Jail Talk
Log Info
- Title: Jail Talk
- Emitter: Ashes
- Characters: Ashes, Elyanna
- Place: A01: Jail Cells
- Time: Monday, June 06, 2022, 8:57 PM
- Summary: The entire Valethor gang is in protective custody, waiting for Merek and friends to finish hunting Veren. Donna is off with Delilah, while Ashes and Elyanna share a cell. They've been here for some time, and find random things to talk about. The weather is a popular subject. The discussion turns to Wights, and Ashes elaborates on her experiences with them in the desolation. The void dragon was in control of them, and it was easy to become overwhelmed, although as undead go they don't have many invulnerabilities. Ashlee moves onto the topic that concerns her: feelings. In her case, having some. The long task to clear the wrongfully accused Delilah has evoked many and made the Mourner face some hard truths. There's more to living than waiting for the afterlife. Elyanna asks about the kiss beside the riverbank; Ashes explains her reasons. She repeats what she said in Mahuika's hutt, they have been re-born, their previous sins remain in the Grey Halls and it might be time for the Mourner to learn to live a little too.
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The cells at the Watch are often often full with various people: the usual, returning drunks, the occasional shifty halfling, and then a few Korites who appear to have a rotating door policy. One cell in particular is labeled, 'Sandy.' Visitors may stand outside the cells to speak, while being overseen by an officer.
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-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Appearing -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ashes 5'11" 177 Lb Hobgoblin Female A somber arvec in grey clothes with a skull face. Elyanna 5'11" 153 Lb Half-Orc Female A grim, Arvek-blooded woman in raven feathers. -=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=
It's been several days, a week, possible more since the Valethor gang was taken into protective custody. It's entirely voluntary, they can leave at any time.
It is a jail, though, and aside from the open-door policy there are no exceptions. So, no weapons, no armour. They're someplace safe and accessible.
For the mourner, one bleak entombment is much like another. It's scarce on the bones she expects in the catacombs, but otherwise has the same gloomy environs and moss. A dilligent undead might make a career as a trader harvesting and selling the moss. Ashes has not had that thought cross her mind.
"Chippen says it's thinking about raining outside."
For Elyanna, the time within the jail has been.... nostalgic.
While her breeding, coupled with her... ingenuity ultimately saw her in more wickedly comfortable environs, there has been a significant portion of her life spent within similar fortifications.
Less her armour, and even Maidenhead for the longest time in her adult life, the Keeper has settled into a sort of taciturn humor much as she had after the run in(run out) with Galatta's crew, less the sporadic surliness of the tent-o-three-tails' influence.
At the moment the Mourner speaks, the hobkin was in her thoughts, and the words brings her attention up that way, "Is it?"
A hand runs fingers through the trailing end of her raven locks with perhaps a bit critically, and she continues to the Father tongue, "What would the weather be like back home about now?" <goblin-talk>
"Less hot. More humid. Everything growing quickly." Ashes answers in her unhurried monotone, "Likely raining."
The weather in the hobgoblin homeland is willing to commit to an effect, instead of dithering back and forth. "Good time for marching outside."
It's always a good time for marching outside.
She strokes along Chippen's carapace. The Mourner has found the perfect spot to stare at on the wall. She sees no reason to look away. "A guard asked me how good I am against wights." <goblin-talk>
"Hmmm... I see..." Elyanna replies thoughtfully, then rises to her feet for another slow patrol about the dimensions of their housing. It'll probably take her across Ashes's point of focus in a minute or so.
The tale of the guard's inquiry certainly adds another dash of color to the morning, hinted at by the particular arch of an eyebrow as she returns, "Is that something that we're going to have to deal with, then?" <goblin-talk>
"Maybe. Not in here, unless things go badly." The Mourner replies. "I should select spells for it."
She blinks when Elyanna crosses her line of focus. Her head shakes slightly, "Not Veren's doing. They're from Dragonieer."
