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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"I see."

Sort of. It does fill in a lot of gaps, and now he has ideas for more questions to ask later, either to the Soldier or to others, like Will. For right now, though, it feels a little overwhelming. He's too underslept to focus on something so new and complicated. Strings fall like rain at the corners of his vision.

Finally, they find their way to the front door of The Invincible and Rosinante hangs back so Soldat can open it, given his own one uninjured hand is occupied by his lantern.

"I've been trying to learn these tablets ever since I got here, but I seem to regularly discover that there's more that I still don't know than I knew possible."

Sorry, Rosi, you also had to ask one of the most paranoid people in the village about it, too. The Soldier is probably going to exaggerate the risks, here, because even a tiny risk is too much of one.

It does open the door for him, though. "Your world doesn't have this kind of thing?" It has to admit to still being curious about this not-Earth place Rosinante came from.

"Not that I've seen. I'm used to writing with a quill and ink on paper," he says as he heads inside and picks a table to set his lantern on, then seats himself cross-legged on the floor.

Or, well, attempts to seat himself. Hands shove a chair into the space and he realizes too late it was there all along as he crashes sideways into it. The chair topples sideways, and in his current state he's too slow to react to do much other than look distastefully over at it and all the noise it made.

"Anything else, like voice calls or photographs, are done with the snails," he continues, as if that's somehow self-explanatory. It is to him, at least.

The Soldier comes to collect the chair, just glad it hadn't been a different kind of Chair this time, and moves it aside for him. Makes flapping motions with one of its own hands at the ones hovering around the edge of the nearest table. Shoo.

It drifts over to the bar, close enough for conversation, in an attempt to find something edible and non-alcoholic (surely booze won't help people hallucinating, will it?) to offer the guy. "Snails?" That's an invertibrate with a shell, isn't it? How would that work?

He watches Soldat shoo at nothing - normal enough now, somehow, terribly - and then lights up a new cigarette and indulges in that for a moment.

"Snails," he repeats as he twists the top of his lantern back into place, then cradles the whole lantern in his lap to keep it away from the hands that reach to steal it away. "I've heard you guys don't have them on Earth, or not like ours, anyway. They're telepathic and light-sensitive so we have them rigged up to tech to use as phones, or cameras, or other things." Projectors, signal jammers, call interception, the list goes on. Useful little creatures, snails.

"I had one with me when I got here, but it came through dead, somehow. Ended up burying it." Rest in peace, little guy.

"There are snails. They aren't telepathic, though." The Soldier is reasonably certain that nothing where it comes from is telepathic. The bar has coffee, awesome. It sets that to percolate a new pot, looking pleased with the discovery.

Maybe the snail would have survived if it had a lantern? Hrm. "How do you get them to stay still for your tech?" Snails are slow, sure, but not immobile.

"I've never had to set one up from scratch, I don't know how they do it. They're pretty docile, though. Probably bred to be that way. Any I've ever had already had the modifications made by the time it got to me," he says with a shrug. "Whatever mechanism you need, buttons or a receiver or so on, it comes already attached to the shell."

And truly, they're so commonplace that he's never wondered much about how it all works. Before Beacon, he sort of took snail phones and the others for granted. Just another piece of equipment. Animate, alive, but still basically just an object.

Out of habit, his eyes dart around the room to see who else is here. Disturbingly, he recognizes each of the other faces not from Beacon but from that same mob he seems to be flashing back to every few minutes today, and he finds himself averting his gaze before they can recognize him. Would he even be recognizable now, so many years later? He doesn't really want to find out.

"Snails with buttons already on their shells. Bred to be. A literal biological cell phone." The Soldier shakes its head, having a hard time believing it, but having no reason not to. What about the Soldier's normal experiences (Our experiences ain't normal, pal, come on.) would seem equally strange to Rosinante? "Where the rest of us come from must seem very strange to you."

"Not bred with the buttons on, I don't think, those must be added later - but it doesn't matter. Yes, the point is, the little I've heard of Earth makes it seem incredibly foreign."

And he'd ask more, but it's so hard to concentrate right now. The others at those tables, they're whispering about him, aren't they? That's one of them, grown. One of those monsters. All he can do is tune it out and remind himself that none of it is real, it can't be. He knows it isn't. And as soon as Soldat is back over at the table here, he'll cut them all out completely.

"You making coffee over there?" he asks after a long, slow draw from the cigarette. "Smells good."

That makes a little more sense. "I'd offer to help explain more things. But I don't think my experience is what everyone else's is. I might make it worse." (Happy, Sergeant? "Happy" would be overstatin' things. But good on you to say it, anyway.)

"And yeah. I rediscovered coffee the other day. Best thing in the universe. Even better than cigarettes." Rosinante gets an actual smile-- well, half-smile, but still.

