May Intro: We're Going Down, Down

[lifeaftr_mods]

INTRO LOG: MAY

Who: Everyone!
What: New souls arrive to the archipelago of LifeAftr
When: May 4th and onward
Where: Ensō...and above
Warnings: Mark as needed!

Floating Islet: And Sugar, We're Going Down Swinging
While new arrivals may generally be expected at this time of the month, one factor that has continuously failed to maintain consistency is their point of arrival. And indeed, it appears that this month has once again exceeded even the Storyteller's expectations as to where arrivals may take their first steps on this world. Those who were with us in February will most certainly remember the floating islands hovering far, far above the mainland. While they currently remain inaccessible, they are still steadily floating overhead, shifting appearance as if made of the clouds themselves. And so while waking up on top of the world may be a surprise, at the very least new arrivals will have a bird's eye view of Ensō to enjoy for a time...until they take notice of a rather sinking sensation.

In fact, that sensation would be the island itself, starting to sink out of the sky.

So that's nice.

On a crash course for the ground at F6, the Storyteller will eventually slow the island's progress to the ground below, though a rather profound impact is, simply put, inevitable. Characters with the ability of flight will find the island skimming low enough to reach on their own. Others may wish to utilize their resourcefulness to find an alternate means down.

Or, perhaps, you'll simply deal with whatever awaits you at the crash site.

F6 and Beyond: In An Earlier Round
Thankfully, the Storyteller's intervention will ensure that no one still on the not-so-floating island upon impact will escape with minor injuries at worst, the island itself crumbling to pieces and taking down more than a few thick trees. The pieces of the island will very quickly begin to blacken, crumbling underfoot as the floating island turns to dust. Anyone still aboard may wish to make a very quick departure.

The ripples of this impact, however, are far more significant than two pieces of land bumping up against one another.

Previously, visitors to the floating islands may have experienced some...oddities, during their time above the clouds. For the next few days, these oddities will spread across Ensō itself, leading to some rather awkward scenarios:

[ ♆ ] Some may find their weapons are... behaving oddly, though all are still functional. Weapons, in this instance, may also include fisticuffs, if the intent is to use your fists as a weapon.

[ ♆ ] Equally as irritating are those who find themselves coming down with a severe case of NPCitus: periods of time in which they find themselves incapable of saying more than one or two lines of the same, repetitive dialogue.

[ ♆ ] Equal parts nostalgic and irritating for some are the instances of lag (walking forwards, only to find oneself back where they started), Swimmer's Ear (incapable of movement unless swimming through the air), and clipping (suddenly stuck halfway through the nearest rock are all common, regrettable side-effects).

[ ♆ ] Other unfortunate side-effects may also transpire, as varied and wild as one's imagination.

Though many of these may be hindering or even dangerous in the right situations, they are, for the most part, passive. The Storyteller will assure anyone who asks that these oddities will disappear in the next few days.

You are free to create or utilize glitches you are particularly fond of, though keep in mind that any potential content warnings should be mentioned in your toplevel! You may peruse some of the past glitches here, or create your own along those lines! And a special thanks to our local Donn-mun, Jake (venesection), for the first glitch on the list!

---

All new arrivals will awake with knapsacks, their names stitched to the front. The contents of said knapsacks can all be found in your acceptance notices!

As a final note to those who participated in the Test Drive Meme, bear in mind that those threads, if all parties involved would like, can be game canon in the form of dream-like memories involving a place very much like this one, though the layout is considerably different.

---

Feeling a tad adrift? Make sure to check the Locations Page, which has details regarding the starting areas and a handy map for those who feel better with a bird's eye view!

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LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

Comments

tim wright | ota | cw: body horror

[postictal]

[He was on Ensō when the shadow fell over the sky, blotting out the sun - and the wrench in the pit of his stomach almost had him reeling, remembering the way the sun's rays faded into splotched orange, and then milk-white, and then nothing but pitch-dark, the sound of shadows coming swarming out from the ocean depths. But it's not that, not at all; it's just something else looming overhead.]

[What the fuck else is new.]

[He slings his pack over his shoulder and starts hiking to the projected point of impact. The island's speeding up, now, close enough for him to realize what it is: it's one of those things, those floating pieces of rock and disconnected...stuff, shifting near-constantly like play-dough or mind-clay. As it careens closer to the ground, he starts moving quicker. There's no way this would just happen without there being some kind of impetus behind it, meaning that something terrible is liable to happen, and soon.]

