tushanshu_logs | and all the sinners, saints, and winners [September, catchall, OPEN]

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and all the sinners, saints, and winners [September, catchall, OPEN]

Characters: Raine Sage or China Sorrows, and you! [open]
Date: September
Location: assorted: notably, Healer’s Guild, Fire Sector, Earth Sector.
Situation: assorted, open-ended
Warnings/Rating: obligatory mention of China's magic, which can't help but come up; minor violence in the thread with Cain and China.

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Raine

A; open; the Guild; most mornings and afternoons;

As Raine is anticipating disaster, she spends more and more time at the Guild leading up to the Chihuelans’ presence. Even after they’re gone, she’ll be relatively easy to find here.

Sometimes she’ll be at the desk in the front hall, taking her turn handling people walking in the door like the rest of the healers and students. In such cases she usually has a book open in front of her, and is usually frowning. When she’s not immediately apparent, any of the kedan who also work there will be able to direct someone looking for Raine to her office, a small room deeper in the Guild, notably ornamented with an ever-increasing number of notebooks and a single extra chair.

She’ll often seem lost in thought; barring screaming and blood, it may take her a few moments to focus on the person in front of her.

B; open and/or Duke?; Earth Sector; pre-Chihuelans;

Some few early evenings, it's possible to find Raine in a small park a little ways from the place she and Solomon live; she often takes her practical arte work outside, when she has any in mind. Lately, though, she’s been taking these infrequent occasions more to just sit in peace-- it looks rather like she’s meditating, in fact, save perhaps for the pale glow around her hands.

Though her eyes are closed, she will look up as soon as anyone comes within twenty to thirty feet, focusing on the person as the glow fades. “Did you need something?”

---

China

C; open; Fire Sector; most times of the month;

It’s not difficult to track down China Sorrows, if you’re putting your mind to it; she doesn’t make a secret of where she lives, and she stands out regardless. Most people in the area can direct the asker to the place where the too-beautiful Foreigner lives. In this case it’s in one of the nicer areas in Fire, a place she’s spent a good deal of time warding and is now almost entirely comfortable in.

Previously during the summer, she was doing work with sigils on the door, inscribing intricate designs in primarily circular patterns for a day or two. Those are all invisible now, leaving only unremarkable door and walls and windows.

It is still most advisable to knock.

D; open; College campus; specifically during the Chihuelan visit;

China does not manage inconspicuous well, but her network of informants is still not what it was. Thus, there are days when she’ll find herself a bench or a fountain’s edge or something equally useful to sit on, and watch the comings and goings from the College from one direction or another.

Not obviously, of course, she always has her head bent over some paper or book and she’s always arrayed in that elegantly artless way that suggests she just happens to be in the perfect light, but she hasn’t taken up a sudden interest in craftswork.

People stop to look at her, but most of them manage to restrain the urge to throw themselves at her feet. Once in a while someone stops to talk to her; if it’s not someone with a useful piece of information for her, China is much less inclined to smile.

---

[ooc; so it looked like, overall, no specific starters were necessary, but if you want to plot or want something I have not produced drop me a pm or a plurk at

makaricrow. I'm always happy to adapt. c:]

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Raine eyed the scale, but it looked familiar, she could make sense of the units. "At least in terms of population," she said, agreeing. She'd heard the figure seven billion before. "We hardly have an accurate figure for our world, and with the reunification of the worlds everything will need to be re-figured, but... I would be surprised if Aselia had more than a billion people. Even taking into account any Desians still remaining."

The task ahead of them was still a large one, but they could do it.

She kept watching, as continents took shape. Perhaps she should be surprised, that he was reproducing the entire thing from memory, but after all he had had quite a while, hadn't he?

"Desians?" he asked, moving further down as he worked, not lingering on anything overlong as he tried to do this in a timely manner. He more wanted to make a piece for conversation rather than spend the whole lunch doodling on the ground, but when Raine said she hadn't seen a map of the earth yet despite being surrounded by so many people who everything about it for granted... well, he wanted to make sure she had her own reference to compare to.

