deercountry | Pyrrha | Duty December Catchall

CW, expected across threads: potentially gross food, fighting, everyone dies in the end, impending apocalypse, murder, structures made from preserved fresh meat and bone (cow, sheep), cults, god complexes, etc. Warnings will be posted as they come.

As part of regular parenting, Pyrrha and Duty take to completing a Trench tradition with each of their formally adopted kids: Oscar, Billie, The Fern, & Sharon. The bones are selected appropriate to the child: Oscar from from a beast Duty had to put down, Billie from Trenchwood Farm, The Fern from the same beast whose back resembled a giant fern of bones, and Sharon from the remains of a brutally but efficiently slaughtered blood zealot. Each thought forms slowly and deliberately with focus, the same focus that generally turns them further off from hunting this month.

Once they're done, their eyes light up. Words have been sparser than usual for Pyrrha, as few as ever for Duty. "Shall we?" they ask, yes even to The Fern.

CW, expected across threads: potentially gross food, fighting, everyone dies in the end, impending apocalypse, murder, structures made from preserved fresh meat and bone (cow, sheep), cults, god complexes, etc. Warnings will be posted as they come.

Duty takes to carrying three new bone knives on his person—named Manipulation (for Dorothea), History (for Remina), and Hope (for Argonaut). The hilts are wrapped in friendship bracelets. Wrapped up these form—an image of a chicken shitting; a large eye; and the phrase "Do not give up."

Ask and he will take them out to show you. If you make the connection to Winter Mourning, he'll even offer to enter a memory together.

CW: near drowning, freezing

The cold feels like a dream at first. After all, Coldbloods are usually immune to it. The cold doesn't explain the weight on his chest. He cannot check himself directly for a heart attack, but any such attack would be induced, and no one touches him. Not that. It also doesn't match his usual dreams, the ones he's been controlling.

Dream or not, it's serious business.

Duty flails, and the moonlight hits. Ice. Water. Underneath a lake. He reaches for his tea—? No not tea. Nothing is around his waist, not his spear, not his sword, not a knife, not a sharp pointy thing among them. Fine. He punches the ice once; nothing happens. Not a creak, not a crack, not a screech, not a scratch.

Duty swims in one general direction. His eyes watch the ice above him, and he listens and feels for movement in the water indicative of, well, friend or foe. Either's useful.

CW: giant snake (Madame Generosity), references to illness

It's late, but Duty makes himself presentable. A shower. A shave. A clean shirt. The prettiest weapons. The classics (sword & spear), two pistols, and three new bone knives. One is holstered in prominence at his waist. The leather with an engraving of a large snake dyed white. It stands in for the Pthumerian he hopes to reach an audience with tonight. Rested gently in a leather pouch, along with the rest, is the shed skin of a snake he tracked down earlier in the month, when the news of Dorothea and her sightings spread.

He waits for Heartnest on the front porch, standing in the same spot he stood talking with Augustine a couple months before. As Doorway. Nothing special marks the spot but his memory still his. Trench is his home, and he sees it wherever he goes.

When the shrike approaches, Duty asks, "Were you able to source the—" He holds up one hand to mime a small hard shape. He refuses frustration.

Nico tends to be at the Outpost during the day at this time of year, he dislikes the cold and snow - both of which are worse at night, so he avoids doing that. Well, it's more than dislike in that if he has to shadow travel out of here that's extra coldness and the teen would like to avoid getting hypothermia or frostbite. That means their paths are more likely to cross in the winter, and he's sparred with Duty enough to pick up on new weapons.

Plus, they are made of bone and he can sense that. Nico looks over at the older individual. "New weapons?"

It's not a surprise, he's simply curious about the addition.

Illarion's no less dressed for the occasion, in the splendid and barbaric panoply of a shrike warlord: High-collared coat, fine trousers and polished riding boots, topped with a mantle with woven-in bone and an embroidered veil. (It is the same outfit, in fact, that January's Patron gifted him with the year prior. It seems only right.)

He's prepared for the question on his approach, holding up a gloved hand to display the glint of a tourmaline the size of an infant's fist, a lovely bicolor in apple-green and dawn pink. "Yes. Without wiping out all my bloodstone."

There's a teasing barracks-humor in that, as if he'd even consider trading for a subpar offering merely to preserve his own resources.

"Shall we?"

