thenearshore | Curiosity killed the... [open]

Entry tags:

Curiosity killed the... [open]

Who: Zhao Yunlan & OPEN
When: The second week of February
Where: Far Shore - the library, near Ebisu's temple, the Western District; Near Shore - the ruins of a burned-out department store
What: Exploring, unwisely.

Library

[Zhao Yunlan is becoming a regular sight at a corner table in the library; he's accumulating a stack of books, filling them with bookmarks, taking copious notes in a cheap black notebook, swearing at them and not putting them away again when he leaves.

Research! He hates it. He needs an assistant who will do it for him, but in the absence of that helpful whoever, he's stuck hitting the books himself. It's going to age him posthumously.

Hopefully, no one minds the fact that a largely useless pile of books keeps being renewed on the corner table, and filled with paper scrap bookmarks that have to be removed before they're put away.]

Ebisu's temple

[Since he's died young regardless, Zhao is seriously considering switching from lollipops to cigarettes. There's something enticing about the smell of burning tobacco, and, besides, importantly: smokers can take smoke breaks. As a non-smoker, he's having to find some other excuse to sneak outside and see the sun every once in a while during his workday.

His excuse today is picking flowers. He doesn't recognize the flowers sprouting from the grayish soil clinging to cracks in the temple's modern-looking concrete courtyard, but they're bright, colorful, and have a non-zero chance of brightening the day of the poor white-collar workers typing their fingers to the bone on either side of his temp desk. Fresh flowers, an important part of office feng shui: or something like that.

(He's considering bringing in a houseplant. Those also make great excuses to take a break.)

He nips off the stem of a bright red daisy-looking thing, considers it, and turns with a shameless grin. Whoops, there's somebody, has he been caught skiving off?]

Here! It goes with your eyes.

Western District

[It's late on the night of the 12th, and Zhao had been working his way back home to Bakugou's place after a long day doing accounting and a few drinks out afterwards, except, annoyingly, his stomach is killing him. All right, so he'd skipped breakfast, and lunch, and dinner, and: all right, the last time he ate something was yesterday when Bakugou'd made breakfast. But it's not like he ever gets more or less hungry no matter what he eats! He'd thought it was no big deal.

Apparently even dead men can get heartburn from strong liquor on an empty stomach, he reflects, and slumps down onto a comfortable rock at the edge of the road, indulging his solitude with a wince as he bends over and puts his head on his knees.

This is really embarrassing. He'll just give it a few minutes, and once he feels a bit better, he'll just drag himself back home to bed....]

Department Store

[Mysteries abound. These mysteries, though, don't look like they're going to be solved anytime soon. Zhao ducks under plastic disaster cleanup sheeting and looks around the dripping, ice-cold, smoke-blackened floor of the unlucky department store, and shakes his head. Any clues that might've once been here are long since gone. If the fire hadn't gotten them, the months of abandonment and subsequent investigation would've.

Maybe he can sneak in and pull the investigation files somehow. Shinki do tend to go unnoticed, so he's willing to bet he can shadow a cop into any police office he wants. Getting keys to get into their files might be a little trickier, of course....

Sighing, he turns to go, just in time to spot a pale, whitish, sheet-like thing that's not plastic lashing out towards his ankle across the debris-strewn concrete floor.

With a shout, he jumps back, landing in a puddle. Filthy water splashes everywhere, and the sheet rears up like it's been possessed by a cobra, striking out at him again. The edge of it brushes his hand as he scrambles out of the way, raising an instant, aching, purplish welt.

Well, fuck. He's just found his first ayakashi all on his own, he realizes, turns, and bolts for the stairs with a possessed sheet in hot pursuit.

This is making a lot of noise.

Hopefully someone's passing by.

Help?]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That wouldn't surprise me. I've seen people in a similar state, though they were not as mobile.

[ The people trapped inside the Awl had been little more than remains of hate and impotent anger. There wasn't anything really left of their humanity save whatever the dark energy gave them. He was wondering if there was an echo of the Hallows here, maybe used to give life to the soulless. ]

Holy places..? I see.

[ The look he gives Zhao Yunlan was one part judgement and three parts disapproval, eyes narrowed, face stony and brows drawn down. He should have known. Even without his memories Zhao Yunlan would toss himself at danger because that was just how he was, and Shen Wei knew it. ]

I hope you make sure to cleanse yourself from any blight you catch.

[That's a schoolteacher's glare if Zhao Yunlan has ever seen one; it wakes a deep-rooted pang of juvenile defiance in his heart. Apparently, he was once the kind of student who got a lot of disapproving glares, he notes, and grins back with his best charming-asshole expression.]

