2021-05-23: Demon Consultant Magilou
- Log: Demon Consultant Magilou
- Cast: Ruth Pauling, Magilou
- Where: Guara Bobelo - The Arena
- Date: May 23, 2021
- Summary: Where a Hellion seeks to feed their sorrow through the ambience, Magilou makes a fractional-unspecified-organ attempt to feed their head. There are (no) feels in the air.
=========================<* Guara Bobelo - The Arena *>========================= The Cathedral of Saint Calucion is a gutted shell of its former self. Artillery shelling demolished its white marble dome, destroyed its elegant mosaics, and shattered its stained-glass windows. The one icon left standing is the statue of Saint Calucion, which now presides over the city's bloodsport. A group of enterprising thrill-seekers repurposed the Cathedral not long after the Church of Granas abandoned Guara Bobelo. The building is now the home of the Arena--a place where the bold and desperate fight monsters, and each other, in the hopes of earning fortune and glory. Cottage industries have sprung up around Guara Bobelo's new institution. Iron-barred storefronts sell weapons, armor, and dubious curatives to would-be gladiators. Back-alley clinics make a tidy profit treating Arena survivors, despite squalid conditions and the questionable training of their surgeons. Even those who die in the arena contribute to local business, if rumors of body-snatching anatomists are to be believed. BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFlXaMLnfn4
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
Guara Bobelo is one of the few major population centers left in the Celesti wastelands, all thanks to the massive dome that has entrapped it in eternal night. (Until anyone has the courage to step outside and breathe in that fresh, healthy, vibrant salted earth air... and think better of it, then bum for change to hitch a ride to Buckeye.)
One would never believe today that Guara Bobelo used to be one of the major cities of Granasian worship through the canonized saint Calucion. Not after the Cathedral got bombed out by Congressional Knight artillery roughly a quarter of a century ago, and then 'resurrected' as a foul mockery of all of her values: it is now the one major source of commerce that recoups Guild Galad's investment in acquiring the city.
Guara Bobelo is now the premiere place for bloodsport games in the Zoara landmass, and while the surrounding city lives in overcrowding, squalor, and despair... there seems no shortage of those willing to pay to watch people and creatures die gruesomely from the questionable safety of a stadium seat. (Guara Bobelo's Arena - the only place where the front row seats are cheap!)
That the Saint Calucion statue oversees this degeneracy, its original cultural values lost and its only worth being 'it looks pretty, maybe we should keep it clean, also the irony is hilarious and we are just that far gone.'
Today (...tonight? In Guara Bobelo, it's always 'night'), someone is paying a visit to the front steps of the Arena. They're overdressed in too many layers, and that overcoat is too big besides. The hood of their shawl is pulled over their head, and what should be a distinctive rifle has many of its features obscured in a wrapping blanket.
They have been there for a few hours, unmoving and kneeling with their right knee raised. Their right forearm rests upon it, bearing a Granasian rosary as they keep their head bowed. All around them (though only somewhat clear to their right), the sounds of crying and despair. Someone's loved one lost their life. Another lost their life savings. An irate surgeon throws his hands up about how there was nothing he could do while side-eyeing a certain back alley organ collector.
The kneeling figure remains there through all of it, in seeming fervent prayer of a sort. There are, in time, murmurs. Few have the courage to approach, and only one taps it - a young man.
"Hey, you," he says, "how long are you going to kneel there? Praying for victory before you test your luck, huh? Waiting for someone to hear you?"
They don't respond.
"Saint Calucion ain't never raised her hand to save the life of any in there. No real use praying." He grins. "I managed to score a seat further back for once, c'mon, how 'bout I 'pray' for you? Ha ha h--"
Their head raises, a sharp glare to match a sharp turn of the head like they could have lunged for their throat right then and there.
"SHIT whoa," he throws his arms over himself, falls on his seat... then turns to crawl on all fours, and run off without another word.
