sixthiterationlogs | under the stars i'm alone among strangers

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under the stars i'm alone among strangers

WHO: Taako
WHERE: Around 6I
WHEN: First two weeks of September
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: None anticipated, will add if needed

Taako's not settled in. That would suggest he has some intention of relaxing and staying here. But he has finished hurling himself into all the obvious corners at high speed in hopes of finding a simple solution. Time to let those bruises fade and test his surroundings more carefully. And to find a place to actually live, so empty houses feature heavily in his prowling. He climbs a lot of trees in the hopes that the vantage point will make things clearer somehow. And to keep out of the way. He doesn't trust any of these people any more than he does their cute little prison.

Not particularly concerned with social graces--it's not like he ever has been--he sticks his head in wherever seems fair, poking around the inn and any other buildings that look public, accosts hapless passers by with "what's your story" or the occasional blunter "how've you tried to get out so far?"

And sometimes he does have to go have Taako time. He's found a fiddly little fishing setup. It's been a while since he fished, but he's pretty good at it, and it's always been a good way to sneak in a nap while ostensibly being productive. Naps happen a lot more now that he actually needs to sleep. Being a human sucks, and he's awful at judging how tired this stupid body is. (He's also walked into a few walls and trees when he forgets he can't see in the dark.)

Less relaxing but just as reassuring, he also takes up refreshing his very rusty swordsmanship. He hasn't needed it for years and he was never actually good. Just competent. When he has a sword, the other person is more likely to get hurt than Taako is, but the other options are just much better when there's not a horrible arcane dampening field over everything. The missing magic is vast and terrible and impossible to contemplate, hobbling Taako himself and potentially keeping any rescue attempts away. But he's dealt with that periodically, being out of spell slots and components, being up against it. The difference is he's...

He's alone again. The problem manifests consciously as no Magnus, but he's got lots of people he's hidden behind over the years. Even Sazed was... Well, he doesn't do so great without backup. That's just facts. Taako with a shortsword-sized stick versus a tree is a periodically amusing sight. He does more or less know what he's doing, approaches the combat like a saber fighter. He's graceful, if much too showy and not flexible enough in his stances, not a lot of strength behind any of the blows. The tree can take it.

He circulates a lot. Even for the Valley, it might be a bit odd to get used to the sight of the tiny man with three feet of braid dangling behind him, magenta scrubs somewhat inexpertly altered into a wrap skirt and an off-the-shoulder, half-length top. The fabric is crap and he's not used to sewing he can't assist with magic, but he doesn't hate the color and it's better than nothing. He may be stuck as a human with no hair products, but it'd be worse not to try. He's not giving an inch, here.

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This one already doesn't look too promising, though Taako's camped out in some weird enough places that he didn't write it off right away. They're all pretty boring, so unless something's tremendously wrong, might as well make the decision based on color or what trees are nearby (or where and how he could stow any more of his family who showed up here, but he doesn't have to admit that part to himself). Had he gotten as far as the porch he'd have turned around and tried the next one, but finding a fellow prisoner is a little more interesting than finding nothing.

"This one's not taken, is it?" he asks languidly, not as though he'd be embarrassed to find it was. It didn't feel like an inhabited building, and people can put up some signs or some shit if they want to be possessive of buildings with dust all over the place. He leans on the dining room table with one hand and regards Jude with mild interest. His eyes do flick to the pipe, but only for a second. That's... not a bad idea, honestly. He's been using a branch to practice, but there's probably something more solid, even if there don't seem to be any swords available.

"No," Jude answers, shaking his hair out of and back into his eyes as he shakes his head. Even with his problems, he'd remember this guy if he'd seen him anywhere before. Heard him anywhere before. He hasn't heard a voice like that outside the clubs his college acquaintances used to drag him to.

"It's just about to not have a bathtub," he explains. "Need a new one after the quake, and if you keep going through, the back porch and door are all smashed up." In case there was any possible argument for him putting the whole tub back on the pipe, which his hands really don't want to do today.

Since the guy is already here--

"Hey, would you mind--" he stops, taking a second past the outfit, at the person underneath. Yeah, he's probably not moving that tub right now. "Nevermind. You're looking for a house?"

While Taako is certainly tougher than he looks, physical strength is not to be found in his hidden depths. And asking him to do physical labor isn't really the way to start a good relationship with him, either. He raises an eyebrow slightly to acknowledge the near miss, but it disappears into a nod. "There didn't really seem to be a system in place, so I'm deciding which one I hate least." It bugs him not to have a real basis to make the decision on, but without one, he'll just have to ostentatiously own his shallow criteria instead.

The idea of hating or not hating the houses is an odd one to him, and sets him in a considering lean against the door frame. Even at home, it would seem a luxury, to walk into any of the houses here with their hard wood floors and moldings, multiple porches, sometimes multiple stories--and react with disdain.

It wrinkles his nose a bit, but--they all show up in scrubs, they all make do. There's no telling what someone came from before this place leveled the playing field.

"What do you hate least about a house? I've been in and out of a few." It's the charitable thing, he supposes, helping even a picky person find a place to live.

"Um. Don't know about you, my dude, but I'm really into it not being trapped in a creepy forest with a bunch of losers and all the magic shut off." Taako keeps most things to himself. (Like not being able to stop seeing every possible house through everyone else's eyes. Mags would dig that weird bit of woodwork, or maybe make fun of it. Merle could fit a garden there. That bedroom's far enough from his that Lup could keep her boytoy around and not weird him out with the noise. It'd probably be easier to cope with being alone if he could stop reminding himself.) But there's a certain power in owning shit out loud. Not being able to call out obvious shit moves the social awkwardness to other people.

"Besides that, uh, like, I kinda always wanted a kitchen island. I don't know, what the fuck do people do in houses?" Greedy as he is, it's an acquisitive thing. It's the getting, not the having. He hasn't lived in a house as such since he was a kid, and he has no interest for its own sake. Weird as it got toward the end there, he'd rather be back in his dorm at the Bureau than the nicest house here.

Still leaned into the door, Jude waits out the reaction, looking idly up the molding of the door. None of that really answers the question: as far as he knows, no one can fix that for the guy, especially himself. Eventually the beggars and choosers logic seems to sink in, and he gets something he can work with.

"You'd probably have to get one of those built, houses here are--" He isn't sure what they are: they're fancy by his standards, but they also don't have electricity or kitchen islands. "I don't know, they don't have a lot of stuff, nice as some of it is. Most people just look for an empty place to keep themselves fed and clean without tripping over anyone else.

Pointing the length of the pipe back over his shoulder at the tub, he adds, "It's a bit of a wait for the bathroom at the inn, and all."

"Ugh, tell me about it, the flood of suspiciously uniformly human wreckage is super disheartening." Logically, if he's been jammed in this awkward, stupid, useless body with its dumb eyes and need for regular rest, he's not the only one, but he hasn't found anyone who'll cop to it yet. "Still, there's all this, fuckin', I don't know, variety? Seems like a weird thing to include if you're just building a creepy as hell trap." He's curious under all the lazy hostility and smugness. Either this was all set up for a purpose or it's been repurposed. "Kinda wanna see what's out there, y'know?"

Squinting doesn't actually make any better sense of the words coming out of the guy's mouth, but squinting is what Jude's got, right now. In a way, the attitude--too big, detached but not enough--reminds him of Sam, and he hopes this isn't one more person to find having some kind of breakdown in the wreckage of the next disaster. But if he is, so what? He handled it then, he'll handle it next time it comes up.

He's made a surprisingly capable go of it all, so far. Even if it's most surprising to the ugly voice that sits at the back of his head, piping up in his best friend's nastiest tones.

He slept too well to have to deal with it today. Today is just--houses. "I don't recommend exploring the caves alone, for a few reasons, but the rest of it seems fine. There's a big body of water on the other side, and more houses in better shape, but you'll have to hike a ways to come back for supplies if you can't hunt them down on your own."

"Pfft, no way, even if I had my spells up and running I wouldn't solo caves. That's how you end up eaten by jellies." Ignoble way to go, though jellies can actually be pretty dangerous. There's just something particularly ignoble in a capable adventurer ending up digested by a wobbly cube. "Not without some reliable muscle and a healer," he adds absently, because that's just common sense. Of course, common sense says bring someone who knows traps and finesse, too, and then his throat catches for just a fleeting moment, and he has to look down and examine his nails to cover the lapse. "Like, unless the fishing's way better off on the other side, staying central seems like the best call. It's already way too easy to miss shit." No stones of farspeech, no handy intercom systems, he can see falling out of the important loops very, very easily here.

"You say that like there's a lot of shit to miss," he says. Which he says like--like he'd even know, tapped in to the social hub of the village as he is. He got one taste of it at that meeting, and he's done for as long as he's allowed to be. No more crowds, no more public speaking, no more exploring caves with people who have visions.

Which are the only thing keeping his mouth shut, even as his brow raises for spells and healer.

"Anyway," he says, deciding not to delve into that for his sanity, "I bet we could rip a counter out of a house like this and build you an island, if you took up a place with a big enough kitchen." They're all big to Jude, considering, but he doesn't know what's comfortable to basically drop a table into.

"Look, it's not like I want bulletins on the gossip, but people keep telling me how doomed we are. I'd like forewarning when there are... fuckin'... flying electrical multiplying wolves bearing down on us." It's a purely practical problem, here.

He allows himself to be rerouted, though. "I left my carpentry guy in my other planar system, but, I mean, I guess. Not like there isn't time to kill while we wait for the doom and shit to happen." Or, hopefully, for rescue in the form of any of his various reality-hopping allies, or a way out he finds himself, which'd just be even better.

There's a point where you have to turn into the slide, if you want any hope of straightening out, and Jude's been getting plenty of practice in the village. Eventually the weird shit that comes out of people's mouths has to be--funny, or utterly dismissed, and he tends to walk the line for politeness' sake.

Today, his mouth twitches at flying electrical multiplying wolves and shit, like it's a category with a lot of entries. It's the kind of outlandish thing Parker might make up, and then harass him into sketching.

But they'd be real, to Parker, in a way he really hopes those things never prove real to anyone else. "Doomed is kind of an extreme take. I just think we're stuck here until we aren't--until whatever put us here decides. Less doomed, more--there's nothing we can do about it for now. So why not build an island in your kitchen."

"I like you. You can stay." He says it with an air of great magnanimity, a sweeping gesture of a skinny hand made sort of elegant by sheer force of will. Noblisse oblige.

The fact that Taako has personally tangled with a flying electrical multiplying bear is beside the point, though it might make Jude's air of relative calm a little harder to sustain if that came up.

"And when the wolves get here, we'll impress them with our excellent kitchen layouts," he adds chirpily, entirely too amused with himself as usual. He's been in the habit of laughing at his own jokes first too long to stop now.

Jude, having been in the house--and village, far as he can tell--first, doesn't even acknowledge the permission by shrugging it off. People like this guy enjoy the sound of their own voices, and the jokes they tell are largely to make themselves laugh. Ignoring the unimportant parts of what people say is the best armor he's found since he started school as a kid, and he's only found a handful of people to remove it for.

"I know a guy who might help, but he'll probably want something in exchange." He could lean on the gift of the journal to push Jax toward charitable endeavors, but he doesn't really have a reason to.

Him, he'll work on it just to have something to do, a break from batch after batch of paper. "Should probably pick a kitchen to put it in first, there's a few on the way to where I'm headed that were pretty big, if you want to have a look."

Not responding to Taako's incredibly hilarious asides is, potentially, a way to slow them down. They work a lot better with someone feeding him openings and giggling at all his comments. They'll peter out relatively quickly if no one cooperates the way Magnus or Lup would. Not quickly enough for most, admittedly.

"Sure, not a lot to decide between any I've seen so far." He has mostly been scoping out the kitchens. Beyond those, he can only really imagine much use for the bedrooms. The other spaces are either for serving food or for stowing more people, should certain individuals turn up.

He doesn't really get how having a house works, even now.

"Also, have thoughts about oven situations, though those're gonna be a real pain in the ass, lighting fires like some kind of chump, with other fires..."

As far as Jude knows, the ovens in the houses are all the same: sections of the stove that put food fire-adjacent, rather than over or inside. He hasn't bothered to try out his own, having little to bake on a given day, and pretty sure he's going to burn the house down eventually.

It's a wonder more of them haven't, the old shit they're full of. Maybe there just aren't enough people to tip the statistical scales, or the storms and earthquakes have toppled places faster than they can burn down.

"There might still be firestarters at the inn, up in the supply room. You're gonna need wood, too, especially going into winter." Another glancing once-over, but it's not really his place to tell a guy if he can hack it on his own or not.

