spoopy music
Nov. 30th, 2016 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hedgemazeELEVATOR PITCH
James Aubel is a young man of 30, of dark hair and dark blue eyes. He’s a successful businessman (and equally wealthy), and owns an old, venerable estate in Derbyshire, along with his father. His mother committed suicide when he was younger, but that’s something neither of them like to talk about.
James prefers to keep to himself when he can, and though he can be polite to others, it’s obvious that he strains to do so. He’s clever, can read people amazingly well (to the point where it’s off-putting, if he’s not careful), and can be incredibly charming when he wants, but his personality is hampered by an uneven temper, a jaded outlook on life, and a sharp edge of sarcastic wit, often at the expense of others. At his core, he suffers from identity issues, feeling like he’s just playing a role in life that he doesn’t quite deserve — though many chalk up these insecurities to the pressures of business life.
Rarely does he work from his ancestral home, preferring to live elsewhere in the cities. He travels often, having been to many prominent cities and countries. They’ve all but nearly lost their novelty to him.
Unbeknownst to all, he harbors a dark secret, one that he has problems reconciling with himself more often than not. One way or another, the heart of it seems to be located somewhere within their sprawling hedge maze, as he keeps a key to the center of it on his person at all times. Even his father is unaware of why, though he hardly seems to care one way or another, as long as it keeps cleanly manicured.
That’s fine by him.
ABILITIES
-telepathy (has not used in years, sometimes he forgets he still can)
-empathy and empathic projection
-heightened senses and reaction time
-slightly faster recovery time compared to most “normal” people (from illness and injury)
-still fucking suffers from asthma, how did this still happen
-as a centipede creature, can completely "meld" or "synthesize" into another organic being's body, becoming its new life and retaining the original's memories. (Defunct, in that he's already done so. This is, biologically, a One Time Deal)
-with great stress on both body and mind, he can change back into his original form. However, since he's already melded with a human body, he wouldn't be able to take over another lifeform's body even if he did change back. His human biology is literally written into him at this point.
WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE
This is the story about a Creature, a boy, and their estate.
Tucked behind the wide green hills of Derbyshire, England, was their home. Sprawling and grandiose, and reeking of old money, it was a house unlike any other. Long wide halls, tall cavernous ceilings, ostentatious studies, dining halls long and empty. The boy that lived there was named James Aubel, bright and curious, shy and weak-bodied. His parents hated each other, though he loved them dearly, even though his mother said mean things to him, and his father was always away and barely said anything at all. Even so, he enjoyed what time he could spend with them (on good days, his mother would even take him out to walk the grounds, and ask him about his studies. She would examine his face so fervently, wondering how much his features instead matched more closely another woman’s face, something dark behind her eyes) and when his father did return home, he would always bring a gift. Books. Stories about worlds far away and magical, or of spaceships and dangerous alien creatures.
Most days, though, he was just lonely.
Behind their home was a hedge maze, green and wide and well-manicured — it twisted this way and that in the most confounding ways possible, but James had the route to the middle memorized. On his worst days, he would take solace in pretending to be lost, to find himself in the center where no on else could bother him. He could look up at the sky and wonder what it would be like to fly, or sit and cry until his eyes were red and swollen. One day, he did just this, wondering why his mother had said such terrible things to him that day.
Next to him, under the soft soil, lived the Creature. He was not a large thing, sized much more like a slender centipede, white and translucent and glowing. The Creature did not remember how it came to be, or how it found its way into the center of the maze — it only knew that one day it fell a very, very long way, and landed in green blades of grass, then burrowed under the ground to sleep forever. Except he did not sleep for as long as he had expected. In his dreams, he heard a soft crying, coupled with a great Sorrow. It was enough to stir him, and he crawled out from under the ground and saw a boy. In his mind, he asked the boy what was wrong.
