entrancelogs | [OPEN] And if it ever starts to feel bad, little fang

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[OPEN] And if it ever starts to feel bad, little fang

Who: Chara, you, hey can you bring napkins
Where: OFF TO NEVER-NEVERLAND
When: Throughout the event
Rating: PG for potential violence? Will edit if necessary.
Summary: Chara is a ten-year-old with a violent resentment toward humans and grown-ups. So basically, business as usual.
The Story:

[A - Remember that your gifts are your game]

Adults.

Chara hates adults. Despises them, from the very pit of their soul. They thought they were safe in Wonderland, that they could live forever among kids who get it, kids who understand, kids like them. But now grown-ups have come, like they always do. Come to drag them back into the dark, kicking and screaming. Come to take them away and lock them up and make them pay for misbehaving.

Ha. They're welcome to try.

Chara has marked their face with warpaint, vicious streaks of berry-red slashed across their rosy cheeks. Two stripes, one on each side, going up toward their eyes. Don't know why, but it felt right. Powerful. They clutch a knife with a blade coated in dreamshade and carry jagged little rocks in their pockets. They're not alone now, not in Neverland. They have something to lose now. Something to defend. And they're going to defend it to the death.

They've scrabbled up into a tree, a smear of green shirt and brown hair hidden in the foliage. They know someone's bound to come by sooner or later. They left a trail, a deliberate and obvious track of snapped twigs and bruised ferns, to bait an intruder this way.

All they have to do is listen, watch, wait until the right moment. Then... they pounce.

[B - The melody sings what the words can't say]

[They'll never, ever, ever admit it, but sometimes, the Lost Ones sort of yearn for something that's missing. Something indefinable and out of reach, made of faint memories of comforting songs and warm baking and bedtime stories.

Not that Chara would know. They never feel that.

But they... sometimes something seizes them, they guess. An urge to be something they aren't? No - not that. They're just bored. They're...

They're making a blanket.

Two sticks that their knife carefully whittled down to straight, smooth evenness, yarn from - they can't remember where it came from, where did it come from again? - and the comforting, zen repetition of row upon row of garter stitch. They don't even know who needs one most, who this one is gonna be for. It's not like they could ever work fast enough to make one for every kid. But one kid, at least, can have a security blanket, if they work hard.

Maybe they'll ask Frisk. Frisk would probably know who needs one. They mull it over as they sit on a stump, looping together row after row together.]

[C - But they might laugh and they might be scared]

They don't like the night.

It's not that Chara's afraid of the dark. It's just... they're a light sleeper. Lost Ones whimper in their sleep, cry in the dark sometimes, snore or mumble or kick as they slumber. The forest is full of animal sounds and rustling branches. Always, always, they curl up as small as they can make themselves and hope and hope that nothing creeps in through a window, crawls its way in through a door, slides to where they sleep and extends a spidery roving hand up their leg and -

They don't sleep too good, a lot of nights.

So they take night watch. They never get tired. Their bedtime is never. And they're not scared of the dark. May as well be useful to someone, if they're going to be up anyway. Tonight's another night where they keep a vigil, feeding twigs and sticks to a campfire to ward off the nighttime chill and illuminate the camp.

Maybe you can't sleep tonight, either. Maybe you're an intruder, making your way to the flickering beacon of a distant campfire. Whatever you are, you can find them here.

[Wild Card
[Any other prompts you'd like to use!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Frisk groans aloud at that joke, shaking their head. Bad jokes always do bring everybody together though, right? That's just a universal constant. Or it should be. Uniting people in amusement and loathing.

"You're not unholy," says Frisk airily, grinning as the fire locates a pocket of sap in the log and utters a loud snap. "You've got plenty of holes on you, right? You've got two eyes, two nostrils, and a mouth."

They demonstrate by stretching their own mouth wide in another pleased smirk.

"Therefore, you must be blessed," they add.

It's weird, the morbid impulse that jumps to their throat, the knee-jerk response that they have to forcibly bite down on - the itch to joke about how they'd love to have a few more holes, like maybe perhaps multiple stab wounds, ha ha! Why would you go and tell a joke like that to a kid, right? That's... that's just creepy. Not funny at all.

