pluviosa | [Open] I'm On A Boat

[Open] I'm On A Boat

Who: Casper and ???
What: Boat shenanigans! Digging! Trees!
Where: Several locations
When: Day 3-4ish
Warnings: One prompt has a dead body, one thread is getting into some serious/dark subjects.

Jungle Cruise

[Casper does not have many weapons - certainly not the kinds of powerful magical options other people on the ship have. But he's not out of all options. He heads down towards the bottom of the ship - or at least what he can reach. Deck 9 is about it, so he starts there.]

[The water is a problem. The water might be too much of a problem for him to handle - so he freezes it. At least a good chunk around him is frozen, so anyone coming down there might need to be careful not to slip. That done, he starts digging. He doesn't have a shovel or any tools so it's just him pushing at dirt trying to find some kind of bottom.]

[This is probably not going to work. Come either mock him or help him?] (See next prompt.)

Kill it with Fire

[Casper has been digging and he absolutely does not like what he's found. He's read enough horror books and seen enough horror movies to know that letting this thing spread is an incredibly bad idea. He keeps looking around for anyone, covered in dirt and mud and probably other things with his hair all wild.]

Do you have fire magic? Or the ability to make a fire that's really hot?

[He needs a hand, because a campfire is not going to do it. He needs extremely high temperatures in an extremely controlled environment.]

On the Treetops

[He likes to be up high. Some of these trees are gigantic so he's having fun climbing them. It's very much an easy thing for him - he's just scrambling up them and jumping from tree to tree. He's making a lot of noise though so he might be being too disruptive. Either way he's having fun and it's not like there's a whole crowd to bother.]

[Occasionally he rests, and stares out at the barren wasteland around them. What could be out there? He wants to know, but he also doesn't want to die again.]

Night Sky

[Casper is enjoying himself just chilling out on the deck at night. There are no constellations that he's familiar with, so he starts making up new ones.]

That one's the Cat. That one's the Rabbit. ... Maybe that spot on the moon is the Monkey? It's definitely not the Bunny.

[He's mostly talking to himself - Bob is asleep in his hoodie pocket - but he'd welcome company, if you'd like.]

[Wildcard]

[Got another idea? Either grab me on Discord (artematthew) or Plurk (

atrypical).]

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[The voice is far-off at first, but its frantic tone is unmistakable. Alisaie looks up from the sign she'd been attempting to decipher and breaks into as fast a run as she can manage without slipping.
When she makes it up the stairs, she recognizes the friendly man who had run into her that first, horrible night. Casper? He looks bedraggled, covered in mud and gods only know what else. His hair is wild and his expression even more so. Alisaie inches closer, worried about what he's found.

It seems she was right to be worried. It's horribly overgrown, plants digging into every part of it, but the corpse is still recognizable for what it is. She's seen enough of them.]

"Oh, gods..." [She can't help the exclamation as she draws close. Whoever this was, they can't have died peacefully. Under normal circumstances she'd be delighted to show off her prowess with fire, but right now the feeling of dread is far too prominent]

"I can conjure fire. As much as you need, probably."

Yeah...

[His voice is a little rough - he's tired and he just wants to deal with this shit and he just wants to nap. He just had the desire to dig through stuff - he was not prepared to deal with this even if he's possibly the most qualified.]

I appreciate it. I don't know that you can get it hot enough to cremate without damaging the ship - but at least hot enough to kill off any plantlife....

Shang Qinghua hears the sounds of... something in the trees? Knocking them around quite a lot? Heading out onto the deck and looking up reveals enough of a flash of hoodie and jeans among the branches to be sure that it's Casper and not some kind of monster turning up.

...He isn't great at climbing trees, but he has his own way to get up there. Casper seems to be sitting still for a moment, so he pulls out Kao Ci, steps on, and carefully rises fairly slowly into the air, making sure the spiritual energy here isn't going to knock him out of the sky before he risks going high or quickly. It seems basically fine, though, so he flies up to hover next to the branch Casper is sitting on.

"Hey." Lame conversation starter, so sue him. "Hell of a view. I'm glad we woke up in here and not out there."

