2018 Advent Event - Casual Chat V.1 [read first post]

[lovely!]

The decembuary fam makes the causal chat so much better

[beebopbee]

The decembuary fam makes the causal chat so much better

the decembuary fam gives me more stuff than i need

[lovely!]

The decembuary fam makes the causal chat so much better

the decembuary fam gives me more stuff than i need

Nah. You deserve everything

[beebopbee]

The decembuary fam makes the causal chat so much better

the decembuary fam gives me more stuff than i need

Nah. You deserve everything

shut up i'm going to cry again

[risotto]

"Hey Vee-lad!" The greet was.. strange.
"It's pronounced 'Vlad'. The 'Y' is silent." Vylad responded back to Cipher. "Hey Cipher!"
"My life has been a lie." Cipher mumbled to himself.
Vylad let out low sigh. "Get off my igloo, Cipher, you're gonna melt it."
Cipher let out a low grumble and jumped off. "Fine."
"Did you ever put the star back?"
"In the trash? Yup!"
"Cipher why?"
"Because it belongs there! My ornament is the true star!" Cipher said. "Actually I lied, that's azalea, who's the true star!"
Vylad just shook her head and said. "Oh Cipher, what are we gonna do with you?" Vylad laughed softly.
"C'mon Vee-lad! To the casual chat!" Cipher said grabbing Vylad by the arm and pulling her along with him, leading her to the dreaded Casual Chat.
"Now we have everyone here!" Cipher yelled, throwing Vylad into one of the groups.
Jurassic cleared their throat and said very clearly. "We, the Decembuary Family, has prepared a farewell speech."
"Oh no." Vylad mumbled.
"Dinosaurs are better than wolves, don't yell at me, haters." Jurassic announced. There were only three of them, not the entire family, which the Chickensmoothians were grateful for that, they could only imagine if all the rulers of the thread were here.
Jurassic stepped down and Satan took their spot. "WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN?" Satan yelled out.
"Aisle Seven!" A chickensmoothian yelled out, covering their ears. The chickensmoothian were right in front of the stage.
Satan seemed pleased and left the stage, running off over to the dreaded, trade threads, looking for page seven.
It was Cipher's turn. The weird dorito stepped up and pulled out his husband and the baby macaw.
"These are the loves of my life! No touches!" Cipher said, holding them close to his body.
All of them nodded. "Yes, of course." Those poor Chickensmoothians. Jurassic walked down the stage with Cipher and they began to talk to the frightened players.
"Tony! Harold!" Cipher yelled out.
"Oh no." Tony mumbled. "Hey, C." Tony said turning around slowly to see Cipher waving them down franticly.
"How's the marriage? I though after you found out that Harold dated your aunt, it'd be ruined forever." Cipher said, grabbing Tony and pulling him in for a side hug.
"Um, I'm right here." Harold said raising a paw.
Tony just rolled with it and sighed. "Well Cipher, I've seen worst."
"He made me wash out my mouth with five full bars of soap." Harold said. "I can still taste it."
"He learnt well from me, after all, he made it so that they'd serve hot chocolate with water at the wedding just for me." Cipher said.
"It was my idea to give Tony all that soap." Vylad mumbled from somewhere in the crowd.
"Shut up Pineapple!" Cipher yelled at Vylad.
Going over to where Jurassic was, the sweet child was just petting a T-rex and a Velociraptor, and cuddling a kitty, how cute!
Satan has successfully found their children and was now pressing a bunch of buttons for the casual chat, accidently locking them all in.
Seriously, who's idea was it for them to rule the casual chat? On the bright side, every advent pet that the chickensmoothians brought in were with them, which Jurassic was firmly holding the leopard print kitty tightly, while Vylad was just sitting on the back of the T-rex Jurassic was just petting and Cipher was...
Hah! You thought Cipher was doing something else? Nope, he was still bothering Tony. Yup, just Tony.
Satan was trying to figure out how to unlock this, while all the mods were just sitting there in the freezing cold snow in the casual chat, drinking tea, hot chocolate, and coffee, eating a bit of chat and were gushing over the Strawberry Shortcake Ur, as was most of chickensmoothians.
The chickensmoothians were also cuddled up in blankets they got from that one box. It was a pretty cool sight to see everyone locked in the casual chat.
Banner and Tess looked like they were sleeping, but actually, they were doing a puzzle. A puzzle that was animated, aw, lucky.
Oh, Satan unlocked the casual chat, and it was locked again.
Satan will figure it out someday.
Sure enough, by the time it was unlocked, all the chickensmootians were asleep and cuddling up with pets and with the blankets. Needless to say, they shouldn't be in charge of all of this. It was a horrible idea, but very wise at the same time.

