Abominations for Solutions

A Request to Remember

17 Years Earlier...

It was so late. Ink was truly tired for once. He thought that he'd been up for at least four days straight, trying to get this sketch of someone that he had pictured in his mind but couldn't quite put his finger on. Every line he swore he erased, every little detail on the face didn't seem like it was supposed to be there. Nothing was right.

So he sat there, in a little pocket area of the Doodlesphere that he frequently liked to hang out in, drawing under the glow of orange orbs he'd embedded into the studio's elastic tie dyed walls. The place was also where he quite often slept, if the idea of sleep ever popped up in the artist's busy mind. A messy bed was set off to the side, hosting a whole range of random materials Ink had stuck in there by mistake, only to find them poking him in the back wherever he tried to rest. Paint brushes, knick knacks, dried paint globs...

Readjusting his position, Ink pretzeled his legs and stared at the massacre of eraser crumbs smeared across the blurred sketch. Of what exactly, he didn't know. "Gah!" With a frustrated swipe, Ink snatched the ink-stained page and balled it up, tossing it, letting it make friends with the dozens of other abandoned pages he's scrapped up within the past hour or so. With a sigh, he pressed himself off the bed, producing a pained squeak from the mattress's part.

He'd just downed a few doses of yellow vial a few hours prior when his sudden creative urges dawned on him. But sometimes he just needed to get up and moving to get the creative juices flowing through his system. But. Nothing was coming. Blank. He stood there, absolutely blank. Boredom colored his mind and his hands fidgeted restlessly as if they were trying to make out that certain something he was supposed to draw...

"Pfft..."

Ink sighed. He flopped onto a pile of old ratted scarfs, brang his feet up towards his head for no particular reason, and rolled onto his back, falling off the pile and onto a Styrofoam ball with paint brushes sticking out of it.

"Ouch!" Ink exclaimed, removing the spiky ball from his back. Returning to his pile of old ratty scarves, Ink held it up to the sky and turned it around in his fingers, feeling his eyes drift shut with exhaustion.

From this particular section of the Doodlesphere, he could watch a million new AUs unravel within streaks of beautiful color. The colored paint-like strings criss-crossed and blended within the soft, open purple sky unraveling just above his head. Ink had noticed that this sort of phenomenon happened mostly within the evening hours, which naturally created lovely light shows that never failed to draw wonder into his shifting sockets. He concluded it would be a shame to forget something like this. In one way or another. New glowing portals began to dot bare sections of the soft purple sky, glowing with the rich essence of creativity. It invigorated the artist, filled his empty chest, reassured him that creativity still existed. It motivated himself as well, maybe to honor the dedication of those who kept the multiverse alive, maybe to continue the goal that his own creator had failed to follow through with.

But these events, blooms, as Ink had dubbed them, were growing more and more infrequent. And that scared him to his core. It scared him whenever he laid out his empty used vials out beneath the sky, only to find nothing but a thin coat of dust idly hugging the glass by morning. Starvation.

"Huh?" Ink went into a shocked frenzy as he was knocked out of his slight daze, a soft flourishing noise echoing through the ethereal walls of his domain. Signifying someone was here. No one ever visited the Doodlesphere, it was mostly Ink that did all the visiting. And bothering, if you were to ask Error. But the estranged sound sent an almost immediate reaction, like a jolt, into Ink's hands, making them fumble around and grab at his scarf. His right index finger trailed along the rough brown fabric, trying to decipher the smears and scratches that were supposed to be reminders or notes at some point in the indefinite past. He scoffed and shook his head, scuttling over to the indestructible bubble he'd formed along the wall, acting as his mirror.