deercountry | o4 . february catchall

Entry tags:

o4 . february catchall

Who:

necrolord and you!
What: Local necromancer is networking. Archives research, healing for lockjoint and self-mutilation, and more.
When: February.
Where: Archives, Lumenwood, streets of Trench.

Content Warnings: Skeletons and mentions of the self-mutilation curse. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

(1) research.

You've probably seen him around, by now. The man is something of a fixture in the Archives: he settles at an unremarkable table and proceeds to drown it in open books, scattered pages, notes, journals. He seems intent on skimming his way through half the library. Sometimes there's a girl, scrawny and dour with her face painted up like a skull, hovering at his elbow. Today, he's on his own.

He doesn't look like much. Simple clothes; bare hands, which suggests he's either confident or reckless, in a town that will titter at anyone who doesn't wear gloves; he looks fortyish and plain. Only one thing about him is remarkable: his eyes, black as oil from edge to unpleasant edge.

Today, he's amassed an odd collection of vials, bloodstones, and shards of bone. You might catch the sudden reek of Beast blood, which is alarmingly toxic to handle even with gloves; you might catch him weighing a huge, inhuman bone in the palm of his hand, looking thoughtful. If he notices your attention, he'll speak without looking up.

"Six months, and I'm still trying to puzzle out the basics."

(2) the skeleton plow.

[ On the 9th, a blizzard blows in. It leaves the town blanketed in a heavy weight of snow, and Trenchies come out with shovels and resigned expressions to scrape the streets clear.

God, who has places to be, finds this a touch inconvenient. He's meant to be in Lumenwood just now, playing Jesus on everyone's frostbite and having a generally pleasant morning. So he claps his hands, watches a dozen skeletons claw their way free of the frozen earth and pop out of the snow ("like daisies," he says to whoever is nearest) and then sets off across town with his helpful new posse.

Each skeleton moves as smoothly and politely as a human servant, with a speck of red light in each empty eye. God makes a little gesture, like a conductor with an orchestra; his servants' fingerbones fuse and spread. Their arms distort and lengthen. They each now wield a broad bone scoop, which looks somewhere between silly and horrifying.

The skeleton army sets to work shoveling snow, heedless of appalled bystanders. ]

(3) healing.

[ Maybe you're still suffering from Lockjoint, Sleeper. Maybe you've begun scraping your own skin away under this month's curse, trying to resist temptation, trying to resist the urge to confess.

It doesn't matter whether all the damage is hidden by your clothing, or whether you think you're doing a good job of masking your pain. Today you're near the gates of Lumenwood - maybe to get help for your own issues, maybe not - and there is a man here, who has just waved away a grateful Trenchie making conversation. He turns, tips his head in hello, and considers you. ]

Want a hand with that?

(4) wildcard.

[ Happy to match formatting! ]

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The man at the table looks up at him, and his expression softens slightly to see a familiar face. He sets to drumming his fingertips on the arm of his chair, instead, absent and thoughtful.

(He notes the limp, and notes the burn beneath the bandage. They'll get to that.)

"Our lovely new home." With a free hand he gestures: to the Archives, to Gaze, to Trench. "And the nitty-gritty of how it all fits together. I always thought I had an eye for blood magic," understatement is very funny to him, "but I've yet to crack the local variant. The squids are still beyond me."

Orpheus nods along as the man speaks, lighting up slightly as he realizes that maybe this is something he can help with.

"Well," he says. "I can't help with the squids, or the blood magic? But I may know some things that aren't recorded here, or that may be hard to find. You're a Sleeper, right? Were you one of the ones who came from Deerington, before you were here?"

Because that seems like a good place to start, at least. Others might've already filled him in on what Orpheus knows, but he figures there could be some bits and pieces he's picked up along the way that could prove useful.

This sharpens his interest right away. He rubs his chin, thoughtful.

"No, I missed out on the dream. I've been assured I should be glad of that, but a little more info would be nice." Quite seriously, he says: "I'll be glad of anything you can tell me. Seems like I have a lot of catching up to do."

Orpheus nods, frowning a little in thought as he tries to figure out where best to start.

"There's a lot to go over," he says, slowly, considering whether he wants to share what he's been working on. It isn't finished, but... "I wasn't there for all of it, but I've been trying to gather what we know about how it came to be and what happened in it, so I can record it for people. It's worth remembering, I think. I'm not anywhere near done, but I have the start, if you'd like to hear it."

He slides the guitar on his back around on its strap, serving as a hint as to exactly what format he's been recording this history in. It's maybe not the most efficient for preserving certain details, but it's what Orpheus knows, and songs have a way of outlasting the written word, under the right circumstances.

"You're telling me I stumbled across a Deerington historian." The assessing look has gone warmer. Or, at least, he smiles, even if it doesn't quite reach his black eyes. "I'm always impressed by a musician. By all means."

He sits back, sweeps his hand in a stage is yours little gesture of assent.

Orpheus laughs a little, sheepishly, rubbing at the back of his neck. "Sort of! I doubt I know the most of anybody here? But I'm trying! Anyway, um."

