[ A - The Curtain Falls ] Time had been getting weird for a while now, but this most recent one is the worst. Halfway off to god-knows-where after his brother forced him to go gallivanting into the woods and. Now he's back at that school he hasn't been allowed in since smashing a computer monitor. In the completely opposite direction from where they were headed. How does that make sense? Fuck, he can't even use his phone to distract himself. That thing went right into the ocean the second there was some weird snake thing on it spewing smoke 24/7. Last thing he needs is his family thinking he's hallucinating on top of the paranoia. Brother's already half to believing it.
Any Navigators will start heading a distinct litany of panic from somewhere, getting about five times as loud when that voice starts going off about being prepared because he's not supposed to be prepared for anything, how is that supposed to make any sense, maybe gabe wasn't kidding about needing to get out of the city, he owes an apology now, which is literally the worst thing, no, second-worst, second only to being teleported to a school in front of strangers and freaking himself into palpitations over voices in his hea
Wait.
Was that a Die Hard reference?
"Okay, I'm done."
And just like that, the waves of panic ricocheting off each Navigator does a damn near 180 into the opposite direction: a calm chain of placid swearing about falling behind in studies all the way to the science wing. May as well get something done while reality spirals into madness.
[ B - A Debt Collection (Closed) ] Kris bolted.
It wasn't even the rats that did it. It was the lockers turning to fangs. Not even the thought of being eaten by them, watching them drag statuesque classmates and living people inside, or how they kept aiming for him as if alive, it was just the thought of being devoured took hold as the single thought of Get Away From Him. It's an it, not Him Capital H, but it worked just as well. The hall seems to repeat endlessly, like staring into fun house mirrors, but there's a section of pillars before the hallway curves - no broken shards jutting out to try and devour what's left of him (whatever that means) - and he's too freaked out to do anything but sit on the floor and watch the mayhem further away.
The rats will find him soon. He feels them if he thinks too hard, or he feels everyone else, but both options are freaky on about fifty different levels, and when a hand rests on his own chest to try and keep his heart from shorting out permanently, the hand disappearing into flesh is written off. For a second. The freakout pauses, frozen in a moment as a voice blocks out the world. Even most of it slips away in the wave of Nope that locks him to the floor.
My other self
It sounds familiar, like the anger over waking up at nine on a Saturday, like putting someone in a headlock until they stop breathing, like ripping out a tumor with your bare hands and slamming it to the pavement, like coming home.
Have we forgotten what it means to cross us
Forcing away the one you trusted most, because they betrayed you. Ripping out vocal chords with your bare hands. Making Mary look you dead in the eyes as you killed her - over and over and over and ov
Let us finish forging this Contract
You hate contracts. You didn't want this. You were finally left alone for once.
You are a coward and a murderer and a con artist. You have decided to be complacent to your own demise. You have no friends or confidants except for a brother you do nothing but lie to. In a city of countless others, your own purpose is nearly meaningless. Less than meaningless. Even still, it was yours, not this douchebag alt-you, and it's still a life better than the alternative.
You don't remember what the alternative is.
- Wait, what?
Haha, it went off script. It's enough to jar everything enough to open eyes back to reality, to stare down at the Thing that now lays on the tile under skeletal-thin fingers - not thing. Heart. It's a heart. What? For once, there's no voice echoing a more-assholish edition of your thoughts, no sensation of a monster waiting over one shoulder, no fear of becoming a different person, because you've always been the wrong person, and when your hand lays on top of it, feeling beats flow through and returning memories you forgot you didn't have, it's
"Don't!"
A hand grabs hold in a vice - frozen as death, just as thin, pianist's fingers but they don't know any instruments, and eyes follow up to lock on a face you haven't seen in days/weeks/centuries/aeons/Worlds, the only person on your storyline that has navy hair and that's only so everyone knows they're not human. Gods forbid you say it to their face though, the bitching would go on for years. The concern burning out of those ice eyes is just as irritating as it was the first time, but more that that, it's as familiar as each breath in your lungs, as each heartbeat that rings pain across your nerves, because they've been with you even longer than both.