The heat is almost too much as the flames start to get a hold of the massive log, but they don't move back. They sort of... there's something about hovering juuust on the threshold of too much. A weird flicker of memory bumps up against the back of their mind - sitting in a crappy plastic lawn chair around a fire pit, resting their sandal-clad feet on the big metal cylinder containing the fire. Marvelling when the heat melted the grooves off the bottoms of their flip-flops. Getting the weird impulse to stick their hand in, try to grab a handful of flame, see if their fingerprints would melt completely blank, too.

Creepy. They really are just nonstop creepy.

"You've got all of those too, right?" They instead announce, sticking to normal and very much Not Unsettling topics. "In fact, I'd call you the hole package."

Add a corny wink, some over-the-top fingerguns. Now it's funny!

A snort now, Frisk's hands clapped over their mouth as though to reveal their amusement would be a heinous crime of the first order. Shoulders shaking with silent mirth as the fire burns and pops away beside them.

Everyone loves some bad laughs, don't they? Bad laughs, and nice friends. And...they feel like there's something more to that sentence, but they don't pursue it. It's not an important thing to know, they don't think. It must not be, or they would be remembering it now.

"How very holesome," they say, when they get their breath back, "of the both of us!"

And that just sets them off snickering all over again.

They laugh. Of course they do. Frisk's funny, and the best kind of jokes are those kind. The ones where someone else isn't the punchline, isn't the butt of the joke, isn't getting belittled and expected to giggle about it. Why aren't you laughing too, Chara? Can't you take a joke?

Their laughter dies down quickly, though, chased away by the ugly thoughts that keep them up at night, the unpleasant answers they have to bite down on, push away, carefully conceal.

"In some of my dreams," they mumble, knowing it's the wrong answer, knowing it's not funny, "there's a hole where my heart should be. It's just... empty."

The conversation takes an unexpected turn, and Frisk knows that somehow, for whatever reason - they've said the wrong thing. Or maybe they didn't, maybe they were just joking around, but one thought leads to another, and then things become quieter, darker, grim.

Frisk quiets, their smile fading slowly, sadly.

"They're just dreams," Frisk says softly. "You love more deeply than any other person I know."

They're not smiling anymore, Chara. Look what you've done. Killed the mood. One impulsive little second of honesty, one single sentence of too much information, and now it's awkward.

"I see it when I'm awake sometimes, too," they blurt, because if they've already ruined this, then might as well just set the whole conversation on fire. Nobody likes to talk about seeing things. "Sometimes flower petals fall out. Sometimes there's just one flower and he's digging his roots through my veins. Sometimes it leaks something weird-smelling and horrible."

They smile, even if it's the wrong time to be smiling, because that'll probably help creep Frisk out. "It looks awful. It looks gross. In fact, it really looks kind of pitiful."

"You..."

Frisk's mouth goes dry for a moment, as they blink. A flower digging his roots through their - but that's impossible. That's just Frisk, isn't it? Just Frisk and their stupid weak brain kicking them in the shins, making them suffer just for kicks.

They glance over their shoulder, to ensure no one's creeping up behind them. To make sure no one can hear. Still, they lower their voice before they speak next. No one can know what they say, what kind of awful weaknesses hum in their blood.

"You see the flower too?" Frisk whispers, their eyes bright with an emotion they can't name. Eagerness, maybe. Or possibly fear.

Their smile falters. Their eyes widen. The dirty, ragged sleeves of their shirt get twisted and squeezed into startled, nervous fistfuls.

Those things they see... those aren't real, right? Figments of their imagination. Bursts of static spilling out of a cracked, broken brain. You have to just ignore them, because they don't actually exist.

But Frisk... Frisk asks if they see the flower too.

"A golden one?" They whisper back, leaning in like they're speaking of something dangerous and off-limits. Like speaking too loud might summon him. "It's - it's a him, even if it's the dumbest thing in the world to gender a flower, there are lots of species of plants that don't even..." They trail off, recognizing how stupid and irrelevant that train of thought is, recognizing that nobody cares if they must have for some reason decided their awful imaginary friend needed to be a boy.

Because they decided that, right? They made him up, just invented him, because he's not a real person. He doesn't exist.

"Does he talk to you? Sometimes, he can talk."

"Yeah."

