tushanshu_logs | what's a... door? [ closed ]

WHO Jacob Kane (Cain), Skulduggery Pleasant.
WHAT Just a friendly drop-by to see how the other is doing. Maybe get some info. In the name of friendship, clearly.
WHEN Sometime at the end of October, idek.
WHERE ME-1A.
WARNINGS N/A thus far.

Things were getting quiet again. Riva had gone back to Midii after staying with him for a while (which was weird, but not too weird on Cain's new scale of relative weirdness on the whole of being here, anyway), and that meant he was alone to himself. That was nothing new, but it was something he noticed after having lived with Riva a few days, and his brother, niece and their freeloader/house arrestees for a few months before that. It gave him time to think, gave him time to get settled back into his own skin.

What it really gave Cain time to do was realize what a fucked up situation he had been pulled into. Nothing was ever straight and narrow in life, but damn if this wasn't more crooked than usual. Giant, possessed continent turtles and fucked up clocks and psychic baby turtles and the lands between the realms of life, death and dreaming. None of it sat well with him, and he wasn't afraid to admit part of it was in fact due to him being an old man in soul who was damn well acquainted with how things were. Now they weren't. That was aggravating... and maybe a bit unnerving. Just what was the world's oldest man (back home, anyway) supposed to do about an invisible enemy? What did they expect him to do about a torn populace of newcomers? Stepping up and taking charge... he definitely could, and something might even come of it. The real question was: did he want to? Getting involved like that was going to bite him in the ass sooner rather than later.

Maybe he would just sit and stew for a while longer. His phone still had juice and that had music... Yeah, maybe he'd just put something on and see about getting some kind of research done. The network might not be safe to post on, but there wouldn't be harm in going back to see what kind of things had already been committed to the forums, right? You could learn a lot about a person from their social networking habits.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It was a matter of confidence, practicality and a disregard for his own safety. Survival instincts only went so far when the matter of your survival had nothing to do with your own actions and everything to do with your body's stubborn refusal to stop surviving. That, and part of him had wanted to see if Skulduggery would react to such a poor position. He didn't seem like the type to react to much of anything thus far, but that wasn't going to stop him.

At the skeleton's answer, Cain gave a lazy grin. "Thirteen? You're a bit behind. Only a little, though. It's 2014 for me, almost into fifteen," he added. "How's that for a convenient coincidence? All the time in the world and we're barely a year apart."

At the first comment, Skulduggery nodded. "Or, if we were to look at it another way, you're a little too far ahead."

Perspective wasn't quite as important as people liked to believe, but it was always a good idea not to discount it entirely - particularly if it helped Skulduggery make a point.

He also wasn't sure how much of the coincidence was coincidence, given that he now had two people here who came from his own world. There were interesting patterns buried in the arrivals which Skulduggery hadn't had the time or patience to investigate, but some things were glaringly obvious. Things like people tending to arrive in groups. Things like people being able to understand one another's pasts. It was that thought which spurred his question, and Skulduggery asked it while leaning his bottom jaw on one hand to study Kane a little more closely. "You haven't run into anyone you recognise yet, have you?"

That position of Skulduggery's had Cain tilt his head just a bit in return. It was conversational, the skeleton's tone and pose, and it gave off a feeling just as much as any facial expression might have done. On the other hand, it was much more manipulable than subconscious expressions. It was an interesting point to say that Cain might have been ahead rather than Skulduggery was behind if only because everyone was behind where Cain was concerned. No one was ever going to catch up to him, so of course he was the one that was perfectly in place.

"No," he said simply and with obvious question. The idea of meeting someone he would know in a place as vast and foreign as this did not come out of nowhere. "I've barely been here any time at all. What would the chances be? Unless I've been missing something."

He didn't mention or show to his hesitation another thought that had struck him. Even if there had been someone Cain should have recognized within Keeliai, it was entirely possible they could be from so far into his past that he didn't even remember them anymore. Those sorts of ghosts weren't the type he was used to worrying about.

"You've barely been here any time at all," Skulduggery pointed out. "Of course you've been missing something."

