Floriano has been waiting the right amount of time—longer, even. Around him, cups have already found their owners. Steam rises from mugs at neighboring tables. Someone laughs over a shared pastry. The couple by the window nurse matching drinks, easy and unhurried, as though they have been here for years and the years have been kind.
The counter in front of him remains bare.
Somewhere beneath the murmur of other people's contentment, there is something else. Not music. More like the sound a clock makes when you press your ear to its back: a patient, intricate turning. Gear against gear, wheel coaxing wheel, each tooth catching the next in a sequence too deliberate to be accidental.
On the far wall, past the last of the tables, past the reach of the warm light, shadows shift. Large ones. Slow and even, tracing arcs that repeat, and repeat, and repeat. The shape of them is unmistakable.
The café does not notice. The café has never noticed. It simply runs.
The break room is gone. In its place stands the same establishment Charlie found herself in before, but William is not here with her.
Instead, a waiter materializes at Charlie's elbow. White gloves. Pressed jacket. The kind of waiter who belongs in a restaurant where the chairs cost more than the food.
"Right this way."
He offers no explanation, just moves, and the expectation that she will follow settles naturally as gravity.
Two groups sit nearby, each folded into their own conversations, unhearing of the other. Then: a younger man with brown skin, wavy hair and a goatee, a vest the color of good coffee, sailboat on one arm and a blimp on the other, a steel watch at his wrist—staring at an empty table with the particular expression of someone running out of patience.
The waiter stops at a table set for one. He draws the chair back. Waits.
Once Charlie is seated, he produces a menu and places it in her hands.
"Oh, uh...thank you." Charlie spoke as she sat down and began looking at the menu.
Occasionally, she would glance up at the menu and look over at the other patrons in the restaurant. She didn't remember other people being there the first time she visited this unusual establishment. Perhaps they were here for the same reason.
"Excuse me," she asked the waiter, "sir? The people over at those other tables. Are they in the same situation I am? Or, are they like the bartender or the hallucination version of Will from before?"
Charlie wanted to talk to them. She wondered if perhaps they could provide help for her current dilemma. Though, she was nervous. After all, these were people she had never seen before and she wasn't sure how they would respond to her situation.
"Uh, just water is fine for now." Charlie replied as she continued to watch the other conversations, "And, where would I even know where to start seeking the truth? What truth am I even supposed to look for?"
She paused to think for a moment. For a while, everything was going fine. She found a new job, her relationship with Birkin was going well, and the threat of bio-terrorism seemed to be on the decline. And, yet, she found herself here once again. In this place. This unusual location that seemed to appear whenever it was needed.
"It's not a cure...." she said to herself, "It's a death sentence...."
The gentleman was becoming irritably impatient. Jealousy was not a regular companion to him, with his shiny metal watch and intellect. However, no man is an island, and the respect of others was something he viewed as both a reward and a necessity for business. He tapped the vacant counter before him, echoing the clanks of cups and silverware enjoyed by customers. He certainly didn't feel like a customer himself. Rather, he felt more like a spectator. Rather than a watchmaker or even a watch wearer, he felt more like a window-shopper pressing his nose against a glass. So far his query on the barista's location hadn't been answered, though he supposed that he hadn't properly addressed it to anyone in particular. It may as well have been a voice to the void. He considered asking someone properly, either Jay or the purple-haired woman. however neither seemed especially talkative.
Floriano was distracted from his discomfort when he heard someone nearby in pain. He turned to the quiet woman who finally spoke, watching multiple reactions in her body. Seeing her pain, he commented, "You too? Maybe these seats are splintered or something." Just when his expression relaxed for a bit, he noticed that someone who had arrived just after him was now being served. "Oh, there he is..." He felt a pitch on the skin under his watch and flinched. However, he also noticed that the purple-haired person was holding her own arm in pain. He pointed his finger and inquired, "Is your arm alright?" And just like that, a gram of compassion neutralized his selfish suffering. "If you want, I can walk over to that barista and ask for some ice. He's been giving me the cold shoulder anyway," he offered with a smile.
