overbox | Spark in the Gloom

Spark in the Gloom

The Spark in the Gloom
A panfandom Smut Adventure RP Sandbox

Somewhere in the twisting paths between universes is The Archipelago. A world made of the flotsam and jetsam of a thousand different realities. An endless chain of islands, each one made from the seed of a different world. Local culture, weather, and even laws of physics can vary wildly from island to island. Without any kind of guiding will behind its creation, the Archipelago had always been a place of live and let live for the various people who found themselves there.

Until the Gloom arrived. This unnatural force of darkness coveted apathy and depression. Passion, pleasure, and happiness are its anathema. The islands over which it holds its grip aren't necessarily PHYSICALLY dark, but they always have a darkness of the spirit about them. The people it leaves behind are little more than mindless drones, performing the bare minimum to survive but lacking the energy to do anything else.

The Spark is an order of people from this world that have taken a stand, and they have chosen their primary weapon well. It is a weapon that most sentient beings know of. It is a force of passion, of creation, and pleasure.

The Order's weapon is sex. The very act of physical intimacy of any kind repels the Gloom and merely being NEAR anyone who is having sex or who has recently had sex causes the Gloom's agents physical discomfort. As some kinds of undead are to holy ground, the Gloom is to orgasms.

You poor lost souls were somehow lost between the cracks between realities. Maybe a sciece experiment or spell gone wrong. Maybe just a freak fracture in time and space. One minute you were home going about your life, the next you were in the Archipelago, and an agent of The Spark was pulling you out of the ocean. The Spark has the ability to send you home, but the Gloom is currently too strong and would surely block any such attempt. So if you want to get out of here, your best bet is to help The Spark in their fight.

Firebrand Island
The Spark's HQ is set up on a beautiful island deep in the nigh infinit expanse of the Archipelago. On the surface, it appears to be an enormous luxury resort surrounded by a thriving tourist town. A huge sprawling hotel/casino/shopping center forms the main body of resort, but with various smaller beach cabins villas, and other sattelite structures dotting the coast for miles in either direction. If you take the cable car tram going inland, you will find yourself going up the side of a mountain to a secondary resort, which instead of swimming pools and snorkeling tours, offers skiing and hotsprings.

Regardless of where you go on the island, you'll find the locals have very little in the way of a nudity taboo. Public bathing, sometimes of mixed gender, is the norm (In some neighborhoods, the houses don't even have their own showers, with everyone sharing one centrally located bathhouse.). You might get some weird looks if you started going at it in the middle of the street, but in general the people here aren't very judgey and will let you get away with whatever.

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The Order of the Spark
The Order is well known on Firebrand Island. It's something of an open secret that beneath their fabulous resorts are elaborate underground facilities devoted to tracking the spread of The Gloom, training their field agents, supplying them with state of the art equipment, housing planes and ships for traveling across the Archipelago, and other such things. The Order might use non standard weapons, but they are still fighting a war. They have to be READY.

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The Gloom

This supernatural force of darkness and depression has been slowly spreading across the Archipelago for decades. It isn't a physical THING you can fight with conventional weapons. It is, at the most basic level, an psychic aura of depression that drains the joie de vivre from wherever it spreads. Acts of supreme happiness, pleasure, and satisfaction will cause the Gloom to retreat.

The Gloom DOES have physical agents, though. People who live with The Gloom for too long will start to change. Most people end up as like blank faced shuffling zombies, but every once in a while, someone will become an Avatar of the Gloom. They mutate in monstrous ways and become devoted spreading the Gloom. It is unknown if the Gloom itself is sapient, or if it merely uses the sapience of its avatars. Either way, the MOST effective way to free and island of the Gloom is to find and either kill or chase off the avatar upon it.

The other thing the Gloom does is drain the power of others. While in Gloom enshrouded territory, you will rapidly grow weaker and lose and supernatural abilities you might have had. The only thing that can protect you from this effect is Mojo.

