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Prompt 1 (Mysterious Carolers): Caroling has been a tradition for years, so it’s not really unusual when you hear a soft chorus from outside. What is unusual is that it’s three in the morning, and the moment they start singing you feel a chill in the air. Maybe it’s a holiday song, maybe it’s not, but whatever it is it’s a song you know before--from this life? From another?--and something about this version makes you go cold. If you move to the window, you will find no carolers, but the song is loud enough that you know you should be able to see them. They sing one song, and then there is silence. An eerie chill lingers, and your dreams are haunted by strange voices. You’ll probably never be able to hear that song again without feeling a chill.
His instinct was to tell them to shut the ******** up.
Zachariah sat at his desk in his upper-level apartment, his eye twitching instinctually as he heard the soft chorus from outside of the apartment complex. He knew choral groups were at least relatively common during the winter; it was something he was usually willing to just ignore, but there weren't even any other noises outside of the window to help cancel things out. It was three in the ******** morning. Who the hell caroled outside at three in the ******** morning? He could understand rehearsing inside of one's own apartment, he guessed. So long as he didn't have to ******** hear any of it--
He groused to himself, standing up from his desk and brushing himself off and marching himself over to the window. It was cold, but he'd open it up to lean his head out the window and remind them what damn time it was.
He opened the window.
The ******** was there no one--
Why did he feel so cold?
Zachariah looked around, squinting as he attempted to figure out where the sound was coming from. Honestly, he wouldn't put it past this cursed city -- probably was some other cursed holiday nonsense of some echoing, chilling song that went through the apartment complex, that might be reported on the next day as trolling carolers or prankster carolers or something that excused the magic under a layer of something else that made logical sense and ignored the existence of what they were around. He gave up. He slammed the window shut. He walked away.
He resolved to ignore it but resolving to ignore the chilling sound of the carolers only went so far. He could hear it all around him as if it was just outside of his window as if the carolers had decided to float there and stare at him as they sang a song he wondered if he recognized. Sounded familiar in that vague sense, in the way that he was fairly certain he might have heard it before but he didn't know where from -- but did it matter? All he wanted it to do was to ******** stop; it was too early for this, too early for any of this, and he just wanted to get back to work without pulling his hair out of his head--
And then it stopped.
Oh.
Good.
Zachariah shook his head, shook out his arms, and then returned to his desk, happy to return himself to work and try to forget what happened.
And yet, somehow, he found himself typing out the lyrics to the song he heard instead of the Python code he was supposed to be hammering out. And yet, somehow, it seemed to worm itself into his skull, and he swore he could still hear them singing even though it had stopped. And yet, somehow, even when he closed out the program and decided to do something else, anything else, he swore that the four AM music in his village was actually just the carol he had heard over an hour ago, and when he ate a snack to try and ease his mind back at 4:30, he swore the crunch was accompanied with the same chill he felt when --
He shuddered.
Zachariah decided that it was time to go to bed, and hopefully forget about whatever cursed nonsense Destiny City was on this time.
Maybe he'd forget about it in the morning.
