deercountry | July Catch-All (open & closed starters)

Entry tags:

July Catch-All (open & closed starters)

who: Pyrrha Dve (by that name or another) & new/developing CR
what: Arrival, Fallout of Boatgate, starting Hunting, etc
when: Arrival starting ~July 8th. Going to Bone House ~July 9th. On from there
where: Beach, Bone House, Around Trench

content warnings: Usual arrival CWs (placenta, nudity, disorientation, etc), remains from boatgate at the beach, corruption levels/beasthood, alcohol consumption, messy not entirely healthy relationship dynamics. Others added as they come up.

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cw: placenta, nudity, usual squiddly arrival

The limbs, membranes, and identifiable features melt away from the squid, replaced by a thin layer that hides the shape within. It stays that way, slowly undulating and reshaping beneath the surface. The water washes over it, but the body sticks to the sand and stays on the beach. When it stops moving, it's the length of a tall man with the shape of legs and arms.

Fifteen seconds later, the thin placenta layer is torn apart from the inside. A dark skinned man with a light dusting of rust-colored hair and beard sits and looks around. This place is familiar, not only the idea they have been here before but something else more familiar. They turn, staring a long time at fragments of bone in unnatural configuration—a construct, not merely a skeleton. The pieces are small but many. Something happened, if not here, then at sea. Not all the bodies belong to squids or are alive. The outfits are torn, but the bodies are waterlogged, some of them bitten. They too come from the sea.

They lay back down, staring up at the sky, with a terrible feeling in the pit of their stomach, something not readily explained in words. Words? They run over that in their mind, the shape and feel, the sense it means something. Words are not as familiar as the magic in those bones or the wounds on some of the bodies. They gather more of themself with the tide.

cw: near nudity

Pyrrha did not rush. The robe granted her was enough, and among all the things in the welcome bag, one set stood out. It was old, well cared for, and the only part of the bag that contained something of home. Of Gideon. She also had some growth on her face. With the care of ritual and millennia of habit, she sets out the mirror, scrubs some of the soap across her face, and removes the stubble. She isn't entirely back to herself. Pyrrha cuts herself once, twice, but the cuts are gone by the time she washes all the soap away with saltwater. Clean.

Everything is gathered up and returned to the bag, safe in her grip. Her eyes close, and she sees Gideon easily. He looks the same as her. The stress weighs on her brows the same as his. Her lips rest in the same shape. Her soul aches for being alone. At last, they have that in common too.

There's only one way to learn to walk, and she's told more may have washed up with her. The razor is not much of a weapon, so she stalks and occasionally stumbles down the beach for anything that feels familiar. Time is too long and too great to know what exactly may come.

Edited 2022-07-08 01:25 (UTC)

CW: nothing yet. will be added as they arise.

Though Pyrrha has only been to the house once, she remembers the way there. Trench isn't so familiar that she wanders. Instead she follows their path, including going past the slushie stand without stopping. From what she saw at the beach, Pyrrha doubts John will be so mild mannered about getting shot in the face. Again. Their conversation replays, lies and all, the entire walk to the house.

It's quiet. She circles the area, checking out other approaches and keeping an eye out for anyone abnormally interested in it. The same sense of being watched prickles at her back as the first time. It's part of the neighborhood, not only John's house. Pyrrha plots an extra escape route because of that. Caution is good, but she isn't going to orbit John. She's punching through any orbits and approaching straight on.

Cognizant of warding options, Pyrrha approaches the house peacefully. Yes, there's guns, a rapier, and a spear within easy reach, but that's normal for her. The guns aren't loaded with herald bullets. Politely, she knocks wondering who will answer the door and whether she will recognize them.

cw: high corruption levels, alcohol consumption

Pyrrha arms herself with less alcohol than an armful of hard liquor looked like. Most of them hold less than a third their original volume that, Pyrrha prays, met Augustine's historical caliber. She also holds two glasses with one hand as she approaches the Necromancer Divine, King of the Nine Renewals, our Resurrector, the Necrolord Prime, the man who became God, the God who became squid, and the squid who became a herald or close enough to it.

