ph_logs | May Event - All Too Familiar

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May Event - All Too Familiar

Content Warnings: Walking dead, character deaths, potential for gore | Special Thanks to Meghan and Kalineh

It was a fine spring day when mysterious letters began cropping up all over Pumpkin Hollow. Letters whose apparent senders do not remember writing them, whose recipients or discoverers were harmed by reading them. Eventually these mysteries, though still unsolved, come to a quiet halt as stealthily as they began, but not before a mail carrier in a cowboy hat trots out to Elsie’s tree with a letter in hand, unmarked aside from being addressed to her.

She gleefully rips open that letter, hoping it's another message from her father. It isn't and, at first, she's crushed. But only until she starts to actually read it.

Elsie,

River la Croix has been hiding something in her forge for a while now. It is called the Book of the Dead. In its pages are hundreds of spells from across time and space with the power to give life to those no longer with us.

Your father is doing his best to revive your mother. But this island’s barrier is blocking his will, resisting his magic. I can no longer watch you suffer in solitude when a solution exists. All you have to do is decipher the text, and its powers are yours. Your mother will be returned to you.

River does not want to part with it. She will become suspicious of you if you ask, and it will become harder to acquire it. You will have to take it without her notice by levitating it out of her forge. She, like many others, is fearful of the Book’s power. This fear isn’t entirely unwarranted for them, but for you, your connection to the Feywilds’ magic will be enough to grant you access to that otherworldly power.

Good luck, and all my love to your dear mother when she returns.

Fond regards,
A friend

Could this be it? Could this be the miracle she's been waiting for? Hope swells painfully in her chest as she clutches the note close. She mustn't celebrate too early. She still needs to get the book. At least her mysterious friend has already told her where to find it. Her jaw sets in a look of determination, and she speeds away into the dusk.

It doesn't take long to reach the forge. River has defended it well, but Elsie slips into her own shadow and sneaks beneath the door without so much as a whisper of sound. Only her hand extends from the puddle of shadow on the floor inside, like a disembodied arm hovering before the flames. Mustering her will, she reaches out to the ancient book and commands the winds to lift it. Sweat beads her shadowy brow while she concentrates, the flames flicker and dance around the slowly levitating book. Just a little more, a little more… There!

It's heavy in her hand, and remarkably cool to the touch despite having been pulled from the fire. She retracts her arm and the book back into her shadow and slips out the way she came. Her heart thumps in her chest as she races back to the safety of her tree. To her mother, who will soon be able to wrap flesh and blood arms around her like she once did. All that's left now is to read. Her friends have been teaching her how. Her mother will be so proud of her.

Carefully now, she opens the book, feeling her skin crawl as a sudden unease grips her very core. No, she will not be deterred. The language is unlike any she's ever seen. The letters, if indeed they can be called that, feel jagged and painful to her mind. Still, she will Not Give Up. She screws her eyes shut, thinks of her mother, and holds tight to her desperate hope to be reunited.

When her eyes reopen to behold the page before her, understanding strikes like lightning. Suddenly, she knows she can speak the words. As they escape her mouth, an unknown magic swells into the space around her, then beyond her. The ground shakes. The air turns foul. And as the trinkets in Elsie’s tree chime together in the unsettling breeze, ringing out with notes more sour than usual, it quickly becomes clear that the advice she received was not from any friend.

The forms of people begin to pry themselves loose from the ground all over town, as if emerging from water, leaving the ground unbroken as they lift themselves out of the ground. They bear horrid injuries, shambling along grotesquely, telling a story of death. However, these are not skeletons from the graveyard, housing the souls of long-dead locals. These are things of flesh and blood, however exposed they might be, wearing newer faces.

Much newer.

Since the barrier went up, many people have died, only to have their bodies vanish and replaced by a new one. Those bodies now walk the town, seeking to unleash a wrath brought on by the corrupted magic of the Necronomicon. Anyone who has died inside the barrier will have a violent, undead copy of themself representing each death wandering the island looking to increase their ranks. Which means that there will be many, many, many Yoricks.

Destroyed copies will remain destroyed for the standard overnight period of any other person. But there are too many of them to defeat this way, and their destruction is impermanent. Thankfully, help is on the way!

In the midst of the undead and their attack on the citizens of Pumpkin Hollow, tiny glimmers of hope appear in the form of folded paper birds. The little gold birds flit from fighter to fighter, small whispers promising that if enough enemies can be felled then the High Priestess can intervene. The necessary number is unknown, but if a bird alights upon someone, they will feel their weariness vanish for a short time, and perhaps, should she feel like it, they may receive a temporary boon to use against the undead.

