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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By the river in the garment district, there are a number of really excellent wholesale clothmakers who, given the right incentives, will deal with individuals rather than factories and big fabric stores. Or what pass for factories and big fabric stores in Baedal. It didn't take long for Penelope to find out that the right incentive is, often enough, a pretty face belonging to a loyal customer. Which she very much is.

So on a nice day, after a train ride and a not unpleasant stroll, she takes a detour by the riverside before going to do some business. A nice not-at-all human-looking Xenian promised to give her a deal on a particularly gorgeous flowy silk-like fabric that he (she? it??) had been overproduced recently, and which Penelope had not inquired to the origins of. You have to choose your battles, when you're stuck in a weird alien melting-pot world, trying to get by. There's no room to worry about bio-friendliness when half your day is spent just trying not to unintentionally poison yourself on alien food your human stomach can't digest.

Thankfully, donuts in Baedal are still just donuts, so Penelope has a relaxing stroll along the river with a donut, a cup of coffee, and a cigarette. It helps keep her mind off of whether or not Angus bothered to wait before she left the street before he took off for Ilde's house. Damn traitorous bastard cat. The absolute balls.

He stops short of actually asking for the whole story concerning this particular fabric's construction, but Bruce is briefly kidnapped to hold one end of a vibrant green-dyed skein over the harder currents. He cleans off after, but he suspects his nail beds are going to be that emerald color for a good while. It's all right.

Soaked up to his knees and carrying a leather bomber jacket (the one he had on when he arrived), Bruce spots Penelope when he's walking back up one grassy slope of the river's edge to where he left his shoes. He tilts his head when he sees her, considering; he doesn't say anything yet.

If anything could startle Penelope anymore, it wouldn't be a half-soaked good looking guy wandering out of the river. Not in this city. What's somewhat surprising is that he's staring at her like she's done something more remarkable than walk by holding a coffee and a donut. Maybe she has and she just doesn't remember? The thought stops her in her tracks.

"Oh god," she says, around half a mouthful of donut. "Did I sleep with you?" There's about a fifty/fifty chance of it having happened, it's worth it to ask.

The stages of reaction to that are, suddenly and obviously, uncharacteristically easy to read on his face. For half a heartbeat Bruce keeps looking at her with that reflective expression, as if he hasn't fully registered just yet what she's said. Puzzlement hits first - then something like being scandalized, and then incredulity. Bruce is not hugely expressive, no, but every so often he manages to get a little bit blindsided. Sometimes.

Well. It's Penelope, all right.

He opens his mouth, inhaling, ready to say something - side-eying her a little as he does. A host of potential responses flit through his head like the colorful face of a slot machine, and then the thought of yes it's her, no she doesn't remember me causes him to abandon whatever reply he'd settled on and veer in a new direction that could possibly be summed up as the bantering equivalent of pouring a forty out on the sidewalk for a fallen friend.

Deadpan: "You'd remember."

The long pause is something of a worry, and she narrows her eyes at him mildly while waiting for his reply. Something definitely went on in his brain just there, and if she were one of the more unscrupulous sort of magic people, she'd just love to listen in on whatever it was. But she is, unfortunately, far more scrupulous than most people of her acquaintance would give her credit for.

His actual answer is somehow incredibly reassuring. (Also correct: from the look of the guy, she is relatively certain she would.)

"Okay. You were giving me kind of a look, there." She waves her donut hand (and cigarette hand, incidentally) around vaguely for emphasis. "Having fun... wading?"

"Yes."

This is true. He did enjoy himself wading, so there.

(Her responses, while comfortingly herself, carries a lack of personal piss-taking that he finds slightly unsettling. It's better that she never went through the frustrating nightmare of that alien city; this shouldn't bother him at all.)

"You looked strikingly like someone I knew at home, for a moment. Sorry."

"That's not all that weird here. From what I hear, I mean, it's never been me before. It's still like... mildly unsettling that there is another person with my face wandering around somewhere, but I guess that's the fun of multiple universes!" Penelope attempts jazzhands here, but with so much crap in her hands, the effect is slightly less than ideal. "And by 'fun' I mean 'bullshit', of course, but you know."

