quillheel - ROOTS.
ROOTS.

MEMORY IS A LANDSCAPE OF HANDS TOO AFRAID TO MAKE FISTS.

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Are They Skeptical Of Supernatural Phenomena Or Do They Believe In Them? (Kim)

Are they skeptical of supernatural phenomena or do they believe in them? (Kim)

HALLOWEEN QUESTIONS // always accepting!

Are They Skeptical Of Supernatural Phenomena Or Do They Believe In Them? (Kim)

Kim is definitely somebody who I think hasn’t really believed in the supernatural past age 13. 

Are They Skeptical Of Supernatural Phenomena Or Do They Believe In Them? (Kim)

In the past, when he was much younger, he believed in not the religious kind of supernatural, but the more human. He believed in ghosts. He believed in weird unexplained things that had no logical cause and never would, he believed that things and people lived in the Pale, he believed the pale itself was an almost living non-entity. He believed in the past coming back to play tricks on you or teach you lessons, never werewolves, never vampires, and only ever sometimes did he believe in Gods. 

Her Innocence like a dream on a broken tape reel that he slowly stopped replaying. Her Innocence like a dream on a broken reel that he knows many people can’t stop.

But after 13, after 14, he became an impossible sell. It was in large part because of the bullying he’d endured, and admitting you believed in ghosts was the same ammunition to them as saying you believed in Santa Claus when by that time you were old enough to know what kissing somebody when you were drunk was like and recognize the economic disarray you were all in. He never believed in the supernatural, but he believed in things that didn’t always make sense; because in a world where nonexistence bubbles at the edges of your reality, there’s bound to be things without answers, that didn't line up with how you thought reality worked. There’s bound to be questions left in dead air and never going back.

After the revolution, after so many wars, after so many captains lost in that great fog, how couldn’t there be some ghosts left in Revachol by sheer virtue of their magnitude?

He thinks, these days, that it was how he was coping with death as well as childhood ignorance. He’s still uncomfortable with the idea that when you die, you’re gone, and nothing remains but the body. He knows, in all likelihood of the world they're living in, it’s the truth, but he still tries to untangle the maybe-there maybe-not souls of his fallen brethren when it is they do fall, and fall often. Parts of him still with the fibers of a ghost’s coat under it’s nails, parts of him still believing in something a little more.

But he’s tried to stop entirely. Dedicates himself to the logical, and while never above his own curiosity and the potential of things, Kim is a skeptic. The world kicked the belief out of him, and the disillusionment has been setting in his entire life. He does not believe in ghosts anymore. He does not believe in Gods. He believes in himself, and he believes in the RCM, and he believes in what he can do here and now as he’s alive rather than a thousand years of looking back at what he couldn’t change, because a glance can trap him, just a glance.

Give him fact. Give him something to hold onto with both hands. Give him something, something that makes sense.  He does not believe in the fictions of humanity half out of their minds for the entire rest of time.

But with enough evidence, anything can change. With enough persistence, with enough dedication. When things stop being ghost stories, and start being metrics you can read.

Less supernatural than science, even when science seems supernatural.

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More Posts from Quillheel

1 year ago

@disassnbler // cal & N!

@disassnbler // Cal & N!

none of them knew the wormhole could spit out just whatever it felt like, not until now; even with what Tangent had been claiming when she wasn't cooped up in her lab that it couldn't. nothing does not create something. there is always a reason. they'd been yet to find a reason, a good one, anyway. some, like Cal, just accepted and welcomed the bot. others, like Anemone and Solane were a little more wary. some were tearing their hair out trying to figure out where he came from, and how ━ spearheaded by Tangent herself and Instance, predictably.

