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Entry tags:
[open] isn't that awful
CHARACTERS: Ilde, and relationships extending outward.
WHERE: Bearings
WHEN: Post Boom 023 - 027-ish
SUMMARY: Untangling the threads of disaster.
WARNINGS: Castor.
hush while i put all this shit together.
I have made some top level categories, but if you want to do something outside them, feel free to make a comment.
WHERE: Bearings
WHEN: Post Boom 023 - 027-ish
SUMMARY: Untangling the threads of disaster.
WARNINGS: Castor.
hush while i put all this shit together.
I have made some top level categories, but if you want to do something outside them, feel free to make a comment.
| Organization Bout It Out OOC Organization Punch Everything Outline | Bout It Out Reviews With Lexa What The Goal Is Talks to Tiny Sam Ilde Performs Her Creepy Song To Creep Everyone Out -- Has fans in the audience, subspace hooligan types she has been building a fanbase with. -- Sam & Steve have each performed as unofficial 'managers' to keep up appearances. -- Watches all the matches upon recovery from performance, but is pretty spent. Says Some Creepy Shit To Nirad Snuggles With Ren |
| Explosion Gets Blown Up Sam & Ren Ilde Is Fine + Top Level -- In shock physically, exhausted psychically, trapped emotionally inside of Ren's tantrum. -- Refuses to be removed from the scene without Ren. -- Can't stop him, can't stop Steve. Darkling Checks On Her Darkling Goes To Comfort Ren & All Hell Breaks Loose Tells Petre To Fuck Off Comforted By Nate -- Finally lets him take her back to the Bearings once everything has concluded. | Recovery Goes The Fuck To Sleep -- Gets cleaned up with Angel's help. Checks on Tiny Sam Meets Up With Big Sam Bucky & Steve Ren & Hux Ren & Darkthing |
| Pre-Talks Ilde & Steve Ilde & Darkling Darkling & Sam Darkling & Steve Sam & Ren Ren & Steve Ilde & Ren | Upcoming Castor Meeting Prep For Underground Rank II Underground |
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[ Words he's said before, and believes in. Faint longing. He closes his eyes, attempting to steel himself against the memories Ilde and Ren's connection bids to rise within him. The image of the woman from before - she with white hair and light cupped in the palms of her hands - is a balm to him as she is what makes him unsteady. Oh yes, he envies Ilde and Ren in the same breath he misses her. ]
You found one other, across worlds and realities. They could not begin to understand.
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No, they don't understand very well. But they do care.
[ Maybe it is an incorrect interpretation, but she sees Steve's rally against Kylo Ren as a kind of caring. Someone needed to stop him, for all their sakes. Ilde only regrets she was too rattled to do it herself. A pang that she had lost all control in that situation. ]
I think we are strong brood.
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[ Castor isn't his, he can't surmise what they think among themselves - as loudly as he hears Bellamy's presence. Clint's presence. Ilde's words, he simply takes at face value - even if his opinions might, well, differ. ]
I have no doubt you and yours will recover from this. There were a great many things we all experienced. And learned.
[ Ilde's desire to rise above, is the one that comes to mind. ]
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It is there to feel, a squirm in the center of herself.
Powerlessness was a tenet of her worship to the Godking. To take would have been a challenge to him... But he is gone. She must be her own deity. ]
I am disappointed. I had promised him we would all return to the Station together.
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Death is in the habit of disappointing even the most diligent of us. You're not alone, in that.
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[ Something she personifies, a figure that has stalked at her heels every moment, a laughing figure who awaits the day that she is not strong enough, clever enough to survive and he can finally take her. Death is the reward for the weak. These feelings play out like a childish little puppet show in her thoughts, ending with her own frayed little puppet skewered through the heart, writhing until no longer moving. ]
It was all around me, in the burning world. It had ceased to trouble me.
[ Past tense, tentatively. No one she has truly cared about has yet died, she cannot entirely convince herself that Death has troubled her yet. ]
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Tell me of it. [ A beat. ] Your burning world.
[ He's already seated, after all. ]
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Shall I show you? I have been... preparing. To show the others.
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[ What they will share among one another is difficult to decide upon. That Ilde has been - preparing, as she said - to share this world she has mentioned, that was her own... he feels a little greedy, a little more than desireful of that knowledge. Power and knowledge; two things that were infinite, in his eye. ]
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The pressure of her presence comes with a scent of smoke, of wet earth, and flowers a perfume that is all her own, suggesting singed edges, dead bodies, the garden.