Penelope shifts her weight on her hip, here, making it clear that she's going to hang around and wait for this guy to get his shoes back on so she can interrogate him further. It's not every day she meets a somewhat genial, not-bad-looking male-type individual who claims to A) know an alternate version of her and B) not have slept with her. Or maybe it's just some bitch with her face, who knows. Whatever. She intends to find out.

"So who's this bitch you know? She's probably not me, since you didn't seem pissed off at me when I caught you staring before, and if it was me, let's face it, you would be. So." At least she's smiling when she says it! Or what passes for a smile, with Penelope's dry expressions.

"It's mostly how you hold yourself," he says, and the soft-spoken quality of his voice somehow still seems to fit, compared to his flatline humor moments before. While that statement is mostly some mild-mannered defense in the face of the steamroller of WORDS WORDS WORDS that is this woman, it's also true. Physical likeness, despite being something Bruce has a very keen eye for, hardly matters. She acts, sounds, speaks, stands like herself.

He hasn't even heard her name yet; Bruce thinks very highly of his own intellect, news at eleven.

"Why would I be pissed off at you, if it was?" Faintly amused; he goes for his socks and beat-up combat boots that might be older than she is.

Penelope raises an eyebrow. That's not exactly the most common way people identify her. Almost always it's something far less... sweet, in a really neutral, inoffensive way. Her horrible mouth, or her smug fucking face, or something rude about her ass or how short she is. Never anything as considerate or involved as how she holds herself. It's perplexing. Why on god's green earth (or Baedal, whatever) would she allow someone she isn't related to and more importantly, isn't a woman, to know her long enough to know how she holds herself?

Abruptly, Penelope concludes that this man must be gayer than a box of birds.

"Hi, have you met me? That's why." She takes a sip of her coffee. "I have been alerted to the fact that I am more than your recommended daily dosage of snotty bitch several thousand times by people far less good looking than you. Apparently I make enemies. Shocking, I know, keep breathing."

Bruce balances easily on one foot at a time as he gets this done, knotting laces quickly without actually seeming hurried. He does wobble a little, once, but it's slight (and wholly manufactured as to not seem quite so eerily physically competent). It's only then, in her little diatribe about herself, that he feels a pang of loss - he stops himself from frowning.

"I'll manage." To keep breathing, he means - and he keeps watching her, too, without a trace of offense. "I'm Tom, by the way."

Which is not what he told her the first time, and he wonders if it matters, here. That odd feeling of loss remains like smoke; they aren't alike at all, but that visceral sense of not belonging, not-at-fucking-all, was something they shared.

"Penelope Lane, just... to confirm. Nice to meet you." And weirdly enough, it is. It is nice to meet someone who, for whatever reason, already has a positive personal opinion of her. For once.

"You have me at kind of a loss, though, I have to say. I mean, look at you, with all the advantages in this situation, and me, standing here with my fucking donut like a moron." It is a delicious donut, though, so she takes another bite. It occupies her mouth just long enough for him to finish tying his shoes in blessed silence. But that's about all he'll be getting for a while, because Penelope fully intends to squeeze this Tom guy for every last drop of information on how the hell he knows her. "Tell me the tale. How did we meet?"

And finish tying his shoes he does, tugging the ends of his still-damp jeans back into place and straightening up. It's not so cold out he'll be in any real discomfort - it's warmer than Gotham - and he doesn't mind the condition he's in at present. After he wipes the remnants of moisture and grass off his hands against his thighs he starts pulling his jacket on, and moves so that he's fully off the sloped incline of the riverbank, up next to Penelop.

"Nice to meet you too," he says, and quirks an eyebrow a little. "I never said it was you, you know. Just you reminded me of someone." ... Teasing her?

He is immediately greeted with an eyeroll that has had a lifetime of perfection. He has perfect balance and ninja reflexes-- Penelope has facial expressions that can set fire to someone she doesn't like from 100 yards.

"Come on. Who the fuck else would I remind you of." That's not so much a question as it is a mild scolding.