Pai.
"Don't touch it. You don't have to face it."
"The hell are you saying 'don't' for, asshole, you're-"
"I'm not yours."
"There's multiple Paimons now? One of you is enough of a nightmare."
"That's hardly fair when multiples of you keep ruining everything."
"I missed you, too."
"Shut up and put the organ down. Look at me, not- nowhere else. You are flipping your shit. This is not real. Repeat it."
It's not real. None of it's real. This is all just a brain running sideways as reality grinds to a halt, screaming rats giving way to the sound of a winter's wind, jagged walls giving way to a deep, abyssal, black, tendrils of smoke roll in from your peripherals, from behind to the distance - passing out? Yeah, definitely passing out. Two hands rest, one on either shoulder, waiting patiently and supporting, keeping the world upright, but Pai just looks nauseous. Panicked. Apologetic. The fuck.
"It's real."
"Stop being difficult. I'm trying to help you here-"
"By making me go back to being that idiot who's scared of everything?! He's an embarrassment!"
"He doesn't have a debt! Why are you always like this?! I swear," the rant continues.
And there's Pai's downside, always going off the instant they get too uppity about things - this one says they're not Yours, but it doesn't matter. Paimon/ia has a bad habit for swooning over the Loyal To A Fault types in the most fretting parent way possible, so you're still confused as to why they keep babysitting your dumb ass. More importantly, they get emotional and say shit they shouldn't. Debt? What debt. Outside of Pai themselves, you never touched contracts. Too messy, too much sacrifice for too little reward. There was only that deal with Foresight you made after yo
Oh.
Pai's not there, or they might be but they're not for all it matters to you. Same with that Something you had in your hand, the sensation is gone now; it got lost to the feeling of those hands on either shoulder digging in painfully, fingernails changing to claws and if you think too hard there's a few fingers too many - it can't be valid, you forgot about the book, His Aspect, too busy dying like an idiot to remember the words, too focused on screaming at a God than recognizing the knowing smiles or caring about how easily He agreed to your demands- stop forgetting to breathe. It's hard when there's no air, it's absolute zero and the tremors are just the temperature and you ground yourself on the sound of wind chimes in the distance - mirror shards dancing in a nonexistent breeze, eyes humming to a peaceful song, knives sharpening against one another.
A Man Who Is Definitely Pierce Brosnan And No One Else speaks and the wind chimes turns to scraping. You still don't know who Pierce Brosnan is. He came to collect He can do that from anywhere right He doesn't need to be here in person that's just a waste of effort and energy and He can't be here, you would've known if he was EVERYONE WOULD HAVE KNOWN and the panic is so visceral and sudden and yours that you make the mistake of looking behind you to see if it's Him
and Fate catches up to you
For once, there's no voice echoing though thoughts, no sensation of a monster waiting over one shoulder, no fear of becoming a different person, because all any Navigator can hear is the exact moment a static burst overrides everything: nails running down a chalkboard, a nonverbal sensation of heart-stopping terror before something shatters and it stops entirely.
Probably because the screaming starts.
It's agonized, wrenching in the worst way, and very quickly takes on an inhuman two-toned quality - one voice swearing in constant chain, cutting off sporadically in maddened sobs, aborted promises, hysterical apologies to a God that does not forgive. The other voice never stopped screaming, and it keeps it up - far beyond any need for air, pain and horror and regret and misery all in one long note.
The entire scene is guarded by the abomination that rises. A hulking monster made of floating shards of a material you can't name, glass mirrors crystal but you can't look for too long because they all stare back, in a form that if you squint (tilt your head, take five shots of tequila, let madness rearrange how you see dimensions) it almost looks like a wolf. Glowing cyan running through wires hover around protectively, maybe, the needles that wait like poised snakes indicate the opposite. Despite the color of the liquid inside, when it hits air it turns to a viscous black ink, dripping from the tips and sluicing to the floor, almost matching the color of red that sticks to Aleks' hands as they rip away the view of the creature before him, rending the world to nothing but someone's screaming and darkness.
