It's time for me to take some chances [Closed]

[saltwaterlungs]

CHARACTERS: Darcy and friends
DATE: Still January
LOCATION: Kitchen and Bobby B’s
SITUATION: Darcy makes some moves
WARNINGS: None yet

To burn it all to a billion ashes

[ To each of the following; Dimitri, Gwen, Erin, Okie, and Valdis, a text is sent.
Lunch?
I’m in the kitchen. ]

Stop playing dead

[ The core members of what can be loosely described as Team Captain also get texts. Skulduggery, Ava, Maximilien, and Peter.
Meeting at Bobby B’s
Bring anyone you trust.
When they arrive, Darcy’s already set up at a table, looking at her phone and smoking a weed cigarette, seemingly well enough to scrape herself back into some semblance of how she usually looks, in a suit jacket over a hoodie. ]

For one last time, I'm screaming out loud [exploration]

[ Darcy’s got one stop on their mind to prioritize for their own exploration; the crew cabins. Late one evening, upon making certain there’s nobody around and they aren’t being observed, they approach the bulkhead. ‘You could always go in’ is vague even for the Captain, but they have to wonder if they have some sort of… admin privileges equivalent for the ship. So they try to open the door as if they expect to be able to, casually as walking into their own room. ]

Comments

[makesomedeals]

"Of course the book knows, why wouldn't it know? Why shouldn't inanimate objects all be secretly sentient." He mumbles to himself as he holds the book open in his palms, curling the last digits of his fingers around the cover just to keep it in place. It would actually be horrifying to find out that everything is sentient - and put him in the awkward position of being just as bad as all the humans that used him, when he was using chairs and cars without realizing they could feel.

Something he's just not going to consider. Instead he focuses on the book itself, waiting for the pages to ruffle unsure what to expect. Maybe things will light up, or an eerie breeze would blow, regardless, he's definitely tense.

[freedomsuitsme]

With a grand gesture and a muttering of incantations, the circle begins to well with a strange, inky substance, and the pages of the book flutter. Sigils and symbols etch themselves onto thin air, solid smoke forming something akin to a digital readout. The magician, maintaining focus but clearly intent upon perusing the information, moves the symbols about, silky gloves almost seeming to brush sections aside as if they were applications being pushed to the background. It's surprisingly methodical, a search through stacks of information, key figures acting as pointers to registers of importance. All the while, the pages flutter back and forth, a shifting of threads, a shuffling of data.

[makesomedeals]

He keeps his fingers out of the way, making sure the pages can move as needed. Maxwell had made it sound like the book itself was sentient and deciding what to do, but as he watches him manipulate the symbols in midair there does seem to be more to it than that. His sensors focus on the viscous black goop that seems to well up around the circle - but his analysis tells him nothing. In a bid to reassure himself he decides that it's because it's from a realm unlike his own and he isn't programmed with the right instrumentation to obtain any data on it. And not because it's magic.

It's not unlike watching a scientist shuffle around data trying to formulate an answer. He hadn't understood what they were doing either, but there'd been an end result like they're hoping for here.

So instead he peers down at the book as it flips pages as if in a strong breeze that keeps changing direction, trying to see if there's words or anything discernable.

[freedomsuitsme]

Oh, the book is full of text and diagrams, but most of it is in a script utterly alien to Maximilien. Occasionally, a scrap of Latin translation flashes across a page. "Precious." "Incantation." "Insanity." But nothing coherent or comprehensive.

After a few minutes, the energy begins to diminish, and the fluttering of the pages slows.

[makesomedeals]

His eyes flick over everything going on, noting that things are starting to slow down.

"Does that mean you've found something out? Or is something wrong?"

[freedomsuitsme]

"The ritual has mostly run its course. Remain in the circle until I indicate that it's fully done, and then we can discuss what's been uncovered. It's not as much as I'd hoped, but it's something."

[makesomedeals]

"Hmmm." He stands there diligently until the spell finishes, the book closing in his hands. There's a part of him that wants to reach out and see if the dissolving symbols in the air have some sort of tangibility, but he resists. "Something is more than we had previously."

[freedomsuitsme]

"So... I can say with confidence that I have never seen this level of magical concentration in an artifact before. Or perhaps... perhaps it isn't that it's the most magical thing that I've ever seen, but that its magic isn't tied up in its inner workings. I've held some very powerful artifacts, but they've all been tied to a particular task, a specific purpose. I've seen a key that could open a hole between worlds and maintain that gateway, but that was the only thing it could do. This is different. This is raw magic craving purpose. It almost... reminds me of Them."

[makesomedeals]

Max can hear that capital T on the word Them. "Them?"

He should almost be pleased that he's carrying around some powerful raw magic that wasn't intended to do any one particular thing. A fitting sort of freedom for someone who was designed with a singular purpose.

"Intensely powerful with no designated purpose. So what you're saying is if I learned how to harness it, I could do practically anything?" He's not sure if that's liberating or terrifying.

[freedomsuitsme]

"Them," he confirms. "My patron, the original source of my power. Nightmare given form, the void that stares back."

Maxwell thinks.

"I'd hesitate to say you could do anything. We don't know the rate that this artifact puts out magical power, or how quickly it recharges, if at all. But... if you did learn how to harness it, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine that you could do whatever your mind could conjure up. Though of course, I'd imagine there's a cost. Magic only has the power that it does because it has a cost, in my experience."

[makesomedeals]

"Nothing ever comes for free," he agrees. With a sigh he offers the book back and gestures down to the circle to see if he can leave where he's standing.

"Infinite power and no way to harness it. That's.. Well I'd say that's almost fitting in a way. I do so love the Captain's cruel irony. It's a talent."

[freedomsuitsme]

"It almost feels like something I would have pulled, back in the day."