trusthell | SHRIEKING SKULLS WILL SHOCK YOUR SOUL AND SEAL YOUR DOOM TONIGHT

SHRIEKING SKULLS WILL SHOCK YOUR SOUL AND SEAL YOUR DOOM TONIGHT

[After 10:00 p.m., the library's... definitely a little different. The tables have lit candles on them, and there are... kind of janky cardboard cutouts set on some of the shelves. An attempt was made, at least, even if there could've been more boxes destroyed in the attempt...

But regardless. There's candles set around a place for some snacks if anyone wants to bring them, and there's also a blanket set on one of the tables. Because clearly, that's where the storyteller's supposed to sit...? Maybe you wanna do it. Maybe you just want to stand or sit or something.

Either way, let's get fucking spooky up in here.]

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[ souls... ]

Go ahead.

[WHY WOULD YOU

NNNNNNNNNNN

HE CANNOT BACK DOWN. HE WILL SIT HERE AND LISTEN TOO.]

[...Do you need a little moral support, buddy-]

[HE IS FINE THANK YOU FOR ASKING

HE WOULD APPRECIATE IT IF HE COULD LEAN ON YOU, SILVER, AND NOT SAY A DAMN WORD AT THE FACT HE MIGHT BE GRIPPING YOUR ARM A LITTLE TIGHTLY.]

[ SORRY GOLD....... ]

[GOLD WILL REMEMBER THIS.]

[ AND YET GOLD WILL STILL LET HER SIT NEXT TO HIM TOMORROW AND PROUDLY SHOW OFF PICTURES OF HIS POKEMON CHILDREN. ]

Edited 2017-01-27 05:11 (UTC)

[WELL, YEAH, THOSE ARE HIS KIDS]

[ raise your courage by listening to kimbley's creepy stories. max it out alongside intelligence and charm to date your cool-headed senpai with a chip on her knee. ]

So let me tell you about Number 66.

I've spent a lot of time in Central City lately - the past ten years, actually, it's where I've been since the civil war in Ishbal came to a close. There've been a lot of rumors floating around the place that I was staying, and one of them dealt with a man named Barry.

Now, Barry was the owner of a local butcher shop. Always seemed like a normal guy, from what I hear - kind of unusual, kind of a loner, but mostly just the guy you'd go do business with for five minutes and forget about.

As it turns out, the guy had a few secrets, of the "crossdressing, murderous maniac" variety.

The story goes that he murdered his wife, and then stole her dresses and wore some kind of wig to approach women on the street and lure them over to his meat truck, where he'd murder them, too. Chopped them all up with a cleaver.

[...]

Don't worry, I know where it sounds like this is going. It isn't, I promise - the guy was actually caught and arrested soon enough, after he tried to pull this stunt on a few kids that he ran into. The day was saved, Barry was thrown into death row and then executed by hanging, and that's the end of the story.

Supposedly.

You remember what I was telling you about the places beneath the prisons? The rooms with the walls made of glass, where terrible people are sent to die... Someone's got to guard those places, right?

There are a few whispers here and there, around places like that - all of them about some guy that they just call Number 66. No one's actually seen Number 66's face; he wears a full-body suit of armor at all times, actually, so no one knows what the guy looks like. But some people think that there's more to Number 66. That his behavior sounds kinda familiar, you know? Especially among the death row prison guards, who find certain inmates hard to forget.

It's also worth mentioning that Number 66 apparently favors a butcher's cleaver.

Edited 2017-01-27 05:28 (UTC)

[ so much for sleeping tonight, dear god ]

[he is never forgiving anyone for allowing kimbley to continue talking why does anyone let kimbley talk]

I-- Uh, I don't suppose he's favorin' a nice skirt to go with that cleaver, is he?

[He did not stumble over his joke, of course not, don't be ridiculous.]

[Oh, that's definitely creepy.]

Tell us another one.

[Silver are you fucking tone deaf to literally everyone in the room]

[SILVER, BUDDY, HE IS JABBING YOU VERY SLIGHTLY IN THE RIBS.]

We oughta be blowin' out candles for all these, don'tcha think? And I'm sure he ain't got a hundred stories to last us, so let's just let him take a break if he needs to.

...You're right.

[He'll go blow out a couple of candles, then!]

There. Now he can tell another.

[why are you the way you are]

Yeah, great job. Thanks for gettin' to that.

Keep them coming!

[KIMBLEY'S THE BEST AT THIS, CAN WE JUST HAVE KIMBLEY TELL THE REMAINING STORIES...???]

