Public Forevermore

[Kal]

Raising a single chalky eyebrow, Kal looked more closely at the Mystic.

"You successfully evicted someone from an Inkwell Sanctum?" It was not unheard of, per se, but it was no mean feat either. Given the malleable nature of this place, overtaking an entrenched position would be a truly hellish experience.

Smiling cheerfully in Marcus' direction, Kal gestured affectionately towards his collection. In this case, an ominously glowing gem, an aged skull, and what looked like a hyperdrive field guide, of all things. "Souvenirs, mostly. I often bring something back with me when I travel; gifts, purchases, and a variety of ownerless or lost items."

It was clear the Shadow had exactly zero compunctions about tomb-robbing.

Stopping in front of an unadorned black door, Kal waved it open and stepped inside, revealing a sleek examination or perhaps surgery room of some kind. At its centre stood a padded slab, behind it waited a trio of unclothed aliens...

... and from the ceiling came a spindly, many-limbed insectoid with seven eyes and a carapace that glittered like the stars in the sky. Each of its eyes moved individually and seemed to hone in on the organics with cold interest.

Ishani Dinn​

 

[Ishani Dinn]

"You successfully evicted someone from an Inkwell Sanctum?"

Arlo scratched his chin. "Hell if I know. He just called it the 'Arcane Realm'. Apparently all the tarot card, uh, beings had their own Realms. But yeah, we evicted the fox-headed bastard."

He seemed a bit reluctant to talk about the subject at length, though this had less to do with the Magician and more to do with the emotional impact the entire affair had had on him. Not hard to guess, given that it had involved close family members whose lives and/or souls were endangered, but... well, let's just say he hadn't spoken to his daughter or her husband in a long time.

A very long time.

The answer to Marcus' questions proved a lot less interesting than the Chaldean had hoped. So it was just random junk collected as souvenirs, with no significance to anyone else but Kal. Well, it could be argued that all physical objects only held significance if granted it by people... but that was a debate that would take too long to get into.

They were already being ushered into an exam room. Marcus took a step or two inside, then froze as nude gray aliens walked in. At the sound of skittering somewhere above, his wide eyes lifted to the ceiling, where he beheld a many-limbed, many-eyed monstrosity. His gaze remaining fixed upward on the thing, his mouth slowly formed an O shape... and then he fainted.

Arlo caught him under the arms before his limp body could hit the floor. The Mystic looked less than happy about this new development, especially since Marcus was the one who wanted to come here and receive treatment. "And to think you're the same Marcus Roland who fought at Winsome Creek..." he muttered.

But he didn't let the Gray Ones or the Weaver touch his fallen comrade. Arlo lifted the younger man as if he were a child that had fallen asleep on the couch and carried him over to the slab.

"Right, let's get this over with. No funny business, just cure his amnesia."

Kal​

 

[Kal]

Looking slightly taken aback, Kal eyed the unconscious man.

"That was unexpected. I was not aware your kind did that outside holofilms." Collapsing when faced with something that provoked fear seemed a pretty abysmal evolutionary strategy - were organics not 'designed' to survive and breed?

Strolling over to the lab, Kal and his Grey Ones spread out around Roland's head, the Weaver remaining overhead.

Watching. Appraising. Assessing. Waiting to fulfil any request with inhuman precision.

"This may take a while." Waving a hand, a section of floor turned into a thick black sludge, crawled upwards, and assumed the form of a plush chair, should Arlo feel the need to sit down. He did not bother offering food to the superstitious.

Without further ado, fingers lowered themselves Roland's forehead and he began his examination.

Ishani Dinn​

 

[Ishani Dinn]

“We have our moments,” Arlo muttered. After all, fiction imitates life, not the other way around.

He eyed the sludge-formed chair, but didn’t sit. Instead he stood at Marcus’ side, arms folded across his chest as he watched the Shadow and his… companions work.

Marcus’ mind was a mess. No wonder he was so confused. Not only had his memories been affected by the overdose of vitae in a peculiar way, unwinding and degrading as years were subtracted from his body, but his ability to think rationally and regulate his emotions were impaired.

