[OPEN] i'm taking back the crown

[cacophonish]

Who: "Jeff" & anyone who wants to visit
What: Jail :(
When: Mid-month (immediately after this post) til... end of month? What's time anymore, I don't know
Where: The Brig :(
Warnings: Possible references to violence, possession, character death

Notes: it's pretty likely that there's somebody guarding the brig at any given time, even if they're not explicitly mentioned, so things aren't likely to go off the rails here. hit me up at weeyotch / weeyotch#8200 if you want to plot anything specific!

I see what's mine and take it
Ughhhhhhh. The brig! Is! So! Boring!! How is it, after two-and-whatever years trapped in this hellhole (plus or minus a year, decade, century, whatever, who knows how long it's been since he shuffled off to the great Nothing), this is his first time seeing the inside of the brig? Back on his cruise, if he acted up too much, and someone had to put him down? They went ahead and did it.

But not this time. No, now he's just sitting in a cell, dying of boredom, because the passengers don't have the balls to kill him.

But hey, you know what? Silver linings, looking at the bright side, turning lemons into lemonade, whatever: At least he doesn't have to pretend to be Jeff anymore.

Anyone who comes and visits (interrogates?) him will find that while he may look like sweet, simple, stupid Jeff, everything about him-- the way he moves, the way he speaks, the expressions on this face-- he's all Chase Collins.

Not that... not that anyone knows who Chase Collins is. But, well, if you want to find out, now's your chance.

Comments

[midnightroads]

Bash shows up with a selection of items in a Serena Eterna souvenir backpack, dressed in black. No scythe this time, and no humor.

Arthur knows an exorcism rite, but it requires the bones of the dead, and something they owned, and he doesn't have that. He doesn't have much of anything he needs. But he's brought some supplies, and he's going to try to cobble together...some sort of rite.

He has to try something. Anything.

[cacophonish]

Bash shows up, and all he can do is smile in pure satisfaction, like a cat who's just caught a mouthful of canary.

"Awww, babe. Knew you couldn't stay away."

[midnightroads]

"I'm here to exorcise you, not to visit you. You're nothing to me, and I want my boy back."

He doesn't even look at Chase as he begins to pull everything out of his bag. A bottle of rum--top shelf, completely full. A thermos of coffee. A few cigars.

(The rum is interesting. Bash doesn't drink, he never has. But he's mentioned the significance of rum to his pantheon before, to Jeff.)

[cacophonish]

Jeff knows the significance, and interestingly, so does Chase. It's one thing he's got in common with his host body: an interest in all things magic. For Jeff, it was about exploration and adoration, his love of the Gift and all the ways it might have touched people throughout history, and across the world. But for Chase? It had been part of an obsessive mission to find answers.

"Uh huh. Calling on daddy for help?" He grins. "I hope you packed a top hat."

[makesomedeals]

Max is not going to stay and chat but he is gonna stroll by at one point arms behind his back as he looks at Jeff.

"I certainly hope Jeff isn't in there still because he will be absolutely insufferable about this if he ever gets out."

From behind his back he produces a bottle of rum from his own distillery back home, the best of the best, so top shelf they'd keep it in a locked cabinet. He passes it through the bars to whoever this is right now, he doesn't care.

"For killing Crichton. I do hope it was enjoyable."

[cacophonish]

"If he ever gets out, he's probably going to hug you again." All the more reason not to give Jeff his body back, right?

And the sad thing is, Jeff would be able to appreciate the rum a whole lot more than his possessor can. He likes to chase a high as much as the bard does, yeah, but his drug of choice is pretty specific. Alcohol never did much for him. In spite of a rich and privileged upbringing, he probably can't even tell the difference between top shelf and well.

But hell, he's not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Chase accepts it with a mock salute of thanks, before moving to flop back down on his cot.

"You should've seen the look on his face..." He flashes Max a smug, downright contented smile, before breaking into a laugh. "He was so mad about it."

Die mad, Crichton. Oh. Wait. You did.

