Fear and Loathing in Excelsior

[portolan]

Who: Balthier portolan and anyone else!
What: A mysterious object leads to a horrific week of fear and misery
When: May 21
Where: Excelsior
Content Warnings: death, violence, phobias, memories of characters worst traumas – this is fear based; please tag specifics for your threads.

CWs: death, violence, phobias, memories of characters worst traumas – this is fear based; please tag specifics for your threads.

OPT OUT OPTIONS: Don’t be in Excelsior or don’t be hit by a spell yourself. Players may also limit to smaller scale fears, or avoid specific fear topics they don’t want to play out.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN EXCELSIOR

An ancient artifact releases three pixies intent on spreading as much fear and chaos as possible. When they hit someone with their spell, their fears manifest, with effects worsening the longer the pixies are free. To escape the spell, characters must face their fears or be trapped in the fear cauldron. Once the pixies are captured, the captured souls will be released and the manifestations will fade, though the damage caused will remain.

ANTIQUES ROADSHOW —

Downtown Excelsior may seem like an odd location to open an antiques store. One wouldn’t think that the chic youth of today would be interested in dusty relics of the past. Yet ask anyone and they will tell you this shop has been around for decades. Rue Moore once reported that it's particularly beloved by the Society and that was how it was able to stay afloat through the changing times, speculating that they use it to move black market goods.

Step inside the high end building and find yourself disoriented by the clash of differing time periods. French Rococo chandeliers, a pristine settee owned by John Adams, an honest-to-god suit of medieval armor, and a few framed sketches by Rembrandt and the like. There’s an electric thrill, as if you could reach out and touch history - though some of that may be the high number of protection magicks being employed.

Whatever you touch is probably worth more than your annual salary. You break it, you buy it.

Balthier is standing at an antique desk plucking away at a laptop as the first few volunteers arrive. He gestures for them to head to the classy bar tucked in the corner. You’re free to enjoy a glass of rich wine and high end appetizers, chatting amongst yourselves about the task at hand while the host finishes his work. As the crowd gathers he shuts his computer and ushers them into the back room, where even more antiques are carefully stacked. Among them are the offenders from the network post and a stack of additional concerning items.

A Little Bit Of Pixie Dust

The biggest puzzle of the night is a medieval cauldron. Intricate carvings depict great tales of monsters and magic. The most notable carving of all is three human faces engraved next to three creatures: a fae, a shade, and a troll.

Search as they might, there’s no record of this object in any database. At the end of the day this one is the only one left identified. As the last remaining investigation team members turn away to pack their things, they miss three small lights slowly rising from the carving’s open mouths. As the door shuts behind them, they may miss the sound of giggling. Or the soft swish of a tricky spell hitting you squarely in the back.

Pixie Magic is unfortunately difficult to detect, after all.

But the first spell cast is a sign these fickle spirits are picking up an old game. Who can create the most chaos? They're powered by human suffering. All fear that they collect returns to their cauldron, making them stronger and increasing the distance they can travel from it.

They are not discriminating and their targets are random. Anyone hit by their spells will become the victims of their fear manifestation spells. Each pixie specializes in a different kind of fear.

The first specializes in internal conflict. Think you have a face like a horse? Well now you might be Bojack Horseman. Worried you’re annoying? Well now you can’t stop doing every annoying habit you’ve ever had. Terrified you might be stone-cold and heartless? Congrats! You're turning into a statue.

Afraid of being ignored? Day 1 you might notice more people are ignoring you. As the spell progresses, no one is returning your calls or texts, people are avoiding you, and you are having trouble being served at coffee shops. By the end of the week, congratulations, you are no one can see or hear you!

These fear spells may be defeated by the character facing their fear or someone where someone helping them see they are still wanted or safe despite their flaws.

---

The Second Pixie specializes in interpersonal conflict. Maybe your love life explodes. Maybe your worst nemesis returns to harass and humiliate you. Whatever it is, you’re having trouble with others.

EXAMPLES: One day 1, you might be increasingly aware of your significant other's flaws or the health of the relationship. By midweek, you may find yourselves hitting each others buttons and fighting constantly. By the end of the week, you both may be compulsively playing out every flaw the other person perceives you to have.

