deercountry | Was I really seeking good [Open]

Was I really seeking good [Open]

Who: Varian and you!
What: November catchall!
When: Throughout November.
Where: All around the place!

Content Warnings: Child poisoning in the comments, bloodletting in the first half of the Sleeper Farm prompt

BUILDING AN ABOMINATION TO THE GODS - Driveway of Disaster House, Cassandra- OTA

Varian can't actually remember the last time he built something purely for himself. Both back home, in Deerington and here in Trench, his inventions have always had a greater purpose. Sure, he enjoyed making them, but they were always ultimately to help other people. Building something just for his own enjoyment generally wasn't on his radar. It's only recently that he's felt like he's earned the right to indulge in something for himself.

And so, at the start of the month, Varian can be found on the driveway of the Disaster House- starting to put together the very early beginnings of a frame for a car. He isn't bothered by the lightly falling snow- he doesn't feel the cold anymore and the crisp air is honestly good for clearing his head. He's wearing his serial-killer-esque welding mask and has his little foot-pump-powered 1800s welding kit with him, but that isn't doing so well in the cold weather. After a few frustrating attempts at getting the damn thing to work, he gives up, stepping back to stare at the metal he's trying to get into shape. He looks at his hand, a soft hmmmmmm sound echoing in the mask. He's not comfortable with this, but Mako has been helping him get a more...positive outlook on his abilities.

So, for the first time since he got here, he decides to actually use his abilities for something instead of actively avoiding and being reviled by them. He flexes his fingers, using the techniques Mako has run over with him many a time, willing flame to sprout on them. He has to concentrate a lot, and it's definitely not a tiny, careful flame like the one on his torch (he's not quite THERE yet) but it's enough to start welding the pieces of metal together. Once he's done that he snuffs the flame by closing his fist. He steps back, pushing the mask up so it rests above his goggles (why doesn't he just take the goggles off, why does he have to wear both?) to assess his work, before realising someone is standing nearby, turning to offer a little smile.

"Do you think it looks okay? It's kinda shoddy but I guess I can always go over it later once the snow stops."

IT'S FULL OF OPENINGS, IT'S JUST YOU AIN'T SEEING THEM - All around the city - OTA

For once, fate has smiled down at Varian. His Patron is The Tower and while the buildings are shifting and doorways keep vanishing and reappearing he's still able to find his way around. It's given him confidence that means he might just be ignoring the always buddy up system, because it's fine. It's totally fine. He knows where he's going. So he goes about his daily business as normal - unfettered by the chaos that the vast majority of the population are dealing with. He's a compassionate soul, though, and if he sees someone looking lost, he moves over to them, raising an awkward hand in greeting.

"Uh... hey. You look...lost? Do you want me to help you out? I understand where I'm going for...for some reason. If you stick with me, we can get to where you need to go."

SECRET, SECRET, SECRET SECRET BUNKER - Willful Machine - 28th November OTA with CR prompt

Finding the compass on his workbench had been a happy little surprise. He didn't really need one, but it's pretty nice and after quizzing the people in his house (none of whom took responsibility for the little gift) he probably should have been worried about the device that just appeared in his lab in the dead of night. He isn't, though, because it's cool.

Naturally, he uses it as a normal compass first- but as he's working on his car, he does need to try it on bigger things. He's headed to Willful Machine for more parts, and it using it on a sheet of metal on the ground to measure out exactly what he needs. It's while he's doing this that the circle opens up under him, upending him into a little room. One moment he's there, the next he isn't. Maybe you were there to watch him fall in like an idiot. He looks around at the space- full of everything a person would need to hunker down for a night and makes a soft confused noise before yelling because that seems the best course of action here.

"Um- HI??? Is anyone there?"

And if that doesn't work, he'll get out his Omni and send a message to his friends:

Fell in a hole. I think into a pocket dimension? Help.

MUSHABOOMING

On hearing there were cool new mushrooms to deal with here, naturally, Varian's gone about trying to harvest some. He can make all kinds of cool alchemy with them!! This being Varian, of course, means he's neglected some pretty basic health and safety in his mushroom harvesting. So people can catch him in various pickles throughout the town as he goes about stupidly collecting stuff for his lab.

