Encounterlogs
Korinas Odd Encounter Sr Nikolai 241019
In a modern penthouse apartment, Korina experiences a peculiar series of events involving malfunctioning appliances and mysterious sounds that culminate in an odd encounter with a ghost. The ghost, manifesting with a fluctuating appearance reflecting different stages of her past life, is tragically stuck in Korina's magic circle. Through interactions tinged with a mix of frustration and curiosity, Korina learns the ghost's sad plight, involving an attachment to music from the radio era. Despite the ghost's lament, Korina, focusing more on practicalities than the ghost's unresolved issues, decides to release her from the binding circle but not without humorously blaming the spirit for the damaged appliances as a parting shot.
The story transitions to a quiet, tension-filled library scene, where Sienna, a student, is attempting to study among other patrons. The library's hushed ambiance is abruptly disturbed by the peculiar behavior of the librarian, whose actions become increasingly erratic and intense. The librarian, seemingly under the sway of an unseen force, exhibits signs of distress and uncharacteristic aggression, unnerving the students and permeating the library with a palpable sense of unease. This shift from a contained supernatural encounter within Korina's apartment to a more public disturbance in the library suggests the unpredictability and far-reaching impact of the supernatural on ordinary lives. The episodes highlight varying responses to the supernatural, contrasting Korina's direct approach to resolving her ghostly disturbance with the helpless observation of the library patrons witnessing the librarian's unsettling transformation.
(Korina's odd encounter(SRNikolai):SRNikolai)
[Fri Oct 18 2024]
In the kitchen of a modern penthouse apartment
Boasting beautiful granite countertops and a central island, this kitchen is loaded with a series of appliances. A range of luxury cookware offers freestanding electric induction, air frying, and high-precision baking technologies. Gorgeous, floor-to-ceiling wrap-around windows extend from the western wall to the north, providing a beautiful view of the terrace and poolside, and the Warden's Wood beyond, lusciously thick with trees.
It is morning, about 45F(7C) degrees, and there are a few thin white clouds in the sky.
(Your target encounters a ghost who's fixated on some past tragedy from their life, they need to either give the spirit some sense of closure, or send it on it's way through more violent means.
)
While Korina tries to sneakily obtain the cold steak she had shown so little interest in before, or whatever she's actually up to, there's a faint crackling from the fridge. There's no magic smoke let out, though, nor any smell of wiring failure or electrical mishap. Just the crackle, like TV static. Smart fridges were never a good idea in the first place, so it might be an easy thing to disregard... but a moment later, there's another scratching-crackling sound, and then grainy music, as if from a poorly-tuned old timey radio. It's only there for a flash, and then it's gone, and Korina's offworld upbringing does get in the way of recognising that tiny little snippet.
Definitely odd, though.
Korina had absolutely been in the middle of retrieving the cold steak from the fridge while Nikolai took a midday nap - or handled a 'dream meeting' or whatever excuse he wants to give - though her furtive efforts are brought to a halt by the strange crackling of the fridge. She sniffs at the air - nothing but steaky scents, surely? - and then closes the fridge door sans steak to walk back over to the hallway leading into the bedroom. She opens the door without going in, just so she can keep an eye on the fridge while she calls out into the bedroom. "Nik."
"Nik, wake up. The fridge is breaking. Fix it." He is the fix-it man as they all know.
Only steaky scents, as God intended. Then there's the sound of the workroom door creaking open, a Russian sigh (which differs from an American sigh) and a spanner flies through the air, tossed from all the way over the other end of the house. It thumps into the fridge door, which immediately quiets down and begins to behave itself as any good fridge should. It's not the first time Korina's seen the Good Old Fashioned Wrench Throw, but it's usually a sign that the big boy's too busy to take proper notice.
"I'm working," he calls over. "Dodgy shipment of plastique, baby. Give me a few hours." As the door creaks shut, a faint 'Blya-' can be heard before the latch clicks shut and a percussive thump rocks the southern end of the apartment. There's no smoke, though, and Nikolai's immortal, so it's probably better to just let him fix whatever broke.
Speaking of broke - the oven's timer goes off, beeping annoyingly.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
It just keeps going. And - is the rhythm changing, slightly? Distorting? With senses as keen as Korina's are, the answer is yes. Something is afoot.
