Log:Borrowed: A Girl In Trouble

Borrowed: A Girl In Trouble
She has no mouth. She cannot scream.
Participants Cordy with Etsy as ST	20 December, 2017 The Market. Food. A shower of sorts. Auction. Whose? The Borrower's. Part of Borrowed.
Location Deep Hedge
Content warning for body horror. Sleep isn't so much a thing in the slaver's stalls at the Market that the girl who will be Cordy has been taken to: arms and legs restrained, ground cold and hard, noise constant and inhuman and disruptive. Sleep is a fitful, terrified thing, even when she's drugged into compliance. Afterwards, she cannot be certain which of the following things are true, and which are fever dreams from a drugged and terrified brain: The soldier splits open and her body dissolves into a pile of tiny black ants which swarm over Cordy and bite her a million invisible times. The old woman turns into a goat and leaps out of the paddock in which they're kept as nimbly as she sheds her ropes. A tiny fleet of fishing boats, carrying a hundred crickets instead of sailors, floats by over her head, casting out their nets over her mind while she sleeps, fishing up her dreams. The child is tied to a stake like a pig for roasting, carried away without a whimper. The stars slide out of the sky and laugh their way past the stall. What she can be -- somewhat -- certain of at the end of it all is that she's alone in the paddock, still tied at wrist and ankle, and that a strange, bleeding-pink dawn is breaking over the Market. The smells of some sort of food, somehow both rotten-fruit and roasted meat, simultaneously turn her stomach and make her mouth water. How long ago did she eat? She's not sure. Not sure at all. What's time, again? There's nothing so orderly and predictable as a delineated progression around a clockface or sundial. So much of certainty has been left on the metaphorical midden heap- at least, the girl who will be Cordy prays it's just a metaphor- and what she's left with is her unreliable observations of the here and now. She's hungry. She's alone. She doesn't know what happened to the soldier, nor the woman, nor the child, who had seemed half-gone before ever she set foot- no, she hasn't stood since she arrived- since she set rump here. She doesn't quite have the foundation to feel -sad-, but tears flow anyway, unnoticed, staining cheeks still plump with soft baby fat. "" She tries asking, to the empty air, if no bugpeople are nearby. "<May I have something to eat? Or some water?>" Silence answers her for the longest time, left alone to let hunger and uncertainty gnaw at her in turns as the Market wakes. Eventually, though, perhaps in answer to her, or perhaps on its own schedule, the sky seems to fold in on itself, and the air itself disgorges a compressed pink brick of what might be meat or might be Jell-o, or might be something else entirely. It lands next to her face with a splut, kicking up dirt to stick to those cheeks, to her forehead, and into her eyes if she doesn't close them fast enough. The air shudders again, and a tiny raincloud opens up over her, drenching her to the bone in chilly water. What's worse: soaked and filty on the ground? That the request for water is being answered, apparently, with chilly cold? Or that the water seems to be making what seems to pass for food... dissolve? All the while, a heavyset creature -- like someone crossed a polar bear and a man, gave it mange, and strapped it into an ill-fitting leather apron -- waddles from high-walled pen to high-walled pen. He peers at her. Grunts. "Auction today." Whether that's to him, or to her? It's not a language she's heard before, and yet she knows what he's saying. Cordy has reflexes, good enough to keep her alive when by all rights she should have been crushed or bled out in the earthquake. Her eyes shut and her throat locks in her surprise- it's only after she gets drenched that she squalls and squirms, eyeing the... thing... for a moment before wriggling close enough to pick it up and wash what she can off its surface with her soaked palms, letting the dissolved layer carry away the muck before eating. "Action today?" She sounds puzzled, even as her head corrects what she thought she heard. "... no. Auction? What is being sold?" She knows. But she still has hope. Maybe she misunderstands. Maybe this is just some sort of jail for trespassing, and she'll go home when she's done her time. That wouldn't be so bad. But she knows. There's no answer, just the mangy thing looking at her for a moment before lumbering away. She knows, and it -- he? -- it isn't going to tell her if she can't figure it out. Maybe those words weren't really for her, anyway. The block tastes both of oversweet fruit -- something like a blackberry dipped in slightly-rotten syrup -- and of some sort of fishy protein. It's both disgusting and filling, the texture of grainy tapioca. It both makes bile rise in the back of her throat and makes her so hungry that it seems like only a second or two before it's gone, like the whole thing was gone in two bites, though that can't be true. Just as soon as she's done eating, the rain ends. Well, that's one way of cleaning the merchandise. The gate to her pen opens, and a short, goatish looking thing about two and a half feet tall comes skittering in; it's armed with something that looks a little like a sickle, but the blade's made of electricity. It hisses