o4 . february catchall

[necrolord]

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! ]

Comments

[frogiturgy]

Oh, great. An artist. Perell regarded the smile with his best attempts at impassivity in response to the proposed theatrics.

"One of the friendly looking ones that can drop the largest and unluckiest crocodile in the bog." He replied, going by the habitats he was most familiar with.

It didn't matter that crocodiles were on the verge of extinction because of the actions taken by himself and others to rescue a friend. He had honed his wizardly demeanor during his century in isolation. It was just nice to have it be useful.

[necrolord]

Wow. Not a speck of humor about it, either, not a hint. This is incredible.

"Fantastic. Alright, little frog," and here he steeples his fingers atop his stack of books, "let me tell you all about Trench. Great little seaside town, just don't eat the calamari."

He drums his fingertips against each other, considering.

"The problem," he says slowly, "is that the place is all one big, tangled system. Planets generally are, sure, but this goes above and beyond: every time you think you've cracked this bit of blood magic, it turns out that outside force interweaves. Which makes it not so much an outside force as a part of an ecosystem, or the systems in a body."

He stills his fingers, regards his frog.

"I'm beginning to think decades is more the scale of it."

[frogiturgy]

Perell is very serious about frogs.

Listening to the explanation, Perell nodded quietly. This was familiar territory to him-- the flow of energies in his own realm were interwoven in a complex ecosystem, as it were. Few were blessed with the ability to walk between realms, few were mad enough to make deals with entities beyond their comprehension to embody a fraction of their power, and few were placed within the ecosystem by the cosmos as neutral entities who could manipulate the flow as needed.

"Fortunately, we do have that kind of time. I mean, we are the calamari here after all."

It was something he had a little more experience with than he wished.

[necrolord]

"At least there's that," he says, which is obviously a joke. Spending decades as baffled squid isn't anybody's idea of a good time— well, okay, that's never true. Props to whoever's into it.

"Still wouldn't mind a bit of a breakthrough right about now. You here for the same?"

[frogiturgy]

"I'm here for any kind of breakthrough, really." He said with a shrug-- smiling in casual appreciation for the joke.

"Right now I'm just taking a break. You ever reach that point where words start looking so weird that not even coffee can help? That's where I'm at."

[necrolord]

"I know it well," he says, mournfully. "Working on anything in particular? Frog-related, maybe?"

[frogiturgy]

"Oh, I wish."

He shrugged. The deflection was obvious, and he wasn't quite in the mood to bare his soul to a stranger.

"I'm just trying to learn about the local magics. Same as you, from the looks of it."