Eventually the High Priestess will show herself, making good on the promises of the little birds. With a smile, her magic will wrap around the remaining undead, returning them to the unseen graves and binding them into Death once more, leaving the living to pick up the pieces.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"It's the perfect brand of humiliation."

Ripley teeters in the uncertain place between finished and unfinished tasks. She isn't ready to have her bubble burst and so flounders for what dirty part of herself to offer CT next. Feels childish for it— which she supposes is synonymous with selfish— and doesn't care to investigate this further.

She holds out her hands, a king who can't tell right from left and so commands attention to both. They're smattered in dry blood. Scuffed from being tossed to the ground.

"Mm-hm. Kids always have a funny way of thinking things are their fault. I never understood why that happens. We see our parents engaged in their adult responsibilities, and when they change, we insert ourselves into that without understanding why. Take on the whole brunt. When dad retired, I was older, and still I felt like I'd kicked over something I didn't even know was there in the first place."

Then, purely indulgent, "How'd your moms meet?"

"Ah, well, they were high school sweethearts," CT starts to explain, as she carefully takes one of Ripley's hands by the wrist and starts cleaning the skin, trying to be careful of the scrapes. "Ma transferred up from the school in the single digit levels to the thirties when her family saved up enough to move up a sector. Apparently Mama saw the new face in class and immediately decided she was going to be her guide to the school."

There's a muted, sad quality to the smile on her face as she talks, but it's a smile nonetheless.

"They both denied it was love at first sight, but they did become inseparable very quickly and I guess one day they realised that wasn't going to change."

"Ahh-ha, a classic story." She leans forward, eyes wide to encompass the entirety of her; seeing words in addition to hearing them, and committing the strings to memory. The simplicity of their meeting captures her; two people decidedly committed to not leaving each other alone. One enters the second's orbit and, like the sudden winking of a new universe, which happens before it's realized, find their trajectory altered. Paired forever.

Forever is a silly thought. Her parents are a glaring example of this, but that's not to say they hadn't altered each other's trajectory. That her father doesn't still visit her mother, sat quietly at her bedside like he'd taken to doing before she left. You swear you'll be alright? Ripley had said. You swear you aren't lying to me? And he nodded, our lives are eclipsing, you still have yours, and sent her off.

"That's sweet, helping her acclimate. Most people I know would have kept their heads down. Everyone was so..." She gestures limply with her free hand. "Reticent? Difficult to gauge? Maybe I had a bad group. Stations could be real mixed bags, like that."

Cool towel to skin, fingers splayed, palm turned back to front.

"Resol was always a warm place." In both atmosphere and culture. "Especially in the lower sectors. Up higher... I only went above the hundred mark once, for a field trip, but the feeling up there was much— colder. There were hardly any people out and about and no one who was paid us any more attention than they had to. Everything was neat and sleek and glossy. But also weirdly sparse. All that money the people up there had and they didn't seem to spend it on anything interesting."

Like a different world, compared to the lived in streets hundreds of metres below. No signs of culture or people, only the cleanliness of minimalism. Self-driving vehicles and empty platforms.

"Of course my family were never going to break past the forties. My moms worked hard to even get us that high and we still climbed down for most things, rather than up. But I liked it that way." She cleans between the digits, over the knuckles and creases of the palm, down the arm. "Mama taught at the school they met at. They gave Ma a part-time custodian job after she quit the mines, to hold us over until she managed to pull a job managing some low-level repair crews."

Sounds like home, she thinks to say but doesn't. Ellen hadn't felt contempt for the plainness of her Lunar station so much as she'd, at times, felt bored. Barren white halls gave way to barren white rooms, the sleekness of its furniture like something pulled from the ocean. It made the blackness beyond their windows impossibly so. Were it not for Earth's moon, which they orbited, she might of assumed they were nowhere. Aimless spacial interlopers. At times she imagined they were.

"I assume you mean that literally— the sectors being above and below? Were they tunnel systems? Niches? I've never heard anything like it. Our people were separated by on-planet and stationed. Stationed individuals were researchers, scholars, administrators. The folks on-planet did the heavy labor. They'd argue which was favorable like it was a professional sport."

Solid ground, open sky. It made the labor worth it, to some. Others fell for the minimalist illusion; dreamed of it.

