logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: TURN THE LIGHTS OFF

EVENT LOG: TURN THE LIGHTS OFF

characters: everyone.
location: around town.
date/time: january 20-29.
content: the lanterns begin to malfunction.
warnings: body horror and psychological horror. please cw tags appropriately.

you'll become one

January 20th arrives the same as all the days before it. There's no great pulse of warning that throbs through the air, no ominous wind that causes the bonfire to shudder. The spirits are neither agitated nor do they hide. You could almost miss the change, if the lanterns weren't always by your side. There's no explanation that comes with the way that it's changed, but it's impossible not to worry when it's happened so suddenly.

Maybe it takes a few days, or maybe it only takes a few hours, but suddenly it isn't just the lanterns that have changed. You, yourself, have become somehow different. It's possible that you won't even have the right state of mind to wonder how long it will last. At the very least, it appears you aren't alone. All across Beacon, lanterns are changing, and changing the people with them.

Out in the distance, the lighthouse's beam has turned green.

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"Can it," he snarls in response, tempted to fling the pen also. Or maybe a bottle. But he's not completely in the thrall of whatever this is, and holds back just enough to keep it to yelling across the room. For now.

"Was is on purpose? What the hell is so funny, huh?"

"Don't you see?"

Quentin sniggers, the giggles and laughter just bubbling right out of his mouth. Like bubbles! And he kind of wants the bubbles from last week back. The pink ones. That would have been really funny right now.

"Everything is funny. You-" he points a finger at Rosinante, still cradling his glass in the other, "You're funny. Just look at you."

"Yeah? Want to tell me what's so funny about how I look?"

He balls a hand into a fist. Since when has Quentin laughed at him? He's only spoken to him a few times. Is this how he's always been? Laughing behind his back, and now openly? It would just figure - they probably all laugh sometimes. He doesn't need to be liked, but being laughed at is a step too far.

"You-- you have eyes-"

Quentin giggles helplessly, almost curling up in his seat as he tries to explain through hick-ups and flailing gestures at Rosinante.

"You have eyes and-- and they're in your face."

Like that explains anything and the giggles die down after a little while, but the huge smile on his face ever wavers and neither does the sparkly, bubbly feeling in his stomach.

Despite the surge of anger coursing through him, anger which he doesn't fully understand the source of, that statement is just baffling and his eyes widen in confusion as some of the rage slips away. Oh sure, he's still plenty irritated, but laughing at the fact that he has eyes doesn't quite draw his ire the way other comments might have.

Drugs. That's the only explanation here. He must have gotten something when the night market was in town last, and it's put him completely out of his mind. "What did you take?" he asks.

Quentin waggles the glass of wine at him, slipping out of his seat to weave carefully through the tables until he reaches the one Rosinante is seated at.

Then, he just folds himself up in the nearest chair, one leg curled up against his chest and sets his glass down, still wearing a smile so huge it almost makes his face hurt.

Or maybe his face is hurting, but it doesn't feel like a bad thing. It feels like just the thing right now.

"I had wine. I've been having--" Quentin takes a deep breath and rolls his eyes, "I've been having a lot of wine. I kind of like it. Do you want some?"

As he pushes at his own glass, even if-- he probably doesn't have to, because Rosinante looks like he has loooong arms. So long, in fact, that Quentin can't help giggling a little.

The impulse to reach for that glass of wine and spill it in Quentin's face strikes him very abruptly. He manages not to do that, but his eyes track Quentin's movement closely, and he can still feel the hot wave of anger uncoil within him as the drunken idiot comes and sits down. As if he wanted someone to join him!

"No," he growls, and grips the table to keep his hands from doing something stupid. "I really don't. Don't you have something helpful you could be doing, instead of getting drunk? What the hell is wrong with everyone here?"

"I have no idea about anyone else," Quentin says brightly, voice just brimming with mirth, and he pitches his voice low and conspiratorial, "But me? I'm happy. That's it."

The blue light of his lantern casts the most interesting shadows under the table and Quentin looks away from Rosinante to watch it before he grabs the glass back and drinks deeply. "I'm just-- really happy to be here. Can't you feel it? How lucky we are to even be here? And-" he giggles, "And the spirits? They just kill us, over and over, and we just take it. Like we were all made for this."

"You're insane!" he shouts back abruptly, not finding that funny in the least. "We don't take it, we never have. Is that what you've been doing this whole time?"

