Underground Cryptids Community ✨Reboot✨ |{CLOSED}|

Sometime last year, I did a bad job starting a RP based around the Cryptids, the humanoid creatures who are definitely not human; my character is a boy with the wings of a Mourning Dove named Einar _{(Ay-nar – according to The Pinterest, it's norse for 'one who walks alone')}. I'll put up his character sheet, and a template for others.

Id like experienced RPers only, with good grammar n all that, long responses.
I'll get a lil intro up soon, laying the foundation for the story I hope to write with whoever is interested!

Einar Luctum-Columbae

• Physical appearance

-age: 17-18

-eyes: bright blue, unusually opaque as human eyes go. pretty normal for his kind. can be hard to tell though, because he's not really one for eye contact most of the time.

-hair: darkest brown, lightly wavy. a lot like Sam Winchester in season 1 _{(pls google hes cute)}

-body: 5'6", not particularly muscled. small shoulders. He hunches his shoulders a lot, too. pale skin, as he doesn't go outside much. Light, faint freckles all over, more opaque/bold freckles on his neck. birthmarks that look like large blots of ink or huge misshapen freckles.

-Gender & Pronouns & Sexuality: male, He/Him. if you're being sarcastic / joking around, he doesnt really care if he gets called 'giiiiirl' or things like that. Bisexual, but more inclined toward girls than guys.

• Inhuman features

His wings are supposed to be that of a Mourning Dove, but they are are defective; instead of being light gray, white and cream they're gray with off-white and charcoal feather-tips. The wings are way oversized too, and clumsy, especially in small spaces. They're so large coordination is difficult. He can disguise them in a very unusual way, willing them into a sort of invisibility. Not only are they invisible, but they can't be touched or felt while hidden. Einar is fairly certain it's a slightly different plane of reality, or a serious magical glamour, but his family never explained it to him. The only clue to the wings' presence when cloaked is that the air might seem warmer or a breeze might be felt when he moves his wings while hidden. Some individuals with the Sight or similar extra senses can see a shimmer or the ghostly outline of his wings when hidden. He's very self-conscious about his wings, because of their defect in size and color.

• Backstory

Einar's family, the Luctum-Columbaes, are very prestigious in the Winged Society. Among the Winged People, the Winged Society is basically just the aristocrats with well-known names and fancy houses and politics up their asses. The Luctum-Columbaes (the latin name for Mourning Doves), have very high standards. Einar's two older siblings are both prodigies in their fields. He's grown up knowing that he most likely wont amount to anything, only being memorable or standing out in history as the Mourning Dove with defective wings. He attends a nice (expensive) school, and only has a few friends. He isnt allowed to tell anyone about him being Winged Folk, because his parents always say that the humans will hunt them, or study them, as a species. The secret weighs on him constantly, but he still fears to tell even his closest friends.

• Personality

He is in between extrovert/introvert, in that he likes interacting with others because its refreshing for him to interact with ppl who aren't his sucky parents or siblings, but he feels estranged from normal people so he has a hard time striking up conversation without it just turning into small talk that doesnt go anywhere.

he likes to have little talks, the kind that reveal little pieces of your soul. he is a gentle soul, a very stargazing, listen to gentle music to fall asleep, talk in soft voices until drifting off, evening with the stars coming out early type of guy.

he freaking LOVES hugs and cuddles, but he doesnt know that because he never has an opportunity to enjoy those those things. thus, he is a lil touch-starved boi who just needs to be platonically crushed in a hug.

• is he ok with being shipped with someone in this RP?

yes, hes fine with that 😁

feel free to use this as a template for your own characters

In a forest, far from the humans and their destructive nature, there is a hole. In the middle of a forgotten wood, amongst the ancient tress who protect their cryptic friends, there is a hill with a round, mossy door with no handle. There is a manhole cover in a suburban neighborhood. In a rural park near a playground, there is an upright ring of naturally bending branches, the air shimmering inside with blurry lights. There is a waterfall, cascading down a small precipice, that no human has ever seen the backside of.

These, my fellow inhuman humanoids, are the secret entrances to a special place, untouched by mankind.

