Of course, nobody actually ever asked zem, because the sort of aura of malevolence ze started giving off as soon as mid-November hit was practically a palpable thing that'd gotten zem several Grinchy nicknames over the years -- but the entire holiday season had always kind of gotten on zyr nerves. Loud, cringy, and completely lacking in any kind of style, and so forcibly overmarketed you either succumbed or you built up the kind of 'tolerance' you built up to an infection: that was to say, violent and aggressive. Holidays weren't zyr thing. Gift exchanges and Secret Santas, sure, that was one thing, buying zyr friends gifts was one thing, but... how commercialized the seasons were always made zem want to hurl. Ze'd take a nice winter palette over any of that any day.
The least offensive part of the season, though, had always been the lights.
You got lights just about everywhere, especially in urban districts, especially in the kind of houses and yards where people had the time and money to care about how they were thought of and wanted to look properly interested. Some of it was influence from all those years of lighting design, but honestly Sparrow just... liked it? There was all that variation, and so little of it was strict red-and-green. You had stars, and strings, and dazzling drippling lights down the sides of buildings and outlining doors and pillars, and -
Wait. Ze squinted, cocked zyr head up, leaned away from the pillar. Were those ones - no, ze was seeing things. For a second it'd looked like the icicle lights on the tree had stopped glittering in the right order and started pulsing, flickering on and off and on and off in lengths like morse code, but now that ze really looked at it ze must've beeen seeing things. Zyr Uber would be here soon, anyway, it was... three minutes away, looking at zyr phone? Maybe more. Traffic lights always got unpredictable and traffic always got weird in this area of town at this time of day.
But there it was again, out of the corner of zyr eye; that uncanny flashing, uneven-rhythmic light up-and-down in patterns of brightness that repeated and looped - and again, when ze turned to look at it, the lights were fully normal. Of course they were normal. Why wouldn't they be normal? Sparrow was seeing things, looking and wanting and waiting for a good chance to be Larimar like a muscle that'd gone unstretched, running on four hours of sleep and a lot of espresso; it made sense. Visual hallucinations were worrying but not unheard of.
This made sense up until ze got in the Uber and the traffic lights were doing it, out of the corner of zyr eye; not only those, but the stars and cheap little porch lights for the season too on the way to zyr lodgings, and by the time Sparrow walked out the car door and forgot to tip zyr eye'd started twitching something nasty. Ze'd remembered why ze'd gotten so irritated with Destiny City, actually. It was a whole brand-new quandary of nothing but wild bullshit.
Quote:
Prompt 9 (Illuminating Conversation): This time of year there are lights hanging everywhere. They come in different colors, different styles, different patterns of illumination. You might not remember when it started, but when you looked at a display, you noticed the lights seemed to be flashing in a specific pattern. When you look away, you might be able to see out of the corner of your eye that they return to normal--but any time you look at them, they repeat the same unique sequence. It’s not just one light, either; almost everywhere you go you can find some light repeating the pattern. Is something trying to send you a message? Could it be Morse Code, or something else? A coincidence? Either way, you can’t seem to decipher the message and it’s getting to you. Especially because no one else seems to notice it.
