Spark in the Gloom

[overbringer]

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?

Image References: 1? 2?

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!

Comments

Bai Lin | OC | OTA

[fistsofchange]

-1-

Bai Lin, a rather filthy looking girl in her early 20s wrapped in the robes you might imagine a martial artist practicing monk might wear, stood on the beach with her mouth hanging open as she tried and failed to take in the seemingly endless expanse of crystal blue waters, or the gentle waves washing over the white sand beneath her feet. She had never seen any kind of natural vista so clean.

"That's...that's it, isn't it? The ocean. I'd heard the stories but...I've never seen anything like it in my life! It's beautiful..."

She blushed, faintly. "I probably sound pretty like some kinda backwater bumpkin right now, don't I? I guess I still am, in some ways."

-6-

The first encounter with the Avatar had gone poorly. There had been a land slide, a collapsing building, some explosions, and now everyone was separated. Lin hadn't seen anyone familiar in god knows how long, and she could feel her Mojo running out. It felt like a weird sort of coldness in her stomach. She'd started shouting out the names of the other hunters that had been with her with increasing panic while trying to find her way through the confusing city streets of this abandoned town, and then, when no one had responded, gotten really desperate.

Lin defined herself with willpower and optimism and curiosity, and the Gloom was taking all that away from her. She could FEEL it unmaking her, so she'd turned to a last ditch effort for generating just a tiny bit of Mojo.

And that is why you came across this rather awkward situation, having finally figured out where her shouts from earlier had been coming from. Bai Lin's face was vaguely puzzled, but mostly just blank. She was standing there, with her robes hanging open, her belt unbuckled, her fly unzipped, and her shorts partially pulled down. She had apparently been in the middle of getting undressed to start masturbating for the tiny trickle of Mojo that would have given her when the Gloom had gotten through her defenses and left her utterly unable to focus on anything beyond her own personal world of depression and misery.

She needed a jumpstart urgently. Now wasn't the time to be shy.

-8-

The warm climate of Firebrand had eventually convinced Lin to abandon her robes, so she now stood in the middle of one of the Order's gyms in shorts and a tank top. She was slowly going through various martial arts forms, with skill and grace. The motions made her almost seem weightless, while the punches and kicks struck with lightning quickness. She gave the impression of being very good, but it still probably came as something of a surprise when she ended the form with a standing ten foot vertical jump, before slowly fluttering to the ground like a feather on the wind.

When she landed, she took a deep breath and opened her eyes again and let out a deep breath. "I can still do it." she said to herself, quietly. "No matter how strange the world gets, I can still count on myself, at least."

-Or just make something up!-

[Bai Lin is a former ascetic monk turned wandering martial artist, doer of good deeds, and professional ray of sunshine. She hails from the post apocalyptic atomic wasteland of 22nd century China.]

1

[lackinginfaith]

[Caren has always seemed a little annoyed about this place, talking about how she has a country to run and it's gone without her long enough. Still, she laughs a little as she rises up out of the ocean. It's been better once she realized that she wasn't going to dissolve into foam if any humans saw her as she was.]

Oh, I wouldn't be too surprised. Anyone would be happy in a place like this.

[fistsofchange]

[Lin took a step back out of reflexive surprise. No one had ever mentioned to her that people lived IN the ocean. But she also didn't want to say that, in case it made her look even MORE uneducated. Maybe she could just roll with it. She slowly walked closer to the water to get a look at what kind of person lives down there.]

It's fancier and cleaner than anything I've ever seen before. And there's all kinds of fun stuff to try out.

[lackinginfaith]

[Well, the top half looks pretty normal, but Caren raises her tail up out of the water cautiously.]

Just don't throw anything in there. You don't know how many times I've found someone's swimsuit because they needed to strip in a hurry and didn't account for the tide.

[fistsofchange]

Her best friend was a dragon, but he still had kept to a human form the whole time she had known him. She wasn’t even sure he COULD transform back into a dragon. So despite all the strange things she had seen, she still did a double take at Caren’s fish tail. Good to know the world still had surprises for her, at least.

Then what Caren had said registered, and Lin giggled a bit. “Well it’s good that you did. Imagine if after they finished they realized they didn’t have any clothes anymore!”

[lackinginfaith]

Oh, they probably still did. I just throw them back on shore when I find them. Not like I spend all my time in here. Just enough. It's nostalgic, even if home was a lot colder.

[fistsofchange]

...So that means you also spend time on land?

[The obvious question was on the tip of her tongue: how?]

[lackinginfaith]

Something like that. I look a little different when I do.

[She's already dragging herself up onto the sand, which looks a little awkward.]

Some for practicality, some for looking like a different person. Slightly. Self-preservation tactic, apparently, even if that whole "if a human discovers you, your body dissolves into foam!" thing wasn't even true.

[fistsofchange]

[Monsters and spirits follow all kinds of weird rules. She just kind of accepted that if Caren said that a human seeing her true form would cause her to dissolve, then it must be true.

