collectedlogs | INTRO LOG #1

INTRO LOG #1

Welcome to Collected’s first Intro Log! The information we’ve provided about the setting is not exhaustive - feel free to interact with the setting as you see fit. Rather than have specific prompts, our event posts throughout the game will generally have information listed out like this and players may come up with their own prompts.

If you have questions about the setting or the intro log, please ask them HERE in the comment thread! And most of all, have fun, shoppers.

PROMPTS

The first thing anyone does is gasp for air.

It’ll feel like the first breath you’ve taken in years. That’s right; before you can even become aware of your surroundings, the most immediate thing they’ll process is that you’re in water. Foul smelling water - like rotten eggs and decay. It’s pitch black, and you’re swimming in it with only your head above the surface. If the smell doesn’t deter you, the longer you stay in will; the water stings to have on your skin, chemical in nature.

So - you need to get out. This water can’t be okay to stay in. Once you’ve gathered enough about your surroundings, you’ll see that you’re inside a mall, of sorts. There’s a large (non-functioning) escalator in front of you that will lead you to the semi-safe havens of the second floor - but be careful, because everyone’s going to be gunning for that only exit.

» Once on the second floor, exploring will lead you to a few notes of interest: Long windows and tall glass doors show the conditions outside. The sky is a burnt orange, and there is a thick sort of fog on the horizon. Nothing for miles in every direction - just an empty parking lot, completely devoid of life or any sign that anyone has come across this place in many years. Even so, you’ll find the windows and doors unlocked, so getting outside is easy… the problem is what’s out there.

A trip outside will make it instantly clear why you see no life outside the mall’s walls: exposure to the radioactive sun outside causes your skin to bubble with welts, and the thick, toxic air of the outside is impossible to inhale without keeling over. It’s blistering hot, too. Even non-organic creatures would melt or be eroded by the sun’s radioactive qualities. One thing is abundantly obvious: you cannot survive outside. Not now, at least. Those who receive a burn or other damage from the conditions outside will discover that strangely enough, upon returning inside the mall, the wound begins to heal up on its own. Slowly, and extremely painfully, but it’s healing. That’s strange…

» Another thing of note is that there’s a food court on the second floor. There, you’ll find a variety of abandoned restaurants that have varying amounts of non-perishables inside - canned vegetables and preserved meats, as well as dusty old jars of sauces and the like. There are a few walk-in freezers with hefty locks on them, but if the locks are broken or picked, there’s actually some frozen rations, as well! Many of them are not labelled, so the dining experience will be pretty hit or miss. None of the stoves or cooking appliances in the food court work anymore, either, so you’ll have to get creative when it comes to cooking up these ingredients. (Or just, you know, eat them cold.)

» Throughout the mall’s bathrooms, water fountains, and gym showers, you’ll find that all the water in the mall is suspiciously clean. Like, way too clean to be normal in a place as run-down and clearly abandoned as this. You’ll find that toilets flush completely fine, and shower water heats up (eventually). Should you be grateful, or concerned?

» There’s an electronics store on the second floor, as well, along with a internet cafe. Should you try to turn on the computers in the internet cafe, you’ll find that it only opens to the same forum page: a site called Mall Watch. It’ll prompt you to make an account and password if you try posting to it. In the electronics store, you’ll also find that any phone you forage for and try to boot up will also only open up to this forum page. Weird!

» If you’re looking for a place to sleep, the department stores of the mall still have a variety of furniture sets collecting a lot of dust. Then again, no one’s around to tell you where to sleep - and maybe you don’t trust all these new faces you arrived with. If you’re okay sleeping on the floor of a random store, more power to you.

» You’ll probably want to do something about your clothes that were stained by the black water on the first floor.. try foraging for some clothes! Looking around, you’ll find that some clothes stores have some stock left over, though everything’s generally a mess in clothing stores - it’ll take you some time to find anything that’ll fit you. Looking around enough on this second floor, you might end up stumbling across some of your own belongings or clothing, or those of your peers.

More than anything, the longer you explore and scavenge the mall, you’ll recognize how eerily silent it is. If not for you and your peers here, this place would be totally desolate. Clearly, there’s no one around for miles, and as far as you can tell, you’ll only be able to survive here for as long as the supplies here last. No one’s coming to save you - no one even knows you’re here. In every sense of the word, you are alone.

For now.