If you have a nemesis from your past who haunts you, you may find yourself having more memories and dreams of them on Day 1. By Day 3 you might start seeing their face or signs of their work around town, or impacts of their presence. By the end of the week, they may full-on appear in this world, with all their powers, threatening to repeat that terrible memory if you don’t stop them.

These fear spells may be defeated by literally defeating the other person, or by reconciling with them. They could also be defeated by accepting reconciliation is not possible but removing the person's access to you (or to destroying the city, RIP).

---

The Third Pixie specializes in person versus environment conflict: packs of angry chihuahuas. The weather. The sidewalk opening up to swallow your ankles. Awakening dormant magical creatures. A super volcano going off.

EXAMPLES: You hate the cold and can't shake a chill. By midweek, the temperature around you is literally 10 degrees colder than everywhere else. By the end of the week, you are the eye of a blizzard.

These fear spells may be defeated by overcoming the physical obstacle through whatever means necessary.

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter...

Perhaps you failed to overcome this challenge. Just as you succumb to your worst fears, your eyes open and you find yourself standing in an empty space. Others are there with you, looking equally as forlorn and lost.

And then it transforms.

You and your fellow victims are now trapped in a HELLISH LIMBO. You’re living out one fear after another – whether it’s yours, or that of one of the others who failed to overcome their fear in the world outside.

In this hell your very worst fears are realized. And there’s no way out. The pixie’s magic brings things in, but it doesn’t let them out.

Those who have not succumbed to their fears may be drawn to the back room of the antique shop, finding the cauldron abandoned but overflowing with power. The magically inclined may be able to find the seam on this pocket dimension and ATTEMPT A RESCUE.

But more concerningly, the carvings on the cauldron appear to be glowing. What was once a fanciful depiction of ancient battles now appears to be a warning that the worst is yet to come.

These powerful creatures need to be defeated and returned to the cauldron. They have fanned out across the city and will be encountered separately, so teams may wish to form. They cannot be killed, but wounding them will bleed out their power until they can be re-sealed on the cauldron.

The only trouble is you need to find them.

Transformation

As the pixies amass more and more power from the fear they’re generating, the range they can travel from the cauldron increases. The further they can travel, the more fear they can inflict. And where better to feast than a city built upon consumerism, where fear isn’t dealt with but bought off. Perhaps you may spot the flickering light of a pixie out of the corner of your eye, but it’s gone in a flash.

Eventually though, they trade speed for power. As their power crescendos the pixies begin to change shape. By the seventh day, all three of them have shape shifted into much larger and more imposing forms.

The first pixie will become a beautiful and terrifying fae. They make themselves at home in the city’s enormous man-made park and offer fae bargains to those foolhardy enough to trust them. Strength won’t overcome them, but a quick thinking mind might.

The second becomes nothing but a shade. It slides under cars and along walls, hiding in people’s shadows and whispers their darkest fears. This entity can’t be held down or stopped with physical force, but it recoils from the light.

The third rampages throughout the business center in the form of an enormous troll. Like the other two, this entity cannot be stopped with force. Excelsior’s artificial weather systems may be needed to slow this beast down.

AFTERMATH —

Once the pixies are restored to the cauldron, their fears in the city fade away and trapped characters are released, physically unharmed but mentally shaken. The damage any fear manifestations did to the city remain, but any people or objects they conjured fade away within the day.

The cauldron cannot be destroyed, so something will need to be done to keep it from wreaking havoc again.

IN SUMMARY...

• Balthier asks for help identifying magical objects. Characters interacting with one object in particular awakens sleeping magic inside.


• When the pixies first awaken, they must stay close to the cauldron to sustain their power.


• Each pixie's fear spell works on a different kind of conflict (though characters can be affected by more than one, or cured and then affected by another). As the week goes on, the manifested fears will worsen.


• Characters can defeat the fear spells by facing their fears or by someone else helping/interfering.


• The pixies must be defeated and returned to the cauldron.