Her lips purse a little, distorting the teeth of her skull tattoo, "The Feiu of the Tears would want me to do her will, with them." <goblin-talk>
Put them back in the ground, basically.
"I don't have anything for dealing with the undead, directly. It was never my purview." the Keeper notes in a considered tone, "I'll help you as I can."
Her head cocks a smidge to the side as that brow clibs a little higher, "I'd not expected such... creatures to venture so far afield. Do we know the cause?" <goblin-talk>
"Wights don't need anything special, just hit them hard, don't let them touch." Ashes explains, her head un-moving. A white lizard appears under her hand and now she's petting carbuncle too.
"I fought some in a mine. They were being controlled by a Void Dragon. It was being controlled by Heth." She goes silent for a moment. "I touched him."
"I could feel the void."
She makes a small shrug, "It's probably Heth, coming for us." <goblin-talk>
That's not a comfort.
Elyanna's stride slows to a stop and turns to look her friend's way, "Do they have certain places that are more vulernable than others, or are they more like ghosts?"
The steely eyes roam over the Mourner's hands, and the creatures thereunder and a little quirk of amusement touches her lips, "You're going to need a wagon for all your pets, soon." <goblin-talk>
"No. They're solid. Vital strikes work. Nothing mental, nor poison. They're like fast, aware zombies." The Mourner continues. "If one kills you, you turn into one. It can death spiral quickly."
She's silent at the observation, continuing the petting of centipeded and lizard, "I haven't gotten a snake yet."
"WhoooOoooOOoooo?" Her owl warbles.
"A snake. I haven't named the snake I don't have." Ashes explains.
The red woman sighs softly and nods, "Much like the magic plague." she notes sourly, "If I'd been killed with it, I would have become the tainted dead."
Her hand closes to a fist, "After the mission when I met the sisters... it became too risky to do what... I knew needed to be done. I'd have been a liability."
She turns from her friend, then, allowing a pause to enter the second trimester, then, "If I fall, do not hesitate."
She regards the bird as the questions start, then, "Do you know all their words, then?" <goblin-talk>
"Okay," Ashes says simply, a practical hobgoblin underneath it all. She doesn't fear mortality, but that... returning as an undead would be an insult to her goddess. A slap in the face after all the gifts she's received, not something she would allow to happen to a friend. "Same for me."
Another pause, "What do you mean? Dunny only says 'WhoooOooo'."
Elyanna nods with a soft, "Agreed." to Ashes' concurrence on the matter of post-mortality.
She meets Ashes's gaze, or at least seeks her eyes, and, "You're answering as if Dunny asked about a potential new roomate." <goblin-talk>
"Oh." Ashes says, staring owlishly at Elyanna. She has a mini-model on her shoulder as teacher and comparison, and demonstrates her effective mastery of this skill. "I guess."
"Touching them I sometimes know." The Mourner shrugs a little, "Mostly I guess well."
"Do you think Merek is ok?"
"Unfettered? I imagine he is." Elyanna replies, "Though you know his power better than I."
She turns to face her more fully, arms folding loosely at her midriff, then, "Are you... alright?" she asks softly. <goblin-talk>
Ashes doesn't answer immediately. She's thinking it over. Is she alright? Has she ever been alright? What would be a good thing to compare to, and how would it be different from what she's feeling now.
Maybe that evening with Not-A-Monster at the Fernwood. Or the one at Ma Rosie's that got her banned. Something unexpected which doesn't align with her usual experiences.
Which are mostly living without really living. Seeing the dead in the grey halls having more vibrancy than she does.
"I don't think so." The grey girl finally says. "I really liked holding the Last Sunrise. I want to be like Tessa."
Another pause, her lips twitching before she vocalizes, "I don't think an ambition to be a supernatural being in the afterlife is a good one, but I can't think why. It feels a little..."
Like the slug's desires.
Elyanna's eyebrow does that thing again and she takes a moment or two to examine that.
"You very well may." she assures her friend as she steps closer, "You've served the Fieu eagerly and well."
