thenearshore | Curiosity killed the... [open]

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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?]

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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.

I don't think they remember anything from before they're reborn.

[I left notes, Ebisu had said. If he remembered, he wouldn't have to leave himself notes across his reincarnations. Yunlan frowns at Shen Wei's writing, absently chewing on his lower lip for a moment before he sits back and checks his pockets. He does have a few lollipops left; good.

He focuses for a moment on unwrapping the butterscotch one, thinking through that idea, that their appearance is some kind of mutation of divinity.]

She might have forgotten something, she might be lying, or our appearances might be actually something new.

But don't mutations usually involve slower change, Prof?

[He lodges the lollipop in one cheek and marks his book on the wrapper.]

From the way it sounded to me, we just started appearing like this last year. All at once, no slow development.

Ah, then it might be an old rule or something they aren't seeing. [ He added a note in a series of odd characters similar to those heading each point, and linked it around the sideways 8. ] If she didn't leave a note about what might happen, then there is a good possibility she doesn't know.

[ He tapped what he wrote down so far, his long fingers moving down the points even though he wasn't really seeing them. He was doing what he often did, connecting things in a way to see if a pattern came out from the chaos. Inside a pattern, would be a truth and from there it should lead to a better understanding. So far, this was still turning out to be mere speculation, but it was still fun.

He missed this after all. ]

Not exactly. I... [ He stopped and looked at Zhao Yunlan as he unwrapped and stuck that lollipop in his mouth. He could feel the tips of his ears burning as he he had a visual reminder of just how wicked that mouth could be and immediately looked back at his notes. ]

I know of a few instances where mutations happened rapidly in organisms in order to protect against sudden imbalances. Though I believe most of the adaptation is through the build up of antibodies inside the blood stream. There is also the mitochondria DNA and it's effect on the cell structure.

Plus, this whole place-- [Yunlan gestures up vaguely at the library ceiling, and around, drawing in the entirety of the Heavens by implication.] isn't an organism. It's some kind of spiritual construct.

But if I'm following your metaphor right, you think we're the side effect of some kind of problem with the Heavens, something like this place trying to rebalance itself with whatever comes to hand. Right?

And that's in contrast to the other possibility, which is--

[-- Shen Wei's gaze is lingering on his lips, and the tips of the man's ears are flushed bright red. Zhao blinks, smirks, and rolls his lollipop slowly across his tongue as he shuffles through his own messier pile of notes to the page where he'd been laying out ideas of his own.

Good intentions can only survive so much temptation.]

-- that someone's doing this on purpose. Either the higher-ups here, which would mean Amaterasu's lying or she's a figurehead, or some outside force. I hear from Shun that the Heavens' events have been attacked on a regular basis.

Society is an organism. People are the parts to the society, the buildings and vehicles are the underlying backbones and how they interconnect is how the organism thrives r die.

[ How many people referred to a business or a group of people as a well-oiled machine? This place may be a spiritual haven, but it was set up to work in a certain way. That it was falling meant something was wrong in the machine. ]

Gods are the blood cells of the flow of faith. They handle the prayers and deal with this flow of energy and make sure that the system is kept flowing. Then you have the shinki who guard the gods like the white blood cells guard against foreign objects that may harm the gods.

[ He swallows hard, not daring to look up knowing that Yunlan was doing that thing with his lollipop. He knew his blush was moving down and he wished he had a way to make it go away. ]

A sudden upswing of an invading force and a decline of the white cells would mean a surge in proto-cells or antibodies to help against the invasion. So these soulless and is is the answer to trying to fighting off these invasions.

If you're thinking of all this as an organism-- [he waves his hand again, with more certainty, leaning forward as his interest in the topic overcomes his desire to see just how far he can coax that blush to spread.] -- are we really part of it?

We're still different from the old gods. We disappear all the time, shinki like me sometimes remember things, we've still got real names instead of just the ones we get from our gods.

It could be that it's that invading force that's putting us here. We could be cannon fodder to keep the old gods distracted and divided, and stop them finding those invaders.

[Or, what's the right image for Shen Wei's metaphor? Zhao's not great with medicine or biology, apparently. He scowls in brief thought, and then suggests:]

... An allergic reaction?

That's because we are imperfect, a hastily built response to an highly aggressive predator. The source building this hasn't found the right ratio yet, that's all.

