OPEN MINGLE: Time to Talk, Summoned!

[magicalarchaeologist]

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.

Comments

[notrunninganymore]

Hm. Creepy. Gabriel doesn't usually spend a whole lot of time pondering this sort of thing unless he absolutely has to, but his own paranoia has certainly increased in the last few years due to particular events, and so he can't help but be a bit unnerved about this.

"Maybe they don't need us to do anything. Maybe just being here's enough."

He doubts that the factions won't also have something active for them to do in the future, because why go through the trouble of Summoning people if you don't make use of them, but maybe that's just a bonus. It could be that their presence alone serves some passive benefit to the factions that no one is aware of just yet.

[magicalarchaeologist]

"I don't think the Free Cities and Solvunn planned on this. Thorne Summoned us first and after they tried to execute someone, two mysterious individuals, Elizabeth and Oliver, appeared and froze everyone, allowing people to escape to the new factions. My assumption is knowing Thorne would keep doing it, they used the spell too so there wasn't a power imbalance. It's only been two years, maybe they haven't decided how to use us."

By they, in this case he means the Free Cities and Solvunn. He thinks that Thorne planned this for far longer so they did have ideas in mind, but the other two is adapting to the situation. It's conjecture, obviously, but based on observation and a train of thought and experience. Two years is hardly enough time to decide what to do with all these strangers. Give them a decade and they might have a plan in place. Years are very fast to the long-lived, although Istredd's eighty-some years is nothing compared to Gabriel.

"Solvunn though thinks this is the work of the gods, so they are happy to have you all there. And who knows, maybe it is. We've only had a few run-ins with them."

The gods are frustrating for Istredd because he'd love to study them and try to communicate, but it is simply impossible from Thorne. And as Lucifer has teased him about, he hates having to count on other people to do things for him. He spent too many years as an independent scholar, able to do whatever he wished. Waiting on answers when he should be able to just do it is frustrating.

"Michael gave us the pantheon of gods from Solvunn, it was very helpful of him."

[notrunninganymore]

Gabriel is not so convinced by this idea, even if he's totally willing to buy that the faction leadership might not know what they're doing. Even if they're trying to keep up with Thorne, this is way too much effort to go through without any idea of whether or not Summoned are useful or not.

Then again, as much as Gabriel likes humans, they're definitely known to be... Kind of shortsighted. Impulsive. Not so smart.

He's also not so impressed by the gods thing, but that comes with the territory of being an archangel. In Gabriel's case it's not the disdain his siblings might have, but having spent a lot of time around gods--and even pretending to be one for awhile--they're just other people as far as he's concerned.

But that doesn't make Istredd's last comment any less funny.

"How mad was he about it?" Gabriel can't help but ask, and the grin on his face makes it obvious he doesn't actually mean 'mad', but more like how much did Michael sigh and roll his eyes in that conversation.

[magicalarchaeologist]

"About that? As far as I know, he wasn't, but he's a hard read as you know." Istredd doesn't know if Michael minded or not, he was willing to hear him out, although that was more about Wanda no doubt. "He's friendly with one of my close friends, Wanda Maximoff, and it was important to her too." Not really important to her in terms of getting it to Thorne, but she wanted to help, and she would have done it if he wasn't interested. One way or another, Istredd was getting that pantheon.

"I think he was more annoyed by me asking if he could tolerate Lucifer moving to Solvunn. But again. Hard read." Istredd could tell he didn't like that though, and Lucifer later sort of rolled his eyes at him over it. Istredd is a champion meddler, he can't resist.

"It's just an emergency situation, if we ever need to leave Thorne the way the others did. The question is where we'd go and I was curious, that's all." Meaning Istredd doesn't plan on them going there. He personally would probably like going to Nocwich more, but Lucifer permanently crossed that out. With the Free Cities still being tense because of Dean, it's trapping them into corners, and he's not going anywhere without Lucifer.

[notrunninganymore]

"The real question is whether everyone else in Solvunn could tolerate both Lucifer and Michael there at the same time. I'd go live in a cave, myself."

He's joking, but also not. He loves his brothers, and even when he's mad at them he can tolerate each of them separately, but together they would be an absolute nightmare. He didn't hang around for that in their world, and he sure as hell wouldn't do so here.

Still, the comment is overall light, as it's a problem for future, hypothetical Gabriel. And hypothetical everyone else, he supposes, but whatever, still not current Gabriel's problem.

Current Gabriel has also run out of questions for the moment, or at least ones that are both coming to mind and that he actually wants to know the answers to; some questions are better unanswered, after all, even to him. So he thinks it's probably time to be returning to the real world, but even he's polite enough not to just disappear, at least in this unique of a situation.

"Well, can't say I ever imagined meeting someone who's dating Lucifer--for so, so many reasons--but if I had, this would've gone better than expected." A compliment? A very low bar to reach? Yes to both.

and we can wrap here or on yours!

[magicalarchaeologist]

"I doubt any of us would enjoy it." Michael and Lucifer least of all, and then everyone else in connection with it. He doesn't want to be in the middle of the two of them tense all the time either. Solvunn seems like a bad idea for them for other reasons too; too much temptation for both of them regarding the gods there.

This is a first meeting so Istredd does see it as them sort of testing the temperature of the situation. So far so good.

"You're not really what I expected either. I thought the rest of the angels were more like the other two." Not that he thinks Michael and Castiel would enjoy being compared to them, but they have a very flat reaction to things. They're not human in the way they talk and act. Gabriel and Lucifer seem to blend in better. It's not a bad or a good thing, just something to note.

"It was genuinely a pleasure to meet you, Gabriel. Feel free to stop by any time if you want." Istredd may feel comfortable approaching him out and about too, he has an easy way about him.