The gemstone is nearly as stylish as Heartnest's outfit. Except that it isn't possible, Duty would tease him for overdressing for the occasion. That nice of outfit being possible is good to know, but finery hasn't been his priority.

One side of his mouth curves slightly, and Duty nods. "You were a wealthy man," he teases back.

He motions ahead and walks side by side with the shrike. "Never Mind suggested she'd be willing to see us," Duty sets his thoughts aloud because they're difficult to keep in order. He'll talk less once they're with her. "That's promising."

Madame Generosity might live up to her name or have self interest as the next patron. Both are valid. Both they can work with.

"We cannot simply demand she self-isolates," Duty muses, but they will see how she's doing. "I pray," somewhere between a joke and a serious statement, "she's interested in at least one of our ideas."

It would feel like a strange way to bond, one she wouldn't have agreed to, if a memory wasn't what really brought them close in the first place. What helps the most, though, is the fact that Duty has chosen to share this with her; it's not something stolen from one of them.

Still, she hesitates, "You sure about this?"

She's offering him a chance to back out, a chance to change his mind.

Duty nods. "I"m sure," he says. Without any hesitation, he wraps his hand around one of the bones.

At first glance, it's a boring compound. Fluorescent lights. Cheap countertop. Canned goods. A circle of adults old enough they've gone beyond drinking with bottles of booze duct taped to their hands but younger far younger in feeling if not an actual decade or two for them all younger. John, for example, looks physically about the same age, but his eyes are golden and carry more hope, less swagger. The others may not have the same names, but Pyrrha recognizes them all. Augustine looks younger. Mercymorn less spiteful. Most of all, Sharon likely recognizes the one who looks most like Duty—a younger, nearly unscarred Duty. Solid. Imperturbable.

Something twists in Duty's heart, one stuttering beat, before he devotes his attention to watching it all and taking in the details.

Beyond the window, the farther view is blocked by a solid wall of meat. Muscle. Fresh as the day it came off the cow. Some morbid sound absorbing barrier. No one in the memory pays it any mind. However long they've lived within this wall, it's long enough to stop staring at.

The conversation flows around Duty and Sharon. Necromancy, how does it work, how can it save the planet. There are two main threads there, braiding together over each other again and again: the technical (how can necromancy preserve people to get them off the planet, how can it heal the planet, bone magic is incredible but it's not that) and the practical (how do they get anyone to agree to their plan, how to get buy in, how to convince people it works, etc).

The woman Duty recognizes as who he used to be stands up above the fray. "First things first. If they’re going to let us fix the world, you’ve got to make them take us seriously. Get some leverage. If they want to make you into a bad wizard, be a bad wizard. We can write the history books to say you were a good wizard. Or at least an okay wizard. They’re not going to listen because we talk nicely, they’re going to listen because we scare the shit out of them," she says.

In the way of dreams, the way of memories, after everyone stops looking like fish opening and closing their mouths, time shifts slightly. The phone rings. The quiet half-conversation they hear is all about assuring whoever's on the other end doesn't mean violence. Duty cannot hear it but doesn't trust them. The woman he was doesn't trust them. John doesn't trust them either, but standing there with Ulysses and Titania—even dead and young, Duty recognizes them—behind him he's got all the confidence of an evil wizard.

The black suits are Americans, even those that mask their accents to some degree. It's in their voices. They only use the c word once, focused more on their honest to god dead leader they want to prop up like a puppet. What's more nefarious than an evil wizard leading a cult? A cabal of shadowy powers fronting with the best looking zombie in the history of zombies.

They offer a lot of zeroes. It pays to be an evil wizard. It pays to puppet the president of the United States.

They money's ones and zeroes on a screen. Duty reads about the smoke screen of the FTL project—even lacking context, he'd know that much from his own body language in the memory—while they wait for everyone to come back. They graph all the inconsistencies on butcher paper. The story is so full of holes a five year old could see through it. There's no way it works. There's no way this saves humanity, much less the world.

Still, John walks back through the door with a nuclear weapon in a briefcase and billions of dollars Alfred once more explains are a mass hallucination.

Evil wizard vs. 'charitable' corporations. Duty knows how the story ends.

They come back to Trench, and Duty's quiet. A glimpse of the past, before the end of the world. It hardly feels like new information, even as it hits him in the gut, all these people walking and talking when it's been so long. He breathes, mutters thanks to Remina under his breath, and looks over at Sharon.

Though he hasn't shown her a picture of what he looked like, she knows he looks like his husband. Surely she recognized him. He wants her to recognize him.

