beyond the pale

𝙱𝙴𝚈𝙾𝙽𝙳 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙿𝙰𝙻𝙴

[inl4ndempire]

@inl4ndempire a small-scale multi-muse writing blog. by lovi (she/her, 30). low activity. rules and roster below cut.

rules. this is blog will primarily be a sandbox for me to voice-test certain muses that have peaked my interest. i write at my own pace; please be patient. i will only write with mutuals and i will not follow back any writers under 21. i'll do my best to tag triggers with 'cw'. please let me know if i miss something you'd like tagged. a blanket warning, however, for written depictions of fictional drugs and drug use, which will not be tagged. my other blog is @arcticrime.

the best way to start a thread with me is through memes; there's no expiration date. feel free to send one whenever you want, no matter how old the prompt is.

standard rp etiquette applies. i am responsible for maintaining my own boundaries, just as you are responsible for maintaining yours. please be willing and able to communicate clearly and honestly if lines are crossed.

roster.

klaasje amandou. disco elysium.

ruby the instigator. disco elysium.

silco. arcane.

crowley. supernatural (kripke era only).

[inl4ndempire]

ohhhhh i'm one (1) day away from being on break for a whole 10 days. while i work on things, like this and i will send prompts. specify muse if you want.

[abjurator]

my reasons for being here are the same as yours.

he speaks and breaks her concentration. the only noise otherwise is the looping ceiling fan overhead. it's rare that the place is so quiet. somewhere, there's a rowdy thirteen year-old threatening to blow something to pieces out of angry, teenage impudence, but sevika's not ready to deal with that headache. not yet.

needle and thread, pulled tight: she's got one heavy, false hand on his arm while she stitches him up. it's been a rough morning. they'd been ambushed in the lanes, on the way to collect a scheduled payment. she'd told him not to come. he hadn't listened. some idiot with a rifle and a dream had come close, nicked his forearm, a long, thin, nasty gash. she'd turned that man's brain to mush, but now they're here, back below, the opening hours for the last drop edge closer and closer, and she's doing this. she wants a drink. or shimmer. both.

there's something to the fact that he trusts her enough to do this, given he could probably stitch himself up. the arm serves as a weight, anyways, to keep him from moving. she doesn't slow, one steady stitch at a time, but her expression draws into something more tight, a furrowing of the brow, curl of the lip. she speaks now to @inl4ndempire less like the king of the undercity and more like a friend, tone verging on concerned: "you think i don't know that?"

[inl4ndempire]

the corrosion at his eye's center has grown incrementally. earlier he measured it, watching a bronze washer vanish while in front of his face. eclipsed by a point of total collapse. at the time, its expansion evoked neither rage nor self-pity. now the inevitability sits its weight on his back.

@seivka is at the periphery where the lamp-light melts into itself until it is water-soft and strange. if he turned his head, he could see her fully, mark her progress by more than just the lines of fire crawling up his arm. he chooses not to. a demonstration of trust and control in equal measure: trust in her, control over himself, over the dead man’s fear that still has occasion to seize him with the river's sudden fury after heavy rain.

❛ others find it easy to forget. ❜ silco draws a finger down the side of his temple, silent for a moment before his mouth twists in contempt. ❛ these petty squabbles are a waste of time that we do not have. without a unified city, topside will only bury us further in the sump. ❜

[terrorignitis]

Louise Glück, from A Travel Diary; Winter Recipes from the Collective: Poems, 2021

[bluedprints]

@inl4ndempire: strange, what love does.

VOLITION [failure] — oh no.

love smells like someone running their hands over your hair. the static electricity buzzing under the oils. love is a bathtub. all skin and blisters.

VOLITION — but let's not think about that, champ.

harry nods his head like a madman, bites down on a hangnail until it stings in his mouth. "did you know komodo dragons can reproduce asexually?"

[inl4ndempire]

like looking into a fucked-up fun-house mirror of her own grief. in that way it feels self-indulgent to pity him. before, she’d simply fold it up and tuck it away alongside the rest of the sad, but what's the point? it’s all come undone.

❛ can’t say i did. ❜ she pictures a living nesting doll, the perfect replica inside it, identical down to the tiniest of atoms. klaasje cups her chin in her hand. ❛ does that mean they never get lonely? ❜

[soothfog]

Logic would suggest prophets—by merit of their felled futures—are immune to punchlines. But jokes subvert logic; they are little farcical departures from known reality. Crowley's: lewd and eluding. Dirty. Lee scratches the uptick of his mouth with his thumb as one would a glob of crusted mustard.