The first theories were that the Heliopause harbored an AI piloted drone which was lost during going through the wormhole, but the Helios answered unhesitatingly that they didn't have anything of the sort ━ their technology was advanced compared to the Stratospheric, but their AI was feeble in comparison despite their pride; they could make the body, maybe, but they didn't, and even if they did they couldn't have made the AI as intelligent as he proved he was ( 'bordering on human' was the first thing Vace had said when seeing him, and Tangent was beginning to realize that that sentiment wasn't as far off as they might've expected. )

The next theory had been that he was sent from Earth alongside the Heliopause, or shortly after, but the timing didn't work, and neither did the story; he was from Earth, but there was no Copper-9, at least not in Earth's recently remembered galactic history and definitely not in Vertumna's, and while N was a pilot, there'd been no craft with him as far as they could find, even if there was the timing of which he must've left earth and arrived, using the Heliopause and Stratospheric for reference didn't match. ━ so many questions, and a never-ending list of contradictions.

━ they were still looking for answers, the how and why and when, but roughly, everyone had acquainted themselves with living alongside the robot, began becoming friends with him ; it was easier than had first been expected, especially when Vace discovered his combat capability. ━ Cal, on the other hand, was more interested in him himself! forget the technicalities, this could be a new buddy, and he could only imagine how jarring all of this was to begin with, too... he wanted to be a minor source of stability for him, if he could be at all. something simple. something easy. ( farmwork tended to fall into at least one of those categories, anyway... )

@disassnbler // Cal & N!

" Yep! Floatcow leather, reinforced with an internal synthetic webbing to make it tougher. " Cal flexed the gloves, colored a deep brown, as if to assert his honesty with a display alone. " Maybe not the best for temperature management, these aren't made from the helium bladders, but if it helps, it takes a lot to burn me! "

He pats his bicep. " As a youngster we all get genetic modifications here, and mine was always being the right temperature. Makes freezing or getting burned a little harder than it usually is! " ━ he speaks with some strain and hauls up a bag of soil under one arm as he keeps the other mostly free, tubing coiled like a snake around his elbow. " Also means I don't gotta sweat. "

with only a tanktop in the way of his upper-body, a tattoo peeking out from below the hem as the sun beat down on him, it seemed to be true. " Real useful during Dust! which... how's your cooling? not too sure if you'll like it much- "


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1 year ago

❝ the more you freak out, the faster you’re going to bleed. just take it easy. ❞ / anatoly :]

 The More You Freak Out, The Faster Youre Going To Bleed. Just Take It Easy. / Anatoly :]

Anatoly could hardly hear Jamie over the blood rushing in his ears.

Or maybe that was the pond water keeping pressure pinned inside the delicate inner-workings of the exposed organ. there was watery plant-life clinging to his limbs. cold and wet as his clothing hung and stuck to him like a grotesque mangled scarecrow. his own hands dark with blood and mud and the green syrupy chlorophyll of the plant-life he’d inadvertently dredged up in his struggle. His lungs heaved and bloated their veins like inflated wild streamers in his chest, pained like a lightning strike, either trying to gouge out the water from each of its tiny pockets, or shuddering a terrible frozen shaking throughout him; body heat as a distant memory. 

He would’ve been terrified of suffering from a heart-attack if not for the fact he could barely find the mental distinction between the sections of his chest. ribs and stomach and collarbone fusing in his clouded nerves, his more delicate senses useless against the intensity of his panic. a drowned rabbit’s heart racing when the crane dives into the lake reeds, not expecting it to wriggle its way out of its talons, not expecting the canine to hound in after the both of them, wolfish and smart and vengeful, not expecting both to emerge on the bank; and it not to. 

Anatoly could already only barely remember. A pounding dream of water and color and movement, the muffled sound of gunfire, the tangling of many limbs, the scramble for the surface and the blood that bloomed around him.

His own blood, he knows a breath after he can breathe at all, his own blood.

Teeth marks stretch and mar the skin of his right shoulder down his arm to the joint, like a beast not biting but dragging as though trying to pull the flesh with it, interrupted only by the clean ( or cleaner ) tunnel line of a grazed bullet; likely going for the head. Cloth flaps uselessly in his shivering, or slaps in on itself, the fibers clinging to each-other, greatly like how Anatoly now does to Jamie. Unintentional. His arm is almost black with his blood. ( you think his other hand might be locked into it’s grip on your coat, too cold to move, the joints disobedient and him, unaware, but desperate. perhaps not for you, but for safety, for survival. )

The words take root a 10~20 seconds past their origin date, and his wide dark eyes glance up at Jamie, looking shallow, and dazed, and already dead.