NAVIGATION

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

i. arrival
( harrow could most likely count the times she's been submerged in water in her life on one hand — cleaning the body by way of ablution had been phased out within the last myriad, upon the invention of the sonic (a far more efficient and far less uncomfortable method, in her mind). there had been the deep pools of drearburh, frigid and salty, which her mother had insisted serve as the conduit for any important secrets that passed between them. but that had been so long ago — when she begins to come to she instead thinks she's back in that salt-water swimming basin in canaan house. she half-expects the voice of gideon nav to chide her for her lapse in attention: zoned out again, nonagesimus? that chilly weirdo of yours really cast that strong of a spell?

there's a small, stubborn sort of surprise that sticks in the junction of the atlas and occipital bone — the water doesn't taste of salt. instead it tastes wrong, carrying with it the chemical and electric taste of battery acid. she flails, struggling in a direction her instincts seem to recognize as up, and then her head breaks the surface of the water. she gasps, blinks rapidly against water and running face paint, seeing nothing but a mostly-flooded cavern cast in the grayscale of low light.

there are questions, questions like, what, and where, and why? but, for now, these slide back several places in her mind in sorting of precedence. most important is how do I get out of this situation, because the water is deep and she is currently being weighed down by several layers of dense, heavy clothing. harrow was a functional swimmer, not an apt one — treading water is already growing difficult. she makes a hurried look around herself and finds the direction the most light is streaming from. then she begins swimming in that direction, movements awkward and harried by her robes.

she realizes mid-way there that she isn't going to make it. lactic acid washes through every under-developed muscle strung along her skeleton, teaching her the harsh lesson that perhaps she shouldn't have so perfectly forsworn any manner of physical exercise. it's at this point that someone else in the water could a) offer to help (or help forcibly), as she's beginning to sink leadenly beneath the inky surface of the water, or,

b) witness something very strange as, just after she sinks beneath the surface of the water, something pale snakes up and then lances out of it, reaching the twenty or so yards to the escalator and the promise of dry land. closer inspection would find that this "something" was a spine, or something similar: a long rope of vertebrae and cartilaginous discs. when the far end reaches the mechanical stairs, half a skeleton bursts from the end like a macabre flower blooming from a stem. the arms grasp the rail of the escalator as the shoulders turn to allow the skull to crane behind it, the red pinpricks of light in the eye sockets staring into the water behind it, along the line of its over-long spine.

a few long moments later and harrowhark reappears, pulling herself hand over hand along the spine, which dissolves into bone ash behind her as she does so. when finally close enough, she releases the make-shift vertebral rope; what remains seethes and rearranges itself on the fly into the skeletal hips and legs of the construct. it stands, shuffles forward, and fishes its necromancer from the water. the bones creak as it pulls her up in an odd, bony carry, waiting patiently as she hacks out half a lungful of dark water.

the skeleton and its bundle of soaked-through, wheezing necromancer is currently taking up one of the lanes upwards to freedom, and as harrow regains the ability to breathe and perceive properly, she finds that she is not alone. another was either already out of the water, paused on the escalators, or blocked from rising similarly from the fetid water. she doesn't seem too concerned about that; she's about to say something, but then she coughs again — this time, bright blood.

focusing again, tries again: ) Who ( she wipes a trickle of blood from her chin with a sodden black sleeve, ) the fuck are you?

( there are many more questions she wants to ask in much the same tone and timbre, but for now she settles on this one. )

ii. scavenging
( to harrowhark, an unknown was something unseemly, offensive — a threat. there existed in her own world dichotomy of those who honed their bodies and those who expanded their minds. she had always found the former path to be short-sighted and stupidly limited; a sword provided only a short list of incredibly predictable solutions for a given problem, but the application of accrued knowledge was a far more diverse weapon. but it was reliant on a currency that she compulsively collected with an almost draconic avarice.

so even with their discombobulating new environment and the buzzing cloud of questions and unknowns that flocked to it like buzzards to a corpse, she does not waste time. she immediately sets off into the bowels of the desiccated commercial building, inscribing in her mind what she could not in her now-missing journal: a mental map of the area, notes of the doors and their locations, lingering queries as to what this space was for or what significance that area could hold.

it's all conjecture, of course. to her eyes, this place is a relic well over ten thousand years old.

it is during this time soon after their arrival to the mall that one of two things happens:

a) harrow has found something of interest among the nondescript rubble and mess of the mall, and she is either getting a closer look without touching the thing yet or, if she's fairly certain it isn't dangerous, has picked it up and is inspecting it further. this something of interest is far more familiar to you than it is to her, so it would probably be pertinent to ask it back from this curious crow of a girl, still swathed in the heavy and half-sodden robes of her house and station.

though such a request would be met by wide eyes, a selfish retrieval of the item to herself, and a quick question posed in riposte: ) And what would you offer for it in trade?

b) the above situation, but in reverse: harrow's dark eyes have espied you with something of hers from a distance, and now here she comes like black-fletched arrow, a thundercloud of aggravation darkening her countenance. if this building held the same promise of good oss as the corridors and chambers of drearburh or the foyers and hallways of canaan house, in its slow and elegant decline into disrepair and decay, perhaps she would have summoned a construct immediately to act in the stead of her presently absent cavalier.

but it seems she's limited only to the bones she has on hand (which is still quite a few, but well below "enough," by her standards), so she tries diplomacy first.

or whatever stands for "diplomacy" in harrowhark nonagesimus' standards: ) You have in your possession something of mine. Unhand it.

