un: rikugou

[yokeye]

[At around 3:00am on Saturday, June 29th, a short message is posted to the Network. It's a link; to an off-Network public website.

Please forward this to your non-magic friends, if you believe hiding our existence is wrong.
www.prophetiesdelatombeedelanuit.fr

[The entry page is a black background with a badly done logo:



When the eye is clicked, it leads to a terribly designed website. Lime green and neon pink everywhere, with bold text in yellow and white. The text is center aligned, and a mix of hideous fonts. After a brief explanation stating the website is a collection of precognitive vision experiences, a video is embedded.]

[Video]:
Toki is in the basement of Theatre Lenormand. A soft red glow the only illumination to the room. He's wearing his Daybreak uniform, beret and all. Behind him, the concrete wall is decorated with fading drawings of the Herald's eyes from an incident last Monday. He waves at the camera, smiling. In his usual fashion, he plows right into a rapid-fire speech in Japanese. There are French subtitles in bright violet.

"There are very important things out in the world that you are not being told about and I'm going to talk about them here, because everyone deserves to have this information! MAGIC IS REAL! Did you hear that!? Okay? Yes! Magic is real and the supernatural exists! All of those things you've heard about in folktales and myths and legends actually roam the earth and these people, these magic enclaves, are keeping this from you! Daemons, vampires, werewolves, necromancers! It's all real! This uniform? Is from a magic school in France called Daybreak Academy! It's hidden up in the Alps near the German border, but will you find it on a satellite image!? No! Because they don't want you to know! Now, let me tell you about what happened to me and how I got to this magic place and why I'm telling you about it! Several months ago, I was just an ordinary person like every one of you! I lived in Tokyo, Japan, with my sister and one evening, while we were out at a shrine, she was attacked and killed by a werewolf! This could have been prevented, or at least considered a possibility if either one of us had known that lycanthropes existed, and it's not just werewolves; I know a werebear! Back to the point! After my sister died, I was approached by a normal-looking businessman and I thought he was a colleague of hers, so I talked to him, and before long I was admitting to wanting to have the ability to make sure this didn't happen to someone else, an ability to see things like this before they happen and prevent this kind of tragedy! As it turns out, this man was a daemon, but not like from a hellscape mentioned in various religions, no! Daemons are from a place called the Outlands, which is not on Earth, but is accessible from Earth through portals and other inter-dimensional travel methods! The daemon gave me exactly what I wanted in exchange for probably my soul or something, I don't know, but it took one of my eyes! Not like literally, because obviously it's still here, but it's blind! After that, these people came, from the Academy, and that's how I got here! This Academy is part of an intricate network of magic users and old bloodlines that are keeping their world separate from the rest of you; you who are affected by daemons and lycanthropes and magic and fey, there's fey too, and you interact with these creatures and concepts and don't even know it! Alright, that's the basic story here and what you will find on this website are accounts of my gift from this daemon: prophetic visions! Despite continued dismissal of my abilities as inaccurate and partial hallucinations, even from this magic community, I will tell you that they are true! Take everything as it is and prepare yourself for Nightfall, because even if you're not part of this secret world, it's here and the upcoming war will undoubtedly effect the world as a whole! PREPARE! FOR! NIGHTFALL!"

[The video abruptly cuts off. The rest of the website is how Toki described. Link after link to text files of typed vision notes, pictures of his records in various locations, as well as "proof" of Daybreak. Pictures of the campus and the grounds, scans of class schedules, candids of decidedly inhuman students and faculty, and some of Soleil.]

Comments

[nor_iron_bars]

nah, if i supported you i'd be hauling your poor ass outta here before the axe comes down.
i just figure you're allowed to ruin your own life if you wanna.
'course, the four or five hundred other lives you just tried to ruin might have a bone to pick.
but i guess they got as much of a right to fuck up your day as you got to fuck up theirs.
that's the fun thing about freedom, see?
good news is, you can do what you want.
bad news is, so can everyone else.

[yokeye]

[He doesn't have a life to ruin, and maybe that's half of why he's unconcerned about it.]

they'll make their own choices, i guess!

[He won't regret trying to get this information out, even if others don't understand why it had to be done.]

Let me know if this works with what you have in mind.

[nor_iron_bars]

[She suspects she can guess why he's doing it, even if she doesn't quite care. ...Maybe she would have, once. A decade or so ago. But she's pretty sure Wist isn't going to dig up that part of her a second time.]

got it in one, kid.
everybody makes their own choices.
good or bad, we all just gotta live with that.
for however long we got, anyway.

[As for information... well, good or bad, she follows the money. And right now, Daybreak Academy is still signing her checks. She'd already started censoring his website before she even replied to this post- subtle edits here and there, removing anyone too recognizable and replacing them with "close enough" stock photo substitutes that don't look quite like anyone actually attending the school, making anything supernatural look like a really obvious bad photoshop job.]

[Taking it down would be way too obvious, but by the time she's done the whole thing is going to look like a badly-executed student prank, not a scrap of actual sensitive information left. Honestly, he's practically done most of her job for her, with those font choices. She leaves a few careful bits of code behind, to log the IP address of anyone who's visited the site- or anyone else who might, after this. If trouble comes from that quarter, they'll know.]

[But, pausing as she makes one final edit... she clicks back and reverts a single part, leaving the drawings of the Herald's eyes visible as they were. No names, no faces, definitely no locations. She's even managed to carefully splice a few bits of fake audio in to change Toki's speech to something slightly more safe. But just this one thing... she'll give him that.]

[No one who isn't already familiar with supernatural, or about to be, is going to actually recognize the Herald's eyes. If they're seeing that symbol, they're already in too deep to back out- even if they don't know that yet. So it's not risking anyone's safety to leave it where people can find it.]

[And maybe he could use one thing to hold onto, in the middle of all this. She thinks he might need it.]

we're good

[yokeye]

we have less than two years!

[He won't check the website again, and hasn't since he posted it. He's hiding out and just replying to text messages until they find him; running off campus would make it worse.]

[nor_iron_bars]

only if we fuck up real bad.
i give us about 47% odds.
not the worst gamble i've ever taken.
compared to the time i drank that green stuff, this is actually pretty safe.

[She runs the numbers every two or three days, using the same program she coded to put together stupid office betting pools. They're up two percent from yesterday.]

[yokeye]

47% still sounds bad
green stuff?
have you had blue devil liquor?

[He's just making conversation now.]

[nor_iron_bars]

it's almost half.
that's pretty good, considering.

[Admittedly, their odds were better before the Herald's arrival, but it could still improve.]

yes, but this was a different thing.
protip: if a russian dude offers you $50 to drink this bottle of mystery liquid he found in the basement, don't go for it.
hold out for at least 100k in cash.
otherwise, not worth it.
worst fucking thing i ever put in my mouth.
...ok, it's a tie with the time i bit a swamp monster.
still really bad tho.

[yokeye]

got it, no russian basement drinks!
...
there are swamp monsters?

[nor_iron_bars]

there was def at least one.
didn't see more but i honestly would not be surprised.
florida's just like that a lot.

[yokeye]

are they made of swamp, like mud and slime and things
or are they swamp monsters because they live in the swamp?

[nor_iron_bars]

first one.
but now that you mention it that is very confusing.
we should probably come up with a clearer name.

[yokeye]

clear names are always better!
like "mudslimes"
but then people will think they're slugs made of mud
...
they aren't, are they?

[nor_iron_bars]

i don't think they were???
they weren't, like.
slug-shaped.
there's probably something like that out there, tho.
outlands ecology is fucking nuts.

[yokeye]

[A response never comes. Adelaide's taken his phone.]