Inbox

[skeletonkeay]

INBOX OF GERARD KEAY

Point of contact for Pumpkin Hollow. Gerry can be reached by phone, mail, or a visit to his shop during business hours. Pinhole Printing and Binding is open from 11am to 6pm every day except Tuesday, because fuck Tuesday, or unless Gerry deigns otherwise.

code

Comments

[misbegottendreamer]

"A little. He spoke about what he felt his role was in the hive. He called himself 'a room without doors.' I feel like he understands the nature of what happened to us more than most would. But he seemed much more concerned about discussing the well-being of others, yourself included."

[skeletonkeay]

Gerry frowns deeply at this, concerned and puzzled. What the hell does that mean? A room without doors... trapped? Useless, somehow?

At Drelasa's last remark, Gerry lets out a huff of air. "Yeah, that sounds like him. That... abject refusal to worry about himself is why I'm always so damn worried for him. And I do get it, I'm not exactly the self-care king or whatever. But he's just so avoidant and I don't know how to get through to him that he can talk to me. That I want him to."

Ironically, Gerry fails to comment on his own well-being.

"...Wanna split this potato bread with me?"

[misbegottendreamer]

“He didn’t strike me as avoidant. To me, it felt more like he’s so accustomed to these sorts of things that it doesn’t worry him as much as the needs of his neighbors. Now, I could have been misreading, but he felt fairly forthcoming during the whole conversation. And yes, I would be happy to share the bread with you.”

givingstide.

[decrypter]

Wrapped up for Gerry with a tag that Gwen helped write, there are two parts to this gift. One is a bag of cookies infused with holiday spices, iced and on the sweeter side. The other is a blend of black tea, and when prepared according to the instructions, it comes out strong and slightly bitter. Combining the two, the flavors marry well and create a peaceful, tasty experience. He can share with Cecil, or not.

Read All About It.

[cyansoldier]

Pinhole Printing and Binding…

The sort of place you find information, right? She hopes so. The man who'd helped her off the boat— no, scratch that— tried to help her off the boat (and who nearly earned himself a whack in the process), hadn't offered any useful intelligence. Just nonsense. A boatman’s sea-sick drivel. She docked knowing nothing, stepped ashore knowing nothing, and now travels down a lonely path into town knowing nothing.

The white-haired woman wasn’t any help either, her earnest message about the futility of revenge falling on deaf ears.

Catherine Church Agent Carolina feels naked without her armor.

Like a crab with its shell pulled off, soft, gummy abdomen exposed. To be picked at by birds.

Focus.

Info, that’s what she needs.

This is just infiltration. Plans gone temporarily awry.

Carolina pushes through the door, marshaling her face and body into a shape that deflects from her own internal freak-out. The air smells of paper-pulp and fresh ink.

“Excuse me?”

[skeletonkeay]

There is a man at the counter of the shop, tying up bundles of newspapers. They are to go out to the newsstands around town, when someone comes by to pick them up. He's about to tie off the last stack of Pumpkin Hollow Gazette issues in brown twine when a woman in newcomer's clothes walk in with a look he's grown familiar with.

Like a trapped wolverine.

Long black hair showing blonde roots is tied in a loose ponytail as a man with charcoal smudge eyeliner and eyes tattooed on every single joint looks up from his work. He speaks with an English accent, though a bit nasally and not nearly as posh as the one she's used to hearing out of Wyoming. "Afternoon. Just make landfall?"

[cyansoldier]

The man she finds working the front desk is... nothing like Carolina expects. There's modernity to him so unlike his place of work; smokey eyes, tattoos, a little unkempt— better suited for a nightclub than a honky-tonk print shop like this.

Her face says as much, the effort she's made to arrange herself abandoned. When you're so used to wearing a helmet (and when said helmet is taken from you in an unwelcomed transport from war-torn space to Victorian resort island), expressions are often forgotten.

What this man finds is a woman standing ram-rod straight, red hair (dyed, of course), pulled back into a ponytail. Her skin is pallid and her eyes are crystal- a near-transparent green. She looks sick. She's holding herself together and failing.

"Yeah." Find your footing. "Yeah, just now. Those newspapers, are those free?"

[skeletonkeay]

The reaction gives Gerry a laugh, which escapes from his smirking mouth as a soft breath. He makes no remark, just offering her a paper from his yet to be tied stack.

"Town hall pays for 'em. They're the easiest way to get safety updates. Y'know, for the monsters or whatever."

His own eyes are a pale grey, like polished steel or a sky before rain breaks. But in certain light, they have sort of an electric green iridescence to them that cuts to the heart of whatever he's looking at, making it impossible to avoid the pervasive feeling of being seen. This sensation is not helped by all the eyes tattooed onto him. Every single knuckle, his wrists, even his throat. The only tattoo that isn't an eye is the pumpkin leaf poking out of his sleeve, connected to a vine that runs under the fabric and ostensibly up his arm.

There is a fire in her. A fire that has eaten up so much of her life. Gerry can see the scorch marks that others can't. There are also distorted faces crawling over her skin and bullet holes chewing at her heart, a fog of isolation behind the eyes, a trace of web in the hair, but those burn wounds scar her deep. What has she lost? What potential has burned away? What violence has been wrought upon her?

He says nothing on the matter.

"So! What fun adventures did you get dragged out of to be here?"

[cyansoldier]

"Is that some kind of joke?" A humorless beat. It gaps the space between hand and newspaper and she gets a sense it isn't. "Right. What kind of monsters?" She takes it, loose pages unfolding in a noise not so unlike the flapping of wings. The motion feels ridiculous; a leisure she isn't used to. One requiring she be in a chair with legs kicked up on the nearest desk, and in not doing so she performs the function incorrectly.

Carolina reads, however the words go nowhere. She reads and finds she cannot recollect the last sentence. Can't make out the images printed in halftones on the page. Not because she's incompetent, rather because she can't shake the feeling of being watched.

Too focused on the eyes. So many of them, real and fake, staring through her.

Carolina hasn't a single idea what this man thinks he'll see, but she doesn't like it. And so back into the newspaper she goes, expression turned stony. Something about a Love Tunnel— God, is this all nonsense?

"Nothing very interesting. A stroll through the park, let's leave it at that— what does half of this stuff mean?"

[skeletonkeay]

"It rotates," Gerry says casually. "Last month it was demons. It's usually demons. Sometimes its eldritch monstrosities, or man-eating spiders, or our own minds. Little wooden creatures that will turn you into a tree, or customized nightmares, or bugs that possess your body and mind, or cultists, or giant crabs, or bloody Krampus. The list goes on and on. There'll be some wretched thing in March to deal with, I'm sure."

He watches her expression turn and his eyes dart away. Staring is hard not to do.

Gerry decides instead to fixate on her ponytail. Pretty color... He tries to commit it to memory, wanting to paint with that color later.

"If you're keen to be genre-aware, you've arrived in a horror comedy, and you're the butt of the jokes. But it's not all bad! Lots of space between to breathe. Honestly, it's a vacation compared to the constant slog of supernatural bullshit I came from."

[cyansoldier]

She sniffs. Turns a page; infrastructure turned confectionary, cloaked figures caught on winter winds... "Seems to me like you've gone from one supernatural slog to another. How's this one any different?"

You're the butt of the jokes. The expression pierces Carolina's hubris like a round of ammunition. An animal pulled mid-hunt and expected to play, to be laughed at by... whatever it is that rules here. Facial musculature twists and twists until she realizes she's scowling.

Her lips go slack.

A mask cracked, reconstructed, cracked again and brought back to life soon after.

Funny, she still can't tell if he's joking... It's starting to roil her nerves.

"I don't follow."

[skeletonkeay]

"It was a slog because it was constant. And all of it was profoundly horrible. Here, sometimes houses turn to chocolate or you get a curse that makes goats hate you. Back home, I spent three years chasing evil clowns embodying the abstraction of identity while they roamed the globe stripping the skin off of people to recycle it for making monsters, trying to stop them from turning the world into a merry go round of endless incomprehensible unreality, and I got sidetracked in France by a guy who'd become an apartment complex for sentient beetles, and then again in Australia having to seal a man-eating pig into concrete."

Yeah, that's a ton of information. A lot of it completely insane. But the point isn't for her to parse it--- it's to demonstrate just how challenging it is to parse it all.

"If the real monsters only show up a few times a month, and the rest are just tricks designed to make a fool of me, I'll take it."

He notes the scowl. How could he not? He does, after all, have such an eye for detail. But again he does not remark. Gerry shrugs again, casual. "And in between, I get to have a life of my own. I'm not ashamed to say that's new to me. My last crack at life was centered around what I could do for other people."

[cyansoldier]

What to digest first; the parade of evil clowns? The filleting of human beings for the purpose of reconstruction— whatever that means? Abjection in its most unreasonable form, suggesting the real existence of the supernatural? But men can't turn into buildings. Beetles don't lease apartments. Curses are an excuse for poor skill and goats hate everyone. Carolina strains, trying her damndest to make sense of it all or at the very least network it from her ears into her brain.

And if this is a joke, it's an elaborate one.

His postamble cuts loose the stubborn threads that hold her arms up and she lowers her newspaper to look at him. Really look at him, not so different from the way he'd looked at her (excluding, of course, the cobwebs and burns and every other awful physical manifestation). Who she sees is uncomfortably familiar.

"Three years is a long time. But if they were so bad, why chase them? Seems counterproductive, doesn't it?"