Reunification of the worlds sounded vaguely familiar, as odd of a concept as it was. It wouldn't hurt to have a refresher, though, something to keep his mind busy as well as his hands. "How did all that go again?"

"The name for the primarily half-elven group of forces employed by Cruxis as a threat in the declining world," Raine said absently, more focused on the developing shapes. "The Kharlan War was retroactively blamed on them as well, and while there were recorded instances of humans among their ranks, for the most part the term Desian became synonymous with half-elf in many parts of the worlds."

She paused there. They'd spoken of some of it, in the Dreaming, but she wasn't surprised detail had gotten lost. "How much detail would you like?" she asked. "It's something of a long story."

That made some sense, and Cain nodded with the explanation. He had the idea that half-elves were not looked kindly upon in general where Raine was from and knew better than to prod deeper into that now. Still remaining didn't sound so great, anyway, and he tucked it away for later. A better time.

"How about this? You tell the story and see if you can't make it last as long as it takes me to finish this," he said, only briefly looking up to see if she agreed or thought he was being ridiculous. He could take either at this point and was slightly, pleasantly surprised she hadn't blinked an eye at his spontaneous cartography. "Then when we're done, we can go over each other's details."

"All right," Raine said, and paused for a bite of salad. "The Kharlan War, between the kingdoms of Sylvarant and Tethe'alla, escalated the use of magitechnology until it outpaced the Great Tree, and the Tree began to wither as a result. However, the war was a human war, and I can only hypothesize that they truly didn't know what they were doing."

It still meant that they were too caught up in hatred and killing, but it was something a little better, than simply not caring. "A small group of half-elves did notice," she went on. "Most specifically, a woman named Martel Yggdrasill. It seems she was especially attuned to the Tree, in some way." She wished she knew exactly what it had been about Martel; perhaps the spirit would know? "She had raised her younger brother Mithos on her own, and together they sought to make it known that the Tree was dying. I don't know the details, but they were joined by another half-elf, who Martel must have loved, and a human who..." Raine let out a breath, frowning absently to herself. She didn't know where he had come from. "I can only assume he must have thought their quest worthwhile. But in the end, it was useless. The Tree died."

It had taken her a little while, to piece things back together. "It wasn't hopeless," she said, after another pause for salad, and to watch the lines under Cain's pen take shape. "When the Tree died, it left behind the Great Seed, a mass of pure mana which had the potential to germinate into another Tree. But it would require a great infusion of mana from another source. There was such a source -- a comet, called Derris-Kharlan, which orbited Aselia at the time. However, it had an elliptical orbit, and would take roughly a hundred years to come back to a place where its mana could be used for that purpose. The world would have died in that time. So Mithos made a pact with the spirit Origin, the spirit of All Things, and with his power split the world apart."

She said all this evenly, distantly, like it was simply a piece of history and not something impossible, something that had made such a ruin of their world. "The Seed still generated a trickle of mana. Not much, not enough for the entire world, but... some. Mithos set it up as an hourglass, so that mana flowed from one world to the other, allowing both to survive without outright dying. Further, he put Sylvarant on one side, and Tethe'alla on the other, thereby separating the two powers that had caused the war, in the hopes that that would end it." Raine sighed then, and looked genuinely downcast. "It didn't. The two kingdoms were still aware of each other's existence, and the battle then became to control the mana flow, so that one could continue to flourish. But, of course, Mithos with Origin's help was the only one who could do that, and in the attempts to gain control of the mana, soldiers from one side killed, not him, but Martel.

