o14. quasi closed.

[forgodssake]

CHARACTERS: Charles Xavier + Caprica "Natasi" Six + Garrett Hawke; and others.
LOCATION: Probably there are trees.
WARNINGS: TBA.
SUMMARY: The sad story how we became lonely two legged creatures.
NOTES: A series of pre-planned threads and a general catch all for October, so please, if you want to do something, shout at me!

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TENT

[sorrycharles]

[ A lonely tongue of flame flickers low in a metal frame at the tent’s center. It spindles slow-burning resin into smoke, warming the tent walls into shades of orange. As lamps go, this one provides a comfortable amount of light and requires little in the way of maintenance.

Having Erik back around is good for these sorts of things.

He’s lounging in his corner with the knife handle he’s working hidden in his hands, shoulders bolstered against tatty bedding and the roll of his jumpsuit. Clean, shorn, shaven. Sawdust litters the floor at his elbow. After an hour or two he’ll sweep it into a tinderbox and go to sleep. This has become the routine.

Tonight, for the first time in a long time, he steals looks at Charles while he works.

His pile of sawdust is smaller than usual.

He wants to talk. ]

[forgodssake]

[ Sitting cross legged on bedding, bare foot and dressed down to clothes he could comfortably pass out in, Charles is in his own world, an additional mental pocket dimension enclosed within the exclusive universe created here by lamp light and tent walls.

He's managed to manifest a pair of silvery steel scissors, chosen for virtue of being a simple machine -- his fingers are slid into its loops and he tests the movement of the implement, now and then. This was about ten minutes ago, and despite his best efforts, he's been unable to manifest anything along with it, like something to cut, or anything of use and value. An improvement from a week ago, but nowhere near how it had been prior to the crash, and he's not sure what is more curious -- that it's weakened, or that it remains at all.

Anyway. He has some scissors now and nothing to do with them, so that's groovy. He uses the blunt edge to pick at the grit beneath a thumbnail before registering that he has Erik's attention, through no action of his own.

Charles glances over, an eyebrow crooking up.

Tired but too thoughtful for sleep, his routine follows on from Erik's naturally, or the other way around. Hunger seems a bit of a constant, and the shifting light throws into sharp relief where he's gotten thinner in the face, but a meal of tasteless reptile meat and seeds makes it an easy feeling to abide by. ]

[sorrycharles]

[ Charles’ hunger makes his own harder to ignore, source accounted for and dials wound down to adjust for the added distraction. It’s a process he manages without much thought, hardship integrated into the white noise of his continued existence.

But he’s all the more aware in the lamplight, private discomfort dense behind his sternum.

He’d prefer that Charles looked less like shit.

He looks human again, himself, after a timely transfusion and a week’s worth of re-hydration. His good eye is clear, focus fluid, engaging contact with the sort of liquid steel confidence that dropped a stadium on the white house and occasionally sees him in a cape.

The tricky thing about nursing dragons back to health is that “getting better” means they go back to burning down villages and eating everyone’s livestock. ]

We couldn’t surrender.

[ This is a logical statement he makes unprompted into the privacy of their tent, unrelated to guilt or insecurity. ]

[forgodssake]

[ Charles closes silvery scissors with the same negligent gentility as folding a fan, blandly ignoring internal assessment as to how much like shit he might indeed look, already feeling it. Conversely, he prefers Erik like this -- with his wits, livestock or no.

He sets his scissors aside. In a few minutes, they'll fade from reality, without his notice.

It's Erik that has his attention. ]

To Van Rijn, [ he fills in. If Erik is ready to talk, he will try to help pave the way. ]

[sorrycharles]

[ Of course, Van Rijn. Erik remembers his address to the network as clearly as he does Raven in the shuttle on the way back, blood everywhere.

But that isn’t where his mind is at. His mind is here, with the cut of Charles’ face in the firelight, and the shamble of their tarp fort in the jungle’s shadow. The ghost of Christmas present. ]

It tried to stop us.

