tushanshu_logs | ENDPLOT | BEFORE THE DAWN

ENDPLOT | BEFORE THE DAWN

Characters: ALL!
Date: December 1-7, 2014
Location: Under the shell and in the Dreaming
Situation: Malicant’s defeated, but it seems the Foreigners have gotten a little bit stuck ...
Warnings/Rating: Add warnings as needed.

Where are you going?

What did you do?

Can you hear me?

Hello?

At first the Dreaming twists and warps around the Foreigners, radiating with the sort of unheard shriek that causes adults to wake sweating in their beds. The only problem is--they don’t. Something cracks like a thud in the skin and the surroundings of the turtle’s body dissolves, and their environment changes in a heartbeat between blank greyscale and any familiar environment.

Eventually it settles, but something is wrong. Where before the Foreigners had clarity of thought even in the Dreaming while battling Malicant, at first it feels as though their minds are shrouded, groggy with half-sleep. They might find it difficult to realize where they are--that their most familiar environment, surrounding them now, is not because they've been sent home. They’re still Dreaming, and the Dream is subtle, but can be manipulated and can be shared if they remember their comrades strongly enough. More of them converging in one place will help shed that torpor, leaving them to realize what might be happening...

They’re trapped. Every now and then they hear Eva’s voice speaking, and some of them will even see her in person, walking through their Dream with a trail of grey mist in her wake.

Can you hear me?

Follow me.

If you want to go home, follow me.

[OOC: If you’re intending to canon update your character (even if they just want to return home to "check in") OR if your character is departing Tu Vishan for good, please use Eva’s subheading! If you’re not going to canon update but your character will still try to follow Eva, she will vanish into grey mist and they’ll be unable to follow.

The rest of the log is general "mingling" while the characters who choose to remain in Keeliai are trapped together in the Dreaming. They can share details of their battles against Malicant, try to brainstorm a way to escape the Dreaming, anything they want. They will be aware of the passage of time, though they won't have any concrete way of knowing how much, only that it seems like it's much longer than it should be.

Please see this OOC post for additional information regarding timing and posting during this log, or questions. Thank you! ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

With so much time on his hands, Cain had gone exploring. Part of him was still unattached to the reality of where and when he was, but the longer he stayed outside of his own dream, the easier it was to make the proper connections of when and where and why and who. This village was particularly nice, so much fresh air and sun. It reminded him of some of the older days, not when things were simpler but when they had less junk to crowd things out. He found himself leaning back on the outside wall of the house with the window between them to maintain some space while he took in the surroundings.

"I like it," he said after a long moment. "Where is this?"

She wasn't wholly surprised when someone else wandered into the dream of Iselia; if there was surprise, it was a pleasant one. Raine slanted a glance over at him, smiled a greeting, and looked back up to the sky. "Iselia," she said after a moment. "If there's a place I would call home, it's here. You're seeing it in a little better condition than it was."

Home, for her, had always been more about the people in it than about the place itself, a necessity of having spent so much time on the road, but Iselia came close, and she appreciated seeing it again.

"Iselia," Cain repeated, testing the name out on his tongue. He tilted his head to return the greeting smile, although his own seemed tainted by the sardonic twist. Everything still felt just the tiniest bit off for him, and he couldn't help but wonder if his wandering to Raine had some sort of connection to it. He didn't exactly have all that many connections here in Keeliai, after all. Anything was better than nothing.

After a moment, he turned back to the rest of the village. "Good," he said. "Bit late to start wallowing now, right?"

Raine's exhalation turned into half a laugh. "A little," she agreed. "And frankly there's been enough of that. Iselia will rebuild, and be stronger for it." Efforts were already underway, even; their house had simply been neglected since there was no one currently living there.

Soon enough she straightened, and turned her attention solidly back to Cain. "You're welcome to come in, if you like," she said, indicating the house behind her. "Or there's the rest of the village." Raine tipped her head a little in the direction of the dirt path. A cat was passing by, lazy and unconcerned by the two of them, and there was the faint, distant sound of people talking. A background, though, little more.

There was a considering head bobble as Cain stood away from the house. Part of him wanted to accept the invitation and relax inside, but another insisted on the wide open space of the village and the company of the pleasant ghosts all around them. It made things seem less lonely, almost normal, and was doing wonders to make him feel at home in his own skin.

"Let's go for a walk," he responded. "Maybe a bit of a tour? Day's young and beautiful... and we probably have some stuff to talk about."

"All right." Raine tugged the door shut behind her out of habit and set out, directing them to the left. The way she was leading would bring them past a larger house, set back a little from the rest of the village and fenced off, eventually to a wider intersection of dirt paths near a one-room schoolhouse. Green and growing was the rule, to the extent that verdant moss had crept up some of the houses.

Stuff to talk about, hm. She hadn't intended to bring up what they'd been through together, more than happy to leave those matters in the depths of Tu Vishan where they belonged, but if he felt it merited discussing... well, there were perhaps three people including him she'd be comfortable doing so with. "I suppose we do," she agreed, and walked on in quiet for a moment before deciding on a question. "I meant to ask-- you introduced yourself as Jacob. Is that the name you prefer?"

It was quaint, yet Cain could see there was a love in the village from the people that lived in it. The real Iselia, the one reflected in Raine's own fond memories of the place where they now tread. When the years continue to roll by, and Lisa and the kids had passed on, Cain hoped he could find somewhere nice and quiet like this to settle down for a little. Maybe only a year or two, but it would probably do him some good.

Raine's question surprised him and he gave her a mightily bemused look in return. "That's what you want to ask?" he said, laughing quietly. Of all the things they had been through... well, it was definitely one to consider, he figured as he recalled the utter insistence Abel's shadow had toward calling him Cain. "Not really? I mean... it's an alias. Good as any other one. You can call me Cain if you want, C-A-I-N instead of the K-A-N-E of Jacob's surname."

As his brother had called him. Well, if he was offering the name, there couldn't be anything too negative attached to it. "Cain," she repeated, nodded. "All right." She did think it suited him a little better than Jacob, anyway.

Raine did realize that in his place she might not have expected names to be her highest priority. She shrugged lightly. "Of course I have other questions. While I may have been able to fill in the broad strokes myself, I'm sure I'm missing details. However, in the absence of a pressing and practical need to know, I'd hesitate to pry for curiosity alone. I... suppose I'd ask if there's anything you'd like me to know."

Everyone here seemed to have a painful past to one degree or another. That wasn't something she was unused to, honestly, and while it had often been true in her world that such things needed to be brought out into the light of day in order to find a way forward, here it was somewhat less pressing. If Cain wanted to talk, she wanted to know, but there was no strict need to drag the rest of it out, especially when so much of his baggage had already been put on involuntary display.

There was something about talking with Raine, something about the inordinate amount of time she had left around her neck. All of those numbers waiting to resume their course once she left Tu Vishan and resumed her normal life. It made him feel a little closer to the idea, someone who whatever reason would get a taste of what such a long life would be like in the presence of those who had no such time waiting for them. It was both warming and out of his area of expertise: Cain was the only one such person on his world. It would have been overly self-important to say that for a fact, but Cain also knew that his many descendents in the Enforcers would have told him should they have spotted anyone else alike.

So, yeah. Raine had a lot of time and he wondered how much of it had already been spent before her arrival. He could only see what was left, after all. It was only by her manner that he pinned her as young, whatever relative meaning of the word would apply thanks to their lifespans. "Okay, can I ask you something first? I know, I know," he said with an already apologetic tone, "it's not polite to ask, but—how old are you?"

What? It wasn't like it would last very long if she slapped him for it.

"You can ask me the same if you want. Or... whatever, really," said Cain. "You saw some of the worst of it back there, and I'm usually better about it coming up than that. After you took out the baddie like that for me, I kinda owe you anyway. Believe it or not, hiding things gets really old, really quick so it's pretty open season."

Raine was more bemused by the query than anything else, and had to pause to think about it. There had been a disconnect in the calendar when she arrived in Keeliai, autumn shifting into spring without the decency to pause for winter, and she hadn't really bothered to keep track. "Twenty-four by now," she said. The fiasco with Evandau had about marked it. "Why do you ask?"

She did definitely know people who could have benefited from his philosophy. The corners of her mouth turned up a little at that, trying to imagine Kratos without his near-definitive caginess. It was a difficult mental image to maintain. "Without you, I'd be dead," she reminded Cain. If there was a debt owed, as far as she was concerned, it wasn't on his part. "All right, how old are you, then?"

Other, more serious questions she considered carefully, not asking immediately, intending to be sure they were questions for which she genuinely wanted the answers, not simply questions for the sake of themselves.

"Just trying to place my finger on it," Cain said easily. She was definitely young, then, but no less an adult for how many years she did not have on Cain. That had been a weird lesson to learn, when everyone was younger than you were, there was still a definite difference between a child and an adult; Cain was the odd one out, and not everyone was a child just because he was older.

There wasn't really much room to argue semantics. Cain understood the importance of not-dying, but as far as he was concerned, Raine hadn't been in any actual danger. She had so much of her life left, after all, and so he owed her for saving him rather than the other way around. "I'll be two thousand eight hundred in seven years. Well, almost six by this place's calendar."

Edited 2014-12-02 19:37 (UTC)

It probably said something that the large figure barely shook her. Raine raised her eyebrows a bit. She'd known older, certainly, but it still outstripped anything she was likely to see. "How, if I may?" she asked. "The ways I'd expect that to happen in my world aren't exactly applicable. An extension of your-- resistance to being permanently harmed?"

She also doubted he'd been just 'trying to place his finger on it,' and in a moment leveled him with a skeptical look. "I'm not yet to the point where I don't look my age, and I doubt you sincerely need exact numbers. What would make you expect something different?"

There was an air of amusement at Raine taking it all in stride. It wasn't exactly normal, but it wasn't completely uncommon, either. Cain generally liked to fish for the ones who would be weirded out by someone being so old, because those were the best types of people to poke fun at. "Definitely related," he said. "I don't age anymore, and any injury doesn't stick. If I wanted to be dramatic about it, you could say I'm stuck this way for good."

Cain shrugged at her look. At least she was perceptive enough to make the connection. "I see death," he said, somewhat on the careful side. He wasn't going to tell her how much time she had left, but some people got rather weird about knowing you could stare their death in the face and they may never know when the end would come. Perhaps if she remembered what Cain had said about people who could do so, he wouldn't need to explain himself further. Did she know about her lifespan? "What point would you stop looking your age?"

"Forever, hm?" The look she gave him now was a little more tempered, thoughtful. Forever was, put bluntly, a long time. He seemed to deal with it well enough, considering everything, but she wasn't convinced people were ever meant to live that long. "Do you know how you came to be that way?"

Raine did recall his mention of people seeing death, however. If he could see how long she had left to live, and assuming her life wasn't untimely cut short, that would explain the question. "Another ten years, perhaps less," she said. There wasn't much weight to the words, but it wasn't quite offhanded, either. "Half-elves... age oddly. Unsteadily, I suppose. If I'm not killed, it will likely be a few hundred years before I show signs of aging again." That did give her pause, if only a little, for as much as she'd thought about it and come to some kind of terms with her lifespan, the reminder she was going to outlive the majority of the people she loved was not exactly a welcome one.

It was something Cain had come to accept very early into his immortality. There was a lot someone could do with that much time, but there was also the fact that humans simply weren't built to handle having that long to live; their memories were especially fragile considering. It was a balancing act and one that he felt he was handling to the best of his ability. "The death of my brother triggered it," he said softly, then shook his head. That one wasn't easily admitted, but Raine had already seen so much related to it that he didn't feel as twisted up inside as usual to mention it. "But I don't really know the specifics otherwise."

"Half-elf?" His head tilted, regarding her curiously with the new information. That would explain the hair and probably the magic, actually. The only reason he hadn't fully made the connection was because of the... He made a motion up near his ear to indicate where her own ears were hidden by her hair, a light smile on his face. "Pointy ears and all? No, but okay. That would explain a lot."

Raine was beginning to suspect that most things, with Cain, came back to his brother. "Hm," she said, and didn't question the specifics further. She was most assuredly still curious about his state of being, but some of those things that had flickered by... no. It could be let be. "Tell me about your brother? I... presume what was presented was inaccurate."

He just had to bring up the ears, didn't he. "Half-elf, yes," Raine confirmed, and ignored the other question entirely. Malicant had mentioned it, but it wasn't surprising he'd missed it. She'd missed some things, too, in the mess of emotion and confusion. "It's not usually a good thing to be, in my world." She tipped her head a bit in return, herself curious. "Are there elves, or something like them, in yours?"

There was a lot Cain could say to Raine's suspicion. It was certainly true, Abel meant far too much to him and had influenced so many huge things in his life, but that didn't mean he couldn't live without Abel if necessary. Like it had been for most of his life, actually. Maybe he was still in that stage of disbelieving awe that he was getting another chance to actually know his brother again after thousands of years of self-imposed separation. "In a way," Cain allowed with a dip of his head. "It's... hard to explain. He's an Enforcer, been one for a very long time. I mentioned those, right? He's dry like that, but uh... you know, usually not as violent with anyone but runners. He's a really good guy even if he doesn't know what that means."

Cain let himself take that information in stride and adjusted his perception again. He was doing that a lot lately, and it was getting easier and easier every time. Being half-elf for Raine wasn't easy. He wondered why, but knew better than to press for now. "Only fictional," he said, a wry and apologetic smile on his lips. "It's a very popular thing to have elves and sometimes half-elves work as foils to human nature. I'm not gonna presume that's the same when they're real people, but that's how I know about it."

Raine knew the type, more or less. "I believe you mentioned them, yes," she said. She could grasp the meaning of 'runners' from there, given what she recalled he'd said Enforcers did. And she could tell Cain cared for him, very much. Cared, and blamed himself for his brother's death. Rather than anything more prying, she asked, "What's his name?"

And the thought of elves as fictional was a strange one, but once she'd blinked, and realigned that in her head, Raine could, she supposed, see how that might work. "In broad generalizations, perhaps. Elves are long-lived, patient, and more given to scholarly pursuits, where humans live shorter, more violent lives. The Kharlan War, which changed the shape of the entire world, was a human war, and would only have increased that perception of each other. The elves tend to stand apart. And both sides tend to have similar reactions to half-elf children." Her smile was a little wry, not a happy one. "Generalities, stereotypes, yes, and within each race there are of course variations, exceptions to every rule, but in the way they think of each other..."

Good enough for Cain. If Raine understood what he was getting at through contextual clues, that just meant there was less that he needed to explain overall. It wasn't his usual line of explanations, anyway; most people he spoke to about this sort of thing already had the basics down due to their own life experiences. "Abel," he answered after a moment's pause. It wasn't as if Raine was likely to get the reference considering they didn't have the same frame to work from. "That's what he goes by now."

"It's more or less the same idea," Cain surmised. That was definitely interesting, because he had little faith in the ability of people to correctly interpret the nature of something they couldn't possibly experience. That didn't mean he couldn't enjoy the products containing those impossibilities, but the fact that humans in a world without them could predict elves well enough overall had captured some of his curiosity. "You mean the elves refused to participate in that war. How long-lived are they usually?"

He didn't care if asking that made him predictable. Cain had his own interests and there was nothing wrong with pursuing them.

It wasn't something she had any real reference for, but Raine tucked the name Abel away, with the other names and people she had plans to remember even when she was left alone again. There were plenty of them, these days.

"Usually about a thousand years," Raine answered. "Half-elves, nearly that, though fewer of them die of natural causes. And yes, they refused to participate. The war originated in a conflict between two human kingdoms, and it made extensive use of magitechnology, which elves aren't particularly fond of. There may have been exceptions, but it was four thousand years ago, and many of the details have since been lost."

Fascinating, that a nearly completely foreign world had that kind of parallel, if only fictional. Now that the threat of Malicant was over -- hopefully -- perhaps she could make a proper study, surveying the other Foreigners for details of their worlds as well. Even among those few she'd had a chance to talk to in depth, the places and ways in which parallels occurred were surprising.

A thousand years was a long time for an entire culture to live. Much as he wished there were others he could commiserate with sometimes, Cain wouldn't be able to imagine so many people living so long. That was a lot of power to have over another race with such a relatively short lifespan.

"Four thousand?" Whistling in appreciation, Cain then grinned. "That is a long time ago. Hell, I can barely remember what happened two thousand years ago now. Magitechnology, though. Obviously magical-run technology, but did anything make it actually different from regular tech?"

Never let it be said that Cain grew totally complacent in his age. There were definitely new things to discover and learn, or to accept about the way the world changed around him. This was definitely beyond that pale but it was a similar idea. He was getting used to taking things in stride and accepting them as real to someone else, even if he was unlikely to ever experience most of it for himself. It almost felt too normal to have things that he couldn't someday accomplish, just like everyone else, and that feeling itself was going to take the most getting used to.

Raine held off on exactly how long some people in her world had lived, rather focusing on the question about magitechnology. She'd studied it, after all, more than just in passing, and Cain had hit on the very issue that made the war so terrible. "The consumption of mana," she said, nodding. "In my world, mana is the source of life itself-- it's in all living things, from the earth to the people. There was, before the War, a great tree that was the source of it all. I suppose it was such an integral part of the world that no one ever thought about it."

She gestured as she spoke, growing steadily more animated. "When an arte is cast, there's a tiny portion of the mana that, rather than being shaped into something else, is simply consumed. It's small enough that all the elves in the world couldn't hope to outpace the Tree, but when it comes to magitechnology-- it was created by humans, after all, to mimic the magic that they couldn't use, and it had the same effect. And even then that might have been fine, but for the war. Magitechnology grew larger and more powerful and plentiful, and because humans can't feel mana, they couldn't sense that the Tree could no longer match it. Soon the Tree itself began to wither, and fade."

"They induced their own energy crisis." No matter how terrible the actual plight was, Cain couldn't help but laugh at it. Even in a world where apparently the issue could have been avoided for alternate means of easily accessible energy or tools of warfare, humans had fucked up and destroyed their perfect generator. After his laughter died down, Cain shook his head and said, "Sorry. It's not funny... but it is. There's a parallel there to some things going on in my own world right now."

Because Raine would probably be interested to know, Cain continued without prompting. "On Earth, people are facing a lot of difficulty because we've begun to hit the bottom of the well. We use finite resources that produce a good amount of energy, but they also damage the atmosphere in large enough quantities and can be harmful to living things. So it's all going to lead itself into a race to find a way to clean things up and continue living in the same way as we are despite it currently being unsustainable. No one knew the consequences of it until later, when it was way too late to make such a massive shift in lifestyle to turn things around."

She didn't find it particularly funny, even and especially when he explained. Ironic, perhaps, but mostly just sad. "It's a closer parallel than is comfortable," she said in a moment. "When the Tree withered, no one noticed or understood the consequences till too late. Save one person, and the three closest to her, and she was a half-elf, so her warnings went largely unheard. They eventually took... drastic action." Raine shook her head, sighing just a little. "Four thousand years, and only now have we begun to repair what the Kharlan War did. For your world's sake, I hope your people will be able to act positively before anything worse can happen."

The humor came with perspective, or perhaps the large amount of distance Cain had from most of the world's current problems. He wasn't so naive as to think he was better than any of it, but he still remembered what it was like only a short time ago before electricity and engines and everything that currently killed the world in the name of its greatness. Briefly he wondered if Raine would feel the same if she were older yet, and decided against really inspecting the thought. As old as Cain was, there was no way he could observe or predict how anyone else would react to living so long: his own life had been full of extenuating circumstances and he doubted even another immortal would be as messed up by it as he was.

"They've already begun to notice," he allowed. "With what the problem is, though, all of their research is going into how to not make it worse rather than truly finding a solution yet. Buying themselves more time. You say it's finally being resolved for you?"

ENDPLOT | BEFORE THE DAWN

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