taxonomites | 02: Who says you can't appropriate a forge?

Well, that is something you do not see every day.

And considering some of the days Madelyne Pryor has seen, that's saying something. Hell, not too long ago she and werewolf wizard rid this place of an evil wizard. Even still, this is... a thing, isn't it?

Unexpectedly, she finds herself staring, caught up in the sight and the rhythmic sound of the metal being worked on the forge. She's always had an appreciation for this sort of work. While she works on machines, engines mostly, she's never really been a fabricator but she's always sort of wanted to be. When she catches herself staring, she pulls her eyes away, shaking her head.

When the woman approaches, there are two young Extras at the anvil with Nuada, striking the short curved blade in measured, rhythmic movements. The metal gives off a nearly too bright glow, fast fading to an orange red. One must work quickly while the metal is hot enough to manipulate, and it takes time, skill, and several hands.

While someone else might choose to delegate, Nuada prefers to be part of the process. It's his sword, his commission, only he knows the design he wants, the proper weight.

Once the blade, or blades, are done, they'll be sent off to other masters of the varied trades surrounding swordsmithing, but right here and now, Nuada's world is the blade, and the forge, and the repetitive, meditative lull of hard work.

In here, he can push away the thoughts of his dead father, of his dead companion, of the choices made with the greater good in mind. Sacrifices. There is always sacrifice, demanded or given.

One the Extra's lets a set of tongs slip. They're not being used currently, so it isn't a catastrophe or even a true error in the sense that it will hurt the process in any way other than it might disturb the rhythm of the pounding of metal. The tongs to not hit the ground, surrounded by a flickering green fire as Madelyne catches them.

Hopefully, this would be a lesser disturbance than the discordant clash of metal coming into contact with the ground.

To a lesser being, the sound of metal on metal would indeed be more of a distraction. Nuada, however, is a different beast. His eyes slit towards the tongs and the green cloud surrounding it. Magic.

The Extra swordsmith and his apprentices don't react with quite such measured calm. Nearly as one they cry out in alarm and scramble to get away.

Nuada's jaw tightens, his lips thin to a stark line mere fractions of a second before they part. "Hold!" He barks the order, and watches as the men return to their given place. The swordsmith, distinctive from the others by the lines of his face and the many pin-prick, blotches of scars on his arms, perfectly cowers under Nuada's stern gaze.

"We've an agreement. I expect you to fulfill your end of it."

The man nods, sweat streaking his face like the shadows of prison bars. The reality of his predicament is not far from it. You don't make deals with the kind folk. Sometimes, you don't have a choice in the matter. "Yes, Sire, right away."

"Very well. Take my place."

Turning his eyes on the redhead, he tugs off his gloves, pushes them at the master swordsmith and stalks forward.

"You. Witch." It isn't a slur, the way he says it, with his voice so soft and low. "Bless this forge and the people in it. Do away with their fears."

"Me?"

Madelyne looks a little startled at being addressed so and being asked to bless the forge. Obviously, he wants her to calm the people and, well, they are Extras. For a moment, she feels a bit of an ethical twinge but she extends a hand and sends out calming thoughts to the Extras at and around the forge area. "I did not mean to startle anyone. I simply meant to help aid in the construction of the blades. Please be calm and continue your work."

It isn't a blessing. She does not feel the authority to give one. Still, the Extras in the area calm some.

The disbelieving question gets a tilt of the head and a pair of raised, hairless eyebrows. But then the witch moves into action, and Nuada finds himself both satisfied and ever so vaguely disappointed. If the price of settling the superstitions of his workers hadn't met the witch's approval, he could have demanded something much more worthwhile. Oh well. Obedience is its own reward, and he's pleased to see her acquiesce despite her misgivings.

"Much obliged, madame," he tells the witch, bringing his left foot half a step back for the incremental tilt of a bow. "I am Nuada Silverlance, crowned prince of Clan Bethmoora."

"Sir," she says in response dipping her head in response and giving small curtsey. She isn't at all sure what the appropriate response is for ... whatever sort of royalty he is but she has been to Asgard. Hopefully those manners will serve her well.

"I am Madelyne Pyror."

"Madelyne Pryor," he echoes back - an alias or her given name? Time will tell, he's sure.

"I would say the pleasure is all mine, but I would be lying, surely. What is your business in this village?"

"This village appeared here in the night and I came exploring it," she comments softly. There is a faint smile, a curving of one corner of her lips, "And there was an evil wizard that needed to be taken care of over that way," she gestures where there is one of the looming ominous faux magical towers.

"I didn't ask how this place came to be," he retorts in crisp, curt tones, and begins on the path of an invisible circle around the young woman; content to simply assess her from top to bottom.

"Evil. How very easily you use that word, how very well you must sleep at night, to have vanquished an 'evil' wizard."

No, he is not amused, nor impressed, if either were the witch's aim. "Does that make you a 'good' witch? A champion of life and righteousness and the true way?"

