deercountry | o5 . bone house mingle!

I think I've sneezed over 50 times today. There has to be a limit, right?

[He doesn't mind the snorting. He's not really in any place to judge which is unusual because normally he loves judging people.

Shinji-kun (the lizard) is hanging out next to them and goes over to inspect. Kaworu offers him a tissue to eat which he (thankfully) does not eat.]

Did you die here? Or back home?

Ah.

[That makes sense. He wonders a little why he couldn't tell it was her... it was though his mind and eyes simply could not perceive her in unison to allow him to recognize her.

The soft, almost gentle tone, is soothing, grounding. He shakes his head.]

Not pain... more like it's hard to breathe.

[Johnny was still on the hunt for more students to train. Luckily he had a new lead thanks to Gideon. Some nerdy kid who she had been helping to "train." That was something Johnny Lawrence could work with.

The morning seems peaceful enough until there's a loud crash as Kaworu's door is kicked opened. Johnny enters the room spikes a bundle of fabric at Kaworu who was likely just sleeping innocently.]

Rise and shine, nerd!

[Don't mind him as he continues toward the bed to grab and flip the mattress.]

Life has come to heel kick you in the balls. Time to learn how to kick it's ass right back.

Semi-closed to whoever opens the door
Midoriya, known to some as the hero Deku, doesn't come over to people's homes uninvited. He is expected. A young man, high school age, short but solidly built, arrives at the door wearing a faded blue jacket hoodie and his backpack. He has the hood up over his dark green hair, which bears signs of damage and is in need of a trim. He wears a simple black cloth mask stretched over his lower face and neck. Facial coverings are sometimes a fashion statement among Trenchies, but it's unusual on Midoriya.

It's just a precaution. He remembers, a lifetime ago, when he and his friends snuck off to Kamino at night, and he crossed his arms in front of his face, comically trying and failing to be covert. He wishes he could ask his homeroom teacher for real tips now.

He's probably overthinking it. Just in case, he needs to ask a small favor of anyone he has met or will meet.

Sitting (OTA)
If the curtains are open, he sits out of view of the windows, politely occupying his square of space. The residents keep their shoes on ~~in this nightmarish dystopia of a house~~, but he removes his red sneakers unless told not to. He's pocketed his mask and unzipped the jacket worn over a plain black shirt.

His thick curls are scraggly and uncharacteristically coarse. There is still a sleepless roughness around his eyes. Despite receiving magical healing, a few scrapes mar his skin near the back of his jaw. His face is not twisted in Corrupted sadness like it was when the month changed over, but it is restful, serious, and worn. On the face of a person who lived his life looking at the world wide-eyed in wonder, surprise, and earnestness, it is a drastic change.

"I'd like to ask you a favor if that's all right," he says in a quieter version of his usual politeness. "It's a small one, but it can be easy to forget."

It's 3 AM, where are you? (OTA) cw: scars
Midoriya is standing silently in the dimly lit kitchen, a victim of a sleep schedule he ruined over multiple weeks. He's wearing his pajamas (T-shirt and basketball shorts) and a voluminous bedhead. The large, blotchy scar on his well-muscled upper arm and the ones on his hand are old ones from home. Since November, he's been covered in even more scars, but they pale next to his new ones, ragged slashes still redly fading.

He hopes to find a midnight snack without disturbing anyone. In his hand he examines a box labeled Cap'n Trench.

You'll find differing opinions from them, and differing opinions on them. It's a mixed bag.

[ He sits back, considering. ]

They can do a lot of damage under the guise of providing helpful little trials. But they'll hand out blessings, too, and they pick favorites. Every one of us has a patron who's taken an interest, for better or worse.

[For a moment, Willow wants to assume it's just her - the odd glow of the stranger's eyes, the way his voice sounds like it's not just one, but a chorus in synch with each other. Some weird, delayed post death symptom - it could explain the mushrooms as well. Except he apparently sees them too. So they really are there.

She shakes her head, trying to clear her thoughts.]

Okay, okay. That's weird, right? Mushrooms growing out of skeletons? I'd think that they'd be, I dunno, too dry for that.

[Willow freezes too when she sets her eyes on woman. Okay, okay, this is fine. So it's not the ship's Captain, but someone he shares the house with. Surely she'll be just as able to help, or at least raise the alarm, or something.

'Hey - hey I know we don't know each other, but I kind of need some help? Something weird is happening!'

It comes out as a bark, and Willow lets out a frustrated huff. Of course. Of course she can't talk like this. Instead, she bounds back into the room, and looks at her human form sleeping on the bed, and back towards the stranger.]

[If Paul was even slightly more himself, he might stop to question who this person is, or if he should be pausing to discuss fungi with her. He might try to explain himself, or at least give his name.