The word is breathed-out, barely audible over the crackle of the flame. They're abruptly sitting bolt upright, their spine ramrod-straight, their eyes unblinking. How can this - they don't even...they didn't even arrive here together. Did they? Time is so fuzzy here, where they never age, where there's no rotation of the sun to mark the passage of the day, where things like growth or years may as well be irrelevant.

So how is this possible? How can they be having the same vision of the same flower, the one with the golden petals and the chirpy voice and the weird, weird inclination for them to assume - for whatever reason - that he was, in fact, a he.

"Howdy," Frisk whispers, a poorly-rendered parody of his speech, but no one else they know says howdy. No one real says that anymore. "He says that all the time. 'Howdy.' 'Golly.' No one...no one else talks like that. Right?"

Their impression isn't exactly pitch-perfect, but the words have that brain-scratching, aching familiarity to them. That confusing deja-vu, because they know someone who talks like that, they know exactly where he gets it from, but they can't think of it. Can't. Just... can't.

No one here talks like that.

"He calls himself my best friend," they mutter, words soft but taut with an urgency they don't entirely understand. "But that's... you're my best friend. Toriel's my best friend. My best friend's not a boy. Not a flower. What kind of best friend says - says the kind of stuff he says?"

They wonder if they have to clarify. Threatening to kill them again and again and again, then begging them not to kill him. Saying he doesn't want them, he never did, he was always wishing for something better to come along... then saying they're special, they're the most important thing in the world, nobody will ever love them like he does.

Not unless Chara MAKES them.

"But... we can't both be seeing him. He's not real. I just made him up, right? He's just a hallucination."

"I thought I made him up." One hand shifts up to comb through their hair, tangled and messy and thick with grime as it is. Their fingers get caught in the snarls, tug at it painfully so it hurts their scalp, but they don't care. They apply a slow, steady pressure to one temple with the heel of their palm, squinching their eyes shut.

"I started seeing him all the time. Talking about...about how I should kill everyone." They try to laugh, but it comes out a breathless wheeze. "Says stuff about being best friends, too. F-friendliness bullets..."

Or was it something else he said? They forget. They forget. They just know how he grinned and grinned, with far too many teeth even for something imaginary. Laughed wickedly as he shot little white pellets at them, and they'd dodged even if they didn't have to because -

Because they'd have to explain where the bloodied welts and pits on their legs came from, and no one is gonna believe that nimble Frisk did something so stupid as tripping and falling down the stairs.

Down the - on the rocks. Tripping and falling on the rocks.

They don't have stairs here.

"But he's not real," They insist. "He's not real. Why do you see him too? We didn't know each other until we were Lost. We can't have had the same best friend if we never even knew each other at all!"

Can they? They... they didn't know each other. They didn't. Right? They suppress the "before" as hard as they can, try to never ever think of it. It's a horrible swirl of conflicting, awful emotions. Lancing pains of "you were never wanted" and "they stopped loving you." The contradictory tormenting thuds of "you never had any worth to anyone" and "you almost mattered, but you were replaced." Just when did they hear Pan's music calling them?

"We can't have made up the exact same thing. That's too much of a coincidence. But... but then why, Frisk? Why do I see what you see?"

"How are we both seeing him?" It's the same question, and they can't...there's no straight answer to it. There isn't. They might have been close, might be friends like so few other people on this island are, but they arrived at different times. Didn't they? Didn't they? Wasn't Chara...it's like they've been here forever.

"I don't understand," Frisk whispers. "I just can't understand..."

And then a shiver races up their spine. Like someone's walked over their own grave. Like someone's echoing something they've heard before.

"And how can he be our best friend? Flowers don't talk." Not real ones. They don't. They - they can't talk. "Right?"

"Those flowers were my favourite," they mumble. "They might be the one thing I miss. They don't grow here at all." Maybe it's that simple. Maybe they both just really liked those flowers. Maybe their weird incomprehensible minds just translated favourite into best friend. Maybe it doesn't mean anything at all.

"Does he ever make you feel..." They trail off, trying to tiptoe around the most taboo word they can possibly think of. The kind of word that Lost Ones would laugh at, that Pan would surely scorn. They don't ever use that word. None of them want to go back. Ever.

But they don't know any other word for this. They try to think of one, but they can't.

