Majestica (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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zenderael_mmo2012-10-29 09:09 pm
frombelow) wrote in zenderael_mmo2012-10-29 09:09 pm
Entry tags:
[Majestica/Nova] - Where can I get one
Who:
Majestica
Nova
When: Saturday, 5/21
Where: The Nenakret
Before/After: N/A
Warnings: Majestica is less annoying now that she's real but not quite all the way there yet
Selling potions again! Sigh. A moderately debt-ridden alchemist's work is never done.
It wasn't the busiest of days at the Nenakret market, and Nova had been bored -- for a while. That was until he remembered his earth tablet. He had gotten engrossed in this 'show' (vocabulary reluctantly wrestled from Nix) called Second Street Witch, which featured a cast of backstabbing twenty-something malcontents who all had various magical abilities or attributes -- there was the titular witch, who seemed to be something between a mage and an alchemist, and then a bunch of people understood to be psychics, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and demons embroiled in a constantly shifting web of love triangles and rivalries. The mythology wasn't quite what he was used to, but the show liked to hit you over the head all the time with how everyone's powers worked, so he thought he had a pretty good grasp of them all.
It was great!
Or it was terrible. He couldn't tell.
When he had left off, the witch's best friend (who was really her worst enemy) had just faked her own death during a hiking trip in the hopes that the witch would be blamed for it. Little did she know, her own boyfriend had been plotting to kill her all along, and was using the incident as an opening to do so. The show was currently switching back and forth between the witch and the would-be murderer both searching for her with very different aims, and it was all very tense and suspenseful.
He almost hoped he didn't get a customer...
He didn't get a customer.
He got something worse.
Majestica had been able to extract a few different perspectives on the player/alt situation that Sascha had introduced her to from various Earthers. She had the basic gist of the situation--some Earth idiot had created her but was too stupid to do it properly, so she'd ended up a muddled mess of conflicting traits. The explanation annoyed her, to say the least.
Along the way she'd discovered that she suddenly had the ability to tell who was real, as she now was, and who was still being controlled from "Earth." The fakes had strings attached, gossamer-thin like spiderwebs. Only mages could see them.
There were plenty of them here, as she wandered the Nenakret. She didn't know what she was looking for. An outlet, maybe. All this bad news and revelation had left her frustrated.
When she laid eyes on Nova, she found him familiar. She couldn't quite recall the details of their interaction, but she was sure they had interacted. It was the thing he stared at so intently that caught the majority of her attention, though. She'd seen the alchemist tablets by now, but this didn't look like one of theirs.
Completely without preface, she walked up to Nova's stand and thumped an arm down on the front counter, leaning over to tap his screen. "This," she said. "What is it?"
He jumped. Shows had a way of pulling you right out of reality and into the storyline, and he hadn't even seen her until she was right up at his counter, making sudden noise and touching his stuff.
He looked up. Did he know her? Vaguely... he felt like they had had a very confusing conversation once, but nothing much specific.
(In truth, they had had a very confusing conversation -- but Nix had been thoroughly displeased with it and stricken it from her headcanon in a huff, leaving him with only sort of a vague echo).
He pulled himself together and managed a smile even before his nerves had fully settled.
"It's a tablet, an information storage device from earth."
"From Earth," she repeated, her eyebrows rising the barest hint of a degree.
She looked him over briefly. No strings, so he wasn't a puppet. Seemed to be an alchemist, though it was entirely possible he was just selling somebody else's potions. Her tone calculatedly neutral, she asked, "Are you from Earth?"
Him, from earth? Weird idea. But it was a valid thing to wonder about someone now, wasn't it?
"No, I'm just..." He found the pause button and exited out of the show so he wouldn't miss anything, setting the tablet down on the counter. "I'm just very interested in earth. What about you?"
He paused, trying to figure out how to word what he wanted to say.
"I'm not interested in answering questions for someone who's only pretending not to know the answers, so if that's the case, you ought to come clean right now."
'If you're a player, don't fuck with me' was really hard to communicate without mentioning players...
"Interested in Earthers," she replied.
