jigokulogs | JULY CATCH-ALL

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JULY CATCH-ALL

Who ⬤ Kim Kitsuragi & YOU
What ⬤ Various July activities! I'll be writing up custom starters throughout the month -- I'd be happy to whip them up for anyone who's interested, so feel free to hmu on plurk or on the CR meme HERE.
When ⬤ Throughout July
Where ⬤ Throughout Jigoku-cho
Content Warnings ⬤ Adult language and subject matter, likely some discussion of the blood rain's traumafest.

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I-

[Jon stops for the moment it takes those words to really click. Lord. How long as it been since he's been able to just ...go out somewhere? Before the last siege on the Institute, perhaps? Absolutely before they ran to Scotland. He sort of remembers going out at least once after his trip to Ny-Ålesund. It almost feels overwhelming, like the breath in his throat and the way he can still feel the repetitive beat of the heart in his chest.

Feeling normal. What an alien concept. Jon sounds almost breathless when he speaks again.] I think... A quiet pub would be all right. Anywhere we can sequester off a bit, if that's all right.

[He hasn't forgotten his promise to explain things to Kim. But it will be his first time really laying it all out, and he's still intensely private.]

Edited 2022-08-20 10:02 (UTC)

A quiet pub... yes, I think that can be arranged. Come on.

[ From the shopping mall he's dragged Jon into, it's a short walk to a nearby pub. It is in the nature of his profession, both back home and here in this wretched place, to know what sort of bars and pubs are best for sitting quietly and soaking in whatever intel he needs to discover, and which are simply pleasant to sit and drink in. In this case, he chooses the latter; it's a pleasant little place run by a stern looking Hikeshi Baba, marred only by her inclination to blow out lanterns every so often. It's something of a fixation of hers, though Kim is vaguely aware that it has basis in the type of yokai she is.

A cheerful bell rings out as he opens the door, holding it open for Sims to follow him, and Kim gestures for Sims to take a seat at the corner booth, glancing around at the others in the pub, largely wrapped up in their own conversations. ]

What will you have? I'll grab us a couple of drinks while you get your thoughts together.

[It's all right. It's quiet, it's not overcrowded, it's not too loud (but loud enough no one will hear his tale). This'll do. He eyes the booth Kim gestures to and nods once.]

A whiskey, if they have anything of the sort. If not, whatever you're having will do.

[Beggars can't be choosers, and in a Japanese Hell, it's best not to assume what is and is not on the menu. But he'll take a seat where he can see the door, and the bar, and the back of house entry. A paranoid man now that he can't simply Know where everyone is and what they're doing. He needs to gather his thoughts, tucking the bags away under the table by his feet. What's relevant to what Kim needs to know about the situation, what won't take three hours for him to tell?

By the time Kim comes back, he's nicked a pen from somewhere and grabbed a napkin to start jotting down key points, words like "Fourteen", "Beholding", "Hilltop". It isn't much, but it's a start of getting his head in the right place.]

They have whiskey.

[ Kim goes and fetches the drinks -- a whiskey for Jon, and a non-alcoholic drink for Kim, something with spritzer and bitters in it, complex enough to scratch that itch for a drink without any of the alcohol involved. Kim rarely drinks - he has a once a week rule, generally speaking, though he doesn't tend to meet even that quota - and he has a feeling he wants his wits about him for the upcoming conversation.

He returns with the drinks, slides Jon's in front of him, then takes a quick sip of his own. He glances over at Jon, and what he's writing, unable to make heads or tails out of any of it. ]

Here. I have a feeling I'm in for a long story. [ He raises a brow at him. ] You may need two of these.

[ He's buying. He can afford to do that much. ]

I-it is. A bit long. Sorry. If you’re certain you still want to hear it.

[He hesitates, really thinking of how to talk about this. It isn’t something he’s even had time to process, the story’s end happening just moments before he found himself here. Jon takes a breath, a sip of his drink. Something about it does calm as much as surprise him - he can taste it, for one. ]

It started when I was promoted to the Head Archivist position at the Institute I worked at. [If he wanted to be truly honest, it started when he was eight, with that damned spider book. But it’s not the important starting point here, nor is it something he feels comfortable sharing. As understanding and patient as Kitsuragi has been so far, Jon still wants to keep some privacy after everything.] I was tasked with making audio recordings of the statements people left us of their experiences with the supernatural. They were… odd. A lot of them. While most recorded easily as digital recordings, a handful of them would distort and only be able to be recorded on an old analog tape recorder. So I started. And it… [His hand trembles for just a breath.] It got bad.