[ The living vacuum, clawing light in, tugging on optic nerves. ] The thing in the ship. [ ‘Moira.’ He doesn’t have the heart to jab at Charles’ government conquest, unease for the reference dense in his face. ]

It’s probably still alive.

A Visitation

[metempsychotic]

[ She said she would come again, when the sun had risen. And whatever else Iezabel Sadonna has become, a liar she is not. The visitation is heralded by that distinct mindform, a nearly-static preservation of thought that mirrors her painstaking self-mummification. Upon closer examination, there is a certain layering to that mental structure, like a new edifice built on much older foundations. But both are rigid, both somber, together resembling more a carefully curated ruin than a space of active inhabitation

She's wearing her mask and gloves, less out of courtesy than a desire to go unnoticed while in this state. She's even gone so far as to weave a mnemonic misdirection about herself; weird as she may appear - though really, how much weirder is she than many of the other inhabitants of the camp - attention short of the properly questing tends to slide off of her. She leaves little impression beyond the sense that something has slipped by, a flicker caught in the corner of the eye, gone as soon as noticed, taken as a mistaken impression.

Unless, of course, you happen to be expecting her.

Ieza appears, a long shadow outside of Charles' ad hoc home, stooping to peer through eyeslits and tentflap. Short of her motions, the crunch of stone and squeak of mud under her boots, she's essentially silent. But her presence, a dense darkness crowned by a pale ovoid, is insistent. She looms, a swath of black in the bright midday sun. ]

[forgodssake]

[ The first thing that notices her is the dog.

A somewhat skinny but not unhealthy animal, a black labrador in the early dawn days of its adulthood, lifting its head to direct a blast of noisy panting at the intruder. Something about her draws the sleepy dog up onto his paws, and issue one loud clap of a bark, while its tail wags uncertainly.

In the midst of that, Charles realises he isn't alone too, moments before her shadow filled the tent flap, and he struggles to his feet, joints creaky and protesting as he climbs out of where he was sitting crossed legged in his bedding.

Inside, it's comfortable enough for two. The fact that there are two places to sleep attest to that. Neither are for the dog, who is stayed when Charles rests a hand on his glossy black head. ]

Come in, [ Charles invites, a note of-- well, he expected this. It doesn't take a telepath. ] He's friendly.

[metempsychotic]

[ Revenant though she may be at present, Ieza is not anathema to dogs- that much is clear from the animal's reaction. If anything she will be less interesting to the labrador than a warm bodied person, unless she's mistaken for a jerky chew. Ieza hesitates as the dog barks at her, though not because of any cynophobia. Quite the opposite, really. This is a living being, healthy and well developed. A creature of some size and complexity. Her lingering gaze might well be taken for what it is- the tacit question: is that for me?

But probably not, not considering the way Charles treats the dog. Disappointing, but hardly surprising. They kept hounds on her family's Lorith estate for the purposes of hunting, and though her own fairly feline inclinations prevented her from bonding with them, her cultural inclination is to view them as companions rather than chattel. Still...

Ieza folds herself into the tent, descending into a kneel on the unoccupied sleeping spot, trying her best not to eye the labrador hungrily. She knows she must be patient, and though patience is easier to sustain in her current state, the changes she has retained since her regression almost all stem from a desire to regain what she has lost.

She is, at least, patient enough to inquire- ] Your friend- he is well? Better now? [ -before addressing her own wishes, the real reason why she is here. It also serves to remind Charles, just in case his memory or sense of indebtedness are fleeting things. Ieza is relying on both. ]

[forgodssake]

[ The track of her thoughts doesn't invite any particular tells from Charles, save for the way his fingers pinch light around the dog's ear, possessive. She detected something like love in Erik, and it would be a fair estimate to imagine the same in return, but Charles isn't going to feed his dog -- Lincoln -- to anyone.

Probably.

But he keeps his expression school, save for the interest sharper in his eyes. He sits opposite her, and keeps an arm slung about Lincoln, who leans into half-hug, panting contentedly, oblivious as to most things save for that this new place smells better than the last. ]

Much better, [ Charles volunteers. He beats her to the chase. ] And I hadn't forgotten what you said, last.