( at least when he starved it was a quiet shutdown. at least when he starved it was easier to look at. at least when he starved, by the time you’d find him, there was nothing to left talk to. )

He isn’t, his body screams even if his mind hasn’t quite caught up yet, he isn’t he isn’t he isn’t he isn’t he-

 The More You Freak Out, The Faster Youre Going To Bleed. Just Take It Easy. / Anatoly :]

The first sound that emerges from his throat is entirely incoherent, the attempt of language lost entirely on waterlogged vocal chords and shivering that goes down his throat & chokes him. His second attempt is better, a word — or more accurately approximated sound — that Anatoly taught to mean something like ‘okay’ where he came from. A mother tongue that comes more naturally than English in his distant but confused state. he stops squirming as much, at least for a minute or two, before he starts again like a compulsive writhe, before stopping again. he murmurs something in that same language as he tugs back at the hand locked to Jamie’s coat before seeming to realize what had happened, and changing to the other hand, attempts to roll up the soaked sleeve of its own wounded arm overtop the gashes that may or may not have been wrapped already by the time of his realization. 

Had it been 10 minutes since he was pulled from the water, or 20?

It wasn’t as though he had a watch, either way…


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1 year ago

[ storm; a raging storm outside, where sender insists receiver stays in ] (to wally from home; right i get the muse for the one that can't move, but at least home can shut its doors and protect him from the thing in the woods--)

[ Storm; A Raging Storm Outside, Where Sender Insists Receiver Stays In ] (to Wally From Home; Right

Like a thunderclap to a small dog, Wally cannot stop moving.

Usually, Wally liked storms. He liked the low sound of thunder and the blinding light of lightning, even if the boom between air & between atoms sometimes startled him, his focus was one of awe enraptured. Rain pattering on the world like a hundred thousand marbles, evidence of reality, evidence of stability, evidence of the world changing in different; wonderful ways. Usually, Wally liked to watch and wait for a storm to pass. Usually, he’d sit — mostly quiet, aside from occasional murmurs to Home — and draw in his little spot perhaps on the porch or next to a window. Usually, it does not rain at night.

He feels as though he is forgetting something important. A thread tugged at the ridges of the seam, like bewilderment, like torture. A thousand miles of downpour. A thousand miles of fiber weaving unto fiber weaving unto-

He feels as though he is forgetting something important. What was it again?

— It makes him antsy. An actor forgetting his lines from just off-stage, he peers out from the spaces he can to watch the dark rain, how he can barely see it at all. Home’s insistence upon keeping him in does not help, and abruptly the entire house feels sinister by sheer virtue of what was being kept away ( inability to tell the difference between locked out, and locked in )

Home was not the problem. Wally was.

He feels as though he is forgetting something very very important. If he looked closely enough, maybe he could see it between the floorboards, like a shivering, terrible, oil slick black hand guiding a prop, like a snake writhing just loud enough to hear it, hear the hiss when he stepped on the right panels. Like being caught in a bad dream, Wally cannot shed the feeling that something bad is about to happen.

When Wally is afraid of something, he likes to remind himself that it can’t hurt him. He does not know what he is afraid of. Maybe that’s what he’s forgetting.

“ What’s wrong, Home? “ he asks, sat in his rocking chair after wandering up and down the halls as though seeking a breach in the wallpaper itself, in the plaster. The nerves don’t leave him, and he’s just a few minutes away from getting up again. “ I always draw outside. Why can't I go...? "

An inquiry that loiters on the edges of the anxiety that pervades, that Home is trying to protect him from, that Wally does not understand, was not meant to understand.

If he stared closely enough at the gaps between the floorboards, maybe he could see it. See what Home was trying to keep out. A basement that does not exist.

He does not want to see, but he has to know.


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