isleofavalon | Once a Bat, always a Night Person [Open]

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Once a Bat, always a Night Person [Open]

🧙 WHO: Stephanie Brown and YOU
⚔️️ WHAT: Settling in
🕒 WHEN: Around arrival: after midnight, 6am and afternoon
🗺️ WHERE: Around town, the breakfast buffet and outside a cafe
⚠️ WARNINGS: None

1. Old Habits
Steph has been staying up all night since she was 15 years old. That's 4 years of getting most of her exercise well after dark, and 1 year of night shift that may well have been more work than being a vigilante. Her arrival had been hectic and tiring, but she just couldn't force herself to go to bed at what society generally considered a 'normal hour'.

Instead she wanders the town after dark, taking a meandering route and keeping an eye on the rooftops, just out of habit. She has some of her weapons, but she has no intention of taking up the cowl again here. It's fricken Camelot, how much crime can there really be?

She barely notices anybody that might be on the streets. She has a lot on her mind, and not just deciding whether or not she's dreaming all of this.

She makes it across almost every inch of town before the sun rises.

2. Continental Breakfast
She happens upon the hotel's breakfast entirely by accident, and while she's actually on her way to bed she can't say no to free food. For a few days she's there every morning at 6am, hoarding muffins and keeping a half-full cup of coffee as close to her face as she can without looking too weird. She doesn't drink it, she just likes to keep it close. She's missed this smell. Given, it's probably not very good coffee, but it's a hell of a lot more coffee-like than what she's been drinking for the last few months.

Every now and then she takes a deep whiff of the untouched coffee and quietly sighs in satisfaction.

3. Magic was easier in books
Steph sits at a table outside a cafe, a truly gigantic mug and an assortment of coffee-condiments in front of her. The mug is full to the brim with latte, but it's already her second cup. Four packets of sugar and three wooden stir-sticks are pushed to the outside of the group, glowing brightly enough to be noticeable in the middle of the day.

She was trying to make them invisible. She hasn't had any success. Maybe she should try reverse psychology, she thinks. If she tries to make the sugar packet in front of her glow, maybe it will vanish instead.

She's been at it long enough that she's scowling as she focuses on the packet, making fists with both hands and splaying her fingers at the thing every time she makes an attempt.

"Glow," she mutters under her breath. "Glow! W...olg? Wolg. Lumos!" Unconsciously raising her volume, she makes a noise of frustration and tries one more time.

That final attempt has some effect at least. A dozen needles made of light pin the packet in place, stuck at all angles as if they had circled it when she wasn't looking. For a moment she just stares at it.

"...What?"

[ooc | brackets also accepted! ]

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She tries to keep an open mind as she listens to that explanation. It's not easy.

"That is literally suicidal." She feels like that should be pointed out, even if the reasoning is religious. And she doubts a warm rock would help much if you were dying of thirst. She shakes her head and shrugs the notion off.

"I've been helping out at an emergency clinic, and nights in Gotham can get... long." Even without traditional resources, the city is full of crime and most of it takes place at night. The added wrinkle of being cut off from the world just meant more people were hurting themselves in truly idiotic ways.

"Plus, we ran out of real coffee a few months ago. Totally worth staying up for." Of course she drinks it during the day. She's going to be totally destitute soon, but at least she'll be caffeinated.

He sipped his tea. "Ah, I never said it was a good idea. Though there are some small, isolated villages in the mountains where the people who live there supposedly have celestial blood. Still, they hardly ever venture down and people don't often make the trip there, so who's to say if there's any truth in those rumours?"

He probably does know but no one can tell from his expression.

"It sounds like you've been busy." Yun Yifeng bit into some bacon and it was quite tasty. He hummed a little in approval, Then he smiled at her. "Gotham is the place you came from? Do you mean the nights are long literally or is there just a lot happening at night?"

Honestly, given what she knows about her own world, it's entirely possible there are people with the blood of gods. Or aliens. Whichever. Maybe they don't need food or water.

"Metaphorically. Usually." There was that time an alien monster ate the sun, but that only happened once. She starts picking at a muffin, pulling off bites small enough to be finished between sentences.