Hey, Prof, don't worry about me. Blight stings! I wash it off right away.

[Give or take however long it takes him to get to the nearest source of purified water, but it isn't ever too long.

That said -- inner defiant teenager indulged -- he lets his expression go serious again.]

Those other people you've seen. How did it happen to them?

[ That was a look that he got a lot from Zhao Yunlan, especially right before he did something entirely inappropriate for a public setting. Which was probably why he did that because he knew just how much it got under Shen Wei's skin. Still, he couldn't stop the disbelieving snort and eyeflick that was like a full eye roll by another person. ]

It's still not something you can shrug off all the time.

[ Well. It seems that this part of their bickering hasn't changed too much despite what they're were bickering over. Use of the Hallows, being heedless of dangers, nothing really changed there. ]

They were a small tribe of people who had come in contact with an Artifact that was part of a set originally used for stabilizing my homeland after a meteor storm and subsequent war almost destroyed it. Together, the four Tools were beneficial, but separate they caused a lot of damage to those who had no idea what they possessed.

[He hasn't gotten himself re-killed yet; he shrugs at Shen Wei's admonition, grin briefly resurfacing. Blight isn't that bad as long as he deals with it. Getting ripped up by an ayakashi, on the other hand, is a real possibility and one that wouldn't wash off.

He takes some care, at least.]

So, being around that artifact wore them down? Or... well.

[He blows out a breath.]

The way it goes here, I've heard, is: if we get killed it might not stick, but we'll forget. Wind up blank slates all over again. Who knows -- maybe it's an overdose of that cup of forgetfulness that washes those poor bastards' brains clean.

[ Even if he forgot his life, Shen Wei felt Zhao Yunlan was going to be death of him. ]

It was the Tool that drained energy to power the binding, so it drained them of all it could and trapped what was left in its prison. Those remains reminds me of the soulless.

[ he taps the open book under his hand, frowning at the thought of Zhao Yunlanwithout what makes him him. It almost made him want to wrap Yunlan in blankets and hide him somewhere safe, despite knowing that instinct was not appreciated by Yunlan. ]

Maybe.

[Drained energy to power a binding, huh. Yunlan looks down at his notes, tapping the tip of his pen against a period. His face is setting into stone.]

You know, I'm just a dead man, but I've heard from a couple of gods now that we're "trapped here."

[Are the soulless the remains of people drained of their self to power this binding? He doesn't elaborate -- Shen Wei's clearly smart enough to follow that line from A to B.]

-- That could just be a coincidence, though.

[It could be something else powering the trap, and the piles of bled-dry husks of people accumulating in remote bits of the Western District could be totally unrelated. But that's a hell of a coincidence.]

[ There was a lot more to it than that, not that he would go into details. Yunlan had known at one point, but everyone warned him about the hazards of telling him the past. Of all the things Shen Wei had done in trying to keep him safe, not speaking about what the Awl had done to people should be easy enough. ]

You cannot say that all gods were living when they were pulled here as well.

[ Like himself, who had been standing at a point between life and death. It was going to be his last goodbye to Yunlan, and that he was also dead now? Well, Shen Wei wasn't sure if he should laugh or scream at the implications. ]

I haven't tried to see if I could go to my homeland, but I have a feeling I won't be able to.

[ Dixing had been separated from Haixing. The Gates would have been closed. At least, that's what he thought was happening in those final moments. He wasn't sure, and he would never be completely sure, not like this.

And there was that mind he loves so much, working through the pieces to jump to a theory. Often it turned out he was correct, and he loved Zhao Yunlan for it, but other times, it was a disaster. Usually one that ended up with him being injured and in pain. ]

Yes, it could be, but we only have bits and pieces to work with here.

Right, right. No theorizing in advance of the data.

[His tone is light, but his glance at Shen Wei is serious.

Bakugou had sounded pretty sure he was still alive. His panic over Izuku not being alive any more was enough proof of that, and it's not the kind of topic that would be easy to bring up with someone on the first conversation. So, how does Shen Wei know that not all gods came here alive?

One answer does spring to mind.]

Were you dead?

Make sure you have a solid foundation for the walls you're building.

[ Just another bit of advice he had over the years with his studies. A little old fashioned sounding but still it means the same thing, right? ]

Me? [ He toyed with the edge of the book in front of him, his fingers lightly ruffling the pages though he wasn't really looking at it. Was that place a fevered dream or an actual moment held in place by the Hallows? Was it death just beyond? He did know that he was not going to survive, not with the poison and the wounds and everything. ]

Yes. To save the life of a loved one, I stepped into the path of destruction.

