Anyway as a broad blanket just in case since this IS a Termina mini-CYOA, but includes general cw for various trauma, self-harm, suicide and/or suicidal ideation, gore, death, etc. not that this is a promise that these things will appear but it's just to generally cover my ass for the canon, I cannot predict what will come up.
~✦~
Camille will find herself enthralled in a memory. It overlays far too perfectly with everything that's been going on in scawwy, because I am a clown who chose my Silent Hill-inspired canon and changed my plurk theme to Silent Hill half a year before scawwy premise came out, and everything happening here is just a repeat of Daan's whole-ass canon.
ANYWAY. She's trudging along the city of Prehevil, exhausted after a long three days that felt much more like weeks, months. Her entire body is sore and her head pounds, sanity low from all the horrors you've seen and the ever-present voice in the back of your head demanding that you kill, participate in the Festival, become the champion. You stubbornly have ignored it thus far though, and you'll continue to ignore it, gods-be-damned. The last thing you want is for this place to win you over. It's the last 'fuck you' you can give to that feathered freak at the top of Prehevil's Moon Tower, or you'll fucking die trying.
Behind you follow three people.
A one-armed girl with black hair, picking grimly at the bandages there. You recall a cackling madman in a white mask had chopped it off with a machete like her arm was mere paper, not flesh and bone. Fortunately you had cloth fragments to stem the bleeding, but guilt strikes you when you see it and the blood and grime on Asa's face. If only you had warned her just a moment sooner when you saw the lid of the coffin shift.
A boy with ginger hair, though his hair is so thick with grime that in the dim atmosphere, you wouldn't have been blamed for thinking he may have been a brunette instead. Bandages cover his face and over the eye there. A strange half-cocooned townsman with a mallet had all but hurled a handful of broken glass right into his face, shredding the flesh. If you got out of here fast enough, got him to a hospital quickly enough, then perhaps Lavi will be able to salvage his vision, but you're pretty certain in the deep of your gut that he won't get that eye back.
And last in the line is a lanky pale man, whose perfect coiffed hair when you first met him is now nigh-unrecognisable with the blood matting it and weighing it down. Even he who learned how to revel in violence out of necessity due to the cruelty of the Great War has his limits, a permanent frown on his features and a decided exhaustion in his blood-red eyes. Astarion's sleeves are alarmingly red up to the elbows, a testament to how many people you've had to cut down just to survive here.
They're all you have left now. You arrived to this city on a train with a handful more people, but... things happened. You watched as the odd little shadowed girl's bones twisted right in front of you, her terrifying scream of pain as she bent and broke under the moon's influence into a horrifying monster, the way Laudna had to step in and swiftly put her down. The beautiful young singer with the halo, gutted and crucified in the midst of the old town, her once-bright eyes dulled as villagers danced around her entrails during the onset of night, bile lining the crest of your every tooth watching this. That quiet foreigner with the eyepatch, unassuming when you all met and spoke on the grass patch outside of the train -- found in the apartments overgrown with white mould, one empty bottle of vodka and a pool of his own blood around him, scalpel in pallid hand and clean cut to the jugular like he knew exactly where to do it.
Day by day you lost folks, and Per'kele was more than happy to remind you who had died thus far whenever you managed to get even a wink in of sleep. You know what to do, so get to it, he'd always say. Bastard. Still, you had little direction other than the place he suggested: Prehevil's Moon Tower. It was an arduous journey getting here, finding the three effigies in strange dimensions, fighting through the horrors, getting through the awful church basement and through the back-alleys... but you're finally here.
You look upon the square before the tower's doors, multiple townspeople's gutted bodies and heads on spikes, a disgusting monument to sacrifice. The sights would make an incredible headline, a photograph of the century, an exposé scoop about the horrors of this backwaters capital that would make every goddamn journalist from here to the next millennium jealous. ]
...Ew...
But this is it, right...? We're finally at the tower...
...Everything we've seen so far has been pretty bad, but somehow, this still takes the cake.
Oh, how wonderful. I'd just been thinking we'd been getting too used to the smell of rotting innards.
Well? We're not here just to ogle all of this, are we dear?
Camille moves forward more from inertia than willpower these days. She feels hunger most strongly. Left to fish in barrels, cupboards, shelves of emptied house for whatever scraps got left behind. She picked a maggot out of a meat pie this morning. Carved around the spot, ate the safe selection. Stomach gurgled. Downed the rest. She's managing well. No poisoning this time.
