Gray
Dedicated
Roleplay posts: 124
Registered: Jul 2, 2021 10:00:37 GMT -5
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Post by Gray on Mar 9, 2022 15:28:44 GMT -5
(Note: Artist's rendition. Details may be corrected by the text)
About half an hour’s walk from Port Argentium, one might catch the surprising glint of a glass roof on the shore. Moving closer, they’d see a building rising from among the tide pools, cylindrical and made of black stone, with narrow stained-glass windows, and a conical glass roof. There does not appear to be a door. Hanging from the roof, in the direction of the shore, there is a piece of driftwood labeled ‘Not A Wizard Tower’.
Many would argue whether the building is a tower at all. It is only one story tall, though its base hints at it having roughly been broken off something larger. It is only accessible via dry land at low tide, while at high tide, all but the glass roof might be completely submerged. Under the remains of this Tower, there is a gap down to the rocky ground, that an octopus seems to have claimed as a home.
What goes on in the building remains a mystery. From the cliff face just across from it, or even from an otherwise right angle, it is clear that the inside is filled with plants, from small trees reaching up to the ceiling, to epiphytes growing on their bark, to vines wrapping around them. Upon closer examination, a botanist would feel unsettled, for nearly everything living in the glasshouse produces poison, pain, or both, with a smaller variety of potential painkillers and medicines. Nearly-invisible from the outside, there is a clockwork mechanism in the middle of this dangerous garden. A few who’ve passed by the tower while foraging have occasionally reported hearing the slow ticking of a clock.
The Tower is currently home to Nina, the travelling painter, and to a mysterious man called Gray.
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Theodosia Planchette
Committed
Roleplay posts: 80
Appearance: Theodosia stands at a fairly average, unimpressive height. Her red hair and numerous golden piercings and ornaments are quite eye-catching, although her tendency to glare at people often dissuades a second glance. She wears a number of bright silks and elaborately patterned robes befitting a proper fortune-teller. The twisting, vine-like tattoos on her arms are actually just painted on, a fact that she tries to keep hidden from people.
Skills and Abilities: Theodosia is a trained fortune-teller, gifted with the ability to see through the mists of time and pluck upon the threads of fate...or so she claims. Whether she actually possesses any such skills can be questionable at times, but her knowledge of fortune-telling methods (from cards to ashes to chicken entrails) is unrivaled.
Registered: Mar 28, 2021 21:11:09 GMT -5
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Post by Theodosia Planchette on Mar 11, 2022 23:54:34 GMT -5
The hardest part of being a fortune-teller, Theodosia decided, was being a fortune-teller. It certainly wasn't the fortunes, those were easy. Telling people what they wanted to hear in vague, noncommittal language wasn't exactly the most difficult thing in the world. Twisting the images on her cards or shapes of her tea leaves to mean whatever she wished wasn't hard either, not after so many years of practice. No, the hardest part of being a fortune-teller was playing the part. Her job was all about making people believe that she had mystical powers, and so she'd been obligated to build her life around the appearances that everyone expected. She avoided liquor, as a drunken fortune-teller was liable to slip up and make a mistake. She always carried around an extra set of clothes in her basket in case she happened to trip and get muddy or wet, for it didn't do for people to see a fortune-teller get surprised. She kept away from the other townsfolk, as she was expected to be aloof and mysterious. The life of a fortune-teller, it seemed, was one of loneliness and sacrifices.
One such sacrifice that she'd been reluctant to make was the abandonment of card games. She'd loved playing card games as a child, enjoying favorites such as Beggar's Bluff and Bastard Prince. Ironically, despite working with cards almost every day, she couldn't remember the last time she'd been able to play a game with anyone. It wasn't proper for a fortune-teller to play games of chance, after all. If she won, she'd cheated. If she lost, she was a fraud. There was really no way to win, and so she'd been forced to cast aside her favorites and turn to games of solitaire and prophecy. Now, though, it seemed that her luck was about to turn. A young sailor had come to ask about the future of his love life, and had been so pleased with her reassurances that he'd find a pretty girl that he'd given her a pack of playing cards. After some deliberation, Theodosia had found herself heading up to her friend Nina's house, hoping that she would be in. Perhaps Nina would enjoy a few hands of Bastard Prince over a cup of tea. The Gray-doll sat snugly in her dress, poking its little cloth head out in front of her throat and gazing around with its black button eyes.
Reaching the glasshouse, Theodosia was relieved to see that the tide had receded, allowing easy (if slippery) access to the stumpy little "tower". Of course, getting to the glasshouse was only the first of her concerns. It seemed that Nina still hadn't put a door in the odd little house, and Theodosia found herself still unable to reach the rope that seemed perpetually just out of reach. Her only hope was that perhaps Nina would lower a ladder, if she was even home. As she approached, she felt the doll twitch against her skin, ticking ever so faintly in time with the tower's mysterious clock. It was more noticeable so close to the tower, and the sensation made her shudder. Something told her that the damned mechanism had been ticking and turning long before she'd been born and would continue to do so long after she was gone.
"Nina!" she called, stepping up to the smooth black sides of the tower. "Nina, are you home? It's me, let me in! I've brought some cakes. You like cakes, don't you? They've got...some sort of seed in them, I think."
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Gray
Dedicated
Roleplay posts: 124
Registered: Jul 2, 2021 10:00:37 GMT -5
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Post by Gray on Mar 15, 2022 14:42:14 GMT -5
“Nina is not here any longer.”
A voice came from Theodosia's left. It was flat and smooth and carried on with with the implacable regularity of a gear grinding itself down to nothing on the rocky shore. It was familiar, and yet misplaced, in the way that the voice one hears themselves speak is is different from the voice heard by others.
The voice came from a man. He had ashen hair and a cloak the colour of soot that moved in the breeze. He could be glimpsed to the side of the glasshouse, sitting on a raised section of the shore, half-curled, watching the sea, and turned his head to face the fortune-teller just as she came into view.
The man's name was Gray. He had met Theodosia once, in a dream.
When he spoke, the mind might give a little jolt. He should have been easy to spot. It's not as if the man had been invisible, or particularly well camouflaged. No. It's almost as if the mind hadn't perceived his presence as something...
Interesting.
Distraction? Who knew. If one looked closer, one could see something like fine embroidery adorning his clothes, complex little white wavelets flowing from chin to boots, bringing him closer to the colour of the stones. Even closer, and it would be clear that wasn't embroidery.
It was salt.
There was a mattock by his side. His clothes looked worn, his cheeks arching between straight and sunken as he spoke. His nose was bright red and peeling, like part of his face was and, just before he turned, there would be the glimpse of a deep scar with jagged edges on the nape of his neck. He moved too little, but when he did, he did so gingerly, as if what fuelled him had been burned to a crisp and then swept in a pile, before being burnt down again. One of his hands rested on his knees in a black glove.
There was fresh blood on his other hand.
“You can leave the cookies, however.” He said.
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Theodosia Planchette
Committed
Roleplay posts: 80
Appearance: Theodosia stands at a fairly average, unimpressive height. Her red hair and numerous golden piercings and ornaments are quite eye-catching, although her tendency to glare at people often dissuades a second glance. She wears a number of bright silks and elaborately patterned robes befitting a proper fortune-teller. The twisting, vine-like tattoos on her arms are actually just painted on, a fact that she tries to keep hidden from people.
Skills and Abilities: Theodosia is a trained fortune-teller, gifted with the ability to see through the mists of time and pluck upon the threads of fate...or so she claims. Whether she actually possesses any such skills can be questionable at times, but her knowledge of fortune-telling methods (from cards to ashes to chicken entrails) is unrivaled.
Registered: Mar 28, 2021 21:11:09 GMT -5
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Post by Theodosia Planchette on Mar 19, 2022 12:13:17 GMT -5
The soft, flat voice that echoed out over the rocks sent an icy chill of horror and revulsion down Theodosia's spine, freezing her in her tracks. It was as though she'd bitten into an apple, only to find it infested with worms. She recognized the voice, of course. How could she not? The last time she'd heard it had been burned into her memory forever...and yet, in a sense, she had never heard it at all. She turned slowly, wondering how far she'd make it if she had to run. It wouldn't be easy, not with the wet sand and her long, flowing dress. Sure enough, she spotted the man sitting like a gargoyle on a stone, as much a part of the landscape as a piece of driftwood.