through the bonds at her ankles, as much burning its way through them as cutting them, and then there's the slightest tap of the weapon against her ankle, both prod and warning. Every nerve in her body lights on fire - she's never (yet) known agony like this. "Up!" comes the screeching little voice, a lead attached to the bonds at her wrists. Just in case she might think about running, apparently, both warning and bond. It's hard to balance the NEED to eat, the craving for more, with the sickening lurch of her stomach at the intense, over-ripe taste of her meal. She gags, just a little, but fights past it to gulp down every bite. She's licking her fingers, eyes exposing the cringe at the taste, when the little thing saunters in and frees her feet. She's on the very verge of thanking it when it brushes her ankle with the curved voltage. She -shrieks.- It's a howl of agony, startled and frightened and utterly unprepared. She convulses, twitching and half-rolling at the electric rage turning her muscles to useless steel. She fights to her feet, once she can, making a noise halfway between a pant and a sob, her eyes wild and her hair stuck to her face by the water so recently chilling her to her core. "<I'M UP! I'm up, please don't, please!>" The world becomes a blur once she's up on her feet, both from the teers that come to her eyes and the way that her body becomes -- just -- blurry. She's tugged along by the bonds on her hands, the little goatish creature dragging her to what she knows is the auction block. She has to be dreaming, right? But she knows she's not. She knows she's not. She can't be. What are these things? A column of fire and smoke sways from one side to the other, humming tunelessly. The sky folds in on itself again, as it did before it rained, just next to that column of flame and blackness. A spiral of gelatinous bubbles burbles in and out in a non-Euclidean fashion. A tall creature of indeterminate gender swathed in ice and electricity speaks -- its mouth opens, at least, and then there's the sound of nothing where sound should be. Dragged up to the block, her 'leash' passed along to the auctioneer. She can't understand the language that's being spoken, but she can tell that she's being spoken about, spoken over. Bidding begins. The distinct, inescapable sense of unreality is draining. She feels weak, though admittedly she's not at all recovered from the terrifying sensation of electrocution. She stumbles along as best she can, trying not to give the tiny goatbeast some reason to strike her again, eyes wide as saucers as she stares about at the impossible... are they people? They're... they're -entities-, but people? Something inside her twists. No. Not people at all. "<What... is happening..?"> She says to herself. Quiet. Scared. Disbelieving. "They can't... not... me..? They're... it's -me-..?>" Later, she won't be able to say what happened, or who bid, or how. It's a blur of rage and anger and want and tears: every emotion a person can feel assaults her all at once, and then they all drain out of her as if she had a port stuck in the back of her head, like Neo in the Matrix. Later, she might wonder what happened, but her brain will refuse to let her know. The human mind protects itself, and never more than now. It isn't, in the end, one of the inhuman things that wins her, or at least -- it isn't one of the spirals or columns who comes to collect her. It is the polar-bear-with-mange thing who, once the sale of her ends with a literal thunderclap, scoops her up and carries her away. His bootfals are heavy, jostling her over his shoulder like a damn sack of potatoes; the mud of the Market's pathways squishes red and black under his heavy boots. No one has spoken to her since the word 'up.' Jostled, both in body and mind, slowly piecing herself back together in the wake of protective nothingness, a black blanket tied tight around whatever just happened, the girl who would be Cordy fights for words, and- at least at first- can't recall that her native language wasn't what she heard It speak. "<I... did you... you bought me. That... is that... what happened?>" Her voice is small. She feels small. So, terribly small, in the face of all these Things, these Feelings, this Place. "<Can... can I go home? I don't want to belong to somebody. I want to go home. There was an earthquake. My parents need me.>" There isn't any compassion in the thing's eyes once he sets her down on the back of what looks like a wagon, except there are no wheels -- a hundred little humanoid feet hold up the undercarriage. No. Not humanoid. Human. Someone took the legs off of people and attached them to the wagon. No. That can't be right. Cordy's eyes refuse to focus on that detail. She's linked up to the bone-white framing of the wagon itself, a vardo-style thing with no apparent mount or steed to pull it. "No." That's all it says. There's no compassion, no, but there is something like pitty, maybe. Or maybe it's just vague disgust. "Just worker." He hasn't any part in the transaction: he's just the hired hand who loads the groceries into the cart. "You Borrower's," he grunts, and shakes his head. "You not yours." The tall, inhuman thing, as if a person were made entirely out of a parenthesis, looms suddenly over the two of them, and there's a chill colder than the Arctic. One of its three-fingered hands, ice-blue and flame-hot at the same time, rests on top of Cordy's head, and then she hears her own voice coming from above her. "No one asked for your opinion, Magnus." The dark wet stain on the front of the mangy bear-thing's pants and leather apron spreads, and he hobbles away just as Cordy has the opportunity to put together that it was her voice coming from above her. She can breathe, still, but her jaws won't work, they're locked shut. Her lips ... aren't. Her tongue simply no longer exists. No voice box. Nothing. She has no mouth. She cannot scream. "<Oh.