deercountry | you can keep on getting better [open]

Entry tags:

you can keep on getting better [open]

Who: Anna Amarande and you!
What: May catchall
When: May
Where: A bar in Cellar Door, other locations to come

Content Warnings: Light alcohol use, conversations about humanity and murder, blood, vampirism

a. if you want, you can buy yourself a drink [at the bar]

[anna's made plans with a couple people to hang out this month. it's not a tense environment at all, and sometimes she can even be seen on the tiny little stage playing some chilled out bass grooves for the patrons. no concrete songs, really, mostly just improv for vibes. when she's not on stage, and most of the time she's not, she's nestled herself down into a booth down near the end. it's quiet, well-lit but not obtrusively so. people around here know her and know that that's basically her seat, so any conversations that happen there are as private as they're gonna get.]

[she's expecting a few people to show up as she nurses a beer that's so weak she might as well not be drinking anything at all. probably for the best that she's sober for these talks, whatever they end up bringing with them.]

Hey. Glad you could make it. [she tilts her drink at her guest.]

b. no you'll never drink like me [for kainé]

[there's always been a few problems with going out and hunting beasts, no matter how confident and comfortable it makes anna feel. no matter how many lives she saves, she's always putting herself at risk of corruption or injury or beasthood or all three, and one of these days it's gonna sneak up on her. all at once, extremely loudly and incredibly close.]

[anyway, when she comes back home this time, it's clear that she's been in better shape. she limps her way into the house, and she's at least cognizant enough to fix her roommate/girlfriend with a sheepish little look as she holds her side. the cloth there isn't dripping yet, but it's clear that it didn't start as red as it is now.]

Motherfucker out there got the best of me. [she's talking like she's not in pain, or like she's trying very hard to pretend she isn't.] I think I stopped most of the bleeding myself. Don't suppose we've got anything here that can help seal it up before I go to the doctor?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Oh, Palamedes thinks, and then, so he's giving people names to call him now. He wonders if he's given one to Harrow, or to Paul - for personal reasons he does not think about what he might have asked Gideon to call him, lest he shrivels up in disgust - and then puts that aside as not exactly the important thing here.

(Well, he does note that he seems to be giving out more than one name, which is fascinating. A little ancient note mentioning an 'EJG' comes to mind, and if 'E' is for Emperor... anyway.)]

Well, he's a presumptive prick, [Palamedes says, taking a generous sip of his water to give that time to sink in. Some necromancers do not fawn over God, and other fun stories.] I'd have advised you to keep your distance if I hadn't, you know. Been busy.

[been eaten by a sea monster.]

Can I ask what changed your mind? If it's too absurd to conceptualize putting out there, don't worry about it; I'm on your side already.

[no, it's fine. she wouldn't have listened at first anyway, so maybe it's... for the best that he got eaten by a sea monster? no, that can't be right. anyway. she breathes out like she's trying to sort through her thoughts. there is a clear catalyst, and she still feels strange talking too much about it. but she doesn't want to leave it to something as simple as "vibes" either. but she also wants to protect what teacher has told her.]

[for some fucked up, demented reason, she still feels some base level of responsibility for those secrets. even as she's about to speak on why she feels like he doesn't deserve it anymore.]

I've seen... a lot of loss in my life. In my face and in the faces of others. I've seen it on gods, and on other things that shouldn't have human expressions. Things that, you know, don't experience emotions the same way as we do. [she thinks she can discuss this clearly enough without going too deep into it. still, she lowers her voice, like the specter of the liberator of death still haunts this place.]

I know what it looks like, is what I'm saying. It's one of those things that's probably universal. But I don't see it on his face when he talks about the things that he's lost. I don't see it in his eyes, not the same way. [she closes her own eye and lowers her head.]

Maybe I'm reading too much into it. I don't know. But I'm starting to think our Kindly Prince might be full of shit in a couple different ways.

