entrancelogs | + The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to You +

Entry tags:

+ The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to You +

Who: EVERYONE!
Where: EVERYWHERE!
When: Saturday, May 19th - Wednesday, May 23rd.
Rating: PG-13, warn if you're gonna go higher!
Summary: A catch-all for the Kyln / Sierra Madre event!
The Story:

For the duration of this event, the entire mansion will be part space jail, part apocalyptic wasteland desert with an abandoned hotel/casino. On the third day an escape route not previously discovered in the Kyln appears and breakouts can be planned...

...Only for everyone to find themselves walking through a large glass prison toward the toxic gas filled wasteland of a desert, the Sierra Madre. Does the prison look better than the toxic cloud outside? If you're stuck in the prison after dark beyond day 3, you'll be forced into and locked in your cell for the night. But at least locked away, nothing from the outside can hurt you. If you try to brave the actual elements in the desert it might be a little hard to breathe. The air has pockets of toxic gas and even a few seconds of exposure could prove deadly. And watch out for the Ghost People.

Inside the abandoned hotel/casino you'll find shelter from the gas and ghosts, but beware the holograms that are 50/50 with their attitude. Prison beatings, a beating from the holograms, which one Would You Rather? And whatever you do, don't try on the collars lying around unless you like to explode. Literally.

[ This is a catch-all for all your prison/desert needs! Please mark your threads clearly in the subject line with your character's name and either a cell number or just a location if you didn't feel like randomizing it or you're making a top level for a public place (like the dining hall or wandering the hotel/casino). Here's the plot post if you need it!

Have fun! ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Guess it's not that important. The sentence throws him off-balance. It's the way it's worded that gets him, layers of sarcasm over a sickening truth.

He died with no family no friends no fucking answers he died for nothing

He's staring at the table, eyes unfocused, fingers wound through a tangled clump of hair at the crown of his head.

"Rather he didn't," he mutters.

A pause.

"Asshole," he parrots back, an afterthought. "It'd ruin...ruin my record."

"What record," Tim growls, grinding one finger into the surface of the table, a pin stuck through the word launched right the fuck back across at him. "You don't have a record. You lost it in a fucking school because all you ever do is bring cameras to gun fights and expect that to be magically enough to save you."

There's a dizzying, heady rush of it all spilling out. Shit he flung at the first Jay to arrive, stumbling and blinking stupidly, but never got around to launching at this one without some initial provocation.

"I'll give it to your Mirror, at least - he didn't try to strangle me the first time we met. So I guess he has that going for him."

"Sounds real nice," Jay spits back, a half-formed thought ~~just like the one that sent him to Benedict Hall~~. "Think he's the 'good one?'"

The edge of his mouth curls into something like a smile, but it gets lost partway. Can't make jokes when it hits this close to home, when they're talking about his final minutes, when they're talking about find Alex, find the Ark, scrawled into his head like they're the only words that could ever make sense.

"Think he's the smart one?"

His voice catches.

"Not smart enough, apparently, since he thought he could bullshit a bullshitter. Guess he really is a Jay after all."

He slams the end of his fork into the greenish mess on his tray. Prison food is, apparently, gritty and swirled with revolting grayish chunks, with a handful of some kind of cheap jerky stick on the side. His stomach was in knots even without this shit in his system. Right now, the lump in his throat is making it hard enough to swallow, let alone anything else.

"I was kinda thinking you were doing almost okay. Hadn't died or anything! Turns out that you're not really okay, now, are you?" Tim snarls at his tray of revolting fucking prison grub. "Turns out you're just lucky."

Just lucky.
Just lucky when Shepard destroyed that rock monster.
Just lucky when Clem shoved an icepick through that zombie's skull.
Just lucky when Tim buried a knife into a thing that looked like That Thing and then Tim and then a college friend of mine.
Just lucky when Tim held a lighter up to the tangled loops of tape at the edge of his two-story doppelganger's mask.
Just lucky when the Red Queen offered him that bracelet.
Just lucky when Tim and Clem dragged him out of the static and told him that, for once, he wasn't alone.
Just lucky when Tim soaked the transmitters with gasoline, set the whole mansion alight, and quieted the screaming in his head.

Jay sits up straighter, brow furrowed. Thoughtful.

