audio | un: hidden

[matermali]

( cw; cannabis )

[ There is no softness to the voice that murmurs onto the network in the midst of the night when people should be sleeping. Those sweet souls are not her concern if they don't wish to hear. She offers no comfort, but a reminder of what's been lost—what can still be taken.

In doing so, the woman's raspy words creep out from beneath the shadows with a voice that drags—no, it crawls—over ceaselessly hot coals. In its shudder to whisper out a poem borrowed from home, there is a smolder always bordering on a choked gasp. But no hurry, no hurry. Where do you have to be? ]

Old Yew which graspeth at the stones...that name the under-lying dead; Thy fibres net the dreamless head, thy roots are wrapt about the bones.

[ To that, a pause that looms with omen. ]

The seasons bring the flower again, and bring the firstling to the flock; And in the dusk of thee, the clock beats out the little lives of men.

[ Now, a strange yearning nearly begins to dissipate the smoke that seems to scorch her throat.

Hush, take a moment. Take a breath; hold it. Feel the shiver of a fingernail at the nape of your neck, feel it trace the curve of your ear to borrow your attention. Only just. No, don't turn. Don't touch. Just listen; the whisper can still singe. ]

O not for thee the glow, the bloom...who changest not in any gale, nor branding summer suns avail, to touch thy thousand years of gloom.

And gazing on thee, sullen tree, sick for thy stubborn hardihood; I seem to fail from out my blood...and grow incorporate into thee.

[ For a time, it seems that may be all. Then, in the same hush she speaks with a more particular address: ]

I hear that we have been denied the ephemeral — to exist endlessly within a perverse mirror of God’s image. Here, nature should protest. Instead it menaces with its silence.

[ There is a silence of her own while Vanessa takes a drag to sigh out a thin stream of smoke into the evening air. Her voice now drops so low it grates and pinches too close, like gravel against tender feet. Tickling whispers are gone; they flee the weighted melancholy that persists. ]

We carry on within a dollhouse between worlds. Do not be tempted by its pretty trinkets, lest you truly be cursed to wander the demimonde forevermore.

[ Denial still rules paramount over the rumor of immortality, but the lack of bodies is an...unsettling implication. ]

...The graves lie empty.

Comments

audio | un: cstarling

[quietlypersistent]

[ Clarice had been finally been fading into sleep. She is still fully clothed, resting in an armchair in the apartment she was squatting in's living room, with a view of both the front door and sliding glass door, viewing both ways in. Despite being on the top floor she is extra precautious on her first night, especially without her preferred form of self-defense. She had only just begun to dream, clouded images of the ranch from her youth gathered, bird-s eye view of herself as a child running free in the night to visit the barn solidifying like a ghost's slow apparition. It is interesting that she is not viewing from first person perspective, as usual. There is also no sound - odd. She is still so fresh and light in sleep that she has lucidity and dream reflection.

The voice on the network wakes her, startled but groggy, seeking the source of the sound, relieved and then waking with growing curiosity as the communication continues. It is not a settling rouse from what was soon to have become a nightmare from a new perspective. She moves the phone closer and pays attention, brow furrowed. She tries not to think of Hannibal's manner of communicating through riddles and literary references and obnoxiously obtuse metaphors. Her temple throbs slightly as she rubs sleep from her eyes and massages it.

'The graves lie empty.' Interesting. It sounded dramatically recited, though she herself couldn't place it, but Clarice decided to take a chance assumption that it was not the woman's own work presented but her recollection of some literary reference. Or maybe she was just assuming from recent experience.

Aside from that - was this woman ok? Clarice responded with audio of her own. Her tone is steady and curious, her voice young but assured, a detectible but heavily repressed West Virginian accent betraying her roots despite her calculated professionalism. ] Ma'am? That is a very poignant and admittedly relevant reference, but I have to ask - are you alright? Are you safe? Apologies if this seems presumptuous or rude...but you have to admit, that wasn't exactly a standard poetry reading.

[matermali]

[ Oh, she had been quite literal when speaking on the graves, and this is (unfortunately) a fairly standard poetry reading for her. ]

Nothing is right. Not for any of us. None are safe.

[ She feels she shouldn't need to explain. How are people sleeping for more than a few minutes at a time? Are they honestly curled up in beds? What's the matter with everyone? ]

Which poet would you favor?

