citylogs | October Catch-all!

Entry tags:

October Catch-all!

WHO: Midnight (

unreserving) & open!
WHAT: October catch-all
WHERE: Where isn't he, honestly
WHEN: Catching all of October, will update after the plot details drop!
WARNINGS: ~*Midnight*~. But also probably alcohol and disordered eating mentions generally, will update as necessary. UPDATE: there is some MENTAL HEALTH going on in Hiyori's thread. mind the warnings, there are cults in there.

a. various places (day)

How was that?

[ Midnight flagged your character down for a practice session! Fortunately, it's not his usual jock routine: he spent the last 20 minutes explaining the ins and outs of the City as though his partner has just arrived here. It was a very serious roleplay, Midnight answered all questions with great thought and care. ]

I think it may be best to also mention some basic safety precautions... To proceed with great care to any new locations, to consider supplies and other survival items before risking a new encounter. But other than that... Do you remember any other questions you had in mind when you first arrived here?

b. swimming pool (afternoon)

Did you want one?

[ Why were you staring at this teen in the relaxation pool? Probably because he's sitting on a pool noodle, floating near the edge, snacking on a large carton of chicken nuggets. Said carton is... probably somewhat moist, but he's doing a pretty good job of keeping it from becoming overly waterlogged, and he certainly doesn't seem to be up to any specific mischief. Nope. Just vibing in the pool with chicky nugs.

The kid himself has short, ragged black hair with a few pink streaks, pink eyes, pointed ears, pale skin... Basically, if anyone's met Midnight, one might wonder if he had a little brother or a son who's just arrived. The similarities are quite uncanny. However, his question isn't particularly... Midnight-y. It's just a question. The most obvious reason why one would be staring at someone else's food in the first place. ]

c. garden prompt

[ Midnight will be avoiding the more grabby plants — he doesn't want to test if their thirst for his blood will lead to their demise via Originium — so the grabbiness here? Why, that's your hand he's grabbing. Because he's spotted someone he may or may not know among these very rude plants and, after listening to some of the gossiping circulating, has made an executive decision to leave the venue with his new partner in tow. (He... did get an earful about your characters issues on the way, but his main concern at the moment is getting his new partner out.) ]

Nasty lot, aren't they? Manners are free. Come along, love. Let's get a drink.

d. wildcard

if you'd like a custom starter please dm me (i don't have plurk sorry)

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[ heine can't judge him for that. if it had been him on the receiving end of the concussion he'd probably be doing exactly the same thing—which is, he's aware, against the advice of almost every doctor in the known universe, but then again heine has never been all that good about following rules. ]

How many times do you expect you're going to need this service? [ heine takes the bottle back and takes another long drink himself. he's tipsy already, but then again he got started well before midnight. unfortunately, a quirk of his accelerated physiology is that his liver processes the liquor much more quickly than he wishes it would, which means being tipsy won't last all that long. ] And how fast do you think you're gonna recover from the concussion?

[ from experience heine can say that it takes him about half a day, depending on the severity. he figures for midnight it'll be a couple of days at most.

heine nods as if midnight has said something extremely sage, then shakes his head. ] I have to sleep more here than I did at home. I think it has something to do with the [ he wiggles his fingers ] powers thing.

[ Hmm... Midnight nods, watches Heine drink. That must be disorienting, a sudden change in physiology necessitating more care. ]

My sleep has always been like that. Short. [ Midnight shakes his head, makes a grabby gesture for the bottle. Him next. ] No, it's my balance that's off. Been feeling a lot more clumsy since I've been here, let me tell you. If I had to go to see Daan every time I've banged a shin or hit an elbow against a table since I've been here...

[ A shake of the head. This place really does do the most to take their powers away... And for what? It's not as though they can leave, or have any enemies but each other. So what's the worst they can do? Kill each other? They already do that, and it doesn't even stick. ]

Anyhow, I'll only need it as much as I'm determined to cause problems. And if I recover from a concussion at all, well, more's the pity, depending on who you ask. I do promise that I won't go around causing the kind of crimes that will get me clapped in cuffs, though. I'd like to choose my partners for that, thank you.

Clumsy? [ now that's interesting. the changes in heine's physiology he can track as part of an overall declawing, as he keeps calling it—like his entire being is somehow muffled. he heals more slowly, his reflexes are dulled, he's not as strong or as agile as he should be. but clumsy? heine can't say that's one of his own symptoms. ] That's interesting. Do you normally have... some kind of ability to not be clumsy?

