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 )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He said he'd keep an eye on him, and he is, nominally, doing that. It's just safer to not go it alone, and the longer he watches him, the more accurate a notion he'll get as to how Foster...operates, for lack of a better term.

When they materialize from one mana pool to the next, Tim can't resist the mental parallel between Ziziphus and this new fucked-up place. He presumes it's fucked-up, because most of the places they visit end up being fucked-up in some regard or another, particularly where Tim involves himself.

He rolls a shoulder to reposition his pack, heavy on his shoulders, staring at the dark bulk of the building.

Decides he doesn't like the look of it. Decides he doesn't care. What he's liked and hasn't liked doesn't historically have a lot of bearing on what needs doing.

"All right," he mutters. "I guess there's only one way to go here."

Foster is operating under a similar assumption about the islands, although for vastly different reasons. Or maybe not so different; after all, the difference between new islands and new worlds or universes is a matter of scale, not of function.

Anyway, most things are fundamentally broken, or at least by their very nature imperfect. Imperfections, flaws, are what lead to rupture, contamination, and other calamity... that's simply how it is.

But when he sees the building--the looming, bevined, classically architectural corpse of something vast and institutional, he balks. Immediately. It looks like so many hospitals--not modern ones, but the kind that were built decades ago, the kind with a long history and a morgue built into the basement. The kind where a research hospital might be set up, where the respectability of the institution offsets the dubiousness of new science or magic. He feels ill just looking at it.

"No." Absolutely not.

"No?" He doesn't like buildings - or he doesn't like something that this building implies. Tim half-turns to inspect the building more closely, raking its exterior with a furtive look.

It looks the way Alabama looks: something empty, long-abandoned, overgrown.

"What's wrong with it?" It's an even question, as neutral as one might pose in regards to the weather.

"That is a hospital. Do you have those where you're from?" There is absolutely no compromise in the declaration, and nothing neutral about the way he says it. He includes the followup question with something approaching contempt (or disgust?) that Tim even had to ask.

He hates it as much as he fears it and he is not taking one step closer to it.

"Yes," says Tim, slowly, heavily. He turns to look back at it, a heavy weight clenching like an ironclad fist around his chest. "I do."

He knows hospitals a little too intimately. It looks..."I think it could pass as a school," says someone in the walkways of his memory, light and simple, dismissing the endless hallways and obvious burn damage that peeled the paint away in the corners.

"Some of them even look like this."

Foster looks at Tim, but his claws are burying already in his hairline, physically uncontrollable agitation a symptom of his disease.

And, in this particular case, dis-ease.

"I don't... like them. And I can't--I'm not going in there," Foster spits, showing his teeth in an unusually animal-like way: a way that looks like aggression, but is simply a grimace of fear. His claws sink into his scalp, blunted tips pressing painfully into old bruises, he turns away and circles back in restlessness and certainty.

He hasn't been in a hospital, a real hospital and not one in his dreams, since... not since he was a teenager, or even before, he can't remember exactly and doesn't want to. Just looking at it is as bad as remembering, because there was never anything specific that happened there that made him this way. It's the memory of what didn't happen, what could have, what was meant to, what was promised him--

Fuck.

"I'll die--I'll die there." And he laughs.

Half a dozen responses to that stir on his tongue and die in the same instant. He elects to say nothing at all, at first. He'll die in there. Tim has died in one, ostensibly, theoretically, supposedly. Felt the weight of his heart go sluggish and slow as the medication started numbing his nerves, one by one, as a palmful of pills did their slow, painful, gut-clenching work.

Remember it: the jamming of paint underneath fingernails. The tearing of the back of your throat. The opening of knuckles on broken glass.

Promptly stop remembering. Remembering is never his problem. Forgetting is what's always intended to kill him.

"Lotta people die in hospitals," he says, finally. "I'm guessing it's pretty empty, but it might not be."