James was not afraid of the Creature. Instead, he was curious, and this curiosity blossomed into a conversation. He found an odd comfort in the quiet glow of the creature, its shell milky white and reflecting both sun and moon equally; and in turn, the Creature found an alien enjoyment in speaking with the boy, something he had never felt before. Every day onward, James would find the Creature in the middle gardens in the maze, and the Creature would burrow up in eager greeting, insectoid limbs piercing through dirt and flowers with sharp precision. He would tilt his head, antennae waving in comedic greeting, and ask how his day had been. He had found a friend in James, and James had found a friend in him. The boy kept him secret, and thus the Creature became more precious to James, as all secrets oft have a tendency to do. For a full year did they meet, talking about James’ day, or about nothing at all, until the boy was just barely nine.
One day, the Creature wasn’t sure the boy was going to show. And finally, with hurried footsteps, the boy arrived, but something was wrong. James was crying, and the Creature couldn’t quite understand what he was telling him — his mother was chasing him, chasing him endlessly through the maze, but they weren’t playing a game. She had a knife, he said. He didn’t understand what he had done wrong but she was going to hurt him, he had said. The Creature did not know what to do, he could not understand the complexities of human thought and emotion that would lead them to this state, but he could feel — deep within him, reverberating in every tendril, in every limb — that something was wrong with James, even though he was not bleeding. He could feel that his heart hurt, as well as his lungs. That his body, already weak by nature, could not handle the influx of fear and stress and sorrow.
“I don’t want to die,” James had said through streaked tears, hunched over in the grass, while the Creature craned his head to look at him. His breathing had become ragged, barely managing strained words. “I don’t want to die. I want to grow up and have an important job like my father, I want to meet pretty women and go on adventures and leave this house…” he coughed, unable to continue for a full minute. The Creature felt the boy’s helplessness, and for the first time, he did not know how to comfort him. “I want to leave this house! I hate this place! I hate everyone here!”
James had slouched further into the ground, his knees and palms deep into wet soil. The Creature felt a sadness he did not know could exist. He searched for words, but they felt far away, beyond even his grasp. Finally, he reached out to James, his words uncertain and quiet.
Do you hate me, too?
He never received a response. Within him, he could feel that James’ heart had stopped, and his body crumpled into the garden, unmoving. And for the first time in his long, eternal life, the Creature felt grief. It twisted within him like a knife, drove his mind in circles. James was gone, he could feel it — and in his head, all he could hear was I don’t want to die. What could he do to fix this? He could not give him his life back, but he could, perhaps, fulfill his wishes. His wishes to live, and then the Creature could have James back, in some small way. He would just have to do it for him now, in memory of the boy. He owed him that much for waking him up, for sharing the sun and experiences with him during their year together — that way, he would not have failed him, and James would not hate him. Surely not.
And so the Creature made his choice. He burrowed into James’ body like he would the soil, tearing through the flesh and bone of his chest and making home within the warmth. And then he transformed the shell, twisted his many limbs longer and thinner, digging into veins and muscle. His own self became James’ new skeleton, James’ new lifeblood, though he would be James no longer. The process was painful, even gruesome, but finally, finally, the Creature fit. He merely had to remove the old bones to make way for new ones, and with a bit of transforming and shifting and changing, he had made James’ body his own. It fit snug and warm, if not strange. He opened his eyes and saw the night sky staring down at him, felt the cool breeze on his cheek. The Creature sat up, and at the entrance to the gardens, saw James’ mother staring at him in shock. Her dress was streaked with blood and she held a knife in her hand. The Creature narrowed his new eyes at her.
“Why did you want to hurt him?”
She screamed, turned, and ran.
The rest had happened so quickly, and the Creature (now James, or James was now the Creature, or they were both each other now, two had become one, it was difficult to tell) barely had enough time to bury James’ old bones, the only thing he could not make into his own. He wouldn’t need them, for now he had new bones — and so underground they went, quickly and softly, into his old place of rest.
Hours later, the police had found him, sitting still in the middle of the hedge maze. The next day, he had overheard that James’ mother (no, his mother now, he had to tell himself) had taken her own life with the knife she carried, her body slumped against the walled greenery on the far west end. James… yes, James was his name now, James felt nothing. He had no love for his mother, or his father; he knew what they had driven his old self to in the past, he knew of the sadness that he had felt because of them. No, he didn’t care that she had died, not really.
