epidemiology | EVENT ★ BACK TO THE FUTURE

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EVENT ★ BACK TO THE FUTURE

BENDED TIME

As outlined in the OOC post, things start to slow down and grow quiet in Oska for a few days as the bugs crawl away and slowly disappear. But then the cocoons hatch. Fully grown temporal insects claw their way out of them, each about the size and temperament of raging bulls.

They come out far more aggressive and eager to fight, are are willing to take on anything that moves with jaws and claws alike. Except, of course, another insect — when two of them encounter each other, they enter into a mating dance and then slip away into another dimension, leaving behind only the temporary ghosts of years gone by. If you can’t find a way to pierce that thick shell to take one down, better find another one to pair it off with instead. Just try not to get bit while leading them around and find yourself suddenly 5 years old again.

The insects aren’t the only thing going on in Oska, though. As it turns out, unicorns really hate this adult form of the temporal insects, and will start kicking their way out of their stalls in the stables to get at the insects in an attempt to impale or trample them. According to Uruz they’re gallant warriors, but not always quite cut out to take on a bug, and can easily get themselves hurt or killed. She would really appreciate recruits taking a moment to recapture any stray unicorns they may come across and leading them back to the stables. Try to avoid any insects on the way, or you’ll find yourself suddenly fighting insect and irate unicorn, which is no one’s idea of a good time.

The lake is getting more active, too. All the fighting has woken up something in the depths of it. Dark red tentacles sometimes creep up onto shore — and don’t worry, this time they don’t belong to a sea goddess. The tentacles don’t attack unless attacked, and can in fact be quite agreeable. Nodes along the length of them act as primitive eyes, which see well enough to interact with anyone nearby. They’re also all a little peckish. Toss a tentacle a bit of food and watch it curl around and ingest it using tiny mouths on the underside. It might even be willing to play a few rounds of fetch or slap a bug into the sky for you if you put it in a good mood with a morsel of food.

The senior ALASTAIR members can be seen out and about and doing their part, too. Uruz and Dagny fight as a team, centaur and elf, sometimes fighting back to back and sometimes as mount and rider. They’ll stop and lend a hand, but the cats are a little less generous. Cherenkov and Crowley fight inseparably and use magic and science in deadly combination to ward off and destroy the bugs, but can usually only be seen darting on their way from one place to another. They have a lot of magitek to repair in the destructive wake of the insects. Pomarr, neither as senior nor as invested in actively picking off the bugs, offers shelter near a tentacle-free portion of the lake, calling down storms to toss away bugs for her and anyone in the vicinity.

OOC NOTES

This log spans a week ICly. Characters will find themselves beginning to understand each other again as the bugs first vanish, as the effects of the cats’ work on the magitek pays off. The translation problem will be completely fixed by the time the cocoons hatch. All of the bugs will have been killed or shipped off by the sixth day, leaving the last day before their departure to the next mission blissfully relaxing. Any temporally misplaced recruits will be back to normal by the last day, as well.

A reminder to anyone still texting: the texting feature of magitek jewelry operates based on thought! There are no physical keyboards, recruits merely think the message that they’d like to send to another recruit.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Evan, on the other hand, has very little to lose, and he's becoming increasingly intrigued by the direction the conversation is going in. He looks at her as she frowns, examining her expression with close interest, though he takes a moment's break from such consideration to hum and pat his pockets.

"No such luck." Whatever swapped him into the state he's in now, it was not so kind as to furnish him with a key. "Well, we shall hope that I left my door unlocked last time I was there."

But, having decided that's beside the point, he turns relentlessly back to the conversation she'd tried to put down. "You know, I did wonder for years afterwards if I'd somehow exaggerated in my memory the degree of interest you had shown." He grins at her. "A handjob in a shared tent is one thing, but I was never sure if you'd been angling for more. You sound positively sweet on my old self."

She reaches in around him and pushes the door open, slipping past into his former room. The view is a pleasant one indeed and she walks through to the window, talking over her shoulder while she recovers her own poise.

"What can I say? You had much for me to be sweet on. You were competent, generous, patient and attentive." She fiddles with the window latches and throws them open to the breeze. "And your fire, ahh, you are such a tease with that fire. Had we not argued so sharply so recently before, I would have caught your jaw and kissed you after you let me light your fingers on fire. Did you realise how moved I was by the time I kissed my flame to your pulse point?"

She's a sight, up against the window's light, as much as the view. Oh, all of these visions from the past... they draw out layer upon complex layer of reminiscing, of regret and interest and nostalgia. He watches her between moments of looking around his old room.

So strange. It feels like it should be dusty, but it looks as if he was here yesterday. He takes in a deep lungful of the Oska air, which is shockingly fresh. Had he forgotten the flavour of the little pocket dimension's breezes? Can he smell the lake from afar?

Her words make him pull a wry grin, even as he looks out the window with slitted eyes. "I didn't," he admits openly. "I had no idea. It took a lot of thinking back over that afternoon and dissecting that moment for me to even consider... which in retrospect, a bit foolish of me, given." He turns to her, to look fully at her again rather than out at the blue above them. "For that, I'm sorry. I never meant to tease you, not in that way."

She finally looks over her shoulder at that, shooting him a warm smile. "There is no need to apologise, my friend. I enjoyed sharing the moment immensely, for who else could appreciate a mastery over fire? Ahh, I had wanted to show off my fire again to you so I could impress you with how far my control has grown, but instead I simply pushed myself in a panic and fainted on top of you."

She pushes herself away from the window, having regained her composure, and gestures for him to stop staring at her and go take her place.

"Come and look at the view and see if it is what you remember it to be, then let us talk of deeper subjects. I remember how worried you were about your mortality when we bathed together in the lake. If I can, I would like to bring words of reassurance from the future to the past."

He takes the invitation smoothly, ambling to the window and taking a place there, crossing his arms on the sill and leaning into the breeze that pulls inward to tickle at their hair and stir the still air in the room. He sighs deeply of that breeze before he turns his head just enough to direct that smile at her again.

"Ahh," he breathes as an echo of that sigh. "Looking for wisdom from the figment? I shouldn't tell you anything; I should keep my lips sealed to ensure my own future existence."

He chuckles, closed-mouthed, not half as serious as his tone may sound. The exchange is so interesting to him: she really believes she has a bead on his younger self, doesn't she? And she might, even; he perhaps recalls that younger self only a little better than he recalls any of the other people he's known here. He remembers that conversation by the lake, but in fact he remembers how it ended better than he remembers how he had felt during it.

"Refresh my memory," he asks, thoughtful. "What exactly was I worried about? Some things I had concerns about at that age did come to pass; I'm not sure how much you want to be the bearer of that news."

She glances at him and looks away with a shrug, dimly disappointed that he doesn't remember. That had been a moving conversation, one where she'd felt that she'd grown close to him, for all the embarrassment at the end.

"What I know of you, or the person you are when you are young, is that you find the uncertainty upsetting. Even if you know your fears will come to pass you will at least have time to prepare yourself from the blow."

Ahh, but it has been over a century for him, hasn't it? She looks up at the tower and hopes so very keenly that he is just a brief ghost passing through, for she misses his off-balance self already.

"You had no idea how long you would live or how many friends you would lose on the way. The thought of losing your loved ones and still being young haunted you." It's daunting to imagine, but if he looks as if he's five years older when he's lived two lifetimes how old will he grow to be? She twists her upper body and props her chin on her elbow, staring at him once again with great interest.

"It must have been hard when your friends began aging while you still looked as young as you do now. Ahh... there is nothing I can do to help you with what you are, but I still wish to protect your tender feelings. I am sorry I was in your life so briefly."

The assumption that she makes catches him by surprise, and he props himself up a little straighter. Oh, but of course -- he still looks so young, doesn't he? That would be the logical thought, wouldn't it? But how long that must imply his lifespan will carry on...

The glance he gives her is bright and rich with both new understanding and an understated pleasure. That last feels a bit disingenuous in the face of her clear ache, but it's nice to realize he hasn't overestimated her esteem of him, and in fact that he might have underestimated it a little. "That's hardly a thing to apologize for."

He turns a little too, propping himself on the windowsill once more to meet her intense gaze. "In any case, no, I was spared that particular agony. Actually for a good few years I was left wondering if I'd dodged the lifespan question altogether. I age at the same rate as your average human, more or less, you see." He watches her intently, reading her reactions with increasing interest. "I grew up, I got old. I even died, after a fashion. Twice now. It makes things a little easier, I think, than having to Lazarus Long my way through the world... and I have to admit, it leaves me with a much deeper appreciation of living in a young body." He flashes a briefly mischievous smile.

Her eyes widen in interest as she stares at him, her mind quickly reordering her assumptions. One hundred and sixty years old, and he looks to be just a few years older than her...

