entrancelogs | Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore

Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore | OPEN

Who: E V E R Y O N E (Including our 4th wall guests!)
Where: Everywhere, one both Mirror and Real Side!
When: December 12th - December 18th (WEEK ONE)
Rating: PG-13, warn if going higher
Summary: This year's Ewaymas celebration rolls out the way it usually does, with intense decorating, a sudden snowfall and...far more arrivals than usual! New faces and old fill the mansion - but why would Wonderland bring so many people at once? And why do some of them remember Wonderland?
The Story:

On the evening before December 12th, the captives of Wonderland might be awoken by a loud commotion. Some of it is typical Ewaymas noise, likely familiar to anyone who has been in Wonderland for more than a year – construction sounds and jingle bells as Wonderland decks its own halls quite literally. Garland and lights race down the walls and down the stairs, and stockings appear on the walls for each and every person in Wonderland, embroidered with their names. There are decorative candles everywhere, and all sorts of decorations for every conceivable winter holiday, even if it does not align perfectly to the dates of Ewaymas. Time isn't real, so there will be menorahs and dreidels and Star of Davids even though Hanukkah ended two days prior. And of course, in the front hall, growing straight out of the floor, is a large decorated tree full of ornaments for everyone. And as always, it will have snowed heavily overnight, bringing all of the snow Wonderland will have between now and spring.

There is a second source of commotion in the night though – the sound of a crowd.

Over the course of the night, dozens of new arrivals will appear in Wonderland. Some for the first time. Some wondering how they managed to return with their memories. Others stumbling in with no recollection of ever having been here. Some might be friends from other timelines, other possibilities, and some might even be doubles of people who are already in Wonderland. It's strange for Wonderland to drag so many people into the mansion at once, but everything seems to indicate that they are supposed to be there. They have their own network devices and even have their own stockings on the wall and their own ornaments on the tree – by all accounts, it seems Wonderland expects that they'll be staying, and is treating them like any other new arrivals. Please, make them feel at home and help them settle in nicely.

The first few days will be for catching up with old friends and enjoying the decorations and settling into Wonderland. However, within a couple of days the decorations will start to glitch, much the way corrupted computer graphics might. Lights might change abruptly from multi-color to blue or white, entire décor styles will abruptly change, candle flames will flicker on and off like broken fluorescent lights, and any singing decorations might loop on a beat or two over and over putting you into an eternal hell. Wonderland doesn't seem to be able to stick to one motif, and it can't stop changing. These glitches are occurring on both the Real Side of Wonderland and the Mirror Side.

By the 15th, these glitches will include entire rooms changing into different holiday scenes. These scenes will all be of characters at various winter holidays in the past, the present (in their world), or a possible future. At this point in the event, characters will still be able to navigate the basic mansion and be able to exit these moments easily. These scenes cannot be interacted with – Wonderland seems to consider them another form of decorating. Unlike previous events of this type, these scenes will not loop at first. They will play once, and then Wonderland will glitch and correct itself to be the room it is supposed to be. The scene might play again, but it will be in a different location if it does.

By this point, Wonderland is having an increasingly difficult time holding itself together in a way that makes geographical sense. You might exit one room, even a room that was not previously playing a scene, and find yourself in the kitchen or on the roof instead of in the hallway. You might open a door that you were sure led to your room only to see a ten foot drop to the grounds outside.

This is the mingle log for WEEK ONE! For more information on this part of the event or any questions, please head over to the plot post, or check out our Fourth Wall Master Post for your other Fourth Wall event needs! Prose or [action brackets] are welcome. Please clearly indicate whether your character is on the Real Side or Mirror Side in your top levels. And of course, have fun! ♥

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That guy was different. They're all different.

[He lets his shoulders lift in an incremental shrug. The lump of a locket is a weight around his neck, the chain of a promise twined into the strands of his beacon-red soul. Maybe it's more like an anchor, tying him back to where he wants to be. Where he wishes he could be, or maybe just thinks he needs to be.]

[Maybe they don't need him, really, anymore. They never really did.]

[Maybe that was a lie, too, in its own way.]

[Two fingers go to the lump just beneath his shirt, where the locket in question dwells.]

That's not a bad thing.

[There's something under Tim's shirt. It's substantial, whatever it is. Too small to be a chest-cam, at least by 2013 standards. Could be a necklace with some kind of large pendant, or a medal. Could be something else, maybe something implanted in his chest, maybe some horrible growth. There's so much Jay doesn't know yet, about Tim and his island and his castle and his friends, and he's already wasted his question.]

[He cocks his head, squinting at the lump under Tim's hand.]

[It's not polite to stare.]

[He forces his gaze back to the table.]

