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Post by lodnir on Nov 2, 2015 2:03:48 GMT -6
I most likely be posting daily because my words are literally garbage I most likely won't be reaching a good stopping point at the end of each session. Story dump 1 Words: 1000 (sort of) Revamped Synopsis
{Spoiler}In streets clad with black madness reigns. It rolls through the alleyways, leaks into cellars, spirals up the colonnades. It is the motor that binds this broken city together, the sickening oil, the cackling tyrant. And in spite of - or because of this continues on. There are no humans left here; they probably wouldn't survive the madness. Where had they all gone? In the smoke and the screaming and the pain of that night, when the moon shook and the sky bled; Did humanity evaporate away with the morning dew as a sun shone on this raw and tortured world? No, humanity lives on. Though no human remains. Those who inhabit this city are the incredibly human-like. Impersonators, actors, analogies, charactures, all given queer life by the events of that night. All burning with their desire to become human, though they achieve what no human could hope to do. An entire bonfire of Pinocchios in a world without Geppetto.
In such a broken city, a doll like girl races from monsters that lurk beneath the veneer of sanity. Trying her hardest to escape as well as finding a reason to escape. A striking young noble challenges the world to trial by combat. Sickened by this farce and forced to play along. A ghost in a puppet seeks to find his way back home. Even if nobody will recognize or believe him if his home still exists. But who knows, there might be a happy ending yet. Or at least some kind of ending. In this mad city -The Grand Guignol, Asylum. Chapter 1 part 1{Spoiler}“Alice” is the first name I chose for myself, it is not my name but it is the one I chose. I have many other names as well that are also not mine. though I am called Alice by a very few number of people, it is the name I am most called by. It is not a matter of liking or not liking, the feeling of wanting to be called something else, or the desire to deceive. I quite enjoy Alice. It is the name I gave to Mother when she found me among all that rubble. My siblings I grew up with at Homehouse all call me Alice. I remember the feeling of inexplicable excitement when Mother read the story book with the character also named Alice in it; like it was telling a story about me somehow. Even when Mother made up stories using us as characters when she had read through all books so many times Friend and Paris starting complaining – I was very attached to“Alice”. My fondest memories are from that time, from those people, in that place. So Alice is my most name-like not-name. But am I really Alice? That older sister that always helped when Vinny had a nightmare and Mother wasn't around. That girl that had miraculously survived lying amongst the rubble. That girl who fell down the rabbit hole.
I stare down at the man chained to the ground kneeling and he stares up at me. I tighten my grip around the bone white knife. Not too tight, just enough so I can do what I need to. His nebulous dull lilac eyes posing a single question “what will you do?” I get the impression of curiosity more than anything. As if he was watching these events from somewhere far away in a time removed from him. Does he doubt I can hurt him? Perhaps. I doubt much has ever hurt him much in the entirety of his existence. Perhaps the concept itself is foreign to him, though probably not. Or maybe he knows something I don't about this entire situation. It is possible that I have been set up – that at the end of this I can not end up actually doing anything and this entire thing has been for naught. A stubborn static haze of panic and doubt begin to creep in but I force it out with the sheer nothing that I have seemingly become without realizing it. Would it be better if he was panicking I ask myself. If he was begging desperately and sobbing or if he was furious promising retribution on my friends and family I am not sure if I could remain this empty. Or does he expect that I will not be able to see this to the end? The lilac eyes continue staring back, blinking occasionally to dispel any illusions of intensity.
Those unfamiliar lilac eyes. Though I could probably draw from memory every other characteristic of the man, the eyes seemed to be a separate entity to me – though they were undoubtedly his. Another blink. I can only wonder what I appeared like to him at the moment. For a moment I believe I see my reflection in those clear and flawless eyes but instead a flash of insight like lightning in the dark of his pupils reveals something else.
Acceptance.
Unmistakable acceptance. He understands what I must do. Regardless of what I end up doing, if I follow through or simply end up throwing everything away, he will not shirk at his part of all of this. He will not think less or more of me however my choice – his fate – turns out. It seems so entirely like him, so blindingly obvious I had not seen it until now. Maybe then, he will be willing to share some of my sins. Absolve them. I reject the guilty thought and douse it with contempt. No, if he is willing to accept me for my resolve then I must answer in kind. I raise the bone white knife. Higher, off to the space near my head, muscle tightly coiling. A wrathful god ready to cast down fury; a defeated woman ready to discard the pretensions of her ego. His lilac eye stop blinking, looking at me straight ahead. The sight not instilling a single emotion common or strange, only singular purpose. Where had Alice gone?
