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 Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2013 7:48 pm
There were not many duties to attend to, here. The Weeping Forest was far from a silent place, but it was one of little responsibility. Unless X got a call summoning him to the woods, he was content to slink around in the shadows, observing students and staff and minipets alike.
It was rare for humans to intrude upon the domain X had claimed for his own, but it was known to happen on occasion. They looked for portals, for the doors that led to places in-between, that stank of the old gods and power and crumbled stone.
He did not intrude upon them, for they were unfamiliar, and despite his allegiance to a different ideology, X had no desire to slay them all. Not now, not like this. Their time would come, and when it did, the reckoning would be great; it would echo throughout time, throughout history. It would so with a miasma of suffering, not from a death caused in a forest in a world that exists only to the monsters beneath a human's bed.
However.
X did like to watch. Which is what he did now, curled up in the shadows of a tree, beneath a portal that led to a temple for the gods. He watched, and he waited, because this little human girl.
This one was his favourite.
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Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2013 8:33 pm
As thrilling as a seemingly supernatural artifact could be, it was not long before Mimsy deemed it a distraction from her more legitimate goals. The words of minipets were bizarre and unnatural, but the chances of finding the single creature who happened to know the secrets of FEAR's particle physics were statistically smaller than her traveling back in time to opt in to an internship at CERN to discover the Higgs by herself.
She certainly would not have objected to that, were the probability more in her favor, but it was not.
There was, however, a curiosity raised by the excursion on which she'd found the artifact in the first place. The specificity of the place they had to go to find these portals raised a flag: clearly there was something outstandingly different about this forest that made this a possibility. Something she wanted to see for herself.
It would require only some scrapings and soil samples, which would more than suffice, so her mission was an easy one. But Kostya was not in the best of states, and it felt a bit too much like she'd be taking advantage of their arrangement if she were to ask a favor of him now.
This forest was quiet and non-threatening enough during the venture for artifacts that choosing to go alone was, logically, the best option. Asking anyone other than Kostya would mean wasting time explaining her reasoning and making unnecessary small talk, and she'd be there and back before anyone even noticed.
Just a brief and easy trip to gather some samples.
With her focus entirely on her theory, she set to work, approaching the closest tree with a petri dish in hand.
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Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2013 8:46 pm
She was a grown woman, now, smartly dressed in a white coat. Her hair was plaited, as it had been back then, and he smiled in a way that did not show in the shadows. The girl had always been so observant: she had seen the shadows that X had tripped her with, and had followed him into the forest then as well.
He had found her on more than one occasion, in her past, but had not interfered too frequently, for humans were delicate bags of meat and flesh and blood and bone. Fragile.
X's shape, a pool of shadows no larger than a splash of spilt milk, was heavily camouflaged in the forest of grey-black-dark, and so the demon moved.
Slowly. To not draw attention to himself, and melded with the girl's own shadow. After a time, a tentacle of darkness raised and curled around her ankle. Loving, tender, familiar.
Hello Mimsy, it seemed to say. Remember us?
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Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2013 9:39 pm
Small creatures were to be expected in an ecosystem such as this, so when Mimsy felt something on her leg as she finished her first scraping (and the scrawling of annotations that accompanied it), she thought that's all it was. It was probably some sort of snake or worm or elongated FEARiapod--
Oh.
Her fingers shook, the dish falling from her hand, landing upside-down in the brush near her feet.
This feeling was familiar in a way she'd not allowed herself to be familiar with it ever before. Everything was so carefully planned and calculated to avoid the stir of this exact feeling. All had been locked away and circumvented to never think of that or anything close to it ever, ever again. Kostya's presence alongside her in this forest let her forget why she ever stopped going in wooded areas to begin with, and now it was too late. Now she was alone, but the worst of it was that she wasn't.
Not really.
"Please," she begged through her teeth, with the very last bit of breath she had left.
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Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2013 9:52 pm
The laugh that Mimsy Kercher's quiet begging extracted was cool, cold.
"You always were fond of that word," X softly crooned against her leg, the tendril of shadow sliding to tighten around her ankle further, a boa-constrictor in its own right. "Back then, that is."
He moved, an inky-black layer against the ground, sliding between her feet to be in front of her, so that he could see from the darkness the look upon her face.
"It has been a long time," X said, his voice echoing through the branches of dead trees, and there was a smile in his voice, insinuating the worst, his amusement palpable in the air. "You have aged well, Mimsy Kercher."
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Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2013 11:18 pm
There was silence in the forest, nothing except his words, and for once since she'd begun her very short life at Deus Ex, Mimsy wished that Svensyl would say something.
She stared, eyes locked on the shadows, though the thoughts slowly ticking through her mind told her not to. She was a deer in the headlights of her curiosity again, and she was sure that this time it would actually kill her.
Her brow twitched when he spoke her name.
This wasn't fair. All this time she'd done everything within her capability to have power over this creature, but he'd clearly been busy doing the same. And he had won, because he'd spoken a name she'd never given to him. The more she grew enlightened of the 'shadows', the more she uncovered defeat. Everything that she worked for was systematically being taken from her.
"I don't know you; you shouldn't know me," was all that she managed, a jumbled portion of her intention.
She stood as still as her statue. Tears collected in the rim of her glasses.
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Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2013 11:26 pm
"Oh," he said, and it was affected by woe, and in a swirl a form rose from the shadows, tall and lithe and spindly. She was a tall girl, this human, this warrior-woman of the system, but X was taller.