Oh, huh. Here Korina had thought Nik had been taking a nap. She squints over towards the workroom, shuts the bedroom door, and walks back out to the kitchen, spanner in hand. She absolutely does not know how to use it.
Back Korina goes, and she stops in the middle of the kitchen, hands on her hips, to look at the beeping oven. There's a long stare.
Korina's eyebrow twitches.
Fine. She'll do it herself. Korina opens the oven door - did that stop the beeping? Maybe if she's lucky. She not going to count on her luck. What she /is/ going to count on is someone' engineering powers in hopes that they linger within the spanner long enough for Korina to do /something/. What something does she plan to do? Only God knows.
That's a lie. Korina's trying to take apart the oven door. She could've probably just done it by hand - with a lot of damage - but she does manage to instead find the screws and begin unscrewing them. Why is she pulling off the oven door if there's an annoying beeping going on? She does not know. All she knows is that the Beeping Should Stop. "Stop." she tells it irritably.
Oh, huh. Here Korina had thought Nik had been taking a nap. She squints over towards the workroom, shuts the bedroom door, and walks back out to the kitchen, spanner in hand. She absolutely does not know how to use it.
Back Korina goes, and she stops in the middle of the kitchen, hands on her hips, to look at the beeping oven. There's a long stare.
Korina's eyebrow twitches.
Fine. She'll do it herself. Korina opens the oven door - did that stop the beeping? Maybe if she's lucky. She not going to count on her luck. What she /is/ going to count on is Nikolai's engineering powers in hopes that they linger within the spanner long enough for Korina to do /something/. What something does she plan to do? Only God knows.
That's a lie. Korina's trying to take apart the oven door. She could've probably just done it by hand - with a lot of damage - but she does manage to instead find the screws and begin unscrewing them. Why is she pulling off the oven door if there's an annoying beeping going on? She does not know. All she knows is that the Beeping Should Stop. "Stop." she tells it irritably.
Demonstrating her brilliant engineering acumen by taking a spanner wrench to a series of screws, Korina succeeds in removing some parts from the oven door, certainly. Never mind that it is a touch-sensitive pad on the front which controls the timer mechanism as well as most other functions; seeing the Holy Wrench Throw has clearly instilled a need to use the tool herself in our heroine today.
Alas, that bitch doth keep beeping, though the longer it goes on, the faster it begins to resemble music, until the simple speakers are playing a melody they can't possibly have been programmed for. It's old ballroom stuff - nothing Korina's Faeling upbringing would have taught her, but not too dissimilar from what some of the figures of her past might have danced to, themselves.
"Please don't stop the music," a sad voice requests - sourceless, apparently. It didn't come from the speakers, nor is there anyone visible to speak it. Had it come from the ritual room? It /was/ a bit distant...
It had to be done. The wrench throw demanded it, and far be it for Korina to throw a wrench (ha ha) into its plans. Why else would it be thrown if not to be used? It is simple logic. Think, Oven, Think.
Anyway, yes, Korina removes the door. She places it on the kitchen island, and then stares some more. It keeps on beeping. "Stop." Korina says again, and smashes all the keys on the touchpad she can. All of them.
Her next attempt at Fixing Things comes to a halt when she hears the voice; there is, immediately, a cat-like hiss escaping Korina, and the hair at the back of her neck rising on end. She's immediately grumpy. "Go away." she tells the voice next, stomping over to the ritual room, just to check. /Is/ there a wayward sad boi in there?
Not quite! Trapped within yonder ritual circle is a sad /girl/. Well, sort of - the ghost seems to shift through the ages of the life it once lived from moment to moment, though it's strangely natural, rather than jarring. She certainly was old by the time she passed, but there's a younger woman in there as well - who'd maybe been in her youthful prime in the 20s or so, if only Korina had a sharper eye for Earth fashion.
"Hello," the crone-debutante says, not sounding too surprised to meet someone who could see and hear her. She gestures to the circle beneath her, lamenting, "I got caught in your magic circle. I'm sorry, young lady. I didn't mean to."