"The city's notorious for crime, and most of it happens at night. Put it in crisis and things manage to get even worse. The last year felt like a decade."

Usually?

That sounds like an interesting story opportunity...but he's more interested in the rest of it.

"I see. When a situation is unstable any small problem naturally becomes magified. But what sort of crisis happened last year, if you don't mind me asking?"

It's definitely a story, but Steph only has the news reports' side of it. The current apocalypse, on the other hand...

"Well... some kind of dome just sort of appeared over the city." It doesn't really make much sense when she says it like that, but it doesn't really make sense no matter how she puts it. She makes a face at her coffee.

"We still had power and water, somehow. And there was sunlight, sort of, from the dome itself. But we were totally cut off from anything and everything else. The first week was the worst, but people never really stopped freaking out."

She starts spinning the cup idly, watching ripples form in the coffee as she remembers those first days. And the days after. And the people left behind, trapped in a world that may or may not exist anymore.

"We ran out of painkillers after just a couple of months, and pretty much all of the specialized medicines. Food's running out. Nobody knows what happened, or why, or what's happening to the rest of the planet. We definitely don't know how much longer we can last."

"A dome just appeared."

He doesn't sound disbelieving but he...definitely sounds like he has a lot of questions.

"Was there no farms nearby or areas that were farmable? Did the dome also stop animals from passing through?"

The benefit of coming from Fantasy Ancient China means that things like farming and hunting were things he'd expected at least a few people to know. Even in the capital where there are so many rich families there should be some people in the markets who knew these things.

Steph shrugs sympathethically. She has a lot of questions about it too, but she has plenty of practice accepting that most of them will never be answered.

"Hardly any open ground at all. Most of what was blocked off is paved and built-on. Any gardens are small and totally man-made, mostly in pots. And no, no animals passing through. We did have a pet store and a zoo. The zoo..."

She makes a face, trying very hard not to remember any details.

"...went about as badly as you can imagine. If you want meat you're stuck with cute fluffy rodents, and pigeons if there are any still left."

"I see. That must have been hard."

The place sounded very different from what he was used to. A place like that becoming isolated...that would have been very disastrous indeed.

...roast pigeon didn't sound too bad though. Roasted young pigeons were quite a famous dish in some regions of Great Liang.

That part, he will keep to himself.

He also wanted to ask what a zoo was beyond a place that has animals but she didn't seem to want to talk about that either. He was an information broker but he also knew that he didn't need to indulge his need to know things at the expense of others...well, unless they deserved it or the situation was that dire anyway. Which, it currently wasn't.

"Perhaps there is some solution to your problem that could be found in this place."

Come to think of it, when was the last time she saw a pigeon? Rationing food never really started being a thing except in hospitals. People, right?

She looks up at him with a tired smile. It's not as though this stuff hasn't been on her mind almost every free moment since she got here. Except for the zoo stuff. That was pretty traumatizing.

"Maybe." If her world still exists. "Either way, at least I've got coffee. And actual fresh food. I forgot how good bacon was!" Some real cheer creeps back into her voice. As long as she jokes about it, none of her worries are real.

"What about you? I guess your home is pretty rural if there's farming, but what did you do for work?"

He won't call her out on it. He's seen his fair share of terrible coping mechanisms and this was not the worst. Besides, it wasn't his place.

"Hm...I'm not sure 'rural' is the correct for it. Perhaps 'not as advanced' is more accurate. As far as I've understood from speaking to others anyway." Great Liang, after all, had many great cities but they wouldn't be the same sort of thing. He took a moment to cut into a breakfast sausage and took a bite. He chewed and swallowed as he considered whether to answer or not.

In the end, she had shared fairly freely, especially things that had probably been common knowledge where she's from. He could return the favour.

"I am the leader of a martial arts sect that specialized in brokering information. Whether the whereabouts of a runaway disciple or a stolen family heirloom as long as they can pay the asking price, Fengyu Sect will find it as long as it exists."

His description sounds a lot like a spy agency, maybe the CIA. She figures she probably can't ask a ton of questions about it, however interesting it sounds.

