Event Post: Ghosts That We Know

[hadrielmods]

Who: All characters participating in the event
What: The event log for the Ghosts That We Know event
Where: All over the city!
When: June 21st-29th
Warnings: Emotional trauma, ghost murder, long slow deaths

It's been awhile since something really awful happened. Or maybe it hasn't - maybe you had a really awful day just yesterday. Don't worry! Things can always get worse. And they sure will, because when you awaken on June 21st, you'll find yourself haunted.

Maybe it's a relative, someone who raised you and loved you deeply. Maybe it's a friend, someone close to your heart. Maybe it's a former - or current - lover, someone you've given your affection to. Maybe a mentor, a coworker, a person who doesn't even know you love them. Whoever they are, they're someone who matters very much to you - and now you're seeing them where you shouldn't. They're haunting you, taking each step alongside you, and they're exactly like the one you love.

Over time, you'll feel yourself growing weaker as the ghost gains strength. Being able to see your loved ones again is a double-edged sword, because they're sucking the life from you. What are you going to do? Die, so that they can live? Or kill them to preserve your own life? And what do they want you to do?

By the 26th, the ghosts will have taken enough energy from you to be solid. That means you won't be the only one who can interact with them anymore - and maybe your friends here have opinions of their own about what should happen to that ghost draining your life away. But hopefully someone will do something, or else you'll die along with your ghost on the final day of the event.

Hey, didn't we get a few psychologists here in our cave city? Man, you guys are gonna be booked up after this one.

► This log covers June 21st-29th.
► Feel free to make your own logs, as well
► Please tag headers of threads with content warnings where they apply
► Please put your character's name and open/closed in the subject line of your starters!
► If you can't bring yourself to murder someone you love, no one else is around to lend a hand, and you die - please let us know here.

Comments

29th (Wildcard)

[circumitus]

Over the last several days, the effects that their phantoms have on them have become increasingly more obvious. It was easy for Rey not to care -- at first. Having seen the impact that it had on Nick and, in some way, the shadow of her own mother, watching as she started wasting away into nothing... She can't let that happen again. She can't do that, not to Nick or even to Undine. Her mother had given Rey everything for a reason. Throwing that all away for her own selfish guilt would render everything that woman had done for her meaningless. Her death would have no value. Not if Rey didn't make anything of it.

So far she'd seen what had become of others as well. People who were more than willing to let themselves slip away for the ones they love. It's no question who is responsible for this, seeing that they not only had their arrival celebration rudely interrupted by the city splitting apart, it was also like them to pull some shit like this.

You always hurt the ones you love.

It happens both ways. The ones you love hurt you, too. Everyone who got a visitor that week had a little taste of that. Many nearly allowing themselves to be consumed by it.

The blood of Jack's parents don't stain Rey's clothes for long. As though she had never killed them at all, as if they never even existed, the blood is gone. No longer splattered onto her clothes or the blade of her knife. She isn't so naïve to believe that they'll come back the same way as everyone else here who dies.

Rey is running. Her feet pounding against the street path as she makes it to apartments of the first spire. She catches herself on the railing once she enters the tower where Maketh lives, hurrying up the stairs until she makes it to the third floor.

She doesn't even knock once she gets to Maketh's door. Rey just flings it open and enters, looking for any sign of its tenants.

[mismanagement]

[The door bangs open. Maketh doesn't flinch. She doesn't rise from her place on the couch, curled up with a blanket and a bottle of tequila. She only narrows her eyes.]

You better not have broken that.

[circumitus]

"It was open. Probably."

Either that or Rey twisted it so hard that she broke off the latch without realizing it. Oh well, she can apologize for the intrusion later.

She head towards the couch where Maketh is, blinking. "You're still here."

As in, not a lifeless husk, drained by her ghosts.

[mismanagement]

Maketh bares her teeth in an ugly grin. She feels drawn out and pressed flat at the same time, uncomfortable in her skin. Nothing fits as it should. "Of course I'm still here. I'm always here."

Somehow, she always survives.

[circumitus]

Not always, but it is convenient for the moment.

"People are... They're being drained, by the ones who came for them." It's vague, but specific enough that anyone who's had their loved ones come to visit would (probably) get what she means. Rey isn't someone to think of them as ghosts. Mirror images, more like it.

[mismanagement]

"Are they."

Maketh snorts, rolling away. She doesn't want to look at Rey right now. Doesn't want to be doing this with anyone.

"What do you want, Rey?"

[circumitus]

Rey's relief is quick to transform into disquiet and frustration. Seriously, is this what she puts Nick through all the time?

"Are you fucking kidding?" she snaps. "People are dying -- was almost one of them. And you're asking me what I want?"

Seeing how close Maketh seemed to be towards her ghosts, it only made sense to make sure they didn't end up getting her killed, too.

[mismanagement]

Apparently they're doing this. Maketh pulls a pillow over her head. "They're gone."

She hates that, feels their absence like a physical weight, a pull deep inside her chest.

[circumitus]

"Ah." Rey's shoulders sag, not surprised but ashamed that she's relieved all the same. That it's not Maketh's corpse that she walked in to find, with her friends alive and well.

Only they wouldn't be well, would they? If Undine's notions were correct, the siphons would die without their sources of energy to sustain them. Rey would rather go on believing that her mother's theory was right, than to think that she died in vain.

