I shall never be forgiven all my faults

[Quiet sounds - wind scattered dead leaves that have been tracked into the hall, a kettle softly bubbling, the ticking of a clock and the humming of the stove. Giles enjoys the silence for a while before he speaks.]

Happy Halloween, everyone. Day late and, um, a dollar short, I know, but...we were all a bit preoccupied yesterday, weren't we?

...after all of that, though, I must say I still preferred this fiasco to last year's.

[A chair is pushed back. Footsteps can be heard as Giles starts to pace. Edna gives a soft squeak as he picks her up from the floor.]

For those of you who weren't here for Halloween last year? Count yourselves fortunate - not only were we stuck in truly ridiculous costumes, but by the end most of us were hallucinating and half mad. The Malnosso chose to alleviate the situation by stuffing us all in a tent where a maniac in a beak mask teleported about tearing out our feathers all night.

...shame the masks wouldn't burn as well as the costumes. Personally, I found setting that stupid outfit on fire to be remarkably therapeutic.

Do you know what Halloween was, back home? Halloween was supposed to be the night where the world didn't end and the various supernatural beings we had to hunt for night after night didn't show their faces to cause trouble. They all found it terribly tacky, you understand. To a real vampire - one that's survived longer than a month, I mean - plastic fangs are terribly gauche. Even after everything changed, human hopefuls were still something to be scorned.

...sad as I am to admit as much, I still agree with them. But I'd take tacky over horrifying any day.

[A pause, broken only by a soft "thump" as Edna wriggles out of his grasp and lands lightly on the floor. She stalks away, dignity quite bruised.]

How did you all celebrate Halloween back home, then? If you did, of course, I'm aware it's a rather...specific sort of holiday. For about half our years in Sunnydale, we spent it attempting to avert some disaster or another. Which I suppose just goes to show, tradition can sometimes go and hang.

[A chair can be heard scraping across the floor as Giles takes his seat again. His pencil makes rhythmic "tap, tap, tap"s against the paper.]

I need a boat moved. Or, um, I need help getting a boat moved. Not a very large one, but...well, too big for the transporters. I know it's probably a fairly staggering oversight, building it here, rather than the out by the beach, but [he sighs in mingled frustration and exhaustion] I suppose I never thought we'd get this far...

...still need to name the damn thing.

[Filtered away from Helios Sprensonne, Grell Sutcliffe, and Harth Fray - Unhackable]
How do you talk sense into someone utterly bound and determined to refuse to see it? Or, more appropriately, how do you remove the martyr from his martyrdom? Are any of you honestly still blaming yourselves for whatever you did while wearing one of those ridiculous masks? And if you managed to talk, how the hell did you manage it?

...I'm afraid to take my eyes off him like this and I'm not sure I have the eyes to spare.
[/Filtered]

[Locked to Grune - 75% unhackable]
[It's a courtesy filter, more than anything else, although a part of him is holding out hope for a pleasant surprise for people if this works out.] I, um, I think I have everything together. You can stop by whenever you want, and we can get to work.
[/Locked]

[Locked to Helios Sprensonne, Buffy Summers, Ginia Solana, and Link - Unhackable]
[A long silence, a long drawn out and thoughtful silence, before]

I'm sorry. F-For, for how I acted. With that mask the, um, the...two colored one. I think I've figured out what, wh-what it did to me, and I remember how I was and...

...I'm sorry.
[It's a talk he's had with Helios already, but...Giles wants his friends to hear his apologies without being shouted at in the process.]
[/Locked]

[With Helios and Ginia both left in rather poor states by the experiment, Giles can't really bring himself to go far from home or clinic. And, indeed, he'll spend a good part of the day hovering in the vicinity of those two buildings. However, an excuse to get away comes in the form of this strange manifestation of stress baking that had gripped him for most of the morning. Sorry, Grune, but he's already gotten a bit of a jump on the cakes. And the pies. Especially the pumpkin pies.

Most of it is left for Helios - it was his idea, after all - but Giles is going to take advantage of their own survival and the general exhaustion of the village to do something that is probably quite silly. Blame it on the exhaustion, because he does look exhausted, although he's abandoned the librarian clothes for something a little more his style and a little more current century.

Which is to say, he's going to set up a table in the plaza, set out a probably quite impressive array of baked goods...together with a portable kettle of hot tea...and settle in with a book. A small handwritten sign is taped to a space of clear table - "Please take some." If certain people do not stop by his table and take some damn sweets? He'll take the leftovers to them later in the evening. House 7 and the clinic, this means you.

