there is a community of the spirit.

[caballero]

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.

Comments

[serjeant]

'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."

[caballero]

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."

[serjeant]

...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.

[caballero]

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.