Years passed, and James tried to emulate the vibrancy and playfulness of his old self, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t the same. Human life had twisted humor into sarcasm, optimism to cynicism. He had wanted an “important job” and to meet “pretty women”, hadn’t he? He would have these things, but there was something hollow about the way he approached his goals — there was nothing satisfying or happy about gaining either of them. (And gain them he did.) For so long, he felt like a sham, but he had to remind himself that he was living for the sake of living; because surely this was better than sleeping forever, whether it be in a coffin or curled up in the wet soil, in a garden somewhere cool and inviting?
He told himself that. He would have to live for the old James’ sake, to preserve that smile, even though he could not seem to emulate it himself. The potential was there, he could not waste it, he simply just did not know how to use it. Perhaps he couldn’t, perhaps being human was beyond his means.
But he would try.
AND THEY CAME FROM THE STARS
As for what James really is, no one can say for sure. His kind doesn’t have a name, and they have no clear origin. Civilizations and sentient beings that are actually aware of their presence know very little; other than they sleep in the ground, sometimes never waking, forever trapped in a dormant slumber.
But sometimes they do awaken.
The long and short of it is this: they are small creatures, at first, insectoid, shaped very similarly to an Earth centipede. The exception is that they have long, razor sharp legs, cutting maws, and whip-like antennae. Their exoskeleton glows an eerie pale light, matching the color of their exterior. In that way, they’re bioluminescent.
Only one will fall to a planet, and then they’ll burrow underground and sleep. Empathic creatures, they can feel the emotions of others as they dream. If these emotions become strong enough, they can awaken, pulling themselves out of the ground to the surface above. The more empathic the creature, the less it takes for them to awaken; regardless, strong emotions are still required to pull such an eldritch abomination from its sleep.
The most important part of this, however, is what sort of emotions wake them.
James is particularly empathic, having been woken up by a young boy’s excessive sorrow. He was still young and small, and therefore still curious — he was also met with friendship from the boy, and so his temperament changed accordingly, taking on traits of being caring and concerned. After melding himself with the young boy’s body, he more or less gave up what he was for the sake of latching onto humanity. 20+ years later and he’s more human than alien, and considers Earth his home.
However, on other planets, some long dead and many, many lightyears away, others of his kind wake up in different circumstances. If a planet is rife with war or chaos (civilization or otherwise; merely violent plant or animal life will also count towards this), the creature will soak up all of the hate and bitterness in its slumber. It will grow larger and larger, until the rage and grief above reach a breaking point. Then it awakens.
When it penetrates the surface, it’s more monster than sentient being. It projects all the negative emotions it was taught to the surface, and anyone drawing near to such a gigantic creature feels these emotions tenfold. The abomination regurgitates years, maybe centuries, of what it had been soaking up in the ground, all that time. It becomes a powerhouse of hungry, writhing, negative emotions. It destroys the terrain, borrowing furiously through the ground, and destroys anything in its way, coming up to the surface to ravage and shatter its inhabitants; plants, animals, civilizations. In this time, it continues to grow larger and larger, until it is nearly the size of the planet it inhabits. And only when said planet is a mere husk of itself — all life ruined, when everything is completely and utterly dead — does it curl back up into the ground, and return to its eternal sleep, never to rise again.
It’s worth nothing that no one knows what happens if a creature wakes up to pure joy or excessive happiness. Perhaps it’s happened once or twice, but it would’ve taken on a peaceful nature, in this case, likely preferring to watch the world thrive from a quiet distance. A far more peaceful outcome for the planet that harbors one of these creatures from some mysterious place in the stars.
Naturally, the tragedies are far more upsetting, and therefore far more memorable. Thankfully, James is just as ignorant of this as anyone else on Earth — nor does he care to find out much about his alien heritage. He’s happy to live his life as a man, and prefers not to at all think about his other self if he can help it.
