[Backdated to 9/9] @silent | open

[callada]

IMPORTANT: I need someone with medical training to meet me at the shoreline near the river. I've found what looks to be my own dead body.

Please hurry.

[Attached is a photo, lit dimly by his lantern, of what does indeed look like his recognizeable corpse floating in the water, hooked through the cheek and attached to a discarded fishing pole lying some feet away on the pebbles.

This is of course in reference to this exploration thread.]

Comments

@Grandmaster

[paletteswap]

What? How?

@parker — text.

[webshoots]

I know basic first aid, but I don't know how useful that'll be.

[ CLONES IS THE ANSWER CLONES. ]

[callada]

Don't know. Was fishing. Caught... this.

[callada]

Same. You want to at least verify I'm not hallucinating this?

[webshoots]

Sure. Give me 20 minutes.

In the meantime, I hate that I have to ask this but: does it look like it (you?) drowned or do you think there could have been another cause of death?

[callada]

Drowned seems likely. Can't see obvious signs of injury on the upper body but it's hard to move it out of the water myself to really check.

voice, @hello

[lunchbreaks]

Hi-- yes, hello, I am not entirely sure that is possible. Can I come see?

I don't have medical training, but I am worried if there are multiple of our bodies.

[callada]

Sure, the more eyes on this, the better. I'd like to understand why it's here.

[And why it seems like it's watching him...???]

[lunchbreaks]

Yes, where are you by the river? I'm coming straightaway.

[ He'll bring gardening gloves and a trash bag. ]

[callada]

On the lakeshore west of the river.

[It's a relief that someone can come by so quickly, though. He'll be sitting on the beach with a cigarette in his mouth and his fishing pole at his side. It's obvious from the drag marks in the pebbles that he's tried to pull the body up out of the water, but had a difficult time of it. Turns out even though he's strong, it's hard to move a waterlogged dead weight equal to his own nearly ten foot height.

At the sound of approaching footsteps, he waves toward the stranger just to make himself more visible in the dark as the light glances off his arm and hand. He looks a little pale, but maybe they all do now. He's been here without sunlight for months.]

I'm Rosinante. Don't think we've met, though I've seen you around.

[And the body, well, guess that's Rosinante too. Formerly. Cool.]

[lunchbreaks]

Yes, and I've seen you as well. You're-- rather hard to miss, to be quite fair. Hello, I'm Aziraphale.

[ He extends a hand to shake. ]

A pleasure, Rosinante. Someone did alert me to me some other things I was supposed to talk to you about, but it can wait until we're done here.

Oh, dear. Alright, will you help me lift the other one out of the water?

[ Aziraphale is surprisingly strong for his comparatively small stature and the fact that he looks like he hasn't hit a gym since gyms were invented. ]

[paletteswap]

That's horrifying.

Is it solid? Could it be a hallucination like when we were in the forest before?

@wayne

[pearlstrings]

Does it have a pulse?

@subzero

[saibot]

A clone perhaps?

[callada]

Solid enough to pull the hook out of the mouth and haul it up on shore.

[NONE OF WHICH HE ENJOYED DOING...]

What gets me is I swear its eyes follow me when I move.

[callada]

No. But the eyes move.

[callada]

Sure seems like it but how and why the hell did I get cloned, and why was the body dumped in the lake?

[callada]

[Although reluctant to take his eyes off the body for long - because it's watching him, and that's fucked up, and what if it leaps for him when it thinks he's not looking? - he does glance away long enough to give Aziraphale a nod and a handshake. Now that he's had a few minutes to sit here and get over the horrifying reality of this unusual situation, he's at least able to present himself as calm, controlled. Totally fine with the fact that he caught his own dead body while fishing in the lake. That's just. Fine.]

Yeah, here, let me get the top half.

[Because the shoulders and torso area are heavier, and certainly not because he doesn't dare set his foot even an inch in the water. He knows contact with the lake will sap his energy and he'd rather not show off that weakness to someone he's only just met. So he rises to his feet and readies to grab what he can of those shoulders, and together they can haul the waterlogged body out of the lake.]

I'm just glad you see it too. There are creatures in the forest that make you hallucinate. I was wondering if this was something like that.

[lunchbreaks]

No, no, this is most definitely your body.

[ He says this without a single trace of emotion. ]

--Ah, that is to say, I had a feeling these ones were either repaired or clones of ones we already had, and our souls were placed into them.

I had been burned, you see, quite badly when I died. And I'm perfectly fine now.

[ He very gladly takes the place in the water, though he does toe off his shoes and socks and roll up his pant legs to do so first. With a little teamwork, they can rest the body to shore. ]

[callada]

I'd been shot. Several times. Still have the scars from the injuries but they were healed. Clones never came to mind.

[But it's no stranger than other things he's heard here so at this point he's open to just about any explanation. He kneels down beside the head, waves a hand to see if the eyes move. They don't, and instead stay fixed on his own, but he's certain that where he'd seen smudged purple on the cheek before, it's now more a fuchsia. Flower petals instead of hearts, the edges undefined and dripping down the cheekbone. Just to be certain, he pulls his tablet back out and takes another photo.]

I died here once too. On the shore, but closer to the lighthouse, where it's rocky.

[lunchbreaks]

Oh? And how did you die? Did you come back sustaining injuries from that death?

[ Sorry it sounds really prodding but he did preface this by talking about clones. ]

This might be the one you came in with. I probably wouldn't have one, you see.

Seems a right shame though, to be just dumping them in a lake like this. Disrespectful.

[callada]

Broke my lantern. I wasn't injured otherwise.

[As for disrespectful, is it? It sure does show that the bodies are dispoable, and given this has been going on nearly a hundred years by some accounts, maybe that's just how things are here for the people who've stuck around longer than they have.]

What are the chances, though, of me pulling up my own dead body? If they're dumping years and years of them in here.

[lunchbreaks]

Perhaps not. Maybe just the new crop of dead ones.

But it would explain how come you're virtually identical.

I suppose our lanterns are tied to our souls then, if it would cause us to die. Tricky business, that.

[ He heaves a sigh. ]

Do you want to... inspect it? I probably could, but... seems. Invasive, you know.

[paletteswap]

Are you certain it's dead?

[webshoots]

[ it takes him about as long as specified to reach the river; and a few minutes more on top of that to find rosinante, although fortunately his height and his — everything makes him pretty easy to spot, given everything.

fortunately — is this a fortunately? — it's not the weirdest situation peter's ever found himself in; there'd been the thought of clones, which had occurred to him before, when resurrections had first been mentioned; when he'd had a conversation about how all of that worked with doc ingram and succeeded in not really getting any workable answers.

there are other options: that the body wasn't rosinante at all, that it was just someone or something with a similar ability to the chameleon (and screw that guy, seriously) which (who?) just happened to meet its own unfortunate demise and not get resurrected. third option is hallucination, which—

—if he's honest, is the least appealing of all three due to the implications of how much they can trust of their own senses and experiences. and then there's—. ]

—Hey, [ is his greeting, punctuated by a quirk of a smile that's more polite than it is anything else, because god, he hates all of this so much—. his attention shifts from rosinante to the river and the body and back to rosinante again, before— ] I mean, are you sure you don't have a long lost, less attractive twin brother out there? Twice-removed cousin? Because the resemblance is uncanny. [ just, you know, a bit clammy and water bloated. ]