[ He isn't nervous, but he generally prefers to have mastery of the conversational field, and so queries-- ]

You're hungry now, aren't you.

chucky x!

[dogbane]

The humid continental climate of New York State is lovely this time of year; enough of a breeze that the moisture suspended in the air doesn't cling or clog in a tangible way. Sunlight highlights the turrets of the mansion roof and skates off the lake in fragmented shimmers, limns the trees, deepens their variable palettes and textures into a limitless depth of green. The balcony railing is warm under Charles' hands.

There is subtle wrongness here or there: too many weeds tangled around the School plaque up front; his own two feet planted, standing on his own power. Somewhere behind him, his pupils are shouting and talking, and soon, Hank will come out to them, calling, reprimand a poor fit for his growly voice and self-effacing demeanor. Yet there is no babble of secondhand thoughts rolling like a brook through his mind, or pain to interrupt it. It's pleasant, though. Convincing. He might not bother to question it, were it not for another presence shadowing his sleeping mind, picking out the details, gently courting him to lucidity.

It makes sense that this is where William comes to find him. This particular dream, where Charles once found himself frequently host to supplicants from all over the world.

Of course, William's a bit older. Twenty-six, maybe. Twenty-seven? Not a high schooler, at any rate, this young Asian-looking fellow who squeaks the glass door shut and makes sandal slapping sounds up until he draws even with Charles above the halcyon grandeur of the view. He's wearing a red T-shirt, for luck, and jeans that bell slightly at the bottoms, but it isn't yet the 70's; the tailoring is quite modest. "Wow," he says. He glances at Charles. "How do I enroll?"

[forgodssake]

Reluctantly, Charles is giving in to the knowledge that this is a dream. Tiding out, with the debris of ugly context revealed, that he is not home, although he would like to forget about filthy jungles and not enough food and eldritch horrors for a little while longer. His hands curl their fingers around the balcony railing as if to anchor himself in.

He looks to William, and almost smiles.

"First, you need superpowers," he says.

He's dressed nicely. Nicer than he ever did on the Tranquility, which is a low bar. He only ever put on a full suit for network addresses or trying to get laid, and even that latter one, Johanna made fun, seemed more distracted about all the layers. Here, he is attempting neither, he's just casually in tailored grey, and depicted as old as he is, sleeping in a tent, with grey-speckled scruff. "Second, you're a decade too late."

[dogbane]

"Hmm. Sorry about that." The apology seems to carry a cadence that goes deeper than the fact that William missed out on this otherdimensional educational experience. Something to do with the spoiled dream, probably. Or why he's here at all, insinuating himself into fine weather and architecture built to make a man feel powerful.

William turns. Backs up to the rail and boosts himself up to sit on it. This would be tremendously dangerous in real life; each story of the mansion is unusually tall, and they are a few stories up. Here, though, the wind plays with his hair and the edges of his lucky shirt, but is incapable of wounding him. He is as much in his element here as Charles is in the waking minds of people, some exceptionally stubborn, insane, or otherwise contrary psychic personages excepted. He looks at the Englishman and folds his hands together on his lap.

He says, "I have to ask you for a favor. I lost somebody, with recon syndrome, and I'm having a real bitch of a time trying to find him by myself."

[forgodssake]

Charles isn't risking it. The height.

His hands haven't loosened from his grip, and the stone is hard and still against William perching butt first upon it. The wind is pleasant, as is the sun. There isn't the sickly sweet smell of the jungle in the air. Or the sterility of the Tranquility's halls, his own smoke-filled room, the chemicals of the laboratory, which are sensations that glimmer along the ideas he has to shape in association with recon syndrome.

"How do you lose somebody like that?"

falls upon from the sky, screeching

[judex]

[ The pretense is that Fenris is only here for the dog. The dog knows him--perhaps, like his master, better than Fenris would think--and unlike his master, Fenris knows the dog back. And is willing to pet it.

