i. you better watch out YOU BETTER WATCH OUT YOU BETTER
[Opening their eyes turns out to be - a bad idea. A very bad idea. The brightness of the overhead sky immediately inflicts them with a migraine-level headache, their eyes burning in their skull like live coals, or some equally fucked up analogy.]
[The sky shouldn't be bright, because the sky has never been bright. For millennia, now, the sky has been dark, cast into perpetual night and tormented by the storms that howled across the planet's surface, powdery nebulas of red sand thrown up across the Wastes and speckling the air.]
[The sky shouldn't be bright.]
[Pain comes the same way it always does; grindingly and achingly familiar, settling across their nerves and down their spine and up beyond every clenched, contracted muscle, every trembling nerve. The headache is noteworthy in that it is not the typical kind of pain they've come to accept as normal. Their body feels as though it is ninety percent scar tissue, on a good day, and the ache that suffuses their bones is chronic and far-reaching and forever.]
[The sky is also, fortunately, overcast, which makes it brighter than they are accustomed, but once the sun ducks behind the dark floss of a cloud, that makes the visual of the city marginally more bearable. And it is, in fact, a city. Not the sleek, modern aesthetic they've come to recognize as something almost like home, because home is a dangerous thought, but strange and spiraling buildings piled atop one another, spread across a cast of islands in a way that they should find unsettling.]
[Something stooped and horned and snarling rounds a corner, and makes for them. It looks like an atrocious blend of two souls at disharmony, but the fact that it doesn't speak in any sort of recognizable language is a fair hint as to its nature.]
[They get up.]
[Vale Racto gets up.]
[Vale Racto gets up and it hurts in the way all things hurt, their breath hitching in their chest like a bud tightly furled, their heart squeezing a sluggish rhythm against the cage of their ribs. The effort it requires is powering through the press and fall of their own inertia mantled across their bones and it tints their vision red. The shape hobbles closer, reaching out with a set of curved claws, and they try to take a moment to study its soul, and that, that is when the sheer, voidlike emptiness that gapes in their head well and truly engulfs them; the emptiness that they had not wanted to acknowledge as fact, when they awoke, but had been the first thing they noticed. The other shape that should dwell in the nest of their soul - is gone. There is only a raw and aching nothingness where they should be hearing their words, the tone of their thoughts, the nature of their perception.]
[The intensity of it lays them low, blindsides them so utterly that they can do nothing to prevent the sweep and press of claws that curl around their throat and hoist them, legs dangling, into the air.]
[But through the disorientation, through the physical pain that is perpetual and bearable, through the metaphysical pain that is not new and perhaps slightly less bearable, through the slow, steady compression of their windpipe, Racto's hand digs into their pocket and pulls out something that they know is in there and it is a lighter. And they only have one shot at this so they marshal themself against the excruciating barrier that threatens to section away their thoughts and they focus through it and click it on because this is what they do and have always done: think through it.]
[They click the lighter on and thrust that single, stilling flame into the Krampus's eye.]
[They lose the lighter but they land on the ground when it releases them and manage to catch themself on all fours and power forward, alarmingly nimble for someone who looks to be in their late forties or mid-fifties at least - and for someone who is in as much pain as they currently are.]
[They're not going to get rid of this thing without help, and they certainly can't run forever.]
[Fortunately, they're used to running from things a great deal worse than this. Just - not under these circumstances.]
ii. you know What You Did
[Settling in has not been a process they can strictly call "efficient" or even very adept. They have relocated before. They have swapped cities. They have traveled across the vast and tumultuous expanse of their planet in an effort to escape those that would wish them harm - often justifiably so.]
[They've just never had to do it alone.]
[The lack of another voice in their soul is an absence too weighty to ignore. The headaches are frequent, but so is everything; so is the steady, dull ache that makes getting up each day a difficult task unto itself.]
[The presence of graffiti alone doesn't particularly manage to interrupt the tangled cast of their own thoughts. It's more what it says that arrests them, and this catches their attention purely because of the unique nature of what it says, and the fact that it probably would not be significant to anyone else:]
SPLINTER
[To which Racto sighs, trying without success to dismiss the tension that rolls up their shoulders and tightens their back.]
[They didn't last this long by drawing this kind of attention to themself.]
wildcard hit me etc.
[please let me know if anything isn't clear and you need some background on how this fella's world works (im working on a comprehensive write up i swear it's just taking time) also you can contact me by pm or at arrpee]
vale racto | original....character.....
[The sky shouldn't be bright, because the sky has never been bright. For millennia, now, the sky has been dark, cast into perpetual night and tormented by the storms that howled across the planet's surface, powdery nebulas of red sand thrown up across the Wastes and speckling the air.]
[The sky shouldn't be bright.]
[Pain comes the same way it always does; grindingly and achingly familiar, settling across their nerves and down their spine and up beyond every clenched, contracted muscle, every trembling nerve. The headache is noteworthy in that it is not the typical kind of pain they've come to accept as normal. Their body feels as though it is ninety percent scar tissue, on a good day, and the ache that suffuses their bones is chronic and far-reaching and forever.]
[The sky is also, fortunately, overcast, which makes it brighter than they are accustomed, but once the sun ducks behind the dark floss of a cloud, that makes the visual of the city marginally more bearable. And it is, in fact, a city. Not the sleek, modern aesthetic they've come to recognize as something almost like home, because home is a dangerous thought, but strange and spiraling buildings piled atop one another, spread across a cast of islands in a way that they should find unsettling.]
[Something stooped and horned and snarling rounds a corner, and makes for them. It looks like an atrocious blend of two souls at disharmony, but the fact that it doesn't speak in any sort of recognizable language is a fair hint as to its nature.]
[They get up.]
[Vale Racto gets up.]
[Vale Racto gets up and it hurts in the way all things hurt, their breath hitching in their chest like a bud tightly furled, their heart squeezing a sluggish rhythm against the cage of their ribs. The effort it requires is powering through the press and fall of their own inertia mantled across their bones and it tints their vision red. The shape hobbles closer, reaching out with a set of curved claws, and they try to take a moment to study its soul, and that, that is when the sheer, voidlike emptiness that gapes in their head well and truly engulfs them; the emptiness that they had not wanted to acknowledge as fact, when they awoke, but had been the first thing they noticed. The other shape that should dwell in the nest of their soul - is gone. There is only a raw and aching nothingness where they should be hearing their words, the tone of their thoughts, the nature of their perception.]
[The intensity of it lays them low, blindsides them so utterly that they can do nothing to prevent the sweep and press of claws that curl around their throat and hoist them, legs dangling, into the air.]
[But through the disorientation, through the physical pain that is perpetual and bearable, through the metaphysical pain that is not new and perhaps slightly less bearable, through the slow, steady compression of their windpipe, Racto's hand digs into their pocket and pulls out something that they know is in there and it is a lighter. And they only have one shot at this so they marshal themself against the excruciating barrier that threatens to section away their thoughts and they focus through it and click it on because this is what they do and have always done: think through it.]
[They click the lighter on and thrust that single, stilling flame into the Krampus's eye.]
[They lose the lighter but they land on the ground when it releases them and manage to catch themself on all fours and power forward, alarmingly nimble for someone who looks to be in their late forties or mid-fifties at least - and for someone who is in as much pain as they currently are.]
[They're not going to get rid of this thing without help, and they certainly can't run forever.]
[Fortunately, they're used to running from things a great deal worse than this. Just - not under these circumstances.]
[Settling in has not been a process they can strictly call "efficient" or even very adept. They have relocated before. They have swapped cities. They have traveled across the vast and tumultuous expanse of their planet in an effort to escape those that would wish them harm - often justifiably so.]
[They've just never had to do it alone.]
[The lack of another voice in their soul is an absence too weighty to ignore. The headaches are frequent, but so is everything; so is the steady, dull ache that makes getting up each day a difficult task unto itself.]
[The presence of graffiti alone doesn't particularly manage to interrupt the tangled cast of their own thoughts. It's more what it says that arrests them, and this catches their attention purely because of the unique nature of what it says, and the fact that it probably would not be significant to anyone else:]
[To which Racto sighs, trying without success to dismiss the tension that rolls up their shoulders and tightens their back.]
[They didn't last this long by drawing this kind of attention to themself.]
[please let me know if anything isn't clear and you need some background on how this fella's world works (im working on a comprehensive write up i swear it's just taking time) also you can contact me by pm or at