"Mithos did not take it well," she added, and grimaced. It was perhaps the largest understatement of her life. "I won't go into the details unless you're curious about the mechanics, but essentially, he paired Martel's soul with the Seed. It sustained her, so she didn't truly die, but if the Seed had germinated, it would have consumed her with the rest of the mana it used to do so. So Mithos... didn't. He simply let the worlds persist as they were, while he looked for a way to resurrect her in truth. Every so often -- I estimate every few hundred years -- the mana flow would be shifted, so that neither world would die, but neither could be allowed to genuinely flourish for very long, either. Mithos obliterated all knowledge of the nature of the worlds; I have reason to believe he was at least the cause if not the instrument of the deaths of the entire Tethe'allan royal family at the time." Spiritua, the first Chosen, was also Spiritua, the angel of death. "In the wake of that, he set up a church in his sister's name, to manage the world. The Desians he created so there would always be a threat to be fought. Those factors, paired with the continual system of waxing and waning mana, ensured that neither world would ever develop so far as to generate the same level of magitechnology, and while Mithos kept them in a state of stagnancy, he worked to breed a vessel with a match to Martel's mana signature, one that could bear her soul."

Now, though, Raine smiled, a wry little expression. "She was my student," she said, wistfully. "You would like her, I think. Colette... truly believes in the goodness of people; she's always finding the best in them. Even assassins sent to kill her." And that had the sound of a joke, to Raine, rather than the serious matter it really should have been. "We fought for her. Eventually, we were able to make a new pact with Origin, and defeat Mithos, and Derris-Kharlan was where it needed to be. Sylvarant and Tethe'alla were reunited, and the Seed was germinated. I saw the new Tree myself, only a few minutes before I woke in Keeliai."

It seemed a very long time ago now. Raine's fork hovered in mid-air, and her head was tilted a little to the side as she regarded Cain's work.

That was a lot to take in. Cain was listening intently even though he never looked up from his work. Soon enough the continents were finished and he began to draw smaller lines and divisions along the map: countries. He would deal with places like the United States later and just focus on the pertinent pieces while Raine told him an almost-unbelievable recounting of her world's history. It was a lot to take in, but Cain kept up just fine. Most of the terms had already been explained and Raine was definitely a teacher at heart to be able to give him a clear picture of the situation.

It was a moment after she had finished that Cain had finished as well. One last touch was to circle where his city would be, and wrote Rome underneath in the Elven script he had been learning from Raine. He could fill in other major names later, but that one... that one was the important one to start with where he was concerned.

"You said that all happened in about four thousand years, right?" asked Cain, looked up to Raine with a smile, and with a flourish he presented the finished map for her to take and inspect as she wished. He stood, brushed off his knees and sat back down, perhaps a bit closer than before so he could reach over and point things out as necessary. "It sounds like he went insane if he was able to focus so completely on a single task for so long. Not that I could blame him, strength of corruption is often correlated to the amount of power someone has," he added, a casual knowledge in his tone. Even if Cain couldn't blame him, he didn't harbor much sympathy, either. Idly, he wondered at the fate of this Martel's soul, and whether she was supposed to have survived or perish when she had; if she had been destined to wait for so long in a cage of her brother's insanity.

It seemed she'd timed it just about perfectly. Raine set her fork down, took the map in her hands and bent her head over it, as if she was settling to study already. "Yes," she said, absently. "The withering of the Tree was almost exactly four thousand years ago. I believe I told you-- elves live naturally about a thousand years, half-elves a little less. Mithos and his companions used something called a Cruxis crystal to stop their aging process."

She still didn't think it had done any of them any favors.

"I wonder," she said a few moments later, looking up at Cain's later comment. "Perhaps he was from the time his sister died. Fixated, at the least. Everything he had done, from that point, was for the goal of bringing her back, and when he succeeded, and she denied him... he became much less rational." It had been a terrifying devolution to witness, even knowing who Mithos was and what he was capable of.

Raine sighed, and glanced back down. Focused on the single word of elven script, and smiled, even if it was little. "Rome," she said. No difficulty in guessing what Cain found most important. "I see."

