used to care, but times have changed. [ catch-all ]

[insertdadjoke]

Who When Where What Warn

"Jacob Kane" (Cain) & You Catch-all for the rest of August Various places in Keeliai Cain reacclimatizes to life on a a turtle floating through the Dreaming. Basically just make something up and I bet you Cain is there somewhere. The thread with Gene delves into imagery of torture and child abuse. (If you could take a moment, consider filling this out!)

There was a whole lot that hadn't actually changed in the city. Small things, different businesses here and there, maybe a few more houses in one district and some converted or otherwise gone in another. It was familiar in the way any city was after a time lapse, although Cain would be the first to admit that it was a significant enough change for hardly a year's time since his last visit. At least that meant it was easy to catch up on old ground.

However, now he found himself staying at and working at the Hotel however temporarily until he got his feet truly underneath him. That was good, a simple task to keep an eye on people and make himself comfortable again. Working with the Metalworkers on his own projects kept the rest of the time occupied. The vast majority of Cain's free time, however, was spent exploring the city and feeling out the atmosphere, talking to kedan and foreigners alike. He had cleaned himself up and changed his wardrobe just enough to look older than his usual early-twenties for a change of pace. Usually, this wasn't the sort of thing Cain would care about; usually, this was the sort of bed the city could make and lie in all on its own for the denial of taking responsibility they'd dragged in themselves; usually, he wasn't stuck here forced to be a part of it with a bunch of others who were in much the same situation.

Usually, it sucked to have a sense of responsibility for those he felt close to.

Most of his days consisted of hitting up local businesses, making himself known to the locals as someone helpful and harmless and getting whatever gossip he could. Cain checked in on the few friends he had, and looked to make any more to improve his own situation. It never hurt to make use of a specifically positive image, after all. He might as well have a bit of fun with it.

Comments

[insertdadjoke]

Seeing that glance, Cain resisted the urge to roll his eyes. If someone spoke ancient Egyptian but knew of the Rosetta Stone, there was a story to be told there. Anyone with a drop of interest in history or regular ol' curiosity would be prodding at it, but he supposed his own poking was rather pointed. After all...

"Well, it's not often I get to meet anyone of comparable age to myself," he explained. And by not often, he meant completely impossible back home. There was Abel, but Abel was always the exception to the rule. Cain himself was incredibly interested in what such a long existence was like for someone else; he'd never met someone with whom he could share notes.

[denyamenti]

Bakura stopped in front of another store and pushed the door open, letting it linger so Cain could follow within. The heady scent of dozens of spices from bins all along the walls permeated the air hit them immediately, but for Bakura it was a welcome sense.

"There's probably more here than anywhere else," he remarked, meaning the Foreigners. "But no, it's not common where I'm from either."

He moved around the store with a familiarity that spoke of many previous visits, filling bags with the local equivalents of cumin and coriander, among others. They'd be weighed up at the counter on the scale, once he was finished his selections, meanwhile he kept up the conversation.

"If you're looking for a century by century comparison though, you'd be better off talking to one of the immortals around here. I don't have anything from between Egypt and about fifteen years ago. You still, by the way, haven't introduced yourself."

[insertdadjoke]

Cain wandered with Bakura, stopping to check a few things for himself as they went. It was a sensation he'd become unfamiliar with in ages past but that didn't mean he couldn't appreciate the store for what it was. He was definitely going to need a return trip later down the road to better appreciate what was on offer.

"Right, sorry about that," he said with a proper amount of contrition. He set down what he had been considering and moved back. Hiding the disappointment was easy; because while it was nice to meet someone who could appreciate the past in a way no historian could, there would be something missing. Either way, he would take what he could get. "Jacob Kane, nowadays. That doesn't mean there isn't anything to talk about, though. What immortals?"

[denyamenti]

"There are a few of them here," Bakura replied. "Valdis. That angel girl, I think. If centuries are good enough than the rest of the group from Wreath's world."

He stopped to study Cain for a moment, sending a barely-there tendril of power through the Ring, hidden beneath his shirt, but nothing overtly magical registered against the Item's sense.

But someone else who knew... who's known Egypt in its time?

"Talk about what?"