She hums a low, affirmative noise. Looks between wet rag, tentative hands and the person they belong to in a cycle repeated. "People looking out for each other. They must have taken good care of you, your brother and your parents."

"It was all buildings, platforms. All sort of built on top of each other, connecting to each other with walkways and transport tunnels, lifts and so on. Everything was built in stages from the planet's surface upwards and the taller the city got, the richer you had to be to leave the lower levels. Up in the forties we were— managing, for the most part, but things were tight. Above the hundred mark..." she shakes her head, "I couldn't even imagine that kind of money."

Most of the confirmed survivors of the glassing were from those levels, the triple digits where money was no object. They probably had their own docks for escape ships, up there, for only the 'worthy'. Maybe money couldn't save them all, no, but it still saved more of them than anyone else.

Onto the other hand.

"The lowest sector had started spreading into the abandoned mines near the surface, in the last few years. They were running out of space and well, they couldn't go up, so... down it was. Most of them were mining families in the first place." She sighs, bites the inside of her cheek as she quiets for a moment. "We all looked out for each other down there, yeah. When Ma quit the mines even her old workmates kept checking in on us. Once a single-digit worker, always a single-digit worker."

"It doesn't make sense. We move off-world in ships capable of taking us farther than we thought capable, and for some reason we spoil it. Find new, creative ways to cram masses of people into one spot. It's like we learned nothing."

Are human beings really so incorrigible? She'd like to think not, but time and time again her hope is dashed. It's as if, by moving skyward, the wealthier few can pretend what lies below simply doesn't exist. And her own people; overrun by possibilities, industrious fingers outstretched in all directions, in such a way that they forget themselves. Where's the goddamn sense?

She spreads the fingers of a newly cleaned hand, one degree removed from concern around zombie-induced disease, infection, sepsis. From one to the next.

Ripley reaches for her. Cups fingers loosely beneath her jaw in the midst of silence. Something like I'm here, or I'm sorry.

"People won't quit being stubborn anytime soon. It's our specialty."

Edited 2025-06-11 00:25 (UTC)

CT leans her head into the touch, a comforting reflex, and exhales. It hardly disrupts her motion, the other hand still in hers as she wipes it clean with as much care as there is diligence.

"Mm, you prove that well enough," she teases, lightly, flash of a smile across her eyes. "...I loved that city. I loved climbing the buildings themselves to get between levels. I loved the community we had down in the lower sectors. We made it work. People always find a way to make it work."

And now it's all gone. Sometimes the foggy memory of the oasis comes to haunt her in her sleep, the image of a world where her home survived and she never left. Where Connie never had to be anything but Connie and even her brother was still at home—no need for an Insurrection at all. Sometimes she wishes she could've shown it to more people without being sucked in—look, here's home, here's all the things I loved about it.

Can't think about that now. She's been putting off facing that fresh demon for a reason. Now certainly isn't a good time.

"I mean, look at this town. Cut off from reality for years and tormented by all these horrid things and they're still going. They're still living."

"Me?" She feigns offense, tongue sliding across teeth. Catches the shell cartilage of CT's ear between her fingers and tugs playfully, gently. "You mean I haven't made myself perfectly agreeable this entire time?"

Loved, had, made; all past tense. Ellen isn't privy to the details and she doesn't need to be. She gathers enough to know that whatever community had built itself from the ground up— that had swelled into underground tunnels like floodwater with nowhere else to go— is no more. A common thread, in the war-torn world Connie comes from. Her's hadn't tipped that awful precipice quite yet; impossible to know now if they've reached that point.

"Yeah, it's incredible. You could run them into the ground and they'll pop back up like spring flowers." Bits of blood come away with the washrag. "Seeing them around town, in the shops, on the shore, doing all the things they've made routines of for all these years, it makes things easier. It's grounding.

"In the beginning, I thought they were all crazy. I didn't understand how they could spend their time doing anything other than running around in a panic. But nobody wants to live that way. We weren't made with the stamina."

CT laughs, neck bending compliantly as if the tugs are effective, matches the playfulness reflexively with a couple half-hearted attempts to nip the 'offending' hand. "It's okay, you're fun even when you're not being perfectly agreeable."

The blood fades away, the towel left red in its place. Clean-up to be done later. One more big communal laundry day to end the season, maybe; the town coming together to wash away the dead once more.

"We can't live that way, you're right. I think— we build up a tolerance, at least, to being on higher alert than the average person should be. God knows people did back home, with the war. You got used to it and went on with life or you crashed."

