wellcome | 5.0 Test Drive Meme

Entry tags:

5.0 Test Drive Meme

Premise & Arrival ֍ FAQ ֍ Apply ֍ Navigation

Welcome to Well! See the first prompt for how your characters arrive in Well. Your character arrives with only a handful of memories, clad in a mix of Old Western clothes and clothes that might fit in at a renaissance fair, and no items from home.

Anyone is free to play on the TDM, but you need an invite to apply. Feel free to use these prompts, and interact with the arrival or locations. NPCs are around, but only say a certain set of phrases. TDMs can be considered game canon.

This TDM takes place from the first week of February onward, and can happen concurrently with other events during February and March. This will be the only TDM for February, March, and April.

Applications are open January 27th until February 1st, and February 24th until March 1st. Invites are available for friends of current players.

Arrival: Six Feet Under

Content warnings: graves, being buried alive

You wake up in the ground. The hole you're in fits your body nicely. Just as you wake up, dirt spatters onto your face, into your eyes and mouth. Maybe that's what woke you up. Before you've had a chance to clear it, more dirt drops onto your body from above, again and again, in a grim rhythm. Until you get out of there it won't stop.

Unfortunately, you're six feet deep. You might want a hand.

More unfortunately, you won't get one from the person with the shovel. The gravedigger, silhouetted in black against the sky above you, will continue to shovel dirt onto you while you try to escape. Once you're out, she loses all interest and moves on to the next grave. She doesn't acknowledge you in any way.

Above the grave is a headstone: your own. It says your name and it might have your birthdate. The death date is unreadable. There may be an epitaph about your life. It doesn't look new. In fact, it looks as old and worn as the rest of the graveyard. Other open graves are scattered around in this graveyard, and other people are climbing up out of them, too. Maybe you want to lend them a hand, or maybe you want to get out of here as fast as possible.

A mossy wrought-iron gate leads out into greenery.

Now that you're out, you need to find your way... somewhere. Not here.

For current players, you're welcome to have your character wake up for the cycle like this.

tl;dr:

You wake up in your own grave! Someone's burying you alive! Better get out of there.

The only way out

Content warnings: being eaten alive, carnivorous flowers, intoxication

The graveyard is in the middle of the maze: a sprawling hedge maze on the outskirts of Wellstone town. The ground is soft with recent rain, and the hedges are just blooming green like it's early spring. Your shoes squelch in the muck.

It starts easily enough. As you make your way deeper, though, you'll start run into things that make the maze… harder. Gigantic flowers block the way down one path, and they titter together as you get close, swaying and moving in ways that flowers shouldn't. If you do get too close, a flower lurches forward and snaps its petals around you like jaws. Are those teeth?! They're like foot-long cactus spines, sharp and deadly. You might want to get out of there, and fast. The teeth hurt, and the inside of the flower isn't a cakewalk either. It hurts your skin, and if you're in there too long, your skin may start to burn off.

Down another path are more flowers. These are smaller, and oddly fleshy in color and scent. At the center of each flower is an eye. Some of them seem familiar, although you can't figure out why. As you pass, the eyes roll, following you closely. If you make eye contact and any of these flowers, you feel a chilling wave of fear that roots you to the spot. Your stuck in its gaze, staring back at it as it stares impassively at you. You have the horrible feeling that if you stay here, something awful will happen. It grows worse and worse, more acute, but no matter how strong that fear, you can't move your feet. Someone, or something, has to break your eye contact with the flower.

At a final turn in the maze, the sweet, soft scent of lilacs fills the air. You're sure that scent means you've found the end, and that you should follow it. Naturally, it doesn't. It leads to a dead end. Again. This one, at least, is beautiful: it's a little meadow surrounded by hedges, blooming in lilacs and lavender and little purple-headed poppies. The scent is heady and overwhelming. It fills you up. It settles into your head like a haze, making it hard to focus. It seems like an amazing idea to just… stay here. Lie down, maybe, among all those nice flowers. Just for a little while, you tell yourself.

Only, it may be more than a little while. The longer you sleep in this lovely little meadow, the more vines and flowers will grow over and around your body. Eventually, they'll make their way into your nose, your ears, your mouth and start to pull you down into the soft earth. Someone's going to have to wake you up and get those vines off unless you want to stay in this maze forever!