Madelyne laughs, a sound that veers toward bitter but doesn't quite reach it, "I do not use evil lightly at all nor to I suggest that I know any such thing as 'good' or one true way."

A brief pause before she adds, "He espoused himself to be such, as is the way of this ridiculous place. While I like to think of myself as good, I'm not a crusader."

Behind the witch, Nuada's dark lip curls in a sneer. Laughter. It's always laughter, isn't it, at the expense of someone or something.

"Did he, now. I bid you a good day, madame. May you have your fill of ridicule ere the day is done."

He comes full circle, gives the witch a nod of his chin, and returns to the business at hand.

The laughter was mostly directed at herself, though it might not be obvious to anyone else. "Ridicule?" she asks, curiously, "There was none intended except perhaps at my own expense. I am not a champion of light and justice."

She shakes her head, "I wish you and your project well." If he's decided what he'll think of her, she's not too bothered. There has been much worse thought of her and rightfully so.

A good question is: where do you even get an apple in the Adventure Zone? Would it even be safe to eat? Maybe the youthful man who's materialized (or rather, strolled up to like he's shopping for groceries) at Nuada's forge brought it from home, but it seems unlikely; either way, he has a bright red apple in his hand and is in the process of taking a large bite out of it.

Some people might call Sherlock Holmes vaguely fey, but all of those people are human. Sherlock is most certainly human. There's something distinctly human about the overcomplicated nylon anorak shell he's wearing, the way he tinkers idly with his tablet while he walks (texting, of course, like he's on the train), and the overall cocksure manner he has of visiting not a mysterious fantasyland, but an elaborate Renaissance faire. He stops in front of Nuada's forge and leans over curiously to study what he's making.

About fifteen seconds into this he says without looking up, "You're the new one, aren't you." He's as British as they come, in the voice. It figures. "They let you set up shop here? How long do you stay?"

This up close the heat is nearly tangible. The fire burns bright and hot, and out of it, Nuada pulls a short, slim blade with the faintest of curves. In shape and size it might speak of Japanese blades, if not for the tip, which curves back on itself like something alive. It is a saif, a scimitar, a katana, neither and both.

Nuada brings the blade to the crude set up of basin and water. The blade hisses and spits, turning the water into dragon's breath - and still, that holds the elf's attention more than the human intruder with his annoying questions.

The yellow eyes look then, up and down the length and breadth of the pale man (fey, no certainly not; he lacks too many things to even come close; but...feline, perhaps. Around the eyes and the jaw. Still, a cat would be preferable).

"I should think the answer to your first queries are fairly self-evident." He tilts his head, eyes cutting to the area behind him, and a short, stocky male Extra. "Don't you agree, Arbert Swordsmith?"

"Yes, Sire, my prince, of course, yes!"

Twitchy. Twitchy and thoroughly predictable, but at least the Extras here know him for what he is. "Do you always expect to get answers?"

Lifting the blade for an inspection (no), and dunking it back into the water. "Is it rightful authority or simply a case of a fatally inflated ego, I wonder."

Sherlock's lips quirk at the name 'Arbert Swordsmith,' but overall peering at Nuada he looks more quizzical than challenging. Perhaps if Nuada were a form of warlord patriot native to Sherlock's world--a conservative jingoist, a fascist banging on about the dying of the golden age--he might've provoked more defiance in the fundamentally humanist, if naive and apolitical, Sherlock Holmes. As it stands Nuada is a curiosity, a foreigner of the most foreign kind, a queerly pale man with a queer self-possession. He is new, and although new is just barely short of a slur to many people, it certainly isn't to him.

And Nuada is unusually direct. Does he feel more at-home in the Adventure Zone or has this just proven the easiest place to procure what he wants, as far as he knows? Asking him wouldn't appear to be the most efficient way to acquire that information, in any case.

He leans against the wall and takes an idle bite of his apple--half calculated theatrics, half pure whimsy--as he regards what Nuada's doing, a safe distance from the sparks and soot. He's fair himself, and tall, and feline indeed around his pale eyes: not just in the eyes, in fact. There's that fearless air of a housecat come to bother something much larger than itself at its work.

"Rightful authority," he says, "may mean something different to me than to you, Nuada of Bethmoora. If it answers your question," he talks through a bite of apple, the flesh white in his mouth, "my occupation here is, generally, playing the violin."

Edited (i grammer gud) 2013-02-13 07:47 (UTC)

As much attention as Nuada spares him, he might as well be a spider crawling underfoot. The spider moves, and Nuada resumes working; the spider talks, and Nuada lifts his eyes from his work. It speaks. How very clever.

The mention of the violin earns Sherlock a sharper look, of widened yellow-red eyes that swiftly narrow into slits.

"Yes," he says simply, laconically (acridly). "It does."

This is certainly the first time in Taxon someone's cared this much about the existence of his violin. Possibly the first time ever. Sherlock files it away, curiouser and curiouser, and moves on: he goes back to looking at Nuada with open interest. Hostility rarely deters him, much less frigidity: that takes being boring and so far Nuada's at least more interesting than anyone else within reasonable walking distance.