[insertdadjoke]

"All right, that's somewhere to start," Cain said with a slight duck of his head. It was still weird. Weird and hard to comprehend, but that merely meant he needed to get closer to see it better and understand what it was all about. No matter how long his lifetime was, this was a one shot chance while he was here.

Unfortunately for Bakura, Cain's own brand of immortality was truly nature at work. Nothing to notice aside from the laws of his own universe having a spot just for him in its workings.

"Well, Egypt is a good springboard. You own a dojo and know Raine, so there's other things to talk about too," he offered. What? It wasn't odd to appreciate the company of someone else who had similar experiences to your own. The others either weren't old enough or Cain had yet to establish they were even from earth.

[denyamenti]

The conversation was strange, Bakura would give it that; moreso than even he usually had with other people. But there was a strange earnestness to Cain's pressing questions, like he was trying intensively to make a connection.

"All right," he said, seeming to relent from some of his standoffishness. Perhaps it was the second mention of Raine, perhaps it was the lure of being able to speak freely about Egypt with someone else who had context, but there wasn't any harm he could see in indulging this guy for the moment.

"We can talk about Egypt," he allowed. "You were there as well?"

[insertdadjoke]

Connections were about all Cain had at this point in his life. Without them, he didn't have any sort of purpose or guidance or anything to keep him from wandering around at a total loss for the rest of his life. No matter how brief his stay in this dimension would be overall, that didn't mean he could go without trying to forge something to keep away the distress of isolation.

"Once or twice while it was still... well, ancient," Cain said with a wry look on his face. "To be honest, I mostly stayed around Europe in that time. Etruria. Rome, more specifically, but I had dealings all over."

[denyamenti]

"Life started there," Bakura shrugged, yet there was a bit of quiet sadness in the words. "It had always been ancient." That was, in fact, something that had been very central to Egyptian life, that the land itself was immortal, unchanging. No matter what kings came or went, Egypt itself endured.

Until it didn't, and Bakura had awoken to find a dozen other countries' kings had ruled there (including and most notably Rome, which was now portrayed as the cumulative death of the Ancient Egyptian empire), its monuments were now ruins, its language dead, and some idiots about a hundred years ago had went and relocated part of the Nile.

Carrying his spice selections to the counter, he waited for them to be weighed out and continued speaking.

"Etruria, I don't know. Rome didn't exist yet. Greece barely existed. I'm from well before the New Kingdom," he added, if that helped Cain at all, although Bakura couldn't have given him an exact date since the era had been wiped from history and all. Ironic, that he'd have considered that fitting for Akhenamkhanen's dynasty, since they didn't deserve to be remembered.

The shopkeeper named an amount, and Bakura set the juulan on the counter.

[insertdadjoke]

Cain stayed silent while Bakura spoke, thoughtful and obviously not interested in interrupting. There was a lot to be said for having someone with an even earlier perspective on culture than Cain himself, and while he understood the ideas of Egyptian thought and religion, he had never really grasped it. By the time he had gotten old enough to truly take it in, the world have moved, changed, and his priorities had been elsewhere.

"Then you'd have the advantage," Cain allowed after a moment. It was weird to admit that. Not that someone knew something better than he did, but that someone knew it better because they had lived it while it was still relevant and that Cain hadn't even had the chance. "Rome was founded just shortly after I was born—" By himself, which he felt no need to mention yet, "—so I never got the opportunity to appreciate it for what it was on its own."

[denyamenti]

"I'm not sure how much advantage it is," Bakura replied dryly. "Hasn't made much of a difference for me while I've been here. But Egypt would have had much foreign influence by then. That was the biggest threat, when I lived. Invaders from the north, from the east. The Hyskos, the Asiatics, the Sea People. Everyone wanted a piece of Egypt's wealth, and rather than trade, they just wanted to take. And it wasn't just outsiders... Upper and Lower were united at the time, but it was strained. The damned Priests controlled a lot. Nobles were corrupt, and bought themselves out of the laws."

A wry shake of his head, pushing loose strands of white hair from his face. "It makes it sound horrible, doesn't it? But at the same time..."

[insertdadjoke]

That merely got a grin from Cain. It sounded all par for the course in politics back then, and yet there were plenty of things left unsaid in the lines between intrigue and takeover and unrest. For any struggle, there was always something that made it worth it to the people that lived through them.