Korina squints. /Does/ she look particularly sad? Maybe she was hearing a different ghost. Is her house haunted by /two/ ghosts? She glances back into the hallway and towards the oven in the kitchen just to see if she can spy another sneaky ghost around, then shifts her attention back to the young-old woman. "You are not a good ghost," Korina tells her, and she doesn't mean good as in morality - she means good as in good at being a ghost.
"Make the beeping stop." there's her offer. Take it or leave it.
Yes, Korina hasn't offered anything in return. That's irrelevant.
Of course she's sad. She's stuck in a ritual circle and /lamenting/. Those are very sad things.
"I'm sorry," the ghost offers instead. "I used to be okay just with the radio, but these days, nobody seems to keep them in the house... And the music just finds its way into whatever will listen to it." She may or may not know that her music was playing from a now-vandalised oven, but nothing about the scenario really seems new to her.
"I can't make it stop," she frowns. "It follows me wherever I go..."
She didn't seem super lamenty when saying her greetings, to be fair. But fine, Korina can accept that. She's lamenty enough when offering her apologies. Korina accepts the sadness. "The radio?" she questions, "Like in the car?" Because nobody ever uses the radio app on phones, and that's just how it is. "You should go to the car." She steps forward, then pauses, just to make sure. "You will leave if I let you go, yes? I will send you to the graveyard otherwise."
There's a pause from the not-so-recently deceased, then a hesitant nod. Whatever sympathetic charm she had hoped to ply, she doesn't seem to be getting much from Korina, and just by glancing around the witching room, it's easy to surmise she has the power to back up her words.
"Okay," she acquiesces, in a soft, sad voice. "I will leave. I'm sorry..." She lifts her feet, which drag behind as if shackled to the floor where the circle's boundaries are painted. "I just need you to release me..."
To be fair, that's the ghost's on fault for looking for sympathy here. Korina just wants the spooky owoky ghosties out of her space. The spook in question, admittedly, /has/ been polite enough that Korina doesn't attempt to insult her or talk shit to her any more than she has already. She simply steps forward and kneels down to scuff away a little section of the circle, her eyes on the ghost the entire time. "I will tell Nik you broke the oven," she tells the ghost on the way. "And the fridge." It was none of Korina's doing, obviously.
The ghost's own* fault, even, is what Korina probably meant.
Well, it works. Korina successfully side-steps helping the ghost handle whatever frozen grief or unfinished business had kept it chained to the mortal coil - and all it cost her was the integrity of her oven. Any ponderings that she might have about why mysterious music would play around the ghost, why she couldn't seem to exist with a single self image, what had caused her to wander through the apartment building until she'd been snared by Korina's circle... they'd all have to be dropped, certainly, as the circle is broken, and the ghost disappears with a simple blink of nothingness.
Problem solved?
(Your target is possessed by an angry spirit that is forcing them to act out and putting themselves and/or others at risk. They must either defeat it or find a way to calm it down.
)
Situated in one of several desks strewn around the librarian's desk, Sienna sits with her cheek propped in the palm of a hand, quietly flicking through pages yellowed and worn with time, a manicured nail quickly following along a line of passage on the Siege of Tyre with half-hearted interest. Her vision swims from eye strain, lids drooping shut for a just moment as she draws in a breath, then pulls out her iPad to take photos of the illustrations on the page.
The library holds its usual quiet, a silence that absorbs every sound and slows the passage of time. Dust drifts lazily through the soft, yellowed light from the old lamps above. Yet tonight, theres a weight to the stillness, a nearly imperceptible tension clinging to the shadows between the towering shelves. The few students scattered at their desks dont seem to notice, heads bent over books, absorbed in their studies.
At the far end of the library, the Librarian moves with an odd urgency. Her steady, controlled manner has given way to sharp, erratic motions. Books are pulled from the shelves with a snap, then shoved back too hard, as if her hands cant find the right rhythm. The faint scrape of her shoes against the floor is louder than it should be, the sound sharper, more frantic in the librarys usual hush.
Her face is tight with strain, brows furrowed deeply, eyes darting between the rows of books with a restless energy. She seems detached, almost unaware of her surroundings, yet theres an unsettling intensity in every movement. A slight tremor runs through her fingers as she handles the books, a barely contained force humming beneath the surface, sending a quiet vibration through the air around her.
