ph_logs | My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

Who: Yellow, The King In (

howtheyshine) & OTA

What: Canon updates are rough, buddies.

When: Early August

Where: The Dock, the woods, see headers!

Warning(s): Eldritch tantrums and horror podcast character trauma.

i. the docks - cw body horror - OTA

He keeps himself in check as he finds his way back to the ferry. He doesn't think he fools the creatures he speaks to, the beings who essence he can feel now, in intermittent moments that fade the longer he's on the water. He doesn't bother trying to shape himself into something human. He can feel what he's made of now, too, what this form is made of, the base materia, the corpse of the man he was bound to. Larson. It's like learning he's lived in a house built from bones and human hides.

He tells himself it bothers him because he deserves better than a human corpse.

But the closer he gets to the island, the more the King realizes he's about to see people he forgot existed until hours ago. Hours at most. People from a life coming back to him in slow waves, making him feel and radiate an oppressive sensation, a psychic nausea that he does his best to pretend is intentional.

The shape that exits the ferry towers over the dock, a void wrapped in yellow mist. He sprouts groups of tentacles as he moves, each one unspooling and pulling him forward before fading back into the shadow underneath his yellow film. It's silken, uncanny, a steady glide. Every limb is a blue so deep that looking too long feels like drowning.

He is a monster, and he's going to make sure everyone knows it this time.

ii. lockwood forest - cw animal death (not graphic/off-screen) - OTA

As soon as he can escape town, he does. He goes to the woods first, the chaos of emotion like a whip against his spirit, driving him on and on, sleepless and snarling, a violent shadow that kills two deer and snatches a rabbit off its feet before he catches himself and lets it go. He didn't want to kill it, it's a fucking rabbit, it's beneath him. They're all beneath him. It's all beneath him.

He can feel another presence now, too, when he couldn't before. Kayne, the Kayne-but-Not, the thing that is Nyarlahotep here and became something else somewhere else. He can't feel where it is. He can't feel if it's close or far, if it's watching him or simply exists and he can tell now. But he's afraid of it. He's afraid of it, and there's nowhere to run, and killing animals hasn't made him less afraid. Any more than killing humans did.

But at least out here he's harder to find.

Other than the like, destroyed greenery.

iii. paradesium - cw mental manipulation/potentially altered mental states - OTA

He ends up in Paradesium. It seems like the best place to stay. The hardest spot for mostly-average humans to reach unaided. He haunts the ruins in ever-changing shapes, shifting colors without names. It makes him... homesick. This empty place, these tumbled stones. A monument to something, someone, that he should be equal to. At least.

It's why he does what he does. That thought. The recurring itch that he should be more than this, he should be more than a creature too nervous to stay in one shape lurking in hidden places. The uneasy feeling that this place, too, should be more.

Maybe some will feel it. Probably most won't. But the King in Yellow tries, very briefly, to warp some of the city ruins into something else. The part he chooses was a palace once. He tries to make it into a palace again, a grand and sweeping edifice to the god he's supposed to be. It's like throwing a glass of water onto a bonfire. The power twists out of shape, fractures away from him, leaving pieces of the ruins laced in Illusion. The power shifts and looks for the cracks in the mind of whoever comes near it, almost independent of its summoning god. It adapts to the particular desires and daydreams of the minds it can touch. Each pocket of surreality spills out a draining joy, an ecstatic exhaustion that encourages dreams. Sleep, motherfuckers, and give him somewhere to vent his feelings that won't truly kill anyone. Probably.

iv. wildcard/once upon an event i missed lol

Another idea? A thread you want to continue from my last ancient posts? An event prompt you want to share for me to tag? Want to just straight-up talk through CR things that might have happened because my god I've missed so much and I love y'all's characters, why not skip the awkward introductions?? Have at! I'm also available on plurk, if you'd rather, and the game discord server (nickname Jae).

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A bug in the accidental web. The triumph lasts for as long as it takes Yellow to shift sidelong into the mind opening up to him. He's overeager. Doesn't consider the familiarity of the presence--it's not Gwen, it's not Sally, who cares--except then he recognizes who it actually is.

Oh, fuck, he does care.

He backpedals hastily into a corner of the dream taking shape in Crichton's mind. His shape in the dream is somewhere between the towering nightmare that fought John so recently and the kid he forgot existed. A boy haunted by the ghost of a monster, in a place that Crichton probably never wanted to see again. Yellow doesn't know it, he can't read minds. But he wanted whoever he caught to be angry and afraid.

"What are you doing here?"