↪ action

[zangetsu]

（ he's forced himself into some kind of routine here. he does drills twice a day, once not long after the sun's up and once not long before it goes down — a jog through the park, a series of kata, and then meditation. without his sword, it's not like he's helpless. but so much of his power lies in it, he's never bothered to cultivate the other powers a shinigami has at their fingertips.

he knows a few incantations, but actually doing them? hasn't happened yet.

still, he's on his way to try, jogging along one of the public paths in the park when he happens across... chanting?

at first, his brain momentarily shorts out trying to decipher the words in either japanese or english, and then it seems to shift and settle because what she's saying is recognized. tennyson? and that realization hits him about a half-second before the strange immensity of the pressure around her — the kind that has him reaching up over his shoulder for a hilt that isn't there.

he doesn't quite realize he's stopped dead to stare at her until it's too obviously awkward to try and say anything else, and then he just. draws up short, rubs awkwardly at the back of his neck and then starts racking his brain for the writer. shit, which old english guy...?

there is the thump of a heartbeat that seems overloud, and then he says as casually as he possibly can: ）

Tennyson, right?

[matermali]

[ Another night were Vanessa's senses are so dulled that she hears the voice before even noticing the person. To her credit, the furrow in her brow has eased by the time she shifts her attention; there's a deliberate crawl to the way her unblinking gaze travels from the moon to the bold young man with his shock of red hair.

The rest of her remains perfectly still—a statue if not for the chasm hidden behind pale eyes, and the whisper that scratches out from between thin lips that nearly hint at a smile. Slowly, she allows the phone to settle beside her, her other hand hovering just above her lap while wisps of smoke curl and twist. ]

Do you enjoy his work?

[ No matter if he doesn't. She's only glad that someone recognizes it. ]

audio; un: Constantine

[keepgodwaiting]

[ In a voice still slightly groggy from sleep, but sharp nonetheless: ]

Who the fuck are you?

[matermali]

[ Not that she thinks people ought to be getting too comfortable here in the first place, but why don't they simply keep their devices in separate rooms while asleep, if they cannot be turned off?

She considers, though whatever vulgarity is offered doesn't offend her. It's just so brusque, and from a lady. If anything, that piques her interest. Who indeed? ]

Apparently I am someone who has caused you great offense. Did I wake you?

@star.lord | text

[nostalgiabomb]

[ See, Peter was already having a kind of rough time of it as it was – he really didn't need the whole nails on a chalkboard sensation in the middle of the night, on top of everything else. ]

oooookay

how about we chill out a little, elvira

[matermali]

A friend of yours?

[ Is this Elvira brilliant or is she awful? Maybe it's a compliment. ]

text, un: duomaxwell

[heeroics]

[ ...huh? whatever, ]

You dug up a grave?

[matermali]

[ Look at someone finally asking the right questions! ]

More than one. The cemetery is a mere illusion.

Someone is playing at pretend.

action

[nichocolatine]

[ badou's arrival isn't subtle. it's in the crunch of leaves and twigs under his boot, the sharp stench of smoke in the wind, the bright orange glow pulsing in the dark with every puff he takes of his cigarette. his hair, too, flaring every time he passes under a streetlamp, almost the same kind of tint as the fire at his lips.

he's still wearing the clothes he'd gone to bed with that evening — a pair of jeans and another graphic t-shirt that's just a little too loose, this time bearing the words TREAT HER RIGHT across a vector drawing of the earth — outing his haste lest the object of his intrigue scurry away like the cryptid he's made her out to be in his mind. ]

Evenin'.

[ his approach had been slow and casual, as if he were truly doing nothing more than having a leisurely stroll in the middle of a fucking graveyard (as you do), but he'd wanted her to see him long before he ever came to a stop a few headstones away from her. ]

Good night for a smoke, huh?

[ in badou's experience, only two types of people linger in shadows around this time of night: the ones who have no care for danger, or the ones who pose the danger themselves. sometimes they're both, but every single time they'll be bad news.

(which one is he, you ask? why, the secret third option: the fools who can't help walking into that danger, no matter how hard they try.) ]

[matermali]

[ The scent of smoking tobacco is something to draw her attention more than the noise. Not many in her circle smoke it, and it isn't to her favor, but it's still something other than the nothingness that pervades every space here when she travels alone. Spotting him long before he approaches—how kind of him, how gentlemanly—Vanessa is barely repressing a smile when he finds the nerve to speak.

The description was memorable indeed, but Heine did not mention his friend's choice in fashion. The gaze cast to her side takes in the phrase written across his shirt before letting her full attention settle on his face. Everything about a man is in how he moves, how he acts, but the soul is in the eyes. One is enough for her to draw in for her to better appraise. ]

...Wise words.

[ Whether she means his shirt or his weak attempt at small-talk (probably not the latter), she doesn't expand on. Instead, she steps away from the stone, but she doesn't approach him...tempting as it is.

