There's some to be said about the Card Kingdom and its fate because as tragic as it is for them to have been abandoned like that it's such... An inevitable event in nature. Because it not only happened because Gerson fucking died so the classroom wasn't used anymore but also because the kids who were once there probably just grew up!
I think it's just the inherent cruelty of this world. Holy shit a cop with. Holy shit something is going on. INFANTERÍA?! UM I don't know what that was anyway
It's the inherent cruelty of this universe and its nature, it's not the lightners or the darkners fault. The darkners are forced to live as tools for the lightners, something the later aren't even aware of, and just like that they're doomed to come a time where they are abandoned, where they stop being useful. This cop is gonna get run over anxious fuck.
I'm curious about how the game will develop because as we stand I feel like the core problem isn't really being solved here. Because I don't give a fuck about the angel and the knight what I care about is the sickening power dynamic forced upon these individuals.
And this is without mentioning that the game hasn't even brought up the horror of being replaced, something often done with objects. Usually when a character is missing here the whole they left can be felt. But let's put an example, using Queen. What if she was no longer useful as a computer? What if they got a new more improved computer instead and just kept the old one saved away because it's useless now? Once a ruler and now you've been replaced Just Like That because the lightners deemed you unworthy, outdated, useless.
Definitely won't happen with Queen but I'd kill to see it happening in general because it is Very Fucking Possible.
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[THURSDAY]
Buried Alive - Outlived Family - "Not growing old was fun at first, but then everyone around me started dying."
Hi! Hello! We're here, Late To The Event. Technically, we have plans for all these days! We only remembered this event was ongoing halfway through the week, and by then... well, you know how it is. Technically, this isn't fully compliant with the prompt, but it's close enough that we figure it counts, since outliving his entire family was actually slightly less impactful than outliving his husband for our boy.
Fic below the cut, and @species-whump-weekly we sincerely hope this isn't too late to count.
You have been asleep for long enough that you aren't even sure if he'll still be alive.
His swarm finds you before you find them.
Marina gasps when she sees you. She's years older, now - wings worn at the edges, shell thin and flimsy, aged far beyond the young butterfly you saw her as last.
She looks older than you ever have been. She looks older than you suspect you ever will be.
Her father, your friend – your paramour, your years-long companion – isn’t with her. You fear, for a moment, you’ve stumbled upon them too late. You nearly cringe away from the migration them and there, fearful of discovering yet another thing that’s slipped away while you hibernated.
But you don’t have the heart to walk away.
He’s been waiting for you.
He is old, and frail, and dying. You can taste the creeping end in his veins from the moment you step foot into the tent. His shell is pitted with age, now, cracked and chinked in places, brittle enough that you fear taking his hand will hurt him. Time has weathered him, his wings transparent and paper-thin around him, and you… you stay the same, looking just as young as the day you first met him on the stolen life of those who unearthed your grave.
“I knew you’d come back,” he tells you. “You wouldn’t die that easily.”
You hold his frail, trembling claw in both of yours. You aren’t sure how he can say that so confidently. He has always had more faith in you than you have in yourself.
He invites you to drain him.
You hesitate, at first. Every instinct you have picked up over your long, long life is screaming for you to run. To survive, to keep your secret- he knows, and it's against everything you've ever learned to remain, to let him speak, to not preserve your life-
He knows. But maybe he's known for a long, long time.
You take his offer. You take his life.
You know what it is that killed him the moment you bite. The magic of the wastes, the low hum that seeps into your bones, the constant background noise that sometimes threatens to tear you apart - it gathers within him, down to the deepest parts of his shell. There are lumps of flesh in his heart, his lungs, full of the same mind-jarring, skull-shattering buzz.
He has the wasteland sickness.
You think that, perhaps, he has had the wasteland sickness for a long time.
You drain him until he is dry, until every last flicker of the wasteland sickness is gone from his body, until he is stiff and his flesh holds the texture of jerky, and you let your fangs linger on his shrivelled veins until you can't bear to remain anymore.
You are sick, the next day.
And the day after that, and the day after that.
The buzz is in your bones, now - too close, too loud, rattling through your shell like a twisted beast. You have the wasteland sickness, stolen from his dying body, and it is trying to take you the way it took him.
You do not die.
You don't know if it's a blessing or a curse, anymore.
It is energy. It is vitality, the buzzing, throbbing pulse beyond the heart of a beast on a scale you cannot comprehend.
It is life force, and you can stomach it just the same.
A week passes. Two weeks. The symptoms slow, as you digest it. It becomes your life, your energy, it bends to keep you alive, it becomes you, while you lie weak and dizzy and throwing up blood.
It becomes you. You become it, in turn.
It is the last pulse of your husband, and you refuse to waste it.
You stumble out of the tent two weeks later, exhausted and bearing injuries you cannot see with your naked eyes. You are tired, and hurt, and you have burnt through most of the life you had, but you are alive.
His body is still waiting for you.
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but the thing is, melanie hates jon because he is so very much like her.
they work in adjacent fields, they've got such similar temperaments - they both run straight for whatever supernatural horror they need to understand, they both suck at planning ahead (poisoned coffee, melanie?) and they both lash out as a primary defense mechanism - and jon wasn't qualified for his job, and martin's only "degree" was in paranormal psychology, so clearly the Institute was hiring from a broader pool than "qualified archivists." i can't imagine ghost studies are all that lucrative as a field. if melanie hadn't made it as a youtuber, what would she have done? we don't know a lot about her educational background but - she knows what it's like, to need to know. she walked into the Institute and got a job because Elias saw that he could use her.
If she'd had a legitimate encounter sooner, if she'd started her quest a few years early, if she'd come to the Institute to give her statement and stayed to use their library before Gertrude had died -
Or even if she just couldn't survive on a youtuber's salary, if she'd gone looking for job postings in relevant fields -
It could have been her. She looks at Jon, and she sees exactly who she could have been. It's only luck that it wasn't.
And that's the kicker, isn't it? It's luck, that she's in her shoes instead of Jon's.
And is she supposed to feel lucky? To feel thankful that she's had to suffer through attack after attack, Elias showing her how her father (her dad, who called her his little moth) died screaming, her body torn open by things that don't exist, her sense of self slipping as she ripped into flesh with no recognizable form, her trust violated as she woke up to two of the few remaining people who are supposed to be on her side cutting into her against her will - to feel lucky, because she had to gouge her eyes out just to have her body back in her control -
Is she supposed to be happy that she lived through all that? Is she supposed to be glad, just because she could have been Jon?
Nobody told Melanie she needed to feel sorry for Jon, or give him her sympathy, or any other kind of pity. She just wants to give it, because God, what he'd gone through -
(Thank God it wasn't her -)
- Fuck that, she isn't lucky.
She hates Jon, because she refuses to feel grateful for the horror show her life has been. (Because she's grateful, that it wasn't her; and she's furious, because - yes it was. she paid the price of the apocalypse in blood and scars and trauma, too. She wasn't Jon, and could have been - but fuck it, she was still Melanie. and the hell that she has lived through isn't nothing.)
It's just bad luck, that it was Jon of all people. It's just bad luck, that it was Melanie.
No one here is lucky.
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