The forge is hot. He fans himself with his hand and it occurs to him: "The heat doesn't bother you," he observes, a very chatty spider indeed. "Do you do it for a hobby, the weapons? Or do you intend to use them? No, don't answer me--both, I imagine. You strike me as in want of a war."

As far as human flaws go, inquisitiveness is among the better ones. At least for now, Nuada's patience may be brittle, but has yet to wear itself into nothingness. What's more, if the inquisitive finds the answers to his query all on his own, well, all the better.

A hobby, oh, that this be a hobby. Hairless eyebrows lift, the hint of a smile as he lifts the blade (the glove he wears is not for protection from the heat, but rather the sharpness of the tang), feels its weight and balance. It's good enough. Now to fashion a grip and a guard, then to mount the same onto the blade. A job fit for its respective masters. He still has his knife - a paring knife by comparison to his spear blade - but having gone so long with a proper weapon only to find oneself without... It needs to be remedied. In due course.

He holds the blade out, and one of the apprentices comes dashing forwards to relieve him; Nuada plucks the glove from his hand. There are more interesting matters brewing.

"In want? No. Not in need of one, either. Is there a reason you're still here?"

As it happens, Sherlock Holmes may well have all the Promethean curiosity of Men contained in his person; his eyes follow the blade when Nuada raises it in the same way they've been following Nuada's eyes and hair and the curiously solid cant of his speech in English. He almost ignores everything Nuada's saying and plows on with another question but it occurs to him that Nuada won't likely respond very well to that tactic; he's making it very clear that being pestered with no yield in return is not going to go anywhere. So for once he stops and considers answering a question of his own.

The apple's half-eaten now; he turns it around in his fingers and takes a bite out of the untouched side. "I'm bored," he says, "and I've literally nothing better to do. There is literally nothing better to do."

There's the distinctive hum of malcontent buzzing behind his eyelids, but Nuada listens with half an ear as he finds a moderately clean rag to wipe the grime from his face and neck.

Bored. Well. There are worse conditions, far worse, but if that is the height of itty-bitty-spider's woes who is he to dissuade him the notion.

"I'm sure you could find something worse to occupy yourself with than ingratiating yourself to an elf prince. I must point out you're not doing very well, so far. But then, one cannot be good at everything with such a short lifespan and limited use of one's faculties."

Yes, little man, little long-legged spider with sharp-enough eyes and a myriad thoughts running along the Habitrail of your mind, that was an insult. Are you clever enough to see it; wise enough to let it absorb?

"However... I can sympathize with boredom." And curiosity, at that.

Sherlock scours the apple for the rest of its flesh, all the while picking bits of information like scraps of meat off the bone: elf prince, short lifespan. He smiles at ingratiating yourself. The idea that he might attempt to ingratiate himself to something gives him a sort of childish amusement, sarcasm or none.

"Yes, I hear that Taxon's full of all manner of lions, tigers, and bears these days, oh, my," he says with his arms crossed.

There's an assortment of questions he could, hypothetically, ask Nuada, with a low probability of receiving an answer; maybe Nuada will tell him more in bits and drabs, like he has been doing, maybe he won't. The fact is, Sherlock's not exceptionally curious about Bethmoora at the moment. Bethmoora is even more unreal to him than the notion of ingratiating himself to an elf prince. Nuada is another one of this endless marching order of proud immortals, this one not yet exposed to the arbitrary humiliation of their captors; he'll probably learn, and if he doesn't, it's hardly Sherlock's problem.

No, Sherlock's mind has returned to something else, something a little more directly relevant to himself. He twists the apple core between two fingers. "Don't you like the violin?" he says.

...and now he's quoting popular culture.

Nuada closes his eyes, taking a deep breath. What ever line of reasoning it was that initially urged him to exercise caution, it's leading a threadbare existence at the back of his mind. Caution. Patience, and inaction, and waiting. He can be patient. He can wait. He's waited an aeon already, what's another few years?

"Quite contrary, I have a great fondness for all manner of instruments: it is beggars and minstrels I've a distaste for."

Sometimes Sherlock says the things he says because he's clueless; sometimes he says them because, while he's aware they aren't the best idea, he's not sure what else to say. Sometimes he's just being a pest.

He crosses his legs leaning against the smithy's wall. Nuada's irritation has the heat of a slow-burning fuse. That's a little more alluring right now than the charms of the Adventure Zone which, while charming, have been designed with the precise purpose of giving him something to do (or observing his behavior while he does it, or whatever the point is of this particular Skinner box). That's no fun.

"Then in Bethmoora," he says, "I take it the instruments play themselves?"

The pointed ears lift, the shadowing brow as well, and the lips curl over sharp white canines. As alluring as Nuada's rapidly fading patience may be, his fuse is significantly shorter around humans; shorter yet after spending days on end in the company of mindless oafs. To suddenly have an overly enthusiastic parasite sticking its head where it might be gnawed off...well. It warrants no explanation, and his justifications are his own to keep.

