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death to bakerstreet
Jamjars give people opportunities to place their favorites into alternate scenarios of circumstantial bonding, alliance, animosity, teamwork and sexuality! Some encounters are innocuous and some epiphany-spurring, and whether you're interacting with a castmate or engaging in cross-canon CR, there are opportunities for creativity and exploration only made possible through this format. If you are fucking lazy or don't want to deal with activity-checks or want to do a miniature test drive, just meme it. Just... fucking meme it.---
I
✿1. Horror: Your characters are taken from their own worlds and thrown into a terrifying situation! Things are creepy, resources are scarce, and ensuring your own survival is paramount.
✿2. Sex Game: For whatever contrived and nonsensical reason, your characters are forced into a world where they gotta bone. Aside from smutstuff, you have the opportunity to play out how very awkward it is to navigate these agreements and encounters before and after. Lasting bonds can form from something you didn't expect! But so can eternal regret.
✿3. Slice of Life: Characters are forced to live together in familial units. They have an opportunity here -- in spite of being stuck -- to relax and slow down and do some fun, ordinary things. Picnics, dates, school, etc.
✿4. Fantasy: Characters are forced into guilds and roles, given weapons and are made to utilize their powers in coordinated units to complete missions.
✿5. Scifi: Characters are thrust on to the frontier of spacial colonization! Characters on a spaceship! Characters being drafted into an Imperial Earth Army to fight/conquer foreign entities! Characters being in a world where they are assessed, identified, tracked and policed by artificial intelligence! And so on!
✿6. Reincarnation/ New Identity: Your character has been reborn at this game, or given a new identity. Work out their karma or help them come to terms with having to live a new life.
✿7. Asylum/Prison/Institutionalized Identity: Characters are locked up and put under heavy surveillance. Slowly they are institutionalized and disintegrated from ordinary social rules of engagement. They could be told that they've been identified as mentally dysfunctional, or they could be in prison! Are they pleading their innocence, or do they know they're guilty as fuck back in their world?
✿8. Assignment-Based/Mercenary/Survival: Characters have to put their skills to good use as drafted mercenaries. Help your captors assassinate, spy, sabotage, infiltrate, steal, and terrorize for points that will lead up to your freedom or the freedom of others.
✿9. Your Choice!: Do whatever!---
II
✿1. First Impressions: You never forget your first impression of someone. Unless it was entirely forgettable.
✿2. Oh Hey Again: I kind of know you!!!! Hi!!! I hate this place but love familiarity hi!!!
✿3. Event: SOMETHING IS HAPPENING and your characters have either run into each other or sought each other out to stick together during it!
✿4. Living Quarters: Surprise, your characters are in the same house! Or room! Or building! Either way you have to share space and facilities with this person. Enjoy!
✿5. Mystery: Who Did It? Why Are We Here? Characters are disappearing, people are dying, whatever is happening it is FISHY!
✿6. Canon Update/Respawn/"But we know each other, I swear!": One character comes (back) to a game and does not remember previous CR. A relationship or friend or even hateship is forgotten. How will this be dealt with?
✿7. Begrudgingly Working Together: You are so fucking annoying but I guess we have to fight Monster of the Day Together/Get Unstuck-UnLost Together/Find Our Way Back/Help Each Other Out.
✿8. Is This a Date: Gee, you guys sure are doing a lot of things that people on dates do and you're having a lot of fun [sweats]...
✿9. Violence: Characters beat the shit out of each other or help each other out of a gory situation with terrible traumatic injuries or something!
✿10. One-Sided(?) Crush: How do you get their attention? Or, alternatively, how do you ignore that this person obviously is crushing on you and it's totally awkward
✿11. Protecting/Saving: Your character's chance to be a hero or a damsel!
✿12. Network Post: Mandatory bs.
✿13. Inbox: Hey, can I talk to you for a second? In private?
✿14. Your Choice!: Do whatever!
no subject
So he nods, since it's all right. This is helping too, and even though there's a feeling that this is the person that smiles when they're hurting, they seem happy too. Small gestures like this are what he can do. ]
No. [ His answer is calm, but simple, and he walks to a nearby house to walk inside without much more than that. With the confidence of how he walks inside, you'd assume it was where he lived, but it totally isn't... He just knows no one inside will see, and he'll return the bucket once they're done. ]
Is this good?
no subject
He'll go back to trying to get the little budding vines to cling to the lattice board in the meantime, looking back up once Cole returns with the bucket. His expression immediately brightens and he stands up from his semi-crouch... sort of. He's still stooped low enough so that the vines that have already wrapped around the lattice won't tear.]
Perfect! You could set it down over here, if you'd like. [A nod toward the dry ground at the edge of the garden.] Just mind the mud! Shoes are a little difficult to clean here. [DOES COLE EVEN WEAR SHOES]
no subject
He quietly does as he's told and walks to set the bucket on the ground by Jack, then shakes his head. ]
It's fine. The mud will wash off.