"Oh... boy." Crichton says, once he starts to understand what he's seeing. He's a veteran of meetings in the mind at this point. Anger flashes like a brief spout of heated oil in a pan, but he tamps it down as he thinks of Sally, and how worried she was.

"Looking for you, Yellow. Sally is worried sick and she wants you to come home."

Shadows of his nightmares start to appear like figures in a fog. Something lurks at the edges, something with sharp teeth and sharper wit. Crichton would rather Yellow not be introduced to that.

"What are you doing to me? Let me out of this, man, and we can talk."

Yellow growls, and the sound comes from the boy, the monster, the air itself.

Unfortunately, Crichton knows him well enough to tell the difference between Yellow angry and Yellow afraid.

"I don't want to talk."

Crichton stands his ground against those growls. He's not a fan of how similar this feels to the talks he used to have with Harvey, but unlike those, he has trust that underneath everything, there's a soul worth saving in Yellow.

"Maybe you don't," he answers gently, "but I think we need to. I need to. So, can you humor me?"

He hates this. It would be fucking easy to say no, if he didn't remember who Crichton was. If he didn't care about Crichton being happy, about making Crichton happy. And if he lets Crichton out, if they talk face to face, that will be even harder.

"Then... talk."

Crichton attempts to massage the incoming headache between his eyes away. Okay, fine. He's done this plenty of times, so what's one more?

"Sally told me how afraid you were that you might hurt her or Gwen. I get that. I'm glad you're being careful. I know you probably think you're doing the right thing for them, but you can't protect them that way, Yellow. Pushing them away hurts, too."

He laughs, the already unnerving sound edged with something like hysteria. Or rather, the ghost of the King, shadowing Yellow's human shape, laughs. The human-shape shivers and steps back a little deeper into the drift of translucent robes. He has to wonder if this is what being crazy feels like, feeling two things with such force it could tear him in half.

It's there in the voices that answer Crichton. God, shadow, boy.

"I know it hurts." He can feel how much it hurts, the prospect of losing them. But it doesn't hurt more than the fear of the thing he was when John and Arthur found him. The fact that he forgot all about the people he called family here, that he would have killed Crichton or Sally without a second thought if they'd faced him in the Order's gathering place.

"The pain is safer."

Oh, Yellow, he thinks piteously, what have they done to you? Crichton can't begin to guess, but he knows what it means to laugh like that. He knows what it takes to put a sound like that in a man's throat, let alone a burgeoning God.

"Maybe," he says as he takes a step forward, looking at the boy shrinking back, that's who he needs to talk to. "Some risks are worth taking. I think this one's worth it. They're your family, Yellow. They'll forgive you if you don't always get things right. Please, come home."

Yellow shivers again, hunching into himself rather than backing up. The robes, as gossamer-thin and transparent as they look, still catch against Crichton like heavy cloth when he reaches them.

"And if I forget them?"

"You didn't, Yellow. You know who they are and who I am." He takes another small step, holding a hand out. "If that ever changes, then we'll remind you. We'll take a family photo together for proof. If... if your memory is a problem, then we'll work together to solve it."

Two voices answer. One of them is the voice Crichton knows-- the voice of a god, too deep for the human shape Yellow wears, rumbling with a power that distorts the words a fraction. Like another language burrowed under the skin of his English and is threatening to burst through. The other voice isn't as deep. It cracks in a very different way, adolescent desperation, tunes itself to something closer to Crichton's voice or Arthur's as he speaks. Unnatural still, but trying.

"Yes we did." "Yes I did."

That booming voice rattles his senses, but it's nothing compared to the pain he hears in the other--fragile, desperate pain.

"You mean when you went back, right?" He's heard this story from others, too. Returning to life briefly, forgetting everything that came before, it has to be some kind of side effect from the ferry.

"How long were there?"

He hunches downward again, curling into a ball the way he did on Crichton's couch, when he confessed he wasn't John. Except this time he's sitting on bare floor, shrouded by the robed thing that looks like the King. Yellow drags his senses into himself, too, so he doesn't have to see Crichton's face. He made the dream, after all. He can see everything that appears in it.

"Long enough."

Might as well get it over with. Yellow lets the shrouded, masked thing speak.

"A few weeks at most. Long enough."

The room they're in is changing, the way that dreams do. Crichton's mental backdrop blends and merges with a grand cathedral space with no windows. There's solidity, reality to the place, a sense of somewhere visited in wakefulness.

"I am a god. I did what gods do."

There's no readable guilt in the words. There's also blood running down the walls and columns.

