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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It's not difficult to read on him. He can already parse an earnest, determined sort of rigor here, as the boy fumbles down his stack of barely-opened books.

John waves a hand to invite him into the empty chair.

"Two heads, et cetera," he says warmly. "Perhaps we can trade dots. Where have you started?"

"The dream," Mako says promptly, and only then drops into the chair with a harsh scrape of wood that echoes too loud across the silent stacks. He winces at the sound, lets it fade, and rests a hand on the top book on his stack, about half-Pthumerians. "It makes sense. Pretty sure... either the dream helped shape this world, or we did. You weren't there, right? You know anything about it?"

"Only the very basics." And a little more than that, but better to get the recap. "I've heard something about a sacrifice."

That's the piece he's most interested in: what was given in exchange for the world they have now. It's a powerful magic.

"...yeah," Mako wrinkles his nose and pulls out a book from the stack about blood sacrifices. "Something like that. We were warned. Given these eggs, told to choose our own fate without any kind of instruction at all. All we had to go on was theories, and it was the same shit: theories without data. How are you supposed to decide the fate of a bunch of people and a world based on guesses? My best guess is, we really are the ones who made this, and we made the wrong choices, but you can't trust that."

It's a useful recap. There is a genuinely astute observation buried in it: theories without data, moral choice without any light on the options. To be punished for a sin you were corralled into.

Every day, he feels just a little more personally attacked.

"And what choices did you make?" He waves away the wording. "The broad 'you.' I don't mean to pry."

"I don't exactly know," Mako admits after a moment of heavy silence. Quiet always feels weighted in libraries, like all the books are there with eyes and ears waiting for him to misspeak. "It was, uh. Confusing. Don't know what right we had to decide the fates of all the people who made the dream in the first place. Pretty sure we all set Sodder's mother free by killing her. I... thought I was doing the same thing to Julia. I don't think we did, and that was probably wrong."

Choice-wise. Mako feels obscurely guilty for making that choice himself, but he'd thought he was making the best choice for her as much as he could, and he has never been sentimental enough to cling to his own guilt that way. They were set up for failure, and now all they can do is their best, as far as he's concerned.

"Or," he continues, "it was all just some theater crap and we never had a choice at all. Wouldn't be the first time powerful people tried to make you feel like you had a say in something and then took your voice away, you know?"

He nods slowly, thoughtfully.

"So the choice was death," he says, and there is no revulsion in it: only gentle, frowning interest. "Death as a kindness for some and not for others, without much chance of guessing whether you're giving mercy or punishment."

At that last speculation, he makes a sympathetic noise. "Could be. But sacrifice can be a powerful kind of magic. Even without a full view of the board."

Spoken like someone with experience in it, Mako notes, and leans forward with interest flaring on his face. "Why wouldn't someone give a full view of the board, if it's that powerful? Why not let people make a real choice, if you had the chance?"

That's what they really need to know, after all: why the Moss King would give them such vague information, why he would let them interpret it through their own lenses instead of telling them outright. Mako doesn't trust the Moss King or any of the rest of them as far as he can throw them, but that's the thing that gets him the most, the thing he's stuck on.

Well, now it's getting downright personal.

"Hard to say," he says, as though this isn't the issue that just ruined his whole year (century; millennium; myriad). As though he didn't just fistfight his right hand at the mouth of Hell over maybe, possibly, something a bit related. As though it's academic. "Depends who held the information, if you ask me. Could be they were invested in a certain outcome."

Another beat, and he adds: "Or they thought there was something to be gained in having to piece it together."

"You don't think it's possible they didn't know either?" Mako asks, mostly to ask, because the thought kept occurring to him only to be summarily dismissed. Sure, maybe there's something in there: the spirits never communicated particularly clearly with Korra, after all. Maybe it's just a translation error from godlike beings to mere mortals, but Mako didn't keep himself and Bolin alive by reading harmless intent into everything. If there's an angle, he's pretty sure anyone with that much power is going to use it.

And this is the closest he's gotten to someone willing to actually theorize with him about it.

"But," Mako continues, because that line of questioning obviously isn't it, in his own head, watching his companion, "say it was the second one. What could they gain by making us be here? Is there any way to know without, I don't know. Knowing what the other options even were?"

"Oh, always possible," he says readily. "Gods can be just as clueless as mortals, that's my theory."

(It's a very good theory.)

"Either way, there's a few questions buried in there," he observes. "What could they gain from putting the choice on you; what could they gain from the sacrifices you chose; what could they gain from landing you here. Is it the place or the people that are important? How much do they have to do with each other?"

He resumes drumming his fingers again.

"That's why I wish I understood the process better, you know. It sounds like the girl was Deerington, or near enough. Hard to say whether this place was an intended outcome, or just a side effect."