She focuses on the stone weight of the bad pie in her gullet, because it's the most mundane of their miseries. A comfort, even. At least she's full now. She almost catches Lavi's eye and stops herself. The bandages still daunt her. Asa and her stump give her fretful sweats. Astarion's footfall is flagging, but at least he's in one piece. Better than she can say for either kid.
By the time they get to the tower Camille's thought she'd gone noseblind to the stench of open gore under the heat of day. Turns out she isn't. Thanks, Astarion, for giving her the prompt.
She darts off quick, to an open crate. Leans over and wretches up her hard-won meat pie, in two and a half rushes of bile from her gut. She turns back around and yearns for a tall glass of cool water. Shit out of luck, all around.]
...I don't know that we have any choice but to go in. [A wretched thought. She eyes the corpses among the base and feels, impossibly, a new prickle of fear. Her nerves are shot to hell, it's a wonder that she's kept moving in any direction, much less forward.] I'll go first. I guess it doesn't matter for the article.
[A lie. One covering the absurdity of running back to see Frank Curry, waving papers in hand. "I've got it! Front page scoop!"
She doesn't know if she can do it after all. Camille steps in, dizzied. She can feel her pulse pounding in her neck.]
[ Just another thing to add to the disgust and vileness of the city of Prehevil. You'd always known the town had a reputation for being backwater, but this was certainly more than you bargained for. More than any of you bargained for, even the townsfolk themselves.
Asa watches Camille empty out her guts with a mixture of disgust but pity, all sympathy of course. If her canon wasn't Chainsaw Man, she's sure she'd be the same. Lavi is grimly looking behind you all, keeping watch for any stray bobbies still patrolling the streets upholding some long-shattered definition of justice, or worse yet, bellends watching from the rooftops, ready to pounce with sharp iron spears in hand. Astarion, meanwhile, observes a corpse on a pike with a mixture of disdain but he dares to be impressed at the cruelty of it all. ]
It better not be locked, after everything we went through...
...
I know we don't have any other ideas, but touching that feels like... a bad idea...
[ That's the last comment you hear as you approach the grand gates. If nothing else, you understand here in this moment why this tower was revered in ancient times. The carvings date back hundreds if not thousands of years and something about the structure commands authority and presence. You feel grand eyes down upon you, an overwhelming pressure, like a coldly scorching spotlight.
And yet, at the same time, you feel the animus building in your throat, the apprehension, an exhilaration struggling to break free from underneath. The doors call to you, welcome you, invite you to demand entry. You feel sick and on the verge of a breakthrough in equal measure.
You place your hand on the stone and you feel a rush, euphoria. Your heart thuds so loud in your chest you fear it may burst. You made it. You're at the finish line.
Just one problem.
There can only be one champion of Termina.
Your vision blurs and you feel a pounding in your chest. The air grows thicker than ever. Asa, Lavi, and Astarion all clutch their heads, fall to one knee, curl in on themselves. ]
U-uh... no, I...
This isn't part of the deal...!
...Shit. No, I can't...
Did my time run out...?
Cam, you gotta... you gotta run...!
What? How did you -- ...?!
No, I can't go back, I'd only just --
[ Their bodies break. The moonlight burns their skin, scorching it, melting them and twisting them, inviting ecdysis into new forms. All of them but you. ]
[The other names hit the choke on her throat and wither. Camille freezes.
Only one.
Who gets to choose? Does it have to be this way?
If she'd waited a moment longer, asked them to think for a minute...
Camille steps back. Adrenaline stiffens her posture, the unheeded exhiliration snaking through her veins to smother the fear. No.
Except she can't escape it. Watching them bend under unseen hands, their flesh burgeon. Warp. They're just kids, she thinks, futile. Pleading. He's been through so much already. ]
Please, no, no... [Useless whimpering. Hands in her hair, bargaining with gods who couldn't care less.] Not them, not them, please.
[She has seconds. If that. She knows they won't be themselves much longer. Weapons. Is she armed?
Three. All three. Friends, can't do it like this. Not to them.
She wrenches at the doors. Open, for the love of god. Don't make her do this.]
[ It's too late. No matter how you plead, the cold moon has no intention of listening -- wordless and far beyond your reach, despite how ominously and too-closely He seems to loom overhead. ]
This -- isn't -- help -- Yoru --
[ Asa screams, voice rough. Scars lacerate her entire body, ripping her open from unseen seams. Feathers and wings burst out, wet with blood, cracking out of her shell, but so does something else -- speartips of red-stained ivory, guts twisted into protruding claws, every knob of her vertebrae bursting through the back of her shirt into a series of blades ready to tear. A walking vessel of destruction, valkyrie ready to herald the coming of blood. Her eyes line with bright rings, barely visible as her very flesh ignites, the Devil of War as she should have been. Chainsaw Man can't save her now. The Asura rips out the protruding bone from what was once her stump of an arm, procuring a makeshift dagger and begins to march. ]
C-come on, Gramps... I didn't forget what we are, promise...
I just... I wanted just a little bit more time, is... I...
[ Lavi's ribcage cracks and snaps as he keels over, breath heavy and wheezing as he tries to hold on. He gives you one last regretful look as he loses himself. Eyes split open all across his body, but none look towards you -- instead, they're all too occupied with the pens of bone glued to each hand that bursts out of his body, forcing the curve of every rib closed over his beating and exposed heart. Around it, on pale flesh like parchment, they begin to write chronicles, records of the proceedings in the rotten city. They carve directly into his own flesh as if his body were nothing but a stone tablet. Only when the fervish writing runs dry do the eyes finally look towards you, Camille -- the Scribe spots a fresh inkpot of red. ]
I don't want to go back.
[ That's all Astarion manages out before his body changes too. Every joint breaks in a moment, twisting him cruelly as he grunts underwhelmingly despite agonising pain, deep cuts in ritual patterns across every inch of visible skin and more under cloth. His entire body becomes stained red, but the crimson concentrates itself in certain places. His wrists. His ankles. His neck. Cuffs and chains of blood as his body exsanguinates itself, turns himself into a dry corpse unfit for the light of day. The chains yank at him as they do an unwilling animal, forcing his dessicated body to bare bloodied fangs. The Thrall is ready to lash out, nothing but fear and ferality left in it.
The door doesn't budge. Only one champion, snickers a voice, and a helpful wave of bloodlust, panic, the onslaught of survival instinct to give you that helpful push. You have a gun, a knife, a small thing's amulet that blesses your reaction time and speed.
You didn't want to kill them... well, they're not themselves anymore, are they? Death would be a mercy, is the thought that floods your head. Surely you wouldn't leave them to suffer like this? It's two birds with one stone. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
W7, thursday
Anyway as a broad blanket just in case since this IS a Termina mini-CYOA, but includes general cw for various trauma, self-harm, suicide and/or suicidal ideation, gore, death, etc. not that this is a promise that these things will appear but it's just to generally cover my ass for the canon, I cannot predict what will come up.
~✦~
Camille will find herself enthralled in a memory. It overlays far too perfectly with everything that's been going on in scawwy, because I am a clown who chose my Silent Hill-inspired canon and changed my plurk theme to Silent Hill half a year before scawwy premise came out, and everything happening here is just a repeat of Daan's whole-ass canon.
ANYWAY. She's trudging along the city of Prehevil, exhausted after a long three days that felt much more like weeks, months. Her entire body is sore and her head pounds, sanity low from all the horrors you've seen and the ever-present voice in the back of your head demanding that you kill, participate in the Festival, become the champion. You stubbornly have ignored it thus far though, and you'll continue to ignore it, gods-be-damned. The last thing you want is for this place to win you over. It's the last 'fuck you' you can give to that feathered freak at the top of Prehevil's Moon Tower, or you'll fucking die trying.
Behind you follow three people.
A one-armed girl with black hair, picking grimly at the bandages there. You recall a cackling madman in a white mask had chopped it off with a machete like her arm was mere paper, not flesh and bone. Fortunately you had cloth fragments to stem the bleeding, but guilt strikes you when you see it and the blood and grime on Asa's face. If only you had warned her just a moment sooner when you saw the lid of the coffin shift.
A boy with ginger hair, though his hair is so thick with grime that in the dim atmosphere, you wouldn't have been blamed for thinking he may have been a brunette instead. Bandages cover his face and over the eye there. A strange half-cocooned townsman with a mallet had all but hurled a handful of broken glass right into his face, shredding the flesh. If you got out of here fast enough, got him to a hospital quickly enough, then perhaps Lavi will be able to salvage his vision, but you're pretty certain in the deep of your gut that he won't get that eye back.
