Fable the First: Fuck this shit I'm out

[breakaleginhalf]

WHO: New beastie boy Gil!
WHAT: Memory share event!
WHEN: throughout March
WHERE; Everywhere while he gets his settle on, also memories in Arcadia
WARNINGS: Memories may include: Body horror (potential for mutilation, dismemberment, disembowelment, decapitation); cannibalism; cruel/unusual torture leading to death; forcible sedation; mind control/manipulation/commands to murder; Faeries but like, old school Gaelic horror stories. Please let me know if there's anything you'd like to hard opt out of!


I. Where's the beef (OTA, everywhere)

Alright, well. That was a stupid-ass safety drill. And Gil can't say he's fond of Friday either, with the whole No Face thing, but at least he's free and can do what the fuck he wants.

So at least step one is easy: work out what the fuck this place is. Cruise ship? Easy. Specifics? What the fuck. Also he's never been on a cruise ship before so it's very... new.

It's pretty easy to find him: he's the new guy, what's there to say. He's short, he's jacked to the shithouse, he's got a black buzz cut, he has thick scars covering every inch of his visible body in his singlet and cargo shorts and bare feet (some thick and ropy, wrapping around limbs and his neck like the pieces got melted back together, some are small, narrow and deep, and yet others are just shallow and superficial, and everything in-between), he has bare feet as he wanders the decks.

(For those with special eyes, though, he looks a bit different: the same height but a monstrous beast, his knuckles nearly dragging on the floor, arms almost half as broad again; thick, dark fur where the scars glint through like streaks of silver and flesh, the fur short but deliberately clipped down to the same length around his neck and chest, where there was clearly a mane at some point; his face is more like that of a bear or hyena, with jutting fangs and huge, bat-like ears; and his bare feet are now cloven hooves, oil-slick black and almost serrated at their tips.)


II. Thks fr th Mmrs (CW: ALL OF THE WARNINGS ABOVE)

If you're unlucky enough to fall into one of Gil's memory slips, it immediately and intensely feels...

Wrong.

There's a brilliant force of emotion in the air, like the buzz of an audience anticipating a stellar performance, made tangible in the air, like breathing through glitter, a sparkling hit of energy and life that feels like wading face-first into a dream. Or maybe the best high of your life, where everything is surreal, beautiful and overstimulating and intense.

And in every one there's a huge behemoth, black as sin, eyes like burning embers - sometimes it's like a wolf, all teeth and hunched shoulders, prowling - sometimes it's almost a bear, claws and thick fur and a roar that burns through to the soul with unbridled fear - sometimes it's no longer a human, disproportionate, foul and fury.

And in all of them, there's blood.

Comments

[breakaleginhalf]

He opens his mouth to comment on the plant comparison. Then closes it. A short pause. And then he just shrugs.

Hey, if it ain't wrong.

"Okay, so gender is a whole other problem I'm not even gonna bother starting on, we'll- fuck, I dunno, circle back to it later." It can wait. "Relevant point being, humans are stupid about the same apparent gender being a couple. It's a whole thing. I'm not, personally, I'm gay - I'm a guy, I like guys, moving on."

He flaps the notepad a little. "Getting laid is a euphemism for having sex, which- I. Genuinely have no idea if you know what that is. Uh. An anatomically internal method of procreation?"

[ablativeholopleather]

"Gender's dumb to get all hung up on anyway."

Wayne listens, and almost thinks he should be taking notes, but he can write down the parts that he remembers later. It's like a lightbulb comes on over his head when Gil gets to the whole thing about sex.

"Like galliforms? They need two to make more and they lay eggs."

He's probably way off but he's trying.

[breakaleginhalf]

He grimaces, ears flicking under his Mask, but it's not aimed at Wayne.

"Jesus Christ I hate human anatomy so much," he mutters, passing the notebook back in case Wayne wants to, like. Take notes. "Mammals don't lay eggs, females have a special organ called a womb that serves the same purpose of like, fetal growth casing. Gestational period of about nine months, then the baby gets birthed whole and free."

[ablativeholopleather]

Welcome to your life now Gil, you are providing sex ed for local confused alien. Thank you for being a good sport about it.

Wayne does write it all down as soon as he finds the pencil that he'd stashed to be able to do so. There's more sketching, a very small human all curled up in a ball inside a larger person, the closest he can really get without actual anatomical reference guides.

"Got it. Okay. We don't do that. I mean, Waynes don't do that. When we die our flesh goes back to the planet and reconstitutes into the beginning stem components of new larvae. If we live to become Old Waynes and die that way, there's more material for them." He turns to a new page to sketch the process, from that same little slinking creature, to a smaller Wayne with more of its carapace wrapped around, to what is basically the present Wayne. Off to one side, there's a little skull in the shape of his head, arrows for the cycle making it into something of a flow chart. The creature that he draws at the end of the process is downright alien, with a multitude of arms and legs and a tail to boot.

