deercountry | Catch-all for July and August

He gives no outward reaction, to this story of apocalypse. God tips his head in acknowledgement. He listens. His eyes are very dark, and the white rings of them seem bright as distant stars.

"And he said yes. He went to meet her in the ashes."

He says it like it's the simplest thing in the world.

"It's not that easy,"

Oscar cut in, watching God's movements and expression change as he told more of the story.

"Salem was completely alone in the dust, and the Gods saw what that loneliness was doing to her. She even threw herself in the pools of darkness left in the remnants of the Brothers' lands in a bid to kill herself. It failed, but only transformed her pain into something more powerful "

Oscar contemplatively took another cookie, toying with it got a moment to avoid contact with those frigid, burning eyes.

"She became darkness and rage incarnate. So.... No. The knight was told that he wouldn't be alone in this. And, at some point in the thousands of years that passes, after humanity had rebuilt itself from the ash, he woke up on our world in the head of a stranger."

"Darkness and rage incarnate," he echoes in murmur, like he's testing the weight of it. "You have to admit: that's a cool title."

It's mostly a joke. He'd know from titles, right? Scourge of Death, Vindicator of Death and all.

"So they returned his soul to the world, but not his body," he says. "What became of him after that? I'm guessing it doesn't end there."

He'd expect incorporation and subsumption of the soul by the host's own body, or degradation of the body by the spare soul: no one is meant to bear two distinct entities sharing real estate long-term. But his rules, very clearly, do not apply.

Seriously:

"You've seen what I'm made of. I'm sure you can guess."

But, sighing, he elaborated.

"Early on, he took over the host bodies entirely. He reunited with Salem and, with the two of them still being lovelorn, they wed and did what married people do. They built a home, started a family... And, they were happy for a while. That is, until the knight realized that Salem wasn't joking when she suggested that they become gods of the new world. He took their children and tried to flee, but she killed them all."

He cracks a wry smile, and it looks only a few shades from bitter.

"I am really starting to feel for these characters," he murmurs, over his mug of tea. "It's very difficult to make a marriage work after years of apocalyptic solitude. Honestly, Salem did nothing wrong."

This is patently a joke, self-deprecating in its absurdity: in this story, John wouldn't be the knight.

"You would say that."

Oscar shook his head and heaved a sigh.

"Over centuries and multiple host lifetimes, the Knight realized that there were better methods than just overtaking the host. After all, the point was for him to never be alone. If he worked with the host, instead of just taking them, he realized that the world wasn't so painful. However, the hosts were always changed by the experience-- and so was he. Eventually they both changed so much that it was hard to tell the difference between identities in his own head. Meanwhile, Salem just continued sitting in her anger, growing stronger and biding her time...

"And the rest of the details don't matter for this. The Grimm and the Relics have no influence here-- it's just me, what's leftover from Julia Sodder's dream, and the weight of everyone who came before me."

Edited 2022-08-25 16:03 (UTC)

He inclines his head again as he listens, fingers still upon his now forgotten mug of tea. Oscar explains, and he nods like a man taking in purely academic information: quiet, pensive.

"This is useful context," he says, finally. "I mean, I imagine it isn't fun to live through, don't get me wrong. I've seen early-days soul mélanges and it hasn't been pleasant. More than one person isn't meant to live in a body, not without," and here he makes a very vague gesture with one hand, fingers wiggled in the air as though to indicate something ephemeral, "achieving a sort of... homogeneity. It sounds like you're describing the same. The— what's the polite term? foreign soul?— will fully subsume the host, we'd probably call that possession, or they mingle into a unified being."

He regards Oscar with a new, thoughtful consideration.

"Still, I'd like to hear how the story ends."

"That, sir, is still ongoing."

He hasn't completed his mission yet-- but the price their rag-tag little team was paying was too high. Oscar wasn't sure how he felt about Remnant anymore-- and it didn't matter.

Trench was home.

"The Knight, over all of his lives, had found a way to control the threads of history-- through fairy tales, and wars that came and wiped out so much of our culture and history. He even has some information hidden from me still, but I know he's got reason for that."

He huffed a breath, fingers tightening around the tea cup while he stared within it's depths.

"He was a King once. That gave him more access and control than he had expected, and everything he did was to protect the world from despairing over Salem-- and, I think, to hide some of his own hurt and shame.

"My last memories of being in Remnant are of being captured by Salem. The team I'm working with found out the entire truth, but it's not enough to just save us. There's still things that Salem doesn't have... And even though she acts like I'm one of the Knight's youngest hosts in all that time, it doesn't mean she's a gentle interrogator."

