ataraxionlogs | [closed] Of ontological intersection

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[closed] Of ontological intersection

CHARACTERS: Ieza and Rey.
LOCATION: The jungle, Rey's abode.
WARNINGS: Philosobabble, wild conjecture.
SUMMARY: In which recent events and concurrent implications are discussed.
NOTES: None as of yet.

The momentous and disastrous alway have a way of shaking Ieza loose from her hovel, sending her tumbling through the jungle to consult with Rey, who bears the dubious distinction of being dubbed Docent. Generally these calamities have been rather personal, evidence of Ieza's somewhat impromptu but otherwise well-founded trust. This time, however, the issue is shared by all of them- just one in a growing number. And while former passengers on the Tranquility may be numbed to some greater or lesser degree, for a recent arrival like Ieza this little conniption is a long time coming.

Her nearly-nocturnal schedule means that the most polite time Ieza could call is probably dusk, when she tends to awake. But of course it is only at the crack of dawn, after a long time spent scowling with frustration at the stars, that Ieza arrives at Rey's figurative doorstep. She's in less of a state than the last time she made a twilit visit, not nervous or febrile, though she appears agitated, one hand worrying a flat stone between her fingers, the other holding a shuttered lantern.

"Friend?" She calls up into the tree-top abode. And again- "friend?" There's a touch of impatience and expectation to how she says it, a not entirely flattering tone, despite the warmth of the word itself.

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This time, Ieza does not find Rey hanging out in the dome as usual. Silence follows her initial calls.

Luckily, Rey doesn't sleep much, neither has she strayed far from her jungle home. A few moments will catch the woman emerging from the trees and darkness, with smears across her face, hands, and tanktop.

"You need something?" Rey asks. In her bloodied hands is a string of stripped and gutted meat, revealing the remains of at least twelve geckos. There is no hint of annoyance or emotion in her tones, as she approaches the other woman with the utmost calm despite the morbidity of her bearing.

Ieza has little problem with morbidity herself, in relation to herself. She's dealt with having a ghoulish reputation ever since she developed an early interest in the mechanisms of life-death and death-life. But this is her own self-perception. To see Rey appear, brandishing gutted meat and smeared in blood, gives Ieza something of a shock. Not over the blood itself, but over its context.

That is to say, a butcher or herdsman or anatomical scholar can be expected to be bloodstained. A being such as Ieza takes Rey to be- only certain affinities of them would be found in such a state. It is disquieting, being only further evidence that her Friend - even if she were, in broad strokes, what Ieza takes her to be - would still not comfortably meet her expectations.

But today is not a day for comforts.

"You said-" two words that carry the unmistakable petulance of correction, "-that our purpose is survival. If not for our sake, than for others."

Defiance is visible in her face, in the brightness of her eyes and the set of her mouth. The way she's talking, it's as if she's been arguing with a psychic construction of Rey in her own head and now, having found the real thing, she expects her to pick up where they left off.

"It just- it strikes me now as untenably dense."

A lesser person would've taken offense to Ieza's revelation. Rey, on the other hand, greets with a deadpan disposition that remains more neutral than offended.

"You came all the way here to say that?" Rey asks, her brows raised. She's still gripping the string of dead things, more casual about it than anyone stumbling upon a woman stained in blood probably should be.

That neutrality- that, if nothing else, makes Rey like the Azad Ieza knew. A certain implacability, particularly in the face of accusation or insult. A lesser person Rey is not, that is certain; more like the divine being Ieza insists she is. Yet this very brand of superioirty was always the most maddening, even in her well loved Tutor.

"Hardly!" Ieza exclaims, evidently willing to bring enough affect for the both of them. "We are dwelling in a realm of incredible ontological inconsistency. A place that- Sabel Sanctissima, should we even call it a place? Yet here you are-" she gestures at the bloodstained Rey, "-seeped in the materiality of this place. A place so malleable that- look!"

She closes her fingers around the flat stone, hiding it from view within her grasp. When she opens her hand again, something with the moonlit luster of silver lies in her palm. She lets it slide to the crook of her thumb, clasps and shakes. A high, clear ringing issues forth. A bell.

"This is not my praxis."

Rey watches Ieza through her narrowed eyes, as the frustrated woman displays the stone. Her accusations and presumptions are not entirely welcome.

"And what makes you think that it's mine?"

There's something different about Rey's tone just then. Emotion slips through her monotone, as she both speaks and carries herself like a being that's actually rather annoyed rather than somewhere in between.

It doesn't help when she huffs. "Not all of the answers you're looking are with me. You want figure out a purpose -- or a praxis -- in this place, you need to figure it out for yourself. And if you think caring for my family is seeping myself in this world's materiality, you're wrong.