"At the same time, it was home," he said with a nod. "That's natural. You said you lived back then but only have the last fifteen years or so of experience. I... was around for the whole time. It makes more sense than you might think. Even if all that was going on, it doesn't tell anyone what life was like or how the people felt despite it all."

[denyamenti]

At the same time, it was home.

That basically summed it up, for Bakura. For as much as he had loathed its rulers, he had just as fiercely loved what Egypt was supposed to be. Had the massacre at Kul Elna not had happened, Akhenamkhanen's dynasty may actually have gained a powerful ally. Not, of course, that that was a path his mind wandered down. There was nothing to be gained by pondering a lifetime of what-if.

"Yes," he said simply instead, agreeing to Cain's assessment. "It was."

He'd often wondered what it would have been like, not to have been trapped inside the Ring for the intervening millennia. How much of the world he'd have seen change, and whether that would have changed the way he approached things when he finally did locate the Puzzle and the rest of the Items. But that, again, was a type of second guessing that was dangerous, especially to a person like him.

"Do people normally live that long, in your world?"

[insertdadjoke]

What-ifs never really did any good in the end. It was enough to learn from what had happened than to try and borrow trouble from what hadn't. That was an incredibly hard-learned lesson for Cain after the death of his brother. It had been a mild obsession of his, on and off, to try and figure what would have happened had Abel survived with him... but it was all for naught in the end. Even with all the time in the world, he had no way of achieving the impossible.

Cain raised a brow and pointed toward himself at the question. "As me? No, not ever. Average lifespan nowadays is seventy-to-ninety years but that's a fairly recent change. My case is just... special," he said with half of a shrug. As if it wasn't a big deal. As if living hundreds of times past human reckoning wasn't enough to drive someone insane.

[denyamenti]

Bakura nodded, more to himself than to Cain; so it seemed that their worlds as far as humans weren't dissimilar, which seemed to be in the majority for the Foreigners. "There are a few special cases in mine," he replied. "But none of us are exactly model citizens."

[insertdadjoke]

"What," Cain said, plainly with an air of obvious amusement, "you think I'm model?" Now if that wasn't just a laugh; he may behave, but that was just for lack of reason to act out most of the time.

[denyamenti]

"It'd be ill-advised to tell someone they are when I don't know them at all," Bakura returned with a shrug. "I hadn't meant it as a contrast, Kane."

And then, in a ninety-degree turn, he asked, "What was Rome like?"

[insertdadjoke]

That merely got an entertained grin in return for the comment. It didn't have to be a contrast, but there were times Cain felt like being difficult for the sake of it. Little things.

"Rome was beautiful," Cain said after a moment, wistful and longing. "It was full of people all eager to do what they could to better their city and their lives. It wasn't without its problems either, but to visit Rome was to visit somewhere everyone was proud of where they were. You know?"

[denyamenti]

"Aa, I know," Bakura replied, because he did. The way that Cain spoke of Rome wasn't unlike how Bakura did of Egypt, although the thief was rarely one to be poetic about it. Cain, at least, would understand the depth of loss, of a homeland lost to the past.

This was definitely not the conversation he'd expected to have today.

Gathering his bag from the counter, they exited the shop. Bakura didn't have any other errands to run at the moment, so he looked in askance at Cain to see if there was more.

[insertdadjoke]

Cain wasn't really one to anticipate how a day would go. Hope, maybe, and plan for a regular time, but things always had a way of twisting around that made adapting essential. Besides, it was pretty fun to be that same unforeseen force in other peoples' days.

"You heading back to the dojo?" asked Cain. He wasn't going to follow at Bakura's heels, but he was curious about the place. Perhaps next time he would stop by if Bakura didn't wish for the company now.

[denyamenti]

"Yes," the thief replied. "It likely will be busy again today; it has been, ever since the Justicar's announcement. But if you wish to know more about Egypt, you can come by some time."

[insertdadjoke]

"I'll take you up on that," Cain said. It wasn't just polite conversation; he was the type to take people up on their offers literally, and not feel awkward about it. If Bakura didn't mind speaking more on the good ol' days untainted by modern perspective, then he was definitely going to indulge sooner or later.

"Been nice meeting you, Bakura," he said with a light wave, moving to continue on to his next port of business. "Vale."

[denyamenti]

((OOC: For my own reference, this moves later to here.))