Shawn picked up his fork with his free hand, and used it to snag a piece of cake. As he was about to eat it, a thought occurred to him. "Mr. Clayton, what was going on with those dishes?" While he waited for an answer, he popped the piece of cake into his mouth.

The cake was buttery and delicious all at the same time as Shawn tasted the first bite. it had a nutty flavor yet it was light and somehow creamy.

"It felt like you were going into the unknown for a moment when you were reaching down into the sink. Is that what it felt like? It looked that way. When you go into the unknown, far, far out from what you know, that's where the forces of great change are. There's a lot of potential there Shawn. But there's also great deal of uncertainty and confusion."

"Is that what you mean?" Mr. Clayton's tone was now philosophical and a bit darker than the sing-songy, high-pitched voice Shawn had grown accustomed to.

Shawn took another bite of the cake, and watched Mr. Clayton speak. Obviously, he didn't have facial expressions in the same way as a human would, but he noticed the tone changing, even if he didn't entirely understand the meaning. "I guess? But it felt like something bit me. And it's my puppet hand; that can't be good for performing."

A glob of frosting fell off of Mr. Clayton's chin and plopped to the table, staining the tablecloth with white cream.

"Something did bite you." Mr. Clayton agreed, his tone still very much level, dour and increasingly philosophical. Then he cocked his head, more frosting falling from his mouth, a bit of cake falling with it. "But even using the word 'bite' means that you might know what that was. You put your hands into the unknown water. How could you really know what happened?"

He stared at Shawn with that smile: empty and vacant. A skull's grin.

Shawn nodded in agreement as he continued eating, a bit less messily than Mr. Clayton was. "It felt scaly, and sharp. Like a piranha. And you called it a nip, which is like a bite."

"All true." Mr. Clayton agreed. He wasn't really eating anymore. Not really. The fork was place at an awkward angle on the table in front of him.

"Inside the water is where the strange and unknown live. You know that. You've always known that. Haven't you?" Mr. Clayton said, and his tone was now rising with some of his usual manic enthusiasm.

Shawn bit down on something hard and foreign. It was kind of like the sensation of finding out that the sandwich that you brought to the beach had sand or a rock in it. Shawn found that his tongue wanted to move about and try to identify the foreign object in the cake he had in his mouth.

"Do you understand what I'm talking about?" Mr. Clayton asked, a grin in his voice.

Shawn moved the strange item around his mouth, scraping away the cake surrounding it with his tongue. He tried to identify what it was by touch, but if he couldn't do so, he'd have to spit it out into his hand.

Shawn's tongue identified the hardness of the object. There was a sharp part of it and then some kind of soft outer coating. Once Shawn swiped away the cake, he spit the object out into his hand.

Whatever it was, it was sitting in his hand coated in a glob of cake and frosting.

"So much of what I'm saying is about getting rid of distractions Shawn." Mr. Clayton said. He stopped talking for a second as both Shawn and the Puppet focused their gaze on Shawn's hand, which was palm facing up, holding a glob of cake mush but inside the mush, whatever the object was in Shawn's mouth.

The pause, was mechanical as well. It was hard or near impossible to manipulate the Puppet with one hand and scrape away the cake from the object in Shawn's other hand. Still, Shawn got the sense that Mr. Clayton was eager to see what the object was and also eager to keep talking to Shawn.

Shawn tried to figure out the west way to clean off the object while still allowing Mr. Clayton to talk. In the end, he settled for using his free hand to scrape the cake mush off onto the bloody rags his hands were wrapped in, while doing his best to keep his puppet hand steady.

Shawn looked through the cake batter at the object in his hand.

It was....

A finger. A small finger with a long black nail attached to it. The skin of the finger was a greenish-brown. And the nail was sharp like the hand must of been clawed. The finger itself was very small, almost child-like.

Shawn looked at the finger for a moment without realizing what it was. When it finally dawned on him, he immediately spat out what cake was left in his mouth. He looked over at Mr. Clayton, clearly shocked and a little queasy, but still trying not to show weakness in front of him. "Did you bake this in here?"

"It was one of the ingredients." Mr. Clayton said nonchalantly. "You've got to get rid of distractions somehow! Yucka! Yucka!"

The his eyes looked over Shawn. "So, what did we learn?"

Shawn looked at the finger for a bit, but changed focus when he noticed Mr. Clayton staring at him. "I learned not to let things distract me...but is the finger a distraction, or a secret?"

"It was a distraction. The finger and its owner were both a distraction" Mr. Clayton replied. "Because there is only enough room for one focus in your head. For one voice. For our voice. No other. There is no other voice now. We must lose things that are distracting and sharpen ourselves to a single point of focus: changing things back to the way they were"

Mr. Clayton's vacant eyes probed the depths of Shawn's own eyes for a full five seconds  before the Puppet spoke again. "If changing things back is our focus, then Greater Ventriloquism is the path that we take to get to that focus. And in so doing, we must let go of everything and turn ourselves over to it."