She arched an eyebrow at his warning, not catching his meaning about players and puppets, and interpreting it instead to mean that he suspected she was just fishing to see if he knew more than she did by pretending to know nothing. That seemed inefficient. Was it something her player might have tried?
"Do you know about the strings?" she asked, instead of directly addressing his concern.
"Yes," he said, relaxing a bit. That was a good question, in his opinion. It didn't sound like the type of question a player would ask while pretending to learn about the phenomenon. Players seemed to have a lot of trouble grasping that people who were awake would want to know who wasn't.
"People who are being controlled by earthers have strings," he told her -- or confirmed, if she was just trying to see if he knew what she knew. "I know someone who can see them, but I can't, so when I meet someone new I have to guess."
I realize that, she wanted to snap, but held back on it, the only indication of the thought being a subtle flicker of a furrow across her brow. Her player had been an idiot. Best to ignore her instinctive responses.
"I can see them," she said, instead. "If you're not from Earth, how did you acquire that?" She gestured toward the tablet.
"I bought it. There's plenty of them sort of floating around, now. Well -- not plenty, but I know someone who acquired a few."
She could see the strings! A mage, then? He tried not to get too excited -- she didn't seem like a particularly friendly mage, but he still wanted to ask...
"Say, how many people have them, out there?" He indicated the crowd. "Half? A third? A tenth? Most of them? I've been wondering since I woke up..."
Probably stolen from an Earther, she guessed. Maybe she could kill one of them later and loot them to see for herself. Maybe that was too much effort. She didn't know what she wanted to do. She'd have to decide.
She turned around, leaning her elbows on the counter, and began to pick out the glimmers of strings that she could see amongst the crowd. "Not most of them," she said. "One in every ten or twenty."
She glanced back to him, over her shoulder. "Is that what you call it? Waking up?"
One in ten or twenty wasn't anywhere near as bad as he'd assumed. Maybe he should stop being so skeptical of everyone, then? It made him wonder how different that number was from a month ago. Probably there were people waking up every day, and the number of people with strings would be shrinking.
"That's what I decided call it," he affirmed. "It's kind of catching on, I think. Some people call it 'becoming real',' but nobody was really false, exactly. The ones being controlled are still people, they just aren't themselves."
She gave a grunt of combined consideration and acknowledgement, looking out over the crowd again. Waking up. Yeah, the point at which she'd broken free of the strings did feel a lot like waking up from a nonsense dream you could barely remember the details of. Was everyone like this, then? Nothing but a vague template and foggy memories to build off of?
Her eyes narrowed as she chewed thoughtfully on her thumbnail. Now that she knew the situation, what was she going to do about it?
"Strings can usually be cut," she mused, her eyes following a middle-aged spellsword through the crowd--specifically following the strings just above his head and shoulders.
"They cut themselves after a while," Nova said. "I think it's a very taxing spell, but it's possible if you wanted to do it." He watched her watching the people going by.
"You can learn interesting things by talking to the creators while they're still around, though. Have you met yours?"
It didn't seem like it would be very taxing. Just walk over, snap them, done. She wanted to do it, just to see what would happen.
"No."
She pulled away from the booth, straightening. She didn't even consider elaborating, she was too focused on her desire to test this idea. She walked away, a woman with a purpose, making a beeline for the spellsword she'd been tracking.
...Well all right then, unfriendly mage, just walk away then, see if Nova cares.
He did keep on watching, though. She seemed to be up to something.
She confronted him, stepping in front of him and forcing him to stop in the middle of the street. She squinted to get a better look at the strings and where they were located, and then reached a hand up and drew upon the power of fire.
With a sizzle, the strings went up in smoke, and the spellsword simply vanished. To her eyes, at least. Any non-mages would think he'd simply run off, without remembering seeing him do so.
Her eyebrows rose in interest as she stared at the vacant spot that had been occupied seconds earlier.
She returned to Nova. "It wasn't as difficult as you seem to think."
Nova was making quite a face at the smugness after that kind of display.
"He just ran away from you, you didn't even do anything to him."
Didn't he? Well, what else could have happened?
She set her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow at him. "Vanishing into thin air is what you call running away?"
"Did he? I sort of... didn't pay attention, I guess..."
Nova was unusually disappointed in himself for that. He'd been trying to watch closely.