Since he had not been regressed back to infancy, he still remembered his childhood. Growing up in Mizeget, the son of a clerk and a schoolteacher, he had dreamed of wealth and power and control…

Kal​

 

[Kal]

Leaving the dreary task of accessing the brain's integrity to his minions, Kal dived into Roland's thoughts and memories, beginning early and slowly moving forward. An unremarkable childhood and the desire to become remarkable. Hopes and dreams and sorrows. A first kiss, an embarrassing failure, a tragic loss, and the humble seeds of success.

Then things began to become fuzzier, but the core memories remained. Suppressed, distorted, but present.

Slowly, almost excruciatingly so, Kal began to move forward, solidifying experiences in his wake. War had interrupted his life and war had taken his home, but Kal was here to restore integrity, not play therapist. Everything of significance was pulled back together with the painstaking perfectionism of a timeless being, even those he wished to forget.

The horrible losses at Wolford Vale, his wife taken by disease many years later, his daughter growing distant soon after, little helped by him diving headfirst into his work as a blissful distraction. Building an empire without heirs.

A man of many regrets, it was no wonder he had sought a second chance.

---

After a few hours, the Weaver would lower itself down towards the unconscious body, its spindly fingers clutching his head as it began to work its strange art. "His neural patterns must be partially reconstructed. This will take time; if you require rest or sustenance facilities can be provided." Not by Kal, mind you, but by his emotionless servants.

---

A day would pass, and then another, or so it would seem. Its passage in these depths did not always correspond to Realspace and all its laws of physics. After a 'mere' fifty-two hours or so, Kal pulled back, smiling in satisfaction.

Regardless of whether Arlo had stayed throughout the procedure or not, he would hear the Shadow's voice.

"That will do it. A mind fully restored if ever I've seen one - if anything he should remember more."

Ishani Dinn​

 

[Ishani Dinn]

Like a knight of legend holding vigil, Arlo stayed awake for the whole fifty-two hours, stubbornly refusing even to sit in the chair. He looked at it a few times with barely concealed longing, but each time he would picture himself sitting down, he imagined skeletal arms emerging to hold him while the muppet hanging from the ceiling descended to perform ghastly experiments on his helpless form. Or something of a similarly spooky nature.

He was also afraid that if he rested his old bones, he’d fall asleep. Not that that wasn’t a risk while he was standing up, but he’d made a bed out of enough chairs in his lifetime to know he’d be courting the sandman if he did sit.

To pass the time, he sang. Sea shanties, folk songs from the Plains, Zeltron hymns he had learned from a Zeltron wife (only on Chaldea, baby) many years ago. As time wore on and he became punch-drunk from lack of sleep, the music got bawdier; he sang about whores with hearts of gold, cowboys, ghost riders, and crusade songs.

“Saddle and bridle your beautiful mounts. True knights abandon all adornments,” he sang in a local dialect of Twi’leki, baritone voice filled with a weariness that didn’t fit the patriotic fervor of the lyrics. “Arm yourself, adorn yourself with your faith. Proud Chaldeans, your world thanks you…”

He finished it off with softer fare—love ballads and lullabies so old, they were engraved among his own cradle songs. If the Shadows expected payment of some kind for their services, surely Arlo’s record-setting performance of every Chaldean song ever written was more than enough.

His singing was interrupted by Kal.

"That will do it. A mind fully restored if ever I've seen one - if anything he should remember more."

A much more alert Marcus sat up on the slab. He looked over at the Mystic with new eyes. "Renard?" he asked, blinking in surprise. "Is it really you?" He snorted. "Did you really sit up with me all this time? That can't be good for your health, especially at your age."

Arlo smiled thinly. "Fuck you, Roland." Turning to Kal, he said, "If you would please open a portal back to Chaldea. In the same field, preferably. I don't want to wind up in this sack of shit's house, and he definitely doesn't want to end up in mine after all this."

His change in attitude toward Marcus could partly be attributed to how badly he wanted to sleep, but also to the fact that this was no longer a confused and frightened boy in his charge, but a man who had abused a legal loophole to partake in immorality for purely selfish gain.

That, and he had never actually liked Marcus Roland very much to begin with.

