"It's your choice. If you want to give a statement, I'm not going to stop you. Hell, if someone came to give a statement, I don't even know if I'd warn them. 'S not like any of the rest of us were warned, and I don't-- I do still care about him? Just, what he was doing...

If he threatened you into this or, or anything, I'll--we'll figure something out. I promise. But if you do want this, that's not a decision I can make for you."

She laughs a little. "If he'd tried to threaten me into it we'd be having a very different conversation. But thanks."

Okay, back to the room she is nominally supervising right now. (For a moment she pictures getting them a fainting couch, and this is why she is giggling when she opens the door.)

Daisy turns the radio down. "Hey."

"Hey." She plonks herself into a chair. Something tells her Jon has not touched his Food Item but she glances over to check, just in case.

That sure is an untouched Food Item sitting next to him. "How was--I mean. I hope your walk was refreshing."

"I feel much more capable of using words to form sentences now!" she says cheerfully, but then her smile fades.

"So. You guys are probably starving to death but there's really no way to be sure until one of you keels over for good, is that about the size of it?"

"Pretty much."

She looks at Jon, and then that's too hard so she just sort of looks near Jon, and ends up staring at his Food Item. (All kinds of thematic implications there, which she notices and then decides she'd rather ignore.)

"...I couldn't actually make you not be dying, if you are. The best I can do is 'dying but slower'. Right? Like, there's no—telling the same story twice won't cut it?"

"...No. There isn't. The rest of them--Daisy, Basira, even Melanie--they've given statements before. If it were that easy..." Sigh. "I'm sorry. It would help for--a couple weeks, probably."

She drums her fingers on her knee.

"... I'll do it if you promise you'll eat real human food on a vaguely reasonable schedule from now on, because I cannot think of a stupider way for this to turn out than that I go to all that trouble and you end up succumbing to regular-ass starvation because you were too busy dying of eldritch trauma withdrawal to notice that your normal human bodily needs were also killing you."

That actually surprises a laugh out of him.

"Yeah. Yeah, okay. You'll do it?"

(A tape recorder, somewhere else in the room, appears and clicks on.)

"I mean, clear everyone who hasn't agreed to hear the bad words out of earshot first, but yeah."

"Right. Daisy?" His eyes don't leave April.

"...I'll go find Basira."

Jon takes a deep breath. "Statement of April May Turnberry, regarding... a fairy ring.

Whenever you're ready."

She makes a soft, amused sound, and murmurs mostly to herself, "Welcome to hell, sorry about the tentacle porn. If I was smart I would've brought a bucket to puke in."

Then she straightens up a little and says, in a more serious voice, "Everybody knows about the fairy ring in the forest behind the school."

The story is long and kind of upsetting although, despite her warning, the version she tells here does not have nearly as much explicit tentacle porn.

It's weird how she keeps finding all this polished prose flowing off her tongue, but she can't find a good spot to interrupt the story in order to remark on it.

She blushes slightly when she gets to the tentacle parts. It doesn't slow her down, though.

When she gets to the first time one of the Cave Things makes a noise, she does interrupt herself, to say, "—you don't need to hear it. But I'll tell you what it was like." Then onward, through the sound, through what it felt like to hear it, through the aftermath where every other priority seemed totally insignificant next to the all-consuming need to never hear it again.

But she did hear it again, of course. When she describes the second time, she has to pause to wipe tears from her eyes; her voice shakes a little with the memory of despair. Because, she explains, "Once could be a fluke or a warning or a test, once could be a one-off, but as soon as they do it twice, that's when you know it's staying on the menu."

And so it went, alternating uneasy sleep with tentacle rape, with occasional appearances from the Worst Sound In The World. There were times when she was sleeping badly enough that she's not confident anymore which of the things she experienced were in any sense real, and which were just her brain getting confused about its inputs. They never let her go on too long like that, though; eventually they'd always give her enough of a break to leave her well-rested again.

She got to the point of starting to recognize individuals, or at least to think she might be recognizing individuals. It was easiest, unfortunately, when they made sounds; every one of them had a unique distinctive voice. She thought there might be five or so but she wasn't sure. Some of them, she was pretty sure, never made noises at all.

Right from that first time, when she thought she saw tentacles bursting through her stomach and then woke up to find it completely unmarked, there was an undercurrent of unexplained impossibility to the whole thing. Sometimes things happen that just don't make any sense, that shouldn't be capable of happening.

The first time they teach her a word of their language is another of those, more blatant than any before, because it involves the creatures phasing their tentacles into her brain.

"—and on the one hand, right, that's almost an explanation, if they can just phase through things, but on the other hand—I shouldn't be able to feel it, and I can sure as hell feel it—for the record, it does not feel nice—and this time I think I have to tell you what they said, because this time they weren't just singing. They told me their name for themselves and made me understand it. They call themselves—" and she hesitates, bites her lip, takes a deep breath, preemptively digs her fingernails into her palms, and makes a very, very, very bad sound.

She says it as softly as she can, so it's not quite as bad as that memorable first description implied. She still has to sit there for a solid half-minute afterward just taking deep breaths and focusing very hard on not throwing up, while the humming echoes fade from her bones and the fresh sense-memory fades from her thoughts.

Jon had, prior to this, considered himself somewhat of a refined connoisseur of suffering, as April puts it. He knows what it feels like to have worms burrowing into his skin, to press his hand into burning-hot wax, to have his ribs removed through unbroken skin. In a more removed way, he’s read really quite a lot of statements from people who have experienced a truly wide variety of types of pain. 

