lifeaftr | January Event: Fade to Black

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January Event: Fade to Black

JANUARY EVENT: FADE TO BLACK

Who: Anyone and everyone!
What: Your true self comes to roost
When: January 21st - 23rd; January 25th - 28th
Where: All over!
Warnings: Dark subjects such as violence and self-destruction are likely to come to the forefront - please mark your content accordingly!

Down in that Darkness

This log is primarily for the Shadow and Light portions of the event, for ease and convenience. Your Shadow can be either the Persona-inspired sort - a "brutal, bitterly honest recreation of a character's worst flaws, darkest fears, and deepest secrets" - or the edgier, more laughable variant. The Lights, on the other hand, will do their utmost to convince their real selves of their best qualities, no matter how little they want to hear them.

Remember that the Shadows will be present from January 21st to January 23rd, and the Lights will be present from January 25th to January 28th.

On January 25th, we will post a separate log for Rejection Rooms!

Some useful links, for reference:

[ ♆ ] OOC Event Post
[ ♆ ] Rejection Room Sign-Ups; remember to note your interest in these as soon as possible!
[ ♆ ] Deaths Page; death penalties have been reduced for the duration of this event, but still do let us know if your character dies regardless!

Event Timeline

[ ♆ ] January 20th: The monthly Storytelling occurs.
[ ♆ ] January 21st: Shadows of both initial variants appear.
[ ♆ ] January 23rd: Shadows of both initial variants disappear.
[ ♆ ] January 25th Lights and Rejection Rooms appear.
[ ♆ ] January 28th: Lights and Rejection Rooms dissipate. Those still trapped in their Rejection Rooms by the event's end will suffer a character death.

LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He gets a shrug in return.

"Just be careful about what you call it, and who hears you. I wouldn't call me the good side of anything." Ha ha.

There's a threat implicit in that, and he doesn't hide it. Tim has had enough experiences with Foster to know better.

Good or not, light or not, what Foster calls it is the lie. Not entirely without justification, no, but that too has consequences. Except that there is no version of Foster that doesn't prefer that to this. Which is funny, because there's just enough control freak in him to want to stop it anyway.

"Right. Sure. The real you doesn't like thinking that there's good to him at all, or whatever."

Tim can relate. He can relate, vaguely, in that he definitely doesn't want to meet the Light part of himself, doesn't want to think about what that might entail, doesn't entirely believe that this sort of thing could feasibly exist and even if it did can't entirely accept that it would be true.

A lie, because he is a liar.

"I'm not not real," 'Foster' replies in a cranky tone.

"You're gonna hate this, but you're a little like me, or him--I don't know what what I'm supposed to be doing about that, the me and him and me being him thing, it's getting confusing really fucking fast. But it's easy to object to me, by any definition of 'me.' If it's not my fault, then that means either it's someone else's fault, which is false, or it's no one's fault. Which is unfair."

He pauses, staring pensively over Tim's head for a second. "Blaming me is the easy way out."

This conversation is acquiring double meanings extremely fast. But 'Foster' fixes his gaze on Tim--if there is one thing Foster is, or thinks he is, or tries to be, it's honest, even when that means being extremely dishonest. But this Foster--is he Foster, really?--isn't caught in the layers of double logic that dictate the Foster Tim knows.

"Listen, if I can be frank, there's no way in hell I'm going to accept this. I've been here before. It was unfair, and unfair to inflict more unfairness. The best I can do is talk to people I've met, and maybe make it a little less painful to be around me."

He runs his claws into his hair pensively, restlessly, running the curved tips over his scalp until they hit the plastic butterfly clip. He doesn't pull them out, though, he just leaves them there, looking down at Tim.

"You can bow out, though. That's... uh. Hahaha. Well, that's fair. The Foster van Denend you know is not likeable. Very much on purpose, but also very much accidentally. He'd rather you avoid him."

He's fumbling his phraseology, and he's too tired to know what to do about it, trying to follow the train of logic - and some of it lines up better, far better, than the Foster he knows day to day seems to be able to verbalize. He thinks.