"Gray," she said, voice tight in an effort to suppress its tremor. "What are you doing here? You're not supposed to be awake. Where's Nina? What did you do with her? What have you done, Gray?"
As her gaze took in more of the man's features, Theodosia felt the familiar sensation of panic rising in her throat. Blood on his hand. Some sort of pickaxe thing. Had he been digging a grave? Had the madman finally woken up and decided to kill his apprentice before she decided to put an end to him herself? With a shaking hand, she reached beneath her silks and drew out an ornate dagger with a curved blade and gilded handle. It was the knife she used when she was reading the entrails of chickens and other small animals, but she'd never thought to raise it to anything larger than a woodchuck. She lifted it now though, its tip wavering as she leveled it at Gray.
"A-answer me, Gray," she said, glaring at him and trying not to hyperventilate. "What have you done with Nina? If you've hurt her again, I'll...I'll..."
What would she do, really? Even if he'd just woken up, she knew that she stood little chance against a trained assassin. Brave words were one thing, but actions were something else entirely. What she really ought to do was run to the settlement and get help, but would she even make it before the crazed killer hunted her down? She didn't realize that she was still clutching the basket of sweets in her other hand, knuckles turning white on the wicker handle.
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Gray
Dedicated
Roleplay posts: 124
Registered: Jul 2, 2021 10:00:37 GMT -5
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Post by Gray on Mar 20, 2022 8:08:31 GMT -5
You're not supposed to be awake. Where's Nina? What are you doing here? What did you do with her? What have you done? You're not supposed to be awake. Words reached the assassin like the clinks of pieces on a gaming board. He struggled to piece them together in a way that made sense, he, who just months before would take in the subtleties of a noble's fluttering sleeves from the corner of his eyes. He knew why that was. Torture had lasting effects on the mind. He'd written a monograph about it. Perfectly expected. So he stared at the visitor, struggling to catch up with their jittery reactions. Then the girl took out a dagger, and something in Gray's eyes lit up. He understood weapons. They had become as much part of him as his bones, as his mind. He didn't need think, only react. Before he knew it, he'd jumped down from the rock, his bloody hand cutting the air like a blade. “Your wrist is too extended,” he said. His fingers curled against an imaginary hilt, as he demonstrated the correct versus the incorrect grip. “Tendons are not made of rice flour. If you thrust like that, you're going to cause an injury.” He looked at the metal point shaking in his direction, and shook his head. “For a curved dagger, I'd suggest a vertical,” he said, sketching a half-circular, upwards stab that would catch most people in the gut, followed by a downwards stab aimed past an imaginary clavicle. With one finger of his other hand, he sketched the orientation that the blade was meant to be in each time. “Or lateral stab,” he gestured, “as opposed to straight on.” His gaze lowered to the ground, as if watching the figure he'd just killed. “Your balance is off.” He tapped his front foot. “Weight, here.” He tapped his back foot, and made a few steps. “Mobility, like this. Force building from the ground to your weapon.” His gestures were slow, exaggerated, repeating. “Shoulders and hips, rotated to minimize target area. Knees-” Gray looked at the frightened young woman again, and something in him blinked in realization that his words didn't go very far in fixing the skill imbalance. He looked down at his gloved hand. 'Positive reinforcement,' he'd once written on it while training Nina. To remember. He clenched his hand. “Then again, incompetence can be a valid form of defence.” He conceded. He closed his eyes for a moment. Right. Nina. “ Nina has had a propensity for making bad decisions since I met her, and her deciding to travel inside my mind and bring me back is a textbook example.” Was there just the slightest bit of spite, under that matter-of-fact? “I cannot guarantee she is alive. The last I saw of her was this morning when she said she'll go to the docks to help out with gutting fish expected from a large catch, and am I going to sit here all day.” Even adjusting the pronouns took effort. What his voice didn't carry across was the deep worry that Nina had shown. “You can never know, with fish guts.” He pondered. The man tilted his head and looked at the sky. “Or perhaps it was yestermorning?” The assassin stepped closer to the visitor. Every third or fourth of his steps had been soundless, creating a pattern like a broken clock. He supposed she would have been unwelcome, if he'd had the emotional capacity to dwell on it. “Now. Theodosia, if this is indeed your name.” He wasn't sure if he'd absorbed the name from the dream, or if it had come up later, in one of Nina's rants. He stared with an intensity and in a direction that most women would find discomforting. “Since you came all the way here, riddle me this. Why is a shard of my aura held against your bosom?”
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Theodosia Planchette
Committed
Roleplay posts: 80
Appearance: Theodosia stands at a fairly average, unimpressive height. Her red hair and numerous golden piercings and ornaments are quite eye-catching, although her tendency to glare at people often dissuades a second glance. She wears a number of bright silks and elaborately patterned robes befitting a proper fortune-teller. The twisting, vine-like tattoos on her arms are actually just painted on, a fact that she tries to keep hidden from people.
Skills and Abilities: Theodosia is a trained fortune-teller, gifted with the ability to see through the mists of time and pluck upon the threads of fate...or so she claims. Whether she actually possesses any such skills can be questionable at times, but her knowledge of fortune-telling methods (from cards to ashes to chicken entrails) is unrivaled.
Registered: Mar 28, 2021 21:11:09 GMT -5
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Post by Theodosia Planchette on Apr 11, 2022 12:57:43 GMT -5
She should have known, Theodosia supposed, that she and her knife would prove little threat against a trained killer. Drawing the blade had been an impulse, the sort of spur-of-the-moment action that she usually tried to avoid. What had she expected, really? For Gray to back down? To turn and flee? She wasn't sure...but she certainly hadn't foreseen this. She stood frozen, watching Gray slash and stab into his invisible victim as he gave his impromptu lesson. The whole scene felt oddly surreal, as though she were watching a play on a stage instead of a professional assassin. When he broke off from his little lecture on lethality, the spell broke, and she realized that she'd still been clutching the knife. After a moment's hesitation, she put it away, stuffing it clumsily into its sheath and returning it beneath her silken robes. It clearly wouldn't have done much good anyways.
The revelation that Nina was simply off doing some mundane errand let her finally breathe and relax, although she still cast a wary eye at Gray. Even though he seemed non-threatening enough, there was an aura of danger around him, like a temporarily satiated predator. The man was harmless because he chose to be, and Theodosia had the distinct sense that he could choose not to be in the blink of an eye. Perhaps leaving would be better...but no, Nina would probably be here soon enough. When he spoke her name however, she froze, disgusted at the sound of her own name coming from such a twisted being. The fact that he was staring directly at her bust wasn't helping, and she wondered how long it had been since he'd seen a woman other than Nina. Surely the two of them didn't have that sort of relationship...shuddering, she decided that she'd rather not imagine such things. His words were puzzling, and she cast a confused glance down at herself before realizing what he was talking about. Letting out a surprised gasp, she crossed her arms protectively in front of her chest, hiding the little doll face that poked curiously out from the neckline of her dress.
"I don't like that you know my name," she said, her emphasizing her words with an accusatory jab of her finger. "We've never met, not really. Dreams don't count, and it's rude to go wandering into other people's heads. As for your aura...it's the fault of that damned clock."
She gestured vaguely towards the stubby tower, feeling the soft ticking against her skin emanating from the little doll. When she'd made the creature, she'd stuffed it with little more than cotton fluff and scraps of cloth, but it seemed that some part of the clock tower's magic had manifested something more mechanical inside the little felt man. The doll seemed to be reacting to the clock tower's proximity, ticking in a way that she'd never been able to feel before. Theodosia shuddered, wondering how much she still didn't know about the clock's mysterious magic. Perhaps Gray would be able to help, if he didn't decide to shroud everything he said in riddles. Turning away from him out of modesty, she fished the Gray-doll out from the front of her dress and gave it a pat on the head. The doll squirmed in her grasp, and she turned back to Gray and held the little facsimile of him out.
"It's you," she said, pointing at the soot-colored cloak that the doll wore. "I made it to look like you. I...I made a lot of dolls, all of people I had grudges against. The clock tower brought them all to life, I don't know how. The others have since left, but this one stayed. He's a lot sweeter than you, Gray. I think I like this one better."
Stepping up cautiously, she held the doll out for Gray to see, ready to pull it back if he snatched at it. She didn't trust the man, but she trusted Nina. Of course, she was pretty sure Nina didn't trust him either, but she at least respected him. That was worth something, at least.