The hooded figure stares at him - and some other gazes in their direction - before bowing their head anew. They don't seem all that intent on budging. No one else, for the moment, seems intent on asking them to do so.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"Oooh! Blood sports!"
"Miss Magilou, that's way too scary..!"
"Oh, you say that about EVERYTHING here."
"That's 'cause everything here is way too scary! Why did we even come back here..?!"
"I had a bet with a guy, don't worry about it."
Anyway, that's why Bienfu is currently hiding out in Magilou right now. All dressed in jester's raiments, a skirt full of books, Magilou is the last person one would expect to approach the Arena; regardless she floats like a butterfly on over towards it, and her recent visitations to Guara Bobelo have already taught the locals that she stings like a dove.
She thinks she recognises all those layers, and maybe that's why she ambles up the stairs. Magilou doesn't bother to hide her snickering, as the young man scrambles off.
Magilou doesn't quite approach directly as much as she just sort of ambles up alongside, hands laced behind her head. "Bit of a dreary holiday destination," she says, eyes focused up on Calucion, "don't you think?"
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
If one didn't know better they might assume they were a statue of some sort, left to sit there and be forgotten by whoever was carting it around (because they weren't being paid enough to care). And so... a witch arrives, with the same startling abruptness and faultless angle of attack, where the hooded figure appears to fail to acknowledge her presence until Magilou takes her place aside them.
"..." A breathy silence escapes, something that counts as 'a noise' but fails to grasp onto phonetic likenesses of letters that it just has to be represented as ellipses, period.
"It's home." By the time that voice is spoken, it's certain one can't go by 'they' for the hooded figure. It's her, the one who tried to attack Halim from a spectacularly bad and dangerous plan of action she couldn't talk herself out of (or at last was able talk herself into doing, one or the other, or both, somehow). She doesn't raise from her pious kneeling. "...What little of it there is."
A sad smile can be seen in what little lighting is available for that bowed, hooded head. "It's not happy at all. Everyone else would sooner forget there was anything... good, before."
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
Magilou turns on a heel, and ungraciously flumps onto the staircase, facing down so she's more or less at eye level with the not-quite-statue. "Your home's a dump," she points out, honesty without kindness.
"Yep," she goes on, looking up at the domed sky, "this is where you decided, huh?" A beat, and she elaborates: "I saw it when I was messing around in your Domain. We all did -- different parts, I guess. You're just gonna have to live with everyone knowing your dirty laundry." Magilou waves a hand, as if it's out of hers entirely.
She leaaans back, elbows resting on the stairs as one leg crosses over the other. "Towns change," she says, one jester-boot jauntily wagging in the air. "There was this miserable farming village at one point which ended up as a major city... and then nice little hamlets like these become hives of scum and villainry. It is how it is," she shrugs, with much the same what-can-you-do tone.
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
At eye level, Magilou can spy that Ruth's eyes aren't really looking ahead. (Whether to avoid looking at Magilou, or what's in front of her... wait, are these two one in the same now? Point stands.) They're downcast, looking upon the bauble about her forearm. Maybe even the ground, at the same time.
Away from the dome. Away from Saint Calucion. Her home's a dump, and she has no protest to that.
'This is where you decided, huh?'
"...Huh." A beat, and then elaboration. Her eyes flutter, craning her neck upward as Magilou leans back and goes on about how towns change and nearly getting a face-full of wagging jester boot in the process of trying to follow Magilou's gaze.
"My..." And then, without finishing the statement (the second word was absolutely going to start with a capital 'D,'), a snort and another smile. "Who doesn't know about what a heartless monster did," as if she somehow found a plausible explanation on the spot for a question she never fully asks.
Her tone grows a bit more sullen and - predictably - guilty.
"It never was happy," she says. "That... might be the one thing that's the same."
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
Ruth says this place was never happy, and Magilou looks up at the dome. "Yeah, I can believe that." Magilou is just not nice about people's hometowns.
"But hey, lots of people don't know," Magilou waves a hand, loosely. "That guy you just scared the pants off of probably doesn't know you from Adam. Half the guys in the poker room. Like, most of the mole people in Guild Galad?" She straightens up a bit, feet to the steps, but it's just so she can prop an elbow up on a knee. (And, subsequently, her chin on the heel of her hand.) "I'm gonna tell you a hot tip about history: it stops mattering to most people three, four years out, tops. When it's not relevant to their miserable lives, they really don't care!"
Her eyes visibly roll as she says, "... unfortunately for you, half the people who pried into your secret backstory are do-gooder types who just looove to meddle. Now they know, you're gonna get a bunch of morons trailing after you like baby ducks. So yeah, have fun with that."
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
There's nothing nice to say about any part of Southern Aquvy outside of St. Heim and the surrounding communities, but recent events there sure put a whole lot of that into question. 'It has lots of vegetation and doesn't look like a blasted wasteland full of barbed wire and tainted groundwater' is progressively less high praise these days!
More silence follows on being told about being all but unrecognizable, and the fingers of her right hand twitch, clench, unclench, but not untwitch. "...I care," her voice is a bit on the meeker side, unable to speak over Magilou as she gets to the biggest trouble to follow her wake.
"That still eats at me," she confesses to someone who also contributed to eating at her, "how kind their words were. Supportive, accepting," she cracks a smile that widens, and it's not a warm smile. Her right hand faces upwards, palm gradually reaching towards her chest, "they look into... someone like that, and they speak like that," growing bitter laughter, "like I'm the one who needs the help, and not..."
The breath never leaves her, hand drooping and with it, her head raising so she's looking at the eye-rolling jester. There's tears starting to form in her eyes, unabashedly. "What would they want out of me that I am already not giving?"
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"They want their warm fuzzies," Magilou dismisses it, with a flick of her opposite wrist. "These days, soon as purple gets to be your favourite colour, there's an entire line of people waiting to fix it right up. These kids have really lost sight of the original messaging... what someone's got in their heart."
Magilou sighs, looking past Ruth, down the steps, down the street, down the abyss, where there's always something staring back. "But I guess they never saw it, huh..."
A tug at the corner of her mouth, and a tug of her gaze back to the wrapped-up woman. "Point is, it's not really about you. Oh, they'll say it's all you, but that's just the pretty lie they tell themselves. But you'd know all about that, wouldn't you?" That lopsided grin grows sharper, and the way her eyes lid, they could almost pass off as just plain green.
Magilou lifts her head, so she can shrug broadly again. "I don't really care one way or another, so if it means that much, I'll call you a monster. But frankly, some of my best friends are monsters, so it doesn't really phase me. I just can't stand it when people get on their high horses, that's all."
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
Idly, as Magilou dismisses the thought, her right hand's going back to her heart around the time she gets to 'the original messaging.' She does inwardly ask herself, in a fashion, if purple really is her favorite color? It is... one she sees a fair bit. She looks down towards her hand, and shuts her eyes suddenly as if not liking what she's seeing. (Which is weird, because those hands are gloved - and also when she changed, her hands were one of the two things about her that stayed unchanged. The other being her ears.)
She starts looking away, again, at the musing about whether 'they' never saw 'it,' as if she doesn't quite have words the process the idea, other than her fingers scratching at her chest like something inside were itching.
Maybe it's just her skin as a whole, now, for that burst of emotion that was about ready to flood out then and there, eyes looking up again as Magilou works up that lopsided, mocking grin about the lies people tell themselves. They all did grill her on the way she tried to consider herself a different person than what came before, only to be met with a dizzying array of counter-arguments she still hasn't fully processed.
"...That's... the thing," her voice steadies, sort of, in that it's more wavy than shaky, like a part of her would love to just let it all out right then and there but some part of her reason has gone, 'no, not yet.' The one weapon intelligent mortals have against their affliction... often used to rationalize themselves into spinning in circles.
"Ever since... I've felt like less of a monster." How many Hellions of shattered spirits denied some difficult truths even to their last breath? She doesn't question so much why she's willing to be so open to someone who confronted her with precise, surgical questions at Halim, but her head has had less buzzing about the last handful of hours.
Her right hand starts grasping up at her left shoulder. The bad one. Enough pain that the idea she'd still carry that rifle on her back is something outlandish to consider. She quietly takes in the ambience of the place. The despair, the resignation, the sorrow, all adding a weight to her chest that brings... not so much peace, but a preferred form of discomfort, and then... a question.
"...What do you care about?"
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"Good for you," Magilou says, and on the surface it seems the exact kind of insensitive flippant comment she'd make, hearing how Ruth feels about herself. But there's a lack of venom to the statement which might almost make it... genuine?
Or maybe she just doesn't care much either way. Who knows.
And then Ruth asks. In the face of despair, over the distant sounds of a mourner wailing, Magilou -- laughs. Head all thrown back, she barks out a cackle, as if Ruth's just told a hilarious joke. Her hand comes up to her hat to stop it toppling off her head, shoving it a little ways forward as her head flops back rightside-up, bangs all askew across her face. "Oh man," she says, and her grin is a scar ripped across her face, "how did you know I was waiting to pour out my life story?!"
A hand clasped to her heart, the other reaches out to the sky. "I have a performance this very night! I'm so, so scared that I won't reach my audience! Can I make them laugh?! Can I make them question the futility of life?! It's so much pressure! Oh, it's too much to bear!"
She collapses back against the stairs, a hand to her forehead. "No one understands the vast weight upon me, the great Magilou...!"
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
There is laughter, cackling, a gleeful release of almost exaggerated elation that defies the very gloom of this place. Why, that laughter might even echo off the very cold, uncaring dome of Guara Bobelo's eternal nighttime 'sky,' and Ruth... continues to be knelt there, frozen in that bit of statue-like body language that starts communicating that the rest of her does have some range of movement.
"You have a lot to live up to, don't you." The overdressed woman of a nature that would have handwaved some of the motionlessness leans a bit closer... lowering a knee, so that both of them are on the steps. Both of her hands clasp together, lowering down in front of her--
Suddenly, a look in her eye as she swings her head over her shoulder towards a few people who are approaching with quizzical looks on their faces, as if possessive. Her expression is severe. The skin on her forearm underneath the rosary seems a bit paler, closer to gray. The dull copper of her hair under the hood seems to adopt a gradual patina to something greener...
But it stops, and reverts, returning her attention over to Magilou as her expressions grow gentler. Gentler, despite the sharp features of her face, or the manner of a few seconds before. Her eyes gently close. Her right shoulder raises and rolls once, as if reflexive - adopted body language from something more 'her' that presently missing.
A sense of looming, but not outwardly threatening unto itself.
"I don't," there's a soft, defeated smile, "but... if it's that scary, be as scared as you like..."
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"Not in the slightest," Magilou, the disappointment who failed to thrive as a shadow, waves off Ruth's probing entirely too casually. "If anything, the world should live up to my expectations!"
Her brow quirks up, as Ruth whips herself around, smile fading for a moment. It comes right back, of course, endemic to her face, and as Ruth seems to assess her, she may well get the impression that the void looks straight back.
A hand loops, casually, in the air. One circle, two, three.
"... relax," Magilou says, finally. "I'm just having some fun with you, so it's no big deal if someone happens to overhear. If my performance turns heads, I'm just good at what I do, wouldn't you say?" Her grin is easy, her tone light.
Her hand drops down, over her knees. "It's real cute how you want to protect me and all, but I'll tell you this for free: your whole thing about taking on all the sorrows of the world or whatever? It's not going to work with everyone. One day, you're going to meet someone, and you'll dig right in, trying to find their fears, their worries, their insecurities, all those messy feelings..."
Magilou leans forward, weight on her knees, eyes on Ruth. That grin falls from her face, and all the vibrancy drains from her. "... and you'll dig, and dig... and when you come out the other side, you'll realise there's nothing there at all." Her eyes aren't just green; they fade to purple, above. There's no light in them at all.
"So... will you know what to do with yourself when that happens, or will all your warm fuzzies run away? I wonder."
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
The tone whiplashes back towards the somber, the more realist, as Magilou tamps down the atmosphere between them. Meanwhile, a tension ratchets up elsewhere, a certain sense of growing possessiveness over something that may not be there held at bay by a wall both illusory and real at the same time.
Difficult questions are asked, and the younger of the two returns to near-motionlessness beyond turns of her head - and an imperceptible backwards lean as Magilou leans forward and levels those eyes. Those eyes don't level back, looking down to the right and lidded to closing.
As if the void won a staring contest.
She cares. That's been a mantra, made of her own mania when Malevolence starts getting the worse (and the better) of her. Caring that others are in pain - being present for it, or as she seemed perfectly ready to do, causing it when met with resistance at Halim.
What would she do if there were none there?
"..."
Hellion logic often leaps between a few dangerous either/or extremes where everything in between those wide, gaping cracks where a middle ground bridge cannot exist falls, falling so deep it can't be seen - like it can't be there until someone else casually reaches into that emotional chasm and holds it up. What then? Then what?
"I don't know," she answers while that metaphor dangles that idea there.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"Hey," Magilou shrugs, leaning back against the steps, looking up at the dome again. "Just think of it as a vacation from having to care about how other people are feeling all the time. I mean, that's exhausting, right? Everyone feeling things at you all the time. Where do they get all that energy..?"
(Magilou doesn't use 'I' statements very much, but that doesn't mean she never remarks on how the world looks to her.)
"But who knows! You might never find someone empty like that." Magilou shrugs a shoulder, puffing at her bangs from the corner of her mouth.
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
"Vacation?" Ruth works up a smile on her face at the very idea of it, lifting her right hand up over her chest. "I can't look away. I feel it all the time." It sounds exhausting, put that way. Everything feeling, feeling, feeling, all the time. The smile grows a little bigger with every passing moment. "It's everywhere. It doesn't stop." It's hard to tell if this is desperation or excitement, but... she is surrounded by it.
It's miserable here, and conversely, she seems... at least eighty percent, ninety percent chill? Not completely chill, but up there - spinning up against the point Magilou was trying to make.
"That's why I don't feel like a monster. I can't help but care," she's missing the point, and the two of them just went over what it is she might not know what to do with herself when she falls into that trap of digging into someone or something where something isn't there. In one ear, out the other....? The grin starts to fade.
Maybe she is grasping onto the side of a ladder on the deep end of the pool, putting that thought in her head - assuming it can percolate there for long enough before some other bizarre tangent related to this swirls there and knocks said metaphorical hand off to resume free-floating in the pool of contradictory ideas and awful emotions.
A prolonged sigh follows, as if maybe that tangent might hang on a little longer than it normally may, in these circumstances.
"...Some days I end up causing it. Those feelings. The sadness, the fear, all of it, even when I'm with another working through it... sometimes because of it. It does get... heavy, then. Is there value in someone like that, when the only thing they offer to the world at large causes those feelings?"
Beat. "...I don't know. I don't mind... not knowing, that much."
She has to mind some.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
Ruth misses the point, and Magilou lets her. If she were one of those meddling do-gooders, she might make more noise, but...
Nah. Magilou's got a different approach entirely.
"Who cares if it adds value? Who says everything needs a value judgement? Things just are, Ruth. That big old dome," she lifts a lazy hand to point, "it doesn't care if you're having a good day or a bad day. That dog which lives down the street couldn't care less if you make someone's day suck. And that guy you spooked earlier? He's probably already forgotten about it because he's got bigger things on his mind."
She breathes out, hand coming up to rest behind her four-pronged hat. "I'll tell you this much... you don't have to worry about making me sad." There's something rueful to her grin, looking up at that uncaring dome. "That's just the kind of monster I am."
Head atilt, she looks back to Ruth. "But you're right, it's gotta be all about you. You doing your spooky thing is absolutely what's making everyone feel like crap. Nothing to do with them, right?"
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
'Who cares,' is about to be met with 'I care,' but she doesn't retort in that tired, repetitive way, in one of a handful of feedback loops.
"..." She's not making eye contact, once again, in favor of looking towards the baubles that themselves offer no opinions (because rosaries don't talk).
The arguments appeal to the gnawing parts of her everything - the despair - about how hopeless it is. How little an effort matters when so much is already set in stone and can't change. Only an urge to keep chasing, to keep running in circles and attempt to rectify everything through the same methods that caused all this - all because of some nagging idea there was something good there.
But it's gotta be all about her, isn't it? The same, selfish person she decries. The precise poking and hole punching the jester picks at.
"...I," she turns her head back, misses, continues drifting her gaze in another direction, never quite coming up with a satisfactory sentence beyond 'I.'
That 'I' is the 'A' in the alphabet of illustrating her argument, and she doesn't have much an answer to it.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"Hmm," Magilou hums through her lips, falling back against the stairs, hands looped behind her head. It's a terribly uncomfortable bed, but she doesn't seem to care.
Silence hangs like a guillotine, and for a long moment, she makes no attempt to fill it.
"I've never really understood people like you," she says, finally, and there's no energy behind the words. "Everything matters so much... crying and carrying on... there's too much life in you. Maybe that's always been your problem. To excess... ah, well."
She unlaces a hand, lifting it up, looking at the dome through her fingers. "I don't get it. I can't get it. I lost that a long, long time ago... and it still wasn't enough. But hey, what can you do? It is what it is."
Magilou chuckles, dry, bereft of humour.
"But you know, I think we're both just feeding off the real people. Experiencing what life's supposed to be like... through them. I just wonder if you know what they're doing for you, all wrapped up in what you're supposedly doing for them."
Her hand flops down onto her face, boneless. She doesn't flinch. That isn't supposed to be possible.
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
Too much life, the jester says as she talks about how she can't understand people like her. Her hand drifts along to her chest again, just to feel the heart that's there, pumping along while ruminating over that. To be intoxicated and overwhelmed alike by sheer emotion around her, led along on an instinctual leash.
That hand clenches as Magilou talks about having lost it a long, long time ago - and that it still wasn't enough, like there's something in there that stings - something a little too close, the way she flinches. The way she felt, or... felt she felt, the thoughts get recursive and weird and difficult again.
Nothing a shed tear can't fail to fix, but it's the least destructive of what's going through her, followed by a a breathy 'ha, ha,' as if she can't decide whether to laugh, cry, or both. It ends up being the foundation of both.
"...I don't know." Only the idea that she cares, and that all these feelings must mean she cares, no matter how hollow it feels after those who work through those feelings start feeling like they disappear.
The question is, does she really, really want to know in a way that resolves that feeling, or does she just want to keep bouncing back and forth between the extremes of what answers might be true?
Saint Calucion over there sure hasn't answered her, ever, for one.
She doesn't mind sitting here right ass he is, though - that's one less death spiral of indecision, for the moment, when there's already enough just by being.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
Does it sting? Magilou can't really tell.
"Don't worry about it," the witch says, beneath her hand. "No one knows anything, if you really get down to it."
She's quiet, there, on the steps. For all her festive performance, Magilou, it seems, is perfectly comfortable with silence.
Stretching on, and on...
Quite comfortably...
... until...
... seemingly from Magilou herself, a strange, cute little figure in a top hat emerges. He adjusts his hat, looking around, nervously. "Miss Magilou fell asleep..." He explains, to the woman in wraps, before he flaps his tiny wings to take him next to Magilou's head. "Miss Magilou! Miss Magilou! Don't take a nap here, of all places!!"
"HUH WHAT I WAS JUST RESTING MY EYES,"
"Miss Magilouuu!!!"
Anyway, that's how Magilou's Seraph ended up dragging her off the street.