+ It's good that we can't see what isn't there +

[vitaelamorte]

Who: EVERYONE
Where: Wonderland and adjacent dimensions!
When: Friday, April 21st to Monday, April 24th
Rating: PG-13, warn if higher!
Summary: A place to list your tears throughout the event, and describe the worlds that can be seen or accessed through them. Event Post.
The Story:

While invisible zombies ravage Wonderland, tears are popping up everywhere! Through them characters can see versions of themselves from alternate universes. Some of them show a different version of Wonderland, some a different version of their home. Some are as benign as a character drinking coffee instead of tea, others are as drastic as somebody's entire personality changed completely.

On day one tears are so small as to barely even be recognisable. Faint voices and melodies can be heard through the tiny cracks if you step really close, but these brief and indistinct glimpses are barely even worth describing.

On day two tears have opened up wide enough to recognise them for what they really are. Yesterday's melodies will sound clearer, and the voices will become decidedly familiar, belonging to people characters know, sounding perhaps even like the characters themselves. Look through the tears and they may catch sight of home, or something that merely looks like another part of Wonderland. The tears are yet narrow and instable though, and the field of vision is correspondingly poor.

On day three the tears have grown a great deal. The worlds beyond them can be seen and heard, though most cannot be interacted with at all. Only the biggest ones are already stable enough for characters to stick their hand inside, and pulls through any objects within reach.

On the fourth and last day some tears have finally become large and stable enough for characters to pass through whole. Not all tears will reach this stage, but those who have can be visited, and the world beyond them explored... at each character's own peril.

Comments

[postictal]

Everything normal. A world where everyone gets to live, and no one suffers, and no one dies, and Tim's head isn't tainted right out the gate.

"Any of it could've happened," he mutters, passing his hand across to the back of his head, down to the nape of his neck, grip tight. Any of it could've happened, because if it's one of those things that get forgotten, it can just join the legions of other useless, formless, discarded memories.

Doesn't sound the least bit plausible. Some kind of world where everything works out, and no one dies, and no one wakes up in a paranoid sweat with their hair plastered to their forehead because their heart won't stop pounding in their chest. Sounds about as plausible as a world where she was - around. To ask. To care.

"Sounds fake," he grunts, a wry drape across something harder - much harder - to look at directly. Like staring into the fucking sun, searing his retinas.

[arks]

If Jay had been the type, he would have laughed bitterly. Of course it sounded fake. They knew as well as anyone what lurked in their world, what it could do to people - Tim more so than Jay, despite everything Jay had done with the YouTube channel he'd created. There's nothing to trust about these tears, despite what they seem to offer.

They're too good to be true, which makes it even worse to see.

Instead of laughing, he just nods, keeping a wary eye on Tim as he tries to collect himself. "Of course they are," he says, shuffling where he stands, arms crossing and then uncrossing and crossing again, as if he doesn't know what to do with himself and fidgeting is the best way he can make up for that.

"Wonderland doesn't exactly seem like the type of place to show us something like that out of the goodness of whoever's heart," he mutters then, before he looks back to where the other tear had been - the one with the determined voice, protective and upset. "Tim... What was that? The voice. Who was it?"

[postictal]

Who do you think? He bites back the snapped-out retort the moment it wells up in the back of his throat. Still asking his questions, still unable to piece together an answer without double-checking to make sure, at the expense of the people he's talking to.

It's clear he's got no idea what to do with himself - with his hands, with his fidgeting, with his questions. He's probably just defaulted to the one thing he knows.

Tim breathes.

"My mom," he says. It emerges gruffly, but it's an answer. Jay should be happy about that, right?

[arks]

"Oh."

Well, as much as Jay made his way around investigating at home, sometimes he can be dense, and in this moment he really feels that. He winces at his own tactlessness, looks back to where the tear had been with something that's a mix of guilt and curiosity, and he wonders how different the tear had been to reality.

As much as he and Tim had been sort of friends, or close enough to it in their situation, he really knew nothing about him. Not his family, not his past - only medical records, and small things uncovered during their travelling.

"Sorry," he says, then asks again, "Are you alright?"

[postictal]

"'M fine." In glaring contrast, that one's not much of an answer at all. It's a snapped-out hiss of audible frustration, a grunted confirmation that he's anything but fine, at the present moment. The hell's he doing, leaping down Jay's throat over this, as if that defines any of it or makes it better or even more tolerable.

His eyes flick up and around the surrounding walls nervously, chasing shadows. Muscles in his throat working as he swallows.

"Just don't want - anything else coming through." He keeps his tone pitched low, and careful. Wouldn't want anyone overhearing.