hellonspectacles | Once more into the breach, dear friends

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Once more into the breach, dear friends

It is nighttime, or what passes for nighttime in space, and the ship Mount Ida is quiet.

It isn’t a particularly large vessel. There are berths for a dozen crew members and private rooms for the ship’s two officers, a mess hall, a med bay, an armory, a brig. Nothing about it is particularly luxurious—Blood of Eden doesn’t go in for luxury, and the members of Troia Cell are no different—but everything is functional and well maintained. The ship hums faintly with the sound of engines and life support and electric lights, a but most of the crew don’t notice it anymore.

Near the officer’s cabins is another berth, occupied (or so it seems) by a single person. It contains a bed, and a sink, and a table on which, strangely, sits the perfectly formed skeleton of a human hand. The door is locked from the outside and a crew member stands guard. Are these precautions to keep the person inside from escaping, or to protect them from coming to harm? No one is sure anymore.

The crew member, Sergeant Hot Coals of Vengeance, is bored. Their shift is almost over, they need a piss, and they’re not even sure what the point of this assignment is anyway. Sure, the room’s occupant might be a zombie lover, and she might be a little weird. And sure, she did dislocate Lieutenant Pash’s arm when they tried to take that gross little bag of bones from her, but that was months ago. These days, she’s polite, and she spends long hours in secret meetings with the Commander, and she always asks for an escort when she needs to leave the room.

Coals really needs to piss. They peek through the little window in the door.

Inside, Camilla Hect is curled up on a narrow bed, breathing steadily. She’s asleep, and anyway, the door is locked. What’s the worst that could happen if they stepped away for a few minutes?

Coals leaves their post, and Camilla sleeps on—or so it seems.

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Thankfully, Wayne reaches the door to Pal’s cell-slash-room without incident. At some point they are going to have to figure out how to explain the presence of a giant yellow monster, but thankfully that is a problem for another time. When he reaches the room, he will find Cam, or someone who appears to be Cam, peering through the door’s mail slot-sized window. The figure waves and slips something under the door.

Hopefully, even if Wayne can’t read, he can match the figures written on the piece of paper to the numbers on the nearby touchpad.

At least he won't be Old Wayne for some time yet, he just doesn't know how the flow of time might work here after everything else that's happened to him so far. That will be an interesting, and likely distressing revelation for most others involved when he becomes Wayne-colored goop for a while.

Just to be safe, when he gets that slip, he quickly correlates the symbols to the buttons, and is relieved when they're easy enough to match. He presses close to that slot and murmurs a quick "thank you" before straightening up and moving to punch in the offered code. The moment it confirms, he's going to dip into the room and hopefully not spot anything any more out of place than just the fact that Pal was in a cell to begin with.

The room is exactly as Wayne observed through the slot earlier. There’s a bed, a wardrobe, a desk and chair. And there is Camilla Hect, standing in the middle of the room.

Or, at least, it looks like Camilla Hect. But she’s beaming in a way that Cam never really does.

“Wayne!” the figure cries. “Oh, it is good to see you. Shut the door and come this way—they won’t be able to spot you from this angle. We can’t keep you hidden forever, obviously, but we can choose our moment to our best advantage.”

"Cam, oh man I'm glad you're here. Alright, let's go." Wayne is good about following instructions at least, knowing that it's important that he does so so that none of them end up caught and imprisoned.

He sticks close, trying to keep to the blind spots that she picks her way between, voice low and keeping an eye out for anyone else, familiar or otherwise.

"So what's happening? Why're you guys locked up here? Or is that a story for later?"

Palamedes quirks a smile. He has spent a lot of time lately responding to the name Camilla Hect, but still it’s strange to hear Wayne do it. “Not quite,” he says, “Though I am sure she would appreciate the sentiment.”

He takes a breath. This bit is weird, even by necromancy standards. Even by Serena Eterna standards. Even, he suspects, by Waynehouse standards.