Edited (typo) 2024-02-27 01:30 (UTC)

"That one over there reminds me of a wolf," Lucia Corina offers, wandering up next to him and pointing at another area of the sky. "And look, the rabbit is chasing it, instead of the other way around. What teeth rabbits must have, here!"

"Neat trick." He grins at Shang Qinghua and pats the branch next to him. It looks pretty sturdy, as long as the other isn't a lot heavier than he looks. "But yeah, it is. ... I don't think we'd be talking if we woke up out there."

Hmm... he swings his legs under the branch and kicks them a little. "Maybe whatever brought us here has a failsafe to make sure we don't show up somewhere where we'd die immediately?" It's possible, at least...

"It does." Can he figure out where she's pointing from the vague area? Maybe not, but no point in saying that. "I know of a story about a killer rabbit, actually. ... Or, well. It's a story from a comedic... play." Better to not try to explain movies right now.

"One of the cooler parts of being a cultivator, for sure. I was so pumped when I got my own spiritual sword finally and I could fly." He carefully maneuvers around until he can perch on the branch next to Casper and summon Kao Ci to his hand, stowing it back in its sheath. "Man, I don't know the last time I was up a tree."

"Depends whether it was aiming for this planet in general or for the ship in specific, I guess. Or maybe it just covered the whole planet in people and most of them died. Sorry, that's a horrible concept, I should have kept that inside my head." He shifts his weight, testing balance, but he's managed to sit pretty solidly, and therefore most of his attention can go to Casper.

"Same with my wings." Bob is up in a higher branch, pretending to not notice the two of them. "Trees are fun. Good for sneak attacks, too." Which it's... sad that he has to think about it, but it's useful knowledge.

He doesn't seem bothered by the thought. "... No, no. I think it's a good train of thought to consider, though uh... probably the ship? I'm guessing the ship. If you've got the ability to drag people through worlds then you're probably good enough to select a destination. I'd think so, anyway."

“Wait, wings? I don’t see wings tell me about wings. I mean, uh, if that’s okay, but I assume you wouldn’t have mentioned it if you didn’t want— I mean. Yeah.” Yeah his mouth is just Going. He has gotten too comfortable with Casper and now the filter is Gone.

“I mean, and if you’re hauling people around transdimensionally, you probably have, like, a purpose in mind, and people are more useful alive in most cases? Not that the assortment of people here gives me literally any idea what purpose there might be. I mean, did you see fucking Super Mario? I’m like, at peace with being fictional, but like, holy shit. Mario! Does make me wonder if more than just me and him are fictional, but I dunno how we’d find out, I don’t recognize anyone else, but they could be from media I never consumed, or something that came out after I died, or… yeah. I mean, Wet Justice and company look pretty anime, and so does the kid with the cat, but that’s not very conclusive.”

"Huh? Oh. I can sprout wings - or talons, or whatever - by channeling my power through Bob. It's a lot of fun. I don't know if I could carry someone while flying - probably? I'm not sure." What's a filter? Never knew 'er.

"Yeah. Yeah I definitely saw Super fucking Mario. And I mean in the great multiverse of whatever maybe? I was mostly a books and movies kid. I never really got into anime and stuff... not even that one with a lot of yelling that all the guys seemed to like. And video games were basically just 'whatever I could find online' since buying a console was definitely out of the question, and I only have a cell phone because my dad wanted it to call me for work whenever. Which basically just meant yelling at me to get home..." ... Anyway.

On a slightly more positive note... "I've seen people uploading video game stuff to YouTube?" He says it... not confidently. "But I dunno if that site's gonna stick around, I've seen a lot of places come and go."

“Oh, sick, that sounds really neat. We could fly together! I mean, there’s not a ton of space to do much, but like. Man I do not take advantage of being able to fly as often as I should, I’m always too busy working. And I wrote cultivators using fucking carriages and horses most of the time because I’m a boring idiot, so we barely even fly to travel.”

“I am, was, like a horrible otaku, I was all over anime and manga and video games, but I also like, am from China and from later than you, so the availability was probably better.”

