ph_logs | January Event - Escape from Unknown Kadath

Entry tags:

event

January Event - Escape from Unknown Kadath

Escape from Unknown Kadath

Sleep

How many times now has it been?

I suppose it depends how long you've been here. This could very well be your first such excursion. But for many of you, it's an all too familiar circumstance.

You crawl into bed after a long day of work or… interpersonal drama, or whatever else you adorable, pointless little weirdos get up to in your free time. You close your eyes, and drift off into a deep slumber, far, far from the worries of a harsh and troubled world. Or so you thought. You wake to find yourself somewhere new, whether physically transported or simply trapped in some horrible lucid nightmare, and you are subjected to new and unimaginable horrors you never dared to dream back on that wretched little island. You are at the mercy of who or whatever brought you there, and their whims, or your own wits.

And so I ask again, "offworlder," how many times has it been now?

How many times have we met?

Would you even know?

Oh, goodness, where are my manners? I really should introduce myself. I have a number of names--- the Crawling Chaos, the Caliban Storm, the Bloody Tongue, Kayne--- would you believe I've even been called "Mr. Tiddles"? People are just so creative. But my proper, gods-given name is Nyarlathotep.

It's alright, I know you can't pronounce it. Why don't you just call me the name you usually do?

What do you mean, "which name"? Oh, come on now. Surely you've figured it out by now. Here's a hint. It starts with an N…

But there will be time for all that later, my pets. I have splendid news for you. All of you have been such good little playthings for the past several years that I've decided you deserve a holiday. I've brought you to a destination near and dear to my heart, for a dream getaway you surely won't forget.

Let me give you the tour.

Dream

{ CONTENT WARNINGS: Unreality }

The palace of the gods of old sits high above the great city. This hidden metropolis bustles in your ignorance, but is all but dead with you here to perceive it. Those brave enough to chase the rumors of its existence will find it perched high in steep and baseless mountains of sheer moon rock, with no ground at the edges and separated by a chasm with no end. These mountains, as austere as they are impossible, reach achingly like broken fingers towards a hungry, prismatic sky and can be found in that dreadful space where reality gnaws at the edges of your unconscious mind. The name of the city, spoken of in whispers exchanged among ghouls and cats, is Kadath.

I'm still workshopping that Airbnb listing. What do you think, too much?

Well, it doesn't matter for now. You all are the first guests in quite a long time, and our helpful attendants are just so eager to meet you! But more on that later.

Within the palace you'll find such splendid amenities as a banquet hall suited for the highest number of guests your rudimentary mind can realistically conceive of, a stairwell that always begins but does not end, a sprawling courtyard garden full of plants that refuse to accept a shape with physical boundaries and a wishing well that does not care about you, a constantly shifting maze of impossible hallways, the inner sanctum of all knowledge which shall never be written, and the throne room of the gods.

Your room, regardless of its location within the palace, will be fitted with a canopy bed whose gossamer drapes ebb and flow as if submerged in water, and a balcony that looks out onto that starving sky which beckons to you, begging that you may stare into it long enough for it to crawl into your eyes and become you. Such trappings, as it were, are yours to explore at your leisure.

Now, it is worth noting that we are not used to hosting guests as reality-impaired as yourselves, and thus our accommodations may take some getting used to. For one, you won't find an exit. And for another, you may find that your subconscious influences the way you perceive the… aesthetics of the palace, in ways your fellow guests may not see. The layout is also utterly indescribable, and thus you will only find anything if you were meant to, and you may have to be open to means of traversing spaces that are beyond your normal idea of what is possible.

Such is the way of dreams, no? Trying to make sense of it would be futile for a mind that is so accustomed to the rigid limitations of wakefulness, truth, and sanity. Although whether you realize you're dreaming may vary. I wouldn't recommend considering it too carefully if you want to enjoy your time here.

"Go home"? Now why in the world would I tell you how to do that?

Chaos

{ CONTENT WARNINGS: unreality, wrongness, faceless figures, memory loss }

Now, as I've said, each of our infinite guest rooms is outfitted with the same luxuries. Unlike Aster, I do not play favorites. I cherish you all equally! Most, but not all of you, will find yourselves waking there. Leaving your room and getting downstairs is entirely possible but does require you to traverse the upstairs hallways. Those can be a bit of a labyrinth. (Side note, there is a rather splendid film by the same name which really captures the same energy of the space. You really should watch it if you’re ever in the appropriate time period.) Some may find the journey more arduous than others, depending upon where you are attempting to go, but there's truly no one single right way to do anything around here.