If one of us were to take up the journey, to travel to the undiscovered wood, they could be free of the humans and free to live as their ancestors did; as cryptids should.

So raise your wings, flex your digging talons, prepare your multi-dimensional travel. Think of the sun, unobscured by pollution; think of dirt without chemicals. Think of the Cryptic Forest, and come home.

Hive buzzed in circles in their chamber.

If they had been a single being, it would have been considered pacing, but that wasn't quite the right word for them. Pacing would be taking paces, and that would require legs. Not that Hive had any shortage of legs; being a cloud of bumblebee-like insects, they had an infinite amount of legs. And yet, they paced in an anxious swirl, round and round in their underground room. The sound of the hundreds of thousands of tiny wings, whirring and buzzing and humming, would have deafened a person. But they were alone. So very alone.

Once, there had been a thriving community of other creatures in those underground passages. Dozens, hundreds even, living out their fantastic lives in the forest above, and the open sky above that, and the root systems far below. But now…

Now it was only Hive. Just Hive, buzzing around the small cave that had once been their safe haven from all the clamor of the others. Now they missed the noise, hustle and bustle of fellow cryptids.

We need to bring them home … But how can we? We are only ever us and we cannot masquerade in the world of mankind as anything other than us … Can we contact them from here? … We have the human computer … It may be too old to communicate effectively with the humans' new devices …

Hive whispered among themselves, trying to find a solution. It wasn't just that they were lonely, but the forest needed more cryptids to survive. As a hive mind of insects, Hive had a certain…connection to the forest. The relationship between the trees, the air, the magic lifeblood of the forest was symbiotic with the creatures it sustained and protected. With only Hive and maybe, just maybe one or two others scattered in the forest, it was slowly fading. Dying. The air felt thin. The water, less alive. The outside edge, an impenetrable wall of thorns that would only part for the inhuman, was shrinking inward, and in some places it was even withering away, leaving gaping wounds where human bacteria could find purchase.

We can't let that happen … There must be a way … If there are others still here … We must search for any who remain … The forest is still huge, even if it is curling in on itself. How can we search the whole space when we are so few? …

The cloud of humming insects slowed in their pacing. They had lost several minds over the years, their numbers diminishing slowly. They had once been much mightier, many more minds and many more wings.

Are the dragons still here? … They left for adventure many years ago … How do we bring them back?

Hive knew they were thinking in circles, even as they flew in circles. They had thought all of these thoughts before. But maybe…

It is time for action … Thinking will not cause them to return home … We will try the human device …

So they whirled out the doorway, the curtain that had once covered it now a shredded heap on the floor. Down the passage, into another room, out the foxhole and into the open air aboveground. Hive realized that it had been a very, very long time since they had been up there.

They flew through the trees at breakneck pace, to a little building that had been constructed long ago. The door was shut tight, but a windowpane had a chip in it. The gap was only a couple inches. They flooded the one room, coalescing at the desk that wobbled precariously as Hive surrounded it and the old computer monitor.

They hesitated. How exactly was it that they planned to contact other cryptids? There were so many of them out in the human world, lost, afraid. Perhaps unaware that they didn't belong with mankind. And Hive didn't know any of them, or where to find them.

Then they remembered that several tens of years ago, some of them who were more passably human had set up a secret network for cryptids to communicate. Hive awkwardly maneuvered the mouse to click on the email. There it was – the email address that the cryptids who ventured outside the forest used to use to communicate.

After a moment's thought, debating among themselves, Hive typed a simple message into the email with multiple other people – they used to call it the group chat.

come home. the cryptic wood needs the rest of us

They knew that it could have been typed wrong – they'd always had a rudimentary grasp of the written word and how to phrase full sentences to others – but they could only hope it was understandable, and that the message got out.

Now, all that was left to do was wait for a response, and plan for the possibility of no response. Hive felt lighter now that they had taken some action, but also more anxious now that there were continuities to plan for. But they had been good at continuity once.

