riverviewlogs | monthly mingle: FEAST OF THE DYING

monthly mingle: FEAST OF THE DYING

who: everyone in Riverview!
what: monthly mingle: feast of the dying + agricultural emergency
when: the month of october
where: anywhere around the city
warnings: please put any necessary warnings in the subject lines

monthly mingle: october

During the month of October, a particular natural phenomenon on the moon weakens the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead, allowing for the crossover of those dead into the world of the living, with ghosts from the pasts of both the residents and the Quarantine itself to take corporeal form. This has given rise to an array of celebrations and traditions surrounding the transition from life to death, encouraging residents not to fear death, but to embrace it.

Things aren't all spooky celebrations this month, though. There's also a serious emergency happening in the agricultural district, where a herd of vengeful and intelligent hog-like creatures has decided to mount an attack on the city, with a large measure of success. Between September 20th and September 25th, they rammed the fences near the agriculture district where most of the farms providing livestock and produce for the city are located, succeeding in breaking through the fence on the 25th. Drastic action needs to be taken in order to protect the city's ability to feed itself throughout the upcoming months.

feast of the dying: a celebration of the transition between life and death

In the days leading up to October 1st, residents new and old will notice preparations beginning, a flurry of activity getting the city ready for the upcoming celebration: the Feast of the Dying. There is an old, widely-known, and widely-believed superstition or proverb in Riverview Quarantine: 'The greater your fear of death, the easier it is for death to find you.' This is a cornerstone belief of a lot of the residents of the Quarantine, most of whom have survived intensely difficult and violent pasts on their own worlds and who are still willing and eager to throw themselves into exploring and settling new worlds, starting their lives fresh. To honor this spirit, the Feast of the Dying is a celebration of the transition between life and death, an opportunity to face death both figuratively and literally, and come out on top.

The festivities during this time feature tests of courage in highly haunted places, escape rooms both virtual and physical with varying levels of danger, and the week-long Feast of the Dying itself, between October 1st and 8th this year.

i. feast of the dying traditions

Much like any culture, there are a few traditions and events that happen every year in the Quarantine, to celebrate the Feast of the Dying. In-depth information on these traditions and events can be found on last year's Feast of the Dying post, and include:

● Ghosts From the Past: Characters will see ghosts of the deceased in various places around the Quarantine, with some areas, where the boundaries between the living and dead are weakest, being heavily infested with these ghosts, while other areas are nearly ghost-free. These ghosts can be from characters' canons (with limitations - see last year's post for OOC guidelines) or from the Quarantine itself.
● Escape Rooms: Horror-themed escape rooms pop up all over the city, augmented with tech or magic to make them seem more menacing. The difficulty levels and scares range from easy to incredibly difficult, and they feature themes from Zombie Attack to Prison to Torture Traps to Mad Science Experiments, and just about anything else you can think of.
● Tests of Courage: In various places around the city, there are establishments where the boundaries between the living and dead are so fragile as to be barely there - hospitals that treated the ill during the Pandemic, insane asylums or prisons where inmates were mistreated, homes where terrible murders happened, places exposed to dark magic, and other similar places. During October, these places are shut down except to those who wish to stay the night as a test of courage. Characters who stay the night will encounter hordes of ghosts and experience extremely realistic hallucinations that may result in injury (which is up to player discretion) in the name of proving their courage.
● Doom Dates: This year, with the amusement park open for business, there is an event called Doom Date, a spooky themed night at the fair featuring haunted houses, costumed actors, and free rides with the price of admission. More information on this prompt can be found on the September Test Drive Meme.
● Feast of the Dying: A week-long masquerade-style party that is open from sundown October 1st until sunrise on October 9th. Sort of like a formal ball inside an incredibly realistic haunted house, the Feast of the Dying is the tradition that the holiday is named after, and features dancing, party events, plenty of food and drink for everyone, and private rooms for resting or engaging in...private activities with close friends.

ii. creepy chaos

This year, there's something a little different going around the Quarantine. The influx of refugees, the Frysh, that recently arrived, have brought a few new spooky traditions with them - while their celebration of horror usually happens in the dead of winter, they've shared the custom for the Feast of the Dying. And what is that custom? Dressing up as monsters, ghosts, demons, and other terrifying creatures! Considering how many other worlds and universes have similar traditions, it's caught on quickly, with costumes incredibly varied in subject matter and level of intricacy, from standard run-of-the-mill costumes pieces purchased from the local costume shop to intricately detailed costumes featuring holographic accents - and, of course, the 'sexy' version of everything. The culmination of the Frysh tradition is the tenth day of the month, where everyone dresses as something or someone scary, and brings treats (handmade or purchased) to give to family, lovers, friends, coworkers, classmates, or anyone else. It fits with the Feast of the Dying theme quite smoothly, reminding residents that joy and togetherness can come even from frightening situations.

All well and good, but someone has other ideas - enter Phineas, a rather notorious mage who's just recently gotten out of a year-long stint in prison. Elderly, a bit of a codger, more than a bit eccentric, and extremely powerful, Phineas has decided to put his own spin on this particular spooky tradition by casting a powerful citywide spell. On October 10, anyone who puts on a costume to participate in this particular celebration will find themselves turning into their costume for the evening. Dressed up as a werewolf? Prepare to howl at the moon! Dressed as a vampire? Be prepared to get a serious taste for blood. The possibilities are endless...

OOC Note: Please remember that Riverview does not allow non-consensual sex, and that game mechanics are not put in place to encourage sexual assault, or to 'trick' characters into having sex that they would not normally have. If your character's costume is the 'sexy' version of anything, feel free to play with aphrodisiac effects or lowered inhibitions, but keep this rule in mind.

emergency in the agricultural district!

iii. hog wild

Residents of the city may or may not remember a particular patch of fertile ground that was scouted over a year ago, and the highly-intelligent and territorial alien hogs that were protecting it because the soil's fertility stems from it being a alien hog graveyard. After that revelation, the city had abandoned the project for the foreseeable future, as digging up an intelligent species' graveyard is more than a little beyond the pale.

That would've been all well and good, had the alien hogs stayed in their territory. However, after being disrupted by two teams over the course of a few months, the hogs (who have an excellent memory for this kind of thing) have started to get a little restless. It's not enough to be left alone - they want revenge. And with the summer winding down into harvest season, they've figured out how to get that revenge. As September winds down and October starts to dawn, the powerful and intimidating hogs have started on stage one of enacting that revenge - they've been making concentrated runs at the fences closest to their territory, hitting it in the same spot over and over again, herd mentality at its strongest, trying to make a dent. And they're succeeding.

The big problem here is that, on the inside of that fence, is the bulk of the Quarantine's agriculture sector. Fields full of livestock and crops that are meant to make up the majority of the winter's food supply are in danger of being wiped out if that fence falls, and if that happens, it's going to be a cold, hungry winter, no matter how many supplies the Capital World manages to send up to the moon.

Since September 20th, residents have been being called into service whenever they were willing to, at first to try to repair the damage to the wall and keep the hogs from bursting through, and after September 25th, to help stem the damage being done by the rampaging hogs. As September ends and October begins, the fight is still underway, and residents haven't managed to do much to stop the creatures encroaching on the agricultural district, so more help is always welcome.

A full write-up of this situation can be found on September's Test Drive Meme.

iv. drift compatible

As October continues on, the situation with the invasion of hogs and all the other creatures that are coming through the massive breach in the outer wall of the Inhabited City is starting to get really dire. As a last-ditch effort, the government is pulling what remains of their fleet of three-story-tall mech suits out of storage. Longer-term residents may remember these mechs from last January, when a herd of behemoth monsters was attacking the city. Since then, the five remaining mechs were taken over by a private tech company, improved upon to some extent, and then sold back to the government, where they were reverse engineered into something new and a little different, and more were manufactured.

As of now, the government is holding on to a fleet of around 40 smaller, more maneuverable mechs that are still quite powerful, but most importantly which still need to be piloted by two people. Considering the emergency the city is facing, the government has released the fleet of mechs to the Perimeter Guard, and is calling for anyone with piloting experience, or even people willing to take a quick course in it, to help man the fleet and head out into the battle, backing up fighters on the ground to try to push back the tide of creatures flooding into the vulnerable and very important agricultural district.

Mechs are piloted by two people working together - while it's not exactly drift compatibility, the two characters need to act together, with one directing where the mech goes and keeping an eye on the terrain, and the other one manning the guns and keeping an eye on the mech's defenses and energy and ammunition levels. This takes a lot of concentration and cooperation, and this day is bound to forge a lot of new friendships....and probably a few mortal enemies. On top of the difficulty of working with someone who may be a total stranger, don't forget this new fleet of mechs are in beta-testing and are only being used as a last resort, which means they have a bad tendency to break down in unexpected ways.

Each mech is fitted with one large canon-style gun that can be semi-automatic or automatic with a limited amount of ammunition, one plasma sword, and a force shield that can take four serious hits before it is depleted. They have a finite amount of energy storage and are able to be in continuous use for 3 hours maximum before shutting down. Out of the fleet of 40 mechs, the mod expects only about 5 to still be functional at the end of the month, so feel free to destroy or seriously damage them in threads.

v. roommates or wildcard

Feel free to use this prompt to meet new roommates, for the purpose of getting to know each other, or hit up the mod-posted prompt to create a Communal Housing floor mingle. Or, if you have an idea for a prompt that isn't in this list, set during the Feast of the Dying, feel free to write it up!

visual inspiration

click on thumbnails for larger view; images may contain disturbing themes

Credit: image i: Logan Preshaw; image ii: Alejandro D'Marco; image iii: Jeff Jumper; image iv: Johannes Mücke; image v: Davey Baker; image vi: David Edwards

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

1) Ghosts of the Past**

a. It started with Bethany's laughter. Relm heard it from behind her one day while at home. At first, when she saw nothing, she wrote it off as a trick from her mind. But then, as she would walk about the city doing whatever, she'd catch fleeting images from the corner of her eye: a flash of her red scarf, a toss of her hair...

Finally, after almost an entire day of slowly being convinced she was losing her mind, Relm comes face to face with her. Her sister, forever 18 and young, smiles as she walks up next to her. The ghost says nothing, just stands and watches Relm.

"Beth? Are you...? You came here, too?"

The ghost just smiles wider. Almost too wide. It's unsettling; Hawke frowns. "Why aren't you saying anything? Beth-"

There's a sigh, and the ghost disappears.

Hawke just stands there, eyes a little wide for a moment as what just happened sinks in.

b. But Bethany's not the only one who comes back to visit Relm this month. Really, in hindsight Relm should have expected this would happen.

As she passes by a park late one night, she hears someone wailing. The sound scrapes down her back like nails on a chalkboard. Despite her gut telling her to turn and run, whoever is crying sounds distressed. Relm ventures closer to the source of the sound until she comes upon someone bent over and crying. The park bench blocks a lot of her view, but Hawke still draws nearer. "Hello?"

By the time she realizes who it is, it's too late. Leandra turns around, eyes not her own staring at Hawke as she begins to get up. Relm gasps, stumbling back. "No-"

Leandra shambles forward. Her appearance flickers, and for a moment, she looks normal before flickering back. "My little girl..."

"Stop-"

And she's back to normal again, her brow furrowed and tone chiding, "Relm. Tone, please." Just as quickly as she changed, she's back to the shambling corpse, voice distant. "You've made me so proud..."

Relm screams before flinging streaks of lightning at the ghost. When the dust settles, Leandra is gone... for now. Hawke bends over, hands braced on her knees as her fingers dig in. "Fuck..."

c. Hawke's taken to sitting by the river and letting the sound of the running water drown out everything. The ghosts don't seem to come as often here, at least for her, and if nothing else, she can jump into the river and peace out pretty quickly. Okay, it's a little drastic, but she's getting rather tired of this...

Then someone sits next to her. And considering she heard no footsteps, she's fairly sure it's another ghost. Relm clenches her jaw, looking over to see who it is.

Her father smiles at her, sitting on the riverbank just like she is: knees up and elbows resting on them. His dark hair is lined with strands of gray. It's not all Relm inherited from him: her eyes, her smile, her magic... all from him.

A lump forms in her throat. While she loved Bethany and her mother, and mourns them, Malcolm is the one she misses the most. He'd been her rock, and the only person in her family who really understood her. Strange to remember, then, that it's been over thirteen years since she last saw him.

"...you're not going to do anything creepy like Mother and Bethany, are you?"

There's a hint of a laugh as Malcolm shakes his head, putting his hand on her shoulder.

"Thanks." Relm leans her head against his hand. It's cold; so different from the warmth she remembers always radiating off of him. But she doesn't care. It's better than nothing. And even though he'll disappear soon enough, she'll cling to this for as long as she can. "...I miss you."

2) Feast of the Dying

Luckily, Relm isn't being haunted 24/7. When her ghosts give her room to breathe, Hawke's finding herself getting caught up in all this masquerade business. She hated the parties in Kirkwall, and the masks remind her a lot of Orlais. But there's no one she has to schmooze with, and no fat, pompous nobles to drone on at her about the declining value of Antivan flour mills. Also, no poorly veiled hints at marriage arrangements. And the masks are just for the night. All these things are agreeable enough that she decides to give the masquerade a try.

Though her casual wear hardly screams fashionable, Relm does, surprisingly, have some taste in formalwear. Her dress and her mask match, at the very least. She's even wearing jewelry! Shock and awe! Granted, just a simple bracelet and necklace, but still.

Wine in hand, Hawke looks around, taking in the scenery and the people. Despite what should be a plain room, it looks so much like a creepy castle somewhere. Lightning flashes from the windows occasionally, even though the weather is calm outside. She grins a little. "This is some impressive enchanting."

3) Wildcard

Feel free to start your own prompt! Hawke'll be down to do just about anything, except probably the tests of courage. She ain't fucking with the ghosts.

**warning for rather disturbing, graphic imagery here in regards to Leandra and possibly Bethany. For those not familiar with Hawke's canon, Leandra died after getting kidnapped and being subjected to a Frankenstein-ian project. Bethany died by being crushed by an ogre, so body horror and blood warnings apply

Alex hates October. She's definitely really starting to hate it even more the longer she's outside and she's seeing what people are needing to go through when it comes to the ghosts that hover around them. And to think, there'd been a time when Alex definitely had called herself a fan of ghost stories! She wanted nothing more than to shake herself for that now.

Coming forward to see the woman turn into a zombie-like thing, there's no way that Alex can describe it as anything other than that. It looked like a zombie to her, and that was something that was new in Riverview, even in the month of October. But the zombie seemed to know Hawke, and that made her worry for her friend.

Arriving at the woman's side just following the spell, Alex moved onto her knees next to her, and spoke softly, while extending her hand towards the other woman's back. "Hawke..."

With everything that had gone on, Hawke hadn't even heard Alex approach. She nearly leaps away in fright when she realizes someone is next to her; it's only when she sees who it is that she relaxes a hair.

"Alex. I take it you saw all of that?"

To be safe, she looks around, trying to spot Leandra. Nothing so far, so they're safe for the moment. But if Bethany's ghost is any indication, she won't stay away for terribly long.

"Yeah," her voice is soft. "I'm sorry, but I did." Of course she did, because these weren't the sort of things that could ever happen when someone was alone. No, the ghosts seemed to want to rake people's wounds open and let things pour out from the old scars beneath, where other people could bear witness to them. It wasn't a good strategy, and Alex didn't think it would help anyone, but there wasn't a good god damn anyone could do about it other than just try and work through it.

"I think it might take her a little while to come back. The ghosts, this time of year, they're kind of unpredictable, but I think that what you did probably helped." Like zapping the ghost into the next year wouldn't fix things, but it might make her quiet for a little while. "Riverview sucks sometimes, and I'm sorry. Do you want to talk about it?"

"It's not your fault, so nothing to be sorry for." Hawke straightens out, trying to compose herself quickly. Having been the strong one, the dependable one for so long, she's forgotten what it's like to show such vulnerability - weakness she'd call it - in front of other people. It's just not what a Hawke does.

"Oh, I wouldn't be so sure. She might stay away, or, knowing her, she'll come roaring back with a vengeance. And a lecture on why good daughters don't electrocute their mothers." Which, okay, one really shouldn't do that normally, but when your mother comes as a ghost and freaks you out, there's only so much one can expect from a person.

At her question, Hawke looks something akin to stunned. And it takes her a moment to process why: she honestly can't remember the last time someone asked her that. People would sort of hint at it, asking if she was okay, that sort of thing. But Maker help her, she can't remember last when someone actually flat out asked her "Do you want to talk about it?" Not just assume she did or didn't, but left it up to her. To actually ask her. Granted, Hawke's always been the sort to keep her feelings close to her chest, but fuck, it would have been nice for someone to ask anyway.

"I, um... I don't know." It's better than 'no', which was her initial gut reaction. "I'm sure you're wondering why she looked like that, though."

There’s a little upward twist of her lips about the daughter comment because Alex’s mother is a force of nature and she gets that. Her mother would probably do the same honestly. But then again, Alex electrocuting her mother was outside of her abilities. Of course if they were she would definitely hear about it. There was no way in hell that she wouldn’t.

Besides if there was anyone who got bad jokes, in times of stress, it was Alex Reagan.

Sitting down, she just nodded at the non-answer answer. If there was one thing that alex was good at it was being open to listening to other people when they needed to decide. Of course there was also no way that she couldn’t answer the question Hawke posed to her. “Yeah,” she admitted softly. “It has crossed my mind.”

Hawke takes a seat next to her. It's not like moving elsewhere will prevent Leandra from reappearing. And as she thinks it over, she realizes that Alex has been far more forthcoming about her own matters than Hawke has been. Perhaps it's only fair, then, that she give a little.

And who knows? Maybe talking it out will actually help. She's not entirely convinced, but at least she can try. Alex deserves an explanation, if nothing else.

"My mother... well." Shit, where does she even start? "My father passed away about... thirteen years ago? It's been awhile. And my mother didn't remarry. Years later, though, she decided she wanted to try and find love again. She didn't talk to me about it much. I didn't even realize she had started seeing someone..."

Something she'll never forgive herself for. She'd been so wrapped up in her own crap that she hadn't bothered to take note of what her mother was doing. Of course, it didn't help that Leandra never bothered to bring it up, either. "A couple years earlier, a local templar had been convinced that someone was killing women in Kirkwall. They were going missing and he didn't think them unrelated. A husband of one of the missing women I talked to said he noticed that she had a vase of white lilies left for her the day she went missing." An innocuous detail at the time, until it came back to haunt her.

"The day my mother died, I came home to find those sitting on the table."

Oh that was bad. Even before anything else hearing that Hawke hadn’t known about the man her mother was seeing was never a good thing. Alex had been a reporter for too long and had covered far too many local stories during her younger days for that. If someone didn’t tell someone that they were dating someone else it was like a red flag— no one should really need to ask. So, she was already bracing herself for the worst when it came to that.

Bracing herself for the inevitable next part, Alex just reached over and put her hand on Hawke’s arm for support when she got to the worst of it. A serial killer was definitely the worst of it in Alex’s opinion honesty. Of course that didn’t prevent the soft exhale of “oh my god.”

And of course it also didn’t stop the inevitable questions that came because of course Alex had to ask about it. “Did you end up working together with the knight to find the man who had killed her?” Because honestly that seemed like the sort of thing that Hawke would do.

"Ah, right. I missed that part." Poor Emeric; she feels a little bad for gleaning over it, but her mind was all over the place. "I'm sure if he had lived that long he would have, but no. Emeric was killed a couple years earlier. He got a little too close. After he was killed, though, the disappearances seemed to have stopped, so I thought the killer had fled the city."

Big mistake.

"When I saw the flowers, I gathered my friends and we spanned the city trying to find her. My uncle helped. He came across a boy who'd seen her. The kid pointed out to where she had gone with the man." She remembers the blood trail they had found, and the way her heart had all but stopped. "We tracked them down to the foundry where we had found the remains of another woman about four or five years earlier." Ninette, the first victim she had heard about, though not the very first. "After searching the place, we found a trapdoor that led down. When we got down there, we found the man. And my mother."

For all the awful things she had seen, nothing prepared her for the sight of her mother. "You see, the man - Quentin - was a mage. And he had had a wife. She died years earlier. Instead of being a normal person and just mourning and moving on he... The damn bastard. He thought he'd build himself a new wife. Recreate her. All those women he killed? They had physical features that matched his wife's: fingers, legs, skin color, eyes..." Her hands clenched against her thighs. "My mother had the misfortune of sharing a similar face."

Over the last three years (and even before even if working at PNWS had tempered some of the harshness that she might have been exposed to if Alex had been working as a regular reporter) she had seen death first hand and she had nights where she could still smell too much blood for a woman who had been hanged to death. But that was nothing to having someone who she actually loved and cared for being taken by a serial killer.

"Jesus," the word was soft, an exclamation rather than any sort of attempt at an interruption. Sometimes things moved from Alex's brain to her mouth without any sort of filter, and that word was one of them. Her face was expressive, and there was the shock on it and concern for her friend, and of course knowing that this wasn't a story that had any sort of happy ending, not based on the ghost that she'd seen.

Of course, she hadn't expected the rest of it. "Oh my god," her voice was soft at the mention of sharing a face with a dead woman and losing it. "That's terrible! Your poor mother! I can't imagine needing to go and find that. Did you kill the guy?" There was little denying in her voice that Alex hoped that she had done, he'd deserved it.

Most of Hawke's stories don't have happy endings, sadly. She doesn't know if the overall story of her life is going to have a happy one. It doesn't seem likely. This particular tale, though, is among the most horrifying and heartbreaking.

"I did." A lot of that fight passed by in a blur for her. Some parts she's flat out forgotten, blacked out from the heartbreak and rage. Quentin hadn't died a pleasant death; Hawke made sure of it. "When he... put all the parts together, his magic allowed the body to talk and move. But with his death, the magic faded and she died. At least she was able to talk to me before she did." Small mercies, but they got to say their good-byes. It's more than what she got with Bethany.

"Good." There's a harsh edge to her voice that perhaps some people wouldn't have expected from Alex, who was generally a kind person, but some people? Some people need to be stopped from doing the thing that they were doing. And it wasn't as if jail was an effective thing with something like this. She couldn't see it working, not with the relatively small things that she knew about magic and Hawke's world. So, it's good that he was dead and couldn't do this to anyone else.

But the harshness melted quickly, and Alex's warmer side prompted her to put a hand on Hawke's arm and just give it a little squeeze of comfort. "At least you got the chance to say goodbye. And if it helps any, I don't think most of the ghosts here are here to hurt people. I just think they have some message. Maybe she just wants to be able to check in and see how you're doing."

As good as it could be. It didn't bring Leandra back or the other women he killed, but they were avenged if nothing else. For what little that was really worth.

Hawke leans into her touch, glancing back at her. "You mean come here to lecture me some more. She was always good at that." And blaming her for things. Hawke rubs a hand over her face. Leandra loved her, she knows that, but her mother also was a pro at the guilt trip. A tactic she employed at regular, especially when she was angry and or hurt.

"I think that's sort of what moms do, isn't it? Mine's the same way." Of course, probably less so than Hawke's, but her mother still laid the guilt trip on her every Sunday for a year about when was she gonna get married, and settle down. And then the guilt trip shifted to when she was going to bring Strand to meet her parents.

A year before they started dating. So Alex got it.

But she does wrap her arms around Hawke, giving her a full on hug, because if there's anyone who needs one right now, it's her.

"Maybe. I don't know. Most of my friends didn't know or remember their mothers, so it's been hard to compare." She never asked Anders or Sebastian about their mothers, and she wishes she had. Maybe they could have provided some perspective. But all she knows is how her mother was, and she's not sure if that's the norm or if, as she fears, her mother wasn't that great of one.

She leans against Alex, appreciating the gesture. "Thanks. A hug is nice sometimes."

Alex can't help but frown at that; it's an experience that she hasn't had. But then again she's from a vastly different world that Hawke is, so it makes sense that it would be. Speaking with authority, Alex just adds, "in my experience it is, honestly. I mean, not all moms and stuff, but a lot of them are like that. They just want the best for their kids. And of course they think they know what's best." Alex's mother definitely did.

"And of course. I'm a hugger, it's what I do." Alex just calmly rubbed Hawke's back for a second, letting the other woman decide to pull away when the hug was done.

"Did yours guilt you for everything? 'Relm, why didn't you do this?' or 'How could you let Bethany do that?' It was always what I did or didn't do."

