pathologicroundrobin | The Pathologic Round-Robin Story Collab!

The Pathologic Round-Robin Story Collab!

OKAY. This is a Round-Robin type of collaborative fiction! Continue writing where one person left off, but feel free to continue in your own manner. Make long entries, short entries, serious entries, comedic entries, etc., Collaborate with others to create a grand, cohesive story, or hijack it to make your own masterpiece! WARNING: All posts are canon.

Preferably make posts anonymously out of tradition, but I guess there's no harm in being logged in if you have an account?

LINKS:

Pathologic Prompt Meme: https://pathologicroundrobin.dreamwidth.org/825.html
Pathologic Round-Robin: https://pathologicroundrobin.dreamwidth.org/654.html
Pathologic Kink Meme (nsfw): https://pathologicroundrobin.dreamwidth.org/1201.html
Contact me here if you have any questions!: https://pathologicroundrobin.dreamwidth.org/1347.html

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Daniil Dankovsky, high king of the goths in the Capital, sat on a bench. He noticed an egg on the ground, and picked it up.

"Far be it from me to believe in mystical feelings, but I'm starving and there's an egg in front of me. Surely this is a sign that I should eat it." Daniil said. He bent over to pick up the egg, but before his hand could lift it, another hand grabbed his own.

It was Artemy.

"Don't eat that egg. It's mine." Artemy said.

"How? This egg was on the ground." Daniil said.

"It is a gift from Boddho herself after I gave her fresh blood to drink. Didn't you see me pouring it out there?"

"You do that sort of stuff all the time. I stopped paying attention."

"Ignorance isn't a good excuse. I'll be taking the egg now if you don't mind."

"No! I'm starving! I haven't had anything decent to eat for a while!" Daniil shouted.

Daniil and Artemy fumbled their hands as they attempted to steal the egg from each other, but in the midst of such buffoonery, the egg slipped high into the air. The doctors traced the ego's trajectory with their eyes until at last, Klara was there to catch it.

"You two are idiots. Here, watch this." She said, before blowing on the egg, and tossing it on to the ground like a pokeball. The egg started to hatch, and out emerged... (to be continued by the next person)

...Alexander Blok. Everyone stared at the giant man. Artemy and Daniil even froze in place where they had been fighting each other. What had once been the pose pose of an angry grapple turned to nervous hugging.

The military man spoke. "It seems that I'm unable to escape my duties even hiding within an egg. Very well. I must continue to fulfill orders. This town must be destroyed."

The artillery arrived in short order.

"Oh fuck this isn't what I had intended." Klara winced.

With a loud, thunderous crash, the whole town came down and everyone within died.

"CUT!"

Clara, Daniil, and Artemy stopped arguing with each other on the stage at the sound of Mark Immortell's voice. Mark's arms were crossed, and his foot tapped on the ground.

"What the hell are you all doing?!" Mark shouted. He shook a copy of the script at them. "I gave you all very simple instructions! How did you still manage to stumble on it?"

Daniil pointed a finger and opened his mouth to speak before Mark cut him off.

"It doesn't matter! My patience is finished!" Mark tossed the script over his shoulder, the paper echoing noisily as it clattered. "All of you can come up with a different script for all I care. As for me? I'm going to get something to help me de-stress: a coffee."

Neither Daniil, Clara, or Artemy thought that was particularly stress-relieving, but said nothing.

Mark walked towards the exit doorway. "If you need me and need to ask me for advice on running a theatre? Don't. I'm fed up right now. Ta-ta, you magnificent, blundering amateurs." There was a strange rushing noise as Mark stepped into the dark void beyond the theatre doors, before the doors slammed shut.

The trio were alone now. It was just them inside the theatre. Not a single other soul was there.

"What is this place? One moment we were about to die, the next we are brought before a stage..." Daniil was the first to speak.

"It's the Town's theatre. They used to do plays here, but no one's been at it for a long time." Artemy said looking around.

"Probably because we've been the play and taking up the stage the entire time." Clara said, swinging her legs as she sat on the edge of the theatre's stage.

