#abandoned memories

[experimental-failures]

Cordyc Event: choose your own adventure

Abandoned Memories

You arrive in a small town that had been forgotten for many years now, its streets and buildings left bare and lifeless. The streets tell an odd tale; stores and homes having been left behind seemingly on a whim as doors lay open and goods previously ready to be sold or prepared for that days dinner having been completely left behind.

The buildings have fallen into disrepair as the signs of nature reclaiming the land have begun to show evermore with each passing night.

There's no telling what could have caused a whole town to either disappear or completely move so suddenly as to leave everything behind. The only obvious indications of any events are large holes dotted through out the town, numbering four in total around the area. Near the center of the town sat a dilapidated building missing an entire wall on one side; the rest of the building was riddled with holes the same size as the other four. One much larger hole took almost the entirety of the buildings floor, creating a path delving deep into the ground beyond your vision.

[valictini]

I’ve already said it, I’ll say it again, Mal du Pays is such a visceral and clever word to describe Siffrin’s Sadness. When I first saw it in game it genuinely made me pause like. Yes, it translates to homesickness. But it has the literal word for country in it. “Country sickness”. For a guy whose core problem is that his childhood, his culture, his country is missing. One could argue it’s a twisted pun. I’m obsessed with it.

[juniemunie]

[Abandoned by the Lightners, his heart became cracked with hatred.]

Hitting a lil' too close to home?

[liminallylonelyybabyy]

christmas felt different then

“…it’s just a part of growing up I guess…”

[sclappin]

This was part of my undergrad illustration thesis, which was illustrations to accompany the text of Shakespeare's The Tempest, repurposing aesthetics and imagery from the rural New Hampshire village where I grew up.

Reposting this piece from May 2020, because it is now available as a print, and Tumblr is being weird about letting me edit the original post to add alt text and a link.

[slavhew]

And I just have to tell you that I

Love you so much these days,

[elphabasthropp]

TV SHOW APPRECIATION WEEK 2024

day 3 ☆ favorite couple

[dxstinesia]

[nerdgasm-22]

[experimental-failures]

Abandoned Memories: Explore the buildings

Previous part

Deciding to explore the abandoned buildings around the town you head into the closest one first.

The door hangs open as you walk into an abandoned general store; the entrance, and shelves are covered in dust and cobwebs along with the forgotten wares that were left behind. Nothing seemed to have been moved for ages now, the only indication of activity being some fallen merchandise and scraps of whatever food may have been stocked, now on the floor. Perhaps an animal had gotten in at some point.

There is a register at the far end of the main room with a door likely leading into the storage area for the rest of this place's stock.

You can see the register is sitting wide open as you walk past shelves with food and snacks that have likely expired a long time ago. Some cash lay sprawled across the counter next to the register, some having fallen to the floor. You try the door leading to the back only for the hinges to come loose and let the door fall.

You shift it to the side and continue into the back.

More merchandise lines the room, but none seems out of place. That is until you notice a shelf that had been cleared off and left empty. The shelf itself had been gouged into, leaving behind a message simply stating "It's watching us"

On your way out of the back room, you notice some papers detailing the inventory kept and shipments made. On some of the papers, there are small scribblings near the edges which seem to look like a face being absent-mindedly drawn, though there are no distinctive features.

The next building you step into needs to have the door forced open, and hinges rusted into almost nothing. Walking into the first room brought the sight of a forgotten living room; cobwebs and dust coating the corners of the room with a couch that has largely been weathered beyond repair.

The kitchen was largely the same, dust coating everything as cobwebs filled the spaces between. The remnants of a rotting family breakfast were left on a table in the middle of the room.

Up a set of stairs leads to a set of bedrooms on either side of a short hallway, both rooms showing no signs of use for a long time now. Clothes line the closets of both while one had some toys and even a journal tucked away under a bed. The journal was still readable to an extent and mostly consisted of its owner writing down their night-to-night experiences. Partway through the owner had started to mention having nightmares; dreams of horrific singing and a deathly pale face watching them from outside their window. These dreams weren't mentioned in every entry but did come up fairly consistently until the sudden end of the entries.

Within the room across the hall, everything was largely the same. Clothes left behind to never be touched again with a bed that, aside from the dust and rotting, looked to have been made ready for the night.

A note was left out on a desk that was nearly ready to fall over at the slightest disturbance. Parts of the note were hard to read from it's age but what you could make out went

"It's Eating Us inside to know that things went so poorly the last time you were here. We still have no idea what you could have ran into that frightened you so badly. If you'd like to Save Us for last on any return trips then we'll do something to make up for whatever happened. I was going to invite you to a club that just got made before you left but now I Can't Think Of It all of a sudden. Oh and we're still practicing some of the signs you've been teaching, so hopefully next time I'll be able to form better sentences for you. Please do Help if I manage to make too many mistakes."

