open log } swapping your blood with formaldehyde;

[astronomer]

Who: Alice Morgan and you.
What: A few days in the life.
Where: Everywhere; given locations are Brock Marsh, Creekside, Gallmarch, but she can be anywhere.
When: This week, essentially.
Notes: The main post is rambling narrative and context, feel free to skip it. Tag in anywhere, or feel free to post your own situation. PM me or get me on plurk if you feel the need. :E
Warnings: ...Alice. Idle fantasies of murder, general hideousness.

The city is monstrous.

Alice has been in Baedal for just over three weeks, and every morning she wakes up surprised- is it still there? Yes? Really? It always is, outside her grainy and dirty (she has taken a sponge to it to no avail) Brock Marsh window; Baedal, fuming and smoking and twisting away from her, hemmed in by grey-white fog and fear.

She has been following, but hasn’t posted to, the Network. She hasn’t really met anybody but Krithn, the distracted star-mapper she’s been assisting, who forgets to shave and forgets to eat and forgets what he’s paid her and can always be relied upon to shell out more than he should if Alice takes a gentle tone with him and suggests that an advance on her wages would be appreciated, not mentioning the numerous other sums he’s advanced her. He hasn’t noticed that she’s a genius, but he hasn’t noticed much on ground level for years. He disgusts her. She steals his keys. She studies his maps and charts and books when he’s not in.

It occurs to her that perhaps she should have cried on the network, that most people- most of them who are Chosen- must come to their cohort damp with tears and nigh hysterical. It isn’t that she hasn’t cried- she has, for the sheer impossibility of it all, because she was so angry, so indignant, so sure she was straight-jacketed in some padded cell in the real world and it was all so revoltingly undignified- but only for herself. Emotional exhibitionism doesn’t thrill her. It simply didn’t occur to her, at the time, that she should make the effort. She was shocked, briefly, into numb honesty- the truth is that she was and is afraid, of course, afraid and angry and bewildered, but her emotions have never had the power to paralyse her. She’s stronger than them.

And is she mad? Alice thinks about that, eyes drifting from one of her borrowed books to the pavement as she sits outside a cafe in Chimer; is she mad? No, she reflects, staring up at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, rubbing the corner of a page between her fingers. On balance, having recovered from her fit of panicked fatalism, she’s probably not. And that makes things very simple and very complicated by putting her in a familiar position- in a world which makes no sense, upon which people are desperately trying to project order, in which people are trying to eke out lives of some significance.

Some things are constant. (She glances away, across to the xenian waiter who brought her her tea--) Some things are not.

Prison was worse. Prison was better.

So now she works and saves and reads. Her room in Brock Marsh is slowly filling up with books, like every other room in Brock Marsh. Soon, she will outgrow it; she has her eye on apartments. She budgets in pencil down to the last penny, though they aren’t called pennies here. She wears carefully-selected reasonably-priced clothing which doesn’t look reasonably-priced, and invests in expensive shoes, because she intends to do a lot of walking, already thinking in investments and futures and long-term plans. It’s in her nature. It helps. She burns the hospital gown she arrived in.

Despite the care she has taken to claw some temporary stability for herself out of the chaos of Baedal, Alice feels swamped by the city, unable to breathe for all the things she doesn’t know. (How dare they do this to her, make her drown in all this nonsense, how dare they try this with her?) It is a language she doesn’t speak. It is threatening, hungry, consuming. It drags its citizens in and it eats them alive.

The city is evil.

Comments

the shore, gallmarch | veerdi;

[astronomer]

Alice likes the ocean; it’s the right amounts of beautiful and destructive, and it makes her feel less hemmed in. There are no walls here- though of course, you can’t really escape via sailing. It’s strange that she finds that compelling, these invisible forces, unseen reasons why and why not. They blame it on monsters, but she’s not interested in monsters.

She is here to feel free, but more than that, she is here for the Hole.

It sits just visible in the distance, surprisingly small and (she knows from her reading, from the haphazard and often-disastrous research done on it) perfectly circular. They do not know where the stone structures around it came from; they do not know where the Hole itself came from. It simply stays there and eats and eats, water rushing down it but never depleting.

It’s beautiful, this perfect circle of perpetual hunger. It’s so wrong. People are so afraid of it.

Alice stands on the rocky shore, hugging her coat around her as the sea wind whips her hair up into a frenzy of red curls, across her face, strands in her mouth- she pushes it back like drawing a curtain, thinks it’s not far.

She doesn’t want to believe they found an eyeball, either, or a tongue, or a lone finger- the body part changes depending on who tells the story of the friend of the friend of the friend they all have who jumped into the Hole. She wants to believe they never found anything at all. She wants to believe that the Hole makes people nothing. She wants to think it doesn’t ravage, only subtracts.

Standing on the shore and watching the Hole drink reminds her that she is something and somewhere beyond learning Ragamoll, beyond assisting the star-mapper who disgusts her more each day with his well-meaning bumbling, his massive and useless brain and shy kindness towards her, beyond her prim and well-made shoes, beyond budgeting. The Hole reminds her of where she is- not just a mad city but a multiversal parasite, a blight on the face of physics, a place that can’t be but is, trying to suck her in and crush her. More than that, though, the Hole calms her. It is a gap of nothing in this city filled with everything. More than Baedal, the Hole reminds her of who she is and what can't be stolen from her.