"Homesick?" The word is barely audible, more mouthed than actually spoken.

"He makes me think of a room that was inside and outside at the same time." Golden light filtering in a mottled pattern, the faraway sound of birds chirping somewhere. Chairs and walls, they remember chairs and walls, so it wasn't just a garden. "He makes me think of a lot of contradictory things."

That'd been one thing that had been immediately apparent. There weren't a lot of colors here. Everything's just quiet, soft, muted. Dark browns and blacks and grays, greens in the leaves and vines and not much else. Purple or a deep midnight blue if you ever get a look at the sky, or the waves of the sea.

The bright yellow of those petals is unmistakable.

Frisk leans closer, their brow crinkling. The similarities just get more and more uncanny.

"He says stuff," they say quietly, "stuff that's like...familiar. But not. 'Cause I've never been to a spot with golden flowers like that. I've never...seen some of the stuff he talks about. And sometimes he - " They break off guiltily, again have to check their surroundings, make sure no one is eavesdropping. "Sometimes he talks about people here. The monsters. Like he knows them."

"Do you think they see him too?" They whisper, even if that sounds outlandishly impossible. "He can't know us and know the monsters. We didn't know any monsters until we came here, did we?"

Did they?

More itches at the back of their mind, more things they have to press down by force. More thoughts of warm voices that say "golly" and "howdy," more inexplicable phantom sensations of squishy paw pads and soft fur, bigger by far than Toriel's young claws.

"Maybe we all see him, and nobody talks about him? Maybe he's telling everyone he's their best friend, and we're not... I mean, obviously we aren't really his friends, right?"

It's just a statement of fact. They don't know a talking flower, and he obviously can't be their friend if he isn't real. He's just a daydream.

So why does guilt coil heavy and toxic in the pit of their stomach when they say that?

"I've never asked." Afraid to, they guess. They've never mentioned this to anyone but Chara - Chara is safe to confide in. They won't spill their secrets. And monsters might be good, might be kind, but they're not sure they wouldn't take advantage, given the opportunity, of a tactical foothold over them. To dangle the fact that they're seeing things that aren't there over their head. Weak. Weak.

How're they supposed to confirm this? How do they ask the questions without sounding like they've lost their minds? Does everyone see it?

"We don't even know him," Frisk says, puzzled. "We can't be friends if we don't know him." They shift on the spot, glancing away uncertainly. Their intermittent scanning of the surroundings is starting to feel like a nervous tic, a paranoid sweep of the area. "But I don't - I don't wanna ask and be wrong."

"Definitely don't ask," they blurt hastily. "They won't believe you." Nobody ever believes you. They say you're making things up for attention, they say you're a liar, they say you're crazy. It's just not worth it. Calling for help is never worth it. Wondering is one thing, making up fantasy hypotheticals where you're believed and other people know what it's like, but the reality... the way the world really works... Neverland is the same as what came before, in that regard. It's a fact of life.

"It's too weird," they insist. "If something we thought was all in our heads is - if we can both see it... maybe it's... I mean," they falter, hesitate, stammer. Sounds crazy. You're crazy, Chara. Unstable, unbalanced, messed-up, not right in the head. "I know how it sounds, but... what if the things we thought weren't real are real?"

Boy, do they ever sound like a cartoon character! Like one of those Hot Topic caricatures with pithy quips about how the voices in their head say to kill you. Ridiculous. Stupid. Crazy.

It's why they haven't. Haven't dared to even suggest that they might be seeing shadows and shades that aren't there. That'll just get them mocked, taunted, and with the Lost Ones you have to fight tooth and nail just to keep any modicum of respect among the other kids. Their position is tenuous enough with how adamant they are on no killing. There's no reason to jeopardize things further.

"That's...what it says, sometimes," says Frisk, and they're struck with the intense feeling that they're discussing something that's somehow - forbidden. Wrong. Their brain shies away from the idea as soon as Chara presents it, and they're almost tempted to throw in with it. Dismiss them as wrong, say it can't be true.

But when have they ever given in like that? Frisk doesn't give in. Neither of them do. They don't back away when someone tells them No, they drive at them with everything, hammer at them with renewed intensity and a spark in their eyes until they break through.