"Losing a sibling like that is enough to drive anyone outside of their head," Cain said. That much he knew for certain, but it was also why he knew Mithos had no excuse. They faced the same sort of eternity with the same sort of despair in front of them, and Mithos with his power had simply ripped the world into pieces in his grief and insanity. Everyone was different, and reactions to grief were among the least understood, yet Cain couldn't help but be vaguely disappointed. He shook his head. "He made his choices, and it's resolved by now at any rate."

Seeing her smile, Cain couldn't help but smile as well. "Yes, Rome. That's my city," he said. Not much of an explanation or what the possessive really meant. To him, it said everything. It was everything. Where he had grown up only retained significance in that he'd grown there with Remus. Rome was where he belonged — where he had made sure it prospered so that Remus could have belonged there, too.

"I can only imagine," Raine said soberly. It had never been a stretch, to think of what the loss of one Sage would do to the other, and that among other things had driven her acquisition of healing artes. Cain's voice... it was the voice of experience, she was sure, in no small part thanks to what she'd seen beneath the shell, with him.

Abel.

It was a better thing to think of the unmistakeable pride when he called Rome his city. "I take it this is Italy, then," she said, tracing with one light fingertip the area around the mark Cain had made.

Some people were only just as properly affected by the loss of family as their closeness dictated. Some... well, their family was their world, and it could crumble just as easily as a life could be lost. There was no way to make up for such tragedy and it was up to fate how their lives would go from there. Cain had admittedly gotten an easier time of it if only because founding his city had demanded a certain amount of sanity and attention in order to guarantee the safety and prosperity of his people. Sanity, and no small amount of shock and denial got him through those years.

"Right," Cain said, allowing the previous subject to drop for now. They both seemed to be on the same wavelength and there was only so much that could be said before they fell into terribly depressing territory that had no place during a nice lunch like this. He shifted, pointed to the area around Italy and where it bordered the water. "What started this whole thing was how I was going to say you'd probably remember Italy if you saw it, since it's shaped like a boot. On the other hand, Rome was there before Italy was actually founded but this map is current to cut down on any confusing references."

Raine eyed the area of the map he meant, noted the simile, then nodded. It was as good an association for a mnemonic as any. "Yes, I see what you mean. And Etruria-- a larger area, or the same at a different point in time?" Cain hadn't labeled the majority of the map, she noted, which was probably for the sake of efficiency given the sketched borders.

She had a few other areas of interest, naturally, but Rome came first.

"How long before Italy was Rome there?"

"Smaller area within Italy," Cain said, reaching over momentarily to trace the clicked-in tip of the pen around where it would have occupied. Nothing that would make a mark, but so that she could see the general area. He reached back long enough to take his half of the sandwich and take a bite while she continued to examine it.

He almost laughed right while he was chewing and raised a hand while he swallowed. "Italy is only about a hundred and seventy years ago. Rome was founded nearly twenty-eight hundred years ago. It's seen a lot of change in its time, from a city to kingdom to one of recorded history's greatest empires. Now it's the capital city of Italy."

Raine nodded again, making the mental note, and proceeded with the salad-- at least, until Cain laughed, at which she gave him a dry sort of a look. Twenty-eight hundred years ago it was founded, and he had exceptionally strong feelings about the city, considered himself a native. "You were there when it began, weren't you," she said, amused. It was reasonably easy to put that timeline together.

She would not be wholly surprised if he had helped, but as she wasn't certain, she didn't give voice to the guess.

She was quick on the uptake, obviously, and Cain wasn't surprised in the least. He took another bite and nodded, finishing that up before he continued. "Being there is something of an understatement," he said with muted entertainment. It wasn't at Raine's expense, there was no way she could know, but just for telling the story in general. Being able to give it without all of the legend surrounding it immediately coming to the forefront was what one could call a once in a lifetime chance. "You're currently looking at the first king of Rome. Named after myself, but that wasn't my idea," he added, in a tone that said he really meant to gloss over that specific fact.

