lifeaftr | July Adventure: Where the Weeds are Now Growing Free

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July Adventure: Where the Weeds are Now Growing Free

NEW ISLAND: UMUI

Who: Everyone!
What: Umui appears, and a new adventure begins
When: July 10th and onward
Where: Umui
Warnings: Tag as you go!

'Cause the Dirt is Up to My Eyes
As of July 10th, the mana pools on Ensō and its islets will now allow for travel to the new island of Umui.

Travelers will arrive on a mana pool situated on the C1 square. The thick crops of flowers spring freely across the lush, grassy landscape, clustered in dense knots. The variety behind these growths seems profoundly limited: it is as though each flower has only sprouted around others of its kind, mingling solely at the edges. A large building looms in the corner of the region, a twisting, unfurling mass of piping and a half-crumbled metallic shine.

Whatever lays inside, or beyond the island's limits, is for you to discover for yourself.

Welcome to the new island of Umui! As the island is now accessible, feel free to begin preparations and explorations in this log, or create new ones of your own! For further information in regards to the island, or plotting, the following links may prove handy:

[ ♆ ] OOC info and introductory post
[ ♆ ] Optional future event sign-up
[ ♆ ] Umui on the Locations page
[ ♆ ] Search Requests page

LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

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"Lie about what? Dying? The rot, the disease? There is no lie to save you from death." He's upset enough to be breathing through his mouth--a holdover from days when he still couldn't so much as swallow his own spit for the disease in him, the decay that ate through everything and his inevitable decline.

But despite his panicked anger, his animosity and agitation, Foster is calmer talking about this than he was the prospect of entering the hospital itself.

"I am my disease. I am my disease, I am my disease... there is no lying about it! The dead don't get to leave."

I am my disease.

He's pills scraping the rims of bottles and dark parts of his brain sparking with lightning and the spasmodic wrench of muscles locking him into arched-spine agony, mouth gaping, limbs stuck out at odd angles as he seizes.

So join the fucking club.

It seems to be, paradoxically, calming him down. So he keeps going. He's good at that, isn't he?

"You lie," Tim says, a slow, grinding deliberation sticking to the roof of his mouth. "You tell them: I'm feeling better. You tell them: it's going away. You tell them: you've done it, you've cured me. And their job is to help you, so if you do it enough and at the right times? They're so desperate to believe it that they might start to convince themselves that you're right."

"Help me? Help me. Help me... help me, help me, help me...." He's rambling, repeating himself, stuck in a loop until it breaks, a memory of poisons and poisoned promises, and then there's laughter, sudden and loud and bizarre, both in timing and in tone.

"...no. No, there is no cure. You don't cure rotting meat, you dispose of it, throw it away and bury it where the smell won't attract vermin, the decay won't spread to other, good things. You can cut out the rot and it's still bad. It's still there, eating deeper, foul and befouling the wasted flesh."

The narrative Tim spins for Foster is one that he admires, respects even--a man who lies and shapes his reality to his convenience, who knows what power he possesses and uses it. The power to bend people's minds to his will. But it is a story of a privilege, in a way, a privilege of potential that arguably all people possess--all people being the key word.

But Foster never had potential. Not for anything but death. Born a loss and losing more and more as he grew... a contaminated bed in which only his disease would grow. And the more he grew, the more rot he grew.

This is a story he knows how to tell, though, a wasted lifetime of this story told to him and by him.

"It's not about finding a cure. There isn't one."

His hands work their way into his pockets, one hand closing around the cylinder of the bottle there. The closest he comes to a cure, and it isn't even really one, because if he stops, there's still that clench of the meat of his heart, the ache and press of muscles locking up and then the stillness that follows, the window into which something else can creep in and take root.

It's a shield. A safety net.

But nothing will ever make him less broken.

He stares at the hospital, at the familiar snake-coil of dread drawing tight in his gut, the painful pulse of trepidation metastasizing into something toxic, something bitter and fermented lemon and sticking to the roof of his mouth.

"It's about picking your best world and living it."

He is a liar.

