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 Posted: Tue Dec 12, 2023 1:03 pm
Quote: Prompt 15 (Woven in Mystery): Everyone has their own seasonal decorations that come out this time of year. Maybe you found it in some sort of thrift sale, maybe you just spotted it hanging up while you were out and about, maybe it’s at a friend’s house–wherever you are, a holiday tapestry catches your attention. It’s beautiful and someone clearly put a lot of effort into making it. You won’t find this mass produced–it looks like it’s vintage and handmade, with careful embroidery and beads. There’s something incredibly alluring about it–and something sinister. Out of the corner of your eye it might seem as though something is moving. Maybe it happens while you aren’t looking at all. When it doesn't have your full attention, the image on the tapestry changes. It isn’t just that small details change, large parts of the tapestry change, forming whole new images. Sometimes the threads even change to leave vague or threatening messages. It always seems to change too quickly for you to get a picture of, or to even point out to anyone else. Even when the tapestry isn’t moving, it feels like there are eyes on you.
Unfortunately, whenever someone called on him to work the floor or work a register, Preston always found himself faced with customers. Necessary though they were to the shop’s operations, customers made his nerves itch as if they might catch fire. Hell, it seemed, was not the more general assertion of “other people” put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre in Huis clos (not least because dealing with customers, for Preston, so rarely involved Sartre’s concept of the Look—how one perceived oneself from the imagined perspective of another person—or anything else from his theories, save arguably his ideas concerning the human condition of no thing-ness…… Also, accepting the premise of “L’enfer, c’est les autres” required acknowledging customers as people, something that most of them did not deserve).
Rather, if anyone asked Preston, Hell specifically existed in the moments when a customer came to him with some asinine non-problem or an issue that they could have easily resolved themselves, thus forcing him to bite his tongue and plaster on a phony smile—as much of one as Preston could manage when he seemed quite afflicted with something that Roslyn From His Department On Campus called “resting b***h face.”
Today, the issue on several customer’s minds seemed to be a tapestry. After about the nineteenth complaint concerning the bad vibes that it allegedly gave off—more than one person cited feeling that the tapestry had been watching them—Preston stopped counting how many times he had to listen patiently and behave himself while silently wondering how much of these so-called “vibes” came from the tapestry, and how much came from the customers experiencing one or more altered states of consciousness, right that moment. The sheer number of complaints suggested the former, but on the other hand, they did dispense marijuana here. Mental side-effects could not entirely be ruled out. Whether or not they could manifest so powerfully, however, was another debate.……
Immodesty so often proved an ugly quality—but on the other hand, Preston poured his heart into cultivating the shop’s different strains, into keeping the plants happy and their growing conditions ideal. Not so much out of any concern for the end product exclusively on its own merits, much less what it meant to other people whom he did not know and could not be expected to properly account for, and more from his love of the puzzle, of the tinkering, of the endless quest to improve. It would have been equally ugly to pretend that his efforts had all been in vain, or that he didn’t know how hard he worked.
Still, Preston could not simply ignore the possibility that something truly was amiss with the tapestry. He permitted himself to wait until after his lunch, and fortunately, he found the shop quite unoccupied when he returned, except Jupiter, who was a welcome presence, unlike the plague of customers. After depositing his coat and takeout box of leftovers in the break room, Preston headed for the wall with the tapestry that had upset so many.
He didn’t see what all the fuss was, not at first. While he wouldn’t have personally decorated with the tapestry, he had to admire the care and craftsmanship that had gone into the careful embroidery and bead-work. In an array of vibrant color (even the whites and silvers shone more brightly than seemed entirely natural), the tapestry depicted several people in long robes, dancing or praying around a fire pit, surrounded by giant lintel stones that called to mind a place like the ruins of Stonehenge. Along the borders, a pattern of ivy, holly, and mistletoe tied everything about the piece together.
Tilting his head, Preston narrowed his eyes at the tapestry. Honestly, he didn’t see what the fuss had been about.
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Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2024 2:42 am
People were weirdos. Generally, Jupiter Butterfly applied that appellation with nothing in the way of judgement-or rather as a positive modifier. She was also a weirdo. Her family were all weirdos. Weirdos made the world go round.
But today, she was applying just the slightest bit of negative valence. Mostly because even her patience could only last so long, and so many people whining about an otherwise totally innocent piece of solstice decor was just....trying it, in every possible way.
It was a tapestry. A very pretty one. Handcrafted, though its maker was anonymous and it had simply been left in the shop with an unsigned note suggesting hanging it up. So Jupiter had done so, and she was rather fond of it. Someone had put a lot of effort and thought into it--hours and hours, she was pretty sure, because tapestry embroidery was hard and labor-intensive.
She'd be more than a bit upset if she had to put it away, but enough complaints would mean that she had no choice, and so, with a sigh, she wandered over to it, flashing Preston a smile.
"Have people been telling you about the bad vibes this thing gives off, too?"
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Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2024 3:55 pm
“Indeed,” Preston said simply. Even knowing that someone—Jupiter, thankfully, and not another customer or a coworker who grated on his nerves—had joined him, Preston took a moment to consider looking away from the tapestry, much less actually do so. Arms crossed over his chest, he glared at the tapestry as if he could somehow absorb all the details, given enough time and intense focus.
This effort didn’t work.