"I figured that out. I mean, the...him acting the way he does. Making himself as unlikable as possible, 'cause it's this whole thing he expects." Controlling how he expects people to feel about him, right out of the gate. Probably because he assumes there's nothing about him that's inherently likable at all. Well, fine. Apparently Tim can relate.

If he has the opportunity to get some answers - but he's not Jay. He's not Jay, and he's never been like Jay. He isn't motivated by curiosity. It's simple logistics, and practicality, and knowing that if he's going to be stuck on an island with this jerk, he might as well figure out how to not set him off in the meantime.

Too bad he doesn't seem to be capable of anything else.

"I don't even really dislike him. I just don't really get half of what he says, but I figure - you know, whatever." Whatever. Tim's too stupid to figure it out. Tim's too slow to pick up the pieces. Tim's not socially conscious enough, not capable enough, not anything enough, to be any good at assembling meaning out of what feels like word salad. "Nothing new there."

"Nothing new for you or for--for him, I guess, so that makes me the third party." And this Foster laughs, though not unpleasantly.

"But you've been in hospitals. The kind of hospitals crazy people go to, people who don't make sense, and sometimes don't leave. You're the kind of person who got to leave--because you can make sense, you can make them believe you."

He knows you have, because you told him as much, or told his original as much, and Foster retained those words, even if he can't hang onto them when he needs them.

"What you don't understand is just.... a symptom. It's the part where you get to leave. And.... he's being as clear as possible, but there's no cure for that clarity. It's frustrating for everyone." His tone is inappropriately casual, considering. But that's the benefit of this detachment, the inability to suffer for others, or from others. There are no stakes, at least not for him.

Still, he's not sure whether to explain what anything means, what Foster says to people. He knows it won't make sense--Foster knows that, is intrinsically aware on a microcosmic level of the exclusivity of his truth. What he knows, the reality he feels, is for him alone, that's why he has to act on it. That's the imperative of it. And changing the words would dilute the meaning, and you're better off not knowing, maybe. Then again, Taako--the other Taako--knew, and that.... helped. Made things tolerable, for everyone. Well. Almost everyone. But making decisions for him, for his greater self, is..... not actually what he's supposed to be doing.

"You're mostly right, though. Actually. That's why he hates, I hate, being told you don't dislike him. Or half the reason. If he doesn't control you, you control him. And if you won't exercise that control... it's an insult or a ploy, it's you holding it over him. Makes sense if you think about it. Maybe."

Maybe not.

Well, he's right there. Hospitals - sure. He grew up in one. Fucking crazy, is what he is, all twisted up and wadded into something for the use of something else, and he's not thinking about that right now. He's trying not to think about the thing that he's always trying not to think about, because it's better to focus on the conversation at hand.

He's not sure if it counts as getting to leave when he ended up burning down the entire place anyway, but it's the principle of the thing that's what they're getting at, he thinks.

"He can't fathom why anyone wouldn't." It's pathological on a level that's frankly impressive, or would be, if Tim had the time or incentive to inspect it at any length. And it's also - kind of patently untrue. This version of him, whoever he is, whatever he represents, is, frankly, kind of disconcerting in his casual amiability, because it flies in the face of everything that he suspects the complete Foster works constantly to project.

"I don't...look, maybe you get it. I don't know." He scratches at the side of his face, one side of his mouth twisting. "I'm not...that. I'm not the thing that controls anyone."

Or rather, he is, he can be, he has the potential to be, but he'd really, earnestly rather not.

He's been a puppet his entire life. The last thing he ever wants to do is turn that on anyone else.

All twisted up and wadded into something for the use of something else. Tim's worst nightmare is Foster's ultimate dream, his greatest hope. So maybe it's no surprise that Tim is following this train of logic at all, let alone disembarking at the right stations. But it's probably worrisome.

Foster ('Foster') nods slowly as Tim processes all of that, and comes up with an answer that is, again, correct.

Then he has to step in and push Tim back on the train--er, metaphorically speaking.