[It's sympathy that Palamedes feels toward her in an instant; sympathy, not empathy, because he has never known some great and terrible powerful force that did feel earnestly the loss of ages, and so he cannot conceptualize what it would be like to know someone like that. He frowns, considering his cup of water, and he feels for her; regardless of the man in question, it's a painful thing to believe one thing about a person and then be proven so thoroughly mistaken.

He wonders if there's guilt in it. There shouldn't be, but even Palamedes can admit a kind of guilty shame in realizing he was wrong about the things his own home told him were inexorable truth.

So. Well.]

He took me back to his house the day I woke up here again, before I transformed out of the squid body. He fed me tea and biscuits, and made kindly overtures about sharing his notes, and apologized for what happened to me here, and back home.

[Then he frowns, because, ugh-] I couldn't find an iota of sincerity in it, personally. If he was genuine about a single thing back then, it was being mildly annoyed that I wouldn't let him own my problems.

[Or himself, but he doesn't know what Anna knows about Lyctors and their relative position as "God's things," and he doesn't want to drag her into that other, separate mess. He leans his elbows on the table, shrugging.]

I told him I'm not interested in doing tricks and dying for him, so, you know— whatever. [or: he might not have repeated all this now if he hadn't already told God in so many words to fuck himself and his apologies.] So I think I know what you mean.

But... [Okay, he'll get to that. He gestures for her to go on, instead.] What are your next moves?

[this is. a relief. it feels like there's a valve in her chest that PM has helped her pry open. she's not alone in these doubts. she doesn't have to be the only one wary—not reverent, but cautious towards the king undying. she doesn't have to do this alone, which is what drove her so close to him in the first place, isn't it? just because someone understands the same memes as you doesn't make them a good person, amaranth.]

Next moves? [she looks up and repeats it like she wasn't thinking about it until palamedes mentioned it. and she idly runs her finger along the rim of her glass.] I didn't have any. Not yet, at least, but I have... I don't know. I need more information first. I have a couple ideas that I can't ask him about. [the condensation on her glass is starting to disappear, but she still trails a line down the side of her glass.] So tell me more about what it's like on the Sixth.

Fair enough. Think about it; I'm good for another ear, whenever you need one. Not that I'm seasoned in the art of— [he waves a hand,] -doing anything about the likes of him, you know.

[As far as the local necromancers from home go, here in Trench, he is the bottom rung; he's fine with it for a smattering of reasons, but it's true that meeting and thereby deciding he doesn't like that dude has been a recent development for him, too.

Without the memes. He skipped the memes.]

The Sixth is... familiar. Gives me context. But you want to know what it's like to live there, so: fine, for all intents and purposes. We're in a sealed environment and preoccupied with our own projects until one of us has to ferret out the rest from our respective holes in the wall to sign a few papers; it's a world of cagey academics. I'm using that term loosely, "world"— our population has been steadily decreasing, thanks to lack of foresight in necromantic matches.

[The familiarity makes up for a lot, though, but-] All things considered, I'm coming around to this place.

Uh huh.

[as he describes things, she shifts her attention to her omni screen so she can take some notes on what he's saying. when he's done talking, she readies an image, but doesn't display it for him quite yet. that would be spoilers.]

Lack of foresight, huh? Is that more of the Emperor badly pretending to be sincere about preserving your House, or is there something else about the Sixth that makes that hard? Like... I don't know, do you guys need special equipment to go outside of those holes in the wall? Maybe the surface is shitty and inhospitable or something?

We didn't pay attention to the bloodlines and ran out of viable matches. There are charts and tables for reproduction, these days.

[He shrugs and sips his water; they fucked around and found out, literally. He's even on those charts, not that it matters anymore for a whole host of reasons, least of all that he's sitting here in this bar and not anywhere on the Sixth.

That said,] But we do live on a barren rock too close to our star to not melt our faces off in a heartbeat on the sunny side, that's true as well. It's more or less tidally locked, which solves that problem; our Library sits in the polar ice cap. We don't go outside at all.

[Guess That Planet]

[she doesn't have to.]

