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

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."

"Hey, if nothing else, George doesn't deal with people who just waste her time." Clem is more competent than the two of them put together; her concern makes sense. Shepard just cares, outright, constantly and without restraint. People take pity on them, or see that they're people that should at least be scraped out from the bottom of one's shoe so that they don't muck up the place.

George, though. She doesn't exactly waste her time and effort on people she thinks aren't worth it. If he can't believe anything else, he can at least believe in that fucking rock of her personality.

So if he doesn't trust anything else, he can at least trust that.

George...may have shoved him over to be her brother's problem when he first showed up, but she still attempted to comfort him, way back in the movie theater. She's still talking to him.

She's a little less of a terrifying force of nature now, and it seems like that force of nature still puts up with him. Tim's got a point.

"Yeah, she..." He pushes a lump of grey around on his tray. "I mean, she didn't jump through the phone and kill me when I called her Ha--when I called her a secret--secret pop singer, so that's gotta mean something."

Yeah, maybe now's not the time to mention that his conversation with her during that event turned into a prolonged discussion regarding the finer points of Jay's failings as an investigator. The time he was caught in a lie about documentaries being filmed in hotels. The time he failed to account for the fact that his findings being put up on the internet would mean that literally anyone could access them. Both times, in fact, because once wasn't enough.

"She's not as scary as she lets on," says Tim, which is saying something considering Georgia has about as much dirt on him as Jay did, and could probably phrase it a far more inflammatory way. Granted, he can at least be grateful she hasn't thrown that up on a YouTube channel for the world to see, devoid of any moral commentary and leaving viewers up to substitute the narrative with their own where they saw fit.

But she also sat back while he teased her mercilessly about loving her friends.

So she's all right.

"Sure she'd be happy to hear you say that." Jay raises his eyebrows, the barest threads of a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

George may not be as scary as she lets on--may--but she's damn good at hiding it. It's a good thing she seems to be on their side.

Well, she's on the truth's side, at least, and he can't argue with that.

"Seeing what her world's like...makes sense she'd be...y'know, like that." Jay watches, wary, as another camera dips over their heads. He doesn't speak again until it's out of range. "You know if she's worked out any plans to, uh..."

He tips his head meaningfully, hoping that's enough to indicate plans to get the hell out of here.

You know, she said the same thing to me once she met you.

That'd be an unwarranted snipe in a conversation that started in disaster and has ended up more in the realm of almost cautiously optimistic. Against all fucking odds. But then, they've both learned a thing or two about odds during this discussion. Luck.

"We're still figuring it out," he mutters, meaning they don't have anything of substance yet. "George thinks this might be something from Rocket's world, so he might have an idea."

"Wait, Rocket, the, uh--" He gestures. "Little raccoon guy?"

On the one hand, he's a raccoon. Raccoons don't belong in space.

On the other hand, he just hacked together that training simulation Jay's not planning to go anywhere near. Maybe space raccoon's not too far-fetched.

"I mean, I haven't exactly met him in person, but he seems like an, uh...Like, the prison part's less of a surprise than the space part, I guess."

"Yeah, don't call him that in person." Just as a warning. He doesn't know Rocket all that well, really - though he knows him entirely too well in some deeply uncomfortable respects, some horrifying parallels he honestly didn't need to know existed - but he has at least caught onto the fact that he is not exactly fond of being referred to as a raccoon.

George is on far better terms with him than Tim is, and for now, that serves Tim just fine. It's probably less awkward for all of them.

"But apparently he's broken out of a lot of them."

"Then...then, yeah." Jay's brow is still furrowed, but it's smoothing out. He's still mostly convinced. The raccoon-who-doesn't-want-to-be-called-a-raccoon probably knows the way out. Cool. Makes sense. "Especially if he knows, like, this prison."

He drums with the fork on the edge of his tray while he thinks, the fingers of his free hand tapping out a separate rhythm that doesn't quite line up.

"So we either talk to him somehow, without the, uh..." His voice gets quieter. It's not much of a change. "...Without the guards getting suspicious, or we just keep an eye on him and try to, uh. Raccoon see, ra--no, more like monkey see, raccoon...never mind."

Remind him to never try to talk like he's in a heist movie again.

"Assuming his plan doesn't, like, hinge on screwing the rest of us over."

He's not sure what kind of a guy Rocket is, but nice doesn't seem like it fits.

"I don't think so. He likes George." That...he thinks he likes George. She definitely likes him, and she's not someone who generally goes around admitting that she likes people, but Rocket got a mention in her song about the people she's come to view as close in some way or another, so that definitely counts for something.

He hasn't really talked to Rocket. Not since their, uh, forced honesty session on the roof.

He's pretty sure they both prefer it that way.

Sunburst's a pony, and Shepard's a deep space commander
To call Rocket a Raccoon counts as the deepest of slander...

Oh.

Good thing she's taking a stand with those Unflinching Journalist Morals on the whole raccoon thing. Granted, Wonderland's got, like, a hundred or so people, tops. When there aren't any events going on, you probably run out of real news pretty fast.

(Not that he'd know, right?)

"You think she'll be able to get anything out of him?"

He's still having trouble picturing how that conversation would go. He's still stuck back on how they get along in the first place.

"If anyone would, it'd probably be her. They seem...close?" He's guessing, and it probably shows, but there's no point in pretending otherwise. "I dunno. I won't pretend I like it here, but it's not really the worst event I can think of, personally."

Considering the way the last one went, the change is perfectly fucking reasonable, in his honest opinion. He'll take the claustrophobic, downright dangerous prison environment over a technological mind virus that crawls into people's collective subconsciousnesses and eviscerates them from the fucking inside out.

He'll take that any day.

Jay's forehead wrinkles at close. Like, how close is Tim talking, here?

Sounds like Tim's guess is as good as Jay's.

But, then, Tim eases it back. A breakout isn't guaranteed. Sure, they can try, or they can keep their heads down and ignore the way they can't keep still without a weight in their hand and keep going the way they've been going, and nothing's gonna happen. Unless something happens, then nothing's gonna happen. They'll just be marched back into their cells every night and marched back out to eat this slop every day for a weekend or so, and then it'll be over.

Nothing's actively trying to kill them. (Yet.)

Nothing's burrowing into their heads. (Yet.)

If this weren't a regular event, if an end weren't guaranteed, he'd be more inclined to fight Tim on it. But after the Reapers, it's a little easier to quell the instinct to keep moving. When keep moving nearly got his thoughts carved out of his head, it's a little easier to hit the brakes completely.

"Honestly...yeah." He snorts. It's not much of a joke. "Guess you and I know better."

If he sees an opportunity to get his camera back, though, he's taking it. Probably.

Now that his blood isn't boiling in his veins, now that he has the chance to look Jay in the eye and not quail beneath it, now that he's in his right mind - or as right as his mind gets, abstracted and fragmented and split apart along the seams as it always, constantly is - he can actually respond in some significant, genuine manner.

He glances away. Back again.

"...sorry, by the way." Sorry never sits right on his tongue. It feels like a cop-out, like a drape drawn over the hurt. It'll never be enough to actually smooth away the hurt he's done. The fact that he tried to set on fire the man he once bled and burned to protect.

The man he tried to murder his best friend over.

"For...trying to kill you. I know that doesn't make it easier, or better, but - I wish I hadn't done it, so."

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[jay voice] Welcome To My Twisted Mind

cw: suicide mention

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i'm sorry tim

:|

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