They buzzed in circles again, pacing… but now they were planning.

dinggg…

dinggg…

Einar groaned softly, the unfamiliar sound waking him slowly. It took a great effort to peel his eyes open. He scrubbed at them, trying to rub away the crust of sleep. Rolling over, he saw his phone was lit up with a new message.

Well that doesn't make sense… Einar always turned all notifications off before bed.

dinggg…

He swatted at the phone, grabbing it clumsily. The ringtone wasn't familiar, but it was definitely getting annoying as it kept going. When he turned the phone to his face, the screen blinded him, the brightness seeming to be all the way up. But when he tried to turn it down, he found it was already as dim as it could get. So he held it as far from his face as his arm would allow. Einar squinted hard through the glare, trying to read the text in the banner on the lock screen. It looked to be an email, but he only ever got emails from the school. Who would have his email address? The sender was… he tried in vain to focus his eyes. Finally he made out the words on the banner:

'Underground Cryptids Community'

(this message has reached you through a magic email system meant to contact any cryptids with a cell phone or personal computer in a time of emergency. If you believe this message has reached you by mistake, please do not respond. block this address.)

message: come home. the cryptic wood needs the rest of us

Einar re-read the message several times, making sure he had read it right. After several seconds, he mumbled aloud to himself, "What in the feather-burning hell…?"

He sat up in his round bed and clicked on the banner, opening it. There was a link or something attached at the bottom. In the Mail app on his phone, he clicked the link. It took him to a site that looked outdated, with simple colors and no ads or 'accept the cookies' banners. It took a long time to load the image in the middle of the single webpage. When it finally stopped showing a five spinning dots, a map appeared, but not of any geography he recognized. It wouldn't stop shifting and twitching either, changing shape slightly every few seconds.

Einar watched this for almost a minute. Just as he was about to close the page and go back to sleep – it was four in the morning on a Saturday and he was not planning on having an early morning – when the map stopped adjusting and showed him an image he recognized: a satellite view of the large aerial island that his family mansion was a built on, complete with a large gray and brown blot that was the house.

He stared, curious and a little scared. Was it a virus of some kind, finding his location through his phone? Was it some messed-up threat?

The map was slowly zooming out now. A small blue dot pulsed over the house, right where Einar's bedroom was. He shuffled his wings nervously. The map was now zoomed out far enough that the blue dot had covered the entirety of the mansion. Another dot, this one a bold green, was moving around the map, sometimes slowly meandering, sometimes disappearing and reappearing on the other side of the map, occasionally splitting into two. All the while, the map kept expanding. Einar kept watching in growing fascination.

Finally, after several minutes had crept by, the map stopped. The blue dot marking Einar's place had swallowed almost all of the island, leaving only a thin, uneven rim of green and gray. The green dot seemed to have settled on a location as well. It was at the edge of the map, clinging to the border. But something else had changed; it was blinking now, whereas before it had only pulsed whenever it had paused in it's search for… wherever it was that it was searching for.

The map had stopped, but it wasn't giving him anymore information. Einar gave the blue dot an experimental tap. Nothing. He tapped the middle of the map, and in random spots around the area. Still nothing. But when his finger brushed the blinking purple dot, a square text bubble appeared.

slight universe irregularity. inter-realm travel required to access nearest portal

That was six hours ago. Now, Einar found himself at a soft spot in his realm, ready to leave his old life behind. A small voice in his head whispered that this is a bad idea and you can't leave everything you've ever known, you're just a kid. But a stronger, more insistent pull in his gut and in his flight feathers told him to go for the adventure. It was probably a dead end anyway.

What was the worst that could happen?

the bones of the plot to start with is that our characters get this email, and, intrigued, they follow the map to a 'portal' or somewhere that could lead to the Cryptic Wood. as mentioned in the intro, it could be almost anywhere. get creative with it! cryptids are naturally drawn to these places anyway, subconsciously so they don't even realize that they may be gravitating to their ancestral home.
Now, I dont know how each of your characters might get the email. its got a spell or some special magic woven into the coding, so that in times of emergency a message like what Hive sent will reach any Cryptids with a device. It's terribly unspecific though, as old magic can be sometimes.
when they get to the forest, they slowly find each other and make their way to Hive, though they dont know of him. They all arrive at different places in the forest.
Please DM me with plot questions or suggestions, both are very welcome!

