2020-07-22 - Schroedinger's Egg
Joey receives his payment for the assassination of the wizard Griffin of the Inner Circle.
IC Date: 2020-07-22
OOC Date: 2020-01-20
Location: The Veil/The Dreamscape
Related Scenes: 2020-07-20 - Worse, or BETTER?
Plot: None
Scene Number: 4933
The Dream breaks apart, sending them back to their lives.
Or does it?
Joey finds himself in those borrowed clothes again, complete with no underwear. He's not in the town, though the smell of the ocean and the feel of a chill, damp wind blowing inland tells him he's still close to the coast. He's in a forest, next to a river, with a hunting lodge sitting before him. It was once a grand affair, arcing over the river via a footbridge, with a sweeping front porch and fancy, stained glass windows. Now it's in dire need of fixing up: the roof has more than its fair share of moss and lichen, some of the siding and molding is rotted, the bridge looks treacherous at best. Yet it seems habitable enough. The windows are clean and whole, and the frame's stable.
There's a young girl out front, tending to huge boar-like creatures, some bearing tack like they're meant to be ridden. They have short, sharp tusks, and a variety of coat colors, just like a horse would. The girl's got that getting-over-being-malnourished look, scrawny and spare, her hair and eyes wild-looking. Scars trail up one side of her face into her hair, leaving a few locks of it white.
She stops when she sees Joey, eyes him speculatively. "She's in there," she says, gesturing at the lodge. Her voice is husky and low. "Expecting' ya."
Joey is not a fan of not being in his own clothes. He spent too many years of his life having the state provide him with regulation gear. Including his shorts. Don't ask. He's still got the sword in hand, still with the blood of the wizard on it, stabby end down and held in that manner that he has no intent or interest on using it.
He eyes the waifish kid (which according to Alexander's book means needs a damn cheeseburger and a steady income), and nods to her. Admittedly the pigs are cool and that? That he's got no issue imagining running something down on. Could be a great adventure, boar, but he's got some things to return and a promise to keep. The young person gets a nod and he heads on in with a double knock to the door and lets himself in.
"Coira? Brought your stuff back."
The porch creaks under Joey's boots; oh yeah, he's seen dry rot like this before. If they don't fix it soon, someone's likely to break a leg.
The interior is similar to the exterior: former opulance fallen into disuse, slowly undergoing repaired. The windows seem recently cleaned, to go by the dirty rags and buckets of filthy water scattered around under them. They depict scenes of various pitched battles: some victories, some losses, some stalemates. The warriors ride a variety of animals, though none of them are horses. Boars like Joey saw out front, also goats not unlike the one he rode to the tower, great wolves, large cats. Above all of these battles, a huge crow flies, her feathers shining blue-black glass.
A huge, once-grand staircase sweeps up to the second floor. In shadow beneath it is a small side-door, the kind servants use to bring things to and from a larger room meant for people of higher station. It's this door Coira appears at.
"Maestro." She's in the same leathers Joey first saw her in, her hair neatly braided but a little mussed, probably from physical activity. "It's good to see you again." Her eyes fall to her sword in his hand. Specifically, the blood. "His?" she asks.
Joey takes in the details. Were his brother here they could maybe do something about this. Or Itzhak. He's pretty handy. Granted wood's a bit different than automotive but people of a clever mid catch on quick. His eyes watch the pictures carefully. The blade comes up and he turns it over to her in a solemn presentation warriors before him might have used. It's not generally Joey's style, but sometimes the psyche gets swept up in the environment.
"Yours now as it's due." Yes it's His but hell if she doesn't have rights to that now, and her weapon back. From his pocket he pulls a hank of haircut hastily, and lays it tied in a leather lace on the flattest surface. His wizard powers (so he believes) as promised too. "You want this hunter and I have a discussion? I can make time." Looking around he might have some more words on that too which is, personal? Hidden not at all from her. Some things one need not speak to have understood.
Coira steps forward, accepting her sword back with the same solemnity with which Joey offers it. "You have gratitude, Maestro." Her voice trembles just a little. She eyes the hank of hair, curious, and takes it up, turning it over in her other hand.