"Is a runaway disciple really a problem that needs a team of experts?"

That's not to far off a comparison, except that he doesn't get involved in politics. Well, he didn't before anyway. Even now, unless it directly affects Ji Yanran he still won't do anything remotely related to politics.

Still, he smiles pleasantly as he cuts into the breakfast sausage again.

"It really depends. It can be a concern that techniques that are secret to the sect might be taught to outsiders. Within the many sects belonging to jianghu," Which whatever passes for real time, magic Google translate might interpret it as 'pugilist world'. quite a few of them consider the techniques passed down to be something guarded with their lives or are family heirlooms. A head disciple takes those secrets with them and some might worry they will teach others."

He takes a bite, chews and swallows. "Sometimes it's a matter of face. Some of them feel as if, if they cannot control their own disciples it reflects poorly on them."

Yun Yifeng says this all very matter-of-factly. Whether he agrees with it or not has never mattered. "And sometimes...since these disciples are family or as seen as family, their teachers and parents worry that they may actually be in trouble."

Steph tries very hard to follow this, but she's very tired and most of the concepts are entirely foreign to her. She more or less gets the gist, she assumes: secret ninja stuff.

"I guess that makes sense... I think. And it's kind of sweet to think about someone calling in the CIA to find their missing kid." It escapes her for the moment that he probably doesn't know what the CIA is.

She tries to picture either of her parents going to such lengths for her. Her mom she could actually see pulling it off. Her dad? Maybe if he'd been replaced by a pod person. That thought leads her to Batman, and she remembers the lengths he'd gone to in order to retrieve his Robins. Excluding herself, of course, but she's too sleepy and steeped in the smell of coffee to fall into that particular hole of self-pity.

"Does your world have superheroes and supervillains?"

If he knew what ninjas were he'd probably laugh. Though if he had the language or context to explain it he'd probably tell her it's closer to mafia families, perhaps except more legal.

"The CIA?" He asks because, yeah. He has no idea what that is.

He cannot say if his own parents were or were not the type to do such things since he was an orphan but maybe some part of him hoped.

But hoping didn't have any practical worth, did it?

He tilted his head a little. "I suppose that depends on what superheroes and supervillains are.]

If he knew what ninjas were, he might point out that the image in her head is much closer to anime than reality. She's met real ninjas, but she was much more focused on not getting killed than the sociology of the practice.

She waves off the question about the CIA. If he's going to talk to her at the break of dawn he's going to have to deal with some rambling.

"They're..." she pauses and frowns, realizing she's already messed up this explanation by calling them 'superheroes'.

"People with powers, super-powers, like magic, or aliens, that fight crime and protect people. Not usually legally, but that doesn't really matter when a meteor is headed for the planet. Or people who do the opposite. Not all of them actually have powers, though. And technically the aliens are perfectly normal for their own species... Really they're just heroes and villains, but those are pretty broad terms for a pretty specific thing."

Where was she going with this again?

"That just sounds like the kind of stuff that they might do if they found out about it."

He doesn't even know what ninjas are so for all he knows the image she has is the true one.

As a professional, he would prefer an answer. But it is very early in the morning and he's not the sort to keep pushing things without any reason or money involved.

Besides, this whole superhero thing seems so much more interesting.

"Hm...that's a tricky question. To begin with, while what some disciples and masters of various sects can do resembles some forms of magic here, none of those abilities are inherently...super." He says the word as if the exact meaning of that word in this context was rather novel to him. "It's simply something anyone could learn with enough dedication. But as for fighting crime and protecting the people...martial arts sects do do that as does the government. However, it's not entirely correct yo say it's not legal." He lays his fork down to take a sip of tea. "The sects that are part of the jianghu and the government tend to not get involved with each other. Sects will deal with crimes and bandits in their territories which makes the government officials' jobs easier and the government manages the borders and stability of the country so those who are part of the wulin can focus just on improving their martial arts."

He touched a finger to his chin thoughtfully. "I suppose, by the metrics you mentioned then I suppose we do have superheroes? But it's hard to say as I'm still a little confused over the larger context of your world."

