Sunny had been exploring the areas outside of Eridanus for some time now, seeking the strange pull at her soul. This tunnel in particular had continued to intrigue her. A few days ago, she'd brought the kooru to the edge and the creature had turned the other way. It had confused Sunny, because her mount never really... questioned her. Now, though, she was approaching this adventitious cavern and the kooru once again refused to venture forward. Sunny had decided with a frustrated huff that she'd just do it herself.

It hadn't taken very long (relatively speaking) for Sunny to get to the fork in the road. She'd assessed her options and then begun the downward descent into the cold, cold cavern. A whispering began to kick up, and at a certain point the black shadow turned to a blinding white. Sunny strained to hear them, but an almost otherworldly desire was pulling her forward -- until, finally, she caught sight of it.

Shining, rainbow-oiled marble -- but no, wait, negative space, so it was black? Her tentacles strained forward. something about this place... it was wrong. But at the same time, it felt almost as though... this is what she'd been drawn towards, all this time. This was what had pulled her out of her stone; this was what she'd been searching for.

Gently, she touched her eyestalks to the marble and pulled in her eyestalks as though she were closing them. She would wait and see what the Altar had to show her.

The Topaz' descent into the long, cold dark had not gone unnoticed. Nor, it seemed, would the snail's encroachment go without consequence.

As Sunny descended the twisting tunnel, the unfathomable silence began to flicker with whispers. The words were impossible to discern, but tinged with wickedness, with chaos, with violence. Visions of blood came and went--indistinct, fleeting. An urge passed through her, as she neared the bottom: an urge to destroy, to rend, to consume, despite the tiny, harmless body currently utilizing the topaz as a shell. An urge to annihilate. To lash out. That was what this place was: a shrine to entropy, an altar to chaos.

But the snail was not satisfied, it seemed, with visions alone, or the trailing cold fingers of the unfamiliar whispered words, or the urges that came with them: she touched, instead, the bitterly cold smooth not-white of the altar. The urge to devastate flickered through her and for a moment, Sunny would feel as though a great gaze had swivelled, as if the attention of all the power of the cosmos had, in that moment, settled upon her.

And it was chaos.

She was gone from here. She was a world unto herself, the sky above one of purple clouds, roiling with smoky violence and unfathomable rage. This world was all that was: infinite, shifting, churning with change. It would not last long; it never did. Shards of toxic green split the vision, opening like two eyes, and each was larger than her, larger than her world, larger than the caves themselves. Beneath them, a maw, jagged and grinning, its hot glow as it parted wide, and that urge for fierce madness, for unpredictable violence, flared like a fire ignited. The open gap widened, and widened, and swept down as if to swallow Sunny, to consume the world that was her mind, and the poison plumes of breath that boiled forth filled her. The world shuddered; it rang as if with thunder, and then it cracked apart.

Others had seen this, before Sunny... Others had fallen, too, as the ground beneath them opened to swallow them entire. Others had fallen, and fallen, and fallen, and it would never end, and they would be trapped in this darkness forever; and the green and glowing breath spilled down with her, igniting the rock with its foul energy. The darkness gripped her, that chaotic violence thrumming through her... and then it faded.

Sunny is now Touched.

@Sunny

Chaos was what the Altar showed her, the whispers dragging at her mind as purple clouds exploded above -- and they were beautiful. Smoke and rolling thunder, and she could taste the violence in the air but she found herself wondering; why did chaos have to be violent? Change and possibility sprawled out before her, like swimming in a vast sea of dream-mist and lucidly gazing out into the ether.

Then green. At first she thought it was a blade of grass, pushing up through the nothingness, and then it blinked open and she'd never seen something so enormously big. The teeth opened, and fire licked over her body -- Sunny tugged into her shell on instinct, but her mind still swirled. She did not try to flee, or run, or otherwise resist; instead she let the fury and strength and chaos was over her and when she pulled away from the glossy, white altar, her head still ringing and feeling like she'd crawled out of her chrysalis all over again, she thought--

Chaos has no need for violence. The rolling sky was chaos; the endless, churning possibility. Everything and nothing and... the space between. The monster should not have taken me from it; I had so much left to learn. But the monster itself was unsettling. The sky... the space... what a lovely thing it was. Like life. Endless, churning, chaotic, and full of possibilities. Like... being born, all over again. And then, a revelation-- Maybe that chaos-sky was my mother?

A warmth filled Sunny, contrasted by the whispers and growls. "Possibility is chaos, not-white Altar," she said, guessing it could hear her as she turned and started to leave. "It does not need violence. All it needs is hope. I will take part of your gift, dear Altar -- but you can keep the monster. I do not think it was what you meant to show me; I think all I was meant to see was the sky."