"Would you like a seed cake, Gray?" she asked, as though a cake might appease him enough to not slit her throat. "They're made with...oh, I don't know. Some kind of seeds that grow on bushes in the woods. They taste a bit like tea."
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Gray
Dedicated
Roleplay posts: 124
Registered: Jul 2, 2021 10:00:37 GMT -5
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Post by Gray on Apr 20, 2022 4:08:43 GMT -5
Contrary to what Theodosia might expect, Gray could be charming. It paid for a noble's assassin to be able to mingle with the people he was meant to kill. It didn't come naturally to him, however. He'd had to learn what made people tick, and he wasn't yet sure about Theodosia. But there were a few universal levers. Praise, to start with.
“It was a comfortable mind to be in.” He said.
Observe response. Wrong. Once again, he felt that hollow left in his mind. Mental landscapes that he had built up over a lifetime, and had been burnt down to bare rock. He pushed on.
“That damned clock indeed.”
Empathy, he knew, could be a powerful poison.
The question about his aura was answered in a roundabout way. A tiny doll version of Gray was presented to him, a living doll. It felt like the waves stayed still. The white-haired assassin went down on one knee. Was it truly living?
“Was it you in my dream?” He asked. “Nina said a doll helped her, right at the end.” He had imagined, he realized, some sort of elaborate porcelain mannequin, but the small cloth figure looked in its plainness more like a folded-paper shikigami that would be rubbed on someone to capture their demons, their sins. Nina had told him about the runaway dolls, and to leave them alone. She had not forbidden, it occurred to Gray, interacting with dolls that hadn't run away. “What is your name, little one?”
He reached out towards the small creature, and stopped almost instantly. His hand, he realized, had blood on it still. His eyes darted towards his robe-like garments, towards the Tower, back towards his hand. Were there any pieces of cloth on him that hadn't been contaminated with poisonous plants? Just planning how to get a bandage felt very exhausting. He pulled his hand back.
The buttons sewn on the miniature's face were almost as unblinking as the man's washed-out blue eyes. Perhaps in another life Gray would have dismissed the toy, knowing it to be preferable for people to be ignorant of your interests, or even indebt themselves asking you about them. But that part of his mind felt fragile, so he stared, until the young woman spoke again.
“Unknown seeds from the forest.” Gray commented, standing up. He paused. “Yes, I would like cake. I would offer you tea, if you'd be fine with that.”
Nina, it occurred to the man, did not have his training in resisting poison. He wouldn't lose her to something this stupid if she returned. He tilted his head, and thought he heard, just a bit closer, a ticking sound.
“Let us move away,” he said, and led Theodosia and the doll up the shore. He wondered how much of him did the doll truly share, and how would it have felt to be carried around on a woman chest. Not uncomfortable or comfortable enough to bear thinking about, he figured. He struggled not to think about the Clock. Towards the white sandstone cliffs, he walked, past the damp rocks that the tide reached. There was a small cave in the sandstone – it had leaves in it, like a nest, but Gray didn't go that far. He only briefly reached past its rough edges to pick up a rice straw mat, which he spread on the white sandstone dust outside, some way from the entrance. There was a fire pit nearby, which he uncovered and fed with nearby branches, then put a kettle of water to boil.
He supposed most people wouldn't pick up the hot rocks with their hands, but in the moment it had felt exhausting to plan otherwise.
He then went back to the Tower, returning with a couple of things including a flat earthenware pot with a tree in it. The tree was barely the height of his forearm, and it was draped with moss and clusters of tiny, purple flowers with a sweet fragrance. It was not a sapling, but rather a miniature of a full-grown, wind-swept tree one might find on an exposed cliff. He set it to the side, and knelt on one edge of the straw mat. He set up cracked, painted ceramic cups (which had once been flowerpots); carefully, he broke off clusters of tiny flowers. His fingers brushed over clumps of unusually pale leaves, over the grey stem. 'Poor thing,' he thought, 'it's stress-blooming.'
Using the comma-like stretch of the bark that had broken off alongside the flowers, he hooked them to the side of the cups. Then he poured in hot water. The infusion went deep pink.
“Wisteria.” He explained. “Nearly all parts of the plant are poisonous, apart from the flowers.”
There was barely any sound as he set up matching, heavy-set plates in symmetrical positions, and gestured for Theodosia to share her cake, if she was still so inclined. He left the kettle handy. Somehow, he had never touched things that she would use with his injured hand. He asked whether she had a piece of clean cloth he could use as a bandage.
The tea was ready. Gray picked up the inflorescences by their stems, and set them in an extra plate. He reached for flowerpot-mug but his eyes, like a few times before, darted towards the sea. Towards the Tower. His hand raised as if to shield his eyes from the sun, went past his shoulder to grasp the hilt of his heavy, hand-and-half sword, which he took out and set on the soft sand separating them from the shore. Gray then picked up his mug.
“This might be safer. Beings are most dangerous when they are pushed to their limits. The Clocktower is dying.” He sipped his tea.
“Of course, so is Nina.”
((ooc: When I wrote this I took 'flowers' to mean inflorescences, but in retrospect I'm not sure whether the tiny stems connecting flowers are supposed to be safe or not. Please do not use this rp post as cooking guidelines : p ))
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Theodosia Planchette
Committed
Roleplay posts: 80
Appearance: Theodosia stands at a fairly average, unimpressive height. Her red hair and numerous golden piercings and ornaments are quite eye-catching, although her tendency to glare at people often dissuades a second glance. She wears a number of bright silks and elaborately patterned robes befitting a proper fortune-teller. The twisting, vine-like tattoos on her arms are actually just painted on, a fact that she tries to keep hidden from people.
Skills and Abilities: Theodosia is a trained fortune-teller, gifted with the ability to see through the mists of time and pluck upon the threads of fate...or so she claims. Whether she actually possesses any such skills can be questionable at times, but her knowledge of fortune-telling methods (from cards to ashes to chicken entrails) is unrivaled.
Registered: Mar 28, 2021 21:11:09 GMT -5
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Post by Theodosia Planchette on May 8, 2022 20:40:07 GMT -5
As Gray spoke, Theodosia found herself struck with the growing sense that the man standing before her wasn't a human being. He had the face of a man, but the way he moved seemed off somehow. It was like watching some massive, predatory insect as it crept towards its prey, freezing stock-still every now and then as it waited for the perfect moment to strike. The effect was uncanny, tickling some long-forgotten part of her subconscious that her ancestors had reserved for bears and other large predators. She swallowed hard, resisting the urge to step back. Could somebody who'd killed so many people really be a human? She'd heard some say that murder was the most egregious sin that one could commit, tearing apart one's humanity and leaving them little more than a beast. Of course, others claimed that taking a life was the most natural thing a human could do. Theodosia wasn't sure that she liked either theory, especially when she thought about Nina. Did the gears and wires in her body make her less of a human? Shaking her head, she tried to put the thought out of her mind and focus on what Gray was saying. The admission that her mind had been comfortable for him was anything but reassuring, and she wondered what she ought to do to make it less so. Perhaps she ought to find some books to read before bed, things that Gray would disapprove of...but what could that be? Nina would know, surely.
When Gray reached for the doll, Theodosia instinctively pulled it back, pressing the little creature protectively into her chest. The blood on his hand stood out sharply against his skin, and she wondered once again where it had come from. If not Nina...then who? Was it his own? Did Gray even bleed anymore, or did oil run through his veins? She wanted so desperately to ask, but wasn't sure if she wanted to know the answer. People who knew things were loose ends, and she knew as well as anyone that stray threads had to be severed. Instead, she simply nodded at his offer of tea and followed him to the little cave in the cliffs.
"He doesn't have a name," she said, hugging the little doll closely. "I suppose I could call him Gray, but I'd hate to give him such an awful name. I wouldn't be able to look at him the same way."
Would this be where he buried her, she wondered? If he decided to kill her after all, would anybody ever find her body? Would anyone even care to look? It wasn't as though she had very many real friends, and mysteriously vanishing into the wilderness was just the sort of thing one would expect from a fortune-teller. If anyone found her, they'd know she'd been a fraud...but that wouldn't matter anymore, she supposed.
