deercountry | 02 . december catch-all

Entry tags:

02 . december catch-all

Who:

necrolord and you!
What: A necromancer enjoys Bone Season.
When: December.
Where: Throughout Trench.

Content Warnings: Will be marked as needed. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

(1) recruitment: OTA.

There is a man in the Archives. He doesn't look like much: average height, average build, dressed in simple blacks. He chews his lip as he thumbs through some borrowed tome. There's an untidy stack of ancient books beside him, the titles Rituals of Trench: Remembering Our Pasts and Legends of Trench: Curses and Causations glinting in the lamplight. The one in his hands seems to be The Sleeper Condition. If you've come to do some research on the current issues plaguing town, you'll have to approach this plain and faintly rumpled-looking stranger.

He drums his fingers against the tabletop as he reads, and at the approach of any passerby, he looks up.

His eyes are oil-black and horribly, weightily inhuman.

"I don't suppose," he says, by way of greeting, "you've run across much explanation for the squidly reincarnation? All our esteemed authors seem to take the tentacles as a normal fact of life."

(2) recruitment: existing CR.

It is, by and large, a quiet day in Trench. The God of Necromancers can be found ambling from Gaze to the Blood Ministers' District and back again, sometimes with his facepainted attaché and sometimes not. You might even spot him down by the docks, standing out among the brawn and bustle of sailors.

Regardless, he brightens when he spots an even slightly familiar face, and raises a hand in hello.

"Remind me," he says, bracingly, "how you feel about sailing?"

(3) wildcard.

[ Happy to match formatting! ]

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He catches the attention. He catches the longing, and files it away as useful.

"Desperation can breed innovation," he says, and means it so much more deeply than he lets show in the casual tilt of his shoulders. "It can at least breed willingness to follow along when someone gets it really right. And we," he snaps his fingers between them, quirks the edge of his mouth in what is nearly a smile, "can make all the difference.

"The society may be dying. But then in come the Sleepers, each of us specialized in a field that barely exists. Each of us immortal. The timing's so convenient you could chalk it up to divine benevolence."

"It's an interesting idea, isn't it? If you look past the divine aspect - there's precedent for uplift through talent-seeding." Paul nods, a little charmed by the showmanship of the finger snap despite himself. It's a good touch; he'll have to remember it.

"That said, you would want to attribute it to divine benevolence," he says, and there's something like a flicker of doubt there, then a steeling of will, "It's easier to accept that way."

"So - the hypothetical: Sleepers are intended to revitalize the world by progressing magic." He tilts his head to the left, watching closely. "Let's accept it. Where do they start?"

He tips his head in agreement, watching that flicker of emotion and the firm edge that comes after.

"Oh, we can start anywhere. The locals may not take an interest in teasing out the different schools, but we can recognize adepts of every variety: energy generation, transmutation of matter, manipulation of the mind." He gestures to the Archives at large, as though it's his personal collection of examples. "We might pay a closer attention to what people can do, and categorize by something more useful than color.

"Now, if you're asking my personal preference? I'd like to know how death plays in. The origin and continuation of spirit. Where did we come from, where do we go?" He taps out another little rhythm on the arm of his chair, then quirks his eyebrows at Paul. "Hence: why squids?"

Paul nods his approval at the idea of improving the categorization, and he might have even had something to add to it if they hadn't come back to, of course, the squids. The squids and the sea and death.

"Why not squids?" Paul says, and it's too quick out of his mouth for him not to have thought about this before. "They have a sophisticated nervous system to imprint a mind on. They're adaptable to a wide range of depths. They're quick to grow, if they're being cultured somewhere. Clearly, these have a migratory instinct, so they travel in the right direction. But -"

He turns his left hand over on his knee, palm up and empty, and shrugs with his right. He isn't sure; these are theories, extrapolations backwards from the thing itself, trying to work out the reasoning of a being whose one common agreed feature is her incomprehensibility. For all he knows, maybe she just likes them.

Edited 2021-12-21 03:49 (UTC)

If they're being cultured somewhere. What does it say about him that he finds teenage paranoia so charming? But here he is, watching the gears turn in Paul's head with the fascination of a birdwatcher. He'd like to put this boy in a room with Harrow.

(Or the Sixth, if he had a better handle on the Sixth. Bit early for it still.)

"All solid points," he says, with his own nod of approval. "Decent argument for why a squid would be the blank that becomes the blade. Raises a few questions about the transformation, of course."

He gestures to himself, human-shaped.

"We could speculate all day about the soul's influence on the body. There's a lot to unpack." He resumes drumming his fingers and carries on, watching flickers of emotion play through his young audience. "But it's the origin I'm caught on. Something requires that we arrive so deep and distant that squids are the mandatory vehicle for a soul. I'd love to know how our living ocean has been dredging up spirits."

"It's not an ocean."

Sophia is rigid against his skin. He can feel her tiny heart (and how does she have a heart?) thrumming. But so help him, Paul can't keep letting it slip by him without correction. If it's a trick, he's fallen for it - if it's not, then the stranger should know.

