#he helps danny break free of the memories and horrors that keep him trapped there

[sleepy-writes-stuff]

DP X DC WRITING PROMPT #19

Beware! Not gonna lie, this prompt is creepy. I was feeling some horror vibes and decided to write it down. Whether or not it's actually creepy is for you guys to decide tho. However, just in case...

CW: Mentions of blood/ectoplasm, human experimentation, and descriptions of other unsettling imagery. Mind the tags!! They can give you a summary of what this prompt is about.

(#) = Notes at the end of post. Important context!!

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Echoes of the Soul

Danny is captured and taken away by the GIW to be experimented on and despite the combined efforts of his friends, family, and former enemies he's never found. Decades pass, the GIW were shut down at some point and put to trial for all of the atrocities they committed while Danny is recorded as the first superhero know to history. Tragic though his story may be, many modern teenage heroes look up to him.

Danny would only be seen as a memory by the world. Seen as someone who did actually exist at some point, but time and mystery have lessened his impact on other's thoughts and emotions like many other people and instances throughout history. However, it isn't until Jason is on his way back to Gotham since the first time he died(1) that he accidentally/unknowingly takes a detour.

He can't pinpoint why he's taking a longer route back to the city of his birth and death, but something in his chest, his heart, is telling him to follow an unknown path. Though mildly irritated, he follows it regardless. The incessant tug at his ribcage eventually leads him down some back roads into the middle of nowhere, where he finds something.(2)

From the outside, it looks like a regular dilapidated house in the country that was long left abandoned. Something inside Jason screams that the isn't the case at all. He dismounts his motorcycle and circles the property for anything suspicious. He's as cautious and stealthy as a cat stalking a mouse through the grass. Finding nothing, he eventually makes his way to the door, having to break it down to even enter it.

As he steps into the house, all the hair on his body stands on end and he's immediately on edge. Nothing on the ground floor seems suspicious, if a little empty. It was clear nobody had lived here for quite some time, but the feeling in Jason's chest wouldn't leave. If anything, it wrapped itself tighter around his chest, squeezing his lungs and heart to point of almost panicking.

Searching the house and finding nothing in the side rooms, he eventually finds a door to what he can only assume leads to the basement. As soon as his hand even touches the doorknob, his skin is crawling with chills and his teeth are chattering no so much from the cold but from fear he can't locate the source of.

The door creaks when it opens and reveals the stairs leading down into a yawning mouth of darkness. Flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other, he cautiously begins his dissent. Once at the bottom, he finds another door. Only this time, it's completely out of place. Instead of a rotting, wooden door barely hanging onto it's hinges, this door is made of thick reinforced steel with a lever and a keypad where a doorknob should be. It's not difficult to figure out the code to unlock it. With his history, it might as well of been child's play to crack it.

Once the door was opened, however, he wished he'd left it locked. He wishes he never even set foot in this house or even followed the tugging at his ribs in the first place. On the other side of the door was a lab. All of the equipment and surfaces were left in disarray, some trays full of tool even knocked onto the floor as if whoever owned the lab was in a hurry. Or whatever they were studying was trying to get out.

The fact that he was looking at a destroyed lab, was the least worrisome observation, however. Everywhere he looked there were splatters of glowing green, some duller than others. Just the sight of them had the Pits roiling in upset, tinting the edges of his vision green as well. He steps further into the lab, careful not to step on any of the sharp tools littering the floor as well as any puddles of glowing green.

Eyes constantly scanning for any movement, he eventually makes his way to the center of the room, right next to a large, steel lab stable, complete with wrist, ankle, and neck staps. The surface was littered with deep scratch marks and more splatters of the same glowing green substance that he can only assume is blood. There was even an almost perfectly shaped handprint of the stuff curling around the edge of the table. Morbidly curious, he reached out to touch the handprint, wondering if it was related to the Pits somehow.

He didn't get to wonder for long, however. As soon as his fingertips so much as brushed against the handprint, the feeling he'd been following for the past week suddenly had his chest in a stranglehold followed by a vomit-inducing yank that left him dizzy and off-balance. He didn't have time to gather his wits before his ears were flooded with hair-raising screams and sounds of struggle.