"It's not like I asked to be here any more than you."

Edited 2016-02-01 04:55 (UTC)

"Because- because you're supposed to be ontologically intersectional yourself!"

Let's be clear, Ieza is being ludicrous. While not entirely out of her own control, there is something distinctly tantrum-like about this outburst, an affect that is constantly stamping its foot in protest spiritually even if Ieza's physical feet remain rooted to the ground. The tinkling of the bell in her hand as she gesticulates doesn't help- the world's tiniest church-tower, tolling for her sorrows.

"I'm not supposed to be the one figuring this out. I'm mundane. You- you travelled between the stars. You've lived more than one life. If not you, then who?"

It comes down to this- the crisis in Ieza's own unilateral decision about what-Rey-is.

"You're the transpositional one!"

Something hits Ieza, then- one of those devilish details prone to catch the attention of someone like her. Someone with a scholarly, nitpicking temperament. "And what are you talking about- family? What family?" If Ieza recalls correctly - and to be fair, her memories of necrotic time are wreathed in shadow and cold to the touch - Rey has no kin here, not in the sense Ieza understands the term.

It becomes more and more obvious that Ieza is being ludicrous. And the more she talks and reveals the misconceptions she has made about who and what Rey is, the tighter her bloody grip on the string of dead things become.

"Have you actually tried finding the answer for yourself? Sometimes you have to look for your own reasons. Not all answers you're searching for can be found in someone else."

Let alone with Rey of all people, who spent most of her entire existence living and dying at someone else's volition. Because she is a vessel, born to die. But now?

Everything is different for her now. She can live, and choose how she lives. And right now she wants nothing more than to make sure that the people she cares about are safe. That's the purpose she has made for herself.

Her jaw tightens when she thinks about the ones she's accepted as kin. "I have family here, just as I have family back home. And it would seem that you have made enough assumptions about what I am, whatever it is."

"You reached out to me. You guided me. You explained this place, our circumstances- you have insight that you cannot expect of me."

Perhaps Ieza is from a culture whereby kindnesses and favors incur a responsibility upon the bestower rather than the bestowed. Or perhaps she is, at heart, little more than a lost child looking for a guardian. And now her expectations are being disappointed- too many at once.

"You have had years to seek answers. I have been here mere months."

This she knows. She has counted the days, striving for astronomical certainties in a universe otherwise wholly strange. She has sought . And now to hear of family? This point continues to stick. It perplexes her.

"Family? What family? I have seen no such reflections. I have felt your blood shared with no one else here."

A finger rises, pointing, accusatory; the bell in her hand shivers a quavering note. The dead things Rey clutches begin to shiver and chatter, a disquieting display from stiff limbs and empty lungs.

"I know blood. Blood remembers."

"Because it was the right thing to do."

It isn't often that Rey finds herself faced with some moral quandary, but she can't help but sympathize with the new arrivals. And if anyone should be more suited to help explain this place, it may as well be the last person standing who's seen things since the beginning.

"If you want some divine reason as to why you're really here, then sorry to disappoint, but there is none. There's no rhyme or reason or fate that brought you here, just shit luck. Some assholes decided to mess around with wormholes and now we're stuck here until some fluke sends us home or we die. That's it."

Bitter, much? Yes, she's quite bitter with many things during her tenure in this universe. She's angry that she's seen so many people come and go, and yet she's still here, and at the notion that, more than once, she has been used as someone's puppet to do things against her will. If at any point she were to be given the opportunity to snatch her own agency, to make her own choices, then so help her she will take it.

Her eyes narrow at Ieza's accusatory finger. She huffs. It's a good thing that the ones she deems as family aren't here to listen to this. "Of course they're not blood, but that doesn't make them any less like-family."

As someone who had spent most of her life with only a horrid concept of familial attachments, Rey is willing to hold onto the one good thing she has going right now.

"I must have mistaken you. You're more a Perigrant than an Azad. So staunch. So concerned with righteousness. So incurious."

The sound Ieza makes is supposed to be a laugh, but it executes more like a sharp cough, short and harsh. Her hand even rises to cover it, though this very gesture also doubles suggests laughter in Ieza's idiom. Her eyes are bright, her cheeks colored.

"Or you are some other strain. Not livid or pale, but something else. Stony. Obdurate."

This nonsense about bloodless family doesn't seem to satisfy her, but then again, what would? There's little to make clear just what precisely she's upset about, or what the expectation she concocted around Rey even is. Perhaps it's unclear to Ieza herself.

