May 2022: Augustine the First catch-all

[butnotyet]

Who: Augustine the First and ____________ (This could be you!)
What: A little bit of everything, including Event threads, and who knows what else
When: Throughout May
Where: Specific locations listed in TLs.

Content warnings for this character: Explicit gore/body horror as a baseline, probably omnipresent (high-level necromancer); callous and amoral outlook on life (jaded AF); very high likelihood of mentions of death/suicide/weaponized-sexuality in basically any and all interactions.

Specific warning for this post: A profoundly offensive number of conversational lyric-drops in the thread with Anna. It's fantastic.

Comments

[butnotyet]

Augustine's expression goes on a journey of epic proportions that no man, woman, child, or Omen will ever truly appreciate or comprehend, here, and in the end he does something that Anna is proooooobably not expecting:

A golf clap.

"Charming," he says, as if he means the word as an approving compliment; he... doesn't, mostly. "And quite clever, too, I grant you. Congratulations on not getting iced in the process of being quite a few generations too early for what I meant, as well — and I am just terribly sorry for you that you missed out on all the rest of Mister Stump's music, at least so far as hearing it live is concerned."

(The phrase he wants, here, is "attending concerts", but it's not as if he has any memory of attending an Earth-based punk-pop-rock concert to draw from; alas.)

"The next time you'd like to show off your cleverness, however, I'd advise you to do a bit more research into the confluence of rivers and beasts, capitalized or otherwise — although I will grant you that I've always felt quite lucky that I never had to deal with being attacked by a hippopotamus."

Are they done here? They might be done. He's straightened up, standing ready to turn and walk away from her, at any rate — but he's stopping to adjust his gloves, keeping a wary eye on her; something about that stretch, and the way she was knocking on the brick wall, just isn't sitting right with him.

(Alfred coils around his shoulders, both comfortable and alert to any possible danger sneaking up from behind — terribly useful trait, in a place like Trench.)

[hauntedsavior]

Anna has no desire to threaten Gus, though she recognizes that her penchant for throwing words together like a great gnostic mad lib may have ended this conversation prematurely. Still, she got out of it without having to talk about Teacher quite so readily, and specifically her relationship with him, and she will—for the moment, at least—count that as a win.

"I'd clap with you, but only one of us has a ticket to the end of the world," she says, her body turned so her arm is pressing up against the wall again. She's not making any moves one way or another, but inside, she idly wonders if maybe he's trying to threaten her. Of course, she could always just go back to her own source on the beast in the River, provided that she can track him down again. Hopefully, Ortus made it off that boat after all.

"Look me up," she offers instead. "If you have any questions about what it was like. Since you're missing time and all." Another thing to add to her litany of suspicion, she guesses. "Glad we got to have this talk, Gus. Hope the next one you have goes well." And, again, though her voice is calm, there is a godawful, shitty feeling of dread in her fission bomb heart. Because she's not the only one who talks with God, and she has a lot more to lose if a talk goes bad.

[butnotyet]

"I'm going to choose to believe that we're equally likely to encounter the end of the world from here," Gus observes, still mild as yellow cake — a little bit sweet, a little bit deadly, as it were. "Besides — I never said I was missing time, either, even if I made a mistake in thinking you might have been, had you been from a point in time as late as it seemed."

Technically speaking, one has to assume he was just as dead as everyone else, when the world ended, whether or not he got the chance to beat the rush, right? Now it's just him and his brotherly plus-one in this very strange afterlife.

"I'll keep an eye out for you," he concludes — a promise, a warning, a threat, all of the above no doubt — and then he steps out of the alleyway.

And, well.

Disappears.