Nova + Ashtaroth // Done

[vast_oceans]

Who: Nova and Ashtaroth
When: Tuesday, 5/31
Where: Bastan
Before/After: Before X-DAV gets shut down and Artemis wakes up.
Warnings: Lots of angry looks and some pouting >:[



Bastan was in crisis yet again, people were saying-- or what was left of it, anyway. After getting a good look at some of the gains from the latest struggle between the two worlds, (and being rudely interrupted) Nova had decided to take a look at the losses. He thought that somehow looking might shed some light on the mystery, but looking at a place that was less was a whole lot less illuminating than looking at a place that was more.

Eventually, the visit devolved into half-looking, half hoping-he'd-run-into Ravindra or Ashtaroth-- the two most interesting things still in Bastan as far as he knew.

Bumping into Ashtaroth 'accidentally' definitely didn't count as contacting Theresa, right...?

The cleric in question- tall and dark and gloomy-looking- was just outside the Temple, listening to a woman rant about the newly created pits and her business lost therein, alternating between weeping and fits of anger, and it was hard to say if she really wanted anything beyond a sympathetic ear, which Ashtaroth could not provide. (Theresa could, but not to the degree the woman seemed to be demanding, and so it left Ashtaroth barely holding in a look of annoyance.)

Seeing Nova, however, seemed to decide her next course of action. "I'm sorry, ma'am, I truly am, but I must go and attend to my own duties- while I still have them. Pardon me."

And without another word to either of them, turned and walked away.

Was Theresa actually fleeing him?

That was just ridiculous.

Indignation at being avoided fought with his pride, which politely suggested he shouldn't follow her. Pride lost, and he picked up his pace as he set off after her.

"I guess you've officially decided we should never speak again!" he announced, when she was in earshot.

Behind the screen, Theresa sighed to herself when Nova's words showed up in the text box. If she didn't answer him here, she could expect another dragonmail, she was certain.

Ashtaroth turned back around, her annoyance (and pout) more visible. Her arms crossed as she glowered at him.

"That was the idea, yes. What are you doing here?"

"Taking in the physical evidence of the merge," he said.

Ashtaroth always looked so sour. Did Theresa look that way? The way she talked to him in letters, she sort of sounded like she might.

"How is Earth doing?" he asked. Terrible, hopefully!

"Oh, is that all."

Her voice lacked inflection, a flat, disapproving sort of sound to go with the equally unimpressed-sounding statement. She tapped her fingers on her arm as she held them crossed, reaching up to push her hair off of her shoulder.

"We're missing a few things," she said after a brief moment of thought. "Although that's not particular to just us. Ah, your Khshathra showed up recently. She died in an attack, but..."

There was an odd pause, as though she had just remembered something. And then she said nothing else, merely shrugging, though that seemed that wasn't the end of it.

"Well. What have you been up to lately, then?"

His answer was as straightforward as it was absurd.

"Catching ducks for Reilanin. And I saw cars for the first time, and... I, well, I didn't do anything after that, because my player got it in her head to have me make potions all day."

"...what did she want ducks for?" she asked after a long pause, momentarily missing the rest of it. She'd mentioned nothing of the sort the last they'd spoken, a brief exchange when she'd returned the journal. She'd seemed... disinterested in it. Distracted? But she had claimed it was of no great importance at that moment, and Theresa had not pressed the issue.

She did not think the reason was ducks, however.

"Well, that's what alchemists do, isn't it?" A beat. "...the potions bit."

The alchemist comment earned her a hard look.

"You don't have to sympathize, but at least don't try to make me sound ridiculous for minding. It was a whole day that she used up for it!"

Never mind that, given the things Nix had offered in trade for that day, he might have strongly considered giving it up if she'd asked. But why should he have to trade his time for gifts from her, anyway? Honestly, she owed him quite a few potions and player secrets just for ruining him to begin with, in his opinion.

A moment passed before he remembered the ducks.

"The ducks were friends for her penguin," he explained. "Or most of them became dinner, I guess."

"Sorry." And it wasn't insincere- that had been a low blow. Luckily, the double-meaning of the statement had gone unnoticed, and Theresa kept it in mind not to make any more insinuations. Nova was an idiot, but he wasn't stupid.

Her penguin? "Where did she get a penguin from?" Had she asked this already? It felt like something she'd remember, but with all that had been going on, forgetting things like that seemed plausible.

"Anyway- did you want anything, or...?"

"From earth. Don't you know about the penguin? The penguin is old news, Theresa! I thought you two spoke a lot."

Honestly, between Theresa and Reilanin, there must be such an astounding vacuum of interpersonal curiosity. Maybe information about their daily affairs was actually destroyed when they talked.

