isleofavalon | LATE AF SEPT CATCHALL

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LATE AF SEPT CATCHALL

🧙 WHO: Kadoc and a bunch of people, including perhaps your character?!
⚔️️ WHAT: There sure is a lot of dumb shit happening in the month of September. Both OPEN and CLOSED prompts, the latter in the comments!
🕒 WHEN: IT'S—the month of September. (More specifically, the span from the beginning of the month to the first part of the event, ending before any dragon problems!)
🗺️ WHERE: Here there and everywhere, including Celliwig, ~the club~, straight up prison, and other assorted places around Camelot.
⚠️ WARNINGS: Eventual branding/tattoo/pain stuff, the subsequent servitude that comes along with that prompt, language, sexual themes in ~the club~, likely violence/actiony antics in the jailbreak, animal capture and implied slaughter for food in the event prompt, and I'll add anything else!

1. Kadoc the Stubborn Husky (early Sept., OPEN, thanks a lot Claude)

[Kadoc needs a second opinion. Maybe even a third, fourth, and further opinions. Claude is a lovable scamp and all, but Kadoc is a paranoid bastard, and he can't quite convince himself that he's not being had with the whole—howling thing. He sounds fine to his own ears! He's probably not an Animal Mage, although boy would this be a typically embarrassing way for that to make itself known if he were!

He needs confirmation, but after how that went with Claude, he can't quite bring himself to walk up to anyone and just start talking. What if he really is making dog noises?! So, instead, he's gathering his courage to approach people he recognizes as offworlders and . . . hold up his tablet, on which he has a Notes file open, with this typed in a large, visible font:]

I NEED YOUR HELP. NOTHING DANGEROUS.

[ . . . This could have been ~~an email~~ a network post, but he's not exactly on his game right now. Who can blame him?]

2. Jailhouse Rock (early Sept., CLOSED to Kate, Jailbreak quest)
Here!

3. Amanita Bigger Basket (early Sept., CLOSED to Ritsuka, Celliwig's month of magical mushes)
Here!

4. Super Smash Bros Part 2: The Revenge of the Smash (mid Sept., CLOSED to Itaru, The Pain-Tolerant Badass)
Here!

5. Your Obedient Servant (mid Sept., CLOSED to Rinea, The Caring Badass)
Here!

6. Lukewarm Knights (mid Sept., CLOSED to Gareth and Ritsuka, Hot Knights quest)
Here!

7. Jailbreak Part 2: The Great Goosening (late Sept., OPEN, the cute part of the event)

[Kadoc has had, to say the least, an unlucky month—but here finally there's a break, or at least a small pleasure. He's already spent plenty of time out in the wilderness gathering mushrooms this month and was debating whether to bother going on an end-of-month hunt, only for the hunt to come to him for once. A chance to grab a pre-fattened goose for their table to go with all those mushrooms? Don't mind if he does!

The geese have other ideas, of course. By now, Kadoc's managed to humanely return several of them to the farm; his Light magic helps there. It's no big deal to snap them up in cages of hard light and then carry those back to where they belong. But geese are smart. Geese are watching him. And when he finally snaps up the fattest of the geese he can find to take home for himself, shutting it up in another light cage and hefting it under his arm, that's when they make their move.

Catch Kadoc racing down the streets of Camelot, vaguely in the direction of his home, but mostly just in any direction that's away from the ten furious honking geese in hot pursuit of him. He's only barely watching where he's going. Watch out, or you could get swept up in this disaster and end up a feather pillow yourself!

Or save him. Someone, please save him from this entire month.]

(( Check out my plotting meme post here if you're interested in setting anything else up with Kadoc this month outside of the upcoming event; I'm happy to oblige! Also if I forgot to get one up hmu. It was a lot lol ))

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I'm not doing it for that reason! That was supposed to make it easier for you to accept. I'm doing it for myself, if that makes you feel any better. See? Still a selfish son of a bitch. So at least argue with me on those terms instead.

[Well, he does feel somewhat like he does in fact owe her for the egg, but that isn't the primary reason, it's true. He glares at her childishly. They can do this all day and all night. That'll show them both!]

That makes even less sense?