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Post by Tayl on Nov 2, 2015 11:39:21 GMT -6
now that's some aesthetic right there
i'm ready for garbageventures
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Post by lodnir on Nov 3, 2015 0:53:06 GMT -6
That makes one of us! I wrote the beginning, middle, and end of this story dump in a seemingly random order so I probably need to adjust the tone and pacing later so its more uniform and natural. {Day two}A fond wind caresses the city. The sparse foliage here and there seen between the gaps in the buildings sway ever so gently, leaves sighing in the breeze. The wind evoking the primal nostalgia of a time where they lived free of these grey walls. A wistful longing to be repeated forever. The wind stirs the clotheslines strung between these faded and rusting buildings. Tatty but colourful banners. The wind shifts the smoke columns rising from the factories. As if attempting to cleanse the city of the affliction that now plagues it. But the wind can not hope to do that. Nothing can.
The wind pushes me gently. My stomach pressing against the worn steel railing ever so gently. A barrier preventing a 5 storey fall, a hurdle between myself and the sky. Birds to my left and right take flight at this invisible cue, far beyond the confines of this rooftop. Perhaps far beyond the confines of this city. I am not particularly afraid of heights. Or at least not this one. I stare below towards street level; Towards the small huddled figures milling about the dirty and narrow street. The guttering black street lamps. The din of the cart vendors. The steam rising from the sewer grates. I do not feel a thing, fear nor awe. My head is a pleasant radio silent with a single tone playing softly in the back - a small expectation. I continue staring at the city mosaic beneath me while I train my ears for something else. Near-humans in every walk of life enter this stage from behind buildings, around confers, far from the distance. They move with almost clockwork purpose, almost studiously ignoring everyone else around them. A single sheaf of curiosity and perhaps loneliness.
I try think of a time where I did not travel in a similar way. From my location to my destination with whatever route suited me best. Eyes cast down, recognizing others only to move past or around them. When was the last time I actually talked to someone I have not known? It must have been recent but I cannot remember when, despite how novel the experience must have been. I have not been able to recall a great deal many things as clear as I would want to lately. Veiled and smudged with disappointment no doubt. Would others find this lonely, or is everyone the same way? I reprimand myself for trying to think anyone is like me. Nobody deserves that.
It is late afternoon on the verge of early evening. Are the people milling about on their way home? No. Asylum does not keep so precise a rhythm; if anything it is chaos incarnate. Maybe a third of the figures down there are on their way home from somewhere else, less are the number on their way to wherever they ply their trade. The rest, who knows? There are some who don’t require even food or rest, so what use is money to them? It was deemed “human-like” by the harmony council that all citizens of Asylum should pursue a vocation and adhere to a schedule. However like all so many mandates it fell on mostly deaf ears. Ears unable or unwilling to understand. They even tried issuing their own currency, I still see it traded now an again though never in great quantities. Everyone eventually reverted back to the old coins though.
A smiling street vendor with animal features hawks out some unfamiliar meat from his tin street cart. Wrapped up thickly in layers and layers of threadbare coats and slouching in such a way that somehow makes the meat becomes all the more curious. Perhaps this is his gimmick. An old woman with green skin and a crooked nose tumbles over the neglected and uneven pavement. The apples of her basket tumbling everywhere. One rolls into the shiny black boot of a nearby youth with a winsome smile and bright clothing. He smiles and says something to his friends who walk on ahead as he gathers the apples in between the nook of his arm and chest for the old woman in black robes who smiles and thanks him with a sound much like cackling. Such is Asylum.
The people, the places, the lights. They have nothing to do with me though. Perhaps “Alice” or “Lewis” or even “Carol” might have felt the urge to do something. They very well might have done it. But not I. Then parting the veil of my thoughts of not-names - a whisper. A whisper that was not really a sound. If someone else was here they most likely would not have heard it. The monotone of expectation suddenly evolves into a familiar scale of notes, practice and measured. I turn around to the empty tiled rooftop, leaning against its boundary, searching for the whisper that I had caught.