It is always easiest for her to start in the garden. It is the scenery of her inner world, luscious and cavernous and yet... Clearly underground. It is dark in all directions, the air closed in and damp, but there is a final sensation to it all that is unlike any other. The magic that Dreus imbued upon that place, an intoxicating power of light and heat, tempered for beauty here in this hidden sanctuary beneath his palace while the rest of the world is scorched. ]
( Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire,
And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire,
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerged from, shall so soon expire. )
[ Her voice, the recitation of a poem that she uses to keep her mind empty, to soothe herself into calm when the world above is too ugly... Beneath her pretty words comes a second voice, deep and masculine with a rhythm that seduces the mind into obedience.
The voice comes from above, and her mind follows it through the winding pathways of the dungeons, ignoring the skeletal reaching hands, the screaming, the weeping, making her way instead to a set of huge winding stairs, tiled with a beautiful mosaic long since smeared with blood and filth. On bare feet, she follows the cool pathway up into the palace where an unusually intense orange sunlight casts strange shadows through the high archways of the open air citadel that Dreus calls his own.
Throughout the various foyers, thin and sickly looking men and women sit huddled together, out of immediate sight. Their eyes turn towards her with starvation and envy as she walks by, but they say nothing to her.
Though the Godking's voice continues to float through the palace, the great titan himself is nowhere to be seen. He is still too complex for her to fully realize. For now. Soon enough she will master all this, and she will bring him to life before those who do not understand what it was to be ruled by such a magnificent and terrible figure. There are none who fully understand, except perhaps for Kylo Ren himself.
The palace of the Godking sits upon a cliffside, raised like a ziggurat at the top of four corners of immense concrete stairs. She stands at the top of them, looking out off the sheer cliff face across the wastes. An acrid breeze stirs her hair, makes her breath short and her mouth dry.
The world that she looks out upon has no greenery. As far as the eye is able to see there is nothing but miles upon miles of cracked earth, baked into a hardened brick desert where no water is to be found. In the distance, the smoldering ruins of cities can be seen flickering. Anywhere where survivors might have found true shelter burns day and night, for all time. Ash falls from the sky like an ugly toxic snow, let loose from the clouds of smoke that smother the sky into that strange, sickly orange color. It is never truly daylight here.
She takes her time imagining the slow descent down the enormous stairs. There are corpses, here and there, bodies of those who had tried to find sanctuary within the Godking's palace but expired in the dry heat. Their corpses are mutilated, picked at. Some clearly by birds, other much more thoroughly, to suggest something larger.
What that something is will be clear soon enough, she goes to the edge of the cliff and peers downwards into the shadow it casts. The darkness moves like a creature all its own. A swarm of hungry innumerous shadows waits for the nightfall when they will rule the wastes... But for now they bicker amongst themselves, restless and insatiable. Some of them notice her looking down at them and begin to scale the cliff, great maws open.
It's then that she turns to him. The man at the cliff's edge beside her, the one which followed her and shared her vision all the way up from the garden... ]
( Welcome. )
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He doesn't know what he expected, when she called her world "burned". An allegory? A hellish landscape, awash with fire and the sluggish crawl of lava? Instead, the world is, quite literally, incinerated. Inside of her mind and her memories, he smells as she does and sees as she permits. His path is preordained by the one that she takes, though he is able to make slow circles on his toes - turning his gaze up to the ceilings of her king's palace. To the dark alcoves where the emaciated figures of the less-loved reside. He follows Ilde, his navigator, through her landscape. From the garden to the clifftop, to gaze across the burnt world.
( The voice of her king shakes his bones, and it takes him a long moment to realize how much he may be sharing with Ilde, in this. )
The world is burnt. The smell of decay and incinarated flesh takes him back, within his own memories ( -- there, out of the corner of his eye, the heaped bodies on a pyre. children mothers men with hands limp and outstretched, a woman cradling her child, nothing but charred meat and agony -- ) that he dismisses with the sharp, quick flick of his hand. Ilde is sharing, he does not want his attention to waver. Not even it may be in... solidarity. ]
( This is the only harbor? ) [ The palace of her king. Is it the only place left that provides and shelters? The Darkling asks this of her, as she welcomes him, but his eyes are drawn down, down along the cliffside to where the monsters climb towards them and he -- can't -- deny himself the simple, elegant pleasure of witnessing them. He leans, forward, braced against the brisk, acrid winds to see them better. Their maws, their darkness. The faint thump of his pulse beats, harder - elated, rather than fearful.