[ They can do this all day. Maybe that's what they'll do instead of resting before they head back. She crosses her arms, staring back with a flatly exasperated expression. ]

How is this you being selfish, when you're insisting on paying?

Because it means I don't have to deal with worrying about where the hell you're sleeping all night, and you'll be better rested and prepared for the trip back, so that'll go more smoothly too. I get to throw money at a problem and solve it. You have any idea how infrequently I get to do that? Let me have it this one time!

[Money solves some problems in mage society, as Marisbury Animusphere could tell you, but it never had anything to do with the kinds of problems Kadoc had had. Being wealthy wouldn't have made anything any easier on him. But now he gets to be a normal person who pays for things to suck a little less! Surely she'll understand this much?]

Since when would you worry about that?

[ She can at least concede on the last point. Fair enough! Money can't solve anything, but it can at least help a lot. At this point, Ritsuka has gone so long without having any money to her name that she's not even sure what she'd do if she had any at all... but she'd probably do similar to what he is right now, if their positions were reserved.

But that first part? No way. ]

Because of that "truce" thing? No one's going to get mad at you if I do me. They know me.

Do you think I just wouldn't even think about it or something? . . . I wouldn't have come on a trip this long with someone I don't even bother applying object permanence to. I can't believe you think you could just walk off to sleep in the woods and leave me in town and I wouldn't spare a thought to that until morning. What the hell?

[It's so outlandish that he can't even be offended by it. Kadoc doesn't even consider himself a good person! And he doesn't exactly consider them friends, either, and if asked if he likes Fujimaru or not . . . he legitimately wouldn't know how to answer. Does he? It's a weird question to ask himself, and so he hasn't at this point. Everything's too complicated there. And yet, all of that taken as fact, he still can't wrap his head around the thought that he wouldn't obsess all night long over something potentially happening to her and be unable to sleep with the worry.

Wouldn't anyone?!]

Is it an object permanence thing...?

[ Isn't that like, a thing applied to babies? She blinks at him slowly, her head tilting in bemusement. ]

I'm not saying you wouldn't give it a second though, just--I didn't expect you to worry about it? I kind of thought you'd just, I dunno.

[ "Not worry about it" is about the only thing she can think of, and she doesn't really want to repeat herself. It's not going to convince either of them more if she does. ]

...You only kind of put up with me at the best of times, so I didn't really expect you to volunteer to get me a room?

. . . Fine. So you didn't expect it. Whatever. That's no reason to turn it down. Are you really fighting me on this, or are you just surprised?

[It's not like he's going to reassure her that no, he totally likes her, really! That could end up just as awkward and complicated as their relationship. They don't need to have a conversation about exactly where on a scale of 1 to 10 he gives a shit about her. All they need to do is settle where they're sleeping for the night, because while they won't be together-together for it or anything—]

If you're staying in a tree or some shit, so am I, so enjoy that.

[He crosses his arms firmly over his chest. It's more defiant than he usually is when he makes this gesture.]

Who wouldn't be surprised?!

[ Come on! Seriously! Seriously. It's not that she thinks he's a completely selfish bastard, or the villain that he tried so hard to act, but--all things considered, given their very specific circumstances and relationship... who wouldn't be surprised? He's always been weird and cagey whenever she's tried to be nice to him! Turnabout is only fair!

But when he threatens to also sleep in a tree, she lets out a sharp breath, rubbing the back of her neck. It's not like she actually wanted to camp out or anything, it's just what she'd expected. And she certainly doesn't want him to be put out because of her. ]

...But okay, fine. If you're really sure, then okay. Let's find a hotel to crash at for the night, once we've unloaded these mushrooms.

. . . Good.

[He gives her a look, opaque and uncertain. Good! That's settled! He's still going to feel weird about the whole conversation, and the compulsion to continue it somehow is strong, but he fights it back. Kadoc knows when just babbling on for the sake of dragging out the argument is a bad idea. (Practically always.) But it feels unfinished, somehow, and that feeling is going to linger.

Still. Mushrooms first. He nods them along back onto the nearest walkway to head to the apothecary first. The poison mushrooms are easier to unload; he already knows he doesn't want to keep any. Kadoc is the kind of guy who would in fact keep poison on him for various uses, but he'd go for something more refined than whole mushrooms. So they can unload the whole lot of these, and then decide whether to keep any of the good eatin' ones.]

