ph_logs | [OPEN] While we're on the subject, could we change the subject now?

[OPEN] While we're on the subject, could we change the subject now?

Who: Jonathan Sims and YOU!
What: Open prompts for the end of summer!
When: August
Where: Around Marrow Isle
Warning(s): Cursed objects, potential descriptions of gore (More warnings pending)

1. Looking towards the future, we were begging for the past

With a sound of effort, Jon drops the last of the tools he'd been carrying too many of, letting out a winded wheeze as he tries to collect himself.

It's been quite an undertaking, collecting ins and odds from Calloway's Curios before they fell into hands, not knowing what they are or what they're capable of doing. He's not certain of the particular qualities of a few of these things, but he's seen enough things and read about even more to know when something is simply here to cause problems.

Sprucing up the unused shed behind his cliff-side home is proving to be even more of an undertaking, considering he isn't especially gifted at carpentry, but sometimes you've just got to make due.

He's so engrossed in his work that he doesn't notice the presence of anyone outside of Grimmly the Dusknoir, the large Pokemon lingering, watching with what can only be described as single-eyed skepticism. The red eye follows Jon as he moves to collect the scattered metal rods of the lock-system he'd purchased, once again trying to carry all too many things at once.

To say the least, he's far too distracted to notice anybody coming up the short path to his home - especially as, with his heavy carry load, he staggers, stumbles, and topples back, dropping the rods in a spectacularly-noisy explosion of parts around his person.

Grimmly bellows with strange, wavering, ghostly laughter, the mouth on his stomach throwing his upper half backwards, with no regard for the daggers Jon glares his way.

"Oh, laugh it up, you shit, very funny. You could be helping with this, you know, you've got two perfectly good hands!"

2. Well, we knew we had the good things

Amid all the bustle he's been dealing with recently, Jon manages to find time to write and hang a flyer on the bulletin board.

Seeking assistance from the technically inclined for a repair project.

I am in possession of three tape recorders, and need someone who could potentially lend me a hand with fixing the wiring within the machines, as well as potentially making their power sources able to plug into a wall outlet. The tapes are in pristine condition, and I will only need assistance with at least one recorder, though all three being repaired would be preferred. Offering a reward of 200B for assistance.

If interested, please contact me via sending stone or telephone. Thank you.

-Jonathan Sims

With a reward like that, it's clear he's pretty serious about getting these fixed. He'll answer just about any call about them - be it someone who's ready to help him fix these, someone with questions about them, or friends with concerns about the devices. (It may be easier said than done convincing him not to fix them, if one even could, though.)

3. But those never seemed to last (Closed to Neil and Martin)

After meeting Martin on the beach, Jon was in more of a hurry than he'd care to admit to get to Neil and confirm dinner plans. Everything's smoothly in motion, and as ridiculous as it feels, Jon's more excited about this than he can rightly recall having been in a fair bit.

He's never been an incredible chef, but he's gotten a handle on home cooking since arriving in town, and throws together a plan quickly enough to have everything just about ready. It only takes a short trip out to the markets to have the supplies for everything: lemon chicken (the citrus specifically chosen for the occasion), mashed potatoes, and supplies for a light salad, hopefully making for something of an exceptional welcome-to-town dinner.

The sun is only just dipping towards the horizon when he's wrapping up, and judging by a quick glance to the clock on the wall when a knock at the door rings through the house, Martin's at his most punctual that Jon's ever seen him. Maybe he's as excited about this as Jon is? (He surely hopes so.)

Leaning as close to the kitchen's doorframe as he can while not straying too far, keen to finish wrapping things up as quickly as possible, Jon doesn't hesitate to call out towards the front of the house.

"Come in!"

4. Oh, please just last (Wildcard)
Want this guy somewhere, sometime? Shoot me a PM here or on Discord to plot, or just go wild and drop something!

