Encounterlogs
Korinas Odd Encounter Sr Nikolai 240722
The story unfolds in the Thirsty Toadstool Tavern, a setting familiar to its patrons and especially to Korina, who comes across an unsettling change in the tavern's atmosphere. The night takes a bizarre turn when Korina, noticing the bartender's unrecognizable face, is served a mug of purple wine spiked with potent dreamberry. Her trained senses alert her to the concoction's power, yet she drinks it, leading to a rapid descent into unconsciousness. In this vulnerable state, she is transported to a nightmarish realm where a mantis-shaped demon with a human face greets her. This demon, presenting an aura of both allure and danger, attempts to seduce Korina into a demonic pact, offering her power and revelations of a life unperturbed by Fae influence.
Despite the tempting offers and the unsettling transformation of the demon to appeal to her desires, Korina refuses. Her inner strength, born from self-reliance and a hard-fought journey to power, fortifies her resolve. She declares that she has fashioned herself from nothing, rejecting the notion that she was devoid of greatness before the demon's intervention. Although physically overwhelmed by the hellish environment and the demon's persuasive demeanor, Korina attempts to flee, driven by the instinct to maintain her autonomy and resist the pull towards servitude under the demon. Her defiance highlights her character's resilience and determination to forge her own path, undeterred by the seductive forces of darkness that seek to claim her will and potential.
(Korina's odd encounter(SRNikolai):SRNikolai)
[Sun Jul 21 2024]
In Thirsty Toadstool Tavern
This is a brightly lit, bawdy bar. There are always patrons here, mostly faelings and faeborn, but plenty of other travelers as well. The air smells of booze and pipe smoke. To the south is a discrete back door, and to the east is a curtain of beads leading into a darkened room.
A mirror is placed in one corner of the tavern, tall and free-standing with an ornate wooden frame.
It is night, about 77F(25C) degrees, There is a waning gibbous moon.
(A demon from hell has become interested in your target, they decide to see if they can tempt them into becoming one of their instruments on earth.
)
There's a bit of a funny air to the Thirsty Toadstool tonight. Korina might not be the type to take note of everyone's faces and behaviours, but she's still enormously perceptive, and these things have a way of filtering into subconscious knowledge. Right now, things aren't as they should be, even if she doesn't know exactly what's wrong - until the bartender turns to her, raising an eyebrow, and she doesn't recognise his face. Oh, it's the right body shape; the man's still basically an ogre in build. But his face... it's not wrong in any single way, but it's not her employee, either. Shivers run along her spine, unbidden, autonomous, independent - something is wrong. The bartender places a wooden mug of hot, purple wine down before her and says, in a voice like velvet wool, "Enjoy, boss. Throw 'er back."
It's still dark outside, the activity of the tavern incessant even at ass o'clock in the morning, and Korina's still a little sleepy where she sits upon the bar stool, leaning back against the bar and looking over the tavern with vague, idle interest. "Steak," she says immediately, not even turning to look at the bartender when the mug gets placed near her, though the unfamiliar voice has her glancing over with eyes narrowed immediately in suspicion. "Where is Jareth?" she questions, the man's presence turning out to be more interesting than a rowdy crowd after all. She swivels around on her stool, grabbing the mug and sniffing at it before flashing a look up at the guy. "He knows I don't drink." This guy doesn't apparently, but that doesn't mean she should let some good Fae wine go to waste, right? She throws it back.
Now, Korina's a trained alchemist, and a general enjoyer of weird ingredients besides. She certainly recognises the potent kick of dreamberry mixed into the wine, so it's no real surprise to her when things very quickly get wobbly and start to go dark. This stuff is beyond distillation; this would qualify as a concentrate. The bartender doesn't much reply, only smiling wider, and wider, and wider, until his smile's distorting past the boundaries of his face and floating off elsewhere, and the patrons start arguing in reverse before coming to a dead stop, frozen in place.
"Let me get you a pillow," whispers that velvety voice, before Korina's head drops like a stone and smashes into the bar counter as she rapidly falls unconscious and falls off her stool.
God, it's warm. It's beyond the already unpleasant warmth of the summer; it's broiling, and Korina doesn't know where she is. She's on a patch of black grass, with a purplish sheen. The earth is sticky beneath her. Mud? No, it's too coppery; the earth is wet with blood. And there's smoke on the air, too, and the taste of offal. She blinks, and then she's properly conscious, and there is an enormous mantis standing above her, black and red and adorned with a human face - a Nepali face, wrinkled and brown, complete with Shaivite tilak painted on his forehead in bright colours.