Crichton lowers himself to the floor, criss-cross-applesauce, and attempts to get Yellow to look at him--even as the walls start to morph and then glisten lightly with the sticky redness of blood pouring down them. Crichton can feel his heart beating against the back of his throat, but he forces himself not to consider what this could be an omen of. He needs to hear it from Yellow first.

"I haven't met many gods, so you're gonna have to tell me. What do gods do?"

Fine. Fine, he'll show Crichton why he shouldn't want to be here, why he should want Gwen and Sally as far away from Yellow as possible. Their surroundings fade, and the sight of Yellow fades with them.

It starts with Larson, so Crichton can understand the rest of what he's about to see. Larson, with ghostly yellow tendrils trailing from him, these apparently invisible to everyone but Crichton. They're anchored to Larson somehow, but not the way John was to Arthur. Larson's eyes are unaffected. His senses are otherwise untouched. Crichton knows, the way people know things in dreams, that Yellow is in Larson, trapped and hidden.

Well, usually he's hidden. Now, though, the tendrils twine together and start to solidify. Larson's voice comes through like a badly tuned radio, chatting with a scowling man behind the kind of desk that rich men use to compensate for something.

"I do understand why you're not enthusiastic about the idea," Larson says, his voice falsely sympathetic. "But unfortunately, I don't really feel like waiting for a vote."

The stranger stares, incredulous. "This is a bridge too far, Larson. You've always been deluded, but this is--"

"Insane?" Larson's voice is almost sweet. The tendrils trailing from him start to twine together, stretch upward, lengthening and darkening until the man behind the desk scrabbles backward and onto his feet.

"What the fu--"

The King in Yellow doesn't let him finish. He snarls like an injured predator, and a rip in the air spills something onto the desk before sealing itself. It's like a sea star, if a sea star had too many arms to keep track of and one large eye sunk into its center. The man starts to scream in alarm. The thing on the desk lashes out, sinks one tentacle into the man's jaw, another into his ear, and two into each eye. The squishing isn't covered by the screaming.

When the screaming stops, the man isn't a man any more. The creature clings to his face, tentacles buried in his eyes and ears as blood oozes out of the violated orifices. When the man speaks he sounds mechanical. Something learning to use an unfamiliar mouth.

"My King," it says. "What do you wish from me."

The King hesitates, until Larson clears his throat.

That gets him speaking again. "We have work to do."

The work is bloody and disturbing. Larson directs Yellow in how to summon creatures that have no place on earth, create machines that look somehow more like insect than machine. Humans die, their faces fuzzy, unremembered, unconsidered. Some are crushed, others beheaded, their elimination casual and uncaring.

When the cathedral returns, their vantage point is different. They're on a balcony overlooking the floor, filled with people. And then, well. This happens.

The vision fades as Yellow's unlucky victim beats his own head in against a pillar. Yellow doesn't quite have the courage to show Crichton the confrontation with Arthur and the man Noel. He's too humiliated and ashamed to show his loss to John, the way he retreated into borderline dormancy before being thrown to the Dreamlands. Probably the Dreamlands. Maybe somewhere worse.

The room they're in now is the one where they started. Yellow takes advantage of his own power to retreat from Crichton again, leaving the man sitting alone on the floor while he occupies the nearest corner.

Edited 2025-08-18 04:43 (UTC)

Oh, it's movie time now. Once more he's struck how familiar this experience is to the way Harvey used to argue his points, and once more he has to shove those feelings way down where the sun can't shine on them. He's doing this for Sally, for Gwen, and for Yellow. So, he watches.

He endures the gruesome show-and-tell of it all with his own face fixed into a stony mask. Yellow is sensitive, he'll pull away if Crichton shows the horror hitting his heart in his expression. God, he knew it was going to be bad but... the part that stands out most is the man, Larson. It's hard to argue he isn't the true monster in the room. His eyes, even his voice, remind Crichton of his own enemy, Scorpius: cold, calculating, without mercy, but with a deep burning lust for power. To Scorpius is was wormholes, for Larson... it was Yellow.

Crichton comes back to his senses alone on the floor, his fists are balled painfully tight with the effort to not fall into hysterics. Shocking as the visuals were, that wasn't the part putting him on edge.

Softly, evenly, he asks, "How much of that was your idea and how much was Larson's, Yellow?"

The robed thing shifts, a startled motion, and the curled up boy in the middle of it lifts his head to stare blearily at Crichton.

"What- Why would that matter?"

Edited 2025-08-18 16:46 (UTC)

There, that's what he needed to see. The reaction makes him fairly certain of the answer already.

"It matters because, to me, it looked like he was using you. Did he call all the shots? Did he make all the plans and promise you it was for your own good? How much of any of what I saw was something you wanted without Larson asking first? Tell me the truth, Yellow, did you feel like the one in control?"

"I..."

He doesn't move from the corner, but he isn't crushed so tightly in on himself any more. The robed thing is still. Memory, rendered in the dreamscape, makes voices echo quietly around them. Crichton knows two of the voices now, certainly. Arthur, Larson, and a third, a stranger. Yellow squeezes his hands over his ears as though that will make any difference.

We both have a piece of the King inside us, Arthur. You know how limited that feels for them.

--allowed yourself to go from one prison to another.

A pet.

Being whole is only the first step to returning them to their former glory.

Yellow growls, and keeps growling, the sound rising slowly under the chatter of the voices.

"Shut up!"

You’re less than an appendage on Larson’s arm.

Then, I can allow them to return to the Dreamlands.

Do you really think there is any way out...?

John? You’re nothing like this Yellow prick. You're a good person.

--trapped with him. Forever.

"Shut the fuck up!"

That last is Yellow, snarling the words to the void and himself. His words are a flattening pressure, an almost physical blow. But at least there's silence after.

Arthur's voice hits like a stab in the ears, yet somehow it's the stranger's comment that really boils his blood over. Yes, they had a right to be pissed given what just happened, but Arthur seems to see it already, doesn't he? This isn't what Yellow wanted. He didn't have a choice any more than the rest of them.

The sudden quiet after such a cacophony leaves Crichton's ears ringing, but into that silence he whispers, "They were wrong about you."

He takes in a steadying breath and looks up to search for Yellow's eyes, "If John can be a good person, so can you. You're both cut from the same cloth. And I've seen you do good things with my own two eyes. I know you're capable of more."

Yellow manages to meet Crichton's eyes for all of three seconds before he stares instead at his knees.

"The man who talked to John. The King in Yellow tortured him. I tortured him. For ten years. And I didn't remember that either. I tortured him, for a decade, and I don't remember a thing."

That three seconds is enough for it to register how Crichton's eyes drill into him unflinching, but it's not hatred or even disgust that occupies his expression, but sorrow. He heard. Make no mistake, he heard. And that horrific truth does make his insides feel stuck together and heavy, but Yellow has already proven why he can't just abandon him in anger--Yellow doesn't remember doing it, and the version sitting here doesn't seem eager for a reprisal. This does, however, make him less upset at whoever that person was who knew Yellow only as his tormentor. Two things are often true at once. Life is messy.

"I believe you," he says softly, "That was wrong, and if this man ever arrives here, you will have to take some responsibility for it, but let me ask you something? If he did show up, would you do it again or would you want him to know you're sorry?"

And now comes an interesting moment. For all that exposure to people has taught him the appropriate times to apologize for his temper or manners, he hasn't really encountered the need to apologize for anything more significant. He hands-down refused to accept what John said about the things he'd done for Larson. But now that John turns out to be right (of course he does, Arthur's voice hisses), what does that mean? He doesn't remember torturing that man, either, but he could. He might. He doesn't want to know anything about the King in Yellow. He doesn't want to, but he might.

"How can I be sorry if I don't remember?"

His spirit aches. He's starting to tire, which is probably a sign that he should wake Crichton up, but he's still scared even without being judged. He doesn't even know why he's scared. Not specifically. He just knows that everything in him is a shade of fear he doesn't want to examine.

"Why would he want to hear me apologize for something I don't remember doing? I can't even say it right."

"It might never be a complete apology," Crichton concedes. He's not going to speak for another victim, "but telling him you're sorry he got hurt doesn't require you to remember doing it. The main thing is... even if he can't forgive you, it's still the right thing to do. It would help for him to know you won't hurt him again." It would at least be a start.

"You wouldn't have to do it alone, Yellow. If you wanted, I'd go with you. Or Sally would."

When he looks at Crichton this time, he glances away, but then makes himself look back again. He might not be meeting Crichton's gaze every minute, but he's not looking down.

"You'd do that?" He knew Sally probably would, even if he'd feel bad asking. But that Crichton would too, it means- it means people can know what he is and not hate him. Can see what he's responsible for and not pull away. That maybe Sally, too, wouldn't do it because she's nice. She and Crichton would both do it because they know him. Yellow. Not just anything. They know him and they care about him anyway.

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

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cw eldritch body horror and such

Re: cw eldritch body horror and such

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