come_sailaway | [open] come on, make a joyful sound

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[open] come on, make a joyful sound

Who: Skulduggery Pleasant & anyone who wants to deal with him
What: you'd think after an announcement like that one, he'd be making himself scarce, but nope!
When: July, up until the excursion.
Where: Around the ship, by the pool, and also the Chatterbox, obviously. but NOT at Bobby B's. nope!!!!
Warnings: None at the moment, other than potential being-a-dickness from Skuls
Notes: with the Bobby B's prompt, if your character can see through magic invisibility, let me know :)

[AROUND THE SHIP] if you will believe in your heart
[Skulduggery can be found wandering the ship at any point during the day or night. to the untrained eye, it may look like he's pacing, but you couldn't be more wrong. this is simply idle exercise for an old man who is definitely not churning over a lot of thoughts about what his plans are for the future.

he won't stop to talk unless a familiar friend waves him down, but he's more than willing to Aaron Sorkin this shit if somebody decides to pull a walk-and-talk with him.]

[CHATTERBOX] and confess with your lips
[alternatively, Skulduggery can be found in the Chatterbox after midnight for his own private hour-long karaoke session. it isn't quite the same, now that the karaoke machine isn't inhabited by any ghosts that may or may not have ever existed in the first place, but he seems to be making the most of it.

actually, he's having a little too much fun. anyone who tries to have a conversation with him here may find themselves subjected to a musical response in lieu of a real one, and woe to anyone who tries to take the microphone out of his hand before his hour's up.]

[POOL] surely you will be saved one day
[and finally, Skulduggery can occasionally be found lounging on a deck chair with a book during the afternoons and early evenings. he's even dressed down on these occasions, with his shoes tucked under the chair and his jacket folded neatly over the back. he can't seem to stop humming the same few bars of Time after Time... that song is such an earworm!

if someone is looking to corner him, this is liable to be the best time, because he isn't inclined to start a fight in the middle of the day.]

[BOBBY B'S] don't see what the point is in even trying to fight
[there's no skeleton detective to be seen, which would make this a pretty terrible prompt for a roleplaying game. luckily, there is one thing that seems curiously out of place inside Bobby B's: an unattended ship-branded pad of paper and a pen, resting next to an ashtray with a half-smoked cigar stubbed out in it. written across the top of the page are the words: SKULLDUGGERY PLEASANT. underneath that is a list, written in seemingly several different fonts:

- can remove & replace limbs (head too?)
- senses movement thru air, flies
- latent necromancy?
- always armed (2 guns)
- charming (talks way out of problems)
- irrational & mentally unstable
- easy to anger? (no)
- death by car crash
- death by spike pit??? HOW

and then, at the bottom, hastily scrawled and underlined: how do u kill a skeleton?

huh. that sure is weird. it looks like mutliple people have added to this list with the same left-over pen. maybe somebody else has something to add?? or maybe they're trying to figure out why there's one less bar stool at the bar...]

[closed to Darcy] getting into knives
[the cloaking sphere isn't the only thing that Skulduggery picked up from the sundries shop. alongside two relics that would make extremely fitting gifts for a newlywed couple, he's also been given a deceptively simple item that he thinks is just perfect for Darcy. their birthday was... some time ago, which makes this rather belated, but he figures that there are enough extenuating circumstances to keep him from feeling too guilty about that.

he texts Darcy to meet up at Sand Dollars for a surprise (conveniently on his way to Bobby B's for a spot of enemy-watching), and even though he doesn't need to, he invites them to bring any of their million+ swords along. might as well ensure the gift works the way he suspects it will!]

[wildcard] look for the bigger picture when I close my eyes real tight

(Throw something up at random, or throw me a line on Discord to plan something!)

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Skulduggery saunters in without a care in the world, at least for the next few minutes, and slides into the bench opposite Darcy's. The lack of a blade is noted, and Skulduggery briefly wishes he'd bothered to bring the knife he'd been gifted. He hadn't thought it would be necessary, is all -- after all, when isn't Darcy armed with a sword??

"Oh, no. If it were a bad surprise, I would have warned you." Probably, maybe. Anyway! He digs into his jacket pocket and pulls out one uniform lump of something, rewrapped in the sundries gift paper and tied off with a bit of string. It's... well, he made an effort to rewrap it, okay? Sorry not everyone is as capable as Friday is when it comes to taping paper up!

"This," he says, plonking the present down in the middle of the table, "Is an extremely belated birthday surprise."

Darcy's usual guarded demeanour blooms into a genuine smile- had he been talking to Phil?- and they do the dutiful kid thing of effectively ignoring the money in the birthday card for long enough to say-

"Seriously? Thank you-" before immediately reaching for the present. Because yes it's the thought that counts but also she wants the present.

Nimbly unwrapping it, she holds it up for... a few moments, bracing for the rug to be pulled out from under her.

"It's... a rock?"

It's a rare sight to see Darcy smile, which makes their delight so nice to witness. He waits with anticipation as they unwrap the gift, and then watches their face as happiness descends into confusion.

Then, he lifts his hands and proudly replies, "It's a fancy rock."

"Is this proxy revenge for Les Hermaneux?"

At least she went to the effort of drawing eyes on them.

He laughs. "Hardly revenge. It's a whetstone. A very old one. And judging from the gifts that came along with it, I'd go so far as to say it may be one of significant historical value."

He settles back in his seat and tilts his head. "The other gifts came in museum packaging, complete with placards, but this one, unfortunately, did not. Still, my assumption is that it's related to the Thirteen Treasures of Britain. Fake in my world, but no doubt real in others."

"Oh!" bastard burying the lede, she turns it over in her hand now that she knows it's not just a regular stone.

"This is seriously great- I'll be able to stop borrowing Dimitri's shit," and with a gesture Izzy's sword suddenly appears in her hand- like the knife in the bar. Any consideration of if it's rude to sharpen one's weapon on a table is thrown directly to the wayside in favour of sword time, and Darcy carefully mirrors the careful strokes that Dimitri sharpens his weapon with, trying to hold it at the same angle to keep the edge nice and sharp.

As if Skulduggery is the guy to determine whether weapon maintenance at the table is weird or not.

"Ah, good, you know what you're doing with it." Mostly, anyway. Skulduggery isn't going to nitpick that, either! "Just be careful. Unless you're a coward, it's liable to give you a lethal edge."

He's not actually sure if the story meant lethal as in "draws blood" or lethal as in "will definitely kill anyone you turn it against." That's going to be a hard one to figure out without murdering someone...

Immediately stops sharpening the sword.

"What does it do if I'm a coward?"

"The exact opposite of its intended purpose. The blade will be dulled and useless. Well, it'd make for a decent butter knife, I suppose..."

He waves a hand.

"But you don't have to worry about that."

"I am absolutely worrying about that."

She's stopped sharpening but now she's suspended in the Schrodinger's coward situation wherein she could very easily check if this mythical magic item of legend has declared that she's a coward or not, but she's too scared to check.

The irony of that is not lost on her.

He tilts his head.

"Why? You aren't a coward."

She may be an awkward teenager who's afraid of her emotions and desperate to prove herself to people she respects, but none of that could possibly make her a coward. At her core, Darcy is braver than most people could ever hope to be.

"You might not think I'm a coward, but this thing-" holds up the whetstone, "might not agree."

And then what? She's assigned coward by a whetstone?

"Well, there is one way to find out. But I don't know who would let you cut their arm off in a test of bravery."

He's joking! Really. All they need is something for Darcy to test the edge of her blade against -- a pane of glass, a piece of wood, a tabletop...

"You're not volunteering?" she jabs back.

But of course, she's not thinking of testing it against an inanimate object. Swords drink blood and bite flesh. A knife might be used to cut other things, but a sword has a sacredness to it that she's not desecrating.

For a moment she considers trying the hair test on it, but she's shaved and Skulduggery is a skeleton, so there's no source of it here. Instead, there's one other method to test the sharpness of a blade.

Darcy carefully angles her thumbnail to stroke the end of it against the sharp edge. It shaves the thinnest slice of nail away, so delicate that it curls in on itself.

"Huh," she remarks, "guess I'm not a coward."

If she asked, he probably would, but he's limited on replacement limbs and he actually rather likes these arms. You'd be surprised at how hard it is to find ones the right length.

"See? I told you so." Despite that being something smug people say when they're proven right, Skulduggery's tone is one of reassurance. He briefly turns his head as he contemplates what he knows of the legend. "A brave man who uses the whetstone will be guaranteed to kill any foe they set their blade to. A coward who uses it will dull the edge and ensure they won't be able to draw blood. So... maybe don't use it to sharpen any swords you might use for practice?"

"Unless I want spicy practice."

Y'know, the most dangerous practice, that kind of practice.

"Thanks for this, yeah?" the whetstone as a gift, of course, but also the reassurance. It's nice to get literally magical confirmation that she's not a coward.

Skulduggery tilts his head. "Just don't tell them I gave you the means to lethal weaponry." He's in enough hot water as it is.

"Of course. It's a gift well-earned, and I can't imagine anyone else making better use of it." A sword-based moral compass? He can't think of a more Darcy-coded gift than that. "May it always leave your blade sharp enough to cut through bone." Never know when she'll need to do that, moving forward.

"Rôh, I always train with live steel, if they can't handle the heat they shouldn't cook."

That's how that saying in English goes right.

"And may I never become a coward. Because resharpening the edge on all my swords would be an absolute pain in the fucking ass."

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[open] come on, make a joyful sound

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Probably wrap soon?