unrequite: (17)
demon king of the east, midnight ([personal profile] unrequite) wrote in [community profile] citylogs2023-10-03 09:41 pm

October Catch-all!

WHO: Midnight ([profile] unreserving) & open!
WHAT: October catch-all
WHERE: Where isn't he, honestly
WHEN: Catching all of October, will update after the plot details drop!
WARNINGS: ~*Midnight*~. But also probably alcohol and disordered eating mentions generally, will update as necessary. UPDATE: there is some MENTAL HEALTH going on in Hiyori's thread. mind the warnings, there are cults in there.



a. various places (day)
How was that?

[ Midnight flagged your character down for a practice session! Fortunately, it's not his usual jock routine: he spent the last 20 minutes explaining the ins and outs of the City as though his partner has just arrived here. It was a very serious roleplay, Midnight answered all questions with great thought and care. ]

I think it may be best to also mention some basic safety precautions... To proceed with great care to any new locations, to consider supplies and other survival items before risking a new encounter. But other than that... Do you remember any other questions you had in mind when you first arrived here?

b. swimming pool (afternoon)
Did you want one?

[ Why were you staring at this teen in the relaxation pool? Probably because he's sitting on a pool noodle, floating near the edge, snacking on a large carton of chicken nuggets. Said carton is... probably somewhat moist, but he's doing a pretty good job of keeping it from becoming overly waterlogged, and he certainly doesn't seem to be up to any specific mischief. Nope. Just vibing in the pool with chicky nugs.

The kid himself has short, ragged black hair with a few pink streaks, pink eyes, pointed ears, pale skin... Basically, if anyone's met Midnight, one might wonder if he had a little brother or a son who's just arrived. The similarities are quite uncanny. However, his question isn't particularly... Midnight-y. It's just a question. The most obvious reason why one would be staring at someone else's food in the first place. ]

c. garden prompt
[ Midnight will be avoiding the more grabby plants — he doesn't want to test if their thirst for his blood will lead to their demise via Originium — so the grabbiness here? Why, that's your hand he's grabbing. Because he's spotted someone he may or may not know among these very rude plants and, after listening to some of the gossiping circulating, has made an executive decision to leave the venue with his new partner in tow. (He... did get an earful about your characters issues on the way, but his main concern at the moment is getting his new partner out.) ]

Nasty lot, aren't they? Manners are free. Come along, love. Let's get a drink.

d. wildcard
if you'd like a custom starter please dm me (i don't have plurk sorry)
kampfgeist: (anger | didn't quite hear you)

cannonballs into your inbox and makes you write a fight scene

[personal profile] kampfgeist 2023-10-20 04:27 am (UTC)(link)
[ heine is pretty sure this has to be the worst fucking way to die: taken out by a vampire wearing a pair of devil horns, while he himself is dressed as some stupid combination of mummy and werewolf, the furry ears long since abandoned to the ghosts of the second-floor hallway and the bandages starting to unravel from his torso. there's an already-healing scratch on his forearm, cutting from wrist nearly to elbow in the shape of one of midnight's fangs; his hip aches from where he ran into a doorknob earlier, and he's fairly sure one of his knuckles is broken.

all this, when heine didn't even mean to be here. it's enough to piss a guy off, and on top of that heine's pretty sure if he dies tonight badou will resurrect him early just to kill him again.

so he fights, although not with everything he has. heine's still not clear on exactly what midnight means when he says durable, and he doesn't want tonight to be the night he finds out. but he fights, twisting the strap of his overalls free of midnight's grasping hand and then flinging himself through the space between midnight's legs, along the floor until he pops up on the other side in search of a weapon of some kind. something like a club—a chair leg, maybe, something he could use to knock midnight out without doing lethal damage.

in his head, the dog: you always try so fucking hard not to use the strength you were given. live a little, won't you? master. ]


Fuck off fuck off fuck—off.
kampfgeist: (annoyed | get off my ass about it)