“It’s Pal.” He holds up a hand, wiggles his fingers in an awkward hello. “Camilla and I, we’re sort of…corporeal roommates at the moment. Bit of a patch job, but it’s the best we could do, and necessary under the circumstances. No one out there,” he nods towards the door, “is aware that I’m here, or even that I’m alive.”

He knits his brows together in sympathy. There are so many things he never really told Wayne, who, in the course of their friendship, so often trusted him without requiring explanation or context. But now, he has dragged Wayne into some very dark waters, and there are things he deserves to know.

“You remember Canaan House, of course. The trials? After your time there, things sort of went to shit. I,” a pause, “died. Camilla was picked up off the planet by these people. They’re not fans of the Houses, to put it mildly.”

Wayne blinks, but it takes very little for him to accept the idea that he's looking at both Camilla and Pal in the same moment. His attitude is so starkly different from hers after all, and the confirmation that he's found Pal to begin with means they're on the right track.

"Yeah," he replies with a small nod as he listens. He remembers Canaan House, the trials and the monsters they'd come up against. It blurs together a little bit in his memory, but it still stands out as the way that he'd met the two of them, learning to rely on those memories of them and building trust in Pal himself. The fact that the man trusts him enough in turn to want him here to help him out of whatever this mess is means a lot to him. He could say as much later, when they weren't in immediate danger.

And then they could actually talk about things. Wayne takes a lot on faith when it comes to trusting his friend. He would have to continue to do so a little bit longer, it seems. To that end, he reaches to take one of his hands, giving it what he hopes is a reassuring squeeze. But he still has to ask...

"What's your plan for getting out of here? My ship didn't come with me and the last time I tried to pilot something like this I crash-landed it."

“I’m not planning on getting out of here.” Palamedes waves his hands before Wayne can object or ask any further questions. “I know it sounds absolutely mad, but I can’t just abandon—there are matters I need to see to. Both as a scion to my House, and as a friend to people who need me. We’ve reached an agreement with the people on this ship, tenuous though it is. We’re not in danger—not from them, at least.”

He looks at Wayne with brown eyes that have never been his, gaze gentle and apologetic. “If you would prefer to run, I can find you a shuttle. This universe may be foreign to you, but you’re resourceful. You could make a life. Or I can keep you hidden here, and help you find a way back to Waynehouse, or even the Serena Eterna.”

“Or you can stay and serve as our bodyguard during some truly unprecedented political negotiations.”

Absolutely mad is definitely one way to put it...

Wayne's brow gently furrows, nearly imperceptible across the smooth yellow of his skin, but he does gesture for Pal to lead the way. "I don't make a habit of running away from stuff anyway even if it's going to kill me, so...let's go? Bodyguard gig sounds interesting at least." He twists a little in place, staring into the air as one hand gropes, and suddenly it's around the hand of the axe that he'd taken into the trial with him when they'd met. Nice to know that he was still armed, one way or another.

Palamedes sags with relief. He almost laughs. “Oh, thank goodness. Bless you, Wayne. Once this work is complete, I swear to you, on the life of Camilla Hect, and my mother, and the entire contents of the Library, that I will find a way to send you anywhere in the multiverse that you desire. I will dedicate my life to it.”

All of this he says in a rush, but he means every word.

“Right. We’ll need to keep you hidden for at least a day. You won’t see much of me during that time because we have to limit how long I can be in control of Camilla’s body. She’ll look after you, though. She won’t remember you from Canaan House, but she liked you then, and she’ll like you now. She’d look after you even if she didn’t like you.”

“But with you by our side, I think—I think we might get what we want.” He takes a breath. “Or, at the very least, we won’t immediately be killed for suggesting it.”

Pal is so damned heartfelt about it that he can't bring himself to question what the man promises. It's going to be a new world entirely, he'll be the only one of his kind, but he can't really see how that's a bad thing. One day maybe this universe would be populated by more Waynes, if he found a place to one day go to ground. He would just have to trust in his friend's plan.

A cool, gloved hand lights on Pal's (Cam's) cheek, and pats lightly in a casually affectionate gesture, before Wayne moves away and leans to peek out and double check that nobody is on the approach.

