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cultivatingyourfuture · 6 months

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after hearing the pitch on your main blog, and scrolling far enough to see the tags you were putting on some posts, i am very intrigued about the everything that is going on (especially with emily) so could i get a brief rundown of the everything pls n thanks you

i spent forever trying to figure out how to tell a "brief" version of this story and this is how i settled on doing it. keep in mind this is the brief version and if you want in depth explanations/analysis on specific parts of the story i IMPLORE you to ask me about it because there is just no way for me to say everything i want to here and I STILL had to omit some details for brevitys sake. ok

content warnings: death. physical abuse. emotional abuse. verbal abuse. violence. implications of sexism. implications of misogyny. body horror. child death. child endangerment. talk of drug addiction. talk of alcoholism. obsession. stalking. kidnapping.

two fucked up siblings [paige jensen, pierre jensen] make a company (regrowth) and make cyborgs about it. first one they make runs away but the data they're still getting from it reveals their tech works like.. extraordinarily well with plant life? they build a tech empire off of this idea. they continue making cyborgs as well but the brother has so much guilt about the first go round he refuses any part in it (but still allows it to happen. his sister is the only reason he has any semblance of power, after all.) the sister continues running new experiments regarding combat and medicine and anti-aging and etc etc with her technology on a variety of subjects-- some willing, some unwilling, some already dead before they could say something either way. notable cases include toni finnigan, a terminally ill woman who engages with the project as a last resort and considers herself indebted to the siblings as a result; neil marshall, a young boy who accidentally saw the siblings first attempt to procure that first subject which went horribly ary and got the wrong guy (who was neils father); emily jyung, the scientist overseeing much of the cyborg testing at paiges discretion who decides she can't live with what she's done and seen and submits herself to the process in order to find atonement; holly pendleton, a girl who signed up for a very simple consumer test, took a wrong turn, and found paige jensen elbow deep in some poor guys chest cavity; and vallen rosamel, an addict and thief who makes the great decision of trying to hit on pierre jensen on absolutely the wrong night. pierres inferiority complex keeps him where he is in his position of power even though the weight of the cyborg project and his involvement is slowly crushing him and paiges fear of failure has her spending more and more time on it in a desperate attempt to make something of herself since pierre (charismatic. likeable. dude) gets all the credit for her (brash. awkward. woman) innovations.

meanwhile in like........ summer 2000 that first runaway cyborg falls into the backyard of this scientist with a really bad caretaker complex named francesca (i never call her francesca/frankie tbh i call her fizzle) who sees this thing with cracked glowing eyes and vines crawling out of its arms and goes oh. okay. and takes it in and starts fixing it up-- culling the plant that's affixed itself to this person's core and repairing the technology and finally fitting a voicebox onto it because it can't speak. this person(?) then relays that it has no idea who it is or where they came from, just that there were two people and this impending sense that they needed to leave, now. because of their lack of memories, they decide on a new name for them and they choosd Cherry, after the type of plant thats now in their systems. cherry uses he/she/they pronouns because fizzle (trans woman) asks him about it and she's like Oh. Um. Good question. Let's... find out? and so they use all pronouns and then never change that because those work well enough.

cherry adjusts well enough but they're really frustrated with their lack of memories because they don't even know if they consented to the process or not, they don't know if they had a family, they don't know what they left behind and what's waiting for them or who's looking (side note-- the only thing that feels any bit of familar are songs. something something foreshadowing something something playlist thats a work in progress). it doesn't help that the time they spent between escaping and coming across fizzle consisted of a lot of people being terrified of them and looking to hurt them (one guy literally shoots them like?? two days before they find fizzle????) so she's got this crushing sense that she's missing a fundamental part of herself that makes her able to be """human"""-- or, at least, accepted by humans. and she decides that whatever that is was probably lost along with her memories. so that really bothers them.

anyways a good bit of time passes and then they start picking up this high pitched frequency and fizzle can't fix it nor figure out the source of it so cherry just has to deal with Robot Tinnitus for a little bit. but they figure out that the frequency changes depending on how far / close they get to... whatever the hell the source is. so they wait till dark and they go out and Follow It, and it lands them at this dingy little nightclub juuust in time to watch someone stagger into the alleyway holding their head like they're in pain. or maybe hearing something very very loud. so cherry slowly approaches as the frequency gets louder and louder and more painful and boop! connection found.