( and if it's just, well... a human bone? one look at her would make this seem not so outlandish, considering they hang in multiple strings from her neck, band around her wrists, and stud the arcs of cartilage of both ears. she also seems to... rattle slightly, when she moves. )

[ ooc: most of harrow's items are accounted for, but if you wish to find either a Ninth prayer rosary (knucklebones strung along a cord) or an extra pair of Ninth vestments (roughly five pounds of mouldering black cloth, voile, and lace which probably looks like it belongs in hot topic), you are welcome to! ]

iii. mapping
( once harrow has been (blessedly) reunited with her journal, she returns to what she feels is the most primary and important in her order of operations here: mapping all of the accessible surface area of this building. she sails through the mall like a spectre, dark hood pulled over her head. she can be found nearly anywhere, bent over an incredibly thick little book, exacting something into the pages with what appears to be a pencil-length metal needle (which she occasionally lifts up to jab to the inside of her lip, rewetting it with blood — she is currently without pens or pencils, so she makes due with what she has on hand).

so absorbed is she in her work and making sure that it is accurate to scale and space that it wouldn't be too difficult to sneak up on her, if one was committed enough to stealth. if you're not, she will snap the book closed before you get too close, but otherwise you might be able to sneak a look at what she had been working: a seemingly accurate floor-plan of the second floor of the mall written onto the page with browning blood, complete with marked and labeled doors and several annotations in a language you cannot read.

whether you get an idea of what she was up to or not, it seems apparent by the alacrity with which she snaps the book closed that it is not something she is eager to share.

there's something in the blankness of surprise at her realizing she's not alone that seems youthful, girlish — something completely clashing with all the rest of her. but then it disappears under a beetled brow and a sour expression; harrow jerks her chin upwards in a haughty gesture. ) Most would know better than to approach a necromancer of the Ninth unannounced. ( she says it as if it was something she assumes all children are taught in the crib. )

iv. wildcard
( or write your own! feel free to contact me via pm or at

lycanthropic if you want to discuss anything! )

[There are not many things quite so unbalancing as foraging through a pile of seemingly useless old things only to find what is, without a doubt, a bone. A human bone, Constantin can tell, having been tutored in anatomy and made to name the bits and pieces of the skeleton once wheeled in to demonstrate.

Can he name this particular bone now? No, he certainly can't— but while the details may go fuzzy and unremarkable, no other lesson from his youth can stand out as starkly as observing a real skeleton, and so he can recognize the shape. He's recognizing the shape right now, as he picks it up, because of course he picks it up—

And oh, his frowning at it is interrupted by the arrival of a rattling young woman who seems, ah, displeased? And demanding of her— oh.]

Oh!

[Constantin looks at her. He looks at the bone. He looks at her again. Well, she does make it easy to believe this bone he found in the dust is hers, in some sense of the word...]

This? You know, I'm almost relieved to know it wasn't lurking in wait before any of us arrived here! [Imagine if somebody was murdered? Which, actually-] Whose is this, exactly? Should I raise an alarm?

( there had never been a single day in harrowhark's life in which she had been fazed by the presence of human remains. the Ninth House had been built ensconcing a tomb, after all, and drearburh itself was little more than a glorified ossuary when one stripped away the trappings of worship and day-to-day life. they bound their books in tanned human leather, made their soap from human fat, and tended their thin, dreary fields with the reanimated bones of their own dead — it was not done in maliciousness or in malevolence but merely out of necessity. the Ninth House existed in a huge drill shaft bored into a rock so far away from the light and warmth of Dominicus that without the machines providing oxygen, heat, and life support, they were practically spaced. they scarcely had enough to provide for their own, and as for the rest, well — there was not much more that the Ninth produced but bodies of the peacefully-passed penitent dead.

so to happen upon a human bone registered as less than nothing for her. actually, it would register as a sharp relief in an environment like this, so devoid of anything she could use as a seed for necromancy. so when she comes across constantin with an extremely useful thanergy-rich bone in his hand, her attention is sharp enough that it might cut like a knife. she looms closer, inch by inch, as he looks between herself and the oss in question. she has half a mind to simply snatch it from him, but — she begrudges there is something to be said about cordiality.

as he speaks her sour expression becomes several shades more bewildered, as if he had suddenly lapsed into some dialect she wasn't familiar with and could scarcely make heads or tails of. her brow furrows again, and she takes a closer look at the bone — a long, good length of femur, only faintly discolored, barely pitted, and not at all cracked or dented. it was good material. )

Male, ( she observes it off the bone as if she were reading it from a sheet of paper, ) seventies or eighties, judging from signs of osteoporosis and arthritic wear. ( here she indicates the area of the head and neck of the femur, the slightly degraded shape of the greater trochanter. )

Dead no fewer than forty or fifty years, based on the concentration of thanergy. So you may stay your alarm.