When at last you find your way out of the maze, past the treacherous flowers, you set your sights on Wellstone: a town in the first bloom of spring, a light mist making everything dewy and bright.

tl;dr:

After you leave the cemetery, you find yourself in the maze. There are flowers that are obstacles along your way.
There are large, flesh-eating flowers full of teeth that want to eat you.
There are fleshy flowers with eyes in the middle that, if you meet their gaze, hold you with fear.
There are lilacs that lull you and make you want to lie down and take a nap. If you do, vines will wrap you up, making it very difficult to get out.
Once you make it through all the obstacles, you can make it out of the maze into Wellstone.

Scent of death

Content warnings: bad smells, potential for body horror

It isn't just the maze blooming with the coming of spring: Wellstone itself has burst into bloom. It seems that everywhere you look, flowers have invaded the town. Sweet snowdrops poke their heads up between cobblestones. Violets wink from shadowed corners. Morning glories climb walls and line windows. They all smell wonderful, good enough to make you want to bend down and take a good, long sniff.

Except for one. Blooming in the courtyard of the Staywell, just in front of the door in a little garden circle, is a corpse flower. The flower is massive: over three meters tall, giant stamen thrusting up to the sky with frilly red leaves around its base.

It's hard to avoid the flower: any time anyone opens the door to the courtyard, the scent enters the lobby, the parlor, the cafeteria. It seems to permeate the Staywell at random times. And the scent is strange: if you try to talk to anyone about it, they don't agree with you on how it smells. And they won't agree on how it affects you.

Smelling the corpse flower makes you feel a little... strange. Its effects vary by person, and even when a person smells it more than once, the effect might change. At first you feel a rush of disgust, then nausea, then--well.

When you smell the corpse flower, you might smell:

The most delicious thing you can imagine. You're suddenly extremely hungry and feel compelled to eat as much as possible.
The most wonderful, nostalgic scent. You feel compelled to proclaim your loyalty and friendship to the next person you see.
The most relaxing thing. Your body feels loose and relaxed and you feel at peace. You want to spread the love and feel compelled to get everyone else around you to chill the fuck out.
Sugary sweetness. You feel an intense draw of affection toward the people around you and feel compelled to compliment them in increasingly over the top ways.
The scent of raw, rotting meat. Everything around you suddenly look strangely... meaty. Is that chair made of meat? That wall? You're very acutely aware that you are made of meat, and that everyone around you is made of meat.
The smell of death. You feel a horrible, creeping sense of guilt and feel compelled to confess something awful you do or do not remember doing to the next person you see.

Comment below if you'd like a random smell (or feel free to select for yourself). Effects last anywhere from half an hour to an hour. Characters can experience different effects throughout the TDM. The corpse flower will be in bloom the first week of February and the first week of March, and closed the rest of the time.

tl;dr:

There's a corpse flower blooming in the courtyard of the Staywell.
When you smell its scent, you'll smell a scent that makes you do--something! Select from the list what you'd like to happen, or comment below for a random effect.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Alec doesn't make note of Blythe's apparent dissociated indifference to his spiel. He's not much for so-called appropriate eye contact himself. The rules about it always seem complicated and ever-shifting in ways he can't keep up with.

In the same vein, he's unfazed by her shift in intensity and her thoughts on cities and their impending butchery, respectively. If anything, it's a little refreshing to have someone be straightforward about their thoughts.

"Pretty much a stomach," he agrees, smiling slightly, "Personally, I've been vandalizing the place and playing cards. Not much better to do if you're not one of the local brain trust working on, you know, the whole fucked up meat situation."

"I wish this was a city," he adds, with faint wistfulness, "At least there's stuff to do before cities eat you."

She laughs, and it's dry. There's nothing funny about any of this. "Yes. 'Stuff'," she repeats. "Sell your life to a company who answers to another company who answers to some faceless man in a suit whom everyone believes is untouchable. Or find a narrow spot between the spikes welded to a bench that despises your existence and freeze as the world ignores you."

The world is a processing plant for the meat being obliviously conveyed through it all, she thinks, and she breathes in deeply. The scent of death fills her nostrils again and anew, and she smiles, and she shows teeth. It's as though she can feel each individual fiber in her neck move and turn as she looks at this poor boy who must think her a monster indeed. Her eyes burn gold.