"Good morning, my beautiful Radha," whispers the man-faced demon, soft and sweet and velvety. He - It - reaches out with a barbed forelimb to tilt the woman's chin up to behold him more fully. Nevermind the utterly profane energies unspooling from its - no, his - very form; those remain obscured to the active mind. Korina's only peripherally aware of those. Nor the dozens of human corpses, twisted out of proper shape, which pool around the demon and the woman. The demon's directing her gaze up only at him -- it.
"This is not how you make..." That's all the words Korina is about to get out, slurred, before her eyelids are drooping and her head is tipping over, the woman rapidly unbalancing when her consciousness flits away on a haze of dreamberry. Even if someone is paying enough attention to notice, she probably takes enough naps here that nobody would bat an eye to her just snoozing away in some corner somewhere - assuming they didn't see the way she dropped heavily and unintentionally. She doesn't even get a pillow, which is fuckin' rude.
Korina's growling faintly under her breath at the stench of blood and offal and smoke before she's even properly 'awake', and there's really no time to linger on how the fuck she got here when she's already having her head tilted up towards the mantis-man abomination. There's one singular, slow blink, the woman tensing up at the sheer onslaught of sensory information combined with the 'what-the-fuck'ery of the situation, and she does she only reasonable thing she can be expected to do here: a wordless, loud hiss, followed by a bat of her claws at the barbed forelimb before she attempts to leap back and away. "Wrong person," she states, the words carried upon a growl, and doesn't give out her 'own' name in correction, just keeping her eyes fixed evenly upon the mantis, crouched defensively. "I am leaving."
Where Korina's hand comes to smack against the demon's carapace, her skin sizzles as if she'd struck glowing-hot metal instead. Pain races up her arm as she makes her declarations, and the face the demon wears turns downcast, as if full of paternal concern for her very wellbeing and her scorched fingies. Of course, when it - he? - touched her, the contact had been perfectly cool to the touch. "You have nowhere to go, dear girl," the voice sighs - and it is the same voice, assuredly, but it speaks now as a stranger, rather than assuming any familiarity. "I do not ever have the wrong person," he continues, then lifts one of its legs to present the image of two of the surrounding corpses in particular - both carrying her face. One has its features twisted in absolute agony, expressions Korina didn't know she could even /make/. The other is much the same, only her features are contorted in mind-breaking ecstasy, as if slain by pure pleasure.
"Even if you /were/," he replies then, amusedly, "I could simply make you into the right person." It lowers itself down to eye level with her, forcing Korina to scramble back just to give the demon enough space to not crush her in doing so. "I have been watching you, Korina of Lauriea. You are a powerful woman. Cruel. Confident. Sensual. So unbothered with the opinions or feelings of others... You are ideal." He lets out a little sound of... approval? Desire? Something complicated, but certainly intrigued. There's a lurching of something heavy beneath the demon's quarters, just out of sight.
"Demons rarely approach humans for our deals. Most dealings are with those who come to us... But you are very promising, young lady. I would like to make a pact with you - I can offer you greater power; anything you desire."
There's another hiss, though this time it's of pain instead of aggression at the heat that courses up her hand and arm; she curls the limb close to herself, angled away from the demon as though to protect her injury from its sight - but surely it can sense her suffering anyway, for all that it may try to act paternal. For the first time now since her arrival here, Korina's eyes flick over to the bodies - the /corpses/ - littering the ground, her eyes widening and breath hitching in her throat as she scrambles away from the demon's approach.
The look she flashes the mantis then is pure, utter disgust.
"No," comes outright refusal. There's a single glance to the distance beyond the demon, and another behind her just to see if she can figure out anything about her surroundings - if this is Hell, she's been here aplenty, though not much beyond the border. Surely she can find her way back? She doesn't dare to keep her eyes off the demon for too long though, gaze fixed on its throat instead of its eyes - safer that way, surely, though it's likely the demon could just tear her apart from limb to limb if it truly wanted to instead of going for subtler means. "I have an owner already," she claims, "I will not be tied to /you/." There's a curling of her upper lip in a bared-teeth snarl, entirely involuntary, "I will have greater power anyway. Magic of my own, not borrowed."
