Participants:
| Scene Title | Old Melody Made New |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | A pivotal event comes back to haunt Godfrey's dreams unexpectedly. |
| Date | February 9, 2020 |
The ivories feel so satisfying under the press of Godfrey's fingers, melody emanating from within the pulsing piano. He takes it slow and easy. The song is one he hasn't played in quite some time.
But it bothers him none at all.
It is the first song he saw in concert, the hall reverberated with each note and he found himself swept into the melody. It ignited the passion in his heart to learn how to play it for himself. Even now he closes his eyes and falls into the sweeping and rather romantic notes of Chopin’s Nocturne.
It was like coming back home to a longtime lover. Without looking Godfrey knew which keys to caress to get the exact sound he wished out of them, letting muscle memory guide him. He wonders to himself why he never played it anymore.
The flow is easy and true, even when the trilling notes of the upper register begin to increase in their pace. It leads him through the entry effortlessly, and the music itself begins to feel as though it were not just a part of the piano, but the air itself. It swells, the memory of that first concert dominating his mind's eye.
In the hall outside his apartment at the Cresting Wave, something crashes, and his fingers still.
And yet the music continues to play, and he thinks nothing of it. It reverberates in the air, the phase change in the swell of the song continuing on without his fingers to guide them.
Godfrey’s head tilts towards the sound, brows lowering as he listens and tries to figure out what made that sound. He shifts to look over his shoulder towards the door, listening for a few moments more. “Curious.” There is a grace to the man as he rises from the piano bench.
Moving towards the door, he tugs as his sleeves and buttons the cuffs. “Kaydence? Is that you?” Godfrey calls out, ahead of grasping the door handle. There is no answer right away, so he opens the door to have a look.
When the door swings open, it's immediately obvious that something is wrong.
Something has torn through the hall, scorch marks and streaks of red staining the walls and ceiling. Overhead lighting is cracked, flickering, creating an odd shadow over the area. There's a tension hanging in the air, the sound of crackling in the distance, yet no smoke to accompany any of the fire. Furthermore, he's not alone in the hall.
Neighbors of his lie facedown, unmoving, clothing torn. The air smells faintly of burning flesh. Overhead, one of the lighting fixtures spark.
Kaydence Damaris is crouched in front of her daughter, recognizable by the lilt of her voice rather than her face as she rocks from side to side. Her helmet is discarded by her feet as she sits cradling her daughter by the shoulders while the younger girl sits with her back against the wall, unmoving. Tearfully, she hushes the teenager, face burying in her dark hair.
Further down the hall, Marlowe Terrell is sprawled sitting with a dazed look on her face, blood on her brow.
Chords coalesce on the air, thrumming and pervading.
"Godfrey," Marlowe whispers hoarsely, her head turning. Hand pressed to her side, she looks down at the end of the hall, to where a door is set. It's not the stairwell exit— something else entirely, painted metalgrey. The lights down at that end of the hall are out entirely, and yet it beckons to him. "You've got…" she strains out.
"You've got to finish it."
She can't go on and do it herself. She can barely sit up, much less stand. She plants a hand flat to the ground, trying to move toward the door anyway. A valiant effort is made before she curls her head forward, wincing. "I can't."
“Kaydence,” Godfrey hisses to the woman and her daughter, his back pressed against the door frame as he looks down the hall. Adjusting his grip on the rifle - he always had that right? - he moves across to stand next to his friend and her spawn. He pulls the skeletal facemask down so she could see his face. “She alright?” The blood oozing from Ella’s mouth wasn’t good.
Bloody hell, he was too late.
“Where’s Mar—?”
Godfrey sees her down the hall and doesn’t even think, before rushing to her side. Resting the rifle on his armored shoulder, Godfrey crouches next to Marlowe with intense worry. She was, in fact, one of his favorites. Reaching out he moves her hand enough to see the wound as it pumps out a steady stream of red. “Oh, Marlowe,” he whispers in sympathy for her condition. She might not have long.
Godfrey’s stomach clenches with worry, as he presses her bloodied hand against the wound again, getting her blood on his gloved hand. Dark eyes flash with a hidden light as he looks up as Marlowe speaks to him, telling him he needs to finish it. The way she strains to speak, forces him to swallow back a strange emotion.
