2022-11-20: Magilou Has Left Your Party
- Log: Magilou Has Left Your Party
- Cast: Magilou, Jean
- Where: Taben's Peak - Interior
- Date: 2022-11-20
- Summary: Magilou quietly exits the party after Ivan is saved from his flames. Jean notices. They talk around the subject for a while, and then they don't say much at all.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
Magilou didn't stick around for the happy ending.
She can be found, eventually, though -- lurking around the interior, strange passageways of Taben's Peak. (How nostalgic.) In this twisty, turvy treehouse, to address it too kindly, Magilou leans on a metallic wall, fingers splayed against the vines growing through and down.
Bienfu has since retreated inside her; he is, after all, a coward.
From somewhere, water drip... drip... drips.
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
It did not, in fact, turn into a full-out party. ...But Jean had a good time anyway! Not that she can get a lot more booze than she came with in Nall's mountain home. Kids! It's fine, though. She brought enough.
But eventually she headed out, in specific to look around for Magilou, and soon enough, she finds her. She steps around the corner, and...
Drip. Drip. Drip.
"Thought I'd find you somewhere," Jean remarks.
"Hi, Magilou."
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
An orphanage which doesn't provide booze... what a terrible thing!
(Horrifically, Magilou was, in fact, a parent at some point.)
Her gaze slides aside, to steps so like water-drops; she looks at Jean, and looks through Jean, a thousand yards further out. "Welcome, welcome," she patters, vaguely.
"Do be careful. The horrors in here have a certain knack for grinding you down... until you've naught left to return."
She has a certain talent for sucking all the air out of the room, when she forgets to put emotion behind her words.
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
Jean wasn't!
Magilou's expression is pretty notable. Jean looks at her for a long few moments, considering those emotionless words. She thinks, and thinks...
"That's probably a history reference," Jean says. "You do like those. But it's completely lost on me!" she answers, cheerfully, and steps the rest of the way over. Her cheer is not to be denied.
"Want a drink?" She pulls the flask. If Magilou doesn't want any, she'll have more!
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"Hmm? Oh, don't mistake my warning. It's positively gripped by its contemporaneity," Magilou lifts a hand, gesturing, vaguely, further into the halls.
Drip... drip... drrrrRRRAAAARRRGGGHHHH, groans an abomination unto man, deeper to the heart of Taben's Peak.
She looks over, though, as Jean pulls out a flask. "Far be it from me to deny petty crime," she agrees, too casually, as she takes it and gulps down some of Jean's no doubt deeply illicit booze. If it's water, she'll -- well, insist the bet was rigged, probably, it's infamously hard to actually get Magilou to pay up.
It's strange, though. She'll talk this casually, but the words ring so hollow, with a stark lack of care. It is illustrated no less than the way she doesn't bother recorking the flask before she hands it back over.
Perhaps she was anticipating Jean wanting to drink, too.
But maybe not.
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
"It is pretty much 'what it is now', isn't it? No matter what it used to be, now it's a place where kids play. Kinda says something about life..."
Some kind of abomination, somewhere. Hmmm. Jean doesn't go after the optional boss. Instead, she hands over the drink, and it is deeply, deeply illicit booze. It's also pretty good quality this time, burning fiercely in the throat.
Jean takes the flask back, and downs another good bit of it herself.
Probably it wasn't anticipation.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Jean asks, and she doesn't bother saying what 'it' is; it seems pretty plain that Magilou is either troubled or too tired to fake it. "It's fine if you don't. ...I'm happy for him, but it's a little melancholy, too."
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"That Nall ended up here is..." Magilou shakes her head, looking up at the ancient ceiling. "... well, he seems happy enough. You ought to go fishing for him sometime, you know."
She's SELLING HIM OUT???
Well, it might be more of a betrayal if Jean probably didn't know that already.
It was, at least, good booze. (Definitely illegal.) Magilou has drunk enough neat spirits over the centuries that she doesn't stumble over it. No: it's only when Jean asks if she wants to talk about it that there's a little sag of her shoulders, chin and mood dropping down, a doll with strings cut.
"There's nothing to say about it," Magilou says, fingers of one hand lifting to press, lightly, to her chin. There's no light in her eyes to join the motion. "His existence is notable only in how utterly unremarkable it is... so long as there are men on Lunar, there will be men who advance the course of their understanding on the backs and blood of those who believed in them."
Magilou breathes out, eyes moving away. "I've nothing to offer him. Less than nothing, perhaps, if I've drawn you out here instead... though it may be a mercy."
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
"Heheh," Jean answers about fishing. She probably knew.
There it is--Magilou's shoulders sink, and it's an answer in and of itself. ...But not quite the answer someone would think it is, immediately. Jean leans on the wall nearby, arms bare since she had to get rid of most of the heavier parts of her cloak and outfit due to their being on fire.
"But this one," Jean says, "Got help. ...To me, that makes a difference." A beat, "...But that's my mortal perspective, I think."
Then she says, "Nah, you're not keeping me from him. He's definitely not ready for my idea of a party. He'll be fine."
Jean regards Magilou a little longer. Mercy... Yes, it probably is.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"Yes," Magilou agrees, approximately.
"The ones bereft of assistance find themselves cleft from existence, with no one left to reminiscence."
If not for Bienfu and Grimoirh, she...
Rather than saying something so plainly, her dull expression flicks back, to regard Jean, fingers curling at her chin. "Will he?" She wonders, musters enough will to at least raise her tone for a question. "I wonder... he could still easily be consumed by the inequities of existence."
Her shoulders lift, and fall too heavily, as her eyelids shutter over those strange purple-green eyes for a moment. "Not that I care," Magilou adds, and the statement is itself careless.
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
"That could easily have been me," Jean says directly, looking out into what used to be the Grindery. It isn't a sad thing to say for her, though. It could've been.. but it wasn't.
"Maybe," Jean says. "But that's tomorrow. I have a good feeling about him, though."
Beat, "Well, I have a good feeling about most things, this many drinks deep!" She laughs at herself a little. Somehow, though, Magilou's gloom just doesn't infect her. Magilou, of course--doesn't care. Obviously. "...Sometimes I think about the ones I didn't get to in time. The ones I can't get to in time." It might be something of a subject change, but it feels related to her.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"You and a thousand others," Magilou says, to the vine-clenched walls of Taben's Peak. She doesn't go so far to include herself in the estimation.
Not explicitly, anyway.
"Fitting, perhaps... I would step in to catch a spirit, if that is now his claim."
Or does she?
Magilou doesn't laugh with Jean, though. Neither does she sneer. She really just doesn't feel much about this situation at all.
Her arms fold, loosely, across her chest, one leg bending as she leans heavily on something like metallic stone. "The one who inherited..." She starts, and shakes her head, closing her eyes. "Well, what passes from mentor to pupil isn't as simple as that, but the echoes are still quite plain. I met her only after her loss... in many ways, there was simply nothing I could do. Unfortunately, the headstrong rarely heed warnings or cautions..."
Her fingers are still, against her detached sleeves. Magilou is so often a creature in motion; here, she is fixed in place.
"... and so it repeats, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. Making weapons out of human hearts... what a miserable waste."
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
"Yep," Jean agrees, and she does include Magilou in it. There's so many who don't make it. She thinks about that a lot. But at the same time..
"Eh?" She doesn't understand what that means about catching a spirit, and she isn't so prideful that she's afraid to mention what she doesn't understand.
But she looks at Magilou, talking abut inheriting. The 'echoes'...
"Who was she?" Jean wonders. Warnings and cautions. Fixed in place.
"...I feel the same about that much, though. Humans... We're capable of so much more than being weapons! Not just humans, but--while you're talking about us, I might as well own it."
Jean is quiet after that, and looks up into the ceiling. "..."
"...I like those other things," she says, and then doesn't say anything else for a while, just standing with Magilou until she says something herself, maybe.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"Let's just say I have ever been known to the spirits of this world," Magilou explains -- explains? -- when Jean asks. "As a changeling in the nest..."
She takes a breath, and explains a little more: "Why, I speak of no one less than the Lord of Calamity herself," she says, weary, "of infinite hunger, with a taste only for blood, single-mindedly seeking her vengeance. I suppose I cared for her, as much as someone like me ever could... she's gone, now."
Not dead.
Just gone.
Jean falls quiet, and Magilou offers nothing more, for long moments. The silence falls, and whether it is oppressive or familiar is of no concern to her, unmoved by awkward feelings or by melancholy. Here, there is nothing at all.
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
"Oh." Jean looks into the ceiling a little longer at Magilou's answer. "Like how you're connected to Bienfu." If she's right, anyway. But Magilou explains some more, and Jean considers. Vengeance...
"I see." Jean debates if she should say it aloud, and decides against it--not for secrecy's sake. Magilou knows her own secrets very well. But if she chose to share this one with Jean, it wouldn't be right to throw it back in her face. 'The headstrong rarely heed warnings or cautions'...
And a Lord of Calamity, too. Like they call Lucia. Jean reflects on that for a while.
