03 . boat log!

[necrolord]

Who: necrolord and existing CR. If your character has met the Emperor and would respond positively to an invite, jump on in. (If you're not sure, ask me at ochrona!)
What: A voyage out to sea! This is a mingle log; feel free to toplevel and tag around.
When: Ambiguously around New Year's.
Where: The Pthumerian Ocean.

Content Warnings: Undead sailors, flesh-eating crabs, tentacles, corpses; Deer-standard levels of inherent fleshy horror. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

[ See John's toplevel for prompts, and feel free to tag in brackets or prose! ]

Comments

[necrolord]

"Oh, we're all going to be cooped up together a while. I don't see the harm in keeping things light." He gestures, broadly, to the choppy dark sea and the ugly spires of Trench in the distance. "We have little enough levity to be getting by with."

[frogfear]

"There's all kinds of things we can do to keep things light, or fun," Willow answers. "We could play cards, or, word games, or math games... We don't need to sing."

If he wants to sing, he is absolutely free to do so. She is not joining in, lest his undead tentacle friends threaten to throw her overboard or something. Or worse, some of their perfectly alive companions do.

[necrolord]

"Right, got it, that's a no from you on the singing." He clasps his hands together politely, but the amusement's still there in his arched eyebrows. "We can get down to business, if you like. Think a bit about how your magic will interact in the local spaces."

[frogfear]

Oh. Willow wants to talk about her lack of magic in Trench about as much as she wants to join in on a singalong. He's going to find out sooner or later, but it's still a particularly uncomfortable topic, and it's not exactly public knowledge.

"Oh, uh. Yeah. About that," she says as she shifts her weight. She glances at him after a moment, and shrugs a little. "My magic doesn't interact with, um, the local spaces here. At all."

[necrolord]

He can tell from the set of her shoulders, but he still arcs his eyebrows up and gestures for her to go on.

"Well, that might be useful to hear about, if you wouldn't mind. Give us an idea of how the forces interact."

[frogfear]

Willow shrugs a little. It's probably best to just tell him the truth - especially if there's any chance at all any of his insight might be helpful.

"There's not much to tell. When I said they don't interact, I mean they don't interact. Blood magic is fine - I've had no problem making any of that work. But my own, what I knew from home, doesn't work at all," she takes a deep breath. "If I try, it's just migraines and fog, and distorted noise, like... uh, like radio static?"

[necrolord]

"Radio static," he echoes. "I wouldn't call that nothing. I think 'nothing' would be pretty distinct. You could watch me try to pull a rabbit out of a hat to get an example of what 'nothing' looks like."

(He could certainly pull something out of a hat, with his knack for constructs, but she wouldn't like it.)

"There must be information to gain in radio static."

[frogfear]

"I don't know, I couldn't make anything out of it." It's been frustrating, especially in light of the threats the town has thrown at them the last couple months. Not being able to defend herself with magic feels vulnerable.

"To be fair, though, I only tried a few times," she shrugs a little. "Not really a big fan of the headaches afterwards."

[necrolord]

"Well, maybe bashing your head against it wouldn't do much good," he says generously. "All the same thing, huh, no matter what sort of spell you try? I'm sparse on details, here, but it sounds like you had quite a few tricks up your sleeve before the static hit."

[frogfear]

"Well... I only tried a couple simple spells," she admits. "But with the way magic works at home, if you can't do the simple stuff, there's no point in trying the harder stuff. It's one of those got to learn to walk before you can run kind of things."

She's not about to mention that her first spell was a complex curse that hadn't been performed in a century, they don't need to talk about that.

[necrolord]

He thinks a moment, his eyes on the water. Then he says:

"Is it all one power source, back home? That's what interests me. The principles; where it all comes from. I'm used to recognizing a few different kinds of energy, and that all translates in a fashion, but it's not quite one-to-one. There are tricks here I can't explain."

[frogfear]

"Well..." There's a pause from Willow as she contemplates the situation for a moment. "Magic at home comes from the world itself. Anyone can learn to use it, but if you've got an aptitude for it, you'll go a lot further a lot faster, with a lot less effort."

It has occurred to her that being away from home is a sound explanation for why she can't get a single spell to work here in Trench, but the fact that something still happens leads her to believe it's probably not quite that simple. So she doesn't sound particularly convinced as she shrugs.

"I mean, I guess it could be the differences between this world and the one I'm from, or something to do with the changes all of us went through when we came here..."

[necrolord]

He is quiet for a long beat, then makes a low and thoughtful noise.

"Oh, I'm sure everything's to do with the squid changes," he says reasonably. "But we've got a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, there. Did being turned into squid disrupt our powers, or is the squid thing one more biproduct of a lower-level shift? I think it's got to be something fundamental."

He nods to himself, his gaze still out to sea.

"So there's the question: your power comes from a planet you've been pried away from. Are we seeing a signal distorted over distance, or has something else flowed in to fill the gap? Is our new blood a badly-tuned receiver, or a faulty copy of the original signal?"

[frogfear]

"Or some kind of combination of the two," Willow lets out a frustrated sigh. "The catch is, trying to find out which it is and how to counteract it. If it's even possible. Everything I've read about how our powers from our original worlds translate into this one is remarkably inconsistent. Some people's are completely unchanged, some end up with nothing, and or something completely different, then there's everything in between."

Normally, she would feel inclined to tell him as little as possible about... Well, everything. But somehow, he seems a little more trustworthy at the moment, in spite of the boat, and its questionable crew.

"The worlds were from don't seem to make much of a difference. The person I was seeing at home is here. Her magic works fine."

[necrolord]

"New arrival?" he asks, warmly, as though the person I was seeing at home isn't weirdly ambivalent phrasing. "Congrats to you both."

As for the rest, he takes up drumming his fingers again.

"The inconsistency's the thing," he agrees, like it's an odd little puzzle and not a question of literal divinity. As if it's a real inconvenience he can't turn the stars off and on. "That's the real puzzle. I know there's data in it but I can't see the shape of the thing yet. Could vary by type of power, you know; different abilities must interact with the system in different ways. If we had a better idea of categorization we might be able to see the trends. This person can shoot lightning from their hands, and that's all fine; that person could call ghosts, and that's right out."

[frogfear]

"Recent arrival, yeah," Willow nods. The warm tone combined with effects of January set her at ease, and she gives him a genuine smile. "Thanks."

She shakes her head as he mulls over the potential explanations for the inconsistencies.

"Well, that's still one of the inconsistencies. We both use magic the same way, and from the same source," she pauses, considering. "Different blood types, though."

[necrolord]

"Hm," he says, and for a moment that's all. Then: "Which types, if you don't mind the prying? That is a weird one."

Thus far, his necromancers have been largely untouched. His necromancy functions, though not at the level he expects; he seems to have come unplugged from that divine battery, which is not the sort of conversation to have lightly or aloud.

God blows out the exhale of a man shelving a difficult math problem, and turns to survey their ship, then Willow herself.

"Well, let's see if you can tune in any better out where we're going."

[frogfear]

"Paleblood for me, Vileblood for her," Willow answers automatically. Vileblood doesn't feel any more compatible with magic than Paleblood does, but she can hardly spend too much time looking into it while they're out to sea.

She lets her mind wander as she watches the water silently for a few moments, before he catches her attention again.

"Yeah. Yeah, it's worth a shot."