"Oh, but you are." Not-Entirely-Foster manages to wear a look both tired and bright-eyed for a second, though it quickly commutes to something that's either apologetic or condescending. It might just be that the latter is the only one usually seen on his face.

"Not just you! Everyone is. Connected by a massive, infinite network of controls. Not--" he stops, quickly putting up his paws as though to deflect whatever Tim's about to say to that.

"Not in the way you're thinking. There is no great and puppet master, no master of grand design--or at least, any grand designs are far above any individual person, beyond individual awareness. It all goes back to the source anyway. This is about individual pressures, expectations and feelings and so on." He turns one paw pads-up, letting the other arm drop.

"The means of your control over others is also the means by which you are controlled by others."

The source. That's what Alex called him. You're the source. The word shoots a lightning jag of reflexive nausea coursing down to his guts, and he swallows it back.

Maybe it's the dissonance. Maybe it's just...it feels shitty as hell to think, hey, maybe in some other version of reality, in some other world, in some other universe, he probably would have looked at this guy who has a complicated history with the shit in his own head and felt like they could have gotten along.

That's what's weird about it: Tim likes him.

It's just - fucked. Fucked that he only finds this guy likable when it's all the best parts of him diluted into existence, but clearly these are things that all exist in Foster anyway, if he weren't so bent on ensuring that no one ever got to see them. Maybe, if he tried harder, or if he didn't keep fucking things up with every conversation with him, if he wasn't the exact wrong person to talk to Foster at any given moment, it feels like, if he made a solid attempt in a way that wasn't - whatever the hell he managed accomplishing the last two times they talked -

He's losing focus.

"So is every interaction just...a transaction of control?" Unless he's completely off base. He probably is, right? (He's not smart, he's slow and he's stupid and he couldn't even finish college he couldn't stop any of it from happening so just fucking listen for once in your life god - )

"Mmmmm." Foster's distilled essence of tolerable personality traits
crosses his arms (which turns them into sort of a furry hydra of claws and fungi in front of his chest) and confirms Tim's extrapolation by adding a smile. "See, you get it."

Privately, he's a little surprised Tim gets it, if only because Tim was so quick to get defensive in talking with Foster, even (or especially) when it came to the answers to questions Tim himself had asked. But maybe that's why he gets it.

"Mostly, anyway, but that's the general idea. It's invisible... effortless, most of the time. Or near enough. It's invisible because it's effortless. But you can feel it, right? That's how most people do it. By feeling. Which is... how they waste their potential to be more, do more."

A pause. Then, ruefully:

"That's why conversations with you go in circles. You won't be controlled but you back away from taking control yourself, which is... hard to solve."

It's taboo, he knows, to even acknowledge that interaction between people, let alone take advantage of it or manipulate it knowingly. But what else is he supposed to do? He can't not be aware of it. It's everywhere, all the time, pressing in on him and every second that elapses, every sentence between him and someone else, every change in tone has to be counted and then recounted--

".... and I've noticed that every conversation with you is really serious? But that might not be your fault, hey."

"I don't really have a sense of humor." He hunches his shoulders slightly. It's a familiar criticism, but he's also pretty sure that this isn't what Foster's referring to. It's a lie, anyway - he can crack a deadpan one-liner like all the rest of them. They've no shortage of sarcastic zingers here. That's where his expertise ends, of course.

"I feel like I should do something, I guess. Like, he's clearly not having a good time here, and I just want to understand, and I don't think I'm...smart enough, quick enough, anything."

The foundation of it is something that Tim himself is only peripherally aware of, and not likely to admit even under duress - that he's spent years, now, building himself into someone he can stand, and doesn't want to relinquish all of that just because Foster finds it suspicious that he doesn't see him as any more or less than the average anybody.

"I keep messing it up. Maybe it's only worse because I actually bother to ask this shit in the first place."

There are situations where all the modern vernacular isn't quite enough, and you end up needing the big old-timey guns, like 'gobsmacked.'