Internally, beyond all the alarms blaring in her mind, Korina tries to muster up all the psychic energy she can, probing at the demon's mind as subtly as possible - she's not the greatest at it yet, and it's likely the demon's mind is unlike any she's tried to effect so far, but... she tries. Anything to improve her chances at an escape.
Alas - Korina's psychic efforts glide off the Demon's mind without so much as a sense of friction. Its power dwarfs hers unquestionably, like a mountain weighed against a feather. "Greater than you /have/, yes; but not greater than I could give you," it murmurs, and the wrinkles of his skin smooth, becoming softer and supple and female, tilak flowing into a single red bead worn on the forehead. "I have other things to offer you than power, of course," she-it murmurs. "I can show you what was taken from you, so early. Pact with me, and I will show you who you might have been. I will unweave all the influence of the Fae myself, if you become mine."
Korina shakes her head before the demon's even finished speaking, though that does seem to pique her interest - demonic pacts aren't in the plans for her, but curiosity did kill the cat. She watches the transformation with slightly wide eyes, watching the forming of flesh to different shapes and sexes. There's another shaky inhale, exhaled ever so slowly, and then she shakes her head again. "No. No. I am not-" Another growl escapes the back of her throat, unbidden, simply the result of instincts taking over at some thought or the other, and Korina simply takes another step back, two, then three. "I made myself from nothing," she states, maybe not as firm as she ought to be, the undercurrent of a hiss lining her words. "There is nothing-... /taken/. I had nothing, and now I am strong, and I will be stronger." There's a narrowing of her eyes at the demon, and then she tucks her tails between her legs - proverbially - and turns to run, hopefully straight out of this place, real or dream or otherwise.
Though it doesn't seem annoyed by Korina having spoken, the demon picks up where it left off, as if she hadn't said anything at all. Doesn't seem she - he? It? - has any interest in taking no for an answer, as Korina's stride finds itself quickly swallowed up by the Hellish quagmire of blood and dirt beneath her feet. The ground swallows her up almost to the knee, and threatens to claim even more of her if she should struggle. "You wouldn't have to change your lifestyle very much," it murmurs soft and smokily, the exact cadence of her words shifting to fit the lips producing them. The sound of it sends another shiver, less fearful, down Korina's spine. Just the once, though. "You are already so cruel, so petty. All you would need to do would be as you are already doing, but in my name... Feed that suffering to me, and you will be rewarded. That does not sound too bad, does it?"
Despite the tempting offers and the unsettling transformation of the demon to appeal to her desires, Korina refuses. Her inner strength, born from self-reliance and a hard-fought journey to power, fortifies her resolve. She declares that she has fashioned herself from nothing, rejecting the notion that she was devoid of greatness before the demon's intervention. Although physically overwhelmed by the hellish environment and the demon's persuasive demeanor, Korina attempts to flee, driven by the instinct to maintain her autonomy and resist the pull towards servitude under the demon. Her defiance highlights her character's resilience and determination to forge her own path, undeterred by the seductive forces of darkness that seek to claim her will and potential.
(Korina's odd encounter(SRNikolai):SRNikolai)
[Sun Jul 21 2024]
In Thirsty Toadstool Tavern
This is a brightly lit, bawdy bar. There are always patrons here, mostly faelings and faeborn, but plenty of other travelers as well. The air smells of booze and pipe smoke. To the south is a discrete back door, and to the east is a curtain of beads leading into a darkened room.
A mirror is placed in one corner of the tavern, tall and free-standing with an ornate wooden frame.
It is night, about 77F(25C) degrees, There is a waning gibbous moon.
(A demon from hell has become interested in your target, they decide to see if they can tempt them into becoming one of their instruments on earth.
)
There's a bit of a funny air to the Thirsty Toadstool tonight. Korina might not be the type to take note of everyone's faces and behaviours, but she's still enormously perceptive, and these things have a way of filtering into subconscious knowledge. Right now, things aren't as they should be, even if she doesn't know exactly what's wrong - until the bartender turns to her, raising an eyebrow, and she doesn't recognise his face. Oh, it's the right body shape; the man's still basically an ogre in build. But his face... it's not wrong in any single way, but it's not her employee, either. Shivers run along her spine, unbidden, autonomous, independent - something is wrong. The bartender places a wooden mug of hot, purple wine down before her and says, in a voice like velvet wool, "Enjoy, boss. Throw 'er back."