[What was he saying? They're all different, and that's not a bad thing. This Tim has known another Jay, and he could tell the other guy was different. Jay--this Jay, the one he is right now, sitting across from Tim and carving curved nail-marks into the tabletop--has changed, become a different version of himself, a not-Jay, or at least a not-the-same-Jay. Merrick-adJaycent. Fuck, focus.]

[What is that lump?]

[Don't focus on that.]

Bad or not, does that make us...?

[No, also a bad idea. He wants to cut it off there, but he's not sure how else to end the sentence. Does that make them someone else? Is there one right version of them? Is that one of the other ones?]

Like, how much...how much d'you think we can--?

[Goddammit, it's not his turn for a question. Stop. Reword it. Rethink it. No questions in the title cards.]

When we forget stuff, we change. When stuff happens, we--we change. Like, I guess that's natural, or whatever. I'm just not sure how much can really happen before we, I dunno...

Like, that's what happened with Alex. And Brian. They changed.

[Does this Tim know he knows about Brian? Does this Tim know about Brian himself?]

[He knows about Brian more than he maybe should, and yet - not enough. Not enough to really know the details of what happened to him. They met in the chaos of conflict and he learned, piecemeal, that Brian had lost every scrap of himself over time or maybe in one fell swoop, and left this shell of someone who was, even worse, still aware of his own empty nature.]

[Leaving someone who did not or could not speak, who had grown to used to living feral and alone and forgotten, who had never once considered that if he'd just asked for help that he would have gotten it. That there was so little, so goddamned little, that Tim would not have done to help his best friend.]

[But at that point, perhaps understandably, going to Tim for anything other than a stolen fistful of medication was off the table.]

[Until LifeAftr.]

I don't think it's the same kinda change here.

[He lifts his shoulders in an incremental shrug.]

You know I've never seen It since ending up somewhere else. Not once.

[Jay freezes, eyes wide.]

[His eyebrows furrow, confused for a moment and then thoughtful, but his focus doesn't shift.]

[He's just moving, not quite thinking. When he tries, it's just static.]

[He blinks.]

I have.

[He wasn't holding his breath there. His mistake; now he has to suck one in to compensate, closing his eyes. Figures. It was too good to be true.]

The real thing? Or something that just - looked like It?

[Because that, that he's pretty sure he's hallucinated, imagined, dreamed in some way or another. He's felt Its presence in the abstract sense, in the distant sense. In the sense that It can't be so easily ignored, but at least safely categorized as something that does not affect him more than usual.]

[More than It affects everything that he is, more or less.]

[Jay screws his eyes shut, kneading at his forehead, and tries to think through the static, the ragged edges of his own memories.]

Can't be sure. One of 'em wasn't, I know that.

[Because that one tore off its goddamn skin and went for Jay's throat. That one bled when Tim drove a knife into its neck.]

The others...?

[He opens his eyes a sliver, focused on nothing.]

Guess I can't be positive either way. This place can build stuff, and it can bring stuff in, so...

[He shakes his head, more a twitch than anything, and his next words have that familiar cynicism, that twist of bitterness. He's not sure he used to talk like that, before. He'd need the tapes to check.]

If It was fake, It did a good job acting like It wasn't.

[And how do you know that, Jay?]

Shep--somebody else, she...she's got a mechanical, metal--prosthetic, whatever, I'm not sure. Apparently, that...made it worse. For her.

[And it was his fault. Jay's fault she had to see that, had to have her head torn open, and she's the one who tried to comfort him.]

[He doesn't know Shepard, doesn't have any idea who Shep would be, but he knows what It does to things that are mechanical, and that doesn't bode well. His jaw clenches briefly, a muscle there twitching once. It's not really his problem. It's not really something he can do anything about. It wouldn't - there's nothing he can do about it now. The twinge of guilt has more to do with his ability to accept that move on than it does the incident itself, vague as it is.]

[Maybe that's why. Because, in its vagueness, it's easy to process.]

Makes sense. It plays havoc on that kind of thing.

[What are brains, but electrical synapses firing off into one another? It's true that if It did show up, he wouldn't have much way of being able to tell, except by the most obvious and reliable ways: his own brain, as a gauge of what kind of currents might be getting thrown off-kilter.]

[That's about all he can hope for, really. That's the only metric he has.]

[Makes sense, he says, like he's got the luxury of that kind of distance, like he can talk about It like It's all just theoretical.]

[If this is an event, there's nothing stopping It from showing up. Maybe soon, in this kitchen, pressed into the corner like a spider.]

After seeing what it does to the camera...

[Jay winces, wrinkles his nose, like he's talking about a fender bender, maybe a broken bone. Distance. Trying to match Tim's detachment.]