"Wh--wow. Hahaha... wow! Damn." Give him a minute, Tim, not even this Foster was entirely prepared for 'I feel like I should do something.' It's a good kind of flabbergasted, but of all the people Foster's antagonised, Tim is only just above Héctor the skeleton in terms of people he was expecting were sick of his shit already.

But yeah, Tim did ask. A lot. Which--come to think of it--

"Wait--okay, hang on, is this 'you say you want to help and I discourage you and you get serious and then I give you the goods,' or is this 'you say you want to help and I discourage you and you go, oh thank god?' Either one is fine, but I gotta know which one we're doing."

"I don't...know, really."

That's the bottom line. He really doesn't know if he should be - continuing on this path, but Foster certainly isn't going anywhere, so it would make the most sense to try and make it work, right? He doesn't necessarily have to get it, does he?

Maybe he's just incapable of it.

"I guess the former. I mean, logistically, it's just...if we're going to be stuck here together, at least I can try and not fuck up as badly as I have been."

He stops, a faint frown beetling his brow, and for half a second, it feels like something forbidden. He schooled himself out of formless apologies a while ago, because most of the time, they didn't do anything but make both parties feel fucking miserable.

"Is it...pointless, or...dumb, or anything if I say that I'm sorry I can't do any of it right?"

There's a brief moment of silence as 'Foster' gives him a pained look--it's not really clear who he's pained for here, maybe all of them.

"Dude," he says in a voice reminiscent of someone Tim has never met, but who left a large impact on Foster--for the better, for once in his existence. Her name was Amethyst.

Then he sits down. 'Sits.' Technically it's lying down with the equine part of his body and leaving the humanoid part upright, but he achieves this by folding hire forelegs up carefully and then dropping his hind end like a sack of cement.

"Let me put it this way. The things you're 'not doing right,' you're not doing right because... like, you're human. Foster doesn't... mmmm, he doesn't like people. He doesn't relate to them, and he doesn't 'get' their feelings."

The avatar of Foster's potential (and/or extant) 'goodness' pauses pensively, then gestures with a paw.

"Like, for example, you said he doesn't seem to be having a good time here, and.... god. Not even talking about where he was before now, but I mean, is anyone here having a good time? Just asking. But really... being miserable is... his natural state, and he has to be as miserable as possible. He's chasing highs and lows all the time, trying to get somewhere. You want to avoid pain? That's wrong, in his book. That's you avoiding your potential to be something more."

Which is perhaps not unrelated to Foster's need to be something more than just a dying body. Delusions of grandeur are delusions of grandeur, but the 'crazy' part isn't always that disconnected from the person's values.

"To him, people are counterintuitive. So he doesn't feel the same way, or any way most of the time, so he can't predict the way anyone feels about anything. And when he realises you're having some kind of emotion in his direction... he hates that. He doesn't get it, he can't control it, and... yeah, he thinks of it as you trying to control him. It's like.... you want him to change for your comfort and benefit, but you don't want anything to do with him, and that.... it'd be one thing if you had a goal in mind, a reason to give a fuck. But if all you want is for his existence to stop making you uncomfortable, then all you're gonna do is piss him off."

At this point he stops, rubbing his face with his paws, looking just as pained as he did at the beginning. But then he laughs, just briefly.

"So.... I guess it's only dumb and pointless if you apologise to his face."

"He's projecting a whole hell of a lot," Tim mutters, which was pretty obvious from the get-go. "I mean, he's not...really doing anything to hurt anybody, is the thing. Maybe if he was, I'd be a little more inclined to tell him to fuck off. I don't really care how he acts, as long as he doesn't go about deliberately hurting anybody."

Mostly he just acts - odd. Behaves in ways that probably make perfect sense by his own logic, but when it comes to asking for explanation of said logic, that's when Tim just gets lost.

"I mean, is there any way to win with that? If my reason to give a fuck is 'because it makes practical sense to,' is that a good enough reason? Like, I get if it's not - you can't just fucking change everything on a dime, I know that. It's not like I don't know that. It's when he acts like he's got me all figured out, like he has any fucking clue what I deal with, that's just..." He opens a hand in the absence of having any coherent way to finish that sentence. It's useful, in a way. It helps to be underestimated, and wrongly judged. But god if it doesn't get under his skin.

