psychoshenanigans | Skeleton City // PSL

Vincent has done a minimal job of making some room at the low table for more than just himself. There are a few containers of greasy-smelling things all open in the middle, and Vincent is quick to sit back down in an old, creaky chair and pile some more sauce-glazed nuggets of something onto a plate with a fork.

When Robin gets only silence, he asks again, "Phalanx, that question was for you. Have you eaten this kind of stuff before?"

His eyes are on Phalanx for an answer, even as he reaches out towards a stack of plates on the table. Other things on the table include beer cans, stained mugs, reference books, and a dusty vase that holds scrolls of parchment rather than flowers.

Oh! There's a sound of surprise as Phalanx catches up, looking between Robin's face and the mysterious meal laid out before them.

"Maybe..." The word trails out as Phalanx hugs their shroud closer so it doesn't touch anything on the table, and leans to peer into the open containers.

"...Did you make it? In a kitchen?"

All of the food in the cartons look edible, at the very least. The little mounds that Vincent has taken are the best color (a shiny, orange-brown) despite their unflattering shape. There's a mix of soft grains and pale-looking vegetables in another. The biggest container holds the soup that Vincent was eating earlier, filled with noodles and thin strands of something stringy. There's a box of thin crackers, dried strips of fish, even a shallow box that inexplicably appears to be filled with a solid loaf of cooked egg.

"Someone else made it in their kitchen," Robin explains, the corner of his mouth quirked up at the funny question, "We just brought it home."

"Ingram kept trying to give me extra 'cause of that job we did for her last week," Vincent adds, stabbing one of his glazed nuggets with his fork, "So uh, help yourself, I guess. Not a lot of room in the fridge for leftovers anyway."

Sitting down would make sense. Scooping portions of food onto a plate would make sense.

Carefully picking a cracker out of the box with bare, still-stained fingers and delicately snapping it in half is what Phalanx decides to do instead. Just... standing next to the table, breaking a cracker apart to inspect the texture.

"Good for her," Robin says, clearly towards Vincent, "So she's happy with the outcome of the trial?"

"Feels a lot safer, yeah..."

In the short term, neither of them seem to mind that Phalanx is absorbed in the intricacies of a rice cracker. Vincent may not have even noticed, as he is now paying more attention to eating his own food at the moment. Robin will probably play caretaker soon enough, but he picks up a plate to serve himself first, blobbing on a little bit of everything.

Phalanx is free to poke around, or observe, or do nothing--at least until Robin has finished.

Edited 2018-03-12 04:25 (UTC)

Phalanx does a little of all of the above. Maybe this is what spirits do when no one is watching--simply floating alongside the living, aimlessly experiencing the space with them--because Phalanx seems to forget that they're just as visible flesh-and-bone as everyone else.

After tasting (just a little lick, really,) the bits of cracker, they are forgotten and left behind. Phalanx stands around, happily listening without comprehending. They hum two, quiet notes. They hook a finger on the edge of a container so they can pull it closer and tilt it to see inside. They get distracted and make a fingerprint on the dust of the nearby vase.

The two men continue to talk a little, with Vincent mumbling around his food and Robin inquiring at details around something Phalanx doesn't have context for. It is safely not about them, or not directed at them, and the pile of ghosts does not have any need to pay attention until Robin is suddenly there again, standing just off to their side and holding up a plate for them.

"Would you like some food?" He asks, polite and pleasant, "To eat?"

It is a little like they're surprised that they're still there and visible every new time that they're addressed. It's like they never expect to be taking part in whatever's happening around them. Robin suddenly including them in the meal is treated like a delightful novelty.

Phalanx smiles and reaches for the offered food (and not the plate itself) when Robin holds it out. And the extra clarification is appreciated.

"I don't know," the ghosts answer cheerily. Let's find out!

Edited 2018-03-12 14:31 (UTC)

Robin looks just as cheery as Phalanx sounds... even if he immediately guides the plate out of reach of their grubby fingers.

"Use a fork, please."

He tilts his head and his gaze towards the table, indicating the perfectly good set of forks laid out in front of them.

Phalanx pauses... follows Robin's gaze... looks over the assorted clutter on the table... and spots a fork! Aha!

"Use a fork. Fork. Please."

With this puzzle figured out, Phalanx reaches over and retrieves one of the utensils. A sock falls out of their blanket shroud. And then they return to the plate that Robin is still holding--again, moving to take a stab of something that looks edible instead of taking the whole darn plate.

"Okay, oh-kay..."

