the sunken | part i

[groundrules]

THE SUNKEN

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Welcome to the first log of Arc VI: the Sunken, which covers 15 May – 2 June and doubles as a test drive meme.

Back/forward date as needed! The calendar date suggestions are indicative.

The TDM is open to everyone! If you decide to apply to the game, you can get an invite from current players or the upcoming enabling meme — or participate in the test drive meme and get in touch @ groundrules to chat things over. We currently have 13 slots available for new players.

Test drivers can use this post for logs and network posts — old timers, please make your network posts at eastbound.

LOST AT SEA | TEST DRIVE TOURISTS

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You wake, gasping, in a stormy sea, your thoughts slowed to a confused trickle. Skill, floating wood or a kindly stranger — who you can’t understand — help you to reach shore.

Villagers discover you collapsed on sand and provide critical (if rickety) communication and translation devices. They say you are in Sunken Yancai, a fishing village progressively overtaken by waters and cursed by the secretive ‘ladies of the lake’ to transit through time.

■ Rescuers group newcomers and supply questionable village couture, warm meals and accommodations in abandoned, half-flooded homes or spare small boats anchored in Yancai’s waterways. Huddle up, recover your strength and don’t think too hard on why your memories are hazy over the next three days.

■ Come morning, you visit village leader Quanze Tsaymien, then the sorceress Karsa — who explains you are otherworlders summoned into Akhuras by undead lords who wish to weaponise you in their battle against humans and one another. Karsa is an associate of the Merchant, who leads otherworlders towards ancient transport beacons east.

■ One such beacon rests dormant in Yancai. The group must infiltrate the village and wait a few weeks until it shifts to a point back in time when the beacon was active.

■ Newcomers are handed passport papers with their new identities in Yancai, where they may be known as a bankrupt merchant, perpetually drunk sailor, whale hunter, raft surveyor, mermaid who has just gained their legs, crab collector... feel free to invent a dutifully hilarious apt role for their seaside sojourn.

OLD TIMERS | THE DRIFTING

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You dragged yourself here in a haze. You arrived long ago, as if in a dream. You were born and bred in this village. In truth, your memories of reaching lively Yancai feel nebulous and alarmingly inconsequential.

Characters are facilitated new identities and dwellings by the Merchant, or believe they have had them all along.

■ A weary Karsa warns to say nothing to party members with altered memories, until the sorcery that affects them runs its course.

■ Memory-altered characters progressively regain their memories within three to five days (by 20 May). They have their memories partially or fully back at night ( midnight to 5 a.m.). Throughout the day, memory regains can trigger migraines, eerie confusion and paranoia.

■ Hauntings begin once characters have fully regained their memories.

■ Once everyone is ‘back to normal,’ Karsa explains that Yancai periodically transits through time. The memory alterations are a magical solution endorsed by the village council, which ensures locals mentally weather these shifts. Villagers continue to blithely accept you as part of the community.

(DON'T) HOLD YOUR BREATH

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Karsa reunites the existing party and newcomers, issuing first assignments. The Merchants’s information suggests the beacon of Yancai will be online once the village travels in time within weeks. A dubious Karsa asks the party to check on the beacon, located in the former House of Commerce of the largely inundated merchants’ district. Reach it by rowing boat.

■ Villagers say the Master of Commerce, a famous musician, took precautions against intruders.

■ All ground and lower floor entryways of the palatial House were boarded to restrict flooding. To enter, pick locks or climb the putrid stairwell towards upper balconies.

■ Inside, the hissing of running water — and, in the lower levels, of thin, slippery leeches whose bite numbs your limbs, while they attempt to feed. You seem to experience pronounced vertigo when entering any decaying rooms covered in black mould.

■ The beacon is located on a dais in the basement vault room, where water rises near 1 meter. Only a few scattered scrolls and golden decorations remain among decorations, while a large ceiling carving writes, greed deafens man to the cries of his conscience; music sets him free.

■ Some tiles of the marbled floor stand out as you wade — step on one, and all doors abruptly slam shut, while dozens of obscured holes in the wall start to rapidly spill water, threatening to fill the room to the ceiling within the hour. You hear the tinny, waning sound of a village song played from a hidden source.

■ To stop the pouring water and open the doors, sing the song you hear, or find the music box that produces it amid debris on the water-covered floors. Wind it, and it plays its song in reverse, revealing the voice of a laughing elderly man who says, Depressingly, Anurr was right to worry.