Kinda wishes he could have Foster's confidence in the same. Assuming it is confidence.

Tim hunches his shoulders, jamming his hands in his pockets so his fingers curl protectively around the little orange bottle of capsules. It's closed off, but the slope of his shoulders is one of utter misery.

"I don't want to have to control anybody."

"Okay, y'know what?" There's a tension to this Foster's jaw, a kind of... disconnecting from Tim's misery, and he eyes Tim with something resembling... it's not clear, really. Pity? Contempt? Sympathy? He takes care not to touch Tim in any way, even a 'reassuring' one.

"No wonder you two can't fucking communicate. No offence, I mean. But if you don't want to engage him on his terms, you have to set your own. And if you don't, then... yeah, it's gonna be Like That. It doesn't have to be. If you framed it as something that offended you, offended your sensibilities, offended you on the terms of the way things should be... that would be enough for him. It's working for Kravitz. Which is... ironic." A wry note.

Tim's right, though... the fact that Foster isn't hurting anyone is both his only redeeming quality right now, and also sort of the problem. He's aware of it. He's also aware of what a no-win situation it is. Foster is just... too much, everything about him is too much and even Foster is aware there's something wrong with him, something wrong with himself, and something wrong with his head.

Which is why he's... like that to begin with.

"I won't tell you he won't hurt people, deliberately or otherwise, if that's what he feels compelled to. But like... the thing you're doing right now where you're... like, leaking everywhere, all these emotions and feelings, you're just... spilling over and it's actually kind of uncomfortable, especially once you start wallowing in them. Foster can't stand the expectation that he has to make other people happier, or make them feel better, unless you own it, and unless you make him the problem. Which you won't do, so you're like two blindfolded toddlers, swinging bats at a pinata."

He digs his claws into the dirt, pulls up a pawful of roots.

"....mmmm. Well. I don't know if it's any consolation, but he's... not projecting, exactly. That's way too personal. Too abstract. So it's more like... it doesn't matter. What you're going through, who you are or what you do. What you deal with. None of it matters."

Edited (Whoo hoolie!) 2019-02-13 08:13 (UTC)

None of it matters. Maybe not. Is that why he thinks he's got a handle on Tim, on what he believes, on what he wants? From the second they met - you want a painless choice - he was making a lot of assumptions about the quality of Tim's character. Maybe out of self-preservation. Maybe as a way of defending himself from the possibility that he could be wrong.

But hey. Maybe he is right.

And here Tim was so set on trying to get a handle on it. On not being so fucking prone to the self-pity that Chara could not stand, that nearly besieged them both when their souls spilled over into each other. Plainly, he's not doing a good enough job there, and maybe that's his problem. No, scratch that - it's always been his problem. He's a fucking crybaby. That's always been the case.

"It's not like he's the problem," Tim mutters. "It's not even his fault he just happens to be there when it happens. It's just when he starts assuming that he's got some kind of handle on what I deal with - if none of it matters, he can't just be content with not understanding it? He's gotta act like he has any idea? Like he knows anything about what I want?"

That's where things go off the rails. It's not like Tim wants, or thinks that Foster wants, him to divulge his entire life's story to prove some kind of point that might be linear with his understanding of the world.

"Kravitz, huh?" He...would not have called that one. He shoots the Light a quizzical look, brows knitted down. "How'd that happen?"

The Light of Foster laughs--and given a chance to laugh about something, the tension he had been carrying dissolves somewhat. The less obvious factor, however, is that Tim himself has temporarily stopped being such a knot of acute misery.

"Oh boy. Well. Kravitz is... ha, I think the word I'm looking for is bossy." Another laugh. "He has some privileges, of course, being an avatar of death. And, uh. Foster knew Taako, or a Taako. Not this one, that's a different issue, but it was still Taako. So he knew the name and the.... mmmm. Let's call it his vocation." He laughs again, this time a little less light in tone.