/exit sunny (very slowly)

Sunny's voice hung in the air of the Hole like gnats on a spider's web: enticing, a snared treat waiting to be consumed. Dangling like the threat of ignorance that swept the meaning of the vision from her mind, and for a moment, the entire Hole seemed to hold its breath. The whispers paused, the air chilled cold, and in the moment of that bated breath, a thunderous growl crawled free of the Altar and the room was plunged into utter darkness.

Sunny was held in place, rooted to the stone floor as shadows spilled from the walls, from the only exit, and from the Altar itself. Crackling neon green lightning flashed through the billowing shade, surrounding her, suffocating, suffocating, suffocating...

"EVERYTHING IS CHAOS," roared a voice, rumbling through the dark clouds like thunder, shaking the entire chamber like an earthquake. A face manifested before Sunny, the same in her vision, its green eyes peeling open to the crack of lightning. "DISORDER. ENTROPY. YOUR CONFUSION." There was a pause in His voice as another whip of lightning snapped through the clouds, its acidic fingers reaching to illuminate even the darkest voids:

Ỹ̸̖̠̙̯̝Ö̴̲͍̹̬̟́̚͜U̶̹͚͑̽̈́̈̾ ̵̱̒̂̈́̕Ạ̴͈̰̫̞̋ͅȐ̷̡̦͇̺̿̄͑̄̀E̵̗̘̟̽̑̈́͗͘͜ ̷̢̭̫̇̌͊̈́͝T̵͍͓͙̖͍̾͘͜ͅH̸͈͇̜̯͖̅͜Ë̴̠̜̼̙͍̭͕͆ ̶̧̟̏̾̊̑M̴̛̦̘͙͑Ò̸͕̪̉̈́̿̒̓͠N̴̝̪̈́̃͝S̶̢̧̖̰̩͂͛̾́͛̓͝T̸͚̥̳̳̓̆͋̒̽̍E̶̩̮̳̗̯̟͍̓̈̀̄͠R̷̢̺̔̆͝.̷̢̰̯̄̇̂͠

With the last crack of lightning, Sunny is thrust into a tumultuous inner-storm: conflicting and chaotic urges that dance between rage, senseless violence, and the need to CONSUME. She will feel HUNGER for the very thing she thought she did not need: CHAOS.

As the void releases her and the shadows dissipate, Sunny's Corruption level is Touched. She will feel an insatiable need to consume Oil, perhaps more-so than other Touched characters.

Sunny will feel the violent and chaotic urges for 6 cycles.

@Sunny

It was the fact that the muscles in her foot stopped rippling over the ground that drew her awareness more than the fact that she wasn't making progress or that the ominous whispering suddenly stopped. Sunny didn't ever make much progress. Smoke and storm clouds poured from the walls, and the monster coalesced from within them. Fear spiked in Sunny, visible through her shell in the quickening of her heartbeat, but she didn't cower or waver. Her eyes met the monster's (although, admittedly, the form was fuzzy -- her eyes were not really specialized for anything more than light versus darkness and mostly it just looked like a green and purple blob). She had a few thoughts, in that moment;

1) That creature would be rather cute, without all the green and the big curly horns.
2) Is his desire for Chaos only on his own terms not in and of itself a form of order?
3) I did not come this far on my own slime-trails to be shouted at, sir!
4) All Gembound make choices; only the weak succumb to their monstrous nature.

She didn't say any of that, though, because despite not knowing who or what this entity was, she had a feeling that mouthing off again would probably get her turned into a smear of blue glitter and general nastiness.

With the last crack of lightning and the violent demand (rude, honestly), Sunny felt a maelstrom whip up within her. Never before had she had an urge towards violence, but she genuinely wanted to just tear something apart with her non-existent teeth and feed on its viscera. Not that snails never ate meat, but she was certainly unfamiliar with this urge. It was overwhelming in every sense of the word.

Sunny had tasted power in the air, in the smoke clouding her mucus and in the flashing green and green and green and green-- and she craved more. She craved... violence, madness, something untrue. But her rational mind reiterated to herself -- chaos can exist without causing the undeserving to suffer. take the lofty off their pedestals and equalize those who think themselves above reproach; we are all equal in shadows.

She cast a last glance towards the Altar, one of her eyestalks twisting back to look at it. Sunny did not want to lie to the monster, though, and telling the truth would risk her getting hurt. So she kept her silence, and once again began her exit....


/exit sunny (still very slowly)