hellonspectacles | 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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“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."

Once more into the breach, dear friends

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