"Sit down, John," Pyrrha sighs, with more exhaustion than anger. Some irritation, sure, but she's here. She's back. She's in his house, and she's taking the next shift of wasp sitting, or more delicately 'waiting on their Lord.' The office is a mess, but so is the Mithraeum after every battle there with a Resurrection Beast. This is simply... somewhere in the 1-2 herald range. "We have some catching up to do."

cw: nothing yet. will be added as they arise.

A myriad is filled with waiting. Yes, everything happens at once when it happens. Every minute matters. That day is past, and they are back to the long slow aftermath. She let him sleep. Her mind is full of meta analysis, having been around for enough of the myriad that it doesn't slam into her unawares. Quiet coexistence, even in this state, is a comfort compared to years of solitude without conversation.

Pyrrha knocks on the door. Alfred answers. That it's Alfred still takes more getting used to than a snake answering. Her smile is genuine for him, and she glances into the room silently, as if to say 'I can come back later.' If she's gotten the timing wrong. She looks the same as the last time they met. Augustine— She checks out his damage. "You look like shit, friend," Pyrrha says. He isn't the only one who's been there the whole myriad anymore, the only one for whom John's shocking updates don't shock. She gives a small smile. "You also need more alcohol." She doesn't have a way to tell how long it's taken him to get them where they were.

Annabel's echo is gone, at least. Or, not gone— she thrums in his heart, a furious simmer of energy, a thunderstorm he's papered over and called contained— but she's not dogging his heels anymore. And he's doing better, you know? He's lost the wings. The chitin only bleeds back up, like an oilslick over his bones, when he's really riled.

He thinks Gideon is here, for a moment. The emotion goes sideways when he realizes it's Pyrrha, and that she recently shot him in the face.

"Interesting way to start," he says, like complaint, but he folds himself into a chair. The study's a wreck, what with one-and-a-half Heralds pacing manic circles in here for a few days straight. All his shelves of blood and bone are in disarray, all his notes are crumpled. "Look, I want to say: I'm not mad. I mean, I'm kind of impressed, honestly. Remind me not to piss you off."

Ha ha, lost cause. No one's happy with him, and he knows it. When he drums his fingers on the desktop they make the click-clack sound of bare phalanges on wood.

Slowly and securely, Pyrrha lines up the bottles across John's desk, leaving enough space to see each other, and sets the two glasses down last. The liquor makes her armored and well-armed. It declares to John that she is not leaving, not immediately. He could read into it more—that promise of stories a nail hit deeper with each bottle.

"You don't know how to stop," Pyrrha says quietly, heavy words sinking. About pissing her off or about going after the Pthumerians or about exacting his gross of flesh or about driving people away or—

Perhaps the number of options should be concerning.

She sinks into a chair opposite his table, that small distance between them. "You could have squashed me like a bug."

It's reassuring, you know? It's comforting, the way she does everything with such relentlessly methodical calm. She's always been the one tolerating the rest of them, a rock among their storm. Pyrrha's always been reliable.

He's missed her so much.

"Fair hit," he agrees, and spreads his hands on the table. He'll pretend they're just talking about what he does to her temper. "I mean, yeah. But I did deserve it."

He's yet to mention that the raspberries are cursed, and that he knew this from the start. It's not like he was trying to spike her drink, you know? It might've been a cherry slushie. It might've been nothing. But it's not like he can hold Pyrrha's equivalent of a thrown punch against her, under the circumstances.

It's not like he can pretend she had no reason, cursed slushie aside, to gun for him.

"You're still here," he says, more softly. "With what looks like Augustine's entire stash."

She shot him, but she didn't leave him. How sad are his standards, right?

The glasses and alcohol sit there. The conversation's hardly started. If she began drinking now, everything on the table wouldn't be enough. Her supply of cigarettes is also limited. Say what you like about the Mithraeum, but she never had to barter cigarettes there.

"I'm glad you can recognize that," Pyrrha says. Not for her sake, particularly. Living isn't a prerequisite to her decisions. Not having anyone who depends on her, yet, not to stay alive, not the way they have in the past, is a kind of freedom, one she's walking away from with each conversation in this house, with each person she meets.

