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pareidoliaooc2025-02-08 06:42 pm
february 2025 | event i
The month looms ahead...
Welcome to the first Pareidolia event! Characters are just beginning to settle in, but there's no break to be had here. The nights are dark, the wind is cold, and the food sucks. Hope everyone who found themselves here is good at entertaining themselves.
Post any happenings on the appropriate header below. Letting everyone know what your character is doing gets you bonus points!
There will be no IC event post. Please post prompt logs in pareidolialogs with your top levels. Use the following form to post your plotting comment below. Fill out as much or as little of it as you like.
In the first few mornings of your time here, long before you feel settled in the crumbling cabin unlocked by your key, you find your dwelling has been defaced. You may notice it as the door thuds shut behind you. You may not notice it until you return, hours later, ready to collapse into your creaking mattress late into the night:
Across the door, right at your eye level, are words scrawled in dripping, bloody streaks. These words aren’t just crude insults: they are an accusation of specific, damning missteps in your life. It could be a single word stabbing at the heart of your guilt; a threat that someone knows a horrific sin you believed long buried; anything that sets your heart racing and your stomach curdling in mistrust.
Whatever it says, the words are true.
The blood never dries, and it clings fiercely to the wood grain, fighting against any attempts to remove it. Scrubbing it away takes effort, and the longer you struggle, the heavier the air in your lungs feels, the more grey mist at the ground seems to swirl and thicken around your shoes.
And when the words are finally gone, your relief lasts only as long as your next breath. The bloody message blooms from the cracks in the doors anew, seeping through the wood, replacing what you painstakingly removed with even more gut-wrenching detail.
☠ Removing the words causes them to reappear, now with additional detail. The harder you try to cover it up, the more truth comes out.
If you climb the rocky path on the edge of the mountain, just past the cottages nestled there, you come to the sanctuary. It looms above you, the cracked doors inviting you inside.
The air hums faintly as you step inside. Dozens of silhouettes flicker into view, as if crossing the threshold has pulled a veil from your eyes. Most are unfamiliar, but if you look long enough, you will find a person or pair of people you know. They may sit or kneel among the pews or stand in pairs against the wall, their faces downcast or delighted or afraid. Their voices are inaudible, words caught on the edges of the uneasy breeze passing through the sanctuary - until you come close enough to listen.
Those you recognize are discussing you: your disappearance, your life. Their voices align with your memory of them: they are kind and sorrowful and miss you; they are cold and scornful and hope you never return; they are bitterly indifferent; they are lovingly desperate, praying to their god for your safe return. To them, you may have disappeared yesterday. You may have disappeared years ago. You may be presumed dead.
If you reach for them, your hands pass through a chilly mist that warps from the disturbance of your hand, and resettles when left alone. The figures cannot be interacted with. They do not know you are there. Anyone who enters the sanctuary with you, however, can see and hear them.
The silhouette of a girl lies on the altar, her dark curls unbound and splayed around her head like a pillow. Her wrists hang limply over the edges of the altar. She stares at the ceiling, each blink slow. Her eyes never quite open all the way, never close to release her to sleep.
☠ They cannot be interacted with.
☠ If other characters are with you in the sanctuary, they can see the same figures you do.
Wherever you go this month, your reflections are wrong.
Every pane of cracked and dirty glass, every still puddle of water, every polished surface has become a gateway to the uncanny. Your reflection lingers even after you've moved on, its movements out of sync with yours. Your image stares back at you with eyes far too pale and too wide. From the corner of your eye, you may see its lips move, as if it were trying to tell you something: a warning, a message, a threat. No matter how hard it tries, or how hard you listen, there is no sound. Your reflection’s words elude you, like crows scattering at your approach.
No matter which reflections you look at – other people’s, your own – you feel an uneasy certainty that these reflections wish you ill. They watch you pass without sympathy, their faces exuding resentment or judgment or worse. If you touch any of them, no matter what surface they appear on, your body rebels on contact. You feel dizzy, unsteady, and weakened, filled with a deep, pervasive wrongness that lingers even after you pull back. Dark grease slicks your hands, thick and rancid, and you can see that you have left streaks of it behind. It blurs and obscures your reflection, spreading out from the point you touched.
☠ Touching any reflections makes you feel ill and leaves your hands and the mirror greasy.
☠ Your reflection, and any others, seem to harbor negative emotions towards you.
QUESTIONS
Re: QUESTIONS
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Re: QUESTIONS
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The caveat is that the door must remain identifiable as belonging to the intended character. Kaz can write the name on the door (which will work), or a wooden placard will appear to label it.
