[Location: Adventure Zone] [open to any] / [text - locked - Selina and Horst ]

[personaldemon]

[Locked to Selina/Horst] (two different texts, but identical wording in both save for the name)

Miss Kyle, (Mister Brauer,)

I apologize for my actions of the other day. I was under some duress, but this does not excuse my exorcising my difficulties upon your person.

In the future I shall be sure to leave instead.

-Jason Blood

********

He felt better.

This likely had something to do with what he'd been up to in the last several days in the pseudo-medieval landscape. He had found a sword, and an open hole in the earth in the side of a hill, with steps leading down into the dark.

Rather than being a mere pit, this had soon revealed itself as some sort of... underground complex, a lair as it were, infested with goblins, although these goblins were short, green-skinned, large-headed, and reminded him of toddlers given caffeine, as opposed to bearing much resemblance to the things he would have called 'goblins' back home.

But they had screamed, and stabbed at him with short spears and they had died, which was the relevant bit, they had died when he cut them, they had bled and they had screamed doing that too, like stuck swine, shrill manifestations of pain and blood and there were enough of them that they had begun to be one big blur and he had not had to think, he had not had to weigh consequences, all he had had to do was let the sword rise and fall, rise and fall, downward thrust, guard position, parry, downward thrust, downward thrust, and Etrigan had counted time for him, set the cadence in iambic for every sweep of the blade.

He had found humans, too-- the empty husks that populated the city itself, seeming even emptier in their roles as prisoners. Villagers, he supposed, chained here to complete the tableaux of the den of obliging, shallow monsters raiding the innocent; plowmen and milkmaids and merchants whose garments couldn't settle on what era they were supposed to be aping. Their chains had been cheap, rusted-- had been designed, clearly, for rescuing heroes to break with ease.

With Etrigan's drumming setting the count he had severed the chains, and while the first 'villager' was still in the middle of an enthusiastic Thank you, my lord, tha-- he had put the now-blunted sword into the man's gut.

Some of them had fled; he had not bothered to chase them. There had been enough left to occupy his arms and his sword.

And afterwards, Etrigan had stretched like a cat, spine arched, and settled down in the back of his skull with a purr that rumbled through his bones. Appeased, for the moment. Not satisfied. Never satisfied, no, never ever that, but he could be-- placated.

Just like old times, isn't it, dear?
When you tried less to quench my fire...
Yes, brings back the good old years--
Jerusalem, Antioch, Tyre.

He had stood in the midst of the bodies, the sword's hilt in his hand slippery with all the blood. He'd taken a breath for the first time in days that didn't feel as if his lungs were being singed in the process. Etrigan had urged his eyes down to the bodies.

"That's different," he'd said dully. "None of these people are real. None of this is."

The reality of the slaughtered dead
Has always been a subject favored
By those who would the high ground tread
And yet hold their murders savored.

'They're not REAL people!' they all cry--
Have cried in every genocide;
So pile the pointless corpses high
It's not as if anyone real has died!

That's what you're telling yourself, after all:
That better the puppeted dolls should fall
Then that you should let me free
To run rampant on the cit'zenry.

He had scowled; tossed the damaged blade against a wall in frustration and stalked for a door from the room. Like the hilt of the sword, the floor was redly slick, treacherous. "It's true. It is better. I am uninterested in your games of semantics, Etrigan."

My words, unheeded? What novelty.
You'll drown me out with blood, to shut me up!
And true; this might all illusion be...
But you've used the real thing oft enough.

And it felt real to you-- I tasted it!
Every plunge of steel through butchered foe!
Every slashed throat, and every wasting hit
Is justified, in our game of quid pro quo.

So say what words you like, to mitigate your blame--
I hope the candle's worth your own semantic game.

He had said nothing. There was nothing to say, there was never any winning of arguments with Etrigan.

He had merely looked for a stream or a fountain to wash off the blood.

And after that-- feeling, despite Etrigan's smug words, much better than he had in weeks-- he had sent the texts off to Kyle and Brauer. And now?