In the banquet hall, the table will lengthen and food will appear itself as needed, but very seldom as desired. If you have a normal, healthy relationship with food and social gatherings, it will be perfectly fine. Probably.

You may also stumble across the broad glass doors that lead out into the sunlit courtyard. Ancient, impossible architecture sprawls out in every direction for what appears to be miles, far further than should be physically possible. The plant life within the garden is as abundant as it is strange and malformed, rife with fasciated blooms or leaves with no borders, like something generated by the hallucinating mind of a machine built to trick you into believing it can think like you. You can wander for hours, finding dream-like beauty beyond compare, forgetting yourself. Become lost in memories, chase buried desires, or simply lose yourself completely. There's a well at the center. You have a coin. Toss it in, make a wish. Whose voice do you yearn to hear? Who do you wish to be? What material thing do you desire? Do you even remember after travelling this far? Whatever bastardization the indifferent spirit here bestows, it will not make you happy.

Ah, you got me waxing poetic again, how dare you! Now let's see, what else… Ah, yes, the ballroom! You're just in time for our ball. I do know how you Pumpkin Hollowites love your fancy galas, and I'd already imagined you up some stunning clothing---- what? Did you think you'd be running through a nightmare castle, chased by incomprehensible horrors, in your work clothes? Where's the fun in that? Pardon me for a bit of glamour alongside the unreality and bloodshed.

In any case, you'll find the ballroom beautifully adorned and brimming with waltzing dancers wearing pallid, featureless masks. Don a mask of your own, and lose your face in the crowd--- there are secrets being spoken by unseen lips on the dance floor. Some of them are yours.

Then, in the heart of the castle, you will find the inner sanctum of the gods. An archive, mostly, full of reliquaries and books. Objects, holy and unholy, lost to time or only ever seen in dreams. Things conceived of but never built. Volumes upon volumes of knowledge that will never be written nor read, incomprehensible to mortal minds or simply just beyond their reach. The Necronomicon once lived here, before I gifted it to my followers. Now that it has been held in human hands, it can never reside on these shelves again. And there are things here that would very much like to prevent this from happening to the other books and artefacts stored here.

And the last room I shall bother to mention, as there are hundreds on just the ground floor, is the throne room. There is only one thing to find there.

Now, before we move on to what there is to find in the subterranean floors of the palace, I would like to ask your forgiveness for the small vermin infestation. Wretched little creatures the size of handbags running around the halls, primarily on this floor but also on others, who deliberately dreamed themselves here when they knew you'd all be coming. I asked my useless staff to try to catch them, but these blithering idiots only managed to lock up one of the smelly, obnoxious little blighters. So if you see some pointy-eared beast calling himself "Fluffy" or some nonsense like that, do let a member of our staff know immediately. And don't listen to a word he says.

Madness

{ CONTENT WARNINGS: insanity, potential for gore, cult references, potential for claustrophobia, heights, entrapment, graphic descriptions of eldritch body horror }

Now, the basement is where things really get interesting. Sure, the upper floors have luxurious balls and banquets, lavish gardens, spiral staircases for running up and down dramatically or thrilling sword fights, and all the amenities your heart desires. But the basement, that's where all the drama lives. The secrets a family keeps, the skeletons in their closet, their long forgotten treasures, the poorly stored holiday decorations that someone is going to get yelled at for next year, the cult ritual spaces---- you know, the good stuff.

Well, maybe your family doesn't keep cult ritual spaces, but mine certainly does. Dozens of them, take your pick! Torture chambers, well-appointed meeting rooms with austere wine goblets and tapestries on the walls, amphitheaters for grand gatherings of beings of immense size, dark rooms with rune circles and black candles on hardwood floors, and more besides. Why, there's even a blood pit. I recently had it remodeled, as well. Holds more blood now. But I digress.

Given that many of these rooms hold forbidden knowledge and eldritch relics, or maybe even some of my relatives (more on that shortly), you may also carelessly wander into trap rooms. Some of them are cleverly engineered puzzles that those with the mettle to solve can escape. Some are simply designed for violence, meant to crush or stab or maim or devour. Some do little more than hold you, a dark hole in which to be forgotten. Perhaps another will find your same pit, and you can die slowly together, watching each other's bodies unravel as time marches agonizingly on.

