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/ ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This would be so much funnier if she could joke that she'll pass on the suggestion without it ending in Jon accidentally prying the information out of her.

But she still barks a laugh. "A can opener?"

If he could know the mercy Daisy was giving him, he'd be infinitely appreciative. It's amazing how their continued friendship will occasionally crop up a new situation of "I didn't need to know that about Daisy Tonner's sex life" - but maybe there's some statistical outliers there in the form of Erin Peters that need to be accounted for.

Her laugh gets one back out of him, the jokes starting to crumble the tension of the prior topic, slowly but surely. It's amazing what a simple moment of levity can do for the nerves.

"It's what came to mind first, I don't know! Anything would work, at this point!"

"Not sure you can work any tools with hooves. Unless you like. Stick them on? Somehow?"

She cannot be thinking about the Pine Devil with tools taped to her hooves when she sees Dahlia next. She cannot. Jesus christ... she's still shaking her head with a laugh when they reach her place and she lets them in.

Sorry, Daisy, that's a special problem outfitted neatly into a hilarious mental image, crafted just for you. Raw, animalistic power, with tools it can't manage to use. A modern tragedy for the times.

"Maybe it'll get special little straps for the tools. I don't know, Daisy, work with me here."

His playful needling simmers once they're inside, and he lets out a breath. There's a weariness to it, an exhaustion that's just caught up with him.

"...Thank you, by the way. For, ah... I don't know. Not trying to kill me about all of this? That's been a popular response."

( OOC: omfg i came to reread this and found out i never got a notif for this reply?? dreamwidth notifications constantly reigning hell upon me >:O )

"How's it going to get the straps on with the hooves, Jon?"

Inside, door closed, locked up behind them. Daisy tosses her key onto the side table and kicks her boots off, before loosely beckoning Jon towards the archway through to the kitchen.

"Been there. Done that," she says dryly, then snorts softly. "Seriously, though. Least I could do. This isn't. New, to me. You know? We both went through this once already. Didn't like it when Basira acted like I was any better then. Sure not going to start doing the same now."

Edited (wrong photos lmao) 2024-08-17 16:14 (UTC)

"Did we? Can't say I'm surprised, but you knowing makes the process easier, at least," Jon half-jokes, following along. Once they're in the kitchen, he gladly takes one of the bar-stools for himself, settling comfortably against the counter.

"Not a shock to hear Basira was cutting you slack that she wasn't keen to offer anyone else, either. I think anyone could have seen that coming."

"Mm, yeah. She hung onto the idea I wasn't in control. That I didn't know. For..." she sighs, heavily, "a long time. And then it was about. Aiming me at the right people."

She automatically falls into making tea. It won't be anything special, but it'll be warm and it'll be tea.

"Though by then— I was wasting away. We all knew I... wasn't gonna make it long. Like that. Basira just didn't understand that was the point."

"Does you a disservice, assuming you didn't know. I feel like... even if we don't have the vocabulary for it, just from being somewhere, you'll still put the pieces together eventually."

Jon frowns, gently. At least the tea provides some normalcy to all this. They could almost chalk it up to an easy, non-monster visit with a friend to catch up.

"I don't know that she would ever truly understand that. Even from what I knew of her, I didn't get the impression that that's something that she would ever really be able to make peace with. To an extent, I understand."

"Yeah. And, unlike you, half of what I did? Standard asshole cop. Didn't matter that I had claws and teeth. With most people I didn't need 'em."

She pours.

"Think she got it, eventually. Even if it took seeing the— thing, I ended up. After the change. It was never that I wanted it. You know? But back there. We didn't have a lot of options for real freedom. It's— better, away from home. Even if we're still attached to the damn things."

Edited 2024-08-17 20:23 (UTC)

"Fair point. It could always be worse. Has been worse."

As soon as he's got his teacup, he raises it, cracking an awkward-but-playful smile.

"Cheers to things being better than awful?"

Daisy snorts softly, raising her own. "Cheers."

She only takes a very small sip before lowering it again, leaning against the other side of the counter rather than circling to sit down. "Alright. So. Do you know why I go by Daisy? Not a trick question."

"Can't say that I do," Jon gives a small shrug, leaning against the counter from his own side, settling comfortably into the casual nature of everything. "Nickname, middle name?"

Alright. He hadn't found that tape before the coma, then. Daisy nods her head to the side. "Nickname. Sort of. I picked it myself. And the story of why... is actually where it all started. For me. Fear stuff."

Jon lifts his brows, and weighs on that, for just a moment.

"You don't have to say for me, since I'm, ah... good, for the night, but. If you're keen to share, I can help?"