Ignoring the nausea, his head whipped back up to the lab table he was standing in front of. What met his eyes was a young boy with black hair and terrified green-tinted blue eyes as he laid strapped to the table with men in white lab coats surrounding him, with one in particular having his green stained arm elbow deep in the boy's vivisected chest.(3) This one is important! More context below!

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Notes:

(1) This takes place before Jason returns to Gotham in Under The Red Hood

(2) What Jason is feeling is his baby halfa core reacting to a distress signal being sent by another halfa.

(3) This isn't a time travel prompt. What happened here is Jason got sucked into a very corporeal memory/imprint that belonged to Danny. What Danny experienced in that lab filled him with such raw emotions that everything that is part of him (i.e.- his blood) trapped every experience into a playable memory when said blood is touched. The memory is, in essence, still very much a part of Danny. What does that say about Danny's current existence? He's trapped. He's trapped in a neverending, disjointed cycle of reliving everything that was done to him and is forced to haunt the very lab he was held captive in. What does this mean for Jason since he got sucked into it? He's trapped too! However, with another person there, they can help Danny break out of the cycle and free himself. What will escaping mean? Will he permanently die? Will he come back a full ghost? Will Jason helping another person through the horrors of their own death help bring closure to his own? What does this mean for the rise of Red Hood? That's all up to you guys!

[megalony]

Secrets- Part 7

Another part to my latest Roger Taylor series which I hope you are all enjoying.

Taglist: @lunaticspoem @butlegendsneverdie @langdonzvoid @luvborhap @jennyggggrrr @radiob-l-a-hblah @rogertaylorsbitontheside @chlobo6 @rogertaylors-lipgloss @sj-thefan @omgitsearly @luckytrashgooprebel @scarsout

Series masterlist

Enjoy.

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"Why do you have that?" (Y/n) couldn't help but ignore the question she had been asked in order to ask her own. Roger's question was deemed unimportant compared to what (Y/n) had just seen in the box that was now resting on the floor.

(Y/n) needed to know why the box that had been kept up on a high shelf clearly out of the way, contained a small stack of bloodied clothing and why that was kept in Emily's room.

Why on Earth did Roger have clothes that were covered in matted, dried blood? Why had he kept them instead of throwing them out or trying to wash the stains out of them? What purpose could he have to keep those and why keep them in here? Emily's room was a treasure chest to Danny and it was a live-in memory for Roger, surely those clothes were not the kind of memory that the drummer would want in here to taint the memories of Emily that were walking around. He had her ghost in this room, he had her precious memory, why would he taint that with bloodied clothing that was God knows how old and where from?

"Why the hell are you in here?" Roger's words snapped at (Y/n) like the jaw of a crocodile. His body moving do he was bending down in front of the box that he held with such caution as if it were a living thing.

He delicately set the contents back inside the box before setting the lid on straight. Standing back to his full height to reach up and set the box back on its perch on the top shelf before he turned to look at (Y/n). An emotion in his eyes that she couldn't quite decipher but one that looked so much like a mix of anger and fear which made him seem very volatile.

"I was just looking, you've never objected before. Tell me why you have bloodied clothes in a box, Roger!" It was (Y/n)'s turn to snap back. Roger had never objected to (Y/n) coming in here, he didn't keep the room locked and he didn't expect her and Danny to stay out of here. Any other time she had glanced around her had told her it was fine to look around if she wanted. Now that she really had looked he was objecting because she had seen something that was clearly meant to be hidden away.

"It doesn't matter! Why do you have to pry into every little thing about my life? I saw you with Fred last week, you to twittering away about me and what happened with Em. I don't ask you about every detail of your life (Y/n) there's no need for you to pick at mine."

Roger wasn't stupid. He knew her little talks with Freddie every now and then were about him or Danny or Emily and to a point it was fine but then his defences went up. Roger didn't like the thought of anyone but Freddie knowing his life because the singer had been there through everything. He wanted to keep a certain level of privacy for himself and when people got too close he pushed them away to protect himself. This was Roger putting up the barriers but it seemed too late now because (Y/n) had gotten past them.

"I had a right to know you can't have kids Roger, that wasn't me prying for information just for the hell of it. I asked Freddie about Emily, I just wanted to know what she was like but this is different. You have a box with bloodied clothing in and don't see how hiding that away is wrong or worrying."