Or, not true as the case may be]

I'm about as human as they get, yeah.

[She watched with concern as Caren awkwardly flopped onto land, then offered a hand to help her up.]

You, uh, need some help there?

[lackinginfaith]

I've done worse. [She sighs and sits up, inland enough that the water won't just get her again.] It's hot out, anyway, it'll be fine. I'm Caren. What about you?

[fistsofchange]

[Lin sat down cross legged next to her to watch the ocean.]

Bai Lin. Ex monk. Nice to meet you.

[lackinginfaith]

Ex-monk, huh? I'm assuming not for a religion that would have a conniption at all the... this.

[fistsofchange]

Buddhist, I guess. We were always bigger on the marital arts than we were on the spirituality, to be honest.

Also my best friend is a dragon so, you're fine.

8

[windgod]

Well...that was new. Ippo had been in his own little section of the gym working with a speed bag when some new noise caught his attention. Normally he would have just taken a look to see who it was before going back to his business, but the sheer fluidity of this woman's motions made him stop and stare. Even more so when she did a literal standing teen foot jump up into the air and came back down to the ground like a snowflake on a gentle breeze. All he could do was...applaud, really.

"That was...amazing!"

He'd seen some amazing feats of athleticism in his life, but that just about took the cake!

[fistsofchange]

Lin ignored him for a moment to finish up the last bit of her form. Then she grinned suddenly, and her face almost seemed to glow. She was a person MADE for smiling. She spun around towards Ippo and gave a theatrical bow.

"Thank you, thank you! The light body technique is a tricky one if you don't practice it every day."

[windgod]

Oh boy, smiles, his one weakness! Ippo couldn't help but smile back in the face of such optimism and right now, combined with what he'd just seen? He felt like everything was really going to be okay.

"It definitely looks hard to do, but...how do you do it, exactly? Is it something anyone can learn to do?"

Maybe it had something to do with Mojo, but she seemed a little to practiced in its use for it to be a recent development. Then again, she could have been here for a really long time, so he was just guessing to the best of his abilities.

[fistsofchange]

“I guess? I don’t know if I could teach it very well though. It took me years to get the hang of it.”

Her face turned a little uncertain as she tried to figure out how to explain it. “It’s...got a lot to do with balance. You’re balancing on a tightrope, but instead of an actual rope you just have the CONCEPT of a rope.”

[windgod]

"Balance..."

The word struck a cord with Ippo. Balance was the core of boxing after all, without balance there was really nothing you could do after all.

"If you're willing to give it a shot, I'm willing to learn! I have to keep improving myself if I'm going to keep up with everyone!"

The last thing he wanted was to be dead weight while everyone else was doing their best...he couldn't stand that thought.

[fistsofchange]

“The Soaring Fist style takes a lot of training before you can get to the actual soaring bits.” She’d try teaching him, but she wanted to make it clear that he shouldn’t expect dramatic results overnight. “You look like you’re already a fighter, at least.”

[windgod]

"I can do that! I know boxing, but I'm not sure how far I can get only knowing one thing. I feel like my best chance at helping everyone is to expand my horizons."

If there was one thing that Ippo was willing to do, it was to commit himself to learning. It was how he'd managed to get into boxing in the first place and it was what had propelled him through all of his fights until now. In this moment of determination, there was a bright fire in his eyes that made them seem almost like they were glowing before he fell into a deep, respectful bow.

"Whatever you can teach me, I'll give my all in learning, no matter how long it takes or how hard it gets, Sensei!"

[fistsofchange]

"Man, after I got kicked out, I didn't think I'd ever be in a position to be a teacher again."

She rubbed the back of her head, slightly nervously. She'd never had a student before. She was almost positive she was going to fuck this up somehow. "Alright, I guess I'll do my best!"

[windgod]

"So...where do we start? Exercise? Sparring?"

It was here that his limited views were becoming more apparent, his brief look into the world of martial arts had only given him a base idea of what it was like to practice them and boxing, for all its subtleties, was still fairly straightforward. This was likely going to be a lot more intensive than anything he'd ever done before...but it was a challenge he was dead set on rising to meet. If his new sensei was going to do her best, then he had to do double his best!

[fistsofchange]

"Breathing."

She was going to start with the VERY basics. Call it a hunch, but Lin kind of felt like Ippo wasn't the type of guy who had a lot of patience. The cool stuff required a strong foundation of meditation and calm.

[windgod]

"Breathing?"

The basics were a very good place to start and as a person who had won fights blind because they had a solid foundation of the basics to stand on, he could appreciate that. He was excitable and eager to learn, but this was a clear enough message that this was a good time to set his understanding meter back to zero.

"Alright, show me how to breath!"

A sentence that...he never thought he'd say in his life and one that sounded...way weirder once he'd actually said it. This was going to be a long, strange road.

[fistsofchange]

And so began Ippo's adventures in learning to meditate. I won't write out all the details, but suffice to say if he hadn't ever done anything like it before, it was probably Very Boring.