[The ground rumbles beneath his feet; the island's collision into the section of Ensō has wider effects than he'd predicted. It slips him off an incline and sends him rolling fast, half-falling and half-stumbling down across the grass until he slams into a tree with enough force to pepper his vision with a confetti of popping stars.]

[The sky swims overhead.]

[He doesn't know how long he lies there.]

[He doesn't know how long it takes for him to realize that the lethargy in his bones isn't really fatigue at all, or even the result of potential head trauma.]

[It's the decay that's begun to bubble up his insides, squeezing a swell of black blood out from between parted lips. His vision fuzzes when he blinks, looks down - and notes dazedly that one of his arms seems to have had quite a large chunk carved out of it, shorn to the glistening bone. A fat pink coil of intestine peers out from beneath the arches of his ribs, the flesh apparently moldered away to lay his freshly jellied organs bare to the sunlight. And here he thought he had to be on Ziziphus to be sitting in the fetid stink of rot.]

[He cups his undamaged arm around his middle, and is rewarded with a searing fucking agony that's really only comparable to the sort he's experienced exclusively in the cranial region.]

[Tim doesn't scream, but it's a near thing. His eyes blur with heat as he tries to grit his teeth and pull himself to his feet, try to make his way...somewhere, fuck if he knows where. Just - just away from this, away from all of this, somewhere he can piece himself back together.]

[If that's even possible.]

[He should be dead, some part of him realizes fuzzily. He should be dead. Mangled by some force that's practically eaten him away, that's shredded him into something approximating raw hamburger meat, that's pulverized his guts into wet garbage sacks of seeping mush.]

[He should be dead.]

[He always should be, and never is.]

[savedbyasong]

[Shion had also come to investigate when the shadow fell over the sky. It could be nothing good. He had been waiting. The whole of last month had been too quiet. Sure there had been monsters, new monsters on Ziziphus. But nothing truly bad had happened, they had not ended on strange islands, not been thrown into empty voids by a city full of people unable to accept those different than themselves.

He wished he could appreciate the quiet, but all it did was make him afraid. Perhaps it was that he had gotten used to the Tower, where experiments and games had happened every month. He could only remember one month where nothing awful had happened... funny enough that had been an April to.

And that May had made up for the rest ten fold. So he is not sure what he is going to find at this crash site, but he is bracing himself. It will be nothing good.

It's not. It's Tim. It's Tim and he is hurt. Hurt in a way that cannot be natural at all. No natural thing could do this to a person, at least not in a way that keeps that person alive. Horror floods Shion and he breaks out into a sprint.

He's no stranger to horror, bodies twisted in ways that should not even be possible. But still it happening to someone he knows, someone he cares about...

He has his first aid kit with him but it is so inadequate in this situation that it's practically laughable, if laughter was at all applicable in this situation.] Tim... Tim can you hear me?

[He approaches cautiously, in his experience things like this often come with... other side effects. Programmed to hurt others, to deal with trouble makers, mindless obedience to the administrators.

He isn't in the Tower anymore, he breathes and reminds himself that. Not that it really helps. This place has proven it can control their actions, force them to hurt others. He has no evidence that Tim hasn't been turned into some kind of drone, twisted and hurt by the unknown forces that control them here.]

cw: emetophobia

[postictal]

[He feel it pooling in him, bile and blood and god knows what else, ready to come frothing out like a bubble of noxious gas about to burst in his throat. The chalky taste of his own rotting insides is enough to send him heaving, except he's still flat on his back, trying to muster the requisite backbone to muscle himself to his feet.]

[The words, when they come, hum through a haze of reddened mist. It takes him a moment to parse them; a moment longer to figure out how to answer.]

[He rolls onto one side and immediately vomits onto the grass.]

[savedbyasong]

[Enough caution. Tim isn't flinging himself at his neck, isn't charging towards him with hands turned into blades. It might still happen, once the nausea subsides. But Shion would rather a thousand times be hurt by a friend turned against him than to stand by and allow a friend to be alone in pain.]

Tim... [He's at his side now though he doesn't touch him, because he has figured out by now that touch doesn't calm Tim in the way it calms Shion, in the way it calms Aster. That it brings panic rather than grounding. But he stays close and his arm is there as an offer, to help Tim sit up, or to help keep him on his side if he throws up again, he shouldn't be on his back.

By all normal reckonings Tim should be dead. But he looks like one of Jason's experiments, twisted and broken and still painfully alive. There's so much... and so little Shion can do when there are literal organs exposed.]