I slowly pan my sight around the barren planters, the washed out stone benches, the emptiness of the space around me. I look beyond it. Not at the tilted and broken cityscape giving way to evening. But somewhere deeper. Somewhere that only I can see. The whisper that’s not a whisper rings out again. To the left. I turn slowly, very slowly, trying not to break my concentration. Towards another length of dark fence surrounding the grey platform. Between the 4ths and 5th planter from the there is a ripple. I approach it slowly, almost nonchalant, as if something else had caught my attention in this isolated and unremarkable place. The stray strangeness at the idea that I would normally be found somewhere like this intrudes briefly but I manage to convince myself at some sort of plausibility. Maybe if I fool myself the whisper will not notice this odd discrepancy either. I draw closer to the whisper without looking directly at it. It is a tale untold. Unknown, exotic, robust and sensual - but at the same time fleeting, fragile, and helpless. I can almost make out the words; I simply need to reach out and pluck it if I can. I judge that it is no more than three paces off to my left as I approach the railing on this side of the building. A side that faces another, shorter, building with no doubt a tiny alleyway sandwiched in between. I wait for the right moment. I can almost feel the hum of it. I glance down casually at the alleyway. My gaze sliding smoothly down the side of the weathered red brick building; gliding down the deep and worn crevices left by neglect and time. I look down to the alleyway on a whim and see-
Darkness - pitch black. My soft breathing freezes immediately in my throat. A darkness not of night, but of nightmares. I take a step back; the blackness writhes. Please no. I look off to the street out of view to my right; the street that should have been teaming with people, light, and sound. Nothing. My breathing comes quick and ragged. Have I wandered into its world, this festering place? I look around for signs of Asylum but there are none. The sky is a dark purple overcast. The horizon punctured with the black jagged edges of twisted spires. The surrounding buildings and even the one I stand on are somewhat familiar in shape - but they were all wrong. Washed out more than normal, frozen and solid, like the door and windows were merely features carved into the lifeless stone. What had been the “alleyway” a moment before was now a sheer fissure cutting deep into the ground. The only thing that remained of the place I had been before was myself and the sibilant whisper still somewhere, urging me to escape. Against my better judgement, against any conscious decision for that matter, I look back down to the space beneath me I no longer know as an alley - two “eyes” look back up. Those two blotches of crimson. If I had seen them anywhere else I am not sure what I would make of them; but here I know these as eyes. This realization and what it entails crashes and refracts through my frozen mind. It is looking at me. The nightmare smiles. I fall down.
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Post by Tayl on Nov 3, 2015 9:47:47 GMT -6
here are lives i bageled in chat in case you don't come into chat until later and aren't a weirdo who reads through all of chat to see what you missed like i do: {hte copypasta}ViremiaLite: [My head is a pleasant radio silent with a single tone playing softly in the back - a small expectation.] ViremiaLite: now that's a good line ViremiaLite: [ I reprimand myself for trying to think anyone is like me. Nobody deserves that. ] ViremiaLite: same ViremiaLite: that last paragraph ViremiaLite: mmmmmmmmmmmmm good shit right here, your imagery skills are sick and that last paragraph especially is really good at describing surreal stuff without making it too solid or too vague if that makes any sense?? it's good shit basically is what i'm saying
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Post by lodnir on Nov 3, 2015 22:25:26 GMT -6
Thank. I try my best to not make sense. I did get some writing done tonight but its fairly fragmented and not really at a good stopping point. All I got for you guys instead are "Alice's" themes! *booed off stage* Blikje Phantasm (subs are annotations.) -Character concept and temperament; Tin Can Fantasy. Does "Alice" dream of Oz? Rabbit Waltz-The tune of a particular struggle of hers. Winning isn't always good but it's something. I wonder who her White Rabbit is? La Verde-Its been raining all day, and "Alice" has been locked inside. These are the tones of a place that have been saturated with her wistful sighs. Tiny sips of her consciousness.
