psychoshenanigans | Skeleton City // PSL

The moment something hits the ground, Vincent startles and takes a couple of steps out of the room. Robin also looks surprised, but his inclination is to freeze while a bunch of little things go skittering all over the floor.

"Oops," he says, "Guess that was full."

"Full of what...?" Vincent asks, slowly straightening.

"...Stuff," is Robin's reply. "Ah..."

He bends down, picks up a couple of little bones and a bottle cap and a die that had bounced off the tub.

"Sorry, I didn't realize you were full of... things."

And now he's holding a few of them, and realizes he's not sure what to do with them. Honestly, some of this looks like trash... Maybe he'll put it in a pile for later?

"Full of things," Phalanx echoes wonderingly, and they follow Robin in stooping down to get a better look at the junk on the floor. While Robin picks up the bits by the tub, Phalanx goes the other direction--drawn to the little metal pin the same way they had been in the market earlier.

And after spending a second or two picking at it with the edge of a dirty fingernail... Phalanx reaches into the remaining folds of shirts and sleeves, and the pin disappears.

Robin sets his things down and scoots a couple of other things over with his foot. He looks up just in time to catch Phalanx putting something back in his clothes--the exact opposite of what they're supposed to be doing.

"No, that's..." He stops, gives up. Sighs a little. "Okay. We'll just pick up where we left off, I guess."

Vincent hesitantly comes back towards the door, making extra sure not to step on anything on his way, while Robin ignores the mess and decides he might as well keep pulling things off of Phalanx and see what else falls out of him.

There's just enough time to wonder if that's the only thing that Phalanx has stashed away, before another pocket is uncovered. It's the other arm this time, hidden in a wrap higher up on Phalanx's arm than the other one had been, and this one is half full of small-but-heavy metallic objects and half things that are so light they flutter to the floor. A shiny candy wrapper, part of a dead beetle, and a small square of paper that is so worn it almost feels like fabric.

"Oops!" Phalanx announces, mostly for Vincent's benefit, as this latest round of junk hits the floor.

"Oookay," Vincent responds, having only startling a little bit that time. "What is happening."

"They're just..." Robin catches that piece of paper as it flutters to the ground, "Phalanx, what is all of this stuff?"

"Things..." which is the obvious answer, the one that Robin himself had called it, but Phalanx is quite aware of how poor of a response it is. After a fidgety tilt of their head, they try again.

"Things that, mm..." Phalanx reaches into the sleeve where the latest junk had fallen from, fishes around to see if there's anything left, and comes back with a rusty metal bolt. "Shine... and roll, or click. Quick. Pick. I just... pick them up."

"Yes..." After a moment of pause, he plucks a familiar beer tab off from where it was hanging off of Phalanx's side. "...You do. Like a little magpie."

He seems almost fascinated, actually. He's a collector too, but he keeps all of his things hidden away in his nest, where no one will ever see them. He suddenly wonders how old Phalanx is, something that had not occurred to him to wonder before.

"...Anything that anyone's gonna be mad about missing?" Vincent asks the important question, crossing his arms and frowning again.

Does a body full of ghosts age and grow old? Or does it keep going, slowly wrapping itself up, adding, picking up and saving pieces of everywhere it's been?

Phalanx frowns momentarily. "The woman..." And then looks to Robin expectantly after trailing off, since he'd been there to see it and undoubtedly understands what had happened more than Phalanx themself does.

"Huh?" Robin is pulled out of his thoughts of birds, blinking back into the conversation. "Oh, that woman from this morning?"

He ends up tossing the tab over his shoulder. It hits the wall uselessly. "Nah, she won't be a problem."

"...that sounds like it could be a problem," Vincent warns.

"What's going to be a problem is if I can't get this guy out of all of this clothing and into the bath before it gets cold." Effectively blowing off any concern about earlier, Robin goes back to the task in front of him. "We'll just have to sweep up later."

With most of Phalanx's arm wrappings undone, getting at the rest is a little easier. Robin can start puzzling out the shirt layers, and discover all of the pockets therein. Slowly, collarbone, elbows, forearms--Phalanx gains more discernible human shapes.