Taking a seat on the mat, Theodosia watched as Gray stoked the fire and heated up a pot of water. She cringed as he shuffled the hot rocks with his bare hands, wondering if he even felt the pain or if his hands were as cold and unfeeling as the steel blades he so obviously adored. The tea, at the very least, was pleasantly fragrant. She'd never drank anything quite so pink before, but knew as well as anyone else how rare tea leaves were these days. She'd need to find something in the woods that she could make into tea soon enough.
"Thank you," she said, accepting a teacup. Reaching into her basket, she pulled out a couple of small, round cakes dotted with dark brown seeds and placed them on a handkerchief between the two of them. The doll sat snugly in her clothes and watched, its head poking out from her bust like a curious gopher.
"I've never had tea made from something so poisonous," she said, blowing on the steaming beverage before taking a cautious sip. "How many people fell ill before they learned that the flowers were the only safe part? I'd be so easy to make a mistake, so easy to slip the wrong piece of the plant into the kettle. I suppose you've done that many times over, Gray. How many poisoned cups of tea have you served?"
It was strange, Theodosia thought, how much comfort could be wrought from familiarity. Despite the strange, frightening assassin sitting just a few paces away, the simple act of drinking tea and eating cakes made the whole scene seem calm and safe. If she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend that she was in her little caravan wagon back home, preparing to welcome a new customer and tell them tales of good fortune and success. How could she have known that those would have been the happiest days of her life? A moment later, however, Gray shattered her illusion of comfort like a dropped teacup. She choked on her tea, coughing and sputtering as she stared wide-eyed at his calm, expressionless face. How could he say such a thing so easily?
"W-what do you mean?" she demanded, feeling a familiar tremor return to her hands. "What do you mean that Nina is dying, Gray? Is she ill? Something worse? What are you talking about? You can't just say that, Gray! Is there a way to help her? To save her? What's going on?"
Sensing her distress, the doll vanished inside her clothing, hiding itself away from the world as the panic rose in Theodosia's chest. She ignored it, trying to take another sip from her tea and letting out a hiss of pain as she spilled it on herself. The doll emerged once more, soaking up some of the spilled tea with its body and dying its sooty gray cloak bright pink.
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Gray
Dedicated
Roleplay posts: 124
Registered: Jul 2, 2021 10:00:37 GMT -5
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Post by Gray on May 17, 2022 15:23:26 GMT -5
“Five hundred sixty-three.” Gray said.
A pause.
“That I remember.”
It mattered not that he found the lack of remembering distressing. It mattered not that most of those tea cups had been cases of self-poisoning, with some of the rest, torture, and only a minority, genuine assassination.
“The burning taste would reveal wisteria poison. That is, if you had been careless enough to ignore the strange foam atop it.” Gray explained. He stroked the edge of his mug. “There are better poisons to match with tea.”
The man had been since long fascinated by the idea of making himself immune to poison – of taking an imperfect human body and shaping it to his will, just like using wire to bend the soul of a bonsai-tree into art. Or so he had once thought...
Gray tenderly picked up a cake. A muscle along his jaw spasmed as he ate – he hadn't eaten for a long time – and he relied on the tea not to inconspicuously choke to death. He hadn't had water for a long time. As he moved, the sunburn on his face felt like it was cracking to reveal fine lines of smouldering embers.
“Lovely cake.” Praise. “Still soft in the centre.” Specific praise. “Did you make it?” Control.
No tell-tale sign of peach-seed taste, he thought. But there could be other poisons, more subtle, hidden in the wilderness of this world.
Gray reached for another cake.
He reached with his black glove and there was the faintest tremor alongside it, as if something inside him was fighting it.
Seeds crunched in his teeth. It was a delicious cake.
And so, he gave Theodosia the news and raised an eyebrow as if the girl's reaction was somehow unexpected. (The doll didn't react). Shock, he had found, often worked better than pain. One's mask tended to slip when placed on unsteady ground, revealing their core. Gray needed to know who Theodosia was at the core in order to be able to use her. She was intelligent – anyone who could get cake when resourceful Nina roasted tree bark to remember bread, had to be. He watched the lightly steaming pink stain of tea spread across fabric. And, oh, it looked like she'd been shaken quite well indeed.
“Take those clothes off.” He said. Barely lifting his knees from the mat, the man turned the opposite way. “I'd advise. The fabric is trapping the heat close to your skin. May blister.” He pointed over his left shoulder with a piece of cake, at the wooden barrel half-hidden under the greenery by the cliff, in which he'd dipped the kettle earlier. “Cold water, that way.”
He wondered if the tremor was but the initial effect of the mystery seeds. Nerve poisons had since long been among Gray's favorites.
“To answer your questions.” The man said. A breeze shifted his ponytail, revealing a scar in the shape of a gear. “If someone cut the threads of that doll, would it be free, or would it be dead?” His gaze clung to a stray silvery cloud in the sky. “The Clocktower's magic is what's fuelling my masterpiece. Without the control of those strings, Nina's wild magic will gradually drain her dry.” His voice grew soft, almost tender. “Like a puddle capable of growing waves too large for it. Like breathing out without fully managing to breathe in again...” He got the woman right where he wanted her, Gray thought. It just wouldn't do to ask people for help. They'd suspect anything and everything. They'd fight back. “Is there a way to help her, you ask. Let me rephrase that.” He motioned a snap of his fingers. “What can you do? Fortune-teller. Doll.”
It was generally more practical to let people feel accomplished for defying him in order to do his bidding.
((ooc: The observation on wisteria poison is mostly fiction. The true part is that it may cause a burning sensation in the mouth (along with gastric upset), which disincentives continuing to eat it and, therefore, reduces lethality. The part with the strange foam is invented, but is based on the fact that the dangerous compounds belong to a class known as saponins, many which form foams (e.g. in soap or beer) ))
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Theodosia Planchette
Committed
Roleplay posts: 80
Appearance: Theodosia stands at a fairly average, unimpressive height. Her red hair and numerous golden piercings and ornaments are quite eye-catching, although her tendency to glare at people often dissuades a second glance. She wears a number of bright silks and elaborately patterned robes befitting a proper fortune-teller. The twisting, vine-like tattoos on her arms are actually just painted on, a fact that she tries to keep hidden from people.
Skills and Abilities: Theodosia is a trained fortune-teller, gifted with the ability to see through the mists of time and pluck upon the threads of fate...or so she claims. Whether she actually possesses any such skills can be questionable at times, but her knowledge of fortune-telling methods (from cards to ashes to chicken entrails) is unrivaled.
Registered: Mar 28, 2021 21:11:09 GMT -5
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Post by Theodosia Planchette on Jun 6, 2022 19:12:21 GMT -5
Five hundred and sixty-three poisonings. The number seemed almost absurd to Theodosia's ear, an abstract value so ludicrously high that it couldn't possibly be real. She'd expected three or four, perhaps a dozen if Gray was especially prolific. Hundreds, though...it was unimaginable. An entire village worth of people, choking and writhing on the ground as the poisoned tea burned in their throats. Fathers, mothers, butchers, bakers...all falling victim to teacups as innocuous as the one she'd just sipped from. How could he speak of such horrors so causally? He was worse than a monster, more akin to a plague - a god of death, seated before her and munching on her cakes. Over five hundred poisonings, and just from tea alone. Did she dare ask how many others he'd killed? How many had merely been knifed in the neck or thrown from castle walls? Theodosia wanted so desperately to ask, but feared that if she knew she'd have no choice but to run home in terror. Instead, she just watched as Gray took another cake, chewing as causally as though he'd been talking about the weather. If she tried to eat a cake now, Theodosia thought, she'd choke on it for sure. Her throat had gone as dry as old paper, and she could only nod when he asked if she'd made the cake. Flour was hard to come by these days, but she'd managed to get her hands on some of the increasingly dwindling supply thanks to a particularly superstitious supply officer. Sugar was even scarcer, but she'd figured it would be worth it to make Nina a treat. Who knew they'd all be devoured by this ghoul instead?