[postictal]

[He should probably feel worse about how revolting this is, lying there with half of himself gaping open, staring at the yellowed sluice of stomach acid and rot steaming in the grass. There’s a white blur of hair and the anxious repetition of a name - his name, he suspects, though he can’t be certain - which means either he’s graduated to hallucinations or he’s attracted someone’s attention.]

[It probably looks unsettling, having to watch all his internal organs convulse as he speaks. Can’t really help it. A real damn shame.]

‘S, uh...not ‘s bad as it looks. [This sentiment is immediately undercut by the way he arches in on himself in a fit of coughing, spitting out another slew of pink-white.]

[savedbyasong]

[The sound Shion makes is somewhere between a sigh of relief, a choaked sob and a hysterical laugh. It's cut off quickly whatever it is. Tim is speaking, he's conscious, that might not be a blessing actually. But he's coherent, he's thinking.

Shion's bar for okay is really low. He stays close, there's not much he can do but this. Stay close. Be there. Sometimes that is all that can be done, it's so little... His hands are still hovering as Tim coughs up more bile, ready to steady him.] I can help you sit up... if you want.

[postictal]

Mm.

[God, if this were as simple as a bullet in his liver - that'd be less painful, right? Never thought he'd be fucking jealous of Jay, of Alex, of Brian, for having injuries whose etiologies they at least understood, who had one or two points of contact that made sense and could be conceivably stemmed with a hand or a bandage or something.]

[What're you supposed to do when part of you feels like it should've ended at the ribcage, the red oxidizing into brown, the reek of decay spilling out from your chest cavity?]

Feels like I m-might lose...someth'. [The words are vague and his eyes are poorly focused, but hopefully the message gets across: he doesn't wanna sit up and then have to fight to keep his internal organs inside of him.]

[byhalves]

[He wasn't here when the islands were first explored - hadn't even known they were there, with the way the clouds were constantly covering them. He didn't know until there was a shadow over the island and something falling from the sky.

Maybe it's foolish of him, going towards the land falling from the sky, but - but it's dangerous. People are going to get hurt. He knows, instinctively, that it's going to be bad, and the way the land's descent seems to slow doesn't do anything to soothe his worries.

The body he finds once he gets to the crash site doesn't help, either. He almost doesn't recognize it, at first. Doesn't even realize it's a person - just a mangled mess of flesh and guts and parts. But the closer he gets to it (even though he doesn't want to get close to it, wants to head in the other direction immediately), the more...the more he realizes what - who - it is.

Then Tim tries to move, and it all gets even worse.]

You- [He swallows, trying to think. Trying not to panic. Tim's alive, and. He shouldn't be. He really, really shouldn't be.] You shouldn't...move.

[Oh, god. He feels sick, but he has to help. He has to.]

[postictal]

[It’s more than simple, sweeping waves of nausea. He can’t help but wonder, fleetingly, if this is how Brian felt as he lay there, he life easing out from him slowly with each pulse of the knot of meat in his chest, straining to keep him alive despite all fucking odds. It’s a losing battle, to be certain, but when has that ever mattered? All of his battles have been losing ones.]

[Words crack through the equilibrium he’s unknowingly fallen into: riding each successive wave of torquing, sickening deterioration as it eats happily away at his structural integrity and rearranges his guts into a thick red soup. The dark blot on the other party’s face, the bicolored hair - those are fortunately unique enough to him for Tim to correctly identify Shouto first try.]

[A hot boil of blood wells in his throat. He has to roll to his side to spit it out, but the effort is simply too much for him to manage it, at present, with half of his body caved in the way it is.]

[His body lurches, chest bucking. It occurs to him dazedly that he can’t breathe like this. He’s going to asphyxiate on his back, and it won’t even be the fucking war zone that his body has turned into that kills him.]

[byhalves]

[He was supposed to be trained for this - they had to be taught how to deal with emergencies, how to get people to safety. Basic triage and first aid.

But none of that had been real. That had all been volunteers faking injury in fake destruction, nothing at all comparable to Tim falling apart in front of him. Not even the real danger he's seen has been like this. It's nothing like Iida paralyzed in an alleyway, or Midoriya's arms and legs completely destroyed by the power of his quirk, or Aizawa-sensei's body crushed by the Noumu.

It's so much worse. Panic bubbles up his throat, but he does his best to hold it back. He can't fix this.]

I'm sorry.

[He crouches close, one hand hovering over the gaping hole that's Tim's stomach. His other moves to Tim's back, trying to...to prop him up. To make it easier to breathe, he hopes.]