The creature tolerates the unwrapping fairly well... until skin really starts to show. It's only the little signs of discomfort and tension, but they're there.

After a long silence from all three of them, Vincent suddenly speaks again.

"You doing okay?"

He says this to Phalanx, turning his face once more in their general direction. Robin continues his work, picking at a very tight knot holding something up on their forearm, purposefully ignoring the signs of discomfort.

"Okay. Doing okay," Phalanx murmurs, but the tension is noticeable in their voice now. The arm that has been the most freed is curled up snug against their torso, and the arm that Robin is currently working on is getting fidgety, now that they're thinking about their own state of being. Dirty fingers twitch and curl, but Phalanx continues to try and keep the rest of the arm still so Robin's work isn't disturbed.

"I feel... okay. That's right. Just okay."

"Just okay, huh."

See, the thing about Vincent is that he has never been considered a smart man. Very little has ever been expected of him, which is both inherently disappointing and immeasurably freeing. He can do the shit that no one else is stupid enough to do, like be pointlessly nice to people without expecting them to give him anything in return, or even understand why he's being nice.

He steps away from the doorway while Robin finally undoes a the tricky knot and moves on to something else. When Vincent comes back, he's holding an old plaid-patterned blanket, which he hesitantly brings into the room.

The hesitation comes entirely from the floor situation--he has to shuffle his feet awkwardly to avoid stepping on anything, since the last thing he needs is a bunch of little glass (or metal, or plastic?) shards in his socks.

Once he's near them, he slowly drapes the blanket over Phalanx's shoulders--partly because he can't actually see what he's doing, and partly because he is trying his very hardest not to be a large, startling monster-man.

"There," he says with finality, before nudging Robin blindly in the shoulder and saying specifically to his friend, "You don't gotta be weird about it."

Robin pauses long enough to shoot Vincent some sort of meaningful, cryptic, unhappy look--but soon enough he's back to unwrapping in silence, now doubly-intent on finishing.

Edited 2017-10-11 20:54 (UTC)

Phalanx was okay, but goodness that blanket is not going to be turned away. Even with how vaguely-frightening Vincent is, Phalanx stands bravely still and gathers that blanket close as it's draped around.

Vincent's good work earns a sigh of relief. The blanket covers bare shoulders while still being open enough for Robin to finish his work.

"And clean up your fucking mess," is the other thing Vincent mumbles at Robin as he turns to make his way carefully back out of the room. "I'm gonna eat, before it gets cold."

"Yeah," Robin answers noncommittally. A little more fidgeting, though, and his patience runs out. When a knot refuses to loosen, he drops his hands to his sides with a sigh.

"Okay, fine. Scissors it is."

And just like that, he tiptoes back through the scattered things all over the ground to pick up the large pair of scissors that had been left on the ground.

With the new blanket-shawl, Phalanx seems generally more settled about things. The idea of scissors aren't quite so scary anymore, especially since they've already watched most of their raggedy armor be disassembled through other means. Phalanx is pretty sure those scary-looking things are just for cutting non-people things, so...

And while Robin is distracted for those few seconds, Phalanx has time to be free of all that scrutiny and get a look down at themselves. When was the last time they had seen bare skin at all? For all that Robin knows (and Phalanx remembers) the creature could have been created already enshrouded.

When Robin turns back from fetching the scissors, Phalanx is looking down and poking at a marble on the ground with dirty, bare toes, watching it roll across the tile.

It rolls and rolls until it bumps into one of Robin's very nice shoes. He looks down at it, and then at Phalanx's feet, and then back up to their (currently) blue eyes.

And now that it's just him and them again, there's room for the cute moment to seep in and make him happy. So he shrugs off some of his irritation with Vincent and with knots--both literal and figurative--and walks back up to give it another try.

"You look like you haven't had a bath in a long time," he mentions with a little smile. He tries to find something less threatening to cut first, like something on their upper arm, where the skin is less sensitive. He doesn't plan on hurting them, but he doesn't want to make them worry either way.