[ it sounds stupid to say it out loud, so hopefully midnight is picking up heine's meaning. is he especially nible, or gifted with some kind of foresight that helps him avoid running unfortunately into doorknobs. something like that. the mention of daan makes heine shake his head and lift an invisible glass as if toasting to the extremely put-upon doctor himself. ]

Well, if you don't want to recover from the head injury, I'm not the guy to ask. I'm tired of killing people. [ midnight can take that however he wants, heine's not really thinking his sentences through all the way. he squints a little, trying to parse that—i'd like to choose my own partners for that—and only after a second realizes that midnight is probably talking about— ] Oh, like. Kinky handcuffs.

[ probably? ]

Correct.

[ At the kinky handcuffs realization. Midnight aims two fingerguns at him, then leans forward and steals the bottle from Heine's fingers. Him next.

He takes another swig, wipes his mouth, then swings it onto the floor gently next to his knee, sighing. It's helping. Everything feels... softer. ]

Killing people isn't my favorite pastime, personally. Glad to see you catch on.

[ He shrugs, closing his eyes. He is feeling a bit nauseous, but he's willing to believe it'll pass. He's pretty sure he's taken worse hits. (Perhaps not this many in a row, though? Over a week? With no healing? Perhaps he'll have to go see Daan... Just get all of this taken care of in one fell swoop. Poor thing.) ]

Vampires have a good inner ear. We have a reputation for, er... what's the word.

[ He snaps his fingers for a second. ]

Re. Re... Resilience, that's it. Social chameleons, tacticians. Very good at picking up new skills, athletically gifted. We adapt better than any other Sarkaz race... We're the face of our species, really.

[ He shrugs again, eyes still closed. ]

Other side of the coin is that most of the old guard are quite mad. God complexes to a man. Old, more or less invincible, manipulative, accustomed to talking their way into anything they want... Anything they don't care to just take, anyhow. Inevitable, really, even outside the culture of territorialism.

Whoa. [ is what heine has to say about kinky handcuffs. he's not sure what else he could say, honestly—heine's interactions with sex and kink have been so brief and fleeting they hardly even count. also, pretty much everything he can think of to say leads to him imagining midnight sexy handcuffing somebody, which. okay. anyway.

focusing on the alcohol and the midnight lore drop is, comparatively, much more familiar territory. heine grabs the bottle when midnight sets it down and takes a couple of long swallows himself, grateful for how it warms him up when it hits his stomach. the tipsiness might not last long, but it's nice while he has it, a sort of overall softness to the world that heine doesn't normally feel. ]

Makes sense. [ it's not that the god complexes themselves make sense, just that heine has enough of an understanding of the way power corrupts to see how someone that gifted would end up with one. ] Even people with just a little taste of what it's like to be better than can let it get to their heads. Bet it's even easier when everything about you seems superior.

[ he thinks of angelika. of giovanni, of campanella frühling, of magato. mad with their own superiority, callously dismissive of anything they saw as less-than. that could have been heine, too, under different circumstances. if he hated himself a little less. ]

But you're different?

[ heINE PLEASE DON'T THINK ABOUT MIDNIGHT AND SEXY HANDCUFFS CHALLENGE

Anyway, Midnight just wiggles his eyebrows and leaves it at that. He is aware of his horny crimes. ]

Am I? I don't know.

[ Midnight begins wiggling his extremities, checking for damage. Ooh, that's achy. ]

I think I might just be young? I'm almost 40, but one must be around 100 to be considered a proper adult among vampires...

[ He shakes his head. ]

Probably helps that I didn't grow up around the culture, either. I'm Higashinese, you know; most of the diaspora ended up around Leithanien, Sargon, Ursus. Much farther west. I knew some things about what proper vampires should be — my parents would talk about it all the time — but it didn't properly hit me until I started to meet other Sarkaz and vampires at Rhodes Island how different I'd grown up.

[ challenge failed!!!!

that... also makes sense, to heine. that being removed from most of the people most similar to midnight would have an impact on his attitudes, his beliefs as he grew up. heine supposes that in some ways they're similar, products of their circumstances.

of course, most of the names midnight drops may as well be greek to heine with how little he understands. sarkaz he gets, that's midnight's species(?), and he does seem to recall something about higashinese from a previous post where they talked about languages, plus ursus from their conversation about bears. leithanien and sargon must therefore be locations. ]

I think I like you better how you are. [ without the god complex, or the casual cruelty of power. heine has had enough of that to last a lifetime.

heine draws his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them, lets his pumpkin sunglasses slide down his nose a little as he looks over at midnight. ] What's Rhodes Island?

[ heine.......... ]

Me too.

[ Midnight grins. He's fought for the freedom to do what he wants all his life. He'll continue to do so for the rest of it!

Midnight nods in answer to that last question, decides the world doesn't spin enough when he does, and snatches up that liquor for another pull. ]

Name of where I work... Or worked, at this point. How time flies.

[ Midnight shakes his head. Three entire months already... ]

Pharmeceuticals company. I'm with the paramilitary outfit attached to their security division, but it's the reserve corps, not active duty.

