Open Post: The Arms of the Emperor are Never Idle

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon spends her mornings in the practice yard, bright and early, despite the cold. She jogs and stretches to get her blood pumping and her muscles warm before she draws her sword, and then after drills she brings Tally her coffee, and then after that it's back to more sword—unless Tally hauls her off to some other activity, which she pretends to hate but is secretly devastatingly grateful for. The absolute worst part of this place is all the time. Endless stretches of time, with barely any work to be done.

In some ways it's just like the Ninth—except on the Ninth she knew her exits. They were few, sure, and near-impossible, but she knew them: buy her way out, fight her way out, trick her way out, or truly earn it.

None of those apply, here.

She breaks for lunch, and wanders the halls trying to locate various Clues and Mysteries that might end up giving her a way out, and mostly just finds people. More and more people.

She's not antisocial. She likes the people here, more than she's openly liked anyone in her life, individually or as a group. But a gnawing restlessness keeps her on the move rather than letting her time fill up with idle conversation as so many here do. She's always hunting for something to keep her busy, to wear out her body so that when she sleeps her mind is forced to rest rather than serving her a lovely buffet of the worst things she's ever seen and even worse things she hasn't, the things she was yoinked away just in time to miss.

Sometimes it even works.

[This post is open in perpetuity until something happens to make me close it, at which point I will edit it and say so! Feel free to find Gideon in the morning doing sword drills, or tooling around inside, opening and closing drawers and trying peel the wallpaper off in case there's flesh underneath.]

Comments

[ninth_cavalier]

"Thank god," says Gideon. "If you were it would've really knocked you down the hottie scale." She leans against the fence. "I think he said over a hundred wives, also, which feels a little excessive to me. Like, leave some for the rest of us, dude."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Thank fuck I get to keep my place on the hottie scale," Janet says, dry as dust. She slides her hands into the pockets of her coat. "It's too many wives. I met one, you know? She was insanely hot." The specific smug flavor of her grin might give away a little something about how that meeting went.

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon raises her eyebrows. "One of his wives is here?" Apparently Sagramore's sex spider explanation was woefully incomplete.

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Not anymore." Janet shrugs. "We had this day where practically half the place got a visitor." She didn't. Not that she's bitter. Not that she even wants to see stupid Eliot Waugh. "Luo Binghe got her, I guess."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Ah," says Gideon. "Right—I heard about that." She scuffs a toe through the frost. "This—shit that keeps happening. The translator and stuff. Any of 'em repeat themselves?"

[sorrowandsorrow]

Okay, the gist of that question is screamingly obvious. Janet doesn't say so, but she notices. "Not yet," she says, as if she hadn't, "but who the fuck knows? The only consistent thing here is the inconsistency."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Sure," says Gideon, and sighs sharply, shaking her head. "I guess I've been kind of assuming they will anyway, or all this zombie prep I'm doing is pretty pointless."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Is that what you're doing?" Janet eyes Gideon's stupidly massive sword with a small laugh. "This is overkill. Those zombies were pussies."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Oh, this isn't zombie prep," says Gideon, hefting the sword. "This is just normal drills. I meant the other stuff. Teaching Tally self-defense, planning defense strategies with Lancelot."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Oh, Tally," Janet says, amused. "She ran into me while I was you. Lancelot, really? He has the personality of a brick wall, but I guess he knows his way around a sword."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Shockingly strong, Tally," says Gideon, a little defensively but trying to play it cool. "Results of her crazy surgery, probably. And Lancelot—" she shrugs. "I tend to get along well with people who speak sword."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Sure. I speak axe. There's some mutual intelligibility, but it's not really the same." Janet pauses, then gives Gideon a deeply skeptical look. "Her crazy surgery? You can have surgery to get stronger? I thought that was what people took steroids for."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Oh, no, she got surgery to make her hotter. Everyone on her world does it—it's pretty fucked up. They tell everyone they all need to be "Pretty"—" she does big exaggerated airquotes, "so there's no war anymore, or some bullshit. We've been working on, um. Undoing her brainwashing about it. Adrenaline helps." She smirks. "Anything that gets her heart racing. If you know what I mean."

[sorrowandsorrow]

Oh, Janet knows what Gideon means. The complete lack of subtlety is hilarious, actually. "Well, that's unbelievably fucked. Not the sexy baby dyke adrenaline thing you have going," she amends. "That's fine. Everything else is unbelievably fucked."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon rankles a little at baby dyke--she doesn't have a whole inch and a good amount of muscle on Janet to be called a baby--but generously sets it aside. "Yeah, it's super shitty. Her bracelet thing is supposed to report on her to the hot people cops, like, all the time. Thankfully it doesn't seem to work, here, though."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Oh my God," Janet says, with some actual and genuine alarm. "The hot people cops, huh? You know, people can get plastic surgery like that back where I'm from -- actually, people where I'm from specifically love their plastic surgery. I'd probably have gotten suckered into Botox if I hadn't left. But what you're talking about is next-level."

[ninth_cavalier]

"In my dimension people just change their appearances with necromancy," says Gideon. "Like—you can't do a ton—bodies remember their own shape, elasticity only goes so far—but you can definitely change hormone levels and stuff if you're a talented enough flesh adept. Anyway, people can do whatever they want, but that's the bit about Tally's world that freaks me most. They make sure everyone wants it."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Yeah, the word brainwashing tipped me off." Janet crosses her arms, sincerely disturbed. "How do they make sure? There have to be some people who say, actually, fuck you, I don't want to go under the knife."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Yeah, I think they're called, like, Smokies or something like that, they seem completely punk. Tally ran with them for a while, but got pulled back into mainstream somehow and, like, reeducated. It's hard to tell, talking to her, how many people resist, especially because she only remembers reality half the time." She shakes her head. "I didn't think I'd ever be grateful for the amount of freedom I had growing up, considering I spent eighteen years in and out of a cell, but at least they let me be hot my own way."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Eighteen years in and out of a -- oh my God," Janet says, almost laughing. "My childhood trauma is so pedestrian compared to the average childhood trauma around here. What the fuck?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"If it helps, it was more a nunnery-type cell than a prison cell," says Gideon, with a little crooked smile. "Not that they let me leave it, most of the time, but that was for trying to break my contract."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Back the fuck up." Jesus Christ. Janet's kind of glad she never went to therapy. Apparently she didn't need it. Her life was a cushy dream. "Your contract?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"Yeah, the contract that binds me in service to the Ninth House," says Gideon. "It's why I became a cavalier. Harrow told me—um. I was told that if I accompanied my necromancer to Caanan House and solved some musty old riddles I'd be free to go wherever I wanted. Turned out to be a fucking bait and switch, but like, by the Emperor Undying, not by the House, so whatever. Moot point now." She's not mad at Harrow for that. She's not mad at Harrow at all, and hasn't been for months, even before she came here, and that's up there with the weirdest fucking aspects of her life.

[sorrowandsorrow]

Motherfucking fantasy bullshit. "Necromancy is very fucking banned at the school where I learned magic, by the way," Janet says. "Not that that's the weirdest part of what you're saying. The necromancy sounds like a footnote to the real fuckery."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Necromancy's the only real magic at all, where I come from," says Gideon. "I'm still kind of suspicious about all the other shit. Like, where are you even getting it, if it's not coming from the death energy that's constantly emanating from the planetary core?"