And last in the line is a lanky pale man, whose perfect coiffed hair when you first met him is now nigh-unrecognisable with the blood matting it and weighing it down. Even he who learned how to revel in violence out of necessity due to the cruelty of the Great War has his limits, a permanent frown on his features and a decided exhaustion in his blood-red eyes. Astarion's sleeves are alarmingly red up to the elbows, a testament to how many people you've had to cut down just to survive here.
They're all you have left now. You arrived to this city on a train with a handful more people, but... things happened. You watched as the odd little shadowed girl's bones twisted right in front of you, her terrifying scream of pain as she bent and broke under the moon's influence into a horrifying monster, the way Laudna had to step in and swiftly put her down. The beautiful young singer with the halo, gutted and crucified in the midst of the old town, her once-bright eyes dulled as villagers danced around her entrails during the onset of night, bile lining the crest of your every tooth watching this. That quiet foreigner with the eyepatch, unassuming when you all met and spoke on the grass patch outside of the train -- found in the apartments overgrown with white mould, one empty bottle of vodka and a pool of his own blood around him, scalpel in pallid hand and clean cut to the jugular like he knew exactly where to do it.
Day by day you lost folks, and Per'kele was more than happy to remind you who had died thus far whenever you managed to get even a wink in of sleep. You know what to do, so get to it, he'd always say. Bastard. Still, you had little direction other than the place he suggested: Prehevil's Moon Tower. It was an arduous journey getting here, finding the three effigies in strange dimensions, fighting through the horrors, getting through the awful church basement and through the back-alleys... but you're finally here.
You look upon the square before the tower's doors, multiple townspeople's gutted bodies and heads on spikes, a disgusting monument to sacrifice. The sights would make an incredible headline, a photograph of the century, an exposé scoop about the horrors of this backwaters capital that would make every goddamn journalist from here to the next millennium jealous. ]
But this is it, right...? We're finally at the tower...
Well? We're not here just to ogle all of this, are we dear?
no subject
Camille moves forward more from inertia than willpower these days. She feels hunger most strongly. Left to fish in barrels, cupboards, shelves of emptied house for whatever scraps got left behind. She picked a maggot out of a meat pie this morning. Carved around the spot, ate the safe selection. Stomach gurgled. Downed the rest. She's managing well. No poisoning this time.
She focuses on the stone weight of the bad pie in her gullet, because it's the most mundane of their miseries. A comfort, even. At least she's full now. She almost catches Lavi's eye and stops herself. The bandages still daunt her. Asa and her stump give her fretful sweats. Astarion's footfall is flagging, but at least he's in one piece. Better than she can say for either kid.
By the time they get to the tower Camille's thought she'd gone noseblind to the stench of open gore under the heat of day. Turns out she isn't. Thanks, Astarion, for giving her the prompt.
She darts off quick, to an open crate. Leans over and wretches up her hard-won meat pie, in two and a half rushes of bile from her gut. She turns back around and yearns for a tall glass of cool water. Shit out of luck, all around.]
...I don't know that we have any choice but to go in. [A wretched thought. She eyes the corpses among the base and feels, impossibly, a new prickle of fear. Her nerves are shot to hell, it's a wonder that she's kept moving in any direction, much less forward.] I'll go first. I guess it doesn't matter for the article.
[A lie. One covering the absurdity of running back to see Frank Curry, waving papers in hand. "I've got it! Front page scoop!"
She doesn't know if she can do it after all. Camille steps in, dizzied. She can feel her pulse pounding in her neck.]
no subject
Asa watches Camille empty out her guts with a mixture of disgust but pity, all sympathy of course. If her canon wasn't Chainsaw Man, she's sure she'd be the same. Lavi is grimly looking behind you all, keeping watch for any stray bobbies still patrolling the streets upholding some long-shattered definition of justice, or worse yet, bellends watching from the rooftops, ready to pounce with sharp iron spears in hand. Astarion, meanwhile, observes a corpse on a pike with a mixture of disdain but he dares to be impressed at the cruelty of it all. ]
...
I know we don't have any other ideas, but touching that feels like... a bad idea...