[breakaleginhalf]

Honestly the sketch is pretty much spot on, Gil can't fault that.

"Yeah, humans don't do that." He pauses, then corrects, "Human humans don't do that. Like, the baseline ones."

He gestures for the notepad back so he can sketch too, lining his up beneath Wayne's.

"We go baby, so larval-" and a tiny human sitting down. "-children and teenagers, the sort of pupation, puberty phase?" A medium sized stick figure beneath the smaller Wayne. "Adults, like- post-pupation. Us." A full-size stick man beneath the Wayne. "And then old, uh. Like, ages sixty upwards, I guess?" And a hunched stick man using a walking stick under the eldritch Wayne. "And then we die. No redo's or respawn or new life from our corpses. Just-- dead." He adds arrows between them, but after the old human he just draws an X.

[ablativeholopleather]

Again Wayne can hear the voice of Dedusmuln in his head going fascinating as Gil explains the human life cycle.

"That explains why some people are stoked to be here when they woulda been dead in their worlds," he muses, thinking back to conversations he's had with Pratt. "So, the having uh. The children, that has to happen in between because you don't generate afterward. Okay that makes more sense."

He feels so much better about all this now that he has someone that's willing to actually teach him things.

[breakaleginhalf]

"Yeah, the adult phase for us is when we procreate, but, uh. The actual time span is pretty much 'straight out of pupation' until 'right before we get old', so like. Forty? Years?"

Then he frowns. "Wait, you don't use years." He looks back at Wayne. "How long is a cycle? We can probably convert it."

[ablativeholopleather]

"Uh..." there's an absent look that comes with that, when Wayne's hands come up and he counts briefly on his fingers. "Ok, so I was a larva for about seven cycles, I was two cycles out of pupation when I moved into my new place, stayed there for like...two, then went back to Waynehouse for another seven..." A little bit of muttering under his breath, and he's starting to look more confused. "If I'm roughly approaching middle age, and Crichton was saying that's like thirty years or something by human terms and we're assuming I'm kind of the same age...uh..."

Why is he doing this to himself? Where's a calculator?

[breakaleginhalf]

Gil snorts abruptly, loud and dry, and he grins.

"Okay, first of all, Crichton's a dickhead, thirty isn't middle-aged. For humans that's like, fifty. We live to like, ninety or a hundred."

He invites himself to sit on the couch, flipping to a new page. "Secondly- so, uh. Day-night period, one day, is twenty-four hours. Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year." He's writing as he talks, left-handed, making a neat table out of it. "Eighteen years for the first two human stages, then you're an adult until you turn like, sixty, then you're an old adult."

[ablativeholopleather]

Well, shit. If someone has been pulling his leg then that sets him back some doesn't it?

Wayne takes a seat on the pull-out bed that he's been using as his normal bed thanks to having arrived to the cabin second and not wanting to take over. He leans to watch Gil writing with his arms crossed atop his knees.

"Okay. So if people usually hit puberty by like, thirteen years and we're equating that to pupation, with mine being pretty standard, then that's just under two years to one cycle, and if we follow that, then it's...uh..." More counting on his fingers, and then writing down what he's muttering, and coming up with a repeating decimal.

At least from there, he can work out easily enough that not only is a cycle approximately 1.7 years, but that he would be the equivalent of 32 human years old, and that his estimation of when he would need to go to ground for metamorphosis was a little bit off. It's a relief knowing he has a little more time than he thought.

"Okay...cool?" He doesn't know what to do with this information, but he sure does have it now.

[breakaleginhalf]

Gil's leaning in to look at Wayne's math - and at least maths, apparently, stays consistent across the multiverse, which is nice? - and gived a nod. The maths seems solid, at least.

"Hey, the more you know." He'll never say no to more information. He likes that he can put shit in terms Wayne will understand. "It'll help contextualise shit later on, at least. Also, you're almost two and a half cycles older than me."

[ablativeholopleather]

Numbers are one of those universal constants. It makes situations like this far less stressful, thankfully.

"Yeah." Wayne relaxes a little bit on the spot, feeling a little better about even that small bit of progress. Now he can tell people how old he's pretty sure he is without doing mental gymnastics. He flips back to one of the more recent pages of notes to start adding corrections and additional notes, including one about not taking Crichton's comments at face value.

He pauses as he leans back again from his note-taking, and cracks a small smile. "Thanks for all this, man. I owe you one. 's there anything you wanna know?" He figures the exchange of information should continue to go both ways, after all, and Gil has done him a huge solid just by taking the time.

