ph_logs | [OPEN] You always dreamed that there'd more to life than all the lies

[OPEN] You always dreamed that there'd more to life than all the lies

Who: CT (

liesdontfindyou) & you!
What: Catch-All for CT; work, investigation, and just hanging out
When: July
Where: Various places, in headers
Warnings: Cult discussion, death discussion, etc.

1. A place you'd find where you weren't all alone [around town, O&I]

CT is back to work immediately after her return to life. To sit idle would only invite her to dwell on it and that's not something she wants to do at all. Not that routine patrol shifts do much to occupy her mind, but just the act of working helps her to focus her mind on things besides cults and sacrifices and experiences thereof.

She's relatively easy to find around town whilst out on patrol, whether because you just want a chat or because you're having some kind of issue that she might be able to help with.

Most days, after she's done with work, she stops by the O&I for a drink and a meal that she doesn't have to make herself. That and maybe the bustle of real living people is good for her in controlled doses. She's generally sitting alone, with plenty of space to join her if asked, or may occasionally have to ask if a seat is free herself.

2. But now you look around at what you've learned and face the truth [library, enforcers office, other]

When she's not working on actual assigned duties, CT's still working on her own investigative angles. Following some initial discussions with other attendees of the cult gathering, she has multiple little bits and pieces she plans to follow-up on with or without help. These include: verifying the reported deaths of each cult member via official records at the office; cross referencing missing persons reports to see if it's possible to find out who they replaced in the past; searching through old newspapers and photos and the like among library records to narrow down the year it took place; and so on.

Those who attended the cult gathering may find themselves invited or sought out for further discussion or to help her with what she's doing. Other Enforcers may also find her seeking them out for discussion or to get properly acquainted for the sake of future endeavours.

3. That you may never find a home [northwest hollow residental]

Even in CT's downtime, it's hard to say she's relaxing. Pieces of her old routine adapt well enough to the town and that old routine was built around keeping herself as busy as possible during long days travelling or holed up in bases. So, for example, she can be found going on a daily jog to keep herself fit, weaving through the streets of Northwest Hollow on a route she figured out for herself.

Around her home at 517 Meadowlark Lane, she can also be heard or seen practising knife throwing with a makeshift target attached to a tree in her yard. Her gate is cracked open, because she prefers the easy exit and is very aware of her surroundings—anyone who peeks in will soon find her looking back at them, holding a throwing knife between her fingers. "You can watch. Promise I'm only aiming at the tree."

Sometimes she's even sat on the porch, appreciating once again living under real sunlight whilst she reads through a book checked out from the library—all, invariably, some kind of non-fiction about the town or world as a whole. Research.

4. Wildcard

Hit me or find me in the discord to plot. Happy to write custom starters and the like.

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She slips into the chair, already loosely fiddling with the pearl-like beads of a bracelet that she's taken to wearing even in uniform.

"I guess you could say that. I certainly... took some chances, recently."

"I'm torn between three reactions to those chances: tearing you a new one for going in without contacting anyone to let them know what's up, praising you for doing something bold and daring, and simply pumping you for all the information you've learned."

He taps his talons, those long sharp dangerous talons on the top of his desk.

"Anywhere you'd like me to begin, CT?"

"Well, it has been a while since someone tore me a new one..." comes out dryly, half a joke and half not. "But I'm afraid I can't do much in response to that except sit here and pretend I wouldn't do it again. I'm probably better with the information."

He leans in, those steely grey eyes laser-focused on her.

"I'm afraid you've misunderstood me. I am not telling you not to do stupid shit. But you're part of a team now. You have a sending stone, use it before you go off on your own recklessly. Call me, call Alex, call Killbride if you have to. You don't have to take it all on alone, without any support. The rest of the enforcers are here for you."

CT's mouth opens, there's an aborted sound in the back of her throat, and then it snaps back shut. She tugs at the bracelet and rolls some of the beads between her fingertips.

"...right," comes out eventually. Echoes of jamming her own comms. to cover her two in-person drops with Needles and Rat ring in her head. Of having to work to actively undermine her team to stop them from getting what the Director wanted. Of all the little ways she had to take herself out of step with the people around her. "I wasn't thinking about that."

"I know you weren't. You've never had the support you deserve, have you?" He sighs, leaning back on his...stool? Stool, not chair. Normal chairs are ass for wings.

"And I'll be honest, part of my bad reaction to you going off alone is because of my own bad experiences. Someone trying to seek knowledge without letting others know what she was doing was a direct cause of my death back home. In that case, it was dangerous magical experiments, but still. People thinking they can handle on their own, because the act of reckless discovery is something you do in secret without help, it worries me."

Edited 2024-07-14 22:38 (UTC)

And people finding out what I was doing is what got me killed rises to the tip of her tongue and is swallowed back down in quick succession.

And trying to get someone else involved is what got them killed and ze didn't get given any deal goes the same way soon after. Her jaw is tight and the effort not to say something unwise is visible in the line of it.

"...I'm sorry to hear that," is a genuine enough response to the details around his death, if clearly part of buying herself time to think of something more substantial to say. "I assumed I would be advised not to go, if I made this into official enforcer business."

“If you had called me, you would have been advised not to make it into official enforcer business until you were able to report back.” That is, not to blunder in and be The Cops unnecessarily.

CT exhales. "Okay." She tugs at the beads again, thinking. "Well. They didn't realise I was an enforcer, so I managed that much. Though I didn't completely avoid getting made."

"Alright, now. Tell me everything." This isn't really intended to feel like an interrogation, but Cerrit's as hungry for information as CT had been. She is now the best source of data he has.

