aftr_stories | [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

Guess it took him some time to bother trying.

[So far, he's not sold on the concept of fathers. Nothing about this changes his mind, see.]

He's usually quicker about it if he thinks it benefits him. So you know, he never missed Zoe's jazz band recitals but me? Dividends were too low to bother until I was negatively impacting him.

[He stopped submitting to art shows after the first three, none of which his father could be assed to show up to. At that point, the message had been clear: accomplishments only mattered if they could get you into Harvard.]

And he thought you'd want to learn to play baseball.

[Heaviness, bitterness, eyes sliding over the dream-fire guttering in the metaphysical campsite. Familiar weight. New direction. It's always handy to try new things.]

Or...hoped, I guess.

Wanted.

[There's a certain emphasis on the word that Connor's sure Tim won't understand, but it leals through anyway. He didn't play sports for him, every effort he made in that category was in a desperate attempt to please his father. He learned how to catch. He learned to swim. He tried, with increasing desperation to do anything to make up for the things about him that didn't quite match up to his father's expectations.

After a certain point, though, he realized it wasn't worth trying at all.]

He wanted me to learn baseball, so I did. I played baseball for four years and he showed up to my games at first. But then he stopped, and for a while I believed his excuses of being busy but nobody's so busy they miss your entire season two years in a row. So I quit, and four years later he tells me we should play catch on Sundays. I told him I'd believe it when he actually made the time. He never did.

[But he makes time for some kid. Some kid who isn't related to him, and is just...what, spending time with the family? Maybe because he could project the idea of someone he preferred onto the kid. Or maybe because the kid in question was too lacking in a backbone to say "no."]

Sounds like your mom picked a real winner there.

It works out. They both would rather go through my shit than actually talk to me.

[He used to plant post-it notes to taunt his mom until she broke down crying, begging him to just talk to her. Then he did, and she couldn't handle it.]

And my dad's inability to see other solutions worked out with my mom's inability to pick a plan and stick to it.

[He can't even say he knows how that feels. He knows how it feels to grow up isolated, bitterly alone, but there's a reason he's not an expert on the subject of fathers, nor even the subject of mothers, really; all his experience is borrowed.]

[He understands sympathy, he understands it, and in most cases he's good at implementing it. But - ]

I'm sorry.

That sounds like hell.

In retrospect, it just seems fucking stupid.

[Like, seeing this? He just feels everything about his family was petty bullshit. That's what happens with almost a year of distance and removal from the source of his problems.]

At the time . . . well. Killing myself seemed like a good solution, so I guess that says a lot.

It always seems like a good solution.

[Maybe it's panic, choking you out. Maybe it's feeling like there's no fucking way out. Maybe it's an inability to really process day to day life, to the point that you find yourself idly just wanting it all to stop, the same way you'd want the drilling of a constant room tone to cut out.]

[Going nowhere fast. Go somewhere, even if it is just straight down.]

When you don't have control over anything, that's the one call that's just yours to make.

[In theory, anyway.]

[Turned out that's got some holes in it. Wasn't your choice after all.]

Yeah, but there's that, like. I always want to die, sure, but there's this moment when it changes from being an abstract thing to an actual option. Right now it's an abstract thing and I could probably hold a knife no problems.

[He doesn't mean to, but he instinctively turns his hands so the insides of his wrists aren't visible. Out of sight, out of mind.]

. . . But there was a period of time where I wasn't even allowed to use butter knives. If I wanted butter on my toast, someone else had to do it for me.

Hospital stay?

[He...he knows, intellectually, that other people have dealt with that. It just doesn't occur to him that other people would have readily dealt with it. Accessibly. People he knows.]

[It strikes him, belatedly, that he doesn't know enough about the people whose souls he hasn't literally shared.]

[Because he never asks.]

[Some friend you are, huh?]

Apparently one of the conditions for my release was that I wasn't supposed to have access to knives, so good ol' dad put them in the safe and kept them there until the swimming pool thing, which was when he decided I was just faking for attention and he put the knives back.

[So yes and no.]

[...]

[He never got...conditions for his release. He never had someone who could look out for him. He just - he legally entered adulthood and was deemed competent enough to consent to that kind of thing. Head off to college. Pretend he could have a real life.]

[Wasn't missing out on much, was he?]

Seems kind of backwards. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

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

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cw: suicide

cw: same

cw: still that

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