They may find him hallucinating on Walking Terrors, covered in spores and running around with a panicked expression and screaming about the floor melting. Or maybe you'll find him face-down in the dirt, a Floater sitting happily on top of him. Just...help the idiot out, he'd appreciate it.

THE SLEEPER FARM

Varian starts his No Good Real Bad Time swinging upside down- his blood dripping down into a bowl underneath him. It freezes before it hits the bowl, of course, leaving a blue, frozen blood slushie at the bottom. He's still confused how he got here, but he knows that's not the pressing concern here- not while there are other bodies strung up who have definitely had body parts removed. Varian does a quick, muggy-headed check that nothing seems to be out of place- no organs missing, two arms, one leg. Everything as it should be. They've even left him with his prosthetic, which is nice. But he'd still rather get down from here before this gets worse.

"Uhhhhhh, hi? Anyone still...conscious here?"

Or perhaps you find him afterwards, once he's down and on his feet again. He's still got a sizeable gash on his arm, but at least it's frozen over - thanks for the natural cauterization, coldblood! He'll be helping get other people down or helping them move as best he can. Much like earlier in the month in the town, he feels a strange pull towards the way out, and he'll be trying to bring whoever's with him along that path.

"C'mon, I...I know the way out."

He's not offering a reason for that, oh no. It's while he's leading someone towards the alter that they're suddenly pulled out by a force Varian recognises almost immediately. It's an old, familiar one after all- and once they're upended onto the lawn where Disaster House's Lamp Friend sits, he looks up at the sky, frowning.

"...Cynthia?"

[[ooc: As always if you want something else or a closed thread, please hit me up on

teeff or PM me! Will add event stuff later!]]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Varian definitely wasn't enjoying either of those things. Compared to the last two months in this place, this is actually kind of...pleasant. He'll take weirdly being able to navigate the city over all of that, even if it does lend an ominous kind of air to everything.

"I don't...think so?" he frowns, unsure. "It's like... an instinct? Like something pulling me in the right direction? I haven't had any other kind of weird side effects this month at all."

He pauses, grimacing.

"But it's still pretty early on, something might happen yet. I'll let you know if things start getting...weirder."

He turns another seemingly arbitrary corner and hey look at that, they're on the road leading to Gaze.

Well, at least whatever weird thing is going on with Varian does seem to be getting Ange home better than she could've done herself - because she's pretty sure she's been out for hours now without getting even close to Gaze.

And yet here they are. She can already see it in the distance as they're heading down this road, as if it was just that easy all along.

Weird.

"Definitely keep an eye on it," she says, even turning to look at Varian as they walk. Like she absolutely wants to make sure to drill this into his head. "If it changes even in some slight way, tell someone, okay? Even if it's just Fern, or anyone else who lives with you. Don't lose track of it, that's exactly how stuff takes you over when you least expect it. And then it's already too late."

Varian's been quietly following the pull in his head to get to and through Gaze. He does pause when he catches Ange looking at him, picking up the worry in her tone. He tries to offer her an encouraging smile.

"I will. Don't worry, I'm- I'm not gonna let this be a thing I try to handle by myself. Not this time," he's stubborn and reckless, but even he has limits. "This whole...weird blood and moon stuff is a lot to deal with. I don't know even a quarter of...well, anything. Trying to brave it all alone is noooot smart. Not while we know so little. If it gets weirder, I'll let people know."

".. thank god for you having a pretty decent head on your shoulders, you know."

Not that it should be something to praise someone for. Not trying to handle this sort of thing alone should be a baseline thing, something anyone ought to realise upon ending up in this place, but Ange has already seen so many examples of the contrary that it feels like a breath of fresh air, just to hear him say that..

And it's definitely lifting some of the worry off her. She knows Varian is surrounded by people. If something went wrong, surely someone would notice and immediately help, before it could get worse.