He ignored the question about what he wanted, mentally translating it as another way of saying, 'if you haven't got formal business with me, then please go away'.

A sigh escaped the girl. "I don't expect her to remember everything I tell her- I think she'd agree to the same for me." She pushed her hair back from her shoulder again, a fruitless effort as it fell back again. "We've all been busy. I'm not going to worry about a penguin."

They hadn't much spoken lately, truth be told. And Theresa had been busy with everything that had been going on with Gunnar and Duncan, with Rayu and Ashtaroth. Reilanin had also been quiet. Focused on other things? Ducks, she supposed?...

"You really shouldn't be talking to me through her. It really doesn't bother you at all to do so?"

He drew back a little at the accusation. To tell the truth, Missie had gotten him used to it, as if it was normal and harmless, even though he'd found it disturbing at first. Maybe he was being more callous because he didn't particularly like Ashtaroth?

Having someone physically there to address made a difference, talking to players. Better than scrawling angry letters to send off into the void. She might have a point, though. Either playing along with them or speaking to them directly, it all made him a part of their system.

But he answered defensively, because being right didn't mean he had to let her win.

"You all seem to have your own personal rules about what is and isn't all right. Maybe it isn't all right for you to go on making her decisions for her now that you know she's going to awaken one day."

"Excuse me?" she asked, her voice raising with his accusation. "Personal rules, what is and isn't all right- this is what you wanted!" She stepped forward angrily, a finger in his face. "Or did you forget what I'm trying to do for you? The time I have given up because of you? Or does that not matter anymore? I suppose Artemis and his plight must mean very little to you if you're so keen on forgetting I'm only doing this because of what you wanted for Artemis! And you're right- she could become real anytime- so are you to tell me I have been wasting my time, fighting against an invisible timer to do something that may not even be possible-??"

She choked her words off, the angry rant ending there. She glared at him. "Well, all right then. Have it your way. I'm done."

Theresa didn't even care what else might have been running on her computer- without a word, she turned it off with an angry jab at the power button.

Except, Ashtaroth didn't mysteriously walk off in such a way that Nova would have been unable to follow. She stood still a moment, her expression blank, before she blinked awareness back into them. She shook her head, frowning briefly in confusion as she looked at the ground, then looked up and saw Artemis. More startled than angry, she nonetheless glared at him, as though startling her were offense enough.

"W-what?" she asked defensively, her voice no longer angry, but holding a familiar tone of annoyance in it. "Where did you come from?"

Low blows were really one of Theresa's strong points, weren't they? It was amazing how well she managed to turn it back on him. He was impressed on some level, and if he were capable of guilt, he might have been chastened by the parts that rang true. Instead, he noticed them and found them equal parts fascinating and annoying.

"That was Heimdall's plan! He could have done it himself with a thought and refused! So if you want to be angry at someone for dragging you into it..."

He trailed off, realizing he wasn't speaking to Theresa anymore.

"Are you really hiding behind Ashtaroth!" he snapped, too angry to care what little sense that would make to Ashtaroth later.

She frowned at him, a little taken aback by how angry he'd suddenly become. "What-" she said, looking behind her before back to him. Of course, there was no one there.

"What are you even talking about?" She said heatedly. "If you've come looking for Artemis, I haven't seen him lately! He's probably... doing something," she said, seeming to come across a snag in her thoughts and blustering her way through it regardless. She'd just been talking to Miss Clarice...

"What are you so angry for, anyway?" She asked, folding her arms in front of her.

What did Theresa even expect him to say to that? He wasn't going to explain players to Ashtaroth while Theresa was there to guide her response.

This was probably an effort to trip him up and make him say something wrong to Ashtaroth so she could congratulate herself on being better than him. Technically, she had already succeeded, but that didn't mean he intended to go on digging himself a hole.

"I mistook you for somebody else," he announced, suddenly casual. "I'm not mad at you. How are you, Ashtaroth?"

She scowled at him again, distrustful now. "I'm... I'm well. Thank you," she said, evasive. "Though today seems to be full of interruptions..."

Still eyeing him strangely, she rubbed at her forearms even as she kept her arms folded and glanced aside without turning away from him. Why was he there? And why hadn't she seen him come over? He'd sounded like he'd been in the middle of talking to someone... "How are you?" she asked with some suspicion. "...have you spoken with Artemis lately...?"

"Just fine," he answered, perhaps equally suspicious. "No, Artemis and I aren't communicating much at the moment."

Well, there was that conversation about fashion design, but that hardly counted when it came to random encounters with Theresa pretending to be Ashtaroth.

What was she doing.

