Real & Half-Real: Chapter 1 - The Portal and the Plan

[unsheathedfromreality]

Who: The Committee to Rescue Illarion from His Very Stupid Mistake
What: Building a portal to bust into a pocket dimension and strategizing what to do once they get there. All extremely advisable science.
When: Early-mid April
Where: Throughout Trench, and in parts beyond it

It's been weeks since Illarion's disappearance in the fight against Leviathan, and scarcely fewer weeks since his Omen Iskierka began papering Trench with notes on his whereabouts. The shrike's friends and loved ones have not been idle during that time, and now their plans begin coming to fruition.

It's time to get him out of the nightmare he's trapped in--but first, they've got to break their way in, and they've got to have a plan.

[[ Part of the Real & Half-Real player plot! Navigate to other plot posts: [OOC] Interest Check | [IC] Prologue | [IC] Iskierka's Notes ]]

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Gotta Meet A Guy About A Thing

[butnotyet]

"Oh, sure, John. I'll be delighted to meet your friend, John. Maybe he can make a tabletop character for me, too, John —"

With another muffled curse, Augustine the First, impatient Saint of Patience, shoves another tree branch away from his face, letting go not immediately after passing, but only when he can barely maintain a grip on it — letting it whip back behind him with tremendous dynamic force. Whatever the hell monster has been trying to stalk him gets a facefull of pollen-filled spring new-growth, and lets out an unpleasantly piercing shriek of rage or dismay — or maybe that's because of the tremendously large spinosaurus skull, stripped of flesh but still decorated with most of its feathers, traipsing along fifteen or twenty feet behind him — carried by fifteen or twenty feet, on little spindly legs that don't even remotely look like they ever belonged to a dinosaur — and occasionally snapping its gigantic and overly-toothy maw, for instance at beasts trying to stalk the Lyctor animating it.

Why bring a dinosaur head with him? Two reasons: one, it's wicked cool — just LOOK at it! And two: thanks to Paul, Augustine has a theory that the dinosaur came from the same place as the weird letters, and has heard that this Ford guy is doing ... something ... that's somehow related to them. And that has the potential to be novel, and maybe even intriguing!

(These are the same reasons he's carrying around the very large, leathery egg that the spinosaurus was trying to eat when he lost his mind and then his head — bit of a pity, maybe, that he's carrying it around in something that looks so much like a gigantic monorchid nutsack, but what are you going to do?)

Well, this should be it, he thinks, eyeing the dilapidated ruin of a shrine in the clearing in front of them, as the skull takes a cavalier's place just behind him. "Hello the... portal?" he calls.

[cryptograms]

The clearing that Augustine reaches is a sight to behold. A hole in reality is propped open by a frame of silvery metal. The frame itself is etched with runes and sprouting several wires, which fan out across the clearing like the world's sparsest and least elegant spider-web. Various pieces of monitoring equipment hum away at the edges of the clearing; Ford himself kneels at one such piece of equipment, tinkering with the readout. He's obviously not too invested in his work, given how he looks up as soon as Augustine calls out.

"Greetings! Is--"

Is there anything I can help you with? is what Ford is intending to say when he first speaks, but his gaze falls across the skull and its many legs and he lights up, looking like Augustine as brought a present just for him. He immediately abandons any thoughts of the task at hand and instead lifts a hand to point at the newest object of his fascination. Without pausing or so much as missing a beat, he shifts gears and finishes his sentence:

"--that a dinosaur skull?"

He immediately reaches into his interior coat pocket. He needs to doodle this thing immediately.

[butnotyet]

The man in front of the dinosaur skull — the only one of the two actually capable of speech, technically speaking, since he hadn't left the thing's tongue in place and wasn't entirely sure where the larynx even ended up, after the decapitation — raises one eyebrow, and rests both hands on his hips, leaving the shimmery-white lab-coat-slash-academic-robe he's got on over his practical all-dark-mostly-blackish ensemble to shimmer extra vibrantly in the breeze, vaguely reminiscent of a superhero for that matter. (Not actually on purpose.)

"That depends," he answers, voice pitched to cover the whole clearing with ease, tone somewhere between flat, dry, and sardonically amused. "Is your other option 'or are you just glad to see me'?"

[necrolord]

This has the desired effect: across the clearing, a man shimmies inelegantly out from a tangle of wire and spindly struts of living bone. He ruffles his hair, which was sticking up funny and is now sticking up funny in a slightly different direction, and strides over to join them with a look of deep amusement.

