lifeaftr | [Open Mingle] Remember Me For Centuries

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[Open Mingle] Remember Me For Centuries

Who: Chara, The Knight, Ginko, Hinata, Chip, Seto, Muffet, Ren, Xion- and anyone else who'd like to jump in!
What: Some exploration occurs, blood is spilled-- everyone has a picnic. In that order.
When: 4/20 ~~BLAZE IT~~
Where: Ziziphus : C5 and D5 closed prompts, B5 for picnicking!
Warnings: Please post your warnings in comment headers!

CLOSED C5 - You're a cherry blossom

CLOSED D5 - You're about to bloom

OPEN B5 - You look so pretty but you're gone so soon

OPEN B5 - ???

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[The ball rolls happily along, oblivious to the way it is definitely not being used how soccer balls ought to be used. The Drifter is equally unaware, and darts across the field in a streak of blurring violet to slam one foot into the ball and launch it forcefully back at her.]

[Good thing they aren't using their guns. That would just be silly.]

[Soccer... or at least Ball Game... is whatever you want it to be!

She wasn't expecting them to move that fast, which is pretty impressive. The ball goes streaking past her and she turns sharply with her short toe-claws digging into the grassy soil for extra purchase, sprinting to catch up.

In fact, keeping up with the Drifter sure is a challenge as the game goes on. By the time she's starting to breathe harder, there's one moment where the ball is about to roll past her out of reach and she slams her foot down against the ground. Without any contact made, the ball changes course suddenly, as if thrown up into the air by and invisible hand, flying back across the field.

Mouth hanging slightly open, she grins; getting tired but clearly having a good time, faintly emanating the distinct feeling of enjoyment.]

[They don't hit very hard, and their constitution is as fragile as the rest of them, but the one boon they have, the one advantage they can boast above all else, is their speed - in those respects, they are eclipsed by very few.]

[They don't expect the ball to abruptly alter trajectory mid-flight, as though smashed with an invisible bat. The Drifter skids to a halt, straightening bolt upright. The ball escapes them, temporarily. They're a little distracted by the way the ball changed direction without any visible impetus...though it seems there is only one party who can be responsible, given her satisfied air.]

[They don't need to project their confusion to make it evident - you can practically see the shocked question marks spiraling out from their core.]

[Wait, what, she didn't mean for them to stop playing. And if they can zip around, it only seems fair to give the ball a tap -- or smash in her case, since fine control isn't exactly something she every mastered.

Assuming the Drifter has gotten a bit more used to her thoughts, they flicker quickly; golden ripples emanating from the head of a generic-looking figure, tossing a ball away from them when they hit - the Drifter and Liberator running after the ball again.]

[Their confusion clarifies itself to be more along the lines of what did you just do? They hadn't realized she was capable of something of that nature - telekinetic force.]

[The birds of the north were capable of something that they called arcane, something they called sorcery, but the Drifter never paused to examine what it might be in actuality, considering that their leader was little more than a solitary bird swathed in drapery, a charlatan parading an excess of power to make themself appear larger than they, in actuality, were.]

[If she is indeed capable of such a thing, she would be the first - not to employ magic, but simply to exert a raw, kinetic will without touching the object in question]

[She doesn't have much better explanation for it than that, and shrugs a little. It's more exhausting to do to any degree here, for some odd reason, but she hasn't had much need to do it. With certain brief exceptions, things have been so much more peaceful here.

Mental force represented in wisps of color, a thick golden aura around herself, she elaborates all she can, adding her own gestures along with the image of the ball flying off without a touch: stamping her foot on the ground or sweeping her arm to focus.

As almost an afterthought, she replaces the figure of the ball with the outline of some multi-limbed horrific insectile thing, wreathed in its own aura of purple. Sharp tendrils of purple shooting out but deflect from her own gold aura.]

[Strange, but not unheard of. So she was up against some many-limbed thing, something with a force to rival her own. The game is, for the moment, forgotten. The Drifter is still a drifter, and their specialization is in the history of others, and recovering what fragments of those pasts that they can.]

[A thought occurs to them, which they direct to her in a loose impression:]

[How did they communicate, those beings with many arms?]

[The Liberator bares her teeth, thinking about them more again. They're gone now, and (as far as she knows) she made sure of that.

Still supplementing her thoughts with far more gesturing than she would with her own people, she points back and forth between her and the Drifter; For comparison, two people, herself with a broad golden aura, the Drifter's smaller and faint. Sharp tendrils of purple from outside stabbing inside the fainter aura, muddying and tainting the gold. The touch of the alien mind is something she can't replicate except in visual metaphor, and the heavy feeling of displeasure and disgust.

Alternatively, in a flicker, the formerly gold aura goes darker, darker purple, and the darkened silhouette of the Drifter clutches their head and falls, shaking as if in a seizure of some kind before lying still, all color fading.