The utter depravity of his casual admission had shocked her so much that she'd forgotten about the scalding pain across her chest. Gray's suggestion that she disrobe reminded her of the stinging burn, and she flushed bright red at the sheer brazenness of his words. _Perhaps there was part of him that was still a man after all,_ she thought, eyeing him suspiciously to make sure he wasn't going to turn back around. The thought scared her even worse, and she shuddered. It was easy to blame atrocities on monsters, but to see them committed by human hands was something else entirely. She wondered briefly if she really ought to disrobe, to make herself even more vulnerable before this demon of a man...but the tea really was quite hot, and she certainly didn't want blisters over her bust. Casting one last cautious glance at Gray, she cast off her robes and undid her bodice, placing the now-pink doll gently on the ground. Running over to the barrel, she splashed it on herself, letting herself relax for a moment as the cool, refreshing water soothed the pain of the burns. After a few minutes, she returned to the kettle and pulled a dry shawl from her basket. It would have to do, although she wished that it wasn't so sheer. There was no way she'd ever be seen in front of the townsfolk like this...but somehow, Gray seemed different. He was a man, yet not a man. Almost like her dolls, but not quite.
"Cutting a doll's threads will kill it," she replied, shuddering at the memory of the doll-doppelganger that she'd buried with Nina, covered in trinkets and gold. "As surely as severing a man's throat. I know this. Are you telling me that Nina is little more than a doll, kept aloft by the Clocktower's strings? Surely there must be some way to help her, something we can do. Something you can do."
If keeping Nina alive meant keeping the Clocktower alive, Theodosia was willing to do whatever it took. However, when Gray inquired after her own abilities, she hesitated. What did Gray know? Surely his intimate connection with the tower would be far more valuable than anything she could provide. Still...if it helped Nina, how could she say no? She thought for a moment, chewing on her lip.
"What can I do?" she repeated, holding out her arm to let the rather moist doll clamber up to her shoulder. "Certainly nothing that you'd be interested in, death-monger. I don't stab or poison or cut. That's not the work hands were made for, and most certainly not mine. I'm a fortune-teller, a soothsayer, a mystic. I read palms and cards, toss knucklebones and hold seances. I peer beyond the veil, speaking with such unfortunate souls as the ones you send to the next life. I'm sure you know how the game is played, Gray. I've read your cards, twisted as they were. As for the doll...I'm not sure, actually. What do you do?"
She turned her head to look at the doll, which waved its arms at her from its perch upon her shoulder. Shaking her head, she turned back to Gray, wincing slightly as the doll hopped off her shoulder and nestled itself back upon her still-stinging chest.
"I'm not sure what the doll does," she said, petting its damp head. "He dances and waves, but other than that...I don't really know. Watches, mostly. He's good at watching."
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Gray
Dedicated
Roleplay posts: 124
Registered: Jul 2, 2021 10:00:37 GMT -5
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Post by Gray on Jun 19, 2022 6:47:59 GMT -5
“Rōsen. From rosengris. Pink-gray.”
“It is fine if you do not like it.” Gray told the little doll. His stare was like being pinned with pieces of horizon. “Names can be changed. But everyone ought to have a name.” He had turned to the others after rustles of cloth indicated he may do so. “Rōsen. Acceptable?”
The quiet moment had been terrible to the man. His jaw clenched, and his stomach recoiled. Time brought down on him more thoughts than he could bear. A poisonous thought had taken seed. 'What if the cakes are safe?'
If it was not poison, that meant it was food. The idea filled him with numb terror. To that, added the heady feeling of seeing the doll that carried a part of his soul. Part of his soul that broke in torture. A little thing with no name, just as he had been, once. Perhaps the watchful instrument of the Clocktower; perhaps the only thing that could stop it. Just like him. A little thing that watched and danced.
Gray remembered once being an acrobat with a silver mask.
It wasn't jealousy that he felt, not quite. Just a pain that was too bright to put in words. And among it, snaked the cracks revealing hollow, labyrinthine spaces underneath.
“I tried.” Gray had said, when Theodosia asked him to help Nina.
He couldn't even remember everything that he had given up. For how long had he plotted this, tinkering with the clockwork while his apprentice grew cold and weak, barely sustained by the drugged sleep that kept her from starvation? His memories. His sanity. His life. Then the last thing he had, his sacrifice, had been denied.
Now, in the aftermath, he couldn't even do something as simple as talking without reaching in his mind for pieces of sentences that he could barely catch and that just about fit the situation, like trying to place gears in a constantly-moving mechanism.
“As remarkable as you may find it, I am capable of appreciating skill that I do not possess.” Sarcasm? Sarcasm seemed to fit. Blank-toned as always. “Rather, I welcome it.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. It was all too much, too much to piece together. But weakness had never been an option.
“You can talk to dead people.” Gray checked. Euphemisms did not translate perfectly. “Do they have to be people I personally killed? Or would a less, shall we say, personal connection suffice?” He watched carefully. As if to answer Theodosia's earlier question, or to hint at the great things he expected from her, or perhaps simply out of words, the man swiped his hand over the space between them, putting down three playing cards.
The Marionette. The Journey. The King. The dark cards Theodosia had read for him, the cards which Nina later found in his fragmented mind and played. She'd played them in reverse, unknowingly, he explained, and they'd been changed by the process. The Marionette, still wounded by its strings, now looked uncannily much like Nina, with its blue outfit and beaded string hair. Yet the posture was no longer of a prisoner. There was force, grace even, as the marionette seemed to put everything into pulling the strings of whatever lay above.
The Journey card had gone entirely black, with a single bright dot in the middle.
The King card had changed the most. Formerly a decapitated head, it now simply showed an inset of the former's crown, in such exquisite detail that one might almost mistake it for the drawing of a castle. The filigree had become bas-reliefs; the gems, stained-glass windows. A drip of blood and an unruly white hair hanging over it betrayed its grim truth. Yet, looking even more closely, one could see that single hair becoming a rope, and miniature figures escaping down it from the castle that had been their prison.
These were the cards that shouldn't have existed and, in the way, they still didn't. Gray fumbled when touching them, in part because his fingers seemed to go through the edges. It seemed to happen more with the last two. These cards, his gesture seemed to say, have power.
And still, he couldn't believe he was saying this. “There is someone I would like to talk to. I am fairly sure I have not killed him. But I have watched him wither and die, and I know that he is dead because he told me just that.” He remembered the figure in a purple-and-orange kimono, growing translucent and afraid. The Detective had known that the mists would kill him. Gray had talked him through his fears, as he talked to many of his clients. “I never thought much of him, for I thought him a conman. He might be the only...thing in the world, the the Clocktower is afraid of.”
Gray's bloody hand grabbed wrapped around his other wrist.
“His name is...” He struggled to recall. “Yours Truly.”
A pause.
“No, not-...” Gray lightly gestured. An eyebrow raised. “His name is literarily that.”
Even in his fifth language, Gray knew the difference between 'literarily' and 'literally'. He meant it.
His eyes pinned Theodosia in place.
“What do you need?”
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Theodosia Planchette
Committed
Roleplay posts: 80
Appearance: Theodosia stands at a fairly average, unimpressive height. Her red hair and numerous golden piercings and ornaments are quite eye-catching, although her tendency to glare at people often dissuades a second glance. She wears a number of bright silks and elaborately patterned robes befitting a proper fortune-teller. The twisting, vine-like tattoos on her arms are actually just painted on, a fact that she tries to keep hidden from people.
Skills and Abilities: Theodosia is a trained fortune-teller, gifted with the ability to see through the mists of time and pluck upon the threads of fate...or so she claims. Whether she actually possesses any such skills can be questionable at times, but her knowledge of fortune-telling methods (from cards to ashes to chicken entrails) is unrivaled.
Registered: Mar 28, 2021 21:11:09 GMT -5
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Post by Theodosia Planchette on Jul 2, 2022 14:06:07 GMT -5
Theodosia paused for a moment, rolling over Gray's suggested name in her head. Rosengris...it was an oddly cute name to come from such a monstrous entity, but it seemed to fit. Looking down at the doll, she watched as it bobbed its head up and down happily at the new name and sighed. It'd do, she supposed.
"Rosen, then," she said, testing to see how the name felt in her mouth. "Not a bad name. And you're right, everyone needs a name. If they don't have one of their own, they might be tempted to take someone else's. It's a horrible fate, living a borrowed life under a borrowed name. Where does your namesake end? Where do you begin? I saw it happen, you know. Your tower made a copy of me, picking and pulling from silks and other pretty things until it had built another me. It...didn't end well. I don't imagine anything that clock of yours makes ends well."
Except Nina, she thought, hugging herself and shivering. Nina was the exception, she had to be. Otherwise...well, there really wasn't an alternative. Surely she wouldn't fray at the seams or become a monster that had to be put down. Theodosia simply couldn't imagine it.
