aftr_stories | [MU] - FEELING LIKE A GHOST (PART II)

[MU] - FEELING LIKE A GHOST (PART II)

"No, no...no!"

The Storyteller's voice cuts through the inkdrop-dark, frantic and scrambling. A distant blot of campfire gutters in the far distance - far from where you are. The disorientation of the week preceding this one has translated into Mu, and everything is hopelessly out of place. The Storyteller sounds muffled, clearly addressing someone or something else, their voice cushioned by the uniform, void-like night.

"Stop it. Stop it! I wasn't gone for very long at all. You can't behave for two weeks? You have to make it all...all...wrong? I can't keep this up - not with what I've had to do since returning - !"

Gradually, however, the shadowy campsite solidifies into being. Or...a semblance of it does, in any case. Four glistening pyres rear out from the shadows, each glowing a different color. The strange material that domes them almost resembles worked steel, forming different patterns against their multicolored backdrops.

[ ♆ ] The first glows a deep crimson, kicking scarlet embers into the dream-night air. Its pit sphere portrays a crowd of people in silhouette, heads bowed in genuflection - paying homage to some looping, many-coiled shape in the sky above.

[ ♆ ] The second glows a deep orange. Its pit sphere is worked into the shape of a looming mountain, with what might be some sort of village or ruin sprawled at its base.

[ ♆ ] The third's flames are a rich green. Its designs are most abstract; the starburst patterns that swirl across the metallic composition of its fire pit sphere could be explosions, maybe...or something else entirely.

[ ♆ ] The fourth pyre is one bearing host to golden flames, amber sparks sprayed out from behind the shape of a set of scales nestled among a flurry of birdlike shapes.

Beside each pyre is heaped a pile of sticks, colored to correspond to their respective flames. The Storyteller sounds agitated when they manage to speak again:

"Will you let them at least make the choice I left to gave them?" When there is no response, they sigh. "If you can hear me...I can't make it clearer than that, at the moment. Pick one. Pick one, quickly, and try to get out before it decides to make things worse! Just add a stick to whichever one looks best to you!"

Unfortunately, whether you abstain from voting or make your choice, that's not all there is to this night...

Tonight's Storytelling, further warped by Mu's capricious nature, will likely feel familiar to those of you who were with us in December of the year prior. Only this time, you don't get much choice in what kind of story you're telling...or, indeed, any choice in the matter at all. As you wake by the Storytelling campfire, Mu shifts to form three separate events from your character's present - which is to say, within one full year of their current canonpoint - in the most stark and painstaking of detail. There is no altering the memory, nor is there any preventing it once it's begun to play. You will simply have to witness memories that are not your own this go around.

Furthermore, stories that take place in worlds other than LifeAftr will be, frankly, inevitable. Those memories, too, will be recreated, to be relived by the teller and lived by the listener.

While the initial setting will be familiar for oldcomers, and newcomers will recognize it from the introduction they received in their dreams, things will be far more similar to the memory share that occurred in December. All memories must be from within one year of your character's canonpoint. For questions, please refer to our OOC event post!

Even those who prefer not to voice their stories aloud are not safe this time around. The memory does not need to be willingly recalled in essence in order for Mu will shift to accommodate it in full.

Just like the last time this happened, all memories will be worth two offerings each, as if in compensation. So at least there's that!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[The following contains fantasy violence, character death, and references to terminal illness. I will match prose or brackets!]

[The module hisses a cloud of steam as the Drifter slides it up and out of its well in the ground. It flickers as the Drifter claims it, completing a sequence of four - forming up into a diamond, guttering between pink-white-pink-white-pink-white.]

[Their moment of triumph is, as it happens, short-lived. The Drifter hunches over as though struck by an invisible fist, one gloved hand crumpling into a fist at their middle. They begin to cough, spitting up gobbets of sputtering neon. Black droplets of static slide up from the ground, stuttering droplets of corruption bleeding across the face of the world. The Drifter hits the ground - falls to their knees. They make the loudest noise one ever hears them make: hacking, a whisper-breath of sound, as their own body sets about the long and painful task of killing itself.]

[The world shutters into black. A searing pink eye glares out from the void in the shape of a rhombus. It glows. It warps. Something about it is wrong. The frothing glow of its eye sparks a sputter of energy that illuminates its silhouette: ragged-edged, like a cloak flapping in an invisible breeze.]

[The shape formed in shadow warps, distorts. A spike of pitch black shoots out from its ever-shifting shape and skewers the Drifter where they stand. They have no time to react, no time to do anything but arch in soundless pain.]

[They struggle against the thing that has impaled them through their middle, dripping hot blood into the inkwell-ether.]

[Until, eventually, they go limp.]

[The world shuts off.]

