I don't exist

[deservesadaisy]

Who: Ivan and Ilde Decima
What: in-person meeting and comparing notes
Where: out and about in the Brock Marsh area
When: Veerdi, early evening
Notes: If anyone feels a burning need to run into Ivan pre-Ilde, feel free, but brace for possible trolling.
Warnings: They are both terrible people.

Since the militia's raid, Ivan has mainly been cautiously exploring his new city. He's not quite sure yet precisely what he intends to do; he'll get bored eventually, he'll need to do something, but in the meanwhile, he's gathering information and blending in without much effort.

He's looking at some of the new inventions in a curiosity shop in Brock Marsh, and though Ilde has never seen his face, she could very well recognize his voice as he asks the shop keeper a question, clipped English with a deceptive hint of Wales and no hint of Russia at all.

Comments

[rhinemaid]

"Senility is a poor excuse." Just in case he was wondering if she's one of those people.

[deservesadaisy]

He laughs quietly. "I suppose, yes. But to address your earlier comment, there were no 'good old days,' but there were one or two days, here and there, worth thinking of fondly."

[rhinemaid]

"Picky," Ilde remarks, feeling comfortably free to do an aboutface on whatever subject she chooses to needle him idly about; it doesn't much matter, so ... well, it doesn't much matter. She detours almost abruptly, though, turning down another street that leads (inevitably) to the riverbank, tired of walking for a while and fond of the water. Ivan will follow her or he won't, she figures.

[deservesadaisy]

He does; he wasn't kidding about having nothing else pressing, and she interests him.

"Where is it you're trying to get back to?" he asks, after a short pause of walking and smoking.

[rhinemaid]

Ivan likes the sound of his own voice well enough that Ilde watches him out of the corner of her eye as they walk- she moves when notices, and the last half of that tells her enough.

"New York. Eventually." Her tone doesn't suggest it's for any pleasant purpose. "Sonja and I have things to do there. We're going back."

There is no question of that, in her mind.

[deservesadaisy]

"God help New York," he says, lightly, based on her tone. He'd gone there in 2001, but nothing terribly interesting had come of it. "What year?" he adds, remembering that it might matter.

[rhinemaid]

"2011. There's no God in New York or anywhere else." On that subject, she is briskly matter of fact. If anything's watching over their world, from what she hears, it'd have turned its eyes away from that city years ago.

After a moment, since it bears noting here, "Most worlds aren't like ours."

[deservesadaisy]

"I doubt highly there was any God in my world either," he says, "but I take it that's not quite what you mean. What happened?"

[rhinemaid]

With a shrug, "The end of the world. I missed most of that."

Not ordinarily something you'd think a person could miss, but Ilde had been in a Prometheus cell half out of her mind as her body shifted to match her nature; it wasn't until Sonja came that she knew why. This is and is not an easy topic - there's a lot to do with their world that she isn't used to having to explain to anyone else. There's someone else who knows more, or it simply isn't necessary.

As such, what little she says is factual and oddly impersonal, even when she speaks of herself.

[deservesadaisy]

He considers her. "How did it come, then?" He was from the same year, but he supposed he might have just checked out a little early.

[rhinemaid]

"A storm, five years ago." Not something he could've missed if they were from the same world, though Europe wasn't hit as hard. "That's what I'm told. Everything changed."

[deservesadaisy]

"Tell me, about the storm." It's neither gentle nor harsh, but he does want to know, and he's will to discard his devil-may-care attitude to find out.

[rhinemaid]

"I can't." It's almost the same sort of matter of fact, brisk and accompanied by the way she turns her head to make sure she's on the right track to the river, having the incidental side effect of rendering anything else he says out of her line of sight inaudible. "I didn't see it, I didn't know until recently. The storm came, and people were changed. The population was decimated twice over, a lot of the people left behind are...different. Some mutated with psychosis, some developed powers they didn't have before, others were just amplified." Like her. "There aren't cities like this any more."

She finds the fact they still exist in other places obscurely offensive, which is not something she can easily explain to herself - let alone somebody else.

[deservesadaisy]

"I suppose it was always going to be something," he murmured. If it didn't happen in his world, something else would later. Another natural disaster, a misguided fool like Mitchell, the humans blowing themselves up. Living forever was all very well, but there had to be a place to live. "For a bit, I thought it was going to be the Americans in the 1960s. I wonder if it was, in some place."

[rhinemaid]

"Human fuck ups bringing about the apocalypse wouldn't be the biggest surprise out there." Tell us how you really feel, Ilde.

[deservesadaisy]

"No," he agreed, thoughtful and keeping pace with her. "They didn't always have the potential to do it instantly, but it was always going to happen."

[rhinemaid]

After a long, long pause, "Well, it wasn't them. Some of them just haven't exactly helped."

Prometheus is never very far from her mind; some scars take a long time to heal, and she hasn't had a lot of time out versus those very long years in. It would be so much easier just to hate-

Most of the time, she remembers that 'easier' isn't 'better'. Most of the time.

[deservesadaisy]

He was quiet a bit longer. "May I ask which sort of 'different' you are?" Mutated, augmented, changed.

[rhinemaid]

"I told you when we talked, I'm a naiad." She wonders, briefly, if changing species truly did happen to anyone- she knows some people gained abilities, but there's a difference between telepathy and a complete alteration of physiology. Isn't there? Humans with powers are still human...

...this is actually a distracting train of thought, and Ilde forgets she's supposed to be finishing another sentence.

[deservesadaisy]

"I know you did, but I wasn't sure if you were always a naiad, or if that was a change - in degree, or in kind." He watches her, guarded but intent.

[rhinemaid]

Adrift in her own contemplations of species, power and identity, Ilde misses most of that - thinking about how frightening it had been to change, how the reassurance had come in the sense of finally feeling at home in her own skin, her own body. She remembers it like a key turning in a lock (she remembers what his blood tasted like when she tested herself on the guard's flesh)-

It's a sobering thought, when she takes that soothing sense of completion out of the equation. If she'd been different and wrong, if the storm had made her the human she thought she was instead, if a hundred other things. She can't help but imagine that fear not fading, and feels a stirring of empathy.

"-what?" as she realizes he was talking. "Oh. I'm more myself."

[deservesadaisy]

He inclines his head, accepting the answer. "I didn't mean to disturb your thoughts."

[rhinemaid]

"They'll keep." There's a bench by the river, ahead of them, and it'll be as good a place as any to put the box down on her lap for a minute; it's too big to easily get in her handbag, but she can probably figure out something to carry it that leaves her hands free. (She thinks she could probably bean someone pretty hard with it if need be, but she'd still rather have her hands ready.) "What do you think of Baedal, Ivan?"

[deservesadaisy]

He sits, leaving a polite space between them, and crosses his legs. "It's very devil-may-care on the surface, more than many places. But it's also clearly ruled by people who are used to being challenged constantly but ineffectually." He pulls out another cigarette. "It should be interesting to watch, for awhile."

He wasn't sure what he was now, but if he was still immortal (and he'd no reason to suspect he wasn't) he could afford to wait and watch much longer than most of the city's residents.

[rhinemaid]

"Devil-may-care." It isn't a bad description; Baedal is a city with an unusually high population of movers and shakers, people who come into crises with a certain mindset and attitude, and to a degree it permeates into the city's own mood. Making new friends and acquaintances while casually picking up a weapon against the common enemy is ... not actually unusual for Ilde's own world, but the apocalypse is an extenuating circumstance that most probably don't have.

Then again, she thinks of Boromir for a moment, and all the things he doesn't want to talk about. Maybe 'most' is overestimating good fortune.

"You're a voyeur, then?"