"So what you're saying is that you helped me out of no other reason than the virtue in the help itself? You'd have done the same for anyone, because it was righteous? And thus to me- you are effectively indifferent?"

Another laugh, this time in a string. And by the end it is definitely a cough, one that forces both hands to her mouth, putting an end to both the pointing and Ieza's exclamations, at least for the moment.

"You have and you're still mistaken. I'm not 'Perigrant' or 'Azad' or anything that's from your world."

She exhales through her nose, moving around Ieza towards a container at the bottom of the tree dome to dispense the meat in.

Afterwards, she returns her gaze to the other woman, not caring about the blood on her clothes, on her hands, or on her face. "I am a vessel." Born to die, that was her original purpose. But not anymore. "Was created by a combination of organic and synthetic materials. I am, as you say, 'many lived' because I had other bodies like this one so that, when one died, I could be transferred into another. I have lived this way for over a hundred years."

How much of this would register with Ieza's otherworldly notion that she's had of Rey all this time, she doesn't know. But it seems like it's high time to tell the truth.

"I'm not saying that at all. I helped you because... I don't know." She throws her bloodied hands up in the air. The complete opposite of indifferent. "It isn't that I don't care. It's just that you looked lost, like you needed help, and I enjoyed your company and I thought you were pre--"

Rey stops herself before she can finish that sentence.

Foot, meet mouth.

Instead, she focuses on Ieza's current health, which is... not looking so good at the moment. "Are you okay?"

Edited 2016-02-11 07:40 (UTC)

Pre-- what? Presumptuous? Pretentious? Pre-eminent in her field? All of these things are true. None of them are likely what Rey was about to say. But far be it from Ieza to decode when she's upset and wracked with coughs. Maybe later, when she's had time to pour over her memories - as she is sometimes wont to do - she'll notice this truncation. For now, though, Ieza is too far off her own footing to notice the foot in Rey's mouth.

Because there is one sure way to undercut Ieza's anger, and one sure way to distract her: fascinate her. Her face is flushed, her voice a little ragged, but she disregards Rey's concern in favor of peering at her Friend. The way Ieza looks at her- it's as if seeing her for the first time, and certainly for the first time in this particular way. There is an intensity, a searching quality, that is somehow both passionate and clinical.

"You're a construct?"

Could it be? The dreams of the Black Clasp realized, a union of two exquisitely refined praxes.

Even with Ieza's current understanding, she's still a little off the mark. Still, it's much closer than whatever impression she had of Rey before.

"Sort of. More like gengineered using both cloned and artificial components. It's what makes it possible to do this." She holds up a hand. For a few seconds, the skin around her fingers pale; red veins coat over them. There's a spark of flame, but nothing much beyond the heatwaves rising from her palms. And just like that, the spark and waves are gone.

Ieza has seen it before, though. Briefly, when Rey had been disposing the body of the crazed crew member.

Closing her fingers into a fist, her eyes steer back towards Ieza. "Was born to kill, to be a weapon. But something went wrong and this is who I am."

Whatever that may be.

What Ieza took Rey to be before defined an essentially benevolent relationship. Even her outburst of moments ago, the hissing fit of immature irritation, was framed by this basic (mis)understanding. Rey was Azad - like Tutor, like the honored Travelers and the sacred Bestowers - and thus someone to be trusted, relied upon, turned to for advice and particularly for moral guidance. If Ieza was being childish, it is chiefly due to her viewing Rey in this more mature, mentorial role; her Docent, she called her, as well as her Friend.

What she takes Rey to be now is something much closer to an object of study. This defines a radically different sort of relationship for a woman who, in the pursuit of her studies, destroyed her own life twice over, in two different ways. Even the strange words Rey uses, left untranslated due to the specificity of their technical meaning, only deepen the mystery. And mystery is, to a creature like Ieza, an intolerable temptation.

Thus matters have taken a strange turn. You can see this change reflected in Ieza's gaze, the way her eyes affix on the radiant hand, the way the dark pits of her pupils encompass the brief twin reflection of that spark. She's seen it before, yes - just as she's seen Rey - but never in this light.

"I want to understand."

"I used to be a weapon. I was never meant to have a life outside of war," Rey says again. "That's all you need to understand."

The past tense in her words being an important thing of note here. As in, she isn't anymore, neither does she see herself as a mere tool to be used for violence, or as one man's crazed revenge. Right now, she doesn't know what she is, exactly, and that is just something she is still trying to learn for herself.

Whatever it is that Ieza thinks of her now, Rey doesn't care anymore. But there is some respite that comes with the truth. Some form of freedom that comes along with it. Suppose her brother had the right idea when it came to relieving the lies and misconceptions one has of you -- it is, in a way, a release.

