tushanshu_logs | February Catch All

Entry tags:

February Catch All

Characters: Valdis and you!
Date: The Month of February
Location: Noted in the starters
Situation: Various
Warnings/Rating: None yet

A) Before the 5th, Keeliai's Markets: After acquiring the angelic sword, Revelations, Valdis has found herself in need of some supplies in order to make a sheath worthy of the blade. She has enough coin to obtain what she needs and it helps that the Kedan are currently trying to put on a good face for the Ambassadors. She is quickly evaluating the attitude of the store owners and either purchasing or moving on, aware that this window of niceties might be quite narrow.

B) Midnight Hotel: When she isn't out in the city or exploring the surrounding areas, Valdis can be found in the common area, reading up on the history of Keeliai or going over her extensive, hand-written notes on the current issues the foreigners are facing in the city. If one is lucky, they may catch her in the lobby of the hotel, or if someone is ambitious and unafraid, they may find her in her room, though if she is sleeping, wake her at your own risk

C) Before the 5th, Turtle's Head: The cold didn't bother her much and she sat near the turtles head, looking out over the water at Khatronma, marveling at the dome from a distance. Revelations is at her hip, glowing softly in the early morning light. The last time she had been here it had been to possess the turtle in an attempt to help Wan oust Malicant from the ancient entity. It had also been where she had used the Void to kill four of the cultists attacking her and her friends. So many memories and none of the peace that had once been attached to this place.

D) Start your Own: Please give a location and a setup.

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That was a loaded question that demanded a longer and more detailed explanation. Darn that skeleton.

"It isn't so much creating death," she replied, "as it is releasing the potential of death." She crossed her legs, seemingly relaxed, "The Void, a hole in the lining between the spiritual and death planes, is the main facet of my power. It consists of the scythe, bastille and oblivion. What you saw was a corporeal manifestation of the scythe."

"As to how it works? The scythe can kill in three ways. The first, the most violent and the one that requires physical contact, is by actively entering the spiritual plane within an individual and, in most cases, tears their soul from them. The second can be directed to take multiple souls at once without touching them and is target specific, for example, I could take the souls of certain people in a crowd and leave the rest unharmed. The third is what occurred on the cliffs, it is a manifestation of dark energy that, when activated, slowly removes the soul from the body. It is non-specific and destroys every life within the affected area."

She was completely aware of how horrible it all sounded, in fact, explaining it made her feel nauseous.

Edited (word choice) 2015-02-09 00:43 (UTC)

Perhaps Valdis was originally brought to Keeliai for her connection to the death plane - which, if not Keeliai's death plane, would at least be something similar. But that was a moot point now that Malicant was gone.

The scythe, on the other hand, sounded uncomfortably like Serpine's Red Hand, so much so that if Skulduggery still had nerves capable of flinching he might have flinched. Each method, in fact, had parallels in his own universe - the direct contact of the Red Hand, and the larger affect size of Lord Vile's death aura. Skulduggery still remembered what it felt like to wield that death aura, how purely addictive and powerful it was to take someone's soul from them without lifting a finger. He'd never been capable of cherry-picking the way Valdis described. Oh, the aura might have been able to, but Skulduggery himself hadn't had any cause for mercy.

He wanted to be able to sit atop the proverbial high horse and sardonically point out that losing someone important to you wasn't usually grounds for murdering entire civilisations. The problem was that Skulduggery didn't have any ground to stand on, much less a place to put a horse.

"Are there others like you in your universe?" he asked, though he could guess at the answer. "Do they all have such questionable judgement?"

It was annoying to watch someone and not receive any physical feedback. He was a skeleton after all, no muscle twitches to give anything away. The fact blocked any sense she might have of what Skulduggery was thinking.

"The pack consists of twenty five..."She paused, regret crossing her features as she corrected herself, "Twenty-two individuals, whose levels of power within the Void vary." She paused again, remembering how badly she had reacted, "But no. They do not possess souls, and thus, though they can sense emotions, they do not feel them."

Skulduggery's head tilted. "Hellhounds aren't supposed to have souls?" It went without saying that Valdis, for whatever reason, had one. It also went without saying that the ability to experience emotions would compromise vast amounts of power, which actually rendered the question moot, so he wasn't sure why he asked it in the first place beyond purposes of confirmation.

"That's an effective method of control," he went on. "Amoral, of course, but effective. Why are you different?"

"If you believe the demons, then all hellhounds once possessed souls." Valdis kept her expression passive and after a moment, she got up and walked over to the corner near the other side of the bed. She pulled the shining blade from it's sheath and turned around, moving back toward Skulduggery.

"Don't touch it," she warned even as she held it out for him to examine, "This sword is named Revelations, it used to belong to the Archangel Michael." The red jewel in the hilt gently pulsed with light and the blade itself seemed to glow slightly. "It is angelic in make, designed to do only one thing...Destroy hellhounds."

