abraxaslogs | OPEN MINGLE: Time to Talk, Summoned!

OPEN MINGLE: Time to Talk, Summoned!

Who: Istredd, Wanda, and all the Summoned
What: Istredd and Wanda called people to the meeting to give an info dump, let people ask questions or share their own information, and then a hang out after with refreshments so people can chat after and make new CR or check in with old CR.
Where: Istredd's Horizon
When: Saturday, September 9th, at midnight so less attention given to them.
Warnings: Discussion of the game plots including all content warnings up to now like psychological thriller, horror, the cult kidnapping, gods being trouble. Abraxas is a wild place, friends.

HORIZON AND SET UP

The Lighthouse was described by Istredd in detail so people would know where to go. During this mingle, it will continue to shine and circle around like a normal lighthouse so people know where to go. His domain is unique for being essentially a tower of books. Shelves upon shelves of books and multiple floors. The only other detail before the talk starts is that there are five ravens who will be curiously watching everyone from a perch nearby. Your character may end up with a lapful of one of the two leosylphs who live here, one baby blue colored and the other one black with red eyes.

The main floor has been turned into a large meeting hall of a sort, although mostly in terms of having a large space full of chairs and a few tables if people wish to sit there. Your character can perch anywhere they want including up a floor. A key note about Istredd's domain is that people can easily morph chairs or create them in whatever form they'd want, so if you want them to have their childhood chair, go ahead. If they want a gaming chair, it'll show up automatically for them. His space is very intuitive. People can choose to speak either from the back of the room, as Istredd will do, or from where they sit/stand.

If your character wants to attend but not be noticed, they can intuitively use his Horizon to mask themselves/go invisible. Istredd will not call you out, Henry Creel.

After the initial formal talk and information gathering, Istredd will ease up the more formal atmosphere of the large hall and create a food and drink section against the walls. Wanda assists him in making this look nicer and homier. There will be extensive offerings but people can add any type of food or drink to this, it's up to them to modify it.

If your character would like to explore the library or get a beat to themselves/talk privately with someone, they can do that by wandering the floors. People will find that if they open a book it will appear to be empty at first, but if they think about their favorite book, the pages will fill in. It is entirely based on their recollection of the book so may not be entirely complete, but if their subconscious mind has memorized much of it, they will see what they need to in there.

They may also find that as they move through the floors, a 'reading nook' may appear in the corner that will instinctively know what they would feel comfortable sitting to read with. They can also 'lock' this room if they want to discuss something with another person and need privacy.

ISTREDD'S SPEECH

[Istredd will wait until it appears everyone has arrived or most people have and he will clear his throat to get their attention if they are already chatting with other people. He appears as he often does in Thorne, with very plain clothes in a dark shade of blue, serious and calm. He stands straight-backed, hands clasped behind his back. Istredd speaks in a very clear and calm way.]

Please sit or stand as you feel comfortable. If you want, you can create any chair you wish to sit in. After the initial conversation, food and drinks will be provided and you are free to add your own favorite dishes. This is intended as an information-gathering conversation. Last year, Sam Wilson hosted something similar to keep the Summoned informed, and a great many things have happened since. Wanda and I thought to do the same this year.

We posted on the network a breakdown of what happened with the kidnapping earlier this year. If you missed it, the general idea was that a cult from Solvunn took half of the Summoned and held us in a pit, where they were experimented on. The cult's intention was to try and take the connection the Summoned have to the Singularity, and what they believed to also be a connection to their gods.

It should be noted that Thorne tried something similar early on in the Summonings. Their experimentation also did not work, as far as we know. We thought it prudent to keep every Summoned informed of what happened in case something like this happens again. We have put forward from the Solvunn and Thorne conclave a request to our factions to allow us to have access to the island. We'll let people know what we hear.

I also put together a history timeline of the Summoned.

[He pulls out a blackboard with this list written down over it in clear readable words. He points to the February 20,078 section where the details about the kidnapping are written out in particular.]

If anyone would like to add notes or months I missed, please either write it yourself or let me know and I will add it. I am hoping to keep this an active timeline for us. This will always be available in my library here to anyone who wants it. We have also been given a pantheon of the gods from our friends in Solvunn that is also available in here.

I have been taking notes since I got here about general information that may be of interest to people when they arrive, including details about magic, the Singularity, and the factions. They're very broad but you can read it on this.

[He creates another blackboard to the side, also able for other people to make notes upon.]

I don't want to be talking this entire time, so instead I would like to invite people to share any findings or information they have that they think the whole group should be aware of, and also ask questions that could be answered or talked about. Please be polite with one another and understand there are some things we simply do not have the answers for as of now.

There are less than a hundred of us, and I believe it is important that we stay on the same team. Thank you. Feel free to eat and talk, or wander in the library.