"What does it mean if he disappeared? Did he die? Cease to exist?"
She shrugged.
Didn't know, didn't care.
Dismay.
He didn't know or necessarily care about that particular guy whose strings he'd snapped, but not knowing was gloomy...
M-maybe he could ask Reilanin. It was an uncomfortable thought, if you could just vanish someone who wasn't awake yet out of existence...
"The taxing spell was about setting people free, not getting rid of them," he told her.
"I see." She pondered it for a moment, looking thoughtful, but decided it would probably take more energy than she wanted to invest at the moment to figure out the logistics of that. She simply didn't care enough. Just the knowledge that she could easily force controlled people to disappear was enough for her.
She leaned forward again to give his tablet--screen now blank--a discerning look. "How useful is that thing?"
"It isn't very useful at all," Nova answered. Maybe he was being a bit more reserved about how great it was because she seemed a bit... unpredictable...
"But it's interesting, if you find earth interesting. It's got a lot of different types of images and music from earth."
The unpredictability was improved from when she'd had a player, if you could believe it.
"What is Earth like?" she asked, folding her arms over the counter, giving him a severe look from behind her black frames. He wanted him to tell her why it should be interesting at all.
Ah, is it earth lecture time again? Nova dove into an abbreviated version of the information he'd originally gathered for Alex -- earth was a place with WIDE-SCALE MANUFACTURING OF A MULTITUDE OF OBJECTS! Of WIDELY BELOVED MECHANICAL VEHICLES that everyone rode through the streets! That it had no magic and that people could use handheld devices like his tablet to capture and replay information. If not stopped, he'd start getting into history and geography, too...
She listened intently, even though she wasn't sure whether she was interested or not. She thought maybe she should be interested, but Earth was such a far-off distant thought that it didn't even seem like a real place, so it felt like he was describing fiction to her, and she had little interest in fiction.
But it wasn't fiction. It was, supposedly, real. If she wanted to be interested, she was going to need something that proved as much.
"Show me," she interrupted him suddenly, pointing to the tablet. "Use that."
What, did you not see him using it earlier?
He switched it on and started up another show -- not the one he'd been watching earlier, since he didn't want to lose his place, This one was a about a contagion spreading throughout the world that turned people into shambling undead, but you couldn't really tell that from the first couple of minutes. From the first couple of minutes, you could just tell how amazing and lifelike it all looked, even on the tiny little screen.
"Here, look," he said, pointing to the background of one scene. "That's a car!"
She wasn't looking very closely the first time, okay.
It was enough to catch her interest, though. The incredibly lifelike picture--moving, displaying a scene full of things she'd never seen before, strange looking buildings and unfamiliar objects, people wearing odd clothes. It was nothing like Zenderael, but it was obviously real.
So Earth was real. It was a place that looked like this, with people who looked and dressed and spoke like this. It felt solidified now in her head, rather than just being an intangible concept she couldn't quite grasp.
The corners of her mouth tilted up in a small, predatory smile.
"I think I need one of these," she said.
"There are plenty of stranded earthers in need of money, if you want to buy one," he said, packing his own up maybe a little hastily and putting it away.
Don't trust that smile, sorry.
He didn't really expect her to buy one, but suggesting something else just sounded rude, and obviously Nova was never rude.
She straightened, still wearing that untrustworthy smile as her arms fell to her sides. "I'm sure there are," she said.
And then, rather suddenly, "Your name?"
Because if she couldn't find an Earther to get one from...
"Nova Kylethe," he said. "What's yours?"
And please stop smiling like that it's unsettling.
"Majestica," she answered. "No last name. My player was an idiot."
There was no bitterness or hatred inherent in the statement, merely a simple statement of fact.
"That's too bad," he said, anyway. "Mine too, I think it must be common."
Of course, he couldn't help wondering who her player was, even if she didn't seem to care...
"It's a shame," she said with a shrug, though she sounded more exasperated than anything else. "That kind of power, and they squandered it on foolishness."
But she seemed to think that sort of statement required no follow-ups, because right after she said it, she took a step back and made to turn so she could leave.
"Bye?" It was stated as a question, and the answer was given when she started to walk away.