It's better like this. Leaving them in is anathema. Sacrilege, even. The debt needs to be paid. It wants eyes. It always wants eyes.
[ C - An Awakening That No One Wanted ] It arrives after the rats start amalgamating into body horrors, when attacks stop working effectively or at random, when you're surrounded by monsters that don't have a weakness to exploit. A nightmare that looks like a bunch of broken mirrors shaped into a wolf (if the wolf's head was nothing but a fanged maw) and the peaceful sounds of chimes resounding over the chaos around you (barely covering a roar that crawls up every nerve and fear ever laid in your subconscious). It bites into thick flesh and rips away, the wound closing over in absolute ice and shattering to pieces, leaving a frostbitten crater in flesh.
The blood-drenched glass amalgamation turns in your direction. It is almost worse than the rats themselves. Almost. What is worse is the somewhat-feminine-mostly-douchebag voice that laughs in your head, chiming over the other Navigators. Must be nearby. Somewhere.
"Stick to the poodle, okay? I'm new to this and a biiiiit distracted ay-tee-em so work with me here. If I'm getting anyone killed on the first day of my watch, it'll be on purpose."
The wolf has no eyes, but it still feels like every bit of broken bits that make up its being is an eye staring at you. This is not horrifying. The fact the Nav felt the need to spell out chatspeak instead of just saying 'at the moment' is, though. There's another inhale, probably to laugh, but the rats start to move and the shards bristle like fur, chiming in time with an annoyed sound in your ears.
"Switching it up, huh... What tools y'got to play with, kid? Let's improvise."
[ D - Blah Blah Wildcard Slot ] [ Message me on discord or send pms blah blah blah you know the way this works by now ]
cw: Me Not Knowing How To Truncate My Writing, minor eyegore for anything involving prompt b
Time had been getting weird for a while now, but this most recent one is the worst. Halfway off to god-knows-where after his brother forced him to go gallivanting into the woods and. Now he's back at that school he hasn't been allowed in since smashing a computer monitor. In the completely opposite direction from where they were headed. How does that make sense? Fuck, he can't even use his phone to distract himself. That thing went right into the ocean the second there was some weird snake thing on it spewing smoke 24/7. Last thing he needs is his family thinking he's hallucinating on top of the paranoia. Brother's already half to believing it.
Any Navigators will start heading a distinct litany of panic from somewhere, getting about five times as loud when that voice starts going off about being prepared because he's not supposed to be prepared for anything, how is that supposed to make any sense, maybe gabe wasn't kidding about needing to get out of the city, he owes an apology now, which is literally the worst thing, no, second-worst, second only to being teleported to a school in front of strangers and freaking himself into palpitations over voices in his hea
Wait.
Was that a Die Hard reference?
"Okay, I'm done."
And just like that, the waves of panic ricocheting off each Navigator does a damn near 180 into the opposite direction: a calm chain of placid swearing about falling behind in studies all the way to the science wing. May as well get something done while reality spirals into madness.
[ B - A Debt Collection (Closed) ]
Kris bolted.
It wasn't even the rats that did it. It was the lockers turning to fangs. Not even the thought of being eaten by them, watching them drag statuesque classmates and living people inside, or how they kept aiming for him as if alive, it was just the thought of being devoured took hold as the single thought of Get Away From Him. It's an it, not Him Capital H, but it worked just as well. The hall seems to repeat endlessly, like staring into fun house mirrors, but there's a section of pillars before the hallway curves - no broken shards jutting out to try and devour what's left of him (whatever that means) - and he's too freaked out to do anything but sit on the floor and watch the mayhem further away.
