Ulla (
neverwaitslong) wrote in
lastvoyageslogs2022-04-24 12:43 am
Entry tags:
"The hard stone of rage that all lonely girls possess"
WHO: Ulla & Taylor, then assorted others, then Trevor & Warren
WHAT: Post-breach temper tantrum
WHERE: On deck
WHEN: After the Elsewhere University breach
WARNINGS: some violence and property destruction, will update as needed!
When Ulla comes back to herself, her first thoughts are two realizations.
The first is that, for all his flaws, Aleksander was a good brother, and if she'd taken him up on his offer, her life could have been better, not merely different. She never let herself truly consider it before, but now the weight of what ifs and wondering settles over her shoulders, a heavy mantle to bear.
The second, and by far the worse, is that she loved Signy as more than a friend or a duet partner. She was in love with her best friend, and everyone else she's met left her cold not because she's too different or entirely uninterested but because they weren't Signy.
She feels like she can't breathe. Like she wants to scream, safely underwater where no one will hear it. Like she wants to tear this ship apart around her and damn the consequences.
She takes her knife and her mirror and darts up the stairs, headed toward the Enclosure so she can reclaim her tail and gills without tasting her own blood in the water of her cabin for days.
WHAT: Post-breach temper tantrum
WHERE: On deck
WHEN: After the Elsewhere University breach
WARNINGS: some violence and property destruction, will update as needed!
When Ulla comes back to herself, her first thoughts are two realizations.
The first is that, for all his flaws, Aleksander was a good brother, and if she'd taken him up on his offer, her life could have been better, not merely different. She never let herself truly consider it before, but now the weight of what ifs and wondering settles over her shoulders, a heavy mantle to bear.
The second, and by far the worse, is that she loved Signy as more than a friend or a duet partner. She was in love with her best friend, and everyone else she's met left her cold not because she's too different or entirely uninterested but because they weren't Signy.
She feels like she can't breathe. Like she wants to scream, safely underwater where no one will hear it. Like she wants to tear this ship apart around her and damn the consequences.
She takes her knife and her mirror and darts up the stairs, headed toward the Enclosure so she can reclaim her tail and gills without tasting her own blood in the water of her cabin for days.

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It's not a conscious thought, to send her insects to see if they can get through Ulla's door. They're there in time to feel her rush through it, and that makes her decision - Taylor takes off running to catch up.
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Ulla draws up short outside the shut Enclosure door, because of course she can't get in without Warren or a passing warden to open the it.
But when she turns, there's no warden. There's only Taylor, who is the last person she wants to see right now. Ulla glares at her, because Signy isn't here and Taylor is the closest thing she has in this moment. Her hand tightens involuntarily on the hilt of her sacred knife, even though the idea of stabbing anyone with it makes her stomach turn.
Using a corrupted knife on herself once changed her. How much might she change this time if it happened again?
"What do you want?"
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"... Are you okay?" she asks, uncertain.
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Ulla laughs, short and harsh, like the cries of gulls. "Does it matter?"
Because she definitely isn't, but she's also trapped here, with Signy out of reach and nothing she can do to keep the Admiral from ripping open her vulnerabilities and making her bleed.
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"He made Iris my mom, and Jacobi my brother, and now this- I don't know what he wants from it."
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"To dig into any places we're vulnerable until we change, I assume," Ulla replies bitterly. It's how she feels about her pairing with Warren most days, and now this. "I doubt he cares if it hurts."
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Instead, she sits down on the deck, hitches up her skirt, raises her knife above her legs, and starts to sing. There's blood pooling around her, and pain lacing her voice, but Ulla keeps singing. She'll be fine. Soon she'll be healed, with a tail instead of legs, and gills on the sides of her neck, and she'll be able to hide in the comfort of the water in her cabin for awhile.
But she's still furious. At the Admiral, at Taylor, at Signy, even at Aleksander, the half-brother whose name she never bothered to learn before this breach. Her song shifts as she takes the mirror in her free hand, and a storm starts building on deck. She's been resisting the urge for storm magic since Warren gave her the mirror, and tonight the lure is too strong. She doesn't care if she does damage, as long as she doesn't wreck the ship entirely, and she doesn't care if anyone gets hurt.
