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

"Am I?" Ryder preened for a moment before shaking his head, sounding shocked. "Oh, no! Then the patrons couldn't use them! Most people who come here don't like their sofas to be wet." He said the last as if it was in confidence, even though he didn't hide the communication from Anton at all.

Anton followed Skulduggery's gaze and sighed. "Yes. I ... haven't the strength to turn screws at this current point in time."

It was a reluctant admission. He wasn't used to not having the strength. He wasn't used to being wounded. Even Skulduggery, a skeleton, was more likely to be injured than Anton. It was strange. It was unsettling. Grateful as Anton was not to have to deal with the missing emotional filters anymore, he didn't like this state much either. He felt ... incomplete.

"You're feeling better," he said instead, and took a step, and stopped, his face settling into a frozen grimace. He shouldn't have leaned against the jamb. Stopping let his muscles settle, and that made them tighten, and that made his back hurt more when he needed to move again.

"As well as I ever do," Skulduggery agreed, turning and walking over to the lobby door, pretending not to notice the obvious trouble Anton was having. He picked the door up, maneuvered it back into place with a grunt, and began whistling as he looked around for the screws. Tiptoe Through the Tulips, released in 1968 by Tiny Tim. The screws, as it turned out, had rolled underneath an upturned floorboard, so Skulduggery walked over to retrieve them and settled down to put the door properly back on its hinges.

"So," he said after a further moment of whistling. "How does it feel to be mortal?"

Edited (YOU DIDN'T SEE THAT.) 2014-09-23 09:46 (UTC)

"I'm not mortal," said Anton flatly. "If I were mortal, all the emotions the gist encompassed would have been returned to me. They haven't. They've been cut off." He felt almost empty, or would have if the gist had encompassed a great deal more than the rage and hatred and darkness in him.

It still felt wrong not to have them. Choiceless. And there was something--his geas with the gist revolved around despair. As long as he didn't allow himself that, the gist remained under his control. Yet it was still an emotion within his reach, something he could feel if he chose, as terrible as the result would be. Now it was gone. It made him feel ...

Numb. Apathetic. If one couldn't feel despair, how much worth did its opposites have? There was nothing to contrast them against, nothing to make them clear and warm.

"How does it feel to you?" he asked after a moment, but almost dully.

Skulduggery didn't answer for a bit, focusing instead on finger-tightening the screws on the lowest door hinge. (And finger-tightening, for a living skeleton without any muscle ache to get in the way, was almost as tight as a screwdriver might have managed to get.)

"That doesn't matter," he said eventually, and turned away from the work to look his old friend in the eye. "This is temporary. Whatever feelings you're missing, they've been cut off, not taken away. They'll return. And in the meantime, the feelings you're left with aren't any less important for being isolated. You've lived a long life. Are you going to tell me you've forgotten everything about it?"

It was an innocent question on its own, but in context, Skulduggery was eminently aware of the weight it carried. It referred not just the events of Anton's own life, but to the experiences of the war - up to and including Vile.

At first Anton didn't answer, gazing around the Hotel. At where the walls had been broken by pipes yanked through, and where the floor had buckled by stone drawn up, and the lines and lines of sigils in view because they had been damaged. In some way, some way not even Anton could quite tell, it helped to have that obviousness pointed out to him.

His emotions may be loose for now, but he still had them. That was important. It didn't make him feel less empty, but it helped him recognise the ways in which he was, still, full.

"Have you?" he asked finally, quietly, and looked at Skulduggery. "Why didn't you tell me earlier? You know I could not have punished you. Not in the manner you expected. In others, yes, but I wouldn't have abandoned you. Why did you believe I would?"

The surface avoidance of answering each other's questions was typical, but so was the quiet acknowledgement on both their parts that they didn't need to. They both already knew most of the answers, and internalising the rest was habit. Asking questions among the Dead Men had always been more an exercise in the hypothetical than an actual desire for information to be shared.

Apart from this one. This was a question Anton would want the answer to.

Skulduggery didn't give him that answer until the door was properly attached to its hinges, knowing full well he'd be given the time and, somehow, feeling worse for it. It was a consideration he didn't feel he deserved, particularly not after what must have happened to Anton while magic was so unstable.