OOC NOTES

Hey everyone, it's Dee! I am so sorry for the tl;dr. I have the headers below: Speeches (information sharing/tl;dr like mine), Questions (you can specify what exactly they have questions about), adding to the info dumps I have, and whatever else you think of.

If you want your character to speak/offer information but don't want follow-up questions, you can put 'OTA' or 'no follow-up' to indicate what your preference is here. If you put OTA people can reply with a sort of Q&A option, but the no follow-up idea is so that people can share information but not need to commit to that unless they feel like it.

And from there, mingle to your heart's content! Your characters can talk afterward, before, go explore the library, whatever you want, I support it. You can plan closed or open starters, follow your heart.

If nothing else, I want people to take from this mingle that their character can hear any of this information or see it in the library and have it from now on for your RP purposes, and take this opportunity to maybe make new CR/discuss all of this. Do as much or as little as you want! If you have any comments/concerns, please message me on plurk.

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"Massachusetts. A small town close enough to Boston we don't have to go there." Clean streets, wide sidewalks. Everything on Main Street. 'Safe and Crime Free' by the standards of the grown-ups, which mostly meant 'white' as she did a lot of fucking crime. But only Ginny ever got stopped. "If you've been to any small town in the Northeast you know what it looks like."

Thinking about home has her mind on her girls. This would have been her first birthday with Ginny in the group. And now it was going to be her first birthday without Norah and Max. Not counting the ones when she was a baby, she doesn't remember those. ...Didn't want to go down those thoughts right now.

"I'm guessing you know it, otherwise you wouldn't have clocked where I'm from so easily." She didn't get what gave her away, her clothes, her accent. But it's hard to label her like that without at least having more than a passing interaction with the US.

“I’ve been to New York and New Jersey,” she says, lightly, nodding. Massachusetts and Boston is familiar, but not any place she’s been to. “And I’d say it’s something about the attitude.”

That much she says, teasing her a little. Culturally speaking, Americans are very loud and particular, in her point of view. Teens, especially.

“A lot of my friends are American. All of them that are here, from my world, are American, actually. It’s a little hard to escape the Thanksgivings and Christmases that they insist on celebrating. Big dinners and all those things.”

The comment about attitude gets her a smile, taking it more as a compliment than maybe it was meant. But certainly as being seen. She'd never properly considered her attitude being fully formed from her upbringing and home, but it made sense.

"Oh, yeah, we love our big family bullshit." There's a sorrow to the words she's trying to hide, and failing to. Her last Thanksgiving was the first Friday brunch she didn't spend with her best friends, because of a fight. Her winter break was nothing but grandparents badmouthing her now absent parent for eight days and eight nights.

Whom she was also mad at, but at the same time found it deeply uncomfortable hearing him spoken of like that. All parties not in Abraxas. "So some sort of cultural exchange program? Ending up in the states with a bunch of other weirdos with weird powers?"

An educated guess as to how this sorta thing works.

Wanda does get an inklink of that sorrow that she tries to hide. The more Abby speaks to her, the more Wanda realizes that the adults she has grown up with weren’t exactly the most nurturing.

She puts her hands together, rolls one of the rings on her fingers, shaking her head at the questions.

“Not quite,” she says. “My home country was destroyed after many years of a civil war. It took all my family, and I suppose the American government thought it was better to keep me close and under a watchful eye than going rogue.”

Perhaps a little more complicated than what Abby anticipated. A scrunch of her nose, shrugging, to alleviate how her words may land.

“I think that’s why I don’t mind the big family bullshit. Families are complicated, anyway. Have you met Sam yet? Sam Wilson. He’s in the Cities, too.”

"Because you have freaky weird powers, and aren't using them to make money or 'spread democracy.'" Abby helpfully airquotes the words that need it to be clear that while she lives there, she understands some of what her country does. She might not agree with it.

Abby's smile is a weak thing, a 'that sucks' but she doesn't really know how to say it more politely than that. Abby can't apologize for a government she has no say in, on a world that isn't hers. But she kind of hates that that's just how it works too.

"Heard him give a speech, yes. Talked to? No." Abby's distrust of authority is fairly strong. She sees someone who looks like they're in charge she tries to just stay out of their way. Those from a world like hers are even more likely to give her looks for her life choices. "When I deal with the unofficial welcoming committee I talk to Jesper or Hilda."

Well, no matter what, this kid seems to get it. To the point where Wanda doesn't really need to explain her point further.

Teens are surprisingly very perceptive about the nuances of things.

"I do suppose Sam can be intimidating..." Oh, boy. That's a new one. Suppose Sam uses his serious face a lot, especially when he gives out his speeches and dons the Captain America title. Wanda waves a hand in front of her. "My point is, he likes the family stuff a lot. But I know Jesper and Hilda—they're a lot friendlier.

You should stick around with them."

Not that she expects Abby to be told what to do.

"There's a solid crew in the Cities from what I know."

It's fun having no say in your world or anything that happens in it.