Einar's wings had been refusing to stay veiled for the past half hour, and it was starting to bother him. Usually, it was barely a thought and they would be firmly hidden, taking no further effort to keep them there. Lately though, if he let his mind wander, the dark gray feathers would appear and resist going back into invisibility. His wings felt…sticky, almost, as if they wanted to be out in the air, something that had never happened. Einar had at first thought it was just the extra flying he'd done that day, but now he was reconsidering that theory. Now, he chalked it up to his surroundings.

Following the map had led him over a vast expanse of water, a small ocean even. His oversized wings had sped him over the bright reflective waves without a problem. When at last he'd landed on a tiny spit of beach, his wing shafts had quivered as if magnetized, pulling to the center of the stretch of golden sand. There had been a wooden circle about as wide as his armspan, like a horizontal slice out of a tree; but when Einar looked closer, he saw that instead of concentric rings, it was one tight spiral, like a record.

The wooden disk was thick but surprisingly light when he pushed it aside, revealing a tunnel. It reached down and down, until even the bright sunlight from directly overhead couldn't penetrate the inky shadows. The sides of the hole were paved with large flat stones, like cobbles, lightly shaded in pale green moss.

It certainly looked dangerous if one were to climb down in it, but that's exactly what Einar did.

He dropped soundlessly, only hearing the soft whistle of air against his ears and his stubbornly present wings. It felt like hours that he fell. When he exited the tunnel, gravity seemed to spin rapidly, disorientingly. He lurched out of the darkness…but now he was going up. Einar landed on his hands and knees in the thickest moss he'd ever seen. the shapes of it matched the moss on the paving stones in the hole, but it was vibrant and four inches deep in some places. He stayed on all fours for a moment, trying to regain his balance. When his vision stopped spinning and his stomach stopped churning, he took a grounding breath. Einar looked up, and suppressed a gasp.

He was surrounded by the tallest trees he'd ever seen, the canopy high enough that he could have done big aerial backflips without touching the lowest branches. Sunlight filtered down from between the evergreen needles. The moss that Einar was crouched in carpeted the entire forest floor as far as he could see. Tiny blue birds flitted through the wide lichen-tapestried trunks. A soft breeze ruffled the down on top of his wings, smelling of living things. Behind him, a ring of round gray stones, the largest no bigger than his palm, clustered in a circle.

Einar stood. The circle of rocks bordered a shimmering pool of perfectly clean water, not a single leaf or fleck of dirt dirtying its clarity. And down, down, down into the depths of it, for it really seemed to go down for miles, he thought he could make out a glimmering yellow sun above a beach. But the angle gave him a headache to think about – it was as if he was looking horizontally at the scene, but he was gazing down at the pool. Einar shuffled his wings and turned away.

"Well," He said to the air. "What now?"

Since his wings kept reappearing without meaning to, he took off. The moss rippled like a slow ocean in the downdraft. Einar winged off in a random direction, enjoying the feel of limitless space for his malformed wings.

"Maybe there's other Winged Folk here," He said to himself. The place, wherever it was, was perfect for creatures who flew instead of walked. Eventually he would have to come across other people; this forest couldn't be empty…right?

Einar winged a couple big laps around and through the huge trees, relishing the open space. It wasn't that the air was limited at his house. It was on an aerial island, floating in place above a continent, so the sky was his backyard. But there was always judgement whenever he stretched out his wings, the disapproving glances of his parents and constant teasing from his siblings. The looks that said, 'you are defective', 'you are weak', 'how can you be successful if you're deformed like that?'.

But not here. Here, in this strange forest he had to world-hop and fall down a well in the middle of an ocean to get to, her felt free. The air felt like it was caressing him, and the trees were laughing at him, but with joy at his arrival. The little birds darted up to him as if to say hello, chirruping mirthfully. Einar thought he might never go back to his old life.

He did one more loop-the-loop and whipped around a tree trunk as tight as he could before shooting away in a random direction. He poured on the speed, the wind surely making a horrible mess of his untrimmed hair.

