caveofsapphires | smaller patch of fading sky [ open ]

smaller patch of fading sky [ open ]

WHO: EVERYONE. All PCs thus far will be in this log, through active tagging or implication.
WHAT: THRILLS. SPILLS. Hiking trip toward the Diamond City.
WHERE: The Overworld.
WHEN: Forward-dated to May 1st (Tuesday) through May 7th (Monday).
WARNINGS: May contain violence or other mentions of physical harm. This is not summer camp.
NOTES: More information can be found on the OOC post here. Please read it!

Gathered in the morning haze, Sleepers were brought to the mouth of the Cave with plenty of supplies and equipment. Compasses that would point them toward the City. Backpacks full of clothes and food, medical kits, tents and even weapons. Stun rifles and knives — to fight off any unwanted company, they said. ("Watch out for their bite," Ryan had commented. "Those fuckers are downright feral.") The straight and narrow path would get them there in six days if they kept a good clip. They were sent off just like that. Refusals to leave were met with a wall of guard force officers blocking the entrance back into the cave city. No way to go but forward, unless someone was particularly stalwart about remaining.

From the exterminator's station near the mouth, leaving the Cave was as simple as a short hike upward into the fresh air of the Overworld. Dust and an uncomfortable sort of heat pervaded the atmosphere, light winds stirring up the sand and teasing the meager bits of vegetation that had grown. No matter what direction you looked... it was all wasteland, cracked ground and desolate emptiness. Jutting up from scarred ground were boulders and small spires made entirely of glass and patches of stone; instead of reflecting the harsh sunlight, they seemed to absorb it and only add to the muted loneliness of the atmosphere. As far as the eye could see, there was no life to be found.

With no other option, the Sleepers eventually made their way onward.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"So you're an expert with illusions as well?" Re-l satisfied herself with an internal eye roll. "I should have assumed, I suppose."

It was irritating, having to pick up fragments of his story from hints and crumbs, but it was better than nothing. Whoever this man had been, he had been powerful. And by the way he was implying things, there were supernatural forces at work in his universe. Were there thousands of other worlds, then? Each of them separate, each of them operating on totally different guidelines? It seemed such an impossible idea.

She tugged her blanket closer around herself, drawing her legs up and wrapping it around them, resting her head on her head on her knees.

"You might be useful," she said, putting as much ice into her voice as she could. "I can't afford to lose useful resources. And if I brought a mysterious, highly powerful gun into a city someone would notice, and then I would be in danger and you probably would too."

His refusal stung a little, but it was an illogical reaction, and she ignored it. She was used to Awakening, and it would be nice to have a weapon she knew perfectly, but it wasn't necessary. She didn't want it for the firepower. She wanted it because she wanted something from home. Something that reminded her of the world (and the people) she had left behind.

She looked up at the sky and sighed, wondering how she had gotten tangled up in this place so quickly.

"Eh, they're amateur work, but they'll do for the minor stuff. Tricks of the trade and all that." Illusions, constructs, alternate timelines and realities ... Sure, that one with the Groundhog Dean Dies Day had been particularly complicated because he'd had to keep stashing Dean's soul somewhere so Hell didn't get it too early, but something like that just had to be made cohesively and it started sustaining itself. His only complaint had been that he'd gotten bored of the same syrup every damned morning.

The archangel glanced down at the bandage one last time, but the adrenaline of his discovery was starting to wear off and the weariness was sinking in. He felt like he couldn't possibly muster the motivation to get up even if he'd wanted to; his whole body was leaden. With a regretful sigh he left the thought of healing himself alone and pulled the blanket up, resting his head back against the stone and staring up at the opening where the sandstorm still raged.

"Don't keep me in suspense, now," he said, amused. "Just go ahead and tell me how you feel." He wondered if she remembered she'd asked for a question in return for her help, and then decided that, whatever, a display of one of his powers was more than enough in trade.

She appeared to have offended him. Re-l wondered vaguely if she should feel guilty about that, but decided it was for the best. It might stop him flirting with her. And she couldn't afford to get close to anyone here. She was quite sure of that. She was all alone.