Crowley grasps Lee's arm. Sultry. Lee shivers—abscission-y. Touch itself, from another, is a tropical topical of the present; pleasurable and potent and humiliating (as salacious as soliciting someone to sunscreen between your shoulder blades). Lee never asks; starvestruck, he basks. Lee exists here—now—profoundly. Wherever 'here' is.

That is new.

Knowing, definitively, 'when' he is but not 'where'.

Wide, grassy plains repeat and repeat exactly how (and why) noise, here, does not. The clap never returns. Echoless. As if the land ascribes to the same monkly vow of now.

"You have—" it is objectively pleasanter in this field (just so) and that disrupts Lee's oversized and in effect ill-fitting grouchiness he wears because he thinks he should; still, his eyes flick to Crowley's, their hazel hue shimmering like wish-tossed pennies oxidized-green. But Lee cannot outperform the elements: even marooned to snowless lands, his cold, grave stare is not so cold nor dark: his eyebags (sunken maroon dunes) are far darker. He huffs and abandons the charade. In this present state, remembering the time he was counting down to until Kaye's birth lags, foggily delayed (like the weather-late bus); his brow riffle-shuffle-bends. Then. Politer, eyebrows raised rather than his voice: "You have until seven forty-nine."

Wind hoarsely croons. The air feels lozenge-cool on his neck and face. Acclimating to the gentler climate, the pointy-jut of Lee's graying chin peeks out from his collar like a blind field mouse. "Where are we?"

[inl4ndempire]

odd that he has to ask. and here crowley thought it impossible to surprise a prophet. but even that is unsatisfying in its simplicity. he’d be better off scaring birds. at least they’d squawk.

crowley waves the question away. ❛ not important. and, ❜ a finger points at lee. ❛ i’m not the one with somewhere to be, mate. so, why don’t you help me help you? ❜ sinking his hands back down into his coat, he steps around lee, taking care to keep his shoes from the mud.

❛ first we have ourselves a little heart to heart about what you’ve seen vis-à-vis end of the world, all that. ❜ un-bodied, his voice encircles lee’s shoulders from behind. ❛ and then i, ❜ coming back into view he completes his circumnavigation, ❛ deliver you to this baby you’re so keen on. smiles, happy families. ❜ the hands come out again, open palms offering the world. ❛ winners all around. ❜

then they drop. ❛ or keep playing the fool and you can walk. your choice. it’ll only take you a couple of weeks. ❜

[inl4ndempire]

@alulars continued from here

half-rotted, the empty church has leeched its substance into the ground, a sacred alluvium spoiling the earth around it. he can feel it out by the cabin, clinging to the soles of his shoes, stinging him within the flesh of his borrowed body. persistent and pernicious, in a way that promises gradual madness.

even the most minor agonies are to be appreciated. this one is no small part of the place’s appeal. makes him less likely to be followed and the cabin a good spot for a think. usually.

❛ ah. ❜ almost disappointed. ❛ not a shred of taste among your lot, is there. ❜ he remains motionless in the door frame. the only movement within the room is the brief facsimile lent by the light from the kerosene lamps, shuddering in their glass columns. subcutaneous, he coils and condenses inward, prepared to beat a hasty retreat if required. ❛ no manners, either. as bad as demons. if you’ve come for a cup of sugar, i haven’t any to lend you. ❜

[inl4ndempire]

crowley isn’t telepathic per se but as a crossroads demon he is highly attuned to others’* desires and can perceive their substance, the wanted object or outcome. to him they have shape and texture and taste, etc., and as one specific desire grows larger in the mind, so too does his sense of it come into sharper focus. in this way, the indecisive are like a fragrant, if confusing bouquet, while the single-minded are powerfully single note.