( she holds out her hand, palm-up, clearly expecting it to be handed to her. )

[He expects a dismissal, at most; maybe a name, or something about how it doesn't matter, just hand it over— so the fact that she has an answer for him at all is something of a surprise. He blinks, turning said surprise back to the bone as she gestures to it, as if he can will himself to be learned enough to see this supposed wear.

Well, it looks like a bone. He brushes some dust off one end, politely, and frowns.]

Much as I am relieved that we do not have a crazed murderer in our midst, [probably; he could ask about all the other bones she's wearing, but that might take a while--] My curiosity is now irrevocably piqued!

[He waves the femur around some, and while he does step forward to place it in her hand, he also does not let go of his end. It's not a grip that suggests he wants to keep it, far from it, she can have all the dead things she wants— but rather, an unspoken request that she does not rattle off somewhere else until he asks fifty more questions.

Number one:]

How do you tell any of that? Are you a doctor?

[In fairness, doctors freak him out and she is covered in dead people, so this question does not come from total, ah, boneheaded conjecture.]

( she couldn't be bothered to memorize menial, personal facts about each individual that had her collective oss had comprised. necromancers had particular views of the self, of the body and its relation to it, and of death. they had, after all, charted death — she had known before her age had reached double digits of the River which contained the vast, seething masses of departed souls, so many driven senseless and mad with nothing for company but time and hunger. she was well-acquainted with the moment of death, having presided over final rites for scores of the Ninth's ailing and elderly, of the thanergenic bloom and the osmosis of the spirit from the tangible world past the banks of the River. and she knew just as any necromancer did that once the spirit had flown and the soul had departed that the body was no longer anything to tie sentimentality to: it was meat, fat, offal, bone, and little more.

though she would leave the majority of the lot for the flesh magicians of the Third.

her expression doesn't budge — whether or not she is a crazed murderer isn't of his concern, of course, though all of the bones she currently wore had been by donation, thank-you-very-much — though she seems perhaps a bit ... peeved by the sudden interest? oh, how harrow hates to have to explain anything. largely self-taught, she had never inherited a teacher's mien.

her gloved fingers curl around the worn column of the linea aspera, lips pursing slightly when he doesn't relinquish it entirely to her. she could try to pull it away from him, but... she preemptively saves herself from any embarrassment. as gideon might say, she has "fuck all upper-body strength."

at "doctor," her lip curls slightly. she either thinks very lowly of doctors (somewhat true, though palamedes sexuts' skill with medical necromancy was something she would begrudgingly have to acknowledge as extensive) or thinks very highly of herself (absolutely true).

all it proves to her is that he is no denizen of the Nine Houses — she could guess as much, but no one would make such a bone-headed conjecture (indeed) if they were. )

Do I look like a doctor to you, fool? ( her tone of voice is acerbic. she gives a light tug on the bone. ) I am a necromancer.

( she says this like it should answer this and all of his questions (it should). )

[Constantin makes a face, opening his mouth to speak and then shutting it abruptly with a wry, private little grin— she would, ah, likely not appreciate his saying something like 'What is the difference?' even in jest. At least it seems that they both have a less than spectacular opinion of doctors, although it would be best not to linger on it lest he must admit aloud that her appearance is, hmm...

Jarring? Shocking? Unsettling, in its own special way? He's seen decorations of bone, to be fair, but none of them human.

He is still holding the femur, however, and drums it once, twice with his fingers before he lets it go, apparently satisfied.]

Of course! My mistake! I suppose you aren't much of a crow, after all— none of that irritating business with the beaks, you know.

[He gestures in front of his own face, a beak gesture, meant to signify a plague mask. This clearly needs no further explanation.]

A sorceress, then! I've never met one with a predilection for... death.

[....]

So! How does one learn to judge a man's life from his remains? I was never taught any magic, myself.

