logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: BURY A FRIEND

EVENT LOG: BURY A FRIEND

characters: everyone.
location: around town.
date/time: october 9-17.
content: the hallucinations begin...
warnings: psychological horror. please cw tags appropriately.

it's probably something that shouldn't be said out loud

October 9 feels like a normal day at first, save for the red lighthouse beam cutting through the darkness overhead. You know by now—or you've heard—that the lighthouse is only active during ferry arrivals and events... And there's definitely no ferry docked at the, er. Beach. The town is quiet, the forest spirits behave business-as-usual, Rastus doesn't know what's up. Whatever's going on, you'll have to figure it out for yourself.

And you will, though the hallucinations are subtle at first: objects moving when they shouldn't, people's proportions looking just a bit off, voices in an empty room, and so on. Is it just your mind playing tricks in the darkness? Might be! Will did warn you all about the effects of living without a sun and a proper day/night cycle.

As the days go on, the hallucinations are harder to ignore, no matter how much you may wish to wave them off as flukes. What's wrong with everyone's faces? When did all the howling start? Who do you hold onto when the world drops out from under you? And those hands...

While you might know it can't be real, it certainly feels real. But at least it can't last forever!

...Right?

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Kuai has been trying the same strategy: if he stays in his room can he pretend none of this is happening? As it turns out, he can't. He can hear people long since dead speaking from beyond the walls, he keeps catching glimpses of those he lost out of the corner of his eye. But the final breaking point is closing his eyes to steady himself and when opening them he was briefly back in his room in Arctika.

He darted out of the building after that, staring pointedly at the ground and clenching his fists as he goes... Anywhere really. It doesn't help as he can see the hands reaching out of the ground, some of them look shadowy like his brother's clone had multiplied and was trying to physically drag him down to the Netherrealm.

He's so distracted by that he doesn't notice Rosinante until he nearly walks face first into a gun. He can fight his way out of a lot of situations, but being shot in the head from two feet away isn't one of them.

Reacting immediately he dodges to the side, shooting a barrage of icicles at Rosinante's chest, expecting the trigger to be pulled any moment.

"Rosinante?"

His eyes widen. Maybe this isn't Rosinante. Maybe its whatever he fished up on the beach and it's finally reformed and gotten the ability to walk. And it's going on a killing rampage? That sounds plausible.

Edited 2019-10-10 19:50 (UTC)

He hesitates. He had last time; he does so now as well. Points the gun at Doflamingo, puts his finger to the trigger, and can't bring himself to pull it. His hesitation is met with ice, and he's knocked backward to the ground by the impact of the fragments. Too familiar, but in this case the blow is not lethal even if it hurts like hell, and he stares wide-eyed up at the monster which rearranges itself before his eyes into Kuai.

A string clone? Kuai himself? He can't be sure, and he re-trains the weapon on the other man's face as he scoots backward to place his back to the building. The clones can't throw ice, surely, and neither could his brother.

"Kuai. What the hell is going on?" he growls, wincing at the scratch of the shards through his shirt before they begin to melt.

"I would ask you the same." He's crouched in a defensive position, ready to go on the attack should this prove to be some sort of clone.

But how would he know? Is the only differentiation the fact that the foam creature wasn't wearing shoes? Something that went through the trouble to replicate a person would not leave out such an important detail a second time. The hands behind Rosinante reach out to grab him, to drag him into the wall where there'll be a shadow portal to his death and Kuai actually jerks forward instinctively to try and pull Rosinante back before he realizes that the other man isn't reacting to them.

The hands are clawing at him, but they don't seem to be doing anything. They're not real. Just like all the other things he's seen.

"I think.. I think I am still hallucinating from the forest. Or it has come back." He suddenly looks very unsure, unable to trust his own senses.

Kuai's sudden movement is met with the twitch of his own pistol, keeping it trained right on Kuai's nose in case he judged the situation wrong. But there's just enough doubt to keep him from firing. Kuai's movement isn't voluntary, he sees - he must have missed it before but he too has one of those parasite strings arcing up into the sky, controlling his movements. From somewhere above, a pink feather drifts down, and yet he doesn't dare look up to seek out the distraction. People being puppeted are still as deadly as they would be otherwise. To look away might mean being speared right through the eye with one of those icicles. And wouldn't that be just the sort of irony Doflamingo would enjoy? An eye for an eye, in some sort of literal sense, as if any of this had ever been his fault just because he was the one who ran.