Need is one thing. Perhaps it is a liberation for Rey to dub herself 'weapon', to accept the title 'construct', and move on. But the truth does not set Ieza free. Rey has shifted into the murky realms of the unknown, that abyss into which Ieza has more then once over-stared. So while perhaps she needs know no more than this, she wants more. And what little she understands, what she thinks she understands, leaves her all the more curious.

But even Ieza isn't so appallingly awkward to bombard Rey with questions after she has laid such definitive claim to the last word. Her eyes narrow, flickering across this woman, this war-engine, this hung-up sword, but her mouth remains a drawn line for long seconds.

Then at last: "So you mean to say- you've contented yourself with being, without needing to know?" Ieza shakes her head. "It is not my nature to leave it at that. Being is not enough. Not for me."

"Look, there are some things in life that have no purpose. When you've been here for years and seen not just a few, but hundreds of people come and go, you learn to just accept things as they are -- pointless."

She's seen things that have gone nowhere, from the lists on the network to the players in this game that have come and gone.

And yet, for some reason, somehow, Rey is still here. She has been, and in some ways feels as though she always will be.

"If you really are looking for some greater reason in all of this, you're going to find yourself sorely disappointed."

"No."

Flat refusal. She will not accept pointlessness, she refuses transience. She remains, she endures- she redeems and resurrects. She must. This particular Sisyphus insists she can reach the summit.

"I think I might find what I want here."

Her head tilts, pale eyes intent but calm.

"What do you want, Rey? These- ad hoc kin? Does this make you content?"

Edited 2016-02-22 04:11 (UTC)

"Then find what you want, and find it on your own terms. No one can tell you what you wish to make out of all of this but you."

It took Rey years to figure out what she really wanted. And even when faced with that same question that Ieza is throwing at her right now, her answer is definite.

"Yes, it does. I spent most of my whole lives not wanting anything to do with family, and even if it's a fleeting chance of happiness, isn't that worth taking?" She drops her arms to her sides. Throughout her time here, Rey has experienced her fair share of short-term bliss, from friends to relationships she has no name to put to. But this is different. And this is something she wishes to cling to.

She huffs. "What is it that you want?"

"If it satisfies you," Ieza says, with a slow blink and a level gaze, "though... I'm not quite sure I believe you."

She lifts a hand to cover her throat. It's probably some sort of idiomatic gesture, but it's hard to know what it actually means. Her words may add context:

"I am not suggesting you are lying to me. That you mean to deceive. But your aura belies you. A smooth surface still reflects flames, and so holds them."

Presented with the question she put to Rey, Ieza blinks once more, and then smiles a very small, restrained smile.

"Insight," is her first answer, and then, "experience."

"It does, regardless of what auras say and you believe."

Is Rey satisfied with the fact that, at any given moment, her happiness could easily be taken away? No. But she isn't going to spend every waking moment wallowing in this fact.

While she's uncomfortable with the subject of her place in this jungle society, Rey is more eager to turn this around.

"Insight and experience could mean a lot of things. On what, exactly, are you wanting insight and experience with?"

It is fair to say that, should you are seeking for someone with great insight into the human heart, you might want to pass over Ieza. Never a 'people person', she's more comfortable with the inert and the inanimate, be it dead bodies or dead letters.

As such, it's not unjust to deem her assessment of Rey's inner state yet another projection, her 'insight' just a warped reflection of own desires. Then again, Ieza has never really been all that interested in desires outside of her own.

"To you it will sound preposterous," Ieza says, with a sniff, "since you reject any notion of purpose or meaning in this place."

She pauses, pressing a hand to her chest, holding something - a cough probably - in check, before continuing.

"I see answers to a thousand questions that could never have been resolved had I not been summoned here. I see the profit of worlds upon worlds of theory and praxis, gathered in once place. And if you have found what you want here - if you truly are satisfied - then perhaps I can find my own satisfaction as well."

Though it is, one can infer, to be rather unlike that which Rey has found.

"Trying to understand the multiverse isn't preposterous," Rey says flatly, rubbing her forehead. "All things considered, that's probably what the original crew was trying to do before they found out that the jumps took people in and out of their own worlds. If you want to know more about it, you may as well try and ask one of them."

Key word here is try, though. They don't seem to be particularly sociable types. Not to mention there is also the factor that they may know nothing at all. But seeing that they messed around with wormholes and the like, it's a fair assumption to make that they would have some answers to the questions Ieza is looking for.

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[closed] Of ontological intersection

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i apologize for the tinytag

no apology necessary - brevity, wit, etc.

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