The Keeper glances to the entrance of the chamber, then close further to stand alongside, "You want to serve Her beyond, as well."
With a sigh, a brief pursing of the lips, then, "I'm..." she looks sidelong to a spot on the floor for a moment, "Not sure what to think on that." Her arms fold again, then, "You aren't likely to sacrifice innocents, or your convictions, the Fieu's tenets, to attain it."
The Mourner nods slowly, stroking her owl. Her mouse, Minnie, joins Carbuncle and Chippen on her lap. They seem unperturbed by their mistress's self-reflection.
"I guess I never came back to life all the way, the first time." She says finally, then adding. "Or it seemed that way so much I thought it was true."
She falls silent, her eyes empty and fixed on a point while her thoughts go round and round, landing nowhere.
"I dated Merek." That didn't work out.
"Someone is trying to date me." That's not working out either.
Ashes stares at the wall, petting her pets, "I'm not Delilah and Bethany."
That kiss in the hot springs is burned into her memory. That was a lot of passion for a couple of dead people.
The red woman takes a moment to consider the fullness of Ashes's words, trying to sort out the greater mysteries.
She purses her lips again, "It's an uncomfortable thing to have your... most closely held preconceptions brought into question."
A wan flash of self deprication touches her eyes, the empathy on that score unstated, then she stabilizes.
"I knew about Merek."
The revelations went two ways in Ectra's halls, after all.
But of this newer other, "Are you interested...?" she probes.
"I don't..." Ashes says, the sentence dying in monotone. She should say more, but the words don't follow. She chases the incomplete thought which slips through her mental fingers. Chippen and Carbuncle are on her legs, she pets them now. They do not escape her real fingers.
"I don't feel." Her chin raises, her little fangs showing against her lips, normally hidden by her facial tattoo. The happy bee is out today, looping around the dark socket of her left eye, which she has decorated to look like a flower. "I never did. My life was a practice afterlife full of ghosts and goblins. Always ... nothing."
"Until this task. I felt irritated, then angry, incensed, frightened. I don't like these. I nearly died fighting Heth's wights in the mine. I felt relief. I'd finally see the Grey Halls, get all the answers. When we went, it was only questions and a feeling that I was wrong."
The ashen arvec finds the floor again and traces the cracks. "I don't even know if I like girls. The remains of men and women wrinkle up differently and it's all I can think about when I see someone naked."
It's not arousing. Well... it shouldn't be. The Vardaman Temple has very strict rules about 'cracking a cold one'.
There is an slight narrowing of steely eyes as Elyanna absorbs and examines Ashes's words, a touch of skepticism, perhaps. Without a word, the Keeper then begins to whistle one of her particular little diddies as her fingers cycle through her evocative gestures, setting clouds of susperating whispers about the entryway.
A slow breath prefaces the parting of carmine lips, as she deigns to refute them, "If people liked having those feelings, Ashlee, I'd have had devotees, myself."
Her 'performing arts' briefly on display in the Grey Halls, and further, perhaps seasoned with the revelation about the proxied child in question may lend some credence to that assertion.
"I certainly didn't. Or being humiliated and debased." The faded scars on the highborn's back promise chapter and verse in that regard.
Her arms fold anew, and her voice softens, "Realizing how wrong I was."
With the shift of weight to her other hip, Elyanna surveys the Mourner and her entourage, "Without feeling, you wouldn't have continued collecting your little friends, nor invested so much into their care. Without emotion, one accepts obligation... they don't seek it."
She looks away, something awkward dusting her ruddy pallor and her arms part upon taking in her friend's posture, and the crook of a finger reaches out to gently lift under the point of the fullblood's chin, "You don't have to like girls. You don't have to like anyone... in that regard. Though... speaking now on this, I suppose it's time to ask."
"During the cleansing rites... in the stream."
A pause, uncertaintly mayhap, then, "The kiss...?"
