introductions

[cancrymods]

It comes to you suddenly, at the end of an unravelling thread of thought. A sudden, piercing sense of wrongness stops you in your tracks and sends you tumbling through rapidfire questions that you realize you have no answer for. How long have you been here? How long have you been doing the same things, over and over, blindly going through the motions of a routine? Just who are you, anyway?

Questions beget more questions and answers prove illusive until you arrive at the only things you know for certain: the first is that this place is Purgatory.

The second is that you're here because you're dead.

Oddly, this doesn't feel like a surprise of any sort. You don't remember how or why it happened, but it did and that's that. It feels rather as though you've been slapped awake and everything around you has come into sharp focus. You're in Limbo, where you've been wandering since you arrived here in Purgatory alongside all the other mindless souls who are acting out what little they remember of their original lives.

Still lingering is that horrible sense of something being terribly wrong. It hasn't dissipated with your realization of the truth – if anything, it's intensified. There's no way to tell what it is, but there's something going on here.

Maybe you should investigate – or at least see if there's anyone else here who's had the same realization as you...

[ OOC: Welcome to the very first log of Can Cry! For the first few hours, Executors will be free to explore and mingle among themselves. Mod replies will come in a few hours. If you're planning to investigate, please indicate that you're doing so in the subject line as your comment. ]

Comments

[pioailurophobia]

Yeah, same here! I was interrogating that tool- [screaming at them incoherently while throttling them] to find out more be-

Wait.

How the hell are you doing that?

[Kingslayer stares at the hand-signs, utterly baffled. What is this sorcery?

[beknights]

[ They would gesture to their own hand questioningly, if they had another one to do it with. They don't, so... ]

« This is
language.
A
voice. » [ Even saying that makes their signing slow down, clearly uncertain on their part. It feels very much like it's not something they're supposed to be doing, speaking. ]

« I cannot speak
like you. » [ Must not, cannot. It remains that they have never had a voice, not the way this faceless knight has a voice. ]

[pioailurophobia]

A language, huh? Not like any I've seen.

...could be useful in a fight.

[Because of course that's where their mind immediately goes.]

[beknights]

[ A little head-shake, a no.]
« Fighting and speaking
are separate. »

[ They only have one arm, after all. They're vaguely certain they had two at some point, but what caused its disappearance...they don't remember that either.

But even if they did have two arms...speaking to your opponent was unnecessary. You fought, communicated, at the point of a nail. In that space everything was movement, shifting vibrations, the subtle changes and breaths, the sounds and signs that made up the landscape of combat - navigated with a tool that could split that world, carve wounds into it until nothing remained.

Fighting was fighting. Speaking was speaking. It was so, an immutable rule. ]

[pioailurophobia]

...I meant that it would be good for talking with your allies and communicating tactical information without alerting your enemies.

[Maybe they do have a brain rattling somewhere in that helmet.]

But I guess that would be pretty hard with one arm, huh.

[Or maybe not.]

[beknights]

[ They tilt their head in mild confusion. 'Allies'. It sounds like a familiar word, but at the same time, it's not something they'd apply to themselves.

They don't know why that is. It's just something they know, something that's been trained into them. They shake their head, slowly, more uncertain. ]

« Fighting alone is
my duty. »

[pioailurophobia]

That's bullshit.

[Kingslayer cocks their head to the side in the opposite direction, confusion plain on their face.]

If you fight alone, that should be your choice to get all the glory. Somebody blathering on about how it's "your duty" means they're just sending you out to die.

Sure, allies can be a royal pain and have huge sticks up their asses that make them absolutely impossible to tolerate, but ditching them should be something you get to decide to do when you're good enough to make it on your own, not the choice of someone else.

[beknights]

[ This is all a completely foreign concept to them, to be honest.

But it's different, when you're the only one who can stand up and fight. They think. Why do they think of that first? ]

« It is still my choice.
Sometimes there is nobody else. »

[pioailurophobia]

...well, if that's the case, the only thing you can do is really give them Hell.

[That's the only advice Kingslayer can offer, at any rate.]