I could...I could cauterize some of this. If you have a knife.

[If that would even help. There's so much blood and so much of it is external that maybe it wouldn't make any difference. Maybe it would just cause him more pain.]

[postictal]

[There's a lot he should say to that - would, if he had the wherewithal to form words that didn't scrape up against his vocal cords, because you never really realize how much of your body is constantly working, how many organs are grinding up against each other to perform literally every function that keeps you alive, until half of them are on the verge are spilling right on out of you. It's at that point that even speaking becomes a trial in and of itself, when the thick walls of meat and muscle and skin have been stripped away and leave a seething morass of glistening pink.]

[Each breath has started to gurgle.]

C -

[That's the furthest he gets.]

[Shouto is panicking, sitting here in a state of shock and dismay, and if Tim just up and dies here, that'd be a...a hell of a thing to inflict upon a kid who, by all accounts, has been through more than enough.]

[The sound that breaks past the cut edge of his gritted teeth is hoarse and agonized when he braces his good hand into the grass, flexes his undamaged palm, and viciously presses it into the ground, levering himself onto his side so he can cough out a spray of clotted blood and stomach acid instead of suffocating on it.]

[The good is that he's no longer being smothered by his own bodily fluids.]

[The bad news is that the rest of him has, predictably, started to tumble out of the gaping opening in his middle.]

[byhalves]

[Trying to calm down was - it was almost successful. He had been so close to pushing aside all of the fear and panic to focus. He had been so close to clear his head, to focus on helping.

And then things go from bad to worse. Tim's guts are barely recognizable but undeniable - there's nothing else that would be falling out of him, even though everything is so mangled and destroyed they barely look like organs.

And it's all his fault.

If he hadn't tried to help, hadn't tried to help Tim move, he wouldn't be spilling out like this. He wouldn't be in even more pain.

(He would be dying anyways, but if Shouto hadn't tried to help would he be suffering as much as he is now?)

He reaches out, stomach churning at the feeling of - well. The feeling of Tim's stomach. Putting everything back where they belong won't help, won't change anything, but he doesn't know what else to do.]

[postictal]

[There's no easy goddamn way to articulate anything of what he wants to relay. Things like: Relax. I'm not dying. If I were dying, I'd already be dead. Things like: I've probably had worse. Don't worry about it. Things like: It's not your fault.]

[Or the other thing: It's not on you to fix this.]

[But there's a hand trying to...oh god, trying to force the reddened lips of uncurled flesh back into the cracked-open eggshell of his abdomen, and the sound he makes is strangled and unavoidable, his ruined hand snapping up to clamp onto Shouto's shoulder, pinioning it with a split-second arched-finger injection of pure, agonized adrenaline - the sound of someone screaming, compressed down into one spasmodic motion.]

'S - okay. [And his grip slides away, much like his stare, once boiling molten with the searing fucking white-cloud phosphorous of static pain that is his side, now falling rapidly out of focus.]

[Words, half-mumbled, but nonetheless sincere:]

'M not dying.

[onegreeneye]

[Ginko is already trying to check around as urgently as he can - though it's a little difficult when he keeps finding himself a few feet back from where he just was, only to jump forward again a moment later, which... he hates. A lot.

It's really nothing, though, compared to when he sees Tim. He swears under his breath and stumbles to kneel next to him, and-- for a moment his gaze lands on the state of Tim's abdomen, and his stomach lurches with a sympathetic pain, just a memory of an old death.

He makes himself look to his face, instead, his ears pinned back as he forces his expression to remain as neutral as it possibly can. It absolutely looks like Tim is dying - like he should be dead already. But, if he's not dead, and with all that's happening-- either way, it's going to take Ginko a bit to get his bearings here.] Tim - can you hear me?

[postictal]

[It's getting hard to breathe. There's fluid in his lungs, the slow buildup of the sluice of his liquefied organs bleeding into the beds of his airways, and every so often he manages to spit up a clot of it so that he doesn't choke, but it's getting harder each time. He's tried sitting up, but his midsection is too terrifyingly fragile for him to chance it, considering how much it felt like everything was about to come spilling out of him and onto the fucking grass.]

[His awareness isn't really at its greatest right now. There's words humming in the distance, and he can't tell if he should be gauging these as real or as something his own fucking brain dreamed up of its own accord.]

[His head lolls to one side as he squints at the intrusion. Pale hair. Greenish protrusions. Horns. A mean-looking underbite.]

[Another hot slurry of red slips out from between parted lips.]

You, uh...you real, Ginko?