“Oh dude Google bought YouTube and it is huge now, people make bank uploading themselves playing video games. They get like, brand sponsorships and shit, it’s wild. God imagine if a brand sponsored my shitty webnovel. It would have to be like—a condom brand or something, and oh my god I’d have to write Luo Binghe using a condom that is the funniest concept in the world, I have to tell Cucum— oh. Right, I can’t tell him about the concept of his husband’s dick selling condoms, he’s not on the mystery leg boat. Anyway.” Airplane might have gotten a little used to having a transmigrator bro around. “Uh. Yeah, I dunno, anything could be fiction. Scary Ouji Lawyer got mad at me for trying to avoid saying she might be fictional, but I don’t want to give anyone, like, an existential crisis? I’ve known I was fictional for sixty years! But it probably hits different in these circumstances, yknow?”

"Are there killer rabbits in your world, or is it an intentional absurdity?" Everything is so different for everyone that she'd believe nearly anything, at this point.

"I wonder what the animals of this world were like. If everything outside this ship is dead, and there are none here... A melancholy thought, I'm afraid."

"Not to my knowledge, no. It was created by a comedy troupe that was poking fun at the tales people tell about a historical period in the history of one of the continents in the world. Knights slaying ravening beasts and whatnot."

Hm. It is, but... "Even if life no longer goes on here, it goes on elsewhere. And... maybe it will go on here again one day. And in a way it already is, because we're here." Sure they're not permanent residents... hopefully... but it's still life.

"Yeah. I mean, now that you don't have to work... you can have some actual fun with your abilities." Flying on a sword is pretty neat. Isn't there a comic book character who surfs between planets? He can't quite remember.

Hm. "Makes sense. Isn't there a lot of censorship there, though? ... Though I guess people find ways around it." Also what. Okay there was some information in there and then Shang Qinghua went off on a whole tangent and... Casper just puts a hand on the top of the other's head to calm him for a moment before taking it away. "Yeah, it probably does. It... feels impolite to say. As for being fictional..." He sighs and closes his eyes.

"I can feel the wind. I can hear the breeze through the trees. I can smell the leaves. I don't know what makes something 'real', but isn't this real enough? This moment we have? And if the moment's real, why can't we be?" He blinks slowly and smiles, his cheeks coloring slightly. "Maybe that's corny, but if what we experience is all we have then... I think we're real enough, based on that. Being fictional doesn't mean it's not 'real' in a way? If they experience things like you do..."

"Fun... how novel. I've had to work my ass off this whole time to make sure I achieved what the system demanded I do, and then that required being in positions where a lot of people are relying on me, and... there's always more work. When it's not Cang Qiong, it's the Northern Desert, or Luo Binghe's court."

"Yeah, there's censorship, but plenty of stuff is like, inoffensive enough to make it through, or there's like, ways to get through the firewall. But we get a lot of imported media anyway. Got." It's weird to think about China as sort of frozen in time for him in 2015--time has moved on for him, subjectively, but judging by Cucumber-bro's arrival, it hasn't gone forward back home at all.

Casper's hand on his head is super effective, Shang Qinghua's jaw snaps shut until he removes it again. He blinks and tries to get his train of thought back to something other than how warm Casper's hands are and whether his cheeks feel hot.

He smiles at Casper, ducking his head a little. God the younger man is cute when he blushes. "Real enough to carry on with, anyway. It's not like I haven't been fighting all these years to stay alive, because it sure feels like a life, even knowing that I'm being Shang Qinghua and he's some asshole I made up. I'm still walking around breathing and sleeping and... feeling." Feeling quite differently than usual, right now.

"Sounds complicated. Both of those things." He grins sidelong at the other. "What do you think myths are? What do you think gods are? Something someone just made up. And then they believed in it enough to make it real."

He'd nudge the older man but he doesn't want to startle him out of the tree. "And you seem plenty real to me. We may not be able to move the world as much as we'd like - well you can't anymore, at least - but if someone can believe that there's goat piss rivers in the underworld hard enough to make it real, we can maybe try to believe in ourselves enough to count as real, too."