Eyes burning hotter and more deadly than the forge so nearby, he stalks close and slams a hand into the wall by the young fool's neck. In his other hand, a blade. His voice is soft as baby's breath, deadly like the roots of the weeping willow. "You don't know better," he says with mock understanding, as if speaking to a child. "You don't listen. You just talk and talk, and talk. You think you are unique, and so very clever, but I have listened to a thousand upon a thousand men just like you."

He raises the knife, which in size and shape seems little more than a letter opener, lets his eyes slide over its length and width before once more boring into Sherlock's. "I shall tell you a story that has no end. If you can think of a proper, clever ending, I'll let you keep your tongue."

Animal fright does wake in Sherlock's body, of course: he may be an unusual man, but he is, as Nuada has observed, just a man. His heart is rattling along in his chest when Nuada leans in close and his breathing comes a little faster. Epinephrine isn't wholly unpleasant, though, nor the host of sensations it brings. Least of all for Sherlock Holmes.

Something new he hears himself say some three years ago of James Moriarty. Probably that's too much to hope for from Nuada Silverlance. Probably he should feel guiltier about that string of words.

"Then by all means," he answers, pale eyes fixed on Nuada's red ones and the gleam of the blade at the edge of his vision, "I'm all ears."

Should he hold such high hopes of the elf prince, he'll surely come to be sorely disappointed. Nuada has no taste for pomp or circumstance. When he wants something, he'll get it as fast and with as little to-do as possible.

However, his conditions accepted, Nuada nods, and begins his test with some measure of seldom witnessed amusement. "Once upon a time, there was a young prince. He was a righteous man, having been brought up on the back of a horse: a warrior among warriors. All he ever wanted was peace, but the king's great land had fallen into darkness. The hollow creatures came from beneath the very earth, and took what they wanted without pardon. The king was distraught, waging one losing battle after another, until finally it looked as though all was lost. Indeed it was.

"The kingdom was ravaged and plundered, women raped and children made into workers or pets for well-off ladies in faraway lands. All across the land, the heads of traitors were put to stakes and set out in the sun. A deterrent, the victors called it. Respect, they said, was just another word for fear. The king was executed, and his queen and all his heirs and all his dalliances too. The new king took his seat at the throne and ruled the land as its rightful heir.

"And so the story begins anew. More kings, more princes, a new enemy on the horizon. How does it end?"

However Nuada might accuse him of obliviousness and self-absorption, Sherlock does listen. He listens with his eyes on Nuada's, which are still at less of a distance than he would like, but by the end his pupils have constricted back to a non-fearful circumference and his eyelids have settled a little further into thought. A game. Sherlock can play a game.

More like a Rorschach blot. Psychoanalysis was always the softest of the sciences, in Sherlock's opinion. While Nuada talks he also looks him up and down with a few flicks of his pale eyes, taking in his imposing height, the waxiness of his complexion, the contradictory texture of his hair. He does so dearly want to sample Nuada's hair. Later.

"That depends," he says, feeling the wall of the workshop hard against the back of his head, "did the prince fall? Or was he the victor? I've heard of many a righteous man," he means this rather more allegorically than Nuada, and is thinking of rather different people, "who took up reluctant arms against his father in fear of his land--falling into darkness, you say. To the hollow creatures. Yes, I like that story. How does the prince rule," he speculates with a tilt of his head, "now that he's slain his father, now that he's turned against his land: for love of it? A warrior among warriors, you said."

The fairytale language doesn't come naturally to him. He pieces it out on his tongue like jigsaw. Nuada's story is open-ended, filtered through the ears of the listener: Sherlock filters it back through what's coming together in front of him. "The king wonders if there was a point when he could have turned back," he answers. "But I don't suppose there was."

Edited 2013-02-20 07:14 (UTC)

Nuada's eyes watch in a similar fashion, calculating and observant in their own way. As the man speaks, that same restlessness and simmering agitation come skimming the surface but never break it. By his conclusion, the flat of the blade is brought to rest carefully on the orbital bone just below the big, pale blue eye that sees so very clearly.

Perhaps he ought to claim it. It would make a proper offering to the memory of his one-eyed friend. It would make due compensation.

And then: "I can count on the fingers of one hand the men who haven't jumped to the conclusion the prince are among the slain heirs to the throne. But you cheat, Sir. That is not an ending, but a mere supposition. Is that the point you want to make? That there is no end, and that I, treacherous creature, would resort to trick questions?"

Edited (just because >:3) 2013-02-21 13:21 (UTC)

The knife is colder than the forge air. Fear is a curious and aggravating thing. Sherlock can muse in a detached way that death and injury mean nothing in this part of Taxon, which is set up like some sort of hyperrealistic video game. But it is hyperrealistic. So is the knife. So is the primal terror of having something sharp pressed to one's eye.