Speaking of places to be held, some lucky wanderers may encounter our pride and joy--- the dungeons. Rows and rows of intricately structured cells, winding around each other in such a way that it is impossible to tell what is a cell and what is the walkway just from looking! How does one prevent oneself from wandering into a cage and becoming trapped in its iron bars? How do you know you're not already in one? I do love a good mystery. Presently, the occupants within are meager, but once these very walls hosted hundreds of prisoners who dreamed of things their minds were not meant to see. Just as you do now.

The basements of Castle Kadath also contain some unfinished spaces. Caverns, if you will. Many are quite beautiful, filled with gravity-defying rock formations, glowing crystals, and pools of the clearest water you've ever seen. Though it may not be your own face you see in its mirror-like surface. Of course, not all of these caverns are peaceful, nor easily traversed. From narrow rock bridges to flooded passageways, you may have to risk some discomfort to proceed. But there are many possible rewards for doing so, whether that's safety from that which threatens your life, a reunion with a loved one, or an object of power that may even follow you home from dreaming.

Those luckier still (or perhaps unluckier, depending on how you look at it) may find enlightenment beyond their wildest dreams in the depths of the mountain.

Deep, deep within the belly of the old stone of dreams and moonlight, there exists the mouth to primordial chaos incarnate. The world turned inside out, the infinity of space buried within the cold stone of the world beneath unknown Kadath. The center of all infinity. The birthplace of the gods. No gods that you know, none that you dare worship, for just the sound of their names upon your fragile lips could be enough to crack reality. Cause the world to bend and break around their impossible forms just to make way for their incomprehensible will. Things like me, but not like me. Gibbering genius-fools with vast minds so full of everything and nothing that they are beyond thought or spoken word or the weak and limiting binds of coherency. And residing there, in the gulping maw of all that is and ever will be and never was and cannot become, one god still whispers, screams, loud and voiceless, accompanied by the pounding of drums like blood in the ears and the shrill and incessant whine of broken flutes. His form twists and churns, endless tendrils and hungering mouths coiling in on themselves and suffocating in his own bulk as new mouths and new tendrils and new blind and vacant eyes are born, endlessly folding like batter in an industrial mixer and made of vile and putrid matter that should not exist at all, much less as flesh. The few that have known him have called him many things, his collection of epithets even greater than my own. The Lord of All, the Primal Chaos, the Downbreaker, the Deep Dark, the Cold One. The Blind Idiot God. I personally just call him "Dad," these days.

But you, my privileged guests. You are here as visitors! Friends of the family! You, my dears, may simply call him Azathoth. I am sure he'd be delighted by your visit. It will surely be one you remember for a long, long time.

Oh, also, while I'm thinking about it--- should you need to return upstairs for any reason, do take care which staircase you take. There are a number of them that always begin but never end. I'd hate to see you waste hours climbing a thousand steps only to look back and find yourself still on the third one. But it's impossible to tell which ones will do this, or when the effect will pass, or when you'll be able to find another staircase. This place is a bit of a maze. Perhaps you should just climb a while more, see what happens.

Blood

{ CONTENT WARNINGS: eldritch body horror, death, Nyarlathotep literally suicide baiting you in the last paragraph }

And now, my beautiful dreamers, we have reached the finale of our grand tour. I'm sure you all feel so terribly fortunate to spend some indiscriminate amount of time as the houseguests of the Old Gods. Before we part ways, I do feel it pertinent that I should issue a few… safety warnings.

In addition to my staff, which is comprised predominantly of faceless mannequin men and bats, my niece's adorable children by and large have the run of the place. Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods, Mother of a Thousand Young, is the daughter of my sibling. And as her name suggests, she has a rather extensive number of whippersnappers--- though I think at this point "a thousand" is a bit of a misnomer, as I believe their number is more in the hundred-thousands by now. Not all of them are home, lucky for you.

Shub-Niggurath's children are so varied in appearance and size that I shan't bother to describe them individually. They are bestial things of darkness and hatred, borrowing the visages of the beasts of Earth and Concorde and worlds like them. Bears, birds, tigers, oxen, things with teeth and talons to gore you with, blended with--- goats, mostly. Caprine things, often with cephalopod bits mixed in, body parts that no beast should have and which have no names, just clever descriptors. Or occasionally just too many of the normal anatomical bits you might expect. You get the idea.

