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[ofvalves]

Faustian Bargains //Val&Hannibal

@thegiftofcruelty

Everyone was careful not to say ‘possession’ to a science believing skeptic like Hannibal Lecter. But, psychiatric nurses in lower income healthcare settings have seen it all, been elbow-deep in it all, and can recite the whole freak show rote. A seasoned charge nurse like Garland spooked had definitely piqued Hannibal’s interest in Heather Mason. He used his position as Medical Director to house Heather in his more attentive wing with all of the country’s most violent psychiatric patients, which she certainly was not. But there was something toothsome about her case.

Heather had her own private room, mostly to keep her safe from the other violent offenders. She was personally attended to by Barney, now Director of Nursing for the acute floor. Heather had been put through every battery of test that Hannibal could think of. As non-verbal and quiet as she’d been, Hannibal had taken to reviewing her case files in her room with her comfortably but firmly restrained. He thought his best tactic might be to try to get her to talk in this language which had baffled the translators at the larger hospital.

“What do you want, from your time here?”

Brigit Garland had watched Heather leave with a mixture of emotions. But some of it was definitely relief. There were nights she had spent on watch outside the young woman’s room which simply felt strange. Like the quality of the air itself was wrong. She couldn't put her finger on it. 

Even when she was moved, Heather made no outward sign of awareness. If anything, she actually seemed to drop into an even deeper stillness. The slight furrow that she normally wore across her brow loosened.

Her vivid blue eyes betrayed nothing. It could be said to be like sharing a room with a ghost.  

The question was spoken, and hung strangely in the air between the two of them. As if the sound wouldn't quite dissipate. The room was slightly too warm and a smell which crept in just on the edge of perception could make an observant person start to wonder if there was damp starting in the walls.

The sound of the door opening and closing was absent, and yet there was the click of heeled footsteps moved up to the side of the doctor’s chair, where he sat opposite his patient.

“You know, I’d rather know, what you want, from your time here?”

It was a woman, statuesque, pale. Her red, curled hair pinned back loosely from her striking face. She walked to the bed and sat down, crossing one leg over the other. She wore a simple black shift dress.

“Who are you? Exactly? And what are you doing with my charge?”

The accent was American, but it had a twist to it. Like someone who had lived a very long time in England. The voice itself lilting and easy. 

Still, Heather did not move.

[ofvalves]

Faustian Bargains //Val&Hannibal

@thegiftofcruelty

Silent Hill, West Virginia. A steady rain had been drumming the sidewalks of the town since long before the evening closed in, rendering the streets a dark, agitated mirror dotted by streetlamps.

Nurse Brigit Garland stood at the back gate of Brookhaven Psychiatric Hospital beneath the shelter of the porch. Not a massive institution, it had originally been a hospital set up during the civil war, but the building had persisted.

She anxiously twisted the small cross she kept on a chain around her neck. Heather Mason had been mostly her charge for the past six months, but the young woman had been at the hospital far longer than that; aged now twenty seven, she had ended up institutionalised some eight years ago.

The strange part was that no record reflected who had brought her in, and attempts to locate any family had proved fruitless. 

As a patient she was largely catatonic. Sitting for days, endlessly, staring at the walls. But that was not her only symptom. Sometimes, something seized her, and it was violent. Restraints had to be used. She would become a whirlwind of jet black hair and limbs, and even worse...she would speak. But not in English. 

The consulting psychiatrist was untroubled. Negative presenting schizophrenia. But Brigit was troubled. So troubled that she had started to make phone calls, and when she found someone who might help, she’d had Heather moved to the quiet wing of the hospital.

The headlights of a car pulling up made her heart leap into her throat. Surely it was for the best?

[ofvalves]

//Anybody want some Val? Like this thing for a thing x

[ofvalves]

@highstrxngeness

Glitching, fragmented memories. Snow from a television screen obscuring vision, dampening sound. For a moment, the air cuts in half, and her legs are in familiar places, bound around his waist, hands reaching out for a neck that’s never touched... And then she returns, He returns. It all returns. She’s back and true to form; a motionless doll in its grip, limp until her attention brought tightly into focus.

