[Midnight Hotel] February catch-all

[gistful]

Characters: Anyone, everyone.
Date: Month of February, 2016 (2017 in-game).
Location: The Midnight Hotel.
Situation: Catch-all post! Feel free to use this post for anything that happens within the Midnight Hotel during the month, using the subject header to label specific rooms or for specific people. See also the OOC note at the bottom.
Warnings/Rating: Mark your threads if content warnings become applicable, please!

This month the Hotel’s wards are back up to snuff, thanks to the fog being blown off. Notably, the main doors open into all sectors once more – which is a relief to anyone who made a habit of using the Hotel for a shortcut. As always, the windows and garage doors still only open into Central.

There’s a sizeable flow of traffic in and out, mostly due to visitors from Hatal and their curiosity. Apparently it’s gotten around that the Hotel is magical and a common location for Foreigners and odd things, and as a result there’s a bit of a ‘tourist’ feel in the Hotel this month. Foreigners may find themselves being treated as novelties and asked to do magic, even if they aren't magical. The igheeri seem mostly interested in critiquing the architecture (for which they are too tall) and the sinayg can be found trying to listen to the magic in the walls (the exact sound of which is apparently a subject of hot debate), while the muin just seem to want to immerse themselves in the ‘culture’.

About mid-month Anton will toss out and ban a group of five Jagaiz fighters, to the surprise of no one who’s seen them for more than five minutes. They’re all the sort which are good enough at fighting to think they’re the best even though none of them are champions; low-grade braggers and bullies, essentially. Other, politer Jagaiz fighters who visit, if asked, will confirm that their lot isn’t particularly well-liked and their means of gaining sponsorship is a bit suspect.

None of the five suffer more than a few broken bones (and a concussion), and the loss of a few cheap items they forfeited by being forcibly shown the door.

Otherwise, for the observant, much of the furniture has been ‘labelled’ with small English or Chinese engravings in unobtrusive places – courtesy of River. Visitors from Hatal apparently find this ‘culture’ of naming possessions ‘delightful’. In other news, there’s a new kedan by the name of Dardul permanently residing at the Hotel. He’s a bit vacant with obvious memory issues, and is liable to forget people who talk to him; he’s regularly visited by Milyn and is under the care of another permanent resident, Malcil, who seems to prefer not to talk much with strangers himself.

In other other news, Anton can be seen wearing a colourful party hat all day on the 7th of the month, with bonus party tooter in his jacket pocket which he will absolutely use to greet Erskine every time they talk (while wearing a very bland expression).

[ooc: The Midnight Hotel’s status page is available here, with the rules at the top and ongoing status at the bottom. PLEASE POST TO THE STATUS PAGE IF YOUR CHARACTER WOULD LIKE A ROOM, JOB OR AREA IN THE GARAGE, OR ARE MOVING OUT. Anton will manufacture means of payment until Foreigners are able to properly offer recompense or choose to move out.]

Comments

[hellboundheart]

"Depends on what that service is. Sometimes it gets called 'solicitation'."

He waited until Anton was well out of sight, the sound of his footsteps receding down the hall to roll his eyes. Hard to read, that one, and it didn't sit well with John. Life continued on because he could tell who was lying, who was honest. Who killed and who saved.

When Anton returned, John's trench had been hung up on one of the pegs. The coat was the only thing he did bother to hang up. Everything else ended piled up or shoved aside. Possessions meant little to him if they were ordinary. The bottles had been moved and lined up on a sidetable, each of them simple things on the surface. Beneath, magics swirled and slid through the glass, turning them into prisons for a specific type of demon or creature. The rest of his charms had been shoved away into a desk at his bedside. There, the traps were more vicious and willing to hurt. After all, it was where John slept, and he slept hard if anyone checked whether exhausted or passed out drunk.

His tablet sat on another table, slowly gathering a coating of dust. He had gotten the same crash course everyone did, but he never used it. John was in the process of drawing off the half-glove of metal when Anton returned. The tips of each finger glinted with sharp metal.

"What would you like to see?"

As much as invitation as anything.

[gistful]

That was an interesting tool ... if it was a tool. Anton kept magical scalpels around for the sake of making wards, but the way Constantine was removing the glove suggested it had a use for something besides simple killing.

"The mirror spell, as agreed," Anton said, coming in and standing near Constantine, hands behind his back. He hadn't been invited to take a seat. But then he added with a deadpan dryness: "That is, as long as you don't feel you're being solicited."

[hellboundheart]

Killing wasn't something Constantine did often despite what others thought or said of him. Death was a final thing, something no one learned anything of. He preferred to trap and teach.

"Have a seat, mate. Offer you a drink, but I doubt you'd want it. If you were soliciting me, you'd be paying loads more than free room and board."

