Log:Jedi: A Vision of Horror
A Vision of Horror
OOC Date: June 25, 2018
Location: Skywalker Academy, Arisnar
Participants: Rey, Harmless (Storytelling)
Arms deep in after-dinner dishes, Rey visited by a vision - and the future it portends is nothing less than apocalyptic for the fledgling school.
There had been a meal served for several people and now there was cleanup to be had. Rey was standing in front of the kitchenette area with a load of dishes and she's using her mind to lift them up into the air and float them over toward her partner in cleaning. Artoo.
"Heads up." Rey says to Artoo, who raises the little cleaning hose and blasts the dish with the water... Rey uses her mind to keep the water droplets from spreading and creating a larger mess... also adding to her exercise with the Force.
In the past 6 months, Rey's ability with Telekinetics has become extremely advanced. She's progressing further and further with it every day.
So the two continue to clean and float dishes about, in an efficient--if a bit comica--sort of way.
The Force is like water, is it not? Sometimes a river, sometimes a sea - sometimes a cold rivulet trickling down the back of your mind, as sweat might the back of your neck. A instinct of something om the horizon. In this case, such a rivulet exists, manifesting as you play ghost-hand upon the crockery; a cold bead of omen, falling from the fountainhead of the Living Force, splashing upon the rocks of your mind, tricking into understanding.
Something terrible is going to happen. Soon.
The dishes swim together, a great off-white blur. The blur turns wisplike, a vast bank of fog. Choking you, acrid chemical claws tearing at your nose, your lungs. The fog is not fog, but smoke - filling the room, pouring in from elsewhere, already well at work to pull the life from your form. Artoo is not here, that much you can see through eyes stinging and filled with water. What the hell could be happening here?
Rey was very attuned to the Force when all of this began, so... it shouldn't come to her as a surprise that something odd was happening, should it? Oh, but it does. The young Jedi (of sorts) rises from her stool and stands tall amidst the smoke/fog. She starts to turn around and look about, eagerness on her youthful face to find what was causing it or... where she is.
"Ben?" Rey calls out. "Is this your doing?" He'd been hunting her for months, or at least had others attempting to do so. So far he'd come up with nothing though, or... was this it?
"I don't want to play any games." Rey speaks again, a serious tone to her Core Worlds accented voice. "Show yourself." She demands to the smoke around her.
No one being can understand the totality of the Living Force - isn't that what is written in those ancient pages from which you've drawn so much? As you rise and call out to a monster on the other side of the galaxy, there is no reply: there is only the clawing of the smoke, which even for a great seed of the Force as yourself /is/ growing unbearable. If it is an illusion, it is one that is truly potent. Can Ren's sorcery do that? Perhaps...
Beyond the academy building, a sound; a horrific peal of screeching, a sound that rolls through you like a wheel covered in needles, and - something else, something less purely animal but no less an invocation to action.
Wailing terror.
Rey wasn't afraid of much, but the thought of others in terror did make the pit of her stomach feel a lot more filled with fright. So at the sound of the terror wails, Rey's dark eyebrows flatten a little and her gaze grows more... intense. She refuses to believe that any of this is real and fully believes its some sort of test or a manifestation meant to derail all the confidence she'd built up in her powers in recent weeks and months.
"Who's there!?" Rey shouts into the smoke, even if the 'taste' of it was becoming enough to make her feel rightly ill. Again she turns in a full 360 spin with her hands out at her sides... her left hand reaching toward her hip where the restored Skywalker saber is generally clipped to her leather belt these days.
The smoke grows ever thicker; heat can be felt, pushing at you from below the flooring, beyond the walls. Another horrible scream, another wail of terror - this sound of anguish beyond the room, just down the hall. One can stay inside this smokehouse, or one can move on - the sounds of destruction and bestial screeching simply build.
The bead of cold power in the base of your mind flares, as if urging you on.
Rey doesn't hesitate to move on once she sees a exit from the choking smoke. She rushes toward the new pathway and hopes to free herself from this whole vision or... whatever was taking her away from where she knows she truly is.
Her hand grips around the metal of her lightsaber and she rushes out into the hallway and toward the sounds of animalistic screaming? She isn't sure, whatever is going on is pure madness and the teenaged girl just wants to flee from it! The Force has taken her to similar places before, on Ach-to, on Yavin... on Dagobah. These sorts of things are not 'new' to her but they are all the same unpleasant.