But she didn't want him to be huffy and offended either. Huffy and offended people were annoying and sulked at you and didn't talk. And Re-l was still curious. She wondered what the best peace offering would be.

"My name," she said, out of the blue. "They call me Masa, but if no one is listening, then my name is Re-l."

Not offended, but given this chick didn't seem to get the nuances of sarcasm, Gabriel wouldn't have been surprised she thought so. Rather, at the silence he let his eyes close. The stone was cold on his back, but he really couldn't muster the urge to sit up and draw his blanket around him.

Then she spoke again and he stirred, opening his eyes, recalling what she'd told him before. "Does this mean I have permission to flirt with you now?" he asked with impish brightness.

She'd forgotten about that, and kicked herself mentally for having even a moment of sympathy for him. How anyone could combine the worst parts of Vincent and Ergo in a single body without any of their advantages was beyond her.

"It's your time and energy to waste," she said, not looking at him.

The sandstorm couldn't possibly last much longer. And then she could leave.

She could hope. They'd be lucky if the sandstorm didn't last for days.

"I prefer to think of it as a challenge," Gabriel said innocently. There was a moment or two of silence, howl of the wind notwithstanding, and then he huffed and said a little more quietly, "They called me Sylvester. My name--it's Gabriel."

It really was getting cold. The sun had been the one good thing about this stupid world, and with it gone, Re-l couldn't think of a single thing she liked about the place. At least she'd made decent progress today, because at this rate, she was going to be sleeping in the ravine. And there were a number of different reasons to avoid that.

Having a name would help her to organise her thoughts, though she couldn't say that either suited her companion particularly. On the other hand, his reluctance to give them away was mildly amusing. Re-l certainly wasn't above petty jabs, though she never thought of it that way.

"Gabriel. I'll remember." She huddled a little bit closer into her blanket, rubbing her fingers together and missing her big white coat. "With supernatural abilities and a name like that you almost could be a Proxy. And you match the idiocy requirement perfectly too. You don't burn up in sunlight, though." She muttered something under her breath, which might almost have sounded like "shame".

Her almost smile was probably a trick of the light.

At that, and the mutter, Gabriel could only laugh. "A vampire? Puh-lease. I have way more taste and style than them. Especially the kind who are actually allergic to sunlight."

Though it was curious she considered his name vampiric. He had to admit, he was intrigued. He grinned at her, saw the totally-not-a-smile and shifted into more of a smirk. "So why d'you call them Proxies, then?"

The word he used was unfamiliar, but the tone made it evident that they were talking about totally different things.

"Proxies are proxies. Made by the creators, to repopulate the earth after its destruction, and to die when their task was complete. Hence the weakness to sunlight. When light returns to the world, the Proxies are no longer needed. So they die. Except Ergo." She paused and corrected herself. "Vincent. But he was made to be different." She shrugged. "I don't understand everything that happened. Daedalus could tell you a lot more."

She looked down, remembering that Daedalus was dead, and would never tell anyone anything ever again.

"So not a proxy then. Or a vampire. What are you?"

Huh. No wonder she'd said that this scenario was actually possible, if that's the kind of place she came from.

"So what, you all live in atmosphere domes with self-sustained light, and outside everything's just ..." He waved a hand toward the exit. He was intrigued, but his mouth was twisted with ironic bitterness too. Just how many people here had come from worlds on the heels of Armageddon, failed or not?

He turned the smile on her, but its tenor didn't change. "So you have wannabe-vampires and a dead Greek inventor. Happen to have belief in God too?"

"It was like that, at the start. A dull, bland, pointless world, small and tiny." She closed her eyes, and her eyeshadow leapt out. "But it's all gone now. Then. Whenever. The domes collapsed, the Proxies died, and the Arc returned."

She opened her eyes and looked at him. That constant smile made his face hard to read, but he wasn't joking. What could she say?

"I heard the Proxies called Gods, more than once. But I don't think that's what you mean. I can't say I ever thought about it myself."

