This isn't just one memory, but a dozen at the same time, each overlaid on the other to create a perfect replica of that dark, dusty bowling alley basement. With precision, though, comes optical illusion. It splits and spins, a mirror maze of different perspectives all telling the same story. Disorienting, like trying to watch a show through a faceted crystal. Light refracting, the image different depending on the angle you look through.
Here, it's Z and Wybie, seventeen, covered and grime and ash, forcing their way up a vine-filled tunnel, freezing everything they can in their path. Turn your head, and they aren't teenagers, but adults, as you know them now, looking ragged and worn, but still pushing forward, making their way into the Paw Paw bowling alley basement.
From another angle, two Crocketts, Gilda Santos, Georgie Trullinger and Percy Potkin descend dark stairs with Caleb Qualls. But each time they take a stair, their forms flicker, not teenagers hellbent on saving the day, but adults, grimly aware that they couldn't stop what had already started. Down into the basement they go.
And at the heart of the memory, there is Lionel Qualls, taking a dark gold-speckled hand and pull, pull, pulling with all his might. The scene darkens for a few seconds, a slow, lingering blink, and the watching eyes settle weakly on the wild blonde curls, the rayban sunglasses pushing them back out of a dirt-smeared face. "I...told you to go."
As each person arrives in the Paw Paw Lanes basement, the memory consolidates, disparate parts folding together into one scene. Green vines climb across the floor and up the ceiling, pulsing like veins. A heavy haze hangs in the air. In the center of the room, where that jagged maw should be is a massive purple flower, each petal part of a beak protecting a horrible, tooth-filled maw. (Maisy's sigil is glowing like crazy right now.)
Pocket's weakened form lies limp and wrapped in vines, but Lionel Qualls won't let the weed take her. Wandless, but unwilling to give up, he braces his feet, black raybans pushed up into his hair. Pocket stirs, and struggles, too, but it's a blast from Zelda Gunzenhauser's wand that finally frees her. Lionel and Pocket go reeling back, away from the monstrous bloom.
"El!" shouts Mr. Potkin, in his seventeen-year-old voice.
"No, no, no. I—I can't do this again," young Monty Crockett despairs, in the same voice he uses to read to his students now.
The memory stutters, starts and stops, the adult versions of the Bug Club leave their young counterparts still stuck in time. The flower in the center of the room fights being frozen, moving like some clockwork automaton all brief and rigid little jumps. It lifts itself up to lurch forward, roots exposed, and stops in the air.
Zelda fires one blast of frost at the bloom, then another, but it's useless while the creature is frozen in time. They spray across the flower's surface and immediately flake away, ineffective. "We need to get this...memory moving again!" she shouts in frustration. "Or else we won't be able to stop it!"
Get the linchpin, but be prepared for a fight once you have it!
Jupiter stands agape, eyes wide, brows up, breath caught in her throat. She does not look for the linchpin. The first thing she does is move to Mr. Youngblood, axe resting on her shoulder, ready to...well, fight, for sure. Maybe defend him?
Gosh, these kids sure are loyal. Obedient even, if you squint at ‘em just right. And there are few things in life more awe-inducing to Tony De Witt than a middle-aged woman with mom energy telling him what to do. “Y’all heard the lady!” He bellows and then immediately grimaces, “Sorry, Ms. Gunzenhauser....”
He steps forward, within whacking distance of the nightmarish bloom and signals for the others to fan out in either direction. If this thing lurches again, he’s ready to bash its teeth in.
Pocket. There's Pocket. After a long night dashing in and out of memories, they'd finally found who she's been looking for the whole time. The adults here make sense. She doesn't much question it. They love the bugs, Tink, Pocket, just as much as she does. Audrey has the security of her new inkwell sword in her pocket. But it's the pendant in her hair she touches now, allowing lichen to creep over her fingers. For strength. She wanders around, probably in the direct opposite direction Tony's pointing, she's distracted. "...The flower? No." She muses, trying to guess at linchpins aloud. "A wand...his sunglasses."