For a moment, Preston closed his eyes and tried to center himself. His annoyance with the whole tapestry fiasco and the customers who kept complaining over so much nothing did not need to become Jupiter’s problem. Certainly not when she was the kindest and least troublesome of all Preston’s coworkers, and she had every right to harbor frustration with the customers today. When he finally looked to her, Preston’s flat expression had not entirely softened, but it fell closer to “soft” than his face usually managed.
“Truly, I don’t understand what they think they have seen,” he said simply. “While the tapestry’s craftsmanship is both intricate and admirable, nothing about it projects the so-called ‘bad vibes’ that I have heard about.”
For that matter, Preston did not entirely understand what “bad vibes” was supposed to mean, but he didn’t think that any of the customers who had used the phrase could have defined the phenomenon for him either. It seemed to him that “bad vibes” was perhaps meant as a general negative valence catchall phrase, used to indicate something that any given speaker found at least some degree of disagreeable. Which did very little to help with the matter of the tapestry and how unremarkable it was outside of looking nice.
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Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2024 7:58 pm
Jupiter sighed, all heaviness and drama. She wasn't willing to write off the possibility that this was somehow magical--it absolutely could be--but nothing anyone had said to her seemed to indicate that, so far. Instead, it was just a very pretty piece of decoration, and she also took a long moment to really examine it and take it in, as if answers would come to her if she just pouted at it sufficiently.
She huffed, and crossed her arms, and turned her attention to Preston. They were, she liked to think, something like friends; certainly, she cared about him a lot, and he was a pleasure to work with.
"Somebody said they thought they saw it move, but that's not possible, right? I mean, it's just...a..."
Right as she was denying the possibility, there was motion in her peripheral. she whipped her head back tot he tapestry, and frowned at it.
"....Huh."
No, that wasn't possible. Magic was real, obviously, but a moving tapestry was just too obvious. At least, if you asked Jupiter. But maybe she just didn't know; maybe this type of thing was actually super common for magical people, and she wasn't aware because she hadn't been one long enough.
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Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2024 9:16 pm
Looking at people when they talked did not always come easily to Preston. Having grown up uncertain of when to make eye-contact with Brother Horace out of respect for the man or when to avert his unworthy eyes, Preston often found it easier to simply avoid looking at anyone as much as he could. Unfortunately, the world that lay outside Our Lady of Sorrows and the compound had no way of knowing that, and when Preston kept his eyes on something else while they spoke, plenty of people found it rude, cold, and disrespectful, if not worse, even if he could perfectly repeat back whatever they’d told him.
That Preston ever practiced forcing himself to look at people had nothing to do with pleasing the people who judged him based on their own preconceptions, and everything to do with Preston himself. As much as he could avoid it, he would not suffer having his intentions distorted by his own failure to adapt to rules other than those he’d grown up with. Fortunately, he had people in his life like Jupiter, who made such practice feel safe, as though she appreciated his efforts to look at her while she spoke but also would not judge him too harshly if he slipped up.… Today, he felt that he was doing well at keeping his gaze turned on her face.
Despite his focus, he still saw the motion in his peripheral vision.
Another gift from Brother Horace: the senses attuned by necessity, honed by his ostensible ability to be anywhere he wanted, whenever he wanted. At the first hint of motion, Preston whipped his head around, ponytail swishing against his neck like a horse flicking away flies. It barely took him a second to notice what had shifted and point to it: one of the little figures in the circle had broken away from their fellows.
“That one,” Preston said, voice low, “was not facing us a moment ago. Nor were they waving ‘hello.’”
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Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2024 11:06 am
Well. That was uncomfortable. Jupiter had been scanning, looking for the change--but of course Preston found it immediately, and as soon as he drew her attention to it, Jupiter jolted back.
"...I think I understand what people have been saying about bad vibes," she said, frowning. Sure, it was a friendly gesture, but there was almsot something... inherently menacing about being noticed, in that way, by an inanimate object. Like it wasn't so inanimate after all. Like something in it was looking out at them through that little figure.
Like it wanted to say more than a friendly little hello.
"Should we leave it?" Jupiter asked, lowering her voice. "Like, maybe if we ignore it, it'll stop? Or...maybe we should put it away in the back, since it's making customers so uncomfortable?"
She had genuinely been ready to dismiss the whole thing. Apparently, she was an idiot for doing so.
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Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2024 12:55 pm
Although he leaned in closer to Jupiter—all the better to hear her, when she lowered her voice—Preston kept his gaze locked on the tapestry as if daring it to try anything with him. If it needed people to look away from it in order to move, or in order for whatever strange and unnatural nonsense empowered it to work, then he didn’t want to surrender any room to do so. Perhaps his judgment wasn’t fair—the tapestry, after all, was distinctly not Brother Horace and may not have had the ill intent that so defined everything about how Preston’s family had operated—but Preston had no desire to let either himself or Jupiter come to harm over a failure to stay alert.
He nodded at Jupiter’s suggestion without needing to think about it. While he still didn’t entirely think that the phrase “bad vibes” meant much of anything, the fact remained obvious that something was amiss with the tapestry.
“Even if it has no ill intentions or malignancy underlying this shift,” he said, “its vibes have upset more than enough people today. Allowing it to remain might prove unwise.” Especially if the vibes turned out to be more magically potent than one of the figures in the circle around the fire waving ‘hello’ at Preston and Jupiter. Preston did not know everything about how the often unexplainable aspects of Destiny City worked, but he knew enough to know that some of them had to be magical in nature. “I’ll relocate it to the back-room for now. If anyone asks, you can offer them reassurance that they need not worry about its vibes.”
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