phantasmalrift | scar tissue that i wish you saw

scar tissue that i wish you saw

Who: Talon (

honededge) and OPEN!
What: Making good on the promise to leave his gun behind, Talon tries to keep himself busy without stabbing anyone.
When: IC dates April 22nd-30th
Where: All around the station and annex!
Warnings: Talon is a walking ball of paranoia and ptsd so like. He might make things weird. Potential cw for gender dysphoria in the second prompt.

22nd-24th: Station
[Talon made a promise to leave his gun behind when he felt safe. He doesn't really feel safe yet. He never feels "safe". But he's starting to catch on that this world is just plain old not as violent as his, and the gun may just not be necessary. So he leaves it in his room, along with that freaky mask of his, and tests out a week or so without it.]

[You can find him most of the time on the viewing deck, trying to relax and enjoy the fresh air. Reclining in one of the chairs, hyper tense and twitching at every little sound and movement. Sometimes he gets up and paces the edge of the deck. Sometimes that pacing leads him up the ramp, to the roof, where he leans against the rails and wishes he had a vice like smoking or drinking to calm his nerves.]

[Once in a while, he makes his way down to the common room where he buries his nose in a book he copped from the annex library. Don't worry, he intends to return it when he's done. The cover reads "Spellbuilding for Idiots".]

[In the mornings and evenings, you can find him in the kitchen, desperately trying to get a handle on the concept of cooking. It's not something he's very familiar with and the choices are overwhelming. So far he's mastered scrambled eggs, so that's what he makes. Eggs. A lot of eggs. For breakfast and dinner. Talon tends to skip lunch.]

[And if he's in none of those places and you happen to need him, knock on the door of room 25.]

25th: Annex (Potential cw for gender dysphoria)
[Eventually the station gets stale. That's when he makes his way to the annex, poking around the library for a new book, having finished "Spellbuilding for Idiots". He's gained some knowledge from it and intends to use it at some point, but he's nowhere near the practicing stage of spellbuilding, he's barely past the ideas phase. You can find him browsing the fiction section mostly.]

[Or, later in the day, you might find him in the hot tub. He wears a t-shirt and swim trunks, but if you've been under the assumption that he was born male, the two faint bumps on his chest and the neatly folded binder on top of his clothing might blow his cover today. The heat feels wonderful on his tense muscles and he seems totally blissed out, but he's not specifically against company.]

26th-30th: Anywhere, Everywhere Wildcard
[And after that, having discovered that the gun is in fact unnecessary, he can be found nearly anywhere, even the beach or forest. Just specify the date and the place you found him, or hit me up privately/on plurk (

azazelbunny) for a prompt!]

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[Sonja hadn't been particularly expecting to find anyone in here, but then, she hadn't been particularly expecting not to; the station is small enough that unless one shuts oneself in one's own room all day, there's a decent chance of running across other people no matter where one goes. So she doesn't pay him a great deal of mind as she starts hunting through the box of bathing suits.

If the young person already occupying the bath objects to her presence, she's willing to come back later, but it seems prudent to at least pick out something to take back to her room with her. Most of what's in the box seems scandalously brief to her, and she's no stranger to scandal.]

[Well he certainly isn't going to shoo anyone away. Sure, he hopped in because it was empty, but he didn't really expect it to stay that way forever. It's a small station and, to be honest, a hot tub is a major selling feature.]

[But Sonja is probably running into the same problem as he did before he gave up and grabbed a worn-out t-shirt instead: very little proper chest coverage. He watches her appraisingly for a few moments before offering:]

The one pieces are less awful than the bikinis, but there might be another t-shirt in there, too.

Most of these hardly seem worth the effort of wearing them... ah! [That there'd be nothing for her seems like a safe assumption, but when it came up in chat the other day RNG smiled on Sonja, so in the bottom of the box she turns up... something in dark blue wool that probably most of the rest of the people at the station would assume was in the wrong box.

She holds the bathing costume up to herself, a calculating frown on her face; maybe just a tad big, but nothing that cinching the waist a little tighter won't fix. She grins crookedly at Talon.] No stockings, but I won't worry over that if you won't?

[Ah, rng, smiling upon us when we least expect it.]

