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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"Xayah does as well? Hm. I suppose communication is a bit of a problem. I'm used to working alone and we have no hierarchy here. Not that I think we need, or anyone would respect one if we did have a single entity in charge, but it makes coordination needlessly complicated." Maybe if he ever paid attention to the network and did more than train all day and then play Sudoku until passing out...

He notices that, deciding not to push it. It's not any of his business. "You do not need to explain, I was merely curious."

Nothing seems out of place, other than the ever present hands. If that's all this is, it won't be too bad. Maybe it'll just pass after a while. "Were you here when the graves appeared? After a while they vanished with no warning, just as abruptly as they had appeared. Maybe this will be like that and suddenly stop."

The Soldier monitors the network pretty closely, and it still hasn't really come up, you're not missing that much, Kuai. "Surprised more people don't even notice, or mention it," the Sergeant mutters, but gratefully accepts not having to explain. People tend to get weird over people who hear voices and undergo complete personality changes sometimes. He'd had to ruin this potential ally for the Solider.

"I missed the graves thing, but I've heard about it. It really just... stopped? How long did it go on for?"

Good, more time for him to be an old man and drink tea and play Sudoku.

"They likely have more tact than I do." He may be honorable, but he can be offensively blunt sometimes. "About a week. They appeared overnight, and one day they were no longer there. But everything that had been placed at the graves was at the post office to collect. And addressed to the appropriate recipient. If someone went through and organized everything then left it at the post office it would have taken quite a while, and it seemed to vanish overnight."

His voice lowers and he looks away, "I'm glad they're gone. Those were things we should not have seen."

"You saw each other's deaths, right?" the Sergeant asks, frowning a bit, though his eyes are roving around the path ahead, the trees, even the sky, just in case. "It's already been almost a week since these hallucinations started. So if it's the same, it'll be over soon." He's not gonna hold his breath that it's going to be over soon, but it's a nice thought.

"What did you guys leave at the graves?" he asks.

"Yes but it was .. more than that. It wasn't simply witnessing them as a bystander. It was being transplanted into their body and feeling their emotions and thoughts and what they experienced. But without realizing that's what would happen nor with their permission." He still feels a little bit dirty having seen things he shouldn't have, especially those who he didn't know well.

"Candles. Small crafted objects. Some left food or drink, but we didn't have much to spare." He actually has the first amusing thought he's had in a while, "I wonder if those who were left drink got a soggy package of spilled wine or tea amidst everything else."

That sounds pretty horrible. The Sergeant makes a face. "I think I'm gonna be glad I missed that. Don't think anybody would've wanted to get stuck in my head, death or not, and my brain is fucked up enough without experiencing other people's deaths, too." He can only imagine what the Soldier would've done with that. It would've been bad.

Though at least then maybe more people would understand why it's as messed up as it is, and it wouldn't keep having to explain.

"There were some that were fighting off anyone that came near. Who slept on their graves to try and prevent anyone from seeing their deaths. I've still yet to discover if they died in some embarrassing fashion or it was something dishonorable they wanted no one to know about." So there would have been an opportunity for the Soldier to prevent it, but it seemed excessive to Kuai. He was more upset about seeing others than he had been about them seeing his own.

"It was unsettling, and probably best to be missed. Unfortunately we now have.. this." He gestures around at the hands that he can see, and assumes the other man is seeing some version of it himself.

"Is it weird that I'd rather see people explode and find out it ain't real, get weird fucking Words and gunfire everywhere, than have people get a look inside my head?" the Sergeant asks, mostly rhetorically. He gives a little shiver, the plates in the metal arm recalibrating with a low-level buzz. "Think I'd be one of those people sleepin' on my gravestone. Nobody needs to fuckin' see that."

"Weird words?" That wasn't one he'd experienced. He'd definitely had auditory hallucinations, but it had been voices he recognized calling for help or in pain. Maybe the other man was experiencing people speaking in other languages.

"No one needs to see anyone's death. We have already all lived our own, that is more than enough." He doesn't want to pry, but he can't help but be curious, "Was your death exceptionally gruesome?"

"I don't know, I think I just got stabbed through the chest by falling debris." The Sergeant fingers the front of the tac vest, which is somehow whole again despite the Soldier's fragmented memory of dying. "It's not the death part, it's all the stuff around it, you know. It was... I was really fuckin' broken in the brain at the time. Kind of still am."

"Looking in from an outsider perspective would not make much sense in anycase. There wasn't much context to what was happening." Normally he wouldn't pry, but since they're already on the subject he can't help but asking, "What happened where you think you were broken?"

He can imagine several scenarios, but he doesn't know the Soldier well enough to hazard a guess if he's even remotely close.