There is a stillness in the Theatre when Yulia finds her way there, to sit down, surveying the stage from the side parquet. It seems strangely empty now, without the corpses and the hospital beds and the smell of blood permeating the air. It's strange, she keeps expecting a reprise of the ending song, but the play seems to have ended, despite Yulia's intuition.

From behind her, she hears the click-clack of heeled shoes and a cane tapping along the floor, and she turns around to see Mark Immortell join her at the stage.

"Are you auditioning for the next play?" he asks, a mysterious smile curving along his lips.

Yulia assessed the director with a cool gaze. “I think,” she said, “it might rob your audience of a sense of dramatic irony. I have never been able to act surprised.”

Yulia watches a bigger smile spread across Mark's face. "Come now, your acting isn't so bad. You've done a great job so far. It would be so easy to modify the contents a little bit, would it not?"

It's a strange proposal and Yulia can't help but wonder why Mark is saying this to her of all people. Something tugs underneath her skin and it displeases her, so she says, instead, "I'm the sort of person who needs to read the last lines of a book before I can start it. I don't think we'd get along."

“And what of a book that never ends the same way twice? A book that changes with the reading of it, that unwinds and rewinds with the course of your fingertips?”

Yulia taps her fingers against the edge of the parapet and looks at Mark. His eyes seem to glow, even though there is no visible light source around them. She'd never spoken much with him, back when she'd been more fully integrated with the Utopians. Perhaps this was normal for him.

"Well then. That's a formidable story. One that's quite frightening, one where there's no inevitability." Yulia says, carefully, and even though she can feel the trap within it, she is intrigued. "But how much do my fingertips matter? Could it not be anybody's fingertips?"

“You’re quite right,” chuckles Mark. His cane taps the floor like a metronome. “It could be anyone. The intellectual Bachelor, the instinctual Haruspex, the mystical Changeling. But the hero informs the theme, you know. This is the sort of story where observation is involvement, and you strike me as a natural observer.”

Yulia stops tapping her fingers against the parapet, if only to keep herself from falling into an unintentionally rhythm with Mark's cane.

It feels consequential in the way contrary gestures often do. Whether there's any real weight to it, she's less sure, though she finds she doesn't care.

"I don't recall," Yulia continues conversationally, "auditioning for the last play. Is there really an audition now? Or has it already started, with these our opening lines?"

A pleased smile curls on the man's lips, a knowing jesture. He exhales heavily from his nose with a hum, eyes fixed to to some point of darkness just beyond Yulia's form. The cane is still now and the silence is just short of deafening.

The strange, insufferable itch of deja vu crawls up her spine.

"Ah my dear," his eyes focus back to peer into her own once more, "you can not start something that has yet to truly end."

Once a year, Khan brings libations to the edge of town, where the endless chasm extends over the Gorkhon, to where the Polyhedron once stood. He can't support it now, not while he's politically bethrothed to Capella, of course, but nobody can stop what he does in his private moments. He still dreams of it, of its endless corridors, of the happy memories he'd perceived there. He still dreams of running through it's corridors, chasing his friends and finding a place of joy that was untenable in the real world.

Everybody wakes up from their dreams eventually.

This year, however, his libations process is different, because already at the edge of the Gorkhon, legs dangling down over the bridge, large doctor's bag behind him, is Bachelor Dankovsky, looking older and more tired since the last time Khan had seen him, almost five years ago, in the height of the Plague.

"Didn't you would come back." Khan says, shoving his hands into his pockets.

Bachelor Dankovsky opened his mouth in response. A swarm of bees started to flood out from out from it.

Dankovsky suffered a coughing fit as the bees flew out from his mouth, but soon their numbers trailed off. He opened his mouth to let the last of the bees fly off his tongue. Khan, the normally collected boy, had his eyes widened. At least when Dankovsky was distracted. He was tempted to say something to the hunched over doctor, but Dankovsky raised a hand to indicate a pause.

"Forgive me." Dankovsky coughed again. "It's... one of the strange things I've been suffering lately. I didn't think I'd ever return, but circumstances seem fit to say otherwise."

