EVENT | LANDFALL | VALISHAERA | MISSIONS

[ironwood]

Characters: As listed below
Date: JULY 13-26
Location: Valishaera, various
Situation: Tu Vishan has made landfall on Siaxhi, to explore the Dreaming Watch City of Valishaera. July's missions are part of the landfall, as noted below.
Warnings/Rating: Please indicate content warnings in subject headers as applicable.

→ DREAMSCAPE (INFORMATION)
→ NIGHT'S WOOD (EXPLORATION)
→ INAN (RETRIEVAL)

OOC INFORMATION
Landfall Questions | Approved Item Requests | Pocket Dreaming Signups

CITY OF VALISHAERA
Exploring the Coast | The Arybar | A Ruined City

WITHIN THE TEMPLE
The Monks' Domain | The Labs & Library | Gathering Rooms & Garden | The Pocket Dreaming Realms

LANDFALL MISSIONS
Dreamscape | Night's Wood | Inan | OOC Organization

Comments

[skeletonenigma]

Skulduggery's head tilted to the side - one of the few expressions of emotion he had outside of the tone of his voice. "There's no particular difficulty in demonstrating. I'd just rather not. Fire and earth tend to be either noisy or akin to setting off a flare, which isn't helpful when you're trying to pass through a forest without encountering anything. Unless you'd like to fight off a group of hostile creatures we've probably never seen before...?"

The suggestion was a perfectly level one, if made slightly sardonically.

[raavashing]

"They aren't that noisy," Wan said with a frown, then shrugged and turned back around, "Well... fire isn't and we'll probably need it to light our way eventually. Earth, yeah. It's a bit noisy. It won't be once I get more practice with it... But right now it would be."

He brought the map back up and glanced at it again, "We should probably go slow. So the others can catch up if they want to."

[skeletonenigma]

"Why would we let them?" Skulduggery followed after Wan with his hands dipped casually into his pockets. "Not that I'm suggesting this is a race, but why would we go out of our way to let everyone else win? It's silly. Not to mention counter-intuitive. It's a pity map-reading is so slow, or I'd happily fly us both there."

He whistled a short little tune for a moment, and then said without pausing for breath: "You're doing remarkably well, by the way."

[raavashing]

Wan didn't want to look at the Skeleton, he really didn't. So he resisted the urge to look behind him and give the smiling skull a half-hearted glare.

"This isn't a competition," he replied. "There is no winning involved. And on top of that, we don't know where this map leads to yet, so flying us there wouldn't work anyway. And what am I doing remarkably well at? Reading the map?"

[skeletonenigma]

Either the man was in sore need of a sense of humour, or something else had exasperated Wan to the point of irrational irritation. Whichever it was, Skulduggery could already tell he was going to have a little more fun on this trek than he'd first imagined.

"No," he answered offhandedly. Then, after a thoughtful pause, he backtracked. "Well, yes; you're reading the map about as well as anyone with basic map-reading skills could, I suppose. I was referring more to your obvious discomfort with what I look like."

Because it was obvious. It was also the longest Skulduggery had managed to hold a conversation with someone without his appearance being so much as mentioned.

"I could help you with that, if you'd like," he added belatedly.

[raavashing]

Wan was mostly irritated by the fact that he was left to have a conversation with a person who, by all rights, should be very much not walking around. Or talking. But he had been trying not to bring up his discomfort with it. Obvious though it was...

"I'm not sure you could," he said after a moment of half-embarrassed silence. "Seeing a dead body up and walking around, manipulating the elements, talking, and otherwise doing things dead bodies shouldn't do is... look I'm sorry." And Wan was geuninely sorry. He felt bad that it was getting to him, but he couldn't help feeling put off by it and on edge. Dead things should stay dead.

"I don't mean to be rude and I know I am, but not looking at you is probably the best solution I have," he continued. "It's not you... well, it is you, but it's mostly me. So don't worry about it, okay? I wasn't going to say anything and I wasn't going to ask you to go away. I'm just going to try and deal with it as best I can. You don't have to try anything. You're not the one with the problem."

[skeletonenigma]

"As I said," Skulduggery replied, amused. "You're doing remarkably well."

He reached up to touch the top of his collarbone, and an illusory face flowed up over his skull. Well, technically illusory; it was, as Skulduggery liked to put it, a very solid and tangible illusion. The skin looked a little waxy and the eyes sometimes had a little trouble focusing, but otherwise, the skeleton looked as close to normal as it was possible for something dead to look. He blinked once as soon as the features were in place, then smiled at Wan. "Is this a little better?"

[raavashing]

Wan took a deep breath and turned around to look, not expecting anything significant. When he saw the face, well, he actually freaked out worse than before.

"No!" he said through heavy, deep breaths as he stared. "That is not better! I already know what's under it! Seeing that and knowing is worse! It doesn't even look natural!"

Okay, so it looked a little natural, but all Wan could see was where the skin attached to the non-existent muscles that laid over the bones. He had a very active imagination.

After another moment, he let out a loud 'ugh!' and pulled his hands down over his face, "I'm sorry! Just be yourself! Really! I'll get used to it... or something."

[skeletonenigma]

It wasn't very often someone reacted in quite that sort of fashion. Panicking over a living skeleton was one thing - panicking over a perfectly natural-looking face just because you knew there was a skull underneath it was, as far as Skulduggery knew, unique. And completely counterproductive. It intrigued him.

"If you insist," the detective said after a moment, amused. Another brush on his collarbone, and the face retracted, leaving the gleaming white skull behind. "You do realise, of course, that everyone has a skeleton underneath their skin? It's fairly common. One could almost say it's a condition for life."

[raavashing]

"That's completely different!" Wan threw his hands in the air and started walking backwards so they could keep moving while he continued to talk face to skull with Skullduggery. "My bones are attached to muscles which are covered by skin. Your bones aren't attached to anything but each other. The face you put up - however you put it up - isn't the same. It's not real. It's just a mirage."

[skeletonenigma]

"An illusion, actually," said Skulduggery. "A mirage is a hallucination brought on by the combination of heat, sunlight, and dry air, most often in the desert. We're not in the desert."

He paused for a moment. He and Wan were alone, but Skulduggery could almost hear Valkyrie walking beside him, glaring. That was enough to make him tilt his head and say, almost sheepishly, "I'm not helping, am I?"

[raavashing]

Wan gave him a very deadpan look as he responded dryly, "No. You're not."

The exasperated Avatar rolled his eyes and turned around, stopping in his path to check the map again before trying to offer the proverbial olive branch, "I didn't know that's how mirages worked."

that icon made me laugh thank you

[skeletonenigma]

Skulduggery nodded. "Many people don't. For a while, we thought they were hallucinations brought on by the temporary insanity of thirst. I knew that had to be wrong when even I could see them. And before that, of course, people believed they were trickster spirits or even God's punishment. For what, I don't know. Being thirsty, I suppose."

Again, with the feel of an imaginary Valkyrie's glare on his back, he paused. "If you'd prefer I stop talking..."

between frame stills are great

[raavashing]

"It's fine," he replied stiffly. The skull guy had every right to talk. And maybe he'd get used to it as long as he didn't actually look at the guy. "You know, I've lived with spirits for a couple years and even the ones that are pretty tricky have never been able to create illusions. I really can't figure out where those stories about spirits come from."

[skeletonenigma]

'Lived with spirits,' Wan said. Were he from Skulduggery's world, Skulduggery would have immediately assumed he was some kind of powerful Sensitive. As it was, the skeleton took the words with a grain of salt; many different universes meant many different meanings for the same casually-delivered phrase.

"Fear, mostly," he said. "People tend to blame anything they can't explain on things they don't understand. It lends the stories an air of mystique. It helps, to be able to give fear a name of some sort, even if that name is just 'the spirits'."

[raavashing]

"Actually, the humans in my world are pretty familiar with the ways the spirits can scramble a human up," he responded idly as he turned right to climb over a broken and dead tree that had fallen across the faint path and ended up dividing it. "Most of them don't leave the Lion Turtle cities because of the dangers of the spirit wilds. Only hunters and, well, me, ever go out into them. But because the hunters go out regularly, they know what kind of threats there are."