She pauses, there, because it seems extremely disrespectful to go pluck some raybans from a dead boy's hair.
No time to stand and gawk, but Eddy does it for a few moments all the same, reliving a memory he's seen before, and pieces of others all at once. Watching them all come together for those final moments. Knowing enough to know that this doesn't end well.
Or didn't. They're here to change things now.
He's ripped back to the present by Ms. G and Tony's voices. Eddy's good at being bossed around and he runs to an empty space around the bloom's perimeter. Ms. Guzenhauser can handle herself, but it sounds like Mr. Crockett ain't too pleased to be here, and Eddy stands near him, staff ready to bash anything that comes near them.
He watches Audrey pace, trying to solve the puzzle, and then hesitating. He knows that feeling, not wanting to touch something so precious, and the sunglasses clearly are. "Here to save her," he encourages softly.
Trudy has never been overly hindered by human emotion. Benjammin' Funklin's Glass Harmaulnica is hefted over her shoulder, and she is fully prepared to see this through. Audrey's expression does seem to affect her, though. She stops at her side and puts her hand on her shoulder briefly. "We've got to finish," she says, then leans in to snatch the sunglasses that the other girl is looking at.
Trudy plucks the glasses from El Qualls's head and he opens his eyes. He sees past Trudy, past Audrey. Through them. Wraps his arms around Pocket and rolls himself over as the horrible bloom lurches forward, petals spread and ready to bite.
"Glacius!" shouts one Percy Potkin, while another cries, "Expecto Patronum!" Both anguished by what they see. Which spell was the original? It's impossible to say now, but through the spray of ice, a little robin flutters forth, crashing into the beast, knocking it away.
Just enough time for El to heft Pocket toward Zelda and Wybie. She rolls, and stirs, seeming to come to. "You have to get Pocket out of here!" Not Tink. Pocket. This is a memory, but it isn't. That's the real El Qualls. "He's killing her."
Zelda, both young and old, moving similar but unsynched, lug Pocket away as El scrambles to his feet. The scene freezes again, but only halfway. That monstrous blossom is turning, hellbent on retrieving its prize.
Jupiter doesn't quite know what's happening. She didn't live a memory through a cicada's shell. She didn't delve through old books, crusted with lichen. She only asked a teacher about what was happening once, and for the trouble, she nearly put him in a coma.
All she knows is, there's trouble, and there's not much a Quigley's good for but meeting trouble with more of the same.
"Hey! FUCKO!" she shouts, taking two long steps forward, placing herself between Ms. Gunzenhauser and the monster, her — Wybie's — weapon held high. "Hew'n the fuck d'you think you are?"
All intentions of attacking vanish when the real El Qualls unsynchs with his desperate plea. This is it. This is serious. They need all the help they can get.
Recalling the way Audrey had called to the moss before, Eddy reaches inside his hoodie where the funky snowglobe is still tucked away and shakes it urgently. "Fuck. Fuck. Do something." And he's gonna feel real silly if this summons a sno-cone.
Edited (hi sorry zipping in before passing out) 2020-06-11 02:21 (UTC)
Jupiter's ax packs all the punch of a Quigley who takes cues from a Youngblood. (ROLLED 8) The hatchet buries in the ground, several several limbs before they can get at Pocket or Ms. Gunzenhauser and giving just enough time for something to coalesce before Eddy.
No, wait. Not something. Someone.
"Well, shit, this is an emergency, ain't it?" Pouch barks before he's even fully formed. The frost, with his full heart, dripping ice from every edge, doesn't spare a second before he's blasting the creature with frost. One of the flowers petals freezes solid and falls, shattering across the floor. It screams, but it's cries are lost in the sound of spells flung by Monty and Zed, Georgie and Gilda.
"Keep fighting!" Mr. Trullinger shouts over the zing of magic in the air.
Aye aye, Mr. Trullinger. Don't have to tell Tony twice. By nature, he's a lover, not a fighter but this is what he's built for to be true.