Their motivation, when they locate you, is simple. They will chase you single-mindedly through whatever maze you've found yourself in, regardless of what they have to destroy to do so. This will continue until you kill them, outrun them, or until they catch you. If they catch you, they will kill and eat you in the most excessively grotesque and excruciating way they can manage. Fairly straightforward, no?

By now I'm sure you're all asking, "but Nyarlathotep, what happens if I die? I'm outside of the barrier, but also this is some sort of dream. And Castle Kadath is dangerous! There's so many traps and creatures! What becomes of me if I succumb?"

Well, my pets, fear not. Because this is a dream, you cannot truly die. You will feel every moment of the act of dying in glorious detail, right down to the moment your final breath leaves your pathetic, fragile frame. In fact, you will likely find yourself far more conscious of your state than you would be for a normal death, no longer plagued with the delirium of blood loss or organ failure, completely cognizant of every breaking thing in your body until you can no longer perceive anything at all. But, as soon as it's over, you'll pop right back up in your room, right as rain and ready for another go. Now, your corpse may end up left behind if it can be sufficiently useful in tormenting your fellow dreamers, but you'll be none the wiser in most cases.

Of course, this is only relevant if something actively kills you. There are certain things you can do to break or alter this particular cycle. No, of course I'm not going to tell you what they are. Goodness, doesn't anyone enjoy a little mystery anymore? I swear, it's almost like you're reading this as some sort of explanation for what you're meant to be doing for the month or something. What am I supposed to be, a Dungeon Master?

Alright, fine, I'll give you one piece of advice. Get experimental. Try dying as many ways as you can think of! You could even try killing yourself if you're feeling spicy. The castle is your oyster.

In any case, dear visitors, this is where I bid you adieu. Have fun on your little adventure, you've had a painfully dull December and you're in for an equally droll Merrymeet, so this is the most excitement you'll get 'till the Ides. I'll plop you back into your quaint little reality whenever I feel sufficiently entertained, so do try to keep things amusing for me, won't you? And feel free to come pay me a visit if you're in the area! We'll do brunch.

See you soon!

Farewell

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She almost winces, preparing to hear a name she hasn't heard in years, but then he cuts himself off, and— and it's fine. Tasha. She's still Tasha. Good. That's good. Raises a hell of a lot more questions, but she'll cross that bridge when she comes to it.

"'Course I can," she assures him, even as she examines the pile nervously—she's strong enough, she's sure of that, but if she displaces the wrong thing... shit. Shit, she doesn't want to hurt him again. "Just stay still, okay? Don't— don't try and move until I say so or you might disturb something."

Okay. Just... be careful. Start with the loosest rocks.

"What the fuck happened?"

"I dunno," he mutters awkwardly. "I was... lost down here. Just wandering, I guess. It kind of felt like I was going backwards, but I can't... really explain why..."

He trails off, lost in thought. Maybe that means something. Going backwards. It isn't much, but it might offer an explanation for the regression.

"Anyway, one of the loose spike rocks on the ceiling fell, and it shook the whole cave, so a bunch more fell too. Wrong place, wrong time, I guess." He's definitely masking how scared he is. Maybe some pain as well. He really has been like that for a long time, hasn't he? Trained from an early age that it made him likeable. Easy. And that easy was good. "...I think my leg's asleep, heheh."

This time, she does wince. All these years, how did she never realise just how deep this pattern went? "That's not funny, Di, that could be a real fuckin' problem."

Shit. Gotta get him out of there, as quickly as she can without making the whole thing fall apart and crush him. She keeps pulling off the looser, easier rocks, before tentatively getting her hands under a big, uneven block of the stuff. One, two, three—

With a grunt, she lifts it and throws it aside, watches it topple over the edge into the chasm beneath the bridge. Isn't sure she hears it hit the ground. That's not great either.

"...it's okay if you're scared, you know. It's— it's just me. You don't have to act all brave." Except she started making him feel like he did have to hide like this even with her, didn't she?

"...I know," he says quietly. "I guess it's just easier. If I'm calm, people--- take me seriously, and they don't have to take care of me. I don't wanna seem needy."

Her hear twinges. It's so much worse hearing it from him like this, her baby brother she was never, ever meant to be meaningfully older than. She's never been more aware of the few months between them as she is now, with false years in their place.

"You never judged me for being needy," she says, even as those fresh pieces of shrapnel from everything he said before still sit buried in her skull. How impossible she really is. How difficult she made it for him to look after himself. She pushes those thoughts down, and keeps moving rocks. "Even when I did kinda... scary things. Like hurt myself. ...I shoulda taken care of you back, more. I'm— fuck, I'm sorry I didn't."

