ph_logs | Mockingbird, Mockingbird, Mockingbird

Mockingbird, Mockingbird, Mockingbird

Who: Sheogorath, SQQ, Tarantulas, Jeff, Shouji, and you!
What: Assorted 'meetings of madness' across the island
When: Over the course of August
Where: Various
Warnings: Heavy discussions of identity, possibly discussion of fugue states, possible mentions of violence, unreality

Is that a sound you've heard? [Closed w/ SQQ]

It's as Shen Qingqiu is seeking solitude in the temple that he's visited by a strange sensation. It starts as a physical one, the faintest breeze dancing around the tip of one ear, but then it becomes a song- the erhu part of the Butterfly Lovers begins to play. The sound seems to tug at the end of his sleeve, the way that a narrative piece often seems to pull the listener along with it. Gently, gently, it implores him towards the door, and out into the daylight.

Is that a song you know? [Closed w/ Jeff]

At this point, Jeff's been given a good idea of what to look for when trying to identify Sheogorath. Of course, no one's account of the man is exactly the same, but there seem to be some common elements. He has a beard, and a walking stick, and his eyes are all sort of colors but always strange and piercing.

In the late afternoon, Jeff spots a man who is almost certainly Sheogorath, heading into the woods alone.

Perhaps he ought to follow, and try to catch up to the fellow?

One that was layered with the crackle of a radio? [Closed w/ Shouji]

It's getting late, about the time that businesses are starting to shutter for the evening, when that strange old man who fought off the Tristitia with Shouji a little while ago wanders into the Burger King, his cane making a soft tap tap tapping sound on the floor. He walks up to the counter, and stands there, not making a sound, as he looks around the place, a placid smile plastered across his face. He clearly wants something, but what?

What makes him call in the pouring rain? [w/ Tarantulas]

It's raining.

The drops are big and heavy, and they make a noticeable tapping sound against the window panes. Every so often, a gust of wind will rattle the glass. In the distance, there's a long, low rumble of thunder.

As Tarantulas works on whatever it is he's working on, his auditory sensors suddenly pick up on the sound of purring. Should he take a look around, he's likely to notice a large, gray cat in a little vest, perched atop a nearby shelf. It's staring at him with a familiar pair of eyes, their pupils fractal and ever transforming at their edges.

Is it a song of pride or an alarm of pain? [wildcard]

Anything you've been itching to say, or do, or think with the Madgod? Go crazy!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That rain is actually the only reason Tarantulas is even home at all. Not even he feels safe doing electrical installations in the middle of a storm. He's just been puttering around, not really able to focus on any one particular project. Honestly, he might have just thrown the whole idea of working in the bag and spent the rest of the day playing with Dawn, if only the rain hadn't made her sleepy, poor dear. He thought it better to let her rest.

"Well, hello there!" Tarantulas says, once he's located the source of the purring. He grins up at Theodore, holding out his arms for his friend to jump into. "Trying out a new form? Well, come on then. Let me have a good look at it." He's very eager to see this new face Theodore's chosen to wear.

He leaps down from the shelf with feline grace, purring.

“I’ve had this form for quite a while, actually. Just felt like slipping into it today. It’s the sort of day for sitting in window sills and sharing secrets with the raindrops, don’t you think?”

He moves into scritching distance, inclining his head in the way cats do when they’re indicating “you may touch.”

"Well, I think it's charming." Tarantulas grins, gently stroking his hand down Theodore's back as he's sometimes seen humans do. The fur is very soft under his hand, though it threatens to build up a static charge if he pets it too quickly.

"I suppose I have been feeling a little restless," he agrees. "None of my works in progress can really keep my attention today, it seems."

"Have you tried molding your ideas into little balls and juggling them? Maybe batting them around a little and letting the yarn unravel? Goodness, I do love shapes, I do love how they change," he seems restless himself, pawing at the ground a little.

"Or perhaps you could form those trains of thought into words, and we could share them like tea and biscuits."