• Comment HERE if you'd like to be involved in taking out the pixies!

Comments

Marc Spector/Steven Grant || MCU

[misterknight]

☾ i. can't keep it together (steven);

---

[ Steven's never exactly been what he might call graceful, but he's also never been all that clumsy, either. A bit bumbling, sure, mostly brought on by his timidness and constant state of tiredness, but only in the way a person may accidentally trip a bit over their shoes or bump into something because of momentarily failed depth-perception or whatever. So when he has a klutzy moment, he doesn't think too much of it. When it happens again and again, he thinks a little about it, but he tries to pin it down to settling into this new place.

Then, after a few days, it starts to become overwhelming. Overwhelming, because it seems that no matter what he does, he can't quite manage it. Tying his shoes? No. Getting dressed? It takes an embarrassing amount of undressing and re-dressing. With each new fumble, a simmering anxiety begins to rise inside him. Steven knows he's smart. He knows he's a capable, intelligent man. He solved ancient Egyptian and Macedonian riddles, for goodness' sake! But that's never stopped him from fearing that, deep down, he's always been inadequate and always will be.

It certainly never helped when Marc appeared, the guy who's good at all this cool stuff and is the guy most people might want to be. It also wasn't really great when Steven realized that his whole life has been real-but-not-real. But he'd pushed it down, because he'd been useful. He'd been good. Helpful. Hadn't he?

Maybe it was a fluke or some other imagined thing, because Steven doesn't feel like the man who did any of that anymore. Marc's not helping, either. When he occasionally does pipe up in Steven's head, it's with an impatient remark or him saying to just hand the body over or they'll never get anywhere. It works. Steven retreats more and more, letting everything continue to pile up on his brain.

And it seems to come to a head in this moment.

Standing on the street, Steven is trying to get his phone to work. His phone, a piece of technology that he's used for years (even if this one is new, they all work the same). Somehow he's pressed just the right button to completely mess up the settings and it's just enough to tip him over the edge into despair. He sits down on a bench in a thinly veiled effort to compose himself, but, really, he's probably not fooling anyone with the way he's covering up his watering eyes with the heels of his palms. ]

☾ ii. mother dearest (marc); [cw: domestic abuse]

---

[ Eventually, Steven becomes too nervous to be out and about, and Marc begins to front more frequently. Which is just fine with him, he wants to get to know this place better while he figures out what city would be best for them, but it doesn't escape him that something is really fucking weird in Excelsior. People are acting abnormally - even Steven, he thinks, was affected by whatever this is, because that had been odd (and difficult) to witness. That isn't what starts to make Marc's skin crawl.

It's the little glimpses out of the corner of his eyes. A ghost lurking at the edges of his vision, that's gone when he turns to look and persists when he tries to ignore it. Marc's lived an entire two decades doing his best not to think about Her, and when he'd finally tried to do some sort of bullshit reconciliation posthumously, it'd been the final crack in his fragile mental walls.

Apparently you can't just try to ignore the fact that your mother hated you so much she would beat you whenever she flew into a drunken rage. Marc had never decided what was worse, though, the physical or the verbal. In the melting pot of his mind it had all been his own personal hell, and even in her death he found no peace. There's no reason, though, for her image to be haunting him here.

The more Steven retreats, the more Marc finds his mother becoming more prominent. He sees her across streets. He sees her standing at the end of the hall in the hotel, or in the elevator as the doors close. Steven gets quieter, she gets louder. She follows Marc and tells him all the same, horrible things a mother should never tell her child. She fills his head until she's the only voice he hears. And Marc's first and only line of defence against her has gone away completely. ]

Nope. No, no, no.

[ Marc is doing his best to ignore her. The woman, the whatever-this-is that's impersonating his mother, berates him publicly while he does his best to ignore it. She calls him out on it, tells him that's what he's always done, he's always ignored his responsibilities and his problems and that's how his brother died and that's why she has to make him pay attention. When Marc tries to move, she follows, her aggression starting to bubble up.