Keeping the plate away from Phalanx suddenly becomes a small dance as he weaves (perhaps ill-advisedly) around their newly-acquired fork and onto the actual surface of the table.

"There, now you can use the fork."

Vincent raises his head while silently chewing... It's not hard to imagine that the dead stare he points in their direction would have been exactly the same even if he still had real eyes.

Okay! The plate has successfuly landed, Phalanx has been armed with the proper tools, there is one less sock around to potentially fall into something edible. Dinner is served.

Phalanx stands, of course, as it's a good bet that they can only really acknowledge the existence of half of their body at a time. They're good at slouching though, so there doesn't seem to be much of a problem with just kind of hunching up over the plate while they take the first curious jabs at exploring their meal.

They even know which end of the fork to use, how about that?

Again, this is shaping up to be an evening of compromises. If it doesn't occur to them to sit down, Robin won't tell them to sit down. Getting them to consume food is probably a high achievement all on its own.

The demigod picks up another plate and finally starts serving himself, with the only notable moment being his pleasantly chastising Vincent for eating so many root rounds, and Vincent curtly telling him it ain't his fault he's a slow-ass.

The "root rounds", as they are apparently called, are probably the most interesting part of the meal. They're coated with something sweet and salty, lightly breaded underneath, and then spongy, almost rubbery, on the inside. The dried fish is surprisingly tangy, almost bitter, past the initial flakiness. The soft grain with vegetables is barely worth eating, mostly there to fill up the empty space between other, more interesting, foods.

Robin pulls a tall stool over and hunches over a plate of his own--so he and Phalanx kind of match for a moment, with one standing and the other sitting at about the height of the actual table.

As a being, Phalanx is already generally lacking in empty space; there's no great need to fill up on grains. Being questionably made of dead things probably quells one's appetite as well. In either case, Phalanx ignores the bland and healthy-looking things as if they're actually invisible, and plays with the rest more out of curiosity than the hunger it seems like they really should be feeling by now.

The shiny, sticky, technicolor rounds are an expected hit. Though they're a little intimidating at first, it doesn't take long for Phalanx to catch on after a bit of exploration. Only one round gets stabbed and picked apart into oblivion before the others are sampled in a much more normal manner.

However, the fish is the surprise star of the evening. That sharp taste is a visible shock, and despite (or maybe because of) how the flavor borders on offensive, Phalanx finds them thoughtfully chewing through one piece, and then another.... and another...

Robin eats fairly politely, rationing the more flavorful pieces throughout the bland filler so as to turn it into a semi-functional meal. Vincent eventually runs out of root rounds and finds his way to the flavorless grain--which he tops with some broth from the noodley soup to give it some semblance of flavor.

For a while, the three of them eat peacefully, with Robin occasionally looking over to see just what stage of dissection his new friend has gotten to this time. Around the third or forth piece of fish, Robin comments around a small mouthful.

"Looks like the mudfish is a winner."

"Said no one, ever, about the mudfish," Vincent interjects, tilting his head up as if it would actually help him see over the table, "He's into those?"

"Looks like it..." Robin nods, finally pointedly pulling the pile of ghosts back into the conversation, "Hey, Phalanx. You like those?"

He points to the current piece of fish on the end of Phalanx's fork.

"Yes," they definitively answer, and decide to smash the fish on their fork down against the plate instead of bringing it to their mouth. As if it's serving as some punctuation on their opinion, Phalanx calmly obliterates the piece of fish into a million useless flakes.

Odds are, they won't remember to finish up that mess before moving onto another unbroken, appealing piece instead.

Oh, the fish will get eaten one way or another. Maybe not by Phalanx, but maybe in someone's leftovers, or maybe someone will think to feed the already ground-up bits of fish to a local chicken in the hopes of making said chicken a more appealing meal than the fish. Nothing really gets wasted down here.

"Good," Robin replies, just as definitively, paying little mind to Phalanx playing with their food rather than eating it. He watches them do this for a long moment, resting his chin on his palm, hunched over the table, thinking to himself--his own dinner gone and already forgotten.

And then something happens silently very high up above them, and Vincent notices immediately, picking his chin up again to stare unseeingly at the cracked ceiling. Robin catches on a second or two later, looking over curiously, then following the taller man's non-gaze.

"Grid's off," Vincent states. He doesn't sound worried, but it is a grumble of warning all the same. Robin hums in agreement. Then the sounds follow the thing that happened--a repetitive shushing sound, just a little louder with every beat, like a very big heartbeat except that the beating sounds like when blood rushes through your ears.

It's getting closer. Almost there.

"It'll just be a second," Robin adds, looking down at Phalanx just as the noise descends and the room, the floor, the entire level of the underground world is plunged into near-blackness.

Something glows through Robin's shirt, red. Small, maybe a necklace. It only takes a second for a crackle to sound somewhere and some dim lights to flicker back on elsewhere in the world--and then the room is back, nice and quiet and a little darker than before.

This is very normal. Happens every night. The only people upset are the ones who didn't quite get to finish their hot showers, or finish doing business, or finish getting safely home before the descent of artificial night--but the rest have seen this dozens, if not hundreds, of times already.

The only ones upset about the grid are all those unfortunate folks caught in the middle of doing something important... and Phalanx, apparently. Either because of a terminally short memory or (much more improbably) because of somehow never having experienced this nightly ritual, they startle entirely out of their meal.

Phalanx freezes as the power flushes out of this sector, and there's the tiny, highlighted sound of a fork hitting the floor once it's totally dark.

It's all back only a second or two later, but Phalanx already has both hands covering their ears, eyes wide and uncomprehending.

"Oops," Robin says.

"Whaddya mean, oops?" Vincent says, chair scuffing against the floor as the tall man stands up, unintentionally looming over the table. He does not move forward, but he's certainly ready to if there's suddenly a problem on their hands.

But Robin is the first one to actually move into action. He calmly steps off his stool and glides around to Phalanx, putting a hand gently on their shoulder to bring them back down to the singular realm.

"Phalanx, are you all right?"

His voice is soft but his presence is very grounding, somehow, in a way it wasn't a moment ago. If Vincent notices, he says nothing, only waiting to be told whether or not he is needed to help in some way, shape, or form.

It takes a second, but Phalanx's dark eyes finally float around the room before landing on Robin's face and fixing there. One of the hands pressed against the sides of their face has a sock wrapped around it.

"Are you all right?" Just an echo at first, but after a blink or two, they're realizing they haven't drifted as far as they'd thought.

"--We... are. We're all."

"Ah," Robin smiles, sounding glad to hear it. He wonders, at the back of his mind, if this is what it's like for other people, when he finds himself scattering between too many places (or sometimes just one place that happens to not be where he is standing in space and time).

As if on cue, Vincent stands down, hearing that whatever had been going wrong is starting to resolve itself.

"You're all good?" The large man unconsciously copies Phalanx's use of plural, focused more on intent than delivery, "Spooked by the lights, or somethin'?"

"Dark," Phalanx affirms. The hand with the sock disappears back into the blanket shroud, followed by the other once they're totally sure that all is safe.

"Sometimes we're blind. Or... dead?" Vincent can't see the unsure scrunch of Phalanx's face, but it's there in their voice. "But this was just dark... just-dark. Dark-dark."

Vincent's expression is many things: confused, skeptical, hesitant to even begin to try explaining why that doesn't make any sense. But while he furrows his brows in "wait what the fuck was that about 'dead'?," Robin is already there and moving the pile of ghosts right along.

"That's right, everyone is still here where you left them." He gives Phalanx's shoulder a small squeeze before letting go, dropping his arm to a more casual stance. "They shut the power off every night down here. Emergency lights go on," he twirls his finger in the air a little, "But no heating or hot water for a while."

"Wait," Vincent finally interjects, finding something he can actually grab onto in this conversation, "Did you not know about the grid?"

"The grid the... grid..." Phalanx starts the echo barely before Vincent finishes the words himself, sounding thoughtful.

And in a moment of impressive clarity, Phalanx manages to suss out what "grid" actually means in this case. Their eyes are still dark, but they catch the dim light like human eyes normally would as they look up to the ceiling.

Following the memory of where the two men's attention had gone before, and then reaching even farther back, Phalanx's attention goes up--through the caverns above, thinking back, remembering, searching, and they slowly lift a hand to point at the cracked plaster overhead.

"--No, none. Ours was all... not this. Not a grid."

"Not a... grid...?" Vincent repeats them, with more confusion than before.

"Seriously, is there an echo in here?" Robin, meanwhile, smiles and pretends that something is stuck in his ear. It's a short bit, but his good mood does not waver as he asks more eloquently for clarification: "If yours wasn't a grid, Phalanx, what was it?"

He thinks he knows the answer--but earlier, he thought he knew a lot of things about Phalanx that quickly turned out to not be entirely true. He sees no harm in asking, aside from potentially giving Vincent a headache.

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