[personal profile] kampfgeist 2023-10-20 11:36 pm (UTC)(link)
[ heine uses his slight speed advantage and grips the frame of one of the dorm room doors, using it as a fulcrum as he swings himself around it and into the darkness of the room. by pure lucky coincidence it's not one of the ones with a ghost who wants to eat his liver out of his body, but rather, a ghost who's laying on the bed despondently and staring at the ceiling. it doesn't even shift to look at heine as he slams into the side of the bed and grabs for the chair tucked neatly under the dorm desk. ]

Just gonna borrow this real quick. [ not that the ghost cares.

heine grabs the chair and uses all his strength to break it over one knee, snapping off one of the legs and testing its heft. it'll make a good defensive weapon—but fuck, heine can't kill him. he's never had to split this difference before, needing to fight like he means it but not use lethal force. he's not sure he knows how.

he's not going to learn right here in this dorm room, though. heine needs more space to be effective. he shoves himself back out into the dorm hallway, teeth bared in an animal grimace as he considers midnight dazed against the wall. ]
kampfgeist: (crazy | i like your blood on my teeth)

[personal profile] kampfgeist 2023-10-21 06:59 am (UTC)(link)
[ midnight charges, and heine does the best he can with the chair leg. batters him with it, really, head and shoulders and torso, whatever heine can reach. it doesn't seem to slow him any, though—it's the wall that does that, heine's back slamming up against it so hard his head snaps back to strike it and heine thinks he feels a rib crack. midnight wasn't kidding about being hardy.

but this isn't really midnight. heine knows that. he's intimately familiar with the kind of madness that sends you on a rampage, looking to tear down anything that stands in your way. he doesn't know what triggered it in midnight tonight, but heine can hardly fault him for it. ]


Midnight— [ is what heine manages to get out, struggling against those grasping hands before midnight jolts forward again to sink his teeth into heine's trapezius muscle. ] —Fuck!

[ the pain is so bright and sudden that heine cries out with it, but it also helps, in a way. it helps because pain is a wonderful motivator for a creature like heine, who was raised not to fear it. he pushes off the wall, midnight's jaw still tight on his shoulder, and he turns them so it's midnight being slammed up against the oddly unforgiving wall of the hallway. he brings his free hand up and grabs midnight by the throat, forces him away—tears midnight's teeth out of his shoulder—and uses the chair leg he's still clutching to get midnight right in the temple. ]

Go to sleep, [ heine grits out, putting all his extraordinary strength into the second swing. ]
kampfgeist: (annoyed | bout to sin again)

[personal profile] kampfgeist 2023-10-21 08:14 am (UTC)(link)
[ this is what happens in the time intervening:

midnight drops, and then so does heine. first the chair leg hits the floor, and then heine does too, sliding down the wall until he's sitting with his back against it, panting softly with exertion and residual adrenaline. the other ghosts don't seem to be interested in either of them right now, and heine takes advantage of the momentary stillness to catalogue his wounds: a mild concussion, courtesy of his skull against the wall; the torn flesh of his shoulder where he ripped midnight's fangs free; miscellaneous scrapes and bruises, consequence of fighting in an enclosed space. all of them, healing already.

as much as heine would like to just sit where he is to let himself recover, though, he knows it's not safe. he allows himself one minute, sixty seconds exactly, before he gets on his knees so he can leverage midnight over his shoulder. (it's not safe for midnight here, either, and if what happened to him is anything like what happens—what has happened—to heine, he's going to come out of it disoriented and in need of a familiar face.)

midnight is fucking heavy, so it's slow going, but heine manages to lift his unconscious form like a sack of potatoes and makes his way, stumbling toward the exit up to the third floor and dripping blood down his arm and side the entire way. it's like a trail of breadcrumbs for anyone who comes looking for them. on the third floor, he deposits midnight in the corner, then goes looking for some alcohol—comes back with a bottle of vodka and two pairs of jack-o-lantern sunglasses, one of which he puts on midnight's nose and the other of which goes on heine's.

whatever, right? it's whatever. another shitty place with another shitty way of fucking with them.

and that brings us to the current moment, where midnight's incoherent mumble of almost-consciousness catches heine's attention and drags his gaze from where he'd been staring at one of the walls. ]


Don't try to move too much. You're probably a little concussed. [ heine shifts from sitting against the wall, moving into a crouch instead so he can lean over midnight and check the size of his pupils. ] ...Yeah. Go slow. Is that you in there this time?