Hey, that's already more coverage than I've got.

[Speaking of, his own words make him keenly aware of how obvious his chest must be. He sinks a little beneath the water, as if it isn't completely transparent and not hiding him at all.]

You're much more modest than I'm used to.

[She sighs, folding the bathing costume over her arm. A little self-consciously, she tugs at her skirt to straighten it out; it's one she'd pulled out of the box of spare clothes, not the one that she'd been wearing when she'd arrived, and it's a very daring cut for a grown woman by her home's standards, but the soft ruffled pleats still fall well below her knees.] I'm sure I must come across as a terrible prude to most around here, mustn't I? Everyone else seems to come from places so much more liberated than London.

Wasn't meant to be anything against you or anything.

[Does he sound a little hasty to add that? He was trying to play it cool.]

Don't think you're a prude, I just think you've got more dignity than most folks.

[Dignity. That gets a grin out of her.] Oh, there's folks back home as would laugh at that. Sweet of you to say, though.

I'll be right back. [She holds up the bathing suit again briefly in explanation, then heads off to one of the changing rooms. Fortunately, although she's still got relatively Victorian sensibilities with regards to fashion, Sonja's practical enough that nothing she wears on a day-to-day basis is difficult to get into or out of on her own, so she reemerges in fairly short order.

She half-steps, half climbs into the hot tub across from him, eschewing the stairs in favor of just slipping over the lip of the pool.]

Sorry, didn't introduce myself. I'm Sonja Klee, late of Fallen London.

Talon. From, uh. Seattle.

[He furrows his brow a bit.]

London get wrecked where you're from or like. What do you mean by "fallen"?

Well... [She kicks her feet under the water, thinking; there's a lot about the situation that doesn't make sense even to Surface-dwellers of her own world, who know London went somewhere.] The short version is that buisness-beings from between the stars bought it off of the Traitor Empress, on behalf of their client hiding under the earth, and now it's playing host to the Echo Bazaar on the banks of the Unterzee.

Sometimes anarchists say "stole" rather than "bought" but I'm fairly sure Her Enduring Majesty knew exactly what she was doing at the time.

Huh. That sounds...complicated.

[Okay this person might be insane. Or at least, her world was. Though, was it so different from the dealings of dragons? Just. It sounded a bit like the city itself might have been relocated during this exchange?? Which was a little beyond him.]

Am I gonna regret asking what the Echo Bazaar is?

[Sonja laughs. It's a good question; maybe it's a question she should have asked herself, a long time back.] I'm not certain I can explain in words that are safe to hear.

Near as I can tell, the Bazaar's a messenger betwixt the Celestial Judgments, or it was, until it got caught in a love triangle with our Sun and another Star a few millennia back. It got in a bad way off the Sun, and it was rather above its station anyway, and now it daren't show its spires until it can figure out how to resolve the situation without the Sun getting the vapors.

It'd be terribly bad for the Bazaar, and their child, and for everyone in the general vicinity of the planet for that matter, if the Sun were to throw a fit.

So it's keeping out of the sunlight, and it's been purchasing cities to nest in and study the love stories of for, oh, the better part of four or five thousand years, if my estimation of what the First City was is correct.

Damn. That's. That's one hell of a place to come from.

[The fact that Sonja's world seems to personify more abstract wholes, like cities and stars, isn't lost on Talon. He just doesn't know what to make of it. He tries to imagine Seattle as a person. Images of a heavily scarred junky, covered in the latest cyberware and gear, come to mind. The lowest life, wrapped up in the highest tech.]

Wish I could say my world's anywhere near as exciting as all that. The city I'm from specifically just has a bug problem. Like, granted, they're giant insect spirits operating under a hive mind that drives them to consume endlessly, but that's kind of old news in the Sixth World.

[She laughs.] Well, I came from Salisbury, on the Surface. It was my own foolhardiness that took me down to the Neath.

Not that I regret it. Sulky celestial messengers aside, it's a marvelous place.

What's it like?

[Talon leans back, settling into a more relaxed state now that the conversation is moving steadily.]

It sounds pretty spectacular just on principle, but I'm curious what the day to day is like.