He pondered his person. His clothes were something of a lost cause, it had to be admitted. Some of the blood, he noticed now, too late, far too late, was his own-- nicks and cuts inflicted by the goblins, felt now that the blazing heat of Etrigan's presence had subdued again. Very well then; his first business was to see to those. Then worry about new clothes.

Comments

[Location]

[personaldemon]

Holmes's first, suspicious question earns an abbreviated bark of a laugh from him. He doesn't suppose he can fault him for the suspicion, given their interactions to date.

Holmes breaks off for a few seconds, those considerably-too-perceptive eyes weighing him by Holmes's sharp calipers. Holmes comes to his conclusions, whatsoever they are; favors him with a look of clear displeasure and a bedside manner that could do a crocodile proud. Jason laughs again, as short a sound as the first, and shrugs and gingerly extends his leg as if to say have it your way, then. One hand goes down to help pull the stained, torn fabric of his trousers of the way.

Probably it is the blood loss. Infection may not be an issue for him, but he certainly has no such immunities to something as mundane as low blood pressure, or even shock. Yes, blood loss is a nice, safe excuse for why he's still here.

He inspects his forearm while Holmes delivers competent-if-cool first aid-- less to see the injury then to check whether the cut has broken the line of ink that rings his forearm, the same one Pryor had had to cut when wearing his body, the same one he'd had to have Mick St. John help him repair. Mick St. John is no longer in the city. As the first instance of it had proved, it's damn inconvenient to try to do this one-handed.

The mental image of Sherlock Holmes helping with that, as he is helping right now with the cuts, is absurd enough that it brings another irrelevant smile to his face.

But the tattoo is intact, so there's no need to pursue his punchy humour down that mental path.

"Is the text of the book in the Latin alphabet?" is what he says aloud.

[Location]

[infinitelystranger]

The work is easy, anyhow. Sherlock sets his unease aside and sets himself to the puncture wound, wiping grime away from the site before pouring rather a vicious but necessarily antiseptic amount of alcohol. His gaze flickers up warily once or twice to Jason's again, but he doesn't reply until he's finished with the wound: he binds a tight dressing, winding a clean white band around the section of Jason's calf that he's scrubbed clean of grit and gore.

His hands are filthy now. He takes a few moments to fix that, scraping away Extra blood, Jason's, dirt, ash, until his fingers are bare and white again, all except for under the nails.

"I thought it was," he gives his eventual answer. "From a distance or out of the corner of my eye it looks it. But when I examine it I don't recognize any of the characters. It stands up well to cryptographic frequency analysis, too. A little too well, in fact. You know, I don't wonder if it is in the Roman alphabet and there's not some sort of," he frowns, "spell or effect or, I don't know, enchantment on it to keep me from reading it. I've no frame of reference."

There is blood in his hair, God only knows how it got there. He's starting to look like he's done a murder, or had one done upon his person. It doesn't bother him just now. "Your ribs now," he orders, imperious.

[personaldemon]

Jason makes a face at the ceiling at the alcohol pouring into the bite wound on his leg; machismo notwithstanding, that does sting.

He focuses on Holmes's words instead, a decent enough distraction. Off the top of his head he can think of several spells that would obscure a text in the matter described.

"When you attempt to read them, do you get a headache?" he asks, still staring at the far wall. It's some surreal reversal of the questions one asks the injured (how many fingers? where does it hurt?), diagnosing, except he's the one bleeding and there is no particularly good reason for either of them to be offering help to the other. Save what he's already presented to himself as half-reasons.

Ribs, yes; Jason sighs and tugs his shirt free of his trousers, hiking up shirt-and-undershirt until sweaty-and-bloody ribs are bared to the air, as well as the shallow slice that is the source of the blood.

(A sigil of red ink crawls away from Sherlock's sight like a roach scurrying from the light, hides itself somewhere else on Jason's body beneath his shirt.)

"Can you transcribe the script, or does it resist that as well?"

