The Quiet Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thequietmods) wrote2022-01-10 08:34 pm
thequietmods) wrote2022-01-10 08:34 pm
Entry tags:
TDM #1
The ice isn't the only thing cracking right now. Spring storms can be violent, and the thunder is strong enough to reverberate in your chest. Outside of the chilly cave, a torrential downpour makes it nearly impossible to leave the cave and get your bearings. However, through the weather, and past the giant things that seem to be moving in the weather, something large looms in the distance.
The rain and the moving things make it hard to be sure, and you can't even see the horizon line, so it's either a very large body of water, some sort of man-made structure off in the distance, or both. Until the storm clears, no one can be sure which it is.
1. Someone, though, their voice just barely echoing off the walls, seems to be coming up with theories. Is it you? Do you think this is a waste of time?
2. Are you trying to go out into the hostile weather, risks be damned? Is it because you don't care? Do you think you can survive it?
3. Being trapped in a cave full of people stuck in pillars of ice is weird, isn't it? Isn't it even weirder that you used to be in one and now you're not? Are you going to help the others trapped in the ice? It should be warned that trying to break someone out when they're not awake to help will shatter the pillar, and the person inside.
4. As the storm clears up, night has fallen. Thunder booms in the distance and the sound of insects and wild animals picks up. Wolves howl in the darkness. Is now the time to make a move, or are you going to stay in this uncomfortable, but untouched, shelter?
The rain and the moving things make it hard to be sure, and you can't even see the horizon line, so it's either a very large body of water, some sort of man-made structure off in the distance, or both. Until the storm clears, no one can be sure which it is.
1. Someone, though, their voice just barely echoing off the walls, seems to be coming up with theories. Is it you? Do you think this is a waste of time?
2. Are you trying to go out into the hostile weather, risks be damned? Is it because you don't care? Do you think you can survive it?
3. Being trapped in a cave full of people stuck in pillars of ice is weird, isn't it? Isn't it even weirder that you used to be in one and now you're not? Are you going to help the others trapped in the ice? It should be warned that trying to break someone out when they're not awake to help will shatter the pillar, and the person inside.
4. As the storm clears up, night has fallen. Thunder booms in the distance and the sound of insects and wild animals picks up. Wolves howl in the darkness. Is now the time to make a move, or are you going to stay in this uncomfortable, but untouched, shelter?
no subject
Waste of time or not, the huddled girl - unnervingly all white, from her hair to her skin to her clothes, like a living, breathing doll or a well-made-up corpse - in the corner, still shivery as if from the cold, doesn't seem to be interested in participating. She doesn't seem to be interested in anything at all - well, wait, that's not true. It's just that she doesn't seem to be paying attention with her eyes, closed as they are. They don't seem sewn shut or anything, they just ... aren't open. Like she's someone who sleepwalks through life. Or, in this case, sleep-sits.
She makes no move to join the rest of the group in any way. Every so often, she deliberately lifts her head to look out of the mouth of the cave and her face scrunches up in a rictus of violent disgust, before she sticks her tongue out at the inclement weather and goes right back to letting her abnormally long, meticulously braided white hair fall around her shoulders from underneath the pulled-up hood of her white cloak, scooting her white boots back under its long hem.
Boy, she seems friendly as hell.
4:
As night falls and the storm abates, her head once again comes deliberately, sharply up. She stands with what might be the agonizing slowness of someone who's forgotten, yet again, that sitting for long stretches of time makes the joints in her body dislike it when she stands ... except she does it much faster than human speed, and quietly, like she's just ... not about that "making noises" life.
There's almost what sounds like a word someone might actually say, for a moment - like she mumbles "Finally." - and her hood flutters back long enough for it to be obvious her eyes are still seemingly closed. And then there's a small pip of displaced air filling a sudden hole that wasn't there a moment ago, and she's just gone.
Some minutes pass. And then she's right back where she was a moment ago as if she never left. There's a mumbled noise, like someone very faintly muttering "... okay," and then she sighs. Her shoulders sag, and she leans against the wall, either overwhelmed, resigned, or disappointed ... or perhaps all three at once.
no subject
For a while the woman keeps tinkering with whatever technological device she's got in her hands. Then, she glances up, just slightly.
"So it didn't do what you expected."
Like, most people would introduce themselves or something, but who here is a normal person?
no subject
It would be wrong, but the White Girl - and it is rather difficult to think of her as anything else - isn't very forthcoming with her internal thought processes making themselves into external, outward expressions, exactly.
Which is why the almost comically put-out, completely silent yet so eloquent it may as well be a noise like "?!", facial expression she turns on the older woman has such sharp affect to it, probably - there's like three hundred thoughts whirring around in that head of hers fighting for the dignity to be the one that actually does express itself to the outside world.
(Amazingly, she makes this expression without ever once so much as opening her eyes to "look" at the old woman.)
"Not - quite," she says, with visible hesitation, as she breaks 'eye contact' and looks away.
no subject
She taps her fingers on her knee, and then shrugs. Whatever. Sometimes you're not bothered by people who can't communicate well on account of you've been uhhhhhh mostly making turtles for thirty years. "Seeing if you can leave, or seeing what's out there?"
no subject
After a moment of furious - if placid-looking, at a glance - consideration - she makes a gesture like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, but with her eyes closed. "Not worth it," she says, after a long sigh. "Everything - is waiting."