The final building you decide to explore is a fairly large church. One door hanged limply to the side, almost ready to fall off the hinge. The other one some how stood still and sturdy. However, the moment you try to pull it open it becomes apparent that the hinges have rusted to the point of being immovable.

Inside the church is fairly clear, for a place that hasn't seen any use for who knows how long. No left behind items seem to be present as you walk the pews, making your way towards the back of the church.

In the private office of the church, there's a journal tucked away between a large desk and a wall; possibly having fallen or was hidden there.

The pages are largely filled with the night to night routine of the church, including the various duties and tasks for all those working here. Early into the entries the place did seem to have a priest present, yet halfway into the entries all mention of them disappears. Further into the pages are mentions of requests being made for a priest to be sent, but the requests had been denied on the grounds of the church already having one.

This interaction continues for the rest of the entries, with the previous priest never being mentioned again.

[kurithedweeb]

I know we always talk about Garroth ending up looking exactly like his father, but what about Dante growing up to look eerily like Gene.

When he joins up with Phoenix Drop, he's still young. He's a little on the short side, still a bit too thin from life in the wild and imprisonment, and he's a little anxious and shaky around so many people after having grown unused to living in a village. The smiling faces of the citizens remind you of your old home, of clamoring crowds and standing frozen in the plaza as your brother . . .

Anyway, it's good here. It's easy to fit in. The guards joke around with you and make sure you're healthy. They don't know a thing about dual wielding, but you get plenty of sparring partners out of helping the local baker practice her magick, and you maybe make a friend too. You're not too sure how you feel about the Lord, but she's a kind soul and does her best to make sure you're comfortable here in town, and her kids are great. Babysitting the boys is easily your favorite duty. Yeah, it's good here. For the first time in a long while, you feel like you're doing good.

Then the war comes. The children and non-combatants are sent away. The jovial atmosphere of the guard tower has soured into solemn silence as you make your final preparations. In the morning, you step into the battlefield and you go to war for the first time in your life. You have a horrible feeling in your gut that it won’t be the last.

You, Sir Laurance and Sir Garroth make a good team. It makes you sick. The three of you cross the battlefield at a slow and inevitable pace, cutting down any soldier that dares stray too close, and together you cleave the enemy forces in half, scattering them. The killing comes easy to you. You had hoped that in this peaceful new village, with time, you would become unfamiliar to how easily you were once able to take a life, but right then you’re glad your body never forgot the motions of death. Glad for the blood that stains your hands—how can you be glad?

You can’t remember how long you fought for. Days, weeks? Surely not months, or so you think. Yours is a small force, and though Miss Lucinda is a good healer, she grows tired while the other army’s numbers are replenished time and again. You remember the bags under her eyes as she tipped a potion sip by sip into your mouth the time you were shot through the face.

You remember sneaking into the enemy camp in the dead of night, skirting around the edges of it to the back line where the archers rested. You quietly slit five of their throats before you were noticed, and managed to slash another across the belly before the arrow caught you in the side of the face, in one cheek and out the other. The wood of the shaft cracked when you bit down. It was everything you could do not to scream as you fled. Dale thought you were a fiend when you first stepped out of the shadows, face obscured in blood and cradling your jaw as you cupped a hand beneath your mouth in an effort to catch more blood before it left a trail. Laurance held you while Garroth split the arrowhead from the rest of it with a knife and pulled the shaft out the other side of your face, your jaw gripped tight in one hand to keep you from struggling. It took hours to pull the splinters from your cheeks and tongue before they sent you to wake the healer. The whole ordeal had been excruciating. You might have cried. You remember that a lot more clearly than most other times at war. After a while, it’s hard to tell which side spills more blood when so much is shed that red squishes out of the earth wherever you step.

Every day, you fought dawn to dusk. And then one day you won. By Nicole literally knocking some sense into her father, of all things! You find a quiet corner to throw up in and for a beautiful moment, you think life in this little town you’ve started thinking of as home will go back to being good. Until your Lord tells you to guard the village as she races past the gates, and she doesn’t come back. None who followed her do either.

For days, you stand waiting at the gates. You don’t eat, you don’t sleep. O’khasis is gone, Scaleswind has made a refuge of the plaza, and still there is no sign of your Lord or your brothers-in-arms. You won’t even leave to have your wounds seen to. Nicole has to drag a doctor to the gates to treat you, and the entire time you watch the forest hoping that any moment they will reappear. You only step away when someone brings you news that the ship that took the children away has returned. You should be the one to tell them.