He didn't notice the other figures, so far below, appearing mere moments after he had taken off. He missed the stare from another winged person, who didn't know his oversized wings were a fault. He flew into the distance thinking he was alone.

Hive stirred in their rest. They never truly 'slept', but they could slip into a sort of dreamlike resting state, their bodies alighting on the ground or tree branches like a quietly humming carpet. They were woken by a whispering in the air.

The forest was murmuring, as it had not for many lifespans. The air, the other life forms, they were all whispering the same thing to Hive, a message that could barely be fit to words. Whispering that others are here and alone-ness is ending and get up, you must go to them

Hive whirled up, spinning in a cloud, buzzing excitedly. Others? Already? It had only been a few days since the message had been sent out. They zipped away, following the forest's urging to find the newcomers. They had to split a little to fit through a mess of briars and vines and thin saplings. Then they had to take a detour to avoid flying over the dying marsh that oozed toxic fumes like an infected wound. It was more of a swamp now, but Hive could remember when it was soft and green, growing and full of little animals, the air bright and sweet.

Maybe with new cryptids here, the forest could start to recover. It depended on intelligent non-humans to thrive, and the native animals, while more intelligent than the ones found in the humans' territories, were simply not cryptids.

Hive mulled over all the outcomes of meeting the newcomers. How would they communicate when Hive could not form real words? They would find a way, they reassured themselves. They still had almost two days of space to traverse before they would encounter any of the new cryptids. Maybe only one day. It was hard to tell, with the forest's strange speech so muffled under decades of rot and decay. But no less than a day, that was certain. Hive had a long way to go.

Einar wasn't sure how long he'd been flying, but he was sure he was hopelessly lost. After winging out of the glade where he had first entered this forest, the impossibly tall evergreens had slowly fallen away, opening up to a picturesque meadow, complete with wildflowers of pastel colors dotting the softly rolling carpet of fine, bright grass. Short, stocky trees with round canopies scattered across the landscape. Einar reveled in the openness, the clarity of the air, how peaceful the view felt. Back home there wasn't anything like this.

He banked hard, feeling the pull in his flight muscles as he controlled the turn, tight, tight, tight, before diving steeply toward a little creek. He skimmed over the crystal water, awarding his reflection with a rare grin. He reached out to brush his fingertips across the icy creek. His face dissolved behind a tail of mist, his fingers sweeping over the tiny bumps in the water created by rocks with breathtaking speed.

He pulled up to land on the bank. Well, he tried to land, but his legs stumbled when he alit on the bright grass. He barely caught himself before he tripped into the shallow creek. "Oof," he mumbled to himself. His legs had gotten used to flying, apparently; he had never stayed airborne for so long before. His wings, too, were feeling the effects of his journey: his shoulders felt mushy and limp, and his flight muscles fared no better. When he tried to lift and fold his wings, they barely moved. The longest feathers dragged on the ground. "I guess I should rest."

He had started talking to himself a few hours ago, commenting on the scenery and his flying, and generally thinking out loud. At first he'd been somewhat embarrassed at this, as if someone were there to hear him and judge, but eventually the embarrassment passed. Now he murmured every other thought aloud, for all the forest to hear.

Einar stretched his arms above his head, smiling slightly in the gentle sunlight and soft breeze. It was nice here, but he couldn't banish the thought that he had followed the map on his phone for nothing. But what had he been hoping to find, anyway? A secret clan of other Winged Folk who weren't part of the Winged Society, who wouldn't think of him as a curse on his bloodline? A magical cure for his disfigurement? "Yeah, right." But why had that message found him?

He pulled his phone from his pocket. No Service, proclaimed a banner over the top of the screen, right under a warning that he only had 18% battery left. He let the phone go into low power mode. "I don't need service to check old messages." He clicked over to his emails, sitting down on a thick patch of grass. Since he hadn't gotten any new mail since that morning, the one with the map should be at the top. But the emails at the top were old spam and junk, a few from school. His mouth pinched slightly. "Should be right here…" He swiped down, going back through the last few days, his mouth tightening more and more. Emails didn't just disappear without being deleted! Why couldn't he find it? He wanted to write a reply, try to get an explanation from the sender. Then he remembered that there was no service out here…wherever he was.