Pulling out Manipulation, Duty spins it around his fingers a couple times without cutting himself to carefully catch it by the blade and offer it hilt out toward Nico. No surprise he noticed the bone.

"Renewable resource," Duty comments on their construction. Especially here, when so many of the dead respawn and return. Anything they lose that gets used is extra, a free resource. That's even if you don't live with a house full of necromancers.

He watches the spin of the knife, watching Duty easily do the act when bone and metal weapons definitely have a different weight to them. It makes him curious if someone altered the density of the bone for better balance or if Duty just adjusted that fast to the change. Nico takes the offered weapon to find out for himself.

"Fair point," he remarks with the smallest of smiles. People would look at him with a horrified expression for using bones as a weapon back home, but here some just consider it just a simple way of life. "You make these yourself?"

It's a lot to take in. There are pieces that fit into the puzzle of his world, things she's picked up from discussions with Duty to her singular chat with John. Necromancy & a dying Earth & a way to leave it.

Other pieces get lost in her head, in the way her focus flits from person to person. She recognizes John even without those ringed black holes for eyes. Others she recognizes but can't put names to them, like Augustine and Mercymorn. It's Duty, and the woman with the commanding presence, that really steal her attention, though.

In the memory, Duty looks... different. He's no less himself, minus a few scars, but it's like the centuries have changed him in little ways that would be hard to put into words for most people. Maybe it's the way his eyes crinkle or the expressions he makes as he listens to the others talk. Or maybe it's how he looks at that woman. In any case, she sees him, recognizes him, and feels strange to have done so.

Some of the words and talk float through her ears but a few things stumble and get stuck in the folds of her brain. Cult chief among them. She wants to berate someone over the idea but this is a memory from centuries ago. So much of what they plan seems a gamble but the world is dying and what do you do when you've run out of options?

The memory comes to an end and it's disorienting to see Duty again before her. She looks at him a little harder, her blue eyes searching for every little change as if to commit them all to memory.

"You have less scars," His husband's body, she remembers. His and Not His.

The memory is committed. Duty doesn't know if it's possible to relive the same memory, but he will complete many Winter Mournings. It may come up again. It may be his only time.

Duty nods to Sharon and lifts one arm slightly. "Couple on here, rest were post-resurrection," Duty agrees. He knows the stories behind each of them post-resurrection, whether he was there or not. They shared with each other far more intimacies than that.

"They're his," Duty motions toward the bone for lack of better direction. Back toward the memory. "My husband's." Once they ascended, they had ten thousand years without any new scars. Trench? He has a new one on his chest from The Reckoning, and in moonlight, John's handprint glows upon his shoulder.

Duty's glad for the smile. Bone's as normal as anything else in the Nine Houses. It's a reliable source of necromantic power. His spear comes from his own bone. Being bone lets it collapse down. Far easier to carry.

He nods. No need for necromancy for him to make weapons. He's better at using them than making them, but there's always a situation where needs must. Ten thousand years is plenty of time for practice. "Start to finish," he says, meaning the hilt too.

"Your husband's," she repeats after him with a nod, "He was easy to recognize. You...," she trails off here, hesitant, "You were a little harder."

"'Be a bad wizard'" She quotes, looking up at him to see if she was correct, searching for some hint of approval.

Duty doesn't quite smile. His mouth broadens, and his eyes twinkle. Yes, that's him. He only remembers the memory the same way Sharon does, but that's him all right, both in looks and attitude toward problem solving.

"Yes," Duty confirms aloud. Be a bad wizard. They'll write the history books. Well, John sure lived up to that.

Duty may not smile, though she can see that twinkle in his eyes, but Sharon does. Hers lights up her face with a soft pride. She hadn't been sure, not 100%, but Pyrrha stood out in the memory; she'd been the focus. Beyond the strange wall of muscle outside the window, beyond the chatter of necromancy and the planet and cults, it was Pyrrha who stood out.

"Did you convince them? You guys go 'bad wizard with a cult' route?" Her smile falters just a fraction when she says the word cult. That word will always trigger a soreness within her, will always steal something from her, but she knows that they were running on fumes and desperation.

Moments like this are some of the best parts of parenting, Duty thinks. Children proving themselves confident and capable, for which you only deserve a small piece of credit but receive the blessing of experiencing with them. Yes, it's a good one.