She smiles, sad and soft, worn and faded. "We're friends, John," Pyrrha says, "You saved humanity once. Surely that's still in there somewhere." She motions toward his monstrous form, looking less human than usual. Pyrrha doesn't mean the herald-esque shape. She doesn't care what he looks like (though another form would be kinder to Augustine).

Ortus is not a wandering soul. He still does not care for the yawn of the sky above him, and suspects that he never will. He much prefers enclosure.

So it is uncharacteristic of him to be standing at the edge of the sea, looking out across the dizzying expanse of gleaming dark water. He wears a pair of black shorts composed of some sturdy woven cloth, with many pockets full of small and useful things, and bruises are still fading along the exposed flesh of his arms where they extend from the t-shirt he has borrowed, emblazoned with the symbols of the House Cobra Kai. His ridiculous rapier hangs from his waist, where it has always been for the past few days.

"Saint," he says, his eyes widening - and yet he does not bow, nor show the other signs of deference he ought, aside from drawing himself up a fraction of a degree more upright.

In the face of her open exhaustion, he takes up the whiskey and pours: her glass first, then his, two fingers for each of them. He considers, for a moment, then makes it three.

"I don't think it's that far buried." He says this with good-natured exasperation, but there's a note of something real beneath it, a hair's breadth from real defensiveness. "I'm not looking my best... not fighting my best, either. You missed the showdown. The ocean kicked my ass."

He takes up his glass, swirls it, ignores the way the motion shows the bare whites of his carpal bones.

"But I'm not trying to ruin everyone's week."

Pyrrha accepts the glass and holds it, a certain comfort in the motions they are going through. The ritual of friendship. The whiskey should be on the rocks, representative of that, but Pyrrha lets that sit invisibly. The statement, so large, that it engulfs many others isn't itself the right place to stop. Too grand. Too much identity wraps up in it.

"My presence wouldn't have changed that," Pyrrha says. Not entirely the point. She left because she wouldn't be party to that. She has no interest in kicking the ocean's ass. She cannot think of what she could have done to stop it—not stop shooting? John would have lost his patience eventually, and he would have been in a fouler mood.

"You're not trying to ensure you do not ruin everyone's week," Pyrrha answers. If he does even that much, it would be a step forward. She looks him dead on with Gideon's intense gaze. A look so many others have seen.

Walking is still returning to her, but Pyrrha stands straight and tall. Her face, Gideon's face, sits in resting serious face. Like she's in the midst of drama even when no one else sees it. Her attention goes first to the facepaint. The black shorts match it. The shirt—Pyrrha does not recognize what the shirt's insignia means. The facepaint is telling enough, but it's not all. A snag in her head.

"Ninth," she says, as little as him, as little as the Saint of Duty usually says. What little she can see does not suggest someone mere hours ago a squid. Alive.

He never could win this staring contest— sad for a guy who doesn't strictly need to blink, right?— and doesn't try. John winces, exaggerated for effect, like touché. Lifts the glass to his lips and sips his whiskey while the silence settles in between them.

"I should've been more careful about the crossfire." He sets the glass down with a click and fidgets with a finger on the rim, instead. "I fully acknowledge that. If we're honest, I didn't think things would get that out of hand... it's not often I'm outclassed, you know?"

But she wouldn't know, because she's been dead ten thousand years.

"I haven't been on my own front lines for a while now."

Pyrrha takes a small sip of the whiskey, a luxury item in so many places, a luxury item here so far as she can tell. The land around the city is not overabundance in fields of barley or rye. They focus on the necessities, she guesses. Something else to figure out in the coming days. She also sets the glass down, so as not to continue drinking. With little effort or movement, she traces the rim of the glass. A full circle.

"Mariana, the ocean, is the Pthumerian responsible for turning us all into squids," Pyrrha says, "for taking you from your large pond to find yourself no longer the apex of the food chain." It's pure fact. Here they are, both having crawled up the beach as squids, reshaping themselves into familiar forms.

"John," Pyrrha says kindly, "she outclassed you before you ever started." It's not an easy thing to see. Pyrrha isn't sure whether or not John truly understands that Mariana hasn't simply outplayed him in a battle but set up the entire board. It's rigged against him, against anyone who holds themself on the same level as the Pthumerians. At least anyone not a Pthumerian. Pyrrha doesn't know what defines them

"Who did you bring with you?" Pyrrha asks. She motions behind her. "Augustine, of course." It's a large and mostly empty house.