James Aubel is a young man of 30, of dark hair and dark blue eyes. He’s a successful businessman (and equally wealthy), and owns an old, venerable estate in Derbyshire, along with his father. His mother committed suicide when he was younger, but that’s something neither of them like to talk about.
James prefers to keep to himself when he can, and though he can be polite to others, it’s obvious that he strains to do so. He’s clever, can read people amazingly well (to the point where it’s off-putting, if he’s not careful), and can be incredibly charming when he wants, but his personality is hampered by an uneven temper, a jaded outlook on life, and a sharp edge of sarcastic wit, often at the expense of others. At his core, he suffers from identity issues, feeling like he’s just playing a role in life that he doesn’t quite deserve — though many chalk up these insecurities to the pressures of business life.
Rarely does he work from his ancestral home, preferring to live elsewhere in the cities. He travels often, having been to many prominent cities and countries. They’ve all but nearly lost their novelty to him.
Unbeknownst to all, he harbors a dark secret, one that he has problems reconciling with himself more often than not. One way or another, the heart of it seems to be located somewhere within their sprawling hedge maze, as he keeps a key to the center of it on his person at all times. Even his father is unaware of why, though he hardly seems to care one way or another, as long as it keeps cleanly manicured.
That’s fine by him.
ABILITIES
-telepathy (has not used in years, sometimes he forgets he still can)
-empathy and empathic projection
-heightened senses and reaction time
-slightly faster recovery time compared to most “normal” people (from illness and injury)
-still fucking suffers from asthma, how did this still happen
-as a centipede creature, can completely "meld" or "synthesize" into another organic being's body, becoming its new life and retaining the original's memories. (Defunct, in that he's already done so. This is, biologically, a One Time Deal)
-with great stress on both body and mind, he can change back into his original form. However, since he's already melded with a human body, he wouldn't be able to take over another lifeform's body even if he did change back. His human biology is literally written into him at this point.
WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE
This is the story about a Creature, a boy, and their estate.
Tucked behind the wide green hills of Derbyshire, England, was their home. Sprawling and grandiose, and reeking of old money, it was a house unlike any other. Long wide halls, tall cavernous ceilings, ostentatious studies, dining halls long and empty. The boy that lived there was named James Aubel, bright and curious, shy and weak-bodied. His parents hated each other, though he loved them dearly, even though his mother said mean things to him, and his father was always away and barely said anything at all. Even so, he enjoyed what time he could spend with them (on good days, his mother would even take him out to walk the grounds, and ask him about his studies. She would examine his face so fervently, wondering how much his features instead matched more closely another woman’s face, something dark behind her eyes) and when his father did return home, he would always bring a gift. Books. Stories about worlds far away and magical, or of spaceships and dangerous alien creatures.
Most days, though, he was just lonely.
Behind their home was a hedge maze, green and wide and well-manicured — it twisted this way and that in the most confounding ways possible, but James had the route to the middle memorized. On his worst days, he would take solace in pretending to be lost, to find himself in the center where no on else could bother him. He could look up at the sky and wonder what it would be like to fly, or sit and cry until his eyes were red and swollen. One day, he did just this, wondering why his mother had said such terrible things to him that day.
Next to him, under the soft soil, lived the Creature. He was not a large thing, sized much more like a slender centipede, white and translucent and glowing. The Creature did not remember how it came to be, or how it found its way into the center of the maze — it only knew that one day it fell a very, very long way, and landed in green blades of grass, then burrowed under the ground to sleep forever. Except he did not sleep for as long as he had expected. In his dreams, he heard a soft crying, coupled with a great Sorrow. It was enough to stir him, and he crawled out from under the ground and saw a boy. In his mind, he asked the boy what was wrong.