It strikes her that it's strange how not threatened she is by this guy, physically. It seems like as soon as he started talking to her, she settled into her usual easy-yet-curse-laden banter, the kind she assumes with her friends (her mother gets a much less angry version, naturally). She hasn't gone into Fuck Off mode, or Business Talk mode, or even I Would Like To Have Sex mode, which is actually sort of alarming. Why is this guy different, just because he says he knows a different version of her, one which might be nothing like her at all? It's disconcerting, and it knocks her off her game, just a little. She hates that. But what she hates more is that he keeps avoiding her questions.

"Are you always like this? Or are you just having a day. Because I cannot understand why I would have put up with your extreme evasion if I wasn't fucking you."

"I could be having a bad day," he faux-muses, breezing by her demands about who she reminds him of. "I haven't been here for very long, it's pretty weird still."

He really is kind of insufferable, sometimes. But this is familiar, this back and forth, and he likes it a little. Plus he's stalling, because not even Bruce Wayne knows how to explain something like this; it makes him think about Richard Grayson a bit, which is irritating.

Fighting in the arena isn't anything like what Seoraj is used to, but it keeps his hand in and his reflexes sharp - sharp and getting sharper, when he makes a point of punching above his weight, dealing mainly with opponents who can take a hammer-blow without it ending the bout. (Expressly for that reason; he's not here to dance, but he'd rather not kill a sparring partner by accident.) He worries about getting soft here, sometimes, about losing sight of- something. It's a strange life that he leads, halfway in and halfway out. Without his community, his context, his life and what he is. The stillness, much as it suits him, leaves him more restless than he'd have thought.

As he walks back out into the city - hammer in hand and a coat on loose over his thin shirt, tacky with sweat and some of his own blood - he watches the practise, too, letting it quiet his own thoughts as he slows to a stop by the other man observing them. Not close enough to be invading his space uninvited, but near enough that it could be said he was joining him in said observation.

It's difficult to ignore a six-foot-four medieval-looking warrior sporting a giant hammer and bits of his own blood, and so Bruce doesn't; he doesn't stare, either, just notes the fact that he's been joined.

And while ignoring is difficult, it's not impossible, so for a spell, Bruce forgets - absorbed as he is in watching what he's watching, when the tone of the routine shifts, he tilts his head, unconsciously drumming his hand against his bicep, arms crossed. (There's still that funny awareness to him, even then, taken in for a bit by his interest.)

The cadence is familiar in degrees, the orthodoxy alien. It's fascinating, and already being spun into his memory.

After a time, when the sounds of unified shouts and sandals sliding over stone have begun to dull, edging on the break-up of levels and other activities, Bruce looks over at his mysterious companion. It's a little odd; there's not a moment when he seems to stop paying attention to what's before them and start in on the other man. He just is, now, like some shadowed footnote.

Edited 2011-11-09 11:15 (UTC)

At proper examination, Seoraj is an odd blend of the modern (the coat, the boots) and the archaic (the kilt, the hammer - the hair could really go either way) but his manner is squarely the latter when he offers Bruce a hand to clasp at the wrist in greeting. "Seoraj," he says, friendly without being forward; he has an easy confidence, a curiosity about the world around him that doesn't leave room for there to be any hesitation.

Why not watch a fascinating display of a style he's never seen before, in a method he's never witnessed? Why not introduce himself to a stranger watching, too? Something interesting might happen next.

He isn't surprised by the friendly way he's approached there - Bruce isn't nearly so small-minded to find an incongruity between size and demeanor - but he wasn't really expecting it, all the same. His slowness to reciprocate doesn't read quite as hesitation, but more like it takes him a second to process and acknowledge what Seoraj just did as what it was.

When he does return the gesture, hands still a little bruised and grip firmer than one might expect from someone his size (...compared to Seoraj), he seems at ease, but no less guarded. A little curious. "Tom."

(It takes him a minute to pinpoint that it's the lack of mania in the other man's friendliness that's throwing him off.)

Other people have found that incongruity - or simply not seen it, looked at him and read Arum warrior and made their own assumptions that he's handled as seemed best in each case (...sometimes this meant trolling, in other words) - but less, he finds, in Baedal than any other place he's been. And he's been around, at least in his own world. Seoraj thinks sometimes he's spent more of his life walking (marching) than anything else. Enough, at least, that he knows an educated eye when he sees one; Tom knows what he's looking at. That's interesting.

"Haven't seen the like of that before," he remarks when he lets go, indicating the dispersing crowd of practitioners. "It's a warrior's art, though, isn't it?" This may be the politest way someone has ever called Bruce out on his particular extracurriculars, but - and it's evident - that's not really what Seoraj is doing. 'Tom' seems to know more about this than he does, and he's genuinely curious. When you want to know something, you ask.

Edited 2011-11-09 12:03 (UTC)

Just a few short years ago and Bruce would have skittered away from a line like that out of pure paranoia; the idea of being so transparent, especially when he hadn't quite gotten all his (violent, calculating, militant) ducks in a row yet was enough to trigger a full treat in him. Now he's relaxed about it - as much as he can be, anyway. He still seems wary, but it's in a way that says that's how he is about everything. If people in Gotham were used to seeing warriors, then they'd see him plainly, celebrity act be damned.

As such, that assumption doesn't bother him. It's not the blood that marks Seoraj for what he is; Bruce certainly doesn't need any.

So he nods. "I know the track pattern, but the strikes are new to me."

Edited 2011-11-09 12:20 (UTC)

Honestly, the most remarkable thing about Bruce's implied competence is the most remarkable thing about everyone in this city-- Seoraj has just never been accustomed, before Baedal, to the notion that foreigners are really all that...well, competent. He's had his horizons expanded, but when all your travels reflect the fact that no one wants to fight their own wars...

Some prejudices go unquestioned for longer than others, that's all.

"It's a training form, then." He sounds satisfied; that's what he thought, and while he's not deeply invested in being right about things, it's a good assurance of his own ability to keep up with the world that his reasoning isn't twelve steps behind everybody else's. "A bit more decorative than I'm used to." If this is deprecating in any direction, it's his own- he's not criticizing them for their elegance. He admires it, even if it's not something he consciously thinks of cultivating.

(But you don't live as long in his line of work if you don't have a certain amount of finesse.)

If Bruce has learned anything about multidimensional settings, it's that trying to lie about his inclinations to people who know better is not only useless, but stupid, and tempting of bigger problems than being known as someone who might know a thing or two about how to throw a punch. He's not an accountant this time, he's a computer engineer, and he's just got some hobbies - ones that aren't golf. That's fine.

"It's..."

A lapse; brief. Again there's no hesitation, but something else. Like he's floating on some current only he can feel.

"Katas are like oral tradition for this art. Patterns that are proven to be effective are collected like this, made into precise routine, taught to everyone and passed down, so that the system is preserved through generations."

Context, suddenly, for why he's so taken with the fact that he only recognizes parts of these.

'Katas' is a word he hasn't heard it before; Seoraj contextualizes it and commits it to memory with the ease of having done this before, and it's there in his manner, how accustomed he is to learning like this. Just by approaching someone, asking, listening, then remembering what he's told - he seems like someone who passes through.

"It's not as we do, in Arum," he says, reflectively, like he has to remember that 'not like Arum' is not 'inherently a bit crap and sad' - which he does, sometimes, but he does consistently catch himself and explore beyond that. The learning process here is visible in a way he's evidently unembarrassed by. "But we make wars; maybe that's the difference. To fight in the arena is not much like soldiering, either."

But valuable enough to him that this isn't the first or the last time he's walked out flexing the hand holding the hammer.

"It's teaching discipline, not combat."

Which can be a funny concept even for the great unfocused modern masses who have no understanding of martial arts (to say nothing of war) deeper than bad action movies. Whether or not Bruce thinks Seoraj should be impressed by that notion is unknown; he doesn't sound like he's saying it to be lofty, merely informative. For his own practices, he very much sees the value of discipline concerning schools of thought that require it. But such schools were not his only instructors.

(Crane style. Tiger style. Ripping your opponent's face off with a broken beer bottle style. It's good to know all the angles.)

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)

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