"But.. yeah. I imagine all of this must be even stranger for you." Ange moves her hands a little, almost playfully making one of her golden magical butterflies appear with a wave of her hands, making it fly around. "You've never had special powers before, right?"

She remembers talking about that, quite a long while ago. And yet in this place it seems like everyone got powers, even those who didn't have them before.

"Well...most of the time, anyway."

He has a little smile on his face, to show the dig was himself was intentional. He's well aware the chances of him indulging in common sense are often around 50/50. It's just he's being smart about this particular thing. But he is, at least, surrounded by people. The Disaster House is full to bursting, he doesn't have the opportunity to be stupid on his own most of the time these days.

He watches the butterfly appear into life, raising his eyebrows. Cool. Then shakes his head.

"Nope. I didn't have any powers at all, I was always the one trying to understand other people's powers, but I was just...me," he frowns at his own hands. "I don't know. I'd still rather not have them at all if I had a choice. But I'm learning to be...more comfortable with them."

Ange kind of wants to remark about them not really having a choice. Practically having to be comfortable with powers in this place if they want to survive some of the stuff that appears here - like the ghosts that were around last month, though they mostly seem to have faded by now.

But she doesn't say it. For one, she knows Varian must have figured that out himself as well. And secondly.. it just feels cruel to rub it in.

Maybe it's instead better if she does something productive while they're still walking anyway. If she at least tries to help.

"What specifically makes them feel so uncomfortable to you..?"

She could think of some reasons, but she doesn't want to assume when someone else's feelings are involved.

He does, at least, understand that- underneath all the angst he's carting. Eventually, he'll stop feeling sorry about having all the magic foisted on him and start using it as a means to understand people with it a little better. Eventually.

"Magic is...it's messy for me," he hugs his arms around himself- Ange knows his past, so he doesn't have to dance around it, at least. "All it's ever done back home is hurt me and the people I care about. It destroyed people's lives, it drove me to destroy mine. And even before it did that, everything I did before I met the princess? It was just dismissed as magic."

It still bothered him, even now- it meant a childhood of people keeping away from him like he was an oddity- dangerous.

"They never wanted to learn about science or understand it...or me. I was just that wizard kid in Old Corona even if I wasn't. I just... magic makes everything complicated and unpleasant."

"It's.. kind of strange for me to think about a world like that," Ange slowly says. Not that she's dismissing how he's feeling, really. It's just a precusor, just her making sure that he knows she's still wrapping her head around all of this as they're talking about it.

After all, his world sounds like the complete opposite of her own when it comes to this sort of stuff.

"I mean.. Was magic really so all over the place in your world that people would rather believe in magic.. than in science?"

Varian would much prefer Ange's world. He's always felt so very displaced in his own world. His brain is hard-wired for logic and reason and he exists in a world that tosses that out of the window on the regular. He exhales softly, nodding.

"Pretty much, yeah. Like...I'm from pretty far back. Science is still relatively new," which is part of the problem. "Like some people still think leeches are the best medicinal cure ever. It...doesn't help matters. Magic is just easier, they can just shrug and go 'oh well, must be magic' instead of being faced with something that has... well, has an actual explanation."

It was deeply frustrating.

"But I also grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. People didn't really care about learning. It's not like we had schools for people or anything."

She hums.

"No school, and science being relatively new.. something like medieval times..?" It's just a guess on her part - and she doubt Varian himself knows, since it's not like he could just look into the future of his own world. But even though Ange isn't super great at history, she's pretty sure that schools for wealthy people didn't take too long to pop up.. Even if it took a lot longer before everyone could go to school.

She shakes her head though. In the end it doesn't matter, since--

"Magic never existed in my world. Or.." Ugh, why is her world always so dumb and complicated when it comes to this. "Not technically. Not on a huge scale. Most people don't even know it exists. But even without magic, I heard stories that people still considered science pretty much witchcraft and refused to believe in it when it first came up as a big thing."

Like when that.. one guy.. said the Earth revolved around the sun. Not like Ange knows his name, but that's the example that she's mostly thinking of as she's speaking, staring ahead of them.