"This must be... your third life? And you have died twice before seventy? I am assuming that you pass on the average here." She shakes her head in mild disbelief as she imagines being reborn even at the age she is now.

"Ahh! I do not think I could stand going through childhood and adolescence twice more. Did you have to present yourself as an orphan or were you able to find other not-humen to pose as your family? At least a phoenix does not have to hide its true nature."

The mythical comparison makes his lips quirk. It's one that's been made before, and it feels a bit odd in a world where he's not sure if phoenixes actually ever existed, but it's a thought he's had himself. "Third life, yes. Thankfully, I'm no phoenix in the proper sense. When I come back... well, I owe that to my mother, too; when I die, in order to come back I have to rebuild my body myself."

He looks out the window again, considering the view that he'd so coveted back when he'd first chosen this room. The memory is returning, and he wonders how he'd ever forgotten. "The first time I died, it took me a number of years to perfect the art of returning to corporeality. Thankfully it means I get to choose what age I come back as." He turns to her again, inclines his head in a kind of wry sheepishness. "I have not yet chosen to subject myself to puberty again. I remember it being unpleasant enough the first time around."

She touches him again, this time wrapping her long fingers around his wrist and squeezing him to feel the bones under his skin, stroking round to feel his tendons and then his pulse.

"You feel as human as I." She doesn't let go after confirming that; apart from the hug she hasn't touched him in two years. Right now his pulse is slower than hers and she hoods her eyes as her focus drifts to counting its rhythm rather than staring back at him.

"This will be a comfort to the boy I know, I am sure. Would you tell me... no, I might not remember the details, will you write a letter to your young self telling him how you rebuilt yourself? I am sure he will rest all the better knowing that if he dies here he will be able to rebuild himself without wasting years as the rest of us age." She can't deny that her motives are completely altruistic in this particular situation.

"Hmm." Two years is perhaps a more significant drop in the bucket than the better part of two hundred; he's long since forgotten the specifics of her touch too much to miss it. On the flipside of that, it's quite a thing to discover anew. He finds himself distracted by the intimate, exploratory quality of her fingers. No one in quite some time has seen him in the way that these people who knew his young self seem to see him... Serene in particular.

He pulls his eyes back up to her face, though the hooded quality of her gaze is not much less provocative. He feels his attention sharpening in a particular way, though he's not such a slave to his interests that he's wholly distracted from her question.

After all, it is a pertinent one, and an intriguing proposition. "Hmmmmm," he repeats, drawing the syllable out longer as he attends to the idea. "I suppose I could have that impact, even as a figment. Perhaps..."

He chuckles. "I had assumed I'd simply carry on throughout these halls to entertain my own nostalgia, for however long I exist here. But you're right; I could save myself a great deal of casting-about with a few pointed words of good advice." His eyes drift down to where she's got a grip on his wrist again. Now, is that advice he wants to leave his younger self, too? Would he even take it?

Or perhaps she's the one he should leave advice to? When he looks up again, it's with a speculative gleam in his eye.

She meets his gaze and her smile deepens as she recognises his stare. There's that taut string of interest glimmering between them, the one that she recognises from the glances his younger self gives her. She lets go of his wrist and nods.

"I have never hidden that I can be a selfish woman. Let me keep you for a while and remind you of all the worries that you could assuage for my favourite friend."

She breaks their gaze and glances about Evan's room, knowing that he'll have a stack of papers and notebooks hidden about somewhere here.

"Would you keep your writing tools in those desk drawers? I have no idea how long you will continue to keep existing, so it is foolish to put off our most important task..." She glances back to him again, shooting him a deeper smile. "No matter how fun it is to stare at and to touch you."

She's never been one for ignoring the elephants.

Evan at this age is not the gormless young thing who had at once known and willfully not known what that string of interest suggested and entailed. He knows, and knows well, where Serene would like this to go, and had known for certain from the moment she'd touched his wrist like she had.

It gathers behind his sternum, that familiar buzz, but he is not swept away by it. There's a curiosity in him, a sharp inquisitiveness bent on her and her very clear intentions. "Oh, no," he tells her, voice low, "that is a set of instructions I'm going to have to think on for a time. The experience in question is a difficult one to put into words... and sometimes bad advice is worse than no advice."

