a simple question; (cw: death/dying discussion)

[icanhearscreams]

[An unsigned note appears on the bulletin board, written in extremely neat handwriting. There's a few smudges on it from erased lines, as if the author wrote it over and over again.]

Is anyone else here dead?

[Just five words. No signature. He'll see how this turns out.]

Comments

[steelfeathered]

Are you a spirit, or do you have a seeming of life? Breathing etc?

[Also no signature but her usual style, the ink brush with the calligraphic aspect, is undisguised.]

[icanhearscreams]

I can't go through things or anything. I'm breathing, but I know I was stopping breathing when I came here.

[steelfeathered]

There are some amongst us who are very evidently not alive. What this means is opaque. Perhaps you were taken with a spark of life remaining and care could have saved you. Or perhaps I am entirely off.

Do you believe our imprisonment here is temporary and brief, and we are to be returned?

[icanhearscreams]

I mean there's people here who have lives to go back to...

[steelfeathered]

Is this a thing that the forces causing us to be here care about?

[icanhearscreams]

I don't think that this place is malicious... but it might be.

[steelfeathered]

Or simply indifferent to us as individuals! So I have seen before, the last time that I was exiled. This world is much smaller than the last one.

[icanhearscreams]

Really? I think the library is pretty big... though I guess it's not a whole world.

[steelfeathered]

Large for a library, but any prison is confining. The garden just is not enough.

[icanhearscreams]

No, it's not. But if it's a prison, it's at least a better one than it could be.

[steelfeathered]

Yours is a happy nature!

[icanhearscreams]

First time I've heard that.

I'd rather be in a library than a traditional jail, at least.