When Silas is lowered from Vicis’ tail to the floor in the new location, he has to step back and truly register what the hell he’s looking at. Vicis is… Something. Like a giant snake creature. Silas has to crane his head upwards to examine him but can’t dwell too long on how to react with instinctive human fear or some weird fascination. At this point, Silas feels like he’s probably just in some sorta fever dream, maybe high on something really potent that’s making reality go fucking nuts.
Then he realizes Vicis is looking at something in the darkness, some sorta light? Silas has to decide whether to question what Vicis is or focus on the second location and what the hell happened to Damien. Then he hears someone else speak again.
‘Have you forgotten that I own you, Damien? Your life is mine.’
It’s chilling.
“What do you see?” Silas murmurs to Vicis, following him a little to stand at his side and squint at the light that the creature is focusing on. Vines block the way, that’s as much Silas can see. But maybe Vicis’ got better eyes or something to see what’s through it.
Then a vision directly in his mind. Hard labor. Constant work, a small goat creature seemingly working himself to death.
But Silas is certain in Hell, he already is dead. And yet, he recalls Damien's earlier almost manic words of killing himself. A clear desperate escape from that voice claiming ownership. Saddening, if Silas were more empathetic.
And yet, he feels a twinge of anxiety at the flash of the pistol in the vision, the way it’s held. The phone ringing grates on his senses enough to make him clench his eyes shut and shake his head, the migraine from earlier still numbed but the visions are a bit too much as he wonders if he really is on something and if Vicis is even there at all beside him, what these visions are even supposed to mean, he isn’t meant for this type of thing.
There is, finally, a figure. It moves away before it can be hailed, unhurried through the café and gone around a corner.
Should anyone follow quickly enough to catch it, what turns around is not the barista. It is not a man at all.
The face is brass, hammered smooth at the cheeks and forehead, jointed at the jaw in a way that is correct in theory and wrong in execution. The eyes are fixed convex glass, not the soft glass of a doll but ground to a perfect curvature that throws the viewer's own face back at them in miniature. From somewhere inside the chest comes a sound, not breath, not voice. A winding. A click.
Then the gears catch.
It walks back the way it came, measured and even, each step identical to the last, and reaches for the coffee pot. Lifts it with both hands, the arc smooth and ballistic, not one degree wasted, and pours into the nearest cup.
Across the table, a face of the same brass tilts back. The jaw drops to its fixed angle, the coffee disappears into the dark of the open mouth, closes again, and the cup is set back down.
A bow, and on to the next table.
Lift. Pour.
Jaw drops. Coffee disappears. Closes.
And the next.
And the next.
Over and over and over, each repetition identical to the one before it, without fatigue, without variation, without a single wasted motion.
Silver Blade never answered. Floriano arrived, introductions happened, but nothing.
Which, fair. Even in a place designed for getting things off your chest, that was still her story. Jay wasn’t owed an answer. If anything, they might have overstepped. Probably had, actually.
That left Jay with no more excuses and what they’d come here to do.
And, look, Jay wasn’t going to pretend they hadn’t noticed. The chatting, the questions, the keen interest in other people’s problems. All of it had been stalling. Jay had known. It just hadn’t stopped them from doing it.
What was frustrating (and Jay wanted it noted, for whatever record was being kept, that they were fully aware it was frustrating) was that this wasn’t for lack of trying.
Outside of this place, in the version of themselves with a desk and a keyboard, Jay had been trying. Sitting down, opening a blank document, typing What happened was and then... nothing. The thought just stops forming. They tried saying it out loud instead. Opened their mouth, got the first few words out, and then the same thing happened.
And the thing was, Jay could feel themselves wanting to think it. Sitting there, document open, cursor blinking, genuinely, deliberately trying to make their brain do the thing it does every other time: think about a thing and then put it into words. And it wouldn’t. Not “wouldn’t” like refusal. “Wouldn’t” like the function just wasn’t there. Like asking your hand to close and watching it just... not.
They tried again later. And again after that. It never got easier.
There was a word for this. A clinical one that started with the letter T and rhymed with “llama.” Diagnostic criteria, a little box on a form, the whole thing. One of those words that changes everything the moment you use it.
Jay didn’t want to use that word. Because using it meant those people got to have power over them. No. Not giving them that.