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Post by lodnir on Nov 4, 2015 15:50:19 GMT -6
I managed to fill in the gaps of narrative I had left in last night. Hopefully it makes enough sense. II might post more later; who knows! :iiam: {Day Three + A bit of day four }
I need to escape. I am left staring at the purple sky and its jagged black maw. Begin to get up, to turn around, to run. But the rooftop lurches once more before I can gain my footing. My vision shifts against my will. A single sinuous black arm extends from the fissure below. Far above the railing, deep into the purple firmament. Thin as a charcoal branch it turns around as if making a show of its wasted anatomy. In unsettling and inhuman ways it folds itself neatly in half, and plants itself on the steel railing. A dark flood of fear seeks to overwhelm me. Its icy touch is paralysing. It takes all of me just to keep treading, much less try and avoid the leviathan that lurk beneath. But all at once the dark waters are burnt away. Liquid fire pours down my spine and into my legs; defiance, adrenaline, another form of fear? The choking, paralysing fear still exists, but now merely as a thick mist I must navigate through. I stand up and turn around. I need to escape.
I command my still-numb legs forwards. A step. From somewhere behind me the Steel fence groans. I lash with my other leg, channelling the intense heat, the urgency radiating from my spine to the rest of my body. A step. The dull protest of the fence depends into a mad shriek of pain as it is throttled with a weight none should bear. The sound rousing my entire body to a new state of sympathetic urgency. My nerves by some voodoo relation contorting and promising to break if I remain for much longer. A step. Two steps. Three. The last vestiges of the railing’s resistance gives way. The sound of something taking flight that should not be. A great shadow over head. Then in a flurry of black tatters, the Nightmare sits before me with not so much as a sound.
“Child, why are you so far from home? “ A sibilant voice invades my hearing, something in my head slips on itself for a brief moment. Cruel back majesty fills my widening eyes. A huge dark collusion of innumerable wings and arms and teeth. And between it all, a single floating lantern is strung up; like a something from deepest ocean. I immediately try and avert my gaze so the thing does not fill the whole of my vision. I avert my gaze to try and find a way out. The whisper beings to weep for me.
“Child, what is wrong, are you lost?” A tiny black arm, smaller than a rates paw reaches out to me. I flinch back, tumbling in the process; but the thin “arm” efforts catches my chin and keeps me from moving. It is cold, unimaginably cold. But it doesn’t hurt, not yet. I struggle but the arm has me pinned in space itself somehow. My arms and legs embargoed by the Sea of participles.
“Poor child, so very far away from home. So very, very far. “ The words sound almost kind. They have the shape of kindness, but the contents are all wrong. The cold begins to permeate me. My eyes relax against their will to face the countless feathers, the hands, the teeth, the black. The purple sky, now only held in memory, the color of life fading.
“You can stay here child. You never have to leave. You never have to wait. “ For a brief moment the words hold genuine sentiment; the blackness shifts. A single woman, standing by a fading street lamp in the rain. She is waiting for someone. Someone she know will never come. People pass by, nights pass by, seasons pass by, her entire life does. But still she waits, “I will be here for you. “
“You are right. ” My own voice sounds like it is coming from another world. That is right, from another world. Not this one. A world with Mother and Paris and Elly. A world I might not belong to, but more so than this one. The whisper now is only a thin thread at the edge of my hearing, the message it repeats indefinitely too small to make out.
“I can not wait. I can not linger here. I can not be with you. “
My own calmness surprises me. Perhaps they surprise something else too. The encroaching cold the sibilant promises, the woman who waited until even her humanity abandoned her, they all pause.
“Goodbye. I cannot be with you. ”
Will all the certainty I am capable of fooling myself with, I pluck the thread. I pluck the whisper both here and there. I pluck the tale that leads me out. The last bridge to Asylum. I hear a shuddering sigh and I am pulled from that world of loneliness. A sigh of relief or of pain - words that she had been waiting for or ones she never wanted to hear? Words that were missing from that world a sigh which was innumerable as the drops of rain. A loneliness so permeating and complete it only let a whisper through. Something solid and warm enters my hands. A sensation I feel like I have just spent an eternity without. I hold it gently against my chest as I cross over.
I open my eyes to a black sky. The black of night, not the black of nightmares. I am lying in the center of the rooftop I had left from. I am hugging a book. Gingerly, I lift up the book to a full arm’s length from my face. Trying my hardest not to drop the book on my face or at glance at it contents - the former being much more preferable though probably more unsightly. Blank dull turquoise buckram with a tasteful gold leaf trim. As tasteful and conservative as such decadence can be expected of in any case. I quit and bring the tome slightly closer to my face. Is it turquoise? I ponder this minutiae with some scrutiny. Though neither an expert on hardcovers, color theory, or books in general, at this very moment after that I would like to ground myself in something very real - if albeit inconsequential. Even in my eccentricities I think this would be an understandable sentiment. Though I am not confident that it would be a method effective any person other than myself. Turn the book over in my hands, I nearly drop it.
