2019-04-26: A Working Hypothesis
- Log: A Working Hypothesis
- Cast: Loren Voss, Margaret
- Where: Kilika - Town Center
- Date: April 26, 2019
- Summary: Imprisoned in Kilika, Loren receives a visitor he didn't expect.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
This is quite certainly the least secure prison that Loren has ever been party to.
Considering it's in fact a hut, the term 'prison' is perhaps giving it a little too much credit. A cloth has been draped over a hole torn in the one side, probably not more than a month old at best. He does in fact know why, and it's not a fact that gives him much comfort.
Truth be told, this 'prison' is one that he could escape easily from if he so chose.
The only thing she had said is that he's not allowed to leave the island -- and he's certain he could flout that if he wanted.
But that's exactly the problem.
Out there is a world he knows little about, a world where he has no known backup other than the Baskar girl. He needs more time to think what he ought to do, he needs more information, he needs more resources.
Some of the local currency would be a good start. He should ask Lan about that...
Dressed in the clothing favored by the lower class of Glenwood -- he's noticed the slight, Kaguya -- and without his glasses, he sits with his back against the wall, his eyes closed.
She'd more recently given him some of his stuff back, on the condition he be nice to old people. He thinks he knows where she's keeping the rest of it.
His glasses, though, are probably somewhere at the bottom of the sea. There's no helping it.
Slowly he exhales a breath, rolling his will outwards for the dust and dirt of the hut's floor. Just particles. Just debris.
Still earth. He pulls them together, willing them to consolidate as one.
It's easier to do fine motions with the glasses. This, then, is an exercise into the subtle.
Subtlety is important in the application of the healing arts.
Slowly the dust, brought up into the air before him, spins in an echo of, perhaps, planetary formation.
He focuses on his breath. Careful. Don't force it. It's like mending a wound...
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
Focus... gather...
Hear...
Think...
Feel...
The door is tap-tap-tappity-tapped at with the polite insistence of a landlord who is friendly but also wants to know where the rent is, because you're a day behind. The cloth tarp over the hole in the hut rustles, but the fruit of this rustling is not clear.
Wait... there's a distinctive fragrance in the air. Sandalwood and ylang-ylang fruit essence...
But how could there be enough of it to be scentable from *outside of the building?*
OUTSIDE
Margaret tosses her long glossy fresh-washed and perfumed hair back. "THOMAS," Margaret says from outside. "Are you decent? Prepare yourself. I would have words with you."
With her are
* Rex, the mysterious man who kind of fits in around here but not really (he knocked on the door)
* Silf, the enigmatic elfling, who was the one who checked under the tarp. (Silf makes a hand gesture chain to Margaret which idiomatically reads 'oliphant - no - door - closed')
"Is the door even locked?" Margaret half-complains.
Rex shrugs his tattooed shoulder. "It's the principle of the thing, I reckon."
"But he could just walk out through that tarp. At most he'd have to hop. He can hop; he didn't have any problems with his legs. Did he?"
Silf makes another hand gesture.
"Use your words," Margaret grouses.
"Didn't seem like his legs were broke, nope," Silf says cheerfully.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
There's a certain aroma in the air. He quite deliberately ignores it, honing in on his breathes, on stretching his will ever outwards and into ever finer spaces. Like a fractal, his awareness sheds downwards into an seemingly endless spiral.
Focus has never been a problem of his. There are those in Gebler for which it very much is, and who then have to take measures to rein in the issue before it becomes eliminated by... other means.
But it's never been him. The glasses have always been for the single practical sense that it's better to make absolutely sure of accuracy and focus than accidently in the heat of battle fuse someone's guts to their liver.
He can't afford to slip up, even on the moon. Even if he can never go back. The goal of this exercise is to form from particulates something more solid--
"THOMAS" declares a familiar voice from outside.
The half-formed thing that had been floating before him disintegrates into a puff of dust and dirt, pouring into a sad little pile on the floor. He regards it a moment, then regards the joke of a door.
Then regards the window and briefly, briefly, considers making his escape through it.
Ugh. As long as she's on this island he's not going to lose her short of running into the jungle, and the look Kaguya had given him when she had talked about that suggests he doesn't actually want to go there.
So he stands, grimaces, then steels himself and drags the tarp back.
"Let me guess," he starts, lingering still in the relative darkness inside the hut. "She told you."
There is, surprisingly, no actual furniture inside the hut. ...Other than some hard chairs.
This, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the result of yet another power play going on between him and Kaguya. She's not going to give him anything more comfortable until he asks for it, and he's loathe to ask her for it.
This particular standoff has been running for weeks.
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
The tarp peels back. Silf crowds into frame first, saying to Loren parenthetically "hi" even as Rex and Margaret turn their gaze towards him.
Margaret looks funny. She doesn't have any makeup on, and it reveals the light wrinkles around the edges of her eyes, as well as a sort of staring intensity.
"'She' told you," Margaret scoffs. "Hello, THOMAS," she says, with her hands going to her hips as she leans forwards while striding nearer to that tarp-wrapped window, "and I'm aware of when I'm being invited into a battle of wits and I decline, at this time, the invitation, because I am hung over. Never the less, I am told that you have been TAKEN CAPTIVE, though the details elude me, as the duchess is, I am sure you are aware, a somewhat FEY INDIVIDUAL."
"Fey as shit," Rex confirms with a nod.
Margaret waves a hand in the air. "I'm come to interrogate you," she says, "because I am not some fool who just fell off the turnip wagon and rolled down hill into the cattle manure heap last week, Thomas. You're turning up far too often, and I never have heard of you being in the company of other Drifters. All of these people form little clusters, or else they're lurking in the shadows, wearing black cloaks and calling themselves something like Raven's Beak or Skeleton's Hand."
Margaret takes a deep breath and lets it out. Then she looks back towards the window.
And into the hut.
"Did you roll up the bedding?" she asks, baffled. "Are you being fed? You seem to be surviving, at least; I'm not hearing any of the querulous suffering of extended starvation in your voice, though I suppose you might sit on it."
"Ma'am?" Rex says.
Margaret waves him forward.
Rex steps forwards to look up at Loren, solemnly. He puts one thick-fingered hand on the remnants of the sill. It may occur to Loren that he could probably pull himself into the window even before any Althenan magic got involved. But he seems content to stand there.
"We have a lot of questions," Rex tells him. "You've been a mystery to us. Kind of a nine days wonder. Ever since Silf found that seeing glass of yours."
"Did the Duchess take it from you?" Margaret asks.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"Don't play dumb. Her. That woman. Kaguya. She's with you, isn't she?"
In other words, the Duchess.
A pause trends out from him. "Oh good. You're back to interrogate me again. So what's the threat this time? Boiling oil?" He closes his eyes briefly as if he has a headache.
He'd lost a rather deep focus rather abruptly, and it lingers.
"...Trust me," he says, flatly, when she says he's been running into her far too often, "it's not for my health."
Then she asks about the bedding. He glances back over his shoulder. His expression turns a bit quizzical for a moment. Then, he shrugs.
"I've been sleeping on the floor," he says.
There is a pause.
"...It's good for the spine."
He misses having even a sleeping bag. But he'll only admit that on pain of death at this point. If he sees Kaguya grin at him like that one more time he's going to--
His glance turns towards Rex's hands. An appraising look follows.
Before it's replaced by sheer bafflement.
Magic mirror.
His expression goes a little blank for a moment, as if he's running that over in his head and coming up empty. Magic mirror?
Dawn eventually breaks; realization alights in his blue eyes.
"Oh. That. You're out of luck, it's lost in the sea." Reaching up a hand to his temple he rubs at the side of his head, grimacing. Great. If someone hasn't already hinted his alliance to her or or told her outright or if she hasn't put two and two together, they're going to.
But he'll be damned if he'll be the someone to tell tales without it even being tortured out of him, even if he might be stuck up here for good this time.
...What was it that the Commander had suggested in times like these?
He lets the tarp drop flat against the window, for a moment seeming as if he's terminated the conversation without a word. It'll be a few moments more before he joins them on the short walkway encircling the hut, taking care to slide into the shadows -- and not just for the sake of avoiding the sunlight. The last thing he wants is to play twenty questions with Leo.
"Luckily for you, I don't have anywhere to go. So." He folds his arms across his chest. "Why don't you tell me what you think is going on?"
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
"Do you want a powder or something? Looks like you're in pain," Silf remarks.
Then 'Thomas' closes the tarp.
The entire trio is on the other little walkway space by the time Loren emerges. They do not look quite as funny.
Loren folds his arms.
Margaret folds hers... and then says, "I'm going to let Rex explain it since he put it all together and I'd just, go, off on a TANGENT and nothing would get done. Silf, get the boy a gourd of water or something, and fetch me my pipe."
Silf grins with fewer teeth than she should have, and zips off.
Margaret sits on the steps.
Rex, now, folds HIS arms.
"This is only a working hypothesis," he says. "But perhaps you'll indulge me. Tell me how close to the mark I'm getting... because, you see, I understand why you won't answer directly." Rex smiles, not showing his teeth: "This came to me, Thomas, because you remind me of myself as a young man."
Rex's eyes close.
"You're from a hidden nation," Rex says. "It's on Filgaia. I've heard a lot about 'Slayheim,' so it might be that place, or something else nearby. You're like Neo-Vane, but in the later days... or perhaps you're closer to how Vane might be, if Vane wasn't situated somewhere impossible to conceal."
"Your people use your equipment, 'the ARM,' machina - whatever you want to call it - alongside your wizardry. That's what makes your ships fly. That's what powers your Gears - this part's a reach, because I've only seen Gears from afar, you see, but my understanding is that some of them were not salvage." Rex opens one eye as if to say: Eh?
"But... I think that your nation's working from wreckage, too. If you had enough Gears, you'd rule Filgaia; obviously, you don't, or we would have noticed, and probably we would be the ones in prison and you would be the one offering us gourds of water, or not, depending on your ways," Rex continues. "What I can't figure out is..."
"Hrrrm... this is difficult to phrase concisely," Rex says, scratching at his chin. "How to put it..."
"Oh for the love of the Goddess," Margaret complains. She looks towards Loren. "He thinks you're a king or a noble or something but you're being shit upon because your parents are in bad odor, which is why you keep turning up in the proximity of we dirty primitives."
"What I do know," Rex says, "and you can deny it, laugh, or turn up your nose, but I'm quite certain of it..."
He opens his eyes in full. "Is that whatever your country's secret arts are, you're at least a journeyman at them. Maybe more."
"If you weren't confident," Margaret asides, "you'd have probably tried to kill us in the camp and that would have been the end of you." She makes a little puckering 'pow' with her mouth, before slouching forwards, tilting her head to try to put it in the shade.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
She's leaving it to Rex to answer.
That, already, presents itself as a problem -- Rex has, previously, shone himself to have an unfortunately keen eye.
He tries to keep the expression on his face properly disinterestedly aloof.
He reminds him of...
This is already going to a bad place. Loren considers, and not for the first time, just running off for the jungle. ...Except that would be rather terminally counterproductive, wouldn't it.
I'm not either of them. Leah, or the Commander. But I have to try.
It's already off to a bad start at Rex's first guess. Loren keeps his stance steady, as loose as someone like him can manage. He shrugs, as if to suggest the older man might be right, might be wrong, but doesn't commit verbally either way.
"That's hardly unique," he says, at the next point laid out on the metaphorical table. "People dig up things like that all the time. I've heard about Guild Galad, for example..." Deflect, deflect. Don't commit to anything. Try to think how they would do this.
He shifts his stance a fraction, as if to suggest that Rex go on.
Minutely, some muscle twitches at the corner of his mouth; his gaze shifts away from Rex. "Oh good, something a little different from the usual conspiracy theories. For a moment," he says, glancing back at Rex, "I'd thought you'd been swallowing the stories Drifters like to tell." He makes a sound that is at least a close cousin to a scoff, shrugging as he seems to indicate Rex go on.
But the man hems and haws.
And ultimately it's Margaret who comes out and says it plain.
His initial reaction is an honest one: he glances at her so sharply that if looks could kill, he'd at least have dealt a grievous injury. It's an unfortunately honest reaction, indeed.
"Or I'm just that unlucky to get caught up in these things," he grouses, creasing his brow. "Just another wanderer with a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Journeyman. How did... when...
He shakes his head, as Rex had anticipated. "You're making a lot of extrapolations, you know. If you want to accuse someone of something, you want to have more than guesses and supposition."
Damn, and they're not even in contact with the likes of Shevat, or someone who might have tipped them off... this is a problem.
He glances away as Margaret speaks, as if annoyed. "That or I was too hurt to try anything. And I thought I was the suspicious type..."
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
Margaret takes that glare. Her lip curls. It's a sneer, not a smile. "You speak like a barrister."
"We obey no surface-walker law," Rex says, with a smile in his voice, "save that of the Goddess. But sometimes it's easier to follow the paths, so people don't get upset."
At this point Silf returns. Margaret is given her pipe, which she proceeds to light, adding that sweetish tobacco smell to the air. A fat gourd of reasonably cool well water is offered to Loren. ("I'll take a swig if you want to know it's not poisoned," Silf offers.)
Margaret takes a long drag and seems to relax. As she exhales into the air of Spira, she leans back and crosses her legs at the ankle.
"We're not trying to prove anything against you, Thomas. We're making you an offer."
Her head turns to look towards him. "If you think you have a future with your people then we would want to learn your arts. Even what you might consider scraps could secure our sorcerous dominance over all of Lunar, especially if we can take care of this Sin once and for all." ("I know, and then I'll fly to the Blue Star and back after I've done the easy part.")
"And if you're concerned we'll interfere with whatever thousand year schemes of revenge against the Kingdom of Aveh your people seek to execute," Margaret says, "Well, don't. While I do hate the idea of 'Good' and 'Justice,' I'd be satisfied with grinding all of Lunar under my boot, with only the Goddess's foot on my own."
"And - if you don't have a future with your people," Rex then says... before trailing off.
Margaret sits upright. Then she stands, and steps onto the deck. She stays downwind, and over an arm's length away, but she tells him with a certain gentle chord in her voice, "You'd hardly be the first, you know."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He already has it in hand by the time Silf makes that particular remark.
"I hadn't even thought about that until now. Thanks so much," he remarks, before quite deliberately taking a swig from the gourd. He's paranoid, he's extremely paranoid, even by his people's standards. But perhaps there are some routes where it would be better to die than tread.
After all, what's there to stop her from holding a poison in her mouth and injecting it into the water when she takes that swig? ...There are no assurances of anything. So he might as well drink and be damned, at this point.
If someone wanted him dead there's no obstacle to it here.
He turns to face Margaret. "An offer? You people have a funny way of making offers. Let me guess," he says, closing his eyes briefly. "What I get out of this is you playing nice with me. Putting in a good word with your boss, maybe. Not making things worse for me. Am I right?"
His imprisonment, as it were, has apparently not done much for his temperment. It may be possible that he's become less agreeable.
She makes her case.
He gazes at her for a long moment.
He shakes his head. "...You want to learn how to use my magic," he says, treading down the path he assumes she's meant. "You're assuming it's something you can learn," he says, lowering his voice. "That even if I wanted to teach you, I could. I could tell you theory for months and you wouldn't get anything practical out of it. ...You can't use it any more than I can use your magic."
He looks away, then. Lifts his head to gaze up at the sky.
'If you don't have a future with your people'...
I don't. Not as such. But it doesn't matter.
Is being here a part of the curse? Or is this in defiance of it?
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
"Codpiece," Silf tells Loren, cheerfully. She lets him keep the gourd.
Margaret is looked at. She exhales blueish smoke in Loren's general direction, perhaps out of annoyance. "Well," she says, "YOU try doing this in my seat some time, and see how you come out doing it."
"We were thinking we could provide you with considerable material aid, possibly to the benefit of your nation," Rex says to Loren, not knowing what he's offering, exactly. Then Loren explains...
Margaret says, "Interesting."
Silf leaves, probably bored.
"Mm," Rex says, scratching his chin again. "Yes... a factor in the bloodline... that must be it. I wonder..."
Rex looks at Loren again. "Is this why your nation was forced into hiding?"
Margaret straightens up then. "That's actually very interesting to know."
"Indeed," Rex says. "We'll speak again soon, I warrant."
Margaret nods. She taps her nose then, looking at Loren: "There are things other than magic direct, you know. The art is more than just performing a certain song and dance and summoning a blade of wind. Our magicks of velocity were greatly enhanced just by observing your steam trains."
("whoo whoo!" says Silf in the distance.)
"We'll have someone swing by later in the evening," Margaret concludes. "If there's anything you need - books, or a cushion, or perhaps food (which I hear is popular this time of year), just ask."
And with that Margaret saunters back down, walking the same way Silf is heading if with less haste.
Rex gives Loren a long, lingering look, and seems to be about to say something... but then the thick old man shakes his head instead, and moves to join his comrades. As he walks he rubs a fat silver ring on his left middle finger with his thumb, turning it gently.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Loren makes a muted grimace but doesn't otherwise comment on Silf's... comment.
Rex, meanwhile, clarifies things considerably. "...So that's what you're aiming for." He frowns if faintly, turning over that thought in his head. He'd need to send that up the chain of command. Find out if this is legitimate and not some ruse. And at least one of those avenues remains absent as long as he's up here on the moon without the means to communicate.
And he'd need to figure out, precisely, what it would be. Where it would apply.
If it's to anyone's interest.
Rex speculates about a bloodline factor once Loren speaks to the impossibility of what they want. Asks a certain question.
Loren, almost pointedly, doesn't answer.
Let them think what they want.
Especially if it takes them away from the truth.
But as it is, he realizes, he's already said a little too much.
Particularly when she suggests that he doesn't even have to be able to properly teach her for her to learn. "Mmph..." he utters wordlessly, before looking away.
I'm an idiot.
But outwardly he shakes his head, as if to stand tall against whatever may course beneath the surface. "We'll see. I don't need much," he says, which is a lie if he's ever told one.
A cushion would be nice. Even better if he doesn't have to go through Kaguya for it.
Some local history and customs books, even better.
And money can disguise a wide range of ills.
Maybe there's something I can trade. I already put my foot into it. Maybe something small...
He watches, briefly, as the Margaret heads out.
And for a moment, ends up sharing a look with Rex.
There's something...
He's reminded of a similar look that man had given him once, off inside the ruins in that island. The last time they had crossed paths.
But as Rex does not ask, Loren grants him no answers. He takes another experimental swig of water and glances again up at the sky and the blue sphere beyond.
So it's like that...