[skeletonkeay]

"Had to stop 'em ending the world, mate. Unless we wanted everything to be evil clowns forever. Which we didn't," Gerry remarks. "My world was kind of a lot. Can't say I miss it. But I did find out it didn't turn into a clown world from some folks who came here after me, so that's nice."

He wears a light smile on his face. Half joking, half genuine. He extends a hand.

"Name's Gerry, with a G. You?"

[cyansoldier]

Somehow, Carolina musters the energy for a smile. Tired, chary, a half-assed excuse, but a smile nonetheless. "I never did like clowns. Even the nice ones. If you can call any of them nice. You probably aren't so inclined to do so."

She clasps his hand in hers, firm. An officer's shake.

And perhaps a bit more firm than necessary.

"Strange name. Mine's Carolina. With a C."

The redhead deflates a little now that pleasantries are out of the way. "You don't have anywhere I can sit for a second, do you?

[skeletonkeay]

"Eh, it's short for Gerard." He shrugs lightly, then opens the wooden flap-gate of the counter and pushes a chair out from behind it. "There ya go. Not for sale, though."

He pats it twice, then comes out from behind the counter and hops up to sit on it.

"You smoke?"

[cyansoldier]

"So your name's Gerard with a G," She makes an attempt at ribbing. "Got it."

Carolina tips her head gratefully. Takes up the seat he's offered, folding her newspaper across her lap like a napkin at some fancy restaurant. She watches him hoist himself up. Big rubber boot soles thump against the side of the counter.

"Oh. No, I don't."

[skeletonkeay]

"No worries, just thought I'd offer." Gerry shrugs. "Takes the edge off. Terrible for your health, but hey, no one stays dead here. Might as well make the most of the extra lives."

[cyansoldier]

A flash of metal. Click, flick. Like a tiny engine igniting or the flash before the pow and smoke of gunfire. She likes the smell; fuel and hot metal. "Terrible for your breath, too."

Wait. Did she hear him right?

Carolina turns in her seat to face him, elbows pressed against knees. "So if I walked off a cliff, or you crushed my head under one of your print presses, I'd come right back?"

[skeletonkeay]

"You'd come back tomorrow," Gerry corrects her. "You'd have to spend the rest of the day as a ghost. Why? Looking to go barreling bravely into danger?"

[cyansoldier]

"Depends on what kind. Got any recommendations?"

Nicotine smoke makes her nose crinkle.

"Usually throwing myself into things isn't quite my style, but contrived danger— that, I could maybe get behind." She needs out of here, and if she has to die again and again to make it happen, so be it.

"But I get it. It's against whatever cosmic-supernatural rules exist. I've heard that enough already."

[skeletonkeay]

Sorry, Carolina, you'll have to get used to the nicotine smoke if you're going to be hanging around Gerry. He reeks of the stuff. He fiddles with a brass lighter idly.

"I'm guessing the transition from a totally non-supernatural world to one with magic and monsters just parading around like they own the place is a bit of a culture shock. But you'll acclimate. Most people do, and you strike me as adaptable."

She also kind of strikes him as the sort of person who could really use some external verbal affirmation, but he can't place where he gets that impression. (Certainly not because he sees some of himself in her.) He most definitely doesn't remark on that part.

"So, what sort of place is it, then? The world you came from. Completely average city in the mid-2000s? Wild west? Sci-fi space adventure? Wild west sci-fi space adventure?"

[cyansoldier]

Oh, that's alright. If she concentrates hard enough, it's like she's at a very shitty barbecue. Nicotine braised meat with a side of paper pulp. Anyone want a shot of black ink, too?

She watches black-nailed hands fuss with his lighter, her expression sort of far away. Old friends, same habits. Same stupid lighters. Same lame party tricks.

"Thanks, I am. But— yeah, this stuff's way beyond my wheelhouse."

The only clowns she'd ever had the pleasure of meeting were those damn Reds and Blues. Idiots, all of them. The least they could have done was made her a balloon dog for her efforts.

"I guess you could call it a sci-fi space adventure. Grew up on Earth, Earth extended its reach far into the galaxy and before you could blink, war. We called them The Covenant. They were aliens, and not the nice green kind."

[skeletonkeay]

Gerry snorts out a laugh. "Us humans are pretty good at that, aren't we? War. What was it over, anyway?" Hands on the counter, he leans forward coyly. "Did someone steal someone else's toy from the sandbox?"

[cyansoldier]

"Remarkably."

Gerry's question, by no fault of his own asking, draws a groan from Carolina's throat. She presses a hand to her forehead like she's got a headache.

"It's— complicated. There's an alien race called The Covenant, like I said. They're incredibly advanced in their technology but their customs are old, sacred. Their religious leaders believed that humans were a contradiction to their principles and so they began a genocide. We didn't stand a chance and we didn't win very often, either. But... Yes. There was stealing."