tushanshu_logs | EVENT | ZUGZWANG

EVENT | ZUGZWANG | SEPTEMBER 21-28

Characters: ALL!
Date: September 21-28, 2014
Location: Keeliai
Situation: Something in the city has caused the Foreigner's powers to go off the charts, affecting even those who wouldn't possess any. Things pretty much go downhill from there...
Warnings/Rating: Add warnings as needed.

The state of affairs in Keeliai has been tense since the incident at the Midnight Hotel with Evandau, and the aftereffects have put a touch of pall on the city. Kedan look at each other distrustfully, wondering who among their number might be possessed by Malicant's essence and that suspicion carries to the Foreigners as well. How can they fight for us? they seem to be asking. They can't even stop fighting amongst themselves and the Emperor. Of course, the kedan's opinion of Evandau is likewise not exactly stellar any longer, as whether through inevitability or design, his cold actions of killing those who cross him has come to light. While there's no open dissent in the ranks (and likely, it seems, more due to fear of repercussion than loyalty) there are certainly looks and whispers.

The turtle hatchlings have also picked up on it, and they've become quieter than normal. Especially those who are suffering under shedding the remainders of Malicant's taint if they were injured by the poisoned weapons, they'll seem hesitant to bother their parents for minor things, or if possible will ask a parent who isn't afflicted first.

It feels like the calm before a storm.

LINKS
Powers Going Haywire (Sept 21-25) | Powers Nullified (Sept 26-27) | PART 2 TBA (Sept 28) | OOC Plot Post

OOC NOTE
Reactions to the Part 2 plot reveal will also be threaded on this post and the comment will be unfrozen when the other posts are made. Event questions can be directed to this comment. Have fun!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Never in his long life would Solomon have thought he would be grateful for being, essentially, mortal. It was a new an enlightening day when he felt the lines of power unravel and fade. They weren't gone--not completely. They were just cut off. Frankly, it was a relief. Solomon had barely slept all week, save for snatches in places furthest from death, and even then when he closed his eyes he felt as if he was about to fall into the abyss of his own soul. So yes, it was a relief.

So much a relief, in fact, that he fell into his bed not long after midnight and fell into a bliss full sleep, and had every intention of staying there for, oh, maybe a month. In-between catching up on his research, of course, now that the idiot skeleton wasn't going to be broadcasting his murder everywhere.

Reason intervened once he had a proper night's sleep, so that said research was more investigation into what was happening--but even still. Right now, sleep was sacrosanct.

Edited 2014-09-24 12:21 (UTC)

With Anton and Raine both taken care of and, if not feeling better, at least slightly more on the mend than they had been, Skulduggery returned home to the apartment building he'd been assigned.

He didn't strictly need to. He'd spent enough time next to his lantern over the entire month to have charged it for the next several years. But there was one person Skulduggery hadn't spoken to since his ribs were replaced, and with all magic on the turtle entirely nullified, he had a very good guess about where that person might be.

And he was right.

Skulduggery stood next to Wreath's bed and, with no regard whatsoever for the fact that the necromancer was fast asleep, prodded him hard in the shoulder.

Although in Solomon's adult life he'd grown accustomed to going without sleep, or waking up easily at need, one thing hadn't changed from when he was a teenager: once asleep, only hellfire was allowed to wake him up again. He felt the jolt and snapped awake with his head still buried in his pillow, too groggy to even wonder why the hell he was no longer asleep.

"If my pants aren't on fire, you're a dead man," he mumbled into his pillow without opening his eyes. He didn't know who it was, and was far too sleepy to actually care that half his senses were missing so that he couldn't tell in an instant who it was. "And if they are on fire, put them out so I can go back to sleep."

Edited 2014-09-24 23:54 (UTC)

Skulduggery didn't answer at first, too busy considering whether or not needling Wreath further was a good idea. In the end, he decided that some of his prouder moments had stemmed from horrifically bad ideas, and snapped his fingers. The cuffs of Wreath's pants didn't catch fire.

That didn't play out nearly as well as it should have. Skulduggery tapped a single finger against his jaw, trying to remember exactly how mortals did this sort of thing; then he turned and left the room to fetch a box of matches. When he returned, he struck one and set the cuffs of Wreath's pants on fire.

"Would you look at that," Skulduggery said. "I must be a dead man. Oh, wait; I am."

Edited 2014-09-25 00:08 (UTC)

There was a dull snap, but no answer, and with a grunt Solomon mentally shoved away the waking world in favour of the sleeping one. It worked, too, or was well on the way to doing so--he didn't notice anyone leaving, returning, or taking matches to his clothes. Skulduggery's voice was a dull hum of words Solomon didn't care to actually hear.

Then he felt warmth at his feet, spreading slowly over his socks; hot but not yet actually dangerous. He sighed, his voice muffled through the pillow. "You just set my pants on fire, didn't you?"

Solomon rolled over to face the wall away from Skulduggery, doused the tiny flames by grinding his heels into the mattress, and yanked the covers over his head.

"Hey." Skulduggery's voice contained the closest possible alternative to a pout that living skeletons were capable of - or indeed, that Skulduggery was capable of. "I worked hard on that. I don't believe you're favouring my efforts with the recognition they deserve."

He had worked hard on that, too. Setting fabric on fire was remarkably difficult when one didn't have access to magic.

"I was under the impression," he went on, sitting at the foot of the bed, "that the human body only needs a certain amount of sleep each night, regardless of how large the deficit is. You've been sleeping all day. I must say, Wreath, it's a tad suspicious. I think you're just trying to avoid me."

"Whyever would I want to avoid the skeleton whose presence felt like icicles in my eyeballs," Solomon grumbled from beneath the safety of his covers. "I haven't the faintest idea why I'd want to avoid the skeleton whose presence felt like icicles in my eyeballs."

He grunted as Skulduggery sat down, and kicked him in the thigh. Or maybe it was his pelvis; Solomon wasn't sure. "I don't care how long it's been, go away or I'll start quoting Shakespeare at you."

"Neither do I," Skulduggery agreed. "Particularly since my presence shouldn't currently feel like icicles in your eyeballs. If it does, I'm fairly confident you would tell me, since that would probably be an important clue to whatever has blocked off all of our magic in the first place. Besides which, you're not nearly as tired as you're claiming to be. You can't be. You slept all day."

Even if Wreath's foot had connected with Skulduggery's pelvis, it wouldn't have mattered much. There weren't any muscles there to cripple. Skulduggery shifted back to avoid a second kick, and that was the end of that. "Please do," he commented cheerfully. "You told me once that you had all of Hamlet memorised. I don't believe you. Prove it to me."

It was almost like Skulduggery had simply forgotten how much he hated Shakespeare.

There was a brief moment of shifting when Solomon's foot missed the second time, and one of the pillows dragged down beneath the hem of the blanket as though swallowed by the amorphous mass. "Who's there? Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself. Long live the king! Bernardo? He. You come most carefully upon your hour. 'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco."

Solomon's voice was utterly flat, without intonation to distinguish character, and on the final line he kicked Skulduggery's side again. "For this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart." Another kick. "Have you had quiet guard? No, because a bloody skeleton is harassing me in my sleep." A third kick.

Edited 2014-09-25 08:55 (UTC)

Skulduggery skillfully dodged that third kick, laughing. "I'd give you full marks, but I don't think you understood the point of the task I set you. That, or you saw a very different version of Hamlet than most people do. It certainly would have been much more interesting with a full skeleton in it. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, the story should have followed Yorick. I'm sure his tale of being a dead court jester was much more interesting than Hamlet's investigation into his father's contrived and over-dramatised murder. Maybe he was a spy. I've always thought skeletons would make excellent spies."

But he finally did, somewhat graciously, leave the bed, so that Wreath wouldn't have the opportunity to try and kick him anymore. That was by no means an admittance of defeat, and Skulduggery made that clear a moment later when he appeared right by Wreath's head.

"Why butterflies?" he asked.

The only answer he received was a fist right in the nose-hole.

It was difficult to put much force behind a punch like that when you were lying in bed, and had been for the entire day. Skulduggery was shoved backwards, certainly, but the pain was minimal and he recovered quickly. He certainly recovered much more quickly than it seemed like he did, standing alone in the middle of the room for minutes on end with his head tilted at a very specific angle.

Then he abruptly turned and left the room, came back with a bucket of cold water he'd filled from the sink in the kitchen, and dumped it over Wreath's head.

Finally. Solomon relaxed into the bed with a sigh the moment he heard Skulduggery's footsteps leaving the room. That peace didn't last nearly as long as he wanted it. A few minutes later he was rudely interrupted by a sudden douse of cold water, and he bolted upright with a yell, spluttering.

"Go ndéana an diabhal dréimire de cnámh do dhroma ag piocadh úll i ngairdín Ifrinn!" he swore, shoving the soaked covers off the bed and shaking water out of his hair. He reached into his bedside table and yanked out the sheathed dagger he'd used to perform surgery, and smiled sweetly up at Skulduggery between the straggles of his fringe in his eyes. "Which rib would you like me to remove first?"

Edited 2014-09-25 10:13 (UTC)

It wasn't often Skulduggery managed to get this much of a rise out of Wreath. It made him strangely nostalgic for a time when this was not only possible, but commonplace.

He dropped the bucket and raised his hands in surrender, a smile dancing throughout his tone. "You know you love me."

It wasn't often a ploy like that actually worked, either, whether on a grown man or on people like Valkyrie. But Skulduggery continued to use it anyway, because he knew it was true. "None, if you would be so kind. Why butterflies, Solomon? I don't remember you being quite that idyllic. I don't remember you being idyllic at all."

"Right now, 'hate' would be a more accurate word," Solomon muttered, throwing the sheathed dagger back into the drawer, but he gazed incredulously up at Skulduggery. "You woke me up to ask about that? Just a moment. Let me ruin your suit."

He got up, stumbled a little with a groan, and snatched up a pot of paint he had overlooked in a rare offer of supplies for Ryou. "Hold still."

If Skulduggery were still able to manipulate the air, he would have been on the ceiling.

As it was, he drew back several steps instead, as though he'd been stung, making sure the door remained at his back for a quick getaway. "Come now," he said, hands extended and palms raised in a rather misleading gesture of pleaded peace. "Is that really necessary? You could ruin my suit, and a perfectly good pot of expensive paint while you're at it. Or - here's a bit of a revolutionary idea - you could answer my question, thus robbing me of any reason to continue bothering you. Personally, I vote for the second option."

"Expensive paint?" Solomon lifted an eyebrow, uncapping the jar. "Hardly. It was a cheap sample. I don't need it. Besides which, you ruined my sleep. And my bed. My bed is sacred, Mr Pleasant. It seems appropriate to me to ruin something equally sacred to you. Ergo, your suit."

He advanced on the skeleton, his damp hair fluffing, wearing a wicked little smile that he hadn't worn in centuries and had no idea he was wearing now. "Now, as I said, hold still."

Rather than do as the necromancer asked, Skulduggery chose to continue backing towards the door, acutely aware that his current inability to manipulate either air or water was very much working against him right now. "Your bed," he pointed out, "is nowhere near as sacred as any of my suits. Water disappears when it drys. Paint becomes a hazardous substance of noxious fumes impossible to remove when it drys. Your exhaustion is making you delirious. Perhaps you should get back into bed."

It occurred to him that pointing out precisely how paint would affect his suit might not be the most persuasive of arguments to make to a man determined to ruin said suit, but Skulduggery couldn't really bring himself to care. Wreath may not have noticed all of the changes in his demeanour, but Skulduggery certainly did. As always, many of his best ideas seemed to come from horrifically bad ones.

"My bed is one of the few places I can get any peace," said Solomon. "Your suits are ephemeral. You change them every day. They're not even Bespoke-tailored." He continued to advance. "It's too late, Mr Pleasant. You've ruined the first solid sleep I've had in a month. Now you have to reap the consequences."

The bucket was just by his feet. He crouched and picked it up and tossed in smoothly underhand so it got under Skulduggery's feet just as the skeleton was stepping backward.

"At least let me -"

- take off my hat.

Even without magic, Skulduggery possessed a kind of smooth grace you wouldn't expect from a skeleton - or perhaps you would, depending on what your previous experience was. Wreath's ploy didn't work quite the way he might have wanted it to, but it did succeed in pushing Skulduggery out of the room completely, further from the dripping bed and closer to the stairs.

Solomon was more than familiar enough with the skeleton not to be surprised that the action didn't work as well as he could have hoped, but watching Skulduggery stumble amused him. Besides, it put Skulduggery outside his room and thereby avoided more of Solomon's possessions being ruined.

"Let you what?" Solomon asked, exiting his room and still with that evil glint in his eyes--the one which said he had no intention of stopping. "Let you accept your punishment with graciousness and fortitude? Certainly. Stop moving, or I'll be forced to throw the bucket at you again."

"You left the bucket behind," Skulduggery pointed out. It was a marginally unhelpful comment, but, he felt, an important one in light of what Wreath was threatening him with. "I refuse to accept anything with graciousness and fortitude, much less a punishment. You stop moving first."

He didn't, of course, so in order to keep their distance Skulduggery was forced to take a single step down the staircase.

"Then I'll use something else," said Solomon, and dipped his fingers into the jar and flicked paint at Skulduggery, and in the moment the skeleton was reacting to that he lunged, taking advantage of the higher ground to try and dirty the skeleton's suit.

It almost worked. It would have, if Skulduggery didn't launch himself backwards to avoid the lunge, deciding that a fall down the stairs was less likely to affect him than even a single drop of paint on one of the last custom-tailored suits he had left.

It still hurt like the devil.

He rolled and came back up as smoothly as he could manage, snatched up his hat, stumbled once through the pain, determined nothing was broken, and dusted himself off - in that order. "Worked through your rage yet?" he asked cheerfully, almost mockingly, up the stairs.

She'd had-- a question. All right, a few questions, all ones she should have asked earlier, before Skulduggery left. This had prompted her to head toward the Fire sector some time afterward, and now she couldn't remember a single one of her initial questions, as the tableau she'd walked in on prompted far too many more. Why paint? Why was Solomon damp? Why in the world was Skulduggery taunting him?

Raine opened her mouth to ask, realized she couldn't even decide where to start, and closed it again. Finally burst into startled laughter, still standing in the doorway.

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hopping in with permission