Verse Updates for Michael, Kevin, and Drossel
Michael || Everyone else can watch as the sun goes down
There is always the version of the story where it all goes wrong: the lovers die, the hero fails, the evil wins. If Michael was honest, he’d never thought there could be an end worse than the one he already knew he was going to get, but it comes in the middle of the night, with lights and sound, and a frightening lack of powers exploding outwards.
The last thing Michael remembers is going to bed with his boyfriend, and then he’s being woken up, and there’s Austen, and people- so many people, and a needle in his neck. He doesn’t even get the chance to lash out, he just fades. When he wakes up, it’s in a room of pure white, and there’s doctors all around him. And then, when he finally wakes up for the first time, with any true awareness, he’s in a small barren room- cell, it’s a cell- and there’s no light except for the fluorescent light that shine through the single small slat in the door.
His wrist has a heavy metal bracelet, and it stops him from influencing the shadows, but not from hearing them.
People talk about fates worse than death, and Michael would have to agree. The days become weeks, become months, and eventually, he loses track of the pass in time. And when, half mad from the dark, and the strange coloured needles, he’s brought out. And for the first time in what feels like so long, there’s sun, and people, and it all feels like both too much, and not enough. They take off the bracelet, and there is pure comfort of knowing he’s no longer trapped in them with no way out.
They tell him, they need him to do something for him, and give him a picture, and a location, and tell him they need this person brought back. And after so long in the dark, he’d do anything to not have to go back in right away. So he does, and he’s so desperate for the chance to be out, he doesn’t think about the fact that he hates what he’s doing, or that the ‘dangerous’ person he’s been sent to collect is younger than he is, and lashes out with powers (like he should have when Austen first came that night).
It happens again, and again, and again, and sometimes, he’s not just collecting people, sometimes there are worse things. He’s stronger now than he’s ever been before.
Years later, Michael will take the guilt with him, will hate what he’s done, and how much they broke him for it to happen.
*This verse is typically planned to take place during Michael’s tenure with Camire Industries, but he does eventually break free. It takes several years, but eventually it does happen.
Kevin || Broadway is dark tonight
Kevin has never been brave, not in the ways he needed to be. He saw the good in people, wanted to believe in his city, and it was, in the end, his downfall, and that of Desert Bluffs. He gets to be broken for the Greater Good, and filled with such a brilliant, blazing holy light. It is never allowed to be enough.
And then, there’s that same light filling a doorway, and he’s falling through it.
Time falls like sand in the Desert Otherworld, shifting through his grasping fingers until you don’t know if it’s been three days or three months, and you care even less. He ends up spending too much, and too little there. But it’s easy. There’s Carlos, and then a promise of Cecil, and more and more people are coming, it feels like getting better.
And then there’s no Cecil, and Carlos leaves with nothing but a letter, and the last... year... decade... section of time falls down around him. There’s a radio station, but the broadcast rings hollow, and the letter in his pocket has been worn down from the number of times Kevin has unfolded it to read it. Carlos left him a letter, and in exchange, Kevin leaves one of his own on the desk of the radio station, to whoever finds it.
And then he walks out of the station and towards the horizon. It takes... a long time for him to reach the doors into the Night Vale dog park, but he is nothing if not stubborn, so he enters the city that is like what Desert Bluffs used to be, and that he helped subjugate until he was pushed into the Desert Otherworld. He can’t stay here, but there is something glorious in getting to say goodbye to the city he loved, even if it’s not Desert Bluffs.
He walks out of the dog park, and then out of the city, and then out of the desert entirely. He only circles back twice before the Desert relinquishes it’s hold on him. he expects it to be harder, but he keeps his head low, and for the few people that do notice him, they just assume he’s Cecil, so he passes through under the guise of a man that hates him, of a man that is him in a way-- unbroken, and brave, and still the Voice of his own city.
Later, Kevin will grieve; when he’s out of the desert, and his eyes are golden, and he is so, so bitterly alone.
For now, he walks until his eyes are blurry, and his feet, and his back, and everything else just feels like a bruise. He will collapse on the sand, and walk when he wakes, until he’s gone from the Desert.
Soon, he finds himself in an unfamiliar city, with more water than he’s ever seen in one place, and he will stare at the water for hours, until the sun goes down (and to have the sun go down, it’s a luxury he hasn’t had since... since before Strex).
Drossel || Mistakes in the flawless porcelain
Drossel Keinz was not supposed to come back to life. It was a clerical error; a form meant to go to the records that kept getting passed over for increasingly important things, and more pressing overtime than one dead and inconvenient soul. So the file with his name on it get’s passed from hand to hand, until it ends up on the wrong pile. Incoming becomes outgoing, and Drossel Keinz is reborn.
People are not supposed to life twice. They life, they die, their cinematic records become memories of a dead person. Children are supposed to be blank slates, a fresh cinematic record to be filled with a life lived. Drossel’s... isn’t. He’s lived a life and died twice, not that there was much life with the temporary soul. That was all it was supposed to be, an addition to his cinematic record to account for the reanimation caused by the Angels.
Children’s minds aren’t prepared for a life worth of memories and knowledge from birth, and as long as Drossel can recall, in his dreams he sees snippets of a London past-- cobbled streets and carriages, the lingering threat of consumption. It’s the best his mind can do to parse the information, and it means he learns things in strange jumps and starts. he learns to walk and talk early, but he’s a quiet child that doesn’t scream or cry.
Where toddlers reach for the plastic cars and colourful barbie dolls, he finds himself staring at the flawless porcelain dolls, the shining and perfectly styled curls, the tulle and chiffon dresses. His parents-- the ones he has in this lifetime, seem to find it a little odd, but they entertain it, and the shelves in his room are covered in the dolls. A row of small, jointed mannequins covered in pinned cloth and half sewn dresses.
It is a constant even in his second chance at life.
But in a world that had moved on so drastically from when he remembered, the need for doll makers was so much less drastic. What had once been a trade, valued on the street with the watchmakers and musicians was now the realm of the artisan crafter.
But the old dolls, proper Victorian ones of glass and steel were passed down through families, and he learns to repair them. Unfixable cracks gently glued back into place. painted faces retouched with a delicate hand. infinitesimally minuscule details on the eyes, the glaze on the lips, perfected because Drossel can still remember how it felt to be a doll maker in the Earl Mandalay’s house and to apprentice under the man down the street from his father’s store.
He doesn’t do it for the money, but he makes himself a life repairing the old dolls of people who’s had them passed down, and making ones that could be confused for something much, much older than they are.
