Marsh || Steel Inquisitor (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
myironeyes) wrote2014-03-14 12:29 am
myironeyes) wrote2014-03-14 12:29 am
In every single universe, the mistcast will end up solemnly lurking in gardens
[Open Spam, literally any day of plot, he might spend the whole time there in a high class quasi-public green park space. If your character is slightly important in any way, feel free to assume they have access to it.]
[He isn't, actually, confined. He could leave any time he likes. He is one of the Honored Dead, after all. The Empire he once objected to so strenuously respects and prizes him with the cultural weight and timelessness of mountains. This juxtaposition does not bother him; his time among the living feels distant and flimsy and bright, like a butterfly on the other side of a sealed window, a splash of color that is as unimportant as it is unreachable, and his own passionate defiance seems, in retrospect, absurd, the way dreams do upon waking. He cared so much, in a painful, transient world, so much and so pointlessly.
Adept Micillay brings him communications, and he translates them. He likes the sound of Dhanti, the shape of the cadences, the aspirant consonant variations none of the Imperial linguists can never parse correctly, the utter absence of dipthongs, each phoneme one pure beat. The dialects have changed, over the last eighty-five years, but he knows them better now than he did then: death is pure, too, and he is pure in it, purity of mind and concentration without the constant turbulence of fear and sorrow and joy and want. He has watched the language grow with meticulous attention.
(like raising a child - no - nothing like that)
But today, he does not have any recordings. Adept Micillay is busy with other work, and so is Adept Larran, and so are all the initiates he has been in contact with before. Marsh is not perturbed by this. He does not care what occupies them. But since there is no work for him here, he rises - after a period of contemplation, as the angle of the light changes, but not drastically - from his desk and walks out the door.
It takes him somewhat longer to find his way out of the vast building, tiered and honeycombed and ingeniously crenelated for some esoteric purpose of sustainability engineering. He thinks of canyons on Dhantu, meandering backswitch paths. This does not matter. Time does not matter. He emerges at the railthrough level, at the base of several such official buildings. Even the other dead among the bustling self-important traffic here move with crisp purpose. Marsh waits. Someone addresses him politely, asks if he requires transportation. He considers this.]
Take me somewhere with birds.
[They go across, neat mag-grid lines interspersed with whipping centripetal turns around landmarks or other places of too much importance to move, and then up. The place is an archipelago of terraces, in the thriving midway district between the Palace and the Senate, and the balcony edges have a view of the glittering, seething city sprawling endlessly to the horizon below. He turns inward instead. Each skyscraper-island features a different climate of foliage, the deep emerald optimized for Home's solar spectrum -
(The median plants are yellower, on Dhanti, vivid poison-lime.)
- filtering water and pouring oxygen. All of it can be done efficiently and well by machines, of course, but there's an eternal cachet to rooftop gardens. He finds a place to sit. He watches dew drops fall. He watches hummingbirds, bright and blurred as flecks of sprayed blood, go to war with darting golden wasps. He watches a grey-and-white bird with a little yellow crest tuck her head under her wing as darkness comes. He watches her wake in the morning.
He is very still. But he is not so far away or so forbidding as most of the Honored Dead. There is a gentleness to his stillness, and attention in his patience.]
[OOC: Also if some apparatus people decide to fetch him back at some point, that's totally cool with me.]
[He isn't, actually, confined. He could leave any time he likes. He is one of the Honored Dead, after all. The Empire he once objected to so strenuously respects and prizes him with the cultural weight and timelessness of mountains. This juxtaposition does not bother him; his time among the living feels distant and flimsy and bright, like a butterfly on the other side of a sealed window, a splash of color that is as unimportant as it is unreachable, and his own passionate defiance seems, in retrospect, absurd, the way dreams do upon waking. He cared so much, in a painful, transient world, so much and so pointlessly.
Adept Micillay brings him communications, and he translates them. He likes the sound of Dhanti, the shape of the cadences, the aspirant consonant variations none of the Imperial linguists can never parse correctly, the utter absence of dipthongs, each phoneme one pure beat. The dialects have changed, over the last eighty-five years, but he knows them better now than he did then: death is pure, too, and he is pure in it, purity of mind and concentration without the constant turbulence of fear and sorrow and joy and want. He has watched the language grow with meticulous attention.
(like raising a child - no - nothing like that)
But today, he does not have any recordings. Adept Micillay is busy with other work, and so is Adept Larran, and so are all the initiates he has been in contact with before. Marsh is not perturbed by this. He does not care what occupies them. But since there is no work for him here, he rises - after a period of contemplation, as the angle of the light changes, but not drastically - from his desk and walks out the door.
It takes him somewhat longer to find his way out of the vast building, tiered and honeycombed and ingeniously crenelated for some esoteric purpose of sustainability engineering. He thinks of canyons on Dhantu, meandering backswitch paths. This does not matter. Time does not matter. He emerges at the railthrough level, at the base of several such official buildings. Even the other dead among the bustling self-important traffic here move with crisp purpose. Marsh waits. Someone addresses him politely, asks if he requires transportation. He considers this.]
Take me somewhere with birds.
[They go across, neat mag-grid lines interspersed with whipping centripetal turns around landmarks or other places of too much importance to move, and then up. The place is an archipelago of terraces, in the thriving midway district between the Palace and the Senate, and the balcony edges have a view of the glittering, seething city sprawling endlessly to the horizon below. He turns inward instead. Each skyscraper-island features a different climate of foliage, the deep emerald optimized for Home's solar spectrum -
(The median plants are yellower, on Dhanti, vivid poison-lime.)
- filtering water and pouring oxygen. All of it can be done efficiently and well by machines, of course, but there's an eternal cachet to rooftop gardens. He finds a place to sit. He watches dew drops fall. He watches hummingbirds, bright and blurred as flecks of sprayed blood, go to war with darting golden wasps. He watches a grey-and-white bird with a little yellow crest tuck her head under her wing as darkness comes. He watches her wake in the morning.
He is very still. But he is not so far away or so forbidding as most of the Honored Dead. There is a gentleness to his stillness, and attention in his patience.]
[OOC: Also if some apparatus people decide to fetch him back at some point, that's totally cool with me.]