This of course omits the part where Foster had also seen Kravitz, brainwashed, during a ball at a fae's court that was actually a move in a quasi-political power struggle.

But it's not entirely relevant to this story.

"Even if he weren't, though, Kravitz is up front about what he expects--not just of Foster, but in general. Foster respects that. He really... relies on others to tell him what he's adhering to, in terms of reality. You've probably noticed he talks a lot about what's real."

He flicks a bovine ear, pauses to pare the roots in his paws apart some more. He's not really doing anything except disentangling them, cleaning clumps of dirt out and brushing them to the ground. They're starting to look more like disembodied veins than plant matter.

"That's... a whole thing. And there's a connection there, by the way. To your problem with him. Which is exactly the problem." He stops, looks up at Tim again. "Everything is connected."

There's a longer pause before he repeats it, more frustrated this time.

"All of it is connected."

Knowing the wrong versions of different people - well, that's at least a trial he can relate to. He's fucked things up in that domain on more than one occasion, and there's no guarantee that he won't continue to do so. It's one of those uphill battles that just doesn't have a sort of common thread. It's not a problem that comes with a manual, or even a general cultural understanding.

So Kravitz is bossy. So he sets out concrete rules that he expects other people to follow, and is deliberate in their application. Well, Foster clearly has a set of rules that he follows, but the problem is he doesn't seem to know how to explain them to everyone else, and gets frustrated when no one can just psychically divine them straight from his head.

Connected. Another hurdle for them both to clear, and not one Tim understands, either. Not like he understands much.

"Connected how?"

Tim has, unknowingly, struck the same vein of truth that Taako and Ginko did back at the Carnival--different Taako, different Ginko, but the same truth. Foster's rules are impossible for him to explain but intolerable for others to violate. There's a reason he's so desperate to know what rules others operate by.

"Foster 'knows' what you're about because he 'knows' what everyone is about. Some of it is guided by... let's call it his awareness, although I think the standard treatment for that kind of awareness is a high dose of antipsychotics. Which probably wouldn't have helped before that 'cure' to his disease was forced onto him." Should he have said that? Does it even matter? "But mostly it's... patterns. He's seen the patterns in people and their priorities, you see a lot of them when you're twelve years old and dying."

A pause. "That's the thing, once you're told you won't see the end of puberty, they stop telling you to be patient until they fix you and start telling you how good and strong you are and how much richer everyone's lives were because of knowing you. Suddenly, all the problems that make you up stop being problems. You're a wonderful person and a future organ donor and when you die, all these other people's problems will go away. Not only the problem of you, but other problems you didn't even cause!"

At this point he throws up his paws, simultaneously tossing the roots he's unravelled into the air like some kind of ridiculous, all-natural confetti. They fall somewhat pathetically and land on the ground in an anticlimax.

This is an unsolvable puzzle, as far as he can tell. There's really no clear passage unless you remove what holds everything together. It's exhausting and exasperating, and he can't possibly get Foster to accept his own existence (as good within him) (for relatively fair reasons), but that's going to escalate things to a new, even more difficult point that Foster can't fight on his own, so it seems inevitable that Foster will just die and come back and nothing will change. Great!

Oh.

Tim's eyes close slowly as he lets realization slap up against the contours of his mind like waves of seafoam against Ensō's coast.

The problem is he knows that fatalistic mindset, to an extent. It's not a perfect analogue; he was never told he was dying, was never pushed to that kind of limit. He was treated with kid gloves, and he had no one to translate whatever the hell was happening to him to him in a way that a child could understand. He only parsed individual phrases through eavesdropping and careful listening - phrases like delusions and violent episodes, things that no adult would ever tell a little kid.

"He wouldn't be interested in medicating, would he?" says Tim quietly, after a time, the words a self-defeated croak that are the closest he gets to humor. It's gallows humor, it's a pointless aside, and one hand sweeps up over his face.

"Someone forced a cure on him?"

"Ha ha." It's almost the kind of flattened laughter Foster himself is known for, though it's less coarse and abrupt. There are honestly too many jokes to choose from here--all similarly dark.

"Sure, right after he finds the nearest doctor and fellates them out of gratitude for everything they've done for him." He twists and waves both sets of claws in the general direction of his massive equine backside. "Do you know how to dose this? No? Me neither."

He shakes himself out, like a full body chill, and finishes with a flick of his tail.

"Mmmm. But the cure.... yeah. He actually assisted in its creation, by providing materials." He lets that hang for a moment, lets Tim infer what that means, or doesn't mean, before continuing in a too-casual tone that belies how fucked up this is getting. "He grasped the general consequences, but he's so easily led. You can convince him of anything if you just apply some pressure. And he couldn't stop returning to that fear over and over, not when the guy was so good at encouraging him to think he wanted it." That's something Foster still can't quit, the need to inflict whatever horrors on himself he possibly can, because he thinks he needs it, like a craving. The worse it makes him feel, the greater the urge, the better it is to him.

That compulsion especially is easy to take advantage of.

"And it almost worked. He can swallow now. No more choking. No more drooling." The drooling was pretty copious, but only when he got excited, but Foster was always looking for excitement. "And he doesn't get lost. Physically or otherwise. Not... the way he used to." Which is all positive. "So it fixed something, but obviously it didn't fix him." A thin smile, which fades into a grim line.

"He's worse, if anything. He believes he was poisoned. Maybe he's right." Foster's Light chews his lower lip pensively, clawtips touching his chin.

"And... haha, uh. You have eyes and appear to use them, so you've probably noticed by now. The fungus?" He covers his own shelf of dark purple fungus with his claws demonstratively. "It actually grows anywhere there's been injury. The big patch of it on his right arm here?" He clasps the paw over his forearm, topside. A long row of delicate blue caps stick up between his digits. "Chip put that knife through there. Clean between the bones! You could feel it scraping them on the way back out and everything." He lets go again, gets back on topic. "This was a needle."

....

"Sorry, no joke about eyes and needles this time. Not that it's too serious for that, I just didn't expect anyone to listen to me talk this much. Are you okay?"

Edited 2019-02-23 13:39 (UTC)

The mushrooms stood out, of course, but no more or less than anything else that stood out. Between the taur body, the bear arms, the cow ears...the mushrooms just seemed like a reasonable addition to the menagerie Foster carries around in his warped anatomy. Maybe he'd require something on par with a horse tranquilizer; he's not a doctor, thank god, so he can't really say. The fact that the toadstools are the product of injury makes about as much sense as anything else here does.

"I'm fine," says Tim, which is a familiar lie. He's not really fine, but this isn't the most unpleasant story he's ever been told. It's more coherent information than he would have gotten otherwise. There's not much he knows how to...work with, for lack of a better term, but it lends some much needed insight into the fucked up goings-on of whatever world Foster was a part of before this one.

"Why'd this...guy do that, anyway? Was he just curious what would happen, or did he actually wanna help?"

Either way, it was a pretty fucked up kind of help to go forcing on anyone, whether they wanted it or not.

"Ha ha!" This is Foster's laugh. The hollow, flat, abrupt laugh that doesn't seem to reflect how funny something actually is at all. It's followed by an equally Foster rebuttal, which goes basically like this:

"No." He says it in a cool tone, which is more just the effect of coming down off that laugh than any reflection on Tim's question.

"If he'd sincerely wanted to help, he never would have gotten that far. People who want to help don't generally restrain people who beg and scream to do it anyway. Some do, but this was equal parts ego and opportunity. Foster had something he was so certain he could fix, because what self-proclaimed genius doesn't believe he can fix what all the king's horses and men couldn't. And he wasn't hiding that, or the fact that Foster had something he wanted to make use of after."

He offers a more relaxed smile, at least.

"Foster actually popped one of his nuts like a grape under a hoof in the escape after, so if you ever meet a spectacled guy with one ball who looks like he irons his underpants every morning, you know what to expect."

Not that Herbert actually does a great job of hiding it.