[In other words: he'd had somebody special, and he'd died for them.

Yunlan lets his breath trickle out, looking down at his notes and feeling like a complete ass. That's not the kind of love he can compete with. Honestly -- he doesn't think he wants to compete with any kind of love; the idea of stealing someone out of a happy relationship leaves him cold.

And hitting on Shen Wei right now is trying to pick up a man who'd been widowed a week and a half ago. (Even if he'd been making someone else a widow instead, they're parted by death now. Close enough.) No, Minako's going to have to wait for that promised selfie. Zhao Yunlan's learning, belatedly, a little compassion and discretion.]

... They were lucky to have you.

I was lucky to have them.

[ Yes. He had someone very special and the true tragedy was that they were sitting right in front of him now unable to remember it. Shen Wei looked up, his face carefully neutral even though he could not repress his feelings entirely. It hurt so much to see him, and yet he knew that he couldn't stop. Zhao Yunlan had been more than a simple love.

He had been the reason why he kept on during all those lonely years. ]

It would not surprise me if they are deceased as well. We were in the middle of a war, and they were... [ He floundered on how to explain it, on how to say that Yunlan was a reckless idiot that always made him worry. Fighting against people he could not fight, goading on his brother, using the Hallows when he told him not to. ]

Always careless with their life when others were in danger.

[ Was that too much? Shen Wei looked down again, running his fingers along the text but not reading it. He never really cried about losing Kunlun. He mourned him, and then continued on, the promise his only focus over the years. Shen Wei did try to live like he was asked; it had been easier once he was in Haixing, but few were persistent enough to break past his barriers. ]

I guess we were both fools.

[ He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, closing his eyes and forcing the sadness down. This was still a life and he was still here talking to him. It was enough. It had to be enough. When he raised his head, the sadness was buried and he was simply just the slightly awkward professor toying with a book. ]

I would think talking about past lives would be awkward considering how we are all suppose to fill these new roles.

Edited (missed a line sob) 2018-10-31 07:16 (UTC)

[The pain is Shen Wei's eyes is stark against that bland expression, like bone in a deep cut the moment before the blood flows, and his voice stumbles a little when he admits he thinks whoever he'd died for had probably gone on and gotten killed anyway. He might even be right. The middle of a war's an easy place to get killed, Yunlan reflects, and frankly if he'd just watched a man he loved take a bullet for him he might've gotten careless himself.

Also, as noble as all the decisions he'd just made not to push might be, seeing that look on Shen Wei's face still makes Yunlan want to sweep him up and hold him until he's smiling again.

(It reminds him of the way Shen Wei'd looked at him when they first met. He finds himself not wanting to think too hard about that similarity.)

Apparently he's a fool too. It's not like he even knows the guy that well; it's not like he knows anyone that well, but he feels like he's gotten a read on most of the people he's met. With Shen Wei, he feels like all he spots is the hint of greater depths.

Greater depths that are mostly full of grief, right now, and that Shen Wei appears to be damn good at hiding. Yunlan wonders if his own reaction to that means he's got a savior complex, or if he's just a sucker for a pretty face.

He shakes his head at Shen Wei's deflection, looking down for a moment at his own book instead of that little tell of the professor's fingers still tracing the lines of text on the open page.]

Just because some of us forget doesn't mean we all have to make this a new start.

[When he looks up again, he's not paying attention to his expression; unguarded, the look in his eyes is softer than he'd meant it to be over his lopsided smile.]

Not unless you want to.

Would it be worth it though? To try to dig out what you don't remember for that brief moment of knowing before ultimate damnation?

[ No one had said if those that had changed into ayakashi had ever returned. He had a feeling that they haven't seen it themselves, and he didn't want to have any reason to test that they could return.

(He wants to reach over, take those hands in his and just hold them. He wants to lean in close and feel his heart beat. He wants so badly but opening his mouth to say anything was impossible. He couldn't even speak about their world when talking to him, only falling into general terms.)

Shen Wei shakes his head, the smile on his face was bittersweet with centuries of regret behind it. ]

It wouldn't be, not for someone with a good heart. As for me making a new start...

[ He sighs softly, feeling the weight of the years on his shoulders, the new responsibilities he was trying to decipher and the old ones he was use to doing. Zhao Yunlan was there in front of him and he suppose he could tread the thin line between his past knowledge and the new again. It would take some work, but he has done this before. ]

It's better than being alone with my regrets.

It wouldn't be worth it for me.