He imagines for a moment that these whipping tendrils are the pointy elbows of Kestrels chasing after his sister and that's enough to get him good and mad. Tony launches himself into the fray, disrupting vines with vicious blows from his beater bat. "Yippee-" THWACK. "Ki-" WHAP. "YAY, MUTHAFUCKA!" CRACK!
That's a big curse. Don't tell his mom. He saw it in a film.
She breathes out as Pocket is rushed away. She will be safe. Pouch is here. So now Audrey's mind is clear. Now she can fight.
She draws out her brand new rapier and steps in, too close, to give this flower her Autograph, slicing away. Audrey's hardly a fighter. Not like Jup and not like Tony. Or Eddy or Trudy, for that measure. All of whom she smiles at now, taking that moment to step as close to a vine. She knows how to weed a garden well enough, and she slices as expertly as she can.
"MY TURN!" Trudy hollers. She isn't built for fighting like Tony is, but she sure has the spirit for it, and no one has ever called her a lover. Besides, it's time to really put this weapon Pouch made her through its paces, to systematically test its magical properties and limits. She wails on the bloom with a sound like a dump truck unloading thousands of delicate wine glasses onto concrete.
Edited 2020-06-11 03:07 (UTC)
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today - COMPLETE!
Tony's not one of the most fearsome beaters in the school for no reason. (ROLLED 8) Over and over, he smashes the flower, each blow hitting harder as Ms. Gunzenhauser raises up just long enough to sling an Engorgio charm that doubles its size while he's got it raised high.
The blossom swipes with a vine (ROLLED 6), and though it makes contact, it's hardly a bother for Peckenpaugh's Big Man, and soon, Wyborn Youngblood is at his side, ripping and tearing at the vines. "Not a'fuckin'gain!"
Audrey slices expertly (ROLLED 9 + 1) weeding the garden with her ink pot dagger. She can feel that cicada clip glowing warmth, a carpet of moss from her hair to her shoulder, down her arm. Help. Pocket had told her once that she could handle it all on her own, but here, it seems, she realizes just how little she could accomplish without her.
When the vines swipe back at her, it bounces away harmlessly, unable to make a dent in that soft, quick growing, squishy moss. (ROLLED 9)
Plant matter goes flying from just a single swing of Trudy's maul (ROLLED 7 + 1). She hammers away, turning plant to pulp.
The vines shunt her back (ROLLED 3) knocking her into Zed Crockett, kicking both of them off their feet, but they can't be kept down.
Students and staff, young and old, fight the fractal image of the plant horror. Flinging spells and swinging weapons magical and mundane, they cut down every version of the weed that tries to grow. It wilts, and wilts, and wilts, over and over, until the last plant slumps and withers.
The younger versions of Peckenpaugh's teachers all begin to celebrate the plant's demise, but there is no joy on the faces of the adults. This memory still has to play.
Young Zelda is holding Tinkerbell in her arms as she pumps her fist in victory.
Ms. Gunzenhauser, beside her, or half-overlapping, clutches Pocket, puts her hand over her face to shield her one red eye from what she is about to see.
El Qualls takes a step forward, a smile just starting to dawn on his features.
And then the dead plant shudders. Something erupts from the floral maw. A man — something like a man — a ghastly version of Burton Bland, purple flowers in place of eyes, green vines where his veins should be. A puppet. He lunges, wraps his hands around Lionel.
"Heart of land. Blood of man. The garden looks very nice today," Burton Bland whispers as he clasps his fingers over El's mouth.
"No!" both Pockets shout, leaping to their feet, but green growth is pushing everyone away. From the gash in the floor — the hole that will one day come to be called the seam — vines and plant matter explode, filling the room, shunting students and teaches away. Out into that long cement hall, the Somewhere Gray, or back up into the burning bowling alley.
Regardless of where the sudden growth pushes you, your vision blurs. You're back on the Sorting Path.
You have seen through the memory "The Garden Looks Very Nice Today".