...in the meantime, if you do stop by, you might also catch Giles dozing off in his chair. What? It's been an exhausting few days, and even his patch job on his injuries from Mithos didn't do a damn thing, in the end.]

[It's the afternoon of the seventh when Giles finally finds his voice again, enough to address the village at large. He still doesn't sound in any fit state when he finally sends the message out over the journal - there are several seconds of silence preceding it.]

For those of you who...weren't already informed...

[A pause, as Giles mentally prepares himself to take this leap, this final step. His voice is quiet, but steady, when he finally gets the words out.]

...Helios Sprensonne was killed in the fighting.

It...we lost him in the middle of the night on the fifth. S-So he, he should be back sometime on the twelfth, or the thirteenth. I, I would appreciate it if...those of you who know him would keep an eye out for his return. Frederic and I will do our best, of course, but...it's a big village, and...we've never done this before.

A-And if you don't know him, he...he has blond hair, and green eyes. About...mid thirties in age. He's a bit shorter than me, and he has a bit of an accent. Not sure how many of you know what "Romanian" is...just, just please help him if you see him. He's a bit of an absentminded fool, really...might need some help getting home.

...thank you.

( Locked to Residents of House 7 + Jack Sparrow )

( Locked to Frederic Francois Chopin )
[Floor five, room twenty two...home...is not an option right now, for reasons he understands even if those reasons only make everything harder. Even so, he'll really only venture into the village proper, armed only with his umbrella and a string bag, to pick up some food from Seventh Heaven for lunch and dinner. He still doesn't trust himself to work a stove or any sort of electrical appliance beyond a light switch or a shower, and without Frederic...

...without Frederic...

...Helios was taken from him, brutally ripped away by the teeth and fangs of monsters. But Frederic just...doesn't want him near, right now, and that hurts almost as much and maybe even more. Because Giles understands perfectly well, now that he's come down off the power and the bloodlust and the rage. He understands why the composer is leery of being around him. He knows that, when all is said and done, Frederic is the only one who can give him any kind of absolution for what he did that night and that his friend has no reason to give it.

He understands, but it makes getting through the day...the thought of getting through the week...almost impossible to bear.

Anyone who wants to find Giles will likely either encounter him on the way to or in Seventh Heaven. Otherwise, they'll find him at home or just generally in the vicinity of CH7 - most likely on the front steps and fidgeting anxiously with a lump of artist's clay the size of his fists. It took a few tries, but he managed to find an apartment that was unoccupied, on one of the higher floors. He can't bring himself to move any further. The area around this particular community building is an area he's familiar with even while blind, and on top of everything else he can't trust himself to

He'll take care to be high enough on the steps that he can take shelter under the building's canopy from the rain - dry clothes after coming home were the best feeling in the world and the greatest comfort after the long nightmare that was this draft, and he's not eager to experience rain again. Not even if that rain is just a light seasonal shower, nothing on the ferocious monsoon that marked their last day and night in the rain forest.

He seems shell shocked, shaken, exhausted, and overall like a man who has lost his best friend and waded through blood this past week and is trying to deal with it. There are bad moments, all day - moments where the wet, squelching sounds of bodies exploding ring in his ears. Moments where he feels as though he's choking on someone else's blood. Moments where he hears the howls of the Shift Hunters in the wind, and the light rainfall of the day becomes the sharp sting of the monsoon. Moment's where he fears he might not be able to lock up the part of him that smiled as his victims...and they were victims...died bloody, where he fears that this is who the people he loves will know him to be from now on.

Moments where he's glad to be alone so he can just break down and cry for the loss of his best friend, of the man he refuses to stop thinking of as his own beloved brother.

And there are some moments...the worst, strangest moments of all...where he's just glad that he wasn't one of the unfortunate few to die in that jungle. He's lived through death once. He can only hope, has only hoped, that even Luceti isn't cruel enough to make him live through it again until the end.

Thanks to the last of Helios' magic, he's unhurt at least.

His eyes, at least, have lost their black color.]


((ooc: If anyone notices - I am very sorry for the repost, I don't usually do that sort of thing. However, my entry wasn't showing up on my friend's list - seeing as how I have myself friended, I thought that was odd. I had been futzing around with the time settings, and I thought that might have knocked my journal entry down to a lower "time" past more entries than it had actually should have been when I posted. I'm reposting to see whether or not that is the reason why my entry wasn't showing up.

And, hey, turns out that it was! Teach me to mess around with technology I don't understand *derp*.

The moral of the story is that Lazarus doesn't fix everything. Every time I've tried to recover this entry with Lazarus, it's reset my changes to the time that knocked my entry off my friend's list listing in the first place. Soooo...sorry for the comm spam, guys!))