She looks at her pets, who sense an increase in attention and get squirmy under it. Carefully she continues stroking, to calm them, to calm herself. "Impulse."
That comes easy. Her friend... yes. Her friend again, deserves elaboration. Her lips wriggle, she grasps at ghostly thoughts. Chippen turns around to stare directly at her with tiny, beady, incomprehensible eyes. His antennae wave. He has the right of it. A creature that crawls through the moist, waste earth is exactly suited for sifting her mind. The perfect familiar.
"A Kiss before Death. Because I thought you needed one. That you had never had one from a friend that liked you for being you. A kiss that wasn't opening a door, or closing a door, and might be the only one you received that wasn't part of a power dynamic."
The Mourner looks up, eyes meeting the red hobkin's. "We've been through a lot. You were alone, a lot. And those things you carried... I wanted you to feel loved."
"Everyone deserves to feel that once, before they die."
Oh, that...
The red hobkin had almost entirely forgotten certain tidbits that had been shaken free during her struggles with the tent-o-three-tails. An endeavor unaided by the reemergence of a stark reminder of her dark past, one whose absence is likely the only reason she'd met with success those years ago.
Nor, despite her insistance that she never actually 'hid' the gravity of her sins, knowing that their exposure had so sullied a friendship that she'd quietly treasured.
An uncommon fidget runs the gamut of the Keeper's frame as she parrots the word, "Impulse..."
A pause, the steely eyes half lid, lowering a moment as something human draws at the corners of her mouth of her friend's concern. There is a tingle in the corner of an eye that she ignores in favor of dipping into a slow nod.
Meeting her eyes anew, she begins a soft, "Thank you..." and what peeks out from the regimented veneer is tender and uncertain, as she gently clasps the Mourner's shoulder, "For... caring about me, my friend."
Ashlee feels the weight on her shoulder, looking up. She lifts her pets into her pockets and stands, a matching height to Elyanna, if not one in build and curves. She embraces her, grey wrapping around red, and presses softly into a hug. She's warm, there's a gentleness to her size, a weak strength that might be what her menagerie appreciates most. No wrinkles, yet.
"I do." She squeezes. "What I said before is true. Your past life remains in the Grey Halls, you be judged anew on what you do in this one."
Words that apply to her also, though she has not reflected on them. She adds her well-worn, Mourner assurance, "Everything will be okay."
Words with the weight of prediction, standing firm in the face of the unknown, impossible truths that could not have an ounce of validity until she adds the Vardaman perspective, or perhaps, her perspective. "One day we'll die, and then everything will be ok."
It's the in-between bits that are messy. The afterlife too. Ashes needs to revisit this outlook.
In the mean time, there's another kiss. On Elyanna's cheek, giving her a close-up of the bee. It has a big, big smile. "Impulse."
Elyanna's hand is solid, but her grip is far from crushing, and it lingers through Ashes's rise to her feet, through the stowing of her menagerie.
It lasts until the outset of the embrace, when it slides around the Mourner's shoulder to flatten against her back, as it's twin arcs around the woman's waist. Curve finds alignment with curve, and the two hobs share their warmth.
With the soft words, she finds some of her own, "That's true for you as well, Ashlee... Your old life has been weighed, and this one is wide open for you... you'll have time to discover what passions it holds for you."
A little squeeze, "To live, not... simply bide time until the curtain falls."
After the kiss, her eyes spot the little emblem, the trick of makeup that's always been uniquely hers, and the hobkin takes pains to place her lips far enough to not smudge it for a soft, lingering moment.
"I'm glad to be.... worthy of knowing you, my friend."
"Me too." Ashlee says, maintaining the embrace, feeling the flow and shape of another person. A living person, warm and vibrant. She blinks several times, much more than she often does. There's hesitation in her voice, signs of life. "I'll... try. It's... it's hard."
It's easier with friends. Animal friends, human friends, monster friends, not-a-monster friends. Elyanna is correct, she has a new life also and she needs to try living it, no matter the discomfort.