(Y/n) could understand Roger wanting privacy, she had gotten more than she bargained for when she asked about wanting children and then wanting the truth from Roger. She had only wanted to find out what Emily was like because she was faced with seeing pictures and memories of someone she essentially knew nothing about. But this wasn't (Y/n) prying for information, this was her asking what was going on because if Roger couldn't see that hiding away blood-covered clothes was rather disturbing and worrying then there was something very much wrong.

"Stop it! You shouldn't have been looking in there, it's out the way for a fucking reason. This is my life, my reality, not yours. I live with my past I don't want to share it." This whole room was full of Roger's past and his memories that both put him at peace yet haunted him in the dead of night. Roger's past and his secrets were his and his alone, he didn't want to share them with anyone because he wasn't burdening them with what plagued him.

Roger had to suffer the consequences of his past, he had to put up with it following him around like a weight shackled to his ankles and wrists. He took his past with him everywhere he went and he did not want to put that burden on anyone else. He didn't want people knowing why he carried them around and what had happened in his life. (Y/n) needed to stop prying before she found out the truth because it was breaking Roger and if she knew he doubted he would be able to put himself back together again.

(Y/n)'s hand pressed to her temple as she glanced from Roger to the box resting above him. One the one hand, this was Roger's life and his past and she had no reason to try and pick it apart and see it for herself. She was not in his past, only his future and therefore he had a right to keep his past to himself. But on the other hand, Roger had a past that was slowly tearing him apart piece by piece and (Y/n) wouldn't be able to fix him. If she didn't know what was going on then how was she meant to help him? How could they go forward from this point if he was always going to be holding something back from her?

"I can't just ignore this Roger. What part of your past involves you stuffing clothes into a box soiled with blood and keeping it in here?"

Such a fire of contorted emotions sparked to life in the drummer's eyes as he felt like he was trapped in a corner yet at the same time like he was about to explode. His nails were digging into the palms of his hands to harshly he was creating crescent moon indents into his skin. His chest was heaving to the point his ribs felt like they were going to fracture and splinter from the excessive rate they were expanding and contracting at.

If Roger chose not to tell his past right here, right now then he was condemning their relationship because (Y/n) clearly seemed unable to move past this point. But if he let his demons free then he was condemning himself because the reality of the situation would be set in stone. Roger had spent years trying to flee from his past that seemed to be following him everywhere he went. Owning up to that now would crush him under the weight of what he had been running from.

(Y/n) had been the one who had to choose first. She had been the one to decide whether a life with Roger was worth it and what she really wanted. Now it was Roger's turn.

Roger needed to decide whether spilling his secrets to (Y/n) would be worth it in the long run. Did he really want to let her know the secrets that only Freddie knew? Was their relationship worth the risk of not telling her? Roger seemed to be doomed no matter what choice he picked because something was going to go wrong for him either way. Much like (Y/n) would be losing something no matter what she had picked in the first place.

(Y/n) felt like a pin had been punctured into her lungs causing them to pop like balloons when Roger's fist pummelled into the wall behind the shelves on his left. His temple resting against the top shelf as he tried to gain back his breath and lose the anger before he reached for the box he had set back on the shelf. Leaving the lid on the shelf and putting the box on the next shelf down before reaching inside and pulling out the contents that (Y/n) had not properly seen, only having caught a glimpse of the horrors stowed away inside.

Tears began to well in Roger's eyes as he tentatively held the cream coloured shirt with little blue designs swirled onto it which the box once held. A shirt that was soiled with blood that tainted almost every inch of the fabric with either a large soaked patch of dried blood or little splatters that were like flecks of paint beginning to peel and fall to the floor.

When Roger decided that (Y/n) had studied it enough, he carefully rested it in the box as he grabbed the trousers the box also held. Pulling out the dark olive green trousers that were tainted with blood that was as black as the midnight sky. Blood that was flacking like a snake's skin. Blood that had no doubt soaked through the material and into the inside.

(Y/n) didn't understand why Roger had these in here.

They were clearly his clothes but they were neatly folded in a box and placed in Emily's room. Clothes that were painted with blood which hadn't been washed or thrown out.