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Mojo

Mojo is the name for a kind of power that exists in this world that is the opposite of Gloom, though it is much rarer. You can generate small amounts of Mojo from masturbation, or from acts of creation (art of all kinds, hard but rewarding work, etc), but the best way to get Mojo is through sex with another person. Trying out new kinks has also been shown to produce some bonus Mojo, so it's always worthwhile to experiment with something new. Simply put, the more sex you have, the better protected you'll be from the effects of The Gloom. You can feel it as a sort of pleasant, metaphorical warmth in your stomach. It is the Order's greatest weapon in this war.

You don't HAVE to have sex, of course. The Order of the Spark idolizes freedom and personal expression. There are, as mentioned, other ways to build it up. They just are so much less effective, and sex can be so much fun. And let's be real, if you aren't interested in smut, why are you even looking at this post?

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SOME PROMPTS
1: Relaxation - It's a hard life, fighting a world devouring supernatural malaise. Fortunately, when you're not doing that, your accomodations are Top Notch. Go to a fancy restaurant. Hang out on the beach. Go skiing. Relax in the hot-springs. Get a job. Paint a picture. Go to the library. Watch a movie.
2: Mojo - To fight the Gloom you need Mojo, and to get Mojo you need SEX. Firebrand island has a million places to slip away for a steamy encounter, if you're away from the privacy of your room. And they say that if you try something you've never done before, you can generate even more.
3: Mission Prep - You've got some Mojo, you've got your mission. You're safe for the moment. As your speedboat/helicopter speeds you towards the next Island determined to house The Gloom, you've got some time to chat with your allies. Any last minute things you want to get off your chest? Want to strategize how you're going to take on the next Avatar? Just want to chat? Now's your chance.
4: Hunting - An island is a big place, and the Avatar isn't always somewhere obvious. The locals are usually too depressed to do much more than stare at you, so you have more or less free reign of the island, but good God is this place a dump. There's a dirtiness of the soul here, that your Mojo is holding at bay for the now, but is still omnipresent and overbearing.
5: Battle - Avatars are strange and terrifying creatures. They could have tentacle arms (not THAT kind of tentacle arms. The Gloom hates that stuff), ripping claws, jaws that can chew through steel, acid spitting glands, or worse. But you're a badass too. Protected from the Gloom by a shield of Mojo, with your friends and lovers at your sides, you are as ready as you're going to get. So go kick some ass!
6: Emergency Recharge - Something went wrong, and one of your friends has run out of Mojo. They're getting weaker by the minute, and it won't take long for them to be reduced to one of the shuffling mindless drones that the Gloom turns most people into. Fortunately, you found them, and there's one sure fire way to restore them to normal.
7: Victory - The Avatar has been defeated, and without it to anchor the Gloom here, the thrill of victory has started to erase the malaise covering the island. As people wake up from their long depression, they start to realize what happened, and BOY are they happy to do so. A grand party is held in your honor. The agents of the Order of the Spark are off on the side, making deals with the island's govnerment, but in the meantime, everyone is celebrating YOU. Enjoy your victory. Go dance. Sign autographs. Pose for selfies. Get drunk. Hook up with an attractive stranger. Tomorrow, it's back to HQ to get ready for the next fight. For now, you have NO responsibilities.
8: Training - Swing that sword, lift those weights, get in that sparring ring. You gotta be ready for the next island. And if your clothes starts to get pulled off or ripped during a sparring match, well, that would just be AWFUL, wouldn't it?
9: Recon report - Before all the cool sword havers can run in and fight the Avatar, you have to know what it looks like and what it can do. That means infiltration and recon, which is a risky business on it's own, but also uses up a lot of Mojo. By the time your extraction came, you were basically a drone. Upon getting home, you have two tasks. 1: Get Mojo'd back up and 2: Tell everyone what you learned about the new Island and its Avatar.
10: A Dirty Job - Fighting the Avatar is all very dramatic and important, but there's a lot else that needs to get done. There's a base camp on the engloomed Island's edge to maintain. There's maintenance to be done on the boat that carried you here. There's locals who can't really take care of themselves right now. Plus, if you end up with some spare time, slipping off somewhere quiet with a friend and generating some Mojo is always helpful to the mission.
11: Wildcard - Between the Slice of Life of living on Firebrand Island, the action/adventure of fighting the Gloom, and the Endless Smut of building up enough Mojo to SURVIVE fighting the Gloom, you have a lot of options. Make something up!

