by Cailleach » Sat Dec 21, 2019 10:26 pm
Very few people thrive in prison. Cailleach is not one of those rare exceptions. Cut off from her abilities she's reduced to simply being a young woman and she doesn't exactly know how to act the part. She could almost make peace with the idea of being a caged animal, but being here she's not a monster, not a nightmare, none of the things she imagines herself to be. She spends a lot of time avoiding the central area of the prison where a large open common and dining area sits beneath the observation room hanging down from the ceiling. The only time she really ventures out of her cell is to grab food or the occasional supply of what passes for entertainment. Books always seem to have competition and she doesn't care to butt heads with the Loud Man who seems to have taken up bit of a leading role among the inmates.
But she lays claim to the art supplies. Crayons and paper, but still. And once she has her hands on them nobody ever wants them back. Every single of the waxy sticks is chewed on, the paper wrapping worked into the colorful wax where it hasn't been scraped away by teeth. It's a careful balancing act. Too much nervous chewing and she wastes precious pen, but she can't seem to help it. Hunched under the bed in her cell, blanket partially fixed to block out part of the view out, around her a nest of torn and bunched up bedding and a spread of scrawled drawings on both paper and floor, a crayon hanging from the corner of her stained lips. It's all abstract shapes, tangled lines, geometric patterns or something in between. Sometimes it resembles celtic knots or hermetic linework but it never seems to be anything concrete. Similarly, many of the sheets of paper are folded or crumpled into shapes. It'd look like bad origami if it wasn't seemingly intentionally abstract shapes as opposed to a failed animal. Sometimes facets of the folding are colored in with shapes or plain colors and she's placed a couple of them on top of her bed, satisfied enough with how they turned out that she hangs on to them.
She's in the middle of constructing some kind of hollow sphere out of paper by weaving strips of paper together while glaring out through the door of her cell and at the 'thing' sitting in it's own cell, all the way across the common area. It has barely moved since their arrival. Manikin is what the guards called it. Secluded Puppet what she calls it in her head. She loathes it. Once a person it chose to seal itself away in a blank casing of hardened ceramic and preserve itself forever, locked away from the natural ebb and flow of life and death. It doesn't eat, doesn't drink, doesn't breathe. She doesn't care to understand how it did that, all she cares for is that it always sits there, reminding her that she might as well be the same. The inhibitor collar locks her into herself. Isolated. Locked into one shape. She cannot see the sparks, the sprites, the spirits, can't hear their strange song in her mind. She's being kept from her domain, from her calling. The snip of the thread, the harvest 'fore the winter storms, the freeing of the spark.They don't understand!
But she can still smell them, see the fingerprint they left, the pattern inscribed into their very being. You just need to know where to look. Not with the Puppet though. Nothing. Fragile little egg. Pathetic. She spits, a waxy blob of blue. She drags her finger through it and absentmindedly smears it into a swirling shape as her eyes catches the blonde man with what might be a box of puzzle pieces under his arm. He' special somehow. She just knows. He' been touched by the sparks. Not like the others here, the little girl and her Chittering Machine or the shark-man and his Conductor. No. This one has seen. It's in his eyes. In the way he moves. He reeks of the sparks and she can only imagine that if it wasn't for the collars she could see him bathed in them... Hazard. Not an inappropriate moniker, but maybe not his True Name. What are you? Parasite? Administrator? Thief? Something else entirely?
The crayon falls from her mouth and clatters to the floor as she realizes she's been staring.