No, Kuai is talking and he needs to concentrate on reality even with his mind trying to sprint several extra miles at once.

"I have been all week. So have others. I can't tell what's real half the time and what isn't." He was afraid to admit it earlier but by now it's gotten hard to care. His ability to think straight is compromised and he knows it, and if this is really Kuai, he deserves the warning.

He looks away from Rosinante just briefly, because the longer he looks at him the more he morphs into someone else. Or pieces of someone else anyway. An arm of one person, the face of another, as if his mind can't decide which hallucination it wants to settle on and instead tries to make some amalgam of all of them.

"Were we drugged?" If this is effecting everyone then there must be some cause to it. He'd remember if one of those Jellyfish had whacked him with a tentacle again, unless they floated into his room while he was asleep. And somehow did the same to everyone else?

Very slowly he backs away, putting more distance between the two of them, because this is Rosinante, and not someone he needs to attack. And even if this is some sort of clone, it could have killed him several times already.

"What are you seeing? Everything..." He trails off, head snapping to the side as he hears a recognizable voice asking where he is. But no.. it's not real. It can't be. "Everything is almost melting, like my memories of back home are merging with this place."

He's not going to mention all the hands.

Drugged? Who knows. Robin had called it an "event" when he asked her, but nothing she says is fully trustworthy. So this is beyond her control? He doubts it. She's very good at playing innocent.

Truthfully he doesn't know the answer, though, so he just shrugs, drawing the feathers of his coat higher toward his ears. The distance is a relief, as it grows, and though he keeps the gun pointed at Kuai, he lets his arm lower to the ground. It's there as a warning, not to him but whoever is controlling everyone. The thought occurs to him that if Doflamingo and Robin somehow were to work together, they could probably butcher the whole town spectacularly. She's certainly the type he likes to collect and wield.

"You're a puppet," he replies. "I thought you were my brother, or one of his clones made of string. But you're really Kuai Liang, aren't you? Under his control."

A whole host of expressions pass across Kuai's face. Having been someone's puppet before the first reaction is to snarl and insist he's not, but considering what's going on he's suddenly unsure. When he'd been cyberized he hadn't really been conscious at first so he'd had no idea what was going on, and as a Revenant he'd been fully aware that he was being controlled, mentally screaming and trying to regain control of his body. This didn't feel like either of those things.

Eventually he settles on straightening up in defiance, clenching his fists at his side, "I am no mans puppet."

But what Rosinante is saying seems to fit with what he's seeing: Clones, puppets made of string. What if he's right?

"I am fully myself." He's sure of that anyway. "Is your brother here?"

Great, do they both have atrocious brothers who are now here to join forces in some horrible quest to make their lives miserable?

"I ..."

He hesitates. He keeps being so sure that these strings are real, that everyone is being controlled. There are moments when the people around him seem to dissolve into strands of silk, and in the last day there have been multiple times where he's had to question who was really even there and who wasn't.

Robin had said all of this was the work of the spirits and he truly wants to believe that, because the alternative is far worse.

But in a moment of clarity, he remembers there's a way to check. Reluctantly, he hooks his pistol back into the concealed holster inside his coat, and withdraws his tablet, while trying desperately to ignore the myriad hands that reach in with him and lift the tablet out seemingly for him, placing it in his lap.

"He's not in the directory," he says, as his eyes flick back up to Kuai, watching him from under his unruly bangs. "And I want to believe you."

"It's good that he's not here, but it puts us no closer to figuring out what is happening," he frowns, because actually it puts them even further away. Rosinante seems to have seen such things before - almost identical to whats happening. But Kuai is certain he's not being controlled, just hallucinating. Could they all be seeing something from Rosinante's memories?

"I've found the directory to be accurate, those who have died permanently are removed, and when the ferry docks many more are added. There may be some way to suppress your own entry, but that seems like something Will would have to assist with."

And with what he knows of Will that doesn't seem like a thing he'd want to do.