[with a nod of understanding, she pulls up an image she's been working on and turns her screen to face palamedes. she's only learned a few things from her conversations—that the sixth and the ninth are as far as can be from each other, and what palamedes just told her confirms it. and the other label may well be the most educated guess she's ever made.]

Does this look familiar to you? Even in broad strokes.

[she is watching for a reaction like a hawk.]

[Well, it's not every day that someone whips out a fun infographic of this, hm, caliber. Palamedes looks at it with a raised eyebrow, glass raised again, and - huh. For a moment he'd expected something off topic, somehow, but - huh.

He puts the glass down without taking a sip and squints, leaning over the table a bit further. It's the little blue one near the Sixth that does it for him; Viktor asked him questions about the First and all he could come up with was 'the water was pretty.']

Sure. [His gaze flicks over to the tiny Ninth, then back.] He wouldn't have told you all this.

He didn't have to.

[that statement alone might be enough to give something massive away, or at least something that feels massive. it's PM's reaction that makes her recognize that weight. this is information that people probably shouldn't know she has, but there's no way to hide it from the one person with the power to do something about it. it's only because she trusts palamedes when he says he's not on the emperor's side that she feels comfortable sharing it at all. it makes the tension in her shoulders loosen up, even if she feels like she'll be speaking more quietly the longer she remains examining this contraband with palamedes.]

The one thing I can't figure out is why they're out of order. [she points at the crude replica of the sixth house, first in line among the other houses.] The Ninth is in the right place, but you'd think you would be from the First, right?

[The Sixth part of him, the born and bred academic and Master Warden of the Library is absolutely reeling. Not a single person here has listened to him prattle on about the Sixth and responded with anything besides "that's strange," and here she has a fucking infographic that she just made. Not filled in, but he supposes that isn't the point; she knows where the shapes go.

That the Emperor is a liar and a chronic manipulator hasn't surprised Palamedes in the slightest; that there could be people here, in Trench, from a pre-Resurrection society, on the other hand— he bites the inside of his cheek hard, torn between the thrill of discovery and the self-directed irritation that it didn't occur to him sooner.]

I'm from a sealed-in cake tin on a rock that melts bones, hardly viable; the First has water. [Idle, like, of course conditions on the other planets are all kind of trash compared to the one that has water. Not that anyone lives there anymore.] They're numbered in resurrection order.

[god help her, she grins. it's just one side of her mouth and she doesn't part her lips, but this... this is big. this is big, and for once, it feels like she's gotten a leg up on the king undying. it's like if she decides to ever act on these doubts, she'll have a whole ream of information to back herself up. and she'll have, she dares suspect, the support of one of the biggest knowledge-keepers she knows.]

[the grin fades, though, as the meaning of palamedes' words sets in.]

I thought it was just the First that had something happen to it. Nobody lived on the other planets. Why did he have to resurrect them?

To start his own stupid Empire and go to war for the next myriad? I don't know. It was ten thousand years before my time. There's only so much that can be extrapolated from ancient Lyctoral texts, and that's with the highest clearance into the Library a person can have.

[He makes a face, mouth a thin line, as if to hoist a lifetime of frustration with all that business onto the table with a mere look. He resolves not to get distracted explaining the inherent value in paper and how he knows why the rules exist, but that doesn't make the secrets less tantalizing, and drums his fingers on the table.

Back to the topic at hand.]

Why resurrect a planet. Something to do with necromancy, I assume; we don't work in open space, and if nothing lived on a planet before... a similar problem? [A beat. Wry:] Or he just has bad aim.

To resurrect something... [she's trying to think of why he would do such a thing, why he would need to, but to do that—even with what PM is filling her in on, to focus on what the first necromancer gained from resurrecting planets is missing the point.]

It has to be dead first, right? Obviously. They might not have had anyone living on them, but they were still as alive as planets really can be. An atmosphere of poisonous gas on this one, a storm that never stops churning on this one.