We started being attacked. First by a living hive. A woman who had given herself to a Power, of Corruption, and all sorts of… things started to use her body as a hive. Worms, mostly. They attacked the Institute en masse, and we did all we could to stop it. [And it’s strange if Kim looks now, how all the little pocked scars marking Jon all over are just about the size for worms to crawl through.] After that, we found the body of my missing predecessor in the tunnels underneath the building. Detectives came ‘round, started asking questions. I thought- [He sighs, shaking his head once, hanging it low for a moment even with his shoulders.] I thought I was helping their investigation, but they had suspected me. Were investigating me when I wasn’t with them. Even after all the evidence provided proved my innocence, they still treated me like a criminal most of the time.

After that, I began my own search, was suspicious of my assistants until I was able to prove Tim and Martin were innocent… But. But my third assistant, my friend, Sasha. She wasn’t…. Right. It wasn’t until too late I realized some thing had killed her months before and taken her place. I don’t-

[He stares down at his glass, his voice quiet and miserable:] I still don’t remember what the real Sasha looked like. That … thing. It messes with your memories. All you know is what that thing made itself look like.

[Another breath, another sip of the sweet warm liquor.]

I found a man living in the tunnels as well, and brought him up to get answers. He knew more of what was going on with the Institute and the strange happenings. He told me a bit. That. That there were Entities, gods of Fear that lived just on the edge of our world. Everything we’d been seeing were bits of them seeping and slipping into our reality. Vampires, werewolves, spirits, all of them were part of these gods trying to get in. They fed on our fears and terrors, they were our fears and terrors. And our continued fear was gradually making them stronger.

It was a lot. Too much information, so I stepped out to have a cigarette. And when I came back, he was a bloodied murdered mess in my office. So I… I ran.

[Jon debates just how much he should tell of the rest. How much of his own involvement, how much he should say of his slowly losing his own humanity. He’s getting too personal. Too caught up in the small details of trying to paint the picture of what happened to really get the story across.]

I spent the next few months in hiding. The police definitely suspected me of both murders given all the evidence, as did my- [‘best friend’ is on the tip of his tongue. Would Tim mind if he called him that now? Probably.] assistant, Tim, did as well. I was given hints and clues to go investigate to find evidence to prove what was happening as well as my innocence of that second murder. I-

I saw… a lot of things. And while I was in hiding, other… things came looking for me. The detectives were still looking for me as well. [He hesitates, feeling like he’s overheating with the warmth of the liquor and rubs at his neck nervously before his third degree burned fingers land unconsciously at the jagged line across his throat.]

From there it sort of… Kept going. Proven innocent, and then sent out to find information about these Entities and stop rituals of their followers trying to summon them into our world. Successful for the most part for all that it mattered. And. And then I-... I died. Sort of. An explosion that killed my best friend, lost one of the cops, left the other cop in a state of eternal distrust of everyone, and I was… In a sort of coma. No heartbeat, no breathing, but active brain activity. Woke up after six months and everything was worse.

[For someone hearing these atrocities even in this scarce detail, it’s hard to see how it could have been worse. But for Jon, it was… horrid. Another breath. Another moment to get his composure.]

All the while, M-martin. My last assistant. He… He’d been there from the start. And always… Believed me. He never believed I murdered anyone, and he just… I found out later he’d always spoken out in my defense. He was so-

[Worried. Fussy. Kind. Protective, hopeful.]

He ended up taking a position as the new Institute Head’s personal assistant. And I rarely saw him after that. Not.. .Not until the end. He was taken into a…sort of …partial reality. The Lonely, one of the Entities. It had a small domain that he was taken to. A… desolate, gray beach with no light. No warmth, no color. I followed because I… I had to. I needed to, I needed to know he was- [He hesitates, the reminder of that empty, cold voice. I really loved you, you know? from the fog.] And I brought him back. We ran together. Away, as far as we could manage. The Institute was under further attack by hunters and other monsters, and we hid.

It was nice. For a few weeks. And… [God. God, he hates Jonah Magnus, more than he ever thought he could hate anyone or anything.] After a few weeks, I was… used. My boss, the man who’d done everything to us, used me. And ended the world. All the Fears, all the nightmare Entities, all of them were brought into the world through me. And the world became a living hell, nightmares unending. The entire world’s population suffering their worst phobias and fears, the screaming terrors never stopped. Even if you thought someplace was quiet, it …it wasn’t. I knew... and could.. Could feel how much they were suffering even in the silent places.

[A slow shuddering breath. He tilts the glass this way and that with one hand, watching the liquid move in the bottom of it.]