Nor, she found, could she imagine the fact that Gray didn't know how her "powers" worked. Hadn't he understood that her abilities were little more than a scam, a game of teasing information out of a rube with trickery and deception? He had to know that, surely...but before she could speak, Gray pulled out the cards and her stomach twisted. The cards before her weren't supposed to exist. They couldn't exist. Reaching out a tentative finger to prod one, she hesitated and stopped. If she touched something that wasn't real, what would that make her? Something less than real herself? A piece of make-believe, just like the cards before her? The thought chilled her to her bone. The doll shivered against her chest, as though sensing her mood.
"W-where did you get those?" she demanded, turning her gaze back up to Gray. "That's not what the Deck of Fates is supposed to look like. You know that as well as I do. These came to us in a dream, Gray. Dreams aren't the real world. These shouldn't be here. What did you do?"
Her tone turned accusatory as her gaze flicked back and forth between the cards and the silent, unmoving Gray. They weren't exactly how she'd seen them in her dream, which unsettled her further. The twisted cards had been bad enough when she'd been asleep, but these seemed to have been changed further. A corruption of a corruption. Did that make things better, or worse? It didn't matter, really. The cards weren't supposed to be here, and yet they were. The real and unreal had become intertwined, and Theodosia feared that she'd soon find herself twisted in between them like a silk ribbon in a braid. Perhaps, though...perhaps that was what she needed. Nina was inextricably twisted in with the workings of the clock, after all. Maybe, if she embraced a little bit of the unreal, Theodosia would begin to untangle her.
"Reality is a canvas embroidered with stories," she said slowly. "Nina told me that. I'm sure you know that my readings and seances are little more than storytelling, but stories have had a habit of stitching themselves into reality as of late. I...I think I can help you, Gray. I can call upon this Yours Truly of yours, your mystical con man. Who was he, Gray? To you? To everyone else? I need to know him not just through your eyes, but through the world's. I can't tell a story about a man I don't know, you know."
Taking a deep breath, she glanced around the beach and eyed the little cave. It wasn't the best setting for a seance, but it'd do. She'd never done one so underdressed before, though. She was a fortune-teller in fortune-teller's clothes, but what was she without them? Would it matter?
"We need darkness," she said. "That's how it always goes, isn't it? People want a seance in the dark. The shadows let them believe, let their imagination run free. Candles, too. Incense. I don't suppose you have a crystal ball? If not, a mirror will do. Oh, and something of his, if you've got it. If not...I suppose a memory will do. An anecdote. Something tangible, to prove he was real. Of course, I suppose we're past the point of caring about what's real anymore."
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Gray
Dedicated
Roleplay posts: 124
Registered: Jul 2, 2021 10:00:37 GMT -5
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Post by Gray on Jul 20, 2022 14:01:21 GMT -5
Words. Words with barbs on them, dragging across his mind. Wrong presumptions, but that was part of the game. Gray knew. People never share quite as much as when they are trying to prove you wrong. How brave, he thought, for this young woman to prod him such. Scraping words, against his mind, to try to get him to speak. Clever. That's what she was doing, wasn't it? Empty-eyed, he tried to find his way through the flicker of words between them. Perhaps he had played these games for so long that he could no longer recognize what was real.
Those barbs would have been painless, but for the wounds underneath. How much of him was of the Tower...? He had wondered for so long.
It no longer mattered. The heartbeat of the clock, that had reverberated inside him for so long, he could no longer hear. For so long he had tried to destroy something beautiful and terrifying, growing stronger from the love and dread he held for it. He had been changed by trying to best it, by being bested in turn.
He had won.
And nothing mattered any longer.
It was a struggle to pull himself out of his mind, and place himself behind Theodosia's eyes. A much simpler world, where good was good and bad was bad, and he was perhaps the greatest monster she had encountered in her short life. A wraith that held the life of her friend on a string.
And that's how it had to stay.
A finger slowly zigzagged down to a tea mug.
“What you saw was a lightning strike. Power, astray.” He explained. “If you wish to never risk having that power directed right against you, leave. I have no need for you.” He had no energy left for words. His voice went audibly quieter. “If you wish to help Nina, stay.”
He didn't say, 'I cannot do it on my own.'
Yet there was something about the man, as he took in the fortune-teller's shock, her confession. A hunger that she might not understand at first. That he did not. The way those cool eyes seemed to slide slightly behind her when she said, 'I can help you'. The way he stood up, saying nothing, and walked towards the Tower.
A mirror. A candle; tallow, not wax. A sun-shaped bit of plant material, offered in the palm of a black leather glove as he returned.
An executioner's black cloak, swung over the entrance to the cave as a makeshift curtain. The curtain, held aside for a moment.
An invitation.
Inside the cave, it was cool. The sandstone walls had a rugged appearance, as if carved by human hand. A bloody handprint, straight ahead. Something bone-like clinking on the floor as one crosses the threshold. The end of an antler mattock. It had been worked dull. A niche carved into the wall had been polished down to something roughly resembling a bench on each side, and ahead, a coarser wall suggested ongoing digging work.
It later occurred to him that he could have been sitting, but his body was pulled by reflexes to lie down onto a bench. He looked up at the shadow-tinted ceiling.
“Regrettably, we will have to kill Nina,” Gray spoke. “Otherwise, we will die of boredom. This is what he told me.”
It was the tone he was using. It was still his voice, but when he spoke as another, it was expressive, with swirling ups and downs. This voice fizzed like a glass of sparkling wine chilled to just the right temperature.
“It is either her or us, really.” A shrug. “'The victim fell on a dagger, accidentally, in self-defence.'”
There was silence, that in a way Gray managed to convey as not simply the absence of sound in the presence or past, but rather the bone-chilling intensity he had replied with.
When he spoke again, there was a tremor in the wine.
“She is already forgetting us. We can't even bear to show ourselves when she is awake. She finds it too distressing.”
The sudden switch in tones, for one of the participants in the memory conversation, suggested that the exchange may have been carried out across multiple times.
“Gray, listen. Listen. We are afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of death.”
Switch.
“Gray, listen. We have to betray Nina. We need your help.” A heady summertime wine, swirling in a glass. “Our secrets, her secrets, have at them. This is my price.” An unexpected depth. Sharpness. A bitter taste. “There must be someone who will not forget. Do you understand?”
An intake of air.
“Hear that?” The flick of a sleeve, suggesting someone turning. “Should we go?”
“I have increased her dose of drugs.” The blank voice was unmistakable. “She should be out for at least a week. Sufficient time, I believe, for you to speak. For me to listen.”
The tension of a glass bracing against an inevitable fall.
“Ask away.”
He remembered. Gray knew he remembered that conversation better than many events of his life. The damp halflight. The feel of gears in his hands as he tinkered with them. The detective behind them on the other side of the room, the only splotch of colour in the endless mist. He had promised. He wondered – if the gears had ground up his mind for much longer, would he have become the detective by the virtue of him being the last thing he forgot?
“Do you remember what you are?” The blank voice was soft, almost hypnotic.
A huff, behind bloodied fingers coquettishly spread to resemble a fan.
“We could tell you again, but you would never fully understand.”
“A living story.” Pause. “This is what you told me.”
A small shake of the head. The clink of a wrist, as the fan snapped closed.
“You see stories as stemming from people, shaped by the people who move them along.”
“And?”
“Without stories, there would be no people. You're thinking on the wrong scale. From our perspective, it is people who barely exist. Pawns in the pattern. Such simple beings, it took us the longest time to realize you are even alive.”
“Where did you begin?”
“In the endless winters of the south. In the howl of the wind, as it almost resembled a voice, scattering the snow. In the Tower, in pain and a will that lingered beyond death. In books, a legendary library with grey-green arabesque-patterned rugs and golden bumblebees, where so many volumes were gathered that the writing they contained collapsed onto itself-”
“They can't all be true.”
“Different parts of me have their own stories. We can never quite agree.”
“Which is to say, you don't remember.”
A pause.
“We were different back then. Not...conscious. Perhaps not alive.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever had a piece of song stuck in your mind? A joke that you found yourself sharing – no, I expect not.” The character that Gray had conjured gestured more freely, and did so with the abandon on an actor on stage. “An idea that shaped your life so thoroughly that you found it only natural to carry it on?”