[makesomedeals]

"Eugh." A shudder because he knows he's right. Probably a big sloppy one whining about how much he missed him. Great.

A problem for future Max. Current Max was going to deliver this little token of his appreciation and leave but...

"Oh was he?" Max's tone darkens, "Tell me everything."

He wants all the tiny details, every bloody gasp and twitch and death gurgle. Regale him with this story Chase!

[cacophonish]

His lips curl in a Cheshire smile. "Oh... You would've fit right in on my cruise."

It's a compliment!

"Okay. So first, just--" He spreads his hands graciously. "--setting the stage here. I threw a clown at him. Life sized, pretty solid. It took him down easy. After that, all it took was a little--" Vague handwave. "--magic to pull some cobwebs around his throat, get it niiiice and tight, just really choked the fight out of him. By the time I got him on his back, he was glaring at me, I mean." Chase laughs, abrupt and giddy. "If looks could kill! Ah... You know, he even tried to reach Jeff? Did the whole, 'Oh, Jeff, I know you're in there, don't do it!' spiel... before I stabbed him in the throat with a lawn decoration. There wasn't a lot of talking after that, just. Heh. Gurgling. Sounded uncomfortable." Thoughtfully, he adds, "But he still found it in him to look really pissed at me. I was kind of impressed."

what are timelines a this point

[pointofhonoria]

There are some useful things about this body, most notably the fact that people trust this goody-two-shoes. It's not hard for her to offer to take over guarding for a minute or ten whilst someone else runs to another deck for something. That's long enough for her to get some time alone with the little asshole without worrying about being overheard.

"You feeling proud of yourself?"

[cacophonish]

He flashes the most obnoxious, syrupy sweet smile he can manage. It's very effective on this face!

"Always." A beat, before he laughs giddily. "I mean, come on! I straight up killed a guy, and I'm still alive!"

Can you believe it, 'Crabb'? Nobody even killed him!

[pointofhonoria]

"Unfortunately." That lacks a little of the bite it would usually have, because what's actually unfortunate right now is she has to be grateful no one killed Chase, or Ginger, or Omori. Their situation only gets worse if anyone dies. "They really are soft, aren't they? I don't get it. How has this trip been going months and they're not prepared to turn you into a smear on the floor just 'cause you're wearing that stupid face?"

The sentimentality and so on makes absolutely no sense. Who the hell uses the brig on this ship? It locks from the inside!

"If it wouldn't be more trouble than it's worth, I'd be tempted to take you out right now after that reckless stunt."

[cacophonish]

"I don't know. I've got zero useful memories of this voyage to work with. It's all--" He waves a hand at his-- well, Jeff's-- head vaguely. "--a big drunk blur." He grins, totally smarmy. "I guess this face is just too pretty to hurt."

And now Chase rolls his eyes.

"Why? It's not like this hurt your plans." Or did it? Who knows. Who cares, really. "We're all still alive, We've got these bodies, and everything's fine. They're not even willing to kill any of us."

[pinballer]

Vance slips in through some wall or another, sensing a ghost here. He doesn't care if someone else spots him (it's not like they can grab him and drag him out when he's intangible), but he stays close to the wall in case he needs to make a run for it.

This ghost has possessed someone he's never spoken to, which makes it easy to leave his expectations at the door.

"Hey."

[cacophonish]

Chase looks at him, tilting his head a little, with a slightly bemused smile on his face. He doesn't recognize the face from any of Jeff's memories, but he does have a memory of Bash telling the bard about some... ghost kid with big blond hair, so...

Big blond hair. Floating through walls. This is him, right?

"Hey." His smile grows into a sharp grin. "Neat trick."

[pinballer]

"Thanks."

Omori reminds him of someone he knew back home. Chase doesn't, so there are no pesky feelings to get in the way of just being upfront with what he wants to know.

"So, like, ghost to ghost. The fuck're you doing here? Is it just that being dead fucking sucks?" he says, "I'm not a snitch or anything. I got more in common with you than I do with them."

