#people I find over and over and over again have a tremendous capacity for cruelty

[aronarchy]

Antis, this blog is not a safe space for you.

[mushroomminded]

Some Kathy Angst for Y’all

saint-j92000 submitted:

Alright, let’s try this again, from the top;

Let’s say the tragedies befalling Matt are entirely supernatural in nature. They’re far more contrived and elaborate then scenarios most kidnappers would engineer, and he really does just fall asleep in bed and wake up somewhere else. Edd, Tom, even the neighbours have all felt a growing sense of paranoia, or felt odd things from time to time, or had the occasional vivid nightmare, but Matt is receiving the full brunt of the horror initially. The entity causing this is not unlike that which causes everything in the Haunted Game AU; it is a formless, shapeless, wholly evil “thing” that preys on the vulnerable, tormenting them with their worst fears and feeding off of their utter terror, keeping them in a constant cycle of hysteria to sate its seemingly never ending greed. It has preyed on countless people already; the boys and the neighbours are only the latest targets, and no doubt more of Durdham Lane’s residents will be claimed in due time.

Almost as soon as Kathy sets foot in this universe, something feels terribly wrong. At this point, she’s still fairly new to the “trying to save failed timelines” thing, and though she’s seen some weird stuff nothing has ever felt this… rotten. Were it a more experienced Kathy, she’d see it for the doomed universe it is, but for right now, she’s unaware. However, as she senses the entity, it too senses her; she is, after all, a magical being of considerable power herself. It recognises itself as the more powerful one, in terms of raw magical aplitude, but it is smart enough to know that overestimating ones self and underestimating the enemy is a rookie mistake. So it refocuses it’s attention, for now, the boys are spared. Kathy, on the other hand…

She doesn’t realise how close it is to her until it is far, far too late. “Far, far too late” in this context being when her heart just… stops. And out in the woods with noone to administer CPR, that’s a problem. She, of course, dies. The entity, initially, is satisfied, but it quickly runs into a problem:

Kathy stands back up.

I dunno if you planned for her to be functionally immortal, but for the sake of this scenario I’m gonna run with it; she cannot permanently die, and no matter how gruesome her death she will revive. The downside; that stuff still hurts, and she does technically “die” and then “revives” rather the remaining invulnerable. The entity takes a little bit to fully figure this out,as it’s attempts on Kathy’s life grow ever more gruesome.

She drowns on air. Her head collapses into itself. Her insides violently eject themselves from within as though they were bile. She is violently dismantled limb by limb. Her body temperature increases to the point that she cooks from the inside out, not unlike meat grilling on a griddle. Every last death is absolutely agonising; she’s never known such pain, and each taste of oblivion is as terrifying as the last no matter how brief. Still, she soldiers on; partially because of her innate desire to do good, and also because… well, she doesn’t have a choice, really.

Eventually, the entity realises its attempts on her life aren’t working, and it is wasting valuable time and energy killing her over and over with very little gained from it. However, it also learns something quite vital; though powerful, though functionally immortal, Kathy is human. She has the capacity for empathy, and for emotional intelligence, but most of all, she has neurosis; things it can attack. It can almost smell them on her. And that’s when it realises Kathy isn’t a pesky distraction that needs to be dealt with. No; Kathy is the ultimate mark, and fate did it a tremendous favour by dropping it in her lap.

It immediately sets to work chipping away at her mental state. The first step is easy; though somewhat new to this, Kathy has seen failures already. She’s watched the boys and their friends fail, suffer horribly, perish entirely, all that sort of thing; it plays these failures back to her, on a constant loop. Then it changes tracks; it shows her all the failures that will happen to her, or at the very least ones that could- Space Quiznos, Haunted Game, it even twists scenarios like Reverse Monster Family so that the outcome leans towards the negative. It’s low hanging fruit, but it works. It preys heavily on Kathy’s deepest fear, after all; being unable to help innocent people, especially those she cares for, despite all her power.

The entity realises that this fear goes even deeper, too. After all, Kathy is technically human; she was not born as she is, but became this way somehow. Therefor, the life she had before was taken from her. She can’t quite remember what it was, now, but the lingering sense of something is still there. Her fate was wrenched from her grasp and decided without her consultation; it was decided by someone, or something, that she walk the earth as this incredibly powerful, unkillable dimension hopping magical helper, instead of just… Kathy.

And she can’t even help people. She’s unable to do the incredibly specific thing she was forced to do, the one single thing that has kept her going as her own personal desire to help grew alongside it being her designated role.

This shatters Kathy; she tries so hard for so long not to cave, not to let the fear or the horror or the sorrow run wild as her mind is constantly assaulted by nightmare after nightmare, but when this realisation finally hits, the dams break and she weeps, openly. She begs for the entity to stop; to show her mercy. Her need to be safe, to be sane, overrides her protective nature.

It is very sweet and highly fulfilling stuff for the entity, but it is short lived; you see, in her emotional frailty, Kathy opened her right eye. Her power’s effectively went into auto pilot, and she was pulled from the entities clutches and thrown into another dimension entirely, left alone and without companion to heal from her ordeal. It… takes a little time. It hardens her considerably; not to the point that she is unable to smile, crack wise, or even snow her soft side, but she is not as naive as she was; she knows when she can and can’t help, and if she can’t help, she gets out of dodge. She has perhaps swung too far the other way though, and sometimes leaves the boys to fates they could avert, where she not so quick to rule it out as hopeless, but you can hardly blame her for what she went through. It isn’t until she happens across the reverse monster family universe where some of that original fire burns once again- allowing her to actually succeed in saving the boys and punishing that universe’s Edd for his cruelty- and it is not until she adopts them as her sons that those hardened edges begin to soften. But those are stories for another time.

The entity, as you can imagine, is furious. A truly delectable morsel, one which was effectively self-sustainable, had slipped away from it. And unlike Kathy, it CAN’T shift dimensions; it cannot follow her. It doesn’t even really have awareness of the concept, but it knows it can’t even feel her anymore; it will never find her, no matter how hard it looks.

It is with that incensed fury that it turns its attention back onto its original marks.