[onegreeneye]

Yeah, I'm... I'm real. [He drops his knapsack on the ground next to him and pulls it open. For a moment, his hand stalls, then jerks back to his side; he swears under his breath, and manages to actually reach in a moment later to get to digging around for what he needs.

His first impulse is to try and clean the injuries and stitch them up, but this is... a lot. Frankly, he's not sure how Tim is even alive right now - but, as long as he is, might as well try to help.

Ginko pulls the jug of water from his bag and turns to Tim again, gritting his teeth.] What happened?

[He's guessing it has something to do with the whole falling island thing, but. Just to be sure.]

[postictal]

[Well, that was a pretty fucking useless query, wasn't it? Hallucinations never admit to their own nature. They don't so much as acknowledge the fact that their existence is, in general, pretty improbable. But then, most things here are. Floating islands, snake-fish people, water that sends you to an alternate world that requires an Orphic ritual to draw you back out again - all about as strange as something he'd see in a flare of static.]

[Problem is that Ginko keeps...skipping. Like a tape getting rewound. He flickers choppily, like a roaring flame, glitching forward and back.]

[That kinda implies he might not all be there. But then - Tim would laugh, if he had the sense of humor for it - Tim isn't really all there either, huh? Not by a fucking long-shot.]

Thought someone m-might need h... [The words gum behind his teeth. Or maybe that's the admixture of bodily fluids that are struggling to work their way up his throat. Yeah, actually, he thinks it might be that. He retches a stew of blood and bile, stained white with rot, wishing he could muster the requisite energy to wipe the rest of it from his chin and cheek before it tries into a sour-smelling mask.]

[He should be dead.]

[He should get up.]

[He would, really, but he suspects that whatever's holding him together would cease to, if he tried.]

Headed ov...over, [he works out, the words rasping. With the amount of...things that keep leaking out of him, one way or another, the waves of vertigo that keep tearing away what little equilibrium he has, the sheen of cold sweat that's chilling his arms, he has to wonder if he'll die of dehydration first. That'd be a hell of a way to go out when he looks like this. Truly, it would.]

[onegreeneye]

[That rotten stench does have an upside: It keeps the thick scent of blood permeating the air from making Ginko hungry. Which... honestly, he really hates the fact that it needs to.

As it is, though, he can focus on actually helping, however much he can. And refraining from making any comments about how Tim probably needs more help than most at the moment.] Well, now I need you to hold still. I'm going to try to wash some of this blood away, see if I can... can stitch you up.

[It sounds pretty pointless, even as he says it. Like trying to tape a crumbling wall together. But he can't just not try. So he tilts the jug over to splash water over Tim's whole... situation, as gently as he can.]

[postictal]

[Fuck.]

[So someone's gonna try to help him, and that's...that's fair, they've got a lotta people here who try to help everyone else, often to their own detriment, they've got a lotta well-intentioned do-gooders here, and he can't even complain because for once this works out in his benefit.]

'M not dying.

[If he were, he's confident he'd be dead by now. Fortunately, his...state renders him happily oblivious to the fact that Ginko's carnivorous instincts have begun to rear their head. It renders him oblivious to most things besides the fucking molten cauldron of complete and utter agony that has been made of his arm and abdomen.]

1/2 hey thanks I hate this; perma-cw for gore in this thread I guess!

[achievementhunter]

[They were, perhaps, a little angry at Tim. In a similar manner that they were angry with Lup; a brief, noxious bubble of fury that popped soon after forming. As complex as their emotions have been in the wake of their fight with Frisk, it still includes... a small piece of-- gratitude, that they had been stopped. That the worst Frisk had to bear, as Chara was ushered away, was a split lip and an equal sense of unsatisfied frustration and resentment.

Lup had assisted them in coming to terms with it. They could only assume that Tim had been there for Frisk in the exact same way.

There wasn't... an intention to avoid him. No intention to let him stew in assumptions and radio silence, even when they simply had no wish to-- hear. About their Partner. How they were doing. If they were happier, now that Chara was gone.

Chara hadn't been avoiding him. They hadn't.

But they also hadn't thought that the next time they'd see him, he'd be in such a state.]

T-

[achievementhunter]

[For all they've-- nothing compares, no matter how quickly they race through their memories. They've never seen injuries like this; never seen someone attempting to hold their insides inside, never seen a chunk of flesh so large that the bone stands out in stark contrast to the tattered flesh that remains around it.

The worst part is the lack of blood. The lack of indication of how or why and nothing they can slow or stop, just the injuries and the shuttered, dazed agony of his expression.