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peckenpaugh2020-06-01 11:19 am
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
Here, it's Z and Wybie, seventeen, covered and grime and ash, forcing their way up a vine-filled tunnel, freezing everything they can in their path. Turn your head, and they aren't teenagers, but adults, as you know them now, looking ragged and worn, but still pushing forward, making their way into the Paw Paw bowling alley basement.
From another angle, two Crocketts, Gilda Santos, Georgie Trullinger and Percy Potkin descend dark stairs with Caleb Qualls. But each time they take a stair, their forms flicker, not teenagers hellbent on saving the day, but adults, grimly aware that they couldn't stop what had already started. Down into the basement they go.
And at the heart of the memory, there is Lionel Qualls, taking a dark gold-speckled hand and pull, pull, pulling with all his might. The scene darkens for a few seconds, a slow, lingering blink, and the watching eyes settle weakly on the wild blonde curls, the rayban sunglasses pushing them back out of a dirt-smeared face. "I...told you to go."
As each person arrives in the Paw Paw Lanes basement, the memory consolidates, disparate parts folding together into one scene. Green vines climb across the floor and up the ceiling, pulsing like veins. A heavy haze hangs in the air. In the center of the room, where that jagged maw should be is a massive purple flower, each petal part of a beak protecting a horrible, tooth-filled maw. (Maisy's sigil is glowing like crazy right now.)
Pocket's weakened form lies limp and wrapped in vines, but Lionel Qualls won't let the weed take her. Wandless, but unwilling to give up, he braces his feet, black raybans pushed up into his hair. Pocket stirs, and struggles, too, but it's a blast from Zelda Gunzenhauser's wand that finally frees her. Lionel and Pocket go reeling back, away from the monstrous bloom.
"El!" shouts Mr. Potkin, in his seventeen-year-old voice.
"No, no, no. I—I can't do this again," young Monty Crockett despairs, in the same voice he uses to read to his students now.
The memory stutters, starts and stops, the adult versions of the Bug Club leave their young counterparts still stuck in time. The flower in the center of the room fights being frozen, moving like some clockwork automaton all brief and rigid little jumps. It lifts itself up to lurch forward, roots exposed, and stops in the air.
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
Get the linchpin, but be prepared for a fight once you have it!
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
He steps forward, within whacking distance of the nightmarish bloom and signals for the others to fan out in either direction. If this thing lurches again, he’s ready to bash its teeth in.
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
She pauses, there, because it seems extremely disrespectful to go pluck some raybans from a dead boy's hair.
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
Or didn't. They're here to change things now.
He's ripped back to the present by Ms. G and Tony's voices. Eddy's good at being bossed around and he runs to an empty space around the bloom's perimeter. Ms. Guzenhauser can handle herself, but it sounds like Mr. Crockett ain't too pleased to be here, and Eddy stands near him, staff ready to bash anything that comes near them.
He watches Audrey pace, trying to solve the puzzle, and then hesitating. He knows that feeling, not wanting to touch something so precious, and the sunglasses clearly are. "Here to save her," he encourages softly.
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
"Glacius!" shouts one Percy Potkin, while another cries, "Expecto Patronum!" Both anguished by what they see. Which spell was the original? It's impossible to say now, but through the spray of ice, a little robin flutters forth, crashing into the beast, knocking it away.
Just enough time for El to heft Pocket toward Zelda and Wybie. She rolls, and stirs, seeming to come to. "You have to get Pocket out of here!" Not Tink. Pocket. This is a memory, but it isn't. That's the real El Qualls. "He's killing her."
Zelda, both young and old, moving similar but unsynched, lug Pocket away as El scrambles to his feet. The scene freezes again, but only halfway. That monstrous blossom is turning, hellbent on retrieving its prize.
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
All she knows is, there's trouble, and there's not much a Quigley's good for but meeting trouble with more of the same.
"Hey! FUCKO!" she shouts, taking two long steps forward, placing herself between Ms. Gunzenhauser and the monster, her — Wybie's — weapon held high. "Hew'n the fuck d'you think you are?"
Jupiter brings the ax down as hard as she can.