[ It's more important to help, he thinks, but that part he doesn't say aloud. He does tilt his head curiously as he looks at the plants, and in a bit of curiosity, he decides to ask. ]
What are you growing?
no subject
BUT GOOD, okay, Jack's looking out for his new filthy hobo child friend. Shoes are still important and a person just can't go running around with water-logged boots in a grossass place like Haven!!]
Tomatoes, mostly. I had a few other things before, but I don't think it was good to try growing them all together... [HIS TOMATOES SUCKED THE LIFE OUT OF EVERYTHING AROUND THEM. But hey, at least they're looking good!]
Some herbs, too! But those are inside.
no subject
They sucked out what the others needed. In the gardens, the tomatoes are always grown away from other things. The gardener looks, carefully, gently digs his fingers into earth to pull out weeds, since— [ He breaks off abruptly, since this isn't his friends, who understand and are used to hearing him relay the memories that pile up in his brain. He ducks his head shyly under his ridiculous hat, then shakes his head. ]
Sorry. If you grow them alone, they'll grow better, I mean.
no subject
I've been told. [A LITTLE TOO LATE, BUT...] I'll have to wait for the ground to regain some of its nutrients before I start to plant more things, but I'm looking forward to it! I do love tomatoes, but having only tomatoes is a little limiting.
[That said, easy as that strange statement would be to pass right over and leave unaddressed, curiosity does get the better of him in the end.]
Are you a storyteller by trade? You seem to have a knack for it!
no subject
[ He looks up towards Jack again, and his light blue eyes meet Jack's even if it's through a mess of scraggly blonde hair and from under the brim of his big dumb hat. ]
I listen. I help those that are hurting.
[ There's a pause, as he decides to take this as his chance, and there's a pause as he just stares at Jack as if uncertain of what to say. He's sifting through what he sees, hears, feels, because there's so much of it with this person, since he's allowing some of it to flood into himself, carefully. Green, red, black, snow stained with blood, two siblings, but one of them is gone, or... Ah. That's a part of it. ]
You climbed the castle because you wanted to see her. But it wasn't her. You knew this, but it was important all the same. Because it was you, wasn't it? It's all you were, wanted, would be... [ His gaze is still even, unwavering, since when he speaks like this, he has confidence. Not otherwise. ]
I'm sorry. I'm sorry that she died. But that's not all who you are.
no subject
That said, it's a good thing Jack is currently surrounded by plants and a lattice that might as well be stationary, because his other kneejerk reaction to scary things is to throw glasses of water in their faces (or shoot them in the ear, apparently). Maybe a bucket of water here, if Cole gets really lucky! For now, though, he seems quite rooted to the spot. It's because Jack knows that Oz knows - he's shown his memories, after all; shared something dear with his dearest Chain. Oz knows, and Glen knows, and Lacie almost knows (but Glen isn't here, and Lacie never will be), and no one else should because those are private things that he keeps close to himself. The things he wanted for Lacie, the things that he wanted to use to cement his own realness—
"I help those that are hurting", huh.]
How do you know about her? About Lacie...? Even the tower— only the Baskervilles should know, but I've never seen you before - not once. [He shakes his head once, easing the lattice toward the ground.] What you're saying... It doesn't make any sense at all.
[Apparently he's just going to skip over the customary WHO ARE YOU considering he's like 99% sure Cole's some sort of dEMON STRAIGHT FROM HELL.]
no subject
[ But this reaction is the one that Cole is more used to, because of course people get nervous and upset when he reveals these deeply personal things about them. He relaxes from the tense nervousness that had been there at small talk, because that's what he feared much more, being more human, but this? This he's fine with. He can help, or at least try to. ]
The memories, feelings call to me. But it's all right. You won't remember me.
[ His voice is gentle, warm, and comforting, in a way that's almost unnatural. But there's a sense that every word is careful too, which is why there's a slight pause before he continues, allows himself to drink up that emptiness, sifting through what floods in. It hurts, he thinks. This person hurts, because there's so much pain that he thinks to himself for the first time in a while, that there may not be anything he can do for him. But he doesn't want to die, either. It's... strange. ]
You are... [ He pauses, sifting through the hurt, trying to find the words to vocalize what he's feeling and seeing all at once, but after the pause, he sounds a bit sad. ]
...You're like me. You're lost. Lost, looking, trying to find purpose, but the purpose is lost, because it's difficult to know what it was to begin with. You... are you. You can't be anyone else.
no subject
So he listens - morbid curiosity, partially. Mostly out of fear. It's a situation where he needs to keep his wits about him, which means paying very close attention to everything that's said and everything that Cole does.
He gets hung up on that, though. Lost, he says. "Like me".]
Like you...? [It can't be possible, though. It's not possible to lose a self that was never had from the start, in the same way that it isn't possible for him to be anyone but himself. He doesn't have a "self" to be. Without Lacie, he can't remember who that person is.
His posture straightens a little as he settles the lattice, and he wonders for a second if this godawful stranger is something that mortal wounds could take care of. Good lord above, where's Oz when you need him.]