“Okay. So. I’m going to try and talk about what happened. Fair warning, I’ve tried this like fifteen times now and every time my brain just…” They made a vague gesture. “Stops working. So just... bear with me on this one.”
A breath. The folding chair creaked.
“It all happened four years ago. I saw an interest check for an RP called ❀✿❁✾❁ & †‡⚔⚔⚒⛏☠. It was advertised as a historical fantasy with romance, mystery, and espionage. Romance wasn’t really my cup of tea, but the mystery and the fantasy elements caught my attention. Every PC came with a mystery to figure out, which really sold me. It had been years since I last joined a group RP, and with the pandemic messing things up, I was excited about this. Even more so because the RP wasn’t fully figured out yet, so there was a lot of potential for worldbuilding and co-storytelling.”
“And when I say it wasn’t figured out, I really mean it wasn’t fully developed. Magic was supposed to be the center of the story, but the magic system wasn’t actually in place; it was incredibly vague and had little to no rules other than the idea of equivalent exchange. Even the rough era or time period the historical fantasy was supposed to take place in was inconsistent. It ended up being kind of a patchwork of different time periods.”
“When I went to the two GMs, I gave them a list of ideas for who my character might be, leaving a lot of wiggle room so they’d fit into what was already there. The one consistent theme was ’vengeance’ against the king. One of the GMs suggested that my character actually be the descendant of the true ruling family that had been overthrown. The relatives hunted down by the current ruling family, with the history of that fact magically manipulated to be hidden and distorted. To me, this felt like a really big role to have. I was honored, honestly.”
For a second there, talking about those first months, it felt good to remember.
“There were... some things I didn’t realize at the time that would later become a huge problem.”
Jay held up a finger.
“Because a lot wasn’t decided in the beginning, the GMs would ‘officialize’ things much too late, so things that had already been established would get contradicted or retconned."
A second finger.
“The RP wasn’t the plot-driven or structured RP I thought it was. It was a sandbox. No prescribed storyline.”
A third.
“Almost everyone in the RP were already friends or had been RPing with each other before, some of them for years. Which meant they had their own way of doing things. What they considered ‘obvious’ or ‘a given’ wasn’t obvious at all if you weren’t part of this group before.”
Jay’s hand dropped back into their lap. For a moment they were quiet.
“At first, everything was good. Everyone was engaged with everyone else’s things, both IC and OOC. People talked openly about ideas, and any player could chime in if they wanted to. It also helped how open, welcoming, and friendly everyone seemed to be, and how willing they were to try anything out.”
Jay almost smiled. “I remember how elated I was when this player ‘P4r’ reached out to me with ideas for character relationships and interactions.”
Staring at something the others couldn’t see, they said, “...I miss those first six months so much... Sure, there were a couple of hiccups, but overall I thought things were good... I just... I’m not sure when things started going wrong. The RP, the friendships, all of it.”
━━━━━━ ◈ ━━━━━━
In every Catharsis where someone still perceived Jay, everything ceased to exist. From whatever filled their space to every sound, every sensation, every trace of anything at all.
Absolute nothingness.
It held until Jay’s voice found its way back.
“...Sorry, I…”
Jay pressed both hands to their face and dragged them down slowly.
━━━━━━ ◈ ━━━━━━
Experienced by anyone who perceives Jay’s presence in their Catharsis: everything in their Catharsis ceases to exist. It lasts until Jay speaks again.
The Moderator caps her pen. Sets it on the clipboard.
"There's nothing to apologize for. You covered more ground than you probably realize." She smiles. "I think there might just be too much to process all at once, that's all. What if you tried it in pieces? Small ones. And it's okay to ask for help with it. Let the people here ask questions. Sometimes it's easier to answer something than to figure out where to start."
With a small nod toward the group, she opens the floor to them.
"This has been a decent exercise, and I appreciate my mini-catharsis, but I'm dropping out. I'm more interested in a group dynamic than a turn-based battle against depression."
A moment passed before Jay looked up at the Moderator.
“Sorry. For scaring them off.” A short exhale. “I tried to engage with everyone. Get to know them… Maybe I didn’t do enough.”
Never enough.
Before the Moderator could reassure them, Jay’s gaze had already drifted to the other avatars around the room. Everyone still in their seats, still facing them, still looking like they were listening. Something behind their eyes, though, said AFK.