( no, she would not appreciate something like that being said, constantin, and especially in jest — humour was a fickle plaything of people who had far more time on their hands than sense in their heads (her erstwhile cavalier being a prime example of this). the only thing that matters presently is that he relinquishes the femur to her, and she retrieves it with a short, clipped motion, feeling an odd wave of relief fall over her at having at least one piece of oss on hand should the shit really hit the fan at any unforeseen future moment.

something about his nomenclature and pantomimed symbolism is lost upon her — probably because the doctors he spoke of were something considered prehistoric to her own civilization, and no order of their own ranks had ever thought to replicate the plague doctors of the pre-Resurrection. she lets it go, however. this is not the first nor the last time she will be confounded by someone she meets in this place, she thinks, completely correctly.

"sorceress"... it is not the term she would prefer, no, but if he must. ) That is a narrow view of it, ( she sniffs, yet offering no further explanation. in truth, necromancy was a mastery of not only death but the life which preceded it as well — a complete command over all aspects of the human animal. but harrow is a bone adept, and her art was considerably skewed in the direction of "dead" rather than "alive," so she will let it pass.

she is silent a long moment, brow falling heavily over her near-black eyes at the question. it's not magic, not at all. so she approaches her response from a different angle: )

How does a child learn to speak their parents' tongue? How does an artist learn to replicate an image on the page? Neither are taught. ( she swings the leg bone in a short arc downwards, the lateral condyle making a satisfying smack as it connects with the meat of her other palm. ) Time. Observation. Practice.

( growing up in a glorified charnel house helped. )

Alright... certainly. Did your mother not teach you to speak? Even my mother spared a paltry few weeks to entertain me before sloughing off the duty onto someone else.

[Is this interpretation too literal? She did say learning to speak isn't taught, which he supposes is almost true, but surely not entirely-- hm!

Well, it doesn't entirely matter to the question at hand, which is the bit about the bones. He waves off his own sidebar there as if to pretend he never asked or started running his mouth about his mother, ah— it's best just to loop back around to the beginning.]

What, then, do you observe and practice with your multitudes of time? You stare at bones until they speak? You told me that man's history with only a glance!

[He wonders then if it is only bones, if she can tell by glancing at him standing here in front of her how poorly his health is, how many times he has lingered on death's threshold only to step back uncertainly into life— but that's not something one asks a stranger about. No, the man dead for a handful of decades is a much more polite topic.]

And what do you need a man's old parts for, anyway?

( harrow's brow furrows; the already-beleaguered layer of face paint threatens to begin to scale off altogether. she had been a quick and canny child, but even by the time she had been able to speak, she had been late in learning to read, and by the time she learned to read, she was late in learning the fundamentals of basic necromantic theorems. did a parent ever truly take time to actually hold class on what should come naturally? even griddle had learned to speak the common tongue, and her primary sources had been scolding and questionable comics and magazines.

regardless, she composes her answer, which is a terse, ) She was not a patient woman.

( in any case, what she means is that one does not always attend a class to learn something. sometimes the knowledge merely accumulates over time, like dust on an untended and neglected bookcase. the Ninth necromancers were known for their mastery over bones, and none were so prodigious as their Reverend Daughter.

she sighs another long, aggrieved breath through her nose, eyes growing heavy-lidded as she musters the very limited patience she seemingly inherited from her parent(s). she decides to aggressively kill two birds with one stone (or bone?). ) I've learned what I have from what I do. To become a bone adept of any worth, one must become knowledgeable of the theory but also the form in practice. I couldn't very well conjure a construct worth the oss it cost to create if I didn't understand the anatomy.

As for the owner of this and his history, ( she says, turning over the femur in her hands, ) age becomes simple to tell when most of your house have been dead for decades or are likely to join them soon. Osteoporosis. Arthritis. It's easy enough to see the symptoms in bone when I have seen it in both life and death hundreds of times before. From there, it is merely a ( very ) educated guess.

[It isn't every day one opens a half-empty container of Slim Jims™ and finds a strange journal chillin' within.

Or, well. To be fair to Felix: it isn't every day one opens a half-empty container of Slim Jims™, period, because Slim Jims™ simply do not exist in Fódlan? And let it be known that Felix is utterly delighted by these sticks of what may or may not be meat, because the smoky flavor is divine. He is relatively content to sit atop this dusty table in the food court for the next, oh, twenty minutes or so, Aegis Shield resting beside him as he (cautiously) gnaws on some mystery meat and flips through this mysterious Book. He doesn't recognize any of the symbols he sees; he certainly doesn't recognize whatever script this is written in, and he wonders, idly, if someone like Sylvain would make proper headway with it. Felix has never been much of a scholar.

But Felix is a hunter, and thus Felix does take note of the strange leather in which the book is bound. It's almost, hmm, greasy to the touch, and different than the tanned skins he's used to. Puzzling, indeed...

