psychoshenanigans | Skeleton City // PSL

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Skeleton City // PSL

They call it the "Market", and it's always buzzing like a hive. The vast caverns are warmed by the hundreds of bodies all hauling, shouting, pitching, laughing, exchanging things from one hand to another. Even more people stroll up above, their voices lost in the tangle of bridges made of stone and wood and metal. The place is lit by dozens of electric signs, spilling brightwarm colors where the hanging lanterns cannot reach.

There is a lot to look at. One person seems to trade a bolt of rich red cloth for some nails and hinges. One man is trying very hard to convince another that the chicken he is holding is worth at least three bags of grainmeal. And then there is whatever Phalanx is holding, which they most certainly did not trade for, and it most certainly leads to someone reaching out over their stall table and grabbing them harshly by the arm.

"Hey, you little theif!" Says an irate, heavy-set woman, "What do you think you're doing?"

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The bundle murmurs and jostles itself a little as it moves around on the couch until it's small and comfortable again. The spirits don't like being away from Robin, but they're quick to find their own center to curl up around again.

"We're feeling," Phalanx confirms. They appear sleepy, looking forward at nothing with tired eyes, but they sound surprisingly present. "But with... old things. Skin and eyes and ears and fingers."

The demigod isn't entirely sure what that means--but it interests him, hearing them speak so lucidly about something after the long day they've had. He has a seat next to them, settling in to see if they're up for a little conversation.

"What's that like?" he asks, hoping for a little clarification.

"Like feeling," but by the tone of Phalanx's voice and the vaguely disconcerted expression on their face, it doesn't seem very comfortable. "But it's old. From old." They frown a little while they search for words. "Before. They're not... it's not... real? Not anymore."

And then they turn to look at Robin a little helplessly. Nothing is easy right now.

He meets their gaze, nodding slowly. While he still doesn't understand exactly what Phalanx is experiencing, he knows what it's like to feel things that have not been real for a very, very long time. And he supposes that Phalanx has done that a lot today. No wonder they're so tired.

He reaches out to brush some hair away from their face, under their hood. He speaks softly, just so that Vincent does not casually overhear.

"I get confused, sometimes," he admits, "When it feels like the way things felt years ago. Years and years... But I can smell it like it's now, or see it. Sometimes feel it."

As if the thought reminds him, he pulls his hand back to start picking at the fingers of his gloves. "But it's all right, this is a safe place for that. And Vincent is always kind about it, even if he is kind of a dumbass."

As if on cue, they both hear a very belated, confused, "...Did you say there was food?" faintly from the bedroom.

Though Phalanx is not one to be very attached to physical sensation, Robin's doting seems to be just as soothing to them as it would be to a creature with a normal, natural, living body and mind. They're listening and unwinding, enjoying not having to respond with words for a few moments.

It isn't until Vincent's voice pipes up from the back room that they blink a few times and return to themself, looking as though they've just remembered something.

"...There are pins in our arm."

Watching them unwind brings Robin his own sense of relief. Maybe he hadn't had time to think about how much trouble they could have been in... But it did get tense, out there, and there were several moments where he was worried he'd be in a whole lot more hot water than anyone was ready for. So the moment is nice, an easy breath after a busy whirlwind of a morning.

But something about hearing Vincent off to the side, followed by Phalanx's sudden realization, hits him from a strange angle and a silly little giggle sneaks out of him. And it doesn't stop there--another giggle follows, and then another, and it takes him a long moment to finally cover his mouth and get his own laughter under control.

"There are," he says, from behind his hand. "Gods, and your poor hand--let me see it."

Phalanx laughs a little too, but it definitely looks as though they don't realize they're doing it. And they also seem a little surprised when their arms begin to unwind from the center of the blanket-ball under their own volition.

It's a much less aimless motion once they catch on, and soon Phalanx has both arms free from the blanket--wrapped up with (and sewn into) the fancy new strips of cloth, with an old wound on one hand, and a few new little wounds on the other arm. Those pins that Phalanx had previously aligned so neatly in their sleeve would have been fine if they had remembered they were there, and if a big blanket hadn't been rustling over them for the past couple of hours. Most of the pins and needles are still more or less where they'd been left, though stabbed into considerably more skin than they had been before, with a few of them missing entirely.

He reaches out for their hands immediately, holding them in his own, palms up... But he glances past them at the pins sticking awkwardly out of Phalanx's arm, giving them a pitying look.

"I'd wondered..." He drops one of their hands to reach out again, smiling as he plucks a couple of pins out without the slightest hesitation. "But you were very invested in keeping these pins..."