"You said she was the patron of the sea." It's an interesting human habit, euphemism. 'She', not Mariana. "That's half of it. And it's like an ocean. But it isn't one. We should all be dead. I thought at first - sailor's tall tales, there are more of them than fish. But the weather is impossible. Do you know how much energy water can store? How much heat, how much motion? This place should be leveled by storms, or flooded, or crushed. But it isn't. And no one cares to ask how. It 'just is'."

He's leaning forward now, intent, frustrated, offended: "Chaos. Fate. The unknown. They might as well write 'here be monsters' and be done with it."

He quirks his eyebrows up at the claim, at the intensity. It pauses his tap-tap-tapping. A beat of silence hangs between them.

Then he tips his head in acknowledgment of the point, opens his hand in a gesture of Go on.

"Well spotted," he says, tone still low and warm and mild. "I'll confess it's been a while since I lived by the sea. If there is a meaning to that forever-distant storm, I've yet to unravel it."

This incorrectly implies that he does not have theories. It's not an ocean is a flattening of what he already knows to be true; the River is not a river.

Paul isn't getting what he means across, but how can he possibly do that? He feels like a fool, like he's constantly failing to produce the right thing to say here, the thing that will make the stranger raise his plain brows and take Paul seriously as something other than an amateur. The burning thing is: Paul is an amateur. A few weeks of studying archaic books written largely by people whose minds had cracked under the weight of what they were studying is nothing.

But he's seen it. The towering waves, the things inside of them, the crushing black depths where they come from and where he has hung suspended in his dreams every night since he came here. So he keeps pushing on, around the edges of what he means, his eyes narrowed and his head tilted as he tries to think. (It might be easier if he slept more often.)

"How much power do you think it takes to bridge universes?" His hand is on the table beside him, his fingers pressing into the surface to ground him. "What kind of engine do you need to generate it?"

"Now there's a question." It sharpens the way he regards Paul, all approval. "That's what I'm talking about. Do you find it interesting that when we die here, we crawl out of that same water? That once it has its hold upon a soul, we enter a closed system?"

He props his elbows on the arms of his chair, laces his fingers. There's a smudge of ink here or there along the edges of his hands.

"At a certain point, I'm inclined to get out on the water and have a look around."

Relief, then. Paul tries to draw together his composure as much as he can after that. He reassures himself he's said nothing too revealing. He's passionate about the subject, that's no sin. But he stays leaning forward, bent slightly at the waist, and his eyes are bright. It's not that he misses being looked at like that, but he can enjoy it when it happens, surely?

"I do find it interesting, and I don't see how it'd be possible to study what's going on without going out," Paul agrees, "But you'd need an experienced crew. People who know storms and rough water, and ones that can fight anything you come across in the sea."

Tiny teeth bite the back of his neck sharply (his wince is contained around the eyes) as he goes on, with a slight smile: "I know a few things about sailing."

He notes the barely-there wince, and the continuance despite it. The light in Paul's eyes gets him to crook a smile.

"Sea serpents don't worry me," he says, as though mulling it over, "and I have hands to spare."

Puppets; corpses. They're limited by his knowledge of the sea, which amounts to very little. It would have been smarter to snag the souls with the bodies, but he'd been in, admittedly, a bit of a mood when he'd arrived.

He also has the gaggle of over-serious teenagers, which now apparently includes one more.

"I could use a navigator."

Paul and Sophia rarely use anything so crude as words in their seamless flurry of unspoken communication; when he speaks aloud to her, it's a game. So when he knows whispers into Paul's mind, it gives him pause. His hand flattens on the table.

Maybe he does, Paul thinks. Maybe this is Paul's purpose, here, the reason for his dreams, the path he may step on to see them in his waking hours. He has been lost. Is it so wrong to want to be found?

"If you find no one better suited," Paul says, by way of yes, terribly casual and calm, "I'd like to see some of these waves myself."

He sees the stumble, the flare of tension. He sees that it doesn't stop him offering.

The God of Necromancers smiles to him then, slow and considering, and he tips his head in a nod.

"Glad to hear it." He clasps his hands together, openly pleased. "I'll do some looking into the logistics and reach out. No time like the present."

Paul breathes out more slowly than he would have otherwise, a sigh that isn't a sigh. The delicacy of the moment eases for him, some of his rising urgency quelled for now.

He still can't be sure what the other is thinking, behind that pleased expression, but he's made larger decisions on less information than this. You make do with what you have at hand.

"So it's settled. If there's nothing else, I should leave you to the work," Paul says, making to rise. He's still not going to ask for a name, or how and when the other will reach out. If he is any of the things Paul suspects he is, Paul's sure he has his ways.

He could volunteer an introduction, certainly, but at this stage it might only sidetrack them. It's not an opportune time to spook the boy. He seems to have a funny hit-or-miss record; half his acquaintances balk at the title, openly alarmed, while the other half only go closed and curious. At least on the boat, there may be a measure of reassurance in his authority.

When he settles back into his chair beside his stack of books, it's clearly a dismissal.

"Good to meet you, Paul. I'll be in touch."

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02 . december catch-all

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