-------

Happy Holidays to y'all! Hope you enjoy this fanfic!


All the pets were too cute! I love them all and I need them all in my life, which now they are in my life. They melted my ice heart.

My children are okay, no one touched my blind daughter

the wendigo and barghest are safe oml much protected No one is allowed near them except family and the angsty rock sol

perfect

i love this so much i will yeet appreciate

[scarecrowz]

hey, all this talk of fanfic reminds me: i actually wrote this HELLA LONG fanfic for CS. it’s not really a CS fanfiction — it only uses the CS pets as characters, but i think it’s okay all the same. i’ve decided to post it below, but be warned: it is, like i said, really long. it’s 5k words. and it’s also really bad but i still spent all this time writing it so i am not going to trash it.

also: try and guess which advent calendar pet is cress hadley.

without further ado, behold decembuary’s garbage writing that she spent a lot of time on but probably shouldn’t have.

At around 6 to 7 pm, on some day in December (it might be December 16th, she doesn’t know), Cress Hadley will try to cross the fault on the side of Mount Deirdre.

She will, unsurprisingly, fail, and then die.

She will miscalculate and place her left foot just a little too low. Her foot will try to stand on something that isn’t there, and her mittened hands will grab at the edge of the ravine, trying to pull herself up, even though she knows the ending result like how she knows the tiredness seeping through her bones and like how she knows what will happen next because she’s lived (or died) through it four times before.

There will be one moment of timelessness, where Cress can feel the exact second her grip on the mountain’s edge slips and she tumbles down. She’ll watch the salt-shaker-sprinkled night sky from where she’s falling, rapidly dissipating as jaws of snowy mountain rock close in upon it. She’ll think to herself, this is the same mistake I’ve made four times in a row, I’ll get it right next time, like her life is an a
arcade video game she can restart by will.

It might as well be, honestly.

Beneath her sprawls the Rainbow Ravine, a name that invokes images of idyllic, rolling hills, and lazy summers, but it’s really just Cress’s name for the open graveyard that she passes above every single time she has to try and cross the fault again. In the Rainbow Ravine are the corpses of past mountain climbers and adventure seekers, who weren’t as lucky as Cress with her arcade-video-game life and her free restart button — once they fell through the fault, they were done for good. No insert coin to restart; nothing can buy back their lives, and no one will voluntarily bring their bodies back, either. Mount Deirdre is truly the most unfortunate final resting place — the oxygen up on the mountain is scarce, like a dollop of butter on bread spread far too thin, and the weather is harsh. Nobody will come to retrieve them, and so there they lie, at the bottom of the Rainbow Ravine, the brightly colored coats on their bodies forming a “rainbow”.

Cress has spent so much time on desolate Mount Deirdre that she’s pinpointed where in the rainbow her soft violet coat would fit in, and she’s figured out that her corpse would complete the rainbow stunningly well if she can manage to position her fall so that she’ll die right between the woman with the black strap boots and the man still wearing a brown backpack. To humor herself, she’s tried to do just that, but she always ends up off, and falls in the green area of the rainbow instead, ruining the whole thing.

Whatever. Even if she did end up in the right area, her corpse wouldn’t stay anyhow.