"You mean...the flower, the one we both see," they say slowly, processing, "it's...real, somehow. Maybe not, not physically, but...somehow. It could be."

How else would they both be seeing it? It can't just be a coincidental shared delusion. It just can't.

They know they've taken a very dangerous step. Strayed into unknown territory. Now they teeter precariously on a pinpoint, not entirely sure where they should step next. Where that thought should progress to.

Real, but not physically real? Where are they supposed to take that? What does that mean? Why does - why does the concept of existing but not, only being a figment in the corner of someone else's mind... why does that make their heart hammer in their chest like it's trying to break free of their skin?

"I don't understand. I cannot comprehend what this means." They don't get it. They don't. Their sleeves are getting hopelessly scrunched by their wringing, restless hands. "How is that possible? Is this... is someone playing some kind of trick on us? Did Pan somehow do this?"

"Why, though?" That's not...it's not an irrational guess, that's the thing. Pan can do all sorts of things, all sorts of incredible and terrifying things. They wouldn't put it past him, to be capable of this too.

"We've done everything he's asked. Why would he..." Frisk scowls at the ground. If this really is some trick Pan is playing on them, they...well, maybe they wouldn't be so surprised. Their whole life is people opening up, pretending they can be trusted, and then crushing that trust in the palm of their hands like an egg, letting the yolk dribble out between fingers and laughing in their face as they do so. Tricked again, Frisk. Let down your guard, and this is what you get.

It's not surprising, anymore. At least, it shouldn't be. But here they'd found a home, people they could love and trust and be a family, a family of broken things, and this is what's to come of it.

"But who else could?"

"I don't know!" They blurt it, a low but frustrated hiss, just shy of being too loud to count as whispering. "Isn't the whole point of Neverland that... you know, we're free? No grown-ups controlling us, nobody refusing to understand, nobody jerking us around just because we can." They didn't have to feel alone in a crowd here. Didn't have to feel like they were just a tool or a plaything or some other disposable trinket. They didn't follow the music just to end up as somebody's toy, did they?

"If we can't just live happy here, then... then where are we supposed to go? What's the point of being Lost if we're still being tormented and picked on all the time?"

That was supposed to be the point. They thought it was, that it must have been. And now they can't help but feel, sharply, intimately - betrayed. Their mouth twists downward with revulsion, their shoulders hunching.

"Just when we thought it was - " They break themself off, coldly. They don't even know what to say to that. Safe? Happy? Normal? It wasn't any of those things. And, apparently, they don't even deserve a desultory amount of any of it. Tricked again.

"There's nowhere to even go," Frisk adds. They sound less glum about it and more - furious. Their mind is already silently racing, pulling together every scrap of knowledge they've gleaned about the island, yanking forward everything that might help, compressing it into a fulcrum to lever themself out of any fear, any trepidation, any concern. Hardening it into something compact and bladed, a real plan to take them out of here and into the next best thing.

They don't deal in hope. They deal in finding something worthy of achieving and then doing it.

"Then we'll-" Go nowhere. Like nowhere is a tangible location, like they can just rip Neverland down like it's a stage set? Yeah, okay. Sure. That makes sense. That sounds real possible. They're just trying to be contrarian like some impulsive little baby, not even thinking about what they say.

"We'll make a place to go," they instead announce. "I'm sick of being someone else's puppet. I'm sick of not being in charge of my own life. If I hated it before, why would I like it when Pan did it?" Is it Pan? Maybe it's someone else. Maybe it's the flower himself, somehow? (Impossible, it feels impossible, because their best friend would never - because the flower isn't real.)

"I don't know how, but... but I'm not okay with this. I don't wanna just stand there and take it."

"Giving up is the worst thing there is," Frisk says in a tone that brooks no argument. "If this isn't...if this isn't a place we can be, we'll find something else. Make it happen."

They fix Chara with a fierce, intent look, perhaps unsettling in how overly focused it is.

"Those adults had to come from somewhere. If we can figure out how they got here, where they came from - we can figure out how to get there too, maybe. We don't even have to stay there. Just to get out of here."

It might mean making one of them talk. Making them talk in unpleasant ways but - but they can handle that. They've seen worse things, done worse things.

[OPEN] And if it ever starts to feel bad, little fang

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