■ Don’t forget to check the beacon — and report back to Karsa that it looks structurally untarnished.

THEY SLEEP

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After surprising revelations at previous citadels, Karsa tasks you to investigate just how… permanent death is in Yancai. Villagers share that their dead are buried in a strange rite at sea — part of which will take place within days.

■ The dead are ‘entombed’ in one-man sarcophagi ships with carved and chained lids that depict their likeness. These burial boats are set at sea on the first day of each season and return three months later.

■ Join the harbours around 22 May, when mourners gather to receive the burial boats. Characters must pretend to be greatly anguished relatives, acquaintances or debt collectors to join the grieving.

■ The boats float towards you, seemingly of their own volition. Gaze afar and spot a boat carrying a man in black — the same who haunts some characters — who observes until the last burial ship has reached the piers, before he disappears.

■ Sailors draw up the boats and unpeel the untouched chains and lids, to reveal… no corpses. Peer closer and find neither biological signs (stench, liquids) of discomposure, nor the magical chillness of spaces where cadavers have lingered long. Scratch marks litter the inside of some boat lids.

■ Mourners seem grateful that the waters have ‘accepted’ the bodies. Some say that their relatives whose boats have yet to return must have been stolen by the ‘ladies of the lake,’ a villainous witch coven. Speak to mourners or sailors for clues.

■ Linger long near opened burial boats, and you feel tempted to throw yourself into the sea, slowly losing consciousness — until someone rescues you.

AMONG US

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On 25 May, village leader Quanze Tsaymien drags the chained and half feral mistress Miang-si to households and Yancai’s largest market square.

The young woman, he says, was seduced by the ladies of the lake — the furtive witch coven that condemned Yancai to time travel. Luckily, the village elders have… coaxed Miang-si back onto the righteous path.

■ Miang-si is brought door-to-door to point out her 'accomplices.' Ill at ease, villagers whisper of similar witch hunts leading to false accusations and blood-curdling repercussions.

■ Both men and women are suspected and brought before Miang-si. Perhaps she takes an eerie interest in you, getting especially close to catch your scent, touch or remark on (in)visible hurts, or even dotingly kiss you. If you whisper quickly while she’s near, you might be able to ask one question.

■ If you are patient and kind to Miang-si, she briefly squeezes your hand as she withdraws. Within the hour, you find blood writ on your palm that warns, Our fat moon rises red.

■ If you are agitated, or if Quanze rushes her during your visit, Miang-si erupts into sudden, side-splitting cackling — while you find yourself croaking like a toad, or transforming into one and retaining human speech. The spell dissolves after eight hours.

■ Quanze’s long-suffering men say this sorcery breaks faster if you kiss one of the curmudgeonly emerald toads that hide in some of Yancai’s lakes. Catch one such delightful, slime-spitting creature or barter it from merchants at a costly premium.

ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT

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A full moon is set to rise within days of Miang-si’s visit, on 27 May — just as Yancai shows signs of time shifting. Villagers are prone to stilling and staring askance, seeming lost or adrift.

The village itself evolves: one moment, the same house appears freshly new, then drowned, while waterways overfill with water, then seem barren. Overall, the village deteriorates.

■ That day, the sun suffers a midday eclipse, while droves of black birds circle the woods and village outskirts, attacking those who come close.

■ The waters increasingly thicken and darken, preventing boats from entering certain waterways.

■ An exceedingly bright moon and a diffuse lunar replica rise with nightfall. Come midnight, the village is alive with the sounds of ripping, structural collapse and shrieks. Tar-covered corpses emerge from the waters, clawing on and climbing up piers. They swarm, drawing passers-by into waters to drown them. Help them — and foremost, yourself.

■ Light and fire keep the dead at bay. On some waterways, wildfire now spells, WHAT IS WET WAS WRONGED

■ Weaker alone, fresh corpses climb into your rowing boat, pretending they are innocents who seek shelter. They betray themselves by speaking very slowly, struggling to keep track of the conversation or obliviously peppering it with details of their death. They stubbornly ask questions about you, repeating your answers, and become violent if you say they are dead. Push them into the water at first opportunity.

■ Quanze Tsaymien and other men of the village take arms, urging villagers to barricade in the nearest home, harbour or warehouse and weather the night. They advise to be silent and beware the dead who imitate living voices, warning not to touch any black mould or water that suddenly appear in your home — which alert the dead of your presence within.

