THE SQUAD DOES AN INTRO: GROUP MEET UP - [modplot] [event] [free-for-all]

[wildermods]

THE SQUAD DOES AN INTRO: GROUP MEET UP
OOC POST
The Green's binding spell finally works out its kinks and the entire group is teleported into the same area in the center of the city, near the statues of the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow.

Everyone in the group feels a tingling sensation as the magic sets in place and binds them. Anyone that tries to leave will now find themselves being teleported back if they wander too far. The group will have to try to stay together when it moves now.

They have a little bit of time to figure things out.

---

OOC INFO
✦ Post in actionspam format. Plots and mod-run events in the game are meant to be in actionspam format to keep a brisk pace.

✦ Free-for-all Post. This event will be in "free-for-all" format, meaning that threadhopping is encouraged and that threading should be treated in the same conversational way as network posts.

✦ By now, the language magic should be fully in place. By now, everyone should have magically learned Sylvaen so that everyone can speak it fluently and understand each other.

Comments

[awfulcer]

I could probably think of something, but it'd only make it, I don't know, two percent worse and not seriously worse. [It's a joke, kind of. A really sad one. He's trying to treat her statement as if it's something precious, like something made of thin glass that he could break if he treated it wrong, something that needs a finer touch than he's got so he's making the best with caution and intent.]

Do you need someone to sit with you? [He's pretty sure he doesn't have anything else to offer, but he does want to provide her with some comfort. He just knows that there's not much you can do to take the edge off grief.]

[astrarche]

You dug yourself into this hole. Now you have to deliver.

[She says it in the way a mother might say "you made this mess, now clean it up," with no trace of humor. There's no sign, except for the sign of her commentary, that she wants the distraction.

She pauses a long while before answering.]

I would like for someone to.

[There is a world of difference between 'need' and 'want,' but the difference feels less when what one wants is available. She has lost enough now to admit it.]

[awfulcer]

[He feels a bit on a limb, since the monkey's voice and words seem to be diverging in meaning, so it takes him a few seconds to make the decision on what to say next.]

I could give you a speech about how everything happens for a reason. Those always make it worse.

[He's going back, digging up after his dad died when he was a young man instead of the most recent loss, where everyone was a bit too stunned at him defenestrating someone to talk about how God needed another angel or whatever.]

Or about how suffering makes you stronger. That one's awful.

[astrarche]

[Looks like she'll have to wait to find out what 'that Japanese face' is. Well fine. She's played a long game before. It was a good distraction while it lasted, though. She chuckles, once, bitterly.]

If suffering made you stronger I wouldn't be dead.

[But there's a curiosity that's needling at her, penetrating through the thick numbness of her grief.]

I thought this was an afterlife. But no one else is acting like they just died.

[awfulcer]

I don’t think I’m dead, but hell if I know. An aneurysm or whatever can sneak up like that, [He snaps his fingers.] Wouldn’t even see it coming. Maybe we all suddenly died and you’re the only one unlucky enough to remember it.

[He feels strangely calm with that idea. He even wonders for a moment if it’s been the morning before coming here that was the dream, that maybe he really did blow his brains out last night. If this is the afterlife, he has some people he needs to give a piece of his mind and then hug.]

But I’m guessing the rules don’t apply here, so you might be dead, I might be alive, none of it really matters anymore.

[astrarche]

['None of it really matters' is all that she feels right now. Thank goodness someone else put it in to words.

And yet, something has been claiming to matter since she first realized she was falling somewhere other than to the afterlife she expected.]

Did you hear the same words I did, when you showed up here? Something about a 'Green.'

[Why has she been asked to care? Why has she been asked to care about anything?]

[awfulcer]

Sure. That shit about lost people and all?

[The 'lost in the forest' thing was kind of on-the-nose accurate for Dixon, to the point where even he drew a connection and felt a little insulted over it. But it's true; he's very lost, very unmoored, keeling around in a storm just trying to keep the boat from flipping over.

Anyway, it's something to talk about besides dead kids. Dixon figures if she's talking about that then she's at least using a tiny bit of her mind to think about something besides whether her son is still alive. Even just a tiny bit means it isn't all-consuming, at least for a second.]

You think we're going on an adventure or something?

[astrarche]

Why should I care?

[She asks it from the deepest part of her heart. It's not the dismissive casting-off that one usually asks that with.]

Why should you care, for that matter? Why should any of us care? Who decided to ask me?

[Who made this decision? Who did it? Who thought that the right person to go on their quest was someone they'd have to pluck from between life and death, consumed by grief, with the fate of her son an oppressively unanswered question?]

[awfulcer]

Because what else we got to care about?

[It comes out so fast it's like he was waiting for her to ask it; he's had the answer long before the question occurred to him. He slipped into caring about this before he realized he could have opted out.

It gives him something to do when he has no purpose, no point left, the very last bit ground out of him.

Who knows? Maybe she's in the same boat, now that her reason to live is gone too. Maybe she isn't in it today but she'll join him there, in a futility that makes any destiny offered up a blessing from heaven.]

Maybe you finish whatever it is we have here and at least you can figure out what happened. [His voice gets gentle again.]

[astrarche]

[What indeed. Her care over Kubo's fate, over her disappointment at not being with her husband, is so overwhelming. It's all she cares about. And she can't get either.

Instead - she gets this. This quest. This sword. This conversation with someone else who has no reason to care, either, but does.]

What else indeed.