"Could you excuse me just one moment?" he asked. Then he took out pen and paper and wrote Theresa a letter, and sent it off right then and there.

If you're going to storm off, storm off! Switching to Ashtaroth's voice like it makes you invisible is just insulting to both of us.

What was he doing? She stopped being quite so uncertain and became more unimpressed, her stance resettling to reflect as much, arms still crossed in front of her though now her glare had returned, and a finger tapped restlessly at the crook of her arm.

Theresa, in the meantime, had gone into the kitchen, and the mail dragon startled her just as she'd grabbed a glass of water. Still furious and now adding confused on top of that, she took a pen and angrily wrote back, The computer's off. I'm not even playing.

It wasn't until the dragon had left that she stopped to think on what that could mean.

Nevermind Ashtaroth's impatience! Ashtaroth wouldn't even have to be impatient if Theresa wasn't...

He got the reply. Looked up from the paper, slowly, to Ashtaroth.

Oh, fuck.

"Do you feel like learning the terrible secret behind the world today, Ashtaroth, or would you rather go off and find it bit by bit on your own?"

Her eyebrows rose as his gaze came up from the piece of paper, her expression just short of imperious. As if the past five minutes hadn't been strange enough on their own, his next words only made her more confused, and thus, more suspicious of him.

"Terrible secret- what are you- what is with these dragons??"

While she spoke, another mail dragon had popped into existence, holding out another letter.

She's still there? Have you told her anything?

An awkward smile as he addressed the next letter before getting around to answering Ashtaroth.

Not yet, he scrawled. Any requests?

"I'm consulting with someone who has to do with the secret," he said, as he finished writing it. He sent that one off, too.

"I'm not intentionally keeping anything from you, but the last time I tried to explain this to someone without any kind of prelude, she started threatening to burn down my house with fire ants."

"They're taking their blessed time getting back to you," she said waspishly, tapping her fingers against her arm again. True enough, there was a long pause between dragonmails, accounted for by Theresa simply staring at the return letter from Nova.

Tell her.

That was all it said. The little dragon, oblivious to their respective concerns, even sat on Nova's shoulder for a moment to preen.

"Is that so. Well, I assure you, Bastan is short on fire ants, particularly at this moment, so that particular threat can't have much potency to it from me. Now, if we're done speaking like children, what is this 'secret' you speak of?"

How to even explain it.. He folded the letter into smaller and smaller squares as he thought about it.

"Can I start with the assumption that you're familiar with Earth?"

"Yes, of course," she said, her frown softening somewhat as she tried to guess where this was going. "It's all anyone seems to talk about here, given that's where most of the city has gone."

She fought the urge to slap the letter out of his hands, not because she wanted to see it (she did), but because it was distracting and, already annoyed, felt herself becoming more annoyed at the sight of it.

"As you probably know, then, the earthers can create amazing devices. They produce them in such quantities that lots of people wind up buying and using them without any sense of how they work. There is one device where they can look in on our world, and they can create people there. They use those people to interact with us, and they tell stories with one another through them. They've been doing it since before the worlds began to merge, thinking Zenderael was someone's fiction and it was all a kind of play."

The paper had gotten too thick to fold, and he looked up.

"Eventually the people they made to play in Zenderael all wake up and become real, or aware, or whatever you want to call it. I woke up about a month or two ago. You woke up just now."

He didn't even have the decency to look at her while he spoke nonsense- did that mean, at least, that he thought it was nonsense, too? She was probably just picking at things to be annoyed with now. Her first impression of him had been less than stellar, and to see him again in the middle of snapping at her hadn't improved their relations any in her eyes.

But when he did look up, the girl felt a sudden coldness in her middle. It was ridiculous- too ridiculous- but she'd been in Bastan, working so tirelessly, and had heard things like this- it all sounded familiar because it was what people were talking about. World merging, people creating people, 'waking up'-

Her face had gone blank while he spoke, processing this. "But... but I... I've been here," she murmured. "I've been here the whole time."

Of course, her memories of recent times were sharp- Theresa had played her so constantly, even down to simple interactions such as the one she'd walked away from earlier, that Ashtaroth could not help but feel solid. She shook her head, a hand up to cover her mouth.

"We remember the things we were used for, and the memories they made for us. So it feels like having been here all your life, but most of us were made very recently."

He spread his arms in a shrug. "I was made a year ago. I imagine you're about the same. I told you it was a terrible secret."

Her mouth opened again, but she shut it after a brief moment, speechless. She looked away, as though she might find help from somewhere else, but she couldn't, for the moment, think of where, or who from. Her childhood, her journey, her training... created memories?