Given Anton's policy on alcohol, John decided to drink his share for him. Here in his room, John didn't bother with the teapot or illusion of brewing tea. Straight from the bottle into a tumbler into his stomach worked fine for John Constantine.

"Mirror ward then."

The tips of John's thumbs touched, his voice rising in a chant that was a mix of French, German and Polynesian. He pulled his hands apart at the last syllable, something about the room changing subtly below the sightline. Even pleasantly buzzed, John could cast spells with the best of them. Picking back up his cigarette, he waved towards the door.

"Try to leave."

Unless Anton broke the ward, he'd find himself walking back in the room as he went to walk out. It was a sly creation, one designed to confuse a person caught in it. Those unfamiliar with magic wouldn't realize what they were caught in until they were already turned around. It laid over Anton's wards, completely apart from his constructs out of either respect or necessity.

[gistful]

Despite the offered seat, Anton didn't take it, primarily because there wasn't enough time to do so. He didn't comment on the drinking; so long as Constantine could hold his drink and wasn't going to use it to pick fights, he didn't mind. The ban was mostly to stop idiots from indulging and then brawling.

Anton went to the door and stepped through without hesitation. He was familiar with the faint tingle of magic--only through long experience--but he was still impressed when he emerged back in Constantine's room.

"It's a verbal spell, then?" he asked, turning to examine his own wards, using a scalpel to make them rise on the wall in an array of blue light in order to examine the difference. Constantine's was like a shimmer or an oil slick, sloppy in comparison--but effective. "Interesting. Those are incredibly rare, in my world; most are sigil-based."

There were a few, like summoning a reflection, which had a verbal element, but even then it required the corresponding sigil. Constantine had spoken this into existence. If he hadn't spoken in languages Anton knew, Anton would have wondered if Constantine's world knew the oral equivalent to sigils.

It wasn't perfect. Anton could see places where it was catching on Anton's wards. He could also see how those catches would translate into the mirror ward dismantling. "You've taken great pains to make sure this doesn't interfere with the Hotel's foundation," he observed. "I appreciate that."

[hellboundheart]

"Verbal is easiest to go with for this. Making a mark on something leaves it there even if no one can see it or feel it. They'll let go easier with it being a surface spell. If you need to change your wards or anything else important, mine will fracture apart instead of try to stand."

He watched Anton closely as he looked over John's work. The wards slid and moved with the sigils beneath, sly buggers in their own way. When Anton was done, a few words from John sent the ward collapsing back in on itself. All traces of it vanished like smoke fading out.

"Don't know what all yours do, mate. I can make a ward or sigil lash back at a person toying with it. Rather not have multiple ones of yours turn on me at once if they do the same. Rare though? Not in mine. Yours are the lesser known ones, harder and needing more discipline. A wrong line here, and you're trapping yourself in a sigil. Saw that once. Wasn't pretty."

In the mirror on the far wall, a dark haired man never seen on the turtle slumped on a couch and reached for a bottle.

"You use a lot of sigils around here. I know a couple of magicians who could spend years going over this place and studying."

Obviously, that didn't include John himself. He was interested, yes, but not enough to bog himself down with a sketchpad and charcoal pencil for years.

"You did it all yourself?"

[gistful]

"Yes," said Anton, watching the ward snap and then moving back to the offered chair, and sitting. He sat straight-backed, not on the edge of the seat but not sitting back, either, his elbows on his knees. "I started conceptualising in 1950s, but couldn't begin construction until the turn of the century."

He inclined his head thoughtfully, and his gaze was caught by the mirror. He studied it while he spoke. "You aren't wrong, however; arrays of the Hotel's complexity are admittedly rare in my world as well. But sigils are the primary means of ritualised or preparatory spellcasting, and verbal elements are far less common on the whole. Most sorcerers use basic sigils at one point or another. Most don't know any verbal accompaniment."

Wall-walkers could use a verbal locking spell, and summoning a reflection required a verbal component to trigger the sigil, but they were exceptions.

Anton returned his full attention to Constantine. "How do you draft the spellwork when changes are needed? I saw a few elements I may be able to help with to prevent intersection with the Hotel's wards."

[hellboundheart]

He had to take notice of how Anton held himself, trying to pull up the edges and classify the man beneath. Stiff in John's opinion, disciplined. Brought to mind a mortician more often than not. But where and why did magic come into it? It was a mystery Constantine wanted to understand, and he had nothing but time for it.

"Then magic is common in your world? Something everyone has or can do?"

The idea alone was staggering to Constantine. In his world, the only magic people believed in was the likes of David Copperfield or Criss Angel, lies that made themselves look true. To the question, John gave a careless seeming shrug.