"There is leisure here, then? True leisure, no longer a distraction from leasing everything we are for the chance to stave off death for another fourteen days?" Her think, cracked lips close, but the arc of her smile doesn't change. Though she still feels detached from her own humanity right now, no different than cattle on the killing floor with a bolt gun pressed to her own temple, she says something that might come off as outright pleasant. "I would like to learn how to play cards."

There's a judgment call to make here. On the one hand, Blythe is smiling at him like a dead shark who read a book about how to lose friends and alienate people. On the other hand, Alec might have a chance to finally play cards with someone even worse at them than he is.

"It's not that hard," he says, with a loose shrug, "You mostly pretend to remember what the rules are until someone tells you that you lost or you're ruining the game."

He left his lemonade on the bench. He wishes he had it now to quiet the gripping emptiness in his stomach where Blythe's stretched grin seems to echo.

"Want to go inside and I can teach you a couple of the easy ones?" He suggests. "And, also, maybe you can run me through that whole faceless man in a suit thing again? That sounds fucked up."

"Yes," she agrees simply, to both questions at once. She takes her first steps away from the corpse flower and feels the glow start to fade, the prickle start to trail its way down her back and away from her tongue and lips. By the time she's made it to the door, politely holding it open for her companion as well, she isn't feeling nearly as crazed about the visceral realities of the world. The door closes and she returns to the chair she'd been seated in, and she leans forward with her elbows digging into her thighs and her hands clasped before her.

"The faceless men in suits," she says, the menace slowly replacing itself with disdain. "Are people who were ruthless enough to stomp on the lives of millions and clever enough to convince the world they were doing it for good. The people who sow poverty and scarcity and death just to reap legacy and add time to their lives." The sharklike nature of everything she's been saying and doing for the past few minutes has passed. Her words aren't coming out sharply or particularly quickly, maybe like she's trying to sound a very particular way.

She still feels no need to introduce something more complicated to the conversation, so she holds her tongue between her teeth and redirects her words towards something simpler. "They are very good at cards."

Alec retrieves his misplaced lemonade and sips it as Blythe goes through her explanation. It clicks somewhere around the middle of the second sentence that she's using a metaphor, so they're probably not talking about literally faceless men, which is slightly disappointing.

Still.

"You mean rich people," Alec says, and disappointment is tempered with some satisfaction at putting it together. He's not worked up about it like Blythe clearly is, but he does have a general sense that he doesn't approve of the shady, unreachable powers that be, at least to the extent that he thinks they're all probably mostly assholes.

"So maybe we skip tycoon," he muses, after finishing off his drink and carelessly dumping the tankard on the far end of his bench. "I gotta go get the cards from my room. If I leave you here, you're not going to fuck off, right? Because if I have to climb all those stairs to get you something and you're not here when I get back, I'm not hunting you down."

"Where would I go?" she asks, and though she's going for something close to a joke, it takes a moment to make it to her face, like expressive humor isn't exactly something she's good at.

"It would be extremely impolite to tell you that I would like to learn something and then leave in the middle." She presses her feet a little more firmly against the floor as though rooting herself. "Besides, I'm yet to make myself used to the halls of this manor—I would get lost all over again if I tried."

And, perhaps inspired by how receptive this person has been to her at her strangest, she adds, "Unless you would prefer to do the learning in a place that isn't falling victim to strange smells?"

"The delicious forbidden meat room?" Alec suggests to Blythe's query about possible locations she might fuck off to, his own attempt at humour not much better than hers, just rehearsed to glib quickness. That's generally good enough.

He rocks on his heels after, considering her second question. It's probably not a bad idea to get out of the miasma of weird compulsive smell.

"We could go to the tavern after I get back," he suggests, after running through the tragically limited options, "They've got unforbidden meat. The jukebox sucks, though."

It gets a tiny little upturn of her lips, which is the boldest true smile she's done so far—well, at least one that's meant to be pleasant and not frightening or manic. Still, her words only begin after the suggestion of a new venue. "The Stardust, yes?" she asks. "I have not yet heard the jukebox there, but I trust you that it will at least be better than all of this."