[EDITED EXTRA PROMPT]

5. Beneath the Watcher's Eye

The more time passes, the more Jon feels his resolve beginning to slip.

At first, it's simply accidental, compelling people for statements when they're not looking to share. It sustains him, he feels terrible about it, and there's another sore spot to try to navigate around on this cursed island. The more time that passes, however, the few statements that are offered by the call of his bulletin-board posts simply don't provide like they used to. More often, the fatigue hangs heavy on his bones, even without the work to wear him down. Thinking grows difficult, and simple ordeals feel as though they've gained ten new steps overnight.

He tries to fight it off; he really, truly does. The itch sinks deeper into his bones with each passing day, though - no amount of reading old statements or reading books on things that had happened in town scratch it.

There comes a point with all itches that you've simply got no choice but to scratch it.

He adds his flyer to the bulletin board once more, crisp and neat. Sending stone calls are acceptable, events that have happened within Pumpkin Hollow are valid pieces of information to offer, and anything of any magnitude will be heard. The net is as wide as he can possibly cast it.

Waiting for the net to fill is an impossible task, however. Despite himself, he begins to hunt.

His search doesn't have the physicality or brute force of a Hunter seeking prey - but in energy and approach, they're shockingly alike. He's patient, calculated, and mindful. He stays out late during the nights of shore leave from the Mipha's Grace,, finding new haunts to insert himself into. Restaurants, taverns, bustling public events, and coffee shops are his most frequent targets; if he finds the perfect candidate outside of one of those spaces wearing marks that are heavy enough, though, he won't be picky.

Once he finds scars adequate enough, he sinks into action. The approach is simple and polite: if there's too many people around, he'll ask to step aside. If it's a quiet space, he'll move to stand near, to sit across from, to linger by whoever he's got his eyes on.

And then, he'll speak. The supernaturally inclined feel static begin to build in their ears, and even those who aren't get a sensation of their own, unnatural and tingly, something akin a sleeping limb beginning to wake up.

"You have seen something great and terrible, something beyond comprehension. Tell me your story."

[Extra notes: this is my general prompt for Jon taking statements! You can play this any way you want to. If you want their CR to stay positive, your character can show up at his house and deliver their statement normally, talk afterwards, whole nine yards. For anyone who'd prefer negative CR, though, or want to have Jon take a statement but have characters who would keep that to themselves, put him wherever your character might be and have him compel it out of them!

Additionally, closed to close CR: characters are welcome to bust him compelling statements out of someone! He is doing it fully intentionally this time, and while he'll generally see himself out while emotions run high from the person he took it from, he can be caught by someone who knows what's happening. He won't target people he's friends or generally friendly with intentionally, but it can happen accidentally. Hit me with anything! \o/ ]

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What a sad, strange irony it is, to have no idea that the other considers themselves so much less than human. There's a new, suffocating weight to the quiet after Jon finishes speaking--- though maybe that's only on his end, feeling a bit like he's shoved his foot into his mouth, poking in places where he ought not have--- but it's quickly replaced by the clicking of the tape recorder. The tape whirrs to life - the extraction did prove truly successful, and the recording begins to play.

Once more, like the last, it's his own voice that begins to speak. It doesn't stay that way for long.

Voices bridge together, one after the other, some familiar, others less so. Statements about portals, about time, about places that were not of the world they took the space of, with strange tearing sounds interrupting each one, utterances of familiar names, all mashed together as though the tape was stitched together from fragments of others. A single phrase repeats, sticking in his mind with a persistent, lingering weight.

You are here.

When the tape finishes and stops playing, Jon is tense, panicked, and has no idea how to wrap his head around any of it. He looks to John, and goes to speak, but he loses anything that he might have said at first. His voice catches in his throat, for a mere moment. What could he say to this poor man, who volunteered to help him, opened up about the incredible pressure on his shoulders, and then has to hear something so thoroughly and utterly not of his world? When he finally does manage to speak, he's hushed with disbelief and bewilderment.