The Sergeant is silent a moment. Well, that's an opening, all right, and Kuai did ask before. Might as well spill it so he can stop dancing around it. Plus, this part of the "broken" is a lot easier to explain than the part about not being a person, and handlers, and lost memories.

He scrubs briefly at his forehead with the flesh hand, a nervous gesture, and finally says, "You know how I sound different right now? That's cuz there's. Fuckin'. Two voices in this head. Last time you met one, and I'm the other one. That's pretty fuckin' broken."

"I know someone made up of a thousand souls of dead warriors. I wouldn't call it broken." He takes the information in stride, because two people sharing one body seems a perfectly reasonable explanation. Maybe if he knew how two people came to be in there he'd think differently.

"Do you have a name you prefer instead of Soldat?" Not that he would know which one he was talking to until he spoke to him.

"A thousand," the Sergeant repeats incredulously. "That sounds. Really crowded." He and the Soldier are bad enough. But a thousand other voices in here? Jesus. They'd never get anything done.

He wants to ask how the fuck that even worked, but let's get introductions out of the way first: "Uh. I'm the Sergeant. No actual name, or anything, I don't remember it-- so just my rank. But rank's better than nothing. The Soldier was calling me 'chatty guy' for a while, so. This is better." That had been so annoying.

Edited (holy underlines batman) 2019-11-10 03:15 (UTC)

"I'm not sure how he functions if I'm being honest." Ermac wasn't exactly good at explaining anything whatsoever.

"Sergeant. I am Grandmaster Kuai Liang." Probably polite to introduce himself since he'd met the other half. Did they talk to each other? It seems like they do, maybe they share memories the way Ermac did. He's not going to ask, but it does raises a lot of questions.

He shakes his head wryly, "Kuai. I am hardly a Grandmaster anymore without my clan."

"Hey, if you earned that rank, you fuckin' keep it, man," the Sergeant says. It's what he did, after all. (Of course, he doesn't have another name to fall back on, but still. He'd earned it dammit.) "Ain't like I got any privates to order around here, myself. Nice to meet you officially, though. Seriously, people around here take this fucked up head situation... a lot better than we expected."

"I suppose." He had been Grandmaster for a long time, and rebuilt the Lin Kuei several times via only his training. Maybe he did earn it.

"It'd be hypocritical to question that in a place where we will die if our lanterns are shattered and haven't seen the sun in months." Nothing here made sense, why wouldn't there be two people sharing a body?

Absolutely earned it, pal.

"I dunno, still seems like somebody might get upset about it. The whole hearing voices shit is supposed to be a bad sign, you know?" The Sergeant pauses, then adds with a smirk, "But I guess if you're used to guys with a thousand voices, two must seem pretty tame. You ever actually see somebody die by lantern?"

"Maybe it is normally, but who can say what's normal in a place like this." Or in Outworld where the thousand souled warrior was made. Nothing about that would be considered 'normal.' And now here they are, a man sharing a body who has a metal arm, talking about it with an ice assassin. Everything about this checks out.

"I haven't seen it personally, but I know people have. One dropped it and died immediately." He shakes his head, please let Rosinante's example serve as a lesson to others. "Though at the time we didn't know how important they were. Those who have been here before weren't exactly forthcoming with information. I was with the first group to arrive and they said they didn't want to overwhelm us with detail."

His disgruntled tone of voice shows what he thinks of that idea.

"Yeah, I heard about that. Because going into all this shit without all the intel is a great fucking idea." The Sergeant rolls his eyes. "Actually almost left the damn thing on the ferry, at first, because we didn't know any better. Crowley had to tell us to bring it."

"I'm not sure what the harm would have been to simply tell us all more. As it was they were inundated with the same questions again and again by different people for things they already knew the answers to." He's less than pleased that things were being purposefully kept from them for what he considered a terrible reason. But there's not much to be done now.

"They also said nothing about things like this happening."

"So does that mean shit like this didn't happen for previous groups, or that it did and they ain't sharing that, either?" the Sergeant wonders. "Hard to tell. Another reason they should just spill, Jesus." He shakes his head. "Though you'd think if this was new, somebody would say somethin'."

"My guess? It happened but they're not telling us. They had said that they didn't want to worry us with needless concerns, and this seems like one such thing." Kuai was mildly offended that they seemed to think the residents would panic if told about the reality of their situation.

Hadn't they handled everything that had been thrown at them for the past few months? Some more information forthcoming seemed logical to him.

"I haven't tried to talk to Will or Robin or Rastus since this begun. Actually I have not seen either Will or Rastus for a while."

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EVENT LOG: BURY A FRIEND

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