[Zhao's words are blunt, but the way he feels is less straightforward. What he's lost, what he's forgotten... it makes him a mystery to himself. He's a collection of bad habits and dubious skills, a body marked with scars whose stories he can't tell, a blindfolded man navigating a landscape of absence. He wakes up from dreams of searching for something he can't find to a bed that feels empty with just himself in it. He's thought of getting a cat.

What he wants is to find a way to be at home, but everything here is strange to him. The buildings, the rules, the language, the etiquette, the food: he doesn't even know what would be right. He only knows that all of this is wrong.

Would it be worth it to know who he was, for just one second before knowing destroyed him?

Maybe. No. Maybe.

He shrugs, smiling away the ache of his own doubts, and looks up at Shen Wei. Shen Wei, who knows just what he's lost, and suffers more for knowing. Zhao Yunlan is a whining fool.]

You don't have to be alone no matter what you do.

[He's also an impetuous fool, and Shen Wei is sitting within arm's reach; Zhao leans forward, rising just enough from his chair to clap a hand warmly on the professor's shoulder.]

Let's be friends.

Don't ever lose that conviction.

[ He nodded at the words, but also heard what he wasn't saying. He could see it in the way Zhao Yunlan's moved, the tenseness in his shoulders, the lines around his eyes. That maybe maybe, even with the threat of becoming an ayakashi, he might just once know peace.

Shen Wei could tell him about the city they were living in, about the people that where there and the work that they did. He could tell him about how they had loved, of the time he spent in the past as Kunlun, about the time he spent courting Shen Wei without even knowing that each word and look was a scrape of a knife against a weeping wound. Of staring across a ruined floor, the mad eyes of his brother staring out from under hair bleached white, of hearing him yell and curse and that moment when he jumped between the blasts to let it hit him.

Of after, when he laid in the bright blood from his heart while Zhao Yunlan tried to push it all back into him.

These were things he couldn't say, but he still was able to speak of general things, of himself. He won't mention Zhao Yunlan, or the others by name, but maybe give him something else, and when he looked up to say a little, that maybe they at least shared a nationality due to their names, and sees him lean forward. He rests a hand on his shoulder, and the smile on his face might be a little weak, but the warmth in his eyes was still the same. ]

I would like that.

[ Maybe he was greedy despite his worries, but Shen Wei reached up to lay his hand on Yunlan's, his skin cooler to the touch than what was normal for a human's. ]

Yes. Let's be friends.

[Maybe Zhao Yunlan's greedy, too -- actually, there's no maybe about it. There's a whole world of secrets in the sweep of Shen Wei's eyelashes, hiding his gaze as he looks down for a long, long moment, and then up again. He wants to know them all.

All the ones that are safe for him to know. And more, besides... but he can be reasonable.

More reasonable than he is greedy, even, sometimes.

He leaves his hand where it is, under Shen Wei's cool fingers -- bad circulation? It's not that cold in here, and Zhao's hands are warm by contrast.]

Good, it's a deal.

[He'd better not think he can avoid Zhao Yunlan now: they're friends. He squeezes Shen Wei's shoulder before reluctantly letting go, and glancing back at his unruly book pile. Right, so.]

You know, speaking of those soulless shinki... it's weird I haven't found anything about them. How long have they been around?

I heard that the new gods and shinki like us only started showing up about a year ago.

[ He doesn't let his hand linger even though his fingers had closed on Yunlan's for one brief moment. Retreating back a little on his chair to give them a more professional space, he still was smiling a little. There were many things that Shen Wei should not be doing with Zhao Yunlan, but at least having a little contact and friendship with him would be fine, right?

Oh yes, back to the questions he had been looking up answers for. He cleared his throat and glanced at the book he had opened earlier. ]

A lot of this doesn't add up if you are looking primarily at it as individual actions. Which means that we should look on this as not three individual problems but one affecting an entire system or entity.

[ Glancing at his notes, he judged the ink was dry enough and flips the notebook to the next page, re-inked his brush and starts to write in eerily precise simplified Chinese. ]

So, this system has been going on for little over a year or two according to one god I spoke to. [ He wrote the time and the god's name, making a quick, odd symbol next to that almost like an English D. ] Before that, they had an established system of renewal that had been working for them for years. [ The next symbol brought to mind that of an English F with a tail. ] They have a rule of thumb for shinki being brought forth from the dead souls that come to this place. [ Third symbol was a strange merger between the English a and a s. ] But then an imbalance must have started to grow as the demises of the gods and shinki outstrip the original system.

[Zhao reaches over to tap a fingertip by that third strange symbol.]

Gods used to come back as children if they died.

[He's working for Ebisu; he's put together some of those hints. Not all of them, there's definitely plenty of the story that he hasn't worked out, but at least enough to know that Ebisu died recently, and went from an adult to a reborn child.]

