"Have we met?" Wilson asks, incredulous at the nerve of the vaguely familiar man. Another Ocularum member, he thinks, but they haven't spoken before. The question's mostly rhetorical anyway, defensive against the cold sting of Nightmare Fuel in his fingertips and radio static at the edge of his hearing. Not what he expected on his way back from the library. Wilson brought an axe in case of monsters, a torch to hold back the darkness, but neither seems like the right tool to ward off a fellow Pumpkin Hollowite with an impertinent question.
He makes a juicy target, and a multifaceted one. The short, pale, bristly man with the curly spikes of hair is riddled with marks. Buried, Desolation, End, Flesh, Hunt, Eye, Slaughter, hints of Web and Lonely and Stranger and a frisson of Vast. The deepest is Dark, entwined with a Spiral tag-along; where Wilson comes from, the two are never far from each other, but Mr. Pitch is the one calling the shots. It's that well that Jon's drawing from now.
Wilson finds that he can't leave it there, can't stop at giving his nosy neighbor the brush-off and walking away. Or maybe he just doesn't want to. Doesn't he want to make sure this guy knows exactly what he's in for with that question, pile detail after gory detail onto him until Wilson's no longer the only one who wakes up frantic and drenched in sweat from thinking about it? If he told his entire story that way they'd both be here until sunrise, but he can at least pick out one of the worst parts and gift-wrap it.
"It had been one hundred and eight days since I'd seen the sun. I don't think that last world had a sun. It was covered in fireflies, I'd been catching those for light, but I was starting to run out." Wilson pauses, preparing an educational tangent. "The advantage of firefly-powered lighting is that it's hands-free and noncombustible. Mount it on your hat and you can fight, you can use tools, you don't have to worry about burning down an entire forest if you use too much of it or put it down in the wrong place. But fireflies barely breed in the Constant at the best of times. I had to get to the portal before I drove them locally extinct."
"It was covered in huge spiders, but that was fine, they distracted the clockwork automata that wanted to crush me and fry the pieces. Once the dust settled I patched myself up with some improvised spider-venom salve, loaded my most important items into the teleportation machine's baggage compartments—" —calling it the Teleportato or the Wooden Thing would undermine the effect he's going for, even if it has no other proper name that he's aware of— "—and let the shadow hands come up and grab me. No amount of experience could ever get me used to those things. On pure instinct I try to run away even if I wanted them there, but I can't get more than a step or two before they catch me by the arms and legs and then I'm up to my neck in pure darkness wrapped around me and it pulls me down through a hole in the threads of the world."
Beneath the Watcher's Eye (before word gets around about the statement-taking)
He makes a juicy target, and a multifaceted one. The short, pale, bristly man with the curly spikes of hair is riddled with marks. Buried, Desolation, End, Flesh, Hunt, Eye, Slaughter, hints of Web and Lonely and Stranger and a frisson of Vast. The deepest is Dark, entwined with a Spiral tag-along; where Wilson comes from, the two are never far from each other, but Mr. Pitch is the one calling the shots. It's that well that Jon's drawing from now.
Wilson finds that he can't leave it there, can't stop at giving his nosy neighbor the brush-off and walking away. Or maybe he just doesn't want to. Doesn't he want to make sure this guy knows exactly what he's in for with that question, pile detail after gory detail onto him until Wilson's no longer the only one who wakes up frantic and drenched in sweat from thinking about it? If he told his entire story that way they'd both be here until sunrise, but he can at least pick out one of the worst parts and gift-wrap it.
"It had been one hundred and eight days since I'd seen the sun. I don't think that last world had a sun. It was covered in fireflies, I'd been catching those for light, but I was starting to run out." Wilson pauses, preparing an educational tangent. "The advantage of firefly-powered lighting is that it's hands-free and noncombustible. Mount it on your hat and you can fight, you can use tools, you don't have to worry about burning down an entire forest if you use too much of it or put it down in the wrong place. But fireflies barely breed in the Constant at the best of times. I had to get to the portal before I drove them locally extinct."
"It was covered in huge spiders, but that was fine, they distracted the clockwork automata that wanted to crush me and fry the pieces. Once the dust settled I patched myself up with some improvised spider-venom salve, loaded my most important items into the teleportation machine's baggage compartments—" —calling it the Teleportato or the Wooden Thing would undermine the effect he's going for, even if it has no other proper name that he's aware of— "—and let the shadow hands come up and grab me. No amount of experience could ever get me used to those things. On pure instinct I try to run away even if I wanted them there, but I can't get more than a step or two before they catch me by the arms and legs and then I'm up to my neck in pure darkness wrapped around me and it pulls me down through a hole in the threads of the world."