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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"Alright, alright! I figured it'd be too small a town to pull a scam like that," Jon jokes, the irony of him going through that same town with a supernatural hunting spree not at all lost on him. "I don't know that we could do much rotating, but I could feasibly put it on a northward shelf...?"

He lifts a hand, scratching his jaw softly as he contemplates it, before glancing back towards Shen Qingqiu, thoughtfulness giving way to curiosity.

"What exactly are these four guardians? I'm not sure if they reach here, but if they're deities of sorts, I know the goddesses seem to be on decent enough terms with others...?"

And there Shen Qingqiu goes, laughing into the back of his hand like Jon just said something hysterical. "What," he asks breathlessly. "Don't tell me they don't even have anime in your world? Not even Yu Yu Hakusho or that shoujo where the girl traveled into a book? How sad." He still doesn't sound like he thinks it's sad, he sounds like he thinks it's funny. And like he suspects anime does exist in Jon's world, actually, he's just been living under a rock for the past thirty years.

"The four guardians are representations of the four largest constellations in the night sky, according to Chinese astrology," he explains. "They also oversee the cardinal directions. The Azure Dragon of the east, the Vermilion Bird of the south, the White Tiger of the west, and the Black Tortoise of the north, Běifāng Xuánwǔ. Although if you were a weeb you'd probably know him as Genbu."

He reflexively pulls his fan out of his sleeve, waving it idly as he explains, "Usually Xuánwǔ is represented as a tortoise or a snake and a tortoise coiled around each other, but there's a particular legend which positions him as an ascended immortal, a former prince who entered the heavens. He wanted to leave his mortal life behind, but because he had already eaten the food of the material world, his innards could only ever be human. So he cut them out and replaced them with organs made from the substance of divinity. His stomach turned into a tortoise and his intestines into a snake, and together they terrorized the mortal realm until Xuánwǔ brought them back under control. Now they serve as his generals."

Jon balks, quite frankly too caught off guard to tell him that there was, in fact, anime in his world. God, that tone is so distinctly reminiscent of his college days, getting derided for not watching one thing or another. How the hell was he getting hassled for not watching anime here, of all places, by a man who he'd assumed was from a world closer to Concord's own than his? (When will he have peace for not bothering to watch Yu Yu Hakusho? Not even in death, apparently.)

"I... see," He finally speaks, still sounding a bit baffled. "Nothing I'd watched included any of that information, so--- thank you. If you think Xuánwǔ's influence has a chance of reaching this place, I'll move the grinder. Even if we haven't got a way to find out if his reach does or doesn't extend this far, it may be worth doing for good measure."

"I'll help you move it, of course," Shen Qingqiu says immediately, grinning at Jon over his fan. "It looks heavy." He absolutely doesn't want to touch that horrible, greasy thing again, but sometimes being a good cultivator requires doing things you don't want to do, for the sake of others. It's in the manual or the by-laws or something.

"What about the rest of these" he asks, gesturing at the shelves with his fan. "Do they have freakish little curses too?"

What's with the grin? Is he... being made fun of right now? He does still look a bit noodly, all things considered, but he lifted it home! He doesn't make any accusations, however, nor let the potential offense sting too deeply. Shen Qingqiu wants to touch it again? He's entirely welcome to. "Excellent. I'll move the others for you, in that case."

Speaking of the others...

He steps over to the other shelves, making a non-committal wiggly hand gesture. "They're... mildly cursed? Nowhere quite so bad as the grinder, as far as I'm aware. The scissors stain your hands with blood upon use, the pendulum merely has an awful energy to it, and the coin is... ostensibly just a coin, but the other object bearing a 'Lot' title was of a fairly hefty consequence, so I thought I'd hold onto it, just to be safe. Everything else seems mostly fine, but not trustworthy enough to keep inside a home, but it shouldn't pose too many issues to move all of it."

It's nice that they're starting to get along so well, Shen Qingqiu thinks cheerfully. Jon will be more likely to come to him for help in the future if they have an existing rapport. He studies the cursed objects carefully, lingering for a moment over the coin. "These came from other worlds, didn't they? Not ones quite as cursed as yours, but...there's evil on them too. It doesn't feel local."