"Oh, being able to turn my ideas into yarn would be lovely," Tarantulas agrees. "I taught myself some basic crochet a few months ago, so I could make an enchanted scarf for a --" He hesitates. "I'm not sure you can call him a friend anymore, but I made it for him all the same. But if I could turn ideas into yarn, crochet with them, and then read the patterns like blueprints...wouldn't that be wonderful?"

He absently adds, "I think I still have a few balls of the normal stuff somewhere around here, if you'd like to play with them. Just try not to make too much noise, my daughter's napping."

His eyes grow as wide as saucers.

“Yarn?! Lovely, soft, silky yarn?! Oh, you do know how to speak to a Daedroth, now, don’t you?”

"I suppose I do!" Tarantulas laughs and gets up to fetch the yarn out of a box stuffed into a closet. He's going to need to build another extension onto the house, soon; he's running low on storage space.

"So does this form alter your thoughts, then? Incline you to be more cat-like?" He gently sets a yarn ball down on the ground and rolls it towards Theodore with his foot. "Or do you secretly always long to roll around on the floor and play?"

"A little of both. No matter what form I take, yarn is one of my favorite gifts to receive. Have you ever seen a patch of carpet, sitting in a sunbeam, and had the urge to lie there and surround yourself with the feeling of warmth and yarn, the smell of fibers and dust? Have you not had the pleasure of resting your abdomen on a smooth wooden floor? Not ever had the urge to lick some finely-hewn stonework?" He rolls onto his back, batting at some imaginary thing.

"But this form comes with certain expectations. Those things become a little more focused- remarkable, considering focus is one of my rarest resources!"

"Spiders tend to prefer cool darkness, not sunlight. But it's nice to indulge in a few textures, now and then." For lack of anything better to do, he lies down next to Theodor on the floor and dangles a length of yarn over his paws.

He starts swatting at the thread, first with a single swat of his paw, then a few more baps, and suddenly he's going at the string at a frenzied tear. It is both undeniably a cat thing, and fascinating to watch.

It is indeed fascinating, and Tarantulas is quite happy to keep it up, making the string dance and sway in the air for Theodor to bat at, until his own back starts to ache from the way he's lounging on the floor. "Ah, sorry," he says, pushing himself back upright with a creaky groan. "I'm not actually as flexible as I look in this shape, I'm afraid."

"Not a problem at all, my friend. Though your questions feed my appetite to have my own answered- when did you realize you were a spider?"

"Oh, that's easy. It was some ten thousand years ago -- I was on the trail of an old scientific idol of mine, the former senator Shockwave. I'd figured out millions of years previously his plan to seed the galaxy with energon caches in order to stave off the inevitable energy shortage, and I wanted to see if he'd had any good results. He had, as a matter of fact, and I helped myself to some of the crystals for my own experiments, but he'd picked this rocky little planet with the most astonishing life forms. It was humanity's homeworld, in that universe, and they'd already established hundreds of interesting civilizations all over their world, but I was most taken with some of the sub-sapient creatures. While I was camping in one of their deserts, a furry arachnid with little orange rings around its legs suddenly crawled onto my leg, breaking my concentration. I coaxed it onto my hand, and I rather fancy we studied each other for a while before I put it back on the ground and it crawled away. That was my first encounter with a tarantula, and well..."

He smiles blissfully. "I suppose you could call it love at first sight."

He wiggles in delight.

“It was the same with me and butterflies. I spent the better part of my early existence chasing down those colorful little cuties. ‘Course, I am butterflies myself, so that turns into an odd little cycle of a relationship. I still remember when I learned how to change from them. It was terrifying. It was wonderful. It was everything.” He’s managed to catch a bit of the yarn now, and is slowly twisting himself into a kitten-yarn ball.

"That sounds like a lovely existence, if a little flighty for my taste." Tarantulas smiles indulgently, watching as his friend gets himself tangled up in the yarn. He'll step in to help Theodor disentangle himself if he needs it, but right now he appears content to cocooon himself in the stuff, like a little furry silkworm.