[ Midnight grins, waves the bottle again before settling it back down. ]

... Which may bring up several questions. "Why in the world does a pharmeceuticals company need a paramilitary unit?" would be at the forefront of my mind, were I you.

[ heine snags the bottle when it's set down and takes a long drink of his own. being able to get even moderately drunk is one of the only saving graces of this city, he thinks, but he still wishes he could get drunk all the way. it seems fun. ]

I'm guessing it's for some reason other than the bog-standard "drug companies like power and power is easier to keep when you have an army"?

[ if that gives a way a little of how jaded heine's own world has made him over time, so be it. if this were back home, the security forces would be almost exclusively for protecting the assets of the company and probably disappearing the people who would become the unwilling test subjects for new developments.

heine knows that because he lived it. ]

You know, that is a very lucid guess, but it also makes me very concerned for your mental health.

[ Midnight shakes his head, watches Orange Heine sip the Orange Drink. He's already had it rough without also understanding the reality of the world around him. (But honestly, who is Midnight to talk about one's mental health? Glass houses and stones.) ]

Anyhow... That's what I thought too. The drug company was treating the source of my blood smoke, if you will, so I was living in their medical department. I got curious about their little private army, did some poking around...

[ He shifts into a crosslegged position, resting heavily on the wall. ]

It was the first time I'd ever encountered a philanthropic ethos followed by a painfully honest list of crimes committed by the department in the name of protecting their own. In short... my world lives in a constant state of epidemic, and it's difficult to convince certain parties to accept help, no matter how charitable or benevolent. Centuries of discrimination has made radicals out of those worst hit by the effects of Catastrophes, lots of broken trust from war and various injustices. Thus the need to protect one's own while trying to help others... It's that sort of thing.

[ it's maybe because heine has had it so rough that he understands the world around him. if anything, circumstances of his birth being what they were probably granted him an insight more incisive than average into exactly how deeply power can corrupt people.

he is, however, just very slightly too drunk to parse the entire explanation exactly as it's given, so heine spends a second squinting at midnight as he puts the sentences together in his brain. ]

Okay. So you were... in their hospital, and got curious about the army, but when you went snooping you found out that... [ philanthropic ethos who the fuck says that when intoxicated. come on. ] The drug company is super committed to helping people who have your blood smoke thing, but for a bunch of reasons, it's not always easy to help people and also not die in the process, so they have an army that helps keep them safe while they're doing their helping thing?

[ ????? ]

Is that right?

[ Another pair of finger guns. (Granted, they're both rather lucky that Heine did, in fact, more or less grasp the point, since Midnight's starting to tip into his threshold of whether he can actually understand his own rambling or not.) ]

Mm. There are terrorist organizations advocating for Infected rights, you know. Re-un-ion. The goal is to help them get healthcare too, but they're a bit beyond wanting to be helped. It's a difficult task to reach individual members who want to be stable more than their rights... for good reason too.

[ Midnight laughs. ]

Ethan was Reunion... He was someone I worked with at home. RI rescued him from a botched operation in... Ursus, I think? Might've been during Chernobog, come to think of it. Anyhow, he's a lovely fellow. Just a bit disillusioned with the whole...

[ Midnight waves a hand expressively. Disillusioned with everything, more or less. ]

Trying to... make people see Infected as people, and not political tools, or subhuman. Miss Amiya — our CEO — she'd like that too, but she has a few tricks up her sleeve to make things like that happen. Lots of powerful people looking out for her.

[ He huffs. He's rambling, honestly. What he wouldn't give to get away from the politics of his world. He's as far away as he can get, honestly, but... ]

Willing to get their hands dirty for her, really.

[ heine is definitely putting the story together more through context clues than because midnight is telling it coherently, but for a guy who's drunk about half a bottle of straight liquor on his own, he's really not doing too badly. ]

Individual Infected or individual Reunion members? [ he imagines both probably need healthcare, and either would be difficult to reach on their own. the only comparison he has in his own world is most likely the mutants, although what they needed was less healthcare and more—protection, generally, from the people who wanted to buy and sell them like chattel.

at any rate, it sounds like there are at least a few people in midnight's world who care about that sort of thing. making sure that people are treated equally, and not just as pawns on some larger political chessboard.

what heine really wants to ask is how midnight ended up among the ranks of the infected, but that still seems too personal. ]

How long have you been working there?

Yes. Both. At the same time, even. Even when the terrorists are rather ornery enough to use ballistic weaponry.

[ Oppression gives people trust issues. Who knew?