God isn't wearing his own cloak, today. The one now hanging in his wardrobe is filigreed with delicate whorls of bone, ostentatious to a level he'd take as snide commentary if he didn't also like the look. Great to wear when working miracles, but damned inconvenient when he's tinkering with inadvisable portal tech alongside the guy who still calls him Sasha.

"It's always both," he says, and then: "Glad you made it."

There are layers to his tone, to the shape of his eyes: fond, approving, and some great and lingering distance beneath it. Some deep-etched undercurrent of melancholy, some edge of the coolly implacable being Ford met when a boy lost his hand. There is a tension here beyond easy definition.

And yet he tips his head like he's introducing two friends over a pint, and to anyone not really looking, it could be sold as true.

"This is the guy I've mentioned. When it comes to ghosts and otherworlds, you won't find better."

Not unless Cassiopeia climbs out of the water next, and the genuine likelihood of that hangs over them all like a suspended sword. Hard to say who could climb out of the water next, if the squids upstairs keep playing hardball.

[cryptograms]

Ford seems to be all but flat out ignoring Augustine, offering nothing more than a vague Mmhmm to indicate that he's still listening - though that very confirmation makes it quite clear that he is not listening, his focus instead wholly on the task of sketching the ambulatory dinosaur skull.

It's not until 'Sasha' steps up alongside him that he seems to realize this stranger did not come here for the sole purpose of showing him a neat dinosaur skull. Ford snaps his journal shut and tucks it away again, though his demeanor grows just the tiniest bit more icy. Things have been... awkward ever since Sasha melted off Oscar's hand. Ford's been strongly heeding Dipper's warnings to be cautious around him, but he's aware that sudden distance from a dangerous element can be just as bad an idea as remaining too close. Ideally this would result in him threading the needle and finding the perfect balance between the two extremes, but instead it's just resulted in him swinging haphazardly between his normal level of friendliness and a more subdued, polite distance.

The point is, for once Ford is tuned into the social atmosphere and aware of the less-than-ideal vibes hanging over the conversation, and he's grateful for a chance to step forward and possibly distill them.

"Stanford Pines," he finally says. He does not offer a hand to shake. "Sasha's mentioned that you and I work fields that somewhat overlap."

[butnotyet]

The problem with animating a construct and setting it up with semi-autonomous subroutines is that sometimes it chooses to act on them all on its own. The problem with trying to take a quite large spinosaurus skull for a walk is that its legs were left on the far side of the portal it tried to squeeze through, thereby rendering it relatively immobile. The problem with fixing that issue by sprouting a bevy of vaguely-humanoid, vaguely-froglike legs, all along the inferior mandible and occiput alike, is that none of those legs came with working eyes or an understanding about such pesky details as, say, which way is forward, which in turn brings to mind such phrases and concepts as herding cats. The problem of combining all of these into one particular moment in time and space is that the skull-on-legs, attention caught by Ford's notebook snapping shut, promptly bustles towards him, aiming to butt its nose up under the hand he isn't offering for a handshake — much as a cat or dog might.

This is, naturally, distracting enough that Ford might not notice that the new arrival has caught the galaxy-blackout eye of his awkwardly-dangerous friend, eyebrows raising in an expression of sheer incredulity as he mouths Sasha?!

For a second, or maybe nine or ten of them, quite a few different expressions flick across his face, for that matter. Really it's a pity, that the sun and shade are conspiring to cast such a pattern of shadows across his skin, making it more difficult for anyone to read the questions written there — questions like are you fucking for-real with this shit?, or what the hell have you been saying about me, Teacher?, or maybe do I ever want to know what you called me while you were talking about me?

But then he's looking at Ford again, and the way the Luggage skull is now trying to rub its cheekbones along his pant leg, like a cat scent-marking its territory, and groans loudly.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," he complains. "I am terribly sorry about that — did you want me to make it stop? I — huh." He blinks, gaze flicking thoughtfully between the two portal-tinkering wiseguys. "I think it thinks you smell... familiar," he tries out, tasting his words as he goes. "As much as thinking applies, anyway, or smelling, for that matter — which fields would those be, for you?"

[cryptograms]

The dinosaur skull does, indeed, make for an excellent distraction. While Sasha and Augustine are busy having their silent exchange, Ford is thoroughly distracted and absolutely delighted over this actual dinosaur skull greeting him like an affectionate cat. Whatever tension may have hung over him has completely disappeared by the time Augustine speaks and Ford looks up again.