"What the fuck?"

John listens, and in the aftermath remains silent. Strangely, this calms him, this strange revelation which…makes an odd sort of sense looked at the right way. The implications make his head hurt a little, that they’re…God knows where…

Another world. Beyond that, he knows it’s another world. They all do, but…maybe another universe, one so far divorced from any other…

“The anchor.” John breathes. “The cultists, they said that locket was an anchor—fuck, the goddamn leaf…”

An anchor for this…what? Microcosm of reality? An alternate world, a capsule of existence? However you look at it—

It hits John right then, so hard and so sudden he starts shaking again, has to rise from his seat and start pacing, moving, doing something.

“Schrödinger’s cat.” He breathes. Reality is perception, all things are real until you see them, faith becomes fact once you know, and the knowing limits.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be…

“…world without end.”

John stops and turns to Jon, eyes wide.

“I don’t think we’re on Marrow Isle—and I don’t think we’re dead.”

Jon's attention snaps up to John's pacing, and attentive, alert, and just a touch panicked, he listens, hanging onto Rambo's each and every word.

By the time he's drawn to his conclusion, Jon's jolted up to his feet, as well. His pacing has a bit more direction than a simple back and forth; he's stepping sharply over to his abandoned bag, fishing out a notebook. The second his hands are on it, he's jotting out messy notes, haphazard but desperately quick in getting the information on the page.

"Where would we be, if not on Marrow Isle, though?" He asks - there's no disbelief in the question, but intensity, as though he were trying to solve some complicated math problem. "But we're--- if we're in another world, could we still be alive, in a sense? We function as living, breathing people. We change, we age, we just don't--- die. Curse aside, that's as alive as I think one could get, but..."

Jon rewinds the tape, and clicks it on with a great deal of urgency. It's hard to wait for the part he wants to hear, but when he catches it, he stops the tape, just after the mention of a crack.

"Hear me out. There's something at play here, something that's not only brought us from our world, but I'd wager that, perhaps--- it's a similar something that's bringing in the things that would seek to level this town. Mortanne wouldn't do that, but, I wonder--- in this strange state of existence and non-existence, if there's something that keeps Marrow Isle from being able to be placed back where it once was. And if there is something, like--- like that crack, what other things could it be causing?"

In his flurry, his desperation for emphasis, he takes John's hand, giving it and urgent little shake.

"You are here. This is some sort of Marrow Isle, one way or another, and we are here, but there's something else. Something else is here that is causing everything."

He pulls back, in his great hurry, and picks up the tape recorder; his mind is clearly racing, and he's all over the place, but he can't recall the last time something had stoked the fire in him so thoroughly.

"I've got to get this information out there. If we've got this much from just the two of us, if we put the minds of the other experts in the community together--- I think we may just come out of this with a significantly clearer picture."

"You're in a situation where you could die, get ripped out of that second before it happens--you're alive and dead at the same time, like the damn cat." John replies. "We're all the cat, this is the box, and the radioactive crap..."

Jon keeps going, and it...makes sense. And it doesn't--it's so far out of John's frame of reference, his scope of understanding that he's barely clinging to it but it makes sense. The thing that could kill the cat, or not, preserving this place or destroying it. But no, that--that wouldn't be the element decaying. Maybe the Geiger counter?...

...but what if the Geiger counter is broken? What if the box has a hole in it? What if what if what if what if.

The crack. Something's broken--and when Jon grips his hand, John is gripping back and it doesn't hurt.

John forgets that anything hurts, just for a second, straining to make sense of the whole thing until Jon lets him go and he suddenly remembers.

Rolling his shoulders to try and shake off the sudden, sharp chill that sweeps in to fill that void where, for an instant, he felt connected, he rubs his arms briskly and refocuses on Jon.