"So it somehow seems to be a universal thing, regardless of the existence or magic, or the lack thereof."

Even if that thought may be a little depressing, considering how much Varian loves science.

"Not quite, aim more for the early 1800's and you're closer," but really, he's learned most people from the future assume anything that happened before the 1920's is medieval times, he's accepted it, begrudgingly.

He frowns, listening to her explanation. He doesn't know a whole lot about her world- only that she's struggled a great deal in it, and he knows she's no stranger to magic, which begs the question of how much these things all tie in together. It's...concerning.

"...I'm guessing that caused you a lot of trouble? Magic being...rarer?"

Wow, Varian, please don't call out Ange's lack of paying attention in history class like that, it's rude. (Though even having paid a whole lot of attention in history class might not have helped her much with that, given how much more it'd be focused on Japan instead..)

"Oh, yeah."

Thankfully no witch burning though, because witch hunts would be.. an entirely different and awkward thing to explain to someone whose worlds is steeped in magic.

"No one believed me about it being real. People always called me a weirdo or a freak." It's astounding to her how casually she can say that by now. Maybe it's just because she knows that she's got people who truly care for her here. Like Varian, who's walking right beside her to guide her home, just out of selfless care. "It got to a point where even I got convinced that I was making it all up in my head, considering I was the only one who could see it. I thought I just had.. imaginary friends." There's some shame in the way she says that last part.

Because it's still so awkward.

He's gonna call it out every time, history class for her is present class at best for him. Usually future class, if he's honest with himself. It's a whole confusing mess.

Luckily no witchhunts- there was one lunatic werewolf hunter and that's about as bad as things got in Corona. And she was very swiftly kicked out of the kingdom because it turns out hunting the friend of the crown princess is a bad life choice.

"Oh."

He's quiet for a moment as they walk- that seems...so deeply unfair. He might have been seen as some weirdo no one understood, and it resulted in him being alone a lot of the time, but he also doubled down. Trusted what he knew- stubbornly held his ground.

"I'm sorry. That's... that had to have been really difficult. To feel like you couldn't even believe what you were seeing with your own eyes. That's cruel."

She shrugs a little, as if she's trying to downplay it.

"It's just how these things work. If you hear something often enough, it's easy to start believing in it yourself as well." Or in Ange's case, stop believing. "If anything, it's more impressive that you stuck with what you thought, despite no one else being on your side when it came to it."

"Hah, I guess I'm just too stubborn to do anything else," he admits sheepishly. "Once I put my mind to something, nothing's ever gonna shift me. I knew I was right, and I wasn't about to let them tell me otherwise."

He smiles, a little sadly.

"But I did have people who stood by me afterwards. I'm sorry you didn't have that."

People who stood by him, huh? He did mention his family, though that.. whole unfortunate incident happened. And then there's Rapunzel, and perhaps other friends.. Sure, Varian didn't have it easy, and he did some really dumb stuff, but apparently somehow things ended up okay for him after all.

It might be enviable, considering how utterly constantly crappy Ange's life has been, but she's not the type to get jealous of others because of it. Besides--

"It's fine," she says, shaking her head. "I have people like that now."

After all, no one in this place ever bothers to doubt her when she says she can use magic.

"It just took me a little while longer in the end to find people like that, I guess."

He was endlessly lucky. Even after all he'd done, his friends were there to help him pick up the pieces- help him work himself out again. He's never felt like he deserved such treatment if he were honest. He deserved to be thrown back into the dungeons and ignored for the rest of his days. But that's not what happened. That's not the Corona Rapunzel wants to rule, and he's endlessly grateful for the second chance and support he received with it.

"That's... good. That you have people here now. That's...what matters."

Because this is where they're living now- presumably forever. She needs that support here, and she deserves so much. of it in his opinion.

"Sometimes it takes...time. But I'm glad you have them. Really, Ange, very glad."

Edited 2021-11-23 12:16 (UTC)

".. when you put it like that, it feels so weird," Ange says.

It doesn't sound like a bad kind of weird though. Not necessarily. It's the kind of weird that makes her voice go a little bit quiet, that almost makes Ange seem shy as she stares at the ground while they walk, maybe idly kicking a rock along, just to have something to idly do.