"Yes, he says, holding still, "and no." He is not accustomed to having to hold very still. "Those are two questions. I do not imagine that this story has an ending, no. But I don't believe that's because you're playing a trick."

He lets that statement lie, not choosing to elaborate, because the only idea he has for leaving his predicament is something like Scheherazade's. Without breaking eye contact with Nuada he slowly raises his hand towards his face.

"Let me go, Prince Nuada," he says without rancor. "You'll better like my answer if I give it willing."

Nuada considers the reasoning, holding the so very bright blue gaze, and finds it clever enough. But is it ever really enough? The thought irritates the moment it's spawned: conquests and industry and nuclear bombs, did it ever take more than a single man being just clever enough?

His lips curl; the blade lifts, leaving nary a mark save for the faintest of impressions in the skin. He rather hopes the impression on the young man's mind to be more substantial.

He lowers his arms, and takes a step back. Behind him, the Extras wrest each other out of their collective stupor, and go about their business once more. "By all means," says Nuada quietly, returning the knife to its hidden confines. "Dazzle me with your clear-sight."

Edited (errant rathers: gotta catch'em all! + grammar blunder + apostrophes argh! okay, stopping now) 2013-02-26 15:51 (UTC)

Sherlock's eyes track him replacing the knife, not so much as a calculation of him as a threat as with more detail-hungry curiosity. Everything about Nuada is going into a folder called Nuada on Sherlock Holmes's immense and well-organized biological harddrive; so far it's full of question marks and empty spaces on endless spreadsheets.

Nevertheless, he answers the question as soon as Nuada steps away--straightening up a little to his full height, which outstrips the elf prince's by just an inch or two. He's a big human, or he would be if he weren't quite so lanky; as it is he has the appearance of a scarecrow, a boy-scarecrow with a great deal of animation and bright, bright eyes.

"The king has no regrets," he says, hitching his coat up a little: being pinned still literally or socially always fills him with the insatiable urge to fidget. "Not that I know the man personally, but--being the man that he is--I imagine he'd rather see something of his destroyed at his own hand than another's. So he's gotten what he wanted." Sherlock makes a quizzical face and adds, reflectively, "A common enough motif in fairy stories. Everyone always gets what they want, one way or another. It's just never very pleasant."

He flexes his fingers, then his arms over his head: stillness really doesn't suit him. "But you weren't asking me whether it was pleasant," he says.

No. No.

Nuada's eyes lower to watch some unspecified speck of dust or similar, but his eyes see something very different. The face of his dying father, petrifying into a serene stillness. He can still feel the rush of battle, the blind aggression and calculated tactics, all of it fading away at the sight of the dead king. He felt cold, then.

'Never very pleasant'. No. But what humans so often forget is that getting what you want always comes at a price - often at too high a cost for someone unprepared.

Nuada watches the restless husk in silence, dragging his yellow gaze ever so slowly from the tips of its boots and up the many lines and fidgety angles of his limbs, coming to settle on his eyes once more - but only after giving the entirety of his face the same blatant scrutiny.

"You may leave," he says as sole verdict of the man's wit. "Unless, of course," and here the corners of his mouth twist and bend into an unpleasant smile, "you want something from me?"

Even such a disinterested and unsentimental (ha) person as Sherlock Holmes has heard a fairy story or two. When he peers at Nuada he has no illusions that the fairy prince means him well by offering him some sort of bargain: bargains gone wrong are the cornerstone of the Western morality tale. In any case, his manner has too much menace in it--not just the knife to Sherlock's cheekbones, but the way his eyes rake Sherlock now. In some uncomfortable way Sherlock imagines they're one and the same temptation reflected in Prince Nuada of Bethmoora.

But--he puts aside the flicker of fascination. Maybe later. "Not now," he says with a faint smile in return. "I'll let you know if I change my mind."

And a bit boldly, with no more of a formal goodbye than a formal hello, he turns to go. The apple is oxidizing now, going brown in the flesh.

Idle hands, so the saying goes, do the devil's work. Well, perhaps. In Horst's experience, it's rarely true; he finds that in most cases, a productive pair of hands is often just as serviceable and twice as fruitful when turned to wicked ends. Lazy people make poor villains: their sort of chaos is on the order of skipping university classes, or not bothering to put their garbage properly in the wastebin. Industrious people are the only ones that hammer ploughshares into swords.

No, it's an idle mind you have to worry about. Tedium breeds listlessness, and everyone has their own way of coping with that, making busywork for themselves. For Horst, who's toured much of the western shore of the city and chosen a new residence for himself and thus done about as much as he cares to for one (very harrowing) day, this means he's left to spend the remaining small hours of the night wandering Taxon's borders to better acclimate himself to it, an endeavor which hasn't gotten him very far. The unfortunate truth of vampirism and its nocturnal lifestyle is that even when winter nights run long and you get nearly thirteen hours of darkness, after a certain point, city or no city, you start to run out of things to do. Many of Taxon's residents are sleeping, and even more of its stores are closed. Things are very quiet.