He takes a deep breath and begins to play a slow melody that gives each note its own space to reverberate and echo through the rows of shelves. Maybe starting to sing in the middle of a library is a bit rude, but that doesn't seem to occur to Orpheus right away.

"From across strange seas they came
The Queen and her retinue
She sought for her daughter a mortal mate
Pursuing the power, born anew
Of mankind's dreams and Pthumerian might
Brought together in one being
Her granddaughter's far reach and sight
Outstripped all those preceding"

And there he stops, putting a hand to the strings to still them. "I can explain any of that, if I need to. I know it's not the clearest - the song is more to introduce the broad strokes, than to try to capture everything."

The first thing he parses is this: the boy can sing.

The second is that this is the history of the Sodder family, which brightens the interest in his very dark eyes. Orpheus stops to explain, and John claps (very quietly, because it's a library; he thinks this is funny).

"No, I'm with you." He gestures a little hurry up motion, a little go on. "I follow. Got any more?"

Orpheus shakes his head, apologetic. "The rest I'm still writing. I know what happened next, though."

And he figures that's probably what this man is looking for, more than the artistry - even if he does seem to appreciate that part.

"The Pthumerian Queen had a daughter named Cynthia - who came with us here as the Moon Presence - and Cynthia married a human man named Roderick Sodder, and they had a daughter named Julia. Julia was... different, when she was born. They called her a monster. Her own father was afraid of her. I think Cynthia might've been too, in a way?"

He frowns, shaking his head.

"But she was just as powerful as the Queen had hoped. She could change things, based on how she thought they should be. How they made sense to her. And she was - she was just a little girl? She thought like any other human girl. A storyteller, but all her stories came true, and some of them were - frightening, or dangerous. She spun shadows into monsters in the way that children do, and there was only so much she could do to stop them once they were made.

"Eventually it became too much for anyone to keep under control, and the people of the town tried to put her in a coma, while they figured out a way to control her power. That... didn't go very well? I think it destroyed Deerington - the real Deerington, and started the dream that so many of us came from before we were here. Does that make sense, so far?"

He nods along to the story, expression shifting to open and thoughtful fascination, brows together. At the end of this, he leans in to steeple his fingers.

"Yes, I follow. This is in line with information provided through the reports of past Sleepers—" Peter's packet, as he's heard it called; and several rambling conversations with Stanford Pines, "—though I'll confess this is an angle I hadn't quite considered. That of young Julia as a storyteller."

As a victim, a divine heir, a chosen one gone wrong. More girl than monster; more pawn than girl.

"I've heard of the dream, and the coma, and the roles of a few individuals now changed: the girl's mother, the town's Mayor, and the woman formerly known as Mother Superior."

Orpheus nods in turn, looking a little surprised at the admission.

"She loved stories," he says. "That's how she found us? The Sleepers. The first of us was a woman named Ramona Derwin, who Julia knew because she'd read books about her - where she was a fictional character."

And he shifts uneasily at that, taking his guitar off his back and propping it up against a chair before sitting down, drumming his fingers on the table.

"It's... Mother Superior said she created all of us - made us 'real' in the dream, after learning our stories. Others say we were real all along, and explained the stories people told in Julia's world in different ways. Coincidences, or people seeing into other realities and writing them down. I don't really know which is true? But either way, the stories are how she was able to pull us through. I think she thought we could help her."

For all the good that did her. Orpheus goes solemn and silent for a moment, looking down at his hands on the table in front of him, thinking of the little girl who faded away thinking everyone had decided she was a monster.

"I've heard a bit of that, too."

Not enough to truly parse it. Only enough to make a few private jokes. The thing is, he's not going to accept the shape of this universe as unknowable and himself as someone's storybook villain. It just isn't much of an option.

(It's been a long time since he thought he was anyone's storybook hero.)

"You say it as though you knew her." He tips his head in thought, tone dropped a little out of respect for that silence. "Did you?"

"Not exactly," says Orpheus, frowning still. "I only spoke to her once. But in the dream, if you went to the right place at the right time, or made offerings in a certain way, you could see memories of hers, and other people from the real town. I tried to find as many of them as I could, while I was there."

It had felt like the right thing to do, getting to know the people that Orpheus at least had assumed they were there to help. If nothing else, it meant someone remembered them when they were gone, and Orpheus feels like that counts for something, at least. Maybe it's more reassurance for the survivors, to assuage their guilt more than anything else, but it's something.

"Anyway," he says. "I think one of the people who changed the dream the most - by telling Julia things that she wove into the fabric of it - was the Dog Keeper? He was a firefighter in the real Deerington, and one of the people who was kindest to her, I think. There might have been something special about him, too. He was sent there from somewhere far away, and I don't know by who, and he's the one who told us that there were other half-Pthumerian children around, and that was a big part of why everything went so wrong."

He taps his fingertips to his temple, thinking hard. How did he put it, again?

"Julia was the strongest of them because of her lineage, and one who opened the first door, and let the monsters into town. But the other children - once they saw her do it, they realized they had doors of their own. But everyone blamed Julia, because it was easiest. That's what he said. He's still around, after all this time? He doesn't talk much anymore, but you can find him out in Trenchwood."