"You were disrupted in the middle of a war," he translates. "I can relate."

He drinks his tea, and considers. He can see why Pyrrha's taken a liking to this kid: he's scrappy, interesting, and not afraid to tell off something a lot bigger than himself. He's trying in a way that is painfully apparent. John's not blind.

He knows to hear every He as also We, both self and separate. Not many people have a good frame of reference for that. Lyctorhood is subsumption, not homogeneity; but he is not exactly a lyctor.

"Darkness and rage incarnate," he agrees. "I don't imagine she would be."

"...a lot of us were,"

Oscar said quietly. The amount of people that understood even his baseline trials always astounded him. Pyrrha, and others like her, understanding the deeper issues left him shaken.

Just as John had gained some insight into Pyrrha's decisions, Oscar had as well. Pyrrha hadn't been joking when she suggested that he and John were fairly alike. How many people could talk about world shattering affairs so plainly over tea? How many of them would try to explain via metaphor and have it understood.

... He didn't like this. But, Oscar always knew he was a few poor decisions away from being a war criminal.

"My predecessor still speaks to me in my head. We were starting to work together at the time we were taken into the Dream. But, as Salem said herself, I'm not him. Not yet. But, since the only condition is that this eternal Knight always joins with a 'like-minded soul', I don't think the gap between us is as wide as I had imagined."

Edited 2022-08-25 20:35 (UTC)

"I'm starting to get the picture."

He sets down the tea mug with a soft clunk, and tips his head in consideration.

"Personal question: is it still progressing? How does the squid situation play in? Not to be callous, here," he raises his eyebrows like it's a joke, after July— "but you've got a fascinating case study going on, when it comes to puzzling out the way Sleeper souls interact with the local patterns of death and rebirth."

And: "I imagine this has something to do with the way things played out, back in the spring." When Oscar fell out of his body and couldn't find his way back in. No wonder; the link between soul and body isn't straightforward, in his case, least of all if this greater revenant has deeper roots in his body than he does. He's in a constant flux state of possession.

"--it's stopped since we left Remnant,"

Oscar explained, carefully omitting the fact that his predecessor had a physical body due to the circumstances. Sitting a little straighter underneath that curious gaze, Oscar frantically looked everywhere but John's face.

He was a known liar, even to Salem. There was no telling what this man who dared to call himself God would divine.

"What's done is done. We can't reverse it. And when Deerington fell apart, we made decisions that we hoped would earn our freedom from the agreements with the Gods that bound us-- like how we freed Cynthia Sodder to become the Moon."

Oscar shifted awkwardly, and tried to cover his unease with a big gulp from the tea cup.

"I think a lot of things are involved... the kinda things that you're probably familiar with. Honestly, I wasn't even sure about coming. But...

"Pyrrha said that you'd be nice."

Edited 2022-08-25 23:41 (UTC)

Pyrrha's giving out her name to stray soul mélanges, then. Not like it matters anymore; not like any of them still have control of anything at all, here. She didn't even live through the eras in which they were all most distant and divine.

Here, they're, what? Powerful squid among other powerful squid. The landscape is cluttered with ghosts and gods.

"Did she," he says. "I'll have to take that up with her later." It's a toothless threat. He's more interested in this kid squirming with something he isn't saying, anyway. "And what is it you think I can do?"

His first instinct upon meeting Salem for the first time had been to lie.

Oscar, in all of his fear, had summed up the iron in his soul and drummed up the best Ozpin impression he could manage. It would have hosed Ironwood certainly, likely Qrow, and who knows who else? But a single sentence was all it took for Salem to divine his Truth.

He didn't sustain a searing blast of magics so ancient they didn't even have a name anymore to just give up his Truth to someone who called himself God.

"Pyrrha knew all this from my own admission. We bonded over sharing headspace with others and deciding to make our own path with what we've been given."

A shrug. John didn't need to know more.

"The kinda stuff you do doesn't exist in my world. I can't even explain it. Now... I warn you. That Noodle Guy gave me the word 'Anti-theist'. I don't trust anyone who encourages others to think of them as a God. But, Pyrrha is just a person with a strong will who was dealt a bad hand. I trust her."

Sharing headspace with others, says the kid. God puts a pin in that.

"Anti-theist," he murmurs, and closes his eyes. Incredible. "I trust her, too. So we've got that in common."

He says it like it's a little bit funny. It is, in fact, a lot bit funny. With immense patience, God says:

"And she thinks I can help you with something?"

Oscar quickly hid his discomfort by loudly sipping at his tea. It wasn't so hot anymore, but it allowed him a moment. He needed that eternal heartbeat to contemplate the wisdom of what he was about to do.