In the folds of his kefta, something shifts ( the blink of eyes, too many eyes in the dark, the flex of a shadowy-silk claw - something calling out to another thing in hissing-buzzing-animal cries in the depths of the darkness that overtakes his expression, something that could have been a cousin, could - possibly, be the same, though of another origin ) and out he breathes, sharp and nostalgic and familiar: oh. ]
( How? ) [ A question. One that asks about everything she knows. How did this happen to her world? How did those creatures come to be? ]
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She feels the eldritch squirm of what lurks inside of his guise, and she knows it frightens her. Her heart beats that little bit faster, her lips pressed together in a thin line. ]
( All of it is His. The flames, the shadows. )
[ The dark shape of a titanous man watches the pair of them from atop the stairs, indistinct, lacking all the sensory detail of what truly makes him Godking, all except for the sense of pressure that comes from his mere proximity. ]
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The pressure, of her king's being, though - he feels that, most of all. ]
( What is he, Ilde? )
[ He'll ask her questions so long as she is willing to answer them, looking for her insight more than the facts. ]
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This is truly what has challenged her. She can build the gardens, she can build the palace, the wastelands... but He is so much more complex than all of that. He surpassed all other powers in their world, rose to a stature that no mortal could contend with. He is Godking.
His is a destiny of flames.
An asphyxiating heat radiates from Dreus and the air warps around him, displacing the world in a hallucinogenic halo. His pure searing existence makes the physical functions of the body begin to seize up, overworked, causing a kind of drowsy sluggishness. Drought infiltrates every pore.
But there at the tip of the tongue is something else, something both sour and sweet in one. Caustic but candied. One is the taste of his madness, and the other is the proximity of his undiluted magic. He seeps of it, a power that he cannot fully contain inside of his body and so it permeates the air like a drug. It dazzles, it fulfills, it gives strength where strength fails. A distracting counterbalance to how his corrupting flames blazes, spoiling meat and hearts. Ilde's spoiled heart is thundering.
There are times when she longs for her king. All the certainty he had provided to her in her life. She had been perfect in his eyes, an angel, and now she must be only herself, unforgiven, bearing all the worlds ugliness with no promise of redemption. ]
( He was born with this, and it grew inside him. There were once others with arcane powers, but they could not quell him. )
[ Her voice is soft in the distance, a whisper. Over top of her words are His: ]
I had heard of such plans such visions and I knew they did not see far enough, but what was demanded in a way of a plan needed to go beyond tongue and teeth and hunger and flesh, beyond the bones and the very dust of bones and the wind that would come to blow the dust away. And so I began to envision a darkness that was long before the dark of night, and a strangely shining light that owed nothing to the light of day...
[ One of his many rambling ideas that she had heard time and time again, but it is not the words themselves but the way in which he speaks them. He speaks in a cadence that seduces, an unnatural charisma that exudes from his deep sonorous voice. The richness of his tone evades all resistance, his words and the images behind them echoing in the depths of the subconscious. They ring there, resonating so perfectly, pitched just so.
And his eyes fixated with their hateful irascible heat, their manic intent, make it impossible not to listen fully... ]
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( I think - I can understand him. A little. )
[ Not the madness, though. The Darkling is a different breed of madman. He does not speak on the mount, his words are not feverish and painful to hear. He remembers what Ilde said before, he made us madmen with him, and he can begin, in fits and bursts, to comprehend her words. Had he been from her world, he would have been just as mad. Perhaps dead. He would not be himself - not prized, and certainly not feared. Ilde and her king speak, in two tones, but the same words, and even as he holds fast to Ilde's hand, his other reaches - stretches out. Gloved fingers spread, into the space between himself and her king. Her mad, frightening king.
The only thing that keeps him from bowing his head under the weight of her king's voice, is another. The cool, clipped tones of a woman recently dead. Scathing and vehement, as she promised him - you are destined for more than this world can provide, there is no one who can help you in this, you are alone but you are powerful, and you will bow to no other.
There is a distinct division within him, now. There is himself-as-Ilde, heartshaken. There is himself-as-himself, rebellious and proud. And there is himself-as-observer, scientific, darkly curious. He turns the palm of his hand, the outstretched hand that seeks to bridge the gap between his mind-body and her memory-king. The soft snap of his fingers, and there is liquid-thick, flexing, coiling smoke and darkness -- it emanates from him, the way it does from her king. He cups it there, in the palm of his hand, and it flows, placid and impenetrable, before her eyes. Though he hasn't taken his eyes from the madman. ] ( This part of him, at least. )
[ It's the first step he takes, to confirm what it is he does and is, to her. ]
( The rest of it - I. Could not begin to. )
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A gust of wind hits them, dirty with soot and dust, not terribly refreshing at all. Dreus wavers at the edges, dragged by the wind, as her focus drifts.
And so she lets it go. Drops the imagery like a curtain, abrupt, and looks into his face between her hands. ]
Show me.