He looks at Tim, the surly asshole who makes up fifty percent of lucky. More, if he adjusts the math to account for the pills, for late-night panicked conversations and movie nights.

"Could call it that."

No harsh retort? No scathing comeback?

HIs blood's still running too hot and too thick, but the shift is enough to arrest him for half a second, freezing him solid, squaring his jaw, flicking his stare back up to meet Jay's without really meaning to.

"What would you call it?" It doesn't emerge as barbed as he'd like - or maybe too pointed, given the circumstances.

He knows what he'd call it. But that's an interior monologue kind of thing, not the kind of thing you just run around saying. Sounds weird out loud.

Fuck it.

"Help."

He forces the next bit out, despite the tension wiring his jaw shut. "Like, I had help."

Because when you're alone, you charge off into the unknown without any idea of what you're up against and expect it all to work out perfectly in your favor.

Because when you're alone, it's a wonder that you don't get killed more often.

Because someone who self-admittedly has no one can only ever crowdsource on Twitter and hope that someone out there is better at breaking codes than Jay himself ever was.

"Didn't have a hell of a lot of it back home."

Jay snorts.

"I mean, I had some, but..."

As soon as he was alone again--no one but the faceless, formless crowd on Twitter, like in the very beginning--he walked straight into Alex's gun. Funny how that worked out.

"Not...not like here." Head ducked, he mumbles it to the table.

Says something about who he is as a person, the real kind of person he is, that some part of him wants to spit in the face of that. Fuck you, Jay Merrick, for twisting this around into something meaningful and trying to jab him in the eye with it.

"You mean that?" His eyebrows jab upwards, a sharp challenge. "Then maybe start acting like it. Stop confiding in a camera, like that's the only thing you got."

When has he ever actually needed it, since he got here?

"Yeah, okay, fine, I--" He'll take that. Honestly, he'll take that. "That's...what I'm..."

Come on, idiot, explain. It's not that hard.

"After...the way things went last event, I've been thinking. About, like..."

About what? Mostly terror that he almost died, that Tim (Tim, who he very nearly trusted) almost killed him. Over the next week, it decayed into something more along the lines of gut-wrenching shame, like someone was scouring out the inside of his ribs. He didn't gain anything by going in there. All he did--all he did--was put people at risk. And this time, it wasn't people, in the abstract. It was Clem. It was George and Shaun. It was Shepard, who put herself in danger for his sake on day one. It was Sans. And most of all, it was the guy with the can of gasoline and the box of matches. The guy he lunged at with no warning but a strangled shout aimed at the voices in his head. The one who thought he was already past helping.

"This is stupid," he mutters, before continuing. "But, like...there's actually...like, it's not just me, anymore. If I screw up, it's not..."

It's not just some nobody who was living in a crappy apartment by himself doing nothing.

"So I have to...to...try and plan...think in terms of the bigger picture, I guess."

He's not sure if those are the right words, but they're what he's got.

Fuck you, Jay Merrick, for turning this into a teachable moment.

All right. Well. That's not strictly fair, is it? He's being an insufferable dick while Jay's trying to communicate for once, flipping their roles around pretty thoroughly in the process, meaning that Tim no longer can be unrepentant in his dickholery and still have it be justified.

"Okay," says Tim, slowly, no longer white-knuckling his fork but making a concentrated effort to speak slowly and breathe slowly and not look at Jay directly. "So. How do you plan to do that?"

That's the thing, isn't it?

He's got no idea.

He can't exactly say that, though. Instead, he fidgets with his own fork, carving furrows into the dubiously edible slop on his tray. Think. C'mon, genius, think.

"Like, I guess, I..." Need to remember other people have their own motives, relative to their own everything. They're not characters reading out their lines by rote, not NPCs, not suspects, not obstacles.

"Shit." He kneads at his head. "Maybe..." His voice dips quieter, and his shoulders hike up to his ears. "Get to know people better, I guess. Or, like, at least...think what they might do before I do something."

God, this conversation's humiliating. He sounds like a kid in an after-school special. Empathy and you!

See, that's the thing. He knows that Jay isn't stupid in the sense that he doesn't know what shit is - it's just that he never thinks to apply himself to the scope of its influence. He's moronic in a very specific kind of way that he's legitimately never seen before. It's a narrator who's bought his own role in the story, and assumes that what he says and does won't have any genuine effect on the world around him. The observer's job is merely to document, not to intervene.

But that's never been the case. He's never had that luxury, even if he's done a hell of a time convincing himself otherwise.

"You're not a kid with a camera and a story to chase." The words are gentler than he means for them to be - or maybe he's just speaking quietly, unconsciously mirroring the tone Jay's set. "You never were. You can't just act like you're this...passive thing that takes in the world and distributes it to people. This shit is gonna affect you, and that is gonna affect other people."

God, Tim's...eerily good at...this thing that he's doing. Psychoanalyzing. It makes sense, in a twisted kind of way. Maybe he picked it up from observation.

Maybe he had to.

Jay wants to get pissed off about it, too. He wants to tell him to mind his own business, to take his observations and shove 'em.

But he can't quite scrape together the energy.

Jay Merrick is exhausted.

Over four years, he's been working on this. Over five, counting Wonderland.

He's been here nearly a year. He's made incremental progress on the case, but he's...done other stuff. And weirdly, that other stuff has started to feel a little less 'other' as time goes on.

Maybe that's just because Wonderland's made it tougher to 'distribute' stuff to people. There's no YouTube. There's no real internet, period, and all the backup servers in the world won't fix the fact that his channel was just as much about letting people know as it was about leaving an archive for himself.

Or maybe he's just tired.

Or maybe--and it's uncomfortable to think about, but since when has that ever stopped him--maybe it's because he doesn't need it so much, here. He doesn't need to toss his observations out there for everyone, just so someone acknowledges them. He doesn't need Twitter to remind him he fucking exists.

He's got people, plural.

The characters are acknowledging the camera.

It's diegetic. He's diegetic.

~~Does that make him more real, or less?~~

He sinks his head into his hands, kneading at his temples. One, two, three, four, five.

"Yeah."

He's not sure what else to say. He tries anyway.

"How do you--?" He cuts that thought off before it can make him sound like even more of a freak. How do you do it? What's it like, being part of the narrative? What's it like, being a character with agency?

Tim breathes, slow and...tired. Leans back, sets his fork down with a quiet click. They're both civil, meaning that there aren't any eyes on them. They can express whatever the hell they need to.

For all that Jay's accessed more of Tim's personal background than anyone without a doctorate, it's kind of stunning that he's not exactly pieced together just how cohesive it all was. Just how much of it was limitations, strictures, barriers thrown up to keep him contained. Even as he was breaking them, it was the fact that he'd chosen to do so that defined him more than anything else.

His life was never truly his. Not really. It belonged to people smarter and older than him. And more than that, it belonged to a shadow in the corner of his mind.

"You think I know?" You think he's anything but a puppet - has been for so long that there's nothing else left to him? "The only choice that was ever really mine was the way I wanted to go out."

And even then - a fistful of medication wasn't gonna be enough, because It wasn't done with him yet.

Is that how many you're supposed to take?

Jay hisses through his teeth, running his hands through his hair. He doesn't look up.

He remembers sifting through the half-ruined footage, watching Tim empty the bottle into his hand. He didn't understand what he was seeing at first. It didn't really sink in until the fourth or fifth time around.

The only choice that was ever really his.

For Jay, going to Benedict Hall was a choice, wasn't it?

Was it?

Jay presses the heel of his palm into his forehead, forces himself to breathe.

"Home, our--our world or whatever..."

Not just that thing, but all of it. The crumbling buildings, the cracked highways, the rotting motels, the callousness of the comments, the way he had to learn to talk the way they did, to keep it all locked down, to keep everything distant and professional and detached at all costs. Hospitals and schools, nurses and family, rules and regulations and consequences if they don't shrink to fit them. Normal and Unnatural. Good and Evil. Sin and sacrifice and superstition and skepticism, and the way the definitions change depending on who he's talking to.

"It's fucked, isn't it?"

Whose fault is that?

Maybe It was always going to creep Its way into their world through the cracks, through the afterimages of nightmares imprinted behind closed lids. Maybe It had laid claim to that nowhere state with its overgrown lumps of kudzu and burned-out husks of abandoned buildings, simply because it was perfect for Its purposes, longer before It decided to sink Its claws into the man It chose as Its puppet.

Maybe it was inevitable. But he sure as shit didn't help.

"I know I didn't help it any."

He called himself the 'source'. Like none of this would've happened if it weren't for him.

Like, if he'd never shown up, they'd all be happy. They'd all be normal. They'd all be friends who made a student film, and they'd hang out and watch movies together like friends do.

"Bullshit," he mutters. "Like, I know--This isn't, this isn't uplifting or inspiring or anything, but I think it'd be--or at least my life'd be crap with or without you."

He'd be living in a concrete block apartment, by himself, doing nothing. He'd be floating from job he hates to job he hates, commenting on other people's threads, playing ten-hour sessions of Neverwinter Nights, and waiting to die. He wouldn't be normal. And he sure as hell wouldn't be happy.

"At least with you, there's somebody to talk to about it."

"Without me, you'd still have friends who were alive." Alex wouldn't have gone off the rails. Brian wouldn't have elected to simply extricate himself from his life for years on end, devolving into something that spat out codes in lieu of genuine conversation. Seth, Sarah, Amy - they wouldn't be dead and rotting, unmourned and forgotten.

Regardless of the fact that it was Alex pulled the trigger, he'd never have done so without the motive to get him to that point.

Alex lit the match, but Tim was the kindling.

"Yeah?" Jay cocks his head, eyes flashing. "But with you and without Alex, they'd--we'd probably be still alive, too. I mean, it can't be that simple. Stuff doesn't work like that."

Like hell he's gonna let Tim ignore the details, just so he's got an easy target. The truth's messy. It's complicated, and the more you learn, the more complicated it gets. If it weren't, he wouldn't've spent nearly five years trying to piece it together and wound up dying before he could finish.

God, he's starting to sound like Georgia.

There are worse things.

"And I mean, think about Wonderland. That's just...you. No Alex, no..." His eyebrows lift. You know. "And I mean, is everybody here dead? You've been here, what, two years? Alex was going after people within months. With you, we got this."

He gestures wide, to the prison, to the residents. It's not pretty, but it's not home either.

"And without you, I'd probably, I'd probably be five deaths down and working for the Queen of Hearts by now."

His voice climbs louder. "But here's the thing, I don't know that. And neither do you."

Whatever they've got right now, that's it. That's what they have to work with, to learn about, to catalog and quantify and plan around. Deal with it, Tim Wright.

That's a satisfying thought.

The increase in volume has him darting furtive looks over his shoulder, trying to gauge whether they're drawing people's attention, particularly those with the authority to act on it. Fortunately, it seems that no one's going to regard them with any genuine concern unless it looks like they're about to start going at each other's throats.

"So you're saying that it's just - not as bad as it could be." Really, when he considers it at length, that's the best he could ask for. It could be worse. It could be ripping through his life now, and burning through everyone like gasoline. It took years, the first time, until Alex began to accelerate it.

Maybe it's already happened.

The thought that maybe it never will is too bitterly optimistic for him to entertain it, even in theory.

"Yeah...yeah, I guess."

Not as bad as it could be. That's something, even though it's not everything Jay's thinking.

"And, like, it's not like you haven't...helped." Is this a pep talk? Jay's lost track, but he's lousy enough at it that it might as well not be. "I mean, you--you got the Queen out. You kept an eye on Clem and Alice, looks like. You took out that chunk of the Mansion. You..." He coughs. "You saved my ass more than once."

He dips his head.

"So...so, yeah. Not as bad as it could be."

"It never is." It could always be worse, Tim. It could always be worse. You could be worse off. The nicotine withdrawal might be making him grouchy, as it always does. He hasn't managed to get it to stick for longer than a few days, a week at most, until he inevitably lapses back.

Quitting isn't going well, when an event kicks your stress levels back up to maximum every few weeks or so.

"Well, don't sell yourself short. You do a lot of stupid shit," he's certain to add, with a pointed look that's just barely short of a glower, "but you were part of the group that went Mirrorside too."

Jay has to take a moment to process this.

Don't sell yourself short, says Tim Wright.

(Is it really a surprise, at this point? Even after he helped drag Jay out of the static?)

("We have your back. We've had your back.")

("You've made friends, Jay.")

"Yeah, but..."

But he didn't really help. All he did was carry a camera.

But he was there. He helped Tim to his feet, lent a little support while Tim climbed back through the Mirror.

It's not much, but Jay guesses it's something.

"Okay."

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

[jay voice] Welcome To My Twisted Mind

cw: suicide mention

same cw

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject