2018-11-10: A Reason To Drink
- Log: A Reason To Drink
- Cast: Josephine Lovelace, Jude Moshe
- Where: Dazil City
- Date: November 10, 2018
- Summary: Josie invites Jude by a rented workshop to commiserate about the state of the world... and the things they have to do for the sake of it. Takes place before she heads with the others to Elru.
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
The invitation had been almost unceremonious:
'Come give me a visit sometime, maybe I'll even be in' had been dropped Jude's way via Memory Cube, along with an address of sorts:
'Workshop #23, East Sunshade Street'
'Hell, AKA Dazil City'
It seems she hasn't forgotten his comment about what the Aveh Desert and the Badlands are like.
The sun sits low in the sky above Dazil, a hazy red under the heavy clouds. It's fair to say they're bringing no moisture here; this far out from the mountains it's a faint dream at best.
Dazil City comes alive in the evening. There are always those who are active during the day -- even during the hottest hours -- but most who live and work prefer to schedule their live around avoiding both extremes of the desert. Evening and morning, those limnal states, make for more comfortable living.
Workshops line certain avenues. Most of them are owned by Ethos as a rule, but it is possible to rent space if you're the more itinerant sort... for a fee.
Assuming, of course, that one keeps one's projects more... managable and legal, naturally, and doesn't infringe on the Ethos' territory.
In other words, those tinkers, mechanics, and ARMS Meisters without a shop to call their own.
Josephine Lovelace falls into more than one of those categories, and has for now done a rental of the aforementioned #23 workshop. Apparently it's the off season for excavation work -- something about storms in the desert -- so demand is a little lower, which suits her just fine.
She figures, the rate things are going, she only will need this place a few weeks more.
Right now an assortment of pieces -- 'junk' to the uncultured eye -- are scattered before her. A series of lenses. Oddly shaped sections that a professional will be able to ID as older ARM parts.
And then there are the tools.
And then, of course, her favored Gawain-series rifle, broken down into its component parts as Josie proceeds on the endless project of modifying the rifle to her liking.
Her hair is pulled back, a bandanna tied around her forehead. Goggles rest over her eyes. Her usual outfit has been traded for an extremely simple trousers and shirt attire, with only the single ragged bead on a cord around her neck for adornment.
Both hands are bared, though in the case of her right hand, that means it's down to just the bandages wrapping almost all of the burn scars, which only begin to peek out from the edges of the cloth.
There's a reason she favors her left, that much is clear.
Penelope is apparently not within, possibly banished for reasons of sanity from the workshop in use. Does that mean she's lurking outside somewhere, waiting?
Who knows.
<Pose Tracker> Jude Moshe has posed.
BEFORE
The sound of an ink-dipped quill scratching on parchment has always had a distinct quality to it that. It's hard to qualify it; it's one of those things acquired through the layering of memories upon memories rather than the sound itself. And if he were asked to describe it, he'd never give a straight answer, of course.
Jude Moshe would just call it soothing, an answer just true enough to not be a lie.
It's one of the many reasons he gives for why he prefers written correspondence over Memory Cubes so much. 'It's soothing,' he says. Or 'he prefers to give a personal touch to it.' Or 'I'm writing a love poem; would you like to read it?' Most of them work well enough. But whatever the reason is tonight, Jude's world is filled with the sound of a quill's sharpened end blotting parchment paper with ink when that Memory Cube message arrives for him. It's a dichotomy that he's gotten used to, by now, and it shows in how he barely even looks up as he plays back the message. There's barely even the slightest shift in his expression as he works, scrawling a comprehensive message that fills the entirety of that parchment.
He only pauses at that very last line.
Hell, AKA Dazil City
And allows a wry smile to touch at the corners of his lips.
It's only after that he rolls up that message with the crisp sound of paper scraping paper. He tucks it into a little compartment inside the waiting Jacob, offering a smile small yet fond in a rare and sincere way to the automaton before patting the metal bird on the head.
"Okay, buddy. Time to get to work. Take care of that for me, huh? I've gotta take a little trip to hell."
He finds his cigarette case, amber eyes staring in the direction of Dazil City with an expression best described as practiced ambivalence.
"Honestly, I don't know which of us has it worse."
NOW
In the desert, there's little slivers of time in which the world is a frantic scramble of life. Trying to cram in as much activity within tiny wedges of time that makes everything seem just that much desperate.
The magic hour.
Dazil is, of course, no different. If anything, it's worse, thanks to the density of its population. Night and day in the desert might be a time of extremes, but this is simply an extreme of a different shade. The sound and clamor of men and women even just outside Josephine's door. Eventually, it just becomes part of the ambiance of a place like this. White noise. Whether that means Josephine, hard at work, hears the entrance of someone else in her place of business more easily or not as she works is of course an open question --
"Guess you're in, huh?"
-- but it's not like her guest had any intention of being secretive in the first place.
Shoulder leaned against the doorframe to Josephine's workshop, head lulled lazily away from the frame itself, intrepid reporter Jude Moshe seems to have perfected the ability to make himself comfortably ambivalent no matter where he is. Jacob, much like Penelope, is nowhere to be seen -- hard at work, perhaps, or just waiting for the perfect moment to strike Penelope down. The world may never know.
A dark red brow lifts, as Jude slips a hand into the pocket of his familiar, tan coat.
"So this is what Josephine Lovelace looks like in her natural habitat," he observes, with all due scientific curiosity, of course, before he produces that nickel case, and flips it open with a lopsided smile.
"Like someone in desperate need of a smoke break."
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
She's doing close work at the moment, the sort that requires her to carefully eye and evaluate the parts she's obtained and determine whether they'll be able to fit and function in her constantly modified ARM.
Some of the parts she's assembled will need to be altered to fit. That's fine.
And then into this, as she taking measurements of the replacement for the barrel, walks the man she'd sent an invite along to.
Her head lifts and she sets down her tool. Pushing up the goggles to rest atop her head, she even halfway smiles.
"Well well, look who the cat dragged in," she drawls, pushing back from her workbench and strolling over towards him. "Feels like it's been a dog's year since I'd seen you around, you know. How'd Lunar suit you? I never did ask."
She pauses before answering herself: "I've got to say, getting dragged off to another world while abed with injuries and losing most of my research, even if it was temporary, isn't the sort of adventure I'd like to repeat. Still, it certainly was an experience."
Her gaze drops, lingering on that case he produces. And then she turns, reaching up to crack open one of the small high windows.
And turning back to face him, her lips crack in a smile. "...Got it in one. Heh, if I didn't know better, I'd peg you for a craftsman yourself," she comments, arching a pale eyebrow meaningfully.
"Don't suppose you're offering? Since if you're not..."
She produces, meaningfully, a lighter in her left hand.
She gives him another once-over. "No Jacob, I see. Too bad. Here I am with my tools all ready, too..." She shrugs her shoulders and sighs. "Well, we can't have everything. How's business lately?" She flips the cap of her lighter.
"Got much call for articles about the end of the world?"
<Pose Tracker> Jude Moshe has posed.
Well well, look who the cat dragged in.
"Last I heard, it was more like a giant whale."
This line, delivered with the practiced timing of a pro, is paired with the pluck of a cigarette from that nickel case. Jude offers it a comfortable home between his lips, and a chance to live up to its self-destructive purpose when he plucks it free to offer up to the sacrificial flame of Josephine's lighter, the question lingering in the air. How'd Lunar suit him?
He lets her answer first, of course, content to leave his own an open question for the moment as he turns that cigarette idly between his fingers. "Guess no one likes to be displaced," he observes, before tipping the bright cherry glow of that lit cigarette Josephine's way. "I'm going to stretch my powers of deduction and say you were more upset about the research than the injuries. Is my journalistic instinct still keen?"
It's a question delivered with an easy smile, the kind of light touch that comes with the territory of equally light verbal sparring. As for him, well -- he brings that cigarette to his lips for a moment, cool amber eyes shifting rightwards to peer at the work beyond.
"It was amazing," he says, in that earnest way that leads a keen observer to expect another shoe to drop.
"I've never seen a place so green that was so joyless."
Other shoe dropped, Jude Moshe exhales smoke out towards the side with a hapless lift of his shoulders.
"Like discovering God and realizing he's not all he's cracked up to be."
A second later, as if deliberately on the tail of this observation, Jude decides to answer Josie's other question with the tilt of that cigarette case in her direction, in offering. "I dabble a bit, I guess you could say," he answers her question on crafting with the most noncommittal of ease. "Out in places like this on your own, you either know how to keep your ARM in working order, or you know how to do a really good imitation of a corpse."
She laments the absence of Jacob; and as he tucks away his case once more, his brows lift. "Don't mention that in front of him. You might find a way to frighten an automaton. If you want to dissect him, you have to show a bit of finesse." He clucks his tongue once, a smile gracing his lips. One that just becomes a helpless thing at her next question, and the sigh that follows is a most unfortunate one indeed.
"Well, you know how it is. Sensationalism sells...
"... but no one likes a doom sayer. You've gotta find that happy middle ground. I was thinking something like..."
His hands lift into a framing gesture, as if to help Josephine picture it:
"'Everything is Awful, The Anti-Christ is Here -- But You're Not Screwed Yet!'"
A second passes. He looks back towards her, as if expectant.
"What do you think?"
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
"Heh, fair enough."
Without a second to pause she reaches over and sets the end of his cigarette alight with the little kindled flame.
"Most people don't," she agrees, tilting her head in a short nod. "I know the kids," by which she means just about anyone five-ten years younger than herself, "were out of sorts. But as for me?" she gestures towards herself, stiffly, with that bandaged hand and arm. "Guilty as charged. Fortunately enough, my collection found its way back to me." She nods towards her only partially unpacked baggage on the floor near the bench. "Actually, that's one of the reasons I dropped you a line. I seem to recall asking for a little assistance with this puzzler once, and while I'll say I've got enough on my plate at the moment to go chase this one down, no matter how much I'd rather..."
Her lips curl into a lopsided smile. "Well, I can chew the fat. An hour or two won't damn the world."
And if it does, then there was no saving the world to begin with.
But back to the topic at hand: Lunar! And how Jude liked it?
"I tell you," she says after a moment's consideration of his statement, "In those weeks before we found bar that still served actual alcohol, I was convinced I'd actually died and gone to hell."
Just about the first thing she'd done -- well, among the first things she'd done -- on getting back to Filgaia was drink something properly bracing, in a rowdy bar, with a fight breaking out over a spilt drink. It had been glorious.
She reaches over and draws a cigarette from the case, flicks her own lighter again to the end, then lifts it to her lips for a good long drag.
"I tell you, it was pure suffering having to roll my own cigarettes. You'd think with all those potions and gegaws someone would have figured out how to make and sell a damn cigarette. But no. They sold pipes," she says, words dripping with venom.
Whatever wrath she still holds she's over and done with it quickly enough, the smoke she's having already working its magic.
"I figured," she agrees, inclining her head in a quick one-and-done nod. "Like you say. Anyone roaming around out this half of the continent's just asking for trouble. A little sand in the wrong place is a killer." She glances at him, sidelong.
Only to chuckle as he comments that she might have hit upon a particular topic that would even terrify an automaton. "Heh. It's his fault for being so damn appealing. But it really is a shame. On one hand, I'd love to know what makes him tick... but it's possible he might never tick again once broken down."
She shrugs.
"The lament of the mechanist, or so I hear."
So how does the news business go, under current conditions?
Her gaze is upon him.
She arches one pale eyebrow, as if to urge him to please go on.
He shows her exactly how he'd sell it.
And her response is, naturally, to break out into peals of laughter. It in fact takes her a moment to collect herself.
"You'll sell a thousand copies," she affirms, lips parted in a grin. "Hits that perfect note of despair with that little glimmer of hope. Right? Who says you can't make a gella off the apocalypse?"
<Pose Tracker> Jude Moshe has posed.
In those weeks before we found bar that still served actual alcohol, I was convinced I'd actually died and gone to hell.
"Worse," asserts Jude with a grim certainty that comes as an undercurrent to all that wry detachment,
"You died and went to heaven. I'm pretty sure only paradise could be that uniformly bland."
Jude Moshe, student of optimism.
"Of course," he adds, as his gaze slides towards the baggage that Josephine had previously indicated, curiosity flickering mildly in that amber stare, "like most things with a shiny surface, it just ended up being even more rotten underneath. It's like they're trying to find some perfect balance between homeliness and hypocrisy. I think they've mastered the art." See? He can find ways to compliment things.
"I'll say one thing, at least. I think they've cornered the market on castigation, and that's pretty impressive, considering the competition."
In his own way.
So, instead, he opts to just affect a masterful grimace as Josephine recounts the days of rolling cigarettes and having to poke around for places still brave enough to sell liquor. As if to try to ward off those heady nightmare days, the sellsword takes a long and unnecessarily indulgent drag of his cigarette, exhaling the smoke through the flare of his nostrils as he tilts his head ceiling-wards. Talking about the deserts of Ignas seems almost preferable to the fun-hating ways of Lunar, and so Jude just snorts out the rest of that smoke in dry amusement as Josephine speaks of the perils of sand.
"The difference between life and death," he notes, wryly. "Whoever thought all those tiny grains could be such a lethal headache? And yet... it feels pretty refreshing, being back here." He lifts his cigarette to his lips, pausing to consider his own words.
"It's like getting a chance to fondly remember all the greatest hits you took for granted when you were younger and didn't know the moon was full of killjoys and soul cancer."
Always look on the bright side.
And so, he frames his story piece. And as Josephine laughs, the man's lips split into a grin, one hand finding his pocket while the other looses a small pile of ash to the ground with a few strategic taps of his cigarette.
"I'm thinking it'll be my masterpiece," he agrees with all the blandness in the world, "provided we all live long enough to capitalize off it. Then again, maybe the book signings for my memoirs won't be so bad after if the entire planet's a no-man's land."
His shrug, of course, is ambivalent, and not worried in the least. Maybe he thinks they'll make it past all this unscathed. Or maybe it's just the blithe indifference of a veteran. Either way...
"The end of the world and you wanting to butcher my bird aside," notes the respectable reporter nonchalantly, "I think I've got some time to kill. What d'you need?" He tilts his cigarette in the direction of those bundles, head cocking to the right.
"Another pair of helping hands for that mystery project of yours?"
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
"If that's heaven, I'll have to make sure to keep sinning," Josie replies without missing a beat.
"...Ha. Just when I thought 'it can't get much worse', what with all the Malevolence floating about, no drink, and too many shady people running around, bam," and she throws her arms out as if to underscore that sound effect, "it's a damn war. And not even that. Some sort of hell-whale capable of flattening a town! Lucky us that we found a way out though, eh?"
She takes a drag, her smile a bitter, pitiless one as she regards the flooring. "Wouldn't want to have been around if it decided to come on back again for kicks... Heh. Something like that... isn't just going to wander off somewhere to take a nice nap, you know..."
She exhales, making a sound between a sigh and a dry chuckle.
Before her gaze rises to settle on Jude again.
And that smile of hers takes a turn towards the less darkly amused.
"See, it's things like that that make you worth keeping around, Jude. Hm..."
She leans back against the wall, loosely tapping the forefinger of her bad hand against it, stiffly.
"...Come to think of it, I still ain't given you a good nickname."
She appears to consider this with all due sobriety for the moment before shrugging her shoulders. "Well, I'll think of something."
He, about then, launches into his plans to keep him afloat for life -- or at least, until the end of the world. His dry delivery provokes another laugh from the wayward archaeologist. "Think of it as not cramping your writing hand so much. Then again, I wonder if you could just cut out the middleman. Leave the interior blank, call it the people's planner for the end of days." Her lips part in a brief, bright grin. "Then again, that's not much reporting now, is it?"
Is it just a coping mechanism? They're face-to-face with preparations for an end-of-the-world encounter, with no guarantee of whether they'll succeed, make the ultimate sacrifice, or die in vain. They don't even know much of what they'll face, on a continent that even the savviest of merchants gave up on years ago.
Metal Demons, a ruined country or two, the rumored Veruni Control Zones... oh, and if the rumors are to be believed, the Sorcery Globe crashed somewhere over there, too.
"Don't think of it as butchery," Josie mock-protests. "Think of it as progress. I could learn how to make a whole bunch of little Jacobs. Wouldn't that be nice?"
Penelope might disagree.
She pushes herself off the wall, strides over to her bags and kneels. "Something like that," she says, muffled as she works to keep that cigarette from slipping from her lips while she talks. "I figure a sketch or two wouldn't hurt, if you're the sketching type."
They're not big, what she sets out on the workbench amidst the detritus of her efforts. Probably about two inches wide, maybe five inches long at most. Little tiles.
"According to Tiger and Lion," and she cracks a grin as she speaks those ridiculous nicknames, "The text here's all Zeboim dialect. ...Linguistics wasn't my forte," she adds, a touch witheringly, "So don't you even start, especially with a dead language involved. How those kids ended up being able to read something even scholars still argue about proper translation, I'll never know." She shakes her head, before then regarding Jude once more. Her head tilts to one side, as if... curious.
"Reminded me of something," she says, straightening, though never quite losing that amiable slouch.
"So. Just curious. What did make you take up bounty-hunting, anyway? Your paper not paying you properly?"
<Pose Tracker> Jude Moshe has posed.
"Who knows? I hear some animals like to gorge themselves on food before they sleep through the colder months in the places where colder months actually exist. Something about resource scarcity as the temperature drops. I think they call it hibernating." Jude mulls this over, turning his cigarette between his fingers as he watches the ash spill off the crumbling tip.
"Maybe 'destroying cities' is just like that, but for flying whales. I don't know. I'm not exactly an expert on flying whales. I saw maybe one normal one, once." His gaze turns to Josephine, disaffectedly plaintive.
"You much of an expert on flying hell-whales? I get the feeling it's a field most people probably don't get a lot of accrued experience in."
Just a hunch.
The good (??) reporter turns unhelpfully silent as Josie shifts towards ruminating over a nickname for him; dark brows raise instead, almost looking expectant as he turns that stare on the archaeologist. Apparently, Jude is leaving this one up to her, which is why he just smiles an easy smile around his cigarette as she ultimately shrugs it off.
"Guess I ought to feel honored that I'm your last real challenge in the nickname game, huh?" he wonders, tilting a corner glance Josie's way to supplement the teasing cluck of his tongue.
"Well. I'll just have to keep trying to earn my keep while I wait with baited breath for that day then."
He has every confidence in her, of course.
When she ruminates on the foundation of reporting in a post-apocalyptic world, though, Jude Moshe is pushing his way back up onto his feet. Blowing rings of smoke into the air, he makes his way over to the work table, stretching arms up and over his head as he goes. "You know, I've found reporting is a lot like writing fiction than most people like to think about. The real power comes from what you don't say rather than what you do." Like he's said before, after all -- let their imaginations do the work for you.
"So maybe a big blank slate is the ultimate piece of news, if you think about it like that. Endless possibilities."
He lets that rest there for exactly half a second before adding,
"Most of them bad."
They stand on a precipice of the unknown. Elru, while not unfamiliar to Jude as much as he'd like it to be, still has stretches even he has not been -- and 'the heart of the Metal Demons' nomadic space home' probably definitely qualifies as that. How he can seem so nonchalant about that prospect is anyone's guess. Maybe the cigarettes help to keep his nerves down. Maybe they're both just compensating.
Maybe it's something else entirely.
Either way, Jude just offers an effortlessly mild, "You're gonna give your bird a heart attack," to her vision of an army of Jacobs before perching himself on the edge of that workbench. Stubbing out the remains of that ashed stick of tobacco, he looks down at the things she displays for him. Tiles. Is he the sketching type?
Once more, his answer is, "I've dabbled a bit," because of course it is. "Let's see what you've got."
She explains. His brows furrow a bit in response. If he has anything to say, Josephine's prescient preempting instead prompts him to lift his hands palm up as if in surrender, his smile a haplessly apologetic one as he utters a most solemn, "I wasn't gonna say a thing. Promise," that in no way sounds convincing. Eventually, though, he looks down at those tiles again, head tilting.
"Tiger and Lion, huh," he muses, softly, the right corner of his lips quirking upward. "Well, it looks like the same kind of text I've seen in a few ruins I've been too here and in Aquvy. Zeboim's a safe bet, especially if the kids thing so. I get the feeling there's a lot about those two they don't want to talk about..."
He taps a finger on the bench, close to one of those tiles.
"... and a lot they can't, because they don't really know it themselves. It's in the look. They've still got that doe-eyed look of inexperience, before you really get your scars. Everything they've seen... there's got to be something to that."
He falls silent, then, as his hands find his pockets. And silence fills the interim of Josie's simple, casual question:
What did make you take up bounty-hunting, anyway?
He considers. But ultimately, the first answer comes in the slow lift of his shoulders.
"Something like that," comes the words a few seconds after, amber eyes turning towards the ceiling. "Believe it or not, field reporting doesn't exactly have commensurate pay, especially if you want to enjoy life a little bit before the end." 'Enjoy life a little bit' probably explains all the unnecessary niceties in his life, at least. Or possibly the debt. "So side jobs help fill the gaps. Not just bounty hunting, y'know. There's all sorts of odd jobs in the exciting world of the sellsword. Mostly people would just hire me to sit on a wagon full of goods with my ARM out in the open to scare off bandits." He considers this, before just scratching the back of his head.
"They're pretty good for getting a solid day's rest in, at least."
Jude Moshe: bastion of professional integrity.
"Sort of like you, right?" Amber eyes roll Josephine's way. "The Drifter lifestyle's a pretty dangerous one for an archaeologist, after all."
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
Hibernation. As Josephines tend to do (apparently), Josie shrugs. "Wouldn't know it. We never exactly got 'snow' back in Marze, and you're talking to someone who's spent most of the last decade rattling around Aveh and the like. Still, I suppose it makes sense enough." Her gaze flickers over towards him, then downwards at the little pile of ash.
She laughs, a short harsh bark of a sound. "Still got one up on me there! I've never seen a whale outside of a book." Pause. "Flying city-destroying whales aside. And no. I figure it's normally the sort of thing you only see one of, if you're unlucky."
The implication being, naturally, that if you see two of them, you're worse than unlucky. Probably dead.
"...What, no preferences? So you are going to leave this whole thing right up to me, are you?" Affecting all the mock-indignation she can muster, Josie huffs out a breath, her lips twisted in a parody of an unhappy smile. It flitters away once again in mere seconds, revealing Josie's typically easy-going expression.
"You're a complicated person, and complicated people are the worst people to nickname." She pauses, thoughtfully this time. "That, and you've had the audacity to have a name only four letters long. Hmm. J? J-M? I don't suppose you'd take to being called 'Jimmy' now would you?"
Probably, with a wide-eyed, honest look like that on her face, she's not being serious.
"Letting people fill in the blanks, huh... You know, that just about accounts for most histories I've read, too. Just a bunch of greybeards, making up the details between the facts, near as I can figure. Heh, given how gossip tends to spread... might just be human nature, eh?"
Which might be why there are indeed endless possibilities -- in their histories, news, and day to day. Endless atrocities, horrors, and assorted bad news.
"What a work is man," she quotes, disarmingly blandly. Her gaze tracks towards the ceiling. "And woman, for that matter."
But at least there's the reassurance persistant in a good smoke.
And really, any smoke is good enough if you want it badly enough. Which is easily had, in the time that remains to them before they plunge ahead into terra incognita, with a similarly unknown ending.
Perhaps a woman like her -- living moment to moment, her only lodestar the singular passion that drives her -- might have an easier time of it, in these days before they make to set forth. Perhaps.
"I'd think of it," she says after exhaling smoke, "as giving her some stimulation in her life. She's a lonely bird, you know. I rather think she'd enjoy a friend." It's hard to tell if that straight-faced look is real or another facade -- usually such demonstrations shatter soon when Josie is in a joking mood, but...
But even that falls to the wayside as Josie retrieves the pair of objects and plants them on her worktable. "So Aquvy? It's true, they are more common out there. Where this one," and she points at it with her lit cigarette -- the one that's been faintly warped by fire -- "came from, I have no idea. It looks like it was stolen from another, unknown site before I lucked out. And the other, well, you know that story."
Her lips twist in a lopsided smile. "Don't I know it. I'm sure both of 'em would protest or scowl if I said it but... they're still green. Hell, I don't think they even understand themselves yet."
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
Which, is about the moment she asks of Jude a question that's been perched amidst the boughs of her mind for some time and receives an answer and a question, of a sort.
One that Josie answers the only way she can:
"Touche."
She shrugs, gesturing widely with both hands, her lit cigarette perched precariously between a pair of fingers. "It's the same sort of story. It's hard to make a living on the straight and narrow -- and academia's so competitive this days! -- as an archaeologist, you know. Or, really, any sort of scholar. Especially," she adds, pointedly, "without an especially wealthy patron. Expeditions don't run cheap. But grab a few folks with too many weapons and an itch for the glittery sort of treasure and it's surprising what progress you can make, eh?"
She smiles, lopsidedly, her gaze heavylidded. "Not without breaking a few eggs, or walls and tombs, I suppose, and hardly without its hazards, but at the end of the day, it beats sweet-talking rich idiots or dealing with some lot of ivory-tower navel-gazers."
She glances over at him, as if take his measure once again, perhaps weighing in this information alongside what else she's learned about Jude this day.
"But here I thought at least a paper'd pay properly." An overdramatic sigh follows. "What a world we live in, where an honest life's too hard to achieve."
As if, somehow, this were the only thing keeping her from being an upright citizen.
<Pose Tracker> Jude Moshe has posed.
I've never seen a whale outside of a book.
"They're overrated. Trust me."
He says of what may as well be a mythological creature to anyone living in an endless desert.
Like any reporter worth their salt, Jude Moshe is, apparently, terminally hard to impress.
"And apparently some of them can fly, so I don't think I have a whole lot of cause to trust any of them any more." If much more exist.
Still, sublimely disaffected on the perilously subject of dwindling whale populations, the redhead nonetheless cracks a wry sort of smile to Josephine's words about Sin. "Guess that makes us unlucky, huh?" he wonders, considering this possibility before rubbing at the back of his neck. "... Yeah. That checks out."
Which means he also won't hold his breath about that being the last they see of the whale of calamitous intent, either.
With these musings delivered, the expression he tilts the archaeologist's way is one of hapless uncertainty in answer to her utter(ly fake) ire. His hands come up, palms forward. "Hey, hey. Not much of a nickname if I have to make it up myself, is it? Now my confidence in you is slipping a bit." He exhales a sigh, smoke rolling faux-dejectedly from his lips as he slumps backward. "Don't let me down, Josie. I don't have much in life left to rely on."
And with that note, the suggestions come. J. J-M. Jimmy. And for each one, Jude's brows lift progressively higher, to match off against her wide-eyed innocence.
Silence dwells in comfort between them for five whole seconds. And then he punctures it roundly.
"I have to say," he begins, his voice slow, measured, full of portent.
"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't surprised, and a little disappointed, you didn't go with 'Judy.'"
But, that ship has sailed, and so Jude just takes a drag of his cigarette in mourning of missed opportunities before a smile cracks his lips.
It's the talk of truth, and perspective, and the filling of facts with conjecture, that mellows his mood once more. Shoulders roll forward as props himself on the corner of the bench in a slight hunch, amber eyes affixing distantly towards the ground. "Ask ten people in an argument what happened just after it happened, and they'll have ten different stories that you can kind of piece together like a mosaic. Ask them ten years after the fact... you get a portrait that's more like an abstract if you're feeling generous." What a work is man. He closes his eyes, allowing himself a smile.
"We're large," he quotes back to her, from a different source, "we contain multitudes." A second passes.
"Or so I've been told, anyway."
And so, as the tiles are assembled, Jude shifts himself just a bit, stretching out of his position at the table's edge to turn and lean himself over the pair to inspect them a bit more carefully. "I guess if you're going to live a short life," he asides, about Josie's poor pigeon, "might as well make it an exciting one." He reaches out with a hand, deft fingers resting comfortably against the surface of that fire-twisted tile thoughtfully.
"They're peppered everywhere, really, but Aquvy definitely got the lion's share. And Elru..." Well, they're going to be going there next; best not to spoil the surprise, right? Instead, he just hints in the withering stare he levels at those tiles. "... well, if you're lucky, your adventure isn't gonna compel you to stay there any longer than you have to." That ought to do it.
"I have a few contacts I can probably ask about these. Better keep yourself prepared, though," he warns as he leans himself back, tilting amber eyes her way. "Mostly what comes out of treasure hunts like this is a giant headache you can't shake off." He considers this for a moment, before scratching at the top of his head.
"Something I'm pretty sure those kids are gonna figure out sooner than later, too."
She talks, though, of her own reasoning; and Jude Moshe seems to take it well in stride, at least. There's no skepticism in his expression, he doesn't ask any prying questions or cast doubt on any of her answers, either in word or in action. No, he just seems to take it in good faith, or simply go with the flow of her narrative at the very least, turning that tile against calloused fingers as he focuses on that surface examination.
"So, it's like you've got a rotating band of roving interns," he summarizes neatly. "Not a bad deal, but it still feels like a lot of dangerous hoops to be jumping through. That passion for your work really carries you far, huh?" His own smile is a lopsided one as he leans back, brows lifted.
"Guess I can't really talk. We've all of us got our things we won't compromise on, huh?"
With a helpless slump of his shoulders, Jude's expression turns towards exasperation to match Josie's melodrama. "Here I thought that, too. But if there's one thing true about Guild Galad, it's that people will pay you as little as possible for as much as possible. You'd think sitting on a proverbial Shangri-La of dragon bones would make people a little more generous and widen their perspectives... but really, it just does the opposite."
What a work is man.
"Well. We all do what we have to do to get the things we want out of life, right?"
It is, after all, a short life. With a very specific price to be paid for being given it.
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
'Guess that makes us unlucky, huh?'
Josie's reply to that is to smile a little too broadly. "Perhaps. Or you could look on the bright side -- we're living a much more exciting life than most ever manage~" It's the sort of fake-cheer that would put cavities in a lesser man's teeth.
Still, if she never sees a flying whale again, it'll be too soon.
She's not counting overmuch that that's the last they've seen of it, either.
"Well, at least give me something to work with," she mock-huffs, the coversation tilting towards the matter of nicknames and the ideal nickname for someone like Jude. "You'd throw a drowning man a rope, wouldn't you?" She gestures towards him plaintively -- if stiffly -- with her right hand, the old scarring across the underside of the fingers and palm peeking out against the edges of the bandaging.
Perhaps it's his own fault for not providing her with a suggestion of some ilk.
More likely, it's her own fault for plunging on into the realm of suggestions, grasping perhaps for that proverbial rope.
'Jimmy' is what she comes up with.
He's a little disappointed, for his own reasons. "Judy?" She looks him over contemplatively, only to shake her head. "Hm, no, you don't strike me as a Judy. I suppose I could go for 'Jim' if you'd prefer, though? But you know, 'Jimmy' has a real go-getter sound to it," she continues, perhaps nakedly attempting to get a rise out of him now. "Maybe you could use that on your articles. 'Jimmy Moshe'." Cigarette precariously pinched between forefinger and middle, she gestures now with her left hand as if to sketch out the shape of an oversized article. "Who knows? Maybe you could turn over a new leaf, with a name like that."
She can't be serious.
She leans, for the moment, against the wall, leaving the bench to him. Thoughtfully, she takes another drag, her own cigarette becoming too rapidly consumed here in this semi-stuffy workshop. "And when it's a hundred, a thousand years... heh. At least there's no shortage of jobs for scholars," she remarks, her own lips split in a grin. "Or archaeologists. Or reporters, for that matter."
She glances up at the ceiling. "Makes you wonder what 'truth' even is, sometimes."
A little bit. But perhaps it's natural for humans to so contradict themselves.
"My thoughts exactly. There's plenty of time to spend dead."
His hands linger on the one tile marked by fire. It has a small protrusion coming out of one side and is littered with text.
"If you can believe it, that one's 'Wind Activator'. The other one's Fire -- that's the one from Ash Hare." She shrugs a little helplessly. "There's likely at least two more, or possibly as many as twelve to twenty-four if they adhered to some of the... more esoteric elemental-marking methods." She smiles, helplessly. "Well, at least I won't be bored." The corner of her mouth twitches, before as if in sympathy with her future self's apparent headache, she closes her eyes as if in a wince. "That's the price for following a dream, I suppose. But I'm not about to let this one slip out of my grasp so easily. Still, if you've got some contacts out there who might know a thing or three, well, so much the better." She smiles, tightlipped. "It's a big world and I'd like to solve this one before I'm forty."
She'd made up her mind years ago and she's not about to tie up her sails and head home now. But eventually life -- and age -- makes a mockery of us all.
"Probably. But finding that one out is part of growing up." She gestures again towards the tiles and then winks at Jude. "Unfortunately, we don't stop until we're dead, eh?"
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
A pause follows her own story, her explanation punctuated with one final drag of her cigarette before she reaches over to snuff out the very ragged-end of it. "Still, I think my latest crop of interns is better than the last bunch I've had. I've been looking for clues on this thing," and she, now empty-handed, jabs at the Wind tablet, "for years, only to stumble across its partner while following up on their business." A gesture here, Fire-wards. "Though it does mean that now I get to go on east and try to save the world for my troubles. Funny how it works out, life."
Funny how it works out: a city perched atop treasures is miserly.
A bunch of green Drifters stumble across something in a matter of months that she'd been hunting after for years.
"Or fate, if you want put it that way. Heh."
<Pose Tracker> Jude Moshe has posed.
Josephine grasps for the figurative rope --
You'd throw a drowning man a rope, wouldn't you?
"That depends. Rope doesn't come cheap, you know?"
-- and finds herself only holding on to air.
Figuratively.
Which all leads back towards Josephine's wild guesswork with effortless aplomb. A single dark red brow hefts up maybe a quarter of an inch in bemusement as the archaeologist continues on. His head even cants to the right, as if he were trying to wrap his head around the bizarre behaviors of some unknown animal. Arms cross over his chest as he settles backward, and gives Josephine all the furrowed-brow look of damage assessor.
"Huh," he utters, his tone one of subdued wonderment.
"So this is what it looks like when you're drowning. Good to know." His brows become a well-spooled knot of consternation at their center. "Maybe I should've thrown that rope after all."
And yet, he doesn't. Instead, hands finding their homes in his pants pockets, he settles more gingerly into a seat near the workbench and instead looks off aside, almost wistful. "Jimmy though, huh? Maybe. I could start a whole new life, become a whole new man, free of debts and obligations. Jimmy Moshe, the happy go lucky average joe with a heart of gold, devout and churchgoing and a pillar of the community, supporting his loving family by writing heartfelt one gella novellas him and his hapless sidekick, Joey," two guesses who that is, "Lovelace." Whoops, nevermind.
"Working title for the first book: 'The Adventures of Jimmy & Joey: Moon Bootleggers.'"
His hands in front of him, as if he were framing the idea for her to imagine, Jude looks Josephine's way with a look that would almost seem too restrained to be anything but sincere if the topic was anything even slightly less absurd.
"What do you think?"
He thinks it has legs, anyway.
Makes you wonder what 'truth' even is, sometimes.
"Who knows? Maybe it's just a touchstone. Or maybe most of it's delusions. Whatever manages to make all of this nonsense make sense."
No one ever said people had to have internal consistency. Otherwise the term 'cognitive dissonance' would never have to exist.
With that, Jude turns his attention to the tiles, fingers gliding across the text forged upon the fire-twisted one. "What, did they get into a fight?" he remarks, without so much as missing a beat, as she identifies the fire-branded one as wind and the other as its opposite number. His lips purse, just slightly, as he turns his fingers towards that protrusion. "So they're part of a set, obviously. Maybe some kind of a key? Have they done anything strange since you got them?"
She speaks. His fingers fall of that tile, one by one, as he turns that amber gaze to consider her with faint curiosity.
"Life's work, huh?" he asks, after a moment. "Stumbling across some weird, ancient puzzle piece to make into your magnum opus. And I thought I had bad luck."
It's a simple enough comment, and one easily thrown out there as Jude tilts away from the tile in question. "So I guess you've got your reasons for keeping an eye on the kids after all, huh? Besides making sure they don't stumble off a cliff while they're busy gazing lovingly into each other's eyes." The right corner of his lip quirks up lackadaisically at that, an amused spark in amber eyes as he pushes up and out of his feet with only the mildest of stretches to reorient himself. "Maybe, if you don't die, you'll find the next piece of your puzzle after Fei's redheaded friend trips over it in the middle of Arctica."
Stranger things have happened.
Is it coincidence that brought them all together? Fate? Or something more dire?
Jude doesn't answer her observation immediately. Instead, he moves from the work bench, his pace a slightly stiff-legged shuffle until he makes his way deeper into the room. He's going fishing --
"You can call it fate if you want."
-- until he finds something alcoholic.
"I call it 'a reason to drink.'"
He knows there has to be something here.
And once, or if, he does, he'll return, one brow lifting and expression expectant. "I'll see who I can get ahold of all the way out here. In the meantime, this is a problem that requires alcohol. So how about we get started on that, and you can tell me what you've figured out about all this crap already, and we'll see if it starts making more sense by the sixth shot."
He thinks it's a solid plan of attack.
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
"Always knew you were a cheap bastard, Moshe." When she says it, it's more of a mark of affection than anything else.
But the truth remains, particularly when she really does start to -- metaphorically -- drown.
"You're also a cruel bastard." It might be high praise even, coming from a woman like her.
Bantering like this is nearly second nature for a pair of sinners like themselves. Insults -- meant kindly -- fly free amidst open acknowledgement of their respective natures. And yet, even so--
The look on Josie's face when Jude lays out for her the whole, entire, complete plan for his new life and profession out before her is, as they say, priceless. She hovers on that too-thin precipice between offense and amusement, with a dollop of out-and-out confusion for flavor.
"Joey?" she echoes. "Can't you do better than 'Joey'?"
She huffs out a breath, glancing away from him with an over-acted 'hmph'.
"Absolutely not."
Her silence maintains for all of ten seconds. Then:
"Not without 60% of the profits."
They really get on like a house on fire. And speaking of--
'Did they get into a fight?'
Josie smiles over at him, blandly. "My house burned down." Pause. "You ever heard the phrase 'publish or perish'? Well, they weren't kidding." As if she were a kid with their hand caught in the proverbial cookie jar, she grins back at him. "Seems like one of my dear old colleagues is out for blood! Though, seeing as they haven't so much as tried another hit in ages, perhaps I've managed to shake them? Or maybe they're off murdering someone else." She shrugs, as if this were just another inconvenience and not arson/attempted murder.
"Suits me fine. The last thing I need is someone trying to brain me with a textbook while we're heading out east."
As for the tiles themselves though--
"Got it in one. Number two and three, so there's at least a 'one' somewhere, and given the theme, probably a 'four'. But after that, the sky's the limit I suppose."
She prods at the partially singed one. "Tiger managed to get this one to change its shape. Other than that... they're tiles," she informs him, all mock sobriety. "They don't do much except be mysterious. I figure if I can get my hands on the others I should be able to figure out what they're on about, but then there's the matter of finding the things."
Which is one of the reasons she's been tagging along with the Black Wolves. It's not every day you meet not one, but two people literate in Zeboim... and with a knack for finding the things.
To say nothing of the rest of their merry crew and their mysteries.
"Now where's your sense of adventure," she mock-admonishes him, waving a finger. "Finding anything from this period is discovery enough already, and I think these aren't your run-of-the-mill potsherds. This could rewrite history, as they say, right?"
A thought must have occured to her, because she outright laughs, a dry and slightly bitter sound of a thing. "Add a little more nonsense to the nonsense, perhaps?"
She's got her reasons, all right. Rather than out-and-out comment on his statement, she just smiles lopsidedly, shrugs, and glances away, as if mimicking the manner of someone playing coy. Her gaze glitters in the light when she looks back at him.
In other words: precisely. It worked once, it might well work twice. Perhaps there might even be some weightier strand of fate (or the like), twining their lives together.
"It's certainly a thought," she says, resting her good hand on the workbench, her gaze for now lingering on the tablets. Fire, Wind...
He stands about then, moving deeper into the workroom in search of something.
She can guess what.
"Check the black cabinet. It's not the best from the look of it, but someone left a half a bottle of gin. Guess they were having a party."
Pause.
"Or something to cry about."
She stoops, fishing out a small flask from among her belongings. "Tell you what, I'll feeling generous -- I'll even share you a bit of my personal collection."
Read: the cheapest of spirits she could find, short of actual moonshine.
"You're on your own for a glass."