This, he decides, is worse than anything he’s experienced thus far. He can’t scream, can’t move his hands to block his ears. It’s impossible to tell if it’s supernatural or just the freeze response, his useless body panicking in the most counterproductive way possible. He does dry-heave a few times. It hurts. It is hard to put words to how much it hurts. It is a sort of pain that should not exist. He curses himself internally a thousand times over for asking for it when she warned him. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

It also, in some impossible paradox, feels good. Feels better. 

When he stops dry-heaving and April looks mostly recovered, but before he stops feeling the vibrations in his bones, he manages to rasp out, “You can go on.” His voice shakes badly. He's not sure if he actually wants her to go on or not, but it doesn't matter at this point, not once the statement has already started.

She nods, shakily.

"There's—a translation but I don't think I can put it into words. 'Cave Things' is... very halfassed but not completely wrong. The thing is, the way their language works, it's... they're not limited to saying a single word at once, so they layer things. So you put together their word for 'people' and their word for the place where they live and you get—that, but then the word for people and the word for the place where they live both have layers of their own—'person' is about having experiences and making decisions and a bunch of other stuff I haven't dug deep enough to really get into—the place they live is... echoes and reflections and absence and darkness and obscurity and—safety, I think, as hilarious as that is—and I definitely haven't dug through all the layers on that one either..."

She takes a deep breath. "So, they gave me like a week with no singing to recover after that one. Still plenty of tentacle rape but you take what you can get. And then they taught me my second word. It's... call it 'law', that's the closest I can get."

This one, when she says it, is... simpler. Purer. Now that she's mentioned the layers, it's possible to tell that it has fewer of them, in a less complicated arrangement. A particularly sharp observer might notice that it shares some notes with the first one, although they're not quite arranged the same way. Being simpler does not, alas, make it noticeably easier to endure.

April clamps both hands over her mouth and takes another minute to breathe.

"...it shares some bits with 'person' but I haven't picked either of them apart enough to tell where the overlap is," she says, eventually, when she feels like she has successfully evaded the urge to throw up. "You can kind of—or I can, anyway, because I know what-all they mean—think about the word and focus on the different layers and figure out where it's hiding all its meanings, bit by bit, but I have to think about them to do that and I mostly try not to. I—but I'm getting ahead of myself. They taught me a few more words. I don't think I need to list them all. Some of them I don't even think I can translate. Some of them I'm not sure I understand; they have senses we don't, and the brain tentacles aren't perfect at bridging the gap. Anyway. After a little while of that, one of them... introduced themselves? They told me their name, their specific personal name, and it's got so many layers I don't even know if I can pronounce it which is a good thing because it sounded even worse than the rest of their language. I think I blacked out for a bit after they said it. And then..."

She smiles crookedly.

"I'd been poking at their language a little because even though I hate thinking about it, it gets boring in those caves with nothing to do but sleep and be tentacle-raped. So I decided to say something back. I layered some of 'law' with some of a few more words, and I got something that was sort of 'fuck off' and sort of 'rape is illegal where I come from'—they don't have a word for rape, or for sex, or at least if they do they haven't taught me those ones yet, but their word for 'touch/interact' is complicated enough that I could pick out some relevant bits—and they actually answered me, in multiple words even. Something like 'you're in our jurisdiction now', but I know there's complicated shades of meaning I'm missing, because I blacked out again in the middle of them saying it and I think I can guess why every time before that point they let me have multiple uninterrupted sleep cycles in between shoving individual words into my head with their brain tentacles. I had such a hangover when I woke up. Nobody tried to talk to me for a while, they just fucked me a lot and otherwise left me alone, and then I woke up and there was nobody around so I went exploring, and I found a section of the caves that was even darker than I was used to and didn't feel like it was the right shape, and something grabbed me, and then I woke up in a gross basement under a dust sheet and you know the rest."

(Jon does, in fact, throw up this time. Not much, just a bit of stomach acid.)

"Statement--statement ends." He sounds distant. His voice is still shaking and raw; as soon as he finishes speaking he lets out a punched-out wordless whimpery noise of pain.

Jon is not only a particularly sharp observer, he's a particularly sharp observer with powers that let him understand other languages and have a particular knack for painful knowledge. So of course he gets all of it.

It hurts just to think about. He can't quite stop, trying to pull apart the words and find new words, find meaning in the words, and it's not as bad as hearing them out loud, and it hurts so much. His nails dig into his palm until they draw blood. He doesn't want to know. He needs to know. 

(place (absence (cold / dark (obscure (safe))) / echoing (reflecting) / time (old / long-ago) / shape ( stone / water / light (dark (obscure (safe)))) / person (has-experiences / exerts-agency / comprehends-personhood) ...)

The twisting fractal of meaning seems to just keep getting deeper, on and on without end. He can hear in his imagination how each separate note would sound by itself, and, true, it's not as bad as hearing them out loud, but it's still not good. Even in places where it seems like he might have picked apart all the layers on a certain level, he can go back and find new connections to other parts of the word, new paths through the multidimensional maze.

"Jon? Jon, are you okay?"

Jon snaps back to himself before passing out (again). "--Sorry. Thank you, I-- thank you. I should--probably lay back down? There's a lot of layers, and I can--see them. Kind of. You weren't lying when you said that it hurts. But it's--hard to think of other things, when it's--right there."

She winces. "Ah, fuck. Yeah. That... in retrospect makes a ton of sense and I did not think of it at all, sorry. Uh, if it's any consolation, you do kind of get used to it. Just... not to the point where I don't still kind of want to throw up."

Half-snort. "I'm the one who asked for it. Thank you again, by the way. I do appreciate it, even if it's not... coming across right now." He is just going to slump against the wall, it having occurred to him that laying all the way down is a bad idea if he's likely to throw up. Now that he doesn't look like he wants to eat her, he mostly looks tired and in pain.