Cress Hadley is still falling, and now she’s looking at the moon. It’s a full moon the night she dies for the fifth time, and a younger Cress had a term specifically coined for this phase of the moon: a grapefruit moon. She wishes she could say it was because of something dramatic her mother said or an obscure, clever reference to something — but, in reality, 5 year old Cress had had a grapefruit for the first time the week prior, and when she saw the full moon, she pointed and said, ”Daddy, look at the moon! It’s round, like a grapefruit! A grapefruit moon!”

The name stuck. Ever since, the grapefruit moon has been the Hadleys’ odd version of family night, where they all gather to play a board game or go stargazing or watch reruns of old TV shows on TV. If it’s December 16th like Cress has theorized, then her favorite show will be on tonight at 8.

A shame I’ll be missing it because I’m too busy falling off a cliff and dying, Cress thinks.

The death part only hurts for a second. Cress doesn’t know what happens precisely — she’s never researched how the human body specifically dies when it falls off a cliff — but based on her past four experiences of falling off this exact cliff and dying, it’s something like this: all of her bones snap at the same time, and then she’ll scream, but it’ll only last a second, and then something soft, like a blanket, will fall over her. That’s the Veil; the curtain-like barrier that separates the living from the dead. Cress is technically not dead, since she got into this predicament through a mistake, but after dying via falling off a cliff four times, she knows she can’t call herself completely alive either.

She’s nearing the end of the fall now; the death part never gets easier. Cress shuts her eyes, and, in an instant, she feels her bones — cervical vertebrae, clavicle, femur, patella, manubrium sterni, she remembers from a diagram in science class years ago — all snap, giving off a sound as loud as a fired shotgun to Cress but probably only as loud as the sound of a woodchip snapping to Mount Deirdre. That might even be too generous of a metaphor.

Cress manages to not scream this time, consciously trying to preserve her voice. Something soft brushes her cheek, and then, through her thick layers of winter apparel, Cress has the faint feeling of it covering her. It’s the Veil.

What a shame this all has to happen on the grapefruit moon, Cress thinks, right before she falls through her world and into the next.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Like dying, falling never gets easier. Field trips and family getaways to theme parks were always Cress’s bane — even the funny little jump her stomach did when riding in an elevator made her a bit nauseous, much less technicolor carts that spin and twirl and loop endlessly around thin tracks.

The fall from the world of the living into the world of the dead is a thousand times worse than any human-made rollercoaster, even ones that boast of their height and speed. Cress squeezes her eyes shut as she feels herself pass right through the atom-thin, translucent Veil, and into a tunnel of sorts. She can never tell, but she doesn’t intend to look and find out, either.

She tumbles and turns. Soft, pastel shapes wiggle on her eyelids, like colorful static; something sour and fruity rises up from her stomach and into her throat, tasting like bitter lemonade, and Cress wonders: if I vomit right now, into the abyss, where exactly would my vomit go?

There’s a whoosh of wind. Cress can feel her hair snap violently against her cheeks, like somebody’s just abruptly yanked a blanket off of her. Even with all of the gymnast-worthy twirls and spins and flips she’s done on the way down, she still, somehow, ends right side up, hard floor beneath her snow boots. It feels lovely to stand on something stiff, something solid, after all of the time Cress spent on Mount Deirdre having to calculate whether a section of rock was trustworthy enough to stand on, but the first thing Cress does is reach for the closest steady object and prepare for a ocean torrent of vomit.

“Are you okay?” someone asks.

Cress waits one, two, three, four seconds for the vomit to make its way out, but it never comes. Eyes still closed, she gasps loudly, like she’s just surfaced from an extended period of time underwater.

“That sounds like a no,” the person says sympathetically. “I’m just a Worker, so I don’t really….I can’t help you. I organize things. But, uh, here—let me just—give me a moment—”

There’s a slight shuffle, a hideous screech of wood on some other material, and then something solid is pushed against the back of Cress’s knees. Placing a foolish amount of trust on the unseen person, Cress topples backward like a top-heavy toy. She’s delighted to find that the mystery item is, in fact, a chair.

