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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Nothing happens.

Palamedes’ own hands are clasped in fists at his side; he’s breathing hard, and a sheen of blood sweat coats his brow, glowing unsettlingly in the moonlight. For all of that, the trees continue to lightly sway in the breeze, the sky remains bring and clear, the air gently cool. Pal takes off his glasses and wipes his face, and then he tries again. “In the name of Cassiopeia, sacred Lyctor and founder of the House of the Sixth, in the name of all the Lyctors living and dead, in the name of Lady Abigail Pent, heir to the house of the Fifth and a spirit-talker for the ages, I beg the souls of the River to join us in our battle against darkness. We offer our blood to you, we welcome your madness and your pain, if only you would rent open the skies—!” Again, the young necromancer cuts into his hand, raising his palms as the blood drips down his arm.

And again, nothing happens.

Quieter, and sounding a bit hoarse, Palamedes says, “Damnit.”

Nothing happens.

Pal's attention is fixed heavily on the fizzling disappointment of the evocation, and Clarke's is fixed heavily on Pal. She watches him wipe blood from his face and try again, and she waits for an uncomfortable shift of the wind, or a encroaching darkness like she expects the magic to fold over them and obscure the moon. But it's just... nothing. The ambiance doesn't change, and no matter how poetic and entreating his invitation to the spirits is, no otherworldly specter joins them.

She's shifted the tip of the scalpel to another groove between bones on the back of her hand, but without the instruction to spill more blood, she doesn't cut. Pal swears under his breath, disappointed and resigned. But for a pleasant, hopeful second, Clarke had been sure this was going to work. Optimism might as well be a dying animal, but she's not willing to give up on it until the last vestiges of a heartbeat fade to nothingness.

"Was I supposed to say something too? Do we need more blood?"

For a few moments there, Pal had been certain that the summoning would work. He had tapped deep into his thanergy reserves; he had felt, for just the briefest moment, the lives gathered around the campfire, and those asleep in their cabins, or exploring the strange woods. The power had surged in him like adrenaline, and he’d half expected the air in front of him to tear.

But nothing had happened. And now he’s spent.

He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “No. Don’t. There just isn’t enough thanergy to draw on.”

It feels so much like giving up, like saying, Captain, you’ve won this round. And Palamedes hates it.

It says something — it says a lot of things — about Clarke as a person that her first thought is along the lines of: oh, so we need a sacrifice. Her second thought is an unintelligible swirl of disgust and loathing at her immediate jump to violence and the idea of disposable lives for the sake of a science experiment but. It's still nothing new for her.

Somewhat begrudgingly, she drops the scalpel from the back of her hand. Caps it, and sets it aside in the grass — now reaching out to pat Pal on the shoulder in some offshoot of comfort.

"Hey, it's okay. How about we try back on the ship, with all the revenants drifting about."

If Palamedes had been a certain kind of necromancer—say, Ianthe Tridentarius—then he might have suggested seeking out a likely victim himself. If he had been Silas Octakiseron, he might have explained soul siphoning to Clarke, or maybe just gotten to work without a word. Even Harrow might have been tempted by either option.

But Palamedes is decidedly not that kind of necromancer. He would never even admit that either idea even crossed his mind—though they did for a moment as he met Clarke’s gaze.

“You’re right, of course.” He offers a faint smile. There’s a small thumbprint of blood on one of his glasses. “I had thought that the captain’s powers might be weaker in this secondary illusion, but maybe that’s not the case after all.”

Intensity and the desire to succeed at all costs is a cyclical, never ending swirl. And place two people who feel the pressure to chip away at the Captain's illusions like their lives depend on it — because they do — across from each other, it's really no question that they'd feed into one another's ambition and be the worst sort of enablers. But neither voice darker options aloud. Clarke just sets her jaw and nods when Pal acknowledges her backup plan, as if it's set in stone and scheduled now; they're going to try again. And again and again and again until some sort of crack in the charade surfaces.

"You're probably right about that, though. We know his ship runs off suffering and death, so maybe he's weaker here. But you'd be more powerful on the ship."

She still doesn't know entirely what she's talking about when it comes to magic, but can still plot point A and B on a map and draw a line between them. Even if it ends up being wrong, the mental gymnastics should mark a testament to just how committed Clarke is to this idea.

"The hypothesis is sound, we just need more trials."

Holding his gaze is admittedly a bit distracting with that smear of blood across the lens of his spectacles and, unthinkingly, Clarke reaches out to gently pull his glasses off his face. If Pal allows it of course, but she's intent on rubbing them clean on her shirt, undoubtedly leaving the white of her counselor baseball tee smeared in an amalgamation of their blood. The cut on the back of her hand still oozes black black black blood, but is already starting to slow and clot.

Edited 2022-07-04 05:24 (UTC)

“Because I also run on suffering and death,” Palamedes quips. Okay, sure, he would never explain necromancy like that—as he had told Jade not so long ago, he sees the work of the necromancer as something much more holistic—but it is a little bit true. Maybe more than a little bit. There’s a reason Pal still believes the captain to be some kind of necromancer himself, after all.

His mouth makes a startled ‘o’ when she takes his glasses, though he realizes why she's done it a moment later why. “…Thanks. Um.” Pal gestures at her hand. “Usually I’d be able to help with that, sorry. But I’ve got some sticky bandages in my bag.”

She wasn't going to say it that way but, yes Pal. Clarke nods along firmly, ready to remind him that by his own admission, death gave off thanergy and being around destruction of souls made him stronger in case he took offense to the comparison. The Captain uses death and suffering to power his ship, ergo the mechanics must be a little bit similar. And it would track, that where their captor was strongest, so to would Pal be.

She's carefully buffing his glasses for a few seconds before handing them back over, and only really paying attention to the gouge along the back of her hand when she catches sight of how tendrils of black blood have run down to her wrist and forearm. He offers an absent sort of help, then bandaids, both of which Clarke just sort of shrugs off.

"It's not that deep, just looks bad. It'll be fine once it stops bleeding and I wash this off." Don't worry about it, in a few too many words. Still, as they continue to sit here, Clarke will prop her elbow on her knee and keep the hand elevated like a weird sort of bloody wave.

"So if it had worked, what would that have looked like?" Just to know what to expect, what any future signs of victory would manifest as.

Pal sends Clarke a pointed look, the kind that says, okay, do it your way, but at least he doesn’t roll his eyes, or insist that she go get herself a bandage, or get up to fetch her one himself.

He’s too tired to do the last one, anyway.

“Oh goodness, it depends. In theory, a revenant could have appeared beside us like that,” he snaps his fingers. “Though more often than not, they put on a bit of a show, usually in the form of a release of energy. Fire, lightening, that sort of thing.” He shrugs. Ghosts, man. They’re a bunch of drama queens.

“I really can’t say for sure what would have happened here. If we’d really pushed hard enough to break the captain’s hold on this reality, we might have seen changes to the environment itself.” Pal picks up a handful of dirt, pine needles, and matted leaves from the ground and lets it run through his fingers.” Trees might have fallen, plants might have disintegrated. Maybe the sky would have changed colors.”

Flat, unaffected, bordering on unimpressed — "...sounds scary."

It's a vivid picture he paints, and one that really ought to ignite her deeper survival instincts, but. A world covered in radioactive ash, sky a mix of fire-orange and the thick, dark smoke of oblivion chasing her down... Clarke quietly thinks the ground could split between the two of them right now and it really wouldn't come as much of a jumpscare.

Speaking of the ground, she's looking again to the rock nestled in the dirt between them. And reaches out a hand to pick it up.

"All of that, just with this and a little bit of bloodshed?"

If Clarke is impressed by Pal’s answer, she’s working awfully hard to hide it, but Pal remains unperturbed. “That, a little bit of bloodshed, a lifetime of training, and every atom of thanergy I can drag out of this poor excuse for a forest.” He huffs, still irritated by the complete lack of decent workmanship on display in their surroundings. “A few years ago I did a special topics tutorial with a bitch of an exam. They locked us in a sterile room, handed us a femur bone, and asked us to discover the name of the deceased person’s grandmother. Which required a summoning, of course. In a sterile room. Assholes.”

Pal steers himself back to the point before he can get too far off track. “In any case, that was easy compared to all this.” He makes a sweeping gesture. “I can’t even be sure that bringing in an outside force would corrupt the Captain’s illusion. It should, but that assumes his capabilities, however advanced, play by rules I recognize.”

"Or rules at all."

She's listening of course, but most of her attention is on the small stone she's turning over in her palms. It's still a little wet with tacky, half dried blood — a mixture of deep, drying red, and dark, can't possibly get any darker black. Clarke'll absolutely drag her eyes up from the rock when Pal divulges about one of the trials he underwent in training, and arches an eyebrow in acknowledgement, that does sound ridiculously hard, and silent agreement, absolute assholes.

But then she's looking back at the stone, holding it up between two fingers, and continuing the not-so-subtle quest for knowledge about magic. She doesn't have a lifetime to learn, but at the same time the only exam to pass would be the destruction of the Captain. Murder isn't hard by human standards, if she could just figure out some basics and the right sigils...

"So what's with this? Is it like — an anchor? Some sort of channeling point? A target for the spirits to attach to?"

“Precisely.”

Pal rests his chin on his knees, watching her examine the stone. “No, not quite. It’s a ward. Usually I would draw it directly on the ground, but that’s a bit difficult to do on a forest floor.” He picks up another one, lightly tracing the symbol with his fingertip. “Wards are used to create protective barriers. I can make one that blocks people from entering a room, or that alerts me to someone’s presence. These in particular,” he taps the stone, “were meant to keep any revenants within the circle once they entered it.”

It's really the symbols that have grabbed her attention here, especially on the tail end of a conversation with Skulduggery Pleasant about sigil magic and how most anyone could be capable of it. Sure, Pal insists on years of practice and an innate ability built into his DNA but... those were his homeworld rules. And by his own admission, he doesn't know for certain if those same rules applied here.

"...think you could show me more of these symbols sometime?" And let her draw them in a reference book. "They might crop up in the Captain's own dealings, now that we're pressing on his magic. I think it'd help if I was able to recognize what they look like and what they mean."

Ever the teacher, Palamedes nods without hesitation. “Ward symbology is basic stuff. Anyone can learn them, along with other necromatic principles, even if they aren’t able to execute them. And here, who knows?” Pal still doubts that someone without the right genetic makeup could perform the sort of necromancy he is capable of, but he’s willing to acknowledge that the Captain’s bubbles don’t always play by the usual rules. At the very least, in the absence of Camilla Hect, he would find it useful to have someone he could theorize with.

Is it a coincidence that, like Cam, Clarke is a sharp-minded fighter with a never-ending well of curiosity and good instincts? Probably not.

Good instincts, but horrible execution. It's a problematic combination that will probably only continue to plague her greater aspirations, but what's the alternative? When the options are fight tooth and nail with everything you've got and constantly seek out new advantages, or else lay down and wait for the bitter cyclical death march, it's not much of a choice.

So Pal slips into teacher mode, and Clarke takes up the ever vigilant bodylanguage of a student. Eyes on his face, intent and eager; leans in slightly, hanging on every word. Pirate Jenny and Skulduggery Pleasant insist sigils can be used by just about anyone, regardless of genetics, and while Clarke accepts that anything she attempted wouldn't be utilizing necromancers tools, if she could power something based on intent alone... who knew where the list of possibilities would end?

"Is there, like... a symbol alphabet? Does each shape you draw have a specific connotation attached to it, or is it more like hieroglyphs where the meaning is in the sigil whole?"