Although, nothing Sam has done is intimidating, it's simply the state of being an adult from a world like hers that causes her pause. If she ran into him in a crisis she wouldn't flinch away, but in day to day life her needs can't really be answered by him.

Of course, Wanda bumbled pretty haphazardly into something very funny to Abby, that she won't say out loud because it'd be a bit much for a first meeting. However she can't help but let her mind drift to the last time Jesper was 'friendly' with her. Given they've been sleeping together on for two months now. "Oh, I intend to."

She is Jesper's age and Jesper is just like that, it shouldn't really be that surprising.

"It's not perfect, but I think I'd lose my mind in farmville or castle monarchy." Abby was very American. A military government isn't perfect, or good, or even remotely a thing she's on board with. But she distrusts it in a very familiar way. It works in a very familiar way. She doesn't need to learn a whole new form of distrust to survive there. "...then again I jumped off a building to kill a monster, so maybe sanity is relative."

That was a joke, but delivered almost as a dismissal of the idea she was ever sane.

Well, good thing Wanda isn't privy to what goes on in the minds of teenagers. Privacy and all that.

"That's what I tell everyone about Solvunn. It's 10% having something to do, and the rest of the time is good luck finding a hobby you want to do for the foreseeable future." Another reason why she doesn't like when her friends joke about moving to 'goat land', because she knows they'll lose their minds. "But I think we're all where we are meant to be, strangely enough."

And it makes her wonder how each faction tailors the summoning ritual.

"First time encountering monsters?"

"Maybe," Abby's mind is still very certain she doesn't belong here. Or maybe she doesn't belong here yet. Her thoughts on home and where that is are far too complicated to figure out. But something about her being meant to be anywhere felt wrong. "Cadens has a little less problem with me being a disrespectful shithead than I think the others would go for though."

"Not- exactly first, but close enough." A trip to the desert involved monsters, but being smaller threats than any of the recent lot, and having a tall stabby man with her meant that it was a wake-up call while safely protected. "This time I knew more magic and had a better handle on my gifts from the Singularity. So I kind of went looking for monsters. Like- I didn't hide in Cadens where there wasn't a portal."

She didn't feel right just going on with her day, pretending monsters weren't hurting people. People she liked.

That's probably a smart assumption. Cadens—and the Cities at large—seem to have a better tolerance threshold for the rebellious. But the answer tells Wanda that monsters are not a commonality in Abby's world. Seems like she's getting on just fine with the reality of them here, though, and maybe it speaks about the teen's ability to adapt.

"That's pretty bold," she praises, eyebrows raising for a moment. "It sounds like you've done well adapting."

And there are quite a few adept people there who can aid Abby in improving in the self-defense stuff.

"I learned most of my combat skills from Sam, actually. Steve Rogers was my mentor, too. I'm sure you have plenty of people to guide you with it, though."

"I have a lot of free time, and I can't scroll Instagram." Abby never quite got the praise for adapting, because she didn't have much of a fucking choice. She could just whine about how fair it was, but life was never fair to begin with.

She has to make friends, and her friends happen to be criminals.

Maybe she should bother them, ask about things, see if they'll teach her or just- tell her to stay somewhere safe and not help. She's not ready to try that again, best to stick to who she knows. "The list of people better skilled than me is pretty much just a list of other summoned. I only got to kill the ugly thing in the military barracks because I'm shifty and three other summoned were fighting it head on."

“That is a fair point,” Wanda concedes, not just about the Instagram comment but also about the list of people who are more prepared for a place such as this one. “Those are just some of the few I can vouch for.”

In case Abby was ever in the market for a tutor with some references.

“Well, your ability seems interesting.” The whole being upside-down thing. “If you ever want to show that off in person while in Nocwich, just let me know.”

Abby's not entirely willing to take a new person's vote of confidence to mean anything, but she can stack it next to previous votes and it does. Does nothing right now, but with enough she might actually talk to an adult on purpose.

...eventually.

"It's a little less impressive in Nocwich, but I could." Abby considers, she's not super fond of doing tricks for fun. But for experience and learning... "I could use your help in person sometime though. I sorta need to know a little more of my other trick, and a telepath would offer me a new thing to test it against."

As much as her stealth powers are a known quality in Cadens proper, she isn't fully invested in showing it off here. Stealth powers work best when people don't know you can do them, after all.

Wanda remembers being that age, when adults were the last people she'd trust. Circumstances are different, but it all comes with growing up—and then one day you find yourself being the adult in question.

"It's not about being impressive, so much as to whether you can employ it efficiently outside of the Horizon." Because what would be the point otherwise? Still, it's up to Abby to decide how much she's willing to trust Wanda, or take heed of her offer. That's one thing Wanda won't do: force anyone to do anything. "Just let me know."

With a smile, she motions something about having to get back, likely to see how the blind lawyer is doing all on his lonesome.

"It was good meeting you, Abby. See you around."

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OPEN MINGLE: Time to Talk, Summoned!

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