■ Some dead try to tear you apart, while others seek to feed you a disgusting, tar-like black mould. A small taste of it makes you sluggish and feeble for two-three hours, while an entire fistful can kill.

■ If the undead infiltrate your house, hold your breath, do not move and keep from screaming. The dead have weak sight and olfactory senses and might pass you by, as long as you stay silent. It can be more efficient to fool than kill the dead.

■ By 5 a.m., houses start to replenish themselves, gaining a new appearance, while water and mould retreat. The dead withdraw into waterways. Outside doors have been marked with blood: vertical lines tell how many living people remain inside; horizontal ones count how many within died overnight.

■ You step to seize a brave new day — while Yancai enters a new time period (further details due in the next plot update).

NOTES

■ The game enabling meme goes up on 25 May.

■ Hit up available NPCs here or in their new inbox!

■ QUESTIONS.

Comments

[downswing]

He... drips down, cold. Wet. No, clammy. A texturally unsound, viscous proposition, the pulse of Wei Ying's fresh form somehow sensed even in the spidery spread of his limbs. Lan Wangji swallows, coldly, and a great seismic shudder rolls down his threat, shifting his jaw, unsettling his head/s poise and perhaps pushing the frog down —

But he is latched, is Wei Ying, and Lan Wangji only offers him a feeble perch, his fingers beneath Wei Ying's cold derriere. Lifting him is like playing the guqin, learning the strings — he attends the toad with overwhelming, breathless care, fingers entirely too sweet.

Nudging, he sits his knuckles beneath the toad, urging Wei Ying to descend upon them without forcing the transition.

"Shhhhhhhhhhh." Hush and shoo it and exorcist it, this foolishness, wish it away like dust. "Did the change torture your body?"

It cannot be a simple or kindly thing, to be, all at once, a creature so small — bones and skin and flesh unwinding. And though Lan Wangji cannot stop the process, it would ache him more not to know.

[weifinder]

One sticky little foot, strange for its soft insistence, presses to Lan Zhan's cheek. Oh, there's the dodge, and while he transitions one long, lanky rear leg to Lan Zhan's ready knuckles, he does not yet relinquish his hold on his husband's hair.

"Would you?" And he pleads, knowing this is temporary, because he expects the answer as much as he expects the silence of winter snows and the fierceness of spring flooding: no. In his life and experience, very few things are unconditional.

More should be, but practical reality plays out otherwise. He is a man who appreciates ideals, but has become a realist finding his way back to enthusiasm for the betterment, the genuine justice, of a world where the weak should be defended, where might should not be the only right that wins, the only thing of worth.

Shifts his other long rear leg, then one foreleg, until he is hard nosing his husband's cheek in the last moment he has with it, all four feet collected, his belly against the valleys and peaks of Lan Zhan's knuckles.

"Nothing moves right," he says instead, "I can't turn my head, I don't have a neck, I see things wrong, it's worse than when I was the fox," and he says that like a curse. It'd been one, and far longer. He shudders, tiny body a leaf wracked by a storm of displeasure, and huddles smaller, pulls all limbs in. The small, grumpy figure of a toad ill at ease in his present circumstances. "I feel wrong. I'd like to forget this already, but I can't do that yet!"

A whine, and he knows it, but he doesn't check himself for it. If he cannot by now whine to Lan Zhan, then who can he? Jiang Cheng will probably listen. Wen Qing will listen and snort, empathetic but not indulgent. His late dual claimed son would... carry him around, he suspects, but he would not complain of this to Sizhui. One does not inflict that on children, in their twenties or otherwise.

"Everything is wrong. A skin that doesn't fit. How can I even talk? What a peculiar curse... ah, Lan Zhan, I can't access any of my own qi, I think everything's locked away with this forced change to form."

Like the fox, he doesn't say. Only then he'd had teeth and claws and limbs long and fleet enough to carry him swiftly. Now he has... toadiness.

[downswing]

And would he? He has not thought himself a creature of whim, of fluidity, of vanity. Wei Ying complains, and it's a sign of feeble sickness, of discomfort, inconvenience, blisters and small bruises — not broken bones. He is silent when true ailing hits him, saps him of strength like waters bled of stalks.

...and he kicks, nudges and collides, the control over his flimsy fresh body imprecise. Lan Wangji bears the onslaught against his cheek with the northbound hike of his brow, before gently accepting the burden of his husband's small heft on his hand and drifting him up, held within gaze's stab. They watch one another for a heartbeat's silence that seems to stretch into cosmic dignity.