"Kinda wish I'd managed to master invisibility before now," he muses, hand on his hip. "Best I was able to do was turning into a small animal after miss Ylva gave me the idea. I could probably hide like that, if pressed, I just wouldn't be much good in a fight."

Wayne’s gesture is sweet. It has a protective quality to it—not protective in the way Cam has ever been protective, but in a way that a father might be, or an elder brother. The loneliness that has gnawed at Pal, with its chaser of sheer helplessness, dissipates a little. “Invisibility would have been helpful,” he concedes, the corner of his mouth (Cam’s mouth) turning upward. “The animal thing might be, too. I’m mostly hoping they’ll find you so inconceivable that they won’t know what to do with you.”

“No offense.”

"Oh, nah dude, I get it. When you come up against the comparatively weird stuff it kind of makes you stop just to go 'wait no hold up' just so you can wrap your head around it. I ran into that a lot before. Kinda wild, considering..." He was just some normal dude before ending up on the Serena Eterna after all. Being the odd man out has been really, really strange, but it also meant that if someone came at him, they would have to actually take a second of pause to re-evaluate, often based on appearance alone. It's kind of powerful, just being able to stand there looking funny for the purpose of negotiations.

"I'll take 'em offguard by just being Wayne, then I'll open my mouth if I gotta and dazzle 'em with my command of the language." A bit of self-deprecating humour; he definitely doesn't believe in himself as an actual negotiator.

“Oh, I think you’ll find plenty of ways to dazzle them,” says Palamedes warmly. “I shouldn’t stay much longer, I’m afraid. Try to get some sleep? And Cam, if you’re able to convince her. You can write anything you want me to know in that book there,” he points to the desk, “or Cam can do it. Then tomorrow, when the guards come to bring us to speak to the Commander, you can come along. I confess, I’m looking forward to seeing their faces.”

"Sure." He could sleep just about anywhere, and he doubts that this Cam will be any different from the version that he'd met in Pal's memories. She'd be able to take him in stride one way or another. He could make something up about meeting the man on some planar excursion if it came down to it; this seems like the kind of place that that wouldn't be squinted at too hard...

Wayne's hands tuck into his pockets, and he cracks a soft smile in return. "Stay safe out there dude, I'll stick with Cam in the meantime."

He would be able to take stock of everything that had come with him here in the meantime, though he has to be careful about what he uses until he knows that he can get more. No deploying his things willy-nilly. He just hopes that things go as well as his friend is saying they should.

“Thanks.” Pal remains still for a long moment, maybe long enough that Wayne might be assuming that he and Cam are switching place again. Then, coming to a decision, he steps forward to squeeze his friend in a hug. “Seriously, thanks.”

And now when Pal steps back, he closes his eyes. When he opens them again, they’ve turned from brown to grey. Camilla Hect just looks at Wayne for a long moment, and then she goes to sit at the little desk in the corner, where she takes her pulse and makes a note in the notebook sitting there.

“The Warden tells me there’s an alternate universe where you helped us complete the transference/winnowing challenge.”

Wayne waits, just to make sure that there's nothing else following, and is actually taken offguard by the gesture. But he smiles back and returns the squeeze, and he's sure that they'll find each other again one way or another. He would keep Palamedes safe as much as he could, and see to it that his negotiations went the way that he hoped they would. Right now, that's all that he has to do.

The cycle resumes. He has a purpose again for however long.

When Camilla regains control of her body and goes to make note of her pulse, Wayne glances around for a place to sit and settle in.

"Oh yeah. Long story but I kinda fell into the school where you guys were investigating through some dimensional memory gate thing. We destroyed a giant skeleton creature. It was pretty rad."

Camilla almost smiles. It had been pretty rad. When she thinks about it took closely, that trial is one of the last few uncomplicated memories she had. Everything had gone so badly so quickly after that.

She finishes taking her notes and turns around to face him. “That’s how the Warden got this idea. He remembered the underlying theorem that allows a necromancer to ride another human soul and made some adjustments so that it causes less stress on my brain.” She says this with a sort of suppressed sigh, clearly believing these precautions to be unnecessary. “Means we can’t talk to each other directly, though.”

