13 . autumn catch-all

[necrolord]

Who: John Gaius and company.
What: After a rough summer, the King Undying lays low.
When: September - October
Where: Mostly Gaze.

Content Warnings: Tagged in headers as needed. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

Comments

[necrolord]

John takes the stupid bone sippy cup with a smile threatening the corners of his mouth, tired but shockingly genuine. As they settle in, he raises the cup in cheers, and drinks his White Russian like a toddler.

It feels, however fleetingly, like a successful night with the people he loves.

[martyrofduty]

Pyrrha raises the whiskey and drinks. She'd settle for middling stuff except living with Augustine means the good kind.

She looks between Augustine and John, the two reliable sods at seeing her win every one of Cytherea's Who Had the Hottest Cavalier games. "Time to play catch up," she declares, "Time for Who Had the Hottest Adept."

She looks at Alfred, the other cavalier present.

[unsheathedfromreality]

"Which am I counting as?" Illarion asks, accepting his vodka (neat). "For the sake of curiosity, since I am assuming I am out of this game."

He's a necromancer by effort-magic, but only a very poor sort by Imperial standards; did that make him an adept? Or was his martial proficiency enough to make him a kind of cavalier?

[butnotyet]

Alfred looks, for a moment, as if someone just tried to get him to drink the whiskey — full-on snakes-drink-by-demonstrating-they're-just-straws and everything — only for it to have gone up his nose, instead. (Assume, for the moment, just in case, that that isn't how they drink.)

«How much of this is because I'm the only one who never slept with any of them?» he demands, mostly of Pyrrha, but the laughter is leaking in around the edges of his voice, hinting that he's nowhere near as irate as his words could be indicating.

"That does seem likely to make you the least-prejudiced among us," his brother points out, managing to suppress his own laughter, if not the merriment in his eyes — or the momentary wary uncertainty, as his gaze flicks past Pyrrha's.

«Anyway, based on sheer volume, the answer is Valancy regardless.»

(Humblebraggart she was not — which doesn't even get into the —)

"You'll have seen Valancy and Cyrus in that painting Pyrrha put up on the door," Augustine adds, as a maybe-helpful aside to the quiet shrike. "And as for your question — I suppose you might have been either, at some point, but I'm not aware of you having had a permanent partner in your necromancy; it's almost as if you started out being told you should act as a Lyctor from the start, I think —"

Augustine falls silent, looking at him thoughtfully. Now, there's an idea, if he can just pin it down properly — something about that, about souls, about having extra that's always reaching for the River, about placement, and the Nephelian dead-and-undead, if he can just find it, buried somewhere within several thousand years' worth of memories of things that never really happened...

He needs another drink, is what he needs; he knocks back what's left of the whiskey in his hand as a start to it.