week 1. | even in the great abyss, it's the year of the optimist !

[faa]

[ Freddie's voice comes across the Murmur as he dons his mask, its long black beak and brilliant feathers an isolated face of a Cedar Waxwing eclipsing his own, even if he doesn't recognize it as such. That voice, recognizable to the right audience as from New York but not the city they currently inhabit, naturally falls into the cadence of an in-flight announcement without his awareness of the way he defaults to the familiar. ]

Hey. For those who don't know me, I'm Freddie, I live on the Upper West Side. Before I was a pilot, I was actually in physics. ...I'm sure everyone's noticed the voids popping up around here. If any of you have fallen into them or seen inside of them, let me know what you found. Or any other observations, if anyone's gotten close to them. How they behave, how big they are, whether they carry sound, whether their size and placement are consistent. I'm not Einstein or anything but I want to try to gather what information I can. Thanks.

Comments

[merged]

Being inside them is nauseating. I walked into one on accident, and it felt like I was—shit, I don't know, being drained? By the time I managed to get out, I felt like I'd just pushed myself for days. The ground was weird and sticky, and there were these... things on the wall.

They remind me of something back home, actually—the... voids or whatever we're calling them. It's like we've gotten access to a separate layer of reality.

[faa]

[ Sharon's observations would be very useful for characterizing these things—but they're immediately eclipsed by something far more innate and emotional, a kneejerk reaction of sharp alarm that travels through the tether like a sudden jolt of electricity along a wire. ]

Jesus, are you okay? You didn't get hurt or anything?

[merged]

[ His alarm pulls something warm from her, as if she were placing her hand on the tether between them. ]

I'm okay, promise. It was mostly just exhausting and overwhelming, and it made me sick to my stomach. I don't think we should spend much time in these places if we can help it. God knows what'll happen if they close and a Vessel is still inside. [ She's inclined to believe they'd be trapped there. ]

[faa]

[ Freddie settles, if only somewhat, as she explains further; the silent assurance through the shared tether that she's fine does help with that. ]

Why do you say 'close'? Did you see that happen somewhere?

[ He supposes, theoretically, that if they're appearing sporadically, they could just as easily vanish like that. It's a chilling thought, just vanishing into a sinkhole in the middle of spacetime. ]

[merged]

Not see, but I know there was one around West 86th that wasn't there today. Bella seems to pick up on where they are before the lights even start to flicker. She gets weird, like she doesn't want to go forward. [ Her Nightmare, Belladonna, she means. ] Didn't have that issue today.

[potentialman]

I don't...remember where it was, that I stumbled into one.

[ Megumi's trying very hard to just sound normally bashful and not like "hello I cannot remember where my PTSD-induced breakdown took place." ]

But my abilities usually make it easy to see through darkness. It was still like being blinded, so I don't think that it's even that it's dark in the voids. It's so empty that light and darkness don't apply.

[hallowedly]

Good morning! ( Seishirou, it's clearly not morning — ) I'm afraid they're not a particularly exemplary experience.

Cold, dark. But... cosmically. Not like a cave. There's no glimmer of light or hope anywhere. I'm afraid I'd already undertaken a considerable amount of effort in all instances, so this might be entirely coincidental — but I was wiped out, throughout.