After all, he was putting his very heart in the hands of a ten-thousand year old God Emperor that didn't understand any shred of human boundaries.

Setting his cup down with a soft click, Oscar finally answered.

"It took me a month to get back to my body. The part that is Me was stuck bouncing between the headspace of my friends and my Squid out in the sea.

"It can't happen like that again."

God goes hmm. He chews his lip a moment, brow furrowed like Oscar is an interesting puzzle to unpick, and then he nods.

"That wasn't my doing," he says. "Not by any mechanism I'm aware of, anyway... not with any intent. I can undo the pinning job, but that's meant to keep your soul with your body, squid-shaped or otherwise. If there's something else that keeps throwing you loose, I don't have the shape of it yet, and the interactions are as much an enigma to me as to you."

He spreads his hands like it's a mystery.

"We seem to have a lot of variables in play. Still: hold still and I'll take a look." He offers an open hand for Oscar to take, palm-up, eyebrows quirked in invitation. "In trade for the brownies, and telling Pyrrha I've been nice. Deal?"

"Only if that's good enough. I'm not gonna ask you to help for free. Everyone knows that nothing is actually free..."

He trailed, lips pressed together in a wary, uncertain line. Not being from Earth has given him a certain blindness to the miraculous healer that John had taken his notes from.

Oscar steadied himself with a measured breath-- and reached out to take John's hand.

He gives a soft sound of amusement, but it doesn't stop him taking Oscar's hand.

What he does next does not hurt, as such, but it does feel— startling. A moment's dissociation, disorientation, as he releases a theorem already gone threadbare and forgotten with his repeated deaths and resurrections. From here on, there will be nothing of his magic to bind Oscar's soul to body, for the little good it did him in the long run.

John releases his hand and sits back, chewing his lip again in thought.

"I'm a healer, you know," he says, after a moment. "Blood Minister, on technicality. I take tips... I don't charge. So if things go sideways again, you can come to me. Call it an olive branch." He tips his head towards the door, where he knows they're being listened to. "And a favor to a friend. We'll try for more brownies and less bloodshed, you and me."

It's not forgiveness, exactly. It's domesticity, if it's anything. They'll make it work.

It wasn't the first time he had felt dissociated since starting on this mess of a journey to solve Remnant's crisis and find his footing in this new world. It was a disconnect-- a sense of being both within and without his body at once-- and it lasted for a second.

The result was... no change. Just the quietly amused face of a man that called himself God.

"One of my friends from home is a healer. Another is an empath. I've watched them... and the healers I've met here."

He arched an eyebrow.

"You guys take care of everyone, but don't always take care of yourselves."

A beat. He glanced towards the door, where he knew Pyrrha stood watch.

"Just don't mess with my friends anymore, or come to my place once it's rebuilt, and we're good."

It wasn't much. Oscar knew that ultimately his words were just that. Words. Without a firmer grasp of blood magic, he couldn't completely bar anyone from his home once it was back in order, but with luck that little boundary would be... respected.

"You better take care of yourself, though." He added, almost as an afterthought. "Pyrrha also said that you two did a blood pact, so she's implicated in what you do. And, since she's one of my friends..."

Oscar trailed, and gave John a pointed look.

"Get yourself in order, John. So my friends don't get hurt."

Edited 2022-09-16 21:05 (UTC)

This kid is, again, so bold he wishes Pyrrha were in the room so he could give her astonished looks about it. Are you seeing this, he wants to say. She's probably laughing.

Antitheist. Of course she went and scooped him up.

"I'll work on it," he says, tone contrite because it's funny. He's not going to hurt a kid for backtalk. That's not going to get anyone anywhere. "Pyrrha will probably kick my ass, if I don't."

It wouldn't be funny to promise anything about not getting Pyrrha hurt, so he doesn't. That ship sailed lifetimes ago.

Oscar appreciates the lack of promises.

Two years of watching other colorfully menacing figures in both Deerington and Trench claw their way through corruption-driven madness and back to a semblance of sanity had taught him not to ask for promises. All any of them could do was their best. Oscar included.

He chuckled a little at the commentary and finished off his tea.

"If I don't get there to make a point first," He said-- and grinned.

Shooting God in the face was nothing to be proud of, especially for the little good it had done. But, Oscar still felt a little proud about it.

He was done trying to be something that he wasn't anymore.

"Don't push your luck," he warns, low and soft. But he looks amused. A skeleton clatters back in to collect their empty teacups and shuffle back with the tray, and John rises unhurried from his seat; it's a dismissal.

"Til the next crisis, then."

Catch-all for July and August | Closed

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