At the ostensible northern border of the city proper (according to both the orientation of the city map as well as the relative progression of the patterns of stars overhead), however, he finds the faint glow of lights, and distant sounds coming from across a long bridge, and he makes his way in for a look.

A very odd-looking . . . individual is working hard over the anvil, hammering out some sort of blade, one glowing-red section at a time. Everywhere else in Taxon has reminded Horst that he's hypothetically in the future. This place is the opposite.

The silver bracelet on the pale creature's arm, as well as his look of eerie concentration and his easy air of command over the other people standing by him, all mark him out as different from the people assisting him, who look tired and a bit quailed, but endlessly compliant in that sweet, gormless way the non-braceleted people of this world have. Whatever he is, he's not human -- the deep shadows framing his eyes and staining his lips are neither red blood nor make-up, and the draping of his hair looks somehow more like spidersilk than not, the ends of it dipped in pale gold. None of this bothers Horst overmuch -- he's spent too much time in the company of sideshow hellspawn to be put off by milky skin or a stripe across the face -- but the fact that the steel he's hammering away at is very clearly on its way to a blade is mildly concerning. More worrisome is the fact that he and the people he's recruited are working through the night to complete it. He's either very bored, or in a very great hurry. Neither of these bodes well.

Horst approaches carefully, taking a slow and visibly circuitous route so as not to startle this very resolute creature whose blade, while still lacking a grip and unfinished, is heated red-hot and already sharp enough to be a social deterrent. The rest of the village is quieter, though he can't imagine the noise is helping its villagers sleep, but the ground below Horst's feet is well-trodden. In the dirt underfoot, partly stamped on with a muddy footprint, he finds a crudely drawn poster:

LOST PRINCESS! REWARD BEYOND YOUR WILDEST IMAGININGS!

Horst picks the poster up thoughtfully, dusts it off a bit, then folds it into his waistcoat. He waits at the border where the dirt floor of the forge gives way to grass, and raises his voice to be heard above the rhythmic clanging of metal. "I beg your pardon," he says with his clear German accent and his best English manners.

Should Nuada deign to look up from his work, he'll find a man of his apparent twenties standing some safe distance away, wearing the better part of a deep purple suit, minus its more obviously dated frock coat, standing at ease with his hands in his pockets. The harsh and inconstant glow of fire and torchlight is forgiving to Horst's undead complexion at the moment, casting him in unreadable yellows and deep shadows that make it less obvious that his face isn't flush and peachy with the circulation of live blood. Nonetheless, there's more than enough about him to suggest his unnatural inhumanity to any observer who's paying attention whatsoever: while Nuada may or may not be stripped to the waist as a concession to the heat of the forge, as his own needs may be, Horst has been out wandering Taxon without benefit of any heat source: by all rights, no true human being would make a casual practice of strolling around of a midwinter's evening in their waistcoat and half-rolled shirtsleeves.

"Is this your village? Have you lost your princess?"

There's death on the wind tonight, whispering its sweet promises of finite possibilities; Nuada can taste it, like copper and decay on the back of his tongue. It serves a bitter reminder of the more poetic death of his campaign on Mankind - here, in a confined city with little else but insects underfoot (kind enough, willing enough to please, skittish like a startled flock of birds). Extras. Filler. Suitable as work horses, but that's as far as he'll go. And the others, the braceleted ones, the other captives. Twenty-odd people, and quite a number of them magical or otherwise non-human, which is and always will be preferable to the opposite.

Filthy, stinking, hollow husks of wanton greed - and are they any different, the captives with their ludicrous, scrambling attempts to build a life for themselves? It all hangs in the balance, and now that death is in the air, Nuada lays down his hammer. Death approaches...and is immediately deemed wanting.

Oh, well. He supposes an avatar of death could take on any number of clichés - why not that of a dapper young man snatched out of his day and age?

"My village." He repeats the words with some measure of incredulity laced through his (perhaps unexpectedly) soft voice. Why raise it when you've so rarely a need for it.

"Have you lost your mind?"

The swordsmith, it turns out, is at least twice as unfriendly as he is naked. That's quite unfriendly indeed.

Horst smiles, which is all you can really do in the face of such bald coldness (if you're Horst Cabal). Two black marks in Horst's book against the swordsmith already: his current, violence-oriented travails and the fact that he is, most decidedly, not what one would call a 'people person.'

That the other man is, arguably, neither 'people' nor 'person' is philosophically moot, of course. This is set aside, however; Horst prefers to do his armchair philosophy aloud rather than contain it to his head. Case in point:

"Perhaps," he allows, showing no visible damage from the insult (though perhaps it lodges, unseen, somewhere beneath his armor, cutting a small wound that will bother at him later). "That remains to be seen, I imagine. After all, it could be that none of this exists except as the fiction of my own fractured mind. Perhaps -- you know, there's a thought -- just perhaps I'm still entombed in the dark of the earth, and all this -- " he gestures -- "is an illusion I created for myself after so many years, so much long time spent waiting, always waiting. If that's so, I must confess I'm disappointed with myself: I flatter myself I could have imagined something better, larger than whatever this absurd, paltry world is. If, as you suggest, I have lost my mind. Which I graciously allow as a possibility." He shrugs.

