HH_mirror

(( after this eventful RP ))

Borne by the dragon Smaug, Elric of Melnibone had attained the reach of the heavens, and plunged his black blade Stormbringer into the Baby Sun.

If Stormbringer was now the worse for wear ... so indeed was the Baby Sun.

What had been a placid if hideous beaming monstrosity
( The Baby Sun before Stormbringer -- cut for your f-list )
had now been inverted, turned inside out, made hollow as the demon blade devoured what served it for a soul.

( the Baby Sun after Stormbringer -- cut for your f-list )

It shone darkly, its flesh blued, and the sky had gone turbulent yellow above Hogwarts. The caws and giggles it had been wont to emit now sounded elongated, horribly deepened, drawn out slowly, like a record played at far too low a speed. Graaaaaahhhhhhh.

Tubby Custard now rained in frozen pellets. A hail of Tubby Custard. A fierce wind blew, a frigid wind smelling of burnt Tubby Toast.

Under the sickly shimmering rays of the Baby Sun, a strange crop grew. Loudspeakers on stems periscoped from the ground, their heads half-telephonic, half-fungal in appearance. Their passage upward through the soil was marked by an obscene squelching, capped by a jaunty pop!

They popped up all over the grounds, spaced apart widely enough to allot coverage of a given area efficiently. They popped up like mushrooms. Apart from the squelching, they issued no sound for a full hour after the last loudspeaker had emerged.

Then the psychological warfare began. The loudspeakers began to play music.

The playtime was continuous; the playlist, idiosyncratic. The volume fluctuated. Occasionally a song would be broadcast loudly, to catch the attention of those who might have filtered the music into an unnoticed background. Then the music would return to a more tolerable level, something like the Muzak in a supermarket.

Well pleased with its work, the Baby Sun chuckled and gurgled its glee.

(( OOC: Please add to the playlist, in the Hat's journal post for that purpose :D The only guideline is that the songs cannot break the fourth wall. They can be songs that are meaningful to your character or come from their canon, if you like, provided this doesn't break the fourth wall. They can be songs that are about your character's canon, e.g., Hawkwind's songs about Elric of Melnibone, as long as the fourth wall isn't broken thereby. No visuals accompany the Baby Sun's loudspeakers, any OOC links to YouTube notwithstanding.

It is possible to attack and to destroy the periscopes. Their skins will be made of a hard metallic substance, their insides spongy and pinkish. More will grow to replace any that are uprooted or harvested. If uprooted, a periscope will continue to broadcast until its speaker-head is destroyed.))

There had been only the most obscure and private of warnings. There were beings who could have predicted the event, with runes or through oracular visions, or by whatever arcane powers they brought with them to Hogwarts -- whatever powers had not fallen prey to the castle's unpredictable field of interference. But how might they have prevented it? And how could they banish it, now that its inevitable advent had begun?

It rose in the sky, bloody and shrieking, three weeks short of All Hallows' Eve. Having risen, it radiated visible rays of unclean light, a light which carried no warmth and lent a cast of jaundice-yellow to the objects thus illumined. Going outdoors was like trying on a new outfit in a fluorescent-lit fitting room. Everything looked subtly wrong.

Mostly its shrieks heralded nothing. They were disconcerting, and raised the hackles on the backs of animals; they caused a mild dyspepsia in some who heard the shrieks, though by no means all. Indeed, some sentient creatures remained unaffected altogether.

But then there were the rarer moments when the shriek of the Baby Sun signified the beginning of something strange. Phenomena that could best be described as Fortean.

The first of these, beginning with the sun's shriek at noon of the day it first rose over Hogwarts, was a rash of spontaneous fires afflicting inanimate and nonsentient objects. This took place not only on the grounds, but also within the castle. Students might reach for their books only to find the book beginning to smolder, then abruptly flaring into a tower of flame. A plate of food in the Great Hall might go to greasy ashes before the first forkful could be taken. The house elves seemed to be spared, at least for now. Pets were safe. But no inanimate object, no matter how cherished or sacred or essential, was immune.

The Baby Sun giggled its loathsome amusement and lolled in the sickly sky. The whole of the grounds lay bathed in its bilious light. Once a student stepped off the grounds, the normal and benevolent sun of Earth was the only sun visible. Yet all of Hogwarts remained under the Baby Sun's mysterious sway, and none could say why or wherefore.

Perhaps some intrepid students might seek to find an answer.



(( OOC: As usual with these kinds of events, you can opt out. Your stuff doesn't need to get burnt; you don't need to get caught outdoors in a rain of fish or blood, or whatever subsequent phenomena take place between now and Halloween. If you want, your character can be unable to detect the Baby Sun or the weird quality of light at all. The mods will banish the Baby Sun through certain mysterious IC means once Halloween has come to pass. ))