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
Recalling the way Audrey had called to the moss before, Eddy reaches inside his hoodie where the funky snowglobe is still tucked away and shakes it urgently. "Fuck. Fuck. Do something." And he's gonna feel real silly if this summons a sno-cone.
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
No, wait. Not something. Someone.
"Well, shit, this is an emergency, ain't it?" Pouch barks before he's even fully formed. The frost, with his full heart, dripping ice from every edge, doesn't spare a second before he's blasting the creature with frost. One of the flowers petals freezes solid and falls, shattering across the floor. It screams, but it's cries are lost in the sound of spells flung by Monty and Zed, Georgie and Gilda.
"Keep fighting!" Mr. Trullinger shouts over the zing of magic in the air.
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
He imagines for a moment that these whipping tendrils are the pointy elbows of Kestrels chasing after his sister and that's enough to get him good and mad. Tony launches himself into the fray, disrupting vines with vicious blows from his beater bat. "Yippee-" THWACK. "Ki-" WHAP. "YAY, MUTHAFUCKA!" CRACK!
That's a big curse. Don't tell his mom. He saw it in a film.
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
So now Audrey's mind is clear. Now she can fight.
She draws out her brand new rapier and steps in, too close, to give this flower her Autograph, slicing away. Audrey's hardly a fighter. Not like Jup and not like Tony. Or Eddy or Trudy, for that measure. All of whom she smiles at now, taking that moment to step as close to a vine. She knows how to weed a garden well enough, and she slices as expertly as she can.
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today
MEMOR(IES): The Garden Looks Very Nice Today - COMPLETE!
The blossom swipes with a vine (ROLLED 6), and though it makes contact, it's hardly a bother for Peckenpaugh's Big Man, and soon, Wyborn Youngblood is at his side, ripping and tearing at the vines. "Not a'fuckin'gain!"
Audrey slices expertly (ROLLED 9 + 1) weeding the garden with her ink pot dagger. She can feel that cicada clip glowing warmth, a carpet of moss from her hair to her shoulder, down her arm. Help. Pocket had told her once that she could handle it all on her own, but here, it seems, she realizes just how little she could accomplish without her.
When the vines swipe back at her, it bounces away harmlessly, unable to make a dent in that soft, quick growing, squishy moss. (ROLLED 9)
Plant matter goes flying from just a single swing of Trudy's maul (ROLLED 7 + 1). She hammers away, turning plant to pulp.
The vines shunt her back (ROLLED 3) knocking her into Zed Crockett, kicking both of them off their feet, but they can't be kept down.
Students and staff, young and old, fight the fractal image of the plant horror. Flinging spells and swinging weapons magical and mundane, they cut down every version of the weed that tries to grow. It wilts, and wilts, and wilts, over and over, until the last plant slumps and withers.
The younger versions of Peckenpaugh's teachers all begin to celebrate the plant's demise, but there is no joy on the faces of the adults. This memory still has to play.
Young Zelda is holding Tinkerbell in her arms as she pumps her fist in victory.
Ms. Gunzenhauser, beside her, or half-overlapping, clutches Pocket, puts her hand over her face to shield her one red eye from what she is about to see.
El Qualls takes a step forward, a smile just starting to dawn on his features.
And then the dead plant shudders. Something erupts from the floral maw. A man — something like a man — a ghastly version of Burton Bland, purple flowers in place of eyes, green vines where his veins should be. A puppet. He lunges, wraps his hands around Lionel.
"Heart of land. Blood of man. The garden looks very nice today," Burton Bland whispers as he clasps his fingers over El's mouth.
"No!" both Pockets shout, leaping to their feet, but green growth is pushing everyone away. From the gash in the floor — the hole that will one day come to be called the seam — vines and plant matter explode, filling the room, shunting students and teaches away. Out into that long cement hall, the Somewhere Gray, or back up into the burning bowling alley.
Regardless of where the sudden growth pushes you, your vision blurs. You're back on the Sorting Path.
You have seen through the memory "The Garden Looks Very Nice Today".