—Fuck, I hope it's you.
kampfgeist: (sigh | what a headache)

[personal profile] kampfgeist 2023-10-21 08:41 am (UTC)(link)
[ mildly dilated, heine can work with. he's just glad they aren't different sizes, considering how hard he ran midnight into the wall earlier.

at the first coherent speech, heine sighs his relief and sits back down on the ground. at midnight's side this time, at least, as he takes another long pull from the liquor bottle that's been sitting next to them both. ]


I carried you up. You weigh a ton. [ heine's tone is very even. ] And you sure did bite me.

[ the wound is mostly closed, at this point. beneath the skin, muscle fibers knit back together. the skin itself is raw and angry, fresh scar tissue, but that too will fade in a few more minutes. ]

I don't know... what happened. I came down the hallway and you attacked me on sight. We fought. —Sorry about the concussion.
kampfgeist: (skeptical | you're kidding)

[personal profile] kampfgeist 2023-10-22 08:48 am (UTC)(link)
And he's so humble, too.

[ the quip, the light humor in midnight's voice, makes the tension bleed out of heine's shoulders. what he'd worried about, bringing midnight up here, was the possibility that he might be dooming all the people in the common room with them to watching heine knock midnight out again and again until whatever compulsion this is has run its course. or worse, dooming them to be the victims. heine can handle it—heine, as they've established, is immortal.

but it's fine, because midnight is fine. or at least he will be. heine offers midnight the liquor bottle, holding it out to him by the neck if he wants it. it's... just vodka, heine thinks, although it may well be gin. he isn't a connoisseur and hadn't bothered reading. ]


I'm just glad it worked. I'd say "anytime," but I really can't say I want a repeat of this. [ now that it's clear midnight's no worse for the wear, heine doesn't mind a little levity.

the question gives him a split second of pause, but heine recovers in a shrug. ]
Yeah, sure. Sometimes. The kind where I'm doing something horrible, or something horrible is happening, and I just have to stick it out because that's the dream.

[ he has night terrors, heine does. almost every night. he knows a thing or two about shitty dreams. ]
kampfgeist: (smirk | you can say that again)

[personal profile] kampfgeist 2023-10-23 07:16 am (UTC)(link)
[ heine can't judge him for that. if it had been him on the receiving end of the concussion he'd probably be doing exactly the same thing—which is, he's aware, against the advice of almost every doctor in the known universe, but then again heine has never been all that good about following rules. ]

How many times do you expect you're going to need this service? [ heine takes the bottle back and takes another long drink himself. he's tipsy already, but then again he got started well before midnight. unfortunately, a quirk of his accelerated physiology is that his liver processes the liquor much more quickly than he wishes it would, which means being tipsy won't last all that long. ] And how fast do you think you're gonna recover from the concussion?

[ from experience heine can say that it takes him about half a day, depending on the severity. he figures for midnight it'll be a couple of days at most.

heine nods as if midnight has said something extremely sage, then shakes his head. ]
I have to sleep more here than I did at home. I think it has something to do with the [ he wiggles his fingers ] powers thing.
kampfgeist: (thinking | up to no good)

[personal profile] kampfgeist 2023-10-24 06:42 am (UTC)(link)
Clumsy? [ now that's interesting. the changes in heine's physiology he can track as part of an overall declawing, as he keeps calling it—like his entire being is somehow muffled. he heals more slowly, his reflexes are dulled, he's not as strong or as agile as he should be. but clumsy? heine can't say that's one of his own symptoms. ] That's interesting. Do you normally have... some kind of ability to not be clumsy?