"This is shitsucking stuuuupid," Taako says in light, singsong tones. He's actually quite a bit more capable than he looks, or deliberately gives any impression of, but he's also feeling rather lost without magic as so much as a backup. He's taken it easy plenty of times, and when he was a scruffy kid he didn't have spell slots to burn. He does, in fact, know how starting fires and consuming fuel works. He just hates all that crap. "There's obviously plenty of arcane activity going on, and if I could nail down how they're suppressing individual access like this I betcha I'd have the place disassembled by now. But if they can block some bits and not others, give us fucking cantrips, for the Lady's sake..." It's a sign of how agitated he is that he actually involves a deity in his grousing.

There's a laugh caught in his throat, a moment where he just kind of slots the man into the nebulous group of people he'd bounced between at school. People he never quite knew the minds or hearts of, but who kept him around for their own reasons. Goaded him into leaving his dorm, took him to the city, tried to help him shake off Hollow Creek a little more.

They failed, in the end, but he doesn't hold them at fault. He isn't sure what he holds this guy to when the subject dives back into arcane activity and shit he doesn't have any thoughts on. Some of it's, well--a little familiar. The words make sense, but it's--games, old books. Dumb shit he and Parker read up on for their comic. Nothing anyone would come from. He's accepted space travel as some future-achievement from Bodhi, but he doesn't want to think about magic.

The tattoo on his shoulder itches for it, and he doesn't think about that either. "It's pretty stupid," he agrees, having no opinion on the rest. "At least we're not paying rent, though."

"Rent is lame," he agrees, though he's rarely actually paid it. Lately, sure, though Ren handles most of the business end of things at the school, and he just crashes there when he isn't with Krav. The Bureau included room and board, the adventurer's lifestyle was more about camping someplace and occasionally coming up with scratch for the inn, and he'd owned the show-wagon outright in ways he now realizes he probably owes to Lucretia.

And before that? Well, he and Lup did scrape rent together while they were studying. Sort of. Life in the caravans had been easy, by comparison.

It's this last thought that he follows. "There's some satisfaction to be had in the everybody pitch the fuck in and we probably won't die system." It's just that it's a hard one to game. Bah.

"The inn has a pretty big kitchen," he points out, but if the guy wanted to cook in the bustle of the inn, he'd be doing that instead of looking for a house. From what Jude's heard though, there's two of the things, as similar as Bodhi's soil samples. "I think the one across the gap is still empty, but it's a bit of a hike." With empty pantries and no firewood stacked at the door.

If he walks the guy out to that, he might get roped into a whole slew of chores, but he lets the comment stand and keeps walking: there are worse ways to kill a day in the canyon than chopping wood.

"I'm not gonna say I don't love an audience, 'cus I love an audience. Totally down for wowing everyone with my productions of dead animals people found in the woods stewed with green junk." In the right hands, that's a pretty rad meal. His are the right hands. "Just like a little elbow room, too. Got used to having my own kitchen again way too fast." How'd that again get in there?

"Well if you had a house like that already, might be harder to satisfy your tastes," he says, almost to himself. He'd taken to his own on the basis of protection from the elements and a kind of wonder for the size and shape of it. The trailer hadn't left him with a lot of expectations. "Maybe think about the shittiest place you ever lived and learn to settle."

He points at a house just off the path they're following, behind a thick tangle of foliage. "This one's intact, last time I checked."

"Y'know, tried that a couple'a times, but it doesn't do it for me. Resignation and perspective and all that shit." This sure beats sleeping in that ditch doesn't make him appreciate what he has. It reminds him that he's taken his lumps and this shit is just as bad in its own way. "But if intact is where we're setting the bar, let's limbo the fuck under it."

It isn't the first time one of Jude's coping methods has been rejected or criticized, and he doubts it will be the last. It's at least innocuous enough a situation that he can roll with it, carrying on up the path and porch like it doesn't matter one way or the other.

And it shouldn't: what does he care about this guy's ability to enjoy his surroundings? "What does do it for you," he asks, only part of him hoping for a legitimate answer. Low expectations are his preferred attitude toward--everything, all of the time.

Both deliberately facetious nonsense and uncomfortably blunt honesty have their place when people ask you personal questions. Assuming that your goal, like Taako's, is usually to discomfit and punish them. Even he doesn't always know which one will come out.

"Shooting hurty magic at my problems until they fucking die." He's not even sure how to classify that one.

under the stars i'm alone among strangers

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