Quintet (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
quintet) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
revivalproject2023-06-15 10:50 pm
quintet) wrote in revivalproject2023-06-15 10:50 pm
Catibrations
WHO: Quintet and YOU
WHERE: Quintet's Calibrations Room
WHAT:xenofiction Furry Nonsense™
WHEN: Calibrations Time
WARNINGS: tba
Entering Quintet's room, is like exiting a dark tunnel. At first the scene is too bright to discern more than vague shapes, outlines and shadows, the sun washing out all detail into white. Then you adjust.
Dirt floor— no, it's just dirt. Packed flat and cleared of plants and all debris, it's a wide, open clearing, surrounded by tall grass. Taller than you are, even, grass that towers twice your height or more, and giant trees and all around are a series of enormous cavern entrances. Or perhaps, they're other doors?
Animals filter in and out of them, walking in twos or threes, sometimes riding on one another's back, chatting amicably, with a relaxed air despite the strange combinations. Why are rabbits riding on lions? How can wolves be laughing alongside a hopping pair of robins. What's with the anteater, so obviously lecturing an entire group of rats and mice as he walks along, like a professor conducting a walking tour?
And Quintet is there, sitting at the edge of it all, just near the door, watching people come and go, hunched in on herself, tail coiled tight. Just watching.
Come to think of it, for a cat, she's exceptionally large, wouldn't you say?
Perhaps this is the moment when you realize: whatever you were, you aren't anymore. Like everyone else in this society of animals, you also have paws, or wings, or talons, or claws. You also walk low to the ground, and have a snout of some description. In this Society, there are no humans, and precious few apes or other hominids.
And, that means you, too.
WHERE: Quintet's Calibrations Room
WHAT:
WHEN: Calibrations Time
WARNINGS: tba
Entering Quintet's room, is like exiting a dark tunnel. At first the scene is too bright to discern more than vague shapes, outlines and shadows, the sun washing out all detail into white. Then you adjust.
Dirt floor— no, it's just dirt. Packed flat and cleared of plants and all debris, it's a wide, open clearing, surrounded by tall grass. Taller than you are, even, grass that towers twice your height or more, and giant trees and all around are a series of enormous cavern entrances. Or perhaps, they're other doors?
Animals filter in and out of them, walking in twos or threes, sometimes riding on one another's back, chatting amicably, with a relaxed air despite the strange combinations. Why are rabbits riding on lions? How can wolves be laughing alongside a hopping pair of robins. What's with the anteater, so obviously lecturing an entire group of rats and mice as he walks along, like a professor conducting a walking tour?
And Quintet is there, sitting at the edge of it all, just near the door, watching people come and go, hunched in on herself, tail coiled tight. Just watching.
Come to think of it, for a cat, she's exceptionally large, wouldn't you say?
Perhaps this is the moment when you realize: whatever you were, you aren't anymore. Like everyone else in this society of animals, you also have paws, or wings, or talons, or claws. You also walk low to the ground, and have a snout of some description. In this Society, there are no humans, and precious few apes or other hominids.
And, that means you, too.
no subject
Her casual pose is feigned, legs splayed out, tail slowly curling and uncurling. She's watching him; what will he do? Big and dangerous, yes, but if that bird earlier had been any indication, none of these people really knew what to do once they looked like something Society would recognize as a person. Any cove in a storm; Quintet would take the advantage, and bite down gladly.
no subject
“And what exactly am I supposed to do here?” He inquires further. “These dreams hide memories in them. If you’re telling me I have to hunt these creatures, I’ll pass. I’m not an animal regardless what shape you put me into.”
no subject
She indicates with the tilt of her head one of the yawning cave mouths, the nearest a high, narrow split in the sandstone, the interior invisible in the gloom.
no subject
That said, he does get up regardless and walks over to the indicated caves, picking one by random.
no subject
Regardless, he steps into the doorway without her, and the world melts away.