"Oh-- don't worry, it's not bothering me."

Though... being familiar to the weird dinosaur head is a strange concept. If it were the correct sort he'd assume that Augustine had somehow come across his old t-rex skull from one of those portals, but when Augustine mentions his field of study a different possibility occurs to him.

"Anomalous phenomena would be the easiest way to describe it - ghost sightings, cryptozoological creatures, encounters with the supernatural. It's a bit like xenoanthropology, though in Trench it's more like just 'anthropology'."

[necrolord]

John is, admittedly, a lot less subtle when he flashes Augustine a smile in response. Augustine will know, down to his bones, the glitter in God's black-hole eyes when he's trying not to laugh.

"Reminds me a bit of your House, Patience," he says. Like that expression, it's skinned over with cheer but layered beneath it. Your House invites the question-and-admission of his First Saint's relationship to the Fifth, which was not to be raised by it, but to raise it; Patience sets a cheerfully hard boundary, a confirmation of all Ford doesn't know.

The Sasha bit probably made that clear, though.

He takes pity, or caves to indulgence, and stage-whispers: "Ford runs the game I mentioned. I'll catch you up on the adventures of..." No one would dare call it a shit-eating grin when it's on their Emperor's face— no one except probably Augustine, who has earned the right, after everything. "... the dread pirate Sasha Buckler."

In the end, God is having a great day.

[butnotyet]

First, of course, Augustine is distracted by thinking about what the skull's reactions seem to indicate; is it Ford, or is it the portals themselves, that seem so familiar, anyway?

And then he's just about to say something about how he's certainly plenty familiar with ghosts, which isn't the same as being familiar with the cryptozoological, when God just has to go and open his big fat mouth, doesn't he.

It's not just that he seems perfectly willing to collect the whole pile together and call it all River bullshit, and therefore Fifth House bullshit — it isn't even the way he's providing a level of instruction, here, as regards what to say or not-say to this man whose pockets are apparently filled with dinosaur catnip — it's the way he apparently can't even remember how he described Ford to Augustine in the first place, that has Augustine's eyebrows set low and flat above his eyes as he opens his mouth to say yes, I do actually remember you saying that — and then.

That dreadfully shit-eating grin.

Sasha Buckler.

Augustine closes his mouth again, and gives God a very long look.

It's a look that says, plain as day to anyone looking at him in turn, There is a Hell, and I thought I had left it when I came here.

It's a look that says:

I was wrong. It's this moment, right here.

And then, quite abruptly, he turns back to Ford, and fixes a sharp smile on his face that says something like We'll get through this together, instead.

"I suppose cryptozoology is a good way of describing it," he answers brightly. "It had seemed quite intent on eating these eggs — there were two that fell through a portal, a friend of mine has the other — they're still quite alive."

Ahoy, the gigantic monorchid nutsack hanging by his hip; he reaches inside the opening at the top just enough to rap a few times on a nearly-hard shell, giving a sort of leathery thud sound.

"Not really sure how much longer they've got, before they'll be ready to hatch, but it will be interesting to see how easy it is to tame them."

[cryptograms]

Ah, there is it. Ford personally has no problem with the name, but he's aware that it's both a very silly pun and most certainly isn't Sasha's real name. He has no idea if Augustine knows Sasha's actual name, but clearly whatever he does know him by is different enough to earn that exasperated and pointed lack of comment.

The rest of it, though - your house, Patience, the conspiratorial tone of a joke shared between friends - tells Ford a lot. What, he's not quite certain yet, but he'll just have to note it down for later. For now, however, the discussion of the dinosaur and it's strange eggs still has his attention.

"My brother, niece, and nephew raised a dinosaur once." He says it in a supremely casual tone that Sasha will likely recognize by this point - just as he'll likely recognize the way Ford moves on with no further comment. "You said it came from the other side of one of the portals?"

[butnotyet]

He considers, for half a second, what he'd just said, and speaks to clarity, as clarification is next to Godliness (this is a lie, it is very far away from godliness, just look at how unclear John's metaphors are!): "Technically I just said the eggs did — but yes, it tried to come through after them. Didn't really fit, fortunately for us; the portal was, oh, maybe a few inches in diameter too small for the whole head to fit through, up until the very end — don't know if you've noted fluctuations in their size, just before they snap shut? I managed to lobotomize it while it was three-quarters through, and then inertia got the rest of the head through once it fit — and then, well, kaput, as it were."