At the end of however long it has taken me to get my wits in relative order I have made the following conclusions: one, it's entirely too dark to make any certainty of the color. Two, it is entirely too uncomfortable to be lying down like this for much longer. I hold the book close with one arm (though with nowhere near the same fondness I had been coming “here”) as my other gropes around for a spot to place my leverage. Standing up with not too much difficulty, I attempt to brush off the dirt and dust of normalcy. The lights and sounds from the busy street to the west of the building have changed to the template of night. Not particularly more stimulating as a whole than how it was was before, just a different combination of intensities. Night and day has little effect on the citizens, just the particular arrangement of them. Warily, I pan my gaze over to the south fence facing the alley; I feel nothing from it. Then noticing the fence is indeed a little bent out in one spot I feel a bit of fear. But this is regular, everyday fear - not the cold fear of being left behind forever. Clutching the book tight once more, it breathes out a single word thinner than air, the tiny word that it had been babbling at me in that festering world.
“Together”
I let out a small sigh and the fear evaporates. It is replace my a tiny tickling silly feeling. The feeling of being consoled by a strange book I will most likely never read. I begin to move towards that fence. Knowing the boundaries of that world and what is inside it, I can avoid falling in. Arriving at the edge a take a single breath staring straight ahead I take a single breath and hold it, then look down to the “alleyway”. Nothing. Just a thin space between here and there. Confused, I let out the breath all at once. A tiny dot to the rest my question mark which must be comically floating above my head. This does not make any sense. There should be at least a little something there, if not a lot of something; otherwise how did I fall in so easily? I stare intently at the space. No, wait. I do feel something. It isn’t fear however. Not loneliness, not resentment. It's a strange slightly straining feeling. Like reaching for something ever so gently outside your grasp - but without any of the frustration. I recognize this. It is definitely something I do not feel often, at least not expressed in this way. Expectation. Indeed expectation. A different type than what I had been feeling when I had caught glances of the whisper but similar enough for me to be drawn in.
The Nightmare is expecting something from me. Surely it does not think I would willingly fall in… Does it? I prod the thin stream of emotion it is sending off, with a little bit of incredulity. Maybe it thinks everyone is as lonely as itself and would happily come running back to a Nightmare that just nearly overwhelmed it. I am not that lonely yet thank you very much. Porting the tiny stream though I do not feel any sort of this sentiment. Indeed, I don’t feel any sort of hostility, fear, or even all that much loneliness. Actually, that is a lie, there is still loneliness. An almost unfathomable amount of it actually. - but it is almost nothing to what it has been forcing me to sympathize with before. Compared to before… I would struggle to call these things as belonging to a Nightmare. Is it… Is she expecting something else from me? I look around and a tiny street corner with a tiny guttering lamp catches my eye. You can see the corner perfectly from here. The expectation rises, but not threateningly so. So perfectly framed by the edges of my vision, as though by master cinematography. Expectation. I lift my right hand from around the book and place it on the railing, eyes transfixed on the street corner in this world and that. Expectation. My fingers touch something, and draw back.
“Ah, so that is what it was. “
Among the grime, four vertical lines and one horizontal one are evidently more clear in the space surrounding them, even in the dark. Exactly in the orientation my hand had been. But it wasn’t left by my hand, these shapes were bigger - the vestiges of a person before me that had viewing the same corner before me. The remains of a time only the woman would know when had past. Relief.
Thank you.
My consciousness is suddenly overwhelmed with a catharsis of emotions long stagnant. A freshwater geyser springing from a swamp, upwelling the grotto, cleansing it, eradicating it. I close my eyes against my synesthesia, though it does not seem to reduce the iridescence by any amount. If anything cutting off one of my other senses makes the sensation more palpable. Then suddenly, lighter than the touch of a butterfly - kisses. Kisses on each of my eyelids. I am filled with my own vibrant colors and I feel a smile. Tears perhaps as much my own as hers bead out and are whisked away by the end of the stream of lights and colors disappearing to beyond the city, beyond the wind even.
“Goodbye. “
I whisper, from that watching place, from the world of the waiting two. Unaware, at that time, I had been being watched as well.
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Post by Tayl on Nov 5, 2015 17:24:48 GMT -6
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