The drummer folded them back up and put them back in the box, placing it back on the top shelf with the lid firmly in place before he turned to look at his girlfriend. His expression a mix of sadness, sorrow, grief and hate all swirled like pigments of paint ready to be used on a fresh canvas. Tears soaking into his face like droplets of acid just to add to the remedy of paint that his emotions were creating.

"You want the truth?" Roger's words were almost taunting as (Y/n) could have sworn that his lips were curving up into a broken smirk that resembled a smile that only a mad man would dare to show. The tone to his voice made her lungs quiver in her chest and her throat close up so all she could do was move her head in an indication that she would like him to talk to her.

(Y/n) wanted the truth but she didn't want to ask for it because she knew that what she was going to be told was more than she would bargain for. The bargain she was making made her feel like she had asked for so little but would end up taking so much. (Y/n) felt like she was going to take Roger's life away by asking for his secrets. Secrets that he was so unwilling to part with for reasons that would become clear as soon as he told his past to her. As soon as he painted the picture that she wasn't so sure that she wanted to see anymore.

"I was driving the car that killed Em. I cradled her dead body as her son cried in the backseat because I crashed that car. I have to bring up her child knowing I'm the reason he doesn't have a mother anymore. I killed her."

[orange-you-say]

the chains of harrow quest was really, really bad imo

(spoilers for literally the entire quest under the cut)

the quest starts out really promising - an abandoned steel meridian vessel, the crew slaughtered and the red veil insignia scrawled on the wall in what looks like blood. something really really wrong is happening here, a feeling amplified by a sudden red veil ambush after the spending the whole mission in eerie silence. then, when rescuing palladino, rather than fight against clear and defined red veil agents, you’re pitted against a force composed of some sort of shadow figure that shuffles about with no label. you’re hard pressed to spot them before they’re in your face because the level is also ominously dark, allowing them to blend in with the shadows, usually only seeing their red health bar when targeting them

after you rescue palladino you next investigate an abandoned corpus vessel. it’s the same deal as before - pitch black, eerie silence, with strange shadows dancing along the walls, looking almost human. you think you know what to expect this time, especially as you’re crashing a red veil seance - they’re gonna try to fuck you up, and you’re gonna have to fuck them up first and steal their sacred relic so palladino can try to get through to their god-figure rell.

the neat thing is that that isn’t what happens. the veil agents are all already dead, with their sacred artifact sitting in the center of the room. you nab it and get ready to head out, but you’re stopped. something is talking to you. it’s not happy you took the sacred gizmo.

and that’s when rell appears and all hell breaks loose

the shadow figures are back, and the veil agents are reanimating, which on their own would be easy enough to deal with - their defensive stats aren’t particularly noteworthy, and they drop after a couple of hits. the problem is rell. rell is a particularly ill defined shadow man with glowing red eyes who stands out for two other reasons. the first is that he has little minions that will chase you down while he catches up. the second thing that sets him apart is that he doesn’t have a health bar. you can’t kill him, and the doors are all chained shut. so you’re stuck in a room with shadow monsters and zombie edgelords and what amounts to about eight different horror movie monsters in one really pissed off god-figure who’s immortal. it’s great, it’s different, it takes away your ability to cheese it with a silly high amount of damage. it removes the sensation of being overpowered from you, which warframe struggles with in a lot of areas. anyways you escape and get back to your ship after palladino warns you that you can’t kill him, and that marks about the point where the quest starts going downhill

the next three missions of the quest are the same mission spread across different tiles - go to a room, use a kinetic siphon trap that simaris sold to you assuming you’d use it to capture prospective sanctuary candidates, and shoot the physical manifestation of one of rell’s emotions until it’s weak enough for the trap to absorb a la danny phantom. it’s boring, it’s grindy, and it would be painfully dull if it weren’t for rell following you and trying to murder you the whole time. it’s a very nice touch, as are his remarks on each emotion as you trap them, but the justification for it - apparently doing this will help him regain his “true self”, as well as the fact that you must capture a total of nine emotions over three missions, make it tedious and irritating.