James was not afraid of the Creature. Instead, he was curious, and this curiosity blossomed into a conversation. He found an odd comfort in the quiet glow of the creature, its shell milky white and reflecting both sun and moon equally; and in turn, the Creature found an alien enjoyment in speaking with the boy, something he had never felt before. Every day onward, James would find the Creature in the middle gardens in the maze, and the Creature would burrow up in eager greeting, insectoid limbs piercing through dirt and flowers with sharp precision. He would tilt his head, antennae waving in comedic greeting, and ask how his day had been. He had found a friend in James, and James had found a friend in him. The boy kept him secret, and thus the Creature became more precious to James, as all secrets oft have a tendency to do. For a full year did they meet, talking about James’ day, or about nothing at all, until the boy was just barely nine.
One day, the Creature wasn’t sure the boy was going to show. And finally, with hurried footsteps, the boy arrived, but something was wrong. James was crying, and the Creature couldn’t quite understand what he was telling him — his mother was chasing him, chasing him endlessly through the maze, but they weren’t playing a game. She had a knife, he said. He didn’t understand what he had done wrong but she was going to hurt him, he had said. The Creature did not know what to do, he could not understand the complexities of human thought and emotion that would lead them to this state, but he could feel — deep within him, reverberating in every tendril, in every limb — that something was wrong with James, even though he was not bleeding. He could feel that his heart hurt, as well as his lungs. That his body, already weak by nature, could not handle the influx of fear and stress and sorrow.
“I don’t want to die,” James had said through streaked tears, hunched over in the grass, while the Creature craned his head to look at him. His breathing had become ragged, barely managing strained words. “I don’t want to die. I want to grow up and have an important job like my father, I want to meet pretty women and go on adventures and leave this house…” he coughed, unable to continue for a full minute. The Creature felt the boy’s helplessness, and for the first time, he did not know how to comfort him. “I want to leave this house! I hate this place! I hate everyone here!”
James had slouched further into the ground, his knees and palms deep into wet soil. The Creature felt a sadness he did not know could exist. He searched for words, but they felt far away, beyond even his grasp. Finally, he reached out to James, his words uncertain and quiet.
Do you hate me, too?
He never received a response. Within him, he could feel that James’ heart had stopped, and his body crumpled into the garden, unmoving. And for the first time in his long, eternal life, the Creature felt grief. It twisted within him like a knife, drove his mind in circles. James was gone, he could feel it — and in his head, all he could hear was I don’t want to die. What could he do to fix this? He could not give him his life back, but he could, perhaps, fulfill his wishes. His wishes to live, and then the Creature could have James back, in some small way. He would just have to do it for him now, in memory of the boy. He owed him that much for waking him up, for sharing the sun and experiences with him during their year together — that way, he would not have failed him, and James would not hate him. Surely not.
And so the Creature made his choice. He burrowed into James’ body like he would the soil, tearing through the flesh and bone of his chest and making home within the warmth. And then he transformed the shell, twisted his many limbs longer and thinner, digging into veins and muscle. His own self became James’ new skeleton, James’ new lifeblood, though he would be James no longer. The process was painful, even gruesome, but finally, finally, the Creature fit. He merely had to remove the old bones to make way for new ones, and with a bit of transforming and shifting and changing, he had made James’ body his own. It fit snug and warm, if not strange. He opened his eyes and saw the night sky staring down at him, felt the cool breeze on his cheek. The Creature sat up, and at the entrance to the gardens, saw James’ mother staring at him in shock. Her dress was streaked with blood and she held a knife in her hand. The Creature narrowed his new eyes at her.
“Why did you want to hurt him?”
She screamed, turned, and ran.
The rest had happened so quickly, and the Creature (now James, or James was now the Creature, or they were both each other now, two had become one, it was difficult to tell) barely had enough time to bury James’ old bones, the only thing he could not make into his own. He wouldn’t need them, for now he had new bones — and so underground they went, quickly and softly, into his old place of rest.
Hours later, the police had found him, sitting still in the middle of the hedge maze. The next day, he had overheard that James’ mother (no, his mother now, he had to tell himself) had taken her own life with the knife she carried, her body slumped against the walled greenery on the far west end. James… yes, James was his name now, James felt nothing. He had no love for his mother, or his father; he knew what they had driven his old self to in the past, he knew of the sadness that he had felt because of them. No, he didn’t care that she had died, not really.