He bristles, stupidly and impotently; he goes restless at this statement of deeply inconvenient fact; he drums his fingers on the desktop and they still go clack clack clack. He looks like he wants to start pacing again. He's mad.

But he's not mad at her, because she's right, obviously. Of course she's right.

"Pyrrha," he says, and he looks up. He looks her dead in the face, and every speck of humor has dropped out of him: he has gone very still. "Pyrrha, I lit the fucking sun."

This hangs for a long, empty silence. Then he settles in on his forearms, as though exhausted.

"So the fact that I'm losing metaphysical fistfights is, you know," he makes an unnecessary gesture, the little boom of mindblowing. "Can I be honest? It scares the shit out of me."

He blows out a sigh, drums his fingers again, picks up the glass and knocks back half his whiskey. Swallows hard, sets it down. Exhales.

"Augustine," he agrees. Back to the point. "Harrowhark and Gideon— long story. If Augustine hasn't caught you up on that one yet..." He trails off, shrugs his discomfort. "A kid of the Sixth, a kid of the Ninth, a few locals... a few friends."

There is a deep and mournful longing in him, when he says it. He cared, and cares, and now here he is with all these empty bedrooms.

This is not the first time in all his centuries Illarion's played door-guard for someone the world wanted dead and dismembered. Given the circumstances, he is not in any way surprised when Iskierka alerts him there's someone heavily armed--someone neither of them recognize--examining the house before approaching it. He is wearily alert to the fact the unknown out there carries himself (themself?) like a soldier, which could mean trouble atop trouble for this tattered little household if it came to fighting.

For Trench's sake (for Augustine and Alfred's sake), the shrike's very uninterested in it coming to fighting.

He's headed for the door before the knock even sounds, silently recalling his Omen from her perch among the skeletons on the roof. He settles himself just so in the entryway, so the bulk of his out-self can be flattened to block it if that's a hostile out there. Less an act to defend his host--who could use, but is in no fit state to parse, the lessons taught by revenge--and more prevent any more would-be heroes coming to grief in the lair of a god they weren't prepared to face. But should this particular maybe-hostile fight their way past him, well--that's one way a heroic legend begins, isn't it?

He waits a count of three before opening the door. (Iskierka rematerializes on his shoulder in a swirl of smoke and Darkblood, crimson eyes gleaming.) Then he swings it wide, apparent-foolhardy; let this visitor read into the gesture, and the dead skeletal-slim elf blocking the way, what they will.

"Who are you and what are you wanting with this house?" The words are impolite. The tone's passionless, as the dead are apt to be; no offense is meant. He's merely on war footing and not bothering with pleasantries.

The moment stretches and wrings long moments out of a few seconds. Those words from John's lips, it's still something to hear aloud. It may be ego. It may matter less away from Dominicus. It is the truth of the last myriad. An incredible feat that should cement his status as a god. As God. Pyrrha smiles warmly. She's always had a fondness for what people will burn themselves for. The imagery of John illuminated from within, a fire so hot it's the dark gravity well at the center of the star, the energy for fision and fusion alike, the man burning alike if long and slow. It has gravity Pyrrha wouldn't be able to resist.

That image is something else. John lit the sun, but he did not burn himself to do it. He has been alive and well, at the height of his power.

Trench, a name coming from the ocean itself, has its own gravity. The sun, for all its proximity to the Nine Houses, is not the most powerful star in the sky. It doesn't have to be, for her to love it. John doesn't have to be the most powerful for her to love him. "Be afraid," Pyrrha says, "Fear's natural and telling. You can learn from it."

She takes a sip of her whiskey, not keeping apace. "Fear is never all there is. Nor should you let it drown out everything else." That's how so many people act stupid. Wearing blinders doesn't make driving any safer.

"A battle between gods, John," Pyrrha says softly, "Kids?" Death's impermanence hardly prevents trauma. There's so much she could throw in his face about that, so many ways to drive up his defenses and perhaps even push him to lash out against her instead of anyone else. There's time. Pyrrha slips the knife-edge of her words in softly with true love and affection.

