[Video] un: foxtales

[byanyother_name]

[The initial video opening just displays a new sign on the wall of the common room. It looks like someone managed to find a piece of whiteboard and an erasable marker to incorporate into the sign. What does the sign say?

10 weeks without murder

Yes, you read that right. The whiteboard part is where the 10 is written with marker. It's clearly been made to be regularly updated. Kurama's voice when he speaks is...close to his usual calm tones but a little tense.]

Many of the people here will wonder why this sign is needed. The people who need it know why. I am one of the first group to fall through the Fissures, so this encompasses the entire history we know of of outsiders in this world.

I'm going to keep it updated appropriately, since...there might be more of us, apparently.

I would like to ask that no one tamper with the sign except for accurate updates. This is not a prank and it is not for pranks. It's for people that have suffered.

Comments

private to Kurama;;

[founderinglight]

It seems Yuuri's stepped in, so if you need a break, now is a good time to take one. I imagine she's perfectly capable of handling it.

And if you want to talk, or even just do something with your hands other than this, I'll be in the kitchen on our side for the next hour or so doing dishes.

[byanyother_name]

That may be for the best. Something in what he said struck...a little too close to bad memories.

...I'll be there shortly.

[And by shortly, he means in less than five minutes. And...congratulations, Izunia? That body might still be 17 but there is absolutely no mistaking the person in it for a teenager right now.]

-> Action

[founderinglight]

[And when he arrives, there is Izunia, in his Not Ardyn teeshirt and up to his elbows in soapy water, taking his aggression out with steel wool on a pan that must have been the casualty of one of the experimental-to-be-polite cooks.

He only briefly glances in Kurama's direction, before looking back at the pan he's working on, but it's enough. There is a deep anger in him, one that Kurama has no more seen from the normally laid-back man than the apparent teen has shown himself.]

For anything you might wish to say, you'll find no judgement here. Not for dying, and not for killing, not for innocence or cruelty.

[And that's... all he'll say, until and unless Kurama wishes to speak further.]

[byanyother_name]

[Strangely, that anger is almost soothing. It's not...entirely a surprise, either. Kurama has found enough common ground with the ancient king that it's one more flicker of similarity.

He rolls back his sleeves, incidentally revealing some faint but noticeable circular scars with the shiny quality of old burns. He moves to stand next to Izunia, reaching for another dirty dish. He scrubs at it a bit before speaking. His voice is threaded with ice, not directed at Izunia but there, because Kurama's anger has always been precise and cold.]

Any innocence but feigned is a luxury such as I could not afford. As to the rest, all apply. My mother was in danger.

[Izunia...might recognize the way he says that, really. This is Kurama's Ardyn, the sun he orbited until he no longer could, the gravity a significant part of him still longs for even as other parts of him struggle to break free.]

I was the final killer in our game. But my resolve faltered. They were willing to risk their lives for mine but I realized I was not. I took the decision from their hands. I died. It was cruel. It was, perhaps, another betrayal. But they lived. Akira lived.

[founderinglight]

[By the time he finishes, Izunia has finished the pan he's at work on and has the spray nozzle in hand to rinse it off. Once he does so, it goes into a drying rack set up on the other side, and only then does he say anything at all.]

That... Is much what I expected, from Ardyn's account of his.

[He does indeed know that orbiting feeling, all too well. His is wobbly, but still circling, even as he tries to break it.

He takes up a cookie sheet with baked-on grease and once more his steel wool.]

...He hasn't said as much in any detail, but I know that hostages in the form of the already-dead players in that game were used against them. So I imagine hostages from home as well.

[Scrub, scrub, scrub.]

...I don't think I would have done any differently, even a month ago.

[byanyother_name]

[So different and yet so much the same, the games they went through. Kurama hates it more than a little. He scrubs a little more violently at his pot.]

I almost wish it had been hostages. No. We were shown unknown monsters stalking our loved ones, and told that if we were...successful... we would learn what they were and how to stop them.

[Kurama's short, sharp laugh is painfully bitter.] But the way to stop them is to become what I am now. Had my resolve held, I would have killed them all only to learn that what I had to do was die.

It is one of the things I have found it hardest to forgive Yotsuyu in the aftermath. Perhaps I never will.

[founderinglight]

...For good reason. I don't think I could forgive that, either.

[He scrubs on the pan silently for a moment.]

It probably would have provoked me to violence against whoever was in charge, actually, given my history with half-information about the safety of those I love.

[Aggressive scrub scrub.]

I've had more than enough of that.

[byanyother_name]

I came very close to violence, despite knowing that it was not our fight. Despite being perhaps the only one of us who knows what made her as she is. Watching the survivors struggle against her was a special kind of torture.

[Kurama shakes his head, lips pressed into a tight line for a moment. He rinses his pot under the spray and sets it aside.]

It is over. And yet sometimes I wonder how many decades, how many centuries, will it take before it is truly in the past...