Then, with the sigh of the longest-suffering of men, lips already curdling from the inevitability of moist clammy skins, Lan Wangji drips his mouth over his husband's moss-wet head. There, young toad. Would he, indeed.

...more affection than grace to it. He does not shield his horror after, nose wrinkling with bone-deep resignation as he accepts Wei Ying's metamorphosis, his shift in temperature, his slippery, oily, clammy touch. Delightfully off-putting, yet a kinder fate than surviving qi-locked.

And because he is a man wedded, if not bedded, and because suffering is a calling and an art, Lan Wangji, hereby disdaining the many decisions that led to this moment, politely loosens the fold of his robes to slip the toad in the created pocket, by his breast.

"I assume you would not prefer four shichen in this shape." Correct him now, before he starts to look for... other toads to relieve the curse.

[weifinder]

Wei Wuxian doesn't examine that he feels soothed, at the press of lips to his head in a far more likely consuming than the playful pretense moments earlier. Nor is he any less soothed by the distaste on Lan Zhan's face as he pulls away, looming impossibly large over him, features distorted by sheer size, a mountain that peers down upon the climber of its feet. Heavy as Mount Tai, they both have lived and will live, and Lan Zhan is the weight of that in politics divorced from this world, but aptly relevant on their own.

He does not anticipate the pull to chest, the tucking away against his husband's skin, or close enough to it that the warmth of him is a succor of its own. Wei Wuxian huddles himself small and contained, surrounded in soft whites of filtered light through fabric, of moments caught in silent blizzard, isolated in the fringes of a deadly storm.

He closes his eyes, listens to the improbably heady sound of an earthquake, steady and rolling, underneath his feet, his chest, his belly. Lan Zhan's heartbeat is a dragon coiling and shifting in the earth of his flesh, and Wei Wuxian tucks closer, listening. A pulsing sound, the paired thumps and the inhalation that lifts him up with the flesh and bone and connective tissues of Lan Zhan's body, with the encasing silks and the indelible vivacity of life that surrounds him, lowers in the next seconds with an exhalation. He sits next to a cacophony of noises he usually hears only when they rest at night, Lan Zhan slumbering, hands over chest, on his back and insensate to the world around them. Moments where Wei Wuxian steals closer, tucks himself in close, and closes his eyes to the reassurance of a heartbeat, a breath, not his own.

No darkness consumes as much as one in silence. He knows that, knows the sound of his own heart, his own breath, his own relentless mind far too well. Lan Zhan is a balm he cannot articulate, if even he tried.

"I would not," he says, a beat late, toad eyes opening in their multitude of lids, resolving the image of glacial safety he's ensconced in courtesy of his soulmate, his husband, his partner. He tucks his chin down even lower, resting on feet and toes pulled into neat lines, lulled by the tidal ebb and flow of Lan Zhan's inhalations. "I can only stand four shichen in a handsome shape. Or an especially cute one. Why couldn't she have cursed me into a rabbit? You'd like that better, I'd like that better, I could still fit in your robes..."

The heavy, theatrical sigh of a man of Lan Zhan's size, coming from the diminutive form of the toad hunkered down at his chest. How unfair, and his mind already turns, with his husband a man of action and attentive to the moment, to what he'd heard from the young woman before her chains had been pulled tight, her terrible laughter pulled into the harsh light of day and dishonour and injustice.

They have more to fight against here, he knows it.

"She said they don't move the dead. Bitter, against the accusations the village levels at the women of the waters."

[downswing]

"Innocents, accused." They know this tune, its sharp and scathing crescendos, until a man or a woman or a witch climbs a rooftop, and —

He travels, shadow-like, slippery. They say, find a fellow toad, and there are waters close, silvered and thickly, nearly wet filth. They will make do to capture Wei Ying a companion, for all Lan Wangji finds himself restless, piqued. It is not the kiss — for once, jealousy does not claw him into ribbons and string, not with a frog as his contender.

Only the implication of sorcery drawn between two living things that are not soulmates and kin — how will it break or bind them? Will Wei Ying's qi chain itself to the toad? Will the toad gain sway over the known world's foremost necromancer? A difficult exercise of hypotheticals, reduced to ridicule by the species involved. But not unmerited.