He'll put the pins somewhere else, poking them through the outside of one of Phalanx's pockets, facing downward so that the point will be difficult to accidentally catch themselves on.

And as detached from the real world as Phalanx is right now, they are still determined to keep track of those pins as Robin removes them. They even lift their free hand as if they're going to try and stop him or take the pins back, but they reluctantly settle back down when they see that Robin isn't actually moving them very far.

"Invested. Investments, yeah?"

"Yeah, if they help you remember."

Robin doesn't want to take Phalanx's pins away--he learned that lesson earlier this morning. He continues to poke them into their pocket until all of them are lined up neatly, and even manages to spot a stray poking out of the blanket (which he, of course, catches and puts next to the others).

After this, he runs his thumb over their wrist where the pins had been sticking out. He doesn't know if he can really... remove their wrap at this point, not without some scissors and a lot more effort than he can be bothered with, but he may be able to feel a couple of pinpoints of blood, maybe a small twinge of pain here and there, to be able to tell where they're injured.

Vincent, finally, wanders out of the bedroom, yawning like a bear.

"Good morning, sunshine," Robin says to him. Vincent flips him off without a second thought and shuffles towards the kitchen.

Phalanx watches the exchange and appropriately grins at Vincent's rude gesture as if the whole thing makes perfect sense to them--in proper context and everything. Their eyes are still the empty, soulless eyes of a doll, but they're otherwise easy to mistake for a normal, entirely-lucid human for a moment.

However, the fuzzy points of pain, and blood that seems much too old and sluggish to be in a living body, is still a dead giveaway if you can sense that kind of thing.

Robin knows that the experience of pain is different for Phalanx than it is for a normal person, but until now, he had mostly attributed it to their distance their physical body, or the fact that they are technically lots and lots of people all smashed into one form, who couldn't possibly all be cohesively aware of what they're feeling at the same time.

But now, as he reaches instinctively out for the sense of their blood, he realizes that they are physically not as they should be. Not entirely. He feels the pulse of blood in them, sure, but it feels hollow. He looks for fresh blood, searches for the basic fundamental essence of a living person, and it just... isn't right.

He frowns a little as he tries to puzzle this out, suddenly absorbed in their arm as he blindly stitches up the little holes. Then he moves back to their injured hand to do the same, this time watching very carefully to see how the sluggish blood reacts to his magic tugging on it.

"Seriously though," says Vincent naively from the kitchen, "Did you say there was food?"

Robin's magic tugs on Phalanx's body, and some other magic tugs back. It isn't a dramatic reaction (it's barely noticeable, really) and it obeys Robin's wishes after just that little bit of coaxing, but it's enough to tell for sure that this creature is held together, in every unnatural fiber, by magic.

It doesn't glow; the spirits are more active and prevalent than the magic itself is. Whatever is there now is likely the result of what was first put in place at the creature's creation and then left as an inert structure to keep everything running afterward. Living by technicality, but not as any natural creature was ever meant to be.

And Phalanx doesn't notice. They're busy watching after Vincent.

"Frogs. Lizards. We didn't catch them."

"Oh shit, really?" The large form of Vincent pops back into view from around the half-wall that makes up part of the kitchen, "You guys got lizard?"

This is the first thing that Vincent has seemed genuinely excited about since Phalanx has met him. Maybe fried lizards are a favorite of his?

Robin remains distracted with the work along Phalanx's palm, quickly busying into his own thoughts. It isn't just that he doesn't understand what Phalanx is, Phalanx's existence is so far beyond anything that Robin has encountered that, for a moment, he draws a complete blank. He'd been calculating, planning, trying to derive answers from every little scrap of information he can get, but for a few moments, he tries to draw a conclusion and there is simply... nothing. His extensive network of memories and distant knowledge gives him nothing.

He nearly shivers, unsettled.

"Robin, where'd you put it?"

Robin blinks and looks around a moment after Vincent tries to ask him a question.

"Huh? What?" He says stupidly, coming back to reality.

"I said," Vincent repeats, "Where'd you put it?"

"...Oh," Robin slowly points over towards a small table near the entrance of the apartment, "Over that way."

Miraculously, Vincent seems to follow the line that Robin makes with his arm almost perfectly, heading in that direction even though he couldn't have possibly seen it. Robin finally steps back into the real world fully, looking at Phalanx again for a moment before putting a small smile back on his face.

"Hey, where'd that card go? Do you remember?"

Phalanx finally returns from watching Vincent with rapt curiosity, to address Robin's question.