“They’ve got chairs in the afterlife now?” Cress slurs. “I thought that was a Death-exclusive thing. The bastard had chairs in their office last time I came here.”

She still hasn’t opened her eyes, but she knows enough about the people of the afterlife to know that the mysterious Worker most likely winced at her name-calling of Death: bastard. You don’t talk about the herald of the infinite abyss that way; you don’t talk about the reaper of your soul and the judger of your place in the afterlife that way, but Cress has been here four (on five!) times, and she and Death are practically close friends now.

Well. Not friends, not really, but Cress has met Death three more times than a normal human being should. It’s about to be four now.

She opens her eyes.

Cress does not like the afterlife — especially not the part where she has had to come here four (on five!) times and then has had to go and bargain with Death in their office, which really feels more like talking to a particularly unresponsive cat rather than the inevitable fate for all of humanity — but Cress briefly was an art student before Death dumped her on Mount Deirdre, and she has a good appreciation for the architecture of the afterlife.

The entry to the afterlife is housed in a golden library, as vast and as large as the universe Cress came from itself; in all directions are ceiling-high shelves, filled with books and complicated numbers that organize those books. Each book represents a person: their life, their memories, their ancestry, other things, sort of like an uncomfortably detailed biography. The books are organized by time period, with a century each — from here, Cress can faintly see multiple aisles of shelves labeled 1900-2000, the residence of the books of everyone who died in that epoch. Workers — such as the absolutely wonderful person who gave Cress a chair, what a saint — are responsible for shelving and organizing things.

The one hundred year intervals are not the best way of sorting things. Cress personally thinks that it would be better if the people were organized in intervals of thirty years — 1900-1930, 1930-1960, 1960-1990, and so on, making specific individuals easier to find, but human history is millions of years long, and it would get extremely tedious to organize in such small periods of time. It’s incredibly difficult to find a certain person in the Archives when they’re one among thousands who died in a span of one hundred years, but that’s why the afterlife is a wonderfully weird mesh of futuristic technology and a total lack of technology.

A large control panel stands under a golden dome, right in the center of the afterlife’s library, glowing neon light blue and constantly clicking and whirring like it’s having a conversation with itself. Hundreds of buttons, levers, and a massive keyboard are laid out on slanted panels, each with a label in a language that certainly is not anything from Earth. Each person who has ever died has a specific call number eighty digits long (for the average human lifespan, which is eighty years, Death told her, when she had asked why the call numbers were so long the last time she had been here, and also so that there will be no repeats. Someday, so many humans will die to the point where I’ll have to extend the call number to a hundred digits. Maybe even a thousand.). Punch in a call number and find the individual you’re looking for at once.

It’s clever. Cress will have to give Death that.

Ten massive screens line the inside of the dome; Cress is sure that they have a practical use, but so far she has only seen them display various, aesthetically pleasing backgrounds, like a cloudless blue sky or a cluster of twirling nebulas, because even higher beings value appearance sometimes. To the very right of the whole thing lies giant, ornately carved double-doors — the official Judgement Chamber, where all deceased individuals are organized according to their beliefs in life (Christian, Muslim, Atheist, Buddhist, Hindu, Agnostic, a lot of other things — hey, Cress isn’t a religion expert!), and then organized again according to some other standard that Cress doesn’t know. She hasn’t died yet. Not for real, anyway.

The godly soul who offered Cress a chair is now looking at her worriedly. She’s clad in red, with a white cloth draped about her form, pinned in place with a golden flower. She’s accompanied by two others, who are wearing similar clothing — one is dressed in green, and the other in light blue — and they’re all staring down at Cress in something between concern and fear, like they’re afraid she’ll drop dead on the floor any minute.