Wesker is standing in a broad, dome-roofed cave, stone floor littered with the bodies of coyotes in various states of brokenness. His opponent, an anteater, looms enormously large, larger even than his tiger-self, his digging claws monumental, tongue flicking in complex shapes. Through the eyes of Quintet's memory, it leaves trails behind, power flickering like lightning along the anteater's tongue. Despite appearances, it leaves one somehow in mind of the barrel of a gun, spiraled with rifling and deadly. There is a bullet there, unseen.
To his left— two cats. Very like Wesker in appearance. Indeed, they're not just like him, they are him, two other selves, two brothers. To his right, the same, and all of them together, working in tandem; they four are all parts of his mind, his psyche, his self, split off and made real. They're... talking to one another, and to him.
It's a fight to the death— the Anteater lunges with a sound like a rifle-shot, and there's no more time for contemplation.
no subject
He emerges from the cave and casts a look back towards Quintet while making his way over to a different cave. "I use water and soap. You should try it. The mouth of a cat is a cesspool for a myriad of bacteria. Maybe you should start by brushing your teeth."
And into the next cave he wanders.
no subject
She considers his direction, tense in the hocks, waiting. He's not used to masking his tail, "Stop trying to make your own inadequacies a justification for looking down on others— it makes you look weak when your convictions are built on nothing."
The next memory is pain. Just pain; agony crawling across every nerve, rending higher, and higher, the sound of closed-mouth screaming, raw-throated, teeth clenched, so vivid and stark as to seem like it belongs to someone else were it not so inescapable as to be coming from oneself. Agony, that goes on and on and on, and through it, laced with crimson acid crush and fire, a voice, low and vicious, close behind the ear.
Did you know, I used to be a doctor? Not because I thought it was the right profession for an intelligent person, no, but because I thought it was the most honorable and reverent way of shunting my impossible hatred
Somehow, impossibly, the pain increases, a white-hot needle, a curving wire, piercing the brain, boiling through the spine and nerves, every join in every limb locked and straining, every muscle unresponsive, set to quivering. It isn't real pain, but it's the most real that pain can be: the perception of it, the memory and experience of it, every possibility of pain that the body can generate, all generating at once. The inversion of anesthesia, the opposite of numbing, until even benign stimulae are intensified to the point of pain; even the sensation of gravity, of time passing, of the proprioceptive awareness of the position of limbs becomes a new way to suffer.
I thought that instead of lashing out, I could put that energy to better use, and help people. Making life better for everyone, banishing pain and suffering with my knowledge of bodily anatomy and my anesthetic praxis, Caduceus.
Something is breaking. Something must break. Nothing can endure like this for long. Something must end, it must end, it must it must it must
Priceless art contained within the head that you so cavalierly smashed against the far-flung wall!
The pain dissolves in a cacophony of chaotic sensory input and a pain more physical, the crunch of bone, the unexpected twisting inversion of gravity: the memory dissolves with it. There is a brief glimpse of cracked stone, a flash of sunlight, and then it's over.
no subject
The memory itself is... Dubious. A fever dream interlaced with the sort of incessent ramblings Wesker remembers well from years of working in Umbrella facilities. While useful in their own way, Wesker doesn't necessarily miss that time
The memory comes to its close and Wesker can only roll his eyes as he simply sits down between the gathering of animals littering this space. "Now who is the one hiding their nature-given flaws behind assumptions?" He fixes her with an unblinking glare. "You are a cat. Predator by design, yet still prey. Your attempts at making yourself appear superior are pathetic at best once weighted against simple facts. I, on the other hand, have earned the right to look down on others as you put it. Though I don't expect a simple creature like you to understand. Now tell me how to leave this place. I grow weary of it and fulfilled the requirements."
no subject
She tips up her chin, sitting in almost a mirror-pose to his own, paws neatly-squared, spine at a stern right-angle, staring steadily, a cat's subtle fuck you, though Wesker likely knows nothing of the language his body is aping. He has no tail, in reality, immotile ears, restricted senses on most levels, not even whiskers or magneto-sense, or a halo-brain with which to make Art. But for all that he lacks, for all that he cannot see, or hear, or understand, he is still a person; that very same personhood he has repeatedly tried to deny Quintet.
"You came in here some way or another, why don't you leave the same way? I didn't invite you in, and I don't want you here either. None of this is my doing."