He takes a few steps forward, less to inspect the sword at close vantage (though he makes a show of doing so) and more to inspect the man crafting it. "If, on the other hand, I've not lost my mind, then I hope you'll forgive my unintended slight. I've seen elaborate farces of this scale before -- I didn't want to assume its fabrication was beyond your abilities, since you at least seem to find a use for it. You treat these people with an air of authority."

It puts Horst in mind of trucking with a demon, and there's no winning with demons: if you guess at their demesne and you underestimate it, they're insulted by your disrespect; if you overestimate it, however, you embarrass them by forcing them to acknowledge the shortcoming. The end result is that demons are never happy with any introduction -- so Horst hopes that his apology will be of any use; otherwise, he has no idea what else to try, and the prospect of failing so spectacularly at a social encounter is horrifying. His pride doesn't cope well with people disliking him.

Edited 2013-02-14 00:18 (UTC)

What now thinks Nuada with the dry, brittle sense of resignation stemming from spending innumerable years watching humans hither and dither from the sidelines. Philosophy got old before Socrates drained his poisoned cup and was dead (to Nuada's mind) several centuries before the Museum of Alexandria burned to the ground. That a reanimated corpse would think to deliver quasi-philosophical musings strikes him as simultaneously gauche and something he never would have thought to bear witness to; the latter becomes a saving grace of sorts, as immortality breeds such lackluster dullness and boredom that experiencing anything new is something of a treat.

So. Philosophical ramblings aside, he gives the man the one token of acquiescence he can think to give: the slightest inclination of his chin. "They know me for what I am, which is more than can be said for most of the prisoners."

It's nearly inevitable that, at some point, two individuals as unalike as Nuada and Horst will find themselves at cross purposes (and then Horst might learn for himself the difference between being the actual prince of the Fair Folk, and being just another vampire). Delaying the inevitable, however, is the irrepressible nature of Horst Cabal, whose heart is apt to bleed at the slightest provocation, and who is entirely too apt to project his own motives and feelings onto other people. A more decisive person might have already written Nuada off as callous and hostile by this point. To Horst, though, he still might be simply tragically misunderstood.

And what are you, then? he wonders -- but the pale man at the forge has already indicated he dislikes this place, and yet he still chose it for the sheer relief of being recognized, so answering that with Horst's own lack of recognition would likely just make him unhappier. "By what name should I call you?" he asks, working to make sure the grammar's correct. It's not quite the same form of the question he's used to asking -- but things do seem to be a little more complicated.

Unbeknownst to Horst, a similar line of thought runs through Nuada's mind. What is it, who does it think it is, what is its purpose. He's seen the display at the so-called museum, and this man here is obviously not that - which begs the question of where he differentiates himself from the rotting mob of seeming mindless determination.

As previously noted: new. Treat. Perhaps there's some manner of magic involved, or a pact, or any odd-numbered other things a young man can find himself falling headlong into.

At least, Nuada surmises, it knows manners. "I am Prince Nuada Silverlance of Clan Bethmoora. 'Sire' will suffice, if you prefer standing on formality. Having said that, I've no dominion over you nor this place; I couldn't possibly tell you what name to call me by."

'Sire' means something very different to Horst than it does to Nuada. Nuada Silverlance of Clan Bethmoora is most certainly not Horst Cabal's sire: a distinction reserved for Sophia Druin, who's long been hammered heart-first into dust in a crypt very, very far from this place.

"I'm rarely slave to propriety . . . but there's a certain elegance to the respectfulness of formal address between strangers which I've always found charming. It serves my purposes well enough. Euer Durchlaucht," he offers instead, with a small bow and a smile on his face that says no one holds dominion over me anymore, even Death itself, but I do like for things to be done in a certain way, hands clasped behind his back. Let it never be said that Horst Cabal cannot change face a bit for whatever he thinks the situation requires. Nuada Silverlance may find him lackadaisical and prone to whimsy -- but also a trifle more mysterious than Horst actually is, he hopes, which is what Horst credits to the otherworldly prince not having attempted to dismiss him thus far.

"You keep uncommon hours," he says in a neutral tone of voice. "Surely the men helping you are tired." To Horst, they look tired already. He doesn't know the blacksmithing business remotely, nor how long these men have been at work or how much of their sweat is from the heat and not the labor -- but to him, they certainly look relieved for this small reprieve. (Horst has certain natural biases towards people who look at all sad about anything.) "Is your work urgent?"

"Euer Durchlaucht," echoes Nuada softly to himself in perfect intonation and crispness of phonemes; how long since anyone addressed him in such a fashion. He watches the quaint antics with faint amusement, lips drawn into a black-and-white smile.