So it shouldn't be that too many gods died, not unless something changed about the way they came back. What language is that?

If they came back as children, then there wouldn't be a need for new people replacing them.

[ He tapped his brush handle against the paper and spun it around to freshen the ink on the tip. He was going to add another point when Zhao Yunlan reached over to tap near his third point. A drop of ink fell onto the paper and he blinked for a moment, and looked down at the symbols among the Chinese. ]

Ah... something from my childhood.

[ He quickly blotted the ink drop off the paper with a scrap of paper and then smoothly draw a character that looked vaguely like two linked os with tails. After that he wrote what Yunlan said about the gods coming back as children, with a note about shinki sometimes switching who they are working for. ]

How many of the old gods are still here? Do we know that number?

Exactly, so are they still? Has an old god been killed since we started appearing?

[Is there something interrupting reincarnations for everyone? He shakes his head.]

There's certainly a lot of temples in the upscale districts. And I don't know how many there might be out in the West, but it looks like most of them are full.

There weren't all that many of us at the training sessions, but I don't know how many of us just didn't show.

We can't theorize about that yet since we haven't been around long enough to see it in action. Do you know any old god that has been born again?

[ Another symbol, this one a backwards 3 with one extra swirl and a dot at the end of the tail. ]

The number of shinki seems to be almost stable, but their numbers are far smaller than the amount of gods, especially the new gods like myself. With the appearance of new gods like me, the soulless have been appearing as well. Do these correlate with the amount of deaths in the old gods?

[ He spins the brush around his fingers, tapping the third point with the handle. ] This is if we are using the old gods as a reference point, but if we take them out and just focus on the newer ones, what do they have in common? Besides being people pulled to fill the spots?

Ebisu. I don't think it was within the last year, though. Some of us have been around longer. The guy I talked to was Kurosaki Shun, Nekhbet on the contact list.

[As for the smaller number... Zhao frowns, thinking about it.] If all the new gods are replacing old gods -- Mars, Nekhbet... then something must've happened to the old one, right?

So it has to be at least one to one. When you say there are fewer shinki than gods, you're just counting new shinki, right? Because there are all those white-robed shinki, Ebisu has a ton...

[The white-robed shinki, considering how many of them were working to clean up after that volcano when he arrived, must practically outnumber all the newcomers combined.]

So he can be a source to ask questions about this, if he is willing to answer. I'm not sure if he would be.

[ He wrote Ebisu's name by that point, adding a backwards F with a line crossing over it. ] We also do not know if that is something that is special to just him as well. Each god here has a power they are granted on top of whatever skill they may have had in life.

[ Next came a T with two lines interconnecting to the top bar and crossing through the body. ] The white-robed shinki are ones attached to either the old gods in the East, which does not seem accessible to the new gods like myself, at least, not without an appointment. They seem to treat any of the newcomers as a necessity but dirty chore they have to deal with.

Have anyone met any of the gods in the East?

Edited 2018-11-02 03:00 (UTC)

I work for him part-time. He's a good kid, but that's a sensitive subject -- you're going to have to tread carefully if you want him to talk to you about it.

[Zhao keeps finding himself distracted by Shen Wei's odd numbering system; he isn't going to remember them all, not without writing them down, but he's trying. He hopes they're numbers, anyway, or his memorization isn't going to be doing him any good at all.]

I haven't met any of them, but the main goddess herself showed up on the network a week and change ago--

[He taps rapidly at his phone, and brings up a post, tilting the phone so that Shen Wei can read it without getting ink on the screen.]

-- and from the way a bunch of the people respond here, it sounds like they're on friendly terms with her. Like Thanatos. [He scrolls, and points out Emizel's "Are you okay?!"] So I'm guessing they've met.

Yes... Something like that would need a delicate touch.

[ The next one looked like an 8 laying on its side with a hook at the top of the right side circle. He wrote Amaterasu next to it before leaning over to look at Yunlan's phone, frowning as he read the comments. ]

So she doesn't seem aware of what is causing us to appear and take these new gods' spots, or at least that's what she says. There can be a number of reasons why, including an attempt at deflection, or an old rule that they've forgotten. There is no telling if their rebirth to a child's body affects their memories over time since we are new here.

[ He was over ten thousand years old, and while his memory was good, he knows he forgets bits and pieces of the past. Like the symbols he was drawing among the Chinese, pieces of a past lost to those younger than him. Some of the older scrolls were written in a version of this tongue, but the younger Dixing people only knew the Haixing language now. ]

I wonder... if we're a mutation.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject