multiversallogs | when will it start to almost break you

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when will it start to almost break you

Who: Seoraj & Tom who is really Bruce.
What: Nerdings.
Where: A stelanmancy repository in Flag Hill.
When: ~Today.
Notes: ~~Wildly making shit up~~ Worldbuilding.
Warnings: TBA, don't really expect any though.

It's been less than a week since he's found work, and only a meager few days since his new co-workers have discovered his affinity for devices and materials beyond the ken of Baedal's technology. Familiarity with these things are common - especially in the newly chosen - but proficiency to his degree is rare, and even rarer to find in someone looking for work in the engineering field. So it's no surprise that one of the first assignments he's given is to go into a highly secure facility and dig through looking for ultra-rare materials. He actually knows what they are, who cares who he is or where he's from.

Not all stelanmancy facilities are the same, he's been told; in a way they're like gardens. The techniques and magics that work for some experts don't work with others, and the lay of the land always plays into it, as well. The Flag Hill center is an old round wooden building that looks low and unassuming from outside. Within there lies sights like Bruce has never seen: pools of captive fog, some encased in glass, some left to broil as thaumaturgists pick through like great crane-birds wearing plague masks to prevent them from the dream sickness. The man who shows him through the dark wooded halls tells him about the lake in the back, the size of an Olympic pool, through which buildings are pulled and then hovered away with by mages.

Walking across planks of petrified wood in between mirrored islands, Bruce crouches down to watch as a witch with pointed teeth and a friendly smiles coaxes a parasol and necklace made of gold coins into existence.

It's incredible.

An hour later, he's sitting on the floor of an overhang outside what passes for an office in here (open, lattice-worked bungalows built into the walls, looking out over the glass-covered pools), sorting through bits and pieces of metal spilled out onto the wooden surface, speaking in low tones about what's what. The stelanmancer sitting with him listens raptly, being from a time long before factory-processed metals.

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There's always a shred of hope Seoraj will decide he seems insane and wander away, right?

If Bruce were the type to laugh at simple absurdities, he would, there - but instead he just quirks another one of those almost-smiles. "No, I'm not one prone to any magic."

He doesn't say the words my world; he's not hiding it, not really. He's just.. protective.

"I'm an engineer."

Before he can expand on that (if he was even going to, anyway) Lilura comments on how incredible the things some worlds have built are, with all the little moving pieces and electric parts. Things like that are rare through the fog, and rarer to be working; but then he's called away, and Seoraj and Bruce are left there alone.

"An engineer," Seoraj echoes, taking a moment to contextualize it - he thinks of serving in Mawor and the things that the Duke there was doing for his city, what an ideal siege it was. They couldn't have been designed a better city to defend if Nitral had actually been planning for Arums when he'd started working on his walls.

After a few moments, in Lilura's wake, he says, "I didn't used to believe in magic," like they're a conspiracy of sensible men. "Saw and heard some strange things during the war, but that's as may be."

This is harder to deny, but he still leaves it to them as know what they're doing. He's a blacksmith. (He's a soldier.)

Saying I'm an engineer without specifying a field is parts the science-world's version of, 'I work in consulting' and parts concerning egomania; it could be either one, with Bruce. The truth is he's really just that smart - fortunately in Baedal he can get away with not looking any more advanced than someone familiar with mechanics and their social applications, as there's simply not enough tech about the place to give him away.

"It irritates me a little," Bruce admits, about magic - he doesn't sound irritated, though, which is a bit of a funny contrast. He used those moments of quiet to sort what he was looking at, preparing to sit up properly and... something. Maybe converse normally, maybe bolt again. Who knows.

"Your business is doing well?"

"A nervous city is good business when you make weapons," he says, by way of acknowledging recent events in the same breath; he has no way of knowing whether or not Bruce was there or what kind of familiarity he has with the situation, but Seoraj himself is well-placed to have his thumb on Baedal's pulse. He's not much for politics, but he's a people-person and one who's been insinuating himself into the business workings of this place since he arrived - he listens, keeps his eyes open, learns a little something. "Got some funny requests the last few months," speaking of magic, "but it comes and goes."

Ebbs and flows; it's how it is here.

He wasn't there, no, but he's heard about it (he hears about everything), so he looks cognizant of the reference, at least. Bruce had been inquiring more after the purely monetary aspect of Seoraj's career, considering he's able to just roll up here to look for supplies - you'd better be loaded or close enough for government work, he's told - but the response he gives is even more interesting.

"You must have a lot of bar tenders beat." For gossip and too-personal information? Yes. He stands, finally, and seems a bit more friendly than before - barely. He's cautious, but it isn't suspicion directed at Seoraj; with Bruce, there's an underlying but ever-present impression of him being a wild animal sitting peacefully beside you. You can't trust the training of a creature like that. They are what they are.

"What are you looking for?"

But he's peaceful for now.

Seoraj straightens with him, smooth; the hints at who and what Tom is all seem so strangely contradictory, and here and there he puzzles over it. Though he's conscious of the fact Tom is dangerous, so are most of the people he grew up with and it doesn't occur to him to consider this an inherently concerning or worrying facet of his new acquaintance - it's just context right now, to him. It's one of the things that makes sense. Funny how that works out.

"Gold, today. I don't do a lot of weapons work here, most of the time, but now and then, and some of them like it decorative." He looks almost wry; when form and function marry well, that's one thing, but you should hear some of the suggestions he's gently steered people away from. (It's not a bad rule of thumb for who he will and will not actually make weapons for, and he can afford to choose his customers. He has turned people away over the past few months, for various reasons.)

He's not sure who he is, is all.

('Is all', yes.)

"That's not too difficult to pick out." He's got a few bits in the box he's going through, even, and offers the whole thing (wooden, shallow, a bit like a serving tray) to Seoraj. Apparently gold isn't on his own shopping list. Though- "The bracelet's aluminum."

Heavy enough to pass, so well-made, but still.

Seoraj accepts the tray, sifting through it and turning the bracelet thoughtfully around his fingers for a moment, wry. "I had a friend when I was a lad," he says, like he was reminded (he was), "who could see these fine things in his head and make them with his hands- a proper artist with it."

He's a damn good blacksmith, but creatively they're not exactly in the same category.

"Reckon he should've come here, not me. Might have a better idea what he's looking at sometimes."

"I'm no good with art, either." He can design things and build them, but it's always functional and his style is... specific. (Is it black? Can it be stealth? Done.)

At that, he pauses a bit, mentally meandering.

"Life would be boring without anything left to learn."

"Nah," Seoraj says, after a moment, glancing up thoughtfully from the tray that he's still sifting through. "Nah. Boring people think there's not anything left to learn in life."

The fact he may have just insulted whole swathes of the long-lived of various origin leaves him utterly unfazed.

Edited 2011-11-19 10:57 (UTC)

A sound, there - wordless, almost voiceless, and very brief, but it's not unlike laughter and that in itself is a bit like pigs flying with this guy. It's over abruptly as it began, but the smile lingers on Bruce's face (and his eyes) anyway.

"You've got a point."

(If Bruce is spiritual at all, then that is the spiritual opposite of his own view; optimistic where he's grudging. And yet it's nearly the same damn thing.)

Edited 2011-11-19 11:20 (UTC)

It's a good moment, Seoraj decides; he doesn't laugh, either, but he grins back and it's fleetingly a bit like being in cahoots, a bit like sitting around with the lads, and a bit like none of those things at all. Different isn't bad, though, and that's the whole basis of the philosophy by which he lives his life. Life is good - not his life, remarkably, but the fact of it and the constant changing and evolving nature of it is just good and fascinating and ever in motion. Life is good, and it's there to be appreciated.

People who don't see beauty just aren't looking, he thinks; sometimes it's because they can't any more, and it's a sadder thing to him than just death. To live without being able to connect with how astonishing and curious that is in itself...

"It's what we owe," he shrugs, still smiling. "The way I see it, every day you're not dead, that's a day you don't take for granted. That's a world you don't take for granted."

But he makes it sound beautiful, somehow, and not desperate. It's easy to see, then, how he embraced Baedal.

It is easy.

And it's easy, in return, to see that Bruce understands and - what, resonates with? appreciates seems so shallow - has a moment of sudden and honest clarity. A heartbeat into it something else mixes into the expression, just behind his eyes, but he's looked away long before it crystallizes, and maybe it wasn't ever there to begin with.

(That awful void in the center of him, like a black hole, made from fighting evil from the inside, that reaches out- )

"Do you.. bother with much religion? Spirits?"

A few years ago and the answer would've been a simple but polite no; he'd learned not to laugh it off entirely, but it was still something that struck him as peculiar and a little absurd. It's not just Baedal that's made him stop and think, but most of the answer is still 'no' - it's just more thoughtful, these days.

"We let the lowlanders fight over their gods, mostly, where I'm from," he says, reflectively, pressing a thumbnail to the side of his jaw (near his neat, sharp beard) for a moment as he thinks. "A woman I knew called us 'culturally atheist'." When she was in a good mood with him. When she threw him out, she called him a money-grubbing mountain peasant, but that's, you know, another story entirely. "But I'm given to know there's more to it than hiring mercenaries to take out the ones they think aren't doing the thing right."

It's just that, frankly, that's the familiarity Seoraj has with religion.

"I don't really get it either."

Which is both self-deprecatingly flippant (in his mild way) and wry understand of Seoraj's feelings on it. Bruce can't believe in god; he's just not wired for it. Between being a scientist and being a humanist, he finds the entire affair puzzling at best and wholly embittering at worst. That he has tangled with his fair share of supposed deities has only enforced his lack of belief.

But.

"..A long time ago, I was in a country high in the mountains. There's a lake there, called Namtso. Every winter the lake freezes over solid, and those seeking absolution, or those making pilgrimage, walk out over the ice and make camp. The ice melts and they're left there; boats are forbidden near the islands, and it's too far to swim. They walk back over the ice the next winter."

There's conversation down the hall, and Bruce pauses to look over - absent, almost, because it's clear they aren't going to be disturbed; apparently they look enough like they belong there that no one cares. But it's nice to have a little moment in which to be still. This is as many words as he's said to anyone at once in... weeks, really. Maybe more.

Eventually: "It was just spring, and the ice was so weak it'd melted near the shore. One last man swam two kilometers back, in the freezing water, dragging his robes. He laid there on the bank, exhausted, and I asked him if he learned anything about himself. He was smiling, and he said, 'Almost.'"

The story captures Seoraj's attention and imagination sufficiently that he doesn't question it as a continuation of their conversation - gods are a strange, alien thing to him but spirituality isn't entirely and he thinks of that man's smile and the cold and he remembers Langler telling him they had to walk (asking him if he could walk) and it's not himself he remembers seeing but a man growing up before his eyes, still at once a worried boy watching him not die from the other side of a campfire.

And it's different, but the familiarity is fascinating; it's all life and something else, separate but not inaccessible. And isn't that why he is the person that he is? When he remembers this story, years from now, when the details have begun to blur into other stories and when he's forgotten where he was when he heard it, he will remember that the last pilgrim smiled, and he'll remember the look on Bruce's face as he told him so.

"Good man," he says, mirroring the smile in the story with one of his own. "What did you learn?" About himself; about the mountains; about springtime. Whichever. He was there - what did he learn?

It's an anecdote he feels a bit safer in relating than most; it's only the third time he's repeated it to anyone, all the same. Maybe because it felt so surreal at the time, something out of a philosophy book, living instead of reading - and gaining about the same amount of understanding. He remembers sitting there on the edge of that lake and thinking it was no surprise that so much spirituality came out of those mountains, even if the didn't grasp it very well.

"I learned I'm not cut out for spirituality," he says. "But I really like people."

He's bad with them, sometimes unbelievably so, and he doesn't like social situations or having to really talk for that long, but - yes. Person to person, the capabilities of humanity, the human condition, the human will, call it whatever. Bruce is enthralled by people, and everything he does is to further that. No matter what it might look like.

(This is completely a response to Seoraj's mission statement. It just took him a minute to get there.)

Taking the scenic route to the point is no nevermind to Seoraj; it's more interesting that way, and it's more the point of conversation, to him. Direct answers are fine, too, but sometimes they leave a little something to be desired - context, flavour...well, at the end of the day, he likes stories just as much as he likes people.

And he does like them quite a bit, too - the answer gets a chuckle out of him, companionable, and a smile that lingers. "It wouldn't be much of a world without 'em." Considering Baedal, for a moment, he adds, "Whatever shape they happen to come in."

Sometimes it's easier for him to get things out that way - roundabout, edging shy of the heart of it. He's a professional on being blunt and dismissive, but subjects like this are difficult for him to tackle with any brevity. His lack of innate understanding of spirituality leaves him unable to articulate his thoughts very well, besides 'I don't get it.'

"I don't mind it, here."

"In Arum, our business is war," Seoraj says, thoughtfully, and he's taking a roundabout way to his own point this time, too. "Not our own; we do our politics around a table, that's as is." It's also not the popular perception of how they work, but they don't tend to fuss too much about what foreigners think about them. Do said foreigners have money? Are they going to give their money to the Arums? The interest tends to end there, since they're not going to take problem-solving advice from the people who hire them.

"No, but, we fight for other people. They'll hire a clan, and maybe their enemy hires another clan, and we do all the hard parts for them." This explains a lot of how Seoraj interacts with people; probably more than he realizes. "It's our trade, it's what we are. Soldiers, none better in any land we know. But I don't often get to visit cities where I can leave my axe where it is."

He tosses and catches the aluminium bracelet. "It's different." And he likes it.

It's... interesting, to think of war and soldiering in that respect; it opens a lot of doors for potential questions, if he was inclined to ask. Could factions in his home fight wars without the Arum? Would going into another line of work entirely eliminate needless bloodshed? (He's not ignorant enough to think so, not really.)

It explains some things about Seoraj, anyway.

Whatever Bruce might have said in response is lost when Lilura returns and cheerfully announces that they're to be let into the back holding area now - there's probably some of the wiring Tom is looking for. His friend is free to come with, of course, since they're both in the market for metal. That odd semi-talkative mood evaporates and Bruce settles back into being quiet and professional like pulling on another coat, and he walks along with the stelanmancer, easy.

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when will it start to almost break you

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