Zoey knows something is wrong the moment she sees you. Levin and Malachi smile and ask where their mother is—they call you ‘uncle’ while they do. You get down on your knees before them, and you gather them close in your arms, and you cry as you tell them their mother has been missing since the day the war ended. You’re still holding them when the exhaustion catches up with you.

Zoey is with you when you wake. She tells you you’ve been out nearly two days. She fusses over you, and you know you’ve worried her because that’s what she does when she’s worried. You’re a mess anyway, so you let her fuss. You drink the broth she makes you, you change into the clothes she provides, you sit still while she cuts the unruly mats of your hair and shaves your face. You used to cut yourself shaving all the time, no one ever taught you how and you were only six or so when Gene was learning to; you don’t remember now how he showed you each step or the laugh in his voice at the face of disgust you made when you slapped a little hand into the lather on his face and left behind a tiny palmprint. Zoey doesn’t cut you once. When she’s done with you, she takes you by the arm and guides you back into civilization, where everyone who remained has decided already on search parties to go out looking for your missing friends.

You head each expedition. Dale brings himself out of retirement to watch over the town while you’re gone, and asks only that you also look for his son. Does he know you used to be a tracker, used to spend days in the woods trailing coyotes and runaways for enough coin to carry you through the cold months? You try for him, but the ground is soft still and every step anyone takes leaves a print, all overlapping and muddled. You keep an eye out as you circle the same stretches of woods for days, but you find nothing. Your group goes further and faster than any other, the first to find and dismantle bandit camps and dens of fiends, but no matter how far you go you find not a sign of anyone who has disappeared that day. It’s as though they vanished into thin air. Every time you return home, Dale looks at you with hopeful eyes, and every time you must take him aside and break his heart a little more. Eventually, he stops asking.

For a year, you search. The area has never been safer. You have never felt so alone as when people start to suggest that a funeral may be in order.

You feel like a monster for the rage in your voice when you denounce these people. You know they aren’t dead—you would have felt such a thing, you know, you would have felt pieces of yourself snapping like wire pulled too taut, you would have felt the sharp edges tangling inside you—it would have felt like it did when the brother you killed rose from the grave to slit your throat and cut your very existence from the memory of Boboros. You hear white noise rumbling in your ears when the first brave soul says Sir Dante, there’s been no sign for a year now, and your blood is boiling when you slap their comforting hand off your shoulder. You spit that you’re not giving up just because everyone else has taken no evidence of life to mean the surety of death, and with their pitying looks burning into your back to return to the woods. You scream into the trees until you can’t anymore. When it doesn’t help, you use your considerable tracking skills to hunt something, anything, until you feel human again.

You crawl back home the day before the funeral with your cape stained with blood; they held it back so you could attend. You polish your armor and swords until they shine, and the warped reflection of your own face makes you feel sick the way waging war did. You stand at attention the entire ceremony without moving a muscle. When Dale reads the names of the deceased at the end, offering their souls into the embrace of the Matron, you salute, and the clatter of your armor silences the crowd.

Everyone who fought in the war salutes with you. So do your Lord’s sons. You’re too tired to cry. You hold your salute long after everyone else has left.

The remaining forces of Scaleswind return home. One by one, family by family, the streets of your home empty. Without your Lord, without your guard, the citizens trickle out the front gates and never turn back. Some apologize to you as they say their goodbyes, and some of them you actually believe. You close the gate behind each of them until all that remains is you, Zoey, and your Lord’s sons. Then Zoey tells you she’s taking the boys to the Yggdrasil Forest. She holds you tight for too long and kisses your brow when you show them to the gate for the last time.

You can’t believe you ever thought you knew what loneliness was before this.

For five years, you are completely and utterly alone. You search and you patrol and you do your best to maintain the village. You don’t believe in Irene, but every day before dawn you stand before her statue and look down down down over the cliff’s edge and pray that this won’t be the rest of your life. That you haven’t deluded yourself into believing a fantasy, that you haven’t made such an incredible fool of yourself that people can’t bear to be around you, that you haven’t been forgotten. For five years, you pray that someone, somewhere, remembers that you exist. You look down down down over the cliff’s edge and have the terrible thought that you don’t know what you’d do if you were forgotten again.

The gate is falling apart. You don’t know how to repair the damage the weather’s done to it, you tried to patch the cracks but it never holds. With each year, you’ve been pushed further and further outtowards the coast. The only places you have the energy to maintain anymore are the guard tower and your Lord’s home. You blockaded the gates when the mechanism broke, you check it on occasion to be sure no bandits get in, and one day you hear voices from the other side. Familiar voices. You scramble up the wall and look over the other side at a boy you don’t recognize looking back up at you. He says, Is that Uncle Dante? and you climb down as fast as you can to embrace Malachi.