He pushes himself upright again, from where he'd been leaning on the windowsill. "You'll forgive me if I let that percolate. I think it's time to attend to more immediate concerns." He approaches her, comes close, a little smile on his face. When he stops in front of her he cocks his head, teasing, "now, were there other things you wanted to ask me about eldering, or was there something else on your mind?" As he speaks, he reaches up to brush fingers feather-light over her curls.

She stills in her search for paper as he pauses her hunt for paper. She pinkens as he strokes her hair, looking down at him there. He's a changed man, that is as obvious as the nose on his face, and yet she had not been expecting him to so openly call her out on her wants.

"There is always much on my mind, no matter how I try to find stillness." She demurs even as she tilts her cheek into his touch. He is so different, almost a stranger to her... "But if you wish to find what is on the end of the thread you're pulling on, ahh... I am caught between wondering if I am taking advantage of the real you by being so open with you, the altered state, or wondering if you are taking advantage of my sweetness for the man you used to be."

Her eyes had sunk closed as she'd leaned into his touch but now they snap open again as she fixes him with a direct stare.

"For you would not be touching my hair if consorting with me was not on your mind." There's a glint of warning in her eyes against toying with her.

As she wonders over their mutual intentions, he feathers his fingers over her cheek as he had over her hair. She is so soft; but of course she is, beautiful thing, though there had been some metaphor-conscious part of him that had expected her to be as bright and hard and shimmering as her quality of character.

He tilts his head when she offers him that warning, unshy about meeting her gaze. "And you wouldn't have been touching me as you were if you didn't have the same thing on your mind. Or were you just not expecting me to pursue?" If there is warning in her, he echoes it; he had always wondered, a little, if his young self had been nothing more than an ego boost to a woman who could tell he was attracted to her.

Still, he lets his hand drop and tucks it back to his side, mild again in a moment. Should he be honest? Or should he tell her what she wants to hear?

In the end, it's solidarity to his younger self that informs his choice, and he levels with her. "However, it's likely that you're right in some sense. The young man that I was... he wouldn't climb into bed with a person for any reason short of being in love with them, or being on his way to that. You would be taking advantage of the fact that I am not that young man anymore... and in turn I'd be using your affection for that younger self to assuage my own curiosity about what it is that I had missed, having failed to take up your offer for something more casual so long ago.

"You weighed heavily on mind when I went home, Serene," he tells her, "I often wondered if I shouldn't have tried to decouple love and sex, just to see how we would have worked, or wondered what would have happened if I'd been here long enough... well. But in all likelihood I am only a figment, and so I have a unique opportunity to cheat fate, and very little to lose for the asking."

Edited 2016-09-10 12:26 (UTC)

In her heart of hearts, Serene still feels that her love died that day on the mountainside when Cinder was murdered. That had been a love that had grown over years, forming between two children who only had each other against the terrible world. She looks down for a moment as the part of her that has never let go of him quails at the thought of putting anyone in his place.

"...Love is a weighty word, but I still crave for affection and attraction." They are being honest here and that is as honest as she can be without souring her own mood. She looks up at him and shrugs, shooting him a half smile.

"I have spent the last year riding with the oryx, and though I had friends to sate my sexual urges, my flat faced appearance was off-putting. I am so tired of mere fucking with my faced turned down, no matter how clever their tongues and their thrusts."

There is only so far she herself can decouple as well. She steps in closer, raising her fingers to stroke his jaw as she murmurs. "May I kiss you?"

This Evan, old as he is, has been well versed in the language and look of loss, and in the devastating effects of love, though none of his have been lifetime-spanning romances. That equivocation that she does is so, so familiar to him and he feels a pang for one so young being subject to the need for it.

But instead of asking after her loss, or immediately answering her question, he reaches up and catches her hand. His eyes stay locked on hers, full of measured consideration, even as he tilts his head down to kiss her fingertips.

He pauses when he's done her index and middle fingers. The need for due diligence weighs on him, although the part of him that deeply and privately resents the fact that he's a creature of limited existence bucks at that need for responsibility.

"Hmmmm." He decides on a middle road, one she can brush off if she'd like. "Remember that, although he may someday become someone like me, I am not that boy you're thinking of. If this will too much change your view of him..." He lets that hang long enough to try for another press of lips, this to her ring fingertip. "Then I suppose you should stop me." He does not want her to stop him, he realizes.

Had he asked her that before he'd taken her hand she would have stepped back and considered more carefully, but now? She sighs as she stares back at him kissing her.

"Is it considered romantic to kiss another's wrist on earth? In Gallia, a kiss upon another's pulse point is considered the most ardent declaration of desire and respect."