She leans back in her seat, putting her palms in her lap and maybe trying to relax a little bit. It's easily the most casual she's looked this whole time. "And I think I have been without food for too long. Let us feast, fellow meat." This time, it is a joke. This time, her smile is making fun of herself. "And then you can best me in cards and be very satisfied with yourself for beating a sick woman."

Alec's confidence that Blythe and Ariane have to meet, possibly as of yesterday, increases.

"Wait until you hear the jukebox before you make that call," Alec cautions, with a reciprocal little smile bordering on the sharp edge of a smirk, "Otherwise, sounds great. Fellow meat feasting and beating up sick women."

A slight spindling of Blythe's words, maybe - and Alec does it on purpose, going by his chuckle.

"Be right back," he says, turning on his heels and beelining for the stairs. He isn't actually right back. He doesn't like running, and his room is annoyingly up one that one flight of the stairs.

He returns with a shapeless bag dented with more than one squared off shape inside of it slung over his shoulder, and there's a flicker of mild approval when he sees Blythe really hasn't fucked off.

"Come on." He heads past her to the door, rocking up onto his toes as he throws most of his weight into hitting it open with careless teenage abandon. "Let's go get your ass kicked."

It would be funny, she thinks, to fuck off while he's gone. Spend all this time implying that she will be there when he returns, then simply vacate the premises. But instead, when he comes back, she's already on her feet and ready to move... more or less. Alec interrupts Blythe in the middle of examining a long scar running up the front of her abdomen, beginning just below the ribcage and ending several inches away, sloping down diagonally. She lets her thin shirt fall back over her stomach, though she leaves the bottom unbuttoned, and begins walking along with him.

"I am looking forward to it," she says, and she breathes in the air deeply, free from plants as it is. She looks around, her examination stopping only briefly along the path of the hedge maze, then gives Alec the attention that she's somewhat been failing to pay.

"Did you arrive with those cards?" she thinks to ask, remembering how she'd pulled herself out of that grave lucky to be in this dingy outfit. "Or are there places to buy them? And—what is it that you all do for money around here?" She can't avoid the disdain that spoils inside her mouth.

Alec barely skims over the scar Blythe reveals so casually, and he more or less forgets about it as soon as it's out of view with the studied indifference of discretion. He doesn't do it on purpose. He just generally doesn't find scars interesting, on others or himself.

Better things to do with your time than think about where they all came from. Like explaining the total lack of an economy, for example.

"I got them from the general store," which is why the face cards are all aliens with bulging eyes, but she'll see that for herself, "Which isn't actually a store. It's just pretending to be one. There's no money here, even if the puppets talk about charging things to your room from time to time. Not that I'd pay the imaginary bill, anyway, considering the kidnapping. Room's free, food's free, pick up whatever you want anywhere and keep it. Doesn't matter."

He steps around a mud puddle in the road, then hums a little to himself.

"Did I get into the puppets yet?"

Alec tells her there is no money here, and she feels something come loose inside her. It's the evaporation of dread, but it's also the dissolution of her life's work, and it should be something that causes her great despair. She should be untethered, without guidance. And on some level, she is, but the utter relief of knowing that the bonds of capitalism have finally been broken, if only in this one place that is not home, bathes her like a waterfall.

"So there's no need to work yourself to death to survive," she starts, "Or hand over everything you create to another person who had no role in it, or stay away from the ones you love for hours and hours every day. There's no one laying down roots and sucking the soil dry so the whole world can bask in his shadow." She never thought this day would come, and now it's here, and she has no idea how she is supposed to react to it. She steps in the mud puddle in the middle of all of this, not even having noticed to care.

"I... would like to hear about the puppets. I feel as though there must be a number of catches to living here, beyond the obvious."

There are very few things in the world that have the power to make Alec wince. He discovers that one of them is dramatic irony at the expense of the optimism of a new acquaintance when Blythe finishes talking.

"Yeah. About that." The tiny tightening around his mouth dissolves with a quiet sigh. "'Catches'."

Alec generally keeps his opinion on the puppets to himself. People don't like hearing it and he doesn't care enough to push it. If pretending they're not what they are lets people cope with it, maybe he can even see the point.

But Blythe gets it. It's all just meat, sizzling with electricity until it dies. Alec doesn't have to act like it's anything else.

"So someone made these human-shaped meat puppets for the town," he says, bluntly, "I don't know if they grew them in a vat somewhere, or if they used to be people, or what. They repeat their lines, they do their fake jobs, but if there's anything 'left' in there above the neck, it's fucked. Zeroed out. Flatlined. But you have to act like they're real people, not puppets of whatever is running this place, or most people around here act like you dropkicked a baby."

The influence of the corpse flower is behind her, but nothing grows without soil that nourishes it. Everything Alec says here, and she truly appreciates how direct he is being with it, makes perfect sense. "The town is alive and the stomach is ready to digest. If they are part of the town, they are other organs, yes? Bundles of chemicals ready to take action where they are most needed."

Thinking of them as people is something to consider, yes, but she thinks of herself and Alec as people and these townsfolk, these natives do not feel correct. "I would prefer them to... not be sentient," she says, and maybe that's the most delicate way she can put it. "If they are organs following a biological script, there is nothing to worry about—the hand does not worry about the humanity of the brain." The alternative, then, hangs heavy, and she is reluctant even to complete the thought. She would prefer, at least for the immediate moment, to just walk.

"If they are people," she says after a pause that had been uncharacteristically long even for her, "Death would be the most humane thing to grant them." There is little emotion on her face as she says it.

How Blythe is talking reminds him of Palamedes and Dax, unexpectedly. Palamedes and Dax if they weren't committed to an ethical position Alec can't understand and certainly cannot fucking ask them to explain, not after how things went with his first abortive attempt to make sense of the town's puppets.

Or maybe it's more that Alec doesn't know how to explain himself to them.

Alec doesn't look at Blythe during her pause. He looks at the muddy ground for more puddles, the edge of the path for stray flowers, the empty air between both.

"They can't die, either," he says, detached, "Not the way anybody's tried killing them. Or I dunno. Maybe they are dead, and they just don't get to stop."

"But that's pretty much exactly the kind of thing people freak out about." He shrugs. "So my advice? Just nod and smile when people start talking about 'helping' them."

He says that one thing, just that one little comment in the middle of all of this, and it brings a miasma to her brain. A cloud of illness hanging heavy around every chemical pathway that depletes her serotonin and drives her only inward. It is very, very difficult to fight back against, but she at least has the awareness to know that it's happening, and that may help her talk about it.

"I cannot be completely sure," she starts, and they are keeping pace with each other but she feels distant, "But I believe I am dying. I believe I have been dying for a very long time. And I've never been able to stop myself because I have always had something important to work towards." The important thing is something, she doesn't say, that this town has already achieved. She keeps the worry that follows buried deep within her and, deliberately this time, leans back on metaphor.

"The organs keep working while the body still has fresh meat. The only way to 'free' these things would be to starve the town and finally let them die."

Now Alec remembers the scar. It might not have anything to do with what she's talking about. It might just have to do with how all scars that size are a little bit about how you didn't die. The never-fading freshness of the one tracing his left arm from the neck to the elbow twinges, or he just imagines it does.

"That sucks," he says, genuinely enough it surprises him a little. It's not like he's attached to some random who just showed up, or anything, but - it's not like it doesn't suck for her, either.

"You probably won't die of whatever's wrong with you here." He turns towards the last stretch of path before the tavern. "F-Y-I. Our bodies don't change. I don't even have to shave."

He doesn't know if he needed to shave before he got here, actually. He does know it's been kind of nice to be able to shave his legs once and forget about it for three months at a time. Really makes the whole leggings thing a lot more convenient.

Their bodies don't change, but they live nonetheless. They all breathe, they all bleed in whatever way they are allowed. That surprises her, and she brushes her fingers across that scar (one of several she's noticed, of course) and rests her hand on her flat, bony hip.

"Incredible," she says with barely-concealed worry behind it. It isn't important right now; it is something she can ruminate over in private, later, in her room. She doubts Alec is that interested in her inner machinations, so she quiets her worries and snares her tongue between her teeth once more.