And the idiot is still trying to walk.]

Tim. Tim. [Each call of his name is more urgent than the first, Chara rushing towards him until their knees hit the ground and they hover uncertainly close- because they hurt at the best of times and this is not that, stomach in knots. Trying to figure out how they can help.]

Stop, stop. Don't move. I- we'll call someone. A healer. They'll fix this. [Someone who knows how to fix people, will fix this. They have to.

They have to.]

[postictal]

[It feels like it should be worse than it is - the white-static roar of his nerves snowing out, the break and ease of every receptor being shocked into numbness until that, too, learns to fade. It comes and goes in waves. He's entered some kind of radius. The islands overhead fuck with people, and he got too close when things were going south, and now he's - ]

[Now his outsides match his insides.]

[And there's someone calling his name.]

[Isn't...can't be them. They were gone. They couldn't deal, and no one in the house could deal, so they went, and that was - fine, and he'd even learned to live with the knot furled tight over his heart that he didn't realize would continue to tighten and build and tighten without the visual confirmation that they really were and would be, physically, okay. But with eyes like those, is there any doubt?]

[The muscle and skin has been stripped from his arm as cleanly as though it were cut away with a hot knife. The hollow in the center of him has pureed his guts, but he's still breathing, so he has to assume that nothing vital has been broken permanently.]

[They sound worried.]

[Shifting his good arm sends spasms of clenching muscle down to the pit of him, but he can still let it fall across the center of him, like that might cover it up, shield the worst of it.]

You're okay?

[Relatively speaking. They don't look very okay, or sound very okay.]

[Panic is a terrifying beast when it's imprinted on features that school themselves into a constant state of calm and control. He's seen it before - but not directed at him.]

[Must've really fucked this up.]

[Can he do anything without them, or are they doomed to forever guard him against himself? Don't they have anything better to do?]

[achievementhunter]

[Are they okay? Are they okay? A titter of laughter, frantic and bordering on hysterical. There's a wild urge to ask him where he gets off, asking about them right now-- stifled, because they already know-]

Can you at least attempt to focus upon yourself, for once?

[Selfishly-- selfless idiot. They'd already be attempting to contact someone on their Stone, if not for how every option that immediately comes to mind- Wade would carry him carefully, Sans could just give them a shortcut, Asgore might be capable of healing this- aren't here anymore.

Bandages won't cover intestines. Not even stopping to hesitate, Chara pulls their shirt up over their head, ignoring the sun on their shoulders and the usual sense of vulnerability that accompanies sitting in the open with nothing but a singlet and winding bandages to hide them. A fresh roll of white bandages are quickly unraveled, folded out over the garment; it's the only thing they can do to keep his- his wound clean.]

Unless there's someone else you'd prefer, I'm going to ask Muffet to tend to you. If monster food can heal burns and broken bones, then... [They're trying very hard to sound confident.] Then it can fix this. Just-

Keep still.

[postictal]

'S the islet. It...

[What're they doing? They're gonna get - he knows they've been coated in worse, been shrouded in a gray patina of dust and soaked black with offal, but for some reason, the fact that they're bothering with this at all, with trying to mend him when all he's managed to do is end up broken open like a split gourd thanks to his own stupidity and lack of foresight - it itches at him. They're yanking off their shirt, trying to find some part of him to plug up. He's going to ruin it, that soft green-and-yellow cloth, with the leaking discharge that won't stop.]

...does this. Did this. Won't kill me.

[He's confident, at least, that if it were going to kill him, it would have by now. The human body is only so resilient; it may be able to withstand much, far too much, but when it's been gaped open like this, that's going to rub you out real fucking quick.]

So d-don't - [Don't what? Worry? Bit of a hypocritical pronouncement, when he's done nothing but. Nothing but, and now they're the one picking up after him.]

[As always.]

[achievementhunter]

Don't be ridiculous. [They finish for him. Clean bandages wrapped about as much of their shirt as possible, Chara shuffles closer, swallowing hard against an additional spike of panic. What if they get him to lift his arm and immediately make things worse? What if their dirty clothes cause him to get an infection? What if he gets worse? What if he dies? What if he doesn't? What if-]

Even if this is a residual effect of the impact, there's plenty of creatures that would be happy to take advantage of your vulnerability. At the least I can ensure they don't have that chance whilst we wait- for a while longer.

[They're giving him five minutes to prove correct before they take further action, face reflecting the forced calm in their tone.]

Lift your arm, Tim.