A loud thud breaks the silence as a book slams onto a table with enough force to make nearby students flinch. They glance up, startled, sharing uneasy looks before quickly turning back to their tasks. The tension thickens in the room, almost palpable now, as the Librarian continues her erratic movements, oblivious to the growing sense of unease that swells like a gathering storm in the library.
The story transitions to a quiet, tension-filled library scene, where Sienna, a student, is attempting to study among other patrons. The library's hushed ambiance is abruptly disturbed by the peculiar behavior of the librarian, whose actions become increasingly erratic and intense. The librarian, seemingly under the sway of an unseen force, exhibits signs of distress and uncharacteristic aggression, unnerving the students and permeating the library with a palpable sense of unease. This shift from a contained supernatural encounter within Korina's apartment to a more public disturbance in the library suggests the unpredictability and far-reaching impact of the supernatural on ordinary lives. The episodes highlight varying responses to the supernatural, contrasting Korina's direct approach to resolving her ghostly disturbance with the helpless observation of the library patrons witnessing the librarian's unsettling transformation.
(Korina's odd encounter(SRNikolai):SRNikolai)
[Fri Oct 18 2024]
In the kitchen of a modern penthouse apartment
Boasting beautiful granite countertops and a central island, this kitchen is loaded with a series of appliances. A range of luxury cookware offers freestanding electric induction, air frying, and high-precision baking technologies. Gorgeous, floor-to-ceiling wrap-around windows extend from the western wall to the north, providing a beautiful view of the terrace and poolside, and the Warden's Wood beyond, lusciously thick with trees.
It is morning, about 45F(7C) degrees, and there are a few thin white clouds in the sky.
(Your target encounters a ghost who's fixated on some past tragedy from their life, they need to either give the spirit some sense of closure, or send it on it's way through more violent means.
)
While Korina tries to sneakily obtain the cold steak she had shown so little interest in before, or whatever she's actually up to, there's a faint crackling from the fridge. There's no magic smoke let out, though, nor any smell of wiring failure or electrical mishap. Just the crackle, like TV static. Smart fridges were never a good idea in the first place, so it might be an easy thing to disregard... but a moment later, there's another scratching-crackling sound, and then grainy music, as if from a poorly-tuned old timey radio. It's only there for a flash, and then it's gone, and Korina's offworld upbringing does get in the way of recognising that tiny little snippet.
Definitely odd, though.
Korina had absolutely been in the middle of retrieving the cold steak from the fridge while Nikolai took a midday nap - or handled a 'dream meeting' or whatever excuse he wants to give - though her furtive efforts are brought to a halt by the strange crackling of the fridge. She sniffs at the air - nothing but steaky scents, surely? - and then closes the fridge door sans steak to walk back over to the hallway leading into the bedroom. She opens the door without going in, just so she can keep an eye on the fridge while she calls out into the bedroom. "Nik."
"Nik, wake up. The fridge is breaking. Fix it." He is the fix-it man as they all know.
Only steaky scents, as God intended. Then there's the sound of the workroom door creaking open, a Russian sigh (which differs from an American sigh) and a spanner flies through the air, tossed from all the way over the other end of the house. It thumps into the fridge door, which immediately quiets down and begins to behave itself as any good fridge should. It's not the first time Korina's seen the Good Old Fashioned Wrench Throw, but it's usually a sign that the big boy's too busy to take proper notice.
"I'm working," he calls over. "Dodgy shipment of plastique, baby. Give me a few hours." As the door creaks shut, a faint 'Blya-' can be heard before the latch clicks shut and a percussive thump rocks the southern end of the apartment. There's no smoke, though, and Nikolai's immortal, so it's probably better to just let him fix whatever broke.
Speaking of broke - the oven's timer goes off, beeping annoyingly.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
It just keeps going. And - is the rhythm changing, slightly? Distorting? With senses as keen as Korina's are, the answer is yes. Something is afoot.
Oh, huh. Here Korina had thought Nik had been taking a nap. She squints over towards the workroom, shuts the bedroom door, and walks back out to the kitchen, spanner in hand. She absolutely does not know how to use it.
Back Korina goes, and she stops in the middle of the kitchen, hands on her hips, to look at the beeping oven. There's a long stare.
