Laios's Heart Game

[myhungryass]

It's dark, and you are not quite conscious. You have the sense that you are climbing; that you have been climbing for a long time. You can feel the burn in your thighs, the ache in your calves. You're a little too hot, and what you're wearing is a little too heavy. You have the sense of taking a last weary, heaving step onto a plateau.



You find yourself in a dark, blank place, dominated by a huge, dead monster, building sized, as big as a tower. Each of its enormous heads that you can see laid out before you is easily the size of a ballroom. There is blood on its lips and nostrils, blood crusted around its empty eye-sockets, but there is a feeling of hollowness about it. On second thought, you're not quite sure if it's a corpse or a moult.

There is no sign of the stairs you vaguely remember climbing. You are standing on the surface of some opaque black liquid. It feels almost completely solid under your feet, springy, but your footsteps leave ripples spreading out in rings... all around you is a velvety, impenetrable darkness. The only thing you can see is the vast, lifeless beast in front of you, illuminated as if by spotlights, though no actual light-source can be found.

Its orifices are mostly clogged with blood, but somehow, as you stare at it, one vaulted nostril on the wolf's head begins to seem like an archway... the lolling tongue hanging out of the rhinoceros's head like an entry ramp... the exposed, hollow eye-socket on the eagle's head like a portal...

Of course, if you're not quite ready to step inside a monster, you could keep walking around its body and see what you find.

Comments

[nevercaught]

"Laios," he says. "You probably do not know me yet, because you are younger than when I met you, but I should like to know how you are doing. Because you are important to me. You are good company and you try very hard and you are very earnest and steadfast about that which you care about."

[myhungryass]

He stares at Jarlaxle like he's speaking an alien language, although a blush does spread across his face. "...no, I. I know you. I couldn't get your name right at first."

[nevercaught]

"Yes, you do that with a lot of people," Jarlaxle says, frankly but not unkindly. "You know better now. I found a book I think is yours, by the way, and I have another book and a toy lion that I think are memories. Should I give them to you here or do they go elsewhere?"

[myhungryass]

"My book!" He reaches for the one that Jarlaxle found in the wagon, the one that showed him a memory of Laios as a child. "I must have dropped it."

The atmosphere lightens. "Thanks, Jarlaxle. I think... I'm not the right one to take those new memories, though. Like you said... this is just the past."

[nevercaught]

"I will just have to find you in the present, then," Jarlaxle tells him. "I do not mind. You are worth searching for."

[myhungryass]

He huffs, touched and a little bashful. "Jarlaxle..."

He doesn't have the words.

[nevercaught]

"I truly mean it," Jarlaxle promises him, giving him a quick embrace before he goes.

He will backtrack out of the snake and back into Moon House before going to Hen House.

[myhungryass]

That is really supposed to be a one way valve, so he probably has to loop back around the front, and doesn't have to revisit Moon House, but whatever, he can levitate, he's fine. Regardless, he gets to Hen House!

This one is subtly inaccurate as well, just like Sun and Moon House. The swollen chicken feet that hold up the house are perfect down to the last detail, though. It comes complete with the enclosed mud yard and goat house out back, too.

He can walk right in, of course. It feels homey, safe and inviting. He can smell fried rice cooking. As he walks in, he gets a sense of being nurtured. Some of the details inside are wrong, too—clearly Laios has not paid a lot of attention to exactly what the chairs look like—but it's still recognizably Hen House.

Jarlaxle can hear whispering coming from the bedroom Laios shares with Laura and Louis. The door is closed, as are the doors to the other bedroom, the bathroom and the shrine room.

When he gets closer to the bedroom door, he'll hear that the whispering is Laios's voice. He seems to be talking to himself. "You're not a child... you don't need a new father at your age... you can't stay here, anyway... he's not going to stay here... you're being ridiculous. Sure, Falin said he's taken you under his wing... but what does that really mean? But, he wouldn't have taught me about how to have sex with a man if he didn't want to... to teach me things, right?

...but dads probably don't tell their sons about how they had sex with dragons... but maybe it's different if you're adopted as an adult?? Ugh, this is so dumb, why am I even worried about this! Get it together. You're not a child..."

The voice loops. If Jarlaxle knocks or opens the door, the room is empty, though.

[nevercaught]

When he's inside the room he tells the empty room, "I would be his father for now. I have never been allowed to be one and I think this feeling that I have for him is what it is to by a father. I hope it is."

[myhungryass]

That homey, inviting sense increases...

If he brushes against the bed while he's in there, a memory will wash over him.

[nevercaught]

Jarlaxle smiles. That is what's great about dreams. He's right about that.

He'll go and ask Heart Marcille if she has advice for where to find the real Laios.

[myhungryass]

She'll send him on to the rhino head! Enjoy getting swallowed and watching Falin get eaten... and enjoy shirtless Kabru?

[nevercaught]

He does enjoy shirtless Kabru. Is it wrong to eye your surrogate son's boyfriend?

[myhungryass]

Well, Kabru doesn't seem to mind? He'll tell Jarlaxle, if asked, that the left door leads to "something Laios is learning to want," the middle door to "the thing he wants most," and the right door is an exit.

[nevercaught]

He's curious about what Laios is learning to want so he'll check there.

[myhungryass]

This one leads through into a half-finished seeming space. It's a green field with various tools and building blocks lying around—timber and stone, ropes and nails. The foundations of a building have been laid, but it's hard to tell what exactly it's going to become. There's a half-built throne, but it's hard to tell if it's in the middle of being assembled or disassembled. Behind him there is an archway, free-standing and empty, that seems to resemble the one he came through to get here.

He still feels hungry, but there's a sense of queasiness now as well.

[nevercaught]

Is the anything here than he can touch or examine closer to learn more things from?

[myhungryass]

If he touches the throne, it sways a bit worryingly, and he immediately gets a sense of an almost panicked wish to not mess up.

Other than that, nothing gives off a strong impression. It's not just ghostly images or anything, though. Everything's touchable. If he wants to play around with construction materials he technically could.

[nevercaught]

He probably wants to climb on the thing in construction just for funsies.

[myhungryass]

He can climb on it to his heart's content!

[nevercaught]

Yay! And then he'll go through the center door.

[myhungryass]

He steps through and feels a jolt, like missing a step on the stairs. He finds himself in a dark pit, an archway of light far away up above. His appetite is overwhelmingly strong in here. It's not painful—he's not starving. But it's hard to think about anything else. It feels like he could never be satisfied.

Floating in the air in the center of the pit is a twenty-sided gem, bright and gleaming. It looks so tasty.

[nevercaught]

Nothing bad has ever come of Jarlaxle making impulsive decisions spurred on by mystery crystals. He reaches to grab it.

[myhungryass]

When he reaches for it, his hand glances off... nothing. A disconnect in the world, like what's beyond that point is totally separate and unreachable. He gets the sense that it's less a barrier and more that the gem is just... not quite in the same place as him.

However, reaching for it also transports him immediately elsewhere before he can contemplate that too deeply!

Jarlaxle lands on a grassy underneath a tall tree. The sound of the sea can be heard lapping in the distance. Laios is lounging under the tree... but a different Laios than he's ever seen before, with hooves and a tail, feathers around his neck and shoulders, and strangely formed arms, one resembling a bird talon and the other a tiger's paw. He looks up, perks up, and waves.

[nevercaught]

Jarlaxle smiles brightly at him and waves back, the two memories tucked under one arm.

"Laios! Oh, that is a fine body you have made for yourself in the dream—you do not mind your limbs not matching?"