But before long it's Hawke he's talking to. ]

He told me he thought--you [ the pauses are getting smaller, for what that's worth; Hawke, except with a beard; Hawke, except with his mouth on Fenris'-- ] were interested.

[ Donnic. Nostalgic story time started off as an interrogation only slightly more subtle than Cassandra's, but his guard has slipped steadily downward. He's rubbing one bare foot against Dog's proffered belly, and his brief glance up is very brief, but not hostile. ]

[queasycrow]

[ There'd been a stray cat in some temporary hovel numbering who even remembers in his younger Ferelden days, and they'd been there long enough to make a game of it. It was crooked tailed and hungry, but not so much that latter thing that it wouldn't run off at first sign of interaction, and what pieces of fish or fowl they left it only ever disappeared over night. Carver and Garrett would take turns at trying to catch it -- Carver would simply try to be the fastest, while Garrett spent a lot of dignity bent over and making kissy sounds.

Mabaris were a lot easier to understand.

But it had been Bethany that interfered, sitting patiently for a solid hour with cold shreds of chicken, unmoving even when the cat pushed its twitchy nose within reaching distance. After some unknown milestone passed, she was able to run her hand down its skinny spine. (They all had to move on before much more could come of that friendship.)

That doesn't mean valuable lessons couldn't be learned, if you were Garrett, and not Carver. Here, Hawke sits, feet up, cleaning his pauldron of grime and dirt and damp. Patient about it, while it's Dog that continues to be the incorrigible slut, belly up and kicky paws.

Listening, before that wrings from Garrett a crooked smile. ]

I wonder, [ he says. ] No, Donnic got all up in arms at me trying to use him as a go between for Aveline. It's a wonder they managed marriage -- like two blind people attempting a handshake.

[judex]

[ Fenris has moments of rationality. For example: he does not blame or resent Hawke for their bout of amnesiac friendliness. He isn't angry about it at all. He's realizing that maybe that's his lot in life--in lives, however many of them he apparently has--to fall in line, charmed and loyal, behind whichever Hawke happens to be on hand at the moment. Under the beard and broad shoulders, this person is familiar. And funny. The noise Fenris makes is not properly a laugh, more like a garbled version of a dryly spoken ha, but it's close. ]

Good thing they had someone to shove their hands together, [ he says. His eyes are bright.

If he knew Hawke was stray-catting him, that he might resent, but he doesn't know, and it's working. He does resent the magic, preemptively, for the way he knows it could bend his principles. For the muddier waters and the buts and excepts that will worm their way into his vocabulary. Bethany was enough of a stretch. And that's without--

They aren't going to make out.

He rubs his toes up into Dog's armpit and earns a single twitchy thump of his back leg. ]

Did Bethany still go to the Circle? It's odd they might take her and not you.

[queasycrow]

[ Hawke doesn't break from his cleaning as Fenris says that, having warmed at the not-laugh, and this is a familiar scenario. Firelight and easing in the presence of each other and Dog thinking it's all about him, and of course, it would end differently here as it ended back then and there, but that's alright. Hawke is well practiced at living for the present.

Except for when he reflects on the past, of course, and he is forced too, now. Bethany, who'd died before she hit the ground, and how could you let her charge off like that.

He looks over at Fenris, the ease in his own expression gone. ]

Bethany, [ he repeats, confusion evident in echo. ] No, we'd always avoided the Circles. We were good at that, you know. I'm not sure how she'd have fared, if she'd ever made it to Kirkwall.

[ Because she was gentle, but powerful, and passionate, and charges ogres, and maybe two apostates living free of the Gallows would have been too much for Meredith to swallow.

His phrasing is deliberate, anyway. Bethany never met Fenris. ]

twice

[fullmoon]

[ During the hottest, dampest hours of the afternoon, Remus usually pauses his attempts to manually labor his way out of feeling useless. He has limits, after all--he's ill, as they say, and the diet here isn't kind to already-skinny sick people, and it's bloody

fucking

hot.

He's too uncomfortable to sleep, even hiding in the shade of his tent, so when Charles walks by the opening he's awake and sprawled out across the ground on his stomach, hand outstretched, trying to wandlessly accio a bottle of water that's just out of reach.

Every now and then, it works. 'Works.' That would be the source of his blossoming black eye, and part of the source of the irritation in the gaze he aims up at Charles. ]

Setting aside the incredibly statistically unlikely approximations that we crash into something, [ he says. His imitation of Charles' accent could use a little work. ]

[forgodssake]

[ Charles stops when a Welsh tent makes a fairly poor impression of his own accent, looking back just enough to see where Remus is collapsed over within the over-warm depths. His stare, sharp with curiousity, recontextualises, softens.

Winces. ]

Bit of a mouthful when you say it out loud.

[ So summoned, he doubles back, peeling the flap of the tent away a little further. Crouches down enough to find the water bottle -- telepaths -- and roll it closer. ]

[fullmoon]

Bit stupid to say it at all, [ Remus counters. He is being ridiculous. He knows he's being ridiculous--perhaps telepathy might also catch the sense of removal, of watching himself be ridiculous and thinking perhaps he should not be--but he's not appeased by the bottle, even though he picks it up and opens it. His tone is light. ] When they catch up with us, they're probably not going to be very happy about what we've done to their ship.

[forgodssake]

[ Inviting himself to sit, he does, just inside the tent, with his back against the tight woven fabric of its insides. He has an arm slung around bent knee, but there is little else casual about him.

A drastic drop in diet has him thinner about the face, but so is true of them all. There's a newly healed head wound still visible at his hairline, and he hasn't washed the day's filth off his hands, nails sporting black crescents of dirt. ]

If I said it was statistically unlikely they would catch up with us, would you throw something at me?

[ He knows Remus' annoyance -- or worse -- is genuine, but still. ]

etrepa seven + caprica six. you're wondering who i am (secret secret i've got a secret).

[xerampelinae]

[ The wind is picking up, cutting colder and wetter through the camp, bringing with it a sporadic horizontal rain driving most people inside their tents, save for those who don't mind.

Among those who don't mind is Caprica, apparently, who was last seen emerging from the treeline. Rain lances silver off canvas and builds puddles in the dirt, and her bright blonde hair seems to resist the weather's attempts to render it limp, her sturdy waves and curls unkempt but holding form. For someone who apparently doesn't come here often, who hasn't settled here like most, she could stand to look, I don't know, dirtier. It's noon, but the clouds make it so you could barely tell.

She isn't quick to leave. She'd imagined it, taking what she needed and going -- some food, whatever comforts were being left unattended -- but finds herself roaming, exploring, surveying.

Her thoughts are, as far as she knows, hers alone. The camp has steadied itself. Sunk its roots in deeper. Routine is creating paths that she follows, now, through the tents, past dead campfires where the wood is burned white and black. Monotony. She remembers Caprica City, the way they -- she -- moved through its remains. They sat in cafes and strolled through parks and stood on balconies, ghosts of their creators, trying to find that momentum. Maybe there was none to begin with. They settled in the mud and built upwards from there.

Her thoughts are hers alone and a little grim.

A finger of lightning darts through the troubled sky, turning her gaze upwards. Something warmer flickers through her, responsive. The tension in her shoulders eases. ]

[corpse_soldier]

[ She is far from the only one who has chosen to live on the fringes, taking solace in solitude, returning for what she needs before disappearing back beneath the shaded cupolae of the forest; who knows precisely what proportion of those stranded here have chosen to exist in the outskirts rather than the grimy press of the camp-proper? One would have to take a census.

Just one of many things that need doing. To this and other ends, Etrepa Seven has taken to the liminal space, the in-between that marks the edge of the camp and the beginning of the beyond. Tracing an invisible boundary with perfectly measured strides, the ancillary defines the perimeter with each step. She doesn't seem to mind the rain and wind much either. Certainly it is not about to keep her from her self-assigned duties.