"The Arc?" he asked. "Wouldn't happen to be anything to do with that whole Awakening thing, would it?" She'd just told him that they were trying to renew the world, after all. It fit.

He snorted. They could've been akin to pagan gods, he supposed. Or maybe the Leviathan. "No. I mean the One, the Almighty. If you've heard of Him you'd have heard of His angels."

And the implication there was clear.

"They were connected in as much as they both marked the end of the world," Re-l said, "but Awakening had more to do with Vincent. He was what awoke." Her mouth twisted. "I'd say the gun was coincidence, but then Proxy One engineered me, so it would probably be a lie."

She let his final statement sink in. Was it even reasonable to believe him? But if his world held magic, then real gods were not so implausible. She couldn't judge anything on her own standards. There was only one conclusion she could come to.

"You're as bad as he was," she said. "You'd think angels would have better faces."

The details were vague, but Gabriel got enough of the context, and he echoed the twist of her lips with a wry smile of his own. Then his expression morphed into startled indignation.

"Hey!" he objected. "What's wrong with this face? I'll have you know I've worn it for fifteen hundred years!" Then he frowned. "Which, okay, I'll grant you is a while, but everyone else tended to burn out after a century or two no matter how careful I was with 'em."

He didn't think he want to give this one up, even if he could. Not jus because the man had been his one true vessel, which kept him from burning out, but because they'd had a lot of fun together before he asked Gabriel to send his soul on. Taking another meatsuit would have meant binding another soul all over again, and he had less justification for it now than he ever had.

Re-l thought about asking what he meant by "burn out", and then decided she didn't want to know.

The flow of sand was definitely lessening. Whatever force had whipped up this sandstorm, it was fading away. The constant swish of sand grains was fading, and in its absence other sounds became magnified. She still couldn't see the sky, but by now it must be nearly night, or at least late evening.

"All those centuries," she said thoughtfully. "It might be nice to have so much time." She'd known it, even with Vincent in the last good days. There was every chance he could live forever. She had a century, at best. Her grandfather had had much more, but he'd been a sick and dying doll for most of it.

"Not that I'd trade," she added, just in case Gabriel was getting the wrong idea.

He looked at her, then, and smiled grimly; his amber eyes glittered, and for a moment the being peering out them was clearly not just old, but ancient. "You only think that because it's a basic human desire to want more. In my experience? You get so much more out of life than long-lived beings. You don't have many years, so you make the most of them. You can achieve so much in so little time--things other, more powerful beings I know have never been able to understand at all."

The way he spoke was just how he looked, and so familiar. Familiar, and fond, and not exactly awed, nor exactly respectful, but somewhere in-between.

He'd been alive since the dawn of time and he was one of the few of his kind who seemed to have found anything to do over the years. Most of the rest of his family had just stagnated, wallowing in orders and sameness and never having an original thought. Humanity, though. Humanity lived. Most of it. There were always those ones that didn't.

For the first time she really understood that the man next to her had once not been human. His face looked old and tired, the way Proxy One had looked under all the bluster. The way Ergo had looked, when he stared at her in her apartment. Only beings like that were fascinated with humanity. Or pseudo-humanity, as it were.

"You're wrong," she said. "Time has nothing to do with it. My fellow citizens never had an original thought in their lives, and Pino had more creativity than most humans I met. Pseudo-human, AutoReiv, Proxy, angel. It's not what you are, it's what you do and what you think that matter."

Gabriel couldn't help but smile, and it was bitter, ironic and still, yes, still fond all at once. "You'd think it wouldn't. But most of my brothers and sisters have never had a creative thought in their lives. It's all orders, orders, orders and Destiny, all the time. That was the gift Dad gave to humanity."

He shrugged. "Sure, a ton of you don't do shit with anything. But where I came from there was almost seven freakin' billion of you. And most of the time? If you were given a reason to fight, to live, to try harder? You did. My brothers tried to destroy the whole damned world. It was humans who stopped it."