(And it also smells strongly of Slim Jims™, but considering where he found the damn thing, he doubts that's much of a clue.)

So Felix is engrossed, to say the very least, when this stranger sees fit to approach him? Half of a Slim Jim™ is hanging from his mouth when he glances up at her, and while his gaze is cool, his brow promptly furrows as he considers her words—and her, ah, general appearance. Truly wild, girl. Where you from. Maybe a thing he'll ask, after he reaches up to pluck this snack from his mouth and say, rather flatly:]

Be more specific.

[Don't boss him around! And also: @ the Goddess, please let him keep the fuckin' Slim Jims™.]

( any child of the Nine Houses born with a necromantic sensitivity and trained to harness it develops a sense beyond senses of thanergenic signatures — a necromancer needs thanergy, after all, to perform their art, and it was imperative that they be able to know it in its blooms, its streams, its trickles, and its seethes. to harrow's senses, this entire place had the faintest tinge, going through its own slow decomposition both organically and metaphorically, though it was old. far too old to be of much use to her, in any case. but she tracks the other traces of more concentrated thanergy. this is what brings her to the linoleum mausoleum of the food court and to where the young man sat on one of the abandoned tables: not for her own journal, which he held in his hands, but for the twisted disc of what she knew intrinsically to be bone that rested at his side.

it holds a lot of interest to her, to be sure, but for now her attention is fixated sharply and irately at the stranger. there is something oddly and horribly revealing in someone you didn't know flipping through your own private journal — she says a silent prayer of thanks to the Locked Tomb that she had the forethought (read: paranoia) to write anything sensitive (read: almost everything) in crypt-script, which one would find near-impossible to crack without her prayer rosary and roughly two hundred years of spare time.

she knows from roughly ten seconds of having her eyes on him what type of creature this is; she didn't even need the devastatingly obvious clues of the swords to help her in that. cavalier. even more reason for her to get her journal back from him, before he found some creatively stupid way to destroy it.

she has less than zero interest in his new treasure trove of slim jims™ — the faintly chemical smell of processed meat (??) is nauseating, even as faint as it is. )

My journal. ( she indicates it by flickering her gaze to where it was in his hands before returning to staunchly lock with his in altercation. ) Someone like you would derive nothing of use from it. So return it.

( too late for the not bossing you around, felix. she's half-extending a gloved hand, palm-up, expectant. )

[Ooh, Felix hates prolonged eye contact? Sends his hackles raising, really, but he resists the very real urge to look off to the side, choosing instead to hold her gaze as he snaps her journal closed. He's not nosy by nature; he has, like, no real interest in digging through someone's personal affairs once he's aware that they're someone's personal affairs, and yet he doesn't immediately hold it out to her. Rude recognizes rude...

...Except that he's definitely the ruder one here, but that's par for the course! Nothing he's too concerned about as he raises her journal a tad higher, pointedly bringing it closer to eye-level.]

Someone like me? You don't know me.

[We're doing this now, punk. Elaborate.]

( harrow seems to show no propensity to shy away from eye contact; if anything she returns it combatively, as a cavalier might step their weight forward into an interlocking of blades, jockeying for the upper-hand. when he raises the book, it almost seems as though he might hold it over her head — seeing as though she is no longer seven years old, she would not be standing for any childish keep-away. luckily, he merely holds it at eye level, and he avoids a hastily-summoned skeletal construct from attempting to grab him by the throat.

she seems offended that she has to explain, but she does so, albeit annoyed. ) I don't have to. It's obvious enough. A cavalier. ( perhaps a few weeks ago she would have said the word with derision, having a typical Ninth opinion of cavaliers — only worth as much as how many bones they could carry on their backs. but now she merely feels disarmed in saying it. in many ways she had hated admitting to herself how necessary a cavalier was to her — how necessary her cavalier was to her — and it rankles far worse now that she is seemingly missing. )

A sword-arm has no use for necromantic theorem. ( she gestures again with her awaiting palm. )

[Felix may be a pain in the ass, but he's not so childish as to dangle anything above anyone's head? Unless it's, like, Annette he's dealing with—but this strange girl is so far away from Annette it isn't even funny, so. Here we are! Felix continuing to hold this journal just out of reach as he listens.

Which leads to Felix raising a brow, because hey, that's a lot to unpack right there. Necromantic sounds vaguely... magical? Reason-adjacent. He doesn't quite know; he's only delved far enough into Reason to give himself an edge in battle, but he wouldn't be surprised if it was some particularly dangerous branch of dark magic. The people who favor that sort of thing do tend to dress... eccentrically...

...Whatever. Not his problem.]

It's obvious that I prefer swords to Reason?