Her own cigarette is promptly stubbed out against a gravestone (no reverence, no pity), and the last whistle of smoke curls into the summer air away while she considers him closely. What did he come for? She has doubts that Heine sent him, if he even knows. ]

Do you often approach strange women in graveyards, or are you a fan of Tennyson?

[ She doesn't suspect either case. It's impossible not to tease, though one may have trouble telling given the distant regard that her tone keeps. ]

audio | un: hdb

[horrifictie]

[ Harry is normally a very heavy sleeper, invited to sink in the primordial darkness and come out at his routine time. A pact made with his volition he can no longer remember, but the body always remembers. However, this only applies when he sleeps. When he can't sleep, there is only reality. Only his thoughts, chirping on and on.

He catches the audio posting and there's a lot of things being said. Not much he can decipher though. A poem? However, he knows the voice and that's what prompts him. ]

Good evening, miss. Shouldn't you be asleep?

[matermali]

[ Here, her tone almost warms. Not for joy, but for understanding. ]

In a perfect world, I would be.

[ His lack of indignation lures out an ounce of shame with an apology unbidden. He had said nothing against her, but it seems everyone else had been fast asleep. The tender souls. ]

I'm sorry if I woke you as well.

audio | un: flora

[luciole]

[Lucinda has been listening to the audio of the woman's voice. It reminds her of solemn church services, cloudy weather, and the toll of a ringing bell. She waits for her to finish before she replies to her audio message.]

A lovely address to the small crowd that has been accrued here so far if you don't mind the remark.

I'm also mildly unsettled by the lack of the dead and the very faint remnants of anyone who lived here previously.

[matermali]

How kind. You would be the first to say so.

[ Not that she was hoping for compliments. It was no attempt to woo, but to warn against these comforts everyone seems to have embraced so swiftly. ]

Did anyone live here previously, in truth? Anything I can find seems as if it were placed too deliberately.

[ Too staged. ]

Audio | UN: Loki

[abit_ofboth]

[Loki lays awake on the less than comfortable bed in the hotel room he procured, though didn’t stay in right away, on his first night in town. If not for this cursed place, he would have conjured himself up something a lot more comfortable, but with how minimized his abilities seem to be here, he has not yet bothered to try something like that. Though he might if he ever does actually get his own apartment. Something about it makes being here feel all too permanent though and he’s not yet ready to admit that.

So he lies on the cheap, scratchy sheets each night and gets a minimal amount of sleep. That that he needs overly much, but he does still need some. It is as he lies there that a vaguely familiar voice comes out through the device given to him upon his arrival. He frowns for a moment before he realizes it is the woman with the tarot cards who’s voice now reaches his ears.

On a whim, he decides to reply.]

I do enjoy your poetry, but why much you broadcast it to the masses in the middle of the night? [He sounds more annoyed than he actually is. It isn’t as if she actually woke him, after all.]

[matermali]

Had I known it would awaken you, I would have thought twice.

[ But no promises are made. Only further thought!

She still has plenty to learn about these devices. ]

But the night has plenty to offer. Too much sleep wastes away opportunity.

[ Mostly what it has to offer is nightmares. ]

audio; un: henry

[vecna]

[Difficult to say what kind of sleep schedule a man like Henry keeps. It's easy enough to adhere to the routine once kept in the lab—and indeed, an early riser he remains—but now, granted a wider swath of “freedom?” (“Freedom” being only a larger cage than the one its as before.) Well, perhaps he’s jut going to keep whatever sleep schedule he wants.

That’s all to say: he’s certainly awake enough to respond to this strange little missive in the middle of the night.]

"And in the dusk of thee, the clock beats out the little lives of men.” I like that line.

[Of course he would.]

[matermali]

It speaks to you?

[ While speaking to the perpetuity of nature and the ephemeral state of men, she wonders how this one actually takes it. For many, it's more of a melancholy, if not a strange peace. ...Though some have claimed it to be denial.

And it has been chopped to ribbons here. ]

Most prefer what was written just before.

text 🦇 un; banished

[guitarpicks]

what do you mean empty?
like you dug them up empty?

[matermali]

It seemed unlikely there would be any bodies, but I had hoped there may be a chance of discovering something else. We have yet to discover the treasures stolen from some of us.

[ Mostly weapons, as far as she's aware. ]

audio | un: P.Graham (ft. unnecessary amounts of introspection.....)

[possessum]

[ Peter has been largely absent from seeing the messages that come in from others here. He's barely touched the device, barely done much of anything in his few days since stumbling from that train station and into an empty world. (Is any of this real? He still can't know. It may be a dream, a nightmare. A hallucination. It may be Hell.)

