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

How're you feeling?

[Death comes with...cost, here. It's atypical, because death usually has its own cost anyway, but death's impermanence makes things, arguably even worse. It steeps them in uncertainty. You never know if you'll be seeing the same person again, or...]

[At least he'd gotten to bury her this time. Properly.]

Fine.

[ CT shrugs. She's...alive? How is she supposed to feel? ]

I know some people...when they...

[ When they die. She trails off. ]

They come back and they can't...talk, or can't write, or something, but I haven't noticed anything like that.

[ Maybe she got off easy. ]

Maybe it'll take a minute.

[To...notice, or come into effect, or something. He doesn't know. He hasn't died here (yet), so he doesn't know how it works. Whether one wakes up knowing what's missing, or if they gradually come to realize it for themselves.]

You've been seeing memories like these too. Right? [Wouldn't it be so bitterly consistent if memory was the throughline here.]

Mine aren't memories.

[ She says it matter-of-factly, not a hint of uncertainty in her tone. ]

They're like...I don't know. Visions from the future, maybe? Alternate...alternate timelines?

There's some people from here. But it's mostly strangers, and...They don't really make sense.

What kind of future? I mean, you're...

[You're dead, but that seems insensitive, considering everything. Considering that, unlike the case with Carolina and so many others, you're dead holds so much more weight when one actually has died. When one has died again, just recently.]

A future here?

It didn't look like here. I didn't recognize any of it.

[ Of course, the islands change all the time, don't they? ]

But...it has to be, doesn't it? [ She smiles, grimly. If Wash won't say it, she will. ] I'm dead out there, after all.

[He hasn't seen her memories; he's not sure he could weather getting another shot of someone else's life straight to the fucking skull. He hasn't gone looking for anyone's, but some of them have flared up on him regardless.]

Not in Thedas. Maybe that's where you end up.

[ She furrows her brow in confusion. In where? ]

Is that...another island?

Thedas. You know. Where you...after the whole thing, with the future, and the murders?

[He's doing such a great job explaining.]

[ She's just looking at him as if he'd grown a second head. ]

Murders? What are you talking about?

[Dread is an iron fist tightening around his guts, quicksilver jamming shut his veins.]

Your fiancé. Your happy ending. You...

[The words slow down, trickle, stop.]

You remember how you died, right?

Fiancé?

[ She almost laughs. And then she doesn't, because Wash...he doesn't joke around like this. He wouldn't.

There's a pause, a long silence, and then she speaks again, her voice calm and carefully measured. ]

I died in the Insurrectionists' command base, Wash.

[ The Insurrection. Charon. It doesn't matter, because they both know what happened, exactly where it had all gone south so quickly. ]

Tex killed me.

No...

[The word's drawn out slowly, as if that will make it any more or less horrifying: dawning realization, and the way that none of what he's saying makes the least amount of sense.]

You died here too. Do you remember how?

[ What does he mean, no? She stares up at him, hopelessly confused and more worried than ever. He's seemed...okay lately, more than okay - a few nightmares, sure, but his grip on reality, at least, has been stable.

Or at least, she'd thought it was. Now she's not so sure.

Wash doesn't explain further, though, and then he continues and she drops her head again in shame. That much, she remembers. ]

I was...

[ She trails off, and then frowns suddenly, brow furrowed in intense thought. ]

I was following...someone. We were trying to go...

[ Somewhere. Why can't she remember? It had seemed so important. She shakes her head. ]

...You were trying to stop me.

But I wouldn't listen to you.

Who were you following, C.T.?

[There it is. That sinking feeling. That's her penalty. That's her drawback. That's her consequence for dying. The part where she doesn't get to remember any of it.]

[How much time does that have her missing? How many people?]

[ She's silent, too long, trying with all her might to think, to remember. She remembers walking across Enso, remembers Wash pleading with her through the stone, trying to just keep her talking. She remembers a figure at her side...

But every time she tries to focus on that, every time she tries to call up a face in her mind, it slips away into formless mist. She shakes her head, frustrated. ]

I don't know.

[ And now she's starting to get scared. ]

What happened, Wash?

You really don't remember.

[How does someone fix this? Is there a fix? It goes away after a little while, but how long? What's the typical time frame for this kind of thing?]

This isn't the first world you've been to. Do you not remember any of that?

Remember what?

[ She shakes her head again, hair flying. ]

Who was I following? Where was I trying to go?

[ Why can't she remember? ]

You said you were going home.

[What he wouldn't have given for that to be the case. Even if it meant she was gone, that would be better than this, wouldn't it?]

His name was Varric. You knew him.

[ Going home.

He sounds so certain, so serious, that CT feels suddenly cold all over. Because she doesn't remember any of it. Home? What does that even mean?

Home isn't Freelancer. It isn't the military. It isn't Charon. ]

I don't have a home.

[ No, that's not right, either, is it? ]

This is my home.

[ Wash is here. Carolina's here. She has a pet and a routine and she's making other friends.

It's not perfect, obviously. It's not even always safe. But she's alive and she's not alone, and most of the time, she's even happy. What else does she need? ]

I don't know any Varric. And I don't want to go anywhere else.

So. I guess that's your price.

[Stop being so goddamned cryptic, Washington. But even if he explained it to her, would she believe him? Would she have any reason to? He barely understands it himself, doesn't have nearly all the context - ]

Your memories. I'm...

I don't think explaining it will make it make any more sense.

[ She feels...Not lost, exactly. It's not as though there's some blank spot in her memory, at least not one that she's aware of, that feels empty. She'd betrayed the Project. She'd been tracked down. She'd died. She'd come here.

And that would be the end of it, and everything would be fine, except Wash keeps talking about things that make no sense. Except she can't remember the man she'd followed through the woods, or the home that had seemed so important. Except her "memories" might as well have been scenes from someone else's life...might have been, had she not seen herself clearly in them, laughing and dancing and talking to people she's never met before. Embracing strangers as if they were family.

She crosses her arms over her chest, curling in on herself. The thing is...it's impossible. A fiance. A future. None of it could have happened. ]

I was dead.

You were dead here too. You came back. We both know that's possible.

[The first thing you learn, with the Reds and Blues, is that people who are allegedly dead are often far from it. It's seldom if ever that simple. We really need to stop saying that.]

[Sometimes it's for the best. Sometimes, not so much. It's almost always confusing.]

But I don't...

[ But I don't remember. Or more to the point, she does remember - remembers dying, remembers washing up here. Nothing in between.

It's implausible enough that she'd ended up here. Having what sounds like a whole other life in between? She shakes her head. ]

Who's Varric, Wash?

Tell me what I forgot.

[The invisible wince behind his helmet, the unwillingness or perhaps inability to meet her eyes, and he grits his teeth against it, grimacing, trying to work up the best possible way to say it.]

[...]

[Nothing presents itself, and the question has gone unanswered for entirely too long.]

You...you said that you and him were engaged.

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