[A quiet snort. An unspoken sort of, like, I'll grant you that, just before he leans forward to place her journal in the palm of her hand. She could be lying about this being hers, but he doubts it? He doubts it. Who wants a greasy-feeling book...]

Then it should be obvious that I'm not a cavalier. No spurs, [he says, dryly, as he settles back, turning a foot to show her the back of his water-stained boot.] No lance.

( there is a small part in the back of the grey matter of her brain that senses that something is amiss with the way that he says it — a proper noun lying in wait, like a camouflaged predator poised for exactly the right moment to spring. but as it is, it's funny. harrow doesn't really have much of a sense of humour (one might say she doesn't have a single funny bone in her entire body...), but there is the faintest upward tug in the corners of her mouth when she hears him say it. she senses perhaps a half-dozen razor-sharp retorts, perched in single-file line along her tongue, but she decides to be diplomatic.

in this case, it means "not immediately and insufferably rude:" ) ...Yes.

( but that's mostly because of two things: 1) he seems to have some martial bearing, meaning in her mind there are only two possibilities, and 2) he does not have a necromancer's build. having recently seen all of the necromantic scions of the other houses and seeing that it was fairly common for all of them to leave the building of muscle mass to their sworn swords, she feels fairly confident in this assessment.

she jolts forward immediately when he extends the book out to her, her fingers curling greedily around it as he relinquishes it. she pulls it close to her chest, and for a moment the mask (the metaphorical one — the face paint is still very much present) slips: she is merely a girl relieved to have something of seemingly vital importance back to her. her gloved fingers trace over the cover, the binding, finding the place where the metal needle was hidden in the spine. she breathes out, satisfied it's all there.

she looks up, finally piecing together what he had continued to say after the initial inspection of her property. her brow furrows, and she speaks before thinking, ) What use would a cavalier have for spurs? ( or a lance? it would be a truly odd off-hand to use alongside the traditional rapier, though she supposes there was probably some eccentric out there who used one (spoilers: there totally is). )

[ Down, up, down again… but not up. When Harrowhark’s bobbing head doesn’t resurface, something dormant in Historia awakens. Save them, it cries. They’re drowning; save them. She looks up to the second floor, then back down to Harrowhark—or what’s left of her. What should she do? Common sense tells her to leave, to make it up to safety, but her heart tells her to take the plunge.

The latter wins out. She dives down into the deep for a fistful of Harrowhark’s anything—her hair, maybe, or some tulle from the elaborate mess of rags she has the gall to consider clothing—and heaves. Her arms are slight, but the inky muck takes on the majority of Harrowhark’s weight, so the task of hauling her back onto land becomes a trivial one.

They eventually break the surface, Historia before Harrowhark, and shortly after, make it to the foot of the escalator. Step by painstaking step, she eases them both up from out of the water until the only thing the shore has left to lap at are the soles of her shoes. If she never has to swim again, it’ll be too soon.

She hacks up a helping of black gunk off to the side, then props herself up onto her elbows, where she can get a better look at her rescuee. Harrowhark’s hair, dark, wet, and clinging to her face, is in the way. Historia smooths it back, smearing her face paint in the process. ]

Are you okay?!

[ Or, well, as okay as they can be, given the circumstances. Historia’s clothes are ruined, riding up, and clinging to her in places she didn’t know they could. She’s not okay, but she’s okay. She’ll manage. Whether she can say the same for her beached friend, though… ]

Can you hear me?!

( fortunately for both of them, historia grabs a fistful of the Ninth adept's robes (rather than finding a handhold of hair or bone jewelry, which would have been very unpleasant for one or both of them) — it might almost seem that the vestments themselves weigh more than the girl tangled up in them, like some sort of tiny crustacean ensconced deep within a thick entrapment of netting. she becomes dully cognizant of someone pulling her through the water and she can't help but wonder a bleary, gideon? but no, the silhouette is all wrong, unfamiliar. paranoia crawls up her spine in a sickening wave, but she subdues it for the moment, contributing as much as she is able (which is just about nothing except a vague movement of her arms and legs) to get the both of them out of this foul-smelling drowned catacomb.

once they actually reach what stands for dry land in this situation (a half-submerged metal staircase leading up to a stone landing, it seems), it's all harrow can do to pull herself up onto the incline. then she begins hacking up a lungful of acidic-tasting black water, her entire body shuddering with the effort. but gradually air replaces liquid in her lungs, and she begins to make sense of the space around her — and her apparent rescuer.