Okay, now he was depressed. With a sigh he let his head thunk back against the stone, and the archangel stared up at the clearing storm.

"It sounds like we come from very different worlds," Re-l said. She probably meant it to be nice, but her tone had taken on its analytical edge. How fascinating the differences were. There was so much to learn, so much to understand. It was almost worth this stupid situation. Almost.

"Well, you're human now," she said. "I guess this is your big chance."

The sand had faded, and the stars were coming out. Re-l stared up at the sky, entranced. Stars were the most beautiful thing about this place, beyond a doubt. She could have looked at them forever.

"I don't want to be human," he grumbled. "I like you guys and all, but your bodies suck. You sweat and stink and are squishy as Hell isn't, you get sick at the drop of a hat, and you can't even eat candy all day. And let's not even get into the other physical functions."

Besides, he wasn't really human. Not in his head. It made a difference.

Gabriel found his eyes closing and forced them open again with a blink. The stars really were the best thing right now. He'd never really taken note of them before; after winging past a couple of suns from close-up, you kinda just didn't think about them as something to look at. Humanity was far more interesting.

But down here, with his relatively new physical limitations, he was far more aware of the utter space in the night sky. "At least the storm's cleared off the view," he murmured.

"That statement is rather at odds with some of your earlier pronouncements," Re-l said, not looking at him. The stars still held her attention.

Her nose was cold, and when she exhaled little white plumes appeared and vanished in the dark, but she continued to look up.

"No sun means no stars, you know." She wasn't even really talking to Gabriel. More thinking out loud. "I never saw stars before."

The endless galaxies whorled away into space, swallowing her up. She felt herself to be very small and very large at the same time, insignificant and connected to everything all at once.

"That one's the exception that proves the rule," he answered promptly. "Most of the others are just gross, without any fun to help you get over it."

At that he had to look at her oddly. "Stars generate their own light, y'know. It just takes a few million years to get there. You can't tell me whatever messed up your world screwed things up that badly that it shut off all the lights."

The stone really was cold, cold enough now to urge him to move. With a shiver he shuffled forward and pulled the blanket around him, then leaned back again with a sigh. Sure, stars were pretty and all, but they could occupy his attention for only so long. The sheer vastness of the space upstairs was making him start to feel a little homesick. Obviously the best response to that was to stop looking and ignore it.

Re-l hmpffed, huffing out a white cloud.

Her nose really was cold, so she reluctantly gave up on stars and buried her face in her blanket. When she spoke her voice was muffled by the layers of cloth, but she was feeling too lazy to lift her head.

"No, there were stars. And a sun, actually. But they were hidden by thick clouds that had covered the world for a thousand years. Thermonuclear winter."

Of course. "That would do it, all right," Gabriel murmured. He meant to ask what the Hell even happened to her world, then decided he probably didn't need to know, because weren't Armageddons all the same?

And besides, his eyes kept slipping closed. Now he didn't have the cold of the stone to distract him the chilly nip against his face wasn't nearly enough to keep him awake.

Gabriel was falling asleep, Re-l noted. She bit down on her lip and let him drift off, almost holding her breath. Only when she was certain that he was unconscious did she move, standing up and stretching quietly. She shoved the blanket back into her backpack, picked up the torch and headed out into the desert.

The sand had moved, and the landscape was changed, but the stars remained constant. She picked out the particularly bright one she had noticed on earlier nights and used it to find her bearings. There were the distant mountains of the Cave, which meant that the city was this way.

It was not particularly safe to walk at night, but Re-l did not intend to go far. She simply needed to be alone. There was no one in this world that she could truly trust, and she had to remember that.

Putting one foot in front of the other, she began to walk towards the city.

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oh fff i misread that whole awakening bit. orz oops let's just pretend he's tired and misheard.

I thought he was being perceptive! It's a really important word in canon

oh maybe i didn't misread then. first i thought awakening and her gun were separate entities.

Her gun is called awakening but so is everything else XD

gotcha. XD let's say a bit of A and a bit of B, then

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since we're playing sleeping nearby on the sixth Imma go for something different here.