riverviewlogs | there is no place in the world we do not belong

Where are you?

Who are you?

You awaken in the middle of darkness. No—that’s not the right word. Awaken implies sleeping previously, and you’re upright. There’s a layer of dirt caking your bare feet, an ache in your muscles. You haven’t just awoken, but you realize these moments are the first you remember experiencing in your entire life. Your life….what is that, exactly? Who are you? You don’t know. You’re not sure you know anything, or have ever known anything.

How long has it been, that you’ve been wandering around here? It feels like forever, even though your experience of consciousness has only lasted about twenty minutes up to now. You don’t ever seem to get any further. The moon sets, but the sun doesn’t rise in its place. You trip on a root in the darkness, before another moon rises instead. You’re frightened by it. Desperation for the light aches stronger and sharper with each passing step. You’re not so sure how many more of those you can manage; your body is small and frail, undernourished, though you don’t really know enough to be aware of it. You’re not even sure how old you are.

You’re afraid of succumbing to the darkness, though. The perpetual night. The yearning for light carries you forward, through moon after moon after moon, but finally it comes. It’s so bright, overwhelming, but you bask in it like a wilting plant.

(A stranger approaches in the distance, calls out to you, but you’ve already pushed yourself too hard. You try to focus on the light before it all goes dark again)

Edited 2017-10-13 07:14 (UTC)

[ It doesn't take long for Rin to think his way out of this memory. Mostly because, like all drow, he is absolutely not afraid of the dark. He was born from it, he was raised in it, and he's more comfortable in absolute darkness than he ever will be in harsh light. So he endures this foreign sense of fear, this sense of smallness. He grits his teeth, even as his lavender eyes burn red, seeing beyond what the average human can see. ]

How terrible to fear something so comforting.

[The feelings transmitted to Rin are perhaps inconsistent with the man as he is now, sitting on a bench outside a cafe calmly having tea. He looks up at the sound of the voice, and his expression shifts to a frown as he sees the other's discomfort. It's obvious what's happened, though he can't quite guess what it is that Rin is referring to.]

Ah...what did you see?

Darkness, mostly. Overwhelming, all-consuming. Fear manifest, it seemed.

[ He raises an eyebrow. ]

Ringing a bell?

[Ohhhh.]

Yeah. That's about the earliest memory I still have.

[He lets out a softly amused sound; nowadays, the dark isn't quite so alarming. The Tokoyami allows him to navigate in the dark, and without such a total lack of awareness of anything, it doesn't feel quite so suffocating. He knows now, too, that there's no meaning in light without darkness.]

I would say it's in the nature of humans, to fear the unknown.

[A beat. He thinks of a blind girl whose eyes were touched by the Ganpuku, who became able to see not only into the world, but the future, yet never change what she saw. I think I would rather live in the darkness, remembering the light, she'd said.]

...But it can be a relief in other ways, too, I suppose.

[Perhaps it's a blessing, then, to be able to embrace that comfort entirely, without the fear.]

I don't think I ever got your name.

Edited 2017-10-23 03:53 (UTC)

[ He shrugs at that. As can be plainly seen, he ain't human ... and the culture of the Underdark is an alien, brutal thing. Not that he misses it overly much. ]

You can just call me Rin.

[ He might leave it there, but the sensation of the memory chews on him still, pulls at him. ]

For the drow, darkness is a shield. A safe haven. It's the light that frightens most of us.

Ginko.

[He's never heard of a drow, before. Humans are the only sapient species in his world; the mushi of a different manner of existence altogether. He's not had much of a chance to ask the man questions before, but he's been intrigued from the outset by his unique features, and the confirmation that he isn't human only adds to Ginko's interest.]

Your species really doesn't require sunlight at all?

[Even some mushi, like the hihami, needed the sunlight; during eclipses, it split off into a root and a core, the core ascending into the sky so as to gather nutrients while protecting the root by calling other mushi to it, to provide shadow.....

The thought of a flesh-and-blood creature that could survive off no light at all--whose existence didn't depend on it even tangentially--it's somewhat strange to imagine.]

Edited (oops i hecked up a canon detail) 2017-10-23 22:47 (UTC)

[ Rin shrugs. ]

Makes me a little sick, actually.

[ Not so much anymore. Not after so much time on the surface. But he still doesn't enjoy it. ]

We were born in the dark. Most of us die there, too.

What about food?

[This is such a strange and fascinating phenomenon to him, honestly. He's utterly intrigued.]

Do you have crops and such that can grow in the darkness as well?

Ciel absorbed the memory, taking it in stride. It's more mild than any of his own, he could handle it well enough, but come out of it the teen couldn't help but stumble. The remembered exhaustion that wasn't his own confusing his own feet.

"What in the seven hells?" A memory, his mind registers. Not like the ones he'd seen so far, not a dream and not shown for all the network to see. His good eye flicked over towards the person he'd bumped into and-

yes, it was him. He wasn't entirely sure how he knew but it seemed right.

Ciel stumbles and bumps into Ginko, and he turns toward the source of the sensation. The boy seems to have regained his balance already, so he doesn't need to reach out to steady him.

Nonetheless, he asks: "Are you alright?"

He had to stare for a moment, equal parts confused and surprised. Had he not realized what had happened? He'd at least shared in the dream-memories so both involved had been aware after. This felt more real an exchange.

"I- yes, I'm alright." He had to remember his manners first and the straightened, glancing around them to ensure they didn't stand in anyone's way.

"Just what was that?" He could relate, a frail body, being malnourished. He'd spent time like that himself but he hadn't been left wandering and confused about who he was, where he was.

He hadn't realized, no, but he's experienced it enough times that he figures it out immediately. These incidents are becoming quite troublesome, aren't they...

"You'll need to tell me what you saw, first."

The trouble with it not being a dreamscape or a broadcast is that he has no way of knowing which memory was plucked from his mind at that precise moment. He's happy to explain, of course; has no cause to hide anything about himself, but he will need some manner of context clues first.

"Confusion." He answered immediately and then thought back to the details. "Confusion, aches, a lack of memory. And walking- for days?"

He didn't want to hold too tightly to memories that weren't his own. Especially that fear. Ciel himself had set himself on a path of darkness and fearing it wasn't acceptable.

Confusion could refer to any manner of things, as could aches, but it's the reference to walking and a lack of memory that finally solidifies what Ciel experienced enough for Ginko to be able to recognize it. The earliest memory he can reach...it must be distressing, for someone to receive it without any kind of context.

"That's right. My memories were devoured by a Tokoyami at some point in my childhood. I 'came to' in that forest, though I have no way of knowing how or why I was there."

Ginko's probably not even his real name, from what he knows about the Tokoyami now as a full-fledged mushishi. When you can't remember anything about yourself....come up with a name, any name, to escape--but you won't remember anything of your life before when you do.

"I'm sorry. Experiencing that must have been unsettling for you."

That didn't clear anything up for the teen, though the word seemed vaguely Japanese. Maybe he should have listened to Tanaka's stories more often when he'd been a while. That aside, it certainly sounded like a creature to be worried about.

"It's fine." He was confident enough in that, at least for himself. "I've experienced worse but I can't imagine how that must have been."

Well, he could but imagination could only take someone so far. "Did you find anyone you knew from before?"

Wandering like that, alone and without memory, couldn't have been even remotely safe. And there had been someone at the end there, calling.

If that wasn't the response he was expecting, Ginko doesn't show it. Ginko has met plenty of village children with ordinary lives...but he's also seen many that have suffered. Due to famine, or disease, or natural disaster...the influence of mushi, or the lack of it. Some could pose danger to humans, it was true, but an area barren of mushi was typically equally barren of life. Crops wouldn't flourish, and children born to such an area often were frail and sickly.

"I didn't. Or rather, if I have, they didn't recognize me, and I couldn't recognize them, obviously."

His hair and eye color aren't normal, he knows. And while he no longer has the specific knowledge of how they came to be that way, Suguro had suggested long ago that it too was related to his encounter with the Tokoyami. It's as good an explanation as any; he doesn't think about it much, having long since accepted the portion of his life that was lost to him forever.

"Most likely, I was traveling somewhere, but got separated from whoever I was with at the time."

And those people....are either dead or abandoned him intentionally. After all, Suguro had also been able to tell that his condition of attracting mushi had nothing to do with the Tokoyami trapped within him. If he had lived in a village, he would've only brought it the same kind of disasters he did to the village mushi-shi who used him to gain work before shooing him away.

Again, it's not something he spends a lot of time trying to figure it out.

And that was entirely alright with him. Ciel wasn't as willing to share but he also hadn't shared one of his own on contact, for which he was thankful. Hearing this, he could only imagine what this guy would think of what he'd done in the past. Then again, it was equally possibly to had shared something more pleasant, even if those memories were more rare.

"You can't possibly have changed so much since it happened." It wouldn't have occurred to Ciel that his hair and eyes were likely not their original color. One of his own eyes were changed but he never showed it and he wasn't about to guess anything equally supernatural to be in play there.

"There were no frequently traveled routes to look into later?"

Ginko's world doesn't have anything like demons that can be contracted with, really, so he wouldn't particularly have anything to compare it with; despite the fear in his own memory, Ginko as an adult bears no ill will against the Tokoyami in his eye. It was simply living, just as he was. The result is unfortunate, but there's nothing that can be done for it.

He simply shakes his head at the boy's remark. To some extent, he appreciates what Ciel is trying to do--give him some kind of hope for reconnecting with those people from his past--but there isn't much point dwelling on any of it.

"My hair and eye color aren't natural," he explains, "And my original name was lost in the encounter with the Tokoyami."

Simply put, there was just no information that could be used to connect him to his original identity; in those days, fingerprinting didn't exist, after all, nor were people aware of the unique DNA of every creature.

"There's no way to tell which direction I could've come from in the forest, either."

It's such a large forest, and there were many, many routes within it. Many ways to get lost, too.

Really, Ciel couldn't imagine not having memories of who he'd been, knowing where he'd been. Of potentially having things that could be used against him that he couldn't help. Or losing the resources he might have had.

"What exactly are Tokoyami?" The hair and eyes were slightly less of a curiosity, especially since he knows several non-humans. Only one had silver hair, but Ronald's was strange as well, with the two colors.

He wasn't a fan of wandering forests himself, so he'd never learned a lot about dealing with being in the forest, or tracking and trails. The only one Ciel had gone into willingly had been on a job for the queen.

Edited 2017-10-24 04:34 (UTC)

"Ah, right."

He's usually better at remembering to explain things as he goes, given the line of work he's in, but things have been strange at the quarantine, lately, and he hadn't realized he'd forgotten.

"Tokoyami is a species of mushi." Of course, that in itself is its own complicated explanation. He thinks it may be best to start from the beginning, here.

"It might be easier to explain with an analogy." He holds up his arm, and points to the fingers and thumb individually.

"Imagine that the thumb of your hand represents plant life, and the four fingers represent animal life." He points to the middle finger, then. "Humans would be here, at the farthest point."

Then, the thumb traces back down his palm, all the way to the wrist.

"Fungi and microorganisms would be here, where the various forms of life begin to meld together. But there is an even more fundamental form of life--"

And then, the thumb traces back even further, up past the arm and the shoulder...all the way to the heart.

"--Mushi. Close to life itself, in its purest form."

Edited 2017-10-24 05:49 (UTC)

He listened, thoughtful, trying to understand. Ciel was smart, he always had been, a genius at chess as a child, and an Earl at ten. So he was fairly sure he had the basic idea of it as he let his eye follow the trail Ginko made across his hand and down his arm.

"So... If I'm understanding correctly, they're spirits? Souls?"

That was the closest he could relate them to, and partly because of Undertaker's explanation about souls, life and death, when they'd been on the Campania. Before that, he might have scoffed a bit at the idea.

Ginko shakes his head, at that.

"No, mushi don't have souls." Aside from the lack of a physical body, it's the main thing that sets them apart from creatures of flesh and blood, such as themselves.

"They are of an existence separate from our own, part of our reality and yet removed from it at the same time. Few of them are capable of individual thought, and fewer still of anything we might call 'emotion.' "

They possess will, and some can become capable of learning, even speech, such as that one Watahaki he'd encountered...but for the most part, they simply existed.

"They are 'living', like animals, yet inanimate, like objects."

It's a confusing explanation, he realizes. As he'd told that boy, Shinra...it was difficult to explain a sensory experience like the presence of mushi, much as someone born blind would have no frame of reference for the colors red or blue. But Ginko is patient with it; he's had many years of experience answering these questions, and he's patient enough to continue with the conversation until Ciel is either satisfied with the answers he offers or is prepared to move on.

Edited 2017-10-24 06:54 (UTC)

Ciel was no expert but he thought every living thing had a soul. Except plants. So every sentient creature, and it did sound like they were sentient. At least someone of them. Suddenly, the teen was struck with an almost overwhelming sense of gratitude that he'd been born in England. It didn't seem like this would be easy to understand even if he'd been from this mans world.

"So the closer comparison would be the plants and fungus?" The question came out then he sighed, frustration directed at himself more than anything. "I apologize, this is a bit beyond anything I have experience with."

"It's alright. Most in my world don't have experience with them, either. Because they're so close to life itself, their existences can be rather ambiguous--many are unable to perceive them at all."

Even those who could see mushi didn't always understand them. Ginko himself has had many, many years to learn all he has.

"At any rate, it depends on the kind of mushi. Some have a greater sense of will than others."

there is no place in the world we do not belong

one.

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lmfao mushishi is so complicated im sorry

lol it's okay

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