Now and then, at sharp leap, he cups a worn hand over his chest to serve Wei Ying a perch, to ensconce him. Stumbling over gravel, feet catching between weeds, the creak of pier planks underfoot. A fine day for it, at least, even as humidity climbs and grazes their skin, thick and syrupy. The sun scorches, ruinous.

"You yet believe Miang-Si?"

Between them, Wei Ying's pulses of justice often ring too acute and true to allow him fair awareness of the world that surrounds him. But he tries, he does so try.

[weifinder]

He shifts in increments, slow splaying of limbs so his toes, remarkably good at gripping, keep him anchored when Lan Zhan's hand wanders, keep him located simply when Lan Zhan's hand returns. His eyes close and he listens, the sounds of the world around him different. Lan Zhan's heartbeat reigns supreme with the creaking of lungs, a lulling focal point beyond the mounting sensation of constricted form.

He dries in slow increments, unaware of it. Opens his eyes to see nothing but robes and shadowed light beyond them when Lan Zhan questions, and hums as he considers his response.

"Belief," he says at length, "Is easy. Trust less so. The village can't remember which truths are correct, which truths are built out of falsehoods. Perhaps these ladies of the lakes know more. Asking them about the missing dead, ah, wouldn't that be wiser? Missing bodies in this world is a sign of impending walking dead."

Not an acceptance to watery graves, such as the villagers insisted about their months missing and now empty boat coffins. He sighs, making to lick lips he doesn't have and instead sending his tongue shooting out to hit the corner of Lan Zhan's lapel. His tongue, incredible, disturbing length of it, pulls back toward his mouth while his toad eyes stare wide and incredulous. What?!

"Lan Zhan, I want a bath after this. A hot bath. A long hot bath that smells nice!"

Slick and wet and slippery only to dry off with rosy skin and reddened cheeks and full body formed as it should be, fit to frame.

[downswing]

...his husband's tongue, length exceeding his body. Sticking out, spearing, curling back in. Tentacling fleetingly around Wangji's lapel, sending a silent, repentant shudder to trample his back. There are... adjustments to Wei Ying's present form that Lan Wangji, pinnacle of poise, still struggles to embrace. The tongue should not be the worst of it. Yet, somehow —

"Better than you." May the Heavens forgive the sharp blade's edge of his tongue, how he has yet to encounter a challenge he will honour. Wei Ying has grown accustomed to it, acclimated, grateful for any scraps of his attention, however drenched in bile. It should not please either of them so, but Lan Wangji, traversing one pond and the next stretch of waters and a fat swell of lotus carrying every kin and kind of grasshop, cannot bring himself to quarrel.

In the end, a broad lake, waters muted and muddied green, the signs of algae and bitter plant root. He looms over on the shoreline, watchful and waiting and tension mantling his bones —

And the telling croak comes. Once, from the left: a toad, small. Again, in answer right-bound. Once more, and the choir kicks off, and there's an edge to Lan Wangji's smile, ferally triumphant.

He pats Wei Ying over the mucus-like membrane of his head, the game afoot. "Can you call to them? Lure close."

...one ugly toad to another.

[weifinder]

He pauses before he gathers his objection, noting primarily, "Toads don't smell bad! You're thinking of dogs."

Which this village also has, though for once the oddities of the magic which had (disturbingly) altered the edges of his memories continued to hold village away: they knew to keep those beasts away from him.

He listens to the nonsense of the frogs and toads of the silty waters, a slow build into a rumbling chorus. To be asked to call, to lure, like this?

A toad has never sounded as deadpan as he, answering.

"I don't speak frog or toad, Lan Zhan. And the kind of lure I would be means getting eaten. Toads eat other toads!"

Not universally, but he's being very complaining aware of his current extraordinary circumstances, and how I'm some villages he's visited in the past, animals like him are on even the human menu! The thought discomfits enough he shudders before setting to crawl, slow and careful, to poke his small head beyond lapel and realise he can't really see worth shit.

"Go ahead and guoguo Lan Zhan!"

[downswing]

May the Heavens be long, prosperous and good, a power overwhelming. May they stretch gargantuan and all-seeing, forgive his hurts and wants, may they take mercy upon him, may they keep Lan Wangji in their grace. May they lend him patience, the roll of his eyes an obscene exertion of muscles he did not think he possessed to roll his eyes in new and incredibly persistent rotations.