But under these circumstances, the opportunity to talk about absolutely anything other than his self, wretched as it is, comes as a relief. The fact it's ecology -]

They usually are. [Paul moves closer to the skeleton, which remains obediently still, as if sensing their attentions.] After the marrow is consumed, there's not much for fungi to consume until the elements break the bones down further, which isn't what's happening here. Then again - [a slight shrug] - it could be blood magic.

I guess that makes sense - that they'd all be as individual as - well, as individual as we are.

[She is not terribly thrilled at the idea of 'helpful little trials' though. There was more than enough of them being thrown into strange and horrifying situations thanks to Julia's nightmare. At least that wasn't entirely intentional.]

It sounds like they might be a little too interested in us on the whole, though. What do you think? How bad are they, really?

[ His smile is wry and humorless. ]

Personally? I prefer my divinity a little more hands-off.

[ This is, like many things he says, a joke just for him. ]

The whole thing's very mythic. They fight amongst themselves and catch Sleepers up in it; when they're in a bit of a mood, they send plagues. The rules here might be more stable than whatever you saw in the dream, but not by much. You don't have one sleeping Pthumerian, here: we have a dozen that are wide awake and dangerously able to get bored.

Unlike Midoriya, Kaworu isn't used to sleepless nights. At first, after returning to the Trench from the ocean and then the catacombs, it felt like all he did was sleep. But recently they've been creeping up on him. He can blame allergies to some extent but the truth is, he can't stop thinking about the Old Man and his letters.

Sometimes, he wakes and reads the words over and over by the light of his omni. He probably doesn't even need to read it anymore now that the words have seared into his brain. Which is good as the paper in the notebook has been dotted with (allergic, he tells himself), causing the ink to blur and fade.

He pads down the stairs so silently it's as though he's floating. He tells himself it's to grab a box of tissues but silently he hopes to see Teacher. Instead, in the kitchen he finds Midoriya, someone he almost forgot was there despite being keen to invite him over.

"They're good." He comments, voice raspy with sleep and congestion. Cap'n Trench is one of the few foods not made by Paul that Kaworu will eat.

Yeah, if you sneeze sixty-nine times, your nose falls off your face.

[ And that's on that! Gideon reaches over to scritch the back of Shinji-kun's head.

Gideon appreciates that Kaworu is keeping things casual, here. He's not getting all twisted up about her death. It allows Gideon to keep her cool in turn, and she always prefers keeping her cool. ]

Back home. [ It wasn't really home, though. ] I was dead for about nine months before I came here.

How about you? Was the fuck-off sea monster your first time kicking the bucket?

If you're going to flood the house, might as well keep it to one room. I should tidy in here anyway.

[ This he says mildly enough, even as God steps back and examines their surroundings. Upon consideration, he goes and picks up a few stacks of notebook paper left on the table before Kaworu; these he shuffles off to a desk across the room. He nods to himself. ]

I think I have a fix in mind, but it could get messy. Wait here a moment.

[ Without preamble or apparent concern, he turns and leaves for the kitchen. Kaworu is left alone in the cluttered little study, every surface scattered with papers or vials of blood or odd-colored bits of stone.

When God returns, it's with a chipped mug of tea, a glass of water, and a rust-edged little rubbish bin from some forgotten corner of the mansion. The tea he sets on his desk, the water on Kaworu's table, and the bin he sets politely beside the sofa. ]

Right. Let's have a look at your monster problem.

[...

Immediately reaches up and pinches his nose as he rolls over closer to her and Shinji-kun.

He doesn't have a lot of people to talk to about this. It makes most people uncomfortable, sad even, and he hates the idea of people looking at him like he's something to be pitied.]

No. Before I arrived here I was dead as well.

[For the time that he's alone, Kaworu just curls up into a ball, trembling, trying to create as many points of contact on his body to himself as possible. He won't lose himself if he can remember where he is, what his body is, what it's like to be there.

When God returns, Kaworu glances up at him, eyes pained and desperate. He forces himself to sit up, even though the motion makes him gag up seawater into the smartly placed bin.

The monster problem is a soul struggling to exist in the body it was placed in. The Leviathan submerged it so deeply that it's struggling to adjust being back on the surface. And the dregs of the beast threaten to pull it down further if he can't fight.

(And even more the part of the boy's soul that's fighting to surface is just a fragment of his entire soul. There's something beneath the surface.]

Paul looks well and truly fucked up. God considers the wheeling auras of light, the shiver of radiation he can parse as a cascade through his every cell. He considers the shudder of ten thousand voices: not the unreal crush of ten thousand million, but that unholy reverb makes something deep in him flinch all the same. For a moment he stills upon the sand. He simply stands there and regards the sight before him.