the person she's founds name is vallen rosamel and shit has been WEIRD for him as of late. his hair started growing in a different color about four months ago the plants do that just roll with it, all of the substances he was taking just quit working one day, and theyre having longer and longer gaps in their memory every day. and now there's this SCREAMING in their EARS and oh my god. who the fuck are YOU. so after a lot of confusion and a lot of gentle explaining they figure out that vallens the same thing cherry is. which begs a LOT of fucking questions like What's up with that frequency. Who is making them. How is he just out and about. which are all very very important questions but cherry is so excited to FINALLY FIND SOMEONE LIKE THEM that they forget that for a little bit lmao. but cherry convinces vallen to let their friend do a couple of tests (which are very limited. bc the kind of plant vallens got is a citrus fruit and fizzle has a citrus allergy lmao) and what they figure out is that while cherrys got... like... a fourth of a human brain and LED eyes and cybernetic legs and a cybernetic arm and no digestive system and oh yeah NO MEMORIES, vallens got like. some brain, eye, and digestive modifications. and that's about it. the only thing he can't remember are those aforementioned memory gaps as well as however they came about being a cyborg too. sorry cherry but you haven't exactly found someone like you :( and vallen is like okay I want nothing to do with this. no ones gonna fuckin believe me so i may as well just try to live my life the way i have been (spoilers: that life's not good!) and cherry kind of talks to him for a bit. says she understands how confusing and frustrating it all is. but is also like Man you are my ONE HOPE of figuring out what happened to me can you even just CONSIDER sticking around just long enough for me to know you can't tell me anything new. and vallens like ff. fine. anyways that turns into 1 to three years I haven't decided yet. vallen and cherry (and fizzle) are kind of gay about it. it's fine don't worry about that.

anyways eventually Shit Goes Down. vallen gets activated by some other force, stops responding whatsoever, knocks cherry the fuck out and takes fizzle down too when she tries to stop them. all three of them end up in regrowth. uh oh.

cherry gets confronted by paige who has this whole speech but the basics of it are:

-she purposefully sent vallen out into the world in an attempt to find cherry. was going to just kill them originally but decided to let them linger in case she could ever Use Them for her own purposes and apparently that time has come

-never took direct control of vallen-- any connections they've made with him are more than likely genuine because paige can't handle social manipulation like her brother can-- but she was certainly keeping tabs and certainly knows a couple of things even if she doesn't say it directly (like the fact she's calling cherry 'cherry' and not. whatever his name was before. hm.)

-apparently paige has discovered some shit about pierre that 1. she thinks will DEFINITELY bring cherry onto her side and 2. has made her decide that pierre has to go NOW

-"you can either help me or ill just kill you/wipe your memories and return you to testing" and "you can either get revenge on one of us or lose to both of us" as her main points

cherry is having none of this. breaks the fuck out of her containment and runs rampant through the facility, breaking shit, knocking people out, runs into pierre at one point who just stares at her and calls him a name that........... isnt "Cherry" before she just sprints the hell away, up until he 1. locks himself in an old lab, 2. modifies her cybernetic arm by hand to attach a blaster weapon onto it (painful), and 3. escapes into a vent and finds himself in all the backparts of the facility. ends up seeing more cyborgs during testing and is like Holy shit how many people have they done this to. these people need to go home.

keeping this part brief bc the rest of this will also.... not be. I promise I'm telling the brief version here. cherry finds vallen (has to fight him. doesn't want to. does it anyway.) and gets him out of paiges control via dropping a fucking light fixture on him and shortcircuting him a bit. they find fizzle. they go from the lower parts of the facility where the projects been held up to the company building bc they figure out the servers are there and if Cherry can get into those she can find the other bots' memories (and hopefully enough info to incriminate regrowth?), free those, and get them out of there. they get up there and the buildings been evacuated which makes finding the servers much easier. cherry parses the information and also figures out her memories aren't there + her file is mostly redacted. but theres that name again! the one pierre called him!! and if the memories aren't there then. where are they.

sorry no time to dwell on that bc more cyborgs attack! cherry, fizzle, vallen get them their memories back which overwrites their protocols. good news; thats all the active cyborgs left in the building (gonna give u names right quick-- holly (foxglove), mara (hellebore), enzo (chestnut) ) cherry is like we gotta find you guys an exit. as they do so cherry comes across pierres office and is like......... hey. yall go ahead. i need to. check something. fizzle and vallen are like 🤨 but they're like okay. please be careful. and they Go.

this is the part of the story where I advise you to look at the content warnings up above very carefully

so cherry goes into pierres office and starts rummaging around, looking under placemats and taking apart photo frames n stuff, looking to the password to his computer. she finds some stuff-- other passwords, checks, an image of a girl?, but eventually she just says "fuck it," plugs into it, breaks through the password screen, looks through the files and THATS where she finds her memories. finally. after all this time.

so cherry hides under the desk and downloads all of it. all at once. don't worry about that too much right now but this is a disorienting, horrifying experience for cherry to say the least. and as if the memories themselves aren't bad enough cherry is like... why did he know that name but paige didn't. why were they on his computer. why... was a picture of me... behind one of the photo frames.... on his desk .......

