What exactly does it mean when a Plague Doc makes a reference to - “Ring Around the Rosy?” What exactly have you gotten yourself into when invited to participate in a “Ring Around the Rosy?”
That said welcome to another installment of Afflicted Lands - I have more installments - but they don’t need to be read in order (assuming this works, 😆) You can enjoy the picture, or read on to see what happens in -
We All Fall Down
Roughly a month ago I’d been apprenticed to Artemis and James, who told me to always let them do the talking. This put me under the general impression that the “Ring Around the Rosy” was in no way suitable for apprentices, though I’d be doing it anyway.
Thunder rolled in from the direction of the distant mountains and the first beam of light cut into the night sky like an aurora. My new gloves were sweating what smelled like rubbing alcohol from their palms as they gripped the lever. Another beam shot up, but it was still far away. This seemed much too solemn a time for questions but a part of me deeply felt like we were all going to die.
“So you guys traveled to my reality in order to save the world from this - plague, you’re generating some kind of force-field to trap it in the town and destroy it, you’ve done it before, but for some reason you want me specifically to pull the final lever?”
James fiddled with his hat, sniffling noises anxiously emanating from his pale snout as he pretended to examine the woody stumps of recently cleared vegetation. “It’s just one switch, Junior. The other operators know what they are doing. All you need is to wait for the signal, squeeze and pull.”
“It has to be me?”
Artemis nodded. “For an outsider to understand the necessity of a quarantine is a great deal of weight off our souls, new one.”
“You people actually feel guilt?”
l’d never seen her nostril slits retract so far into her face. “What put you under the impression we didn’t?”
Sirens mounted on a near by radio tower started their dirge. I wasn’t about to disappoint my new friends or risk more incursions of that - thing - out into the wider world, so I threw my weight back against the lever, pulling it forward.
The all encompassing hum caused the ground under our feet to resonate with the pulse of the sirens and the intensity of the light column blasting up out of the rig not four meters back. I saw my friends fall, but managed to keep my footing as the ambient sound and overwhelming brightness began to dim. As soon as I could, I ran to them, observing the tears across their mask-like faces and hearing the sobs that made me briefly wonder why a successful occlusion had troubled them so.
A dull, red glow from the spent rigging as it started to crumble distracted from my concerns. Wildfires were reason enough to leave the siblings with their secrets until the threat was abated.
Wait, where were the distant mountains? Perhaps a fog was rolling in. Moonlight came from the wrong direction and from a crescent instead of an orb. Had I been mistaken to assume it had been full? A void filled my insides as I saw that the lands beyond the occlusion ring had been replaced with sand dunes and the sounds of waves crashing on an unseen shore, but it was the stars that most shook me. I’d always been one to look for constellations but there was nothing familiar here.