Then he takes that final step forward. He stops near enough to touch, gazing down at the ruin of a boy before him, this demigod, this immensely sad kid.

"Life has gone on." His tone is low and calm, just as it always is. It is that same agonizing gentleness, that same patience. "I'm here to walk you back to it, if you'd like to come."

Gideon wasn't going to ask. Her plan was to just keep going back to the beach, as many times as it took, bringing fuck-off huge academic tomes and pulpy romance novels and doctor equipment, as if a dead friend is someone you can summon. Maybe she'll still do that. Paul says that Palamedes is gone, as in never coming back, and Gideon cannot believe that. So she won't. Kill us twice, shame on God.

Paul begins to tremble, and it takes Gideon half a moment to realize he is crying. Not openly, not really, but more than anyone on the Ninth ever dares to. She pulls him closer, so that her shitty black t-shirt can catch his tears, so that Paul knows he is not alone in a big, rotting house, with a grief he blames himself for.

"It's not your fault," Gideon whispers, low and soft and close, an answer to those apologies. She makes a few more circles and says it again. "It's not your fault." She'll say it as many times as it takes for him to believe it. She will say it to him for the rest of his life, and the one after that, and the one after that.

(Once upon a time, there was a little girl who needed to hear those words, and nobody said them to her until it was far too late.)

"Besides," Gideon says, when she thinks Paul is ready to hear it, "We don't really know where he's gone, or how long he'll be away. This is Palamedes we're talking about. He and Cam already made plans to cheat death once. You really think he wouldn't have a backup?"

This would all sound incredibly saccharine and sappy if they weren't talking about the nerdiest necromancer of Gideon's generation. Maybe it still is, but Gideon doesn't care. Paul shouldn't have to bear this loss all by himself.

[Willow can't help but think of Glory, and she finds her thoughts are much the same - she would rather the hands off approach as well.]

Yeah. You and me both on that, I think.

[It certainly doesn't sound like, for all the stability Trench supposedly has to offer, they are any better off than they were in the dream. The idea that they've traded one being unconsciously throwing horror at them for a dozen that sound prone to doing so simply because they lack for entertainment doesn't sound particularly promising.]

I'm guessing we don't actually have a way to stop them, or at minimize the damage they could do.

[ Stasya!!! You are very cute, but Gideon does not understand dog! Gideon throws up her hands, and then gestures at the even larger dog. If it is a dog. Gideon is not so sure. Someone tell her what a wolf is, please. ]

Okay, are you two, like, friends? Or something??

[ Gideon, who has heard very few animal noises in her life, startles at the bark. Then she immediately feels like an idiot, and raises her hands in a woah there gesture. ]

Okay. Uh. You want to talk? To the sleeping girl? That's, uh, kind of rude, you know.

[ Gideon catches Kaworu pinching his nose and grins, not unkindly. ]

Don't worry, dude, I was just joking.

[ She does that. Gideon is the worst. But hey, death twins! That's not... a good thing, really, but at least Kaworu gets it. ]

Well, now you're a pro. [ at dying?? yikes. ] Really unfair that we gotta go through allergies on top of all the death. It's like the universe hates us, specifically.

[Should she already know who he is? Willow has no idea. Maybe? If he's staying here, they at least have some mutual friends, but that doesn't mean much in a place like this. Her focus is still on the mushrooms for the moment, though, so she doesn't immediately question it.]

Yeah, I guess some kind of magic seems likely? Especially around here, from what I've heard so far, anyway? Maybe they're magic mushrooms -

[She makes a face suddenly - that's not exactly how she meant that to come out.]

Okay, not magic mushrooms, but you know. They feed off the magic that animates the skeletons.

Oh. I see. Joking is a way humans bond, right?

[Instead he'll just sneeze into his hand instead. Gross! There's definitely a wet sniffle there before he huffs.]

It isn't fair! If we've endured this, we deserve better from the universe!

Not at the moment.

[ This he says quiet and wry. ]

But we're learning. I've been researching them— with a bit of your help, actually. It sounds like your form of magic didn't come through the transition wholly intact. Maybe no one's did. There's been some catching up to do.

[At the sensation of touch, unfamiliar touch, Kaworu flings himself haphazardly away from the offender. Wrapped in a comforter and with horrible bed head, he sinks down ready to strike at the man here flipping up his bed.

(Is he here to hurt Paul?)

He won't try to kill him. Not yet, instead he just watches, breathing heavily.]

Who? Who are you?

o5 . bone house mingle!

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I CUT THE BREAKS. WILD CARD BITCHES CW: Home Invasion???????

OTA. Early March, but not too early

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3 AM

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