She gives him a detailed summary of the lead-up, the invitation itself, the cabins, the incantation and the shift in the environment—

"—we were in the past. Nine residents who died before the barrier went up were there and very much alive. Which—"

—she lists off of from memory easily, full names from Chloe to Lucy in order of introduction. She describes the robes, the location, the atmosphere. What was said about their Master, the promises of the vile divine. She has a very good memory. More explicit details start with—

"—Chloe Albright was the only one I talked to directly. She approached me first and I think she already knew then that I wasn't who I was pretending to be. She nailed me as military and called me a spy to my face while I was still maintaining my cover."

As Cerrit hears the list of names from the introduction, he immediately gets pen and paper to write them down. A couple times, on hearing a name, he clicks his beak. A few on the list get marks beside them.

"Chloe wasn't wrong about you, but that's beside the point." Don't worry, Cerrit's not mad about it, though. "What else did she say?"

The corner of her lips quirks in a way that's something between amused and annoyed. "You're not the first person to point that out. But it still felt... off, at the time."

She's definitely eyeing the way he places marks, but she'll ask about those in a bit. "She talked in vivid detail about the touch of the thing they were worshipping. Having your mind pulled apart by— 'the twisting fingers of Fly-the-Light'. Being... unspun. The 'Bloody Tongue'. It was something between a veiled threat and the genuine beliefs of a zealot, I think."

"We'll need to try to learn more about this figure they worship and its domain. Maybe it's a demon of some kind? Though not one of the Princes..." He sets the pen down, frowning. "Or something else entirely."

"Not a demon, that much I'm sure of. It's something— cosmic. Eldritch? There were tendrils stretching from... somewhere, and the way someone else there described it— it's not something knowable, not really. Not something you can put in a simple box. It exists outside life as we understand it. I think."

It's the kind of unquantifiable unknown that terrifies her, somehow personified. She pulls at her bracelet again.

"They said a lot of things at the end, but I struggled to remember most of it as clearly on account of being actively in the process of bleeding out at the time." Said far too casually, really. "They did talk about an anchor, though. A conduit. Linette."

"Archie and Maude's daughter. Her name came up in some files, I'll leave them out for you to look at later."

There's a bit of a nod he gives.

"Honestly, hearing that this is when she was named to be conduit is fascinating. It means the events of the files were unrelated to the decision for her to be used, probably."

"Their daughter? Wow. That's—" worse than she even expected, upon realising there was a shared last name there. Apparently there's still things that can make her stomach turn. A sudden pang of grief over her own mothers rings in her chest. And she thinks of Carolina, nothing but a tool in her father's games by the end.

She takes a moment to actually turn the information over in her head as information alone, let the emotional response pass by.

"...I'm trying to narrow down some details. Dates and the like. Those files sound like they'll help with that. But if we're right about the mechanisms of how we appeared in the past, there should be a number of concurrent missing persons reports from around the same time. If there aren't... I don't know, that might say something in itself."

"Merrick Gladwyn and..." Right, fuck, beak-click. "...someone else. I can get you the reports."

Because Henry Leeds is a Leeds.

"Gladwyn's body was found out in one of the cabins. Potentially related?"

There's a slight furrow in her brow, when he fails to produce the second name. It doesn't seem like him to just forget a name, but... well, why else?

"Potentially. Or— I'd say more likely related in some way or another. The sacrifice we became a part of was seemingly somewhere within the— Larkin estate? But the cabins are undoubtedly connected. And— it didn't seem like the space should have fit within the building, actually."

He sees that brow-furrow. How can he not? But he's really not in a position to explain fully. And a partial explanation might be more dangerous. He's walking a tightrope with CT.

"Spatial distortion. Great, love that, amazing. That is wizard bullshit at its finest."

"Yeah, the scale of magical bullshit going on with all of this is more than I know what to do with. The time displacement, the spatial distortion, whatever the hell Chloe had going on, the blood magic of the ritual itself..." she gestures helplessly. As established, it's far, far from her area of expertise. She still feels that her focus is best applied on the pieces that lay outside the pure magical mechanics. "They had plenty of power at their disposal. Power that I can only assume would have grown over time. The fact none of them survived to see the barrier is— interesting, in light of that."

"Perhaps there came a point at which them having such power no longer was of benefit to the entity they were worshiping. Or where they failed to meet their end of the arrangement, willingly or otherwise." As Japhet had, with Aster.

"Maybe. Things seem to have gone ahead without them, whether entirely as intended or not; maybe they were just... disposable, after a certain point."

She doesn't sound totally convinced, it almost feels too neat, but that really could be just her.

"This 'maybe' feels like something important to tug at, if we get a chance. What other unanswered questions do we need to examine, in your opinion?"

It feels important to let her know he really is listening to what she has to say, that he values the perspective she brings to this fucked-up matter.

"I don't like when things come up too clean. Not without hard evidence." It's the same way she feels about coincidences. Sure, maybe it's a coincidence, maybe it's that simple, but in the absence of confirmation, she doesn't trust it.

She has to chew it over for a while, fiddling with that bracelet again. "How this connects to the demons' interests is the biggest gap, I think. They're too looming a presence for this to turn out to be entirely the handiwork of some unrelated force. There were... offhand mentions, I think, according to some of the other attendees, but nothing conclusive."

The details shared aren't firm enough for CT to feel comfortable leaning on them without further investigation. And so she keeps it to herself for now.

"I'm also not sure I buy that no one that survived until the barrier went up knows nothing about this cult or their activities. Someone burned down Larkin's estate."

And, of course, Cerrit already has the convicted arsonist in his sights as a point of interest.

"...and this is a lesser concern, but myself and another party who attended also raised concerns that there may have been ripple effects from our presence, even if things remained largely unchanged."

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maltesefalcon - 2024-07-18 21:00 (UTC) - Expand

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