beaufort wind scale [open]

[goodweather]

Who: Phil and you!
What: January open; having a bad one, having a decent one, and Bird Monster Time
When: through January
Where: bellona theatre, library, sports deck, bobby b's, the sky, pool bar, around
Warnings: non-suicidal self-harm thoughts, compulsiveness, probably prior Village stuff will come up


smoke drift indicates wind direction, wind vanes still (cw: avoiding self harm) [rooftop]

This can't be good.

It's the first thing his mind jumps to, when his heart starts racing or the stress builds in his gut, that need to hurt something, but he can't let himself do that. He couldn't before and he especially can't now. He won't. He won't. Too many people care about him. Too many people depend on him. He'll do anything before he relapses like that. The idea is terrifying.

In his cabin he takes a sharpie and draws on himself. As many species of swirling plants and darting animals as he can remember, tangles of geometry, cold fronts, polar coordinates and bad math equations that would probably crash a calculator, as many numbers of the Fibonacci sequence as he can remember; all of it traces up his wrists and his thighs, though no one will see the latter. He can't ruin something like that. He rips a notebook from the bric-a-brac to shreds and painstakingly colors it all red in marker. Tape, too--there's tape in the bric-a-brac and the Sundries, and that he lays on his skin, especially where there's body hair, and tears it off. It doesn't take up hair that much, but the sting is there. That satisfies. That sates. That's safe.

And he runs too. Falls into a dead sprint until his legs burn, then takes off into the sky until his wings and his whole torso does too. It's good cardio, he may as well be productive. Some might spot him soaring in circles above the deck. When he lands, it's onto a familiar rooftop perch, and his legs dangle as he sits to take some weather measurements.

wind felt on face, leaves rustle, vanes begin to move [bellona theatre, library]

In the library, or occasoinally alone in the theatre, a voice can be heard, quiet and low.

"When I heard the learn'd astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; when I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured wh--when--"

A soft but vicious swear. And then he starts again.

Phil sits with pages and books of literature and poetry in front of him, reciting carefully. He... seems stuck.

small trees in leaf begin to sway [sports deck]

It's not at all unusual to see Phil up on the sports deck; he works out regularly, he keeps up diligently with his sword and combat training, has for over a year by now. And he's a strong sort of guy; the impacts he make aren't without force.

But he starts showing up more often, and for longer. Phil goes at the dummy with a dull training blade with an unusual aggression and speed; the impacts are vicious, and the drills are repetitive, and there comes a point when he strikes and the blade snaps apart, the shattered pieces flying.

Phil stops, breathing hard, and goes to sit and take a water break.

twigs breaking off trees, generally impedes progress [around]

Sometimes he has his earplugs in; often he doesn't, because despite how much he hates the noise, he hates being vulnerable more. As Phil passes through the ship he keeps tabs on his surroundings, carefully avoiding any eye contact so as not to be caught glowering at anybody. No one deserves that from him, but he's not willing to tamp it down, either.

But if someone seems to keep his eyes on him for too long, he'll look right back at them and grumble, "Is there something you need?"

whole trees moving, resistance felt walking against wind [bobby b's]

The routines the same. He drags himself into the bar. Sometimes he gets a cigar, but he always grabs a whiskey. Never by the bottle, though, and for each new drink he gets a new glass. He. Needs to keep track.

He's here more often than he was before, and for longer. But... he has water, and food from the Drunken Sailor, so...

slight structural damage occurs, slate blows off roofs (cw: compulsive behavior) [around, in quiet places]

Preening while he does other things is routine. Usually while he reads, which could be in the library or the lounge or the cafe, or while he's just sitting around in a restaurant or a bar or the pool deck. But these days, sometimes he just--he gets stuck. He'd meant to get up and do something else half an hour ago, maybe even an hour, but his talons still run through his feathers, running and running and digging and pulling and--he's breaking barbs, snapping quills, running his feathers torn and ragged, but that's just as well. That's how he knows it's real. Ugly, but real, and the mistakes he makes stay.

... This is probably an issue, though, isn't it.

seldom experienced on land, trees broken or uprooted, considerable structural damage [around]

Phil takes a deep breath. And--

... There's something new slinking around the cruise. It's bigger than a polar bear and twice as vicious-looking, taller than most people at the shoulder, but it only seems to be winding carefully around the library shelves, or up and down the stairwells, or poking through the Tommy Bahama. It's not thrashing, or making a racket, or attacking people. The most it's doing is trying to use a register with its giant bird hands. Or sleeping on the roof of the pool bar. Or struggling to get out of some Bahama clothing racks that he got stuck in without breaking anything.

(Those who are even passingly observant might see why: those wings are familiar. So are the eyes: the left one clear, the right one slashed and cloudy with cataracts. And perhaps even the sallow white light is familiar, and the cool breeze that blows about it.)

very rarely experienced; accompanied by widespread damage [after the probe launch; rooftop]

Phil slowed down on his weather tracking a lot. Once every other day, maybe every three days. Nothing has changed since July of last year, after all.

But now he thinks it'll be much more useful than not to have someone keeping tabs on the atmosphere. So. He'll be there on the same rooftop spot he always takes. New paper on the clipboard, neatly dated and partitioned. At nearly all hours of the day and much of the night, he's taking readings as close together as 15 minutes and no further than two hours apart. Sometimes he'll fly out over the sea just to scan the horizon. He's made a real nest up there to make the long haul tolerable; cushions, blankets, food and drink, books... plus Erin's sword and the cursed dagger close at hand, and the antimagic ring on his finger. And always wearing his lei. (It's invisible in the daylight, but in the evenings, there's... a strange fluorescent cast of light on him. Like most white fluorescents, it doesn't do him any favors, only serving to make him look more sallow and pale, as though he was ill.)

Sometimes he's up there in that big bird monster shape too, struggling to manipulate the pen in his weirdly dexterous bird hands. It'll be useful to get used to this shape now that he understands what it is. It came to him so close to the eve of potential disaster. It's the same thing as when he got these wings two months before the apocalypse happened on Prismatica, and he used them to race through the collapsing city to rescue and evacuate civilians with Henry.

It's a Hail Mary.

It also means they might live.

devastation [wildcard]

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