“A bit of both. Each individual symbol has its own meaning, but the sum is greater than its parts, see?” Pal holds the stone in the palm of his hand, tipping it towards Clarke. In the darkness of the forest, the rust-brown symbols are difficult to read, barely smudges against grey rock, but he carefully points them out all the same. “That’s because the more complex it is, the more protection it provides. This,” he points at a corner of a symbol, one of the first he drew, “keeps people other than myself from passing the wards, while this,” he points at another shadowy symbol, “is meant to hold back unwanted revenants. That’s a bit tricky in these circumstances—I have to make it weak enough that I can force some ghosts through, but not so weak that they can come and go as they please. And this, “he points one more time, “is a sort of alert. A security alarm. So I know if something has gotten through, wanted or unwanted.”

“But what really matters is the material used to make the ward,” he adds. “Because it’s in my blood, I remain unaffected and in control. I’m the key to the lock, if you like. That power can be layered, too—if I had included your blood, for example, you would have been able to pass through the wards unaffected. Bone ash works, too, but bone wards are a bit easier to break.”

Alright, so it's a little bit like an alphabet. Letters alone still bearing sound, but nothing so complete as words or sentences formed by themselves. Clarke listens with rapt attention, and carefully stares at each symbol he indicates, trying her best to emulate a camera and take snapshot images of the wards to remember later. But it's a little hard to focus entirely when almost every word out of Palamedes' mouth commands she drag her attention back to his face — sharply focused, intent, wanting to know more about alarm systems and the sense of personal control one had over their own blood.

It's fascinating. It's encouraging. Stuck on a ship with every shape and flavor of magic user and supernatural beings imaginable, constantly a mortal step behind and grasping at the straws of being able to learn sigil magic — she wants that.

"I didn't know you could break wards. How does that work?"

No surprise, Clarke is an attentive student. Even in the darkness, her expression is sharp with interest and concentration, and Palamedes can see the way she examines the symbols. “I can show you with pen and paper as well,” he tells her, for the moment not thinking ahead to what she might do with this information. Besides, even if Clarke could manufacture a useable blood ward, it probably couldn’t do much serious damage, right?

“There are two primary methods for breaking wards.” Pal sets down the stone and ticks them off on his fingers. “The first method just requires a key, so to speak: in this instance, blood or another source of significant genetic material from the person who created the ward. The more complex the ward, the more material required.”

Another tick. “The second method requires a necromancer to break down the ward on a molecular level by stripping away the thalergy and thanergy of the blood or bone used in its construction. if the first method requires finding a metaphorical key, the second one requires the strength to break down a metaphorical door.”

Later — next month specifically — when she's on top of Ebalon, breaking his nose, bloodying both their clothes, this notion won't register as important. But after being forcibly separated, told off the next day, and picking up her discarded dirty laundry that's still peppered with flecks of his blood... The notion of magical keys will reenter Clarke's thoughts. And instead of washed, that filthy shirt will be secreted away in the back of a drawer. Just in case.

But for now, she's mostly thinking about that second method. Deconstruction. Kicking in a door.

"Okay, so. We know the Captain bleeds. You think if you got some of that, you might have an easier time picking at his wards?"

The corner of Pal's mouth curves up in a smile. Now this is exactly the kind of useful brainstorming that can happen when you have a friend and an ally to talk things through with. "Yes. Well, theoretically. Assuming that the Captain's wards are built on similar principles to mine, which we can't necessarily take for granted.

"But blood is always powerful. That seems to be true in enough universes that a sample of the Captain's blood will surely do us some good." He pauses with a faint frown. "I suppose the trouble is that he doesn't always bleed when you would expect him to, right? Knocking a hole in the side of his head didn't render any blood."

"Darcy made him bleed." Clarke hadn't watched the incident all that closely, doesn't know exactly what transpired between the two of them past what could be gleaned from across the room, but they'd talked about it since and if he's inclined to play favorites "— we could ask if she'd be willing to try to do it again, and maybe this time get a sample."

And after a slight pause, because this is a totally normal thing to forget you've had stashed away in your bureau since your first month on board this hellscape of a ship: "I have some of Friday's blood on a napkin, if that'd do any good."

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JUNE EVENT: CAMP

CAMP AION

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