"I guess... I had a lot of readers. Maybe that was enough to make Proud Immortal Demon Way real enough to live in. And having me and Cucumber-bro in there... I don't know if that made it even realer. I know the people feel... very real when you can see them, touch them." It was hard to know that Shen Qingqiu's original goods was abusing Luo Binghe and not do anything about it--knowing that little Binghe was a person with feelings and not just a stallion protagonist.

"You seem very real to me. And--wait, hold up, goat piss rivers? What the fuck kind of myth is that?!" Train of thought: lost.

"Mm." ... Right. He probably shouldn't have said that casually - maybe that's a lesser-known myth? He's never sure where the line between myth and reality is anymore. "Supposedly my mother's Hall is clean and pleasant for honored guests. ... I was not an honored guest."

Anyway. "But I mean, the point stands. Someone believed that shit - so to speak - and now it's real. So I try not to worry about the line between reality and... fiction, I guess? If it's real to you, it's real enough."

"...In your mother's hall." Well, that just says a whole lot right there, doesn't it. "Well, fuck her and her goat piss rivers, then, she doesn't deserve you." Shang Qinghua doesn't know like, anything about Norse myth, but he is confident on that point.

"That's a very like, zen approach to it. I like... I mean, I've known since I was reborn with the system talking to me that I was living the life of my own character. So it's like... there's only so real I could let myself believe in, for a long time, because it's... not a very nice world, and a lot of bad things happen, and they made it a more interesting story for the readers, or they were like the tropes, but now they're happening to people, but I can't do anything about it because the system will punish me, but it's my fault because I'm the one who wrote those plot points and decided that this person would die and that person should be abused, and--" he is clearly working himself into a long and anxious and increasingly self-loathing rant about something he usually doesn't let himself think about too hard.

"... She doesn't take in the honored dead. It's the outcasts and the lowly, the ones who didn't die in battle or who were good enough for the other gods to take. Her hall's not for people who did great things in life. So..." He shrugs. That includes him - he definitely didn't die honorably enough for one of the other gods to even give him so much as a glance.

Casper looks down at the ground, grateful he doesn't have a fear of heights. "Sometimes bad things happen to people. Maybe it's your fault and maybe it's not. Maybe it's their fault for not being stronger." His voice is... far away. He barely even realizes that he's talking. "You couldn't have known. I... if you don't know you're hurting real people how could you have done it differently?"

He thinks about his father and the way he had to tiptoe around in the house. He doesn't remember how it started, only that it did. Nights and days of work and running to help ghosts and school - where no one liked him either - and just...

It had to have been him. There's no way it can't be. Something he did or didn't do...

"You'd think you being her kid would mean something, but I guess that's parents for you." It's not like his valued him that much, in either life.

"I would have written... something very different if I had known it would be real, or that I would be in it. I..." Casper looks... off. Shang Qinghua reaches out tentatively and covers the younger man's hand with his own. He doesn't know how to be like, comforting or grounding or anything, all he has going for him is that he's here. "I... don't think it's anyone's fault for not being stronger. I think most people are as strong as they can be, and sometimes there's... too much for it. Like... my king is like, the second strongest character in the book, but he still nearly died when his uncle dumped him in the human world as a kid, and again when he was hit with the Ling Hua dart, if I hadn't saved him." Is he saying anything remotely useful? Probably not! But all he knows how to do is talk! "...Are you okay?"

"Mm." He doesn't really respond when his hand is covered other than to close his eyes. "... I don't know. I just... I get hurt so often that I'm just numb to it. Mocked, abandoned, shoved from thing to thing with no regard for what I want to do. People say jump, I say how high. People say 'do this' and I do. I just... I want to please people. But they don't... they don't care about me. I'm just a tool. And I know that. I've accepted it."

And that's the problem, isn't it? "But everyone around me here keeps telling me I'm not. But I've been one my whole life! I don't... I don't know how to live without being used by other people. Ghosts, humans, a mage, other Scions... I've been backstabbed and killed and nearly gotten... sexually attacked. But that's okay, isn't it? Because I'm not a person, I'm just a tool to be thrown at enemies and used by allies. ... I wouldn't blame you if you did that, too. I'm useful, so just... use me if you want." He's not lying, as far as it's detectable. He genuinely believes these things, even as depressed as they make him look.