Not that the level to which she 'got used to it' come the program is... healthy, exactly, but at least it keeps her going. And at least around here there's more leeway. A life beyond the ever turning cogs of the program.

"Mm. It's not pretty, watching those people crash. There's only so much you can do for them, to hold them above water before they... You know. Lose themselves. Our navigator, she was like that. Prickly as ever. She'd let you know exactly how and when you pissed her off. We didn't get along very well, but her stress wasn't any different from ours. It wasn't until things got dire that she shut down. We practically had to drag her through the ship."

The towel sags, a soaked underwater-something now beached atop smooth ceramic. Her hands and face are cool where they've had yet to dry, and she's comforted by the assurance that she can now touch things without feeling as though she's contaminated them.

She sits for while, head thrown back against the tiled wall, hands in her lap. The respite is a cramped, blood-twinged and stuffy one, but a respite nonetheless, walled off from the chaos outside. Here, Ripley loosens perceptibly. Breathes slow breaths in and out through nostrils and feels sleep hook and pull her by the limbs. Thank you, she says at some point.

Lifting her head, "Do you have, uh, any coffee here?"

"Mm. Freelancer mostly selected against that type. Not just because we were already soldiers but because of who they chose to recruit."

Even then their careful psychological profiling them sometimes, mind you. The Triplets weren't what they'd hope they would be; they were skilled on paper but often struggled to match their best in action. But most of the time selecting for those caught up in the military courts selected for the types of people that could handle the pressure—or, at least, their response to it wasn't to simply shut down.

She tosses the towel aside onto the counter.

"You think a station full of cops makes it through any supernatural nonsense without coffee on hand?" she says, then jerks her head back over her shoulder. "Yeah, we've got a stockpile still."

"And how'd that turn out for them?"

Poorly, if she were to guess. Let it be a lesson for what happens when powerful men deliberately fertilized tension; allow it to grow and fester beneath glass while they observed from a not-so-safe distance.

"I should have seen that one coming," Ripley says, chuckling. It takes an honest effort to haul herself up from her makeshift seat. The only way she's able to do so is by throwing out her hands for CT to tug. "I'll have to keep myself busy, or else I'll hole up and finish the whole stock. If I do, feel free to kick me out."

(Glance, tilt, weight tossed from one leg to the other. Ellen's teeth sink into her bottom lip, creasing it like a cushion. The sum of her movements are like some strange thinking ritual.)

Adamant on not thinking too intensely, Ripley pecks CT on the lips and ambles for the door.

"Well, it did literally blow up in their face, so..."

Not so well, in the end. Even if it did take years to finally backfire. Even if the Director is still out there years later, hiding in the shadows.

She takes Ripley's hands and pulls her up, ready to step away to duck back through to the main office space— and then Ripley quickly bends, steals a kiss and scampers off. No, not even scampers, just slips away. It freezes her on the spot for a moment, face warm and mouth open.

(Overthinking, again, a dozen hundred thoughts flying through her mind about the situation she's tangled herself up within that she doesn't so much want to extricate herself from but understand, be able to see where the lines wrap themselves around them, follow them to a conclusion she knows what to do with.)

Then she snorts and bounds after her, "In the office? You'll cause a scandal."

"What are they gonna do, arrest me? Have you enforcers got some fantasy equivalent to handcuffs I should prepare for?" Ripley turns, trots backwards with hands raised in mock submission.

(Don't think about the details. Don't try to answer questions that have no answer. Let the numerical digits march on and on and on with no foreseeable end. Can't you do that? Can't you leave it, for once? Allow things to be simple?)

"So, where's this stash?"

She sniffs the air, bloodhound following a fresh scent trail.

"Fantasy equivalent?" CT laughs, taking a route that leads past her desk so she can pull out a pair of hefty and archaic but generally standard handcuffs from her drawer, dangling them from her fingers. "They haven't changed that much over the years, apparently."

Granted, in her time they're much studier and often powered, so these are far more archaic than even she's used to, but still.

She doesn't bother putting them down before leading over to the station's sort-of-kitchenette, mostly a surface, a small icebox and a detached hob powered by some magical source rather than a whole fireplace or stove to heat the kettle on. And, of course, the actual coffee supply.

"Here you go. Knock yourself out."

"Christ, look at those things," She marvels. "They're solid iron. Is this when you tell me there's a dungeon under this building, too? Somewhere to hook offenders to stone walls— all that Medieval torture shit?"