The rats will find him soon. He feels them if he thinks too hard, or he feels everyone else, but both options are freaky on about fifty different levels, and when a hand rests on his own chest to try and keep his heart from shorting out permanently, the hand disappearing into flesh is written off. For a second. The freakout pauses, frozen in a moment as a voice blocks out the world. Even most of it slips away in the wave of Nope that locks him to the floor.
My other self
It sounds familiar, like the anger over waking up at nine on a Saturday, like putting someone in a headlock until they stop breathing, like ripping out a tumor with your bare hands and slamming it to the pavement, like coming home.
Have we forgotten what it means to cross us
Forcing away the one you trusted most, because they betrayed you. Ripping out vocal chords with your bare hands. Making Mary look you dead in the eyes as you killed her - over and over and over and ov
Let us finish forging this Contract
You hate contracts. You didn't want this. You were finally left alone for once.
You are a coward and a murderer and a con artist. You have decided to be complacent to your own demise. You have no friends or confidants except for a brother you do nothing but lie to. In a city of countless others, your own purpose is nearly meaningless. Less than meaningless. Even still, it was yours, not this douchebag alt-you, and it's still a life better than the alternative.
You don't remember what the alternative is.
- Wait, what?
Haha, it went off script. It's enough to jar everything enough to open eyes back to reality, to stare down at the Thing that now lays on the tile under skeletal-thin fingers - not thing. Heart. It's a heart. What? For once, there's no voice echoing a more-assholish edition of your thoughts, no sensation of a monster waiting over one shoulder, no fear of becoming a different person, because you've always been the wrong person, and when your hand lays on top of it, feeling beats flow through and returning memories you forgot you didn't have, it's
"Don't!"
A hand grabs hold in a vice - frozen as death, just as thin, pianist's fingers but they don't know any instruments, and eyes follow up to lock on a face you haven't seen in days/weeks/centuries/aeons/Worlds, the only person on your storyline that has navy hair and that's only so everyone knows they're not human. Gods forbid you say it to their face though, the bitching would go on for years. The concern burning out of those ice eyes is just as irritating as it was the first time, but more that that, it's as familiar as each breath in your lungs, as each heartbeat that rings pain across your nerves, because they've been with you even longer than both.
Pai.
"Don't touch it. You don't have to face it."
"The hell are you saying 'don't' for, asshole, you're-"
"I'm not yours."
"There's multiple Paimons now? One of you is enough of a nightmare."
"That's hardly fair when multiples of you keep ruining everything."
"I missed you, too."
"Shut up and put the organ down. Look at me, not- nowhere else. You are flipping your shit. This is not real. Repeat it."
It's not real. None of it's real. This is all just a brain running sideways as reality grinds to a halt, screaming rats giving way to the sound of a winter's wind, jagged walls giving way to a deep, abyssal, black, tendrils of smoke roll in from your peripherals, from behind to the distance - passing out? Yeah, definitely passing out. Two hands rest, one on either shoulder, waiting patiently and supporting, keeping the world upright, but Pai just looks nauseous. Panicked. Apologetic. The fuck.
"It's real."
"Stop being difficult. I'm trying to help you here-"
"By making me go back to being that idiot who's scared of everything?! He's an embarrassment!"
"He doesn't have a debt! Why are you always like this?! I swear," the rant continues.
And there's Pai's downside, always going off the instant they get too uppity about things - this one says they're not Yours, but it doesn't matter. Paimon/ia has a bad habit for swooning over the Loyal To A Fault types in the most fretting parent way possible, so you're still confused as to why they keep babysitting your dumb ass. More importantly, they get emotional and say shit they shouldn't. Debt? What debt. Outside of Pai themselves, you never touched contracts. Too messy, too much sacrifice for too little reward. There was only that deal with Foresight you made after yo
Oh.