That gives him pause, connecting it with another moment they'd shared, and he pulls back a bit to look up at her with the raised eyebrows of amusement. "So that's why you went for my wrist with the fire," he wonders aloud, so recently reminded of the moment in question. "That explains more than it doesn't."

He takes a moment to kiss the tip of her pinky finger, still smiling amusement, before he replies to the question proper. "Not with such passionate specificity, no, although hands and wrists are sensuous things. On Earth it's more... hmm, throat, ear, maybe the pulse point at the neck. Back of the wrist for a much drier gesture of affection." He's still holding her hand, and now he pulls it up to examine her wrist. He touches with fingers rather than lip, where he can see the subtle shift of skin behind which the radial artery pulses. "But for you... here?"

She pinkens as she protests, tucking her chin down. "I told you that you were teasing me unbearably with that fire game." But she's not embarrassed enough to fluster and his lips are soft on her smallest finger, so she stares and listens deeply to his explanation.

"Those are sensual places too." His brush is tugging at her attention; she's more starved for true gestures of longing than she'd realised. "But yes, that is the place beyond all others..."

He eschews words, then, as he's gotten the information he'd like and he can see the distraction growing in her. Now is the time for action, since she has not stopped him. He dips his head once more, holding her wrist firmly still, and presses his lips where a moment ago his fingers were. Perhaps in truth they're not indulging quite the level of affection that he suspects the gesture is intended to convey, but in that, they are in accord.

This, he decides, shall not be in the note he leaves for his younger self. He presses his lips for a long moment before he pulls away and releases her hand, eyes on her the whole time.

Her heart thumps loud within her ears when he presses his lips to that most delicate skin and the heat of kiss makes the small vessels underneath dilate. She's dark eyed by the time he pulls away, already reaching with her free hand to pull him by the collar to close the last distance between them.

But his lack of hesitation makes her hesitate, at the last moment redirecting her touch to instead stroke his hair.

"Evan... this isn't your room. I don't think I should lay on that bed until the man who sleeps there invites me." She's quiet and staring hard, wary that this might make his call off this closening before they go any further.

"Will you come downstairs to mine?"

He glances at the bed in question, huffs. "It's my bed for a few days at least."

But he relents the moment he's said it, aware he's let his privately held ire get the better of him. She's got a point, of course, although his feelings about humoring his younger self's squeamishness are complex. It's one thing to wax philosophical about that kid, and quite another to have to work around him. It feels uncomfortably like having a younger sibling: the twenty-year-old Evan whose social mire he's invading feels like a presence, intimately familiar and exasperating and frustrating, but in some odd way, beloved. He shakes his head, shaking the thought off, and steps away from Serene straight-backed.

"I think I recall where your room is, now that I've got my bearings. Let's go." He heads for the door without further prompting, shooting her a wry glance as he does to cover up his brief frustration. "Afraid he'll work out what he's been up to in his old age?"

She thinks she's blown it when he bridles at her ask, pulling her hand away.

"I am keeping your warnings in mind." He should not have given them if he had not wanted her to pay attention to them. "I will not do him the disservice of encroaching upon his private places until I am sure I can offer him something substantial."

She takes his arm again for the walk back down, subtly squeezing his bicep. She lowers her lashes at that definition, shooting him a smile. "But let us not think of your past for now. I like you, you clever flirt. You and I can sate ourselves together and find out if all this between us has ever been more than a mutual admiration."

Oh, to have his little warning thrown back at him. Although the sanctity of his younger self's space had not been what he'd had in mind when he'd made that warning, he can see how his professions that he is a different person than that Evan have led here. She's not wrong, and he ruthlessly wrestles down his spike of irritation as they close the door and carry on down the stairs once more.

The way she then chooses to flirt makes him chuckle, closed-mouth against the sharp quality of that amusement. He gives her a sidelong look. As far as he is concerned there is nothing here but mutual attraction. She does not know him enough for anything more, not as he is, and he has not known her for a century... but now that they're on their way he's not going to ruin the mood by offering such a blunt response to the flirt, whether or not his mood seems to find it appropriate.

His smile and his response, therefore, are indulgent to the illusion. "What an exciting opportunity for a dry run," he teases instead. "You shall have to give me a full review of your conclusions once we've reached completion. You may be gaining the upper hand on my younger self, but I intend to remain as informed as possible until the moment I cease to be."

EVENT ★ BACK TO THE FUTURE

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