For the announcement, he puffed up momentarily, expression changing and demeanor shifting to accompany the vibe. Definitely king material, although the transformation would be almost startling. Two very different kinds of people at very different points in his lifetime. "Which is actually something I haven't really mentioned to anyone else here," he said, deflating back to his usual Jacob Kane posture which was infinitely more comfortable right now. "As you might imagine, it doesn't come up that often."

Edited 2015-10-04 15:54 (UTC)

One thing, to think he had helped the matter; another entirely, to be informed Cain had been a king. Raine blinked at him, speechless for a moment, and put her fork down.

She could see it, briefly. Then he was only Cain again-- but only Cain still encompassed multitudes.

"Would you prefer it to stay that way?" she asked after a moment's thought, regaining her composure. And, when she'd had an opportunity to continue a little further: "'Rome' doesn't sound much like Cain." It was oblique, but still a question.

"Because Cain is a pseudonym," he said easily enough. "Or an alias, however you want to put it." He'd never claimed it was actually his name, just something he preferred to go by and that was nothing less than the truth. Tricky wording, yes, but words were generally easy to play with after having so long to learn them. "My real name is Romulus."

Returning to her earlier question, Cain paused, thought about it, then shook his head. "It doesn't bother me all that much, but bringing it up here would likely just cause more trouble than it would solve. There's literally no way to prove I'm telling the truth, after all," he said. Not that he would lie about that, but he wasn't going to assume everyone might take him at his word.

"In some cases, the wild nature of the story would actually increase its credibility," Raine said thoughtfully. "Most people with any experience, after all, would prefer to tell a lie that would be believed." But it wasn't the sort of thing that would be necessary to bring up, either, and, as he said, it would cause more trouble than it solved. Not worth lying about, but not worth raising.

Romulus. Hm. Raine gave that a little thought, too, considering Cain. But he'd said he preferred Cain, back then, and evidently he wasn't in the habit of using the name he was born under. It made sense, even if layer after layer of pseudonym made her a little uneasy. In a moment she just nodded, and moved past it to think about later. "Romulus. I see." And her attention was back on the map. "There are a few other places that are of interest to me at the moment, if you wouldn't mind pointing them out." And a small, wry smile. "You can likely guess which." She knew she was not subtle.

"Something stranger than fiction," Cain agreed. She had a point and yet there were just too many variables to actually make it viable. To some, it would be seen as a grab for power and others might consider him delusional. Many might believe him, but it would be of no help without any resources with which to garner any power enough to make a difference. "So out there that it has to be true."

Pseudonyms were a necessity of Cain's life. He didn't so much as create something new every time he took one, but decided which part of himself to indulge in; every identity was another part of the whole that made up Cain, who he was right now in Keeliai. It was the only way to really survive in a world where he simply couldn't keep existing in static for the rest of his life.

"Right, I get you," he said. Shifting to set the sandwich down and place a hand underneath the map and the pen over top of it, Cain lightly filled in the island country northwest of Europe. Ireland he wrote beside it, once again in the Elven he had been learning. "This is where Solomon and all the rest are from. Their accents are a dead giveaway to this particular region of the world," he added, his own accent shifting from American to Irish just to emphasize the point.

"Granted, it's not a perfect metric, but it's a start." And in any case, Raine believed him and didn't intend to bandy the matter about, so the matter was more or less academic. She took up her half of sandwich instead, and continued to watch, intent, as Cain filled in Ireland.

He had predicted her. Ireland. She knew something of it, of course, that was unavoidable, but it was something different, seeing the entire shape sketched out and put in relation to the rest of Earth. "I take it then that English has evolved different ways in different locations?" Raine asked, curious. Their common tongue, evidently close enough to English itself, had been prevented from changing overmuch by the linked nature of the two worlds, and Cruxis' involvement. "How many languages are there, across Earth?" With such a large scale, she wouldn't be surprised if there were quite a few.