Korina's eyebrow twitches.
Fine. She'll do it herself. Korina opens the oven door - did that stop the beeping? Maybe if she's lucky. She not going to count on her luck. What she /is/ going to count on is someone' engineering powers in hopes that they linger within the spanner long enough for Korina to do /something/. What something does she plan to do? Only God knows.
That's a lie. Korina's trying to take apart the oven door. She could've probably just done it by hand - with a lot of damage - but she does manage to instead find the screws and begin unscrewing them. Why is she pulling off the oven door if there's an annoying beeping going on? She does not know. All she knows is that the Beeping Should Stop. "Stop." she tells it irritably.
Oh, huh. Here Korina had thought Nik had been taking a nap. She squints over towards the workroom, shuts the bedroom door, and walks back out to the kitchen, spanner in hand. She absolutely does not know how to use it.
Back Korina goes, and she stops in the middle of the kitchen, hands on her hips, to look at the beeping oven. There's a long stare.
Korina's eyebrow twitches.
Fine. She'll do it herself. Korina opens the oven door - did that stop the beeping? Maybe if she's lucky. She not going to count on her luck. What she /is/ going to count on is Nikolai's engineering powers in hopes that they linger within the spanner long enough for Korina to do /something/. What something does she plan to do? Only God knows.
That's a lie. Korina's trying to take apart the oven door. She could've probably just done it by hand - with a lot of damage - but she does manage to instead find the screws and begin unscrewing them. Why is she pulling off the oven door if there's an annoying beeping going on? She does not know. All she knows is that the Beeping Should Stop. "Stop." she tells it irritably.
Demonstrating her brilliant engineering acumen by taking a spanner wrench to a series of screws, Korina succeeds in removing some parts from the oven door, certainly. Never mind that it is a touch-sensitive pad on the front which controls the timer mechanism as well as most other functions; seeing the Holy Wrench Throw has clearly instilled a need to use the tool herself in our heroine today.
Alas, that bitch doth keep beeping, though the longer it goes on, the faster it begins to resemble music, until the simple speakers are playing a melody they can't possibly have been programmed for. It's old ballroom stuff - nothing Korina's Faeling upbringing would have taught her, but not too dissimilar from what some of the figures of her past might have danced to, themselves.
"Please don't stop the music," a sad voice requests - sourceless, apparently. It didn't come from the speakers, nor is there anyone visible to speak it. Had it come from the ritual room? It /was/ a bit distant...
It had to be done. The wrench throw demanded it, and far be it for Korina to throw a wrench (ha ha) into its plans. Why else would it be thrown if not to be used? It is simple logic. Think, Oven, Think.
Anyway, yes, Korina removes the door. She places it on the kitchen island, and then stares some more. It keeps on beeping. "Stop." Korina says again, and smashes all the keys on the touchpad she can. All of them.
Her next attempt at Fixing Things comes to a halt when she hears the voice; there is, immediately, a cat-like hiss escaping Korina, and the hair at the back of her neck rising on end. She's immediately grumpy. "Go away." she tells the voice next, stomping over to the ritual room, just to check. /Is/ there a wayward sad boi in there?
Not quite! Trapped within yonder ritual circle is a sad /girl/. Well, sort of - the ghost seems to shift through the ages of the life it once lived from moment to moment, though it's strangely natural, rather than jarring. She certainly was old by the time she passed, but there's a younger woman in there as well - who'd maybe been in her youthful prime in the 20s or so, if only Korina had a sharper eye for Earth fashion.
"Hello," the crone-debutante says, not sounding too surprised to meet someone who could see and hear her. She gestures to the circle beneath her, lamenting, "I got caught in your magic circle. I'm sorry, young lady. I didn't mean to."
Korina squints. /Does/ she look particularly sad? Maybe she was hearing a different ghost. Is her house haunted by /two/ ghosts? She glances back into the hallway and towards the oven in the kitchen just to see if she can spy another sneaky ghost around, then shifts her attention back to the young-old woman. "You are not a good ghost," Korina tells her, and she doesn't mean good as in morality - she means good as in good at being a ghost.
"Make the beeping stop." there's her offer. Take it or leave it.