Martin and I, we walked. From the safehouse we were in back to the Institute. I know in normal distances, it was over seven hundred and fifty kilometers, but… It didn’t really feel that way throughout the domains. Time and distance didn’t work right. And we faced every horror you could imagine.Gardens of living people’s bones, a processing plant meant to harvest the meat of its human victims at their own hands over and over, endless warzones of zombies. Hospitals made to torture and not heal. [It sounds awful. But the tone in his voice makes it almost sound like he found beauty in it. A quiet fondness for it all.] I think the worst was the …blackened darkness that kept the children running in terror from a monster they could never see, that never tired nor slept.

We made our way back. Found others who had managed to escape their own horrors to find refuge in the tunnels underneath the Institute. And had a plan. T-to fix it. It was… Simple. Just kill our boss who had taken seat as the orchestrator of it all. And… that… wasn’t quite what happened.

[He runs a hand down his face, covering his mouth and feeling the light five-day-old stubble that had been there for months. There’s so much he’s left out. So many of the finer details of what happened to him that he’s kept to himself, tucked away in a place only he can ever know, too scared to let those moments loose.]

One of the Entities. The Web. The Spider, Mother of Puppets. It’s the only one of the Fears that can truly see a larger picture, can plan, manipulate things into place the way it wants. It knew… Eventually the humans feeding them in that apocalyptic horrorscape would die out. And then they would starve as well. So it had started a plan, long before I joined the Institute.

See, there is a place just north of London. A house where, in the basement, there is a crack in the world. In my universe. Things could unintentionally step in through it… or out. And the Web had started a plan when I was a child. Before my voice was fully grown to what it needed. And it wanted them all to go through that crack, using the recordings I’d made of those statements. My voice would lead the Fears out of my universe and into another, where they could do it all over again. And keep cycling through universes, ostensibly forever.

I didn’t- [His entire body tenses now, muscles tight and eyes focused down but his voice is quiet, not wanting to dare speak this into existence. He knows, beyond a doubt, if he says it out loud then it will be true.] The others with me wanted to do it. Follow that plan and get the Fears out of our world and maybe put things back the way they were. And that’s… What happened. Martin, in the end, he- Th-the voice they were using and had kept them contained had to be broken so they could go. Martin was the only one who could do it, sever that thread tethering them to our world. [He can’t help unconsciously reaching to his chest, where the previous filthy shirt had had a large splotch of blood and a tear over his heart. He hadn’t wanted it to happen, if his halting speech is any indicator. He had desperately wanted some other plan.]

And I think- [He looks up to Kim, genuine sorrow and apology in his eyes, wishing for all the world he could take everything he’s said and stuff it back down. Make it so none of it happened here to the people in Jigokucho. His skin is paler now, reliving even just these small moments of his life the last few years telling such an abridged version to Kim, unused to not having the fear fed back to him from the Eye. He’s barely really touched his drink, having forgotten it as anything more than something to occupy his hands.]

I’m terribly sorry. But I think they beat me here by just a few weeks. If what you’re saying is true, then it. It sounds like them.

[ If Kim hadn't seen what he's seen, experienced what he's experienced, had his eyes truly opened to the sort of horrors that a place like this could wreak, he would likely dismiss Jon's admittedly detailed story as the ramblings of someone who isn't quite well. Deserving and in need of help, yes, but unwell nonetheless. It would be a stretch to say that the man is doing fine, but his disturbance comes from a different place than what Kim may have immediately assumed, what felt like a lifetime ago. Instead, he feels as though he's back at work as a criminal investigator, listening to an unnaturally cooperative witness share his story, something that should be taken down, taken apart, and put back together again until he lands on some semblance of the truth. He only just manages to resist removing his notebook from his pocket to take some notes proper, instead choosing to do the more empathetic thing and not make the poor man feel as though he's simply a figure in his microscope, trusting his own memory to jot all of this down once they've parted ways.

After all, he's not getting a dispassionate review of events, not in the way Kim would tell it. This is personal. Of course it would be regardless of the way Sims told it, but he's not bothering to conceal how affected he's been either. All of this was probably just contained within him, bursting to get out somewhere, and Kim is both a willing and gentle spectator to this, as good as any for someone with a lifetime's worth of misplaced guilt to unleash it.

It's also -- a lot. It's a lot to take in. Kim is not good at emotional conversations in the first place; to react to all of this in a way that's sufficient is damn near impossible. ]

Okay. That's... khm. That's a lot that's happened to you and yours. You have my condolences for having experienced it. [ What else is there to say? He sets down his drink with a quiet clink, thinking about what to say, what to do. Deal with what's in front of him, he supposes, which is a man so deeply traumatized that Kim doubts that any amount of counseling would put a dent into it. ]

...with all due respect, while they sound similar, I don't think that was them. Not truly. What you're discussing sounds far more powerful than what we had experienced, and this place has supernatural powers of its own at work. Its own history, its own culture. It would be too forward of me to rule it out entirely, of course, but my gut tells me it's something different. [ His eyes, magnified by his glasses, flit up to meet Jon's as filled with sorrow and guilt as they are. ] And the way we were rid of it isn't something that would have worked in your case, to hear you speak of it.