There's no shortage of venom in her voice, and she immediately regrets it. She rubs a hand over her face. When she looks back up, she finds Leandra staring at her from across the way. Luckily, she's looking normal and not the mangled abomination. Hawke snorted. "What? It's true. You always did it. And you always had an excuse, the few times I called you out on it."

The venom in Relm's voice surprises her, and Alex just gives her back another rub, before she swallowed a bit at the appearance of the ghost who was standing in front of them, staring. Yep, still weird, still not great, but Alex isn't going to let the ghost make her flee from Hawke when her friend needed her. So she just nodded slowly, responding to Relm's question to hers while ignoring the look on her mother's face.

"Yeah." The word is quiet and calm, before the next sentence lightens up to something more chipper and more actually Alex, "all the time, actually."

"Tch. Well, shit. Sorry you had to suffer it, too."

Leandra's ghost continues to stare, though she looks a little sad. Guilty, even. Relm looks away, pushing some of her hair back in a nervous gesture. Even years dead, and her mother still had the power to make her fidget and doubt herself. "What, it's true. You always did. Bethany's death, Carver becoming a Warden... all my fault, according to you. I'm almost surprised you didn't blame me for letting you die."

Despite the fact that she wasn't there, and didn't see what happened, Alex couldn't stop herself from protesting Relm's words, because honestly in her mind, there was no way this could be her friend's fault. "Even if she thinks so, it's not your fault. You don't have control over anyone's actions other than your own." Alex's gaze was flinty, when she looked at the ghost, making direct contact with her for the first time. "No matter what your mother says, Relm. This is not your fault. None of it."

This whole ghosts thing is a total bummer.

It's been about a week, and Roy Harper has pretty much resigned himself to wandering around the Quarantine seeing if there's anyone who needs someone to talk to, or just be around after seeing a dead loved one. After all, most of the people that Roy might see that would hurt his feelings are people who are still alive, so it's not like they're going to show up as ghosts. And whatever ghosts might show up...hell, who even knows if he'd know their faces anymore? He'd either been so crushed on rock bottom he'd barely remember much more than a blur, or they'd passed before he had a chance to remember them. So he's in a pretty decent position, all things considered.

He sees the woman sitting on the bank when he's out running his usual path along the river, with a ghostly man sitting beside her, and takes note of where she is just in case. On his way back, she's still sitting there but by herself. For a moment, he hesitates, but then he slows down and veers over toward her. Leaning down, he offers her a little half-hearted smile.

"Hey, you good?"

Hawke had barely heard him run past the first time, a bit more caught up with talking to Malcolm than paying attention. It's some time later before she hears someone coming back the same way. She expects them to just keep going, and she doesn't even realize it's the same person.

She turns her head when she hears the person approach, and admittedly, his question surprises her a bit (since Malcolm's vanished, for now, she has no idea what he's referring to). "I'm fine. Am I sitting in the spot reserved for the melancholy, they-who-sigh-heavily-as-they-stare-across-the-river-in-deep-thought sort? Someone needs to label these spots better." It's all teasing, of course, since that's her go-to.

Roy actually laughs at that, pushing his fingers back through his hair, smiling crookedly at her. He's still breathing a bit heavy, he can feel sweat at the small of his back, and he exhales a big huff of slightly-misty breath in the cool fall air.

"Well, I mean, sitting on the bank of the river and staring across is kinda a melancholy thing. Speaking from very personal experience."

Laughing again, he flops down on the grass about a foot away from her, legs splayed out, staring out at the river.

"Nah. I saw you talking to one of our spectral ghoulies earlier and wanted to check in. I've been seeing a lot of people struggling with them, you know?"

"Mmm, sure, I can see that. Sometimes it's just a thoughtful thing, too. Wanting a moment of quiet away from everything."

If she was going to be haunted, she'd prefer it if it was done away from others. Bad enough Alex and a few others had to see her mother in such a state.

She smiles ruefully. "He was much more well behaved than the other two who've been haunting my steps. Honestly, I was glad to see him."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

monthly mingle: FEAST OF THE DYING

Relm Hawke; OTA (please read CWs at the bottom)

B!

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