Yes, Korina hasn't offered anything in return. That's irrelevant.
Of course she's sad. She's stuck in a ritual circle and /lamenting/. Those are very sad things.
"I'm sorry," the ghost offers instead. "I used to be okay just with the radio, but these days, nobody seems to keep them in the house... And the music just finds its way into whatever will listen to it." She may or may not know that her music was playing from a now-vandalised oven, but nothing about the scenario really seems new to her.
"I can't make it stop," she frowns. "It follows me wherever I go..."
She didn't seem super lamenty when saying her greetings, to be fair. But fine, Korina can accept that. She's lamenty enough when offering her apologies. Korina accepts the sadness. "The radio?" she questions, "Like in the car?" Because nobody ever uses the radio app on phones, and that's just how it is. "You should go to the car." She steps forward, then pauses, just to make sure. "You will leave if I let you go, yes? I will send you to the graveyard otherwise."
There's a pause from the not-so-recently deceased, then a hesitant nod. Whatever sympathetic charm she had hoped to ply, she doesn't seem to be getting much from Korina, and just by glancing around the witching room, it's easy to surmise she has the power to back up her words.
"Okay," she acquiesces, in a soft, sad voice. "I will leave. I'm sorry..." She lifts her feet, which drag behind as if shackled to the floor where the circle's boundaries are painted. "I just need you to release me..."
To be fair, that's the ghost's on fault for looking for sympathy here. Korina just wants the spooky owoky ghosties out of her space. The spook in question, admittedly, /has/ been polite enough that Korina doesn't attempt to insult her or talk shit to her any more than she has already. She simply steps forward and kneels down to scuff away a little section of the circle, her eyes on the ghost the entire time. "I will tell Nik you broke the oven," she tells the ghost on the way. "And the fridge." It was none of Korina's doing, obviously.
The ghost's own* fault, even, is what Korina probably meant.
Well, it works. Korina successfully side-steps helping the ghost handle whatever frozen grief or unfinished business had kept it chained to the mortal coil - and all it cost her was the integrity of her oven. Any ponderings that she might have about why mysterious music would play around the ghost, why she couldn't seem to exist with a single self image, what had caused her to wander through the apartment building until she'd been snared by Korina's circle... they'd all have to be dropped, certainly, as the circle is broken, and the ghost disappears with a simple blink of nothingness.
Problem solved?
(Your target is possessed by an angry spirit that is forcing them to act out and putting themselves and/or others at risk. They must either defeat it or find a way to calm it down.
)
Situated in one of several desks strewn around the librarian's desk, Sienna sits with her cheek propped in the palm of a hand, quietly flicking through pages yellowed and worn with time, a manicured nail quickly following along a line of passage on the Siege of Tyre with half-hearted interest. Her vision swims from eye strain, lids drooping shut for a just moment as she draws in a breath, then pulls out her iPad to take photos of the illustrations on the page.
The library holds its usual quiet, a silence that absorbs every sound and slows the passage of time. Dust drifts lazily through the soft, yellowed light from the old lamps above. Yet tonight, theres a weight to the stillness, a nearly imperceptible tension clinging to the shadows between the towering shelves. The few students scattered at their desks dont seem to notice, heads bent over books, absorbed in their studies.
At the far end of the library, the Librarian moves with an odd urgency. Her steady, controlled manner has given way to sharp, erratic motions. Books are pulled from the shelves with a snap, then shoved back too hard, as if her hands cant find the right rhythm. The faint scrape of her shoes against the floor is louder than it should be, the sound sharper, more frantic in the librarys usual hush.
Her face is tight with strain, brows furrowed deeply, eyes darting between the rows of books with a restless energy. She seems detached, almost unaware of her surroundings, yet theres an unsettling intensity in every movement. A slight tremor runs through her fingers as she handles the books, a barely contained force humming beneath the surface, sending a quiet vibration through the air around her.
A loud thud breaks the silence as a book slams onto a table with enough force to make nearby students flinch. They glance up, startled, sharing uneasy looks before quickly turning back to their tasks. The tension thickens in the room, almost palpable now, as the Librarian continues her erratic movements, oblivious to the growing sense of unease that swells like a gathering storm in the library.