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He's a floor away when the pressure drops. Confused, he moves to go see what's happening up on deck - he's seen the sun and the moon and the stars but never rain or lightning.
He hears singing - smells blood, which worries him further - and pushes open the door to the deck to spy the lone woman singing up a storm.
"Shit." Trevor swears under his breath, remembering a dark conversation about transformation magic they had once. He gets out his short sword and whip, calling out.
"Oy. Ulla. What's wrong?"
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Answering Trevor would entail stopping her song, so she isn't going to do that. She isn't specifically targeting him; if she's controlling anything about the storm, it's mostly to keep anything too heavy from smashing into the greenhouse glass. She happens to like the greenhouse. But she isn't trying to protect him, either. Not Trevor, and not anyone else who might come on deck. All he'll get from her is a glance, as she tips her face up into the rain.
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Which is when he sees the eye of the storm, the source.
And he sees Trevor.
He starts running again, shouting at the top of his lungs, roaring:
“Ulla, Ulla, what’s wrong? What happened? Ulla!”
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Behind him he's aware of Warren's voice shouting but keeps his eyes on Ulla, calling out as he inches closer;
"You're going to tear the ship apart. Ulla, stop, or I'll stop it for you."
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If she wanted to pull the ship apart around them, she'd have come to this fight better armed, with a second mirror to reflect into this one and create a choir of her own voice. A vocal army.
Trevor's threats aren't what get through to her, though she eyes his weapons warily.
Because there's Warren, who is the one person on this ship Ulla still cares about hurting. She takes a breath, holds the song steady rather than letting it ramp up to a higher intensity. The storm doesn't stop, though. It doesn't worsen, but it's bad enough already. She studies it as she sings. Studies her own reflection, to make sure it follows her lead.
She isn't certain, even now, that she wants to stop this, but she thinks, with that look on Warren's face, that she probably ought to know how.
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It was the air that set his senses off, the smell of rain stronger than he'd smelt here before, the pressure of the air and he was sure if he looked outside, he might see the green/grey sky of Kentucky kicking up a tornado. Surprisingly, he saw the forming clouds and stares at it for a long minute before he heads towards the greenhouse door.
It wasn't hard to pinpoint where this was all starting from, not with the singing that was finally reaching his ears. When Ulla came into sight, it took Raylan a long moment to really connect the woman to the magic.
"Ulla!" he calls out over the rising winds. "ULLA!"
She hadn't much seemed to care for him last time they met, but that didn't really matter - Something was wrong, and someone was going to get hurt.
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This isn't like Sondermane, where she reflected one mirror into another until she had an infinite chorus of her own voice to sing along with her. She isn't going to drown the Barge like she did the palace. She has some measure of restraint, even now.
But there's one way in which it's the same—she made the shift to storm magic before her transformation was quite finished, weaving the end of her healing spell together with the start of the storm spell. Which makes this storm blood magic. It has a life of its own, and it will take more than an acquaintance calling her name to make her fight the rushing tide of it.
She flicks her gaze toward Raylan, but keeps singing, and the storm continues to grow. The winds are wild, and a flash of lightning illuminates the bow of the ship.
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Firing into the deck was also out of the question; he'd have to shoot close to her and it was likely to piss her off more.
"ULLA, YOU GOTTA STOP." His accent gets wider, rounder when he yells, turning words like Fire into Fyyyre. The question was, how close could he get to her before her maelstrom turned into a hurricane force wind or worse?
He knew he was in over his head. It didn't matter.
After Ulla Yeets Raylan
He's familiar with storms at least. He keeps his footing and pushes through the battering of the wind and rain. He squints through it, using his arm as a shield so he can navigate forward over the slick deck and see what the hell was happening. He'll keep to the wall as he draws closer, looking for anyone that might be caught in all of this. He's trying to see what's at the eye of it, what's possibly causing this. A Siren?