[ Here. In reality. ]
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Show me, she says. Where things are real and not implied.
Somehow, he's disappointed to see that - even in reality, he'd reached for one of her hands. They're still on his face, and delicately, he presses them down. Away from his person. Giving her the benefit of putting distance between them, once more. There's a measure of hesitance, in the way his mouth pulls tight, considering her request. And then it's gone. There is no hesitation, and certainly no shame in showing her -- he presses his hands together, the breadth of his shoulders tenses. When he pulls them apart, there is - it's just - black. Darkness, smoke and liquid both, flowing from him - created - spiraling up into the air around them. He curls it, instructs it. There is no doubt that he is, utterly and wholly, in control of it.
And he waits, without explanation, for her response. ]
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Ba-rahmy had been so much like this man. That crisp unnatural beauty and grey eyes...
Like always, her emotions conflict. Desire and dread. Dangerous, this man is much too dangerous. She is clearly flustered, disturbed down to her core. But what had they decided in the midst of the flames? They had decided that her fear need not be so debilitating, a lesson she learned a very long time ago but needed to find a way to learn anew in a much vaster universe. ]
He has sons like you.
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He doesn't ask her not to feel this way. Time has tempered his shame and his inhibition. ] We call it the Small Science.
[ With his eyes, he directs her to look up. Releasing his hold on his power, until it begins to fade away. Neon light and the glow of the Bearing's inner rooms regains its foothold, and he places his hands in his lap once more. ] I outlived my father, [ or so, his mother had said to him. What he means, is that he is no child of her king's. ] I am the -- there are no others like me. Are you afraid, Ilde?
cw: a little squicky and gross, I kind of tried to write around it
The liquid of their thoughts is still freshly intermingled, and the feeling that she looses on him, like a well trained hound, is theirs. Both their horror. She lets the memory of Ba-rahmy seep: one so powerful amongst his kind, but nothing at all compared to the Godking. Restrained, subdued, helpless, hopeless, unable to die, unable to shake off his father's every invasion. So ugly, such abuse of body, mind, and soul. And no escape but the promised day of flame...
She releases it as abruptly as she did her vision, but this is less like the dropping of a curtain and more like the removal of a blade. ]
Yes, Shadow. I am.
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She is scared of him, and uses that fear as her weapon. Held down as he is by her power, though, he can't find it within himself to appreciate her talent.
There are terrible things. Her fears build off his, and his off hers. Until she releases him, ] Effective.
[ Swallowing against the tremble in his voice, the rise of fury in the face of memories ( his / not his ) he'd long since dissociated himself from, he pulls himself upright. He's too hoarse for his own liking, shoulders stiff and hands -- well, he's glad they do not shake too violently. It's been a long, long time, since he felt fear like that. Centuries. ]
I am no son of his, Ilde. [ Of that, he can reassure her. ( And himself. ) ] I admire you, and so, I won't deny what I am.
[ Especially, he means, if it will feed her power in return. All the better for the nest. ]
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Yes, tell me.
[ She relaxes against the railing of the balcony, her eyes closed as she waits for the feverishness that accompanies her abilities to subside. It is not so terrible as it once was, perhaps because she grows used to it, or perhaps as her body grows more in tune with the symbiote. ]
What are you?
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[ As she showed him her world, when he had requested it of her. How easy it could have been to deny him such insight, and yet, she had touched him and drawn him in and given her vision up to him. Included him in monstrous sights and soul-numbing terror. It's familiar and foreign, all the same. Ilde's world, Ilde's fear, coupled with the gauntlet of psycho-technical battle performed for the nest's goals left him...
tired. Bone-weary and worn thin, within his mind and across his defenses. ]
I'll show you everything I can. But, another time, I think. I am... [ A man who needs to actually sleep, in the way that he hasn't. So, he begs her a courtesy: ] Forgive me.
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Of course.
[ She might, possibly, forgive him anything. ]
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It's not often he has to beg a favor from another. Much less to rest, above all things. Power like his, when utilized, would only feed into itself. An Ouroboros of strength, one he has not tapped into since his own arrival. That is the first thing that he will have to remedy.
Her hand, yes. Her hand, he brings to his mouth. A chaste brush of his mouth over her knuckles, before he climbs to his feet. ] Allow me to escort you out?
[ ( The curtains in his room block out the city's light. It's very, very dark - he figures she wouldn't want to linger. ) ]
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Goodbye, Shadow.
[ He can object to the title if he likes, but it is his now and it suits her understanding of him better. He can be a shadow with no master, if he likes. Though perhaps it is her flames that cast the shape she sees in him.
For now, she doesn't try to look back upon him any further. ]