Cress can understand. Humans aren’t supposed to be here, in the library — they’re supposed to be on the other side of the double-doors, standing in a line long enough to rival Walmart on Black Friday, waiting to be judged. To have a human unexpectedly show up on the wrong side of the doors is a catastrophic break in the Workers’ routines, and when all you ever do is sort books all day and run the occasional errand for Death, something like this leaves you without the slightest semblance of what to do. And from what Cress knows about the Workers, they don’t do well without a routine. She can sympathize.

“I’m not going to die,” Cress says. “I’m Cress Hadley, by the way. What’s your name?”

The three exchange anxious glances, each urging the other to speak and each clearly not wanting to speak.

“Jane,” says the one who gave Cress the chair, and Cress’s love for them is a bit diluted now. Jane isn’t a bad name — Jane Austen is a good author, by all means — but Jane? For an angel? It’s disappointing is what it is. Why would an unearthly being have one of the simplest, most earthly girl names?

Cress raises an eyebrow. “Is that your real name?” she asks.

“Well, no,” the supposed Jane says in an unreasonably panicked manner, like Cress has just caught her for committing some heinous crime. “It’s not my real name, but—you see—our names are so long and unpronounceable for the human tongue. We just—we just resorted to using regular human names for better communication with humans.”

“That’s reasonable, I guess,” Cress says. “What’re the names of your friends?”

Supposed-Jane gestures to the green one with an extended wing. “This is Ivy,” she says, and then gestures at the blue one with her other wing. “And this is Charlotte.” Supposed-Ivy and Supposed-Charlotte each give an awkward little smile at the mention of their names, like they’re not exactly sure how to perform the action. Cress smiles back at them, and unconsciously, they mimic the action, smiling wider.

“I’m here to speak with Death,” says Cress, ignoring the audible gasps the colorful trio give at that. “Are they in office today?”

“You can’t just do that,” Supposed-Jane says, her voice becoming much sharper than it was a few minutes ago; apparently she had a rough side after all. “That’s not—you can’t just drop in here and then request to speak with them. Humans can’t do that.”

They’ve seen me, a human, four times, Cress thinks, and they’re about to see me for the fifth time, regardless of what you say.

“If you’re here, you’re dead,” Supposed-Charlotte adds, “and that means you’re supposed to be in the Judgement Chamber. Not here, disturbing our work.”

Supposed-Ivy looks Cress up and down, her lips pursed as she thoroughly rakes in Cress’s — quite frankly — ridiculous outfit: violet coat, at least 5 scarves, hard climbing boots with straps thicker than Cress’s index finger, and a variety of other equipment strapped to Cress’s back in the form of a backpack about to burst at the seams.

“Mountain death?” Supposed-Ivy asks, her voice having a much kinder note in it than the other two, and Cress’s liking has immediately shifted from Supposed-Jane to Supposed-Ivy. “It happens. We’ve had a few unsuccessful mountain climbers pass through.”

“Cress Hadley!” booms a voice that sounds like it’s reverberating off of every gold-and-white surface in this ridiculously extravagant library. “Back again? Really?”

Cress has learned that even higher beings, as much as they look down their nose at humans like her, desire to fit in at times; Death has taken a different appearance for every time Cress had been here, switching skin tones and eye colors and hair like an indecisive little girl playing dress-up. This time, Death manifests as a woman — much taller than Death’s last incarnation, Cress notes — with porcelain skin and hair almost as black as the cloak Death wore in their true form. Death had a pair of lovely blue eyes last time, ones that Cress almost envied (although she would never say so), but this time they had been switched to a dull green, the color of a leaf desperately trying to cling onto the last of its chlorophyll. Also having apparently discovered the existence of lipstick, Death had graciously applied a thick layer of it.

“You look like Snow White,” Cress says. “Skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, hair as dark as ebony.” She thoroughly enjoys how the trio of angels watch this exchange with equal parts horror and morbid fascination.

“It’s not like you have a very good perception of what beauty looks like, anyway,” Death says indignantly.

“Better watch yourself before I slip you an apple,” Cress says idly.

