multiversallogs | there is a community of the spirit.

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there is a community of the spirit.

Who: ~~Bruce Wayne~~ Tom and you.
What: Creeping out from the fringes and the shadows, investigating the city through a closer lens.
Where: Various areas in Baedal, mostly the central districts, and along the river.
When: Coardi (Wednesday), or any day this week after that, I'm easy.
Notes: OPEN LIKE AN OPEN THING. I want your cr and I want your revenge, tag in under whatever scenario your dark heart desires.
→ new note: if you'd like to start a new thread please come up with a new setting on another day, Coardi has hit critical mass of things Mr Hermit BatCrab would put up with before vanishing back into the shadows. :E
Warnings: TBA. (Swearing? Not much else.)

Bruce doesn't want to admit it at first, but after he gets a decent night's sleep and has a real conversation with someone, he feels a lot better. It took him an hour of silent reflection on Hasi's little balcony to come to terms with having felt awful to begin with - it's not being here, it's everything else, being here is a strange misstep but it isn't enough to throw him, not really - and to accept that attempting to remain a ghost in the machine wasn't an acceptable plan of action. For a whole armful of reasons. Also on that balcony, struck by the view at night, with oddly-powered lights set into strange buildings like scattered candles and gems, Baedal reminded him of Baku, maybe Lahore, and the inoffensive memories chided at him from quiet corners about his aseptic behavior.

He still isn't social when he goes out. He's quiet, unassuming, and spends hours wandering, watching without truly interacting. He keeps to the edges of the river, then, walking alongside it off the roads, going under bridges where he can. There are people washing the dye out of great, bright reams of fabric in the still shallows, speaking a language he guesses must have once been of Earth; he practices with them for a time, talking of the river's current and temperament and the goddess that lives within instead of about the tenure of their citizenship.

He walks up into the city proper when he comes to the water's split, skirting the arena - there are men and women practicing familiar-but-not-quite movements in a great lined rectangle. It's an experience on a scale Bruce never had even during his own time as a student, and so he sits and watches for a while. A woman speaks to him about a guild that trains and dispatches warriors to serve as private guardians; he keeps the paper she gives him, but invests in nothing further. It isn't anything he'd truly consider, but he's curious in an academic way about what lies inside their doors.

There's a library he'd like to see, but a group of children with wildly varying ages (and genetic markers) end up kicking multicolored rocks into the cobblestone street - he kicks one back, artfully, and ends up engrossed for the next hour learning a game with rules he suspects are not actually written down anywhere. With few words, he teaches one of them how to hold his arm to balance anything on his hand, and laughs a little, privately.

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Impressed, no, but not in a way that suggests he's somehow unimpressed. The idea of seeking out this kind of discipline for any other reason is alien, is the thing, and while he's vaguely acquainted with the notion he's never really given it much thought before. Now seems like as good a time as any to do so and he wonders what drives that, what reasons there are. Violence has defined his life without ever really being something that appeals to him - he's really, really good at it, grown into a role that he doesn't know how to put aside or if he wants to - and it's just an odd thought.

His world and his life aren't much like most here, though; he should look into this a little more. Maybe there's something in it worth knowing. (Or maybe it'll just make him uncomfortable and confused, that's always possible - being openminded doesn't mean not having any of his own hangups.)

"What for, then, if not combat?" Arum training has adapted over generations, because the world changes around them and they've needed new ways to rip parts of it down. A holding pattern doesn't make sense to him, but he's already acknowledged the kind of context he comes from when he approaches it.

Edited 2011-11-09 14:20 (UTC)

He shrugs one shoulder, slight. "Soldiering." Which is different from combat, despite the relation - as surely Seoraj knows. "There are schools of thought that believe if you're not focused and disciplined enough to do that, you aren't going to be able to hold a line, or follow orders."

A textbook answer, of course. Bruce may be fighting his own personal 'war', but it's a far different ballgame than trenches and phalanxes. (He is assuming, for the record, that reasons like 'practice' and 'focus' are self-evident.)

"Some people just like the exercise. Others equate it to meditation."

And then it veers off into spiritualism, which Bruce attempts to avoid like a cat ducking from water.

"'Meditation'," he echoes, amused in a way that's half-disbelieving - he can accept that textbook response about discipline, that's something that he can make sense of, but with war and violence and its forms tied so seemingly close together in something like this, he doesn't quite see where the relaxation comes in. In the focus, maybe, but the suggested method unsettles him in a way he leaves aside for now. "Discipline, I see that. Maybe some people should just take up running, though, aye?"

More of a joke than a real argument, that.

He smiles a little at that, small and half-private; it feels rare.

"Most people do."