"If I didn't want you to know. I'd never mention it." Even Basira didn't know the story, something she finds herself regretting these days. For all their lives were entangled, there was so much they kept to themselves. "Did say I'd give you another to tide you over. And it'd be nice to do this one in my own words. Not Elias's."

"You've got me there."

He takes a moment to have one more sip of his tea, before he sits it aside and straightens his posture once more. He doesn't pry into her like he's been prying into the random people he's singled out - though there's a pull, he's not looking to make everything spill forth at once.

"Tell me how you got your nickname, and the incident that connected you to the Hunt."

It's honestly not so bad, when she lets it happen. It's still... strange, it probably always will be, but it isn't like that strange and horrible feeling of wanting nothing more but to tell the snotty prick across the desk to shut up and stop asking questions whilst your mouth betrayed you.

So she doesn't resist the pull, letting it organise her thoughts into something coherent and more her own than Elias's cherry-picking. She drinks, exhales, and settles with her hands wrapped around her cup.

"I grew up in a small town in North Wales called Bodelwyddan. And when I say small I mean a couple thousand people, tops. There was a single pub for the lot of us, two takeaway places total, a few shops... once you aged out of primary school you had to go to the next towns over for secondary. If you didn't know someone, then you knew someone that did. That kind of place. My mum was a nurse at the nearby hospital and my dad— he started out as a cop, but by the time I was five or so he had to quit. Injury, had to have his knee replaced. Way he always told it was a dealer ran him down in his car just out of spite, but I dunno. I doubt a lot of what he told me, these days. But he never let that go. He stayed bitter 'til the day he died and he put all that bitterness into local politics. Wasn't a town council meeting without his face and voice. And he loved putting me up there with him. Everyone knew me as Rhys Tonner's sweet little Alice."

She snorts and rolls her eyes derisively, taking another drink from her tea. Her claws tap idly against the cup as she goes on.

"He'd been pushing to tear down the abandoned building site that this all happened in for years before it all happened. He dressed it up as 'safety reasons'. But really he wanted to get rid of the homeless that squatted inside. And, well, he got his wish. Eventually. I all but handed him the perfect bludgeon."

Jon nods, slowly and thoughtfully, taking a drink from his own tea, just ever-so-offset from being in perfect time. He doesn't tap his own cup, though - his hands return to in front of him, neatly folded.

"What led to go into the abandon building site, the day that it happened?"

"My best friend at the time, Calvin Benchley. The building site was fenced off, but it backed onto this strip of grass and dirt that we played at after school. Only time we ever really got to. We were only eleven, so, early nineties. Boys didn't play with girls unless they wanted to get shit for it. Didn't matter that I could've given most of 'em a black eye already. Or that most of the other girls thought I was a bully. I was pretty little Alice. Clearly too much of a wuss to play with the boys." She rolls her eyes again. Stupid kid stuff. "But Calvin was... different. We made friends 'cause he tried to shove past me in the hall one day and I stood right back up and pushed him back."

A kinship of young bullies, one a little better at hiding it than the other. Maybe they'd have grown out of it, the way so many kids do. Maybe they'd have grown up into decent people with no worse morals than the next person. Maybe, if things hadn't happened the way they did, Alice would still be Alice and Calvin would still be alive.

"So, we played out at that park every day. We used to take turns daring each other to do stuff. The other end backed onto the local Church with all its graves, and sometimes we'd dare the other to go climb a stone or steal something. But... most of the time we dared each other to go into the building site. We weren't supposed to. Both our parents had forbidden it a dozen times, told us to keep away from the druggies and squatters, but that never stopped us. And every time one of us took the dare we went a little deeper.

She breathes in slow and exhales much the same. "...that day, it was me that dared him. We'd heard shouting and crashing, some kind of fight. He really didn't want to do it. But I provoked him and called him names, a coward, until he felt like he had to to prove me wrong. Which is why everything that happened after that is my fault."

Jon frowns, letting out a short breath.

"You were a child. There's no way you could have known what was to come, nor the gravity of it. Even the most difficult eleven year-old isn't considering the worst-case scenarios."

Not that he's in any place to argue, after the death of the teenager who'd been by so often to lend his grandmother a hand, caused entirely by his hand on that book. But that's beyond the point.

"...So he went into the building site. Did you follow?"

"Mm. Everyone says that." And yet she's never once agreed. Even when she bit back at Elias echoing the same words, told him it wasn't her fault, she didn't really believe it.

After all, he did pull it directly from her head.

"I waited about fifteen minutes for him to come back out. I thought about running to get my mum but we'd only get in trouble, so I told myself I'd just run in and get him. That he was probably just getting me back for daring him. And then I climbed over the jagged fence into the site to look for him.