It occurs to her after a time he's said something. She blinks, then smiles, her eyes narrowing and her teeth showing. "He was the first one I dealt with. But thank you for the offer." Her expression gentles some, and she nods over her shoulder at the small door. "Come. Your payment awaits you in here. And we can talk, if you want. We've cider, mead, and ale." She turns to head through the small door in question.
Joey waits patiently. The position is really one he's stood in similar enough. The tone, generally terse offers understanding as his posture stands down to casual. "Good. " Now is it a trap? Eh, he's got no beef with her. Why would it? People that go looking for problems are the ones that find it by creating it to be found in his mind.
"Good! Seriously, good for you." He follows and offers support enough, "I keep telling people don't start none, won't be none. Then they don't listen. Then they do dumb shit and have the balls to look surprised when retribution comes down like a hammer." There's the faintest of smiles to her as they walk, "Should be damn proud of your work." He stops following her, feet halting and looks mildly confused, "Coira... I didn't do this for payment. I did it for you. What I wanted out of this is on the end of that blade. We're square." One dead wizard who did a kid wrong is good enough for him.
Also fuck the magic police too.
Coira makes a low sound, considers the blood on the blade in her hand. "It didn't help as much as I'd hoped it would at the time. But it did ease something in me." She sighs. "Yes, it's amazing how few people under stand that simplest of facts. They feel they're above the consequences of their actions." Her brows gather, she gives Joey a sidelong glance of rueful agreement.
She stops when he does, tilting her head. She studies him a time, weighing, measuring. Then, "I appreciate that." Her voice is low, and she doesn't quite look him in the eye. "And I understand. But an agreement was made. I would uphold my end of it," a faint smile teases her lips, "if only so you've a token to remember me by."
They've stopped just inside the room on the other side of the door, and what a room it is. It's a great room, the sort of place nobles and monarchs recline in with their guests, complete with huge, blackened fireplace. Or, it was. The walls are bare, but this was obviously a trophy room. And it was packed with them, to go by the tight, geometric arrangement of ghostly shapes where soot was kept off the walls by the heads and horns of who knew how many kinds of animal. Those are all long gone. Now, it's packed with things.
Coira had assured them she had a collection, and this wasn't any form of hyperbole. The usual fancy furniture one would find in a room like this has been replaced with display cases, work tables, and dressers, and every surface is covered. From fancy scrying orbs to ornate staffs to figurines to large glass jars of knicknacks: if it might be valuable, it's in here.
Joey arches an eyebrow and says, if he knew how incorrectly with dream states, "I find that very hard to believe." Perhaps a bi t literal and figurative. He's got a health respect for vengeance and manners. He follows and touches nothing without invitation though there's a step to readjust his stride. There we go.
Inside the trophy room there is a look that is more impressed than covetous. You need a good fence for specialty goods. That sounds like a Lilith interest more than a Joey interest. The most interesting thing in the room is now the armed woman he's following into the hall of curiosities. "When I was a kid there were people with badges who decided who I was going to be." Eyes float from jewels to strange figurines, jewelry boxes and gilt perfume bottles and herilooms of an age...he doesn't even know. "The decided terrible things for me. Punished me for things I didn't even do, ya know? So in the end a terrible thing is what I became, and they..." His voice is thoughtful and not even anger or resentful at this point, but almost confused, "They asked me, How did you become this way? And I tried to tell them I don't fucking know. You made this. I am the only thing you've let me become."
He walks up to her, within range easy if she has any want to strike at him. Her prerogative. "No one should get to take your choices from you. You've let me tell them that finally so... thanks." There's a pause and he catches himself smile just a bit more speaking plain with another who knows like a lost member of his own tribe. "He showed us this future vision. I saw you there, you know."
Noticing his reluctance to touch anything, Coira assures him, "You may feel free to peruse things, if you wish. I understand Maestros can learn a great deal from a thing, if they touch it." For her part, she moves to a desk, upon which sits an interesting arrangement of what seems to be an apothecary set. From this set she takes a small swatch of clean gauze and a small glass jar. She wipes the wizard's blood off onto the gauze and drops it into the jar, sealing it with a cork top. Only then does she slide the weapon back into its sheath.