She looks up to see a sign that must be the tavern ahead of them, and her ears pick up a song she doesn't recognize coming faintly from inside. "This will only leave us more time for you to be better than I am at cards," she comments like she's suddenly remembering what's bringing them to this new location. And she asks something that she doesn't have the foresight to think may come off as something other than just a question. "Tell me—do you prefer to gamble? Do you enjoy higher stakes when you play? Or do you treat this as just another game?"

Alec isn't sure what to make of that 'incredible'. It doesn't sound like someone being overwhelmed with joy at their new lease on life, but it's not like anything Blythe has said or done so far has really fallen into the realm of typical behaviour.

Maybe she's used to dying. Alec can't guess what that would be like.

He grabs the door and pulls it open, propping it that way with his foot as he looks back at her. If he's reading anything else into the question, it's not possible to tell from the blankness of his face.

"The other people in the club like it," he says, with another shrug, "I don't know. Supposedly, it's more exciting if you've got something to lose." He blinks slowly, a thought forming behind the vacuousness of his blue eyes. "I guess I don't care."

He steps inside, reorienting to face the waiter, who's smiling as cheerfully as ever.

"Hey," he says, mildly, "We were just talking about you."

"You look a little tired! How about some coffee? It'll perk you right up."

"He says that a lot," Alec tells Blythe, not looking at her as he walks to a booth. "You'll figure out all the lines eventually. Sometimes they switch it up a little."

She just quietly agrees; the question, she'd like to think, didn't really mean anything in the first place. Or rather, Alec's answer wouldn't have told her anything she didn't think she already knew about him. He is chronically uninterested in the world around him, and that would extend to things like gambling, like the so-called thrill of quick wins and losses and constantly-fluctuating stacks of money.

She's brought out of that line of thought by the noise of one of the organs, and when she looks up, it repeats exactly the same line in exactly the same cadence to her. She stops just long enough to stare down the eyes of whatever it is, exactly, that's taken the appearance of this waiter. They look back and forth, equally blank, and then she walks away.

She slides in, sitting across from Alec, and leans forward to rest her forearms on the table. Her hair, always somewhat messy, has been blown around a little bit by the outside and shows the black roots, but she just brushes it out of her face and casts a sidelong glance towards the "person" at the front. "It's a very good recreation," she says, not bothering to lower her voice. "But I think it's missing a spark of life behind the eyes. Something that would make it a real human." She knows that her own eyes are hard to call lively at the best of times, as even gold will lose its luster, but she also knows that she has never been anything's puppet.

"And the rest of the town can't see it? That is incredible." She hasn't met many others yet, so she can't cast too wide a net, but it's concerning. "Are they all so desperate for companionship?"

As Blythe sits down, Alec is rummaging in his bag. He sets out a deck of alien-themed cards first, then drops a notebook and a cluster of pens to the side, and then a white walkie-talkie painted with a collection of disparate symbols. There's a crown, a playing card, a worm, a stylized zombie, a sun, and more, jumbled together without much apparent rhyme or reason.

"Some of them." He taps the cards out of their cardboard box, not lowering his voice either. "I think some of the rest of them just don't want to think about it. Or they think it's better to lie about it."

He starts cutting the cards, his shuffling about as deft as anything else he hasn't practised doing a thousand times. Some of the cards slide loose almost immediately, and he scoops them back into the deck with the casual nonchalance of someone who has that problem a lot.

"Maybe it's easier to pretend there's something going on in there than to think about what it'd take to turn a person into that." He taps the end of the deck against the table. "Because you'd have to pretty much do the whole brain. Scrub it out, replace all the stuff that lets them move around and talk, just absolutely fuck up everything else. The only things they know how to do are the things they already do. Even if you were making them from scratch, you couldn't just clone a guy and only teach him how to be a shitty waiter before you put him on autopilot. They'd start breaking down in a couple of days, tops."

He's thought about it. Saying all that might as well be admitting it to her face, but he thinks they're working on a functional rapport. She's not going to start clutching her pearls now.

"And if you had to do all that, what's left to fix?" He shakes his head. "It'd be like trying to put a book back together after you set it on fire, and you never read the book. Whatever you'd get out of it wouldn't be the same person, if it ever even was one." Alec sets the cards down in a stack between them. "And whatever it ended up being, it'd probably hate you anyway."