"I didn't have to go far before I found something, but it wasn't Calvin. There were two bodies. A couple of homeless people who must've got into a fight. They'd impaled each other in the throat with the glass from broken bottles, and just... dropped, right where they'd been stood fighting. The blood was still wet and it was everywhere and it excited me. Pretty little Alice, 'innocent' little Alice, just as excited as she was scared by the sight of the first two dead bodies she'd ever seen. I knew the second I felt it that I could never let anyone know I had, or they'd see what I really was."

Her brow furrows tightly for a moment, until she shakes it off and drags her hair back from her face. Until now there'd been relatively little fear to drag back to the forefront, but she feels it now. Thrumming at the edges of her mind.

"It took me a while to stop staring at them, but when I did I saw Calvin. Standing at the top of this crumbling staircase with his eyes this eerie kind of blank, staring down at me. Completely transfixed on me, like the bodies weren't there at all. Like the thing standing right behind him, this— horrid, naked, fleshy thing covered in open wounds that didn't bleed that was standing right behind him flicking a long black tongue into his ear like it was whispering something, wasn't there at all."

Edited 2024-08-18 03:22 (UTC)

When she mentions it, the vision of the entity is clear in Jon's mind, as though he's truly seen it. In that very moment, it's hard to say how much of Calvin was truly left in that boy, and whether one could argue that he'd been briefly overwritten - or that what he was, a cruel impulse already within him, was pushed to extremes.

Jon isn't really sure which of the two would be worse.

"Did you say anything to him, before he finally moved from where that creature whispered to him?"

Daisy shakes her head, claw tapping a little sharper against her cup than before. "Didn't get chance. Between one heartbeat and the next something in the air shifted and he ran at me so fast I didn't even have time to turn around. There was still no expression on his face, just that same blank stare as he came right at me, like nothing in the world could knock him off course. Sometimes I think it would've scared me less if he'd at least seemed— eager, about it. If I looked into his eyes and knew that he'd been waiting for this moment, that it was somehow about me. Because I don't think it was, about me. I think I was just there and that was all that mattered.

"...I tried to scramble back, to give myself space to run, but he was faster and bigger and stronger than me. He slammed into me so hard I was thrown back into the jagged old fencing and one of the posts pierced my shoulder. I don't think I even screamed. It hurt more than anything I'd ever felt before, I could feel the rusted metal tear skin and muscle in an explosion of pure agony, but I didn't scream. I started blacking out too quickly to do anything but look back at Calvin and see his face finally shift from blank nothing to a sick kind of pride."

The fear swells and swells until it fades back down to background noise, and its only in this pause that she seems to breathe.

"...that's the last thing I remember before waking up at the hospital."

With these statements, more conversational than the firm, direct pull of his less-freely-given ones, he doesn't try to read a step ahead, to take the course of the recollection with each step only taken as it's handed to him. Intuition pulls the next thought to the surface, though, and the Knowing catches him a bit off guard.

It's not pity--- no, he's not about to get his ass kicked for trying to offer Daisy Tonner of all people pity, but there's a muted sorrow just beneath his words.

"No one believed you when you told them what happened, did they?"

Daisy laughs an utterly humourless laugh. "No one. By the time I was with it again Calvin had already told 'em that I'd tripped and fell back into the fence whilst we were playing. Me trying to say otherwise just sounded like a kid trying to get out of trouble by throwing her friend under the bus. But he'd gone running to get help, instead of just letting me bleed out there on the ground. Why wouldn't they take his story over mine? He had no reason to hurt me and he was such a smart boy, destined for good things, so I must've been telling a big fib."

And so little Alice realised that people would not believe her if she was in danger. And so little Daisy realised she'd have to defend herself.

"Dad still decided Calvin was a bad influence and told me to stay away from him, mind you, which I was fine with. I wanted nothing to do with him. Even seeing him across the playground made me shudder. I hated it. I didn't want to feel like helpless prey, always waiting for him to finish the job. He never did. But six other kids were injured or killed over the next eight years, before Calvin went off to uni down in London and I applied to the local police."

She drags her tongue over her teeth, a moment of quiet before she continues: "When the doctor was treating my shoulder, he told me that the wound looked like a daisy. I think he was trying to make it sound better for the innocent little girl he thought I was, make the whole thing less harrowing. It doesn't even really look like a daisy, more like a starburst, but... I liked it. Just not the way the doctor probably expected me too. I liked the idea of a soft, pretty name that came from a bloody wound. I liked the idea of being a bloody knife that no one would ever see coming until it was as deep in their throat as the glass I'd seen sticking out of those dead bodies."

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

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cw: vague reference to suicide

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cw: violence, gore, death

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