[she sits with the implications for a moment. connects dots. comes to a conclusion that probably isn't exactly right, but it's close enough for now. she frowns. she hasn't taken a drink in a moment, but takes one only after she asks palamedes one thing.]

He already knows part of what I'm about to say. But can I tell you something in confidence?

[Palamedes takes a moment to linger in the private amusement of God having bad aim, as much as God having bad aim would have truly bleak implications for the Sixth— for everywhere not the First, honestly. If the other planets were an accident, then the rest of the Empire hasn't ever mattered.

He doesn't think it was an accident. He also doesn't think the rest of the Empire has ever mattered in a way that extended beyond things to have. Back in the Emperor's study he'd apologized, and named Palamedes a Lyctor without even a breath of the eightfold word, and he'd looked annoyed when Palamedes had told him no— but only for a moment, like dealing with a child that doesn't know better.

So no, he doesn't think the Emperor's reason (haha) is that deep, all things considered.]

Of course, [he says, closing his hands around the cold sides of his glass, still leaned forward into this little conspiracy. Better than thinking about what happens when someone kills a planet.] I can keep a secret.

[if that's what he's looking for, then she won't be much distraction. because first comes the part that the emperor already knows:]

There's a second soul living inside of me. One that comes from another world, one that met its end. I never knew how, and I never thought to ask. I don't think she'll know if I try.

[for her, this is something easy, simple. something that she's lived with for years that's become a fact of her world. for others, especially if she's not mentioned or glossed over it in the past, she knows it's something bigger. she can suspect, dry jokes about god having bad aim aside, that it's of interest to palamedes. and she likes him, and she doesn't fear him, and that will make it easier to discuss later. for now, she puts her palms flat on the table, then curls up the tips of her fingers just slightly.]

He knows that. What he doesn't know is that back home, there were a couple hundred people like me. All from planets that reached their ends. A whole host of apocalypses, as terrible as they were sudden. Nobody ever figured out why it happened, or what caused it.

[her implication, she thinks, should be clear. does it make logical sense? not really. and yet, is it that far of a stretch? was A2 not resurrected in a new form within her? god, she wants to be wrong.]

[She has a what!!! Palamedes carefully doesn't make a face, carefully does not betray anything in his expression throughout her whole explanation. That in itself may be telling, after his open surprise about the infographic, but there are some things he's just not willing to leap forward into assumptions about before he knows the whole story. Or as much of it as possible.

Where souls go when displaced is one of those things. It's absolutely staggering, the thought of hundreds of people housing displaced souls from - from a handful of their own armageddons, and he doesn't miss the implication. He could not possibly miss the implication.]

You should understand that I, personally, don't know anything about the act of resurrection. Only he does that. I can tell you my best educated guesses, but first I have to know about your second soul. She's distinct from you?

[Enough to ask her things, at least. He considers that not a Lyctor, but-]

A soul that meets an abrupt and violent death becomes a revenant, a— a ghost haunting a thing. They're not necessarily violent and vengeful themselves, [ahem,] although it's the most likely scenario. There's a possibility that your second soul follows this kind of pattern and not the one you're thinking of.

[And it would probably be better for, like, all the people involved if those couple hundred extra souls were just revenants finding an unlikely bunch of homes. Ethically.]

But it's not impossible that resurrection was involved.

[see, like. okay. this is easier to talk about. this has just been her life for the past several years and she can talk and joke and explain as much as possible, and she has no problem with it. and she can tell that this is a big deal from... well, from how it doesn't seem like one. through tremendous effort, she's sure. and this might be, now that she thinks of it, the thing that drew the emperor's attention to her in the first place. if he could tell without her saying it, well, that's certainly something interesting enough on its own.]

A ghost within a machine, maybe? [she offers a sly look, but it's gone fast because the joke's really not that funny.] She's someone else, yeah. An android named A2 who was fighting a forever war 10,000 years in my future. Don't suppose you've heard of her.

[and though she says that dryly, like it's rehearsed, the words quickly catch up with her.]