I still might keep some of the edible ones. Gareth would be thrilled . . . she'll put them in a pie for us.

That'd be nice. I'm all for being fed.

[ Her tone is carefully neutral. Like him, she also feels weird about the conversation, a nagging sense of something unfinished. Maybe they can revisit it someday--it'd be nice if they could reach a point where they can have any conversation that doesn't feel fraught on some (if not multiple) levels.

She falls into step beside him, looking around curiously as they walk. New cities and new places are an interesting contradiction for her: of course it's brand-new, unfamiliar, but there are some things that are consistently the same. It's kind of comforting, in its own way. ]

...it's really pretty here, huh...

[At least moving the conversation along, if awkwardly, helps with that feeling of unspoken weight. And she's right: Celliwig is pretty. It feels so alien, a reminder that that world they're in really isn't their own at all.]

It's otherworldly. Which, you know, this whole world is otherworldly by definition, but by now I've gotten so used to Camelot that I hardly think of it that way anymore. It took me a while to come to terms with it, but now? It's not that hard to feel like it's just another place I'm living in. Maybe it's just that humans are always human no matter what, and the fae are far from human.

...That's true.

[ She thinks, briefly, of the other Lostbelts--even in Russia, where the yaga weren't truly human anymore, they'd still been human in their own way. There's no way to convince her that Patxi had had anything less than the metaphorical human heart, no matter how coldly he'd acted. And Scandinavia, and then China... surely the others will be the same, she thinks.

(She's got no idea what Britain's going to be like.) ]

I don't really know anything about them other than like... kid stories. I guess the closest I'd relate them to are the stories of kami? But even that wasn't that big in my everyday life, before all this started.

Shinto kami, right? . . . I'd be curious what kinda stories you did know about them.

[Look, he's a mythology nerd, and it's a topic he enjoys; studying folklore in a book is never the same as hearing something casually from someone who grew up in the culture. It's a whole other experience, with an added human element, and the human element of folklore is really the point of it. Kadoc peers over at her, a little shy, as they make their way down the alien streets to the fae apothecary.]

Nothing really specific... just little things that my grandma used to tell me. Stuff like, "be respectful of nature and its spaces," or "treat your stuff gently, because you never know if it's paying attention."

I wouldn't call her superstitious, but... she basically believed in treating everything with respect, whether it was a person or an animal or a thing or a place.

[ There's a fond, distracted little smile on her face as she tells him this. Thinking about it now, she wouldn't be surprised if a lot of her usual attitude was influenced by her grandmother's attitude. What a thing to think about now, walking through this city, worlds away from the little village where her grandmother lives. Lived? Lives. ]

It's not like my family was religious by any real stretch. It was just kind of, I dunno, a general awareness? A thing that was just kind of normal and natural.

[Kadoc has the same thought when Fujimaru says that: it explains some things about her. It's funny how that's the sort of sentiment that has little in common with mage society, and mages are the ones who actually know things about the mysticism of the world. "Treat everything with respect?" Yeah right. Maybe being far from the world of mages really is her secret. He can see how this philosophy would have served her well on her journey.

Without realizing it, he smiles a little, for a moment, lopsided. Then it slips away again.]

Every culture's got its own thing. Background awareness or whatever you're thinking of it as. Mages have their own society, but aside from that, I grew up in a pretty Christian country. It's like how I had an awareness of Hell even though we didn't have anything to do with the Church.

Shouldn't it be like, an awareness of Heaven...?

[ Why would the place of punishment be the place he would default to? Is that a him-thing, or is it just a religious-thing? She can't tell; she doesn't know him well enough yet to make more than a guess.

But she does see that smile, and it gives her a little moment of hope. Maybe it isn't a completely foolish venture after all, trying to befriend this prickly, closed-off guy. ]

I guess I wouldn't know, though. Most of what I've thought about is usually more of what's immediately around me.

Heh. I already knew you weren't Christian, but that cements it right there. Christians think about Hell all the damn time.

[It's not just a him thing!! Not that he considers himself Christian either, but it's still the culture he grew up surrounded by in non-mage contexts, and it's a pervasive one. Now he smiles even more openly, though still briefly. It was funny, okay.]