Pyrrha isn't sure what she expected on the other side of the door, but her visions swims before her like she's tilted right into the River. Except, it's localized. It's the person with, impressively, skin drawn over less muscle than her—Gideon's—body. It's the person with a massive presence, even as she can see into the house behind them. In a town full of oddities, it's still a surprise.

Who is she? Birdie, she's been asking herself that for a long time.

"Duty," Pyrrha replies, "to both your questions." She could explain herself more. She could spin a story. She could even have simply stated that John invited her, that wherever he is is home. Pyrrha's been on a trip, and she hasn't been home in a week. Her words echo those given. Direct to the point some people get offended.

Her hands stay off her weapons. Pyrrha isn't threatening her way inside. What she's picked up has made clear there's been more than enough bloodshed.

Duty, comes the answer, which is a wholly comprehensible one to Illarion; he cocks his head like a robin considering a worm as he parses it. (Outward, on all the dark bulk of him, his ruffled feathers smooth.)

Duty, perhaps, as Ava is Patience--he wonders. It would explain the timing and the calm presentation before this house of all houses in Gaze, armed but not hostile.

"You are being one of the Emperor's, then?" he asks, and as he asks he steps a (rippling, hulking) pace back from the door. Tacit invitation; if anyone has a right to rebuke the man and disturb the house's fragile peace, it would be a Courtier (a Saint).

Though what invitation he extends is contingent on his guess being right--it is easy to trust this fellow-soldier at his (their?) word, but one should always doubt easy trust. The shrike sends a question through Iskierka on to Alfred, a (mind-jarring) image of the figure at the door included: One of yours?

She waits before the threshold, where John stood when she shot him. Previously, it had been entrance to a prison, a graveyard that made her its corpse, where she became his memory rather than a person, an ending she had already lived. It's still his pitiful domain, but the door to a home, a house where she has resurrected herself, where she is a revenant of her own making, a new start marked by impacts on the door. It is her doing. John needs her here—

Trench, reeling in the chaos of his making, needs her here.

Duty has never, simply, been about John. Pyrrha nods, a confirmation. She steps in with full intention and consequence, even as she remains ever aware and respectful of the person at the door. "What are this place and its people to you?" she asks in return. Not merely John. The house is meant for people, to have and to hold and to host.

He hums impatient agreement to her advice. It's good advice, but he doesn't want to hear it. Nothing new there. The disappointment in her voice, that's worse; he looks at her sharp and stung, like a flinch.

"Who isn't kids, these days?" He fidgets, restless and miserable. "I'm too old. Augustine and I— hell, sometimes I think we've become everything they call us."

The room is so empty, the house is so empty, aside the distant slump of Augustine's exhaustion and Big Bird's horror and Kaworu's washed-out nothing. God finishes the whiskey.

"A bunch of fucked-up old liches chewing up the universe." He curls both hands around the glass, grips it too tightly. "It's not like I don't know it looks bad, alright? Skull decor doesn't endear you to everybody. Thanergy blooms don't come cheap. But there are fights I can't just walk away from."

Pyrrha doesn't move, only sits and listens. Her posture is relaxed, and she sits forward far enough she could stand in an instant, not be trapped in her chair adjusting her weight. It's an old well worn position. Hers. She's profoundly not Gideon, even sitting there wrapped in his shape, the source of some of those scars.

"If you really cannot tell," Pyrrha says when it's clear he's said what he needs to say that minute, made his point, "Kids are people whose brains haven't finished developing, who haven't reached the point of calculating the risks well enough on their own. As much as that is physical, you can check. Not having that, I error on the side of thirty, thirty-five." She has been an adult all the years of her life she can remember. That makes things a little bit of guesswork, but she saw plenty of kids while founding the Second.

"With everything people do here with blood, you could have a harder audience for skull decor," Pyrrha points out, "You could craft any number of useful things that also happen to be skulls and start the next big it thing." It's a moment of levity between the heaviness.