[There's agreement in her tone.]

Maybe I can.

[It's enough to get her to the next day. Not happily. But he isn't offering her the possibility of happiness, thankfully. He's honest. The best hope he's offered her is answers. It's all she's willing to hope for, too, and she wouldn't have even hoped for it if someone else hadn't suggested.]

Thank you. For sitting with me.

[She pauses, before adding with unusually unguarded honesty -]

And for talking. It did help.

[awfulcer]

[He nods, then, instead of saying anything paltry like "you're welcome" that would make it seem like an exchange or perfunctory benevolence. It wasn't like that.

Talking to her has made him feel a little heavier, but also steadier - the way something does when it's pinned down when the wind is blowing, tethered and bound but safer, centered, less apt to go whipping away. Like he knows a little more what he's doing but also how difficult it will be.

Feeling as if his use here has been spent up, gets to his feet. He considers dropping the stub of his cigarette to the ground and smothering it out under his shoe, but somehow that seems disrespectful, so he keeps it going a little longer.]

[astrarche]

[She's not letting him go that easily, though.

Not if he's one of the assets she has on her search for answers.]

What's your story?

[awfulcer]

[He pauses, not sure what to say. So much of his identity has been peeled away lately, first by losing Chief and then by getting fired and then the bottom dropping out from under him when he thought he'd done something right. He could introduce himself as police; he could introduce himself as former police; he could go into a long story about why you shouldn't get set on fire or throw people out windows or ever really hope for anything besides answers, and sometimes not even that.

But, as with many things, he settles on the most straightforward.]

Well. I was on my way to kill a rapist and fell asleep in the car. And then I was here.

[astrarche]

[His murderous intentions earn him a shrug and a half-nod. On the way to kill a person - as one sometimes does.

The real question -]

What's a car?

[awfulcer]

[He's not even particularly relieved that she doesn't react to the murder plot. It's just another fact of life, like another tree passing in the landscape. Can't even explain why he particularly wants to kill this guy except that it's somewhere to go, something to do, a way to prove that there are some people out there who deserve to live even a little less than he does.

He pulls out his pack of cigarettes, taps it against his palm and gets another one.]

It's a metal box that takes you places. I don't figure monkeys got them, but I also didn't figure they talked, so I don't know shit. Actually. We find one around here I'll give you a ride in it.

[He's a little slow on the 'medieval-era fantasy' uptake. Like really slow.]

[astrarche]

They don't.

[And there, again, is yet another point of frustration and horror, building up pressure inside her.]

This body wasn't supposed to last more than a week.

[Maybe it still won't. Maybe she'll just fade away in a few more days. Maybe that's all the time the Green has to hold on to her.

She doubts it, somehow.]

But here I am. Still a monkey. Saving the Green and all set to take a ride in a 'car,' whatever that is.

[She doesn't want it. She doesn't want any of it. But they've been over that already. She's sad and horrified and doesn't want this life, but she has it, and they've been over that already.

The only distraction she has now is an awful one, but -]

The rapist you're going to murder. Who did they assault?

[awfulcer]

How long's it lasted?

[There's something very obliviously calm about the way he asks that, like yeah, sure, you're inhabiting bodies. He's getting used to it. The boiling frog effect for "fucking weird" has come into full force.]

I don't know who he raped. Just know he did with his friends and burned her to death. Overheard him bragging about it and... [Well, he'd made some assumptions about who the victim was, acted on them, got them all wrong, and decided to say "fuck it" and go kill the guy anyway.] Figured he deserves a bullet a little more than I do, so. Here we are.

[As if "decided to go kill a guy" and "ended up a character in a fantasy quest ensemble" logically flow one to the other.]

[astrarche]

[That gives her pause, makes her think about it.]

This is day three.

I feel . . .

I feel different than I did in life. I can't . . . I can't feel myself fading. I feel alive.

I feel alive, and I feel like I'm - like I'm not going to change. Like I'm not going to leave this.

[Once she was a princess of time and space. Once she was a mother, slowly dying, able to make that "slow" be "long." Once - she had more time, with her loved ones.

Now she has time, and no loved ones.]

I've killed for worse reasons.

[Why refrain from admitting it? 'Daddy said so' is a terrible reason overall. And she's - she's been so alone for so long.]

What are you going to do here?

[This seems like such a small mission, and yet - the mission she wants is smaller. The mission she wants is Kubo, is Hanzo, is two people and surely if the world was worthy it would be a world they lived in.]

[awfulcer]

[He looks over at her, then returns his attention to the sky and his cigarette. He figures how limited that “alive” probably is. It’s probably a body-alive, not a brain-alive, given her circumstances. Heart-alive and bleeding and soul-dead.]

Well, at least you got thumbs. Could be worse. [On that front and possibly that front alone.] You can still read and write.

[He realizes thumbs aren’t necessary to read but doesn’t want to draw attention to his conversational stumble, so he doesn’t.

He shrugs.]

Go with it, I guess. Try not to fuck it up too hard. I’ll help you try and get answers, if that’s what you’re trying to do.

[It’s something, he realizes, that he wants to do. It’s a goal without fuzzed-out, vague edges, without too much optimism dragging it into the realm of the impossible. It appeals to the buried-deep parts of him that wanted to help people a long time ago, before anger and apathy caked themselves on. There’s a simple part in most people that just wants to alleviate pain wherever they find it, in others and in themselves. That’s the part that makes that offer to Sariatu now.]