“Resurrection beneath the stars... to trees born of God’s created year.” The black pools of Fukuro’s eyes begin to spiral, inky water draining through the center of her pupil to flash a glance of a purely human gaze -- eyes the color of trees she longed to stretch under.

How easy it is to remember his form with her. She is the hook in the eye of his being. Holding her flush to him his body fluctuates, shifts. It is a man again, though still branded on the shoulder, still the irises are a deep red, near enough black. 

His arms band around her waist, he gets lost looking in the green of her eyes for a moment. A near human smile crosses his face.

      “Anything.” He husks with ardor.

The floor is the first thing to begin shifting. The rotting tiles burst upward in a rush of fungi, moss, twisting vine and underbrush. The walls fall down like a folding theatre set, the ceiling is gone and all around them is the pitch black womb of not yet creation. 

Trees shoot upward through the new-made forest floor and sprout and rush to life at an alarming rate until the deep, dark, night forest cradles the two of them on all sides. The final touch is the red quarter moon, hanging low and beautiful in the sky.

Val pants from the exertion, sweat beads on his brow, but he cant bear to release her. When he smiles this time he is even more human.

      “How’s that?” He asks, a hand lifting to brush through her hair.

[ofvalves]

@highstrxngeness​

The pressure of Valtiel’s hand was mighty. Heavy. Too heavy. A loud crack shattered through Fukuro’s ears, pain trailblazing its way through her entire core before that mighty hand lifted and all of Fukuro felt right again. Weightless. Painless.

Her back arched, legs outstretched into familiar positions, fingers interlaced behind her, refusing movement until given permission.

“Shiny... and sweet.” Fukuro whispered, black eyes prying open to bare witness a form she revered more than God Herself. “I’ve seen so many corners... so much darkness without you...”

It laughed, lowly but warmly. The sound resonating through the floor and walls. The creature’s other hand rose to grasp the nurse beneath one thigh, lifting her as carefully and tenderly as it could despite the bruising grip.

      “My darling girl, you are forgetting that I am in all darkness.”

It’s form fluctuated again, like a glitch on an old television set. For a moment it was a handsome, muscular man. Still too big to be human. But the fidelity guttered out and the monster mostly reasserted itself.

It manipulated her jaw like a doll’s head, to turn her eyes toward his...Or where his might have been.

      “Tell me sweet one, what would you like? Where shall we go? Ask anything of me.”

[ofvalves]

[ofvalves]

//Val lives x

[ofvalves]

@highstrxngeness

Adventure. That’s where the darkness had taken Fukuro. Whenever the Town fractured last, Fukuro could see her strings and snipped. For the first time in years, she saw faces that weren’t familiar -- gods that did not demand her worship. The illusion of choice and circumstance invigorated her. But distance did very little to block out That Call.

A booming rumble vibrated through Fukuro’s core, narrowing her world to an oppressive blackness before pulling back, pulsating. Painful. Purposeful. She could have screamed, if she wanted to -- if it wasn’t the voice of Home, welcoming her back to Silent Hill. “Daddy...” Fukuro’s own voice sounded like a layered echo of too many voices, too many relived lives.

“I’m here --” She called, the gates of darkness spitting Fukuro back out into the little room of decayed paper walls and iron bars that God had once deemed fit for her. Waiting.

The breathing walls of the hospital shivered at the new presence, a sensation stronger than a pull on a spider’s web - Valtiel was the spider, but he was also the web itself.

It seemed to him, as she returned, that there was little between them to call them distinct beings.

Doors unlocked, walls folded. The creature padded monstrous and predator like toward the small humanoid figure of the little nurse, shifting as it went, so that by the time she was within reach it resembled something like a human being, and something like a man, but it’s hand still dwarfed her face as it laid it’s palm tenderly below her chin.

Valtiel had been so long in the weave of it’s own world, it was relearning the human shape. It took practice to maintain.

      “My sweet.” It uttered in a voice like an ancient cavern where brave men venture and inevitably die. “I missed you.”

It’s grip tightened a little too much before it remembered how delicate the flesh was and released.

      “Tell me where you’ve been? Is the world exciting?”

