Jonathan Sims (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
apocryphalarchivist) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ph_logs2024-08-05 07:58 pm
apocryphalarchivist) wrote in ph_logs2024-08-05 07:58 pm
[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
2. Well, we knew we had the good things
3. But those never seemed to last (Closed to Neil and Martin)
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
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/ ]
no subject
"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?"
cw: violence, gore, death
"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."
no subject
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?"
no subject
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."
no subject
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?"
no subject
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."
no subject
Jon's quiet, but there's no judgement. In fact, it looks like the new angle of it has made things all the more clear. How couldn't it? Of course, with the Hunt's influence, she would become that ruthless killer, ready to do anything and justify in any way possible what she needed to do to feel that she was keeping herself safe. Even without the Hunt, it was likely to go much the same.
"...Does explain a lot, though. About how you wound up here, considering." A beat. "At the risk of making an ass of myself, I can't really imagine you having any other name but Daisy."
no subject
"Neither can I. Not anymore. The way I see it. Alice stopped existing a long time ago. Calvin killed her. Daisy's what grew in her place." Her brow furrows again. "And I think— I think I buried her for good, years later. See, Calvin never stopped attacking people. I'd check in on him on the database sometimes, 'specially after I moved down to London and joined the Met. He was careful about it. Attacked people who weren't connected to him and never left enough evidence or a credible witness. So they could never make anything stick, even though he was implicated in dozens of deaths or grievous injuries. We almost got him once for aggravated assault, but the people he attacked changed their stories at the last minute and claimed they'd attacked first."
It's hard to say if the cases really were as impossible to prosecute as the Met claimed they were, of course. It's not as if the system actually helps half as much as it's supposed to. Really, it doesn't matter why the cases never went anywhere. The end result would have been the same regardless.
"So one day, when we were both about... twenty-eight, I found him. Tracked down his favourite bar and staked it out until he finally left on his own, then beat him round the head and threw him into the boot of my car. Then I drove him out to the same spot in the woods I took you to years later and threw him on the ground. He was awake by then. There was still blood making the hair on the side of his head all tacky, but he looked back up at me and he seemed so clear-headed it almost scared me. He didn't beg for his life. He didn't even say a word. Like he'd accepted this was the end for him and that was fair play. But I don't think he recognised me. He'd changed the entire trajectory of my life and he didn't even have the fucking decency to recognise me."
There's a quiet crack as the handle pops off of her cup, pulled free by the sheer strength behind her ever tightening grip. Daisy mutters a curse and pushes the whole thing away so she doesn't smash it outright.
"Anyway. I shot him five times in the chest with a gun I'd stolen from the evidence lock-up and that was the first time I ever killed an actual human being. After that... all the little weird stuff that I'd started noticing—the teeth, the claws, the eyes—was there to stay. I've never had another scar. I've barely aged... the longest Hunt of my life ended just like that," she snaps her fingers, "and whether or not I knew it at the time, I... I made my choice, that night. I think when I buried him in those woods, I buried Alice too. And if she wasn't the one that clawed her way out of the Buried by the skin of both our teeth then she's gone for good."
no subject
"When life molds you into someone new, there's only so much you can do before you find that your original self is gone, often for both better and worse. The longer time goes on, the more purposeful everything seems to become to try to remind you of that."
It's a sentiment he understands all too well. Remembering who he was even a mere few years ago feels like the life of a stranger, after everything has been said and done. He's quiet for a moment, and offers Daisy a look, something tentative yet sincere. He's not emotionally verbose, and the sentiment is short, perhaps a bit clumsy - but he's certain she understands that particular struggle.
"...For all the trouble it took, up to this point, I'm glad you're here as you are."
no subject
So much of the last few years has been about accepting the way things change and the things that you lose. Accepting that Alice Tonner died at eleven years old, the loss of the person she could have become. Accepting that she's not human, anymore, and the loss of the part of her that wanted to be. Accepting that her relationships with people would never be the same again, the loss of what there used to be.
But change doesn't just bring loss. And it's accepting the things she's gained that's still a battle, even now. Because to have something means it can be taken away, and then you're right back where you started.
Daisy inhales. Feels her lungs expand to their full capacity, as free as she'll ever be.
"...yeah," she breathes, looking back at him with a gaze that says more than any words she could force together. They're here. Despite everything, they're both here. "Me too."