and then the door creaks. and pierre sees them. and explains his side of things. we'll revisit that in a bit. so cherry is horrified and is very much ready to murder pierre. and she, uh. does. she chases him down the hall (because of course he runs. of course.), points her blaster at his head, and fires. she just kills him.

and then, because he's still pissed and terrified, he goes to find paige. paige deploys another cyborg (kudzu; dead body that paige essentially pilots and therefore not considered an "active" cyborg). cherry kills that too (lot easier when youre not trying to keep them alive). cherry finds paige. they talk. they fight. beat the shit out of each other. cherry aims and is ready to kill but realizes that's what paige wants. says she'd rather her be alive for every moment people realize what she's done. lets her go. paige watches him walk away, then gathers juuust enough strength to enter a few more commands into her main console, then collapses.

cherry, while trying to leave the building, is then confronted by a previously "retired" (see: shut down and locked up for years) cyborg, neil (lemon). cherry is horrified to see him-- so horrified, in fact, that she doesn't do anything when he approaches and impales her through the stomach with a blade built into his arms. she drops, and he walks away.

cherry then crawls her way back to the regrowth server room, plugs herself into the system, and uploads her consciousness in a last desperate bid to stay alive. they are found by fizzle and vallen later. reporters and police swarm the building, and they retrieve lemon, having found him curled up in an alcove in the wall of the main trial area for the cyborg project. paige jensen is arrested, cherrys body is retrieved to be repaired by fizzle, and regrowth is no more.

... so. ok. let's take several steps back and fill in some gaps here.

eveline ethel woode grew up in the same town paige and pierre jensen moved to when pierre was about 2 and paige was 10. daughter of a textile ceo and an ex movie starlet, she was very much under her parents thumb. her mother blamed eveline for ruining her career, since she wouldn't have had to have left the business had she never gotten pregnant, and her father's anger at the most likely heir to his company being a woman combined with his own alcoholism led to a lot of physical abuse that left eveline with a permanent limp and a broken nose. this treatment broke eveline woode to her very core. which went almost entirely unnoticed (or at least uncared for) by everyone except for one pierre jensen. because pierre-- pierre was not only perceptive (how else are you going to figure out what makes people like you?), but he was going through something similar to eveline. do you know how comforting that can be, to know you're not the only one? to see someone suffering the same way you are? neither of them deserved that. neither of them deserved to be alone in this. pierre, slowly, fixates on the idea of getting eveline out of her situation-- on saving them both. and maybe, just maybe, he'd finally find someone he wouldn't have to pretend for anymore. maybe he'd finally have a solution to how fucking alone he was, maybe he'd,

and then eveline Leaves. at the age of 16, she pulls the strings to get herself a cheap little rented home for the next year in a town far the hell away that has enough of a reputation of being where no one wants to go, and she leaves. and this... isnt how things were supposed to go for pierre. she was supposed to leave with him. she was supposed to be HIS escape, not her own. this isn't the way things were supposed to go, just who the hell does she think she is, taking his ONE CHANCE of happiness away? it's like she doesn't even care what--

eveline woode lands in a foggy little town in georgia and things are okay. she always loved flowers, and there's enough actual air in the sky here to let them grow. she's as alone and isolated as she's always been, and that emptiness never quite goes away, but at least she's safe now.

anyways, whatever funds she was able to scramble together from her parents isnt going to last forever, so she picks up some odd jobs and through that ends up meeting this guy named scott. scott is a father of two and he's been through some similar shit to eveline so he Notices The Behaviors (and she's about the same age as his daughter which makes him worry about her MORE) (also Why is a seventeen year old living on her own in this shitty town thats worrisome on its own) and slowly eveline starts to become a good family friend of theirs. she babysits his son, housesits, shes invited to things-- anything to make her feel welcomed and loved. which is... not anything eveline is used to. she tries to not think about it, considers it as just doing her job and doing what's right but like. she loves the marshalls. and they consider her as much of family as they can. mason, scotts daughter, fills her in on pop culture and his wife gives her gardening and baking tips and he shows her music he loves from his record collection (and she starts a small one of her own, too!) and theyre Happy. eveline woode is happy.

