chatsville | (no subject)

living island

["Living Island." That's it. There will be no responses from the source of this post, though characters may discuss as they see fit.

At midnight, however, long after all the stores in Santa Rosita have closed and all the houses in Shadyside have turned off their lights... all the television sets across the neighborhood turn on, volume at full. Blaring garbled noise and static, their dials move as if guided by invisible hands. It doesn't take long before the picture settles into something watchable as a series of strange images begin to play:]

[Grainy and soundless, a camera travels down a dark hallway. At the end of it, a light can be seen, dim, at a fork that branches off into another hallway. The operator moves slowly, one step at a time. When they reach the end, the image cuts out. Opens to another.

There's a metal sign bolted to a grey and featureless wall. Through the washed out color and fuzzy quality, the symbol comes into focus as the camera slowly zooms out, as if the person holding it is moving backwards: three inverted triangles stacked within a black circle. The sign looks old, rusted. Another cut.

The camera is sitting stationary at a low angle, possibly the ground. It faces the door in a dark but not completely pitch black room. The door is cracked open just enough to see the distinct shadow of a person moving behind it, only the outline of their shoulders and one of their arms visible as they pace back and forth. Eventually, the shadow disappears entirely. The camera remains trained on the door for a few long moments before another figure walks into view behind it, stops, and crouches low like an animal. Half of a face, distinctly human but with a strange mask-like quality to it, sways back and forth as it tries to peer into the room. Crawling on all fours, they push the door open. The footage skips.

An out-of-focus light bulb in a dark room. The footage is blurry and made nearly incomprehensible thanks to the light and the way the footage keeps popping and skipping, but there's audio this time. Distorted and low, a voice croons a song as a louder, shrill noise layers over it that sounds a bit like a bell, ringing over an intercom. The camera, slowly moving backwards, manages to catch the impression of a mural on a wall that simply says, in sweeping, childish yellow and red cursive script:

LIVING ISLAND

The broadcast ends there.]

Threaded | Flat

Speaking up on this message thing to anyone not-abducted but definitely awake!

Who else woke up to the picture-display going wild and sharing whatever all that was? Living Island doesn't mean anything to me, but I haven't been here so long, does it mean anything to anyone else? Or that song, or the plaque on the wall? I can draw it again if needed.

Also, has anything like this happened before?

[ that broadcast is interesting, because angelo feels like that is something akin to his experiences before arriving here. the half of a face that he sees reminds him of his captain, who was the void made flesh.

he feels drawn to it. it is a mystery; something for his brain to gnaw on while being far away from home. a home can be a person; a home can be the existential dread of an experience beyond time. a home needs only to be a person who was so absolute he filled your soul with the emptiness of space.

he's missing that, but seeing this strange apparition in the television feels like an experience so close to it. so this is a taste of the strangeness everyone speaks of? curiouser and curiouser. ]

"Living island" is such a bizarre phrase.

How many buildings in this place can feasibly house all the features that were in that broadcast? A few abductees? There can't be that many. That certainly wasn't a house.

[ long enough to have two hallways which is expansive enough to be travelled on. a strange plaque that looks like it's been there forever. a large impression of a mural on a wall. there's about four buildings in this place that can house such features. ]

Mayor Pufnstuf?

text, after broadcast end

un. gallica / ota

@Archer