But stalemates couldn't last forever, so Skulduggery spoke as he tested the door, swinging it back and forth in its frame. "Probably because I was worried you wouldn't. Who stopped the gist?"

"Master Wan," said Anton, and instantly went back to his other line of questioning, not because he didn't want to talk about his own battle but because Skulduggery desperately needed to talk about his--and talk about it when he wasn't poisoned and tainted and in pain.

"Why would you have been worried, Skulduggery? You know me--you know the gist. Do not pretend you were more worried for me than for yourself. Rejecting you would have raised the gist more surely than anything else. How could you believe, even for an instant let alone for centuries, that I would risk that even if I knew? That I could give more weight to your sins than mine, or Meritorious's, or anyone else's?"

He gazed at Skulduggery, and though his injuries prevented him from moving his gaze was penetrating. He felt calm in spite of the hurt, and if that was a result of the gist being absent then it was something he could be grateful for--but it still didn't ease the feeling. "Or," he said quietly, "was it understanding that you feared the most?"

Ah. Wan. Skulduggery hadn't expected the Elemental to have the ability to go up against something like the gist - but then again, with the way magic had gone haywire, it was possible the gist merged with Anton instead of taking over entirely. That would certainly make it physical, and thus capable of destroying the Hotel.

Still, stopping the gist was impressive on its own. Skulduggery made a note to find Wan and thank him later.

"Possibly," he admitted. He closed the door and wondered if every entrance into the Hotel from every sector was now fixed, or if more than one had been broken in the first place. Dimensional magic was certainly confusing. Only then did he finally turn around and give Anton the full attention their conversation deserved.

"If you understood," he said, "then it would lessen what happened. It would put me in a position where I start to take your understanding for granted, and I stop feeling the weight of my crimes. If I don't carry that weight, I lose any chance I might have at making up for them."

Anton sighed. "Ryder, please sit on Skulduggery for me."

"Okay!" Ryder chirruped, abandoning his pursuit of soapsuds to slide across the floor and bowl Skulduggery over, and settle his bulk gently on top of the skeleton so that he could barely move, let alone escape. "Done!"

"Thank you." Painfully Anton made his way across the floor, making sure to step where the floor wasn't quite so wet. Falling now would be a terrible idea. He lowered himself to sit on Ryder's flipper, so he and Skulduggery were as near to face-to-face as they could get. "You're an idiot," he said, "and I'm reserving my punches for when I'll be able to enjoy them. Skulduggery, my understanding doesn't change what you did. It only helps you carry the burden. Whatever you need to do to atone, I will be there to help you do so. If you need to be reminded, I can do that also. Your attempting to handle this alone is what demeans your actions. It turns your guilt into a precious object you cannot bear to give away, instead of a wound on many you ache to heal."

Was he trying to crack more of Skulduggery's skeletal frame? They avoided that, luckily, but Skulduggery was still prevented from getting up by Ryder's sizable bulk and one sizable flipper placed strategically over his neck. He could lift his skull up by a few centimetres, but Anton's lecture made it difficult to want to do anything but gaze up at the broken ceiling.

He sighed. "I was in a good mood, Anton. I was hoping to enjoy it a little more before the other shoe drops."

Because it would, inevitably, drop. The absence of magical power among the Foreigner population wasn't the sort of chaos Malicant was after. It was only the calm before the storm.

"Alright," he said. "I'm an idiot. I should have told you sooner. I shouldn't have been nearly so selfish as to keep the truth of Vile's existence from my closest friends. Let me up."

"No." Anton leaned against Ryder's shell, mostly on his good shoulder because that would have hurt his back far too much. "Because you're only saying so to dismiss me; you don't actually believe it. You don't want to believe it. But, if it will make you feel better, I shall tell you about my mistakes."

Anton glanced around the Hotel, where the evidence of those mistakes lingered in the ripped up floor, the broken walls, the damaged wards. "I should have gone to someone also, when it began," he said quietly. "But I didn't. I didn't realise until it was too late what was happening, and by the time I did--I wasn't sure I would be able to walk the streets without harming someone. So I tried to control the gist alone."

He glanced down at Skulduggery. "I have never been able to control the gist alone, Skulduggery."

"The gist," Skulduggery said, "is very different. How is listening to your mistakes meant to make me feel better? I'm not quite as vindictive as that."

He knew where Anton's story was going. He just didn't want to hear it. The gist and the armour may well have been similar in terms of control, of rage, of their destructive capacity; but the gist was a widely accepted sorcerers' discipline with well-known causes and well-documented effects. Companionable help was readily available if one knew where to go looking for it. The armour had been Skulduggery's choice, from its manufacture to its burial, and there was rather less leeway given to people who made such choices. Skulduggery, of all people, knew that. He was one of the people whose job involved not giving murderers any leeway.

Quite casually, Anton kicked Skulduggery in the head. He didn't regret it, either, even when it made the whole of his back throb. "Now you're being deliberately obtuse, and it does not become you," he said. "The gist is only different, you say, because you enjoy being different. You may stop that at once. You're no different to any man who has gained overwhelming power and been consumed by it, Skulduggery. Cease this self-pity or you truly won't have earned grace."

This time, the kick wasn't a kick so much as a needling nudge. "And even if you don't earn it, I, and others, would still give it to you. That is our right as your friends, Skulduggery. If you are truly remorseful, you would give your friends their right to react as they choose--instead of choosing their reactions for them."

Skulduggery nodded, and spoke slowly, like he was trying out a new idea he hadn't thought of before. "If I were truly remorseful, I would tell Ghastly the truth about what happened to his mother. I see how that would follow. If I truly wanted to be a good man, I'd ruin his life and move my guilt over onto others. It's not self-pity, Anton. The difference between me and any man who's been consumed by overwhelming power is that I relinquished it."

And he was still a hair's breadth away from killing everyone on the turtle. Skulduggery had always been the one capable of making difficult decisions for the greater good, but taking the armour back was the only one he couldn't remember ever being sure of. A part of him had felt as though it was giving up. And perhaps it was; if he hadn't learned anything, if he was so willing to put himself back on that very fine line between himself and mass murder, how close to redemption could he say he was?

And he'd been in such a good mood that morning, too.

Skulduggery shook his head once, then twice, and lifted it to meet Anton's eyes. "If you can name one person outside of our unit who would agree with you, I will not only make a concerted effort to accept whatever forgiveness you feel I've earned, I'll eat my hat."

"Corrival Deuce," said Anton at once. "China Sorrows. Mr Bliss--or he would have, before he was killed. Valkyrie Cain, unless I've missed my estimation of her--she seemed to have youthful feelings for you." He kicked Skulduggery in the head again. "Your wife." And again.

"That," he said calmly, "is for missing my point. I hardly said to tell everyone, though even now you demean your best friend, his love for his mother and his love for you by assuming his reaction. You make the choice for him, and justify it by saving him. Do you think he would enjoy that, enjoy being coddled like a child? You're a fool, Pleasant. You have forgotten your life--what it means to be a Dead Man. Your guilt even now is something you can't bear to give to anyone. You hoard it jealously when it should be shared."

To be honest, Skulduggery was hoping this version of Anton wouldn't remember Valkyrie quite well enough to bring her up. Still, he could have argued that point; she didn't have any emotional investment in anything that happened during the war. In the same way, Corrival Deuce hardly counted - he led their unit. China Sorrows didn't have a solid enough moral basis to be allowed the right to moral judgements, and Mr. Bliss was dead.

But Skulduggery's wife was a woman who would have given him the benefit of the doubt even if he turned out to be Mevolent himself.

It didn't matter. She was dead. Skulduggery had lost the right to his feelings a long time ago.

He watched Anton for a while without saying a word, without moving, without even the false breathing he'd developed as a form of centering himself. After more than a minute had gone by, Skulduggery finally sighed. "Let me up. I have a hat to eat."

Without fanfare Anton dropped the hat on his face. "Have you begun to listen, or are you simply in shock that I invoked Liliya's name?"

With Skulduggery, it was difficult to tell, though the moments of silence were a good sign that he was at least taking things in. Nevertheless Anton touched Ryder's shoulder and with a tiny grumble Ryder shifted enough to give Skulduggery space to sit up, but not escape--or at least not escape being trapped in the circle of the turtle's flippers.

It would have to do. Skulduggery neglected answering Anton's question in favour of sitting up as far as he was able, patting Ryder on the flipper as he did so. Then he took the hat which had fallen onto his sternum, hesitated, groaned, and squished it into a more a manageable shape. The action almost physically hurt. When it was misshapen beyond recognition, he opened his jaw and stuffed it down into his ribcage.

It was one of his favourite hats, too.

He took a moment of mourning, and then glanced up at Anton. "Satisfied?"

Anton's eyebrows lifted and he watched with an impassive expression and a renewed tinkle in his eyes. "I am not," he said gravely. "The least you could have done was let me film it for prosperity."

"He ate his hat!" Ryder exclaimed gleefully, peering at Skulduggery's skull. "That's a nice trick. Can you do it again?"

And, in spite of Anton's usual impassivity, the gist-user laughed. Then he caught his breath with a wince when that same laugh made all his injuries twinge. "I notice," he said, "that you didn't answer my question."

Edited 2014-09-29 09:52 (UTC)

"No," Skulduggery said flatly. "I can't do it again. For one thing, I don't have another hat."

For another thing, he wouldn't do it again, even if he had another hat. Not unless that hat was already damaged in some irretrievable way. It was hard enough doing it once.

"And which question would that be?" Skulduggery asked, the last word ending in a grunt as he tried to shove Ryder off of his legs. "Whether I heard and understood you, whether I'm thinking about what you said, or whether I should let you film my admittedly impressive but emotionally painful antics for prosperity? I'm not eating another hat, Anton."

"I could find you another hat," Ryder offered, very kindly.

"And I notice that you still haven't answered my question," Anton observed, "given that you're pretending you've forgotten what it was. You only ever forget when you want to forget, Skulduggery, to avoid facing something which needs to be faced."

In Skulduggery's opinion, he'd already faced everything which needed to be faced, and come out the other side without having become a murderer or lost himself to the darkness. It was a biased opinion, admittedly, and Anton was almost certainly referring to something completely different. But Skulduggery needed to give him an answer he liked, or Ryder was never going to let him stand up again.

"Yes," he said. "I heard and understood you, and I will do my utmost to spend the next few days thinking about it. If you let me up now, I'll help you fix the Hotel."

Skulduggery had a habit of being ridiculously unaware of himself. It was one of the reasons why he needed to be prodded, when it came to his occasional idiocies. "See that you do," Anton ordered, and then touched Ryder's shoulder. "You may allow him to rise."

"With a third person we can get more done, too," Ryder chirruped happily. "But may I still mop the floor?"

"Of course," Anton said, and glanced around--carefully. "The walls and floor need to be repaired, Skulduggery. I need to re-establish the wards as soon as I'm able."

Able, Skulduggery didn't ask, meaning what? It could well have meant Anton would throw himself into the work as soon as he was capable of moving on copious amounts of painkillers, and Skulduggery had seen how destructive painkillers could become. But it could also have meant once Anton's wounds were fully healed. Wherever the Dead Men were concerned, it was difficult to tell.

Skulduggery chose to believe the latter. "Of course," he said as he got to his feet. "I didn't drop by for an argument, after all. Tell me where to start."

And where the tool-kits were, since Skulduggery couldn't manipulate the air. And how to refill the buckets with water, so Ryder could continue to have barrels of fun mopping the floor. And which ward locations needed repairing first, and where the exact wards needed to be.

"Thank you," Skulduggery added before Anton could say anything else. It would have seemed out-of-place but for context, and for the genuine gratitude in Skulduggery's voice.

"The sink in the kitchen is working," Anton said. It hadn't been this morning, but Anton had managed to draw a workaround for the plumbing spellwork Wan had interrupted to summon his containment sphere. "The tools are on a table in there as well."

"I can bring them over," Ryder chirruped. He had been the one to put them there--they'd been in the way, and Anton had found moving them too difficult.

Anton grunted acknowledgement of Skulduggery's thanks and turned toward the kitchen, where he had been sketching ward fixes while Ryder mopped the floor and picked up broken bits of wood. "Don't be an idiot," he said, and it was hard to tell whether he meant in terms of the thanks or the reason for them.

EVENT | ZUGZWANG | SEPTEMBER 21-28

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SP book six spoilers

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