[infinitelystranger]

"If I lay translucent paper over it I can trace it roughly. The symbols aren't identical, though, and if I try to transcribe it by any other method it--" The wriggle of the tattoo catches Sherlock off his guard and by reflex he reaches out to catch it, under some automatic supposition that it's a bug or something else that might endanger his erstwhile patient. He only succeeds in poking Jason in the ribs, though, and blinks for a moment before he realizes.

He shakes his head with a wry twist of his mouth and then carries on like nothing's happened, "If I try to transcribe it by any other method it won't stay in my head. That I know isn't normal. I have an eidetic memory. Photographic. I can pick out the details from a picture after looking at it once. It serves me well with forgeries." You could've done well for yourself appraising art, John told him once, and Sherlock had laughed and leaned on the cafe table by his elbow and said, yes, before I died of boredom. The things you remember.

"Served, I suppose. The forgeries here--" he wipes blood away from the skin of Jason's ribcage before applying the alcohol again, "--tend to be perfect likenesses."

He dresses the wound in silence. When he's finished he rocks back again on his heels, back into the buffer of personal space between himself and Jason Blood that both of them tend to prefer, not just with each other, but with everyone. He meets Jason's eyes, uncharacteristically impassive. "No headache," he says. "No more than the usual. Do you have an insight?"

[personaldemon]

The poke of Sherlock's fingers gets Jason to cut his eyes sideways from the far wall to give Sherlock a look which may not even be noticed, until it registers to Jason what that was probably about and that Sherlock was not merely jabbing a finger into his side to see how he reacts or anything similar.

He looks back to the wall, nods slightly-and-absently at Holmes's words of having an eidetic memory trumped by the book's protections.

No headache, though. Not Athail's book-bind, then, and no swimming fog or surely Holmes would have mentioned it, so that's three other charms that can be ruled out, and the inability to remember them for transcription puts him in mind of Hermetic methodology...

If Sherlock Holmes is a walking encyclopedia of crime and the methods thereof, Jason Blood is his counterpart when it comes to a breadth of knowledge in the occult. He hasn't the raw power of one born to it, nor the ease and facility with spells that Remus Lupin has displayed to him-- but theoretical knowledge, that he can do.

And running mentally through all the possibilities is better than letting Holmes's words-- perfect likenesses-- linger in his mind like the sight of the imitation people scattered all over the floor.

"I can think of a few possibilities, yes," Jason says aloud, letting his shirt fall back down now that Holmes is done. "Books of this sort are often sealed with a trick or catch that is simplistic once known, but maddening otherwise-- you must open the book to the seventh page rather than the first before being able to read it, or it may only be readable during certain hours, or, or, or. Let me see it and I can tell you more."

And decide if it's something I can leave in your possession.

[infinitelystranger]

Information wants to be free--the romantic battle cry of the Creative Commons. Sherlock has never subscribed to such sentimental hogwash, exactly, but nor can one say that secrecy is one of his greatest values in life; he simply hasn't much got it in him. What passes for secrecy with him is usually professionalism, inasmuch as he exercises it, or emotional guardedness, or mere lack of desire to bother explaining something: that one's quite usual, in fact.

Today he eyes Jason briefly as if trying to ascertain if he intends to steal the book from him, then decides for better or for worse that that kind of silly subterfuge isn't really in Jason's character either. If he intended to confiscate the book from Sherlock, he'd already be trying to confiscated, blood loss be damned. He seems that sort of obstinate man.

"All right. But give me your hands first," he orders him with his nose in the air and a handful of tissues extended. "They're bloody."

[personaldemon]

he is definitely that sort of obstinate man

Jason responds to this with another, more pointed look.

"...I can clean my own hands," he says, and takes the tissues. Were he a different fellow than he is, he might have appended a 'mother' onto the end of that.

Some scrubbing later (under his nails is a hopeless case but he'll deal with that later; it's good enough for break-fast, is the phrase that swims into his mind from a memory he cannot recall), he takes the book, turning it over in his hands a moment before even attempting to open it. His fingers trace down the seam of the spine, following the binding; then the edges of the pages with a thoughtful look on his face. Next he sniffs at the book, which gesture might look rather less strange to Sherlock Holmes, all things considered, than it would to many other people.