There's a little throat-slicing hand gesture, here, as his eyebrows quirk a little: kaput, dekaput, decapitate, whatever, same thing, right?

"Did you want the cervical vertebrae? They're sort of ruining the overall effect of the skull-as-a-storage-chest," as his hand-gesturing switches to indicating the sagging back end, with its sad little 'tail'. (One of the feet attempts to kick at the bit of spine, and gets kicked in the ankle-equivalent by one of the other feet.)

"Not like I had plans for the softspares, either, if you wanted those," Patience adds absently, gaze flicking over to That Asshole, FKA 'Sasha Buckler', to invite him to speak up if he particularly wants a bunch of loose flesh, or scaly hide, or liquidified cholesterol that used to be a brain, for that matter — whether or not he's going to get them is, of course, a different question entirely. Maybe they'll all go to Ford Pines for whatever-the-hell research he wants to do, John.

"I was told," as his tone remains cheerfully light, surely not shadowed by an undercurrent of Speculation, glancing back to Ford once more, "anyway, that in Nephele," carefully pronounced, "they're all called dragons, rather than dinosaurs... which leads me to wonder, I suppose, if your great-niece or -nephew happened to breathe fire, at any point that you're aware?"

Or, in other words: what kind of dinosaur was your relative?

"I can't help but feel a little bit envious — no matter how many forms of megafauna I've encountered," quite a few, with that slaughtering-planets-for-God-and-just-utterly-wasting-resources-left-and-right bit, "we never did find anything quite as delightful as the prospect of your own pet dinosaur. Or, well, family member, of course."

[necrolord]

"Ford can have dibs on the fleshy bits," says God, very graciously. "Wouldn't mind the bones, though. Not that the house is lacking for odd bits of bone already... I just think they're neat."

To Ford's immensely offhand declaration that he's used to kids keeping pet dinosaurs, John flashes Augustine his most delighted are-you-hearing-this-guy expression. It flickers at the thoughtful note belying Augustine's voice, at the leading edge to what he says next. God's expression shutters for the briefest moment, then clears, but Augustine knows his tells. (Not all his tells; that might've made a few things go a good bit differently, wouldn't it.)

He says, bracingly, "Well, now's the time to adopt. Construction's coming right along, best as I can tell. We'll be gearing up for the next phase of this scheme, soon."

That being the one in which John claps his First Saint on the shoulder and sends him off to do some recon on a hostile planet. Like old times, really.

[cryptograms]

Ford opens his mouth to accept the offer of bones, but Sasha beats him to it. It's a bit of a disappointment, but it's not like they don't have plenty on hand already. Still, dinosaur bones! Those are always interesting.

As to Augustine's questions: "No, it was a perfectly mundane Compsognathus. Dragons are exceptionally rare in my home dimension, if not outright extinct."

And sure, so are dinosaurs, but Ford doesn't remark on the apparent contradiction. Instead the conversation has moved on to the actual reason they're all here: the rescue mission.

"Ah-- right. The portal itself is close to completion. Now it's just a matter of ensuring its stability."

[butnotyet]

"I'm entirely certain you'll have plenty of opportunity to play with the rest of the skull at your leisure, Teacher, given that I have yet to decide to be rid of it," Patience says blandly, gaze leveled on 'Sasha' without fear or concern — why should he feel either, given how many tens of millions of times he's used that title with the most profound respect? It's not like there's any reason he'd suspect God hadn't told this Ford fellow he was a teacher, surely, or that God was trying to be incognito, right?

(God has never succeeded at 'being incognito' within the Nine Houses; why would he try, in Trench, when it's so very clear that he isn't trying to be John, either?)

"That, about the dragons, sounds like the sort of professional-see-why-aey that every scientist-researcher who never wants someone to catch him out in a confident statement later proven wrong has given me for the past several thousand years, or so," which is both amused in tone and clearly an exaggeration (ha ha can you imagine?). "Did you want the bones? I really wasn't offering them to him."

So there, Sasha Buckler: now's your opportunity to pay for your crimes against humanity (or, well, this one, at least).

"How are these portals supposed to work, anyway?" he asks — patiently, knowing his cue to set things up for a delightedly long-winded passionate explanation about something that might or might not actually make a lick of sense to him.