"The Dog Keeper."

He nods, slowly. It's a good story; it lines up, fills in gaps he'd not expected to have filled today. God drums his fingers on the table and thinks about the implications of somewhere far away.

"Do you think there's any trace left of the memories? The places you could go to learn their stories, in that world... were they carried over to this one? I've been told there's some overlap."

"I'm not sure," says Orpheus, frowning. "The way I understand it - Deerington, and the dream, and the events leading up to it - they all happened a very long time ago. Long enough that it's faded into myth and legend. But some buildings from the dream are here, and when the people who lived in them found them in Trench, they looked like they'd only gone unoccupied for a little while? And those buildings aren't - they aren't in the same places, in relation to each other."

He remembers trying to figure it out, early on, walking past buildings he recognized and trying to fit them on a map in his mind of where they'd been in Deerington. It hadn't worked too well.

"So, time and space work a little strangely here? If it was even about the place and not the emotion of the memory, or something. I wouldn't be surprised if you could still find them somewhere? But I haven't heard of anyone stumbling into them here."

"It's funny you put it like that: the emotion of the memory." He taps an absentminded little rhythm with his fingertips on the old worn wood, an echo of the melody. "That's the piece I'm only starting to understand. The books don't go into it, but I've heard bits and pieces from Sleepers. The dream operated on dream-logic, on stuff inside your head— on someone's head."

His fingers go still.

"If it was little Julia running the show, back there, who and what runs it here? What's our guiding principle if it's not emotion, anymore? What happened to all the other kids with all their other doors?"

He has theories. Oh, he has theories to fill volumes and to fuel a war. But this boy has pieces for him he doesn't yet hold.

"That's a good question?" says Orpheus, chewing his lip slightly as he considers the more philosophical than historical nature of it. "Should we assume there is one? Any more than our original worlds did. A storyteller's dream may have united themes - arcs to follow, or repeated motifs, but does the waking world? Or is reality too messy for that?"

He shakes his head, frowning.

"I think it could, but it may be harder or more complicated than the world Julia made. Especially since the closest thing we have to gods here are the Pthumerians, and there are a lot of them pulling in different directions. I think some of the ones in the city may be related to - or may even be those half-human children, grown now, but I'm not sure. I haven't had the chance to talk to many."

And as much reading as he's managed to do, it's difficult information to stumble upon accidentally. Pthumerians seem to be pretty private about a lot of things, or maybe he was just looking in the wrong places, too busy seeking signs of Julia or the real Deerington to notice anything else.

"Some seem friendlier than others," he agrees. "There's a thought I hadn't considered, though... who's full-Pthumerian, and who's only half. I'll do some digging and see what turns up."

He sits back in his chair, nods appreciation to his new friend and his guitar.

"As I figure it, anywhere run by gods subscribes to someone's plan. Somebody's design, somebody's narrative, even if the thread is deeper-buried than you'd think. There'll be something to learn from the foundations... from whatever got built after the flood."

His smile is a little crooked, a little wry.

"Guess we'll have to figure those bits out together."

Orpheus nods along. "Right," he says. "I just think it will be deeper-buried, and much more complicated, because the Pthumerians here aren't children trying to make sense of the world, and there are so many of them, and they sometimes seem to work at odds to each other?"

Or at least that's his assumption. Orpheus may be reading more hostility into certain relationships than another person might, given his own experiences with the divine side of his family. Gods fight. Families fight. It's normal.

"But I'm sure we can work it out! I'm - mostly still trying to pick up the pieces of what happened in Deerington, but if I learn anything that I think you might find interesting I can tell you!"

The offer is entirely open, because why wouldn't it be? He's a fellow Sleeper and by Orpheus's estimation at least a friendly acquaintance, and sharing information is good for everybody, right? That said, his Omni buzzes in his pocket, and he pauses to fish it out, glancing at the flat side.

"Oh, um. It's later than I thought it was? Maybe I should get going soon. But - my name is Orpheus! It was nice meeting you."

He nods along as the boy checks his not-phone, readies himself to hurry back off to wherever, and leave God with his papers and odd little bits of rock. He has new angles to consider, here. He has new creation myths to crack.

Then the kid gives his name, and John's eyebrows quirk up.

There is a hanging beat: he seems to consider the boy as though seeing him for the first time, blinking at the clothes, the guitar, the earnest set of his shoulders. Then he says, with a slow-dawning smile:

"You too. Thanks for the song. Consider me a fan."

Orpheus manages to notice that the man doesn't offer a name of his own, which is strange, but he supposes that's his prerogative and doesn't seem too offended over it in any case. It does catch him by surprise a bit, though, and thinking about it effectively distracts him from noticing the way the man sizes him up.

"You're welcome!" he says, brightly, the subtle recognition lost on him. "I'm planning on telling everyone -" he gestures with the Omni, "when I finish it. That might not be for a while, though? There's a lot to cover."

And with that, he gets up, picking up his guitar again and slinging it over his shoulder. He smiles, nodding goodbye, and turns to go.

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o4 . february catchall

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