even as out-of-it as she is, harrow shies blindly away from the hand pushing a sodden fringe of hair back from her face — avoidant of touch nearly as much as she is avoidant of anyone seeing her without a proper presentation of Ninth face paint, which she knows in her gut had mostly washed away roughly twenty yards behind them. is she okay? well, absolutely not; she's soaked through to the skin, which is one of the worst feelings a person can possibly feel, and she has no idea where she is or what's going on. but she blinks and focuses on the other person, and for a moment she is transfixed — her pale hair reminds her of the vision of another, but that was one several years past walking with her in waking hours (and even then, the face is wrong). she abandons the thought with some self-admonishment, brow drawing together. she leverages herself weakly up onto on elbow. )

Yes, ( she says in a small voice, rough-washed as if with battery acid (which is roughly what had just happened). ) —Yes. ( a little stronger this time, and here she half-turns away to meekly cough up another lingering trace of water. ) You are shouting.

[ The “sorry” she owes Harrowhark is somewhere in the sagging slope of her shoulders, but Historia, wrung out and exhausted as she is, doesn’t have it in her to put even a single word to voice. Instead, she sinks back against the escalator, each metal jut digging awkwardly into her back.

When she musters up the will to speak again, she does so quietly, like anything more’ll hurt too much to bear. Her throat already feels like it’s on fire, whether from overuse, abuse, or both; she doesn’t need to make it worse. ]

… I don’t know why I did it.

[ Why she yelled? Why she touched her? Or why she risked her life trying to save her? Historia doesn’t think there’s rhyme or reason to anything here—not to what she does, and certainly not to what brought them here to begin with. ]

( historia certainly didn't owe harrowhark any apologies — it's highly likely she isn't even raising her voice at all, but the strength and verve behind it was simply rendering an already waterlogged and discombobulated necromancer fully malfunctioned. the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House is not a creature predisposed towards feelings of regret, remorse, guilt, or even undue empathy, but she finds the ghosts of such things tugging at the sodden hem of her dark vestments as she hears the reply from her rescuer. she slows her breathing, appreciating for a moment the sensation of air within her lungs, and then she pulls herself up into a sitting position: a pale face in a pool of soaked, pitch-black cloth. )

...To see that you didn't just lifeguard a drowned corpse and waste your effort, perhaps. ( harrow is also not the type to offer the olive branch, but this is just about as close as she will get. she shifts again, turning so she can rest with her back propped up against one of the metal rails of the escalator. the line of her mouth is drawn with discomfort and frustration, but none of this was aimed at her present companion.

she is silent another long moment, then: ) You didn't need to help me. ( a beat . . . ) ...Thank you.

( like pulling teeth with her, but - a sign of gratitude from harrowhark nonagesimus? might as well frame it and put it on a wall now. )

[ it's true that akechi had found a human bone -- like, honestly, most normal people would have gotten rid of it by now, or never picked it up in the first place, but he's not exactly a normal human being. ]

[ he's kind of weirdly fascinated with it, actually. thus, he's holding it in one of his gloved hands -- examining it, when he hears the voice. he smiles a little grimly. ]

Your possession, is it? Why would you have something like this in your possession? Are you a serial killer, by any chance?

[ he's not handing it over quite yet, he wants to see what she says. ]

( necromantic theory proclaimed that there were two primary and opposite forces which constituted a cycle of death and life: thanergy, an energy produced by what was dead and dying, and thalergy, which was generated in what was alive. any child born with a seed of necromantic ability and who decided to hone that talent developed a sense of these signatures; after all, they would need to know where they existed and in what quantities, as they were the left and right hand of what was known as modern necromancy.

as a bone adept of the Ninth, harrow was far more attuned to thanergy: long-dead bones stored it up within them the same way they had calcified in life. she had never thought it would be such a scavenger hunt to track down what she required as the materials for her magic, but it has been. hours of searching has netted her only one so far, though now it seems she is going to double that number.

even if she is used to literally being surrounded by as much passable oss as she could feasibly animate with her mortal ability. it is truly a downgrade.

looking at the bone held in the stranger's gloved hands, she knows almost immediately that it is a human rib, fourth of the left side — a rib that protected the beating human heart. or it had, once upon a time. her eyes flicker up to lock upon his at his question, a flicker of annoyance crossing her painted expression. ) Would it encourage you to relinquish it to me sooner if I said yes?

( she's not. not by her own hand, anyway. harrow is, by the nature of who she is and what she is, a walking grave — two hundred souls released of their mortal coil simply to grant her life, then another three dead from her own decisions. but hers had never been the active hand in any of these instances.

she truly hates to, but she supplies him with what she believes is an answer: ) I am a necromancer. ( and she says it as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

INTRO LOG #1

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i'm here for bones

thief!

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ii - spooky journal time

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i

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belatedly (captain holt voice) BONEEEEEE

how dare you detective diaz