Duty exhales. "Yes," he says evenly. He runs one hand against the fuzzy red makings of a beard, if he misses any days shaving.

"Not that I'd remember." He motions toward the wreath. "I got what you got." It's his universe. He has information Sharon doesn't. Thousands of years of it. More than he could ever share if sharing and listening was all they did all day the rest of Sharon's life. He has the answer, even when he cannot remember the days pre-resurrection.

Maul's eyes glitter with keen interest when he sees the new knives Duty has. He can always appreciate a good weapon, especially ones that are made of bone or antler given how effective they can be here in Trench.

"Where did you acquire those blades?" He asks with curiosity as he approaches Duty one day after he's done working, already having told Duty he was finished, having lost interest in what was going on after the work became repetitive and boring for him.

"Do you remember nothing from back then?" Sharon knows he's been alive for a very, very long time. It seems natural that the older memories would fade away but... to not remember it rubs at her curiously, "Is it because of how old you are?" There's some light ribbing in the way she says 'old', and she even nudges him gently in the ribs with her elbow, but the question is entirely genuine.

With a small sound, cousin to a snort, Duty looks over at Sharon's question. "No, not my age," Duty says. He sighs, recognizing the sensation of desperation everyone carried then. Humanity was so fragile afterward. It felt like the smallest thing could blow it away, John or no John.

"The world ended. The planet and everyone on it," Duty says, "Post-Resurrection, we remembered nothing from before." Not quite blank slates. They still were who they were. Memories, though, they lacked. They formed new ones. Duty remembers every memory he hasn't lost. Which... isn't to say all of them post-Resurrection. That's another conversation.

Even when he works, Duty spends at least half of his day talking—more like listening—to people. He continues shoveling snow like the rest but recognizes Maul with a nod. His pattern adjusts so that he can fit words in with the work.

"Made them," Duty says. For once, the new weapon isn't from Ruby. Hers usually are more complex than a simple bone knife. This... is the kind of weapon he can make for himself.

It's a strange tradition; this making of decorations that will show you the memories of others, but Billie does remember it from last year. This place seems to have a lot of weird traditions, he's stopped questioning it mostly. Decorations made from bone might seem a little strange, but supposedly deer antlers are particularly powerful, so he supposes it makes sense.

He looks up as he's asked if he's ready and gives a nod, extending a hand to his companion. "Let's do it."

Likewise being a Coldblood, it's immediately alarming to K that he can not only feel the cold, but that it's biting, absolutely chilling him to the proverbial bone. In moments like this, he's fortunate to be an android — designed to endure conditions that could be outright fatal to humans, and it serves him well now as he finds himself inexplicably trapped beneath the ice. His strength is such that he can rend steel without effort, and yet as he pushes at the thick ice overhead, it remains intact. Not so much as a crack. There's clearly something unnatural at play here, something that won't be overcome by brute strength alone.

Left with no other choice, he quickly begins swimming in search of something or maybe someone that can help with his predicament. Just able to make out the murky form of another person trapped in this freezing prison, he heads in their direction and is soon greeted with the vaguely familiar features of someone he's observed on the network before. Username Duty. In lieu of speaking, K offers a wave to convey his peaceful intentions, followed by striking the ice to demonstrate: I can't break it, then gives his companion a questioning look. Any ideas, friend?

Duty waves back and considers the ice above them. He wouldn't be surprised if it takes more than one person. Regardless of abilities, that is often the case. That's why finding someone is a good sign. He nods. Same experience.

Time is of the essence. As he sees it, three blood types could be potentially useful: Darkblood, Vileblood, and his own Coldblood. No offense to Palebloods or Warmbloods. He'll gladly accept a creative use of those. Being underwater, Duty treads with his legs, sluggish as they seem, and hold up one hand. He crystalizes a small piece of ice, easy at these temperatures, and holds it up. He points toward himself then at the new person.

Fire. Ice. Either or both could work, but they're high intensity activities. If nothing else, Duty needs his partner ready to haul him up. Preferably, they can work together on the ice for better odds, supernatural and natural.

Pyrrha | Duty December Catchall

Family Traditions (Winter Mourning) [Closed to Oscar, Billie, & Sharon]

Clever Rabbit (Winter Mourning) [Closed to Bone House Extended & Outpost Crew]

Do You Play Nice? (Cold As Ice) [Open]

Snake For Your Health (Pthumerian Illness) [Closed to Illarion]

give me whatever!

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finally getting this CR

welcome!