"It's okay, Tash. I have a hard time doing that stuff. Letting people take care of me. I probably would've told you no," Dmitri reminds her. "Besides, I--- like taking care of you, usually. There's sometimes when it's hard, but I always liked being someone you could count on. And you do take care of me, you're just different about it, you know? You get mad for me when I'm too anxious to get mad for me. You make sure I'm having fun when I'm trying to be boring. And you tell me when I'm being stupid. That stuff counts."

Hearing all of this out of this mouth isn't getting any easier with exposure—even the nice things. Is it really right, to talk about this when he's like this? She bites her own tongue by accident, trying to lift something too heavy too fast, and spits blood as she throws it aside.

"Still should've done more. I hurt you more than I ever fuckin' helped you." She wipes her mouth. Breathes hard. Has to be getting closer, he sounds louder the more she moves. "...can— can you let me be sorry, for that? I was never sorry enough."

Saying all this to a kid. God, he's never reminded her so much of his own AI than right now.

"...Okay. You can be sorry." He relents, falling quiet for a minute, but then adds, "Thank you."

And then, finally, after another beat:

"My leg's under a rock. The one that's asleep. I-I'm, uh. Pretty scared. ...I'm really, really scared."

That's... well, it's not good, it's really not fucking good, but it's better that he's being honest about it now.

"Okay. Well. I'm nearly to you." Another rock out of the way. It's getting shallow, now, gaps in the layer left behind. Can she see him? Even a flash of pale skin? A hand? "And I'm gonna get you out of there. Okay? I promise, I'm gonna make sure you're safe."

She will not let him get more hurt than he already is. She won't, she fucking refuses to let that happen. Not this time. Not again.

"I know," he says, even though his voice is wobbling now, clearly threatening the onset of tears.

Another rock moved and--- there he is. Dirty, covered in gravel, pretty scraped up with some bruises forming. Tears are running down his face--- a face that used to be hers, too. Streaks have formed in the dirt caking his face and he starts crying harder when he sees her, stretching out his arms to be held.

Oh, jesus christ. Her heart wrenches violently. (God, it used to be like looking in a mirror, and that used to be comforting—how can you ever be alone when someone shares your face?)

She's down on her knees before she makes the conscious choice to move, wrapping her arms around his comparatively tiny body and making soothing sounds that clearly do not come naturally, awkward and strange. "Hey. Hey. I'm here. I'm here, Di, I just gotta get your leg and stuff free, okay?"

"Okay," he chokes out through rough sobs, hugging her back as tight as he can. After a moment, he lets go so that she can free his leg, but there's some obvious reluctance. "Th-thank you."

"You don't gotta thank me, this is what a big sister's s'posed to do."

And she's never been a very good sister, not really, but god, she's trying. She never wanted things to get like this. Never wanted to hurt him. But here, she can help. This she can do.

Even she's reluctant to let go entirely but she does, shifting around so she can get at the rock on his leg. Careful, now, as she lifts it, not wanting to do more damage by accident, setting it aside instead of risking a throw going wrong.

And then she's scooping him out of the remnants, arm under his back and knees, and settling them both on what empty floorspace there is to sit him in her lap and get a look at that leg.

"How bad's it hurt?"

It's in pretty bad shape, sitting at a kind of weird angle right at the knee. It appears to be dislocated, and he's got a pretty bad gash in the side of his leg where a rock pushed it out of place. "It h-hurt really bad at first but, uh--- i-it kind of went numb? While I was waiting for help."

Sounds like swelling probably compressed the nerve. Dmitri's voice sounds heightened from light-headedness and panic and he feels like he might pass out at the sight of it.

Yeah, no, that's not fucking good. Reflexively, she covers his eyes like she might have when they were kids and she was either being silly or actually trying to shield him from something nasty.

"...I could re-set the joint but it'd probably still hurt like a fucking bitch, and I'm kinda worried I'd fuck something else up worse. Only gonna do it if you want me to try."

She hopes it's not the wrong approach. She'd want the choice if she were him.

"...I'd think it'd probably be better if it wasn't, uh, like that. Even if it hurts," Dmitri says shakily, after a bit of deliberation. "I trust you."