“Shhh shh shh.” Godfrey reaches up and touches her face, blood smearing over her cheek as he traces his thumb across her cheekbone. “You rest here, luv, while I finish this.” It felt right, this was his purpose…
As he rises to his feet, Godfrey pulls the mask back over his face, the rifle is gone from his hand, but he feels the familiar weight on his back. He doesn’t need it, the man has something much better. With each step, the world around him grows brighter as streamers of rainbows start to dance over his armored form.
It hurt his friends… that angers Godfrey in a way he’s never really felt before. He uses that growing rage to dash away his fears and move towards the danger. As he sides steps into the doorway, he lifts a hand that glows bright with gathering light.
The melody skips with that touch, rushes with his surge forward. When he pauses long enough to push the door open, it slows as he becomes the sole source of light in the dark beyond the metal doorway.
At least, at first.
Then he sees it.
And the melody shifts away into the next phase, the notes opening as wide as his eyes. Godfrey looks upon a flame in the shape of a human, burning erratic and powerful. It burns blue, then white, then yellows and reds again, shouting incoherently as they throw out fireballs into the black, setting the air itself ablaze.
He can make out so few of the details of this person. He sees nothing but a monster.
The figure turns to him, flames flaring blue and a mess of it gathering in the palm of one hand, s͍̖̳̎ͦ̉̃c̦̻̩͔̲̜͊͜r̙̠̣͒̉ͭ̽ͪ̅ḛ̭̰̲̞̀͋ͤͥͮe̖͔̦̠ͤͩc̛͔̘̜̬̋h͇̩̻̱͖̭ͦ͛̌̀ͪͫ͐i̭͌̇̇͐͂͜n̡͔̱̟̥̆̑ͦ͒ǵ inhumanly.
He has to finish what he started.
“Monster,” Godfrey growls out between clenched teeth as he walks forward slowly, uncaring about any of the fireballs that pass by him. He can feel the heat radiating off them as they pass him, smell the burnt hair as one almost clips him. His own power continues to gather in the palm of his outstretched hand, light seemingly curling and twisting within itself. This thing had to be stopped… his friends were dying because of it.
I must finish this.
“How dare you harm the people I care about,” he spits out the words angrily at the flaming human. Godfrey moves his other hand to join the first. Fingers stretch out and curl, like he could hold the ball of energy as it grows further. “I… will… finish you!”
Letting go of the energy, Godfrey pours all of it into this last shot. The heliokinetic fires an intense beam of searing solar energy at that… thing, with a manic grin of pleasure twisting his face.
One fireball surges past as the song trills. A second passes as it continues, and when it falls away to the ground behind him, the notes begin their descent as well.
That feeling he has inside him builds up so much as time begins to trudge. His movements slow meanwhile the last of the song continues to play, and he takes one step after the other, closer to the screaming woman. As the power builds in his hands, the flaming person stops in their assault, one hand still raised waiting for the next.
The illuminating light coming from him reveals details of a face. For a flicker of a moment, the figure is a small, scared child. Then an angry one. And then, tears formed in her eyes and steaming away from her cheeks, Isabelle Wesley-Khan lets out an inhuman scream as she begins to bring down another hovering fireball toward Godfrey's being.
But his beam collides first, sending a burst of auroral color scattering throughout the air as the bright white and yellow energy pulses out, his eyes glowing.
The humanity in the monster is wiped away, and so is everything else. The flame evaporates, eviscerated, leaving nothing but Godfrey glowing in the dark with a sense that a wrong has been righted in the world.
He tilts his head back and closes his eyes…
February 9, 2020
4:09 am
… and lets out a deep sigh of relief that rouses him from his sleep.
Godfrey rarely woke so early in the morning. Normally the tingling sensation of his ability at work would rouse him, as it topped off his internal battery. So wherever has woken him had to have been truly terrifying, though what he remembers was blood and the fading memory of a figure made of fire.
Pushing himself up to sit, legs tangled up in silken sheets, Godfrey lets out a heavy sigh and rubs both hands over his face. Looking up, he squints at the bank of dark windows and the blurry span of lights of the city beyond.
“Too bloody early,” Godfrey murmurs to himself and falls back again, intent on more sleep. Throwing his arm over his eyes, he tries to will himself into the land of slumber; to have the fading threads of his nightmare slip through his mental fingers.
Innocuously, one last detail refuses to leave him.
The closing notes of the Nocturne, playing to completion— it's a lullaby which lures him back to sleep, sealing with it a memory which waits to be made new again some other day…
And the nightmare it now carries with it.