"You're... you're very nonchalant about this," she muttered, her usual spitfire attitude muted in discomfort.

"I'm just used to it already," he said. "I was upset when I found out. You can be upset, too. I think it makes more sense to have a fit than to try to calmly go on."

Maybe she'd be upset at him, too, once she understood everything. If Theresa was right, he'd been screwing around with her life as much as any player who wasn't her own might be able to. He was content to blame Heimdall and Theresa for that, though. Nobody was forcing them to cave into his threats...

(Yes, it really did work that way in his head)

Probably better not to tell her about it, though.

He unfolded the paper, turning it to show her. "Your creator."

She frowned, but it was down at the ground. A fit? Why would she- why would she have a fit about this? Did he expect it of her? She felt prickly at the thought of it. His expectations were the least of her concerns, after all.

Unaware- or semi-aware- of her purpose in regards to the likes of Nova and Artemis, she didn't quite know why she would have a fit, not having quite pulled her mind through the muddy implications.

Her head had tilted back down towards the ground while she thought, and it snapped up at the crinkling of the parchment as he unfolded it and turned it around for her to see.

She shook her head. "That doesn't prove anything," she said suddenly, outright rejecting it instead. "How am I supposed to know that's my creator?"

"You could put some questions to her about your history, I guess, but you wouldn't be the first person to doubt it. I believe they're creators, myself -- it's what everything I've heard seems to add up to, and I don't see how being taken over and getting your mind overwritten is really that preferable to being made from nothing."

But Ashtaroth was a religious devotee, so maybe it bothered her not to have been created in a manner sanctioned by nature as Xumurdad set it out.

"I don't mind if you don't believe me and want to investigate it yourself."

Did it bother her? She wasn't so sure. The idea of Xumurdad had significance in certain situations and none in others. Being created by a higher being was a mystery she accepted without much thought, though what happened to a person after death had haunted Ashtaroth her whole life.

However long that had been.

Somehow, her history didn't bother her much, either. She'd accepted it as something that had happened, that she had grown away from, and ... and was still pursuing through the Order. Her mother-

Her mother who wasn't real.

She looked back to him, glaring. "Well, I don't know why you would mind. I wouldn't be particularly troubled myself if doing so offended you."

"You said you didn't believe me like you wanted me to defend my position," he said, a flicker of annoyance creeping into his voice. "I was just letting you know I don't expect you to accept it automatically. But I haven't got a mountain of information about you and your creator to try to prove it to you myself."

He didn't see what was to glare at him about. There were much better reasons to glare at him that she didn't know about yet.

Whatever. Maybe she was just glaring at the world for giving her a false mockery of a life, and he happened to be in her line of view.

She sighed angrily. She was only getting confused now. "So why would she be talking to you about this?"

"I've made players my hobby," he told her. "Players and earth and everything interfering with the way things were, or seemed like they were."

She'd find out about the revenge part if Theresa thought to tell her, he supposed.

She looked away again, lips pressed together. She'd never paid much attention or reacted much to be told these things by other people- she didn't know how to react to it now. She wasn't sure if she was angry. She was angry about being told by him, so nonchalantly, especially after the statement that all but told her he expected her to have a fit. That he presumed to know her- well, that certainly hadn't changed, had it?

"Well," she said stiffly. "What do you plan on doing about it?"

His eyebrows rose at the question. One answer would offend and horrify her, and the other would invite her to complain at him for oversharing about his own troubles.

"That's a little personal, isn't it?" he replied, probably infuriatingly.

Ugh! Yes, it was! Especially from someone as nosy as him.

"Maybe," she said as she tossed her hair from her shoulder. It stayed that way. "I just didn't think you'd mind sharing. Consider me surprised."

She looked at him again, pressing her lips together before she continued, "well, thank you for comprising me of the situation, but I think I'll be fine from here on out. Unless you wanted to yell at me or- or whoever some more?"

Did she make peace with the unsettling nature of her existence on the spot just to prove him wrong? Amazing. Go figure Ashtaroth.

And! Furthermore! Did she just criticize him for oversharing even when he didn't?!

He made a face. "No, I think I'll leave you to sort yourself out, then. Enjoy."

He turned to go. Would he be dealing with an even angrier Ashtaroth later, or was this the last time they'd have any reason to speak to one another? Whatever! He didn't care!

Did he just- he just made a face at her! She made an angry noise. "I will!" she snapped at his retreating back, stomping a foot a moment later.

Likewise, she turned and stomped off, swallowing hard to keep the sudden fear at bay. At peace? Far from. But her pride had outweighed her sense, and by the time she reached her room, she all but barricaded herself in, as though it might keep back the waves of panic his words suggested.