"I can't knock them trying these things without the soldiering," Seoraj observes, scratching the edge of his small beard with his free hand and then testing the weight of the hammer demonstratively with the other- "I might start running to fat in this damn city otherwise." He speaks of Baedal with an odd fondness, unlike some of the other recent arrivals- but considering most of his time is spent on hard physical labour (both at work at a home), it seems likely he's going to turn into an unexercised labrador in the near future.

(But he might slow down and it just seems- wrong.)

"Yeah..."

One word, a slightly distracted tone - Tom (Bruce) doesn't quite look like he's staring off into the middle distance of vague internal panic, but there's definitely a sense there that he is in no way ready to actually think about what the fuck he's going to do here yet. He remembers Taxon (quite vividly, in fact) and the various absurd obstacles that were thrown at them to keep the rats in the maze busy, and thinks if that happens again he might just ... well, that's not going to happen again, basically.

So far, at least, this feels like a far more advanced experiment. He's going to have to do a lot more than try to electrocute a wall or wonder about psychic interference from stuff portals; there's a whole host of bizarre things and a real, functioning culture to pick through, but he's going to have to because he can't stay here, he can't just acclimate unless it's for the purpose of subterfuge. And there's a fully functioning economy here, and people he knows, so he actually has to participate in society and figure out how to pretend to fit in and get by and, hey, at least he won't be knocked for never finishing his degree at Princeton because it's not like there's a computer science industry here, and -

- He's visibly spiraling off in his own head, isn't he.

Abruptly (but still with that uncanny inherent grace, while awkward, it's a skill), Bruce refocuses on Seoraj, like a rubber band snapping back into place. Ehhem. He points - with one finger, semi-politely - in the direction of that hammer.

"You're a-" blacksmith? Builder? Spiritually opposed to blades? Help.

Edited 2011-11-10 00:44 (UTC)

The temporary vagueness reminds him of what he persists in thinking of as those so clever they can't be entirely trusted to mind themselves, which is mostly entertaining for the sake of how incongruous it is with the impression he's already been given. ('Not that'.) He thinks briefly of the clever little woman from Hellsing who knew his cousin, and his mouth quirks in something that's very like a smile at the edge.

"That'd be a soldier." A quick pause, here, turning the hammer's handle in his hand, "Blacksmith, by trade." So not an officer, then. (Just his little joke.) "'Master Stoneshell' being the title I seem to have inherited down Stoneshell way for the forge."

With a testing heft of the hammer, he shrugs. "If I fight above my level, I can hit harder, not worry so much about it. Wouldn't want to take the axe to someone, though." Yes. This is his non-lethal sparring weapon.

As Seoraj may come to learn in time, that is a fairly accurate summary of this man. (Sigh.)

Bruce still has a little cognitive dissonance when it comes to hearing people talking about what amounts to killing over war and ... just going along with it, but even he in all his self-imposed fanaticism is aware enough to contextualize things. Things like, 'actual war', and ... 'Enfys*'.

So he doesn't really blink, at the mention of the axe. One follows the other.

"That makes sense." It's what Bruce does almost as a rule, out there in the dark as that monster. When he engages something, someone, he knows he can't kill by simple accident, it's easier (better).

* = doesn't mean he has a thing for people with particular weaponry, shush.

Edited 2011-11-10 11:21 (UTC)

"Makes me faster, gets 'em a mark-down if they come by the forge," Seoraj shrugs, with his usual slightly creative business sense. (He doesn't need to work, he could afford not to, but he doesn't know what he'd do with his time if he didn't and in quantities such as he currently has at his disposal, he's honestly not entirely sure what all this money is for. What does it do? Mostly, slowly accumulates more of itself in a bank in Gidd.) "Not such a bad way of doing. Funny place, though."

After a beat, candidly, he concedes, "I never did live in a city before."

Bruce actually finds that to be a wonderfully neighborly business sense, as if he ever got hit in the head with a damned hammer that size, he'd certainly appreciate a discount on whatever the hell hammering he'd need later. (He'll probably pass on hammer sparring. ... For now.)

As for cities - Bruce seems to go a little pensive at that again, and his gaze meanders out at the courtyard.

"It can be all right."

Perhaps he just hasn't decided about this one just yet.

"Passed through 'em often enough," Seoraj observes, easily conversational- aware of that moment and not pretending not to be, but easy company that lets Bruce do what he'd like to with it, in his own time. "None quite like this on the whole of things, but I can see bits and pieces here and there. We get around, when the lowlanders can't be fighting their own wars."

It's been an interesting life, put it that way.

It's only through the grace of being utterly ignorant to most popular (or cult, let's face it) media that Bruce does not then inquire Does that make you a highlander?

Instead: "Where are you from?"

Open-ended question; there's a sense he knows what he's getting into by asking something like that in a place like this.

"That'd be Arum, up in the highlands." So yes, actually, that does make him a highlander and it's very, very sad that neither of these men would understand why that's funny. He does look wryly aware of the fact that it's incredibly unlikely Bruce is going to recognize any of this - there's been one person in Baedal thus far to pick it, and that had been strange in itself. (He wonders what happened to that woman.) "My clan's got a settlement not far from the Valdis ruins- funny old place, now the castle's starting to properly go back to the land. Cats bloody everywhere."

And lo and behold, something like genuine, if uncertain, recognition flickers into his gaze at the mention of Valdis. It's not concrete familiarity, but he does look like he's trying to place it. He doesn't quite like that - Bruce hates it when he can't remember something, anything, especially when he can't chase after it without looking like a total crazy person.

"...Cats?"

...all right, he wasn't expecting that.

"Aye- mountain cats, the big fat bastards with the angry faces." They do just always look mad, it's kind of a thing; Seoraj has long debated (usually over a drink or several) whether this is just how they're built or if they are, in fact, pissed off all the time. Them being cats, he can't quite rule out the possibility that both things are true.

Bruce gets around, man.

It's beginning to crystallize in his head, and it's... not really a thrilling revelation, all things considered, but it's not bad, either. He's moved on enough since that handful of encounters that it doesn't bother him outright. So he gives a little quirk of an almost-smile at the cat description and then: "I think I've seen it, but not in time with you. Pre-ruins."

"Funny, this place," Seoraj observes, reflective and a little quietly entertained by just how weird his life is slowly becoming the longer he lives in Baedal. "Most nobody's even heard of Arum, and then there's the woman who knew Ewar, and a man who saw Valdis, and both of you from no where like."

He's not questioning coincidence- just wryly amused by it.

"It's not the weirdest thing I've heard of," he observes, tone inexplicable - whatever he thinks about all that, he's not inclined to give it away. (He's so fucking tired of different dimensions, and the thought that his reality might end up somehow weakened by these intersections. He doesn't want anything to do with those other worlds full of demigods in bright costumes and masks.)

"I've heard stranger." After a beat, he caveats his concession- "I won't say I've heard stranger any place but here, but I've heard it."

"It's certainly turning out to be unique."

Bruce doesn't want to confirm or deny having been anywhere more - or equally - fantastic, because either avenue would suggest he might want to talk more about it. He doesn't. Well. He might. Seoraj is bizarrely easy to talk to, and that in itself is starting to make the paranoid impulses in the back of Bruce's mind fuss at him to leave. He doesn't know how to talk to people without lying profusely or using the conversation as a thinly veiled battle (flirting, bantering, teasing), and that makes him vulnerable in a way he doesn't like.

'Easy to talk to' is one of the traits about himself that Seoraj has actively cultivated - this laidback, benevolent curiosity about everyone and everything around him - not for any more calculated reason than 'because he likes to be talked to'. That's his life; see the world, meet interesting people, stab approximately half of them. Despite his line of work (in some ways, maybe, because of it), he just likes people and it helps to be able to settle in quick without putting down roots.

Most people don't seem quite so aware of it as Tom does - the things they say don't seem so consciously chosen. He wonders, in a way he doesn't always, what else there is.

"No arguments," he says, though, amiably. "I'm an odd one for my cohort-" no assumptions, "-in that I don't so much mind it."

He can't figure out if that remark is leading or not - is Seoraj trying to get Bruce to say what cohort he's in? Surely it'd be polite to reference it, or ask. His paranoid mind goes immediately to Yes, he's trying to get something and then, Why?

No nefarious potential spring to mind with any credence, but somehow, that's worse. What if this is just some genuinely friendly person, talking to him with no ulterior motive?

That Bruce suddenly shies away is visible if you look closely, more apparently in something that closes behind his eyes than even the way he glances down unprompted, ducking from that reflection in more ways than one. "It's not so bad." He's shifted his stance, now, angling like he needs to get going. He does. "Maybe I'll see you around."

...well. Seoraj isn't sure exactly what prompted that - but maybe nothing- they're just chatting on the side of the street, he could personally probably use a shower, if Tom's got other places to be, he lets himself be briefly disappointed by the abruptness and lets it go without too much analysis.

He grins, instead, turning the hammer handle in his hand as he starts to move away. "I'm hard to miss in a crowd."

Even in Baedal.

It's more pragmatic than it is self-pitying; Bruce is socially maladjusted, weird, and an inconsistent friend (at best), and it's not really fair to inflict his Halloween grab-bag of issues onto unsuspecting persons - particularly nice ones. The broken people who force their way into his life are one thing, and he struggles with that, too, but ...

The look he flashes Seoraj isn't a smile, and it's not apologetic, but it's not something wholly itself, either, like something suspended between.

The second he's past him, he's gone, like he's vanished into nothingness.

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