come_sailaway | JUNE EVENT: CAMP

JUNE EVENT: CAMP

early on June 10th, Friday's morning announcements end with a request for everyone going on the latest excursion to meet her in the atrium. she seems in noticeably better spirits than she had been last time, and she leads them cheerfully to the tender. once they are all aboard, and the door is securely shut, the interior fills with gas, and, perhaps, their last thought before they slip into unconsciousness is "oh shit, not again."

passengers wake up on a rickety old school bus, driving down a dirt road surrounded by woods. what is it that they notice first? that, no matter what they were wearing before, they are now wearing a camp t-shirt and legitimately horrifyingly short shorts? the overstuffed backpack between their knees? the words "take one down and pass it around" dying on their lips? the fact that Friday is absolutely driving the bus?

or, maybe the fact that it's already slowing down, pulling up in front of a massive wooden sign, saying:

CAMP AION

when they get out of the bus, Friday is the one to divide them up into their cabin groups, and she is the one to give the counselors their very official-looking clipboards and whistles. she explains that they are in charge, and that she will be back to pick them up in a week, and... very little else. she responds to nothing outside of whatever is on her unseen little script, and she gets back on the bus shortly after, leaving them there.

welcome to camp. let's make some summer memories!

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Palamedes doesn’t see Ava, at least not at first. Oblivious to the fact that he is being watched, he sets a small circle of stones around him, each marked with symbols written in his own blood. Lips moving in silent incantation, he trails more blood between the stones, then kneels in the middle and presses a small stub of a candle into the dirt.

It’s a long shot, this scheme of his. Palamedes has not succeeded at making the slightest thread of contact with a revenant on the ship, and there are reasons for him to believe that it might be more difficult here. But perhaps, perhaps, by pushing hard against the captain’s wards, or spells, or illusions, by reaching definitively into the beyond, he can do some kind of damage to the awful world their captor has created.

Pal takes a lighter out of his pocket and lights the candle as he begins to speak, his voice carrying in the frightfully quiet forest. “Though this earth is newly made and unsuitable for the living or the dead, I, Palamedes Sextus of the House of the Sixth, bid you come, all that can hear me. For the sake of brethren souls trapped in this illusion, for the sake of justice all deserve, for whatever pity you might feel for we sorry prisoners, rent the fabric of this fantasy and show us the way that freedom lies.”

In the dark it's difficult to make out the symbols upon the stones, wondering what they mean. She tries committing a few to memory, just in case. But they are meaningless to her.

She's not sure what the purpose of the candle is either, or why there's so little of it left. She's not even sure it IS a candle, until Palamedes lights it.

Though she's been silent through all this, Ava holds her breath almost afraid if she breathes out wrong that she might disturb whatever chanting he's trying to perform. So it is a ritual. And it sounds as if he's attempting to call upon souls. Which seems odd, she doesn't think anyone would have died here. Not yet, at least. (She's not holding her breath on that one.)

She doesn't know much about magic, but... "I don't think it worked," she speaks, pale and ghostly herself.

Palamedes remains still after he falls silent. In the darkness it would be difficult to tell, but his lips are pressed into a thin line of concentration, and his jaw is tight. After a while, a small trickle of blood fall from his nose.

He’s just about ready to give it another try when Ava speaks, and he nearly jumps out of his skin. “Fuck.” Pal isn’t easily startled, but hearing an unfamiliar voice come out of the darkness when one is in the middle of a seance would startled anyone. He squints into the trees. “Hello?”

There's something so satisfying, Ava finds, in getting grown men to swear at her sudden appearance. She adds another to the fuck tally, and takes a few steps forward while flickering back into full view. It's always a bit more unnerving in the dark, the way the moonlight picks up on her fragmented existence.

"Hello," Ava greets in return, soft but amused and inviting herself to lean down and poke at the rocks curiously. "What were you hoping to summon out here?"