[ He pursed his lips at the idea of an allergic reaction, tapping his brush a couple times before writing out a new line, a symbol looking like a collapsed H heading it. ]

That might be possible. Allergens occur when the defense system is hyper-alert but has nothing to attack, so it just builds and builds, resulting in strange attacks on the body. There is nothing there for them to attack, but they build up anyways, and attack perfectly healthy parts in response.

[There, see: he can speak this language. If not quite as well as he can speak Ginia's sign language so far, which is to say, he's got a science vocabulary that's probably about ten words, too.]

Right, that. I don't think we've got any evidence to suggest we're some kind of adaptation, any more than we do to suggest we're all stuck in a trap... but what I'm thinking is that we're going to figure this out faster if we figure out who's really behind us winding up here.

When we know who, we'll know why, and they'll probably be able to tell us how. We can decide what to do from there.

We are both new to this place and I think we are operating with a small understanding of how this works. So it's hard to make a conclusive theory to cover everything.

{ It had only been maybe a week for him? Maybe under a month for Zhao Yunlan? Sure they had talked to people but they haven't really gotten any solid leads. So all of this was speculation and two people walking through lines of logic from the evidence that they do have. ]

But is that a person? Or is that the magic of this place?

You're not wrong. [No matter how much information he might have been gathering, there's a lot he still doesn't know, and a lot Shen Wei doesn't know, too. They could go off on tangents together forever and not come up with anything useful.

Still.]

If it's the magic of this place, it's still reacting to a big, recent change. Right? And there should be signs of that change -- less ambiguous signs than us showing up -- too.

But this is still a start. It could change into a different theory, but at least it's a start.

[ He nodded to himself and set his brush down. Flinging out his hand in that imperial gesture again, a small bottle of water, a paper cup and a rag dropped into his hand. Pouring some water into the cup, he started cleaning his brush. ]

That is true, but will the changes be something we can see here? Or will the changes be something kept contained inside the Eastern Districts? There is also the granting of a magic or skill to the new gods like ourselves. Some haven't had any such skills themselves until now, while those with skills have something new. Is that a part of being a god or is it something more?

Hard to say, but if they want to figure things out badly enough, they might let us in to poke around. It could be worth a try.

Just don't try to break in the front door.

[Like that poor sucker who'd been looking for his goddess had. Zhao sympathizes -- it's almost impossible not to develop a real affection for your god, assuming they're not a complete shithead. Even then, he could see the potential for a little Stockholm syndrome developing. Shinki don't have a past, after all; they don't have power and they don't have homes or possessions of their own beyond what they're carrying. Being partnered up with someone who offers their home, their food, the opportunity to fight at their side? It's seductive.

Plus, he just likes Bakugou as a person, foul-mouthed and short-tempered though the kid might be.]

And I didn't know all gods had some kind of special ability show up that they didn't before.

[He nods at the water bottle.] Is that yours?

[Teleporting small items?]

Me? I have no reason to knock down anyone's doors.

[ Trying to affect the image of a scholar must not be working. Either that or he just so happened to show off more powers than he should, and as he thought that, he remembered the fetching of his writing tools. The blush which had been fading away was starting up again, but this time from embarrassment. Shen Wei cleared his throat, ducking his head while busying himself with brush cleaning. ]

I'm just a normal biology professor, not some fighter.

[ Does Zhao Yunlan believe that? He knew now that Zhao Yunlan never really believed it even when they had first met. But that was someone who knew about all the crazy stuff from Dixing and who was looking into odd deaths around him. But no, that would be dismissing that wonderful intellect hidden within that casually warm smile and provocative glances.

He finished and set the brush down before twisting his hand, sending everything but the notepad back before looking up again. Zhao Yunlan asking an innocent question may have a lot of meanings under it. Shen Wei exhaled slowly and shook his head. ]

I'm not sure what I might have gotten yet, but I've been able to fetch small objects for a while. [ Fetch small objects, close doors, shut windows, and move bigger things, like people and vehicles. ] It's not something I show to a lot of people.

Normal biology professor, huh.

[Able to summon small objects by throwing a hand out, then make them disappear with equal ease, but totally normal. Zhao lets his eyebrows inch up just enough to point out the contradiction in Shen Wei's statement.

Honestly, he'd be upset to be lied to, but that's such a bad lie it hardly even counts. It's like watching someone on a tightrope yell down that he has terrible balance.]

Well, if you say so, Prof.

I didn't think you were going to go break down anyone's doors, though. I said that because Amaterasu's apparently got a sore spot about it -- so being polite might go over better than not.

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