>" She doesn't know what else to say when she's corrected. The details of the wagon, especially the details her mind doesn't want to approach, are slowly wrapping around her throat, choking her voice to death. She appreciates the information, but her next inquiry- a planned "what's a borrower?"- is left unsaid at the touch of the flamehot, ice-chilled hand upon her head. She blinks, quizically, confused when her voice doesn't work. When she hears it from above. The blinking quickens as she realizes that her mouth just... isn't, and the sound of her rapid, nasal breathing becomes rapid, desperate, panicked, as her bound hands lift to slap against her chin and cheeks, trying to find lips that aren't where they should be any longer. If the thing above her notices her distress? It doesn't react in any way: it's not interested in her. Not really, not beyond a cursory glance before it folds itself up like a giant spider on top of the vardo, which lurches into motion on its many mismatched, borrowed feet. It's trying out her voice. The vardo moves swiftly away from the Market, picking up speed until it runs faster than any human reasonably could, maintaining speeds as it dodges and shifts through the Hedge; it follows trods as instinctively as other things breathe. It isn't a smooth ride, between the vardo shifting back and forth, speeding and slowing down so that it can maneuver nimbly through the maze that is the Deep Hedge, and less smooth indeed because she can hear her own voice singing above her. Being tried out. Scales, arpeggios, folk songs: all somehow very wrong, hearing her voice coming from elsewhere, and, too, there's something deeply false about it. Fae can only imitate, never create, after all. The mud-and-green of the Market quickly fall away, yielding to some of the most horrifyingly blasted lands that Cordy could ever imagine. This is, after all, before Hiroshima made this sort of landscape a reality: jagged rocks and burned ends of Joshua-Tree-like-thorns jut up out of the earth. Piles of bones, both human and not, dot a landscape that's alternately smoking ruins and icy tundra, sometimes within feet of one another. The girl who would be Cordy spends the ride fighting for balance, trying her best not to be thrown off the vardo, eyes drenching her cheeks with terrified tears. Her nose is running. She doesn't notice or care. Her hair, wavy and gorgeous, is instead limp and matted to her face by her own liquids and her earlier, unceremonious shower. Her breath hitches rhythmically. Just because she can't make the noise doesn't mean she isn't sobbing madly. Her hands, still bound, cling to whatever handholds the vardo offers, trying madly to keep some semblance of stability, since neither this reality, her senses, nor- apparently- the landscape itself intend to offer her -any.- It's torture, hearing her voice wander through songs she doesn't know above her. That's -hers-. She knows it is, it's like finding out you're a ghost in your own home, finding out you've never spoken a word, that every conversation you've ever had was just pretend. Except they weren't pretend, and her voice has simply been -stolen.- No. Borrowed. Said Magnus. Borrowed. The shift to the landscape of a Death World is shocking, and she clings to the vardo's bony structures as desperately as she can to keep from being thrown out to spear herself on the wicked thorns, anything to keep herself from adding her own bones to the collections of those spread across the desolate landscape. Bony? No. Bones. Is there someone lying boneless and still living in The Borrower's realm, or are these the leftovers from people who couldn't cut it? They're femurs and tibias, the decorations knuckle bones and ... yes. Teeth. She cannot see when the doors open, faced out the back of the wagon as she is, but she can see the way that the light dims as they pass underneath the arch of it. A massive pair of cathedral doors that close behind them, the last of the light from the blasted lands beyond her Keeper's vale closed away. Her mouth opens in a gasp. The feet stop. The wagon lowers itself. Pitch black. Cold. Alone. At least she can cry. The abrupt realization that she is clinging to -pieces of people- nearly drives her to let go and take her chances, but her survival instinct is -strong.- It's taken her this far, and she's not about to stop trusting it now. She sobs in silence, bereft of her voice, her home, her freedom, her sanity. And then? It gets WORSE. She slides into some huge cathedral,doors sealed behind her, light locked away, and now? She's alone. The sole bright spot in all this is her voice, returned to her, which she immediately abuses by shrieking in emotional agony, wracked with fear and terror and the tiny, distant sparks of anger at having been so badly used The girl who would be Cordy has absolutely. No. Idea.