Pal recognizes Ava as she comes into view, equal parts relieved and disappointed to have someone materialize who is a passenger on the Serena Eterna, and not a revenant drawn from the River.

Materialize. Hm. Pal has seen Darcy disappear into thin air, but has not yet heard about anyone else who can become invisible. Was it merely a trick of the shadows, or did Ava have a similar ability?

“A ghost. Any ghost, honestly, though perhaps I’ll be more specific on my next try.” He studies her for a moment. “You’re very good at sneaking up on people.”

"Of course I am, I only make myself known when I want to be. And Ghost was my codename, so you at least got... something for your efforts," Ava shrugs. She's not all that concerned about being disappointing.

"Why do you think there are any ghosts around?" Ava asks curiously. "I just assumed this place came into being and will discontinue so as soon as we leave."

Hah. Hah. Points for Ava.

Pal plans to circle back to her comment about having a code name (interesting!) but for now he explains his seance. “Oh, you’re entirely right about that. There are no ghosts here—present company excluded. But it may be possible to draw ghosts here from elsewhere.” For now he leaves the center of his circle of stones and blood, kneeling before a backpack leaning against a nearby tree and taking out a bandage and a tube of antibac ointment. “That’s what I’m testing, anyway.”

She beams a bit at being referred to as present company. Even if it's the most basic acknowledgment of her presence possible and not actually any form of compliment.

"Hm," Ava's clearly skeptical. "Elsewhere where? We're within a barrier surrounded by Eternity." She doesn't think there is an anywhere else.

"Need help with that?"

“Why, from the other side of Eternity,” says Palamedes, only halfway to joking. “Sort of. In my world, when people die, their souls travel to the River. ‘River’ and ‘travel’ are approximate metaphors, to be clear—the River doesn’t exist in the way that we understand existence—but when one is discussing the metaphysical, all one has is metaphor, right?

He takes out the antibac and the bandages and rises to his feet. “So! Souls can be drawn from the River by necromantic means. There’s nothing saying they couldn’t be drawn here, at least not theoretically—hmm? Oh! No, I’m quite all right.” He puts the ointment on his hand, and then stares down at the angry line of the incision. Within a few moments, it disappears.

Ava crosses her arms over her chest, doesn't like that she really doesn't understand any of these things. But he sounds rather confident about it, so she's not going to claim he's out of his mind. "I just don't think the way things work in our own world, necessarily apply to this one," she says instead. "Because this isn't even a world."

But sure, theoretically. Except it really didn't seem to work.

"Did you do that, or the ointment?" Ava asks, not asking before grabbing at the man's hand in both her own to inspect it.

“The River doesn’t need to exist in this reality for me to draw revenants here,” Palamedes says with a shrug. “Think of it this way: we have all be brought here by some kind of power. I’m merely trying to do something similar—ow.” It doesn’t hurt him that much when she grabs his hand, but still, that was unnecessary. “Er, that was me. Basic cellular reconstruction. The ointment was just to kill any bacteria—though now that I think of it, this pocket universe probably doesn’t have any bacteria. Hmm.”

"Yet it doesn't look like it worked," Ava points out yet again. So clearly it doesn't work however he wants it to.

She immediately pulls away at his exclamation of pain, a slightly annoyed squint. "Oh please," she huffs quietly. It couldn't have hurt more than him slicing his own palm open. But she gets it. She's not the sort that most people want touching them, with her weird blurred edges.

"You know. You never did come find me. After that meeting." But he seems like the easily distracted nerd type.

Palamedes Sextus is the epitome of the distracted nerd type.

Thankfully, he is nice enough that he usually feels badly when he has overstepped. "I had some other matters to attend to," he says with an apologetic wince. "But I had every intention of seeking you out. For what it's worth, I think you might have been onto something after all." He gestures to the forest around them. "Aside from those of us from the Serena Eterna, nothing here is alive."

Ava waves off the not-quite apology, usually expects people to have far more interesting things to do than speak with her.

"It was more difficult to notice on the island, we were too busy murdering each other to properly appreciate the environment. But," Ava gestures vaguely around them. "Plenty of time here to get lost in the fake plastic trees." Fine they're not plastic, but she might like Radiohead.

"Wouldn't make sense for it to be alive, anyway."

As Ava had so succinctly observed, the summoning had not worked, and Palamedes knows he doesn't have the energy to try again, and so he begins to kick apart the circle of stones. "I'm impressed that you noticed anything at all last time," he observes as he works. "But why do you think it makes sense?"

Pal has his own theories, but he doesn't tip his hand quite yet. He's curious what Ava has to say first.

Edited (Now with the actual completed tag! *facepalm*) 2022-07-04 00:25 (UTC)

"I was a spy, I notice a lot of things," Ava comments vaguely, watching him kick apart the stones. She bends to to pick one up, to study one of the symbols upon it.

"It makes sense because this isn't meant to be a sustainable environment, right? We're here for a week. That's all. Why would the trees need to photosynthesize? They're not going to flower, fruit, seed, rinse and repeat. Life takes a huge amount of resources, of energy. Why all that effort for something that's ultimately disposable set dressing?"

“Because it’s childish and sloppy to leave something so unfinished, but I take your point.” Pal doesn’t say anything about Ava’s revelation that she was a spy, but he tucks away that bit of information for later. It might not be useful, but it could be.

He picks up his backpack and swings it over his shoulder. “At the gathering a few weeks ago you wrote that he couldn’t create life. That’s different than choosing not to.”

"It's like a zoo enclosure for the penguins, where they paint white onto the rocks and pretend it's ice. And you're that little penguin staring off into the fake painted mountain range wondering why you can never reach it," Ava teases.

"And I keep my speculation open ended, I don't like to commit to any specific train of thought. But I still stand by if he were capable of creating anything like us then he wouldn't have needed to do the whole abduction thing. You know, the whole If You Can't Make Your Own, Store Bought Is Fine."

Palamedes quirks a smile. “Point taken. He is a lazy bastard.” He chews on his lip for a moment. “Which dovetails well with my own speculation, honestly. It’s just not worth the effort for him. Even if he can create life,” he thinks again of the little crab scuttling around in its enclosure back in his cabin on the Serena Eterna, “he’d rather not waste his time doing so.”

“Not a particularly useful character trait in an aspiring godhead.”

She's heard of this crab, from Crabb, but she's not sure if it's somehow an exception or something that was abducted the way they were. Or even if it was another passenger that's gone missing, transformed into a crab. Magic is weird and stupid.

"What traits would you consider useful, then?" Ava asks curiously. "What is it that you think he's doing wrong, or missing? To fully achieve his goals?"

“For the record, I was being facetious, but it’s an interesting question,” Pal says with a shrug. “I still think gods need worshippers. Without anyone to believe in him, to follow him, he’s just a fellow with a funny skillset and a sadistic sense of humor.”

She giggles. Ava always likes the word fellow. "See, that's what I've wondered too." But Skulduggery hadn't agreed, thought if somebody was that powerful they wouldn't need the belief of others.

"But he doesn't seem particularly concerned with that aspect. We're just... what, entertainment and fuel for him?"

“Something like that. He certainly isn’t interested in making us his worshippers. Or, presumably, any of the people who came before us.” Palamedes sighs, but the sigh quickly turns into a yawn. “Sorry—the evening’s activities seem to have caught up with me. I should get back to my cabin before I pass out in the middle of the forest.”

There's an itching temptation to ask, but what if we- and then it's gone as soon as he yawns and announces he's done for the night.

Ava just nods, turning the stone over idly in her hands. "Bye."

Ava dismisses him so thoroughly that for a moment he hesitates. "I do hope we can continue this conversation another time. You seem to have a valuable perspective on our predicament."

Still, he isn't inclined to linger. "Have a good evening."

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decohere - 2022-07-10 02:53 (UTC) - Expand

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