[inl4ndempire]

i’ll bet you see all kinds of people come through here.

no shit. ❛ you could say that. ❜ she scans @occultsleuth openly, wiping motor oil from her hands with a rag that she tucks into one pocket. ❛ it comes with the territory. ❜

the territory lies in the shadow of the motorway, broad concrete beams stabbing down into the earth. between the beams, a patchwork of dilapidated buildings that slide into and onto one another, their corrugated iron roofs crisscrossed with lines of laundry that sway and shudder in the breeze. it draws little fingers of dust from the dirt road across the floor of her garage.

something in his eyes puts her in mind of a paledriver. the center, collapsing inward. but no lorry that she can see. ruby crosses her arms. ❛ you walk here? ❜

[soothfog]

Soft and fond: “It will happen.” The words, kettle-white, spout and hotly sprout from his mouth up into the nipping air. Lee stares. His gaze flattens in on itself like a paper möbius strip bug-squished—and he remembers: Kaye painting Lee's bitten fingernails green-sun-spurge while they sit on the grass verge past the highway's right exit merge, his car's gas tank stalled empty waiting for his sister to emerge, foreheads sweat-sheened as if recently, ineffectively asperged and upon arrival, his sister purges the urge to verbally scourge and Kaye (with poor vocals and in poorer taste) cast as a white Aretha Franklin in her first grade play singing Amazing Grace and Kaye days-old, he holds, her blonding head so shiny-bald it looks bronze-rubbed-superstitiously-gold. Two hours, Lee grounds himself, two hours and twenty-two minutes. His small, warm smile naturally spreads then dulls as all entropy demands.

Candid: “I enjoy your sense of humor, Crowley.” And he means it. Without ulterior purpose. He isn't appraising for purity. This is pure praise.

Then, recalling what will come, Lee's eyes crinkle along his temples like amateurly draped crepe streamers: “I'm more worried I don't have a gift." His stare is targeted. He uncrosses his arms to friction heat into his cheeks; his wool-mittened palms chafe more than spark (ornate songbirds knit on the backs comically look as if they are scavenging his beard for nesting materials). Giving up, his hands re-home, once more, into his armpits and he stoops his chin below the flimsy wall of his coat collar. “Do you know what every child wishes for?”

[inl4ndempire]

this is becoming tedious, watching the prophet sink down into his memories and wallow like a pig in shit. crowley rolls his eyes, huffing out an entirely performative puff of air. ❛ a credit card and a brick of coke? throw in a mirror and you’re off to the races. ❜ abruptly, he brightens. lit from within like an empty house. ❛ let’s take a stroll. ❜

he touches lee’s upper arm. his palm is hot even through the layers of lee’s clothes. there's a light pressure to it, as though he were preparing to shake lee awake. then it falls away.

they’re in a field of coarse, withered grass, grooves of mud cut across it. the air is cold and saturated, though there's no snow, not even on the peaks of the distant mountains that border the field. above them, the sun has slid lower in the sky, pulling long shadows from underneath their feet.

crowley claps his hands together, grinning. a mean show of teeth. ❛ there. that’s better. now we can have a proper chat. ❜

[inl4ndempire]

i'm still here. of course i'm still here.

❛ i can see that. you look, ❜ his eyes slide down @occultsleuth and up again. they narrow. ❛ well-preserved. bit of formaldehyde in the hand cream? ❜

a dim little place, this. closed up against the afternoon, the tattered curtains drawn, the lit candles guttered and sunken into jagged peaks of wax. blood and burnt herbs on the air from the summoning. and away beyond the windowpane the scorch of rain on hot metal that he recognizes as london.

❛ if i’d known you were going to call, i’d’ve put on something nice. powdered my nose. ❜ there’s a spot of dried blood on his wing-tipped shoe. adjusting the knot of his tie, crowley casts about fruitlessly for something to lean against within the confines of the devil's trap. ❛ as it is, i've a schedule. you're not on it. ❜

[inl4ndempire]

thinking of hell in its base state as infinite void that is on the one hand, malleable, in that demons may manipulate one’s perception of hell, 'creating' or replicating objects, people, places, etc., and altering or arranging such creations to their own taste or amusement; and on the other hand, utterly unchangeable, any such 'creation' or replication a simulacrum that is unable to fully evoke the original, lacking in texture, scent, taste.

[abjurator]

she's not looking at klaasje's face. she's not expecting anything like a real answer; she'd divvied the question out as a poor man's attempt at a low blow. more clearly, she understands, now — or at least thinks she does — what she's dealing with. does klaasje think she's the first woman in the world to ever hurt her?

nah. she's not naive enough for that. neither of them are. ruby is watching klaasje's hand, the way it curls around the rope. she's got pale, thin fingers. she gives ruby a real answer. this is what makes her look up.

elegant face, pale, yellow hair the color of butter in a ceramic dish. ruby hates the way looking at her makes her feel. she was never good at not feeling. you get that, right? she grunts an affirmation. "sure. but i wouldn't have..." done it to you. this is the petulant answer a child gives. but she's hesitant to give klaasje much else.