Shawn found himself looking away from the finger at all costs once Mr. Clayton hinted that he'd known the owner; he was afraid of recognizing it. He found himself thinking about what the dummy said, about distractions and focus and ignoring the unimportant things. "Wait...this is a distraction, isn't it? I'm supposed to ignore you right now."

Without waiting for an answer, he stood up, pushing his chair back with a squeak. He walked over to the sink and looked down into its depths. This was where the strange and unknown lived; that was where he'd find the secrets he needed to make his will real. He plunged his hand back into the water, searching for something. He didn't know what, but hoped he'd recognize it when he felt it.
This message was last edited by the player at 11:57, Thu 19 Sept 2019.

Shawn felt around inside of the sink. There were a few pieces of broken dishes at the bottom and a stray fork. But somehow Shawn knew that those items were not what he was looking for.

Mr. Clayton was silent the entire time.

Water swished about. It was thick and luke-warm. There was something smelly in the water. It smelled like old docks and barnacles. Like the smell of a sponge in a sink that's been used too often. A rotten smell of mildew that worked its way up Shawn's nose.

Shawn grabbed a hold of something in the water....and it slipped away. He was now up to his shoulder in mucky, gray water.

Finally Shawn grabbed a hold of something and began to pull it up. A small, batwinged body emerged from the water. A dead thing, with a severed hand. It was curled up in rigor-mortis.

Shawn saw that it was Feddler. Or rather was Feddler. The Imp was dead.

Shawn recoiled from the body for a moment, but he remained in control enough to keep hold of it. Sure, the imp wasn't human, and had made a lot of trouble in his life, and probably only helped him out of self-preservation, but Feddler had known him better than perhaps anyone else in his entire life. He felt a pang of something sad as he backed away from the sink with the body in tow. He looked at the puppet. "Did you do this?" He kept his tone neutral - no judgements or accusations.

"I am a dummy who cannot move his arms or legs. I have no mind of my own. I have no ability to speak without the aid of another. The dummy is a trifle. I am a dummy. I am nothing. Mr. Clayton said.

Feddler's body was stiff and curled up and rigid as a tree branch. Rivulets of putrid sink water dripped down his scaly body in the sink. The expression on his face was one of complete terror and surprise. A frozen expression of something that had been violently drowned.

"I did this yes. But what I just said is also true."

Shawn looked away from Feddler's body, unable to bring himself to look at the imp's expression. Feddler had helped him, but he'd also been responsible for a lot of problems. If he hadn't delayed him in the forest that one time on his birthday, he might've been able to keep Bobby alive... Regardless of his feelings, he couldn't let them out where Mr. Clayton would see. "Thank you for your help. Feddler pulled my strings a lot, and that was scary."

He glanced back at the sink, then over too the puppet once more, deliberately skipping over the body. "If he was in the sink where all the unknown stuff is, does that mean he's a secret we can learn from? He knew more about magic stuff than he told me."

Mr. Clayton shook his puppet head. He looked like a dummy doing that. A head that was just wooden and without life. A stupid head, really.

"You should go into the water. Mr. Clayton suggested with his bright smile. "That's where the unknown things are. And you need to push yourself down, down, down there. But you probably won't do it."

"Without some kind of push of your own. You know what we should do?" Mr. Clayton said, brightening up as if he just thought of brilliant idea.

"You should push me down there. Right down into the sink. You should drown me. I'm just a stupid dummy. I can't really drown."

Shawn cocked his head to the side. "You want me to try and drown you? I mean, I can if you'd like." A little hesitantly, he got to his feet and went over to Mr. Clayton's side of the table. He picked the dummy up, and cradled him like you were supposed to do when performing, cradling the bottom and holding him up straight as he walked over to the sink. He looked down into the water, and then gave Mr. Clayton one last look, to give him a chance to clarify or say 'nevermind'.

Mr. Clayton stared back at Shawn with those vacant eyes.

"Do it. It will be just like when you killed Bradford. Mr. Clayton said. "You should think of Bradford when you do it. Think of him and all the pain he caused."

Shawn met Mr. Clayton's gaze silently for a moment or two. And then he violently shoved Mr. Clayton's head into the sink, pushing the puppet as far into the water as he'd go. And he thought of Bradford as he did, but the old Bradford, and how Mr. Clayton had twisted him into something that couldn't coexist with Shawn, that had made their conflict inevitable. He hated Mr. Clayton for that, hated him, but also needed him, and hated himself for needing him, and he tried to push Mr. Clayton even deeper into the water.

Warm hatred flooded Shawn's limbs as he forced the Puppet's head down into the luke-warm water. If it was a movie scene, then Mr. Clayton's floppy arms and legs would be straining about, trying to resist the imminent death. Instead, they just...

went down into the water. It was more like shove any other object into the water than it was shoving a living, breathing thing. If it was a movie, it would have been an anticlimactic scene.

Nevertheless, the feeling of pushing Mr. Clayton down into the water, at least in the dream, stirred feelings within Shawn: raw, uninhibited feels that were rarely let out at at home or in conversations with his family. Feelings of anger and hate. They burst free as Shawn shook the Puppet violently under the water. And just as quickly....

OOC: Shawn Joins Thread

Shawn: Are You Listening?