After a moment of silence she turned and placed the blade on the bed, the glow faded the moment she released the hilt.

"It was a failed experiment, for though Michael was successful in striking my heart with the blade, it didn't act as intended. Instead of destroying the Void, it merely summoned my soul from it and put it back together."

Skulduggery belatedly retracted his previous thought as he looked at the blade Valdis showed him. There were still things he couldn't bring himself to believe in. The Archangel Michael was one of them.

He didn't touch the blade, however, because he certainly believed in not inviting trouble.

"That's quite a story," the detective said after a moment. "When did it happen? How long have you lived with a soul you shouldn't have?"

Valdis raised a brow when he finally replied. It was interesting that a living skeleton could seem so skeptical when he shouldn't even be possible. She turned and picked the blade back up, flipped it around so that she was holding the blade and offered the hilt to him.

"If you don't believe me," she replied, "Then feel free to touch it." The sword was glowing softly again, "But to answer your question, its magic has protected my soul for three hundred and forty two years."

"No, I believe you." Mostly. Enough that despite the hilt being apparently safe, Skulduggery still made no move to touch it. He'd wondered, when he first came back, if his resurrection had a higher purpose - if angels somehow did exist and taken a personal interest in him. But too much had happened since then, and around about the time Skulduggery returned from being Vile he'd decided he didn't really care anymore.

He wasn't going to tempt fate by touching a sword purportedly made by an Archangel. Lightning would very likely strike him where he stood.

"How long were you a Hellhound before that?" Skulduggery asked, his gaze still on the blade.

Valdis flipped the blade again when he refused her offer, the hilt landing in her palm, the red gem flashing brighter. "Over two thousand-five hundred years," she replied simply. "Any more questions or is it my turn to be the interrogator?"

Then she could feel emotion, but didn't have nearly enough experience to know what to do with it. Or, perhaps, too much experience in the opposite direction. Skulduggery could relate to the situation, if not quite the scale - but it didn't negate what Valdis had tried to do on those cliffs. She'd earned the opportunity to take a turn asking questions, but she hadn't earned any trust. Not from Skulduggery. Not yet.

He shrugged in response. "Promise you won't try to kill the whole of Keeliai again, and I'll answer whatever you want."

"You can rest assured that I will not destroy Keeliai. It is the only place I've ever had happiness, I simply needed to be reminded of that."

She returned the blade to its sheath in the corner and sat back on the bed. She already knew exactly what she wanted to ask.

“Your soul does not exist within your bones. It covers your body with the form of a man wearing armor and reeking of death. Who is he?”

Skulduggery's soul was Vile. Made sense; he really shouldn't have been surprised.

"Me," he answered. His tone was oddly flat; easily recognisable as uncharacteristic by anyone who'd held a single conversation with him. "I made a terrible mistake centuries ago, and thousands of people lost their lives over it. It wasn't very different from what you tried to do, actually, except that no one stopped me and it continued for five years."

His confirmation was interesting, but it didn't explain everything she had seen and felt. He had power over death just as she did, his words indicated that he had killed in such a manner multiple times. The amount of death on him could have been akin to how she might feel to her kin, but she had had thousands of years to kill, whereas he had only had five. He possessed massive amounts of magic and was obviously, at some point, just as unstable.

"No," She replied sharply, "He is only a part of what you are, because if you and he were the same, then we wouldn't be having this conversation." Just as she wasn't just the Void, Skulduggery wasn't just the man in armor, if they were, then they wouldn't have people who cared about them.

"Someone told me recently that we are not just our past or present, but the sum of both. You may have once been a mass murderer, but you obviously aren't anymore, and the fact that you call it a mistake tells me that you feel regret over it now. So what changed? How did you go from a mass killer to an annoyingly observant skeleton?"

Skulduggery would have disagreed with that unspoken sentiment just as strongly as he did the spoken one. There were people who cared about him, yes, but their own questionable choices had very little to do with who he was, given most of them didn't know he was Vile or were too young to remember what that meant. He wasn't always Vile, but he didn't stop being Skulduggery when he was Vile. They were one and the same; mood swings of each other, opposite sides of a single coin.

He didn't try to correct her, though. That was an argument Skulduggery simply didn't have the patience for right then.

"I didn't," he answered instead. "I was an annoyingly observant skeleton when I was a mass killer. I was a mass killer because I became a skeleton, in fact." He hesitated, and then sighed. "But that's not your question. I'm not sure, to be honest. I snapped out of it one day."

That wasn't entirely the truth, but for Skulduggery's purposes, it was close enough.

Valdis didn't believe him. No one just 'snapped out of' being a mass murderer, there was always a catalyst, but she let him have it his way in favor of the new curiosity.

"In that case, how did you become a skeleton?"

There was something odd about the death magic that clung to him, almost as if it wasn't all his own. Part of it had a different something...It was odd, but she couldn't decide why.

I died, Skulduggery would have said under different circumstances. Possibly flatly, possibly lightly. The urge was there even now, but Valdis's straight and honest answers from before had earned her a straight and honest answer in return.