[Not quite succeeding.]

Look, I can't...I can't guarantee It's not gonna...that we're not gonna have a...problem, while you're here.

[Problem, in this context, meaning the problem. The central problem. The ten-foot problem with no face.]

But I can tell you George--Mason, Georgia Mason--has a copy of the prescription if you need more pills. Guess I can also lend you some of mine, if it's an emergency.

Edited 2019-01-28 03:22 (UTC)

I'm good.

[He draws the bottle from his pocket in a motion that's rapidly becoming practiced, shaking it slightly. It doesn't look clean, not in the slightest - it's scuffed, worn, without any label whatsoever, and it's impossible to tell just how many of those little white capsules are inside.]

[The answer to that would be "just enough to last him the month." It's always exactly that - just enough, and no more or less.]

I've got a free refill system. Well...it wasn't free, but it'll keep me for as long as I need.

[Jay peers at the battered pill bottle as best he can. His finger twitches, unconsciously reaching for the zoom on a camera he's not holding.]

You're taking this all, uh.

[Is he overstepping some boundary here? Feels like he is.]

Pretty well. Like, not just this...stuff, I guess, but, like...all of it.

[He's not positive that this Tim is older, but he certainly feels older. He's leveled out. He looks beaten to shit, but he acts like somebody who can give as good as he gets. He hasn't seen that thing in however long he's been wandering, but from the way he's holding himself, it's like if It does show up, he knows he can handle it.]

[Jay's not like that. He's never been like that. But maybe, if he's got a future ahead of him, he can try to at least pretend.]

I had time to adjust.

[A one-shouldered shrug, a vague tilt of his head to one side. In a war zone, an adjustment period was a luxury he couldn't really afford. He had to slam straight into survival mode, and then, beyond that - adjust to scraping together a relatively advanced living in a short amount of time, with no technology to speak of.]

[It's hard to say if certain troubles just seem trivial now, or if he's simply too tired to consider them anything but bumps in a long, painful road, for the sake of his own sanity.]

[Maybe he just doesn't expect to be getting off that road anytime soon. The assumption that he intends to stick around for a while yet - that's new.]

I had to.

[He looks tired, though not the way he did back home, lit by the dim bulb in the hotel bathroom, by the sun filtering through the passenger side window. It's not the sickly complexion, the dark circles under the eyes from too many hours spent peering into a laptop screen, running through videos frame by frame, helping Jay piece together the next entry or puzzle through a cryptic message. It's not the way he blinked and swayed after too many hours behind the wheel.]

[It's not just physical; Jay can tell that much.]

[Is exhaustion preferable to fear?]

[Which one keeps you safer? His first instinct says fear, but after all he's seen--all he's done, he's not so sure anymore.]

Doesn't look like the kind of thing that just...happens overnight.

It didn't.

[It was only a handful of months, is the thing. It was the war-pitched battlefield that was Sol, and all it entailed. It was a Queen and legions of shadows and things that whispered words that sang in the pit of your soul, that you were too afraid to admit were there all along. It was a lot of people who didn't have any clue what to do with him - and, more importantly, the scattered handful of people who did.]

[It was, for once, being made to step out of the context of his own problems and take in a whole mess of other people's problems, and realize that they were so vastly different to his own, and so much more immediate and so requiring of his help and his need to do something on their behalf, that there simply wasn't any time to think about his own.]

[What he says next, he says with the air of someone quoting something else - the words are too stilted to belong to him.]

It simply marks a rotation in perspective.

[That's not Tim.]

[Jay sits up straighter, watches the man across the table more closely, as his mind flicks through options. Tim's Mirror, after all? Shadow? Some kind of possession?]

[Or he's just quoting someone. That makes more sense.]

[He's still watching Tim more closely, though. Those words, that delivery--it's all a little too close to Tim's Mirrorside doppelganger for comfort.]

'A rotation in perspective.' Right.

[Jay quotes Tim quoting...whoever.]

Guess this place just didn't rotate us hard enough.

[Just Tim. Just...a little more predisposed to borrow someone else's words.]

[ * Someone else, who just happened to be infinitely more eloquent with words than he ever could. Even if they, too, liked to borrow the words of another. He knows those quotes too, quotes from a text that he's heard read aloud and remembers reading, even if it weren't his eyes doing the reading. Not his memories.]

[He pushes them back aside.]

When you end up in the middle of a war zone, there's no time to think about your own problems. So you start making yourself useful instead.

Useful.

[Jay bristles at the word, but he's not precisely sure why. It was useful to have somebody watching his back, carrying a second camera, watching the playback over his shoulder to make sure they don't miss a relevant frame or a blip of distortion.]

