Arthur Lester (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
theotherright) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
come_sailaway2022-09-20 05:31 pm
theotherright) wrote in come_sailaway2022-09-20 05:31 pm
[OPEN] the labour and the wounds are vain
Who: Arthur Lester and YOU
What: The walk of shame after rafting with two other idiots off the edge of the world
Where: Around the ship
When: The day after the beach party
Warnings: The normal Arthur stuff. Traumatised man hours. Death happened. Sad about blind. Also, the thread with Bash eventually contains a couple references to 1930s homophobia, plus displays of ignorance about queer people.
Mistakes were made. Big ones. For those sensitive to that kind of thing, an invisible death counter has ticked up in Arthur from zero to one.
i. scoops
It's a big ship, but unless you count Tommy Bahamas, it's not infinitely big. Why the hell can't he find Smith or Steve? Particularly Steve-- you know, the teenager he just helped kill?
In truth, Steve is hiding in his cabin and he happens to keep missing 6, but Arthur's brain is pleased to conjure some more unpleasant scenarios, and the effort of talking it down is exhausting. Looking for people while fucking blind only compounds his frustrations, and he's already feeling a few SAN points down after the whole 'fell into the fucking void' fiasco, and he's currently searching on the promenade which is already fucking overwhelming, and so his reaction when he collides with a fucking stool that's sitting outside of Scoops is, as soon as he's regained his balance, to pick it up and toss it as hard as he fucking can across the fucking ground.
"Fuck!"
ii. tauva
...not long after that, Arthur realises that he needs to calm the hell down.
He forces himself to stop pacing and pacing and pacing and pacing. And once he stops, it's like the energy leeches right out of him, both physically and mentally. Part of his mind is still just spiralling down that invisible void, screaming.
The whole raft thing is a part of it, but it's far from the whole. He's so far out of his depth and he doesn't even know which way up is, and he's been holding his breath for as long as he can, focused on the possibility of escape, but now escape has put him right back on the ship and it feels like he tried to take a breath and instead filled his lungs with salt water.
He ends up in Tauva. It's not consciously planned. But he has been thinking about someone else who frequents the place: someone to whom he once again owes an apology.
Arthur's slumped back in one of the leather armchairs, his useless eyes closed. Until now he's perched on the edges of chairs, sat with his feet beneath him, ready to move if he needed to. This time he's just... folded into it. Head tilted down. As still as if he was asleep, or even more so, because even sleeping people murmur or turn over once in a while. The only parts of him stirring are his lips, which move as if silently singing to himself, and his hands, whose long fingers bat restlessly against one another and against the soft arms of the chair.
He is not super okay.
What: The walk of shame after rafting with two other idiots off the edge of the world
Where: Around the ship
When: The day after the beach party
Warnings: The normal Arthur stuff. Traumatised man hours. Death happened. Sad about blind. Also, the thread with Bash eventually contains a couple references to 1930s homophobia, plus displays of ignorance about queer people.
Mistakes were made. Big ones. For those sensitive to that kind of thing, an invisible death counter has ticked up in Arthur from zero to one.
i. scoops
It's a big ship, but unless you count Tommy Bahamas, it's not infinitely big. Why the hell can't he find Smith or Steve? Particularly Steve-- you know, the teenager he just helped kill?
In truth, Steve is hiding in his cabin and he happens to keep missing 6, but Arthur's brain is pleased to conjure some more unpleasant scenarios, and the effort of talking it down is exhausting. Looking for people while fucking blind only compounds his frustrations, and he's already feeling a few SAN points down after the whole 'fell into the fucking void' fiasco, and he's currently searching on the promenade which is already fucking overwhelming, and so his reaction when he collides with a fucking stool that's sitting outside of Scoops is, as soon as he's regained his balance, to pick it up and toss it as hard as he fucking can across the fucking ground.
"Fuck!"
ii. tauva
...not long after that, Arthur realises that he needs to calm the hell down.
He forces himself to stop pacing and pacing and pacing and pacing. And once he stops, it's like the energy leeches right out of him, both physically and mentally. Part of his mind is still just spiralling down that invisible void, screaming.
The whole raft thing is a part of it, but it's far from the whole. He's so far out of his depth and he doesn't even know which way up is, and he's been holding his breath for as long as he can, focused on the possibility of escape, but now escape has put him right back on the ship and it feels like he tried to take a breath and instead filled his lungs with salt water.
He ends up in Tauva. It's not consciously planned. But he has been thinking about someone else who frequents the place: someone to whom he once again owes an apology.
Arthur's slumped back in one of the leather armchairs, his useless eyes closed. Until now he's perched on the edges of chairs, sat with his feet beneath him, ready to move if he needed to. This time he's just... folded into it. Head tilted down. As still as if he was asleep, or even more so, because even sleeping people murmur or turn over once in a while. The only parts of him stirring are his lips, which move as if silently singing to himself, and his hands, whose long fingers bat restlessly against one another and against the soft arms of the chair.
He is not super okay.
no subject
Not cheery, just very casual about an experience he had to accept very quickly to live through. Or - well, to get out the other side of, more accurately.
"It was a city at the bottom of the ocean with civil unrest, and that's before you bring genetic modification into it, so picture a powder keg next to a furnace."
no subject
So many questions, and so much time, but first:
"I'll need to ask about genetic modification before I can picture it properly. I- I don't think we have that in my world, or if we do, it's not something I've encountered. We have-- well, the, the concept of genetics, of course, so I can make a good guess, but you might be ahead of me on that one."
no subject
He nods without realizing it, but his answer is still clear without the gesture.
"You'd probably guess right - it's modifying a person's genes to make them stronger, faster, smarter (whatever that's supposed to mean), or to change hair and eye colour, apparently even your sex?"
Granted, the man who said that wanted to be 'the Picasso of surgery' so Jack's not wholly certain what the final product of that looked like in Rapture, but it seemed a lot less complicated, messy, and weird than shooting bees out of your hands so probably that worked as easily as the hair and eye and muscles thing.
"And while they were at it, they decided to push beyond that, give people the ability to move things with their mind or shoot electricity from their fingertips, that kind of thing." Jack looks at his hand and shifts Eletrobolt forward, just enough to watch the light flicker down his veins. This one consciously is a gesture just for himself.
"And when the companies behind these genetic - they called them plasmids or tonics - anyway, when the company behind them noticed the drugs were addictive and the people splicing themselves - using the drugs, giving themselves those plasmids and tonics - were mutating, or having their genes break down, or something, some side effect from using them too much or going into withdrawal... They just kept making them." Jack shrugs. "Possibly even charged more. Anyway, you can imagine what that did to the situation."
no subject
The second part of the explanation, from magic powers onwards, is much wilder -- and yet, sitting on a ship in a pocket world, having come back from death for a second time, it's also completely believable. Arthur's a bit too early-20th-century-America to hear about a company being evil and think 'ugh, of course', but he's also not completely naive, so he also doesn't 100% not think that.
"Fuck," he says, in the tone of someone hearing high casualty numbers from a place far away. "And the government didn't step in? You'd think someone would give a-a-a half a damn about this when it started to get that bad."