Einar thought about where he could possibly be, until he realized that going through that portal in the ocean rendered all of his geographical knowledge useless. He could be in a different world, one with no people like him, or even no humans. He might not even be in a parallel universe, but a world far from his, with no similarities at all. "I have to get back." He would rest here for a while, maybe take a nap, and head back the way he came. Try to find that portal in the mossy forest, and then maybe he'd have one or two bars of service and he could find his way back home.

Einar sighed. He should have stayed in bed that day. A distant mutter caught his attention — on the western edge of the sky, dark towers of clouds were rumbling as they approached. Now Einar groaned. The rain and wind would make flying difficult normally, but with his wings as sore as they were it would be nearly impossible. He needed to find shelter of some kind to wait it out, and to keep the worst of the rain off his wings.

He stood. The open landscape seemed slightly less inviting now — more open in an exposed way. The little clumps of short trees wouldn't provide any cover from a storm of this size; up in the clouds as his house was, he had seen his fair share of thunderheads and hurricanes, and this one would be a monsoon by the time it arrived, complimented by lightning and roaring thunder. He would need something better than little trees to cover him.

With his wing muscles protesting, he took off again. Maybe he could spot something from above, before the winds picked up. The air was already fighting him. Up and up he spiraled, nothing sturdier than a particularly large tree anywhere in sight. Up and up he continued, still finding nothing better than the bigger tree. The storm wasn't waiting for him to hide, rolling toward him as fast as it could.

Einar dove, folding his wings as tight as they could go to his back while still giving some measure of control over the descent. The air stung his cheeks and eyes, and tore through his hair as he plummeted. The winds from the storm were catching up with him now. It grabbed for his feathers, his clothes, anything to tear him off course and send him crashing to the ground. The sun was completely blocked out now by the massive tower of dark clouds, leaving the meadow in shadow. Tears streamed from between his squinted eyelids as the big tree loomed closer. Now Einar could see that this particular tree was much bigger than the other trees dotted across the landscape, three or four times bigger with a wide canopy. The roots arched partway out of the dirt, or maybe the dirt had eroded back from covering them.

Leaves and branches and the ground were suddenly too close, too fast. Einar tried to pull up too late. The ends of the branches were sharp, catching on his shirt and slashing at his skin, not slowing his fall at all. He burst through the layer of leaves, empty space surprising him as he went from crashing sideways through leaves and small branches to free falling. The ground rushed up with blinding speed. Dull, numbing pain and the beautiful view from underneath the tree's canopy were Einar's last recollections before it all went dark.

Hive was delayed by a storm, and it irritated them to no end. They didn't have very sophisticated emotions, but agitation was one of their few feelings that could be felt clearly, and frequently. They flickered back and forth, their wings itching to keep moving. But they couldn't fly in the rain, so they stayed tucked irritably away in a dead, hollow tree. It had once been an amazing sight, tall and majestic. The trunk had been nearly the width of a tall human's height; Hive thought it might have been 'six and a half feet', but the terms made little sense to them. Human feet weren't that long, and many other people had feet much shorter, or longer! Or too many to count. People weren't just humans, of course. Any sentient being with a personality was considered a person in the many, many eyes of Hive.

Thunder rolled, then cracked like a celestial whip. Several bodies fell from Hive, momentarily stunned from the concussive impact of the sound. They swirled in tighter, condensing on a limb that had somehow fallen inside the hollowed tree trunk. This storm was going the same direction was Hive. They could only hope it would dissipate before it reached the new cryptids, but the chance was slim. They were only a few hours away from the high evergreen clearing, Hive's best guess at where the newcomers could have arrived. The storm was very determined. It would most likely reach the new cryptids before Hive. They buzzed, aggravation growing. They would be grounded by the rain for several hours, if the aggression of this storm was anything to judge its size by. The front would reach the clearing and Hive would still be hiding from the tail end of the rain. Hive just hoped they would stay, despite the stormy welcome.