[breakaleginhalf]

He lifts his hand in a casual dismissal. "Nah, man, I'm having a good time, I like helping people learn. This is literally my job, I'm a teacher for pupation-age kids."

He drags his hand along his jaw in an idle scratch. "What's the most, like, frustrating thing you have to keep trying to explain to people? That people keep having trouble like, getting?"

[ablativeholopleather]

It's pretty comforting, knowing that Gil is coming from a place of experience. Maybe not strictly in educating people like him, but in education in general. It feels like that means he can trust what he's being told.

It reminds him of one of his best friends in the world.

The smile fades a little bit. "That's kind of...everything, to be honest. Every time I start answering questions there's a blank look or, like..." People are disturbed by the nuances that he's tried to give them. Crichton, for all that he ended up misinforming Wayne a little bit, had reacted the least negatively when he talked about developmental stuff. The other really positive interaction was with a very nice man running a Valentines booth that thought it was pretty neat that his skin could hold a shape. "I try to explain the Hylemxylem and it's like they immediately glaze over. Nobody's ever heard of a pneumataphore and I can't look up an equivalent to help with that. It's not like I can just stop trying to answer questions though, that's way rude."

[breakaleginhalf]

"Okay, well, the first thing I think of when I hear Hylemxylem-" props, he nails the pronunciation. But he's also thinking helter-skelter. "-is almost definitely wrong, but."

He shrugs one shoulder. "Okay, based purely on the sound of the name, pneumatophore sounds like either an instrument or like, a communications device? Like a radio tower, kind of."

That one, he's thinking semaphore. And is probably wrong on both counts.

[ablativeholopleather]

While Wayne could probably see where the connection might be sound-wise, those are two very different things. "The 'xylem was a satellite," he explains as simply as possible, "that got misused." Leaving out the parts about the king of the moon, and the way it destroyed the minds and a lot of the bodies of the people around him. Cans of worms he's too tired to really try to get into anymore.

"Pneumataphores are an organic propulsion source. I can sort of fly in short bursts with it. Works best when traveling horizontally." He flips to another page in the book to sketch again, drawing that basic little Wayne shape again first hopping, then flipping, then jetting away toward the edge of the page.

He taps his pencil on the paper a moment as he goes through the other things that he's had to explain multiple times, and lifts his hand. "Then there's Gestures. They're not like-" He flaps that hand a little in the air in a normal almost dismissive sort of gesture. "Some people think about it like...magic? I guess? That's not really a thing at home, a lot of what we're able to do is technological, but it interacts with our physiology and makes it so some us can, like..." He purses his lips briefly, then brings his hands up to sort of twiddle his fingers around. In front of him, the air warps with a sound akin to a slide guitar. "That's just a temporary boost. The other stuff's mostly protection-based, or can hurt things."

[breakaleginhalf]

"Nah, I get that. I've got a skillset that is magic called Contracts, but they're not like- literal pieces of paper. It's a title, makes it mean something when you use the capital letter. Shows intent, kinda."

There is a difference between Contracts and contracts, and Gestures and gestures. Easy.

He pauses briefly, and adds, "Pneumatophores sound cool as fuck, actually. Humans don't have any fancy organ systems that aren't there for like, basic survival. Digestive system, respiratory, reproductive, brains and shit. We're aware of that kind of biology, it's just not one we have."

[ablativeholopleather]

Will, Flesh, Gestures, Things, Contracts...capital letters that mean things!

There's a deep sense of relief that he gets the longer he's able to sit here and talk about these things with someone that gets it, even if he doesn't have firsthand experience.

"I happen to think it's pretty damn neat," Wayne replies in agreement. "But I think human anatomy might be way different so you guys not having something like pneumataphores kind of makes sense."

[breakaleginhalf]

"Like, the minutae of human anatomy isn't my forte. I was always unconscious when I got these done-" with a gesture at his own general self, and the multitude of scars that cross most of his being. "But I know enough biology to make up the gaps. And if there are like, any actual doctor types on this ship, I bet they'd have a great time teaching you how humans work."

Still, he can go into the basics. "But yeah, like. Humans are mammals, which means- live babies, like I said. Warm blood- ours is red, cos it's full of oxygen. Internal skeletons, no carapaces or whatever." He shrugs and scratches an ear. "As a general rule? We are very squishy, in terms of what can hurt us. The list is literally everything, with the right application."

[ablativeholopleather]

Wayne nods some as he listens, making connections back to prior conversations.