It's not like it's healthy. But maybe I shouldn't throw stones when it comes to that kinda thing. . . . Even saying that is pretty Christian, though.

I guess I don't get it... it's not like we didn't have some saints in Chaldea, but...

[ But also--she thinks about Solomon, and Goetia, the raging, furiously lonely abandoned Beast at the end of the world. Maybe in light of that, it's not a surprise that their whole religion is just kind of like that. Her lips purse into the beginning of a frown, thoughtful above anything else. It's familiar to her, but also foreign, not unlike this strange fairy city: the buildings aren't wildly weird or different (apparently the fae are still mostly human-shaped, it seems), but nothing about it is something she immediately recognizes. ]

It's just not how I think, I guess.

Edited 2021-12-20 05:48 (UTC)

You're better off that way. Honestly, and I know this is a huge damn shock, but I'm jealous of you.

[WHOOOOOA! WHO KNEW! WHO COULD HAVE GUESSED THAT KADOC ZEMLUPUS IS JEALOUS OF FUJIMARU RI

No, he's aware himself of how hilarious that thought is, and he snorts loud enough to hear as he swings open the door to the apothecary to lead them both in.]

Not about Hell specifically. Like I said, I'm not Christian. But Christianity isn't the only screwed up culture you didn't grow up in. There's a lot you haven't been twisted by yet, Fujimaru.

That's true. But it's not for lack of things trying.

[ Maybe she escaped some terrible things when she was a child, but while it doesn't feel particularly productive to point out that she also has baggage--if not exactly the same kind--it's still a thing. There are things that she knows affect the way she approaches people in her role as Chaldea's Master, and they're not necessarily for the best.

And other than that... it's certainly true there's a handful of saints in Chaldea, but they're far outnumbered by Servants who'd like to drag her down. People who want to see her cry or struggle, that she has done her best to sidestep. It's not like she lives in a vacuum, it's just that she's stubborn enough to push back against influences like that when she notices it happening. ]

. . . Yeah. I know that much. I'm jealous of that, too.

[He says that more quietly, and with that, he turns to take in the sight of the apothecary as they step inside. He hadn't yet put much thought into what the place would look like on the inside.

It isn't just luck to have been born free from certain influences that keeps Fujimaru steady and sane (ish); it's her own will and grounded sense of self, and that's something Kadoc knows he doesn't share.]

[ She chooses to let that thread of conversation drop for now. It's not something she wants to talk about in a more closed-in space like this--it's not like walking into a modern mall, but they're certainly not the only people who have been bringing in their mushrooms for harvest. Even though she's trailing after him to the counter, she's also getting distracted. Like everything else in this fairy city, the things here are unique in ways she isn't used to--it's been so long since she's been able to even casually shop.

So while Ritsuka continues to follow Kadoc, she does slow down and linger, examining the shelves and their rows of neat, colorful bottles with an open, near-childlike curiosity.

They can talk about the heavier things again later. Right now, she just wants to look. ]

[They're the same in this way. Kadoc had walked in focused on their task, and that had lasted all of two seconds: there's so much to see! Fae potions, things he could never hope to see back home, but here they are, real as anything. Just a shop they can walk into and browse. He makes a little sound, under his breath, and drifts over to get a good look at a bright and attention-grabbing row of little vials. Like a kid in a candy store, yeah.

He's not even really talking to her when he says,]

. . . Cool.

Yeah.

[ What else is there to say, really? Yeah. It's super cool! Even to someone like Ritsuka, who only really understands the aesthetics more than the actual work that would go into making potions like this, or how they might benefit others. (Or cause trouble; she can't deny that's also a possibility.) ]

They're really pretty.

Heh. Of course that's where your mind goes. Not that you're wrong. It's just what I'd expect of someone who's not a mage.

[He manages to sound annoyingly smug and not entirely unfriendly about it at the same time, even. It's an unusual tone on him. But despite himself, the potion he delicately picks up in his palm first is in fact the prettiest one his eyes land on: a plain vial, but the liquid inside is a swirl of light and dark blue with gold flecks.]

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fujimaru - 2021-12-26 04:10 (UTC) - Expand

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