It's still dark outside, the activity of the tavern incessant even at ass o'clock in the morning, and Korina's still a little sleepy where she sits upon the bar stool, leaning back against the bar and looking over the tavern with vague, idle interest. "Steak," she says immediately, not even turning to look at the bartender when the mug gets placed near her, though the unfamiliar voice has her glancing over with eyes narrowed immediately in suspicion. "Where is Jareth?" she questions, the man's presence turning out to be more interesting than a rowdy crowd after all. She swivels around on her stool, grabbing the mug and sniffing at it before flashing a look up at the guy. "He knows I don't drink." This guy doesn't apparently, but that doesn't mean she should let some good Fae wine go to waste, right? She throws it back.
Now, Korina's a trained alchemist, and a general enjoyer of weird ingredients besides. She certainly recognises the potent kick of dreamberry mixed into the wine, so it's no real surprise to her when things very quickly get wobbly and start to go dark. This stuff is beyond distillation; this would qualify as a concentrate. The bartender doesn't much reply, only smiling wider, and wider, and wider, until his smile's distorting past the boundaries of his face and floating off elsewhere, and the patrons start arguing in reverse before coming to a dead stop, frozen in place.
"Let me get you a pillow," whispers that velvety voice, before Korina's head drops like a stone and smashes into the bar counter as she rapidly falls unconscious and falls off her stool.
God, it's warm. It's beyond the already unpleasant warmth of the summer; it's broiling, and Korina doesn't know where she is. She's on a patch of black grass, with a purplish sheen. The earth is sticky beneath her. Mud? No, it's too coppery; the earth is wet with blood. And there's smoke on the air, too, and the taste of offal. She blinks, and then she's properly conscious, and there is an enormous mantis standing above her, black and red and adorned with a human face - a Nepali face, wrinkled and brown, complete with Shaivite tilak painted on his forehead in bright colours.
"Good morning, my beautiful Radha," whispers the man-faced demon, soft and sweet and velvety. He - It - reaches out with a barbed forelimb to tilt the woman's chin up to behold him more fully. Nevermind the utterly profane energies unspooling from its - no, his - very form; those remain obscured to the active mind. Korina's only peripherally aware of those. Nor the dozens of human corpses, twisted out of proper shape, which pool around the demon and the woman. The demon's directing her gaze up only at him -- it.
"This is not how you make..." That's all the words Korina is about to get out, slurred, before her eyelids are drooping and her head is tipping over, the woman rapidly unbalancing when her consciousness flits away on a haze of dreamberry. Even if someone is paying enough attention to notice, she probably takes enough naps here that nobody would bat an eye to her just snoozing away in some corner somewhere - assuming they didn't see the way she dropped heavily and unintentionally. She doesn't even get a pillow, which is fuckin' rude.
Korina's growling faintly under her breath at the stench of blood and offal and smoke before she's even properly 'awake', and there's really no time to linger on how the fuck she got here when she's already having her head tilted up towards the mantis-man abomination. There's one singular, slow blink, the woman tensing up at the sheer onslaught of sensory information combined with the 'what-the-fuck'ery of the situation, and she does she only reasonable thing she can be expected to do here: a wordless, loud hiss, followed by a bat of her claws at the barbed forelimb before she attempts to leap back and away. "Wrong person," she states, the words carried upon a growl, and doesn't give out her 'own' name in correction, just keeping her eyes fixed evenly upon the mantis, crouched defensively. "I am leaving."
Where Korina's hand comes to smack against the demon's carapace, her skin sizzles as if she'd struck glowing-hot metal instead. Pain races up her arm as she makes her declarations, and the face the demon wears turns downcast, as if full of paternal concern for her very wellbeing and her scorched fingies. Of course, when it - he? - touched her, the contact had been perfectly cool to the touch. "You have nowhere to go, dear girl," the voice sighs - and it is the same voice, assuredly, but it speaks now as a stranger, rather than assuming any familiarity. "I do not ever have the wrong person," he continues, then lifts one of its legs to present the image of two of the surrounding corpses in particular - both carrying her face. One has its features twisted in absolute agony, expressions Korina didn't know she could even /make/. The other is much the same, only her features are contorted in mind-breaking ecstasy, as if slain by pure pleasure.