Midnight curls up his long, long legs. He is so tall that it kind of looks funny, like some sort of spider taking a nap. ]

A little less than a year before I came here. And I'd been living on the landship for aboth half a year before that... I'd never been outside of Higashi before I moved to RI, and in that year I've been to more foreign nations than I'd ever imagined. Ursus, Lungmen, Leithanien, Kazimierz, Kjerag. We were around 600 kilometers from the borders of the capital of Victoria before this place decided to take me even farther from the capital of Victoria.

[ He's honestly an open book, even when he's sober. No question is too personal, especially when it comes to his past. Why would it? It's not now, and now is clearly far more important. ]

That's a lot of traveling. [ there's a lot about what midnight is saying that's interesting to heine, but that's where his mind sticks first: that's a lot of traveling. 600 kilometers is a lot of kilometers outside a city to be. ] It's nice that there's...

[ he realizes halfway through the sentence that this is going to be one of those things where he accidentally says something depressing about the state of the world and makes the conversation awkward. so heine drops that remark and instead says, ]

You really are a... what do they call it. [ he's had just enough to drink that he has to hunt for the term. ] A jack of all trades. Sarkaz of all trades.

[ from callboy to escort to paramilitary for a pharmaceutical company, traveling the world to help those in need. or something. really, in comparison heine doens't think he's done a single thing with his life. ]

[ ... Midnight will fill in the rest by himself, and his imagination isn't great, but does supply some possibilities grim enough that he resolves to ask about it at some point. ]

I'm only good at what I care to maintain some skill at. I wouldn't say all trades... Just anything I like.

[ He grins. ]

I really, really had a vested interest in trying to improve at speaking to people, so I did. It was a relief to know that I enjoy the process, but I can't say that it was always as simple as letting others know what's on my mind. Some days, it's not easy at all.

[ ... Midnight inclines his head, gestures at Heine. ]

Not sure if I've ever asked: What's something you'd like to be good at?

[ it's not that heine has a problem talking about it—his life is what it is, as depressing as that may be—but there's a time and a place to bring the mood down that much, and he doesn't think this is it.

the question takes heine by surprise, and he tilts his head briefly as he considers it. surely there's some sort of generic answer he could give, but heine is just tipsy enough to be honest, so he draws his knees up to his chest and puts his chin on them and says, ]

People, I guess. [ what does that even mean. ] A lot of... things that come easily for most people are really difficult for me.

[ like smiling. laughing. knowing when something is a joke and when it isn't. knowing how to be vulnerable, how to reach out to someone who needs support. holding hands. being touched, generally. all things heine has only just now started to learn, in the last five or so months of his life. ]

Probably nothing for it but time, right?

Time around people, to be precise. But yes, of course. Time is a large part of the process.

[ Midnight leans his head back, closes his eyes. He thinks of Miss Popukar, suddenly. With her gentle nature, her sweetness in between bouts of confusion, dementia. It's occurred to him, among other possibilities, that she may have come from a lab. She was swinging around that chainsaw for years, but never learned how to read... ]

Someone who understands well enough to let you learn at your own pace... Someone a bit more worldly. That sort of person would serve you well.

[ ... Midnight opens an eye. ]

Is your Mr. Badou like that?

Yeah, sure. Time around people. [ what does heine know about it, really.

—no, that's not fair. he knows some, now. despite how many years he spent back home keeping everyone at arms' length, for their own safety if not his own, now that he's here it's been harder not to connect. which is, he thinks, part of the problem. until now, he had never realized how much the simple fact of day to day interactions could hurt.

hearing your mister badou jolts him straight out of those thoughts. of course midnight asks about badou. he's already thought about badou so much today—what's a little more. ]

Yeah, I guess so. He knows me better than anyone. [ and in between bouts of wanting to throw each other through the drywall, badou is very patient with him. ] Besides the Bishop, he was the first person I met after I escaped, so... he's seen a lot of me over the years.

Awfully patient of him. It's terribly fortunate that you two like each other so well.

[ Which, given what he knows about Heine's personality, might be a bit much to say, but Midnight's made an entire reputation out of being a bit much, so he's truly going to commit to this bit. ]

So long as the Bishop isn't here to keep an eye on the both of you, you'd best stay mannerly around each other.

[ This is truly a joke. Midnight understands that Badou, quite literally, threw Heine into a wall. ]

I don't know if I'd use patient to describe him.

[ the only sign of amusement in heine's expression is a little lift at the corners of his eyes, but it's there, and it's real. in truth badou is actually very patient with him, despite his biting commentary and sharp-edged sense of humor. and, despite how reluctant heine had been for much of their partnership to even refer to badou as his friend, yes—heine does like him. very much, in fact.

which is, he thinks, maybe part of the problem. ]

And anyway the Bishop's even less mannerly than either of us, which is saying something.

[ heine, raised literally underground, and badou, a scrappy orphan who practically raised himself—neither of them possessed of much of anything by way of manners. ]

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October Catch-all!

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