"What was that thing that just happened now?" Khan was surprised to see such tiredness in Dankovsky's eyes. "What do you mean it's 'one of the strange things?' Is spitting out bees common to you now?"

"Hah." Dankovsky smiled bitterly. "Bees weren't as bad as it could've been. First it was blood. That gave me quite the fright. Now it would be charmingly quaint."

"Have you come to see Burakh then for help?" Khan asked.

"I'm not sure if it would help."

"Why? Isn't he the best to ask for these sort of things?" The earnest confusion that Khan bore in his voice reminded Dankovsky of the fact though Khan portrayed himself as the future ruler of this town, he was still a youth. That childish innocence was to be cherished...

But it couldn't be sustained for too long for Dankovsky.

"I don't think it's a Steppe matter, you see." Dankovsky replied. "I believe my problem lies here, with our cherished Polyhedron."

Khan looks up, back towards where the Polyhedron should stand, and can't help but feel a little skeptical about that conclusion. "Do you dream of bees and blood, Bachelor Dankovsky?" he asks, wryly. "Because the Tower is a place of dreams, a place where dreams can exist upon our mortal plane. Nightmares and dreams alike...that wasn't how it was designed to be, but that's what I made it into."

Uncle Simon and Mother had both had different interpretations of what the Polyhedron could be used for, but Khan had known they were both wrong, when it came down to it. He was the one who'd walked its steps and understood its secrets.

"Do I dream of blood, you ask? As a doctor, of course. Many times." Bachelor Dankovsky said. "Now, bees? Never. I just suppose that perhaps my mind is interpreting the unknown droning noise I've been hearing increasingly in the back of my mind into the more mundane source. And expelling the results out of me, like an illness. Maybe it's better that my subconscious chose bees. Who knows what could've come out of me instead." Dankovsky chuckled, but its falseness irritated Khan.

"Why exactly are you here, Dankovsky?" Khan asked. "Dreams made manifest... Is that why you've come back? To pick through the rubble of the Polyhedron for clues and cures?"

"If it comes down to it, yes. Ever heard of getting the hair of the dog that bit you? It might be superstition, but superstition is all I have left it seems. There's nothing else I can think of that might be the cause of this. I've exhausted all other options." Dankovsky said with a distant look in his eyes.

Khan was silent for a moment. He wasn't too sure how much of the Dankovsky he knew from before was still there, or if he was talking to a desperate shell of his former self.

"You haven't visited Burakh, have you? If you're so willing to try your options, you should probably go visit the best doctor in town." Khan turned away from Dankovsky's strange gaze, to think. "...Please, Dankovsky. He'd be more than willing to help you." Khan said at last.

Dankovsky's eyes looked in the sky above the chasm. The Polyhedron was there, at one point in time, a fixed one. The memory of climbing up its steps was potent in his mind, though the time had long past Dankovsky. He felt faint, but he considered Khan's words. "If he's at the usual spot, then maybe I will."

Dankovsky turned to leave. Khan heard the echo of his footsteps, but when he turned around to see him, Dankovsky was already out of sight.

Artemy loves his children. But sometimes they can be absolutely patently ridiculous. He blames Notkin for encouraging this behaviour.

"Get down from the ceiling so I can get you all washed up." Artemy says, to Murky, quite firmly.

"No!" shouts Murky, clinging to the back of her large vulture, the half-soul she had chosen. "I'm going to fly."

Currently we are experiencing a large influx of troll posts from the incest shippers, so I have disabled anonymous posts from being immediately visible without being verified first. Posters with dreamwidth accounts can still post immediately however. I ask for your patience during this time as the kink meme is experiencing attacks.

We are accepting moderator applications if you'd like to help the kink meme return to normal operation sooner, but otherwise rest assured that things are being handled. Just wanted to provide an explanation for why your anonymous posts don't display right away. Thank you for your patience.

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The Pathologic Round-Robin Story Collab!

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I'm probably going to regret this but

okay yeah I did regret this

OH HO

Daniil's so dreamy~~ Like literally. It's kinda horrifying, actually. Help.

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