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

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.

Perfect. With one smooth motion and the slightly rusty ease of childhood Solomon slid down the banister, landed on the ground floor and tackled Skulduggery over the back of the couch while the skeleton was startled by Raine's entrance. Solomon rode him down the other side and emptied the jar into his eye-sockets, dropped the jar by his head, calmly wiped off the paint on his hands using Skulduggery's tie and rose as if he hadn't just been straddling a skeleton in damp pajamas.

"Thank you, Raine," he said with perfect dignity, "that was an exceptionally executed distraction. How may I help you today?" He had no idea, but his eyes were twinkling madly and his ruffled hair was curling, and altogether it made him look much younger than he was, and vitally alive.

In Skulduggery's defence, he hadn't expected Wreath to come flying down the banister.

He automatically thrust his hands out to meet the tackle with air, forgetting in the heat of the moment that the air would pay absolutely no attention to him whatsoever. Likewise, throwing a heavyset man off of his light skeletal frame without magic took a special kind of dexterity Skulduggery wasn't quite able to manage before half of the paint pot upended all over him, and Wreath emptied the rest into his eye-sockets with barely a pause.

"An diabhal mend tú," Skulduggery muttered from behind the sofa, pulling off his tie. Had he thought, for even a moment, that this was one of his better ideas? Wreath may have cheered up, but now he was down a suit, and a tie, and he was going to walk around smelling like paint for the next several days. All in all, that wasn't a very fair price to pay.

He used the sofa to pull himself to his feet, and offered Raine a short wave. "Ask him why on earth he's developed a fixation for butterflies and squirrels. Maybe you'll be able to avoid being covered in paint."

What had she wrought simply by walking in? Well, at least one of them was pleased, and what she'd seen had been a sort of beautiful to watch. Disaster in slow motion, obvious but impossible to stop, and perfectly executed.

"Unintentional," she said to Solomon, "but you're welcome. What in the world precipitated... this?" She indicated Skulduggery's state with a broad gesture, not bothering to try to hide a lingering smile. Hundreds of years old, the pair of them, and behaving like children. It was more than welcome, after the month they'd all had. "The butterflies?"

"He dumped ice-cold water over my head," Solomon said longsufferingly, "while I was trying to sleep, just so he could ask me about butterflies. Butterflies. He interrupted my sleep for butterflies." No, he wasn't letting that go.

He turned on Skulduggery, arms crossed and enjoying the sight of the skeleton with paint trickling through his jawbone onto his suit. "And, for the record, watching them make love at you amused me. Tea, Raine?"

With every appearance of having forgotten he was in his pajamas, he made for the kitchen.

"Tea, Raine?" Skulduggery repeated in a not-quite-childish mocking tone, but not one that could quite be called mature either. "And it wasn't ice-cold water," he added a moment later with that tone dropped. "I didn't have time to put ice in the bucket."

He pulled off his hat and his jacket, paused a moment to lament their passing, and then laid them carefully out over the back of the sofa. They were going to leave paint-stains on the fabric. Skulduggery could only hope Wreath would find that at least a minor inconvenience. There was one satisfaction Skulduggery could take away from Wreath, however, and that was what he did next; he brushed his collarbone to bring up a false face, one with a goatee. It hid the paint on his skull, and it had the added bonus of cutting off the smell, which Skulduggery himself was eminently grateful for.

He used that face to smile at Raine. "Long time no see. I didn't realise I was so irresistible."

Children. "You," Raine said archly, "are not." Even if she had technically come to talk to both of them, she wasn't going to give Skulduggery the satisfaction of being right in this case as well.

But she did smile back at him, a little, before turning to follow Solomon to the kitchen. "Yes, proper tea would be nice, thank you." If there were sides to be on in this conflict, she was on his.

"It was cold," Solomon shot over his shoulder without looking and therefore without seeing that Skulduggery had raised his face, "ice or no." He put on the kettle and got out some mugs, and used a dry tea-towel to rub over his hair and dry it a little more, leaving it even more fluffed than it had been, and curling in the warmth and the damp.

It was only then that he remembered he was in his pajamas, and with a grunt wrung out the edging. "How has your day been, Raine?" Belatedly he remembered that, if Raine was afflicted by the same nullification Solomon and apparently Skulduggery were, she'd be unable to sense the mana in anything. He looked up, sympathy flashing across his face. "Not too lonely, I hope?"

The last was said rather dryly, his meaning several different potential things.

Not too lonely. Skulduggery politely neglected to mention that she'd been on her own for days before he went to see her, even if Raine was stubbornly denying her true feelings with regards to how impressive the skeleton detective was.

Wreath's ignorance of Skulduggery's false face, on the other hand, hurt. That was strange. Typically, feeling anything that wasn't anger was strange, but the effect compounded after spending so long unable to do anything but suppress irritation, rage, and regular violent urges. It made Skulduggery feel strangely empty. It was ridiculous, and he cut those feelings off before they had a chance to take root.

Then he stopped, a few feet past the kitchen doorway. Withdrew the false face. Brought it up again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Five times, Skulduggery brought up a freshly randomised magical face to hide his skull, and each time the face was frowning a little more than before.

The visible sympathy almost hurt, but at least she didn't have to explain. That was some comfort, as was the company. "Uneventful," Raine settled on finally, leaning against the kitchen table. "Hard to be lonely, however, when certain guests invite themselves in, and Ryder helps." Even if she wanted him staying with Anton for the interim, that presence in the back of her mind was a reassuring one.

Motion, out of the corner of her eye, caught her attention, and she fought down a laugh at the sheer absurdity of it. "Skulduggery, do you need something?"

"Certain guests have a habit of that," Solomon muttered, shooting a pointed look at Skulduggery and then stopping, and looking at him again. It wasn't the frown, though the frown certainly helped. It was the fact that he had a face. The face, in itself, was still new to Solomon, because he had known Skulduggery for too long for the skeleton to feel the need to hide his face.

"Skulduggery," he said slowly, putting down the mugs he'd just got out of the cupboard. "Why can you pull up your face?"

Skulduggery brought up one more face - one that, unbeknownst to him, looked eerily similar to the face he used to have before he died, like it should have belonged to a cousin or brother - and looked at Wreath. "You know, I was just wondering the same thing. Is there any magic you can still use, original or otherwise?" He glanced at Raine, silently putting the same question to her. "Odd, don't you think? None of the sigils at the Hotel worked."

And yet, the ones which controlled the magic of Skulduggery's false faces did. The most obvious reason for that was a different source to the Hotel's sigils. A different source which, to Skulduggery's knowledge, fueled a lot of individual magic on the turtle. That was... worrying.

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hopping in with permission

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