HELLO FRIENDS 🎃
Thinking about changing this mc to be GN so that it 1) everyone is more comfortable reading this, and 2) makes more sense with the story, maybe
This chapter is a test of that, let me know what you think!
------------
The skeletal trees of the forest vibrate with the echoing shrieks and manic laughter. Dead and dying birds alike shoot from their branches at the sound of a rushing.
There is a stark speck red among the monotone world, a blooming, beating heart that traverses through the grey woods so thick. It shakes with hurried movement, bare of its thorn and naked to danger.
Its spine is broken in the tight grasp of a madness hysterical with delight. There they go running, this boogey creature, howling for every inch of deathly life to hear, an incomprehensible string of clamors.
(Y/n) tumbles through the disturbed wood carelessly, tripping over everything possible including themselves. Their arms may flail and their body may become undone into strings but they do not care.
It only takes a moments pause to pull every taut again, and for the chaos to resume.
The laboratory looked like a monstrous tower growing out of the forest, drunken and sideways with crooked angles stabbing against the sky. Its cold, concrete embrace was felt even before it swung open its steel door.
"Reimi!" The name was struck into the air, loudly. "Reimi, goodness, you won't believe it! I've made such an important-- It's amazing!"
All stitches and bugged flesh, (Y/n) tripped for what was maybe the fiftieth time that day into the desolate and desecrated lab, still springing back to their feet the moment they'd realized they'd fallen.
Again, they call into the empty air. "Reimi!"
Nothing returns from the darkness, the air around them swallows up their words, their breath, and digests them into a choking silence.
Their high of adventure is frozen to their tongue, and instead of calling a third, fourth, fifth time, they stalked through the dead lab with a sickening anticipation.
The silence churned something wicked within their stomach, the bugs between the seams chittering with worry. There was no piano playing, no ghostly humming in the halls, no tick, tick, tick, of her internal gears grinding to keep her awake-- and that was it.
(Y/n) found her, meshed with the floor she lay upon, still and unmoving, a doll truly at rest. They rushed to her, picked up her arm by its porcelain curve, and let it drop. It let out a quick, shrill tink as it hit the floor, and there was no response.
Something bubbled in the background, the faint hiss of a flame biting at the ass of a boiling beaker warding off that strange quiet that seemed to eat up every other inch of the place.
There is a large key rusted to the wall, its weight scrapes against the skin of the wallpaper and the wooden flesh beneath in a low, heavy drawl.
It nearly brings (Y/n) to the floor just as well when they lift it upon their shoulders, but they balance, somehow, against the force that acts against them. With one quick movement, they drop the tip of the key into a slot carved into the back of Reimi, and wiggle it around till it clicks.
All it took then was a few turns of the metal workings.
Like clockwork, the pale body of a porcelain ghost begins to resume its functions before it had shut down, a sound expanding in the back of the throat like a voice calling into a cave, getting closer with each shout.
"...Left me, left me," A fully formed sentence is shot through the dark. And Reimi is awake. "You left me!"
(Y/n) swung the kay to the side and heaved it into a table close by, ignoring the blueprints and plans scattered about now pinned beneath the metal weight.
"I'm sorry, Reimi, I-" Their mind and tongue couldn't much agree on what to say. An apology? "I shouldn't have stormed off like that, you were probably so worried and I-- everything was just-"
Her body slowly catches up with the passed time, joints clicking into position as she pushed herself up to fall back onto (Y/n) all over, sobbing with no true tears. Her body forced itself into every snug crevice the boogey-thing had to offer, till she was fit tight like a puzzle piece.
"Oh, please, I'm sorry, we should've never gone over there--" She scream-cried. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry, I still like you, I'm sorry!"
There was no time to acknowledge the demonstration of sorrow, that living tome of grief and misery, there was so much to document! So many things to record and talk about, the things they had seen! They could only pat her head as they lost themselves in thought, already drafting the first chunk of their report in whispered breaths mistaken as kind words.
Ah, it just itched so terribly at them that they could not reach for the notebook perched on its stand off in the corner, snatch it from its throne and spill into it every thought and idea. The wings! The flowers, and the clouds! Valentine, his impish wings!
"It's ok, everything's alright now," Oh, but how everything was not alright! She needs to know, she has to know of the doors in the woods!
The doll holds onto them, tighter, presses against them a little bit harder, searching for the moment when (Y/n) will get the hint to hold them with more care in their touch, hug her so desperately as she does them. They do not yet understand.
"Reimi, there's something I want to tell you; These doors-- it's extraordinary, really-- shapes carved into the thickest trees I could possibly imagine, they're colored and bright and it's so many things that- have I already said there was one door shaped like a tree? On a tree! Madness!"
"(Y/n), I don't know what you're talking about, hardly at all, whatever dream you've had out there in the cold, I can't even," Reimi breaks into another fit at the thought. "You were out there alone in the cold!"
(Y/n) allows her to crumble into pieces in their arms, their mind drifting to an absent state as they remember every little detail they wish to explore. "No, you don't get it. It was real, Reimi! I fell through one! I saw a rose, and it was so beautiful and alive, I had to have it, but-"
"Stop, stop! (Y/n), please, I just need you right now, not whatever nonsense you're about to dump on me just to tell me you had dreamt it on some mushroom you found!"
"But Reimi, this has to be something, there's, I don't know, you must see it yourself!"
"No! Shut up! I just dealt with Risotto just this morning and his stupid tirade, then the mayor, and those kids whining about where you were, no one thought about me! No one thought about how I felt!"
Reimi had regained most of her mobility and strength, and was then capable of pushing herself back away to the ground once more.
"And you! I needed you so bad, I collapsed and no one could put in my key! And you come back, and you want to talk about all the amazing things you experienced in my absence? During my turmoil in your disappearance?! Please! I just need someone to care, just for a minute!"
They apologize, and grovel, just like she wants, but it's all in absent mind. They can't even think about what she just said, every electric derivative sent to the brain was spent thinking about those doors. So many of them.
A heart, a turkey, a tree, an egg, a clover, a pillow, and what was the last one, a tooth was it? Each one, do they hold their own worlds like Valentine?
The rose hidden in their inner coat pocket hints at opportunity, there is something to discover over there, behind those mystic portals to worlds other.
The King of Halloween must know, surely.
YOU ARE READING
Creeps And Weirdos | Various JJBA X Fem!Reader
FanfictionA misfit among monsters, who would've guessed there would be such a thing? Surely in the town full of the ugly, the hated, and damned, everyone would be accepted... So why isn't (Y/n)?
