chronicle

[ernest]

Fandom: Pathologic
This Fic Contains: Death, existentialism, time loops, TS Eliot
Disclaimer: I've never played Pathologic in my life but I've had extensive conversations withlittle_lady_d about the setting and Lore
Alternate Title: What Is Going On With This Goth Theater Kid
Word Count: 220

chronicle

     you chronicle your own decay. there are so many ways to die, some noble but plenty of gruesome ones, and you are well-practiced in all of them. down the line someone may find it instructive, or entertaining, or somehow protective. you hope.

     perhaps that someone will be yourself, returned to the beginning with no memory of how you got there or of what was always going to have happened again. when you read over the mess of tenses and auxiliary verbs, you shrug in an arcane tangle of ink. well. it wouldn’t be the first time.

     other thinkers measure their lives in coffee spoons or peach pits; you are more interested in how the Shadow Falls between the walnut shell and the lock-pick. your pages tell you that you have been preoccupied with the Hollow Men and the skittering thoughts behind those impassive faces. you cannot remember the last time you slept but you still dream all the time, and in your dreams you are continually guttering, choking, drowning.

     out, out, brief candle. you plunge into the end, into an end at any rate, though to what end you could not say. you cannot speak. game over, but not for you. time to take it from the top.

     look here: someone was thoughtful enough to chronicle their own decay.

Comments

[little_lady_d]

this is so wonderful and dense and atmospheric, somehow with words and allusions you’ve managed to make a miasma as choking and omnipresent as any plague-cloud, yet as light and intricate as the polyhedron spiraling over the riverside. bravo!

what is up with this goth theater kid, though.

[ernest]

i made a choking miasma! how do you always give the absolute best compliments?
re: allusions, i particularly liked comparing an Eliot poem to two different Eliot poems, but it was really fun to figure out where to plant all of them.

tell me more about the polyhedron? even the name gives an immediate sensation of strangeness and something to be solved.

maybe the stage manager is Like This because he hates closing nights and their reminder of impermanence so he'd rather eternally die and come back than just... stop performing but still have to live with himself.

[little_lady_d]

alright i wanted to wait until i was at a computer (and my arms weren't hooked up to intravenous lines) to tell you about the polyhedron and here i am.

the polyhedron is an impossible structure -- really, it shouldn't be standing. it has a long, spindly base, growing and spiraling and culminating in a bulk like a origami wasp's nest. by all rights, it should be crushed under its own weight. but it has an airy beauty about it, and they say it was built out of its own blueprints. look close, and you can see sketches of the structure that you're standing in. it's hyperreal -- a map and a territory. (seriously. it's super weird.)

it was designed by peter stamatin, a genius architect from the city (from the same school as the bachelor), who wastes his days drinking extract of twyrine, the steppe-herb that grants visions. now only children inhabit the polyhedron. you see, the town is full of child-gangs who play strange games, games of souls in walnut's shells and invisible mewling cats. in the polyhedron, all their games become real.

all their games. on the last day, you're invited into the polyhedron. you descend through its strange rooms, and meet two children, playing in a sandbox. the sandbox is a town, and the town is plagued by the terrible, choking sand pest of the children's own creation. they send in their dollies, rough-spun things with button eyes, to be healers and try to cure the plague. but usually their healers just kick up more sand. they were never the children's favorite dolls, anyway, so it's okay if they get dirty.

when you talk to the children, you can choose to speak as the player to the architects of this odd little game, and tell them how it's going. or you can stubbornly insist, up to the end, that you are a real person making real choices, and you won't be toyed with.

it's super weird.

[little_lady_d]

and here's a video of a conversation with the powers that be.

[little_lady_d]

and an alternate bit of dialogue.

[ernest]

ohhhhh, wow! wow, that's all so deliciously meta, and i really love the atmosphere of the game and its music. i'm honestly sort of impressed with myself for how much of that feeling i got into my fic just from our conversations.

i really, really wanted the player to choose the dialogue option that was like "I hope I can still switch places with you some day... You Powers That Will Have Been." because it's absolutely what i would have said.
and then later when he decides to play as Bachelor having an existential crisis... that was Good

the guildenstern in me very much appreciated the little side observations of "I don't remember looking up and seeing blue sky. But maybe it was there all along." and later on when everything was hazy again: "But for a short while... for a short while, it was clear."

thank you so so so much for sharing <3

[little_lady_d]

i'm impressed with you, too! you made a miasma!

yes! that player's decision to play the bachelor having an existential crisis was what convinced me that both choices are valid, because it's the choosing that matters. which, in turn, reminds me of mark immortell's little speech in the new pathologic -- the one that i showed you -- about this being a play that takes place in the inner world of its actors.

and aaah you're right, those were guildenstern-like observations. it's all very autumnal, isn't it?