The smoke resolves into the shape of a doorway - and beyond is revealed a hallway you know well. The place in this vision is not some random dreamspace but the Academy itself, and as your instincts tell you, what is revealed is terrible.
Death is everywhere. The new cook, a slave so recently freed, lies at your feet as you emerge. Silvery barbs pepper his back, and his tunic is awash in blood. Beyond that, others, brave guards who've died with blasters in hand - some killed by the same spines, some missing whole sections of anatomy. The stone floor is slick with the red blood of defenders, the walls spattered with it, and in the vaulted ceiling above a thick mass of smoke tells you all that you need to know - not only is the Academy burning, something horrible is responsible for the siege.
Another scream, this one from the western balcony. Falling back, a young student, collapses upon the stony floor. Their lightsaber remains ignited, hissing steam as blood spreads beneath its humming azure blade. As visions are prone to do, the face is unseen, but it is a young man's figure who lies peppered with more of the lethal spines.
A shadow spreads across the floor from the place the young one died, wormlike, winged, and enormous. Outside, beyond the balcony, the sounds of monsters and their victims mingles with the thunderclap of an explosion. The whole building shudders, vibration bringing down a section of masonry from overhead in a crash of stone and splintering marble.
The chaos was intense, the dread and sorrow that was rushing through her were emotions she didn't want to experience ever, let alone on this level. It was the terror of the failure of everything they were doing here, culminating in a sense of 'Luke was Right' about it all, about how the 'failed husk of a religion' was cursed to forever fall before it could ever rise again.
But... Rey refused to give up, to give in.
"You didn't fail Kylo, Kylo failed you. I won't."
She'd promised Luke those words, and she meant it. So even amidst all the chaos, Rey wouldn't quit. Her own lightsaber is ignited and as the building trembles and rumbles she rushes to get out of it, to dodge the falling bits, to push forward and find her way out to find those who are still alive and to save them!
Ah, Rey, full of nobility! No time to avenge the dead when there are living still to save. You sprint down the stairs toward the bottom floor, leaping over another few bodies - some staff, some students - as you make your way to the bottom, where fire roars throughout the lower floors. The flames are too great to sprint through; as if living creatures all their own they writhe and leer, forcing you outside into the courtyard...where before you lies a vision of Hell.
The grass is strewn with bodies; many of them humanoid, or at least those who should be here. Others are of terrible beasts that lie shot by blasters or bisected by lightsabers, each a thing the size of a horse, legless insectoid horrors which to your fevered eyes seem akin to sacks of leathery flesh the gray-green color of decay, fringed with barbed tentacles in bands along their bodies, great comb-like wings of chitin dazzled with patterns of black and neon orange. Where the head should be, instead a vast mouth, filled with concentric rings of blackened fangs that stream with the same foul black ichor the at bubbles from their wounds. These eyeless monstrosities are the ones responsible for the destruction of this fledgeling school, for that is what has happened here: blaze and torn down from the fallen bodies of monstrosities and the weapons of it defenders, you stand alone on a field of the dead, and you know in your heart that none exist here now but you. Above, filling the air with their monstrous cries, more of the horrors flap and shudder above, so many as to seem to fill the smoke-stained sky; you know now what these things are, or why they seek to destroy the school, but of two things you are certain: this is a vision of the very near future, and that these things have come from the great cave-pocked rocks that rise in the near distance north of the school.
With the shattering of porcelain, the tableau is gone - and you stand at the kitchenette, as you had what feels a bloodstained age ago, the plate you'd floated now a shattered mass in the sink. Artoo lets out a beepig inquiry, asking what is the matter...but how can one express what you have seen? The taste of ash and blood in your mouth, the smell of smoke and burning flesh lingering in your nostrils?
For you, there is only one thing certain: the Force, in its manifold mysterious way, has given you a warning.
When it all comes crashing down and when reality comes swirling back around her. Rey stands there with dread on her face and Artoo can see it plain as day. The droid looks at her, makes that curious beep and then... she shakes her head, side to side. "I've got to find Leia." She tells the droid.
The young woman turns then from the dishes and Artoo turns to inquire after her, with more beeps. "Leave them, come on!" She shouts after her friend who drops his front wheel and starts to tread after the girl, a series of curious beeps rolling after the crazy human Force User, much like they had at Luke for the nearly fourty years that they'd pal'd around together.
Rey disappears out into the non-destroyed hallway, off to find and report this vision to Leia.