"I just do it, mate. Change it or make it able to change. It's all about the construction," John said, pouring himself another double shot. In the mirror, the man looked to the side and walked out of frame. Another man took his place, one that looked suspiciously like John himself. Little surprise maybe that he was drinking. Another came into frame, this one with golden eyes and a wide span of white wings spread out behind him.

"What elements are you looking at? The reversal, the changing or something else. Make one of your sigils for me, here and now, let me build on it and you tell me what you want."

It was a dangerous thing, mixing of magic, but with something like this, John didn't see anything too terrible yet.

[gistful]

"No," Anton said with a shake of his head. "Sorcerers in my world are born, though not always to magical bloodlines. Most can choose not to use it, but mortals can't begin to use it themselves, except for sigils."

He 'just does it'. Anton absorbed that for a moment, looking at the shifting surface of th mirror. "It is all about the construction," he said slowly, and blinked equally slowly. "I drafted the Hotel's wards for over a decade before I felt sure enough to put them to stone."

And that had been a shifting work in progress as the physical reality of the building changed the wards.

Anton looked away from the angel in the mirror to smile faintly at the request. "Wards aren't just one sigil, Mr Constantine. They're more akin to strings of sentences. Complete wards are texts of varying lengths." Nevertheless, he pulled out the piece of chalk he kept in his pocket drew himself closer to the tabletop, clearing a space. "The layer," he said. "Your ward on mine still reaches for foundation when it's activated."

He sketched a simple alarm ward, one that would sound if crossed, and then another, interlocking like scales across the surface of the table the way the wards interlocked in the walls.

[hellboundheart]

"Where I come from, there's a lot who feel the same way. Bloodlines and all should be those with magic."

The downward twist of John's mouth said more of his disdain for that idea than he cared to. Behind him, the scene in the mirror continued to play out, the angel arguing with the human. Said human looked bound and determined to finish off his bottle and tell the angel to screw off. No words could be heard, but expression gave a lot away. Little wonder that the background in the mirror was what John was cluttering up his room to resemble.

That or Constantine was just a slob.

Sharp curiosity was in his eyes as he watched Anton work. When he finished, John traced the lines with a fingertip. Chalk blurred under his touch but the pattern remained. He was learning, examining, turning over something he didn't know yet with the voracious desire of an interested child. Unfortunately, John had about as much restraint when he walked into a situation.

Something quiet and rhythmic was murmured under his breath as he drew his hands up slowly. The chalk swirled and rose into a three dimensional image of sorts sketched in smoke, one that John turned in the air as if it were a hologram to see all sides.

"Got to be a way to defeat that," Constantine murmured thoughtfully.

[gistful]

"We have some few of those who cared," said Anton blithely. "Most of them are dead lines these days. Those bloodlines left don't particularly care about purity." Despite the tendencies of fiction to assume it was important, 'pureblood' had never been a particularly loaded term in their society, even for those who cared.

Anton, in turn, watched the way Constantine observed the alarm wards, both with his eyes and his hands. A hands-on user, that was for certain; the alarms started to peal as John disturbed the chalk, then cut off as it lifted off the table.

"There are," Anton agreed. "Several, actually; this is a simple ward. Usually it would interlock with many others of different kinds, but sigils like these are easy to interlock with each other as well--they're unidirectional."

[hellboundheart]

"How do they feel about people studying under masters or conforming to a school of thought instead of just winging it?" John asked although his mind wasn't on what he was saying. For him, magic was the ultimate high, what he was willing to suffer and hurt for it if needed.

There was no startle at the sudden alarm, only a small tensing without a break in what he was doing. To flinch or make an error in a spell could kill a person in Constantine's experience. Or worse.

"This is brilliant," he said, voice monotone as if he had forgotten Anton entirely to concentrate on the wards. "If they interlock, do they make each other stronger? Like layers instead of a single barrier?"

His fingers moved lightly, caressing and lightly pressing, handling the sigil with same care and curiosity he would have exhibited with a new lover's body. Constantine's eyes were taken with nothing but the sigil. Had an assassin crept in the room, the Hellblazer may have been dead before he realized it.

[gistful]

The look on Constantine's face was very nearly enough to oblige Anton to look away. It wasn't a hunger, precisely--but it was desire, almost more primal than more conventional lust. Anton felt a pang of doubt for the nature of Constantine's magic, or at least the man's ability to choose not to use it.

Necromancy, in Anton's world, was addictive. Was the magic Constantine used the same?

"They do," Anton confirmed. "Sigils are made to layer and combine in multiple fashions. Their methodologies are as varied as their user's creativity. And there is still a place for apprenticeships, in our society--even most of our magics are still fields developed from long ago. It's been a long time since anyone tried to develop a new one."