"Dunno about that. It's good, though." Anything with caffeine is fine by him, and there's something comforting about a nice, hot drink. He's just as happy with tea, and this place stocks both, so at least he has that to fall back on if he gets cut off from his nicotine. Not at all the same thing, but life isn't very pleasant without at least a few small vices.

He doesn't quite manage to return the smile. After endless days of hallucination, his ability to put up facades seems to have diminished slightly, and right now the whispers sound like they might turn violent at any moment. He takes his cigarette between his fingers and grips it tightly, and draws his coat up higher around his shoulders with a shrug as if he can somehow hide within the feathers. Let the voices gossip; he isn't here, and truly, neither are they.

"Where - uh, on Earth, where are you from?"

It's very nice to not be afraid. Everything is just distracting rather than disturbing, and the Soldier is good at ignoring distractions. "Okay, better than cigarettes that I don't have. Because I'm not bumming more off of you. When there's a limited supply." Coffee is slightly easier to get ahold of.

"I don't remember," it shrugs to the question. "Crowley says sometimes I sound like I'm from New York, a place in America. I speak Russian more naturally than anything else, so I might be from Russia. And my last mission was in Washington DC, another American place. How much about Earth do you know?" As in, did a single one of those places mean anything to him.

Suits him well enough. Rosinante does tend toward generosity and kindness as appropriate, but when it comes to facing the possible end of cigarettes, he's all in favor of drawing the line there.

"Not much," he admits. "Nobody's really sat down and told me anything in detail, just that it's got magic, and technology like the tablets is ubiquitous. And apparently humans are the only sapient race. I think I met a couple others here who said they were from New York. Definitely met some from America but even people who said that was their kingdom had different accents between them."

"America is pretty big," the Soldier admits. "Two thousand seven hundred miles across. Russia is bigger." It pauses to collect the coffee and pour two mugs for them. "Lots of room for people to talk differently on one side than the other, and lots of people speak different languages in America, anyway. It's a country of immigrants."

"That's... Right, I think I remember hearing how you have a lot of land. That's hard for me to picture. You could walk for weeks and not see the ocean."

It was Jo, wasn't it? She said she had been born in the middle of that place, America. Hadn't seen the ocean before at all, or something close to that. It sounds lonely. But of course it must be normal for them, even if he can't imagine it. All the cultures of his world that he's ever encountered, except perhaps one, are deeply entwined with the ocean. How could they not be?

"Sorry, I'm having a hard time focusing," he finally admits. "I might have to ask you some of these things again later." He's not even looking at the soldier but rather, seemingly fixated on nothing while for him, an empty table nearby seems to instead have impossibly caught fire. It dances to the monstrous screams and growls that ring in his head, threatening to lay flat everyone in the building. Bitterly, he thinks perhaps the warring sets of hallucinations will cancel each other out and leave him in peace, but of course the chances of that are likely slim to none.

"That's fine." It brings the coffee mug over to Rosinante, offering it to him directly rather than trying to put it on the nearby table or chair or anything. "You don't have to focus. I'll leave you alone now, if that's what you'd like." It got the guy someplace public, with other people around to keep an eye on him, and that's what it'd aimed to do.

Rosinante watches as Soldat seems to be urged toward him, controlled by hands streaming barely-visible strings. It's as if he doesn't want to be generous, doesn't want to approach or offer a drink, but something external forces him to do it. Torture for both of them, perhaps - because in that moment, the soldier becomes one of those angry townsfolk, and the others lurk far behind, shouting insults and accusations at Rosinante all while snickering behind Soldat's back at having been unfortunate enough to be chosen for this task; to approach the helpless, wounded beast responsible for all of their suffering and offer it poison.

He locks eyes with Soldat and almost slaps the coffee away, but he's still just aware of his surroundings enough to force the nightmare into some sort of submission within his mind. It's coffee, he can smell it, and none of what happened all those years ago is relevant here. Fuck you, hallucinations, you haven't won yet - and he's determined not to let them.

"Thanks," he mutters after a moment as he shakes his head at himself and takes the drink. "You should probably go."

The brief eye contact seems to startle it, and it looks away after a beat, gaze sliding down to the more habitual shoulder. Eye contact is still kind of weird, even if it's not afraid, especially when Rosinante looked tense about it. Or about something.

(Probably seeing things, right? It's probably not actually you.) Like the way the quality of the lantern-light kept going electric blue or hospital white. Probably.

Better go, anyway. "All right. Thanks for the cigarette," the Soldier says, collecting its own mug and heading for the stairs. Maybe it's time to check on Scarlett, if she's in.

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EVENT LOG: BURY A FRIEND

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