Whatever it is, his days pass by strange and quiet, and he stays in a fever-dream daze. It's only after maybe a week or so that he finds himself actually giving the device a try. It's mindless and numb, the way most things are for him now. He happens across random messages, barely hears most of them.

Then one comes. And it catches him at once — not lovingly, not welcoming, but like a spider ensnaring something in its web. The boy finds himself frozen in place by the words (strange and olden-sounding things) but mostly by the voice of the woman speaking them. She sounds— like a creeping thing, voice raw and raspy and like something from deep within the earth, and perhaps he's so painfully used to being prey that he falls to the default state too easily. But Peter Graham sits there in the middle of a web, unable to move. Only capable of listening, despite the icy shudder that ripples down his spine. He doesn't like the way she sounds, the way she pauses, the words she uses that he can't quite comprehend to their meaning. (Somewhere in him, he knows what it is to be on the receiving end of spellwork and there's something to this stranger's message that reminds him of such a feeling, though he cannot understand this on any surface level.)

'dollhouse' she says, and he thinks of his mother with a lurching sensation that almost cripples him. Nausea swells in his throat, unpleasant and slick. He doesn't want to respond. It takes awhile, and when his own voice finally speaks, it's quiet, but a little hoarse in itself. He hasn't used it much. Sometimes he forgets how, and his throat can only make clicking sounds.

But now it comes— and he can't hide the way it shakes. He feels like a child much younger than he should be. He stood over those graves for a long time, and wondered. ]

The graves.... you mean the ones in the graveyard? Out past.. past the statues?

(perfect amounts^ ftfy)

[matermali]

[ A voice she hears before sound is made.

Vanessa pauses in the pull of her cigarette, resting a pale hand to one knee before she's even taken in enough to mist the air with her exhale. Only the gentlest of hazes attempts to settle between her and the device. She shouldn't need to look at it, and yet she stares.

She had woken someone young. For that, the mist settles into dew drops to smooth out the rough surface of her words. He sounds afraid; as he should. They all should be. ...Yet there is a desire to soothe, to comfort, from something deeper than the skin and the heart. Something that creaks in her bones and stirs the venom in her blood.

A thumb grazes the curious device as if to caress the one so frightened; static trickles through her mouth-piece with the brush of her fingertip. ]

There is nothing there that can harm you.

text | un: ouroborosed

[inlovewithmycar]

Doth my ears deceive me? Is that old Lord Alfy's poems?

I don't know how you're still awake after reciting from that gloomy old windbag, but I applaud your fortitude.

Anyway, you really reckon this place is running on fairyland logic? Eat their food, drink their wine and you can never get out unless some intrepid young lass in a kirtle green goes rose-picking? Because I think it might be a little too late for most everyone here if that's the case.

omg crowley come hang out w/ satan's bride

[matermali]

[ He might be the first to immediately understand and address the point she was trying to make. It's like these people don't know how to talk! ]

Yes, even I could not manage to resist forever.

[ It was a pretty solid fast, though. Until she almost passed out. ]

It does not mean we should take pleasure in the excess or forget that such temptations always come with a price.

@wrenched

[wrenchedup]

i didn't know judy dench and anjelica huston had a child together until just now.

[matermali]

[ She doesn't know those names, but in this case she absolutely can sense the joke. ]

I remind people here of so many different women that I may almost feel my singular nature threatened. Am I to be flattered or wounded?

[ Would these women make good mothers? ]

audio; un: camille

[cinaedus]

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like nature, half reveal
And half conceal the soul within.

[ The voice that answers is soft in quality, almost lyrical in its recitation. Tennyson is familiar; more than one copy of the poet's works sit on his shelves in a world Camille is not entirely sure still exists. His choice of stanza is deliberate, even posing a question should the woman care to answer. ]

A pity love had but a fleeting chance, though it served as a powerful muse nonetheless. In Memoriam A H H is one of my favorites.

[matermali]

I can think of no muse more encompassing, can you?

[ Or more ruinous.

The fellow poetry-enthusiasts in this company seem to have little complaint over being disturbed in the middle of the night. She has always said that poetry invites certain types.

Vanessa contemplates her response while watching wisps of smoke curl around the device in her hand. There's the obvious follow-up, of course, but his offering strikes a different chord. ]

A man upon a stall may find,
And, passing, turn the page that tells
A grief, then changed to something else,
Sung by a long-forgotten mind.

But what of that? My darken'd ways
Shall ring with music all the same;
To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise.