[Semi-Closed] Help, I'm an Avatar!

[skeletonkeay]

Who: Gerry and any Avatars. Moral support guests welcome by invite!
What: New Avatar Support Group
When: Early November
Where: Pinhole Printing & Binding
Warning(s): Anything relevant to the Fears and the Magnus event, but should be discussion only.




There are chairs set up in the print shop. Sales shelves have been scooted off to the side, and a table is reserved for a few simple snacks.

Gerard "Gerry" Keay sits on the sales counter. He's tall, slender, bedecked in black, and covered from head to toe in eye tattoos. When everyone is seated with their finger-foods, he begins.

"Welcome, everyone, thanks for dropping in. I know this isn't exactly a fun conversation for most people here," he begins. "But do your best to just think of it like puberty, yeah? Just worse."

Gerry then proceeds to break down the semantics of his home world. What the Fears are, and how they work. What each of them is, and what having it as a patron means for you. He talks about his own experiences, allows some other people from his world to talk about theirs. What it was like before, how the apocalypse impacted those that were there, what it's like in Pumpkin Hollow without the Fears directly here. How to define your relationship with your patron. How to cope.

And then, he opens the floor. For questions, private conversation, whatever you need. If you need a well-informed person to talk to, please feel free to approach him after the seminar for a chat. He may also track you down himself if he can see you're needing it. He's a smart boy. With lots and lots of eyes.

Comments

for Gerry directly

[liesdontfindyou]

CT pays very close attention, throughout the presentation. She always would have, even before the change—it's that sort of hunger for information that got her here, after all—but it feels different, now. And sometimes, to someone with the eye for it, there's a golden gleam to her dark eyes that's not quite natural.

Once there's chance, she comes up to catch him on his own. "You're... we're connected to the same one of these things now, right?"

(She's not completely unaware of who he is to a certain redhead in their lives, given how nosy she's always been even before now, but she's got very little intention of going near that tripwire.)

[skeletonkeay]

Gerry nods sharply. "Yep. You, me, Sims, and the television makes four. The Eye's popular, I guess. Which makes sense, it's definitely one that has some obvious benefits comparatively." He offers a handshake. "Nice to meet you. M'sure we'll be talking shop a lot."

[liesdontfindyou]

CT shakes the hand, with the hand of her own with the scar across the palm (she's been having odd nightmares about it opening up into a eyeball ever since... everything).

"I'm sure we will. I— yeah, I can't deny that how... useful, it sounded, led me here." She laughs, dryly. "Sims made one hell of a sales pitch."

She doesn't sound angry. More like she's still wrapping her head around it.

[skeletonkeay]

"Oh, it's handy, for sure. Here." He hands her a written list of the Fears, and their descriptions. Along with something else.

...Lonely marks tend to be fainter and harder to see, looking like wisps of smoke that create striations across the body. They can often look like other things...

...Eye marks are very distinctive. You'll now 'em when you see 'em.


...often found over the face. The Stranger likes to leave marks that look like masks that can sometimes be difficult to see the person's actual face through if strong enough...

"Figured you could use a translation."

[liesdontfindyou]

Her eyebrows go up in recognition. "Oh, yeah, definitely. I'd been noticing these, obviously, but—"

Even with all the new knowledge starting to flow in, it's not like the Eye has ever been one to give its people comprehensive knowledge without effort and so learning about the Fears as a whole is an... ongoing process.

"I already recognise the Lonely, at least, my uh— someone I care about was stuck there most of the two weeks, so, I've been seeing a lot of that." The rest she'll have to read through fully and commit to memory, start categorising in her head. What already felt, to her, like a filing system of memories and information now feels even more so, like the Eye took her twisted self-perception and ran with it. "Did everyone in town have these before the Fears actually came here, or is what I'm seeing now just from that?"

[skeletonkeay]

(My uh, someone I care about--- Yeah, okay, CT, Gerry doesn't need the Eye to translate that one for him. But it does, of course. The word you're looking for is "girlfriend," bestie. Or maybe "situationship" since you haven't put a label on the damn thing.)

"No, loads of people come here with marks even if they aren't from a place with the actual Dread Powers. Turns out those instinctual, primal fears don't really need any supervision from a special entity in order to leave someone with a scar. The Fears, capital F, are just that--- fear. The only thing special about them is that they're conscious enough to want more. Otherwise they're just the same as the mundane versions. Lotta marks got deeper, though, over those two weeks. That much is true."

[liesdontfindyou]

"That makes sense. I think maybe a part of me already figured as much, but— it's a little hard to sort out the assumptions from the actual knowledge, still. And it's a little unsettling, to think that these things leave such a mark on us even without a supernatural force behind them."

Not surprising, really, trauma's a mark enough, but something that can be so clearly read... even if only with the right Eyes. That's something.

"So you've been able to see these things the whole time. I guess you've had chance to get used to the visual noise."