The Liberator's own personal feeling of disgust and fury is intense by this point, adding her own counterpoint with another foot stomp; one of those insectile aliens smashed by unseen force against a stone wall, so hard that its exoskeleton is cracked open and yellow fluid sprayed everywhere, like an oversized bug splattered on a windshield: very, very dead.

One simple question escalated pretty quickly emotionally here.]

[Stories do not need words to be told.]

[The game is all but forgotten utterly at this point. The Drifter's head lowers as they contemplate that narrative: a different people, a strange and removed people, and their oppressors who used the power of mind and will to pen them into submission. And then one day, someone stands up in a furious refusal to fall beneath the weight of that mental shock-stick.]

[They hurt you. You fought back.]

[It's coupled with solemn acknowledgment of her bravery, of how admirable they find that. A weaker opponent struggling up against a far more powerful one - that is an old, familiar narrative, to them, but that does not make it any less of an accomplishment.]

[It seems she did not have a death-god watching her, and restoring her upon every moment of failure. This, too, makes it even greater of an accomplishment]

[Not her alone. Even the dissenter and those that left with him, up until that point... there were people, so many more, behind her, the golden glow spreading evenly from one person to another, people united. That was what was more important than her, herself.

She breathes in deeply and lets it out slowly. Even though it had been some time since facing the last of their former masters, it was easy to get worked up over it again, earliest memories clearly and indelibly etched in her mind.

It's in the past, and they are here and now, in this grassy field with children playing with flowers and enjoying an abundance of food not even that far away, carefree.

Pointing at the ball, over where it had rolled to a stop, she mimes punting the ball with the end of her spear again. She's definitely getting tired, but not quite worn out yet. On the other hand, she can smell baked goods and fish wafting over on the island's breeze, and offers that as an alternative, pointing the other way as well, picturing said delicious items in mind. Up to you, Drifter.]

[If there were more like her in Buried Time...if there were more like her in any reach of that tormented world, perhaps the spread of so many corrupt societies would not have flowered so tremendously: the Emperor would not have torn so many of the otter-people from their homes and mulched them between their ungainly jaws, and the Hierophant would not have banded their followers together beneath a false religion.]

[Her mind may still be on the game, but the Drifter's is elsewhere. Her speech is rooted in her thoughts, in wordless impressions communicated across the distance between them. She never learned to communicate in any other fashion.]

[That strikes them as...troubling.]

[History is passed down through words. It is passed down through monoliths, and written on stones. The Librarian, a flickering ghost of a long-gone age, humming in their periphery with a mixture of relief and gratitude when one of those old fragments of history was discovered - what would they say to a civilization deprived of even those torchlights cast into the future?]

[She does not understand speech in hands, and she does not understand writing. The Drifter gestures to their throat, indicating the way their vocal cords have been stripped away into silence due to the illness festering inside them.]

[Can you speak?]

[It's true that her people are a people without a history; for her, there was nothing before, except those a few years older, and even they only knew their jobs, how to avoid punishment, and little more.

She's seen enough people speaking by now, gets the general idea that they're communicating on some level. But even if she'd bothered to consider the fine details of it, she can't hear the words. So she shrugs, opening and closing her mouth silently a couple times, teeth snapping on air. Kind of like that, right?]

[The response is not a surprise. Her vocal cords have either been ravaged as theirs have, or simply...ceased to be useful over time. Neither prospect is alarming or disturbing to someone whose own speech has been cut away over time, but it is worth mourning - the loss of a means of communicating a history that may now never be recorded.]

[Their job is only to recover, not to chronicle. But without anything to recover, what does that render them?]

[Another query, this one more direct:]

[Would you like to?]

[Curiosity, at that idea.

But less so for the sake of preserving memories over time. Everyone, or almost everyone, has been so quiet from her point of view, stuck in their own heads. As deprived as they are, it's hard for her to not see it as resorting to indirect and distant communication, like the few hand signals her people had snuck under the watchful eyes of their former masters, avoiding mental communication.

It's really sad that, for these people here, that sort of thing seems to be all they have. How can you really understand how someone else is feeling in a gesture, or picture the world around you by flapping your mouth?

Yet, she's taken to supplementing her own thoughts with gestures already, to help them along when images seem to fail, an unfamilar method for these people whose minds refuse to reach out to touch each other. Acquiescing, she nods at the Drifter thoughtfully.]

[Ren was in some ways easier to impart this idea onto, despite her youth: she at least had a basis for speech and words, and a conceptualization of what it is to see words in writing. They have to shut their eyes briefly to visualize it, to parse their thoughts in a way they could potentially issue to her.]

[Picture it: the Drifter's silhouette, forming gestures with their hands that mean different things. Materialize a silhouette to correspond with the meaning, as they perform them. Tree. Weapon. Friend.]

[They open their eyes, and shape the words with their hands.]

[Do you understand?]

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[Open Mingle] Remember Me For Centuries

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