Even if he can't understand everything Tim is saying, can't hear all the meaning for the words, there is a flavour of bullshit that he recognises.

"Is that what you do?" Foster returns, the same way one might throw a javelin. Sharp and savage.

"Or is that just what you usually tell the dying?"

He raises his eyebrows, seemingly nonplussed.

"What do you think?"

Are you going to decide that you know the tenor of Tim's thoughts, yet again? He wouldn't blame you; everyone else has and does, and continues to, when it suits them. It probably isn't wise to...to continue to debate this, to let the conversation carry on as it has.

He just -

Doesn't want to go in, really.

Foster stares at Tim for a long time, trying to figure out what that question is supposed to mean here.

It feels... it feels, again, like it always does. Like he said a lot, very clearly, over and over, but it somehow didn't communicate anything to Tim, like his words didn't deliver any meaning at all. They're both speaking a language made up of the same words, but every word of Tim's version has a different meaning from the ones he knows.

"I don't think anything," he replies at last. His inflection is flat, paired a dull stare and an oddly benign little smile. "I thought that would have been obvious by now."

"You think about hospitals," says Tim. "You think about yourself. You think about the way things die and how they rot or end or...whatever you wanna call it."

And that's just from the conversation they've just had, and the one in those weeks prior. But assuming he lacks a filter here - Tim is willing to bet that he is, even if he won't simply presume - those topics emerged with very little prompting from anyone else. No; it was his surroundings that provoked them.

Or maybe they just brought things to light.

He glances back out at the building, his fingers curling toward his palms. Not wanting to do this isn't an option. It's because he doesn't want to, he knows, that he has to.

"You don't have to go in. But I think I am."

Foster's response is a single styptic blink.

Tim's right, in fact: Foster has very little filter. None at all, most of the time. Everything he says is in response to some internal mechanism or catalyst--triggered, perhaps, by his surrounding environment, but with precious little to do with any living things in that environment.

There are exceptions: premeditated moments of very specific purpose, moved by forces and ideas greater than his alone. Or that's how he sees them, anyway. Whether Tim (or Chip for that matter) would agree is another issue.

Finally he replies, milder but still deadpan.

"Bring something back."

Or is that his idea of a joke?

"You've got your rock, don't you?" Tim digs his Farspeech Stone from his pocket. "I mean, it might help if there's a line back to someone outside, so you can...I dunno, report my traumatic death to the island or something."

He sounds decidedly unfazed by this possibility. This is probably not all that surprising.

"Just a thought." Which is to say, Tim's not going to push it. He's learned not to push things with most people.

Pushing Foster is one half of the secret to what passes as 'cooperation' with him.

Of course, the other half of getting Foster to cooperate is to agree with reality on his terms, and Tim may not be a big fan of what that entails.

Most people aren't.

In response, Foster turns and rummages in his knapsack, which is actually slung sideways around his human waist, so that it functions more like a saddle bag than a backpack. He pulls out an assortment of things (a folded length rectangle of red silk fabric, a toothbrush, an ocean-scoured rubber ducky) before producing the stone from somewhere near the bottom. Obviously he doesn't keep up with it much; he holds it up for Tim's benefit anyway.

Then:

"I won't rescue you."

Calmly, but impersonal and unsubtle like a cinderblock dropped on Tim's face from above.

As it stands, Tim is well-accustomed with having cinderblocks dropped on him. Namely, on his leg. He still has the scar from that incident: pulped muscle and meat and snapped bone and tissue, and waking up with his nerves in a symphony of agony and no memory whatsoever of that happening.

"I wasn't expecting you to," Tim says, wry. "You made that pretty clear. But if you wanna know what's happening in there without going inside yourself, this would be one way to do it."

See? It's a win-win. Foster gets to know what's happening without actually setting foot in the goddamn hospital of his own accord. Isn't it nice when there's only one party taking the risk?

The idea that Tim would keep him in the loop catches him totally unprepared. He stops and stares at Tim for a good two-beat pause, expression flat.

Then he bursts out laughing.