Kal​

 

[Kal]

"Glad to have you back with us. As you are no doubt now aware, you are not entitled to free-of-charge assistance if your side effects occur due to improper use." Raising a hand to belay any unnecessary arguments, he did not seem terribly inconvenienced by the whole affair. "That said, restoring you to working condition provided valuable data."

Drumming his fingers on the slab, Kal did not seem to care all that much about repayment beyond the principle. "I would accept, say, permission to use your memories in a commercial context in an anonymised format. Or some credits."

Given the cost of the Essence itself, the latter would probably prove significant, but not out of reach for a man of his wealth. Kal seemed to find the prospect nothing short of boring, however. It was just a bunch of dreary numbers.

"Ah, about that. Opening rifts to my home is far easier than the reverse. No worries, I have an understanding with the Ferrymen." Or rather, his kind had an understanding with their kind. A rather lucrative, mutually beneficial one, at that.

Ishani Dinn​

 

[Ishani Dinn]

"I would accept, say, permission to use your memories in a commercial context in an anonymised format…”

“Uh, what exactly do you mean by that?” Marcus inquired. What were the Shadows going to do, turn his life story into a holo series?

That answer would’ve appealed to his vanity, certainly, but he doubted it was what Kal intended.

Arlo, quite at the end of his rope, didn’t take the thought of further dealings with both Marcus and the Netherworld very well. He eyed Marcus, thoughts of homicide flitting through his sleep-deprived mind before he decided the man wasn’t worth the effort.

“Ready. When. You. Are,” he ground out slowly between his grit teeth.

Kal​

 

[Kal]

Arlo seemed a bit impatient, but Kal remained unconcerned. After fifty-two hours he could wait a few minutes more.

"Experiences are a valuable commodity among my kind and you have lived a long life." The exact use was left vague, but it should be clear enough that said vagueness was more a reflection of the market than purposeful misdirection. Education was one possibility, but recreation was more common - there were dens in Masque filled with memory-addicts.

Waving a hand dismissively, Kal began to lead the way, this time to a landing-of-sorts. The golden runes that marked it stood in sharp contrast with the decor elsewhere, but matched the flat-bottomed barge that had 'docked'.

"Volks, taojsake efelitz. Tuhash to nȃot tȃtselrikih pauretak tzeretrilu iair."

There was something distinctly ritualistic about how his elaborate bow was responded to in kind by the desiccated corpse manning the wheel. A contingent of Hadeans in gilded armour saluted in turn, vicious-looking scimitars raised high.

"There we are, then. I trust we will have no further problems, Mystic?"

Ishani Dinn​

 

[Ishani Dinn]

Marcus still looked uncertain. “Uh… I think I’d best pay you in credits.”

The last thing he needed was for someone else to use his memories to impersonate him, especially after his drastic de-aging.

As Kal began muttering in a foreign language, Arlo made a preemptive gesture which, on the surface, might appear like a superstitious warding charm. But it was effective; a distinct hum filled the air around the two mortals, a gap in the energies of the Force defending them from any hidden meaning the words might’ve had.

"There we are, then. I trust we will have no further problems, Mystic?"

Eager to get the hell out of Hell, Arlo had already clambered into the boat when he turned to face Kal.

“No further problems. Especially if you refrain from pitching your alchemy to Chaldea in the future.” A rather obvious statement, but one he was obligated to pronounce. If Kal and his comrades wanted to avoid trouble, selling their goods to a planet which banned the sale of such goods was tempting trouble with the local authorities. Simple facts and logic.

Arlo had no doubt that they would still try, however. Demons weren't known for their ability to resist temptation.

Kal​

 

[Kal]

"If you wish. You know how to get in touch, if you redecide."

He might as well instruct some subordinates to direct pricy luxuries towards the man in the near future, remind him of the wonders credits could buy. Kal much preferred more interesting forms of repayment, after all.

As the pair stepped onto the barge, Kal remained behind, mouth opening to reveal a row of gleaming teeth in an innocent smile. "Worry not, Mystic. I have never sold anything on Chaldea." Contrary to what it might imply, the statement was true for his associates as well, as far as Kal knew, but there was no reason to reveal business secrets.

Arlo needn't know that Roland - and several others - had purchased the Essence offworld.

<Do let me know if the Mystics become a bother, Marcus Roland.>

Ishani Dinn​