust.

    "I'd prefer it if you fucking didn't," she says, harsh but tentative, "if that matters."
    destinysgrave: (🌟 a timed ignition to spark a brawl)

    [personal profile] destinysgrave 2024-08-20 02:34 am (UTC)(link)
    Stelle feels very, very nice the whole time this conversation is happening. She feels like there's a lot of different emotions competing for dominance and she doesn't really want to let one win, just because she enjoys the feeling of all of them at once too much.

    "You surround yourself with people you resemble," she says like it's a deep, sage saying, and she nods definitively to cap it off. And after a moment, one corner of her mouth turns up. "Is that a wise enough thing to say? I've been trying to steal a little bit from Dan Heng."
    l933012000020002010004: (demure contactless)

    [personal profile] l933012000020002010004 2024-08-20 02:38 am (UTC)(link)
    Her brow quirks at Stelle's initial statement, a little surprised that she had something as reassuring as that lined up in her repertoire- and then she laughs, because yes, that sounds right. "I don't think you need to steal anything. You're a Trailblazer, not a Hunter- I like hearing what you have to say," she says, pinching Stelle's sides before she moves her hands, running them over Stelle's abdomen. "I didn't sign up to hear Dan Heng's words of wisdom."
    rosarianoath: (we throw our lives to the wind)

    [personal profile] rosarianoath 2024-08-20 02:43 am (UTC)(link)
    "It is no custom of mine," he declares, and that's when he puts space between them entirely. It's an awkward little crawl out of her personal space, and he cannot hide a wince as he gets himself to his feet. Ow. He supposes he should be glad for getting nailed in the balls, though. Now would be an awful time to have an erection, even if one born from friction alone.

    "And it would be a great deal foolish to decline this very fight in the name of not laying a hand on a woman, just to take you as..."

    What the fuck do you even call it? With disgust:

    "Conquest."
    destinysgrave: (🌟 another sweat to be broke)

    [personal profile] destinysgrave 2024-08-20 02:46 am (UTC)(link)
    And that just sends Stelle down a rabbit hole of bad thoughts that she thinks she'd be stupid not to indulge a little. She was just inside Kafka, for Aha's sake; she'd be crazy to pretend like she has shame anymore.

    "Then let me tell you what I have to say instead." She mirrors the way she'd just been touched, letting her hands fall naturally on Kafka's hips. "You have the hottest special ability I've ever heard of and I've passed out imagining you using it on me for sex."
    rosarianoath: (Default)

    [personal profile] rosarianoath 2024-08-20 02:47 am (UTC)(link)
    Whole, and healed. The slash Barnabas left across his chest is a white welt, a distant thing despite the fresh memories. Clive stands where he is, towering over her, hesitant but hopeful.

    And, as she moves to cover herself, very aware of his own nakedness. If it's really her, this is inappropriate. He's not quite convinced it is.

    "I do not know," he says. He isn't sure where to look, especially not to inspect her for injury, so he settles his haze on her face and, carefully, reaches for her hand to help her up. "What is the last thing you remember?"
    poleaxed: static ; angry ; shock (that we're no dick and jane)

    [personal profile] poleaxed 2024-08-20 02:55 am (UTC)(link)
    Slowly, tentatively, she gets back up. In her mind's eye, she can just see the crowd descending like they did her second week here, seizing upon her and forcing her down. And then she stops thinking about that, because she'd rather not. She's gotten real good at folding her mind up like Gabe's origami, letting the ugly parts become distant seams. It's safer, smarter.

    "Yeah, you're a real gentleman." She runs her hand through her hair, and wrings oil out of it. "People are fucking animals, here."