Death pinches the bridge of their nose with long fingers the same ashen-porcelain color as their face. It’s almost a little disturbing.

“Come to my office,” Death says, toneless and resigned. They both know what comes next. They’ve had this conversation four times before. They’re about to have it for the fifth.

Before Cress can stand up from her spot on the chair, though (she’s almost a little mournful at having to leave it), Death snaps their bony fingers, and Cress is falling again.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Death’s office is like a panel in a comic book the artist didn’t bother to finish. At least, that’s what Cress thinks it would look like; like any mortal, Death can’t help showing off at times (the gold trim and ornately carved decorations in the Archives speak volumes of that), but when they have a space solely to themself, it seems like they prefer something modest and easy to navigate. Cress likes to think that Death’s office is like any plain office back at home: white-walled with that classic dreary-office-in-a-tall-building beige, and a plain gray desk with things like a slightly rickety computer and scattered papers all over it. Cress would even go as far to say that Death seems to be like the kind of person who would hang up pictures of their children at soccer practice, that is, if Death actually could have children.

The key word is thinks. That’s what Cress thinks Death’s office would look like.

The problem is that she cannot see it.

Not at all.

It’s like walking into a pitch black room that your eyes never adjust to — if she reaches out her hands and gently pats along (which Death advises her not to do — she had broken their favorite ceramic mug last time, although Cress knows it was really just a ploy on Death’s side to have something to scold Cress for; Death can’t drink or eat, and how did that poor mug end up here anyway?), she can feel some vaguely familiar shapes: the edge of a desk, notebook paper, something hard and plastic-y, a few pencils in need of sharpening.

But she can’t see it. Everything is black and featureless, like someone thought it a practical joke to photoshop the environment out from right under Cress’s feet. Death has to gently grab Cress’s arm and guide her to the chair that she can feel but can’t see, and she feels remarkably like a misbehaving toddler being told to sit down.

She sits anyway.

“So,” Death says. Accompanying a small click, their hands move in a motion that suggests Death is fumbling with their clipboard again, but Cress can’t see the clipboard either. It just looks like Death is holding a black rectangle between their pale fingers. “Based on what I just did, I’m assuming you still can’t see anything in my office.”

“That’s right, genius,” Cress says. Death only sighs and, to their credit, pulls off a well-executed facepalm by slamming their clipboard to their forehead in a passably normal motion, which is a rather big accomplishment for them. Higher beings are, unfortunately, fated to act and speak like higher beings, unable to blend in; something about any human action they do feels wrong, feels off. Death still has a long way to go before they can perform other human actions smoothly, but they’ve started to speak in the normal human being way and not in the weird theatre production crossed with some variant of dramatic slam poetry way. And they did a good facepalm just now, too. Baby steps. Baby steps.

“You know the rule,” Death says. “If you can’t see the door to the afterlife, then you can’t go there.”

“Why didn’t you just let me go into the Judgement Chamber?” Cress asks. “Surely they’ve got a door to the afterlife there, right?” It has to be. Not only is having every dead person pass through Death’s office annoying for Death themself, but it’s also highly impractical.

“You wouldn’t be able to see the door there either,” Death says, almost pitifully. “It would just appear as a black, rectangular void. You wouldn’t be able to pass though.”

Cress juts out her chin indignantly. “I can’t pass through because it was Jonah who was supposed to die in the lake accident, not me!” The lake accident is what Cress has taken to using to refer to the incident that caused her (really, Jonah’s) death: two bikes on a snowy winter day, riding a little too fast down the slope, a lake with ice too thin, a collision; it’s all very messy.

“You seem very willing to let Jonah die,” Death remarks. “It surprises me. You seem more the type to play the tragic hero and accept your fate for the good of the realm and then believe that Jonah has a chance for redemption.”

“That’s what you want me to do,” Cress says. “I’m willing to let Jonah die because he keeps picking on my little sister. Saying how because she’s adopted she’s not a ‘real’ part of our family. Utter garbage, I tell you.”

