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to go to hell in one's own fashion
angband kib and hell karen
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There is a person, lying on the burning sand, not even particularly arranging himself for less sand contact, eyes closed against the light, whimpering a little involuntarily now and again. He wasn't there the last time she checked.

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Nobody was here last time she checked. Nobody has ever been here. She didn't really think there were any other people in existence. 

She stares at him a while, hovering just above the sand, waiting to see if he'll do anything else on his own without her interference.

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Nope. He lies there and breathes and makes sad noises.

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Hmmmmmmm.

(It takes her a very long time to decide to do things, these days.)

Eventually she determines that he is a person, and if he is a person he might have the capacity to feel pain, and if he can feel pain he might want to not, and perhaps he would do more things if he were not in pain. 

She flies away and brings a large tarp made of skins sewn together with hair, and brings bones and ropes from elsewhere in the world, and sets to work arranging the bones and the sand around him in such a way that they can support the tarp, which can then form a little canopy that can shield him from the sun.

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Eventually he stops whimpering, because he has fallen asleep. He sleeps peacefully under the tarp for almost an hour, murmuring words.

THEN HE STARTS SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS.

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Gosh! Lots of different new sounds that she doesn't understand, and then a different sound that she does understand. That is the sound that someone makes when they're in pain, she thinks.

He should be getting burnt less now, and there aren't any cuts in him, so she isn't very sure what to do about this. She floats down under the canopy and sits beside him to see if maybe she missed any obvious damage.

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He's still asleep, and is indeed getting burnt less now. He has a lot of scars and bruises and is very thin and missing a couple toenails.

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Hmmmmm. When these things happen to her she does not scream. 

She's going to wait for a while again and see if he does anything else.

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Screaming a whole lot, and then back to mumbling words after a couple hours of screaming.

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Huh. That's weird and she doesn't really understand it. Possibly he is a less interesting person than she is.

She's pretty content to keep sitting here and see if there's a pattern to when he does which things, though.

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Well, eventually he wakes up. He opens his eyes, focuses on her for a moment, then sighs and closes his eyes again.

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Huh.

Somehow she always imagined other people doing more things than her, not fewer. But she did spend a long time just daydreaming, when she first found a way of stopping the sand from burning her, so it could be that that's all he'll want to do for a while.

She doesn't want to cut his pattern short, not when she's only been watching him for one sleep, so eventually she curls up and goes to sleep under the canopy, without further interacting with him. She doesn't scream or talk in her sleep. She's very still. 

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He doesn't bother her. When she wakes up he's still just lying there, crying a little.

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Huh. Crying is different than before. She'd better keep just watching him as long as he's still doing new things. The pattern might change if she does something else, and then she'll never be able to see this pattern again.

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He falls asleep again after a while. He says things in his sleep in a variety of tones of voice.

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That's cool. She likes listening to it. After a while she starts playing with the shape and movement of the air to see if she can make sounds that sound vaguely similar to the ones he makes.

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He seems to be doing it with his mouth! How about that.

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Hmmmm. She tries making sounds with her mouth. Her voice is quiet and raspy, but it makes some kind of similar sounds, if she tries to move her mouth the same way he is. She spends a long while alternating between mouth sounds and moving the air with telekinesis. Telekinesis gets closer to how his mouth-sounds sound, eventually, though she's still just stringing the individual sets of sounds together in random orders. 

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Eventually there is more screaming.

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Well that's less interesting. She already knows what screaming sounds like. 

She listens anyway. Maybe if she sits here watching she'll eventually figure out what's wrong.

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He still seems asleep and does not appear to have any new injuries.

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Well. She's not sure what's wrong, then. She'll just stay here and wait for him to go back to making more interesting sounds.

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The more interesting sounds resume. Then he quiets, opens his eyes, glances at her, closes them again.

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Oh well! He'll go back to making interesting sounds in a few hours; that's the pattern.

She goes back to practicing making the sounds herself with telekinesis. She can copy what he said earlier pretty exactly if she makes the air move the way it moved when it came out of his mouth.

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He ignores most of this but eventually responds to one of her sounds with another sound!

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Oooh!

She repeats the last set of sounds she made. And then repeats the sound that he just made.

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He says the same sound again.

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She repeats just that sound again.

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He doesn't say anything this time.

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Awww.

....she can try the sounds she made before, again?

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That gets a repeat.

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Hmmmmm.

She can repeat some of the other sounds he made when he was asleep and see if he responds to any of those?

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Not most of them.

He does make a new sound after she's gone through about fifty.

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She repeats that sound!

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He repeats it too!

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She doesn't really know what to do with this. 

She.... repeats the response-sound he made the first time?

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Second response sound.

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She... repeats both of the response sounds one after the other?

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Second response sound.

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Hmmmm. There's probably a pattern but she isn't sure what it is.

She tries the sound that got him to make the first response sound.

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First response sound.

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She makes both of the response sounds at the same time, one coming from her left and one coming from her right.