Pai's not there, or they might be but they're not for all it matters to you. Same with that Something you had in your hand, the sensation is gone now; it got lost to the feeling of those hands on either shoulder digging in painfully, fingernails changing to claws and if you think too hard there's a few fingers too many - it can't be valid, you forgot about the book, His Aspect, too busy dying like an idiot to remember the words, too focused on screaming at a God than recognizing the knowing smiles or caring about how easily He agreed to your demands- stop forgetting to breathe. It's hard when there's no air, it's absolute zero and the tremors are just the temperature and you ground yourself on the sound of wind chimes in the distance - mirror shards dancing in a nonexistent breeze, eyes humming to a peaceful song, knives sharpening against one another.
A Man Who Is Definitely Pierce Brosnan And No One Else speaks and the wind chimes turns to scraping. You still don't know who Pierce Brosnan is. He came to collect He can do that from anywhere right He doesn't need to be here in person that's just a waste of effort and energy and He can't be here, you would've known if he was EVERYONE WOULD HAVE KNOWN and the panic is so visceral and sudden and yours that you make the mistake of looking behind you to see if it's Him
and Fate catches up to you
For once, there's no voice echoing though thoughts, no sensation of a monster waiting over one shoulder, no fear of becoming a different person, because all any Navigator can hear is the exact moment a static burst overrides everything: nails running down a chalkboard, a nonverbal sensation of heart-stopping terror before something shatters and it stops entirely.
Probably because the screaming starts.
It's agonized, wrenching in the worst way, and very quickly takes on an inhuman two-toned quality - one voice swearing in constant chain, cutting off sporadically in maddened sobs, aborted promises, hysterical apologies to a God that does not forgive. The other voice never stopped screaming, and it keeps it up - far beyond any need for air, pain and horror and regret and misery all in one long note.
The entire scene is guarded by the abomination that rises. A hulking monster made of floating shards of a material you can't name, glass mirrors crystal but you can't look for too long because they all stare back, in a form that if you squint (tilt your head, take five shots of tequila, let madness rearrange how you see dimensions) it almost looks like a wolf. Glowing cyan running through wires hover around protectively, maybe, the needles that wait like poised snakes indicate the opposite. Despite the color of the liquid inside, when it hits air it turns to a viscous black ink, dripping from the tips and sluicing to the floor, almost matching the color of red that sticks to Aleks' hands as they rip away the view of the creature before him, rending the world to nothing but someone's screaming and darkness.
It's better like this. Leaving them in is anathema. Sacrilege, even. The debt needs to be paid. It wants eyes. It always wants eyes.
[ C - An Awakening That No One Wanted ]
It arrives after the rats start amalgamating into body horrors, when attacks stop working effectively or at random, when you're surrounded by monsters that don't have a weakness to exploit. A nightmare that looks like a bunch of broken mirrors shaped into a wolf (if the wolf's head was nothing but a fanged maw) and the peaceful sounds of chimes resounding over the chaos around you (barely covering a roar that crawls up every nerve and fear ever laid in your subconscious). It bites into thick flesh and rips away, the wound closing over in absolute ice and shattering to pieces, leaving a frostbitten crater in flesh.
The blood-drenched glass amalgamation turns in your direction. It is almost worse than the rats themselves. Almost. What is worse is the somewhat-feminine-mostly-douchebag voice that laughs in your head, chiming over the other Navigators. Must be nearby. Somewhere.
"Stick to the poodle, okay? I'm new to this and a biiiiit distracted ay-tee-em so work with me here. If I'm getting anyone killed on the first day of my watch, it'll be on purpose."
The wolf has no eyes, but it still feels like every bit of broken bits that make up its being is an eye staring at you. This is not horrifying. The fact the Nav felt the need to spell out chatspeak instead of just saying 'at the moment' is, though. There's another inhale, probably to laugh, but the rats start to move and the shards bristle like fur, chiming in time with an annoyed sound in your ears.
"Switching it up, huh... What tools y'got to play with, kid? Let's improvise."
[ D - Blah Blah Wildcard Slot ]
[ Message me on discord or send pms blah blah blah you know the way this works by now ]