There was nothing shameful about not knowing something if you couldn't possibly have known it, either through geographical isolation or simply a lack of time. Skulduggery was frequently exasperated by the ignorance of others, true, but he usually made a point of putting the blame where it was due. Willful ignorance was when he started losing respect for the person in question. From what he'd gleaned so far, Kane was far from the stubbornly ignorant type.

"People tend to arrive in groups," he explained. "If one person from a particular world appears, chances are very good someone else will follow. It may have something to do with certain realities being easier to access than others, but it also doesn't hold true across the board, so take it with a grain of salt."

Stubborn ignorance was far from how Cain operated. There was nothing to be had from hiding himself from the truth; peace of mind had stopped having the same comforting bliss as it had when he was younger. No, it was better to face things head-on and keep from getting himself further entangled in anything he didn't want merely for not knowing what he was doing.

"Of course," Cain said with a shake of his head. "So it's a crapshoot either way." Not that he had really pinned any hopes on anyone he knew arriving, but it would have been his luck. "What groups have you had so far?"

Skulduggery shrugged. "I don't know the names of specific worlds. I've simply seen too many reunions on the network for it to be a coincidence. I met a teenager the other day who discovered both his sister and a close friend were already here."

A pattern, albeit a meaningless one. Either's Skulduggery's earlier theory was correct, which rendered the entire point moot, or any deeper meaning was hidden to all but people incredibly adept at seeing meaningless patterns.

"It's equally interesting," Skulduggery added after a short pause, "that so many of us come from worlds capable of understanding one another. Even with the language barrier removed, constants we take for granted are holding true - death, birth, adolescence, emotion. When you consider the sheer amount of possible differences in an infinite number of universes, that becomes a pattern as well. Why, for example, aren't we meeting anyone from a world where two and two make five? It's a conundrum."

Their waiter interrupted the conversation by appearing. He gave Cain a pleasant smile and a there was a confused, somewhat resentful and also rather lingering look to his skeleton friend before he offered them a menu. Cain declined it and ordered with a charming grin, made a bit of small talk where he could, and let the waiter go when it was obvious he couldn't stay longer.

Cain tilted his head to Skulduggery. Even while he had been pseudo-flirting with their waiter, he had been thinking that over. "Perhaps we simply can't comprehend someone that comes from such a fundamentally-different place," he said. "Even if they were here, would we even be able to make sense of them? Would it be possible for them to be where their existence would be at odds with the reality they'd be in? Or maybe it has to do with the way that spell was set up, only works in the confines to what the caster can understand. Either way," he said after a moment. "That's a good point. There's a lot they aren't telling us or just don't understand themselves and I'd frankly be a bit worried about that if we knew which one it was."

Skulduggery was used to looks like that, even and especially from before coming to Keeliai. He returned it with an invisible smile, more for his own benefit than the waiter's, and let Kane hold the rest of the conversation until they were alone again.

"I doubt they understand it themselves," Skulduggery mused. "We'd be a far more organised army if they did. It's more likely due to fail-safes existing within the structure of the universes themselves."

He wouldn't deny there was a lot the Foreigners weren't being told, but he wasn't going to make the mistake of generalising that fact. Skulduggery could appreciate the courage stemming from desperate last-ditch efforts, having experienced that courage many times himself; but as far as he knew, he'd never been stupid about it. Evandau, at the risk of speaking ill of the dead, had been stupid about it.

"So coincidences are likely more just the laws of physics following an even more important set of universal constants," Cain summarized. That made enough sense for him that it didn't really bother too much that they weren't going to be seeing any mind-bending impossibilities in the near future. With everything else on their plate, they didn't need to borrow trouble until they'd cleared their first helping.

He added, "Smaller laws need not coincide." Because for one thing, an existence like Skulduggery's was entirely against everything he knew about the relationship between death and living and whatever you called the in between. Considering the state of his own soul in how Solomon Wreath apparently perceived it, the same could be said of himself to other universal laws, and wasn't that the kicker?

what's a... door? [ closed ]

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