[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

[hate_gettin_older]

"Uh --"

He comes to an awkward stop, shifting back and forth uneasily.

"Thought it was mostly over."

[skeletonkeay]

"Mostly, yeah. But not all the way." Gerry waves him back into the room. "C'mon. Let's have a quick chat. Promise I'll only bother you for just a tiny bit longer than is welcome."

[hate_gettin_older]

"Oh well if that's all then," says Edgar, a touch over-brightly, and approaches.

[skeletonkeay]

Gerry snorts, commenting sarcastically: "Don't sound so eager."

They step aside to a more secluded part of the room. "You have marks I don't recognize. That's new for me."

[hate_gettin_older]

"Marks," he says. "Like, from one of these ... Fears."

[skeletonkeay]

"No, like a stamp from the post office," Gerry quips back, with a smirk. But he doesn't bother continuing the bit.

"Part of my whole Eye business is that I can 'see' the psychological scars left behind by interacting with the Fears, or relevant terrors from worlds without them directly present. Some fears are inherent, you know? Anyway. You've got a few obvious ones, but I wasn't exactly giving you a full fuckin' physical. I was mostly looking at the big giant Avatar mark you've got that I've never seen before. What did you agree to back there?"

[hate_gettin_older]

"I didn't," he starts angrily, then falls to a more subdued tone almost immediately. "Din't know I was agreeing to anything. Except driving the fuckin train up to Crane's Ridge and back, so people could get somewhere safe."

[skeletonkeay]

At the anger, Gerry holds up his palms defensively and pulls back a bit.

"Yeah, they do that," he says with a sigh. "That damn train. I heard a little bit about it. Do you want to tell me what happened?"

[hate_gettin_older]

Edgar breathes out slowly.

"So when everything went all nightmares, there was me and like four other people right at the train station, and a few others straggling in, and there was the train. And we ... I dunno how we knew, but seemed like it would take us somewhere better. Except it wouldn't start, no matter what anyone did. Till I tried. I don't think I did anything different, it just ..."

[skeletonkeay]

"It chose you," Gerry finishes for him. "Used your fear as fuel for the engine, and without realizing it, you acclimated until it felt like the machine was part of you. Sound about right?"

[hate_gettin_older]

He considers that, chewing on his lower lip, and nods. "Something like. It sort of ... stopped being terrible, all the shite going on outside, the world ending and that. Like I knew it was terrible but it didn't scare me. Like I was used to the idea."

His shoulders shift, like he's trying to shake something off. "Seems like that should have been worse."

[skeletonkeay]

"Yeah, no, avatarhood can look like that, too. Getting comfortable with horror. Sometimes that scares you more, in my experience."

Often times that's true. Gerry sometimes looks at the things he's grown comfortable with and is mortified by it. It's never been more true than those two weeks in October. He hates how he saw so much, saw so far across the island, more than he's ever seen at once, and it was all so steeped in gore and horror that should have frayed the mind of anyone who beheld it with a sane mind, and all he could think to do was let out an impressed whistle and start having a look around the clock tower to see if he could track down Jon.

"The first thing you have to do is accept that it isn't a statement on your character. It's gonna feel like it is. It's gonna feel like you're a monster and the worst piece of shit on the planet. But you need to at least rationally know that you personally did not do anything wrong."