His husband, so often a menace, is now merely a storm of stubbornness. Very well. Where Wei Ying cannot be troubled to entice his temporary kin and kind, Lan Wangji inserts himself neatly in the empire of fern and nettle and the great waxed spread of lotus leaf clinging to his feet, where leaves have shored, taking the knee to loom large and ominous over the lake's side.

One hand holds the toad in his collar close to heart — toads eat other toads, and they've dripped in proximity — and he plays out a song from the arsenal of plaintive, syrupy, astringent melodies that so often coax interest and kindness from living things. The Lan are not only of Clarity, for all Wei Ying has decided their purpose. The songs of the dead do not suit animals, but the honeyed start of a melody appears to drag the toads out for investigation. Some croak back. A few hop forward, on sunken claws of trees, on hard leaf.

"How many within leap's reach?"

He cannot stop, cannot look up, cannot be seen to watch until he is ready to strike. Now, Wei Ying...

[weifinder]

Wei Wuxian crawled forward, blinking eyelids, then eyelids again, as he traversed his husband to the edge of his lapel, crawling out, over, finding the lack of neck meant he couldn't turn his head like his natural inclination instructs. One eye alone judges distance well, and he finds, to his surprise, that the difficulty of some close focus he'd been suffering and presuming to be the way of life for the toads of the world proves clarity inducing with distance.

He blinks two sets of eyelids again, sticking toes spread, lifting up on his front legs and shifting himself to the right, to the left. Taking in the surprising array of what he can see, the shapes, the colours, the stronger inclination toward blues and greens he had not seen with his human eyes looking upon these waters.

He inhales sharply, the airsack of his throat inflating and wheezing out a grumbling sigh when his mouth opens, all unintentional. He swipes a foot at his face, dragging it over one eye, pushing it down, foot sliding further and off his nose, eye opening again without pause.

"My leap or yours?" He asks, because he has to ask something, before he responds, "Five. One to your left at the shore, on top of several dead leaves, another to your far right, near shore and peering above the water. The loud one is further back on a log thrust up out of the water, on the second branch above the water, curved to the left and spread like fingers on an ancient hand."

The questing guoguo, the craoking, the quiet kero of Lan Zhan's chorus of admirers in miniature, one more frog, smooth backed to the pebbling of Wei Wuxian's own, swimming closer, head breaking the surface to be nearest to the curious sounds of Lan Zhan's making.

A ribbit that matches a creature fifteen times its size emerges, rolls through them both, chest rattling. Wei Wuxian pushes himself up higher with his front legs, then some with his back, as if poised to leap — yet he would not leap.

That one, he knows with the surety of a man who know very little about these specific frogs and toads, but very much about general behaviours of animals similar to these, that one would swallow him whole.

[downswing]

Ah, his beautiful, witty, charming, skilled husband is — ...balking at the heft and impunity of their callous visitors, one of whom has taken to approaching close enough to whisper of its intended dalliance. He hears what he is yet to see, both appreciative and apprehensive, turning to coil a hand around Wei Ying and summarily...

...stuff him down his collar, between layers, in the most explicit exposure Wei Ying has ever suffered with the mountains, valleys and bridge-spreads of his skin. The feeling of this slippery seduction is easily the most gut-twisting, clammy and disgusting sensation Lan Wangji wishes to experience, in this life or the cursed next. The things one does for love.

"Wei Ying." Soft, gentle, like powdered and settled snow, like silver dust, to keep the chorus of his spectators from stirring, startled. "Do not duel toads."

He plays, and his spectators join in, some having seemingly discovered latent talents as flower girls and wishing no more and no better than to sing along. Delightful.

As a... matter of courtesy, one of principle, one of cultivation mercy, and, dare he say so, one of strategic convenience. Perhaps do not battle and slaughter the creatures they are intended to entrap.

"Do any... call to you?"

...to Wei Ying's lips, in particular. Blindly, now that he has been sunken in the whirlpool of Lan Wangji's robes. A trifling challenge and disturbance.

"Heed your heart."

[weifinder]

He has, perhaps, dreamed of something like and utterly unlike this, in half remembered moments or passing daydreams when a specific, particular kind of tired. One where creativity is distilled to quietly observing his husband with a half smile on his lips, and his eyes have perhaps lingered heartbeats too long on the length of his throat, the crossed front of his robes.