“How many of them are actually still here?” they asked the Moderator, then shook their head. “No. Sorry, that’s not fair to ask you. Forget I said that.”
Turning back to the blank, waiting faces, Jay pressed their hands to their knees. “If any of you are still here... you don’t need to stay on my account. I’ll understand.”
The folding chair creaked as they shifted their weight. Jay let out a long, deflated breath.
"You are not talking to an empty room. This place shaped itself for you, Jay."
The Moderator takes the empty seat beside Jay.
"You've spent this whole time worrying about everyone else. Whether they were bored. Whether anyone felt left out. Let me worry about you."
She meets Jay's eyes. "I can only work with what I'm given. So tell me what you need. You're allowed to want things. Don't apologize for it. Whatever it is, we'll do everything we can."
Jay was speaking again, so Sirpa sat back down. She rubbed the places on her arms and legs that had been pricked as she listened, trying to focus on their words instead of the pain. It was sharp and immensely annoying, the kind of sensation that makes you itch underneath your skin and want to jump out of your chair. But Sirpa sat and listened.
To what she was listening to, she wasn't sure. Jay had started using a whole bunch of words Sirpa didn't understand. Yet somehow, they felt familiar. RP. IC. OOC. It was like she knew the words somewhere in her brain, but her brain couldn't access them. But she did her best to follow along with Jay's story anyway.
And then, suddenly, nothing. Quickly, Sirpa's heart raced. Did she just die? She tried to touch her body, to feel that she was still there, but there was no arm to move. Her breath quickened, but in reality---what even was reality at this point?---it was just the idea of it, because there were no lungs to breathe with either.
As suddenly as the world went away, it all came back with Jay's voice.
"...Sorry, I..."
Could Jay control existence? Sirpa shuddered and continued to watch and listen, inwardly begging Jay to keep talking. "How many of them are actually still here?" When they looked her direction, it was as if they were looking right through her to something that she couldn't comprehend. She turned around in her chair, then turned back. It did seem like one person who was here briefly was gone.
"If any of you are still here... you don’t need to stay on my account. I’ll understand."
Well, Sirpa sure didn't understand. But the creature was talking, so she just sat quietly and listened. She hoped they would keep talking, lest she lose herself again.
The image of the baphomet seemed to be slowly crushed beneath an invisible weight much larger than himself. The image of the pistol lasted slightly longer and longer. The candle atop his head actively melting, the flame flickering. The phone rang. Papers piled. The phone rang. Papers piled. The phone rang. Papers piled. The phone rang. Papers piled piledpiled piledpiledpiled piledpiledpiledpiled piledpiledpiledpiledpiled piledpiledpiledpiledpiledpiled piledpiledpiledpiledpiledpiledpiled piledpiledpiledpiledpiledpiledpiledpiled
And the eyes, Damien's eyes dimmed to nothing more than shadowed sockets. The pistol seemed to whisper, "Make it stop." The weight upon him heavy with "please."
━━━━━━ ◈ ━━━━━━
Behind the barrier, below the heavy chains, Damien drew in a shuddery breath. And then another. The metal vines pressed deeply down onto his chest. His hand twitched, as if to grab something beside him, but his hand met nothing other than his personal prison.
“A conversation.” That was all Jay wanted. “Not people sitting around waiting for me to finish so they can go do what they actually want to do. An actual conversation: someone sharing their thoughts, their opinions, the odd personal detail here and there—IF they’re comfortable with it.”
The display vanished with a swipe, taking the light it had cast with it. “There’s always going to be some turn-taking in conversations. I’m sorry. It’s not like I wanted to be sad either... I just... I’m tired of talking at walls, especially when I know there’s a person on the other side.”
Their gaze settled on Sirpa’s avatar. They stared deep into her eyes, and hoped.
Jay's gaze bore into her own. Sirpa held it for a few moments, then shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Again, she got that feeling that Jay was looking past her at something further than she could comprehend. Were they talking to her, and expecting a response? Sometimes, it was hard to tell just in general when it was her turn to speak. She opened her mouth as if she were going to say something, then closed it and nodded. The light around her brightened briefly, emphasizing the feeling that she was being put on the spot, then dimmed.