[He was useful in Wonderland, too. He'd drag Jay away from danger when he was half-catatonic, staring at nothing, mumbling under his breath. He was a springboard for theories, well-founded and otherwise. Tim even kept an eye on him when Jay first started taking the medication, in case there were any side effects.]

[Maybe it's just that useful in a warzone tends to mean something else.]

[That must be it.]

[He lifts his brows, his tone mild, but otherwise neutral.]

Yeah. Useful.

[He still remembers it: Rin's sharp tongue and unwillingness to allow guilt or regret or whatever the hell else to drag her down, no matter who those demons belonged to. No point in thinking about things you can't change; just work to change them, no matter what. You don't know how to fight? Fine. Help in some other way. Take stocks. Make compost. Be useful.]

[In some ways, it was a much-needed wake up call.]

[Useful, like he's just some kind of tool. Like that's his only value, his use.]

[God, you're a hypocrite.]

What'd they use you for, anyway?

[There's bitterness in the words, but they aren't directed at Tim.]

They didn't just...I dunno, send you out there with a gun, did they?

[He's not sure if he's got military family, not sure whether the scraps of information he can dredge up from what's left of his memory--dates, facts and figures, names, vehicles and weaponry--come from real life or movies or dubiously accurate forum posts. All he knows is the feeling, the sinking feeling neither one of them would be the kind of guy they'd send home in one piece.]

[He shrugs.]

I made compost.

[Yeah. Seriously. He made compost, because even if he felt useless, even if he felt like he was some pointless addition that no one could do anything with, he had a pair of working hands, and that was good enough. It's not nearly as impressive as someone with a gun, someone with powers, like the people who could do Castle pushes and build generators.]

[But it was something.]

We had a food shortage, and I was around, so I helped. Can't fight a war without rations.

[It sounds like it should be a joke, "making compost." It sounds like it should be "Well, I'm not dead yet," but the wry, deadpan delivery's not quite there.]

[Is he serious?]

Sounds like you got off...like, not easy, but...Farming. That's better.

[Great, now Jay's gotten himself all riled up over nothing. On your average day, he's not one to lash out physically, but now he can feel it at a simmer, just beneath his skin--the desire to punch a wall, kick over a chair, break something just to get the adrenaline out of his system.]

[He digs deeper into the tabletop.]

I had it easier than some.

[He wasn't there for very long, comparatively, after all. A handful of months, though that was enough to suggest to him that the events unfolding there were typical enough to be taken in stride, more or less. It's hard to say which is worse, at this point - the jolt of adjustment at Sol, or the long-running exhaustion of everything that's happened on the chain of islands he finds himself at now.]

[Probably the latter. The effects there have been...more lasting.]

[Easier than some. That's not particularly reassuring.]

Still, that's not...great.

[From his worn clothes, the weary way he holds himself, he looks like a guy who's seen a lot. Too much, maybe, but they've been past too much for years.]

At least you got out, I guess.

Went from a warzone to day to day survival, so, yeah. Could've been worse.

[Day to day survival, at least, that was familiar. He managed to...he wouldn't use the word thrive to describe it, but that's more or less what happened. He refurbished a building, created Denny. He distributed flare guns. He managed to settle a life in place, despite his initial resistance to planting roots in such a way that he'd have reluctance dislodging them.]

I could've been sent here.

[A string of emotions flash across Jay's eyes. It's confusion, followed by realization, followed by offense, on behalf of the place Jay hesitantly occupied for over a year. The place where he found work, found some semblance of a purpose beyond Alex Kralie, a college friend of mine, found people who could stand to be in a room with him longer than a few minutes, found people willing to risk their skin and their memories to keep his head above water.]

[That's the thing, though. For all its free food and days of dubiously guaranteed safety, they wouldn't have had to risk anything if Wonderland--or whatever he's supposed to call the thing operating it--hadn't been so goddamn sadistic.]

[Nobody would have had to risk their life just so Jay would admit he's sick, that he's been sick. Nobody would have had to spend their memories just to get him a bottle of pills.]

[Jay deflates, head sinking into his hands, and the sound hissing through his teeth might just be a thin, exhausted laugh.]

I think the other you'd probably agree.

That bad, huh?

[He suspects as much. Jay's different from the Jay he knew, in small and subtle ways, but the disparity between them suggests that he's more shocked at Tim's slow progression than Tim was at Jay's own. That in and of itself is pretty indicative of what kind of shit's occurred - or rather, what kind of shit hasn't.]

[He's not sure how to feel about it, so he doesn't let himself dwell on it for too long.]

Wouldn't've called that one.

[That's a lie. But a small one.]

Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore | OPEN

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cw: brief gore

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jay, please chill, i beg of you

this seems like a hopeless endeavor

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