KILL | DIE | LEARN | REPEAT

➳ silent protagonist courtesy of: those guys who cut his head off so now he doesn’t have a mouth

➳ possible medical ethics abomination experiment creature just trying to cope with everything

➳ been living in survival roguelike hell

➳ Kinda rude, morbid, and nosy but not that bad a dude, actually?

[msg]

Moderation? Don’t know her. Go big or go home.  Where I came from, there was a juju candy, basically a powerful lollipop shaped talisman, my friends used and coerced me into using with them. I was seemingly immune to the psychological effects of its magic. Physically, I looked like the others though. Why? I couldn’t say. But I was headless myself for a few minutes approximately five months earlier, so perhaps it is something that can be learned by another such individual.

So the hypothesis standing is: candy is evil. 

Or, things to watch out for look like candy a concerning amount of the time. 

...

Can't say as I argue with you. This stuff isn't even the weirdest shit I've ever come across, and I'm still leery of it. Of course, I am more interested in whether I am essentially psychologically immune to this as well. So personal debate rages on as to whether I'm going to try it or not.

Fascinating, another individual of science. 

Well, you know how it is, take chaotic self-sacrificial decisions in moderation.

From- Bobby

Y’know, I really hate to be a spoilsport, people need holidays and all, but it’s genuinely unsettling how many people went whole hog for a body-and-potentially-mind-altering-substance the Stars handed out with no context.

Raine was enjoying this little experiment of people-watching while in the form of a jack o’lantern. The city certainly felt more lively and friendly with the crowd of ghouls, mummies, and vampires greeting each other and laughing about their new appearances. For a few minutes, the professor had sat on a cement wall staring at a couple having an argument about whether their ghost costumes would look better with pirate hats or demon horns. Raine had wanted to weigh in, but instead she just had a mental conversation where she concluded that a mummy ghost would be interesting to see. Just as she had that thought, she was scooped up into the arms of a stranger.

Uh oh.

Should I say something? Well… Let’s just see where this goes. I still have some exploring to do anyway. But…odd… are those flames coming out of this person’s head? What are they being for the festival? Some kind of monster from this land, perhaps?

It wasn’t until they were halfway up a wall when Raine decided she needed to make her presence known. She attempted to do this in a soothing way, quiet and not too sudden, as she wasn’t sure what would happen to her if she were to get hurt in this form.

“I don’t mean to startle you, but would you please make sure not to drop me? We’re quite high and I don’t want to become pumpkin pie on the sidewalk. Oh, and, pray tell, where are we going?”

It’s a small saving grace for both of them that his startle reflex has been trained- under pain of a lot of spike pits- towards ‘freeze’. So, no one gets dropped, and while he does pitch backward for a precarious moment he puts his other foot back on the wall and braces to catch his breath. 

Where are we going, the pumpkin says-

-(he’s having a conversation with a pumpkin. This is probably the point at which someone who felt like they had control of their life before this would concede to losing it)

-and that reminds him he can’t stay on walls forever like he used to. A gesture- hold that thought- and he scoots to a flat landing, where he can sit, and set down his...

…acquaintance.

Rapid typing ensues.

Is this a hilarious holiday joke that I’m not getting right now?

Genuine question. I’m new to this.

To answer your question, I was getting out of here, but that’s complicated since you’re not the prop I was carrying a second ago.

— black jack jumped at the sound, as he’d been waiting intently just a minute before the response. he really didn’t have time to worry about whatever was going on with the other guy’s… well, everything anymore. at least not right now.

“ hm. sounds like a battering ram. ” he said, looking back at the prisoner’s flaming not-head.  “ …don’t worry about it. the door’s closed, anyway. for now. nobody could see in. ”

he’s clearly not very good at being reassuring; especially when he doesn’t quite believe it himself. he blinked in the light of the phone screen.

“ not that i know of. it certainly didn’t look like it from the outside. ” black jack shook his head.  “ an attic, perhaps? that would make sense. ”

at least, he was pretty sure it would make sense.  “ now. do you think there are more than one of whatever that is? ”

Disembodied noises. Somehow despite all the turmoil and bloodshed of the Island he had only, in his memory, met one ghost, and that guy had been happy to just lecture him about rift security systems and then peace out.

His eye keeps moving, trying to face any place that it’s coming from. He doesn’t like this. Doesn’t like anything about this. The ability to track your enemy’s position is a basic necessity.

A rapping sound at one of the windows- he spins to face it and bolts, slamming the casing up and swiping a hand at...

…Nothing but empty air. 

The thundering overhead repeats itself. He grips the window frame to absorb the pressure of a shudder and his flames are edging more towards red than pink, flickering and sparking with agitation.