"I've been thinking a lot about identity lately, actually. What it means to think of yourself as this, but not that..." He trails off for a moment, humming thoughtfully. "When I first got here, I didn't care if anyone knew what I was or where I came from. I even enjoyed the mystery, dropping oblique hints and making snide little comments about that First Aid. But ever since Dawn was born, it's become strangely important to me that people know she's a Cybertronian, even though she's also organic. That she's a unique being, but she also has this long history behind her. I find myself thinking about the things I'll tell her, parts of our history and culture that I'd never cared about before except as context for my experiments. I don't understand why I changed -- except for the implication that becoming a parent in this manner was an even greater transformation than I'd anticipated. This didn't happen when I was working on her elder brother, five million years ago..."

He pauses in his tumbling, suddenly quite pensive.

"I think one of the greatest lessons I ever taught myself was the importance of everyone having a place to call their own. It's not necessarily a physical place, or perhaps it's only partially physical, but it's undeniably real to the person that belongs to it. It is a home in our hearts, it's the place where we store our skin. Even if we do not choose to live there, the fact that we have a hearth to return to makes the chill of the endless void a little less biting."

"And you think me telling her our history would be part of this hearth?" Tarantulas hums thoughtfully. "I'm not sure I understand...but I certainly don't see how it could hurt. She deserves to know her own context. I don't want her to wind up feeling isolated because she's so different from the other people she knows."

He sighs quietly, looking out at the rain. "I don't want her to wind up like me..."

“At the very least, you are giving her a foundation on which to build. Let her know she has a name to wear, though she need not be obligated to wear it. Let her know of the words in which she can confine herself and set herself free.”

“Do you know why I went through the lengths I did to preserve my realm? The world can be such an unwelcoming place for the creative and the deranged, even when the world itself is mad. My people, my mortals, they needed a place, a world, an identity, and they were of no less worth just because of what they were told, what they were assigned. That many call me ‘The Asylum’ has a double meaning- I am where the mad dwell, but I am also a sanctuary of sorts.”
M

"Would there have been a place for me there, even if we hadn't already been acquainted when I arrived?" Tarantulas sighs quietly. "It's a little hard to picture, even though I am quite creative and deranged. But I've never really been one for other people's society. I think I've spoken to more people on this island than I did in an average hundred thousand year period, in my old life."

"Oh, I've no doubt, there would be a place to you. Somewhere dark, and quiet, where the wild tangle of the root tunnels melts with a stone sanctuary. A place for a spider. A place for a scientist. Somewhere full of traps and tricks that you could study and reinvent, to your tastes. A place where you could take samples of the wellspring and study the energy fluctuations in creatia-made-memory."

From Tarantulas there comes a quiet, wistful sigh of longing. "That sounds...wonderful," he says in his hoarse voice. "Nearly idyllic. But..." He shakes himself slightly. "There are many things worthy of study on this world, too. And I really shouldn't go subjecting Dawn to the stresses of interdimensional travel before she's old enough to choose it for herself."

"There will be a time. And I want to reiterate, it brings me no end of joy that you want to make sure Dawn is able to grow up into Dawn rather than Tarantulas."

Tarantulas scoffs quietly, more out of a mingled sense of embarrassment and pleased recognition than real rejection of the compliment. "I didn't make her so I could have a copy of myself. I want to see her grow into her own person, independent of me. Isn't that what parenthood is supposed to be about?"

“Depends on who you ask, but personally, I think you’re more right than wrong on that.”

"I do enjoy being right about things." Smiling, Tarantulas tugs on the string still wrapped around Theodore's cat body, sending him sliding across the floor. "Rather a weighty conversation for such a quite day, isn't it? I wonder what it is about rain that brings out the introspection in people. It seems to transcend species and culture."

Does this count as a rain check? ;3

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