I'm testing the setting concept out. If people seem interested then who knows, maybe this will grow into something bigger!

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Perhaps most people might be queasy, but Ryan is absolutely enthralled. Up until this moment, his experience here has been wretched. For someone as sexually repressed as Ryan, a place that practically requires sex is not at all suited to him. He's rendered almost entirely helpless against the Gloom as a result, which has lead to him taking a nasty slash across his abdomen while trying to get out of the way of the battle.

The battle he basically forgets about the second Irisviel starts to work her magic. He'd been almost certain he was done for as soon as he saw the injury went deep enough to expose his intestines, but they're moving back into place, the muscle that goes over them is knitting itself back together, the edges of his skin are pulling closed...

"Beautiful," he breathes, reaching out with one hand to feel the healing as it happens. The gore doesn't seem to bother him one bit.

"Please be careful." She can't move her hands to push his away while she concentrates on piecing his guts back together, but the look on her face strongly implies she'd rather like to. "I don't want to heal your hand underneath the skin of your stomach by accident."

His fingers aren't actually pushing into the wound, which is really the only way she'd actually have to worry about that, but she's never healed a wound this bad on anyone but herself before, and she's hyper-aware of everything that could possibly go wrong. Fortunately, it's already at the point where he'd have to quite deliberately stick his fingers inside himself to cause much of a problem.

"Sorry — should have thought... kind of hard to think."

And it's getting harder. The more she heals him, the more the shock fades and the pain starts to set in. Ryan grits his teeth, letting his hand fall back to his side. It's a pity he'd be afraid of losing his strength and dropping his phone in the open wound, because he'd really like to record this and examine it at a later date. A soft whimper escapes him despite his best efforts. He's tempted to try and sit up and check her progress, but he only needs to be scolded once to behave himself.

"It's alright. Just try to relax, and breathe..."

She knew full well that relaxing with a gut wound was far easier said than done, and she really wished she could add an anesthetic effect to her spell, but unfortunately the need for haste kind of rendered that undoable. At least she'd reached the point where his muscles had finished knitting over his organs. Unfortunately, that only made it more painful, as this was where most of the nerves were.

Even though he knows to expect it, it's a pain he hasn't experienced before. Ryan clutches at the ground and throws his head back in an effort to stay still, belatedly remembering her bidding him to breathe. He would really rather not, but he forces a few stuttered breaths all the same. It's a blessing when she's finally done, even though he still feels hypersensitive. He brings up his arm to dab the sweat off his face, panting.

"Thank you," he manages.

Finally. All that's left is a little red mark which will fade on its own. Iri pulls her hands back and gives him a warm smile. "Don't thank me yet. We aren't done here."

And the avatar has been roaring and swiping at their fellow fighters this whole time, so really it's mostly a relief that the others have managed to keep them safe while Iri patched him up. Granted, it didn't take as long as it might have seemed, but still, even as much as a minute is pretty intense in a situation like this.

No, they aren't done. But Ryan can't really fight, so he'll just have to stay back and watch —

Or maybe not? He was told that physical intimacy of any sort would repel the Gloom, he's just thoroughly ignored that since he's never so much as even held hands with a prospective partner before. A first kiss is definitely intimate...

Ryan sits up and reaches out for her hand again, obviously anxious.

"Kiss me."

Well that... gets a blink of surprise out of her. She looks up at him and tilts her head, trying to figure out the best way to respond. It actually takes a few seconds for her to figure out where exactly that came from.