"Even if you /were/," he replies then, amusedly, "I could simply make you into the right person." It lowers itself down to eye level with her, forcing Korina to scramble back just to give the demon enough space to not crush her in doing so. "I have been watching you, Korina of Lauriea. You are a powerful woman. Cruel. Confident. Sensual. So unbothered with the opinions or feelings of others... You are ideal." He lets out a little sound of... approval? Desire? Something complicated, but certainly intrigued. There's a lurching of something heavy beneath the demon's quarters, just out of sight.
"Demons rarely approach humans for our deals. Most dealings are with those who come to us... But you are very promising, young lady. I would like to make a pact with you - I can offer you greater power; anything you desire."
There's another hiss, though this time it's of pain instead of aggression at the heat that courses up her hand and arm; she curls the limb close to herself, angled away from the demon as though to protect her injury from its sight - but surely it can sense her suffering anyway, for all that it may try to act paternal. For the first time now since her arrival here, Korina's eyes flick over to the bodies - the /corpses/ - littering the ground, her eyes widening and breath hitching in her throat as she scrambles away from the demon's approach.
The look she flashes the mantis then is pure, utter disgust.
"No," comes outright refusal. There's a single glance to the distance beyond the demon, and another behind her just to see if she can figure out anything about her surroundings - if this is Hell, she's been here aplenty, though not much beyond the border. Surely she can find her way back? She doesn't dare to keep her eyes off the demon for too long though, gaze fixed on its throat instead of its eyes - safer that way, surely, though it's likely the demon could just tear her apart from limb to limb if it truly wanted to instead of going for subtler means. "I have an owner already," she claims, "I will not be tied to /you/." There's a curling of her upper lip in a bared-teeth snarl, entirely involuntary, "I will have greater power anyway. Magic of my own, not borrowed."
Internally, beyond all the alarms blaring in her mind, Korina tries to muster up all the psychic energy she can, probing at the demon's mind as subtly as possible - she's not the greatest at it yet, and it's likely the demon's mind is unlike any she's tried to effect so far, but... she tries. Anything to improve her chances at an escape.
Alas - Korina's psychic efforts glide off the Demon's mind without so much as a sense of friction. Its power dwarfs hers unquestionably, like a mountain weighed against a feather. "Greater than you /have/, yes; but not greater than I could give you," it murmurs, and the wrinkles of his skin smooth, becoming softer and supple and female, tilak flowing into a single red bead worn on the forehead. "I have other things to offer you than power, of course," she-it murmurs. "I can show you what was taken from you, so early. Pact with me, and I will show you who you might have been. I will unweave all the influence of the Fae myself, if you become mine."
Korina shakes her head before the demon's even finished speaking, though that does seem to pique her interest - demonic pacts aren't in the plans for her, but curiosity did kill the cat. She watches the transformation with slightly wide eyes, watching the forming of flesh to different shapes and sexes. There's another shaky inhale, exhaled ever so slowly, and then she shakes her head again. "No. No. I am not-" Another growl escapes the back of her throat, unbidden, simply the result of instincts taking over at some thought or the other, and Korina simply takes another step back, two, then three. "I made myself from nothing," she states, maybe not as firm as she ought to be, the undercurrent of a hiss lining her words. "There is nothing-... /taken/. I had nothing, and now I am strong, and I will be stronger." There's a narrowing of her eyes at the demon, and then she tucks her tails between her legs - proverbially - and turns to run, hopefully straight out of this place, real or dream or otherwise.
Though it doesn't seem annoyed by Korina having spoken, the demon picks up where it left off, as if she hadn't said anything at all. Doesn't seem she - he? It? - has any interest in taking no for an answer, as Korina's stride finds itself quickly swallowed up by the Hellish quagmire of blood and dirt beneath her feet. The ground swallows her up almost to the knee, and threatens to claim even more of her if she should struggle. "You wouldn't have to change your lifestyle very much," it murmurs soft and smokily, the exact cadence of her words shifting to fit the lips producing them. The sound of it sends another shiver, less fearful, down Korina's spine. Just the once, though. "You are already so cruel, so petty. All you would need to do would be as you are already doing, but in my name... Feed that suffering to me, and you will be rewarded. That does not sound too bad, does it?"