[He waits once he's finished. Jon has barely really even touched the drink in his hand beyond just tilting the glass back and forth and around in a circle by its bottom. He's never laid it all out before, even with some of the finer details of his own suffering omitted. It's odd. Having it all out of his head, to someone who's had no idea what could happen.

It's a dismissal that greets him, though. A gentle one, words meant to ease him down from the panic that had started to spike at being so open and vulnerable and seen; Jon starts to slowly close up again. He runs one hand down his face, settling to just letting it cover his mouth and chin as he turns his gaze down at the table space between them.

Of course it sounds mad. If it had been Jon on the other side of this, he'd have likely been less kind about the dismissal. Internally filing the information away to examine later, of course, but. He remembers a lot of his comments at the start of the job. He'd truly hurt some of those statement givers - he can never truly forget what he'd said to Naomi Herne, nor that very first head butt with Melanie - and sometimes he wonders what would have happened if he could go back and change that.

Now isn't really the time. He needs to focus on what's in front of him. After all of that emotional outpouring, he takes a steadying breath. Forces his voice quiet and calm, even so as to not betray his heart here.]

You'll understand if I can't accept that. I'd like to do my own research into this.

I wouldn't expect you to take my word for it in the first place, [ Kim says frankly. And it's true -- he wouldn't. He's just one person among many, whose true motivations remain unknown to the man sitting in front of him. What sort of person would simply trust Kim simply because he presents himself as trustworthy, for something like this? No, the best that he can hope for is that Sims will consider that Kim is correct.

And he certainly hopes he's correct. He can't profess to be a professional on the matter by any stretch of the imagination. It is simply that he has a feeling that this place is too big, too old to have been so deeply affected by the going-ons of another world. ]

What I would ask of you is to consider my hypothesis on the matter equally as probable as yours. But for the time being, the problem has been resolved.

[ Kim has a way of making people feel seen. It is some by-product of his age, his steadfast nature, his quiet manner, his gentle voice. Even if he does not understand what he's looking at, people assume that he does. ]

So for the time being... you have time to look into it. And to recover, to some extent. [ Whether what Sims says is strictly true or not, the mental stress he's under is not a lie. ] Eat. Get a good night's sleep. Get your sea legs back. That sort of thing.

[Jon instinctively wants to argue that. He knows what he's familiar with, he knows what his experiences are and what this situation sounds like. They're similar enough that he was automatically on high alert arriving here.

But he'll look into it. He'll ask around on his own and figure this out. Kim can likely tell he's made the decision with the way Jon's jaw sets, not looking at him now. Focused entirely on the untouched liquor in his hand. And then laughs - a quiet, brittle thing on the verge of mania before he chokes it down. ]

I- Sorry. Sorry, no you're. Right. I just. I can't remember the last time I've been able to eat or sleep. What a novel concept.

Well, I can't help you with one of those things. You'll be able to get some rest once you get situated in housing -- a perk of this place. Housing is free. You'll be able to sleep in a bed tonight.

[ People here seem to take it for granted, but Kim does not; not having to pay for rent on a monthly basis is one reason why he hasn't bothered moving out of the basic accommodations that were given to him upon his arrival. What does he need with anything more? He rarely stays in anyhow, and provided he has somewhere to sit, somewhere to eat, somewhere to work, he's content. It feels much as it did when he had just entered the world of adulthood for the first time, when it had been a luxury simply to have a space of his own. ]

But we can get you a square meal. They serve food here as well. [ And it's cheap too. ] Go on, get yourself something.

[ One less thing for Jon to worry about tonight. The poor man is overwhelmed enough as it is. ]

[He takes the moment to cover his face with both hands. Breathe. Just breathe, focus on what's in front of him. A drink. An offer of a meal. Being told housing is free apparently? He can't remember the last time that was available to him. Everything from the last few hours catches up and overwhelms him if he thinks about it for longer than a few seconds.]

Thank you. I, um. [He moves his hands, sinking his fingertips into his skin for a moment to rub at his face before settling again.] I'm not really kidding about having not eaten... food for... a few years now. I'm not um. Sure what's all right to eat first after that long.

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JULY CATCH-ALL

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1/2 [ anyone backreading this for whatever reason, spoilers for the entirety of the magnus archives]

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