"So I guess it doesn't matter if I'm okay. No one ever cares how I feel and... I don't know why that would change."

Fuck, he is so not qualified for this. Fuck. Casper’s self esteem might actually be worse than his. “I don’t want to use you. I— all I’ve tried to be to my sect and my king is ‘useful enough to keep alive’ and even if I didn’t like you, I wouldn’t want— I don’t want to just use anyone. But especially not you, because you don’t treat me like I’m just a thing to be used. Even here, there’s—I mean, I offered to gather information for her, she’s not a bad person for taking me up on it, that’s all I’m good at is spying and logistics, and I’m not good at—this. People. But I… I do care how you feel. I don’t know how to help, but I do want you to be happy. I like you because you’re Casper, and you’re funny and nice and you even put up with how much I talk and you… I like you as a person.” He squeezes Casper’s hand a little bit.

"I don't think you would but I wouldn't blame you if you did. ... I'm just..." He shakes his head and leans against the other, seeming to snap out of it a little. "I just... I don't know how to live. On my own. Not... being used. I've never been on my own, and I'm not saying that I'm totally on my own now but I'm... away from the grasp of my parents."

His powers work but he's pretty sure he can't contact them. He's... free, in a way. And it's terrifying to try to make his own decisions. "I don't have a goal or a job or anything right now and I just... I've always had those? And it's not... I... I feel lost." Not the same kind of lost that he feels when he tries to come up with words when he's looking at Shang Qinghua, but still.

"You've lived on your own. You're at least able to be independent. I'm just... I'm a godsdamned tactical missile of a person at this point. A wrecking ball. I can command people and corpses to do what I want, I could freeze this whole tree solid, I can lift half a ton. I'm dangerous and people at home know it. That's why they use me. That's why... I don't know how to live."

"I would blame me. You're not... you don't deserve to be just used. And I wouldn't want to... I'm not a good person, but I don't want to be that kind of bad one. I never-- I don't want to do anything to you that you're not comfortable with."

"I-- honestly I haven't been thinking too hard about the fact that the system can't reach here, because I don't know what I'll do when it sinks in, even though I've been saying all kinds of shit I would have been punished for, like, I told you I'm a transmigrator. But... having to make it up is hard. You're not--it's not that weird that you're lost. Kids with like, controlling parents, it's really common for them to lose it once they get out on their own and no one is telling them what to do." His parents were sort of the opposite, but he's not unfamiliar with the concept.

"And I--I guess I've kind of been trying to slot myself into what's familiar, too. Offering information to people so they think I'm useful enough to protect or not hurt. It's-- easy. I... I don't know if I understand, but..." But he wants to. He wants to be able to help so goddamn badly, seeing Casper like this hurts.

"And I mean, I'm-- used to being around dangerous people. I'm a cultivator, my martial siblings are all good enough to become peak lords. Zhangmen-shixiong could fight Tianlang-jun to a standstill. Liu-shidi is the War God of Bai Zhan and he doesn't even like me. Luo Binghe is like maybe literally undefeatable and he keeps looking at me like he's going to murder me for taking any of his husband's attention. And my king could freeze this tree solid too, could freeze me solid, and I've spent decades trying to be useful enough that he won't. I... you're just a person. Sometimes people are dangerous. Even me, I have a sword and decent cultivation, I could do a fair bit of damage, I just don't like fighting, and I'm a coward, and I'd prefer no one ever see me as a threat." When they don't see you as a threat they're less likely to decide they need to remove the threat. "But I'm not... you're not scary to me."

"I don't know how to-- fucking, I don't know. I don't know how to help. But... I don't want you to do anything for me but be my... my friend. If you-- if you want. Only if you want." He's not much to write home about in terms of friend material, after all. And he's only ever really had the one before.

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Page 1 of 5

[Open] I'm On A Boat

Kill it With Fire

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On the Treetops

Night Sky

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cw: victim blaming

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cw: mentions of abuse and sexual assault, dissociation

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