Of course, once she gets the idea, she finds herself nodding. She's not entirely sure a kiss will be enough to get him back on his feet, but hey, it's worth a try, right? She leans up, and presses her lips against his, soft and tender.

Though it may not do much for her, for Ryan it's so incredibly new that he feels a rush of warmth immediately. He forces himself to stay close, even playing his lips over hers a couple times until he feels like he can stand without wobbling. The avatar even reacts, flinching enough to allow the other fighters a brief opening.

Ryan pulls away, lifting his arm to his face in an attempt to cover up how ridiculously red he is.

"Thank you," he says again, somehow even more strained than before.

Wow. There's being a virgin, and then there's... has this man never had any sort of intimate contact before? Well, he does look a bit young. Honestly, it pulls a bit at her motherly instincts... which is a little awkward right now, but at least it doesn't look like he'll need more than she just gave him.

Managing not to tease him over his face, she simply stands herself, smiling as someone else takes advantage of the opening to deliver a blow that sends the enemy staggering. "You're welcome. Now get back in there."

She smiles encouragingly, and turns back to the fight herself.

Even if he's strong enough to move around now, Ryan is still a noncombatant. The best he can do is stay out of the way so that he doesn't have to be healed up again. Thankfully for Ryan, that at least is something he usually excels in, previous blow notwithstanding.

Once the fight is over and everyone is patched up (he can do first aid even if he lacks magic), he approaches Irisviel again, not quite making eye contact.

"That magic — is that something you learned here, or...?"

Maybe it's just that he makes her think of the sort of person who would have those sort of skills. Or the fact that he got hurt like that in the first place, giving her the idea that he was closing with the enemy intentionally.

Regardless, once everything is said and done, and the initial patching-up is taken care of, she hears him speak up to her as they're heading back to the boat that took them here.

"No, not at all. I've been a mage my whole life, actually." Entirely true, if not the full story. "Trying to learn it here would... I'm afraid there's only so much a non-mage could really learn about my discipline even if they did find a willing teacher here."

Really, it's his fault for not believing that the gloom was a real thing. He didn't believe it — it sounded like complete nonsense to him, so he went along on this little trip just to confirm it. Unfortunately, it turned out to be very real. And though he tried to avoid engaging with the enemy, it's most likely that Ryan's presence attracted it. He's vulnerable to it. Not only is he quite the pessimist, he hasn't let anyone touch him beyond a handshake until just today.

"Oh, I wasn't looking to learn. It's just not something that would have been possible where I'm from, so I was curious." Ryan stops speaking briefly as he makes his way onto the boat, keeping an eye in Irisviel in case she tired herself out. After all, not only did she participate on combat, she healed a wound that likely would have been fatal and then patched people up afterward too.

"I imagine that's true of a lot of the worlds here. On the other hand, a lot of the other worlds have their own methods of using and learning magic, so perhaps it all evens out, in the end." She's actually been taking quite a bit of time to learn about other methods of using magic, herself. Not because she thinks she'll be able to use them, though she might. But more so that she can learn what her allies are likely to be able to do.

As they get onto the boat, Iri makes her way right for one of the seats, her legs shaking a little as much as she tries to hide it. She sighs in relief when she's off her feet, and glances at his face... and finds herself chuckling.

"Ah. Did I worry you?"

She caught him. Ryan looks away as quickly as he can manage, his cheeks turning slightly pink.

"Well... I may not understand magic, but surely some rules apply. All of that energy couldn't have come from nowhere, you must be tired."

He dares another glance back toward her. It's difficult to tell since she's already so pale (it's not often he meets someone even whiter than he is), but he does think her general pallor looks a little off.

That gets an appreciative smile from her, but also a little shrug.

"Well, that's true. I gather up a great deal of the energy from the environment around me, but much does have to come from me directly, particularly given what the state of things are in the areas we fight the gloom. Still, it's nothing sleep and food won't cure."

And maybe a little more mojo when she's feeling less ready to drop off.

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Spark in the Gloom

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Took a long weekend!

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