He means that because they're ghosts, and they know what it's like to be dead and trapped in some awful place they don't want to be. But if he knew that the previous passengers were more eager to fight the captain - and each other - he'd mean it that way, too.

[cacophonish]

Ghost to ghost. Chase watches him for a few moments, like he's trying to see past any poker face, before he settles back on his cot, leans against the wall, and shrugs. Compared to everyone else on the ship, the dead kid's probably the only one who might get it.

"Sucks doesn't even begin to cover it." He snorts. "You're dead back home, huh? Me too." He was never a ghost, his consciousness never continued, but he knows he died. There's no coming back from all that fire. "When you die here-- really die, I mean, there's..." He waves a hand, dismissive, as if the gesture can mask any of the very real fear he feels. "Nothing." He says it with a particular weight, a significance, that may imply that it's not like going to sleep or blacking out. It's a different type of nothing entirely. "No moving on, no haunting, no ending." His expression pulls into a look of pure resentment. "Juuuust... nothing."

[ss_buttcrack]

Bash said they caught this asshole and had him in the brig. Crichton debated with himself if he should go down there or not. He's sure if he'd asked for advice the answer would be to stay the hell away. But he can't. He just can't. So, here he is.

"We meet again," he says solemnly, coming to rest well before he's reached the bars. He's not sure how much he trusts those to actually hold.

"Can I get the name of the guy who went Wicked Witch of the West on me? I think you owe me that much."

[cacophonish]

"Look at you. Wow!" He holds his hands up as if to frame Crichton, in all his grumpy glory, in his line of sight. "You really bounced back from-- well." A grin. "You know." He draws a finger across his throat and makes a gagging, death rattle sound.

With a smile: "I'm Chase."

[ss_buttcrack]

"What kind of name is that? Chase?" he scoffs, flopping himself down cross-legged on the floor still a little ways from the bars.

"You think you're cute? Yeah, your magic tricks got the better of me this time, blah blah. Congratulations. You're still in there and I'm out here. You won't get the jump on me twice."

[cacophonish]

"Well." He shrugs. "I'd tell you to ask my mom, but she's dead."

Cue sad trombone. Not that he seems particularly upset about the fact. It's not like he even knew his birth mom, anyway. She died before he was even old enough to commit her face to memory.

He leans forward on his cot, clasping his hands together. "You know, I do think I'm cute! That's one thing Jeff had going for him." A scoff, before he mutters, "Pretty much the only thing, really."

Moving on.

"Anyway. Think you can get away before I light you on fire again? We didn't start the fire--" He begins to sing, though there's no magical intention behind it. "Oops. Well. Guess I did start the fire."

[konpeito_aji]

It's a lot harder to pull off any would-be "devious" machinations without his left hand around. Since he was a teenager, Nobunaga has been the public facing front, and Mitsuhide Akechi has been his underworld handler, able to operate in large shadow of Nobunaga, and able to act as though willing (and able) to betray Nobunaga should the need ever arise. All circumstances are different here. Nobunaga has less reason to worry about betrayal, and much greater capacity to blend in with the others. And yet, navigating politics without his counterweights was unbalanced, off-kilter and Nobunaga wasn't sure which way to set the sails. Maybe he believed in Taoism more than he'd like to admit.

After warning Crichton in advance, Nobunaga does his best to make sure no one else is too aware, and grabs a chair across from not!Jeff, sitting on it backwards. It's been... a long time since he did anything remotely close to interrogations. Even if Hideyoshi could be convinced it wasn't too dangerous for Nobunaga (personally and politically publicly facing), Mitsuhide was just better at it. Situations are reversed here. Mitsuhide would have to be the public face now. How strange to think. Idly, Nobunaga wonders if their personalities would even be able to handle such a dramatic shift.

"Hello." He politely nods his head, as close to a bow as he can get.

There's no point in pretending... anything really. Normally Nobunaga would have to pretend he doesn't care about anyone or anything other than his mission. That Jeff and Crichton were but pawns to be played as however was useful, but that pretense itself isn't useful here. It's a strange calculation and even stranger to realize Nobunaga doesn't have to pretend he doesn't care about the ghost possessing Jeff either.