She moves to rejoin Joey as he speaks, the hank of hair still in her hand. Her eyes narrow, taking in his story with sympathy and frustration in equal measure. The later for him; the former, for the fact that this is the way of the world.
Her eyes shift from him to the hair. If she minds him being this close, there's no indication. "They see what we might be, and take it for what must be. And then they make it so."
She looks at Joey again. "Yes. One of the others told me." She sounds like she's still trying to decide what it means, if anything.
Joey Lee watches her for a moment and maybe it's a trust but he lets her do her ritual keeping the blood of the mage for whatever purpose it may be used or bartered for later...or because pathogens. He dunno. Could just be germs. That's like a thing in dream space too right?
Eyes lift from a porcelain ballerina feeling familiar in nature and then back to her. "It looked pretty fucking magnificent. What it is? Well that's you in control of your destiny. What it means? Well that's yours to decide, Coira, not theirs. Those of us who freely follow someone else are a hundred times stronger than those who have to, so maybe? Maybe it means we just have to make sure we're protecting our people. " His eyebrows shrug an expression like what can ya do?.
"World's kinda awful. we don't have to let it take our choices from us." He looks around again and back to her quiet for a long moment before murmuring in all honesty. "You're a remarkable person. I am glad I got to meet you. "
<FS3> Joey rolls Glimmer: Success (8 7 3) (Rolled by: August)
<FS3> Joey rolls Physical: Good Success (8 7 6 6 4 3 1) (Rolled by: August)
Coira tenses a moment, maybe expecting some kind of speech. And she gets one, but not the one she expected. She looks down at the hair in her hand. "Then it's upon those of us who are followed to be worthy of your regard." Her eyes move to an unspecified point in the room, weighing what that could mean against other things, other conversations.
She smiles at him when he says that. "And you, Maestro." She turns and looks around the room. "I think you'll know what to choose once you see it. In the mean time, allow me to fetch your cider." She sets the hair down on a side table of dark red wood and exits through that same small side door from which she came in, leaving Joey amongst the hoard by himself.
Everything in the room stands out to him, somehow. None of things are just things; the way he'd know a mint in sleeve, first edition LP, or how he can tell if the hubcaps on a 1968 Corvette are reproduction or original, that's how he feels about the things in this room.
Especially...something over there. On top of a bookcase, among a set of shells and birds' nests and other things.
Joey isn't comfortable around a lot of people, and in fact there's a very small fist full. Something in the simplicity of this trip that is entirely uncomplicated of moral and ethical concerns of people with the privilege of never having been hunted. Her words are observed and win a nod before his eyes look around the room.
Alone he has to admit to himself there's some cool shit in here. Vintage hubcaps and a original press of Pearl Jam's Ten on vinyl though don't remind him of here. And then, there is something that stands out for reasons he is neither aware of nor understands. He doesn't question how he knows things sometimes but he gravitates to it all the same.
Rough hand that commits violent acts so rough men can lay down the sword fro time to time drags that wooden chair over. He climbs up on it to look not in but on one of the cabinets where things of bird have flocked and his eyes rest on one in particular. An egg that is seeming of blue and black marble carefully picked up and held, warm in his hand and reminding him of that raven watching overhead in the paintings in the other room. Always vigilant. This. This he can understand even if he doesn't know why, but very much empathizing with his feelings on this place. This is it.
He asks out loud, "This. What is it? I mean other than an egg?"
Coira returns, a pair of goblets of simple hammered copper in her hands. She sets them down, moves close to have a look at the egg in his hand. "Mmmm. I received this from a woman who claimed her prized hen laid it one morning." She cuts him a sidelong look of, 'which sounds preposterous to me, but whatever, I don't know magical beasts'. "It was payment for dealing with a corrupt knight who was forcing them to bribe him so he wouldn't turn them over for evading the tithe." She offers him his cider. "I'm not certain if it will ever hatch into anything. If we assume she spoke the truth, I'd suspect perhaps a cockatrice had its way with her hen. Or perhaps it was fed a magical grain or seed of some kind..." She shrugs. These are guesses at best. Coira, like Joey, is a woman of action, of swords and weapons and quick decisions made to solve thorny problems. She's not a wizard or a witch.
