+ Your imagination can't hurt you! +

[vitaelamorte]

Who: YOU!
Where: The Mindscape
When: starting November 11th
Rating: may be up to R for character deaths
Summary: Navigate challenges to learn valuable lessons about nonviolence, cooperation, and self-sacrifice! Release your inner animal! Read more about the event here, and on the bulletin board.
The Story:




"If you know yourself, you have nothing to fear."
"Working together is the only way."
"Deaths are a necessary part of life, but not all deaths are necessary."
"The needs of the many outweigh the life of just one."

Comments

[mettatonvevo]

[He sighs a bit, standing up with Frisk and continuing his assessment of this latest puzzle. A long, stone hallway, with glittering fields of magic? to the side of it. It doesn't feel like the magic he knows, so he's not sure if that is a proper assessment.]

It's all right, dear. We'll figure this out, don't worry.

[If anything, the fields give off an eerie tremor in the air that reminds him of Hotland and the CORE, only without the constant sound of steam and the orange glow of the lava. He feels a particularly sharp pang of homesickness and instinctively turns to Frisk to see if they feel it too.

Their face is impassive and blank.

Right. Of course.

He looks ahead of them to the door.]

That must be the way out. I don't know what this puzzle will throw at us, but it shouldn't hurt to start walking.

[And start walking he does, stepping out of the space they both woke up in and beginning to go down the hallway.]

[determinedest]

[He tells them to start walking. So they start walking. The moment they set foot outside the circle, there's a high, bright electrical snap of energy discharging. Frisk watches as the fields at either side of the hallway start to draw closer and closer like a pair of jaws.

They can't think of any particular commentary that might be relevant in that instant, though they're not sure what the energy might be. Maybe it's like those forcefields in Hotland.

Absently, almost as if it's simply an afterthought, they reach up to touch the blaze of electricity.

A hot shiver of pain crackles up their fingertips from the point at which they touch the field in question, numbing them up to their shoulder. Frisk doesn't cry out - it is best to remain quiet, as all children should - but they cannot prevent the reflexive gasp as the shock of the initial touch thrusts them forcibly away.

Their head cracks against the floor.

They end up on the ground, on their back, staring blankly at the ceiling as the fields draw closer and closer. Their arm aches with a strange and jangling non-feeling, as though the nerves have all been simultaneously deadened.]

[mettatonvevo]

[He's already a little down the hallway when the fields begin to move and he stops for a moment, entranced by their forward push. He looks back to Frisk and opens his mouth to say something- and it's like everything happens in slow motion as he watches them reach a hand out and touch what he now recognizes as electricity.

There's a sickening crack! as Frisk crashes to the floor and Mettaton runs back to them, worry and fear etched into his face.]

Frisk! Frisk, are you all right?

[He kneels down beside them, fervently wishing he knew any kind of healing magic. He doesn't notice that the electricity walls are closing in...]

[determinedest]

[There's a ringing in their ears now, though whether that's due to the barriers as they hum closer and closer or whether that's because their head really, really hurts, they can't exactly say.]

Hurts.

[That's the only word they manage before the fingers of their oustretched hand start to burn from the bright blaze of that scintillating energy as it sweeps over them, creeping up to their hand, their wrist, their forearm.

They're having difficulty seeing anything. Their vision erupts into a burst of phosphenes, fluxing between blinding whites and reds.]

H-hurts.

[mettatonvevo]

No, no, Frisk, no, this shouldn't be happening-

[He is scrambling to pick them up, to pull them away from these giant forces coming for them both and he is moving backwards with them when the other wall hits him square on his back.




Floating. He feels like he's floating for a moment, his consciousness awash in a sea of binary and circuitry, flashing errors and warnings and he feels nothing, nothing, he feels like a ghost again and finally he begins to feel fear on some level, though it is displaced, physically one place while he is in another-

Then his body begins to bend, the forces of electricity and magnetism twisting the metal of his body into coils and he is unraveling, physically and metaphysically. Pain pulses both terrifyingly close and far away. If he ever wondered if he was completely bonded to his body, this would be proof that there is no truly separating himself from it.

His hands go limp on Frisk's body as his SOUL blinks and shivers inside its glass case.

WARNING: MASSIVE SYSTEM FAILURE IMMINENT. PLEASE SEEK EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE NOW

Mettaton falls with a crash as the walls move over them both.]

[determinedest]

[It sweeps over them in a chain of bright, unbearable agony, and they think maybe they are screaming or someone else is. It's difficult to tell. It creeps over them in a burn of inevitability, silencing their gasps, stopping their heart, their veins shivering in their overheated fingertips as they feel every part of themself start to b r e a k.



Curious. They didn't depress a single button and yet everything finds itself winding back...]