He had assumed that Tim would eventually take his (selfish, cowardly, presumptuous) refusal and go in alone, then shut him out of whatever he found inside--why wouldn't he, if he knows Foster to be the putrid, rotted garbage he is?

But of course he knows the answer. Tim refuses to acknowledge that truth. He believes Foster to possess not just life, perpetuating, but a compromisable reality, the mundane delusion of personhood, of something to be saved.

Usually Foster would oppose him instantly, because he has to--he has to stop people before the start, he's obligated, required on a moral and ideological level to correct these things before they get too far, or anywhere at all.

But it's actually funnier, right now, when he's quasi-braced on the ledge straddling hysteria and panic. So okay, Tim. He'll bite.

"...if you insist."

To which Tim says nothing, but merely shrugs and hitches his pack a little more securely around his shoulders. The spear is slid free from the loops binding it to the back so he can keep a steady grip on it with one hand, his stone caught in the closed fist of the other.

"I don't remember ever insisting, but sure." He did just point out that it's a practical notion, but then, certain people have always been content to pick and choose what he says, and take away their preferred meaning without bothering to clarify.

Oh, I'm a psychopath, snarls Jay in the beds of memory, tinged in copper, you really wanna call me a psychopath after all these videos -

Bristle up against it: the inexorable cold clench around his heart and the jacket he doesn't think about wearing because it isn't his even if Chara stained it with his blood because he lay there shivering and bleeding into the dirt and he just needs to focus and not be a fucking liability for once in his life not be a fucking mess because goddamn one of them has to be stable here and it's never him but it has to be him so he can just walk on in like he didn't burn the whole place down like a psychopath and breathe in the mouthfuls of ash while the building crumbled like he couldn't just do it now and spark the place alight and breathe -

They're already there. The walls. Dark, but not with ash. Old, but not with burn damage. There's the anticipatory maggot-crawl of trepidation in his guts, under his skin, in the sour taste of his own fear behind his teeth.

"If you'd rather I call someone else, it doesn't matter."

"Like who?"

Foster doesn't know who else Tim would call, but it doesn't really matter.

"Don't answer that." He's thinking. Or... what looks like thinking, anyway. He does actually look pensive, but the truth is he already knows what he wants, just not how to get there.

".... well. It's too late now." He throws the whole thing out just as quickly, and laughs.

"Forget I said anything! I'll be here while you're inside. Listening."

Maybe if Tim weren't so bent on marshaling himself to set foot in this place of his own accord, he might have taken a more predominant issue on it - on the flaws in the logic, the seeming leaps and gaps in how it's not too late, really, and assuming that it is seems rather arbitrary.

Too much of him is swallowing back the bitter taste of his own bile, his own visible reluctance to follow through. The entirety to which how much he knows he doesn't want to do this anchors him like lead, like roots, like quicksand on Chol, like some inexorable fucking drag of gravity pulling him toward of whatever this place possesses in lieu of a core.

"All right." The words are rough, soft, practically whispered; Telltale Heart's a hammer in his chest.

And so he doesn't look back, when he begins to walk.

Foster watches him go; he's a little surprised it came out like this, actually. He was half expecting--more than half expecting, really--Tim to declare that no, actually, never mind. That he knew who he was going to call, and Foster would turn and continue on his own, stepping carefully when he remembers to because ore, ambiguously defined in that way, suggests iron.

Instead, he's watching Tim walk towards the hospital, back stiff and will something less than iron... it's not a bad look on him, though it's also exactly what he's started to expect.

The instinct comes...easily. It's listening to Jay talk into a camera, murmuring words into the digital record that his frame of mind won't preserve, because when your brain accrues holes at unfathomable rates, it pays to have a backup plan. Remembers the camera he once had strapped to his chest - given over to Newt, and now gone with him. He might've been able to repair it.

It might've almost been worth it, for the memory of this. For the way it burns in his chest.

Grass and metal alike crackle underfoot. He keeps bracing himself; looking for burn damage where there isn't any.

Takes fifteen minutes to press himself against a wall and grind the heels of his palms into his closed eyes until fireworks pop up in flares of dappled white against them, and the taste of bile burns the back of his throat. Wipes his eyes. Wipes his mouth.