He sighed to himself. She didn't even buy anything!
But he'd been in the middle of a really interesting scene, so whatever...
Majestica
Nova
When: Saturday, 5/21
Where: The Nenakret
Before/After: N/A
Warnings: Majestica is less annoying now that she's real but not quite all the way there yet
Selling potions again! Sigh. A moderately debt-ridden alchemist's work is never done.
It wasn't the busiest of days at the Nenakret market, and Nova had been bored -- for a while. That was until he remembered his earth tablet. He had gotten engrossed in this 'show' (vocabulary reluctantly wrestled from Nix) called Second Street Witch, which featured a cast of backstabbing twenty-something malcontents who all had various magical abilities or attributes -- there was the titular witch, who seemed to be something between a mage and an alchemist, and then a bunch of people understood to be psychics, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and demons embroiled in a constantly shifting web of love triangles and rivalries. The mythology wasn't quite what he was used to, but the show liked to hit you over the head all the time with how everyone's powers worked, so he thought he had a pretty good grasp of them all.
It was great!
Or it was terrible. He couldn't tell.
When he had left off, the witch's best friend (who was really her worst enemy) had just faked her own death during a hiking trip in the hopes that the witch would be blamed for it. Little did she know, her own boyfriend had been plotting to kill her all along, and was using the incident as an opening to do so. The show was currently switching back and forth between the witch and the would-be murderer both searching for her with very different aims, and it was all very tense and suspenseful.
He almost hoped he didn't get a customer...
He didn't get a customer.
He got something worse.
Majestica had been able to extract a few different perspectives on the player/alt situation that Sascha had introduced her to from various Earthers. She had the basic gist of the situation--some Earth idiot had created her but was too stupid to do it properly, so she'd ended up a muddled mess of conflicting traits. The explanation annoyed her, to say the least.
Along the way she'd discovered that she suddenly had the ability to tell who was real, as she now was, and who was still being controlled from "Earth." The fakes had strings attached, gossamer-thin like spiderwebs. Only mages could see them.
There were plenty of them here, as she wandered the Nenakret. She didn't know what she was looking for. An outlet, maybe. All this bad news and revelation had left her frustrated.
When she laid eyes on Nova, she found him familiar. She couldn't quite recall the details of their interaction, but she was sure they had interacted. It was the thing he stared at so intently that caught the majority of her attention, though. She'd seen the alchemist tablets by now, but this didn't look like one of theirs.
Completely without preface, she walked up to Nova's stand and thumped an arm down on the front counter, leaning over to tap his screen. "This," she said. "What is it?"
He jumped. Shows had a way of pulling you right out of reality and into the storyline, and he hadn't even seen her until she was right up at his counter, making sudden noise and touching his stuff.
He looked up. Did he know her? Vaguely... he felt like they had had a very confusing conversation once, but nothing much specific.
(In truth, they had had a very confusing conversation -- but Nix had been thoroughly displeased with it and stricken it from her headcanon in a huff, leaving him with only sort of a vague echo).
He pulled himself together and managed a smile even before his nerves had fully settled.
"It's a tablet, an information storage device from earth."
"From Earth," she repeated, her eyebrows rising the barest hint of a degree.
She looked him over briefly. No strings, so he wasn't a puppet. Seemed to be an alchemist, though it was entirely possible he was just selling somebody else's potions. Her tone calculatedly neutral, she asked, "Are you from Earth?"
Him, from earth? Weird idea. But it was a valid thing to wonder about someone now, wasn't it?
"No, I'm just..." He found the pause button and exited out of the show so he wouldn't miss anything, setting the tablet down on the counter. "I'm just very interested in earth. What about you?"
He paused, trying to figure out how to word what he wanted to say.
"I'm not interested in answering questions for someone who's only pretending not to know the answers, so if that's the case, you ought to come clean right now."
'If you're a player, don't fuck with me' was really hard to communicate without mentioning players...
"Interested in Earthers," she replied.
She arched an eyebrow at his warning, not catching his meaning about players and puppets, and interpreting it instead to mean that he suspected she was just fishing to see if he knew more than she did by pretending to know nothing. That seemed inefficient. Was it something her player might have tried?
"Do you know about the strings?" she asked, instead of directly addressing his concern.
"Yes," he said, relaxing a bit. That was a good question, in his opinion. It didn't sound like the type of question a player would ask while pretending to learn about the phenomenon. Players seemed to have a lot of trouble grasping that people who were awake would want to know who wasn't.
"People who are being controlled by earthers have strings," he told her -- or confirmed, if she was just trying to see if he knew what she knew. "I know someone who can see them, but I can't, so when I meet someone new I have to guess."
I realize that, she wanted to snap, but held back on it, the only indication of the thought being a subtle flicker of a furrow across her brow. Her player had been an idiot. Best to ignore her instinctive responses.
"I can see them," she said, instead. "If you're not from Earth, how did you acquire that?" She gestured toward the tablet.
"I bought it. There's plenty of them sort of floating around, now. Well -- not plenty, but I know someone who acquired a few."
She could see the strings! A mage, then? He tried not to get too excited -- she didn't seem like a particularly friendly mage, but he still wanted to ask...
"Say, how many people have them, out there?" He indicated the crowd. "Half? A third? A tenth? Most of them? I've been wondering since I woke up..."
Probably stolen from an Earther, she guessed. Maybe she could kill one of them later and loot them to see for herself. Maybe that was too much effort. She didn't know what she wanted to do. She'd have to decide.
She turned around, leaning her elbows on the counter, and began to pick out the glimmers of strings that she could see amongst the crowd. "Not most of them," she said. "One in every ten or twenty."
She glanced back to him, over her shoulder. "Is that what you call it? Waking up?"
One in ten or twenty wasn't anywhere near as bad as he'd assumed. Maybe he should stop being so skeptical of everyone, then? It made him wonder how different that number was from a month ago. Probably there were people waking up every day, and the number of people with strings would be shrinking.
"That's what I decided call it," he affirmed. "It's kind of catching on, I think. Some people call it 'becoming real',' but nobody was really false, exactly. The ones being controlled are still people, they just aren't themselves."
She gave a grunt of combined consideration and acknowledgement, looking out over the crowd again. Waking up. Yeah, the point at which she'd broken free of the strings did feel a lot like waking up from a nonsense dream you could barely remember the details of. Was everyone like this, then? Nothing but a vague template and foggy memories to build off of?
Her eyes narrowed as she chewed thoughtfully on her thumbnail. Now that she knew the situation, what was she going to do about it?
"Strings can usually be cut," she mused, her eyes following a middle-aged spellsword through the crowd--specifically following the strings just above his head and shoulders.
"They cut themselves after a while," Nova said. "I think it's a very taxing spell, but it's possible if you wanted to do it." He watched her watching the people going by.
"You can learn interesting things by talking to the creators while they're still around, though. Have you met yours?"
It didn't seem like it would be very taxing. Just walk over, snap them, done. She wanted to do it, just to see what would happen.
"No."
She pulled away from the booth, straightening. She didn't even consider elaborating, she was too focused on her desire to test this idea. She walked away, a woman with a purpose, making a beeline for the spellsword she'd been tracking.
...Well all right then, unfriendly mage, just walk away then, see if Nova cares.
He did keep on watching, though. She seemed to be up to something.
She confronted him, stepping in front of him and forcing him to stop in the middle of the street. She squinted to get a better look at the strings and where they were located, and then reached a hand up and drew upon the power of fire.
With a sizzle, the strings went up in smoke, and the spellsword simply vanished. To her eyes, at least. Any non-mages would think he'd simply run off, without remembering seeing him do so.
Her eyebrows rose in interest as she stared at the vacant spot that had been occupied seconds earlier.
She returned to Nova. "It wasn't as difficult as you seem to think."
Nova was making quite a face at the smugness after that kind of display.
"He just ran away from you, you didn't even do anything to him."
Didn't he? Well, what else could have happened?
She set her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow at him. "Vanishing into thin air is what you call running away?"
"Did he? I sort of... didn't pay attention, I guess..."
Nova was unusually disappointed in himself for that. He'd been trying to watch closely.
"What does it mean if he disappeared? Did he die? Cease to exist?"
She shrugged.