[ That's the last comment you hear as you approach the grand gates. If nothing else, you understand here in this moment why this tower was revered in ancient times. The carvings date back hundreds if not thousands of years and something about the structure commands authority and presence. You feel grand eyes down upon you, an overwhelming pressure, like a coldly scorching spotlight.
And yet, at the same time, you feel the animus building in your throat, the apprehension, an exhilaration struggling to break free from underneath. The doors call to you, welcome you, invite you to demand entry. You feel sick and on the verge of a breakthrough in equal measure.
You place your hand on the stone and you feel a rush, euphoria. Your heart thuds so loud in your chest you fear it may burst. You made it. You're at the finish line.
Just one problem.
There can only be one champion of Termina.
Your vision blurs and you feel a pounding in your chest. The air grows thicker than ever. Asa, Lavi, and Astarion all clutch their heads, fall to one knee, curl in on themselves. ]
This isn't part of the deal...!
Did my time run out...?
Cam, you gotta... you gotta run...!
No, I can't go back, I'd only just --
[ Their bodies break. The moonlight burns their skin, scorching it, melting them and twisting them, inviting ecdysis into new forms. All of them but you. ]
no subject
[The other names hit the choke on her throat and wither. Camille freezes.
Only one.
Who gets to choose? Does it have to be this way?
If she'd waited a moment longer, asked them to think for a minute...
Camille steps back. Adrenaline stiffens her posture, the unheeded exhiliration snaking through her veins to smother the fear. No.
Except she can't escape it. Watching them bend under unseen hands, their flesh burgeon. Warp. They're just kids, she thinks, futile. Pleading. He's been through so much already. ]
Please, no, no... [Useless whimpering. Hands in her hair, bargaining with gods who couldn't care less.] Not them, not them, please.
[She has seconds. If that. She knows they won't be themselves much longer. Weapons. Is she armed?
Three. All three. Friends, can't do it like this. Not to them.
She wrenches at the doors. Open, for the love of god. Don't make her do this.]
no subject
Yoru --
[ Asa screams, voice rough. Scars lacerate her entire body, ripping her open from unseen seams. Feathers and wings burst out, wet with blood, cracking out of her shell, but so does something else -- speartips of red-stained ivory, guts twisted into protruding claws, every knob of her vertebrae bursting through the back of her shirt into a series of blades ready to tear. A walking vessel of destruction, valkyrie ready to herald the coming of blood. Her eyes line with bright rings, barely visible as her very flesh ignites, the Devil of War as she should have been. Chainsaw Man can't save her now. The Asura rips out the protruding bone from what was once her stump of an arm, procuring a makeshift dagger and begins to march. ]
I just... I wanted just a little bit more time, is... I...
[ Lavi's ribcage cracks and snaps as he keels over, breath heavy and wheezing as he tries to hold on. He gives you one last regretful look as he loses himself. Eyes split open all across his body, but none look towards you -- instead, they're all too occupied with the pens of bone glued to each hand that bursts out of his body, forcing the curve of every rib closed over his beating and exposed heart. Around it, on pale flesh like parchment, they begin to write chronicles, records of the proceedings in the rotten city. They carve directly into his own flesh as if his body were nothing but a stone tablet. Only when the fervish writing runs dry do the eyes finally look towards you, Camille -- the Scribe spots a fresh inkpot of red. ]
[ That's all Astarion manages out before his body changes too. Every joint breaks in a moment, twisting him cruelly as he grunts underwhelmingly despite agonising pain, deep cuts in ritual patterns across every inch of visible skin and more under cloth. His entire body becomes stained red, but the crimson concentrates itself in certain places. His wrists. His ankles. His neck. Cuffs and chains of blood as his body exsanguinates itself, turns himself into a dry corpse unfit for the light of day. The chains yank at him as they do an unwilling animal, forcing his dessicated body to bare bloodied fangs. The Thrall is ready to lash out, nothing but fear and ferality left in it.
The door doesn't budge. Only one champion, snickers a voice, and a helpful wave of bloodlust, panic, the onslaught of survival instinct to give you that helpful push. You have a gun, a knife, a small thing's amulet that blesses your reaction time and speed.
You didn't want to kill them... well, they're not themselves anymore, are they? Death would be a mercy, is the thought that floods your head. Surely you wouldn't leave them to suffer like this? It's two birds with one stone. ]