The Pathologic Round-Robin Story Collab!

[maximumhusky]

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

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

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.”

[(Anonymous)]

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."

[(Anonymous)]

“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?”

[(Anonymous)]

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?"

[(Anonymous)]

“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.”

[(Anonymous)]

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?"

[(Anonymous)]

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."