But that doesn't make any sense, either! That purpose isn't something I've lost, even though I can't reach her anymore. You know that, right—? Don't you know? If you know this much... [Agitation: the next best thing when there are no glasses of water to throw, though his fingers curl anxiously at his sides.]
—Why are you telling me this?
no subject
I'm sorry. I'm not helping— I'm hurting. Trying to mend the knots, but the ropes are tearing, not coming undone easily, so... So—
[ But how does he untangle this? There's a lot here, and he realizes that perhaps he listened too much, should have started with something smaller, but this man's heart is a ball of knots. He draws back from the memories, not wanting to drink too deeply and fade into his own abilities, because the part of him that's a Spirit wants to reach out and hold everything Jack is as a comforting hand. But Cole knows it's not that easy. So instead, he picks at something smaller, one smaller knot. ]
I don't know what that purpose is. But I know you have a purpose. It's her. And her hurt... It touches yours. But she was happy, before she died. Sneaking, rustling, crawling through bushes, and she sees and watches, because it's you and someone else, and she didn't expect that happiness at all. I think she would have said thank you. But she couldn't.
no subject
But hearing it put like that still manages to rile something close to ire in him, because it's still private, it's still a deeply personal subject, it's still incredibly unwelcome for this strange person to go sticking his fingers where they don't belong.
So he deflects - because deflection is a good shield to have, when violence isn't easy to turn to. This, at least, isn't as disturbing to him as talk of his true nature (or lack thereof).]
—Lacie was lonely before she died. [Which isn't exactly a lie, as far as he's aware.] Because of that happiness, maybe... But she was lonely. Someone very dear showed it to me - the last shards of her memories.
[His head cants to the side again, and the look he gives Cole seems to ask "is this supposed to help?"]
no subject
But he can tell that Jack is trying to push away from the other topic, and he sees the look and understands it clearly, so Cole almost flinches as he draws in on himself, looking down as he shakes his head. ]
I'm sorry— I messed up, so I'll try again...
[ At which point he starts to raise a hand towards Jack. So, what will you do, Jack??? Will you let Cole do his crazy voodoo ghost magic... ]
no subject
No, you will not. [Said firmly, like hopefully that will be enough to deter the moebo... HE CAN HOPE.]
What point is there to this? Did someone send you here? [WAS IT MORGAN.]
no subject
This is why it was better for people to forget. The fact that he existed at all hurt people, because he was frightening to them, just like this person is frightened now. He dismisses that power at his fingertips, and though he's drawn to pull at the memories mulling around, he stops himself. It's very purposeful, though it's a silent struggle. ]
...No. No one sends me. I come when people need help.
no subject
What happens when people don't need the help that you come to give?
[Or, more accurately, if they don't want the help. God knows he sure does need it, but it's far too invasive a method and the topic is far too delicate for him to allow it to be handled in such a way.
Honestly, it's probably too delicate for anyone to handle.]
no subject
...Then they don't see me. Or if they see me, they don't remember me at all.
[ The hat tilts down again, and he speaks in that hurried, half-murmured way again. ]
He kneels, disgraced, and it doubles, because there's something missing, something wrong, no longer complete, but he's never been complete. He lost his name. So he waits to die, but he can't.
[ But then just like that, it's back to normal, as if this muttering was to make a point. ]
There are so many people here that see me, though. There are... so many people hurting. And they don't know what to do. So I want to help.
no subject
If there are that many people, it's fine if you don't help one or two, isn't it?
[Which is basically like the world's most polite way of saying "please fuck right off a cliff" ever, wow.....
But it's only because Jack's handle on the emotions that he doesn't fake tend to be weak at best, with the strength behind them ebbing and fading and shifting without him being able to predict much about it, himself. That makes things dangerous for the people around him, sure enough, but it also poses a self-directed threat. The last thing he wants to do is delve into those dark places in front of someone who claims to be here for the reasons Cole does.]
—What are you, anyway?
rolls back
I am me.
[ It sounds like a facetious answer, and yet, that's the best way he can describe it. Once, he didn't know what he was. And now, he still doesn't know, not completely. But he's understanding more and more. He is a spirit, but he's also human, so he's both, but neither. He is... Cole. There's nothing else like him. ]
I didn't know, for a long time. But I have a better idea now.
muffled sounds of jack screaming
There's silence as he considers pressing for more information, but he eventually decides it's probably pointless either way and that any answer he could wring out would take too much effort for the potential return.]
I'd rather not be part of your journey of self-discovery.
[please leave rude ghost human bum child!!! He takes a cautious step back, since he's at least pretty sure Cole won't do anything that he shows obvious discomfort toward.]
So thank you for the bucket, but that's enough.
u can't escape jack...
[ He states that much very simply, and doesn't seem bothered by Jack more or less telling him to leave. He doesn't quite get that alone, and he stands there for a moment like he's just going to quietly watch, but just when Jack would think to speak up again to make it clearer, he turns and starts to walk away, though he does speak softly a few parting words. ]
So I hope you find you too.
[ At which point he'll just keep walking away, but enjoy that, Jack... Also enjoy the fact that you may find it hard to remember anything about Cole over the next few minutes unless you really try!! ]