On a good day, Klug probably wouldn’t be hanging around with what looks like some sort of zombie with a fireball for a head. However, this is, decidedly, not a good day.

“…Are there banshees here?” Klug’s heard a lot of stories from Arle Nadja about the various monsters she’d faced in her home world, and banshees had been among them. Granted, those banshees had apparently been fine once you got to know them, but now he’s thinking about everything he’s heard of that may or may not have lived in the Forest of Nahe back home and the even more awful horrible things that might live in this world, especially with the Halloween shenanigans…

“Or…maybe it’s just somebody a bit too invested in Halloween?” A nervous chuckle, as he ducks further behind the zombie (ironically, another creature Arle had mentioned seeing once). “R-regardless, we should probably just get going, shouldn’t we? I-I mean, really, you’re right, surely it’s not our problem…”

Another scream and if he had teeth he’d grit them. 

Potentially anything is in this city.

A pale shape at the rear of the alley, crouched to nearly bipedal. His first impression is it has VERY long claws.

It lifts its head, sways back and forth, looks towards them and-

No, he’s decided, he’s very uninterested in finding out if it does anything other than scream with that mouth full of teeth that occupies most of its face.

Glasses kid is promptly hiked up over his shoulder, and he bails in the opposite direction, eye narrowing further at the fact that from sound alone, the thing starts bounding after them-!

He’s not sure if it’s reassuring nobody in this city can apparently let something sit or if the return of chaos to his schedule is a relief preventing him from going crazy.

Did he touch the candies? Ha ha, no. Not after the island affair. He is not going to be voluntarily participating in anything the Stars indirectly ask of or suggest to him. No thank you, we have not earned that sort of trust.

It does mean that he’s been scrambling place to place a bit more nervously than usual, waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

(ha, shoes. As in, he is finally in fact wearing a pair. alright, they’re boots, but whatever.)

He’s also been hauling around jack-o-lantern which he’s forgotten at least twice, returning to the area and picking it up with a bit of an agitated motion before making a getaway to the roofs with the spider rune.

Prisoner is... not gonna be touching the candies for the moment.

He is going to be wearing a (non-empowered) costume of a Headless Horseman (with, no horse really) but carrying a jack-o-lantern prop that he may plop over his lack of a head or sling under his arm.

Could be a totally innocent power outage. It is storming pretty badly.

Bad enough that wandering into a seemingly forsaken house had seemed like a great idea.

His eye travels toward the blinking lightbulb, back to the door-

funny, did either of them close it? It’d been open, hadn’t it?

-back to Mike.

Say, in the odds that it isn’t, I don’t suppose you come from a world where you can telepathically obliterate ghosts and it just hasn’t come up before now?

Because that scratching sound probably isn’t rats. 

If I’d slammed the door it would be

That message doesn’t get sent, doesn’t even get half-typed before a thundering sound- like something very large hit the door from the other side. He flinches- the lights go out.

Lovely.

Fantastic.

He offers a wan flashlight of his phone, turned towards the other person.

You know, it’s times like these I really resent being a light source.

Something like the sound of pounding feet crawls across the ceiling above them.

His attention had tracked in that direction before the question was raised, and he doesn’t take his lone eye off it to type.

I think it mostly sounds like not our problem. 

He can think of a few things it might be, things it might mean. When the sound repeats, high-pitched and sharp enough to feel like it’s digging its way into ears he’s missing, it’s at least evidence that it’s probably not distress. Screaming people seldom scream twice in the exact same way.

Especially not while moving closer.

His hand catches the kid’s shoulder and pushes- roughly, but, hopefully enough of a shove to at least get the kid behind him.

😰when my muse is stressed, how do they act out?

The easiest summary is Prisoner is a time bomb about stress. 

Basically, by default he’s used to operating on fairly high levels of it for a long time. If anything, he has a kind of anxiety that rears its head when situations aren’t stressful enough- a kind of internal it’s too quiet. Nothing is ever this good for him for this long. This is a big part of how semi-randomly in the city he’ll suddenly swing towards paranoid. 

He has really unhealthy levels of learned helplessness about the idea that hardship is unavoidable so for the most part he tends to just grab at distractions, so the subtle signs of stress in him are things like impulsive behavior, suddenly shifting topics, randomly picking up a new interest. The thing is, this entire time he’ll be in adamant ‘it’s fine I’m fine’ mode. Doesn’t help that he has a cluster of phobias and trauma that he is absolutely not addressing, see that time he just hung out in a hospital for several days with Zero despite being low-key freaked out the entire time.

Basically he will stay superficially calm as long as he possibly can until he explodes and the nicest possible way he explodes is if he’s identified someone who he sees as completely responsible where he just sinks everything into hunting them down.