Years passed, and James tried to emulate the vibrancy and playfulness of his old self, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t the same. Human life had twisted humor into sarcasm, optimism to cynicism. He had wanted an “important job” and to meet “pretty women”, hadn’t he? He would have these things, but there was something hollow about the way he approached his goals — there was nothing satisfying or happy about gaining either of them. (And gain them he did.) For so long, he felt like a sham, but he had to remind himself that he was living for the sake of living; because surely this was better than sleeping forever, whether it be in a coffin or curled up in the wet soil, in a garden somewhere cool and inviting?
He told himself that. He would have to live for the old James’ sake, to preserve that smile, even though he could not seem to emulate it himself. The potential was there, he could not waste it, he simply just did not know how to use it. Perhaps he couldn’t, perhaps being human was beyond his means.
But he would try.
AND THEY CAME FROM THE STARS
As for what James really is, no one can say for sure. His kind doesn’t have a name, and they have no clear origin. Civilizations and sentient beings that are actually aware of their presence know very little; other than they sleep in the ground, sometimes never waking, forever trapped in a dormant slumber.
But sometimes they do awaken.
The long and short of it is this: they are small creatures, at first, insectoid, shaped very similarly to an Earth centipede. The exception is that they have long, razor sharp legs, cutting maws, and whip-like antennae. Their exoskeleton glows an eerie pale light, matching the color of their exterior. In that way, they’re bioluminescent.
Only one will fall to a planet, and then they’ll burrow underground and sleep. Empathic creatures, they can feel the emotions of others as they dream. If these emotions become strong enough, they can awaken, pulling themselves out of the ground to the surface above. The more empathic the creature, the less it takes for them to awaken; regardless, strong emotions are still required to pull such an eldritch abomination from its sleep.
The most important part of this, however, is what sort of emotions wake them.
James is particularly empathic, having been woken up by a young boy’s excessive sorrow. He was still young and small, and therefore still curious — he was also met with friendship from the boy, and so his temperament changed accordingly, taking on traits of being caring and concerned. After melding himself with the young boy’s body, he more or less gave up what he was for the sake of latching onto humanity. 20+ years later and he’s more human than alien, and considers Earth his home.
However, on other planets, some long dead and many, many lightyears away, others of his kind wake up in different circumstances. If a planet is rife with war or chaos (civilization or otherwise; merely violent plant or animal life will also count towards this), the creature will soak up all of the hate and bitterness in its slumber. It will grow larger and larger, until the rage and grief above reach a breaking point. Then it awakens.
When it penetrates the surface, it’s more monster than sentient being. It projects all the negative emotions it was taught to the surface, and anyone drawing near to such a gigantic creature feels these emotions tenfold. The abomination regurgitates years, maybe centuries, of what it had been soaking up in the ground, all that time. It becomes a powerhouse of hungry, writhing, negative emotions. It destroys the terrain, borrowing furiously through the ground, and destroys anything in its way, coming up to the surface to ravage and shatter its inhabitants; plants, animals, civilizations. In this time, it continues to grow larger and larger, until it is nearly the size of the planet it inhabits. And only when said planet is a mere husk of itself — all life ruined, when everything is completely and utterly dead — does it curl back up into the ground, and return to its eternal sleep, never to rise again.
It’s worth nothing that no one knows what happens if a creature wakes up to pure joy or excessive happiness. Perhaps it’s happened once or twice, but it would’ve taken on a peaceful nature, in this case, likely preferring to watch the world thrive from a quiet distance. A far more peaceful outcome for the planet that harbors one of these creatures from some mysterious place in the stars.
Naturally, the tragedies are far more upsetting, and therefore far more memorable. Thankfully, James is just as ignorant of this as anyone else on Earth — nor does he care to find out much about his alien heritage. He’s happy to live his life as a man, and prefers not to at all think about his other self if he can help it.