What a treat, to be given too much credit and too little of it in nearly the same breath. He tilts his head, glancing back over his shoulders at the workers. Skilled workers, that they are. For now, they are useful, and Nuada needs know aught else.

Back, then, to the living dead man. "Uncommon. I would hesitate to deem either one of us 'common' by any distinction."

The head tilts the other way; the yellow eyes watching, unblinking: one brand of killer sizing up another. "You ask a lot of questions. Would you be so brazen with your own crowned regent, or the highest official of your government? More to the point: you would make my affairs your own?"

Horst nearly answers -- yes, I would question my own regent: who better than one's own citizens to judge one's decisions; but, perhaps more to your point, I am not your citizen -- but then something else occurs to him, and instead he laughs, amidst this otherwise grave situation. "My own crowned regent sits a throne of fire, heralded by a choir of the screaming tortured, and conspires after the souls of the innocent. I daresay I would have somewhat stronger admonitions for him, given an audience."

He meets Nuada's eyes, though, his eerie, scouring yellow stare; his own expression sobers considerably. "I would make their affairs my own," he answers, inclining his head toward Nuada's workers.

Edited (where have all the good apostrophes gone, and where are all the gods) 2013-02-27 15:45 (UTC)

In the light of the forge (warm red and orange and white), Nuada's yellow eyes widen, seeming to soak up the fire and heat. Laughter, at his expense? He tilts his head to the side like some manner of reptile; so far during their conversation he has kept his moderate distance out of something akin to respect, but now he closes the distance like a diabolical stop motion puppet. Horst talks, and talks of the devil, and oh isn't that so very amusing; the corded muscles of Nuada's arm twist and bend as he brings it down and up in an arc, landing bare knuckles to one high cheekbone. His other hand shoots out, grabbing the dead man by the buttoned front of his waistcoat. Lips curl menacingly over too white teeth that, while not pointed still give the impression of inhuman sharpness.

"Of all the insolent fools I have suffered in my time, you insignificant little cur, you speak of the devil on his throne as if he is your master. Satanist! Christian!" He snarls, hisses, enunciates every word. "You were not always dead. When you still drew breath, a mere child, and you stood before a darkened hallway, why do you think your spine tingled in dread? The hairs on the back of your neck would stand up, your heartbeat would begin to race, while you told yourself to be a big boy.

"The devil didn't make you afraid of the dark, he never scratched the floor beneath your bed at night; he never lured anyone into a bargain they couldn't resist. I did. My people did. And you lecture me?"

Horst isn't expecting to be hit at precisely that moment. He's usually drastically better at dealing with people than this, and congratulates himself on being not much of a man of violence. When Nuada moves up into his space, Horst has an opportunity to stop him, or move away, or at least try -- but where Nuada, in the same situation, might've prepared for a fight, Horst's instinct instead is to wait and see what he does. He is, after all, a vampire: it makes him a bit apt to risk afterlife and limb on the belief that nothing can really harm him.

His cheek stings where he was struck, and Horst stands there, blinking in surprise at having actually been hit.

When he gets over his disbelief, he finds Nuada still in his personal space, clutching him by his waistcoat. That doesn't bode well at all.

It's been quite a while since Horst has had cause to fear the dark, or the things that lurk in it -- before he became one himself -- but it does stir a flicker of memory or two: as a boy, scuttling up the stairs sideways like a crab once, so he could put his back to the wall for fear of an unknown assailant slipping a knife between his shoulderblades; Johannes crawling into Horst's bed to curl up in a tiny ball against his back after the first time Mother stopped letting him leave the lamp lit till he fell asleep; creaking noises in the gloom that father explained were 'just the house settling its bones.'

Horst lays a hand over Nuada's wrist where he's still holding him by the waistcoat and offers a cool, polite smile. "I think there's been some misunderstanding."

"Yes, mein Herr," Nuada whispers, too close already to Horst's pale face to warrant further familiarity. "So ist es."

He can see the calculation in the dead man's eye, and could he smell anything other than death on him, he rather imagines to smell those internal cogs at work amidst fire and brimstone. Satanist or Christian: terms don't matter, and those in particular are merely two sides of one coin. Both have abandoned the old gods and the old ways, both acknowledge the same new god - and somewhere down the line, aliens were suddenly accredited the abductions his kith and kin had prided themselves on for millennia. Even here they speak of aliens, which is a slight in and of itself. But to laugh in the face of someone whose peoples have been subject to the devil's tithe since his dominion grew and theirs diminished - no. It will not stand.

Nuada lets go of the soft, sumptuous fabric, pushing the little man away. A 'misunderstanding' indeed. "Good evening to you, sir."

And with that, Nuada returns to the forge and his hard working volunteers, sparing Brauer not a single glance more.

02: Who says you can't appropriate a forge?

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location] :o~ shiny shiny tag /pets it

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location] sorry about the delay!

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]

[location]