anyways meanwhile paige jensen is relaying to her brother about her New Ideas for cybernetically enhanced people and how hard it's going to be to find a volunteer willing or otherwise and pierres like ".... otherwise??" and paige is like Oh. I mean. we couldn't do that. i mean, it'd have to be somebody NO ONE cared about that NO ONE ever notices that has NO CONNECTIONS and NO and pierre sees an Opportunity here. and he suggests a target. because she can't be doing that well for herself anyways, right? not without him there. paige has already perfected memory transfers; all he'd have to do is modify them a little and then everything would be the way it was supposed to be. maybe it's a little grotesque, maybe it's immoral, maybe it's too far, but it'd be worth it in the long run. it'd be fine. it'd be fine. it'd be f

pierre finds eveline, follows her for a few weeks, figures out a path she takes at a certain time in the night that's just secluded enough for him to grab her and leave (besides. bad town. lotsa police reports go unchecked. this Can't Go Wrong)

it goes wrong. someone rounds the corner and pierre goes to hit them over the head and realizes it's a man. but the guy gets spooked and falls ass backwards and impales himself on a fence which was NOTTHEFUCKINGPLANHOLYSHIT. and to make matters worse, the guys son rounds the corner too and at 12 years old neil marshall watches his father scott die and gets a good look at pierre jensens face in the process.

so. scott dies. eveline thinks of it as some divine punishment for anything good happening to her. returns to her self isolating ways. the marshalls never see her again. December 18th 1999 pierre jensen goes to her home directly, knocks her out, and drags her away. it's not until december 24th that anyone realizes she's gone and by then there's not many leads besides some missing items, a broken window in the door, and her own blood.

so when subject 0 runs away and pierre is also faced with an ultimatum of kill a 12 year old or submit him to the same fate as his sister that's kind of when he realizes that umm. uh. maybe this was a bad idea actually. because the ONE THING he was in it for is gone and, as far as he knows, dead. but his face is on magazines and he's catapulted into popularity and he has a company to run, doesn't he? and after so long of feeling powerless, of feeling like nothing, can he really bear to give that power up?

so. additional things. neil marshall gets his memories back and ends up spending a lot of time waiting for cherry to get repaired and wake up because he needs to tell eveline he's sorry and that he misses her and also that he's sorry. fizzle and vallen kind of get the fill about eveline from neil bc the poor kids gotta talk through this shit good god. cherry gets repaired and is functional, hypothetically, but she still doesn't wake up.

so from the database he's still in, cherry is the one sending out information about the story. there's this desperation to understand why they're here and how things ended up like this and to make people know what happened to them. what happened to eveline. because cherry has lived their own life with their own experiences that have shaped her own ideologies and attitudes and shes.... not.... eveline. not anymore, anyway. and this crushes them in so many ways because things were getting so much better for eveline for such a long while there and SHES the one who deserves the friends and the family and the revenge and the peace of mind but she DOESNT GET IT. she'll never get it, because cherrys the one who gets it. because eveline woode died on december 18th 1999 and cherry is what has grown through the gaps like an infection and how much of her is even left there, really? something something commentary about haunting the narrative and being considered less of a character and more as a motivation when you always deserved better from the narrative you were stuck into.

anyways. cherry does eventually get back into their body, reconciles with the fact that eveline is not her humanity and that maybe he never was human and that's okay because it's him and that's all that matters, continues to have turmoil about it but it's. fine. rough reconciliation with the marshalls because he's not eveline but they deserve to see eveline alive again so here he is. cherry pushes on and values the life he has and can only hope that that can in some way grant evelines memory peace.

anyways cherry would be 43 years old today and i think he owns a record/head shop and still goes to therapy once a week send fucking tweet

#AUGH. ok.#sorrhy i didnt get a lot of emily in there she kind of. deserves her own post. hope this answers your question! 👍#asks #rosanqro #story tag #meta tag #horror tag #um. things i forgor #pierre doesnt modify evies memories out of guilt but still keeps them bc hes a freak #vallen is an exception to pierres 'i want no part in this' thing bc he was a spur of the moment decision made after a pretty-#bad fucking fight between him and paige so. vallen was. an apology specimen. which should tell you everything you need to know-#about paige and pierres dynamic #cherrys last name is shears because he only has songs to go off of and shears is taken from Sgt. Peppers / With A Little Help by tha beaduls #neils sisters name is mason his moms names amy. evies parents names are warren and ethyl. i have never named the jensens parent(s)#vallen has csb / hypersexuality disorder because some Shit Happened To Him which led them down the path theyre on #vallen uses he/they. eveline dies at 19 and cherrys either 27 or 29 when they storm regrowth (vallens three years younger than them.#they met in their mid twenties. chill)#pierre and evie/cherry are the same age (evie born in late 80 pierre in early 81)#emily is their most senior employee who was literally their very first hire ever #cherrys blaster arm can turn back to a normal arm at will + their right arm is exposed cybernetics while their left arm is completely human #cherrys also got exposed cybernetics on their left calf but its basically just a prosthetic that isnt supposed to come off #neil is taken in at 13 and then around the time hes 15 hes shut down and put up and just Stays Like That for 5+ years #so the last time he saw evie she was 19 and when he meets cherry theyre about 29. to give you an idea of how jarring this all is for it

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