⇨ A SONG IN THE SILENCE

[ringleaders]

Who: The Harbingers
When: Just after midnight, Day 13
Where: ????
What: The new Harbingers have an out of body experience.
Warnings: Ego death. Some generally upsetting content, most likely.

ONE WAY OUT↴ You don't fall unconscious so much as you find yourself completely slipping out of this reality, the meaning of everything you left behind becoming increasingly abstract and hard to hold on to. You're lost in a void, surrounded by whispers that fall just out of range of hearing, in the presence of something so vast that you feel crushed by its presence. On, in this case, lack of presence. Like they say: the abyss stares back. It isn't someone, it is an emptiness, and everything about you feels like it bleeds away in the face of it. A hole that has no bottom. Every attempt to pull yourself together makes this vertigo feel worse, until existence itself feels terrifying or reprehensible. How precisely this existential crisis manifests will depends on the individual, tailored to your own unfulfilled desires, disappointments, frustrations. You find yourself faced with all of the things about reality that fill you with despair and disgust, and while you can attempt to fight it with thoughts of the things you hold dear, it feels unrelenting. Eventually you will break under the weight of it. It's only then, when you find yourself desperate for any kind of escape, that you are finally given the opportunity. The void speaks to you without words, but instead with a simple understanding. It can give you what you need to take control of this despair, of this heartbreaking necessity. Of every lost soul in this world, you are the one that has been given the chance to be the one to end it, to take control in the universe's final days. You will be creation's judge and executioner - and having witnessed this evidence, you know what you must do. This can't go on. This can't be fixed. The only hope left is for the end, but it will be an end at your hand. For once, the power is yours. Only when you are willing to accept this gift will you awaken. You find yourself in your body again, your senses painfully acute, as if you've been reborn. Is this the first time you've truly lived? Every pain, every worry you had prior to this moment seems so small in comparison. The path ahead is clear and unburdened by complication. You are in a dark space, surrounding by the specters of creatures you can't quite make out, like things just barely forgotten. You find that you aren't alone, as others have awoken in the same space. In front of you, floating above your chest, you will find a black light, like a small inverted sun. You know it's a part of you, but that it wasn't like this before. Though fear and a distant sense of disquiet may linger, you can't bring yourself to distrust your new location, or the change in your Spark. You have reassurance, now. It will all be over soon.

Comments

[motivenotfound]

"I can't... they're plastic frames, I don't want to break them!" Maybe worrying about a specific pair of glasses before the world ends is frivolous by some standards, but this isn't Mari's first end of the world, and as long as she's alive, these glasses still matter.

"These are special, I can't just--oh, this is the worst thing that could have happened right now!"

There is actual anger and frustration in her voice, which is honestly sort of incredible given the context.

[fourthscribe]

It really is, but then again, this is the same woman that came to Tanyuu privately because she couldn't do her own pigtails in a mirror anymore. It's just Mari's way, and Tanyuu can respect that for what it is.

"We can find a way to fix them, I'm sure." Just as Tanyuu says that something...flickers? Or perhaps it's a pulse from within her Spark, something pulling her attention toward the power she now holds. Her fingers raise to brush against the black light, and she purses her lips. Just what was that?

[motivenotfound]

Fixed? Mari isn't so sure. But when she starts to say so, Tanyuu raises one hand, and she blinks--several eyes, though not all of them (she never blinks all of them, though), looking through the shadows at...

Well. She's not yet sure about that, either.

[fourthscribe]

"I think..." Tanyuu frowns, trying to remember what it felt like to grasp herself in that instant. She had understood so much, but it fell away just as soon as she'd held it. Frustrating, with as perfect a memory as she usually had.

But she's almost certain she can do something here.

"I might be able to do something." Curling her tail underneath her, Tanyuu focuses on her Spark and starts to metaphysically prod at it, trying to figure out just how it's meant to--

Quite suddenly a rather normal looking ink brush spins itself into existence, a few dried leaves bursting out from the remnants of the vines that created it from--no, not quite from nothing, but very close. Tanyuu catches it, her eyebrows shooting up in surprise.

[motivenotfound]

Mari frowns, watching Tanyuu struggle, but she doesn't object this time. As Tanyuu does... whatever it is Mari can't actually see her doing, she glances down at the bent glasses frames in her paws, pressing between a thumb and forefinger the junction between where the temple and the eyepiece come together, the place where some underlying wire or hinge has bent.

It's suddenly so clear to her, how pointless all of this is, how important it all is that she remember how pointless it is. The end of the world, you can't take it with you. But you still have to have something to get you there--an object, a memory, some kind of reminder of what you're doing. Otherwise--

She's only distracted for a couple of seconds, but when she looks up, Tanyuu is holding... a paintbrush?

"Uh," she says out loud.

[fourthscribe]

'Uh', indeed, Mari.

Tanyuu stares at the brush for a few more seconds, completely at a loss for what she's meant to do with this. She knows this must be a...conduit, of some sort, she can feel that, but how it works is another thing entirely.

But then again...this is part of her. And everything about her--her birth, her work, her life itself--has always led back to mushi. And her family's scrolls aside, there's one being she knows of that could fix those glasses with just an inkbrush.

"May I have your glasses for a moment?"

[motivenotfound]

"Uh," Mari says a second time, and clutches them a little tighter in her monstrous paw. No offence, Tanyuu, but she's super not seeing a connection between your paint brush and her glasses. At least not a helpful one.

So.... that's a no.

"I don't really want you to paint them."

God, she feels so exposed with them off. Not vulnerable, just... like she's missing something. It's like being caught without pants.

[fourthscribe]

"I'm not going to..." Tanyuu sighs and shakes her head. Well, if she can't do it directly, then maybe...?

Adjusting her grip on the brush, Tanyuu lifts her hand and concentrates. On the tip of the brush ink seems to ooze out of the fibers themselves, coating the tip in a black sheen, and she traces several careful movements in the air. As she does the brush seems to press against an invisible surface in the air, allowing a single character to be written: "繕"

The character remains there for half a second before the ink spirals into a myriad of character strings, reaching out to the glasses in Mari's paws and winding around them tightly--then dissipating without a trace, leaving the glasses repaired and in pristine condition.