[inl4ndempire]

❛ yeah, well. ❜ her mouth turns into a tiny, humorless smile. ❛ you’re actually a good person. ❜ less of a compliment than a professional assessment, the slightest inflection on ‘actually.’

a bit of wind shivers the reeds and the thin-legged birds that have run out onto the mudflats to pick at worms. it rushes toward the martinaise waterfront, a crumble of buildings in the distance. shunts over the slab concrete balcony, her rooftop prison, and strums the red string she tied from the window to the radio antenna.

tracing the shot that came from somewhere out here. the flat exposure of the coastline crawls up her back, her pulse at the base of her throat.

❛ look, i can make it up to you. since it’s my shit you got stuck in. ❜ klaasje lifts the buoy a little, water dripping off the end of it. ❛ i’ve got cash, enough for two. enough for both of us to get out of here. ❜ that road trip they talked about. ❛ what do you say? ❜

[notmorbid]

north american lake monsters.

dialogue prompts from north american lake monsters: stories by nathan ballingrud.

no one is judging you. i just want to help.

i’ll bet you see all kinds of people come through here.

i’ve just got a lot on my mind today, i guess.

maybe i can help distract you.

you’ve known me for what, five minutes?

what can i say? i’m impulsive. caution to the wind.

i’m on the run. i stole a car.

why are you telling me this? i don’t want to know this.

so, this is it? this is how it happens?

i don’t hate anybody. i wish i had it in me.

do you think it’s possible for something beautiful to come out of an awful thing?

do you think a good life can redeem a horrible act?

if i don’t get to hit somebody soon, i’m gonna snap.

you can’t turn into a shut-in. you have to get out.

sometimes people really are what they say they are.

i can only imagine how you must feel.

what’s up, gorgeous?

can you see me in a church?

i’m still here. of course i’m still here.

does it matter how i want it?

you’d be surprised how much more there is to my life.

you passive little shit.

sometimes you’ve just gotta make do with what’s available.

why did you leave me? you were everything i had.

want me to read you a story?

will you cuddle with me?

are you scared of anything?

it’s okay to be afraid.

i thought you might be in trouble.

i think i’m haunted.

you can’t go down that road by yourself.

a ghost is something that fills a hole inside you.

you need to think carefully when you decide what you can live without.

you must think i’m crazy.

this is my home. it’s everything i know.

something’s wrong with me. something’s really wrong.

what’s happening to you? are you okay?

our family is bound together by love.

[inl4ndempire]

@soothfog continued from here

he raises his eyebrows. ❛ oh yes, ❜ slow, grave with sarcasm. ❛ you're really going nowhere fast. must be important. ❜

the narrow patch of dry concrete beneath the awning is empty but for them. when lee glances away, crowley sidles a few steps closer, into arms reach. oppressive, almost, in his proximity, reducing lee’s range of vision.

he withdraws one of his hands from his coat to gesture dismissively at the air. ❛ come on, what’s the rush? you’ve seen one baby, you’ve seen them all. ❜ lee’s even seen this baby in particular. he can smell it. anticipation without desperation. desire denuded, scraped of all its edges until it is smooth and featureless as stone.

bloody unappetizing. he considers this. ❛ worried if you’re not there, it won’t happen? tree, forest, et cetera. ❜

[inl4ndempire]

crowley really doesn't put any effort into coming across as human. it would be pointless, as most of his interactions are with people who know he isn't human to begin with (i.e., deal seekers) or with other supernatural entities. since he does, by virtue of possessing someone else's body, look mostly like a human being, this can produce a subtle kind of 'uncanny valley' effect in someone who can't immediately clock him for what he is.

[inl4ndempire]

i suppose you must feel very pleased with yourself.

that stings. it surprises her. screw over enough people and you start to grow numb to it. betrayal looks the same on everyone, after all. ruby isn’t really any different in that respect.

usually, she isn’t around to see it. by now she would’ve shed klaasje and her quiet misery like an old coat. instead she’s here in the marshes, among the reeds and patches of melting snow. a muddy buoy on a rope clutched in her hand. the brackish water pulled back to the horizon, a distant sheet of topaz.

❛ i feel like shit, ruby, ❜ she says, low and gravelly. scraped out from within. perhaps the first honest thing she’s said to @abjurator. ❛ i didn’t have a choice. you get that, right? ❜