Wait, holy shit. There's actually a chance you might know her. The timelines work out, and if the Emperor is trying to wage war and strengthen his empire... [she sounds downright conspiratorial for a moment, then gives it another flash of thought and lets go of the possibility.] No. I think I'm hearing hoofbeats and thinking zebras. Sorry—anyway, no, like. No, A2 isn't violent, or at least it's not all she is. But she changed me as a person in a lot of ways once her soul started living inside me. Body, brain. [she pokes a finger at her chest.] Heart, too.

[Yeah, nope, he doesn't get this joke, sorry Anna. He shrugs, like, yes? Like that, sure thing. But moving on already to A2 the android from 10,000 years in the future. Anna's future. Which— god, but she all but says it outright when she brings up timelines, and if he doesn't learn anything about pre-Resurrection life in the next hour he's going to dissolve into this chair.

He shakes his head, anyway, not willing to interrupt; no, there are no androids in the Empire's war games, as far as he's aware. He didn't know what they were until he got here, which seems like proof enough. Although who really knows in this goddamn Empire anymore, huh!!!!

He's calm. He brings a hand up to his chin, thoughtful, because it still doesn't sound like anything he's ever heard of unless he forces Anna's circumstances to fit where they aren't meant to. Hmm.]

Body? Physically, your body? [no okay that one sounds kinda lyctor-y but android lyctors still aren't things, whew...] I think if you were, to be gauche, literally haunted, you'd have figured it out by now. Coexistence with a revenant would have too many adverse effects, including how most of them are absolutely raving.

[hmmMM--] I've never heard of resurrected souls going... somewhere else, but then again, we aren't taught anything more than "there was a Resurrection, ooh, praise be"— so, utter tosh. It... might be possible. What trips me up is the number; you said only a few hundred, which is monumentally narrow. I'd be wondering where the rest are.

That's the thing that got me too, right, like. If these are full on planets being destroyed, then why was it only, like, less than a fraction of a percent of the people on those planets getting reborn into bodies from Earth?

[she shakes her head, because obviously she doesn't have the answer. she never could have it, no matter how close she got to the top of the chain with her legitimately very cool boss, zee carlisle.]

Maybe it's all coincidences. I'm not sure. I don't know how much I'm willing to believe in coincidences after A2, though. I mean, what are the odds that a girl with shitty controlling parents who love everything about military history and combat tactics and stuff is gonna end up resonating with a literal tin soldier programmed to follow every military order she's given?

[to take the edge off that sentence, she takes another drink while she waves her hand, dismissing the whole idea of what she'd just brought up.]

Anyway. You said they don't teach you anything more except that the Resurrection happened. Ever wonder about any other secrets of the old world that our Bonelord in Chief might have been keeping from you?

[That sure does sound like somebody's idea for a novel, Palamedes thinks. He makes a face, nodding lightly, like yeah - beyond the realm of coincidence, but where are the other people? Surely they can't all be clogged in the River.]

The odds are astronomical, certainly. I'd argue something about compatibility of your souls if not for the equally astronomical number of souls still unaccounted for in this scenario.

["robots have souls probably, for sure" - palamedes 2022]

As for the pre-Resurrection world— only academically. I run a Library, but I'm not a historian, necessarily.

[But okay, okay.]

Why, what are the good ones?

[as he contemplates, she just offers something casual in return.]

I mean, that's probably it, you know? Soul compatibility. Only person who'd really know the metaphysical situation behind it all is still stuck at home, running the company and maybe doing some therapy sessions on the side.

[she could bring up clarence, the man responsible for turning a host of apocalypses into survival of the fittest. the time-traveling eugenicist who she never saw the face of. but why would she do that when there's some perfectly good goss to dish.]

I mean, it depends on what questions you have, you know? A lot of my stuff's gonna be limited to the First, or Earth if you wanna talk in my language. The Sixth—Mercury—was always too dangerous for any of us to go to, and I don't even think we landed on it with robots by the time I got here. Lots of people were interested in colonizing Mars—that's... [she hums and references her infographic, pointing at the red planet.] If I had to guess, the Second.