"I'd thought the same thing. Some have seemingly practical uses, others are... uncertain as to what they'd ever been used for, but the impression I got at first glance still wasn't good," Jon mutters, eyeing the objects skeptically once more. He gestures vaguely to the basket with the fruit. "And some of them are just--- fruit filled with blood. I don't know why I bothered with those, but they're here now, and they never seem to go bad, so I suppose there's no sense in throwing them out...?"

"Isn't there a friendly vampire in town?" Shen Qingqiu asks, picking up one of the fruit to study it more closely. "One of the, ahem, ladies and gentlemen of negotiable virtue." He turns ever so slightly pink, although he's working frantically to pretend he's not. "You should give them to him, if you don't think they'll drive him into a frenzy or something."

He puts it down again, turning back to smile at Jon. "It was a good idea, keeping these things consolidated and locked up. Now we just need to make sure they don't do you any harm, either."

Jon watches Shen Qingqiu's face flush, and thinks long and hard back to the comment of alleged heterosexuality. That still seems to be panning out exceptionally well for him. Definitely so very, truly unbothered by Erik and his well-known profession. "I may do just that, honestly. I doubt it's a good idea to keep things full of blood so close to the grinder, anyhow."

The praise does come as a surprise, though, and he'd turned to move the basket of blood fruit, just preoccupied enough to let that surprise rise to his face. The smile he offers back is tentative in that surprise of his, but no less genuine. All this time later, and he still gets fluffed up by being told he's had a good idea.

"I intend to expand it and continue to monitor Calloway's stock, but I'm glad you agree that they need to be contained. I've kept my contact limited with them, but your help is invaluable, thank you. The last thing any of us needs is any of the trouble I've gone through undone by a fit of cursed-item-induced madness."

"...Huh," Shen Qingqiu says thoughtlessly. "You look younger when you smile."

And then, because that's such a normal thing for a heterosexual man to say to one of his male acquaintances, he immediately moves on, commenting, "Calloway...why does that name sound familiar? Did someone mention him during that shared dream with the cult?" He gestures at his own temple, saying sheepishly, "My memories of those events are a little scrambled, I'm afraid."

Edited 2024-09-08 07:17 (UTC)

Even if Shen Qingqiu pushes past it so easily, that doesn't make Jon balk at it any less, nor does it help that dark flush that dusts his face. Compliments shock him at the best of times, and maybe it's just that he's so very used to getting called "old looking," but something about the inverse of that catches him so completely and utterly off guard.

It leaves him fumbling to catch up after that thoroughly-stunned beat of shocked silence, and he clears his throat, only looking more embarrassed as he reels himself back, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully.

"I've heard bits and pieces of that shared dream, but it wasn't one I was a part of, I'm afraid, so I wouldn't know. It wouldn't shock me if he had some involvement, considering. He operates a shop, ah... Calloway's Curios? You might have heard tell of it as the Shady Merchant by the locals? Apparently he just comes into these objects from other worlds. Charges just about as much as he can get away with for them, as well."

"Very odd," Shen Qingqiu says slowly, tapping his now-closed fan into his open palm. "I suppose he's been secretive about his source? It might be worth looking into him further, I'm sure I heard someone discussing him at the cult meeting."

"Well," he continues, smiling at Jon, "I think that about wraps things up here. I'd like to get those talismans set up before we try moving the grinder, just as a safety precaution."

"If you take a look into it, let me know, and I'll see if I can't find anything out as well." Look, he's signing himself up for little research projects! That's the real start of friendship right there.

"That sounds like a perfectly sensible solution to me, though. Let me know when you've got everything you need, and we'll take an afternoon for it," Jon agrees, offering him a small smile right back. "And thank you again, truly. There's every chance this could have found a way to go and blow up in my face, as it currently is."

"It's technically my job, to stop these things from blowing up in people's faces," Shen Qingqiu points out. "But it's a job I'm quite happy to do. Thank you, for accepting my help."

Yes, he thinks to himself cheerfully as he leads the way out the door. Horrible meat vibes instead, this turned out to be both a productive and surprisingly pleasant afternoon. He finds himself hoping Jonathan Sims will invite him around again. Or perhaps he should think of some way to reciprocate, hm...

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

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Wrap, with a new situation for them soon? :3c

sounds perfect!