idolpro | Vergil's heart game r4

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!heart games

Vergil's heart game r4

You feel weak, your body won't move no matter how you try, and you are falling, away from everything you know and love. Away from everything you need to accomplish. If you could just reach out, maybe you could hold on to it, claw your way back. But it's a useless endeavour, you fall unconscious, and your mind goes blank except for poetry and a familiar voice.

O mother Enitharmon, wilt thou bring forth other sons?
To cause my name to vanish, that my place may not be found,
For I am faint with travail,
Like the dark cloud disburden'd in the day of dismal thunder.

My roots are brandish'd in the heavens, my fruits in earth beneath
Surge, foam and labour into life, first born and first consum'd!
Consumed and consuming!
Then why shouldst thou, accursed mother, bring me into life?

You wake on the ground in a cave, cold, wet, and sticky. It smells of rotting flesh. Your objective is clear, but you can't recall a name or face. Nothing else about your memory of him is changed, but for some reason the name "Vergil" just won't come to you, and you couldn't describe how he looks if your life depended on it. But at least your body starts to respond to your will, slowly regaining enough strength to carry on.

Unless you're Glory, in which case the rest is the same, but you wake in a library.

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Break this heavy chain,
That does freeze my bones around!
Selfish, vain,
Eternal bane,
That free love with bondage bound.

A cave with a giant, exposed, beating heart in the centre. There's several massive...roots? coming from the heart. The walls of the cave are a web of similar thin red vines and pulsing sacks like blisters. The ground and what remains of the walls and ceiling are slick and fleshy. Some gaps between walls have a thin membrane over them.

On one end of the room is a gate, from ground to ceiling, about 20 feet tall. Innumerable red vines cover its frame. There are two openings in the walls that appear to lead into tunnels, with pointed talons or perhaps ribs poised around them that move occasionally like fingers drumming. One heads east, the other south.

There is never anyone else in this cave with you. You are alone.

[well. Guess he'll pick a direction and head in it then. East?]

It's a long walk...

[There's Blake bouncing around in his head, he's gross and sticky in a flesh cave, so lets try to find someplace nicer, yes?

He's heading south]

Someone's there already because she's special like that

[ oh

we don't like that.

we're going south in hopes that it's not... more of this. ]

You like books, right?

[welp, to the south this time.]

It's getting crowded

[And now he's back here with a somewhat clearer head. He'll ignore the tunnels for a moment. He looks at the heart, deciding not to touch it... it's a bit too literal.

He approaches the thin membrane between the walls.

Might as well see if these are passable, so he holds out a hand and pushes against it]

Well you might be able to tear through these if you really wanted, but they're not going to take you anywhere. Getting closer to all those roots along the wall though, you might start to notice they seem to start from the heart, and most connect to the gate. One particularly large one breaks through the ground, then pops back up near a wall on the west side of the cave, twisting along the ceiling until another hole that it's broken through there.

It looks like a root, but considering it sprouts from the heart, maybe it's better to call it a vein or artery. When you get close, the blood rushing through it becomes apparent, not only to see but to hear. It's also plain to see an opening from its outer shell where it winds back up along the wall. If you don't mind a squeeze and being submerged in blood, you could ride the flow.

[he furrows his brow and huffs. Well, the kid did mention traveling in veins. And it's not like he hasn't been covered in blood before.

So he'll press forward and shove himself in the vein.]

You're instantly swept away by the rushing blood flow, hope you took a deep breath first. Gain 1 Perseverance as you're deposited elsewhere.

A glowing red barrier appears over the gate and blocks the way. The wailing faces of the damned seem to twist and move within it. As you look at it, a massive hand forms from the barrier, reaching out toward you.

You would need to spend 1 perseverance to escape its grasp...but you don't have any.

[ oh.

well i guess she doesn't.

]

Guess she doesn't!

The hand grabs you, or seems to at least, instead it passes through your body and squeezes your very soul, dragging it along as if it might tear it right from you. The feeling is excruciating, but it's over soon, you only have to suffer for a few moments before you take your last strangled breath and everything goes black.

You wake up in the cave again, cradled in the spindly, steel arms of half a dozen hooded, faceless, wraith-like creatures. Or so they appear. There's no life in them, no more than a statue holding you upon its lap not unlike the Pietà.

It sloughs away into nothing the moment you stand.

At least you're basically right where you were.

Re: LIVING CAVE

softlyfalling - 2021-01-29 03:29 (UTC) - Expand

Re: LIVING CAVE

auguryofinnocence - 2021-01-29 03:31 (UTC) - Expand

[Oh she doesn't like this.

Glory has one of her newly-acquired daggers in hand as she heads over to inspect the heart.]

Not that you would know the difference, but somehow, Vergil is in fact here with you. Because you did good.

The roots seem to start from the heart, and most connect to the gate. One particularly large one breaks through the ground, then pops back up near a wall on the west side of the cave, twisting along the ceiling until another hole that it's broken through there.

It looks like a root, but considering it sprouts from the heart, maybe it's better to call it a vein or artery. When you get close, the blood rushing through it becomes apparent, not only to see but to hear. It's also plain to see an opening from its outer shell where it winds back up along the wall. If you don't mind a squeeze and being submerged in blood, you could ride the flow.

You also wouldn't know what it looked like before, but there are fewer veins attached to the gate than there were originally.

[Well. She glances around the cave, not thrilled about any of her options here and upset that Vergil seems to be gone.

But, sure, being submerged in blood somehow seems like the right call here, so she'll wrestle her way into the artery.]

Re: LIVING CAVE

auguryofinnocence - 2021-01-29 04:59 (UTC) - Expand

Re: LIVING CAVE

rollplayinghouse - 2021-01-29 05:02 (UTC) - Expand

Don't go poke at the gate and don't ask me how I know that.

... Well, alright.

Let's poke at the veins instead.

Let's poke at the veins.

[ can they in fact... descend uponst these. is this like a slide, or perhaps a water slide, ]

Re: LIVING CAVE

mind_blown - 2021-01-29 05:26 (UTC) - Expand

Re: LIVING CAVE

auguryofinnocence - 2021-01-29 05:27 (UTC) - Expand

The Hell Gate still has a few thin veins attached to it, but when you enter the cave, the seal covering it shatters into a thousand pieces and vanishes. When it disappears, the centre of the gate seems to as well, replaced only with a void, glowing and swirling with emerald green.

[Well.

It's time to enter the void.]

the void is nice, actually

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