He opens the book-- several times, letting it fall open in his lap and then shutting it to repeat the gesture, as if to see if it lands in the same open place every time. He raps on the cover with his knuckles, like knocking at a door, before opening the book to the first page.

It's magic, Sherlock! --it was a good deal more impressive when Remus Lupin did it.

What Jason does has the air of some sidewalk mummer making nonsensical gestures, except that there is absolutely nothing of the showman in his motions, and indeed, if one was trying to do a convincing impression of practicing magic for the credulous, one could probably think of more dramatic gesticulations.

[infinitelystranger]

Sherlock leans in closer, eyes flickering between the pages to see if anything is changing, the gibberish text reforming itself into something readable, and Jason himself. Nosy and curious are not quite the same thing. Sherlock Holmes is nothing short of insufferable when nosy--it's an impulse born of boredom and irritation. It transfigures him considerably to be absorbed in something genuinely interesting.

He bypasses the obvious question: what's the book about? Jason's going to volunteer that in a moment if he knows (or he's not, and is going to be a nuisance about it instead, but there's nothing to be done about that). "Is this how you've learnt the rest of your magic?" he asks instead, arms resting on his knees. "From books like this? The Lesser Key of Solomon, that sort of thing, or is that all claptrap?"

[personaldemon]

Jason is not unaware of the difference-- that time they had met in the forest, and had their (very) brief discussion on trees and microscopes and other things he's forgotten, he had observed it. Holmes is at his best given something to dig his terrier-like mind into, and deprived of that he is also like a terrier, a bored one-- piddling on the rug, chewing up the sofa.

But it's not his job, to give the brat something to do.

Still, there is no reason not to answer a question that doesn't matter, which is how Jason classifies Sherlock's current questions.

"Much of it," he admits without looking up from the book, which he is now attempting read upside-down, it seems.

"As for the Lemegeton: it is half-truths, which most publicly-known books on demons are. Most of the significant occult texts come in two versions: one for the true practitioner, usually with safeguards such as this one possesses, and the other for the fool who seeks a novelty. Calculated disinformation.

"The names of the demons in the Goetia are those of real demons, but nobody could successfully summon one using only the generally available version of the text.

"--ah," Jason says a moment later, some slight satisfaction bleeding into his tone. His right hand (so recently quite bloody) has the finger and thumb touching to make a circle as a child might signify a monocle, through which he is now reading the text, although it appears unchanged to Sherlock's eyes.

"Mmnh. Minor divinatory spells, it would seem. Ecclesiastical Latin, so no earlier than the third century..." he says, half to himself.

[infinitelystranger]

Even given something to chew on, Sherlock has a few thoughtlessly annoying behaviors in excitement as well--barking excitedly, jumping up on furniture, that sort of figurative thing. Case in point, watching Jason read through his makeshift hand-lens has given Sherlock an idea. He scoots closer and then leans over Jason shoulder in an obvious and extremely shameless attempt to read through Jason's fingers as well, bumping their heads together once in the process.

The text still looks the same to him--interesting. Frustrating, but interesting. Sherlock ignores any looks Jason may or may not be giving him and leans away again, making a circle with his own bony fingers experimentally. He peers through that.

"Oh," he says in delight as he recognizes the Roman script and medieval Latin words through his fingers. "Oh, that's more like it."

He's smiling at his little success and at the marvel of it all; he lowers his hand, looks again, raises it again, opens his fingers, closes them. He tries his other hand. He tries making a circle with both hands. Everything's worth testing, after all. Once he's satisfied his impulse to experimentation on this count he makes the circle with his right-hand finger and thumb again and goes back to examining the text.