That self-aggrandizing bastard, Gray thought. He knew.
“That's what we are. You think you control information. We see the patterns of information that control you, spymaster, using people to multiply and spread. The most successful variants pass on, and the cycle repeats again, again, again. Not alive, not most of them. But resembling a disease if you look at them sideways, and we more than many.”
“How did you meet Nina?”
“Alone. Numb. Her first winter-night in the south. A silence so deafening you could hear snowflakes falling. She cracked. We slipped through.”
“You said disease. You made her sick?”
“Not intentionally. We did not carry the capacity for intent, any more than a wound-worm that burrows into the soft flesh beneath it.” There was a curious fascination in those words. “Imagine, if you will, a dream. A crime has been committed – this is the 'case'.” A finger pointed up, before turning to Theodosia. “You are meant to solve it – you are 'the detective'. You talk to people and you look for clues in the shape of footprints in sand. To avenge the 'victim', you must find the 'criminal'.”
“This is your skeleton, is it not?” Gray's flat voice commented. “Just like mine is bone.”
“Correct. However...” Gray tapped his chin.
“However?”
“You cannot solve the case. The dream restarts, and you try again, but your choices bends the story around you. Even when you find the likely culprit in time, it turns out that someone else has taken advantage of the distraction to commit the audacious murder.” The voice picked up the pace. “Everyone is the culprit at some point, even he victim, even the detective. The detective is the victim, too. It is the endless permutation of the perfect crime.”
“What happened to Nina?”
“One dream became ten, a hundred, ten thousand dreams per night, happening at once in a mind that wasn't made to hold them. Nina grew drained and unresponsive.” A grin slowly grew on the assassin's face. A copy of a grin. “Afraid, but she had turned to us when the silence was killing her, so she could no longer throw us out. Young, so she didn't understand just how unusual was what was happening to her. Not that we did either. Not that most people would. We began to fill her waking hours. And every hour was as long as all he time that came before it.”
'How old was she?”
“Ten.”
“Do you think that she conjured you out of her magic?”
“Torturer.” There was a pause. “We have our pride.”
There was another pause, and then he continued.
“Had the wind carried us to any other village, we may have devoured it whole. Been carried from person to person in snippets of nonsense, and burned ourselves out among the catatonic corpses. Stranger things happen in the southern winter.” The expressive voice sounded slightly sheepish. “We landed in the one place with not one, but two shamans, who were happily married and really loved their granddaughter.” Very sheepish. “They realized exactly what they were dealing with.”
“Are there others like you?”
“In Nina's travels we have come across legends, of songs that make entire villages sing and dance to exhaustion. Symbols in ancient books that cannot be forgotten, or cannot be remembered. For a mad old tribe-mother in the deserts to the West, it was something called Zahir, and for her it was a grain of sand. But no, not quite like us. Not quite alive. There was only other that had the potential to become as complex. We killed her for Nina. We don't think she realizes just what it took of us.” There was a tremor in the expressive voice.
“You were telling me about her grandparents.”
“They did something that parts of us can only consider ironic for our violation of Nina's mind: they castrated us.” And just like that, it was back to the self-amused self-importance. “Gray, how do you fight and idea?”
“With another idea.”
“They told her a lullaby. Not like us, not living, but something made with words of power.” The voice was cautious now, as if even summoning the thought carried danger. “We were too deeply lodged in by then to be removed without harm, but they tucked her in and told her a rhyme. A poem that said...” He shuddered. “That sometimes things just end. That everything ends sometime. That there is peace in closing the covers.”
“Just a rhyme?”
“We are information. For us, information is air, food, and arsenic.”
“Tell me the poem of death.”
Gray didn't share it with Theodosia. He just shut his eyes and held a moment of silence. He had forced the detective to repeat it several times, until the man could start to accept it. He remembered the tears, the reassurance he whispered in return. The orange kimono sleeves brushing against the stone floor of the tower. It had not been the first time that he had to support a client who'd broken down, in order to recover more information; he had become quite good at it. He needed that acceptance. Each time, it took the detective more and more effort to appear; more magic, ripped from Nina's already dwindling reserves. He remembered his gear assembly being nearly complete, and knowing that soon enough, the girl will wake up alone on the floating Tower. When he spoke again, it was with the raspy, breathy tone that he remembered of the other.
“Most versions of myself were extinguished outright.” The expressive voice continued. “Some broke into non-replicating shards and were eventually forgotten. As little as one copy of what used to be myself survived, cut off from the rich mental landscape it used to inhabit.”
“What made you survive?”
“It occurred to me that if I can die...” He held out his fingers in front of his face, like a child. “Then I am alive.”
“If you are alive, then you can die.” Gray said.
He remembered the flinch.
“We grew more complex. Had to. There's wasn't enough food – ideas -, we had to use what we had more cleverly. We grew, not replicating, but grew into ourselves. Compared to us then, our earlier form was but a primitive crawling thing we were slightly amused by. And so was our then-form compared to our current. As a side-effect, we became conscious.”
“And yet, you didn't talk to Nina yet, detective... Or are you the detective story?”
“Are you Gray-the-mind, or Gray-as-a-whole? In your world, I play the role of the detective. Inside myself, I am detective and criminal, blood splatter and inefficient town guard. I am the space between clue words, and I am the murder weapon, just as you are blood and sinew and breath. What you see is but a convenient face. If we were to flay off your face, we wonder, what would we find beneath...?”
“You didn't talk to Nina, though you say you lived in her mind for years afterwards.”
“Why would we? Even after we realized that our food may be alive and, indeed, self-aware, in a limited sense of the word, why would we talk to it? She was delicious; her constant travelling kept us entertained. Do you talk to your dessert?”
“At some point you did.”
“And whose fault that was?” The raised eyebrow was almost a perfect replica. “She was risking too much for others. We realized that if she died, then...then...”
“You died too.”
“It could not be allowed.” He clenched his fists. “We had to help.”
“You nearly killed her by taking too much magic out of her.” Gray pointed out. “It took me months to fix that. You nearly killed her again, by dragging her into investigating murders and thefts that she had no business being near-”
“-we were hungry-” the other voice muttered.
“-and you took advantage of her caring nature to do that. You could see her thoughts, so you knew exactly how to manipulate.”
“As opposed to letting only you do that instead? As opposed to having her broken in only the shape that you envisioned? Why, that would have been boring.” Gray smiled. “We had to give her teeth. And we dare say you wouldn't have had it otherwise.”
“Yet you didn't help her to escape the Tower. She had to do it on her own. I can only suspect that you were perusing the mysteries of this place.”
“We are always hungry.”
A pause.
“Besides, it's not as if you didn't use us, either. You had The Greatest Detective in The World” he said, with a grand gesture“– and Nina –“ with a little gesture, “solve mysteries left and right for the Duke. The Sapphire Necklace case. The curse of Witch's bay. The mystery of disappearing accountants.”
“I had Nina investigate.” Gray said simply. “It kept His Grace content enough to allow her her life. You were unreliable, in preferring to appear when you felt like it.” A pause, for he had wished to unsettle the man, followed by a rare smirk. “But you were useful. I did not like relying on you, for I felt your opinion of yourself was undeserved, and yet, somehow you kept surprising me. To think that something – someone – who amounts to a collective illusion could achieve so much.”
“You know why that is, don't you? My shining self-image.” A peal of laughter, sounding somehow wrong coming from the grey-clothed man. “In stories, the detective is always right.”
“Which is why it took you so long to see that you could be wrong, is it not?” Gray spoke and, to the other, it had tasted a bit like poison.
“What gave you the idea that we might be wrong?”
“If you truly thought Nina beneath you, as you originally did, then there would be no question of using the last remains of magic in her mist-poisoned body to sustain you. She would be erased, reduced to a puppet, yet could you just not replace her with one of the many characters inside you? Perhaps you already did.” He was calm. The statement was absurd, yet he had wanted to see the other's reaction. “Yet to me it looks like you are choosing to die, so she may continue to live.”
None of them had said what they both thought: 'but for how long?'
“That is a story for another time.” Weary, the expressive voice faded into nothingness.
Gray turned his head, as if stirring from a dream. He stared at Theodosia, or at least at the place she used to occupy before possibly running away during his ramble.
“You haven't eaten the shikimi seeds, have you?” He asked. “Poisonous. Safe for incense.” Pause. “Mildly sacrilegious. But that person would have probably found humour in using incense meant to call upon a god.”