She offers Joey his goblet. "And, most importantly, it's yours, if you wish."
Joey arches an eyebrow watching the thing in his hand, warm like a goose egg. Looking back to her he listens, because the stories matter. In the end he will have to go, she'll stay here and for him this project will be done. There's a part of him that just doesn't want it to.
The gruff boxer looks at the hing in his hand considering her words. He takes the cider from her with a murmured, and genuine, "Thank you." Looking to the tired elvish woman he says rather bluntly, "What I would like to take from here is not what I have any right to ask for or demand be given." He swirls the cup looking into it and back to her clarifying. "I'll take what time of yours you want to share though." Taking a long thoughtful look not...really able or having the tools ti delve in things buried into the foundation of the adult he is today, observes, "These people have taken too damn much from us. And we won't... be able to take back what is stolen from us." His jaw clenches shut, his fingers note the cold metal of the goblet that hold the cider inside.
Weirdly it's more personal than he anticipated it to Coira with a faint, tired smile, "The egg? Eh, it'll be what it needs to be. Maybe it'll want to find its own, maybe eat the sky, maybe nothing. It'll figure it out I guess." Joey's not at all used to having a lot of feelings much less more than two at the same time and it's a difficult thing he shoves back and denies himself like every other time. Feelings hurt and there's work to be done.
"I'll protect it." He drinks from her goblet and murmurs silent resolution, "You need me? summon away or call or however you do it. Even if it's to sit and try to figure out why some people gotta be dumb? That's fine. Just let me know what you want, and it'll happen." The egg moves inside and that meaty mitt that is normally there for breaking wood, concrete, meat and bone now serving as cradle and shield to this fragile thing. Maybe that great bird will oversee the trials ahead again. Maybe it'll look over their friend here when she needs it. Maybe it's a fucking goddamned paperweight and Joey's imagination is getting a bit pedantic. (Another Alexander book word that means Get over your own shit, son)
Coira smiles at Joey, even laughs. It's a genuine smile and a free laugh; not the sort of bitter or sarcastic things she usually has on offer. "Ah. Would that I could join you in this world of yours, hm? Slay whatever wizard is hiding in a tower from you." She sips from her cider. "Even if it's foolhardy for me to think I can best a wizard who'd vex a Maestro such as yourself." Ah, there's the wry humor.
She considers him over the rim of her goblet. "What time of mine I want to share." She arches an eyebrow at him. She's tempted, oh she is.
And yet.
She looks over her shoulder, to the hank of hair from where she laid it. She eyes the egg in Joey's hand. "Mmm. I have an idea," she says, and moves to take up the chunk of hair. She nods at a pair of wingback sitting chairs next to a divan, arranged around a coffee table. "Let me make something for the egg to rest in, and we can talk a spell."
Joey sits back in his chair with a widening easy grin and even laughs. Yes, he's capable when he's not concerned there's someone with guns on the back side of the door looking to take him down or what little he has that he dares to care about. No here the wizard fuckwit is dead.
His head shakes 'no'. "Yeah the wizards that took things from me... my...self... the ones that held me down to let me know I can be hurt and I can't do anything are... gone. The one that took my mom from us? I haven't found em. The law never let me look and they didn't care enough to. No one gets to do that.
not to me, not you. Kids shouldn't have to deal with that shit." The word are stilted and shared only with someone that's walked on that broken road. He doesn't look up, but sips his cider. There's a stillness and wounds that don't show and don't seem to close, but instead found motivation and purpose remain.
When repeats and that's what brings his eyes to hers. Game knows game and victors know victors. He watches her consider many things, interest curious in where her ideas are going. A'ight then. He looks at the egg in his hand and looks back with a simple nod. "I got time." He'll make time.