Were people actually doing that? The Old Histories are sort of up in the air; she couldn't tell you fact from myth.

Ripley putters into the kitchen, met by the warm, rich scent of coffee and the hope that maybe, now, she won't fall asleep the minute she sits down. Given the quality of last night's rest (that is, abysmal), she's exhausted, but not at all eager to close her eyes.

A mug is stolen, filled to the brim. She slides into a criss-cross on the floor.

"You joining, or do you have zombies to kill?"

"No dungeon. I think." She swings the cuffs around on her finger, luckily dexterous enough to keep them from flying off and breaking something when they land. "Just a totally normal jail."

She can't speak to whatever the constabulary did before the otherworlders all but took over, for all she knows they did have medieval torture shit, but she at least likes to think they're not running the place horribly now. The cop part of the job never has been her favourite.

She leans against the counter. "I can stay a little while, but I should get back out there at some point. We'll never reach whatever target we're aiming for if people don't keep at it."

"Mm, how boring."

Not that she'd want to be strung to a dirty stone wall. No, seriously, that sounds awful. Got anything a little less heavy? Less prone to rust? Rust isn't very sexy. Neither is tetanus.

"Yeah, you're right. I'll only keep you for a little." Ripley touches lips to mug, heat and caffeine a pleasant buzz at the back of her throat. "I saw more of those paper cranes, on my way here. You know, the ones from the sky? You think it means we're nearing the end of this thing?"

"What, do you want a dungeon?" she teases. "I'm sure something could be arranged but I'm also sure there's much more comfortable answers to fulfil that curiosity."

That edges up a little closer to the line of no longer safe to say around the office than she should probably let it, but it's out of her mouth now and she even emphasises it by catching the cuffs out of their spin. She tosses them back over toward her desk immediately after.

"It's probably a good sign, at least? They're responsible for letting people know what we're supposed to be doing, so I can only assume the more of them, the better."

"Not particularly," she insists into her coffee mug. "I'm partial to comfort, probably on account of— I thought you were concerned about causing a scandal?"

CT's flourish earns a 'very fancy' from the woman below her. One can always trust that a knife-wielder will make a tossable weapon of anything. The cuffs sail through the air to the effect of a canon ball. It's a miracle they don't buckle the legs of her chair.

"You look like you know what you're doing."

Another long sip of coffee.

"I hope so. Two days is an awfully long time to make a late entrance."

"What have I said that's scandalous?" She crosses her arms under her chest. "I'm just talking about our detention facilities."

The cheeky-playing-innocent smile on her face says otherwise, but that's her story and she's sticking to it. The rest can be left to the imagination, for now.

"I'm hoping we're either at the half-done mark or at least close. More than a few days of this and people are going to be exhausted."

"Oh, of course. My mind must have fallen into the gutter. Pretend I haven't said anything."

A stupid smile plasters onto Ripley's face. Whether it's derived from CT's cheekiness or a dozen new images of what the comfortable alternative to a dungeon looks like is anyone's guess.

"We can be sure it'll end, if what she's said is true. That's motivation enough to keep going. Without that, yeah... I don't think we would have lasted a week."

But it will end. It will. Best to remember that.

"We've got bullets to spare and a lot of fighters. So, fingers crossed." It'll end. Sooner rather than later, hopefully. Then it'll just be time to clean up the mess left after. Let the new dead revive. "If you're planning to stay here overnight, you'll have to take a spot at a desk or the floor. It's not exactly the height of comfort but it could be worse."

She's had worse sleeping arrangements in the field, at least, which probably gives her a skewed perspective and explains why the desk sleeping doesn't bother her much.

After this, they can get some proper sleep again. Hopefully. (Whether apart or together, she doesn't dare to think.)

"I'll try not to be outside too long, I definitely don't want to be out when it starts to get dark, but Crichton's been in and out so you might catch him while I'm gone."

"I'll...take my chances here, if you don't mind." She thumbs apprehensively against her mug's handle. "Check in on the little bastard at home once morning comes. But, I don't think I can sleep there again. Not until this is over."

Too dark, too tight. Placed squarely in one of the isle's busiest neighborhoods, yet the minute she drew the blinds she'd felt herself removed completely. Back in that uncertain, shifting place between dream and machine-induced stasis.

The floor is fine. More than fine.

"I'll keep my eye out for him. And— CT... Try not to die, okay?"

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