There's a shiver that runs up his spine. That feeling he gets sometimes, when he's about to become totally blinded to reason in favor of punching someone in the nose. This asshole thinks it's funny that they die repeatedly? That people get warped, and sometimes never come back? Maybe he ought to just be thrown out into the woods then, to fend for himself. The knuckles of his hands turn white from pressure as he tries to maintain some sense of order.

"What, taking it?"

And really, the double entendre in that is enough to start Quentin giggling again. But wow, Rosinante looks pissed. So, he tries to hide it by holding a hand in front of his mouth and hope the giggles aren't too loud.

"I've been-- okay, so listen. I've been reading. A lot. So many books and it was all for nothing. Nothing. There's nothing here that's going to help us. We're just going to keep dying, over and over. But in pieces?"

Like losing friends and family, loved ones will be ripped from them and they'll all be put through hell before this ends. He giggles again.

"Maybe I am crazy. I've always been crazy."

"Grow a spine," he growls in response.

Reading books. Well, isn't that all-encompassing. They have a whole landscape to discover, supplies to set aside in case of future shortage, buildings to maintain and plans to make, and giggles over here has been reading books, found nothing, and threw in the towel. "For fuck's sake. If books aren't giving you answers, then instead of giving up, try something else. Go find the mines. Go build some goddamn bridges. Do. Something."

It will occur to him later, perhaps, that the root of much of Rosinante's anger stems from his own frustrations and perceived failures, but right now he can't seem to do anything but vent.

"I can't," Quentin giggles, and it blossoms in to a full out laugh as he sits there, watching Rosinante's face grow even more angry.

The hurt and sadness twists underneath his ribs somewhere, and Quentin laughs louder, hand clutching at the edge of the table. "I still have his gift in my pocket and I can't-- I just can't--"

Move or breathe, except for how he laughs and the words come out in fits and starts between hiccuped laughs. "He died and he didn't come back like the rest, and now I'm here. I'm here and my lantern's broken and I'm broken and you're just so funny-looking."

Still going on and on about whoever he'd lost? But that was months ago now, right? Rosinante clearly remembers Quentin reaching out to him on the network and asking about how long it takes for people to come back. Whichever of them it was that Quentin had been so attached to, he hadn't come back, and for some reason that knowledge has apparently crippled him.

"Get over it," he replies harshly, feeling seconds away from just punching this guy in the face over his continued ridicule. "Have you never lost someone before? It hurts every fucking time and it doesn't get better, and there will be more. The only way to end that is to do something about fixing this. Otherwise everyone else here you care about is going to die too, and everyone back at home when the world eaters find them too."

"Oh, I already tried that."

Quentin goes on, brightly. "I tried to drown the church. Tried to set it on fire, but fire really doesn't work here? I tried to raze it to the ground, and it just-- it didn't work. There was someone else... he was kind of funny, too."

And so very, very caustic. Like Penny, only worse, because at least Penny had a sense of humor and this guy, he really hadn't. Quentin flashes a quick smile across the table and just keeps talking, "I am never going to get over it. I never did before, and. Wow, people die around me a lot. But you know, you're right. You're exactly right, I should do something."

For an incredulous moment, Rosinante sits and listens. Fixing, he had said. Do something to fix things, make the town more livable, work on solving problems they all face together. Get over personal issues and move onward.

Trying to destroy the church is none of those things.

So whatever the fuck is on this table is about to get dumped straight into Quentin's face. With one hand he scoops up his tablet and lantern, while with the other he then shoves the rim of the table upward, trying to flip the whole thing over in a fit of rage.

"That doesn't - That makes it worse!" he shouts as he springs to his feet, ready to march over there also in case the table doesn't deliver enough of a message.

The table flips and Quentin's wine goes flying through the air half a second before the table lands legs-up somewhere to the left.

This should be scary. A huge, angry guy is flipping tables and Quentin really isn't even watching to see if his own lantern is unharmed or if he even brought it with him when he sat down, he just sits there, laughing like loon.

Laughing so hard, that he can hardly speak around it and-- "It can't get any worse. It just can't."

Quentin is too pathetic to be worth striking. He doesn't want to hurt him anyway - that defeats the purpose of his whole tirade, if suddenly this idiot isn't even capable of doing much other than sitting around and healing up from whatever he might inflict. His anger hasn't deflated any, but there's nothing he can do with it, and nothing he says or does seems able to make its way through the other man's dense skull. He's wasting his own time, now. Driving himself to anger more than the others have, even with this incessant laughing.

So while he'd been prepared to march forward and hit him, the pointlessness stops him. With one final seething look of fury, he stalks out the door. Time to find somewhere else to try (and probably fail) to work.

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EVENT LOG: TURN THE LIGHTS OFF

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