He did not specifically imagine being shoved down into them, being so divorced from a sense of his own body to find it overwhelming and stifling and weirdly comforting to be slipped, shoved, slid down, warmth of Lan Zhan's skin warming him further, taking the chill and the vestiges of dampness that lingered away.

No toads in here, and he braces small feel against the expanse of Lan Zhan's chest, the thud of his heart louder than before, or is that Wei Wuxian's heart? No, Lan Zhan's, he knows it, because his own pitiful toad heart beats that much faster. He hunkers down, presses himself flat as he can against his husband's skin.

"I can wait," he says instead of making any call for a heart that experiences no swaying toward the enthralled chorus of Lan Zhan's frog and toad admirers. "Right here, for hours."

Heed his heart indeed.

[downswing]

"...eight of them," he reminds conversationally, with the ease of a man who has combatted, deflected and summarily dismissed juvenile propositions with great success in the past. He has, after all, raised a son and countless others of Cloud Recesses' less sophisticated children. He knows the farce of patience before a beggarly, infantile request.

"Fearful." It will not fade, after all, for all Lan Wangji gently coaxes his hands into the familiar, plaintive sequences of qi-imbued songs of clarity, of contentment. Wei Ying, a monster of ingratitude, will perhaps yet complain, even of this. "Hunted. Restricted and inconvenienced."

Eight hours paralysed by the limitations of another form are a difficult notion, no matter how prone Wei Ying now proves, lairing up to seize his sleep. He must think (they both most think) this is a matter of bearing with a blister, not shying away from a burn. But sorcery only deepens its hold, claws sharp and cunning, and their claim a carnage.

"You will not resist." Feast upon this, Lan Wangji's faith in his husband's strength. A sight, a vision. Beyond, a triad of toads takes this opportune time to croak their sympathy, their agreement, or their understandable cravings for a midday meal.

[weifinder]

"I can learn to take an eight hour nap on your chest," he says, the whining edge to his voice a genuine complaint over something he isn't comfortable with, but might manage to ignore through sheer mental fortitude. He holds still, peering through slit eyes, feeling it's not dark enough even sealed in close like this to his husband.

The amphibians that stalked closer, curious and not yet feeling threatened, offering commentary in silence and croaks and chirps. No, he doesn't wish to meet any of that horrid number.

What strikes is the creeping understanding of an indignity, a pressure which cannot be ignored. Small bodied, but possessing enough similar organs with similar responses to understand them with dawning horror, Wei Wuxian's large eyes open fully. No, there's a more immediate, insidious reason he won't be allowed the solace of his husband's breast. There's a base biology that asserts himself, and he forces limbs into awkward motion, crawling upward, the tickling slide off desperation aimed up, up, up. Frantic to squirm free, and if he does not face this gladly to resolve one concern, he does squeeze himself free to perch at the folds of Lan Zhan's robes to face it nonetheless.

He doesn't allow himself time to think. He huddles down, braces his awkwardly long hind legs, grips with the rounded toes of his front.

"I hate everything about this!”

Wei Wuxian leaps, soaring out in impossible slow motion, not a clean jump off a creature knowing best through a lifetime of learning how to move, how to conquer. He flies at an angle, front legs stretched forward, hind legs stretched back, the arc he intended not reached. For one hanging moment he seems he might not hit the way at all, before the pitiable smallness of his entrance into the waters at the shoreline is burst upon the world with its splash.

He darts forward in the liquid splendour of the water, a set of eyelids descending without his conscious thought, swimming with too human motions but enough Yunmeng finesse to make it under the safety of anchored, floating leaves.

Nature called. Wei Wixian simply decided he had to answer.

[downswing]

And then his soulmate, his husband, the most startlingly ingenious, beautiful, just, adept and strong man of the cultivation lands scuttles up, nestles close, drags his clammy, graceless, slimy legs and, in a spectacle of geometry and joy, leaps towards the Heavens —

...only to land, audibly, in the lake waters with a shallow splash, Lan Wangji passingly waving a hand to interrupt the summon of his guqin and stirring after him. He runs, only to find six toads rising with him, seemingly curious or bellicose, to investigate the intruder.

Wangji, being a man, possessed of wit and opposable thumbs, does the expected and picks up waxy, long, mellow lotus leaves, throwing them absently at the frogs who follow. They croak impatiently, swearing either a pox upon Cloud Recesses' long-absent cows or an end to Lan Wangji's already unfulfilled bloodline. Either way, he lands first, knees absorbing the shock and scratches of water pebble hitting his skin, as he drags his hands through water to find and net his wayward soulmate —

"Wei Ying —"

...only to discover he's collected the wrong toad — a fatter, brighter, emerald specimen, lips ready for a smooch. He blinks. The toad blinks. A long tongue slithers out.