"People being nice to me was already weird enough." A pattern that she recognized somewhere along the way in Deerington, as she stayed there for longer and longer. Going from absolutely no one caring about her to that was.. a lot. "But you saying you're glad that I have something to make me happy.. That's another level entirely."

She shakes her head. It's just weirder because.. at least with people being nice, you can blame it on it being their personality.

But what does Varian have to gain out of her being happy for himself? Absolutely nothing.

And yet he's emphasizing how glad he is.

"People caring still feels weird."

"I...sure, I guess? I can understand that a little."

Varian's struggled with his own feeling of self-worth for so long, but he's learned to accept people will give a shit about him regardless of if he wants them or not, regardless of if he thinks he deserves it or not. It was a hard road to come to accept it, though.

But Ange is such a good person, in his mind. She deserves people caring about her, she deserves people wanting the best for her and being glad she has even a sliver of happiness in her life. For people to want her to have more of it.

"I think people just...care. And even if you don't understand why they do, they still care anyway," he offers her a small smile. "I gave up trying to understand why they did and just...accepted that they cared about me regardless of my feelings on the matter."

She gets that part, at least. That no matter what you try, they will still care. That's been proven pretty well to Ange at this point. The care brigade never stops, no matter what you try to tell them, or no matter how you try to present yourself.

But in the mutual realisation that all they can do is give in to it, Ange can't help but just say: "Ahh, you're just giving in to the caring mafia. Just like that."

.. she's realising that Varian probably doesn't know what the mafia is. But. Well. It's just a dumb deadpan joke anyway.

"I didn't realise they had gotten to you that much already."

"I'm...not sure what a mafia is but I'm gonna go yes?"

That seems like the sensible direction to go here, he can read the room- like a pro, even! He'll even laugh at her deadpan joke.

"I still don't really feel like that myself," he admits. "But that doesn't seem to factor in if they care or not. In fact, it usually skews them even further into caring about me."

Ugh. She hates it because Varian is so right here. There is absolutely no way to escape the caring brigade, and it's occasionally terrifying.

It makes Ange pull a bit of A Face (like a kid who really doesn't want to eat something that was just put in front of them, really) as they walk, but she shakes her head and instead says:

"They didn't have the mafia where you come from either? I'm slowly starting to feel our worlds are total opposites."

Not just in time or technology levels, but also the magical differences, and then stuff like this on top of it..

She will never escape them - she is doomed and the face she pulls makes him laugh.

"No, we didn't. What is it?"

He's picturing some sort of...building where people go for hugs or something. That's probably right. He's totally got this.

"It really does sound like, huh? But hey, it means we get to learn weird new things from one another we wouldn't experience otherwise, right?"

"I don't know, I'm not sure how to feel about a world with magic everywhere.." And where singing is apparently normal, Ange will later learn.

Varian, please, how are you even possible as a product from that sort of world. At least Ange matches how awful her own world is, okay! This is how introverts are born, because they don't want to interact with terrible worlds!!

Shaking her head to get the thought out of there though, she instead focuses on his question.

"And the mafia is.. well, you probably have something like bandits in your world, right? People who just rob others? They're kind of like that, but much more organized. They have hitmen and underground torture rooms, all that stuff." You know, casually saying 'all that stuff', because underground torture rooms are totally normal. And totally comparable to extroverts who won't stop caring about you.

(It's a form of torture in its own way, clearly.)

"It's okay, I've lived there most of my life and I'm still not sure how I feel about it."

So much singing. All the time. And he often questions how he came to exist in a world like that. He feels the real answer is that the universe likes him to suffer. Seems a rational explanation for all of this.

"Oh yeah! We have lots of bandits back home. There's an organised group...or there was. They were ruled by this guy called The Baron, and if anyone has underground torture rooms, he probably would," did he die? he vaguely remembers Eugene saying the guy had been bitten by his own venomous spider. "Okay, I understand the context now."

Was I really seeking good [Open]

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