As she walks through the storm, Etrepa is not indulging in memory. Such an exercise is bound to send her spiraling towards a grim confrontation with her own reduction. What good would it do for her to recall the heady thrill of space combat, the feeling of power and grace that came from sliding out of her self-made gates in swift strokes, striking at her enemies with missiles and radiant heat before sliding seamlessly back into the insular nowhere of gatespace? It would only serve to make her present experience of coldness and wetness, concentrated as it now is into the singularity of her one remaining segment, that much more depressing.

So no, she's not about to get lost in her own thoughts. She is far more interested in rifling through the thoughts of others.

The gift has no ready explanation, no more than the blessings that fell from the sky so lately; no one she has met so far possesses the requisite implants that would allow her to draw the detailed biometric data that once functioned, with time and familiarity, as a kind of effective mind-reading. Yet when she reaches, she finds them laid out: the sometimes turbulent, sometimes calm, sometime dense and sometimes nebulous clouds of thought, run through with the occasional bright bolt of insight or recognition. It is not at all what once she could do, but it seems close enough that she does it with some sense of comfort, and absolutely no compunction.

If confronted over the reason for this psychic intrusion, Etrepa Seven would assert that she is simply assessing anyone who approaches for potential hostility. And as Caprica Six appears in her vision, looking - indeed - rather too well-kempt to be one of the more rugged jungle survivalists who occasionally acquiesce to the need for medical supplies or simply for company, the ancillary hones in on her with a mix of suspicion and curiosity that has everything to do with staying a few steps ahead of her own thoughts, whatever the outward justification.

What she discerns - once she closes to the necessary five meter range - is confusing and attention-grabbing. She catches only the tail end of the contemplation about creators, a thought that echoes her own potential musings enough to make her wonder if her own thoughts had simply caught up with her. As the bolt in the sky pairs with the bolt in her mind, Etrepa is spurred into action- or at least to address. ]

Do you have business in camp? [ she asks, in a voice that is just slightly more modulated than her 'natural' ancillary flatness; she's been practicing. If her tone were a spontaneous expression of her feelings, Etrepa Seven would sound wary. As it is, she replicates the tone of expectant authority common to every border guard who has not given up on sounding anything more than terrifically bored. ]

[xerampelinae]

[ As soon as approach is detected and the stranger speaks to her, her thoughts seem to close up like a fan, neat and precise and practiced, withdrawing from wander to a streamlined assessment of this one's stature and tone. And as it happens, wary is something Caprica Six picks up on via the same mechanism that Etrepa Seven perceives her thoughts. She stops and turns, a meaningful several centimetres taller so that she might look down the bridge of her nose at the face she's never seen before.

And she's good at remembering faces.

Her prize is bundled together and hard to identify, a package she grips in both hands and keeps tucked against her belly, but she doesn't glance down at it or offer it as explanation. ]

Expecting trouble? [ She has a lot of teeth, and they show slightly in a twitch of a mean smile. ] I didn't know Security was still in operation.

[corpse_soldier]

[ The presence of a package would set off interior alarms in even the most novice of border patrols. And Etrepa is no amateur. There's nothing overtly threatening about the uniformed person's posture, though she is conspicuously equipped with a sidearm that rests in a quick-draw holster on her upper thigh; her stance is certainly wider than it is narrow, suggesting stolidity, but remains a shade or two short of properly confrontational. ]

The previous organization has lost cohesion, [ is true and not worth denying - Etrepa couldn't so much as claim membership in that erstwhile entity. ] A reorganization is underway, [ is a gross exaggeration of her nearly one-woman (well, one-ancillary) quest to establish Justice, Propriety and - of course, always and ultimately - Benefit for the shanty-town the crash survivors call camp. But all achievements that are not merely accidental begin as pretensions. There is no need for Etrepa to undermine her own still-groundless authority. ]

Do you have business in camp, [ she reiterates, ] or any associates who are expecting you?