"Ugh," Mako says eloquently, and promptly yanks a notebook from under his stack of books. It's a little black thing labeled Deerington Notes & Theories, vol 2. Flipping past several pages of chicken-scratch, Mako yanks a pen from his pocket and promptly writes every single one of those questions down, murmuring them quietly to himself as he goes. They're good questions, better than any of the ones he's come up with so far. Beifong's voice is practically there in his head admonishing him to think of good questions first, kid, that's how you get good answers.

He caps it off with the words intended or accident? and circles those several times, then flips the notebook around to show his work.

"Did I miss anything?" He asks after a moment after a wave of self-consciousness sweeps over him. His handwriting is a mess, and it's been a minute since, well. Since he got to do anything like this with anyone.

He watches, eyebrows quirked and gaze patiently attentive, quietly delighted at the notebook; at the title; at the diligent, frowning way the boy scratches each question in. When his new friend flips the book around, he leans in to read.

"Looks good," he says, warm and approving. The handwriting isn't unreadable; he's seen worse. "Volume two, eh? Sounds like you've been at this a while."

The approval absolutely registers: Mako straightens a little, unconscious and sharp, his shoulders going down. He wants to do well at this, he wants to figure this out. Maybe theories aren't his strong suit but he can do numbers and he can do patterns, and this is like a combination of both of those things.

And, well. There is something about attention on him during all of this that means something, and he isn't going to think about what that means or why.

"A lot happened," he says dryly, in possibly the largest understatement since washing up on these shores. "I was in the dream for 10 months, maybe 11. Time got weird at the end there. Almost a year. The dream was... eventful, and weird, and there were all these notes people who'd been there longer had written. I tried to make sense of them. Not sure how well it worked. It really did run on dream-logic, which is an advantage we have here."

"When our advantages include 'at least reality more or less functions in a straight line,' you know it's bad." This he observes with dry amusement, only a little outwardly bleak. "I'm curious how far the resemblance runs, actually. They say this world was remade by the dream, however unintentionally. Hard for me to tell what's a scar on reality from the wound of the dream, and what's..."

He gestures, broadly, to the books on squid.

"... whatever the Pthumerians brought by showing up after. Might help to figure out where each influence begins and ends. It could give us some clues about those motives."

Mako snorts in something like agreement, ducking his head very briefly to hide the smile. The sentiment is more or less something he'd said to Wu the other night, and it puts him at ease to hear it here again. This guy gets it. Whatever it is: the whole broad scope of this, a brand new world that Korra doesn't trust and Wu absolutely does. Mako is caught somewhere in the middle of it, trying to build a life here and sure at the same time that it's going to be yanked down around his ears. The Pthumerians don't give a shit about them or their happiness.

"I know a place to start," he says after a moment, and flips the notebook a few pages back. "There's a remnant of the dream here. A... weird part of town that looks like the one we all came from. Might have some answers to those bigger questions."

"'Sleepy Town,'" he observes, leaning in to look. "I've heard of it, though I've not yet gone poking around. I hear something about a guardian monster who doesn't take well to trespassers."

The monster doesn't worry him particularly. He has walked the length of that wall, the stone that sections the quarantined neighborhood off from the surrounding forests and roads. He's been of half a mind to send Harrow and Gideon in to have a look around; there's something there he can't touch yet, but it feels like a sore spot in reality, the right weak point to press.

"It's our town," Mako says sourly, "kind of. As much ours as this place. It's worth investigating. I don't think we're gonna get a lot out of the gods in this place. They were exactly the ones who were cagey about the answers before. I just—" he's complaining now, he knows that, but it feels good to bounce this frustration off someone. There is an imaginary Lin Beifong in his head, and the memory of her scoffing voice will do in a pinch, but—

Mako's mouth twists. "If we're supposed to survive long-term in this place, we need a lot more info than we have, and I'm not equipped to spend days with my nose buried in books to figure it out."

If anything, the teenage frustration is charmingly familiar. If he does not have Gideon or Harrow at his side while he rifles through books, it's probably good practice to have someone else bristling about the uselessness of local gods.

He doesn't even take it personally.

"I suspect," he says, with a note of amusement, "that's where teamwork is meant to come in. Seems a stretch to hope the same folks who're good at breaking into a walled-off ghost town are also glad to rifle through the library day and night."

He looks Mako up and down, and says in the tone of a proposal:

"I am genuinely terrible at jumping fences."

Mako perks up a little bit like a crowcat seeing a scrap, his eyes going sharp. This place, full of books and dust and knowledge, this is alien to him. For all that he loved the contours of stories as a child, for all that he is perfectly at home with pages of notes or numbers to sort through, Mako has been molded by his own world into something sharper and fiercer than that.

It eats at him. It eats at him particularly this month: a close glance will reveal cracked patches on his skin, like he's burning from the inside out, and a certain burning wildness behind his eyes. Corruption is a subtle thing when it starts, and Mako is an expert at ignoring his own body's warnings.

But even uncorrupted, even with the shapes of him changing around himself, Mako is good at a very specific set of things.

"Lucky for you," he says with just a hint of a smile, "I'm an expert at jumping fences."

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02 . december catch-all

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