THE EDITED PHERES LOG POST

[refiningspacetime]

=> PHERES: Abscond.

=> FLEETBOUND POST. [refiningSpacetime - FIN]
=> MARDUK: Call your guide. [FIN]
=> RICCIN: Retrieve the damsel in distress. [FIN]
=> HINNOM: Lead him home. [FIN]
=> FLEETBOUND POST. [activatingAggro- FIN]
=> SIPARA: Fetch your dumb moirail. [FIN]
=> PHERES: Wake up. [FIN]
 

SUMMARY: Taking drinks from strangers is generally a bad idea. Pheres needs to be picked up from a party, but life is hard when your moirail is out of town and all of your friends are terrible. Luckily, there's always Fleetbound!

WARNINGS: None! Except for Pheres being thoroughly depressing in Lead him home.

THIS HAS BEEN FINALLY EDITED. For like the third time. Due to POV-switching shenanigans, you may occasionally encounter weird shifts / incorrect verb pluralisation at points that I missed in switching from 3rd person to 2nd person POV. Sorry! :c

For the most part, though, typoes should be fixed and continuity is now more accurate!

ALSO:  Follow the story through the links above to ensure you're reading the correct, edited threads, please and thank youu

Comments

[postalprestidigitation]

Here's the thing about ghosts:

They can move as quickly as a thought, in theory. There's no flesh weighing them down, no breath to make them slow, and while it takes them awhile to forget the rules and just do it, older ghosts can pour through physical matter like walls and dirt and stone like water through a crack.

In reality, most ghosts simply can't. There's no gizzards left to stop them, but they remember there should be, and forgetting is an art that takes practice. Even Castor drags his feet, sometimes, when he's feeling especially corporeal, and on days like that, you have to dawdle, slowing your steps until they match a blueblood's heavy stride.

Perhaps the fear has made him remember he's dead, though. The walk from the hive to the sewers is a fifteen minute walk, but it only must be five minutes before the room lights with Castor's familiar off-blue as he slips and slides down through the ceiling, heels first.

He's barely corporeal: somewhere between an imprint and a real troll, his features worn away to the impression of eyes, a nasal hole, the gaping mouth. But you can't doubt it's Castor, not when the leash is tied around his waist so firmly, the doubled strand of your maroon psionic aura stretching from him to you.

And you'd recognise Castor's voice anywhere.

"Putain - enfin fini!" he growls. "Vous disparutes! Et j'retourne chez moi, et -" He flings up his hands. "Vous absentâtes! Que? Tu es un gosse à la con: à cause de ça, vous devez être prudent, tu dois rester près de moi!"

Even when he goes off on his crazy gibberish.

"I don't understand you," you snap, keeping your voice low. You knows a few words, enough pidgin to keep track when Castor goes off in one of his fits - but not when he's spitting words like acid, one after another until the pronunciation is slurred. "J.. j'ne parle! Shhh."

It'd be so much easier if you didn't have to speak aloud.

"C'est des conneries!" he snaps. "Vous parlez français, pourquoi tu mens?

"Shhh!"

"Que? Qu’est-ce qu’il y a -- ahh."

Castor follows your gaze to Pheres: at the sound of your piping voice, the maroonblood has started to stir, and pressing yourself flat against the pipe, you try not to breath and draw more attention.

[refiningspacetime]

Each passing moment leaves you more and more tired. You thought that if you stayed still long enough, perhaps the world would stop spinning: but it hasn't, and worse yet, there's just black draping the edges of your vision, the familiar precursor of a collapse.

There's a reason you don't use his psionics for recreation. Even the effects of small jumps are annoying: a nosebleed and the resulting nausea are easily managed, but they're only worth it if it saves you a long walk with heavy books, or if they keep a customer from culling you.

Big jumps like this.. well. You were lucky you were awake when he landed. You're lucky you're awake right now, because the ringing in your pan and the darkness crowding your vision are hinting it won't be the cause for long.

Fuck.

There's a sound nearby, and you can't tell the source. It might be the river, it might be voices.. or it might be the feet of some hideous sewer-beast, come to eat you alive.

Or it might be Hinnom. They have to be around here somewhere, don't they?

"Over here," you rasp, dragging your head up to peer into the dark. The light off of your psionics is more a hindrance than it is a help: it illuminates a few feet ahead of you, like a cone, and the light only makes the gloom of the room seem deeper.

You can't see what made the noise. If it's something come to kill you, well.. fine. You'd prefer to die when you were still awake.

"Hinnom?"

[postalprestidigitation]

Castor stares.

The way that Pheres's eyes are lit up was less noticeable up above, where the light of the day and the glare of the sun had washed it out to the point of near invisibility. Down here, with only the dimmergrubs high above, it's glaring. He looks like a ghoul.

He sounds like one, too.

"He's not dead," Castor says, slowly, like he's questioning it. He's lapsed back into standard, thank fuck. "So..."

You wait. Sometimes it takes him a moment to think up a plan. But Castor usually comes up with good ones.

"We have to take him back to the hive."

Sometimes he comes up with good ones.

You shakes your head furiously, and you hiss, as low as you can: "No!"

"If he's not dead already," you continue all in a rush, "then he's gonna die, and then he'll turn, and it'll be awful, 'cause not like shit we can do 'gainst a revenant --"

"My god. You're a little angel." You don't know jack about religion, though Castor's tried to teach you, but you know that isn't a compliment just by the way he says it. "He saved you from the drones. We can't just leave him to die."

You don't see why not. Their mom clacks her mandibles, unsure: she can't see Castor, you don't think, but she still really doesn't like when they argue, so you zips it.

(And.. okay, because he does have a point. When someone does something for you, you gotta pay it back: good or bad, that's just a rule!)

(No one ever said it had to be a good pay-back, though. Leaving someone to be eaten by ghouls is still a reward, 'cause they're more likely to end up as a ghost that way, instead of just fading. But. It's a pretty shitty reward for saving your life.)

When you don't say anything else, Castor takes it as agreement and pulls himself together. As he spoke, he materialised more: rattlereeds and a speechwaddle for sound and lips to form them, but now he forces the rest, until he's less of a blur and more of a person, with clothes and horn-stubs and a body all between them.

And, wrapping your telekinesis around him like a shroud, he approaches Pheres.

[refiningspacetime]

That's it, you've decided: you're going to die down here. The thought should be more depressing, but when you turns it over in his head, there's only a sense of grudging acceptance.

This is what you deserve, probably.

You try to live life like all the feeds say that redbloods should: you keep yourself in your cart, with your books and your taxidermy, and you work. When you deal with others, you're well-dressed, docile, and helpful to the higher castes: in short, you're respectable.

When you act like you should, it works out. When things go wrong - when a customer tries to cull you, or a deal goes badly - well, it's because you slipped, made a comment you, shouldn't have, wore something you shouldn't have. When you behave properly, it works.

It doesn't earn you much respect, no matter how polite you are. It doesn't get you many friends. But you've never died, and it's only when you decide to go out, live a little, and act like everyone else - immoral, disrespectful, churlish - that you ever seems to come close.

(Even now, you know that's not precisely right. Most of the time, you've gone out and come hive the next evening or by midnight at the latest: embarrassed, maybe, but perfectly fine.)

(But ypu're bleeding on a sewer floor, in the one place that your moirail would never think to look to retrieve you, and that means you're going to die here alone, where your body will be eaten by squeakbeasts and grubs. Right now, the gloomy thoughts feel right, and that's all that matters.)

You give up on staying upright and curls up on the ground instead, your horn scraping against the concrete. Hinnom is gone, you can't walk any further, your eyes are so heavy, and all you wants to do is sleep.

So you close them, and you let the darkness settle in.

[postalprestidigitation]

Pheres has curled up into a ball like a grub ready to die. By the time Castor gets to him, his breathing has slowed, but he's not dead: just asleep, on the concrete floor splattered with his fluids.

Ugh, GROSS.

You try not to gag as Castor bends down next to him and picks him up, careful as he sometimes carries you. You can feel the rasp and slide of Pheres's weight against your telekinesis as Castor returns, but thankfully, not too well: it's Castor controlling it with the ease of sweeps of practice, and the sensation is like touching bone through flesh.

"You'll have to play look-out today," Castor warns you. "But we won't go deep, just to the pipe."

You bob your head in a nod, but you can't help the dubious look you shoot towards Pheres's horns. He might be able to fit, even with his dumbo shoulders, but his rack is kinda huge.

Oh, well. If they won't fit, Castor can always snap one off.

[postalprestidigitation]

In the end, Pheres gets to keep his horns. Going up the pipe takes the velvet off the sides of his bottom set, leaving maroon streaks on the metal behind, but you go up first, and between your pulling and Castor's pushing, you manage to get him into the hive proper.

Your hive is the old catacomb where you first found Castor, back when you'd been nameless and small and fresh from the caverns. You had thought it safe because his presence had kept away ghost and the walking dead alike: you hadn't realised what that presence was. Castor had watched you for a few nights, just long enough to affirm that you could see him, and then he'd introduced himself.

He's been taking care of you ever since.

His presence still keeps the dead away, and sweeps and sweeps of your hard work have replaced doors, set locks, and made it thoroughly impenetrable to the living as well. (Kids from above like to go trawling in the crypts, for some reason: that's how you met Marduk!) The walls are padded with fabric, and anything and everything you've salvaged from the catacombs over the sweeps: a few things from the culling pits where the bodies used to be dumped and burned, but mostly gifts left behind for the ghosts in the sweeps after.

Recently, you've set up a ruperacoon that Castor found above-ground, and that Mardie helped you haul down. You don't like to use it after sweeps of sleeping dry, but the slime helps when you're injured or sick, and so it only makes sense to dump Pheres in.

You curl up around the outside. The recuperacoon always runs hot, and so you've built your pile of pillows and fabric right by the side, so you stay warm all day long. Castor's use of your telekinesis always makes you tired, and now that you're in the safety of your hive, it's turned into outright exhaustion.

"Gonna sleep," you tell Castor, and you don't even have to ask: he drapes them with one of the shrouds off of the wall, a nice, thick one they stole from a seadweller's bonerest, and that tiny use of telekinesis uses what feels like you last drop of energy.

You sleep.

=> SIPARA: Fetch your dumb moirail.

[activatingaggro]

Man, you are so fucking tired.