"Over that way," they answer with confidence, but the only open their hands to look at empty, wrapped palms. No card there.

Vincent finds the bag of food on the table surprisingly fast. At least part of it is by smell. But by the time Robin speaks up, he's rustling through the contents to see what his friend brought home.

Robin looks at Phalanx's empty hands too, tilting his head. "Huh."

At almost seems like it surprises him that the card isn't just in their hands--but then he tilts his head the other way, towards the other shoulder, and starts patting down Phalanx's blanket.

"You must have put it somewhere, while we left. The black card. Do you remember?"

"I remember," and Phalanx still sounds sure about it. Of course they remember... but where it went after the card was in their possession is an entirely different question.

Phalanx mimics the motion of patting their hands over the blanket, but there isn't a real goal behind it. They're trying to help, but it's mostly just copying mindlessly while they think.

After a minute, whether by intentionally retracing their steps or just compulsively copying what they had done back when they'd first taken the card, Phalanx eventually pulls their hands up into the sleeves of their coat... and a card clumsily shuffles back out the end of one a few seconds later.

This gets a good reaction out of Robin again--he was just twisting around to start going through their coat when the card is revealed out of their sleeve, and his face lights up with a broad grin.

"Hey, there you go!" He pulls the card out of the sleeve like a ticket out of a dispensing machine, "Good job finding it again."

"So what'd you clowns get up to?" Vincent interrupts, turning to face the couch with a mouth full of kebab'd newt. Robin says nothing, busy looking at the front of the card instead.

Phalanx looks a little pained by Vincent's question, drooping forward with their still-handless sleeve-arms wrapped around their middle like they have a stomachache, but they regurgitate the events of the day anyway. It kind of looks like they don't have a lot of choice in the matter.

"Sewing. I got stabbed... shopped... smoke. With a skirt. I'm from nowhere. Drums and... nobody believed me. But she liked the story. We stole a card because... it was important? Trees, but the wrong trees. We got lizards."

Vincent interacts with crazy people on a regular basis. One of them lives in his house when they aren't gallivanting around in other cities' political circles, or whatever the fuck Robin does with his free time. So he can't say he's... surprised to get a very, very weird answer out of Phalanx.

But it's still... pretty weird. His chewing slows while he listens to the laundry list of events. By the end of it, he's stopped eating, and Phalanx can hear him very clearly small the air with a short inhale.

Whatever he's smelling for, he apparently doesn't find it. A moment later, he finally asks, raising an eyebrow, "Was that, uh... In order?"

Oh, that question. It must be one that Phalanx has been asked before, because there's just a helpless (and vaguely sickened) huff of a sigh from them. How are they supposed to answer something like that?

It doesn't take Vincent long to double-back on the question, "You know, nevermind. I don't need to know."

Robin continues to be transfixed by the image that has appeared on the face of the card. He looks a little like he's reading it, digging into something deep in whatever has appeared. Vincent can't see any of that and isn't particularly interested, so the tall man leans back against the little table and resumes eating.

But one part of that stuck out to him, so he offhandedly asks another question soon after: "What did nobody believe you about?"

"That we're too many times. Too many... skins and eyes. The dark. And we sew. And all the magic."

Especially that last one, with how much that topic gets danced around here. Phalanx sighs a little as they confide in their large friend.

"A lot. A lot of things... and we're a lot."

Vincent listens patiently, nodding a couple of times--once at the mention of magic, and once when Phalanx confides that they are "a lot", in whatever sense they feel that to be true. Vincent finishes the last bite of his skewer, chewing thoughtfully, before blindly reaching back and dropping it into the bag it had originally come from.

"I don't really understand that kind of stuff very well," he admits, "But I believe you."

Again, Vincent isn't a smart man by most accounts. But he doesn't need to be. He doesn't have the same fixation with understanding every minute detail of every interaction that Robin constantly chases. He can coast along pretty far on very little. He doesn't need to understand how a pile of souls could exist to imagine that it probably gets pretty fucking crowded and busy in there. If Phalanx says they're a lot, Vincent has no reason to doubt them, especially because he's heard them be more honest in casual conversation than most humans with only one soul to work with.

"I believe you, I believe you," Phalanx mutters as they sit back again and bring their knees up with them. Curling up like a pile of laundry left on the corner of the couch, the souls murmur to themselves--still sounding that vague sort of upset that they've had going for the past few hours, but also like they're now trying to soothe themselves a little bit, at least.

It's nice, being believed. And maybe repeating it, running it a few more times until everyone in there can hear it, will help the feeling stick around.

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