"I wonder what I inherited from Lunn, in the end. That still 'echoes' even now."
She shakes her head, and remains in silence for a while. For her it is not uncomfortable. But she does pull her flask again, and take another long pull, offering it in turn to Magilou again with no particular expectation.
She came to find Magilou. She's found Magilou. That's enough for a while.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
Magilou takes it; Magilou drinks. Magilou hands it back.
Throughout the whole process, she is, vaguely, aware she is handling an item which can be ingested.
Of course, the difference between her dark mistress and what they call Lucia is...
Magilou sinks, as if gravity has simply failed to support her, to the floor of the hall; the vines scrape at her back, and she pays them no heed. One leg stretches out, a clear tripping hazard, while the other retains its bent posture to bend closer to her chest instead.
"Calamity Flare, Hydrostorm, Violet Storm, Lightning Blast... they're all artes he understood, first. Someone with my talents could grasp them easily... but that wasn't enough. And so, annulling the passions of the world..."
Magilou sighs, head rocking back to press against something neighbour to stone and metal.
"... you know, I even first developed Final Embrace to impress him... since his ultimate design was the Absolute Prison. It was too powerful an arte even for him to easily work, back then, so I adapted it to a functional form... it wasn't enough, of course."
Her eyes veil, disguising that purple intrusion, as she glances off into the depths of Taben's Peak. "... it was never enough."
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
Jean's not going to trip while she's leaning on the wall, and she remains leaning on the wall for a while after Magilou sinks. She drinks from her flask again, corks it, and puts it away. She listen, and Magilou explains the artes....
'Annulling the passions of the world'. This was the great project Magilou was set to. And it's a horrifying idea! Jean turns over to look at Magilou for a moment, but sees only her veiled eyes, glancing off into the depths, so she looks back to the wall instead of invading her privacy.
"You're really good," Jean says, and it's an honest assessment of her magical abilities, if a bit of an understatement. Quite one, really.
"You surpassed your master. ...I think mine would only say that if I'd killed him. And even then, Pearl did, but she 'cheated', I guess, so it wasn't enough. Strength was everything to him. 'The bloody journey is the whole point.'"
She doesn't bother making a conclusion. She's just talking, not trying to convince Magilou of anything.
But after a while, Jean sinks to a seat, too. More gracefully; it's less a sinking and more a sliding. But she does it, and sits with Magilou instead of standing with her.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"Oh, I killed him, too," Magilou asides, light as a comment on the weather, "and made a sacrifice of his pure soul. He thought he could outwit us... but the Reaper was whispering at my ear."
(It would be easy to say Magilou's knowledge of her master's tricks is what foiled him, but it was the efforts of her friends which had her looking underfoot.)
"Removing shadows is part of a shadow's job," she echoes herself, dimly. "And I cast a deeper darkness than any shadow... I'm a witch, after all."
She shrugs, all too lightly.
"That's what I decided to be, instead of a failure of a shadow. Simple as that."
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
Jean nods, when Magilou says she killed him. That doesn't need a lot of answer to it; it's a fact, and one that seems necessary. She doesn't comment on it. She just imagines that there's a story there, one she isn't asking after at the moment.
"A shadow's job, huh?" she does reply, and considers that. It's certainly the task she's taken on for herself; she has no argument with it. But she is not a witch.
"So you still do it. ...For what you want to be. Maybe other reasons too."
"...What you want to be..."
"I don't know what I want to be," she admits. "I know what I want to do. But not what I want to be."
"And they're not the same thing."
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"You won't, for a while."
Magilou looks off, into the darkness of the passageway.
"Then one day you'll wake up, change your name, and leave the creation you were behind."
As if it's something Jean will do, and not --
"I can give you no roadmap to reinventing yourself. No instruction. When you claim your existence, it will come from you or not at all."
She takes a breath; it hangs in her chest, for long moments; finally, it releases.
"Just keep figuring out what it is you really want. That's all I can tell you."
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
Magilou gives advice. Magilou talks about herself. These are kind of the same thing, Jean has noticed, especially relating to her. Wake up...
She's not sure she wants to change her name. But Magilou just said she can't give her a roadmap. Not one that she hasn't already used, Jean thinks. Claiming her existence...
"Yeah. I don't think I'd want anyone to tell me. I want to figure it out for myself."
"...So I will."
She lets that hang on the air, too. She has a lot of things she could say. She could comment what she thinks of Magilou staying out here, instead of with Ivan and the others. She could say pretty much anything.
Instead of that, she tilts her head back to the wall, closes her eyes, and breathes.
She doesn't feel the need to distract herself at the moment.