He’s nearly the age you were when you first met his mother. He’s grown tall, and strong enough to carry his brother on his back. Levin is fevered when you first see him, flush and hurting even as he dozes, and Malachi tells you he can’t walk from how bad he hurts. You remember how Zoey fretted over him when he was young, how sometimes he’d scream for seemingly no reason, and once you show them to their mother’s home Malachi refuses to leave his bedside.

You sit with them and ask where Zoey is. Malachi tells you of her obsession, and the relief that you are not alone in the belief that those who disappeared are alive feels like a hint of betrayal. You’re relieved that she’s driving herself into a downward spiral because of what? Because it makes you feel like you were reasonable to fight not to let their souls be put to rest?

You wait for her at the gates deep into the night and take her to her boys when she bursts from the woods, frantic that she’d lost them, and safe if your Lord’s home she holds you so tight your ribs hurt from the force of her grip. After so long, you’re not alone anymore.

You wake before dawn and strap your swords to your back. For the first time in a long time, you feel safe enough to go without your armor. You hike up the steep cliff to the Irene statue. You kneel before her to offer your thanks. You look into the pool at her feet and fear grips you by the throat.

Your brother’s face looks back at you.

You wear your swords the way he did. Your hair falls like his, dark in the shadow of Irene. Your face is gaunt and pale from old habits, eating only enough to sustain yourself so rations will stretch long enough for you to find more—do you remember how they starved Gene before they killed him? How they weakened him so he wouldn’t have the energy to fight? How pale and gaunt he was, dirt streaking over the side of his face, blood and grime drying in his hair, shaking and sweaty with how hard he fought back? Do you remember the scar that twisted around his throat when he returned from the dead to get his vengeance? Your collar is open over the scar he left twisting across your own, and it matches his own so very well. In the shadows of your eyes, you see his own staring back.

You think of the war. You think of how easy the killing was. You think of how easily Gene cut through the guards, the Lord, the memories of Boboros. The rage in his voice when he denounced you as his brother, the twist of his smile when he told you he would leave you to rot, Dante. No one will ever remember you. You can see that twist in the corners of your own smile, pushed into shape by the deep scars on your cheeks. You and your brother are the same.

You’re shaking too much to stand. You never go without your armor again.

[littlepawz]

Gouqi island is located in the Shengsi archipelago of about 400 islands. Jane Qing captured the stunning images of this city of seemingly endless buildings, which were a part of a fishing village years ago. The region has a history of doing well, even today, in the fishing industry. Yet, this particular island seems to have been forgotten.

Each discovery of abandoned cityscapes is captivating, but one covered in beautiful ivy and greenery surely enchants in its own way.

~Shengsi Islands - Gouqi Island / Jane Qing Photography~

[xxplastic-cubexx]

WAIT WAIT WAIT CHERIK MPREG IS CANON

i cannot stress enough how canon cherik mpreg is, yes my friend

[megamindsupremacy]

I need to marinate more thoughts for this but. okay so gravity falls au. partially inspired by this. fiddleford has the memory gun and he's This Close to using it on himself to erase what he saw in the portal. he pauses. he thinks, just because I forget doesn't mean stanford will stop building the portal. he thinks it's all or nothing. he goes to stanford's shack in the woods. he sneaks in through the side door and sees stanford sleeping on the couch. it's dark outside. the lights are out. fiddleford can barely make out the shape of his former-friend's body. fiddleford looks at Stanford one last time. he types into the memory gun, Stanford Pines. he points the gun. half a second before he fires, Stanford stirs, as if sensing the danger he is in. he manages to get out "who-" before fiddleford, panicking, pulls the trigger before he can chicken out completely.

stanley wakes up on a couch he doesn't remember falling asleep in, with a terrified looking man standing over him, holding a glowing gun, and thinks this is one hell of a situation i've gotten myself into

[icdrawings]

I'm gonna make this place your home

By @rocksibblingsau

Branch's drawings from them to now

It's also to represent his memories of his family that he had forgotten and unknown turama that shows up in nightmares

But also the joy of his big sister

[hazelnut-u-out]

Somehow never caught this before, but does this imply Birdperson’s mom killed his dad and he remembers seeing it?

The fact this memory is somehow tied to Blood Ridge in his mind makes me wonder if that’s part of why he didn’t accept Rick’s advances— maybe even subconsciously. If that’s what this implies, no wonder he had commitment issues. Makes the shit with Tammy hit differently, too…

I know it’s a throw away moment, but I really hope we get a follow up on that… Regardless of what that memory is, it’s dark shit.