[ it sounds stupid to say it out loud, so hopefully midnight is picking up heine's meaning. is he especially nible, or gifted with some kind of foresight that helps him avoid running unfortunately into doorknobs. something like that. the mention of daan makes heine shake his head and lift an invisible glass as if toasting to the extremely put-upon doctor himself. ]

Well, if you don't want to recover from the head injury, I'm not the guy to ask. I'm tired of killing people. [ midnight can take that however he wants, heine's not really thinking his sentences through all the way. he squints a little, trying to parse that—i'd like to choose my own partners for that—and only after a second realizes that midnight is probably talking about— ] Oh, like. Kinky handcuffs.

[ probably? ]
kampfgeist: (thinking | hol up wait a minute)

[personal profile] kampfgeist 2023-10-24 04:10 pm (UTC)(link)
Whoa. [ is what heine has to say about kinky handcuffs. he's not sure what else he could say, honestly—heine's interactions with sex and kink have been so brief and fleeting they hardly even count. also, pretty much everything he can think of to say leads to him imagining midnight sexy handcuffing somebody, which. okay. anyway.

focusing on the alcohol and the midnight lore drop is, comparatively, much more familiar territory. heine grabs the bottle when midnight sets it down and takes a couple of long swallows himself, grateful for how it warms him up when it hits his stomach. the tipsiness might not last long, but it's nice while he has it, a sort of overall softness to the world that heine doesn't normally feel. ]


Makes sense. [ it's not that the god complexes themselves make sense, just that heine has enough of an understanding of the way power corrupts to see how someone that gifted would end up with one. ] Even people with just a little taste of what it's like to be better than can let it get to their heads. Bet it's even easier when everything about you seems superior.

[ he thinks of angelika. of giovanni, of campanella frühling, of magato. mad with their own superiority, callously dismissive of anything they saw as less-than. that could have been heine, too, under different circumstances. if he hated himself a little less. ]

But you're different?
kampfgeist: (thinking | not too into that)

[personal profile] kampfgeist 2023-10-27 08:18 pm (UTC)(link)
[ challenge failed!!!!

that... also makes sense, to heine. that being removed from most of the people most similar to midnight would have an impact on his attitudes, his beliefs as he grew up. heine supposes that in some ways they're similar, products of their circumstances.

of course, most of the names midnight drops may as well be greek to heine with how little he understands. sarkaz he gets, that's midnight's species(?), and he does seem to recall something about higashinese from a previous post where they talked about languages, plus ursus from their conversation about bears. leithanien and sargon must therefore be locations. ]


I think I like you better how you are. [ without the god complex, or the casual cruelty of power. heine has had enough of that to last a lifetime.

heine draws his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them, lets his pumpkin sunglasses slide down his nose a little as he looks over at midnight. ]
What's Rhodes Island?
kampfgeist: (skeptical | you're kidding)

[personal profile] kampfgeist 2023-10-31 07:50 pm (UTC)(link)
[ heine snags the bottle when it's set down and takes a long drink of his own. being able to get even moderately drunk is one of the only saving graces of this city, he thinks, but he still wishes he could get drunk all the way. it seems fun. ]

I'm guessing it's for some reason other than the bog-standard "drug companies like power and power is easier to keep when you have an army"?

[ if that gives a way a little of how jaded heine's own world has made him over time, so be it. if this were back home, the security forces would be almost exclusively for protecting the assets of the company and probably disappearing the people who would become the unwilling test subjects for new developments.

heine knows that because he lived it. ]
kampfgeist: (surprise | oh whoa)

[personal profile] kampfgeist 2023-11-03 06:16 am (UTC)(link)
[ it's maybe because heine has had it so rough that he understands the world around him. if anything, circumstances of his birth being what they were probably granted him an insight more incisive than average into exactly how deeply power can corrupt people.

he is, however, just very slightly too drunk to parse the entire explanation exactly as it's given, so heine spends a second squinting at midnight as he puts the sentences together in his brain. ]


Okay. So you were... in their hospital, and got curious about the army, but when you went snooping you found out that... [ philanthropic ethos who the fuck says that when intoxicated. come on. ] The drug company is super committed to helping people who have your blood smoke thing, but for a bunch of reasons, it's not always easy to help people and also not die in the process, so they have an army that helps keep them safe while they're doing their helping thing?

[ ????? ]

Is that right?

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