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He opens his eyes for a moment and then closes them again and doesn't say anything.

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Darn.

She goes back to repeating sounds she heard before in random orders.

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Sometimes she will get First Response Noise, sometimes she will get Second Response Noise.

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It's weird how he makes more sounds when he's asleep than when he's awake. She wonders whether she makes more sounds when she's asleep.

Eventually she flies away. When she comes back she has a little bone flute.

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He doesn't react to that.

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She plays the flute. Maybe this will provoke more sounds?

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He turns his head a bit, but he doesn't say anything.

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Hmm.

She plays for a while and then goes back to repeating the set of sounds she's heard him say.

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The sounds that get a particular response seem to get it consistently and the others get nothing.

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Huh. Any besides the two sounds that provoked reactions before?

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She can get First Sound three ways and Second Sound two ways.

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Huh.

She makes the sounds that provoke responses for a while longer, and then she goes back to sleep.

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When she wakes up he's asleep again too, murmuring again.

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She pays close attention so that she can repeat the sounds back to him when he's awake.

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She has lots of new things to try!

She can get a THIRD SOUND with enough experimentation with the new words.

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Exciting!!

She repeats the third sound back to him.

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He confirms it again.

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She goes through the whole list of words that get responses again.

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They are all the same.

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She is pleased with the amount of a pattern that this is.

After a while she plays back the sound of him screaming, to see what he makes of that.

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He ignores it.

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She goes back to trying other sound patterns. Now she's going to string the sounds together and try to make all of the possible combinations of two, so she can see if any of those get responses.

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Somewhat fewer of these get reactions but the ones that do get a slightly wider variety - four common responses, another half a dozen less common, one of which is significantly longer than the others.

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She repeats the long response back to him.

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No answer.

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Hmmmm.

She goes through all of the words and word combinations that got responses again.

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Responses are about the same. One two-sound combination doesn't get an answer this time and the one that got a long answer before instead gets nothing.

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Huh. She repeats the one that got the long answer a couple times.

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Nothing again, then the long answer again.

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She repeats the long answer again.

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No response.

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She tries... the long response and then all of the other responses?

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He doesn't answer. He does roll over.

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Huh.

She goes back to trying sound combinations. When she's tried all of the combinations of two, she tries combinations of three, starting with combining the ones that got responses earlier.

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Even fewer of these get answers but one combo gets a new long one.

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Oooh! She repeats the new long one.

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First Response Noise.

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Oooh.

She tries all of the combinations of response-sounds. Including both of the long ones.

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Sixth Response Noise followed by the new long one gets First Response Noise.

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Hmm. She repeats that combination a few times so she remembers it. 

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He doesn't answer the repetitions.

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She seems pleased with herself anyway.

And then she goes to sleep again.

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Will she be awakened by VERY LOUD SCREAMS?!?!

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Apparently yes. She's not sure she's ever been woken up by something before. It's confusing.

She makes his previous scream sounds back at him.

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This wakes him up!

He blinks at her.

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She makes all of his other response sounds back at him!

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He rolls over and goes back to sleep.

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Awwww. 

 

She makes the screaming sound at him again.

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That wakes him up but he doesn't say anything.

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Well, she knows how to wake him up now, anyway.

She decides to just wait for him to go to sleep again so that she can get more sounds from asleep-him.

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Eventually he obliges.

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More sounds!!!!

When he wakes up she repeats all of his new sounds to him.

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She can get short responses to a handful of them.

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She adds those words to her mental list of sounds that get responses, and then tries combining each of the new sounds with each of the other sounds.

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He continues with his pattern of sleeping a lot and sometimes saying words and sometimes SCREAMING in his sleep. When he's awake he'll move around slightly now and then but doesn't get up or anything.

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When he's awake she tries new sound combinations on him and sees if she can get new responses. Sometimes she gets up to four sound-chunks in a row, but she can't get very far on that systematically and the next time he sleeps she always has new words to start over with. Occasionally she plays her flute.

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Eventually even the words that usually get answers stop doing so reliably; when he tries to answer sometimes he starts coughing instead and he talks less for a while whenever that happens.

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Ohhh. His throat's going to stop working right, and then he'll make fewer sounds. If she can't fix it then she won't get any more sounds. 

 

She flies away. (While he's awake - he's kind of more interesting when he's asleep, and she doesn't want to miss any of that.) She comes back with a little bone bowl made from a skull and a little bone knife. She sits down under the tarp. She cuts her wrist with the knife, winces, and lets her blood flow into the bowl.

 

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She gives him the bowl. 

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He takes it and sits up a little. He tastes the blood. He puts the bowl down without drinking much and flops down again.

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But is he going to make sounds.

She coughs at him.

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No response.

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Aww.

She kind of wants to further investigate whether this has solved the problem sufficiently, but she's not very good at thinking right now.

 

After a while she faints, still bleeding.

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He doesn't react to that either.