Lan Wangji nearly swoons.

[weifinder]

Wei Wuxian, relieving his needs, surfaces again with all the burr of unpleasant bother over the necessities of biology he'd prefer to ignore, or at least handle otherwise, the water sluicing off his pebbled, tiny head as he breaches the water's surface. His husband kneels on the shore, clearer now with the distance between them, holding up a emerald toad that sends its seeking tongue out, snatching a passing gnat out of the air and near touching Lan Zhan's nose.

His husband sways, and Wei Wuxian calls out, a sparkle of laughter that echoes over the water between them, sending the other toads and their frog companions hopping sideways and away at the sudden loudness with no expected personage associated, retreating to the water but for the one Lan Zhan holds close.

"Lan Zhan! I thought I was the one you wanted kissing a toad, are you testing one out for me?"

He swims closer, legs kicking in a froggish motion, and clambers on shore, walking in awkward gait instead of hopping as a proper toad should. It's awkward enough he settles back into himself, the gnats at the water line idly bumbling past. Wei Wuxian doesn't think before his tongue, his body, reacts with a predatory instinct similar and starkly different from every trained instinct he's honed since childhood.

The rolling flick and thrust of his tongue darts through the air, striking a gnat and partly curling around it, the whole of his tongue pulling back in on the reliance of muscles that leave him gaping as it slams home, gnat crushed and disappearing into his maw as it closes. Wei Wuxian sits stock still, wide eyes even wider after the reflexive swallow ends, eyes having closed in the process and sunken before the moan of discomfort and his increasing distaste for this foreign, strange form builds, builds, builds.

"Lan Zhan," he calls out, the bemoaning cry of his distress one part performance for the sake of making clear he is not in danger, two parts honesty as water beads and rolls off his minuscule back, "A bug. I ate a bug, on purpose. Not on accident when flying, this body's tongue caught a bug on purpose."

Solve this crisis for him, one way or another, brilliant jade of his heart, warrior gliding in and out of chaos, intelligent and warm and witting in his pointed, questing, sly learned ways. Solve this horror of toadyism. He wasn't cut out for this life, not a prince or a pauper among men, cursed for another man's arrogance just as he has been again and again.

Out in the waters, the depths stir. A koi drifts closer. Another toad croaks, emerging from the waters to the floating leaves, three times his size. The insects flit and flitter past, alighting on Lan Zhan's exposed skin. The drone of heat and insects and water fill the background of their ears, and Wei Wuxian moans.

[downswing]

"That body's tongue is your tongue," murmured to the side indifferently, for let it not be forgotten that Wei Ying's troubles and qualms are a product of misfortune and his own wretched design, alike. This world, alive around them, brims with humidity and humour, with a sense of undeniable, petty satisfaction at Wei Ying's ongoing, vocal plight. He compounds his woes with complaints.

Lan Wangji, by his nature the stoic of the pair, simply — coexists. First, with the heat that builds in steady, hefty increments, blanketing. Then, with the resonance of hums and croaked purring, with water clinking and dripping and echoing, shrill. With the hungry, rapid beats of his heart, the crackling of leaves, when grasshoppers and flies drift closer, from blades of lake grass and bracken.

The toad in Wangji's hand squeals one mighty sound that fills out its belly, then thins to wheezing, its eyes black and beady and wrong. He starts to pull back — a long, slick, pinkened tongue spears out — and he doesn't know how, or why, but he's immobile.

He feels the appendage land on his lips, crawl over the shape of them, thin. Swivel. Some part of him shrivel. More fissures. Finally, life sparks back in his limbs and he pulls back, barely refraining from releasing the creature, but summarily pushing it towards Wei Ying, its... mouth close to the smaller one of its husband.

It is at this time that, realising it is perhaps twice Wei Ying's new size and a few notches up the food chain that the captive toad thinks, ah. A fellow frog.

Its mouth opens wide, mean and hungry.

"Tsk," hisses Wangji, two spare fingers tapping the creature on its head, until its mouth snaps shut, grudgingly obedient. He nods, then, towards Wei Ying.

"Proceed."

Look it in the abyss of its starved mouth and kiss.