"Not to belabour the point, but you say 'I'm fine' and I'm not actually sure you are. If only because you're actually listening to all this. You weren't in a great way when we started this convo. And I'm just sort of.... you ever hear of infodumping? You've been asking for that and I don't fully get it. But." A pause, because organising his thoughts still takes some effort. And, well...

"Well. I'm not gonna ask what your angle is, you've told me that already. And I believe you, because.... you're still fucking here and that's a pretty big commitment to an ulterior motive otherwise. You've earned whatever mysterious purposes you're hypothetically hiding. But I'm talking a lot and I... do have to face him again sooner or later."

That's a grim truth for him. It's gonna go over like a lead balloon and he knows it.

"Tim. I can't make him behave himself but I can probably do something. It's about the closest to my actual purpose here that I can fill. What do you need?"

Within reason or otherwise. He can't solve Tim's problems but he can try to keep Foster out of them.

Operative word being 'try.'

So he was a doctor. Or something so close enough to being a doctor that he might as well have been literally that. Someone with an ego so monstrous he wanted to do something to prove that he could. Not that Tim makes a habit of studying the balls of anyone he meets, or anyone at all. That's not really his area. Or his priority.

He wraps his arms around his chest in a gesture that's as unconscious as it is instinctively guarding, an effort to close himself down. Developed early on, very early on, when there was no one around to venture any sort of physical comfort, so he'd have to go and do it himself, hugging himself tighter than anyone else would.

He's still not entirely aware that he does it at all.

Wonders if this is how Jay felt, getting answers from behind the safety of a camera lens, listening to Tim talk for minutes on end, disclosing a past he never wanted to disclose. Wonders if he felt helpless, or if he just...didn't want to interrupt the narrative with comfort, because that might signal that he wanted Tim to stop telling him things.

Credit where credit's due: he's pretty sure that Foster is being more truthful and more helpful in this exposition than Tim himself ever was to Jay. Which isn't saying much.

"I don't know what I need," he says, tiredly. "But if you need to meet him, I won't stop you. I don't think I'd help at all, but if you wanted it..."

He's willing to put his life and time at stake for someone who he knows doesn't like him, for someone who doesn't trust him (deservedly), and someone who he's never had a civil conversation with since he got here, and - sure. Why not. Death is temporary. He can't find anyone he's looking for, which means they're probably all hiding somewhere.

The only real drawback there is that Chara's gonna be pissed if he dies again.

Oh, that's a good sign. Foster's Light wears an increasingly worried look, like a dog or horse with the whites of its eyes showing more and more as some new object gets closer, although in this case he's just watching Tim try to 'cope' with... this. He's starting to realise, very belatedly, that he probably should have stopped talking a while ago. Empathy isn't his strong suit.

And then Tim offers to accompany him.

"Wow. No." The reply is swift and cuts Tim off entirely. "One, you seem more ready for a nap than more of this bullshit. You were about to crawl out of your skin like fifteen minutes ago? Or did you forget? I literally talked you down. Me. Haha. And. Uh. Two... I don't know if other people like that, if it's like... a positive personality trait, but your readiness to just sacrifice whatever mental or physical well-being for any possible reason is making me pretty uncomfortable in light of having you told you what I did." He bites his lower lip with those razor-sharp prehistoric teeth, though he stops short of drawing blood. Or much of it.

He presses his furry paws into his face, claws disappearing briefly into his hairline, clawtips pressing into his scalp. He drags then down his face until they catch on the fungus over his left eye, at which point he pulls them away sharply.

"--ow. Fuck." He takes a deep breath.

"....I know I'm not real," he spreads his paws, "But fucken try not to make me regret this. I'll throw in a please if that works on you. No shade, but you seem like a please and thank you kind of guy."

If not for his own sake, then because, one day, Foster might catch onto how much Tim now knows, and how much he still tries.

January Event: Fade to Black

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CW medical everything, ableism

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I feel so FUCKING BAD for Tim, help me (edit: now I feel worse LMAO)

IT'S FINE!!!!

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CW medical abuse, nsfw joke, needles

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CW testicular trauma mention

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Probably wrap, unless Tim has any last words? (Ha)

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