finally, once rell’s emotions have been contained, you are asked to go to the red veil temple and straight up murder rell because apparently capturing his emotions did absolutely nothing to help him and now it’s his time to pass on, so off to destroy his vessel you go. this has the potential to have been a really touching moment in which we see rell’s humanity restored and free him from his prison after an epic showdown with who you’ve come to understand as “dark rell”. instead, you get a really obnoxious and painful sequence where you must fend off waves of veil agents between rounds of shattering the chains around rell’s vessel - as your operator. this could have been relatively simple and painless, albeit a little too easy, but instead you are forced to use the most fragile unit in your arsenal, and the enemies aren’t going easy on you. the veil agents will throw dagger users at you, and then bows that can take out a significant chunk of health (enough to kill me every time they hit me, but i never got hit by them at full health so idk how much damage they acutally do), followed by veil agents who are just straight up reskins of the shadow stalker with lowered stats. to top it off, “dark rell” or “the man in the wall” is floating around like an asshole and will pepper you with balls of fire periodically. it’s a really painful mission that perfectly captures how lacking in any ability at all the operator is - something that we’ve all been complaining about since the War Within dropped, so DE really has no excuse for how poorly thought out this was. the only positive side to this mission is that death didn’t set you back in the slightest - you respawn a few seconds later with the map exactly as you left it, right down to the number of hit points that asshole had left before he killed you, and keep going

level design notwithstanding, the lore to the quest also leaves a lot to be desired. over the course of the quest, we learn that rell was a tenno who was “different” (autistic), and for this, margulis cast him out. we already know margulis is a character of questionable morality from how she sealed our memories and abilities in the War Within, but this feels much more like a character being driven by the plot, rather than the other way around like it ought to be. margulis loved the tenno, and it seems odd that rell was the only tenno out of many who was “different”.

(and frankly, i find it incredibly frustrating that DE didn’t have the guts to outright say “margulis rejected rell because he was autistic” and instead left plenty of hints and implications that he was. it’s 2017, warframe is set even further in the future than that, we can say that characters are autistic without having a meltdown, and we are certainly above the idea that autism is grounds to reject someone is an acceptable plot device)

anyways margulis deciding rell wasn’t good enough for her apparently turned out to be a good thing, because he goes on to become an expert in void related knowledge which he shares with his disciples, who will eventually form the red veil. he also takes it upon himself to protect the system from what he calls the “man in the wall” - an entity hinted to be the “something out there, watching us” the tenno’s father talks about in TWW. because he knew he would eventually get old and die (which finally starts to answer my questions about tenno mortality - at the very least, people think the tenno are gonna age over time), he chose to permanently transfer his consciousness into the Harrow warframe

let’s back up a second here. rell wasn’t good enough for margulis. he wasn’t allowed to be put in cryosleep and dream with the other tenno. he never received a precursor to the warframe, and yet somehow he happens to have his own warframe? something doesn’t add up here, and it’s never going to be addressed.

after declaring that he must be chained up in the depths of the red veil temple for all eternity, he slowly starts to deteriorate into “good rell” and “bad rell”. “good rell” is who rell is - the clever, knowledgable, autistic child who was ostracized and made to be an outsider. “bad rell” is the man in the wall.

wait, what?

it turns out, while aboard the zariman, after his mother sends him away for his own safety as she succumbs to the madness all adults aboard the ship did, the other tenno still refused to acknowledge him and continued to exclude him. this resulted in him feeling incredible isolated and alone, which allowed the man in the wall to slip in and manipulate him. “bad rell” is nothing more than the man in the wall breaking free after rell’s mental state begins deteriorating. killing rell has apparently retrapped him - inside our own operator’s mind. (this last sentence is purely speculation on my part, given some of the weird things that happened after returning to the orbiter post quest)

this quest starts off strong gameplay wise, but deteriorates quickly in much the same way the Glast Gambit did, and has lore that’s more messy and contradictory than the current US administration on pretty much anything. it also raises a lot of questions for the few that are answered. what exactly is the man in the wall? where did it come from, and why is it so hostile? how did rell get a warframe, and why did his mind deteriorate, when Silvana, who didn’t even share the tenno’s powers, retain her mental stability, if not her ability to think quickly? why did rell’s emotions get free, and why didn’t capturing them do anything? for that matter, how did rell’s emotions attain physical manifestation and separation from their host? how does harrow actually play into all of this? is he really just a glorified set piece, or did his abilities in particular serve some purpose to rell?

honestly this quest was a mess and a disappointment all around