"What do the hands look like to you? For me they're shadowy, a sort of purple glow falling off of them."

"I know what's happening," he sighs. "It just... it gets in deep and it gets harder and harder to realize each time that it's happening again."

Not that he has a full and complete understanding, of course. But he did ask Robin on the first day of all of this what the meaning was, and she offered suggestions that do make some sense, when taken with the grain of salt that every word she types has to be taken with.

"We're hallucinating because of something the spirits have done. Something Robin says usually is temporary. All of this will stop," he says, mostly to remind and reassure himself. It's become something of a mantra he has to repeat regularly as he finds himself more frequently losing his grip on reality.

"The bodies, the shouting, the hands - to me, they're different. Smudged in dirt and holding weapons and tools. Or long, contorted, with puppet strings."

"Why would the spirits do this? It serves no point other than making us on edge." But that's discounting that maybe they think it's fun. Maybe they want to watch them all run around seeing things that aren't there, laughing to themselves.

"I thought Robin had some way to control them, why can't she simply make them stop it now?" Granted he's never directly spoken to her, but she caused the attack at the party, she claimed to try and get them to stop the attack against Winters. She must have some way of communicating with them beyond the musical instruments that people have been using since.

"We're each seeing something different then. Something directly relevant to us." There's a hesitation before he continues. "Have you met my brother? The shadow clone that follows him.. that's what I'm seeing. But dozens of them everywhere."

All he can do is guess, and he's not in a state for doing much deep thinking right now. Kuai is right to wonder what the point is and why the spirits would do this to them, he doesn't see the reason either, but there must be one, right? Otherwise Robin would probably try to call them off. Unless she can't, because her ability to speak with them does not mean they have to obey her. Or perhaps she doesn't want to, because their suffering brings her entertainment in her otherwise long and tedious months and years.

Too many possibilities and it's just too much to fathom on top of everything else right now. He focuses on Kuai instead, trying to make sure he doesn't suddenly shift back into the monster in pink feathers. "I have," he says with a frown. "And if he's what's haunting you right now, then it's even more troubling that he's here, if he's anything like mine."

"He hasn't killed anyone yet. But it's only a matter of time." He doesn't have a high opinion of Noob Saibot's ability to keep peace when murder is the easy way out. His brother wasn't the easiest to get along with even when he was human.

"Is it something we've seen before, only amplified?" He's seen him split into multiple clones before, but never so many. It doesn't seem like it's something specifically to make him afraid, as he's not scared of Bi-Han, but it's definitely putting him on edge.

"Though if he wanted to start killing, now would be a prime opportunity when we're all hallucinating already."

Dammit Bi-Han. He frowns wondering if he should go look for him.

If nothing else, it's good to know his concern about Kuai's brother was warranted. He'd come off as a threatening asshole, but not all threatening assholes are actually dangerous. Yet somehow it's also reassuring that this Noob is not typically a murderer. Hopefully he'll opt not to stoop so far.

"We'll have to keep an eye on him. Possibly others, too. If this was caused by the spirits, they could easily use this as an opportunity to attack again. They haven't yet, but who knows how long it will last. This is exactly the sort of situation where we should have been encouraging people to get to shelter, and keeping track of who is where." But disappointingly, he didn't realize the full extent of the danger until just recently, and he's not in much of a state to protect people. This encounter has proven that handily, and again he's thankful that Kuai is fast, accurate, and yet also merciful.

He touches a hand to his chest again and comes away with fresh blood on his fingers, but it's light. Not much cause for concern. Still, it's a good excuse for getting out of the way for a few minutes so he can try to clear his head. "I'm going to head back to my room and get this taken care of. I feel funny thanking someone for attacking me, but... thanks."

He hides a smirk as he nods in response, "Anytime."

Glancing off towards the forest once more and those constantly writhing shadows he's actually a little reassured that this encounter happened, "At least we know we're not alone in what we're seeing."

They may all be seeing something different, but the root cause is the same. Whatever that may be. He gives Rosinante a parting salute before leaving, training his eyes on the ground so he's not distracted by things he knows aren't real, yet his mind keeps insisting are truth.

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EVENT LOG: BURY A FRIEND

4. Time to bring the trauma

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