The smile's replaced with a quizzical frown. Then finally: "--I still can't read it," he says, and bursts out with an incongruous laugh and is smiling again, bright with sheer absurdity. What about that, then. He's been racking his brain over a perplexing magical code, but it turns out the real barrier standing between Sherlock Holmes and the secrets of minor divinatory spells, after all, is the fact that he never took more than one year of Latin in secondary school.

I'll be damned. He laughs again, shaking his head, and leans back on his hands with a scrunch of his nose.

[personaldemon]

Jason does indeed give Sherlock an entirely unheeded glare at the artfully-messy head that invites itself directly over his shoulder. Before he can shove Sherlock bodily away, he's already pulling back, at least.

Jason sits, wordlessly, making his will save to avoid rolling his eyes as Holmes looks-then-doesn't-look, looks-then-doesn't-look, testing out all possible ways through which one can look through one's fingers.

At Holmes's incredulous laugh, Jason shrugs slightly. Whether or not Holmes speaks the language is his own affair-- and truthfully he's relieved that he does not. If nothing else, it imposes an additional barrier of time before Holmes would try anything from this.

He looks through the pages, turning them, quickly deciphering the basic purpose of each incantation. There's a fair bit of theory-- this is a text for beginners, it would seem. Quite a lot of discussion of the zodiac, signs in the ascendant and so forth and so forth; a student's exercise to create one's own star-chart so that one may cast one's divinations at the most fruitful times of the lunar and astrological cycle.

Et cetera.

The actual spells seem largely benign. The compass-spell, a dweomer he remembers having to study as a boy, a very, very long time ago. (A useless spell, really: nature herself provides so many ways to know which way is north that using magic for the purpose seems exorbitant.) A spell for the finding of lost household objects-- he'll admit the praticality of that one. Car keys are the bane of magicians as well as anyone else. The most ambitious of the spells seems nothing more spectacular than a spell to know the week's weather in advance.

There are no demons. There is no fire. There is neither blood nor pain nor malice required for anything in the book.

He closes it and hands it back to Sherlock Holmes.

"Enjoy it, then," he says.

Perhaps the damned novelty will keep him busy.

[infinitelystranger]

The wind's changed, in some indescribable way. The moment's gone, if there ever was a moment in the first place. Sherlock glances up from the book as it occurs to him that he's crouched over a magic book in the company of Jason Blood of all people; just a moment ago he was laughing, even. Not sarcastically, either. What would he be after with that? This is Jason who thinks he's a brat on a good day, a wretched fool on others--and here they are, smeared all over with Extra blood.

The silence unnerves Sherlock and he folds the book in his arms and gets to his feet immediately, curling his fingers around the spine and the pages like he's protecting it from something, or vice versa. He gives Jason Blood one of his cool, disinterested once-overs. He can stand, surely, and he's not in shock. Sherlock's got what he's wanted. He'll find himself resources on the Latin later. Fine.

Idly at the back of his mind he thinks, well, it can't be anything dangerous if he's letting me have it. But dangerous isn't the same as useful, and really at the forefront is a different line of thinking.

Do you know, Mr Blood, Sherlock could say, your behavior completely baffles me. Instead he says shortly, "You should get up. They respawn after a while."

[personaldemon]

"Thank you, I'll keep that in mind," Jason says distantly, although he doesn't get to his feet yet.

And there's nothing else to say: any debt (and Jason Blood keeps close accounting of his debts, his obligations, the tally of favours owed and received-- for a magician, they are more than merely social courtesy) he might have incurred by accepting Holmes's aid in bandaging his wounds has now been paid, by his assistance with the book.

Everything is even. It squares nicely. Everything is back to what passes as normal. Etrigan is quieted again for now, at a cost of nothing more than these... simulacra (preferable to the alternatives, so very preferable) and if there's a deeper cost, a personal cost, there's no point in keeping track of those anymore--

--and Holmes is occupied, and not asking questions about what had happened here. Well enough. Jason wonders what deductions the fellow's drawn (besides the obvious), but... it doesn't matter.

"Good day to you, Mr. Holmes," Jason says, rather formally, and leans his head back against the fountain's edge to close his eyes a few moments before moving on.