“I can’t really feel human emotions,” Death admits, “but I agree that I would be filled with a similar rage should that sort of thing ever happen to someone I care about.”

“Do you care about anyone?” Cress asks.

“Well, I do care about the souls of the deceased people who come to me and I hope that they have a safe journey into the afterlife,” Death offers awkwardly.

“I guess that works.”

There’s a pause where Cress idly kicks her feet against her chair, neither of them — Death or Cress — sure what to say. Death reaches out across their non-existent (at least, for Cress) desk and scribbles a few things down, and then begins to flip through pages on their clipboard. At first it seems like they do it with a specific purpose in mind, but as time passes, it’s apparent Death is just trying to have something for their hands to do to alleviate a bit of the awkwardness.

While Cress’s chair suffers more undeserved abuse from Cress’s feet, Death switches from paper-flipping to cracking their knuckles very loudly; the noise the action produces is a crack that, if Death were a mortal like her, Cress would’ve immediately hailed them an ambulance. It sounds less like “casual knuckle crack” and more like “I am going to set a Guinness World Record for first person to ever to break their own bones via knuckle crack and I’m already successful, based on the sound my bones just produced”.

Death cracks their knuckles again. It appears to be some sort of stress reaction, or maybe something just to fill the empty void (very literal, on Cress’s part) between them.

“Alright,” Death says, and turns the clipboard toward Cress, tapping at some specific section with the edge of their finger. So it turns out they were doing something after all, although Cress can’t exactly see the fruits of their labor; she can’t see anything, actually.

“If you look here—” Death begins, but when Cress just stares at them, they realize their mistake. “Oh. Right. Can’t see it.” Death turns the clipboard back to themself and mumbles something.

“Are you going to send me back?” Cress asks hopefully. She misses her family, she misses Elowen, her little sister; she misses trivial things that she, regretfully, took for granted: the little pre-spring flowers that poke their heads out of the ground (obviously no flowers grow on desolate Mount Deirdre), lazy Saturday mornings (she can’t afford to be lazy on Mount Deirdre), telling bedtime stories to Elowen, being certain where her next meal comes from (food doesn’t come easy on the mountain — sometimes it doesn’t come at all), and having someone, something to talk to.

Cress isn’t sure of the procedures of the afterlife, but she has a vague idea of how this mess came to form, and it really only comes down to two mistakes. In the lake accident, Jonah was the one meant to die, not her; that was the first mistake.

When Cress came to Death’s office for the first time, Death sympathetically gave Cress a second chance at life, and then placed her back into the world as some unfortunate mountain-climber. That was the second mistake.

Death should’ve sent her back into her own body, back when the doctors were pulling Jonah and Cress’s unconscious bodies out from the lake, not send her to Mount Deirdre. Cress has no skills to survive as a mountaineer, and since she wasn’t supposed to have died in the first place, the door to the afterlife doesn’t recognize her and therefore she cannot pass through.

And so Cress dies. And the door will not let her through. And Death has no choice but to send Cress back, and soon she’ll die again. It repeats in the worst kind of cycle.

This is a disaster, Cress thinks miserably.

Death digs their knuckles into their eyes frustratedly. “Listen. I want to send you back. You are really slowing down my work—”

“How am I slowing down your work? You sent me into the mountains to die!”

“I did not,” Death says indignantly. “It was a second chance at life. I was sympathizing with you, okay?”

Cress snorts. “A second chance at life on Mount Deirdre? I’d rather I just die.”

“And I’d rather you just die and move on into the afterlife too,” Death says. They give a jerky, awkward sweeping motion to their general left, still having not perfected human motions. “But that’s the problem. The door to the afterlife won’t recognize you.”

“Can’t you send me back?” Cress pleads. “That’s what you should’ve done in the first place!”

“It’s too late now,” Death says resignedly. “I’m fairly sure your family has already buried you. You’ll wake up in a partially decomposed body in a casket three feet under the ground.”