Coira carefully removes the hair from its binding and begins separating the strands into groups. She listens to Joey as she works, glancing up at him so he knows she's paying attention. Her mouth flattens at his description. "Sold, then? Or fostered, to people who didn't care one way or another." She sighs, sympathetic. "I was spared that fate. The old woman who found me, she could be stern, but she was never...unkind." She begins weaving the hair; it's not a particularly fancy or neat weave, but it'll hold together, whatever it is she's making. Her hands, rough and calloused, with close shorn fingernails and numerous scars, are no lady's hands by any means, yet they work the hair with the ease of familiarity. "We shouldn't," she says, eventually. "And yet, the selfish and the uncaring, they ensure we must. And so we grow into what they fear, and they call us monster."
A small shake of her head for that. "I don't know that I want my mother's throne. Perhaps one of her sisters' daughters will take it."
Joey watches. Her guess? He looks up and there's the ghost of his shame there, resigned to futility of an age past. "My mother was not politically important. She um... To be honest I never knew who our father was. I dunno if she did and it didn't matter. We grew up poor but working a couple jobs wasn't really enough but she tried. Whatever happened we ate but..." He didn't know why he was telling her this other than it does aid that Maestros or whatever are just people, and they can stand back up again.
"She took up with different people. Most though?" His expression goes flat and gives her the short version. "They were mean and didn't like not being number one in her life. Sometimes I had to pick fights with them so their anger had someplace to go. Sometimes they'd hit back and sometimes..." He looks at the curious egg in his hand mumbling, "Sometimes people do other... things to take all power away from us so we can't talk about it and can't ...believe we can do anything about it."
It's an oddly reason moment that shakes the inside of his ribs from the inside. Looking back to Cora there is rare and open empathy, "I went through so many other people to get that back ya know? Now? no one can lay a hand on me but it doesn't... change, and my mama's still in the ground, and I just wake every day angry and mad at them... myself ya know? But then there's times someone's had enough. I can help them. So maybe they want to make us into their monster and maybe?"
He leans forward watching her "Maybe we're not alone and maybe they don't get a vote. Maybe in spite of them trying to keep us down? " There's a faint, almost sheepish smile as he admits with some savvy coming back to him, "I didn't want the throne I was given either. But our people sometimes need someone they can trust to get shit done. It ain't always bad. It is always lonely and always exhausting though." He pauses longer and admires her and her work trying to take mental notes he can wake back up to.
He needs to start writing this shit down.
Coira's hands still as Joey continues to speak, her eyes settling on the egg in his hand. Flickers of emotion play over her features. "Yes," she agrees. "They take anything they can. Even the things no one should dare." Her eyes meet his for a half second: apology, that his mother wasn't someone whom anyone else would care to avenge; sympathy, that like her he's come to the realization that vengeance doesn't bring back what was lost. It does, however, lay some ghosts to rest. Not all. Maybe not even most. But some.
One corner of her mouth twitches in an almost smile, and she resumes her weaving. The hair is beginning to take shape: a small sort of bowl, perhaps. "Lonely and exhausting, until you find someone to champion." Her smile broadens. "Don't think I fail to see it in you, Maestro." She focuses on her work, pausing for a drink of cider. "You're like me. You want someone who's strong, but needs watching over in some way or another. Someone who you can be there for, on their terms, and theirs alone. Someone who you can assure that you'll be there when they need someone most, in a way you weren't able to be for another." Her voice drops. "Or yourself."
She half-shrugs, glances up at him. "I don't mean to tease or demean. It's not an unworthy pursuit, to champion those who need it. As long as they want it as well."
Joey listens and doesn't move away. To the contrary this feels like the first time he's been really able to stand down in months. It's weird. The Veil isn't weird, not worrying about someone calling right now that bullets just let loose into your guys or one of your business is being torched? That's the anomaly. "Coira, I don't think you miss much if we're being honest."
Jaw tightens and the flinty boxer squints wanting to take exception to the claim but can't. A faint smirk, not without fondness to it relents, "Not exactly off the mark." The apology gets a lift of fingers from around the goblet as if to silently gesture none taken.
"Mmmm." Coira pauses, eyeing the coalescing shape. It's becoming a nest, of sorts. "It was one of the first lessons the old woman taught me. To wait. To look and listen. People will tell you all about themselves, if you're just patient enough to catch it happening."
