text | day 008 | HE412T

[timaeus]

[This text post comes after a few hours of radio silence following Dirk's first messages.]

Surprise, I survived.
"I told you so" etc etc.
Turns out the locals are pretty chill, all things considered.
I've learned their language and they have accepted me as one of their own.
By which I mean I'm cooling my heels in one of their longhouses for the rest of the night after they explained their whole Lost-adjacent dogma to me.
And I learned some shit you folks will probably be interested to hear about, judging by the fat wad of nothing y'all were able to tell me.
Key takeaways:
One, this particular group of natives speaks Morse code.
Tongue clicks for dots and hums for dashes.
Might wanna brush up on it if you don't feel like getting speared should you have a run-in with them.
And two, the people responsible for whatever this is are somewhere to the southeast, presumably on another island.

Comments

not here!!!

[salamanca]

[ Seeing someone reference what happened at the cabin so casually, only hours after he regained consciousness, has Lalo mildly furious. He is even more furious because he can do nothing about it. So instead he's just going to die a little bit on the inside.

He stares at his alias, spelled out so clearly for anyone who ventures past this in the past 24 hours to see, and feels a little sick. It's not as bad as an entire post dedicated to telling everyone what happened, of course, but that's almost gone.

Now here's another reminder.

That's not the only part of this conversation he's paying attention to ofc, but it's hard not to immediately notice.

Don't mind him, he's just going to stew quietly and helplessly. ]

[hyakuoku]

[ Sorry Lalo, Senku is too logic brained to consider this might be shitty. It's not personal or on purpose whoops! ]

[salamanca]

[ It's okay, Senku! Not your fault. He's not mad at you, anyway. On some level, Lalo is aware of how Senku is, and that there's likely no ill intent here.

But it also doesn't matter what Senku's intentions are. Lalo's failures are still being broadcast to anyone reading. The first thing, or one of the first things, that anyone new is going to hear about him is going to be his crowning humiliation. At least for a while. So Lalo is angry anyway. Not at Senku personally, but... at himself, which is a novel feeling for him and one it takes him a few minutes to register and place. He's angry, too, at the piece of shit in the cabin, of course. And at his situation, the way it exists in this present moment in time.

Lalo is used to people being terrified to offend him, even on accident. He is emphatically not used to coping with public embarrassment of this magnitude. He definitely is not used to the helplessness of it all. He is not used to having his failures broadcasted to everyone so freely, with no say in any of it.

He is, in fact, not used to failing, period.

Even if intellectually understanding the usefulness of specifics as a deterrent, trying to remember what Cohle told him, helps somewhat, it's still not enough to offset just how incredibly jarring this is.

But saying anything publicly seems likely to invite a sadist to mentally torture him, if there are any of those listening, and saying anything privately to Senku seems pointless when Senku is far from the only one casually discussing this so openly. Not to mention a good way to potentially offend a useful (hopefully) ally, who wasn't (Lalo is forced to admit to himself) trying to cause harm.

So, Lalo is forced to come back down to Earth, to take a deep breath, and to try to cope like, horror of horrors, a normal person. ]