Mushroom wine's more palatable than you might expect. The University offers dramatically more interesting coursework now. Hell's Brass Embassy throws the very best parties, though you must keep your wits about you or risk someone talking you out of your soul. The cheapest labor is made of Clay and the best engineers are the Rattus faber, which puts some folks out of joint.

London itself's still very Londony, though, you know? People have adapted. [And while she's been cheerful and matter of fact about the previous, her voice gets faintly dreamy now.] It's when you get beyond the city that you find the truly odd - down to the amber caverns of the Rubbery Men, or up to the Flit where there's strange echoes on the wind, or out to 'Zee where there's great monsters in the peligin depths and none of the charts line up quite right, and in some places everything has a life and a voice.

Edited 2018-05-13 23:31 (UTC)

[Man, it's just a totally different world from his. Wildly different.]

Damn. Sounds like something straight out of a fantasy trid. Or a chip dream. I don't think I'll ever be able to understand it all. Not without having lived there, anyway. I think my world is simpler, but a bit less...whimsical isn't the right word. More like...covered in dirt.

And I haven't the vaguest idea what "trid" means, or "chip" in this context, so you've got the advantage of me there.

Oh, uh. You don't have trids there? They're like. Movies or shows that play out on these holographic screens. And "chips" are just little computer thingies you stick in your brain to experience someone else's life while hoping your brain doesn't melt out of your skull.

It can be some pretty dark stuff, I've heard. Never done one myself.

[Sonja considers for a moment, frowns, and shakes her head.] The cinema's still an excitingly new thing in London, and I'd not seen a computer until I came here. Well, some of the analytical engines might be similar, I suppose. But the only one I've seen much of up close is the Truthbreaker Engine at Benthic College and it's more than what's left of my skin is worth to try and mess around with that without the Professor Emerita of Infernal Rarefactions present.

Chips sound a bit like gaoler's honey in effect, though, if not in execution. Risky stuff, and horribly inhumane.

Yeah...chips can be pretty brutal, too, if things go wrong. The problem with overriding your entire brain with someone else's experiences and memories is that sometimes you also overload it with the electrical charge and wind up braindead.

[He's seen chip burnout. It's disgusting and terrifying. He'll spare her the messy details.]

You never saw a computer before this place, though, huh?

[She's not entirely sure what that means, but she's got enough of an idea to be vaguely thankful she doesn't understand more. And she, in turn, will spare him the messy details of honey-trafficking.

Computers are a much nicer line of conversation.]

With the pages that respond to touch, and the instant transmission of messages? No, never.

I'm starting to get the impression that my world was real high tech. We had holograms for most stuff, lots of cybernetics - I mean we could plug our brains into these computers.

[Talon brushes his hair back to reveal a hard plastic sheathe in his skull.]

Datajack. This little puppy projects a crosshair onto my eye, connected to my gun, so I can shoot straight. If I was a little more tech savvy and a little less magical, I could use it to dive into the digital world, too.

Oh, goodness, that sound dead useful. You're a sharpshooter, then?

More or less. Support sniper, shaman, medic - whatever the team needs me to be at the moment. But I started out pretty much exclusively providing cover fire for the rest of my team when I worked for security, so I'd call "sharpshooter" the primary profession, yeah.

Well rounded, then. [She says it with clear approval. She's not certain what "shaman" entails, here - the word makes her think of something Elder, or possibly of the Khanate, but there's no reason to assume his world falls along the same lines as hers.]

I'm handy enough in a fight to not worry overmuch about taking the wrong turning in most parts of the city, but I'm mostly a scholar by profession. And something of a diplomat, in a round-about kind of way.

[Shaman, in this case, might be closer to the honor-bound living in the Chelonate, sort of like the practices of oracles of the Gant Pole, or of the underwater port of Scrimshander - very stuck in it's ways and rooted in tradition.]

Nice. Good to be able to handle yourself, especially if you're studying something dangerous. Whatcha study?

Theosophy. Souls, and vitality, and thought, and the interplay between them.

[It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...flying right over his head and out of his league.]

[But he whistles anyway, nodding slowly.]

Sounds like a hell of a thing to get your head around.

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scar tissue that i wish you saw

25th, hot tub

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