"Still, it'll probably end up more useful than not in the coming times," Cain said with a somewhat rueful smile. With all of the confusion over the Chihuelans on their way, it was not hard to imagine someone might have to step up and be a voice of leadership or reason. He had really just been hoping to avoid that.

Of course he had predicted her. Her boyfriend was from a place she had never heard of before, never had the concept of it until now, and a boyfriend was probably the closest relationship one had in a place like this. It would be the first thing Cain would want to know, after all. "Yes," he said. "It's become something of a global language after American grew and became a super power in the world so even countries that don't have it as a native language still learn it. Which... there's nearly countless languages," he said with a shrug. "Some dead by now, some still evolving. Different people, times and cultures all changing and modifying how they communicate. Thousands, at the least. I've spoken a lot of them but only keep around forty really at hand nowadays."

If he'd founded the city with such principles that it survived? Yes, Cain's skill in that location very much might become useful. Raine nodded agreement.

"I have to wonder if something similar would have been the case, had our world been allowed to grow naturally," Raine said aloud, not quite a simply idle wondering. "Some things remain, of course, and the evolution in certain forms is easy to see, but for the most part..."

She shook her head, looked down at the map again. Italy, and Ireland. "And Egypt?"

"Now you'll have the chance to see," Cain said with the tone of a polite observer. It wasn't anything he would get to experience in her world, but he'd already seen it dozens of times over. This was the natural progression of humanity left to their own devices and he had no doubt Raine's world would start upon the same path now that their dictator had been overthrown. "Whether it will evolve that way or not. It can't stay the same if there's no centralized organization anymore."

Egypt? Cain raised a brow, the connection being made immediately, and he shifted downward below Italy to mark the country as it existed today. "Egypt. Definitely oldest of the three so far."

"Yes," Raine agreed. "I will." It sounded almost wistful, just for a moment; after all, to watch the world change over the sort of time involved, she would also outlive most of her friends. But even so, she wanted to see Aselia have that opportunity to grow. "I'm sure new authorities will evolve in its wake -- the Church still exists, even if Cruxis is now defunct -- but from here, it's impossible to tell. Things must change."

And then, the focus on Egypt. "How old?" Raine wanted to know. "I know Bakura's time was in excess of three thousand years ago, so far as your 'modern' era is concerned, but he gave the impression Egypt had been relatively well developed for a while."

That wistfulness was something Cain knew well, had experienced many times over. It was almost easy to forget that someone who had time didn't understand that, that they call started somewhere. However, Cain was mindful as he could be about it in the face of what should have been impossibilities. "Whether the Church exists or not, it's a different entity now. I can only imagine other entities are going to start vying for recognition any day, as well, to fill the void."

"That depends on who you believe or what sources you look at," Cain said with a tilt of his head. History had not been the easiest thing to chronicle the further one went back and for things older than Cain, even he couldn't have all the answers. It had been impossible to know what information would be important to keep and what he could let slip through. "General consensus is that Egypt was formally founded near to five thousand years ago, over two thousand years before my time. So: very old."

"Almost certainly." Raine nodded, having moved past wistful to brisk in only a few moments. "It would be impossible for them not to, I assume. A great deal will depend of course on how much knowledge is disseminated to the wider populace." That was still up for debate, likely as soon as time resumed at home.

"Then Bakura would have been from a -- kingdom? -- that was already quite ancient," Raine said, brows raised. It fit -- with the weight of tradition, with some of the way he spoke, sometimes -- but this was proper confirmation. "I see. It's a warmer country, isn't it?" She smiled over at Cain, a little wry; she knew she was straying from what he'd initially wanted to show her, and more regarding Egypt and Ireland could be teased out of their respective denizens, most likely. "I do want to hear more of Rome, as well."

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and all the sinners, saints, and winners [September, catchall, OPEN]

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