An actual teasing smile now, when she sees that initial reaction. "Like knows like, Maestro." She sighs, sounding resigned. "I'm unlikely to be a mother or a wife. It's possible, but..." She pauses, eyes flicking to one side, shakes it off. "It will come or it won't. But it's not easy, to find someone willing to be championed, willing to accept they need it. Not their fault, of course," she pauses to make a binding weave and then snap it, "for many champions lord their position over those they protect. Being vulnerable is a risk." She shrugs. "But I can't help what I am." Another glance up at him. "Lonely, and, exhausted." A bob of her eyebrows, and she offers the item over: the wizard Griffin's hair, woven into a nest for the egg. It'll fit securely.
Joey sets the drink down and takes the nest careful not to fuck it up and carefully fits the egg in there. Okay, that takes some skill. He listens and considers, "That's not a champion, that's an asshole." ANd his numero tres pet peeve. "I dunno. Trick is finding someone to champion who does not need you. There's a difference between having someone because you need them there and someone willing to do the same because it's easier and because they want to." Plainly he shakes his head and levels with her. "We are amazing forces of nature. Me. You. Those like us who walk through fire and come out forged and fortified instead of burnt and broken. Hear that in a movie once, but it's still true. You did not knock down that door but you commanded a force that could. Those that tried to stand against us will, maybe not immediately but eventually, fall. I believe that as much as I respect it. And you."
His thumb rubs over the egg and there is an odd truth to it that seems weirdly relevant on all sides. A small thing to be protected now but in truth is Schrodinger's egg. It might eat the sun or stay a paperweight. It will be what it needs to be. "...but anyone that stands with us is immediately a target and at risk? Yeah that's... always the fear ain't it?"
<FS3> Joey rolls Glimmer: Success (6 3 1) (Rolled by: August)
Coira throws back her head and laughs. "That is, indeed, an asshole, and not a proper defender." Her mirth doesn't last, tempered by the reality of how common such abuse can be. "I don't know that you should always find one who doesn't need you. But one who may succeed without you. Those aren't necessarily one in the same."
She nods, lets out a slow breath of regret. "Just so." A quiet pause as she contemplates her cider. "But that is their choice. To be at risk and still by our sides. And we're not worthy of defending them, if we're not willing to defend their right to such a choice."
As Joey's thumb crosses over the egg in the nest, a sensation slowly creeps over him. He feels comfortable, relaxed. Protected. Safe. Coira's last words to him come at a huge distance.
"Thank you for defending me this time, Maestro. May someone do the same for you, when you need it most." Is she leaning over and...handing him something? Everything is dreamlike and slow. It's a heavy, antique, silver key, the bow a gorgeous filigree design of an owl gripping a mouse in its talons. "Please give this to the rifleman, would you? He forgot it."
The world is a comfortable bed of blue-black sky, and Joey's resting in it, curled up like a child in his mother's arms.
He's back, where he should be, in his own clothes...a blue-black marbled egg in a nest of black and silver human hair in his hand. Next to him, on the floor, is an antique silver key.
Joey wakes back up in the real world, unless they're all real. He neither cares no knows. He just deals with what's in front of him. He was taken out of this space from his shower. How he wakes with one green eye opening in darkness? Oh it's against his pillow. His face lifts from the navy blue pillowcase trying to remember when he crawled back into bed.
Is he still dressed like a peasant? Nope! Shit, I'm not dressed like an anything. The only real fully conscious thought he has. The egg in its nest is in his hand, arm stretched under his pillow. Huh!
His head hitting the pillow again having not been this comfortable in ages a thought occurs to him: " Well shit. Now I don't have a towel." His chest fills with a sigh and without setting the egg down just rolls his head in the pillow to go back to sleep. He'll call Nicole about it later. Right now there's a sleep that is from a time that didn't know worry. In no time he drifts off. In the doorway lingers the translucent figure of a 35 year old woman, tired beyond her age keeping a vigil over her boy while he puts the sword down for a while.
Tags: august-gm dream