Didn't know, didn't care.
Dismay.
He didn't know or necessarily care about that particular guy whose strings he'd snapped, but not knowing was gloomy...
M-maybe he could ask Reilanin. It was an uncomfortable thought, if you could just vanish someone who wasn't awake yet out of existence...
"The taxing spell was about setting people free, not getting rid of them," he told her.
"I see." She pondered it for a moment, looking thoughtful, but decided it would probably take more energy than she wanted to invest at the moment to figure out the logistics of that. She simply didn't care enough. Just the knowledge that she could easily force controlled people to disappear was enough for her.
She leaned forward again to give his tablet--screen now blank--a discerning look. "How useful is that thing?"
"It isn't very useful at all," Nova answered. Maybe he was being a bit more reserved about how great it was because she seemed a bit... unpredictable...
"But it's interesting, if you find earth interesting. It's got a lot of different types of images and music from earth."
The unpredictability was improved from when she'd had a player, if you could believe it.
"What is Earth like?" she asked, folding her arms over the counter, giving him a severe look from behind her black frames. He wanted him to tell her why it should be interesting at all.
Ah, is it earth lecture time again? Nova dove into an abbreviated version of the information he'd originally gathered for Alex -- earth was a place with WIDE-SCALE MANUFACTURING OF A MULTITUDE OF OBJECTS! Of WIDELY BELOVED MECHANICAL VEHICLES that everyone rode through the streets! That it had no magic and that people could use handheld devices like his tablet to capture and replay information. If not stopped, he'd start getting into history and geography, too...
She listened intently, even though she wasn't sure whether she was interested or not. She thought maybe she should be interested, but Earth was such a far-off distant thought that it didn't even seem like a real place, so it felt like he was describing fiction to her, and she had little interest in fiction.
But it wasn't fiction. It was, supposedly, real. If she wanted to be interested, she was going to need something that proved as much.
"Show me," she interrupted him suddenly, pointing to the tablet. "Use that."
What, did you not see him using it earlier?
He switched it on and started up another show -- not the one he'd been watching earlier, since he didn't want to lose his place, This one was a about a contagion spreading throughout the world that turned people into shambling undead, but you couldn't really tell that from the first couple of minutes. From the first couple of minutes, you could just tell how amazing and lifelike it all looked, even on the tiny little screen.
"Here, look," he said, pointing to the background of one scene. "That's a car!"
She wasn't looking very closely the first time, okay.
It was enough to catch her interest, though. The incredibly lifelike picture--moving, displaying a scene full of things she'd never seen before, strange looking buildings and unfamiliar objects, people wearing odd clothes. It was nothing like Zenderael, but it was obviously real.
So Earth was real. It was a place that looked like this, with people who looked and dressed and spoke like this. It felt solidified now in her head, rather than just being an intangible concept she couldn't quite grasp.
The corners of her mouth tilted up in a small, predatory smile.
"I think I need one of these," she said.
"There are plenty of stranded earthers in need of money, if you want to buy one," he said, packing his own up maybe a little hastily and putting it away.
Don't trust that smile, sorry.
He didn't really expect her to buy one, but suggesting something else just sounded rude, and obviously Nova was never rude.
She straightened, still wearing that untrustworthy smile as her arms fell to her sides. "I'm sure there are," she said.
And then, rather suddenly, "Your name?"
Because if she couldn't find an Earther to get one from...
"Nova Kylethe," he said. "What's yours?"
And please stop smiling like that it's unsettling.
"Majestica," she answered. "No last name. My player was an idiot."
There was no bitterness or hatred inherent in the statement, merely a simple statement of fact.
"That's too bad," he said, anyway. "Mine too, I think it must be common."
Of course, he couldn't help wondering who her player was, even if she didn't seem to care...
"It's a shame," she said with a shrug, though she sounded more exasperated than anything else. "That kind of power, and they squandered it on foolishness."
But she seemed to think that sort of statement required no follow-ups, because right after she said it, she took a step back and made to turn so she could leave.
"Bye?" It was stated as a question, and the answer was given when she started to walk away.
He sighed to himself. She didn't even buy anything!
But he'd been in the middle of a really interesting scene, so whatever...