The Harbinger of Ferocity

The Twenty-Fifth Hour

Time is short, I warn, that if you wish to decide anything else of particular importance now may be that last chance. Choose wisely, for when the darkness clears not all might be so favorable as this stay in the void.

The Twenty-Fifth Hour

@Polybius @DocRock @Dark Light @Voltus_Ventus

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Prelude

"It is unclear what came next, for your memory is as hazy as your eternal prison in the depths, but it is abundantly clear that you see yourself as a sailor. Was this reality? Perhaps it was things to come? Or had they already been? Your worked hands and displays of strength in the futile struggles to break free align well with this flight of fantasy. The call of the sea speaks to you within your mind where you meld it with the thoughts of this place. Maybe it were that you were a doomed soul to the bottom of the locker and this was where you arrived, but it mattered not. Whatever you had done in sum seemed to turn the tides literal and metaphor."

"The crawling mist receded further and more of the world around you became lucid in spite of being the dream of dreams. Like a thunderous crash of a wave, you felt yourself spinning out of control, tugged by the unseen undertow. The salt spray of the painful dark assailed your flesh once more. With every bit of sailing talent in you, you held. For all of reality came to spin more wildly; the urgency was dire now. As just as you had been drowning with your fall, so too were you drowning again in the black. Hastily, hurriedly, the question begged one last time, howling like wind, who were you?"

The Twenty-Fifth Hour

@Polybius @Pyromaniacwolf @Dark Light @Voltus_Ventus

---

Prelude

"From your twilight stupor do you briefly break the bounds of reality that you were so oppressed by; the deep dark forced to recoil at your imagination's wiles. Your mantra, questioning and wavering as it may be, repeats itself within you, asking back with voiceless sound, "Are you a man of strength?" It tries you, perhaps as terribly as the foggy, inky abyss. Yet you prevail and imagine yourself to be a man of strength. Right or wrong only heaven would know, for here there were no answers but your own. Your own wordless truth, spoken back by your thoughts, reveal to you the arms you so imagine and they too are just as you picture them. They fade away once more as the will wavers and flags, leaving you fording the icy thoughts of your memory."

"Perhaps you were, rather are, indeed a man of strength. It might well be this wretched place with no coveted light toying with you or it might well be you toying with yourself. The sum of this mattered little, for what was ever so pressing was to assemble yourself - lies and truths alike - once more; a feat difficult enough for those in the stillness of the world beyond, not challenged by the overwhelming, devouring black. Now, and only just now, as you drifted in the battering storm of confusion where you were left adrift on waves of conflicting thoughts, did you see the fog had recoiled from the shallows some. A fell omen or a blessing in disguise? The moment passed and again it pressed upon you, that dim glow within spurred, that you need further elaborate on your person and be certain of your choices. After all, assuming you would ever escape, just who and what would you have become from such a harrowing journey to the bottom?"

Post a random fact about yourself.

We're all people.

@POOHEAD189

The sabertooth visibly squints.

Humor aside yet on a related note, I much prefer players in my circles to play characters they are comfortable and skilled with rather than purposefully striking out to be different for the sake of having a different character. So recurrent sexes, races, archetypes, and so on are acceptable and desired from me if they are strong personalities and have a distinctive persona to them. The matter becomes different if I note they are cliches or terribly overused but that goes back to the matter of them being distinctive.

The Twenty-Fifth Hour

By all means, @DocRock, @Pyromaniacwolf, just do be wary and watchful for posts as they come. There should not be too much time spent waiting and they should appear sporadically at least once per day.

Post a random fact about yourself.

One of the best characters I had wrote was based off an individual I knew. Who, when I presented it to them, were simultaneously horrified that they were the inspiration, the persona, for a monstrous thing - imagine a timid, uncertain, flighty soul who lusts for power having it suddenly and recklessly abusing it - and at the same time willing to concede that would be the most likely of outcomes. Of course it edged more closely to the grim and the dark tones, yet it made for a wonderful experience; the idea of what a well known would almost assuredly do.

The Twenty-Fifth Hour

@Polybius @Pyromaniacwolf @DocRock @Voltus_Ventus

---

Prelude

"The reward received for this triumph is meager at best but you have succeeded in some element now. Within the mind's eye you conceptualize hands but the image continues to twist and turn, your thoughts still tugging away at you in a million fragmentary directions. Each effort to wrangle them together is a challenge yet you conceive an idea of what your hands might well be. They are worked, dirty things, yet in the absence of all else that is the deep dark they are perhaps the most divine images you have seen. Yes, these could be your hands, aged and tanned."

"Although the seething black hasn't the same appreciation and soon the shadows creep over them once more. Before the speed of thought they are gone but now at least you know them to be there. Who else, what else might you be? Grasping at the underpinnings of memory, you continue the endeavor to visualize yourself. Perhaps your form was that of a farmhand? Mayhap that of a sailor? Or might it have been a machinist? All these bits, still none whole, tear back against the urge to steady them. More thought is needed, urgently, swiftly, as the seductress' song of nullification was all this limbo had."

Post a random fact about yourself.

When I do opt for artwork of a character, I tend to invest in it as an original work and reach out to my contacts for it. As a result, I have a small collection of now unused pieces from prior topics and games, some extravagant, others far more tame. It is a quirk of mine that I enjoy and prefer characters perfectly true to their design I had in mind and not something I was able to find, as for some reason it gives the sensation they are not the same - as they are not of course - which negatively influences my enjoyment of that persona's presentation.

The Twenty-Fifth Hour

Each step forward, so long as it is taken at all, will only ever yield more evidence, @Polybius.

The Twenty-Fifth Hour

@Dark Light @Pyromaniacwolf @DocRock @Voltus_Ventus

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Prelude

"The futile struggle of gauging yourself with sight fails once more. The perception of self is lost, as you are more not than you are anything else. However, the bleakness brings an unexpected reward upon the lens of scrutiny turned more unto yourself and grasping. If for a moment, you can visualize some aspect of what you picture your own hands to be, but they are hazy and indistinct, wherein soon like the depths you fell into, blur away into the mist. Such a momentary recovery is at least progress still; perhaps, just perhaps, with relying solely on the self could you visualize them better."

"Yet, more troubling, is the amorphous quality of this image that lingers in your scattred mind. Are they your own hands before they faded once again or did you merely imagine them to be? Their frequency seemingly unattuned, it was a foreboding of what was likely the rest of what remained. As in, no more. The only way to recover, recreate, or create them at all again would be through dire and desperate concentration. A lack thereof now would be, without doubt, only becoming more one with the shallows."