And, Skulduggery realised with a measure of reluctant surprise, she might just be able to relate.

"I fell into a trap," he said. "During a long and bitter war, back when it was still a rebellion and I was one of the people leading it. A man called Nefarian Serpine killed my wife and child, thereby compromising my judgement so I wouldn't notice the trap. Then he killed me, using a technique we sorcerers like to refer to as agonising death.

"Apparently, the necromancer who taught him that technique didn't want me to die, so he added in a loophole. The problem was that it didn't kick in until a year later, and by then..." Skulduggery spread his arms. "I was forced to put myself together."

It was quite a story, one whose ending might have been difficult to believe if it weren't for her own experiences with strange magic. The reason for his snap from man to murderer was a sad one, which, until recently, she wouldn't have believed possible, and yet losing the ones you cared about most...

"For what it's worth," She said, "I'm sorry about your family and, whether you believe it or not, I know what it is like to have to put your life back together after having everything torn apart."

"Thank you," Skulduggery said. "I appreciate it."

A reflexive sentiment that had long ago lost most of the meaning it should have had, but for this, he meant it genuinely. A woman like Valdis didn't offer sympathies lightly, and Skulduggery wasn't going to accept them lightly. He could learn a thing or two from the way Anton treated her while they were still on the cliffs.

She looked at him for a few breaths, gathering her thoughts and then turned her gaze toward the window.

"The worst part about having a monstrous past is knowing that you still possess the ability to be a monster, that you could choose to return to what you were. But, for better or for worse, I don't even have that."

"It's odd, don't you think?" She mused, "Both of us became what we are through the powers of another and now we both work to be better than our past."

She paused again, trying to decide if she should ask what was on her mind. Rejection and fear were the reactions that she always expected from people. But from the skeleton, all she was receiving was curiosity and yet there had to be a motive.

"Did you come here to merely understand what you saw on the cliffs? Or do you want to understand so that you can kill me should it happen again?"

Skulduggery shook his head. "I didn't spend five years as an unthinking killer because of that necromancer. He made it possible, yes, but the choice was still mine."

Just as the choice to stop had, ultimately, been his. He couldn't blame his downfall on someone else and still lay claim to the recovery.

Valdis's last question was what gave Skulduggery pause - not because he needed to think about what the answer was, but because he was trying to decide which answer Valdis would prefer. In the end, he tipped the balance in favour of the truth, echoing the tone of the rest of the conversation.

"I'm a detective," he said. "I like being able to understand things. It's a compulsion. I don't believe you'll let it happen again, just as I believe Anton would stop you if you tried. But if things escalate again, I don't need to understand anything in order to kill you. Understanding only makes it easier."

He was perhaps too smart for his own understanding, twisting her words into self-depreciation.

"All I meant was that you became a skeleton because of the powers of another and I gained a soul through the powers of another. I do appreciate your honesty though. It is so rare these days, everyone trying to make themselves sound better than they are."

She looked over at him, "Not knowing the nature of the Void would be folly and if you attempted to kill me using your death magic, then there is one more thing you need to know if you even hope to be successful."

Even that wasn't true, strictly speaking. Tenebrae had said as much himself; Necromancy stopped Skulduggery's soul from moving on, but reclaiming the skeletal remains of his body had been purely Skulduggery's doing.

Explaining that, however, would only have been splitting hairs.

"Oh?" he asked, head tilted. "And what's that?"

"Necromancy is nothing compared to the power of the Void. Should you pit your magic against mine, the best case scenario is that we are both destroyed. Your only bet is to give Raine Sage enough time to cast her light spell."

Perhaps she overestimated her own power, but since she had defeated the voids of two of her own kind and consumed their soul energies, she suspected that no mortal could compare.

Skulduggery said nothing. In a way, he hoped Valdis was right; having someone on the turtle capable of matching Vile's power would be something of a safeguard. But on the other, heavier hand, Skulduggery still remembered killing a god. Killing a god, and for no reason other than because he wanted to see if he could. If it came to an all-out battle, he had his misgivings about being outmatched.

Fortunately, things wouldn't come to an all-out battle. Malicant was gone, and the biggest challenge left was getting the three warring kedan families to cooperate.

"You're very pessimistic," Skulduggery eventually said, standing up. "You should work on that. It takes years off your life."

"As I am essentially immortal," she replied, watching him with one brow raised, "Taking a few years off is nothing, besides I just lost the only person I've ever loved, I don't have the capacity for optimism at the moment."

He doubted her power, as it was, she doubted it too, for as long as her soul existed alongside the Void, she would never have full access to it's power. Perhaps it was better that way, but it didn't matter now and hopefully she would have no reason to test her powers at full strength.

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skeletonenigma - 2015-04-04 22:26 (UTC) - Expand

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redlightgreenlight - 2015-04-06 01:17 (UTC) - Expand

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