The blanket was in her lap again. Did it ever leave? Sirpa tucked her legs close to her and held the edge of the blanket in her hands, twiddling it between her fingers. She was still listening.
Charlie took a deep breath before approaching the people sitting at the table on the left.
"Excuse me?" she asked a hint of nervousness in her voice, "You can see me, right? Last time I was here, it was just me. WEll, me, a hallucination of Will, and this bartender guy. But, now you guys are here and..uh, can anyone explain what is going on?"
She stopped for a moment realizing that she probably sounded either insane or clueless. Possibly both.
Charlie shook her head before speaking again, "Sorry, where are my manners? I'm Dr. Charlie Everson. I'm not from...wherever this place is. Though, I'm guessing most of you aren't. May I ask who you are and how you got here?"
Sirpa still hadn’t spoken, which wasn’t assuring. But something behind her expression suggested the silence was temporary rather than permanent. Jay chose to trust that, chose to believe she’d actually converse with them, not just occupy the same room while they talked at the ceiling.
Small pieces. That was the Moderator’s suggestion. Just talk, break it down, let the others ask questions. Good advice. Possibly even actionable, if Jay could figure out where to start.
Before Jay could figure that out, someone new arrived.
She came in asking whether people could see her (yes), mentioning hallucinations of someone named Will (no context), and referencing a bartender guy (even less context).
“Can anyone explain what is going on?”
Jay wanted to ask her the same thing.
“Sorry, where are my manners? I’m Dr. Charlie Everson,” the doctor said. “I’m not from... wherever this place is. I’m guessing most of you aren’t. May I ask who you are and how you got here?”
“Uh... hi, Dr. Everson. I go by Jay, and... I guess I got here by clicking the link?”
Which, to a woman who’d just led with hallucinations and a missing bartender, may or may not have sounded sarcastic. It wasn’t meant to be. Maybe the question hadn’t been about clicking links so much as how Jay came to find this place.
“I read the interest check, liked the premise, so I jumped in.”
Their gaze drifted to Dr. Everson. Then to Sirpa. Then back to Dr. Everson. From somewhere in the back of their skull, the earlier conversation with Sirpa and Silver Blade pushed its way forward: the ones who didn’t choose to come here and didn’t know how to leave.
“But... I’m starting to wonder if that’s not actually what you’re talking about…”
Another person appeared. When would it stop? This person was also talking about things that made no sense. Was she somehow back in Wesley's catharsis?
Jay had responded to the woman's---Dr. Everson's---question with some even more confusing things to say. What did they mean that they got here by clicking a link?
Then Jay was looking at her. Sirpa's face tinged pink with slight embarrassment at not knowing what was happening. "Uhm." She looked from Jay to Dr. Everson. "I'm Sirpa...and I don't know how I got here." She glanced at the creature, hoping it would answer the woman's question about what was going on. Sirpa was definitely not one to have an answer to that.
Through the chains, through the dark, the air shifts toward warmth.
And his mother is sitting beside him. Lavender clings to her clothes, dry and familiar, her hands settled loose in her lap. Most of her is somewhere else entirely, her eyes following a thought that keeps drifting just out of reach. Damien's mother has been losing herself like this for years.
After a moment she turns, not quite toward him but close enough, and her brow draws in the way it does when you look at someone and can tell, before you know why, that something is wrong. One hand lifts from her lap and hovers toward Damien.
A voice pierced into his awareness, uncertain but warm. Like home. "Mom?" Damien forced his head to the left.
There she was, sitting on the floor beside him. His mom, whose presence never failed to soften his heart. Her existence was the same as he remembered in life---in real life. She had this air to her that reminded him of a butterfly. Delicate and beautiful, but possibly flighty if you moved too quickly. One would need an experienced net to capture her consciousness.
There! Damien found a opening in the chains and reached out his hand toward his mother's, gently brushing a claw against her fur like he always did. "No Ma, I'm not cold," he spoke in a soft and measured voice, filtering out as much pain as he could. For once, he was relieved that his mother didn't know where she was. How embarrassing it would be for her to see him like this. "Are you cold?"
1x Thank