With care, an exaggeration on her part since she means no harm, Pyrrha pulls out a small, sharp knife. First, she refills John's glass. Second, she gently takes his right hand, straightens his fingers, and cuts through the joint connecting his middle finger to his hand. Pyrrha sits back down, her eyes on her work as she carves at the bone beneath the chitin.

"Then fight smart," Pyrrha says. "You know Mariana can hold her own. Don't throw a half-assed brawl with only a large thanergy blood and the neighborhood kids behind you." She holds up the finger and blows away a little bone dust. It still needs work. "How much do you know about her? About the Pthumerians in general? Strengths. Weaknesses. Levers you can pull. How do you get her to come out of her ocean teeming with life to a dry landmass rich in thanergy and face you at your best?"

Pyrrha looks up at him. "You're old. You know how to wait. Use that god-damned big brain of yours instead of falling for every little jibe and insult sent your way." That's the judgment in her eyes for the moment. He fought stupid.

Of course she'd give him shit, and of course she'd do it calm and thorough like this. A classic Pyrrha Dve dressing-down: even God isn't exempt. He bears it with what grace he has left. She fills his drink, at least, and her hands are warm and real and human when she touches him.

"Rude," says God, when she takes his finger at the knuckle. He does not flinch nor stop her, but his brow scrunches in incredulity at the nerve. First the shooting, now this; they've apparently settled into a hell of a dynamic. "At least ask first. Come on. Also, I am very kindly not making a dirty joke."

There is still flesh at the base of the finger, still raw red tendons webbing together the bare bone and chitin. All of it has an iridescent dark shimmer, a glitter of surreal blood. John, in the spirit of cooperation and friendship, withers the flesh to nothing and leaves her with only Herald bone to whittle.

"The point," he complains, "is that I shouldn't have even needed that. It's a real learning curve, squaring up against a pantheon. She's so much bigger than you'd think... so much bigger than she ought to be, and I'm so much smaller... that ocean runs as deep as the River, but I don't know its currents. These are— if you'll forgive me, and I know you will— uncharted waters."

He cracks a smile, which twists before it can settle in. She is, again, so infuriatingly goddamn right.

"But, alright! Fair points all around." God splays his hands in defeat while his long-dead disciple and new babysitter whittles one of his fingers into wacky shapes. "I'll admit, I got mad. I've been mad for a while. What I need, apparently, is a tactician."

"I keep forgetting, don't I," Pyrrha comments. She moved slower this time, let him see it coming, and gave him the chance to speak up. It's not the same thing, is it John? In the spirit of generosity, she lets pass that mentioning not making the joke is halfway to making it. Pyrrha's experienced enough to think of a handful (ha) on her own.

She turns the bone in her hand, appreciative of having something to do with her hands, with herself. Pyrrha could sit, watch, and wait with the best of them with the kind of relaxation that comes from being ready at any moment. This engagement that leaves her vulnerable, again, to anything John might do is deeper than that. Yes, it's John, and no matter how much smaller he's become he's powerful enough to tear the muscles from her bones strand by strand.

"I thought we settled that point already," Pyrrha comments. A reminder, not a discussion. No matter how much John wants to be more powerful than anything else within a few galaxies of him, it's no longer the case. Time to live with the reality Pyrrha's known her whole life. She's rarely the most powerful, no matter how John and Augustine talk of her.

Her knife digs in deeper, forming cavities between larger framework. "I'm here, John," Pyrrha says, tired in a way sleep cannot fix. She's walked through the door of her own accord and doesn't have anywhere else more pressing to go. Congratulations, John, in all the mess, you pushed her squid back to the beach. "Have you ever, in the time I've known you, in the time since the Resurrection, in all the lifetimes you've lived since those early days, not been angry?" A rhetorical question, mostly.

"What I need, not to talk out my ass," Pyrrha scrapes her knife in small circles, "is information." His problem may not be her highest priority, but she needs the information all the same. It's better not to act blindly.

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Page 1 of 10

July Catch-All (open & closed starters)

Third time's the charm | open

X doesn't mark the spot | open

Home is where the hurt is | closed to Illarion

Getting buzzed | Closed to John Gaius

Mom friend override | Closed to Augustine Quinque

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cw: hand gore

cw: hand desecration, body horror