#outsiderkin

I do not remember my name. Nor do I remember when my time was. But what I do know is that I am monsterkin.

I will have a water bottle with a sticker that says "The Outsider walks among us". I am the Outsider. How could I ever have resisted the urge to have such a constant inside joke with myself? I can look at others who read the sticker and laugh to myself because they don't know they're looking at the Outsider himself! They don't know it's more than just a thing from a video game. ~But I dooooo~

I loved the tired, wet rat man and now I am the tired, wet rat man. This probably makes sense to no one but me and is what happens when I end up awake at almost 6:30 in the morning because I couldn't sleep but you know what, I have not sent in any Outsider asks in a while (I think; I may have, I feel like I had some Outsider thoughts recently and at least debated sending them in, but if I did, it hasn't been enough).

Playing through The Knife of Dunwall really reminded me of a few things. Like how I almost start drooling when I hear a bone charm or rune singing (no I don't know why don't ask) or how the Overseers' music boxes make me bare my teeth, the sounds of magic and anti-magic are ingrained in me in a strange way. Even if it's just good sound design and not something primal in me for fictionkin reasons, I highly doubt humans are drooling over the strange, beautiful song of the Void, and it started the first time I heard it way back when I first picked up the first Dishonored game at the beginning of this year (shhhhhh I got a year of Xbox Gamepass as part of a Christmas gift last year).

I wish I'd thanked Billie and Daud when I'd had the chance. I was tired, though I don't think I even knew or accepted it until after I was with Corvo. I got my chance to, in many ways, retire. I missed the Void and I still do even in another life, I also appreciated being able to spend time with my dear Corvo. Maybe someday, I'll have the courage to try to find my canonmates, but until then, to any Billies and Dauds who freed the Outsiders of their canons, know you are appreciated by at least one of us. The others may not all feel the same, but I am grateful for what I had after, for the freedom that I was afforded. It wasn't the freedom of eternity and the Void, but it was its own kind of freedom. The freedom to live a better life than I would have if I hadn't been made into what I was, and if I hadn't been freed from it when I was.

I'm so tempted to try to find other Outsiders right now. But at the same time I am painfully awkward and shy and frankly my Outsider mental shifts are not easy to bring on (something I feel like would make interacting with others like me easier). That feeling is fragile, perhaps because some part of me was always just a scared boy, barely an adult, trying my best to be what I had no choice but to be. Maybe it was always fragile, and canon just never showed me when it wasn't holding up. But what if I'm the only one who feels like that?