[ They don't...have much to say, but they fix their gaze on the light, the ragged and looming shadow. This is the virus, the sickness, the source of their friend's pain.

The memory is gory and terrible, and they feel twinges of empathetic pain from their new scar when the Drifter is impaled.

(In it they find a mirror of their own countless deaths, of taking too much damage and feeling the mask crack and knowing what happens next.)

They sit close, and after a while, they ask a question. It is awkward, and a little clumsy, but... ]

Do-you-see-it
here-too

[ The hallucinations, the nightmares of being killed over and over. Are they things that haunt their friend even now? ]

[Sometimes they feel it: the phantom pain of old injuries that were once fatal. The Drifter's hand ghosts over their chest. There is no hole there any longer. Whether the jackal rewound time, made it so that it never occurred, or simply healed it over, they do not know.]

[It was never their place to ask.]

at times

[It is why it did not take as much effort for them to ignore their corrupt twin, in the waking world.]

do not think it is the real thing
whispers
echoes

[ Their head turns at the small motion, watching the Drifter's hand briefly cover an injury of dubious existence.

A dream, perhaps. But that doesn't mean it can't hurt, and can't cause them pain. ]

Did-you-see-it
Back-then
The-plants

[ They don't really know the word for 'hallucination', but they sort of...make a wiggly hand gesture? Attempting to get the meaning across correctly.

You know. The thing. With the plants? That thing. Yes. ]

yes

[That had been the closest to how it was at home, regularly. That had been...blazingly close to how it had been, and perhaps that was why it had so unnerved them. Because, there, that sort of thing was so learned, so normal, that it was impossible to know if it was hallucination or otherwise. Because the jackal would mend it, and they would pick themself up again, and it would be as though it never happened.]

seemed more real then

[This scene is familiar to the last. An inlaid diamond shape pulses with a high-pitched hum in the center of a room, though this one is sprawling and mechanical, plainly built into a machine complex of some kind. The Drifter's sprite immediately senses an object with which it can interact, zooming to hover beside the module with a bright chirp.]

[The Drifter does not hesitate. They immediately trot over to the module and lever it open with a familiar drone-and-hiss of relieving pressure.]

[And then - then they blink, puzzled. Something is wrong. The module's interior is charred-black, and not glowing as it should be. The sound cuts out entirely. The Drifter has a split second to realize that something is more than a little amiss before the module detonates.]

[Something humanoid and mechanical unfurls from the false container instead with enough force to send the Drifter reeling. They skid across the floor in a spurt of dust. They roll, pitch to their feet swiftly.]

[A quartet of robotic orbs swarm out from its center and immediately begin to pepper the Drifter with white-hot projectiles, rhomboid bullets that sizzle and sting. They swing their blade frantically, deflect several, try to dash and outrun the rest, but it's an unbreaking tide and more and more of them begin to pepper the Drifter where they stand. They aim carefully, rocket forward, and slice through one of them, reducing it to shimmering pieces.]

[The mechanical beast summons another in its place. The Drifter abandons the smaller orbs and instead cleaves for the source: the Summoner, hovering there like a barbed mechanical wraith.]

[They move fast. It moves with them. It lurches in time to the Drifter's forward dash, unrelenting in its bombardment. They can never get quite close - never quite close enough.]

[Their sprite has begun to chime shrilly. They have sustained damage. They cannot keep going. They have to stop, rip a health pack from where it is kept in their cloak, and - ]

[And it's too late.]

[One projectile strikes home, and the world stops. The Drifter jerks, momentarily highlighted in a moment of perfect agony, hot pink blood seeping from their front and pooling on the ground.]

[Then they collapse, and they lie still.]

[The plains are rainswept and glistening. Here and there, the white prongs of opened ribcages and skeletons of things long-dead bristle from the buff-colored grass. Dead trees jut from the ground in spiky lines of black. Crushed machinery, ancient as the bleached-white bones, glistens in the grass like crushed handfuls of powdered glass. Orange lichen swarms up the cliff-sides, occasionally bunching into bushes and canopies.]

[In the center of it all, the Drifter is crouched beside someone. They lie there, very still, bleeding. It's possible that, if you've encountered them in LifeAftr, you might recognize them as the Guardian.]

[The Drifter hunches there for an indeterminate amount of time before, finally, they gently reach forward and roll the Guardian's corpse over, easing their thick pink cloak off their shoulders. The soft ruff of cream-colored fur at its collar has been dampened and shrunken by the rain, but the Drifter still pulls the garment awkwardly around themself, clutching it shut at the front. It is only slightly too big for them.]

[They do not, of course, say anything. What is there to say to the dead?]

[They simply stand there over an unmoving corpse in silent mourning. The rain continues to trickle down. The sky is still gray and silent. The hills are as bereft of life as ever.]

[Now, even more so.]

It's big.