It's interesting to think like this. To think that it would have to be quite so literal to hollow somebody out like that. She's considering all of it very carefully and agrees with the end of it, of course. There is never a way to return what has been lost. Time flows in one direction only. But with the deck shuffled and the cards ready to be dealt, she isn't sure she wants to spend too much time talking about other ways that Alec can be right.

Still. "It raises the question of how long this town has been alive. There are ways to create things this hollow that are not simply organs. Perhaps that is what gives the others hope that they can 'save' them." She does the air quotes, then leans forward and glances down at the deck, then pulls a card from the top and leaves it in front of her. Another in front of Alec, then back to herself while she talks until they have five each.

"It would take decades of being forced to do the same thing to bring a person to this point, though," she says like she's any sort of expert. "And if this creature is still young, the easier answer is what we've both landed on. They have no lives to live and there is nothing to save. Is it five for each of us?" she asks, basing it on exactly the same amount of information while her hand comes to a rest, thin fingers hovering near the deck without touching it anymore. "I don't know why that feels correct."

Alec watches Blythe distribute cards like he's only half-listening to her, which is how he often looks when he's listening most closely. The cause of the disconnect is one of those things he doesn't give much thought to except when he remembers he should try to correct it.

"No," he says, quietly, with a slight shake of his head. "I mean, I get what you're saying, with the decades thing. But it's not like that."

He sighs, sitting back and running his hand through his hair. The look he gives her is mildly exasperated, mostly by his own difficulty at trying to talk about this.

"So you know that there should be five cards," he attempts, "Your brain doesn't know that, but your hands do. Your body has done this before. It remembers stuff you don't remember. Everybody's like that. The things you do, especially the things you do a lot? They get - worn in."

He lifts his hands, half-curling them in mid-air, his fingers moving in a tiny, controlled ripple.

"You know how to get dressed without thinking about how to put on a shirt. You know how to pick up a ball and throw it. It's basic, right? Except you had to learn how to do that. And now, even though you don't remember learning how, you can still do it. But they just don't. There's nothing there. And that's not shit you can just forget by not doing it."

He called them haunted houses, once. It wasn't the right thing to say. A haunted house has a ghost. But what do you call a house that should be haunted, but isn't? What's the word for something that fucked up?

"It's creepy." His mouth twists. His eyes slide away from her like droplets of oil on water.

It's bizarre the way Blythe hadn't even considered any of this, but once again she finds herself thinking that Alec is correct. She knows so many things that, by all rights, she truly shouldn't—that is, if all her memories really have been taken from her. But the very things she discounted the puppets from having burned within them are the things that she still remembers without even having to think about them.

Perhaps that's why, when her emotions run high, she's often found herself thinking "yes" or "no", but this is hardly the place to start interrogating that.

Instead, she slides her cards towards her chest and pulls them off the table, looking them over. There's little meaning to be found in them now; she waits. "Organs, puppets. Computer programs, even," she offers, though she doesn't think she knows much about computers. "Whatever they really are, I think we agree that they're simply... unlike us."

And she seems to recognize how callous that sounds with a small, nearly regretful lift of her eyebrows. If she walks it back, though, it's barely an inch. "Certainly in no sense that they need to be preserved or protected. Or befriended," she adds like it's obvious enough that she shouldn't have to say it. "You and I understand our own incompleteness. I would far sooner let you decide whether to be friends with me than accept something from them unconditionally."

There's a lot going on with what Blythe is saying that Alec thinks most people would care about. The ease with which she comes to the most reasonable position to take on the not-people of the town would make their heads spin. Alec thought he'd stay alone on that one pretty much indefinitely.

But what Alec picks up the most is that little gesture at friendship. More specifically, the privilege she's affording him to make the call on it. It hadn't been something he'd been thinking about. Most people decide whether or not they're going to let him be friends with them, not the reverse.

He likes it. In fact, he decides, he likes her. She's not boring.

"It's not like we need to go out of our way to fuck with them, either," he says, generously, "Not more than we have to. But yeah. You get it."

He picks up his own hand and fans it out, only half-examining the cards before he flicks his eyes up and smiles in what he intends to be a winsome manner.

"So, pal of mine," he says, jovially, "Does the word 'poker' ring any bells up there?"

(no subject)

toxicyuri - 2024-02-02 02:08 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

anglophone - 2024-02-02 19:39 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only