When Marc locks eyes with you, there's no hope of you not getting involved. ]

Help - [ The word feels strange coming out of Marc's mouth. He doesn't ask for help. He doesn't like it, but this is what desperation feels like. He quickens his pace, all but running to the stranger he's deemed is going to be his saviour in this situation. ] Help, please. I need to - You just need to help me.

[ Help him retreat back into himself or help him get somewhere that she can't follow or maybe even just knock him unconscious. He'll take anything at this point, he just needs help. ]

☾ iii. wildcard;

---

Choose your own adventure! Let Steven or Marc help you with your own fears, or one of their vigilante alter-egos can hustle through the city to save civilians or help you try to (unsuccessfully) fight giant trolls or whatever.

ii.

[frenchkissed]

( eddie has barely gotten a handle on his own fears when some dude comes charging at him.

this week has been sucking for everyone, it seems, and while marc is seeing visions of someone from his past becoming more prominent, eddie is doing his best to deal with the opposite, dealing with the loss of someone who should always be there. he hasn't been alone in what feels like forever, and he doesn't know how to be. he doesn't know how to exist without the belligerent, obnoxious, brute of an alien that normally dwells inside of him. without his other, eddie feels like nothing, like no one.

but someone is coming up to him, which is proof enough that he still exists with or without venom's presence.

he's being asked for help and, oh, god, eddie can't help anyone. he can't even help himself. that's what venom has done for him; what the hell can eddie do on his own? he can't fight. he can't jump from building to building. if there's any monster in this fight, eddie is positively useless.

but he can try. when this guy is close enough — and maybe he recognizes him — eddie hold him by the shoulders. )

Hey... hey, man. It's cool. We're cool... I'm here.

( eddie tries remember a version of himself before venom. what would he say? how would he help? )

We're— ...I'm going to do whatever I can do. What d'you need? You need to get out of here? ...You need water?

[misterknight]

Water? Yeah, sure. That's great.

[ Because getting water probably means getting the hell out of there, which may or may not mean his mother will follow. Whatever the case, having someone there as a distraction in even a small capacity is comfort enough to Marc.

Her voice is loud and biting in his ear as she berates him for always running away from his problems. Like he ran away from helping his brother (which he hadn't done, he's sure he hadn't done that, but now he's not so sure). Some things, though, he knows there's no hope facing. His mother will always be one of them. ]

We better go find that water.

ii

[an_extra_hour]

[ Robbie looks distracted by something when Marc runs up. He's looking off to the side with glassy eyes and a firmly set jaw. He looks like he's trying to move himself from the spot he's rooted to, like he's trying to look away from something horrible, like he's trying not to cry. ]

[ Before Marc says anything, though, he winces and manages to tear himself away. There's a slight gesture of his hand, a dismissive wave in the direction he was staring at, an expression that grows firm and resolute as he pushes himself to keep walking. ]

[ And then Marc comes running up and Robbie's expression jackknifes immediately in the direction of extreme concern. ]

[ He locks eyes to show he's actively listening. The tone he uses is engineered to be calming. It's the teacher voice he used to calm hysterical teenagers down during various crises and interpersonal dramas. ]

[ He's not a teacher anymore but agitation and emotional turmoil are agitation and emotional turmoil, regardless of cause or age. ]

Hey. Hey. breathe, okay? Just breathe. I don't know what's going on but I'll help you with whatever it is.

What's wrong?

[misterknight]

[ At the question, Marc glances back over his shoulder. He feels suddenly like he's twelve years old again and trying to run to any place that looks like it might give him solace. Apparently that's a total stranger right now.

His gaze turns back to the guy he's run up to. For someone who doesn't know him, the other man is being remarkable cool about this, and Marc feels a sense of gratitude somewhere under the swarming anxiety and fear. ]

I just can't really be on my own right now.

[an_extra_hour]

Why don't we go somewhere quiet and -

[ Robbie looks like he's trying to figure something out and his head suddenly snaps to look at something to the side again before looking back at Marc. ]

[ His eyebrows furrow, as he realizes Marc's distress might not be a separate issue. ]

You wouldn't...you wouldn't happen to be hallucinating like crazy, would you?

Something horrible from your past? Following you around?