Steph follows this a little more easily, and frowns as she considers the organization that he's described. She leans a little closer to her coffee in the hopes that the fumes will make her brain work better.

"I think that probably doesn't count. The heroes without powers don't fight like you could learn if you paid for classes, and they have all sorts of gadgets and gizmos you definitely can't buy at the store." You could buy some reasonable substitutes, but she did almost die that way because she didn't understand the physics of grappling wires.

"And the people with powers, there are a lot of them, but it's definitely not normal. I don't think it's really intentional, either. There are aliens, of course, but my understanding is a lot of them get their powers through unpleasant experiments or accidents. The secrecy is probably pretty similar, though.

"I guess they wouldn't be as close in a group of dozens as our heroes are in teams of like, 5. I'm pretty sure Superman, Supergirl and Superboy are literally family, too."

She takes a pause to drink some orange juice.

"I never really thought about how complicated it all is before."

"Does a rabbit understand the intricacies of life in a forest? When we grow up in such things we hardly notice how strange or complex they are. Especially when they are systems that work."

He has some more idea of things where he is but he'd be a poor information broker if he didn't.

"Many sects tend to also be family and those that aren't tend to be close. Within a sect, those who study under the same teacher refer to each other as martial siblings and their teacher is akin to a parent figure while their teacher's martial siblings would be their martial uncles and aunts." He paused and looked thoughtful, "Though given how often people will poison or harm each other in order to take over the position of sect head it's debatable how important some of them sees these ties."

She's not sure she likes being compared to a rabbit, even if it's only a metaphor. As forest creatures go, she's pretty sure they're some of the dumbest. Then again, she doesn't know much about forest creatures to begin with.

"How many of these sects are there? There are hundreds of heroes in my world, but that's really just individuals, not organizations."

"I suppose it depends on who you ask. If we're talking only the major sects then there are only a handful but there are many smaller ones as well. Some could even include as few as three people. And, of course, those who are part of the righteous sects wouldn't consider demonic sects as legitimate." He doesn't particularly care about the distinction. Business is business.

Though all this is to say, there can be very many or very few. It depends on how you count them and whether or not someone cares to know them. ~~Also canon never says.~~

"Though I doubt they could be counted in the hundreds. If that were so, then that'd be enough for an army." And then the Emperor would have to take notice.

She hums thoughtfully, tearing pieces off a new muffin. She's not even going to ask about demonic sects. It's either the same thing but evil, or consists entirely of demons. Either way, it's a little more than she wants to get into at 6am.

"So you're in charge of one of the big ones? I guess that makes you pretty important, huh?"

It's actually just people who don't like following social norms and spit in the face of most rules respectable sects follow for the most part.

"Fengyu Sect is one of the major sects though our importance isn't defined by that. After all, everyone has times when they need something found." It was his way of ensuring the safety of the disciples under his care: as long as Fengyu Sect's services were important no one would touch them. "Though I don't particularly enjoy participating in inter-sect politics...to the disappointment of my head disciple."

Steph chuckles. She can appreciate that stance, especially with how much she knows other superheroes argue. There's enough ego in the Batfamily to kill a herd of rhinos.

"Does he have to do all that stuff instead?"

"He respects my decision to not get our sect involved in these things."

And that was one of the (many) endearing things about Qing Yue, the way that no matter how exasperated he got about things he would support him. He smiled a little fondly.

"Though, once I retire he'll be free to stretch his wings." He'll be interested to see what happens then.

"What about your family, miss?"

"Huh!" It sounds like a nice relationship, even if it is exasperating. She thinks she wouldn't mind meeting this disciple, given the chance. His boss seems so calm and collected, she has to imagine the guy is a bundle of nerves.

"It's just me and my mom, really. Or, it was. Dad's an asshole bank robber." She shrugs. She's had her whole life to figure out how she feels about her father, and the conclusion she's reached is that the less she thinks about him the happier she is.

"Mom and I were getting along better after he stopped coming home. But... she wasn't downtown when the dome went up. I've been living with my best friend this last year."

Once a Bat, always a Night Person [Open]

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Sorry for the late reply! Work was killing me.

No worries! That was me week before last.

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