This one's a little harder for me to explain, but it comes with something of a bonus - namely, I was actually present for this one.

Like I said, after the civil war I stayed around in Central City for a while - I've been living there on my own for about a decade now, living off the government's paycheck as a sort of reward for my services. Of course, once you're in the Amestrian military, you never really leave; you can be conscripted back into active duty on almost no notice, or at the very least sometimes they'll extend you an offer.

So I wasn't really surprised when one day, a Brigadier General that I used to work under - his name was Basque Grand, he was a respected war hero back in the Ishbal days - paid me a little visit; he said he was there to escort me somewhere important, that the government had decided that it needed me for something. He seemed to be acting a little strange to me; his entire personality seemed...different, somehow. Like it was someone who was just pretending to be him, going through all the motions but not ever getting them quite right.

I shrugged it off at the time; maybe he was just a bit different to what I remembered. War changes people and all.

So I was brought to one of the major government buildings in Central, where we met up with several other people; we were led into a hallway, about twenty-five of us total, and then brought into a room to wait. We got to talking; some of us were former military, but we quickly realized that others weren't. And after a while of just muttering to ourselves and trying to figure out what everyone's story was, the ones who were former military all came to the same conclusion: the guy who had brought us there didn't seem like Basque Grand. He was a little too dead behind the eyes, a little too obvious with the acting, just a little...wrong. We also had no idea what we were doing there, as none of us had really been given any details about exactly what we were needed for.

We noticed around then that there was a...space, I suppose, between the interior of the room and the outer walls. A layer of glass between us and the walls themselves. An opening where the door was, but that was about it.

Obviously, we'd heard the stories about the glass walls and the red water. And we decided that we didn't want to stick around to see if those stories only applied to terrible people.

[He shrugs.]

We followed up on it, naturally, trying to figure out what the deal was with all of that. Turns out the government officially had no idea what we were all doing down there, either - it wasn't anything they'd ordered. They seemed pretty surprised that that particular person had ordered us to do anything at all, though.

I mean, seeing as Brigadier General Basque Grand had been killed a few days before all this happened, it should have been pretty hard for him to order us to do anything.

[...]

So he was a ghost or something like that? What was his deal?

I don't know if I'd say he was a ghost - he didn't seem like himself, after all.

It was more like dealing with something else wearing his face.

[does he want to ask

does he

..................................]

Like... what?

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alchemicals - 2017-01-27 21:28 (UTC) - Expand

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uncouthhatcher - 2017-01-27 21:48 (UTC) - Expand

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alchemicals - 2017-01-27 22:11 (UTC) - Expand

I wasn't aware there was an entire variety of "crossdressing, murderous maniacs."

[ ...granted she does not really consider murderers in general, aside from here because apparently that is our flavor of university. ]

...I get the feeling I'm going to regret this, but did he have a reason for murdering people, or did he just do it because he wanted to?

Edited (WHY THE FUCK CANT I TYPE TONIGHT I'M SO SORRY) 2017-01-27 05:41 (UTC)

[...I mean, maybe there's not a variety but Norman Bates has to fit in somewhere, right?]

I wouldn't know; again, it's not like I ever met the guy to ask him.

[ i just uglysnorted, please don't... ]

Well, someone must've. [ ... ] Got any other soul stories?

[Hmmm...]

You remember how I said that human transmutation is forbidden, where I'm from? That much is entirely true, it's completely illegal - there are way too many ethics issues to contend with for it to be considered worth it. It's playing god, pretty much.

But that doesn't mean that people don't do it sometimes.

At its core, alchemy is pretty much just the practice of turning one thing into something else. Similar in composition, but different in form. I guess the lead into gold example works, but you can also take a bunch of iron and make it into a spear or a sword - simple enough, right?

If you know what you're doing, it's actually not all that hard to make a human.

Just on a basic, elemental level, the stuff that makes up humans isn't all that complex. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, all that sort of stuff. Magnesium. Sulfur. But whether you can actually make a person... That's another matter.

There are stories about what happens if you try, of course. They all differ in their accounts, too - some say you can make a shell but that's about it, so if you're out to create a human body with nothing in it, that's all well and good. But if you're trying to do something else with it...well, a person's soul has to be made up of something, and it's something you can't just conjure up out of nothing.

Some say trying will kill the alchemist. Some say that the most you'll get is a screaming sack of organs. Worst-case scenario, both happen - the alchemist dies, and whatever they created can't sustain itself and dies as well.

The part that gets really bad, if you ask me, is that sometimes people who don't realize what the result's going to look like have tried to bring their loved ones back from the dead.