He's distracted when a form goes flying, pitched into the rail. As the body crumples he recognizes Raylan and something in him snaps to. He pushes off the wall to go sliding across the rain-slick surface to the other side, all the while ducking or avoiding anything else getting whipped around. He'll rush to his side and stoop down against the rail, scooping his arms under Raylan's to pick him up. Now that he's closer to everything he realizes the real danger of it and immediately starts dragging the Marshal out of harm's way.
"Ff-Raylan!" He calls to him, repeating his name a few times, hoping he'll come about sooner than later, trying to get any kind of response from him through the howling wind. With some struggle, he'll carry the man back until they're just outside of the storm and man-handle him up into one of the lounge chairs. He's trying to see what sort of injuries he's got.
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The Marshal was flung back like a ragdoll by the exploding air pressure as the lightning struck the deck, slamming awkwardly on his left side front and crumpling unconscious. The great thing for Raylan, in the moment, was that the flash of pain he felt was followed immediately by darkness.
A ragdoll he stayed, blood already streaking out of a few cuts on his face, ugly bruising coming up along his cheekbones and under his shirt. It was hard to see broken ribs, but the way that Raylan struggled to inhale as he woke with a start, hazel eyes wide and wild made it's own suggestion. His hands gripped out, palms looking for the chair arms or whatever fell to hand, right hand flashing to his still secured gun - first things first - before his eyes landed on Flint's face.
"Flint? Wha-"
Well, if he wasn't dead already, chances are he wasn't going to get killed now and he closed his eyes briefly, trying to slow his breath down to something shallower, features wincing on the inhale. "It's Ulla. Anyone else up here? Someone's gotta stop her, someon-" Mainly him, he thought as he gasped at a particularly sharp pain, though he felt acutely like a skewer. "Someone's gonna get hurt."
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"Easy! Easy..." He murmurs as the other gets his bearings. Though that wince and the obvious labor of breathing don't go unnoticed. His eyes move down, head tilting as he'll just go ahead and paw at Raylan's torso carefully to see if there's blood soaking through anywhere or to make sure nothing's punched through his ribs either debris or bone.
"What's an Ulla?" He murmurs, then glances off at the Siren, "Someone's already been hurt. You. We both sure as hell aren't equipped to stop a force of nature. Let someone else handle it." He's fairly sure he saw others out there, but they've got this.
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It takes a moment for him to realise, to smell the ozone in the air and look up at the growing storm clouds overhead - and then at the inmate singing in the center of it all, and something in Eiffel's stomach sinks dramatically.
Crap, that's real magic.
The wind picks up and his cigarette gets yanked out of his lips with a cry of surprise, but then he's yelling out to Ulla. "Hey, uh, Ulla? You good over there? Only you giving us Let It Go in Damp A Minor is kind of a problem?"
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It sure is a problem, but only two or three people on the ship have any chance of talking Ulla down right now, and Eiffel isn't one of them. So she only spares him a passing glance, and the winds are going to continue picking up. Lightning flashes off the side of the ship. Not close enough to be a danger, at least not yet. Still cause for plenty of concern.
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"Ulla if you could put King Triton's staff away for five minutes I'd really appreciate it!"
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He manages to get up to the deck; it seems the correct way to the place he's trying to get to. He's a hot mess with a half-drunk bottle of rum hanging against his thigh when he hears it.
That sweet singing. It pulls at Sheridan, the selkie buried in Sweeney's skin, something familiar but still distant. Her voice is a siren's call back to the sea. The wanting. The aching for the thing lost.
The smell of the storm is invigorating, and Sweeney smiles for a moment, his eyes shutting. Free and hungry and halfway home; that's what it feels like.
That is, until a heavy bit of debris slams into him, cast his direction by a swell of wind. It sends sends him sliding back, and he hits the wall hard. It knocks the breath from his lungs and leaves his bottle clattering away. Sweeney winces and looks down, trying to figure out where the blood is coming from, even as the storm continues. It's mostly superficial, but head wounds bleed well, so it's a little tricky for him to figure out in his current state.
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"-weeney? Sweeney. Can you hear me? You in there?"
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"I know you?" There's some level of affirmation, but not enough to make it not a question.
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"Warren Kepler. I was your temp for a few weeks."
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