[Somehow, that's the first thing out of his mouth. Which is insensitive and stupid, and thus the exact sort of thing that Ichimatsu would say. It's toneless, and he hasn't even managed to pull his gaze away from the body to actually look at how the coat fits, so maybe he's just spouting bullshit to fill the silence. Stupid.]

[That'll show him to stick to what he's good at.]

[Ichimatsu, of course, never learns his lesson. And he's trying to be different. So instead of leaving it at that, leaving the Drifter in the mourning rain and their own voiceless grief, he moves his hands into his pockets and speaks again. This time, he looks at them, already knowing that he'll have to do it if he wants to hold a conversation.]

... someone you know?

[Then I fight for friends.]

[That was one of the last things they said to him, before...they do not know if he succumbed, or if he lived. They did not ask. It was not a fear of the answer that waylaid them - it was simply not something they expected to need to know, unless that was what he wanted to share by choice.]

[The Drifter's hand works up to their own cloak. It fits them better.]

someone who was kind

[...no. Not was.]

is

[he watches them adjust their cloak with a sort of focus that's disproportionately intense; anything, really, to keep him from having to look at the body. It's not that he's squeamish - he's about as far from it as they come, honestly - but he doesn't want to look at it.]

[It's just more hurt, that way.]

[The answer he gets isn't unexpected at all, knotting together those ends that had already been loosely tied, but it doesn't give Ichimatsu much joy to hear it. He just nods, understanding. He notices the tense change, and realizes that he'd used the present, too; maybe that was something of a Freudian slip. He's not sure.]

Let me guess... changed the world, huh?

yes

[Short, blunt, sincere. In many ways, it was this act that altered them irrevocably - shook them to their core, took their trajectory and steered it from the selfish, self-serving path to which they were so truly committed. They set off in search for a cure because they did not want to die, but no one wants to die; most living things fight so, so terribly hard just to live.] It is unthinkable to them that anyone would be anything else.]

[Of course, one act is all it takes to change one's perspective. A world unrelenting in its unabashed cruelty allows for this sort of kindness, and it can be the ripples that warp all else beneath it.]

it did

Hn. Then...

[Ichimatsu actually gets up, in his slow, lumbering way, hands tucking into his pockets. He approaches the pair, but stops at a distance - not entering their space, their personal space, where something exactly like this happened a while ago, and he wasn't a part of then and shouldn't make himself part of now. He simply crouches down, resting his elbows on his knees and staring at the inert form of 'someone kind.' Someone who mattered, to his friend. Who saved them, and in turn, showed them how to save him.]

... guess I owe you, too.

[His palms and knees move to the ground, and he dips his head. It's much too sloppy to be the respectful gesture it's meant to be, and his voice is too quiet - but it's sincere.]

Thanks.

[The Drifter watches him trundle closer, closer. They are patient, with a goal in mind. They can wait, and wait they do.]

[It's his pronouncement that puzzles them, cocking their head and prompting a small blink. They cannot recall, in recent times, what they have done that may have merited that measure of gratitude. They did not save him from the flowers - he even insisted they not follow, and they didn't, because it was what he asked.]

for what

[As soon as the bow is over, Ichimatsu is sitting back again, his arms looped around his knees. He stares at the Drifter's dead companion for a few seconds longer before moving his gaze to his friend, reading their text.]

[He shrugs.]

They saved you, right? That's all.

[It's not all; it goes layers past that. Saved his friend; saved him, by extension; one world changed at a time, if he believed in karma and all that crap. Which... sometimes, he does. Either way, even if he wasn't - grateful, it's just polite to show respect for the deceased. Even if he doesn't know them.]

[They don't really know him, and he doesn't know them, but...then again, how much of the Guardian's life can the Drifter say they're familiar with, truly? Everything they know about them they learned as they lay dying, killed by the illness that constricted their insides, their clock run out. Everything about them they learned in those final, fatal moments: that they missed their spouse and their child, and that the same sickness that claimed them both had finally caught up to them.]

[But that's not what puzzles them, in this case. It's more...]

they are here now

[That surprises him, which is perhaps noticeable from the way he sits up straighter as soon as he reads it, his shoulders squared and stiff. It's only for a moment; he slouches again soon enough, frowning.]

[Really. They're here now, are they? Despite this very clear memory of their death?]

[... as far as karma goes, he can't figure out whetherthat's good, or just too fucking cruel to wrap his head around. But not impossible, given how messed up this place can be. He eyes his friend again, wishing he could see more of their face, that he was better at discerning their unique ways of expressing themself; he can't really work out how they feel about that. Instead of asking, he pushes on.]

... in that case, I guess I'd better thank them properly to their face, then.

the drifter | ota

a ; the sentinels will find me and switch me off this time

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b ; i was ever chasing fireflies

c ; every calling cost made to your heart

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