#tithon

[pedroninjavermiliongreen87]

tamer: cooper

mecards: tithon and shuma

[rise-from-squalor]

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath.

Lord Alfred Tennyson // Tithonus

[disruption-crew-lcorp]

[...Hey, wait.]

[Where has Tithon been?]

[disruption-crew-lcorp]

[Snipped from here.]

(-oʇ ɓuıoɓ llɐ ǝɹ,ǝʍ -ʇsnɾ s,ʇI ˙ɹǝɓuɐp uı ʇou ɯ,I 'ɔıʇɐɯɐɹpɹǝʌo -ɓuıǝq sɐʍ I 'ʎɹɹos 'ʎɹɹoS)

[Epos rounds the corner, and finds Tithon sitting on the ground, arms wrapped around her legs. Her head is down.]

!¡uoɥʇı⊥

[disruption-crew-lcorp]

[IT’S SO LOUD.]

[Tithon is having a meltdown due to sensory overload. Everyone is free and he can hear it all. They are all saying something, they all want something and she is the only one who can hear it.]

[They can pick out Elbin’s voice, taken into the chorus of the Mountain Of Smiling Bodies. They can pick out...]

[Epos?]

[Epos. She is practically screaming with fear, a livewire thing of familiar care, where she realises she cares at all.]

[...It is around that time of the loop, isn’t it...]

[disruption-crew-lcorp]

[He is letting Alriune out, by the way. Nothing’s attacked her yet, though she almost wishes something would. She talks in them in soft, hushed voices, and in her quiet panic, doesn’t even realize that she is not speaking her native tongue.]

[disruption-crew-lcorp]

[Awake and watching someone else scream on that operating table for once.]

[It’s awful. He can’t look away. She’s too afraid to make Epos stop.]

[...Or, is that Epos at all?]

[It’s a foolish thought- She’s trying to justify what Epos herself will not, their collective moral failing. It is her, and it’s hard to say that this sort of behavior is even out of character.

[Perhaps he just saw it differently before, because it was always him who got hurt, and no one else.]

[There is something cold and desperate, seething through the room, and what else could there be, from the child who has been building a staircase of bodies to salvation? (Epos is not, of course, a child, and cannot be described as such. He’s making excuses.) There is something gleeful, as well, from the woman who enjoyed it.]

[She’s muttering to herself, fragments of words as she injects the not-Tithon (Isn’t it awful, that Tithon doesn’t even know this poor soul’s name?) with another needle, then fusses with something or other on the table and points a blunt, solid-looking instrument at their neck.]

[She hasn’t even noticed him, as he quietly slips out of the room, cringing at the blood staining his shoes.]

[If she makes time reset again...whoever it is won’t remember the pain, right? And Epos wouldn’t...do it again. There was something wrong with her, has been for the past few hours. This would fix it, and he can make sure...whatever it was, won’t happen again.]

[(It is her, though. It’s just her. She may have had something going on, but Tithon fears that she’d do...that, even if something wasn’t wrong. She only doesn’t do it because she’s...afraid of the consequences, but at the end of time, there aren’t any.) It doesn’t matter. He still has to try. (Why? Because you were friends with her, once? Does that really excuse it, for you?)]

[Sort of. It’s not moral or just, and it is hard to suppress the feeling of the world falling down around him. He begins to open a nearby containment chamber.]

[disruption-crew-lcorp]

How to keep Epos from leaving lab (while she is in a manic state) so that she does not get killed immediately?

(Disclaimer: I do not expect an answer I’m just saying that I have a problem right now.)