Which is to say, there's an itch beneath Tim's skin and it's not entirely to do with the fact that it's a hospital. It's also to do with the fact that there could be something inside said hospital, and it's like a screw dragged over blackboard in the back of his mind.

"A lot of people die in hospitals," Foster repeats. "A lot of people die in hospitals." He looks at Tim, and the whites of his eyes are particularly visible, even though his eyes are narrowed in frustration and pain.

Yes, pain. Pain is vibrant, invigorating, enlivening. Digging his claws into his scalp--tangling in his hair, deepening the bruises, breaking the skin--is real, it's a feeling he can live in. A feeling to die for.

"A lot of people die... a lot of people die in hospitals. Like me."

'Like him.'

Like him. Like him.

Edited 2018-07-12 04:40 (UTC)

The man is clearly on the verge of some kind of breakdown, and the most Tim can do is...is look away, and set his jaw, and a muscle in his temple jumps several times in quick succession and he exhales and rolls his shoulders back slightly and just -

Breathe out, breathe out, breathe out.

"You don't have to go in," he says, relatively even. "So...don't."

One could say the choice - the control to make said choice - is his.

"Can't promise out here is any safer."

Foster shakes his head, pulling his claws out of his hair long enough to reveal blood on them, his densely kinked and coiled hair falling into his face where it pulled free of the single clip that generally struggles to contain it.

He looks slightly dazed, actually. Like being told he doesn't have to go in is an outcome he wasn't expecting.

"What? Safety... I don't, I don't care about safety." He turns around, pacing a small, newly agitated circle. "But I'm not going in."

That is still not up for compromise.

A soft hissing intake of breath, and Tim shifts to face Foster at a more direct angle - slightly. He walks on too many fucking eggshells with too many people for someone whose experience with actually talking to people is limited and, worse, not very fucking good.

There's crimson gleaming at the tips of Foster's claws.

He can start with something simple.

"Okay," says Tim. "Why?"

What?

If he was dazed before, he's bewildered now. Didn't he... didn't he just explain that? He thought he did. He... maybe? It doesn't matter. Tim will use it against him, he's sure.

People shy away from any painful reality--they avoid it with smiles, avert their eyes at grief, euphemise death. Tim is bold to ask at all.

But he has no power over Foster.

"Why.... I just said, I don't... I don't like hospitals. Doctors. Medicine. The sick enter and leave any number of ways. Sick, dying, dead... the dying enter and leave but one. And a hospital is a lie you tell them to lead them inside."

Twelve years. Twelve years of lies. Of getting better. Of futures promised, cures held out, magical, medical. Before the truth, and a nest made of platitudinous assurances.

If ever Foster could truly manage to feel hate for anything, not just think it but feel it, it was in the same breath as this fear, a fear that smelled of car rides and sterility, bare metal and scuffed, neutral-toned tiles.

But unlike the intensity of hate in delusion, this hate was trapped, pinned underneath the surface layer, because the fear was stronger.

'There will be no pain.'

He won't chalk this behavior up to something purely capricious - just because he fails to recognize any perceptible trigger doesn't mean it isn't there, after all. It just means he doesn't know what it is yet.

Though he's willing to bet that hospitals might be up there.

Admitting that he would rather burn this entire building down than enter it willingly would establish some common ground, perhaps, but it'd also suggest something about himself that he's not sure he wants Foster to know, exactly.

He hasn't exactly been straightforwardly trustworthy.

"So you lie your way out again," he says, head to one side. That's how he did it; learning and parsing what was being said to him, said about, what violent episodes would mean and how to break one of the art class pencil sharpeners and squirrel the blade away under his pillow, how to nod and say yes, I feel much better today in such a way that comes across as convincing even if you don't feel anything at all, really.

"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?

July Adventure: Where the Weeds are Now Growing Free

tim and foster go to white castle | closed

There's definitely a vegetarian joke here

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cw: suicide mention

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CW: self harm (unintentional)

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Overcompensates for last two tags with this nonsense

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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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