[ofvalves]

@highstrxngeness

Fukuro... The word rolled around Val’s head and out onto her tongue. “Fukuro?” She called into the darkness.

It had been a long while since the creature had come to this particular desolate hall, not quite certain where it was or indeed, wasn't...Silent Hill was frequently like that. Even the caretaker of these grounds occasionally found himself in unusual versions of familiar places.

It was what came of inhabiting a constantly shifting dream.

It calls again, quietly, lower...The body shifts from the pale, feminine, statuesque to broader, more masculine, the back and biceps heavily scarred. Eyes so dark that humans might comfort themselves by saying they were brown, but they weren’t. They were a shade of red so dark they seemed black.

    “Darling...Are you here?”

[ofvalves]

anambershadow :

The conversation began to tread familiar land. Uneven, jagged and–in her experience…ultimately barren. Amber’s eyes had practically rolled themselves, and her back found the cushioned couch. “I suppose I’d have to find something new to want out of life. I longed nothing other than a healthy Taiwan for as long as I could want anything.” Reaching for that day in the future, as theoretical as it had become, was still a mental sore. Worse still, it became boring. Better to put the books, manuals, and lessons she poured into her brain to good use rather than worry about a sinking island.

Exist now, she told herself. Make a name. And when the time comes, jump ship.  But never think that you could ever fix anything. 

“If you could actually do more than break your hand while swinging at the mainland, by all means, I’m your murderess. I’ll do whatever you say do. But I’m your murderess, anyway. No need to squander that by swimming against the tide.”

She shook her head, glaring into space while her brain races along with the endless pages of research  If only she had a dime for each time Delun’s name emerged. Or Annalis’e’s. They were combined figures that took Empress Kwok An’s shape in the public eye. 

“I’ve been down this road before,” Amber concluded. “It ends with Taiwan getting smaller, and the mainland giggling while they hold the power of the Union in their hands. A Union we weren’t even invited to.” She suddenly took to her feet, seething, pacing down whatever stretch of the empty floor would allow her room. “We could no more get them to recognize our existence, let alone make them realize that their negligence is killing people. And the sea…? The sea will take what it wants.”

Amber stopped, peering out the window in stark silence. Her gaze turned to Val, her face a painful twist of defeat, sorry and anger. “Feel free to prove me wrong. But in the meantime, I’ll settle for preserving and enriching me. Hell, someone has to love me. No one else on this selfish, miserable pebble called Earth is going to.”

Valtiel watched Amber pacing. It was the most emotionally demonstrative she had seen the young hacker be since meeting her. It was interesting to see her so visibly angry. She of course seethed with an unseen rage that clouded her aura most of the time, but until now her body language had been held largely in careful check.

      “As you wish, we shall focus on enriching you for the time being.” Val replied smoothly, and pulling out the drawer in the coffee table produced a slim paper folder. “This is all the details you will need for your next target, it will be a bit more of a challenge than your first, but I feel confident you will succeed. In fact your first mission was rather below your pay grade all things considered.”

She did not place it down yet, it remained in her grasp.

      “But I’d like to ask you, if I may, if you would humour my curiosity...What is the first place that you remember losing to the encroaching sea? The first place which meant something to you?” 

Easy Pickings//Open

[ofvalves]

anambershadow :

We have an agreement, so says the woman across from her. Somehow the agreement did nothing to settle Amber’s nerves at the moment. But she only needed time to adjust. She had already begun to detect a subtle pattern: a repetition of an invitation for company. 

The moment shifted, changing shape: Amber had found her solid ground, small and floating in the middle of the sea of things unknown that expanded endlessly in every direction. But it was enough to offer solid footing upon which she could comfortably stand. Maybe it was temporary, maybe it was a false sense of security, but she found her willpower. Preparedness slew skepticism. It was all she needed to begin.

“My desire to maintain my well being wedges out my need for company.”  She repeated herself, word for word, from the night prior. “As a matter of fact, it all but encompasses my need for literally anything else. So, unless you and your employer’s endless influence can stop this island of mine from sinking and can somehow hold responsible the mainlanders watching us drown…there’s nothing more you or your employer can offer me that I’d want. Just the job. The whens, wheres, and whats of the job. Once I know that, I can begin, and my own needs will be met in time.”

Amber sat forward, propping up her chin in her palm. “But, don’t think for a second that your invitation here, your sly attempt at brevity, went unnoticed. It didn’t. Nor did the fact that your meeting to discuss terms happens to also be here. For someone who claims to be a stranger in a strange land, this place is rather…ornately decorated. This took time. You might not be Taiwanese, but you are no fish out of water.”

A playful smile crawled across her lips. “Surely a woman of your presence, stature, and influence couldn’t possibly be lonely enough to invite the company of a worth-nothing street urchin. No matter if it is for a job.” 

Sharp as a tack. Val was pleased really. Often people simply fell under her thrall, she had that sort of presence without really trying. Humans fell easily into her orbit when she ventured near them. But here was someone who not only remained cool to the touch, but resisted actively. 

That and she had noted their immediate environs. But she was only half right on that claim, which was still twice as well as most people did.

The creature picked the glass up with a slight smile and swirled the liquid around thoughtfully, she bit her lip for a moment before speaking.

      “Alright, you’re clearly far too observant to buy the entirety of my cover story. So, yes.” She gestured around. “I have made myself a nest of sorts, and I’ve been here longer than I might have implied. I’ve learned the customs, the language. I am far from a fish out of water but all the same it is not home to me. which brings me to something else you just said...”

She appraised the liquid in the glass and she thought of the ocean rising to swallow the land.

      “...What if we could hold those mainlanders responsible? What if together we could twist and push and pull in just the right places, send a few more people like dear Mendoza to their graves in order to achieve that? And just maybe if we achieved that, we could take on the sea itself.”

Val instantly raised a finger and a wry smile as if parrying the expected scepticism. 

      “I know how it sounds, but think about it.”

Easy Pickings//Open

[ofvalves]

anambershadow :

There was a staunch effort of Val’s part to be plain and candid, to put Amber at ease. While she appreciated the effort, it was only a mild success. The written account of Mendoza’s autopsy played and replayed in the back of her head like a warped wax record under a broken needle. There was nothing normal about it, and it was the only reason Amber even began to consider “mysticism” having an air of truth.

But if it was true, what was Amber doing there? Surely the mystic and the world of ones and zeroes had nothing to do with one another.

Val offered a drink, to which Amber responded with a polite shake of the head. Her thoughts spun, but her eyes stayed glued to her sneakers. Eventually, she found the gall to look up. “Heh, ‘macabre.’ It was my idea to poke him with a bunch of holes and have him bleed out of all of them,” Amber chuckled.  “I may exercise caution, but I am not squeamish. Not in the slightest. What gives me pause are things I cannot explain. My entire life is built around adjusting to things I couldn’t understand, and my approach has always been to learn. That’s how I picked up my skillset. I didn’t come out of my mom’s womb with the skill of an assassin, thief and hacker. I had to learn. And if there is any truth to this, to your employer’s eccentricities, I’ll learn them too. And I’ll learn them quickly, and I’ll be all the better at the job.”

Amber crossed her arms, and her eyes finally found Val’s. “There are two sides to the truth: your truth, and the truth. I will work with either, without question or pause, as long as I’m given clarity and a chance to learn. Let the truth be strange, mystic, or unsightly. I will adapt, I always do. I just ask that you never keep the truth from me. Because if I learn the whole truth without you, that results in loss of trust that doesn’t benefit either of us.”

Almost as good as a signature in blood. The elder flower cordial splashed into the glass, and in Valtiel’s eyes the world slowed to a crawl, the fluid sloshing from the glass neck of the bottle became a slow motion waterfall.

A glow with the redness of sunlight passing through secret internal membranes illuminated the church like windows of the apartment and flooded into the house, bathing it in a bloody glow. And turning she saw that it touched Amber too, frozen in time for a moment. 

And for just that moment the girl had a dark halo.

The demon blinked, and nothing had changed. Nothing was out of place. She screwed the top back onto the bottle and put it back in the fridge before returning to sit opposite the hacker.

      “In that case you demonstrate a very special adaptability. Most of us, even the most open minded are at least somewhat closed down to the things we do not understand. Maybe it is your bloody minded tenacity, or the voracious autodidact within you that drives you, either way, it serves you well.”

The creature sipped the sweet liquid. 

      “Well alright.” Val smiled and some of the seriousness dropped away from her. She became easier, more human. “It seems like we have an agreement. And as I said before I would be very glad of the company in this place that is so strange to me...But one more thing...”

Val set the glass down on the coffee table and laced her bone pale fingers together.

      “We will of course compensate you monetarily. But it’s apparent by now that my employer is a person of great means. If there is something, anything, you are in need of - something personal, I’d encourage you to ask. We might be able to help. No matter how absurd you might think a request is, we may be able to help you achieve it.”

Easy Pickings//Open

[ofvalves]

chickpeatramp :

sexual orientation: the most emotionally bankrupt person in a takashi miike film

[ofvalves]

//LIKE FOR A STARTER!

And if you prefer to specify Val’s male, female or purely inhuman forms put it in a reply to this post!

[ofvalves]

//Alright folks...After three months of inactivity it’s time to get this thing rolling again...Message me for plots/ideas and to remind me what the hell I’m doing <3

[ofvalves]

**THIS ACCOUNT RISING ELEGANTLY FROM THE DEAD**

[ofvalves]

anambershadow :

Amber’s head cocked to its side, her face scrunching with a hint of sarcasm layered over a significant skepticism. “’A surprise?’ Do people not respond to job offers where you’re from?”

She hadn’t been offered entry, but she stepped inside all the same. As far as abodes went, anything was better than Amber’s hole in the wall. But Val’s apartment was anything but humble. It was plucked from a curated catalog and pasted flawlessly onto empty space, pristine and carefully maintained. And overall slightly nauseating with its broadcasted perfection. Perhaps Amber had simply got used to home sinking and falling apart.

“It’s nothing,” Amber replied, curiously scanning the room. “You gave me a job to do, I did it. After that, there was nothing keeping you there. The company was nice though. And so was dinner: thanks for that. But you’ll never find that you’ll never need to babysit me. You’re busy, and that’s fine.”

Amber was almost cautious in sitting her laptop bag on the floor. In fact, she had grown weary of even standing in the space, beginning to regret having taken steps inside. “So this job of yours. Does it require turning blind eyes? Because if it does, I’m going to have to adjust my method: I get curious from time to time and it’s a little hard to ignore the records of Mendoza’s corpse having a wound the size of a snowglobe in it. I certainly didn’t do that.”

So she really was a curious one. It figured when Valtiel thought about it, so far Amber had demonstrated nothing less than an impeccable attention to detail. The demon nodded thoughtfully, paused for a second before she smiled.

      “Please, come in and sit yourself down. I will try to explain everything.”

Valtiel shut the door, as the latch closed the creature made especially sure to ensure a continuation between the space her house currently occupied and the hall outside. She had been known to forget in the past, much to the confusion of her mortal acquaintances.

She sat down opposite the agent and leaned forward, elbows rested on her knees, long fingers laced together. She took a moment to form the words carefully in her mind before she spoke.

      “I do not expect you to turn a blind eye. In fact, I suspect that you are not especially capable of selective blindness. It’s part of what makes you excellent at what you do.” She paused, fingers unlacing and then curling back together.

      “I told you that my employer has an unusual relationship with...Mysticism, indeed the relic you returned to us has special significance for that reason. And more than that...My employer has a less than pedestrian approach to vengeance.” She smiled. “I understand it may seem especially macabre. But we all do strange things in pursuit of our own beliefs, our own traditions, no?”

She stood and walked to the open plan kitchen, opening the fridge. “So I will say again, I will not expect you to ignore the stranger aspects of this work, on the condition that it does not get in the way of you being able to do what you do best. Could I get you a drink?” The utterly mundane question at the end of the statement was uttered with the same easy tone as the rest. Valtiel pulled out a bottle of chilled elder flower cordial and poured some for herself.

Easy Pickings//Open