"We weren't properly introduced before. I'm Nobunaga Oda, Demon King of the 6th Heaven, and I'm going to free the ghosts." Whatever that meant. "I don't expect your cooperation, but I would appreciate it." He does expect to get laughed at, but that's not too new. It had been a few years, but maybe that was all just a warm up to something bigger. "What can you tell me about how you came to take over this body? Does it have to do with souls?" There's a Billy Joel song about that.

The danger of Jeff's magic being used on Nobunaga isn't lost on him. Which is why he told Crichton at least that he was coming. So if Nobunaga did anything crazy, at least one person would know and be able to handle it. Probably. There is also a risk that he's vastly overestimating his capacity to handle things despite his complete unfamiliarity to magic, ghosts, and all the rest.

[cacophonish]

"Oooh," Chase intones as he watches the other man pull a chair across from him, on the other side of the bars. "Am I about to get my Hannibal Lecter moment?" Does he care if that reference is going to go right over the old timey guy's head? Nope.

And anyway, he doesn't know this guy, but he knows Jeff liked him. Which: big deal, Jeff liked everybody. Even Max, in spite of how obviously the Omnic couldn't stand him. As far as Chase is concerned, though, there's no reason to trust a regular human guy who actually calls himself a demon king, especially when he claims he's going to 'free the ghosts.'

Come on. 'Freeing' them can mean so many things.

So: Chase shrugs, looking totally innocent, and not even remotely trying to seem sincere about it.

"No idea."

[konpeito_aji]

Yeah, obviously Hannibal Lecter goes over his head. Oda does know about the Carthaginian general, because there's a fuckton of poetry about him, and he was about estimated to be even crazier than Nobunaga, (a total feat!) and waging war on the Roman Empire made Nobunaga be like 'I can relate!' However, Nobunaga is hoping not to lecture, and more to start up a dialogue.

"Did the Captain offer you a deal?"

Well, at least he wasn't laughed at, that's a good sign, maybe?!

[cacophonish]

Chase snorts at the notion, but through some miracle, he manages not to burst out laughing hysterically. He does, however, tilt his head and stare at Nobunaga like he's studying him.

"Why don't we skip the stupid questions, and you tell me what your theory is."

Guard Duty! (ota) (cw for 1, for wounds and extremely amateur field medicine)

[obeyseventually]

1.
Jack is exhausted. Not that carrying 'Jeff' is hard, he's just- He just had a fight for the first time in months, and he's still bleeding from it, on top of whatever else 'Jeff's' magic did. He doesn't feel great.

So he's immediately Done With It when he sees how the brig door functions. Fuck it. He shuts 'Jeff' in and reaches through the bars to lock it, and then he drags a shitty little chair over with telekinesis and sits down heavily in it.

He sighs heavily as he does, and when a moment's passed, he hauls his shoulder bag up and goes through it. Miraculously, the bottle in it didn't break, though the snacks he picked up from the buffet got squished, but it's a rectangular tin case of a first aid kit that he draws out. It's from Rapture, and whether by accident or by awareness of the brewing situation in the city, it could probably survive an explosion.

He lets that sit on his knees, since he has to take care of one other thing first. A few other things. Yes, he hiked all the way down to the brig with glass and metal still in his chest. So, probably there's a little dotted line to follow down to the brig. He's fine, he's taking care of it.

He's taking care of it by pinching a larger piece with his fingers and trying to wiggle it out, teeth bared as it stings. But it comes out easy enough, none of them are stuck that deep after all (at least, not in Jack's opinion), it's just that there's a lot of them. Good thing he has plenty of time to kill before his 'prisoner' wakes up, or before word spreads around the ship that someone's in the brig.


2.
Of course, Jack is old hat at self repair now, so if you want to talk to him without the distraction of sloppy first-aid, you'll find him sitting on the chair, arms crossed and back straight, holding his phone in one hand and his last bottle of Salamander rum in the other.