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FEBRUARY HAPPENINGS
Everyone is stuck together on a tiny mountain town, so everyone knows everything... If something happened publicly, or if your character is being weird enough someone could notice, let everyone know about it here.
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What: klonoa is vandalizing the podium of the fucked up memory book so that, in scratched-in lettering, it says "BAD," "DONT READ," "NOT NICE," "BAD DREAMS," and multiple X-marks and frowny faces.
Where: the library
When: start of the month
Re: FEBRUARY HAPPENINGS
What: Kaz takes anything that looks even remotely valuable from common areas to put in his cabin. Extra blankets, ornate books, an extra chair from the common room, a deck of cards. If it's useful or valuable and left unattended he'll take it as long as he has space for it. He might not often be seen taking things, but they sure do go missing.
Where: Everywhere
When: All month
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What: Rownan, in response to Kaz obviously trying to poison someone, labeled some harmless herbs bundles as nightshade and wolfsbane and vaguely 'hid' them in a tucked away cabinet in the herbalary.
Where: Herbalary
When: Early February
Klonoa | Klonoa: Phantasy Reverie Series
Pronouns: he/him
Contact: generaltrash7986 on discord
Character Name: klonoa
CR Preferences: none. give me your all
Permissions: come closer
General Plans: klonoa's going to be exploring! particularly, he's fixated on exploring the ravine that separates the library.
Event Plans: klonoa's gonna have actually a pretty sweet and touching time in the sanctuary. he will also have a door that just says MURDERER.
Anything Else: everyone must listen to this
Ademnet | OC
Pronouns: she/her
Contact: tzviaariella on discord or plurk
Character Name: Ademnet
CR Preferences: None. Hit him with anything.
Permissions: Here, along with a recounting of his backstory to date
General Plans: Ademnet would like to get out of here, please and thank you. He will be exploring the boundaries, trying to find a way back to where he came from.
Event Plans: He will wage a valiant, losing battle with the bloody message on his door outing him as a thief. Once scrubbing it clean doesn't work, he will try covering it up. Once that fails, his next thought will be whether painting over it with more blood does anything--which will involve hunting the crows. (He will probably not succeed at this.)
Odds that he punches a mirror this month: around 100%.
The people he sees in the sanctuary will be one of his younger siblings reassuring the other that he's going to be okay. If you want to catch him in a slightly more vulnerable mood, he'll be sitting there for a while, just to hear their voices.
Anything Else: Emotionally, he is here.
Kaz | Six of Crows
Pronouns: she/her, they/them
Contact: discord - memegod420
Character Name: Kaz Brekker
CR Preferences: no preferences :) I will take whatever :)
Permissions: here :)
General Plans: is also trying to get out of here! He spends a bit of time in the library despite being more street smart than book smart. Mostly he’s hoping to talk to people, investigate, and find out who’s behind this. He believes someone has to know something.
Event Plans: There’s very very many horrible deeds written on his door, possibly an excessive amount. Murder, theft, violence against children, arson, turf wars, heists, blackmail, lies, etc. etc. He’s not bothering to wash any of them off and probably seems pleased they’re there. He’ll overhear his friends discussing his disappearance in the sanctuary, they’re worried but not looking for him and it’s his own fault for never being forthright about his whereabouts. The reflections make him more paranoid and distrustful but what else is new?
Anything Else: He wants to go home :(
Xiao Xingchen | The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation
Pronouns: they/them
Contact: mangobot on discord/plurk
Character Name: Xiao Xingchen
CR Preferences: down to clown
Permissions: here.
General Plans: Actually, he is chilling. Like he is also actively helping Klonoa ask other people if they were wishing for something before they got dragged in here, but otherwise he's living his life. He is looking for his sword though, because this place puts him on edge whenever he thinks he's starting to get comfortable. He comes to town now and then to complete the mental map of it in his head.
Event Plans: He can't see the writing on his door. But he can sell the blood, and he's felt it while opening his door, so he knows it's there. He just doesn't know there are words. He has tried to clean it once, but it came back. It says "It's all your fault" and beneath that goes "You should have stayed where you were."
Likewise, he's also unable to see the reflections, but can feel them watch him, so he tries to avoid spending time in places where that feeling is strong. Funnily enough, this does mean that he tried to spend time in the sanctuary only to hear Song Lan and Baoshan Sanren and random others who have passed through his life telling him to never show his face there again, so he's like. Mostly foraging and meditating.
Anything Else: A stroll in the woods might mean that you find him practicing like this, but with a branch or something similar instead of a sword.