Probably because humanity was slow-cooking Earth in its own atmosphere and people just wanted to call it a wash, jump ship, and try again somewhere else instead of actually fixing shit. [she speaks dryly.] That doesn't sound familiar at all.

[He shrugs, conceding her point with a nod. Yeah, soul compatibility, and just forget whatever happened to the other billions of souls, he supposes - it's not like it's going to come up as a clear cut, valuable answer now, probably.

Which, speaking of—]

I don't know what I should be asking about, [he says, and it's genuine; the First— Earth is so old and ancient and separated from everything he's ever known that he really doesn't know where to even begin. It's a curious shade of overwhelming, and he taps his fingers against the side of his glass in an idle motion, trying to think of - something.

(He does react to 'Mercury,' at least, a brief furrowed brow and the quirk of a grin as if to say, what? That's what they called it back then? Something quaint about it, almost.)

He thinks about 'slow-cooking Earth' and eventually comes up with,]

I've been to the First. Not for very long. It was empty. Even the house we stayed in was essentially a— [god, fucking-] -an open tomb.

[Honestly, it didn't fill him with a powerful urge to learn about life there before the Resurrection, but then again, he didn't think he'd ever meet someone (someone actually pleasant) who was there. He can remember standing in the open air with Camilla and taking it all in—light, water, breeze. It felt more alive than it was.]

Why 'Mercury'?

Named after the messenger of the Greek gods. Supposed to have winged shoes that make him fly way faster than anything else, and if I had to guess, the people who name the planets did it because it's probably got the shortest year, so you'd see it zipping through the night sky way faster than the rest.

[she sighs, though, because she knows what happened to earth. the other planets might still be mysteries, but she can just. assume that in the very near future that teacher is from, humanity just fails. they continue to do nothing, and they watch, and they wait, and they fail.]

I don't know what our beloved Emperor did to Earth after the apocalypse we made, but humans... I don't know. I wanted to believe we were better than this. I wanted to believe we could course correct and keep our home habitable, but all the scientists have been saying for years that we're just going to turn it into a big, uninhabitable dead zone. We used to have water, trees, cities full of people, and now the buildings are probably the only things still standing. Or they will be, I guess, by the time my now becomes your past.

[another heavy sigh. she needs a drink after that one; she takes one and runs her other hand through her hair while she's doing it.]

Christ. Anyway. It really did used to be just this... amazing place, Earth. Don't let me get you all depressed about it. [let her hold all that instead.] We had this forest near where I grew up and sometimes I would just head out there and stretch out on a big flat rock and think about things while I stared up through the canopy of leaves. [she turns her attention to her omni.] Give me a sec, I can probably pull up some pictures of what it all looked like.

[The who. Palamedes shrugs, having no idea who any of those are supposed to be, and not really comprehending why the Earth people would consider the years a different length instead of just picking a standard and calling that A Year, regardless of where the planets are at any given time? Perhaps the Empire had one thing going for it.

He thinks, instead, about the idea of killing a planet through negligence - not the way a necromancer might kill a planet, a terrible thought he's still not sure he can dwell on without going into a catatonic rage, but just by not caring about it. The Sixth - Mercury - may have been a shitty little rock before people lived on it, but if people live on it because they broke Earth...

It makes him a little angry. He'd never breathed unrecycled air until Canaan House. People in Trench look at him like he's insane when he says he'd never seen a real tree, or that the sun simply does not rise on the Sixth or they would be dead a million times over. The First had so much glittering blue.]

There's still water. Honestly, there's more water than I knew to expect, and you can see the First sometimes from the view screens at home. Not— it isn't blue from that far, of course. But the water is still there.

[He gives her a brief smile, a little crooked and strained, like, this isn't helping. Anyway.]

Your pictures...?

you can keep on getting better [open]

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cw climate change bleakness + fatalism

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