And with the added comfort that Vincent has bestowed upon the homeless pile of souls, Robin can feel even more totally free to enjoy this moment as something cute. He doesn't have to pretend that Phalanx is doing alright with this whole thing, they actually are. At least adequately enough, anyway.

Phalanx even moves an arm away from their body a little bit, so they're not hugging the blanket quite so close and Robin can snip away the remaining rags there.

Well, if there's one thing for sure about Robin, it's that he doesn't actually need participation from the other person to keep talking.

"I think it'll feel nice, when you're all done." Cutting is much faster than untangling. He tries to do it in such a way that the majority of the scraps will be saved--because that's a commodity, even higher up in the tunnels. "Your hair will feel soft, and your fingers, too..."

Something else falls to the floor, joining the small mountain of old fabric and junk.

"And I'll wash your clothes, so they'll be soft too..."

"Soft, soft. Soft," said presumably in response to the three soft things that Robin had just mentioned. Phalanx seems to be pleased with the thought--at least in the fact that things will be made soft afterward. It's a pretty good selling point.

Thinking about it, Phalanx hugs the blanket up high on their chest so they can duck their head down into the fabric around their folded arms. It's okay though, since Robin has pretty much solved the fabric puzzle in the areas that are now tightly blanketed. Push things around a little bit, maybe take one of Phalanx's arms back momentarily to free one last makeshift sleeve, and Robin should be able to finish up the much-less-complicated lower half fairly easily after that.

The lower half is startlingly easy, compared to the gauntlet of confusion he's been dealing with. It's enough to get a sound of mild surprise out of him, when he realizes it isn't many layers until his new friend will simply be wearing nothing at all.

He looks, while he's there. It's true that Robin is hardly a prude--weird shit like this is kind of how he gets his kicks--but now that he's seen the lay of the land, he also knows that Phalanx is not damaged, infected, or otherwise disfigured. Honestly, it feels like momentous progress to know that they have genitalia at all. He'd been half-expecting to pull back the curtain and find some featureless flat form, like what you'd see on a doll.

But he barely dwells on it enough to be noticeable, especially not to someone like Phalanx. With everything out of the way, Robin shoots them another one of his wide smiles and pets the top of their hair.

"Okay, finally ready. Let's get you in the tub."

Phalanx doesn't seem to notice when the last shred of clothing falls to the floor, let alone any inspection that may have followed. Whatever the little mob of spirits is thinking about, it has to do with the walls and tub and junk on the floor. Their attentions all wander until Robin focuses them again.

It takes them a moment of looking at the tub, maybe remembering back to how these things work, before they finally step in and sit down--blanket and all.

If Robin shrieks internally at the sight of Phalanx stepping into the tub with an entire blanket still wrapped around their shoulders, he doesn't show it, save for the raising of his eyebrows and a momentary pause.

But he isn't about to take it back, now that it's all wet. In the cosmic vastness of time and space, this particular moment isn't one worth fighting for. It's probably better that Phalanx have something to keep themselves wrapped up in anyway.

"That'll work," he concedes, shaking his head with a smile and kneeling down at the edge of the tub. "Is it warm enough for you?"

Phalanx nods at Robin's question, but the dry part of the blanket is still anxiously looped up and over to form a makeshift hood and hugged close. The creature is settling down comfortably in the warm water, but they're still watching with vague concern as the fabric floats on the surface of the bathwater--turning wet and dark and sinking as it absorbs.

Yeah, the water is warm enough, but Phalanx is already beginning to wonder if there is maybe going to be a blanket problem here soon. Right now, it's just a guess.

The blanket problem doesn't seem to be of any concern to Robin; there are a variety of soaps and things in labeled bottles in a small box next to the tub, and he's busy sifting through them to find something to use on Phalanx.

He brings up a bar of soap and a washcloth, pausing only to roll up his (fairly expensive) sleeves before lathering them together.

"Ever had someone give you a bath before?" He asks this in an off-handed way, though he hopes that jarring a memory or two might remind the strange collection of spirits what a bath is and how it normally goes.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject