[holo] A Special Hell Reserved for Suicides

[trojanhorst]

Horst Cabal has never actually been to Hell before, but he can say with confidence that he knows someone who has, and this is distinctly not how it’s been represented to him in that person’s descriptions. There’s no desert here with an endlessly beating sun, no hopelessly complex admissions paperwork to be filled out, no crotchety desk clerk. He’s not even naked.

Under normal circumstances, on all counts, Horst would be pleased for his expectations to have been proven wrong. In this case, however, he has cause to be suspicious.

“Johannes!” he yells, uncertain if the party in question can even hear him. The room he’s contained in is circular, and silvery from floor to ceiling, the view broken up only by a single pedestal and an open door. His own voice has an uncomfortably metallic echo. Horst cups his hands around his mouth and shouts up at the ceiling in his native German, ignoring for the moment the rather obvious suggestion of the open door. “Johannes, you little shit! This is brassy, even for you.”

Horst blames himself. He probably should’ve just gone off without saying anything, walked into the sunlight without saying goodbye. Maybe he should’ve known. He guesses, in the end, he had expected that even Johannes would have the decency to let Horst die on his own terms. So really, Horst should’ve known better. Whatever pocket dimension this is that he’s been unceremoniously dumped into, he can only imagine one possible cause. One very possible, very infuriating cause.

“Come now. Be reasonable,” he tries again, outwardly cooling his temper. “This is silly, Johannes. Wherever you've dropped me for safekeeping, you can’t keep me here forever. I can still find a way to kill myself, you know.”

Perhaps he can’t fault Johannes too badly for this, though. Alongside his long-laid plans and his calculated risks, Johannes’s rare impulse decisions are usually some of his worst ideas. His brother panicked, that’s all. Maybe he'll reconsider whatever it is he's done.

Then again, it did take Johannes eight years to come down from his last panic.

Still no response. On to a second plan, then.

Horst takes a second survey of his surroundings. There little raised stand nearby with something suspiciously purple set out atop it, which seems to be the only particularly interesting thing in the room. More worryingly, however — and Horst can’t say why this bothers him so excessively — there’s a silver bracelet of some sort wrapped just a bit too snugly around one of his wrists, set with some sort of -- glassy screen. Horst likes a bit of sparkle now and then as much as the next person, mind, but he didn’t exactly pick this particular accessory out himself. He digs at it experimentally with a fingernail, but can only catch onto his own skin. He knows enough to recognize that this is probably not a good sign.

Endeavoring to remain as calm as possible, since getting too worked up might be unproductive, Horst walks over to the wall by the door, raises his arm, and pounds his braceleted wrist against the wall as hard as he can for about thirty seconds straight. At the end of the experiment, much to his chagrin, the bracelet and the wall are both still entirely undamaged. So much for Horst’s grand foray into the scientific method, then. Whatever it is, it's staying put.

The purple objects sitting on the nearby pedestal turn out to be a familiar — very familiar — frock coat, walking stick, and hat. They match the rest of his clothes, and he's fairly certain that he'd taken them off not moments ago for his little dawn appointment and left them folded neatly in the grass. (Just because one's attempting suicide is no excuse to get ash all over a perfectly good coat, after all.)

Horst approaches them cautiously, wary of unexpected gifts from unknown sources, but a bit of careful poking and prodding seems to confirm that they are, to all visible intents and purposes, simply his coat, his hat, and his cane. He can’t really make sense of why they’re there, but they’re there all the same. It seems a relatively minor risk to take them.

He puts the hat on his head and looks upward, though nothing in the metallic device on the ceiling sheds any more light on the situation. “Well, at least that’s something,” he says of his clothes, still talking to the empty room in German in hopes there’s someone there. “I suppose it makes an immediate improvement on my last stint of captivity.”

Tipping his hat to the empty room, possessions either in hand or tucked under one arm, Horst decides to try his luck with the hallway. He'll play his brother's game for now. Wherever Johannes has dropped him, it's clear this room doesn't have much more to offer him.

He hesitates momentarily, instinctively wondering if he’s about to step out into sunny midday by accident and bring on his own accidental demise — but then remembers that that was his exact intention only a few minutes ago. Putting off death just to give Johannes a stern talking-to is probably not that crucial, all in all. What does it matter?

Horst takes a last look at the room, then ducks out into the hall.

Comments

[imperial_long]

Long makes a little grunt of acknowledgment as he notes Horst's criteria, filing them away in the library of his mind. He fishes out a stack of documents and begins rifling through them, eyes darting back and forth over the blueprints and street maps.

"Hmmm? Oh, well. Not-- too much to do. Mostly I read, when on the clock." Or nap, but he won't admit that. "By and large, I do more in the way of answering the questions of new arrivals than I do curating the library, exactly."

A small sigh for that fact of Taxonian life, but then Long forgets any slight frustration at that as he finds a promising blueprint. He hums to himself as he flips through the papers, and sets it aside as a possible hopeful.

"Do you practice a profession, Herr Brauer?"

[trojanhorst]

"It always seemed like a waste to practice just one," he demurs genially, not looking up. "Few of the ones I've tried my hand at would translate to the night life, though. It's lucky for me I haven't exactly got a big grocery list."

He pauses, spotting something on one of the blueprints that he doesn't expect. "Live Tiger Room," he reads aloud. "Well, I don't think I'll ever need to cage myself, though I'm . . . glad to see there are options for the sophisticated gentleman with a feral menagerie. It has an indoor fountain, too. Charming." He shakes his head and sets it to one side. Too many windows, and he really isn't sure what he'd do with a live tiger room, anyway. He doesn't particularly want a live tiger.

"Do most people take up employment? No one protesting the system?"

[imperial_long]

> "It always seemed like a waste to practice just one."

Long twitches a smile down at the pages, then dutifully examines the map Horst indicates with another smile. "Now that is rather fetching, although I do prefer my own hotel room..."

The next question causes him to lift his head, arch his brows at Horst, and shrug.

"Our captors are not physically present, Herr Brauer. Protesting against them has to date not been terribly effective. One can choose to exercise a slightly more comfortable captivity, with pleasant dinners and comfortable clothes, or one can subsist at a survival level and 'protest', I suppose.

"Personally, I enjoy steak dinners, and quality whiskey. I suppose that makes me quite complicit."

[trojanhorst]

For the first time, Horst's eyes flicker into a squint as he looks at Mayland Long, openly regarding him with faint suspicion. "And why would you assume our captors aren't physically present?"

[imperial_long]

Long makes a little tch-ing noise, lips curling briefly into amusement-- not at Horst, but at himself.

"Permit me a correction, then: they are not present in the city in forms identifiable as such. I suppose that any one of these backdrop citizens could be them, but short of attempting to interrogate them all...

"It seems they view the city remotely, Herr Brauer; they are quite aware of what is going on here, and sometimes they deign to contact us, but always through the--" and he taps at his wrist to indicate the bracelet, "--tablet."

There have been the odd, occasional exceptions, but Long is not going to try and explain every possible detail. Horst is new.

[trojanhorst]

"Ah, I understand." Horst nods, his suspicions not particularly allayed (that's unlikely to happen until Horst has finally settled on a single, working theory), but nothing in Long's statement arousing further doubt, either, which is enough reason to set the question of who can I trust aside once more.

"This is nice," he sizes up a blueprint, double-checking it before putting it into the little pile of possible residences.

Something else occurs to him. "'Interrogate them all.' Now then, there's an interesting proposition, actually. Hmmm. Yes. Mind you, some might say the brute force method is hardly the cleverest way of going about things, but it is often reliable. After all, if things are as you say, there's certainly plenty of time."

[imperial_long]

Long takes the one that Horst has set aside to examine it himself, noting the features that appeal to Horst. He gives a little nod, then resumes flipping through his own stack.

"A successful interrogation, by brute force or otherwise, demands that the interrogator have the advantage, Herr Brauer. Time, we have; I would not be so quick to assume the advantage.

"You, of course, are welcome to act as you see fit." The slightest of (possibly teasing?) smiles. Long plucks one diagram out from the stack, hrmms over it, and adds it to the possibilities.

[trojanhorst]

Horst is almost to the bottom of his current stack of papers; another awaits him near his elbow.

"You make a point. In any event, if I remain here long enough, I'm sure I'll talk to all of them in due course regardless, knowing myself as I do."

He looks sidelong at the librarian. "What are our various fellow captives like?" he asks. "If I can persuade you to gossip."

[imperial_long]

"Hrrm," Long says, a noise of deep thoughtfulness. He smiles slightly.

"I can always be persuaded to gossip," he says with a sly curling smile. "Inelegant as it is for me to admit.

"There are about, hm, seventeen of us? I must decide who to start with."

[trojanhorst]

"Age before beauty," Horst recommends, as fond as ever of making use of every English idiom he's ever learned.

[imperial_long]

Long gives Horst a look which could mean any of a hundred things. If he wore glasses, he would push them up his nose, but he doesn't, so instead he only clears his throat.

"And that should depend on one measures age, Herr Brauer. Time period of origin? Apparent physical age? True chronological age? Time spent in Taxon? We have here a young man from before the time of Christ, and a man who has been in the city three years..."

[trojanhorst]

"Ah, there's a question. Chronological age might be interesting, but not nearly so easily telling."

He flips through papers in the second stack at a slightly faster pace, becoming used to reading the various blueprints and cross-checking them with city maps more quickly.

"Length of your acquaintance with them, let's say," he suggests.

[imperial_long]

"Most closely paralleling time spent in Taxon, then."

Long settles back in his chair, eyes on the far wall for a moment while he mentally compiles the list by this criteria.

"Glitch would top the list, I think. He is one of only three people who's been here longer than myself; I indulge myself in the belief I know him well. He is my friend," and Long smiles, distantly, at the word on his tongue, still novel, "and a genius when it comes to invention, science, dance, and many other fields of human endeavour."

[trojanhorst]

"A paragon of talent," Horst summarizes, teasing. "I once made a portrait of a duck out of uncooked noodles for my mother. She told me I was very artistic, but I think she didn't want to dash my eight-year-old hopes. Alas. I'm somewhat less than a genius at any particular field of human endeavor, I fear. But your friend sounds perfectly lovely."

[imperial_long]

Long smiles, skin at the corners of his eyes crinkling at Horst's flip-but-good-natured response.

"You will meet him if you spend any amount of time here. He is lovely. Perhaps he might make suggestions on how you can revise your arte della pasta."

Who else? Long thinks again, eyes briefly studying the ceiling, then offers, "Mr. Wyatt Cain is from the same lokāḥ as Glitch-- that is to say, the same world, a place known as the Outer Zone-- whereas Mr. Smecker is an American."

[trojanhorst]

Horst nods, opting out of the chance to make a silly joke about the descriptor 'an American' and whether or not this constitutes an implied criticism on Herr Long's part. They're running out of blueprints to look at: better get to meatier information as expediently as possible.

"And you trust them each, I take it? What of the others -- no troubles in paradise? Anyone to give you cause for concern?"

[imperial_long]

"Trust," Long echoes, and leans back in his chair, lacing his strange fingers together beneath his chin and studying the ceiling.

"Trust, well now. What should one trust in a world where all is illusion, Herr Brauer?" (Long is not speaking about Taxon in particular.) "Herrs Smecker and Cain are both officers of the law in their homelands, as I understand it. Herr Cain has always struck me as an honorable fellow. Herr Smecker is..." (he thinks) "...colorful of vocabulary. But he has organised a sort of safehouse for crises.

"I do not mistrust either of them. As for any here who would cause troubles..."

He has to think about it some more. "Barring malfunctions, no, nobody currently in the city gives me any pause."

(This may partly be due to Long's continuing inability to really regard other people as threats.)

[trojanhorst]

Horst finishes with his stacks of blueprints, and settles in to pick through the ones they've set aside as viable, waiting for Long to finish with his own stacks. "'What should one trust in a world where all is illusion'?" he repeats back, chin in hand. "Does a rising tide not lift all boats, Herr Long? If you argue nothing should be trusted, I would contend that, a certain blanket level of distrust being assumed, some things may still be rated more untrustworthy than others, and those things in the least doubt could still form a baseline for comparison. Speaking from a purely practical standpoint, as it were." But he stores away the information about Smecker and Cain for future use, the mention of a safehouse. Those things are good to know, even in the midst of a bit of friendly rhetorical debate.

"Well now," Horst says when they're ready to dissect their finalist blueprints, "shall we see what we've come up with?"

[imperial_long]

Long smiles slowly at Horst's counter.

" 'Speaking from a purely practical standpoint'," he says as he starts putting discarded blueprints back into the box, "is something I do singularly poorly, or so I have been reliably informed."

He lets the philosophical discussion go and slides his contribution to Horst's estate hunt across the table to him. "We shall. And I shall bring up my map so that we can see where in the city these desirable locations may be...."