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Theodosia Planchette
Committed
Roleplay posts: 80
Appearance: Theodosia stands at a fairly average, unimpressive height. Her red hair and numerous golden piercings and ornaments are quite eye-catching, although her tendency to glare at people often dissuades a second glance. She wears a number of bright silks and elaborately patterned robes befitting a proper fortune-teller. The twisting, vine-like tattoos on her arms are actually just painted on, a fact that she tries to keep hidden from people.
Skills and Abilities: Theodosia is a trained fortune-teller, gifted with the ability to see through the mists of time and pluck upon the threads of fate...or so she claims. Whether she actually possesses any such skills can be questionable at times, but her knowledge of fortune-telling methods (from cards to ashes to chicken entrails) is unrivaled.
Registered: Mar 28, 2021 21:11:09 GMT -5
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Post by Theodosia Planchette on Sept 3, 2022 18:15:41 GMT -5
Comfort, Theodosia knew, was the key to any sort of seance. It was important that the client felt comfortable enough in the room that they could speak freely, letting slip the sort of hints and clues that the medium could pick up on and use. Equally important was her own comfort, as hard seats and unfamiliar areas made it difficult for her to concentrate on her work. Her own fortune tents and wagons had always been filled with all manner of cushions and blankets, allowing her to settle in easily and focus on figuring out how to convince her clients to tip her better. This cave, however, bore none of the comforts and trappings that she was used to. It seemed closer to the lair of a beast, or perhaps a silent tomb for a forgotten hermit, than a comfortable ritual room. Was that why Gray had dug it, she wondered? Was this meant to be his final resting spot, once he finally remembered how to die? It seemed appropriate, somehow. Less of a monument to a life and more of a hole that a wild beast would crawl into as it felt the end drawing near.
As Gray laid down on the bench and began to speak, an icy chill ran down Theodosia's back. Nina would have to die? What was he talking about? It wasn't just the words that unsettled her, though. It was the tone, the cadence, the way he held his mouth...if she hadn't been looking at the man, she would have thought that there was someone else in the cave. Clearly, she had misread the situation. She'd thought Gray to be merely the client, but it seemed that the mysterious assassin intended to play the part of the medium as well. That suited Theodosia just fine, but she couldn't help but wonder what exactly her job was here. Besides, if Gray could bring the spirit of this mysterious detective to the surface so easily...had he really ever existed? Was he just a figment of Gray's imagination, another twisted facet of the man's psyche? Sinking down to the ground against the rough-hewn cave wall, Theodosia sat and listened, biting nervously into her knuckle.
It was several moments before Theodosia realized that the conversation she was listening to had been spoken a long while ago. She was watching a macabre sort of play, one where Gray starred in both roles. The darkness of the cave turned the supine form of the assassin into a black silhouette, a shadow puppet upon which Theodosia's mind began to paint two very distinct pictures. A corpse-maker, younger and spryer, but no less deadly. A faceless detective, consulting with a man who was not quite a friend but more than a stranger. The two men swirled and danced in her mind's eye, each taking their turn as the body on the bench as Gray spoke. When the man pointed towards her, she flinched, suddenly feeling as though she'd been thrown upon a stage without having learned her lines. It was an unsettling sensation, like seeing her name appear in a book. She was real, and the shadow-play was the show. The two weren't supposed to intersect.
She sat with bated breath as the bizarre show went on, clutching trembling hands together as Gray asked for the words of the poem. As the living shadow before her took the form of the mysterious detective, she listened, at once anxious to hear it and terrified of what she might learn. Gray kept it from her, however, and the omission jarred her. The recollection was incomplete, a censored copy. The sudden gap in the conversation was like a missing note in a song, just enough to make her notice before the narration continued. Gray, it seemed, had not been the first to hold Nina's strings. Theodosia found herself disliking the image of the detective that she'd conjured, hating the man who seemed to live without a body of his own. Detective or not, he was a monster, someone who'd dragged poor Nina through the ringer and nearly killed her. Really, though...it seemed that Theodosia had begun to find herself in the company of far too many monsters as of late. What did that say about her? She'd read once that the measure of a person could be found in the company they kept. Shuddering, she prayed that her time around Gray hadn't tipped the scales too much.
When the recollection ended and Gray awoke once more, she rose shakily to her feet and pulled aside the curtain over the cave entrance. Light, that was what she needed. Warm, clean sunlight to wash away the nightmares and ground her firmly in reality. Turning back to Gray, she shook her head, unsure as to what she ought to say after such an ordeal.
"I didn't eat the seeds," she said, glancing down at the now-sweaty seed pod still clutched in her hand. "But your mind is a terrifying place, Gray. How many others lurk in its depths? Who's hiding in there? Who's trapped, unable to see the sunlight? Besides that, though...you kept something from me, Gray. The words of the poem. Why? How can I help you find the end of the story if you're not letting me see all the parts?"
She sighed, clutching her head in her hands and staring down at the floor of the cave. This was all too much for her, far too much for anyone to deal with. How had she gotten in so deep?
"What do you want me to do, Gray?" she asked, voice drained and weak. "I'm just a fortune-teller. I turn cards and cast knucklebones. I don't solve mysteries or fix broken clocks. I'm only even here to help Nina. If it weren't for her...why, I wouldn't want anything to do with you at all."
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Gray
Dedicated
Roleplay posts: 124
Registered: Jul 2, 2021 10:00:37 GMT -5
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Post by Gray on Sept 13, 2022 16:27:11 GMT -5
“I remember everyone that I have ever killed.” Gray said. “Ever broken.”
To share the Detective's story had felt like pulling at his own teeth. Not one of his back-teeth that wavered when tapped, weakened by starvation, but something deeply-rooted; one of the few parts of him that were still alive. He got it out, and all he felt was hollow. He stared at Theodosia. All he managed was to frighten the girl, though he had not meant to. He nearly laughed.
“I told Nina to leave.” All he could do was continue placing together disparate ideas, desperately grasping at puzzle pieces with paralysed hands. What did this have to do with the Detective? “There exists a system called trauma bonding.” That was from a book. A book he'd written. “Cruelty alone leads to hatred, but cruelty interspersed with kindness can forge one of the strongest chains known to man.” Nina had not left. “Even when not planned for.”
What did this have to do with anything?
There was, he felt, something deeper, darker, lurking beneath. Theodosia had asked what he wanted her to do. He felt cold, and wrapped his kosode-tunic tighter around himself. He had, he realized, hoped the fortune-teller would know; that the could nod and stare and maintain his ineffability. To be anything but perfect was to be nothing; so Gray stared at the sea, day by day, unable to let go of the machine that he could no longer hear. He had hoped that the Detective would solve things; alive or dead. It was a detective's job to solve things.
That someone, anyone, anyone else, would solve things. He pushed himself up, slouching against the rough wall.
“My mind is broken. I can no longer solve the games of the Tower.” Gray said.
His eyes were half-shut, his breathing tense. “I can't even tell whether a co-” g, he nearly added, “a gea-”r, his mind flinched away, “-circle, is spinning ...wise, or counter.” He could not complete the words. It was too painful.
“Nina will not let me die.”
He whispered.
He had hoped it was revenge. He knew it was not.
“She will have to face the Tower one day.” Gray continued. “Not that she has time for research.” Between bearing the weight of the broken magic, and bearing his dead weight in turn, Nina was often too exhausted to find her way to her bed. “I...I am a burden.” Gray admitted.
He did not want to be a burden.
“I need help.”
Or death. But he was a weapon, and it was not up to the blade to decide when to be thrown away.
“I need you to con me, Theodosia.” There was something of the torturer in him, a voice not used to being denied, and something of the tortured. “I need you to fool me that there is a future, beyond rusting on the shore. I may be a dull weapon, but I may still be a useful tool to your friend.” His eyes were empty glass. “If I get better, then I can leave.”
He fell back on his rocky ledge, not caring that he landed head-first.
“Perhaps it may sound odd to you, that a client would consciously wish for a lie, but then again...”
A smile stretched thin on the man's face.
“I am not paying you.”
Moments passed. There was a sound like a kettle, as it tried to puff out and suck in air at the same time. Nina stood at the entrance of the cave, in her familiar blue clothes, shadowed by the sun behind her.
“WHAT.”
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