“I’ll dig my way out,” Cress insists. “I can handle it.”

Death shakes their head. “You’ll just die again.”

“Then the door will recognize me!”

“It won’t,” Death says flatly. “Because you died from—unnatural circumstances. Circumstances that you should’ve never been in.”

“Yeah,” Cress says angrily, “circumstances that I should’ve never been in, but are in any way because you can’t do your job! Look. I’m a pianist. I can’t live in the mountains. You have to send me back, partially decomposed body and all.”

“I can’t,” Death says furiously. “Say you—somehow—succeed in digging yourself out of your casket. How frightened would your family be? How would you like it if a supposedly dead family member dug themselves out of their grave and came to your door?”

“Depending on which family member, I’d be happy to see them again,” Cress responds flatly.

“Cress Hadley, you are insufferable,” Death fumes, flipping through their clipboard pages. “I have things to do. Enough humans have finally died that I need to expand the standard call number to eighty-five digits, and that requires a reorganizing of the entirety of the Archives — every single person who ever died. There’s family heirlooms and bloodlines I need to sort out, there’s so much—I can’t have you repeatedly coming in here and just ruining everything.”

“Just ruining everything?” Cress practically shouts. “You threw me into the mountains!. I swear. I’m not about to suffer the consequences for your actions. I don’t want to be locked in this life-death cycle anymore!”

“Learn to adapt, Hadley,” Death says. “Learn to live in the mountains.”

“If you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly going out of my way intentionally to make your life—I mean, your existence, miserable.” Cress says coldly, but if anything, her voice gets more heated, turning louder on every syllable. “I’m not going to learn to live in the mountains. I’m not going to live with your incompetence, you absolute twat!”

There’s a pause. Even when Cress can’t see anything, she can feel the storm brewing on the horizon, just out of her view.

“Get out,” Death says faintly. “Get out of my office.”

So much for not feeling human emotions.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

At around 6 to 7 pm, on some day in December (it might still be December 16th, she doesn’t know), Cress Hadley will try to cross the fault on the side of Mount Deirdre.

She will, unsurprisingly, fail, and then die.

She’s back where she started. She knows how it goes.

edit: lmao i messed up the italics
edit: somehow a line didn’t get copy-pasted in? how

just so i can read it later-

[Aliria]

hey, all this talk of fanfic reminds me: i actually wrote this HELLA LONG fanfic for CS. it’s not really a CS fanfiction — it only uses the CS pets as characters, but i think it’s okay all the same. i’ve decided to post it below, but be warned: it is, like i said, really long. it’s 5k words. and it’s also really bad but i still spent all this time writing it so i am not going to trash it.

also: try and guess which advent calendar pet is cress hadley.

without further ado, behold decembuary’s garbage writing that she spent a lot of time on but probably shouldn’t have.

-snip-

edit: lmao i messed up the italics
edit: somehow a line didn’t get copy-pasted in? how

Hey this is so good what the heck. Writing this well is illegal.

[beebopbee]

hey, all this talk of fanfic reminds me: i actually wrote this HELLA LONG fanfic for CS. it’s not really a CS fanfiction — it only uses the CS pets as characters, but i think it’s okay all the same. i’ve decided to post it below, but be warned: it is, like i said, really long. it’s 5k words. and it’s also really bad but i still spent all this time writing it so i am not going to trash it.

also: try and guess which advent calendar pet is cress hadley.

without further ado, behold decembuary’s garbage writing that she spent a lot of time on but probably shouldn’t have.

-snip-

edit: lmao i messed up the italics
edit: somehow a line didn’t get copy-pasted in? how

Hey this is so good what the heck. Writing this well is illegal.

i'm illegal smh

[television]

viewpet.php?id=285166125
my offsite is going to be the evil pps 😔

[beebopbee]

https://www.chickensmoothie.com/viewpet.php?id=285166125
my offsite is going to be the evil pps 😔

this is so sad alexa play despacito