"Oh yeah, I remember like...Max was talking about that, with your skin being really thin and blood close to the surface and generally being a lot more fragile but also like, elastic? Like your skin springs back into place." To demonstrate the different he gently pinches the back of his own hand and, instead of it smoothing right back out the moment it's released, the raised flesh stays that way. The color doesn't change as if it's been injured or compressed, simply staying put as if he were simply a soft clay or playdough. "We have skeletons too actually, they start forming as our carapaces kind of shift and change as we go from larva to upright. We leak, but I don't think it's blood as you know it. Nothing red comes out."

[breakaleginhalf]

To Gil's credit, he's certainly seen weirder things than the way Wayne's hand shifts like Play-doh. On the other hand, he hasn't seen anyone quite like that before, and his eyes widen reflexively at the odd sight.

"Woah. Uh." Focus, Gil. "Yeah, that's definitely gonna be strange to humans. Ours just- okay so I'm not the best example, but like--"

He mimics the act, pinching the the back of his hand, but Wayne will see how the skin pinched and relaxes, slightly paler from the force that settles quickly, that Gil actually can't through the fur.

"Yeah, human skin is a- shit, what's the word. Semi-permeable membrane. Lots of blood vessels in it - that's what the colour changes are, from blocking those for a second." He turns his hand back and forth, showing off how the tendons shift in and out of visibility as he flexes, how that deforms the skin and changes colour. "Humans only have like ten litres of blood. If we lose more than like, four or five? We pass out. I think if we lose eight we die 'cos our brains don't have enough oxygen, but like- don't quote me on that one, that's straight up me guessing."

[ablativeholopleather]

Wayne observes, just the way he had with Max, and comes to the conclusion that regardless of the color of a human's skin, it all behaves largely the same way, just the same as it tends to back home. Somsnosa was blue but she was just as malleable as he is.

Following the motion of Gil's hand, Wayne does the same thing. There's a similar tendon shift in his wrist, but it's nowhere near as visible, as if the clay that makes up his outer layer of flesh is that much thicker that it would hide such things. There is also, very subtle at the joints of his arms and wrist, seams similar to what one might see on a jointed doll.

"Okay, so like...best to keep all your blood inside, got it." Which generally seems like a good idea for life overall if he's being honest. He pauses on that thought, then drags up the shirt he's wearing, momentarily forgetting that his torso is still going to be covered by the rash guard. That would be a little harder to move aside to be able to show a mark on his stomach that would have probably been interesting. "When I got here, I was healing from this really bad fight. There was still a mark where I was leaking," he explains, realizing that the motion is probably weird from the outside. He gestures to the space just below the subtle arch of his ribcage, where a human's solar plexus would be.

[breakaleginhalf]

He snickers a little at the blood on the inside comment. That is indeed where the blood's supposed to be.

When he gestures to the injury area, though, Gil's expression sobers a little as he grimaces.

"Yeah, humans don't... repair, easy. If a cut is big enough we'll need to get stitches- literally, you get a special needle and thread to sew a wound closed. And it'll heal, if you take care of it, but it, uh."

He holds his arm out again, and traces one of the thick scars - this one encircles his entire arm, though there are a great many smaller ones, some only an inch long, some long and thin, some like his skin was gouged out and closed clumsily enough to leave a distinct shape.

"It scars. And those don't get better, or go away."

[ablativeholopleather]

The idea of holding flesh together with needle and thread makes him feel a little bit squirmy. He doesn't like the mental image that this presents.

"Weird," he says simply, then leans forward and carefully lays his fingers against the back of Gil's hand to tilt his arm and get a better look at the scars. He doesn't hold tight, and his skin is fairly cool to the touch, smooth in a rather uncanny way that, if Gil were to look close enough, would be a result of having no fingerprints or other obvious creases in his fingers unless they're bent to a dramatic degree. "Is that why they look like that? The needle and thread make them like this? Do they hurt?" They certainly look painful...

[breakaleginhalf]

Luckily Gil's got the layer of fur separating Wayne's fingers from his skin, but it's still weird watching his skin pick up the imprint of fur that Gil knows he won't see.

"Not anymore. They did when they were first healing - humans have a lot of nerves that let us feel pain, but those kind of die when a scar forms. So the scars themselves don't actually hurt. More like the area around it ached until it finished, I guess."

He shifts his wrist, gently so as not to dislodge Wayne's exploring. "You see how there's like, ridges in them? It's where the new tissue pushed against the thread as it was forming."

He's got enough of them that he might as well admit it now. "That's one of the ways I'm not human anymore. When a human gets a limb chopped off, the amount of pain and blood loss kills them. It takes some pretty severe medical treatment to make sure they even survive, and you don't get the limb back." He lifts his free hand to gesture to his neck - and the thick collar of scar tissue, that bobs with his Adam's apple as he talks. "Head off? Instant."