When he speaks into the rock, his voice is perfectly steady:

"Looks more like some kind...lab."

There is a long enough silence that Foster considers the possibility that Tim simply chose not to tell him--out of spite, perhaps, or a more calculated desire to conceal his intentions from Foster. Which would have been interesting. He has enough time to wander, skirting a wide shape around the perimetre of the hospital itself--looking at it and looking away once he feels too hot or too ill or anything at all, actually, detached as he is from it all.

Tim's voice is a surprise, and there is a few seconds' delay as his rotted brain turns the sounds into words, and then a few seconds more as he repeats it in his head until the words resolve a meaning. Lab.... laboratory. Laboratory?

Researching...

".... research hospital?"

"Most hospitals have...rooms and stuff. For pa - for patients." The word hitches, an awkward stutter in his throat that closes it before its termination. Gives him away, doesn't it? The way the world curls up like a thick black snake sitting in his guts, a coiling pressure squeezing tight around his ribs.

There's nothing here. No burn scarring chasing the walls. Just broken glass, and too many flowers.

"This just looks like wherever they did their research."

Oh it gives him away, all right. But where a more sensitive listener might have put two and two together by now, Foster assumes--well, he assumes Tim's upset is related to what he's seeing, his surroundings, but he does not connect it to Tim's earlier behaviour. After all, Tim had it all under control, didn't he?

You lie. You tell them you're all better. They cured you.

"What are you upset about?" Foster asks, and he feels saliva where there isn't any, drooling where he isn't and hasn't in over a month. "What do you see?"

"You didn't want to set foot in here," says Tim, the words low and intent and cut with a tremor he can't wholly swallow away. "Neither did I."

The difference being that he still did it, even if it was like an ironclad punch to the gut, crossing that threshold and there are too many walls and yet not enough, because half of the walls have decayed into nothing.

What do you see?

Impatient, isn't he? That makes it easier, it in a way; again, because he can pretend. It's just Jay, poking angrily for answers. It's just Jay, forcefully demanding he discard years' worth of mental backlog and repressed memories - bringing back old memories like it couldn't possibly have any effect on anybody else - because it isn't useful for you to be hijacked by your own fucking psychotic bullshit, Tim.

So get it together.

Choke down the lump in your throat.

"There's no one here. It's just...overgrown."

Foster has no response to that.

If Tim didn't want to enter, then he shouldn't have done so; he should have made his will clear and forced Foster to do what he most hated and feared. He should have, and could have, but did not.

Why?

Because that's Tim.

The fact that the building is empty is cold comfort. It makes sense, but it's no comfort at all, and Tim is being vague when vagary is least afforded him.

He has dreams, sometimes, of wandering hallways in empty hospitals, both afraid to be lost (he's late, late for an appointment, late for a test, late late too late it's always too late) and afraid to be found--

"...but what is it?"

"All of it." Remember the phantom instinct to sweep the place with a flashlight beam, cutting through the water damage and musty dark and the cratered floorboards of a caved-in school floor and he checks his footing, just to make sure - but there's nothing beneath. Nothing but grass and dirt and old, filthy tile.

"The walls, the floors. It's just - it looks like it's been abandoned for years."

Broken glass crunches underfoot. The treads on his shoes have been worn to almost absolute smoothness, and he slips on the ground as he moves toward a set of dilapidated shelves.

"Test tubes...I think there's some first aid kits." It helps him breathe out, just a little. "Not exactly hospital material."

Foster is conspicuously silent for over a minute. A lot of that silence is just him breathing, thinking, his claws in his hair and in his scalp, picking at the bracket of fungus over his eye.

"Ha ha!" He laughs breathlessly, knowing someone who would have been delighted by a find like that, once upon a time. "Hahaha...! Just keep going."

'Not exactly hospital material.'

Just close enough.

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postictal - 2018-07-23 05:42 (UTC) - Expand

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July Adventure: Where the Weeds are Now Growing Free

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CW: terminal illness good god

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cw: internalized ableism

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THIS IS THE ONLY TAG IN MY INBOX

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