[Open Mingle] Remember Me For Centuries

[achievementhunter]

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 - ???

Comments

[exbarathris]

[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.]

[hyperlit]

[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?]

[exbarathris]

[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?]

[hyperlit]

[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?]

[exbarathris]

[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.]

[hyperlit]

[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?]