"Whatever you do, I'm in." John assures him, gathering up the pieces of the tape recorder to bundle them up for Jon. Wrapping them hastily in a bandanna from his pocket, he hands them to the other man as he gathers his things.

"Could be clues to where it came from in the pieces--save 'em for scrap at bare minimum. The working tape deck breaks? You got parts."

"I'll keep you up to date on anything that I find." Jon's quick to reassure him, and confident as he speaks - especially so, considering he barely knows the man even still, but what can he say? There's some inherent trust that comes with discovering something like this together. John's a good man, and while Jon would generally try to keep people uninvolved in this sort of thing from getting sucked into it, he's here, and he's been a part of this island's community as long as Jon can remember. He deserves to be a part of it, just as much as anyone else.

He carefully tucks away the broken pieces of the tape recorder into his bag when they're offered, and at first, looks confused about doing so, but is quick to accept the idea.

"Brilliant. This tape deck is going to be our lifeline for figuring out what the hell is going on here, and anything that happens to it could be a massive set-back," He prattles a bit. "I've been meaning to try to find someone who can develop a power source, possibly splice together one of this world's plugs into a battery seat--- something to work in case we run the current one dead while trying to figure this out. Is that something you've got any experience with?"

John considers that for a long moment, then nods slowly.

"Not the R&D, but I could figure something out with the mechanics." he replies. "I did some work in demolitions, so I got basic electronics down--you show me a cord 'n a plug and I can join 'em."

He frowns, reaching up to scratch his left temple with the back of his right index finger.

"Might be able to help seat an outlet, too, if a power source can be developed. Could look at a cord, too, if we need something stronger 'n what's available so we don't fry the damn thing."

He's about to consider what else he can do, then thinks of Laios and Mairi and Ylva...

His frown deepens. "You considered magic? As a power source, I mean. There's some folks here who work with the stuff, and...I dunno, we might be able to fake some of it with metaphysical help. Shit's real, I've seen it work."

A beat.

"I was a crab once. It was...an experience."

Demolitions? Well, that's not something he needs now, but who knows when that could come up. It's a good thing to keep in one's pocket, at least.

He falls just as deeply into thought as John does, and when he suggests magic, he brightens - and just before he speaks, John hits him with the crab news.

Jon's words of enthusiastic agreement trail off into a hilarious squeak.

And, then, a sputtered laugh. Not mocking, nor cruel - but just so genuinely taken off guard and amused by the notion, it brought his train of thought to a grinding thought.

"You got turned into a crab? ... Why?"

"General chaos, and a star bear." John quips, but can't quite stop a smile of his own as Jon erupts into laughter. "Seriously, this buddy of mine, Mairi--blue skin, great tits, loves to fight--was locking up with one of those star monsters back during the meteor showers? She needed help, I helped. Asked me if I wanted to be a giant crab, I said yes...so I was a giant crab. Weirdest fuckin' thing that ever happened to me, and I'm including showing up in this joint."

"A giant crab. That's very different than a tiny crab," Jon jokes right back. "I'm not surprised to hear that, though! That it was weird, I mean. I imagine for people like her, though, it's a normal Tuesday."

"Pretty much." John agrees with a grin. This...feels weird, too, but not so different from the weirdness of being a crab. A good weird.

"Jon...listen, beyond keepin' me posted about this situation: you're welcome to drop by any time." he adds. "And--thanks. For listening to me, before."

"Oh, well, I... do live just up the street," Jon notes, a bit thoughtfully. "Up on the Bluffs. I've been meaning to do more than work and go back home, and... I certainly wouldn't mind getting to make a social call for something that isn't a dubiously-evil tape."

A beat. He's not going to tell this poor man that he literally fed off that fear. That's a conversation for another time.

"It's no trouble at all, though. I'm happy to listen when an ear is needed. Do feel free to call me, though, alright? Maybe I'll have to come back soon, convince you to teach me how to make that wine."

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[OPEN] While we're on the subject, could we change the subject now?

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