“You can take the bed if you’d like.”

Even in the instance that she'd participated in the trial without any other help besides the Warden's, he's sure that she was awesome. He could tell that she was when it was the two of them cooperating.

"Makes sense. Some specific transitive properties of mental connection holding over between whatever you're trying to do. He's definitely smarter about this kind of thing than I am but I can see the through-line." There's a fondness to the wry smile in return over Pal's careful precautions, able to pretty easily imagine this being important to him. "If nothing else it should enable you to talk face to face later when there's not all of this," he gestures to the walls to indicate the ship as a whole, "going on."

The offer gets a shake of the head. "Don't worry about me. I'm chill wherever and you were here first."

Camilla’s eyes go a little tight at the corners when Wayne confidently asserts that she and Palamedes will speak face-to-face again someday, but she has never been as optimistic as either her necromancer or his lemon-yellow friend. And maybe they’re right. Maybe there will be an ‘after,’ and she and Pal will be together again as they are meant to.

While she might be courteous enough to offer her bed to this odd newcomer, she isn’t so much that she is going to push it. With a nod she moves to the bed and tucks her knees up to her chin.

“The Warden says you can do magic and fight,” she says with cool interest in her eyes. “That sounds handy.”

Unfortunately, he has no real way of knowing either way. He's only recently learned to try and be an optimist and doesn't realize that such a thing isn't necessarily appropriate here. He only knows what he wants for his friends, including Cam, and that means holding on to that hope that they'll all be able to actually see one-another again.

At least there's no argument to be had over politeness here. He's grateful for that.

"You guys call it magic but for people like me it's just a biological thing. Energy and intent into whatever I need it to be in the moment, mostly in a combat sense. I don't have a lot going on outside of that but being a user of Proscribed Gestures does come in handy, at least."

“The Warden would say that ‘magic’ is only a euphemism for that which a person cannot—or does not want to—explain.” Never very good at sitting still, Camilla shifts her knees from side to side, stretching her joints. “That doesn’t sound very different from necromancy. What is a ‘proscribed gesture’?”

"He always did strike me as a clever guy." He smiles faintly at that, looking from Cam back to his gloved hands resting in his lap. They come up and twist into a Gesture, one that would transfer status effects between the two of them, if there were anything to transfer. It comes with the sound of a slide guitar and a coiled cord of clay that fades into and then out of sight between them. "Like this. They're somatic abilities that involve the energy of the user and call on skills learned from the Monitor. A lot of mine are kinda limited because I don't have access to the signal anymore, but I'm pretty good at muddling through on my own too."

Of course, he knows by now that nobody knows what the Monitor is, what the signals are, what the active cabinets mean to his people. It doesn't help that he's just the low guy on the totem pole; he knows enough to function in the world, that's about it.

"At home, one of my closest friends was way more powerful than I've ever been. Used gauntlets and the wave artifice to take out whole swaths of dudes."

Camilla jerks slightly with surprise as the sudden, melodious sound fills the room, and then fades as quickly as it came. She watches transfixed at the coiled cord that is there, and then gone, fast enough that she doesn’t give into the instinct to reach out and touch it.

“I’d like to see that,” she says, and she could be referring to what more Wayne can do here, or what he could do at home, or even the ability of his friend. “Can he do more because he has more experience, or is it a matter of genetics?”

Wayne's finger twists in the air, producing a last little note in the air.

"Yeah, Somsnosa's both got more experience and more power behind her. We're all pretty different in terms of ability. Even between Waynes it's variable. Somsnosa's really great at the area-of-effect and damage-over-time. Pongorma could hit harder than anyone I've ever met, as a Dread Knight. Decres could do physical damage, I'm support and damage-over-time. I'm not a great healer but I'm better at that than outright fighting. Pal says I'll make a pretty good distraction even without all that though so I'll defer to him."

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Once more into the breach, dear friends

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