Her mouth twists. "I could go. Alone. But I saw ..." She throws up her hands again, groaning. She did not ask to be 'reincarnated' into someone else's fucked up twist on Animal Crossing, after all that she's been through, is a thought she absolutely has and does not say. "So not ... leaving. Waste of options."
no subject
"Right." It's really a competent job, she has to admit, if kind of empty. Realistic, even. She gives a moment of thought to who might care about options. She jerks her thumb at the rest of the group. "Think any of them are farmers?"
(Obviously neither of them are farmers. That would be ridiculous.)
no subject
It's a less easy tell for what it means when she comes back with, "Other things are," a short while after.
no subject
"Other things. Other things like what?" An arch of her eyebrows. "You seem like you don't talk to people much. Neither do I. But obviously I'm going to have some follow-up questions."
1...and 2....?
Strange as this crystal awakening may be, that doesn't stop this stranger from offering help to another in need, or rather, one who appear to be in need. It's rather reasonable to assume that someone as pale as snow and huddled into themselves is not having the best of times, after all.
He kneels down beside her, expression serious and tone tempered into a gentle concern, as if anything louder might make her skittish.
Re: 1...and 2....?
"This is a disaster," she says, finally, after a long, long moment where her jaw works but no actual certain idea of what to say means no actual words come out either.
(Oh, the sweet, awful stench of good old human heroism. That's just great.)
no subject
A disaster.
"You can say that again," he replies, brow knitting together. A grimmer look contorts across his expression, and then it corrects. He elevates his gaze, looking at her again. He had asked about her, not their situation. "But are you hurt?"
no subject
If I say "no", will you leave? is on the tip of my tongue, but of course I can't say that to someone whose good will I very well may need to take massive advantage of in the days - weeks? months? ... I will break D's entire neck this time if it's years, I swear ... - to come. He looks like he walked out of an MMORPG, all right, so he's almost certainly part of an annoyingly vast ecosystem explicitly designed to help prop up adventuring heroes such that they only question the parts of the system they're meant to, so they feel like they've actually solved some sort of problem. I'm guessing ... yeah, he's either some guy like one of those Legend of the Heroes protagonist guys I can't keep straight or he's from a Final Fantasy spinoff game. He's got a uniform like he's one of the Famicom Upright Citizen's Brigade guys but his hair's immaculate in that extremely rude way only a modeling career or a starring role in a Square Enix game can get you. He's actually thinking, so it's definitely one of those types of guy.
I really, really hope he doesn't have a single clue what I'm thinking about right now because this is the sort of thing you don't want to have to have a conversation about with anybody, because it's agonizingly embarrassing to admit to having played enough of any of those games back on Earth that you have more thoughts about them than you do about how to get a decent job there, please, just bury me on the spot because I want to die. I have a real job, of course, I'm not actually a NEET, so I shouldn't really need to get embarrassed about any of that, and anyway it's not like I really played that many of them myself either. But in a way doesn't that make it worse?
Shit, now's really not the time to be having an existential crisis about completely irrelevant background details that probably aren't even accurate to the situation at hand! He's a real boy, not some MMO Pinocchio! ... and, almost certainly, he thinks he's a hero, or at least thinks enough like one to want to act like one at a time like this. Oh well. At least we're not immediately in danger of dying of anything but starvation; he can probably kill things well enough to make that less of a pressing need once the storm clears, and won't that be useful? I won't have to have his death as my responsibility - although it's funny that I can even still care about a random human's chances of survival around me, given the things I've done. I suppose I would be pretty awful, if I didn't, though - and he just has that look about him. That heroic look that says he just doesn't want anyone else to die for his sake, but that he's totally not expecting a random arrow or anything like that to be what does him in, either. Whatever does do it, I really hope it won't be me. I'm trying to retire from that sort of thing.
... I really, really didn't miss dealing with the heroic sort. You can't ever adequately plan ahead how to save them from themselves, and you definitely can never plan enough ways to stop them. Oh god, I'm going to have to talk to him, don't I. What do I even say that won't make him even more suspicious?! Is there anything I can say? Ugh, probably not! Well. Just ... have to do my best ... don't I ... eeeeeeeuuuurrrrgh.
Sorry, buddy, it's really nothing personal ...
End Shiraori Inner Mind Theater, don't let the spiders eat you on the way out.
Of course, the most of that internal monologue that shows on the White Girl's face is yet another wretched look of already-exhausted agony just from having to look at him. Just the most vivid facial approximation of ಠ﹏ಠ physically possible with both eyes still closed. She presses herself against the wall, tucking her legs up closer to herself, and shakes her head. Then, hurriedly, as if remembering that she has to at least try to attempt words in order to make her meaning more evident, she manages, "I'm unhurt."
no subject
Her answer is followed with a patience silence, as if he expects her to volunteer more, but when she doesn't, his shoulders slope with an exhale. No need to put pressure on her, since she appears so timid and scared.
"That's good. I was going to say... Dunno if there are any healers here, but we'd have had to find one." He says this that he would have, if necessary. Briefly, he glances to the side, looking over the rest of the chamber to take count of those present, and then focuses back on her. Seriousness seems to be the default of his expression, but he appears to make an effort to soften the grimness of it, as if doing so for her sake.
"It's Machina, by the way. And you?"