Her heart does that wrenching thing again and she has to take a moment to breathe, pressing her face against his hair where she holds him safely against her chest. (He shouldn't trust her, she hurt him, she killed him—)

"Okay. Wish I had something for you to bite but uh— just grab me really fuckin' hard if you need to, okay? Okay."

She has to shift him off her lap for this, but she gets him settled and tries not to think about how much smaller his leg is than Carolina's was the last time she had to do this. Military field medicine is not made for child proportions, but— she braces the leg, looks at him, and says: "Gonna do it on three. Okay? One, two, three—"

She pops the knee back into place with well-trained hands.

At the suggestion of biting, Dmitri shoves his sleeve into his mouth, making a face at all the dust on it. Better than nothing. Still, with his free hand, he grabs her arm.

One.

Two.

Three.

"AAUGH---" His cry is sharp and muffled by the sleeve, and more tears are forthcoming, but... it does look better. He hyperventilates a bit as the pain slowly gets under control, but it's hard with his head spinning, and he holds onto her tightly. Soon, Dmitri's vision returns, ceasing to sway. His leg looks normal again, aside from the cut. And a fair bit of swelling. "Oh my god," is all he can manage to say.

"I know, I know, I'm sorry—" she mutters through it, the pressure of his grip no bother at all to her. No, that doesn't hurt, but the sound of his shout pierces deep into a memory—the memory—she doesn't want to relive, hears his screams of her name and that final shout of pain that ended it all and—

Stop it. He's alive, here, and he needs you.

"Hurts like a motherfucker, yeah? See, you are fuckin' brave." He let her do it, even though he was scared (because he trusts her, even though he shouldn't trust her). "You won't wanna put weight on that yet, so I'll have to carry you. That okay?"

"Yeah, 'course," he says shakily, the pain starting to fade to something unpleasant but steady and not mind-numbingly agonizing. "We carry each other all the time."

He doesn't seem to question the fact that she's way too big to carry right now.

"Mom and Dad are gonna have a cow," he says, almost comically, then pauses. "Or--- well, I guess not, huh? M'kinda mixed up, I think..."

"'Lil bit," she huffs, as quietly amused as she is horribly sad—maybe she's kind of mixed up, too. "You don't have to worry about Mom and Dad. S'just us right now. It's—"

Better that way, she almost says, but that's a horrible thing to say to a kid, isn't it? Even as an adult, he still thinks about them sometimes in a way she just... tries not to.

"—it's been that way for a while. You're just smaller than you're supposed to be, right now."

She turns around, still crouched, to let him clamber up on her back.

And just like that, he hops aboard. Just like old times.

"All we need is us," he says, a little solemnly. "I loved Mom and Dad, and I miss them. But they were difficult. They didn't understand us. I never wanted anything bad to happen to them, but a lot of the times I wished they'd just leave us alone."

That catches her off guard enough she almost misses grabbing his good leg, but she corrects quickly enough and hoists him carefully, standing up. (The last time they did this, he was carrying her off the ship with a bloody leg and she was so angry and— don't fucking think about that.)

"...I uh. Huh. Don't think you've ever told me you fuckin' felt like that before." Maybe because she always dodges talking about their parents at all. Maybe because they never talk about anything important. "...I'm— I don't even know if I miss them, most of the time. Sorry. I know— I know that's fucked up."

"They were pretty crappy to you, so I guess it's not really a surprise. I think Dad wanted better for you, but... he never really stood up to Mom, so he was still part of the problem. I don't really... like to talk bad about them, but. Here feels further away somehow, if that makes sense." He shrugs.

He says what she's thinking, but isn't saying. "We have a hard time talking, huh."

She has a hard time seeing even a hint of good intentions, looking back, but then she's always had a blurrier view of their childhood than he has. Sometimes she remembers those nighttime drives, but age and distance have made the memories bitter, projected a resentment from their dad for needing to do it that may or may not have actually been there.

"...yeah, it makes sense, and uh, yeah. We sure fuckin' do." It still feels... weird, that it's happening now, when he's like this. Remembering adulthood in spits and spurts, still so small and young where he sits on her back. "Everyone who thinks fuckin' twin telepathy is real only needs to take one fuckin' look at how bad we are at having a conversation to prove that wrong."

Carefully, she steps out onto the narrow bridge once more, compensating for the shift in her centre of gravity. "Hold tight, 'kay? Gonna take this slow."

January Event - Escape from Unknown Kadath

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

cw: knee injury

cw: knee injury

Re: cw: knee injury

cw: knee injury

Re: cw: knee injury

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)