No. No, she didn't die for nothing this time. Undine was right. She had to be.

With a heavy exhale, Rey slumps into a nearby chair. "I'm sorry."

[mismanagement]

It's not what she expects to her. Maketh had braced herself for an argument, readied herself to defend Kareem and Itani with everything she had. But then --

She rolls over slowly.

"You're sorry?"

[circumitus]

If the circumstances were different, Rey could see herself arguing. But the hole that Undine's absence has left is still too freshly deep in her own heart, that she has no room to judge anyone else for not wanting to part with figures of their past... illusions or otherwise.

She slides a hand down her face, pinching the bridge of her nose. She's shed her fair share of tears already, and she's too exhausted to shed any more.

"Yes. My mother..." Rey swallows, the word so strange but feels so natural to her. "She's gone, too."

[mismanagement]

"Oh."

Undine had been --

Maketh closes her eyes. She doesn't have the words.

"I'm sorry."

[circumitus]

"Me, too."

She's sorry, Rey's sorry -- seems everyone's fucking sorry. They're all just a sorry bunch.

Head reeling, she slumps further into her chair, sinking into a lousy slouch. "Nick, he had to... She asked him to. And he did it for me."

Could she have expected any different from him?

cw for suicidal ideation

[mismanagement]

Rome had done it for her as well. Maketh hadn't thanked him. She can't. Perhaps she never will. For a long time she didn't want to be alive after, knowing Kareem and Itani were gone, buried in the damn yard, and now --

And now she's lying on the couch. Listening to Rey. Not looking at her. Not looking at anyone.

"I wanted them to live. They deserved to live."

Maketh shivers. Keeps her eyes closed.

"Rome -- didn't. I almost hurt him for that."

[circumitus]

Rey doesn't move from her spot, and just remains seated where she can stew in her own thoughts as much as Maketh can. Guess they both need their space.

"Undine... said that they wouldn't have, given the past data and the nature of how they came into being. That giving our lives in exchange for theirs would have been impossible. I don't know whether she said that to make me agree with her, or if she knew, but... I want to believe her. My mother is-- was very smart."

She bites her lower lip, letting that past tense sink in.

[mismanagement]

It makes sense, in some awful way. The gods are cruel, persistently so. And though they can raise the dead, they only do it on their own terms. Maketh makes a sound not unlike a sob. "I miss them. It hurts. "

She shivers. Keeps her eyes closed.

"I liked your mother. She was—uh. I don't know. She felt real."

[circumitus]

"I understand."

Loss is a terrible thing. It scratches and gnaws and bleeds you dry. Leaves you alone in your grief. Those 'people' who came to them might not have been real, but the feelings they left behind very much were.

Rey just nods absentmindedly, a faraway expression on her visage. "She died because of me. I always think about it -- how if she didn't feel for me the way she did, maybe she'd still be alive."

Of course, that also means that Rey would be dead. Sometimes, she wonders if that truly would be such a bad outcome.

[mismanagement]

That helps a little. Of all people, Rey would understand. Maketh sighs. "I tried to forget them for a long time. Then I came here and -- somehow, I thought about the past all the time. I thought...maybe if I'd gone with them back then, if I'd died with them, things would have been better. For a minute."

Just for a minute.

"But then they were here and they didn't -- they didn't blame me."

Maketh shivers.

"They said it wasn't my fault."

[circumitus]

This time, Rey does slide out of the chair she's in. Not to leave, but to move closer, resituating herself at the end of the couch Maketh's in. She sits there, rigid, shoulders squared, jaw tight as she stares at the empty space ahead of her rather than at Maketh herself.

"Things wouldn't have been better." Despite the hardness of her posture and mien, her words are soft. "They just wouldn't hurt anymore. Dying is easy -- one minute everything hurts, and then, it's all gone. Living is agony."

And yet some people choose to live in fear, whether they want it or not.

She then casts Maketh a sidelong look. "Whatever happened, they were probably right."

That it wasn't her fault. That they didn't blame her. Even if they did, it doesn't matter anymore. They're gone and she's still here, as is Rey.

[mismanagement]

The couch dips. Maketh pulls the blanket a little closer. Sometimes she gets the impulse to just bury herself until whatever she's feeling passes. Sometimes it even helps. "Part of me knows that."

She opens her eyes briefly.

"You learn to live with what hurts."

[circumitus]

Sometimes, Rey might agree, just a little. She wants to do the same thing herself. Just curl up somewhere in her room and never come out. Disappear.

But she didn't. And she's still here.

Rey shifts, bringing a hand to Maketh's shoulder. She's still here.

"You don't have to live with it alone. I learned that the hard way."

[mismanagement]

Maketh puts her hand over Rey's, squeezing tight. She keeps her eyes closed. "Will you stay? Just for a little while."

[circumitus]

She doesn't withdraw, instead keeping her hand close where Maketh can reach. It helps, sometimes. This can help. Rey just wants to hang onto that.

"Of course. I don't have anywhere else to be."

Nowhere else that she wants to be, at least.

[mismanagement]

"Thank you," she murmurs. She tries not to squeeze too tightly. Rey is solid and real. She won't leave. She won't disappear.

[circumitus]

Even if Maketh were strengthen that hold she has on Rey's hand, the pain would be nothing compared to the empty hole Undine had left.

"No problem." This is as much for herself as it is for anyone else, really. "You're not alone."