"You are smarter than that," X said low, in the base of his throat, and laid a terrible hand upon her face, his elongated fingers jagged at the edges, and his featureless face twisted into a smile. "You know it, too, don't you?"
He pressed a finger gently to the corner of her glasses, to collect the tear there, to wipe it away.
"I know you better than anyone. I have seen into your heart, and there is a curiosity, a flame, a fear. I know it like I know the shadows. Absolutely. Completely. Intimately."
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Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2013 1:13 am
In an instant he was there, all of him, even the parts she hadn't pieced together as a child, an actual entity made of the impossible. The face (that should hardly be considered such) was staring down at her, and it was like she'd never grown up. Never done anything. There were no accomplishments or medals or science fair ribbons, and all of the walls that came with each of them were gone, one by one, and a very confused little girl looked out of a lost woman's eyes.
Her skin felt like it was burning beneath his touch, but she couldn't make herself move away.
"Nooooo," she cried, words strangled out and punctuated with a shudder. You're wrong, she wanted to say, you can't know that about me because nobody knows those things about me. But ultimately, he wasn't somebody, was he? He was something, and he did know. He knew the things about her that even she had managed to forget.
She caught herself repeating 'no' in shallow whispers, slipping seamlessly into a barrage of 'why', then a mumbled question that surprised her: "Why do you care about my heart?"
Why do you care when nobody else does?
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Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2013 1:30 am
X slid his hand down Mimsy's cheek, down her neck and pressed between her breasts, to feel the fluttering thud-thud-tha-thud of her heart, rattling in her chest like an unsettled bird in a cage.
"Yes," was all he said, for a time, emphatic. "What does a scientist do to its experiments?" he asked, voice low, calm, serene in a way she likely could not fathom. "They watch. They observe. My sample size is one, but my experiment's duration spans a lifetime."
He walked around her, feet crunching twigs underfoot, withdrawing his hand and circling her like a predator does to its prey. "Why would I not?"
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Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2013 1:54 am
Bile was burning in Mimsy's throat. No. She was not someone's experiment. She did the research, the precise dissections, the perfect lines of molecules and projected pathways and densities and...no. She was not his pet project. She was not. She was not.
His touch was growing hotter, or she was, the skin on her chest tingling with panic and something she didn't recognize.
"Because it's not...important," she rasped, stiffly curling and uncurling her fingers, anxiously fighting the ache spreading through her joints. She was sticky with sweat and could taste the salt of her tears, slipping through her lips when she took each gasping breath.
"I'm not...not my heart. I am my mind. Your data...is incorrect." She blinked once, heavy, and opened her eyes to a more blurry world, eyelids fluttering in a struggle to make sense of things.
Svensyl sounded miles away.
She didn't. And it hurt, but she didn't.
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Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2013 2:03 am
"You have left it. You have ground it into a fine dust, scattered it to the wind, but I have collected the grains." He spoke plainly to her, like he always had. It was just that only now Mimsy could understand his words. A precious time.
Back then, every few times a year, he had seen her. Sometimes he would stay for a moment, and other times he would watch for days on a whim. And then one day she had been gone, listed dead. X did not mourn, but he did not rejoice her death as others might. It was concerning, but he had overcome it. And here she was: alive and in the flesh.
It was best he had not mourned her after all.
"My data," the Slenderman repeated, pressing fingers to Mimsy's forehead, to sweetly brush back her bangs in a mockery of comfort. "Comes from direct observation."
He used the words he learned from her. The diction was her own, gathered from fevered ramblings to herself, before he had knocked over beakers so that Mimsy would take the blame. In the library, tugging books down from the stacks. Small things. Quiet things, that could happen within reality, that could happen to the clumsy.
But Mimsy Kercher was far from being a clumsy girl.
"It is time," X said, standing behind Mimsy and pressing a hand to her back, in the small of it, guiding her to the portal that she had popped out of like Athena had from Zeus' forehead so many millennia ago. "Time is precious, but you are more so."
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Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2013 2:35 am
Decades, he must have watched her for decades, or maybe her whole life; how could she know now? She didn't ask. She didn't want to know the answer. She had been so certain that she kept the shadows absent from her life. It was something she overcame, the story of triumph that could have been tragedy. Now there was just emptiness where she'd once felt fulfilled, and a heaviness in the place she'd worked to keep empty.
One miscalculated variable, and it unraveled everything.
He must have been right. He had to have every bit of the heart she left buried in her past, because now that she was near him, everything she should have felt for years and years and years came pouring down on her, a storm of spiteful words and denial and rejection and loss and loneliness -- and she couldn't take it.
His hand was on her back and she felt like it was breaking her, squeezing out cracked screams and sobs and things meant to be words that weren't words at all. His touch guided towards asylum as she smashed her palms against her temples, pleading, horrified.
Mimsy fell through the portal and weakly drew her knees to her chest, Deus smudged with tears and an overdose of clarity.
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Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2013 2:49 am
X smiled to himself, wide and excited and tender.
He had not seen Mimsy since her graduation ceremony, looking smug in a gown after earning her degree. It was good to see her, again. He did not wish to go so long in-between visits. Perhaps the Haunted House would open its doors to him, ancient and wild and unpredictable, to guide the Slenderman's path to one of his objects of obsession.
Selene laid forgotten in the back of his mind as X settled into a dark grove, planning.
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