![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The lost cub isn't so much roaming the woods, as carefully scouting, each step cautious. He pauses, partially concealed by a tree, when he spots the kin, and for a moment, he simply watches.
It isn't that he makes any specific noise to announce himself when he begins his approach, but more that he simply ceases trying to conceal his presence.
Nicodemus doesn't seem to be doing anything particularly interesting during the period he's being observed from the treeline by the lost cub. He does shuffle his feet once to redistribute his weight, as if he's been standing there for a while. A few seconds after you extract yourself from the treeline, he turns his head to look in your direction. "Good afternoon, Duke. Come to observe this peculiar occurance, too?" He might have been focused elsewhere or on other things, but Nick seems to be /quite/ aware of his surroundings.
"Making sure none of the spirits get away," Duke answers, and he halts his approach still well back from where the spiders work to repair the gauntlet. "You gotta be careful. They're dangerous."
"I've got a taser if one of them gets feisty," Nick replies, seemingly not overly concerned about one of the pattern spiders coming after him. "So this creature that attacked the caern last night did this? Or was it something else that didn't come through?"
Skirting a few steps to the side to where he can see Nick and still keep an eye on the spirits, Duke lifts a shoulder in a shrug. "I don't know," he answers. "Maybe it did it? It came when the wall broke. But I don't know if it broke the wall. There wasn't anything else. Except that vine thing coming from the cave. But that wasn't trying to fight us."
Nicodemus hmms thoughtfully. "What do you think the vine was trying to... shoo," he says, incorporating a shooing gesture with one hand, to one smaller pattern spider that came a little closer than the others. The spider pauses, turns around, and goes back to doing whatever it was doing before. Nick resumes, "What do you think the vine was trying to accomplish? Any theories on that?"
"I don't know," Duke repeats, along with another shrug. "Maybe it was fighting the bird monster." He watches the spider with an expression of distaste and distrust, and then his gaze goes to some of the other spirits closer to the center. "Maybe it was trying to help. But it died, so nobody asked it."
Nicodemus places gloved hand in gloved hand behind his back again, surveying the caern's center and the spirits within. "I've heard of older cities having a city spirit--a spiritual embodiment of the city it represents. It stands to reason that it would be feasible for a forested area to potentially develop a forestly spirit that embodies the quintessential essence of the forest itself. And it might have manifested the vine in an attempt to save this place." A beat. "Or maybe the garou. But I'm guessing not so much." He then looks at you. "Bawn fruit. This could be a sentient remnant of the bawn fruit, too."
Duke turns a quizzical look to Nick. "It wasn't a fruit," he says with a shake of his head. "It was just a vine." He takes a tentative forward step, still several feet from where the spiders work, and then points at the withered vegetation just visible at the mouth of the cave. "See?"
Nicodemus ahs. "Sorry. It's just a generic name I gave to the stuff I heard that was growing on the bawn earlier." He offers a more detailed explanation. "A few years ago, when the Wyld seemed to be affecting some plant growth on the bawn, some of the more adventures garou ate some of the fruit these plants produced. It temporarily altered them in seemingly random ways. There was a big to-do about not eating fruit from the bawn. And thus, bawn fruit. Or bramble fruit." He admits, "The term I came up with wasn't exactly accurate in a technical sense." He waves a gloved hand towards the dead vine. "Case in point."
"Werewolves are stupid," Duke says once the kin explains. "They know what the Wyld is. Even if I didn't know what it was called, I knew what it was, and eating stuff that's got too much of it is stupid. They wouldn't eat something that had too much Wyrm in it. Or too much Weaver. But they're stupid." He steps a bit closer to the gauntlet's edge, almost close enough to toe the line, and then pulls back.
Nicodemus smiles faintly in amusement as Duke claims out loud that werewolves are stupid. "Some are, just like some people are. I think--and this is just what I think on the matter--I think that the garou become accustomed to taking punishment that would kill or cripple a human being. And they bounce back from it. I'm ultra-cautious whenever I pick up a gun. Glass Walkers, on the other hand, shoot their cubs just so the cub gets it through their head that a bullet is effectively nothing to a garou. This regenerative capability builds a sense of recklessness. A belief that, hey, it'll be okay after my body shakes it off. This all leads up to risk-taking behaviors, like eating bawn fruit for fun and to see what it will do." He summarizes. "It's not stupidity: it's wanton recklessness."
"Stupid," Duke repeats with a shake of his head, and one hand absently rubs at a spot on his abdomen. "They shoot the cubs just for fun? I'm glad they didn't want me. I died getting shot, once. It still hurts."
Quasimodo crosses over from the Umbra into the caern, looking exhausted. He slumps against the caern tree and whuffs a greeting to Duke and Nick.
"I heard they do. I've never witnessed it firsthand, but when a cliath tells you about his initiation into the local tribe... Why would he make that sort of thing up?" Nick simply shrugs. "It actually makes sense, in a brutal way. /I'm/ afraid of guns, and I used to be a police officer. They're dangerous. Shoot a new cub with a gun, show them what it's like to be shot and how they can heal from it completely in a quarter of a minute, and it takes a lot of the mystery and fear out of guns. It might even save their life--or the lives of others." As the wolf transitions into the caern through the umbra, Nick offers him a quiet nod. To Duke he concludes, "It's an imperfect solution for an imperfect world."
"I got stabbed a bunch of times," Duke says, glancing to the Bone Gnawer and acknowledging his presence without pausing his speech. "And bitten. And clawed. Do they make them practice that stuff, too? Emma just makes me run a lot."
Quoz shifts, with some difficulty, to homid for Nick's benefit. It's pretty gruesome to watch, especially with Quoz's disfigurements. Eventually he ends up bent over next to the tree. "Good evening." He blinks at Nick. "Uh, you sure it's okay for you to be here now, Nick? The Gauntlet is shredded, you know." He glances at Duke. "Some tribes do, or give pretty brutal combat training. I'm surprised that you're not bleeding half the time. The Get are usually especially tough on cubs." He turns back to Nick, practically gasping for breath. "Have you heard that one of your friends showed up last night?"
"I've mostly heard about how cubs get trained, not actually seen it firsthand. But I've heard about the experience from cubs and elders alike. The Walkers do similar things with their cubs," Nick assures Duke. "To better prepare them for what's to come later. I think the elders have to figure out where that comfortable balance is between being nice and not sending a garou out on their own without the basic skills to survive--and not screw things up for others. Too far either way is not going to be a good thing, so.... Find a comfortable gray area, I guess?" To the Gnawer he says, "Two garou present. Jacinta's within yelling distance, for sure. And it's the umbra for a caern and full of Wyld spirits that would protect me as being a part of this place." A beat. "Or kill me if I did something to damage it, I'd imagine." He offers, "Some people, when they go to the Grand Canyon, have to go stand on the edge. And some people don't. I suppose it's a matter of which kind of person you are."
Duke looks at the spiders again, and perhaps even more than the kin, he stands well back from the point where the Gauntlet was sundered. "Emma didn't stab me," he clarifies for Nick. "Nobody stabbed me for practice. Only the monsters. And I already know how to fight," he adds for Quoz. Again, his gaze focuses on the spirits in the caern. "Maybe the wall will get fixed soon. Or maybe they can do that magic thing and find out my moon job while it's broken." The last is added as a suddenly brilliant afterthought.
Quoz sighs. "I hope so. Spent the last few hours feeding spiders. And I didn't have much energy left after that thing drained us last night." To Duke, he says, "Well, yours is something of an odd situation. Most cubs can't fight their way out of a wet paper bag when they're first found." He nods at Nick. "One of the Eaters from Hanford showed up last night, if you hadn't already heard."
Nicodemus says to Duke, "You're kind of a very rare exception to the general rule, but you seem to be doing well and hanging in there fine. You should be proud of that, you know?" He shifts his attention to Quoz, lips thinning. "So it came from Hanford, huh?" He sighs and then states, "They don't actually eat things. They negate them. Oh, hey! How did you all manage to kill it? Beyond feeding Riley and Marcos to it?"
You paged Sheogorath with 'You want a log of this? Dunno if caern spirits would be paying attention to Nick standing on the threshold of the rip while chatting to a pair of garou.'.
Duke offers a shrug at the praise, or perhaps simply the mention of the oddity of his situation, but lifts a hand at Nick's question, fingers curved inward. "Claws," he says aloud. "I was going to bite it, too, but the black was trying to get inside me, so I just ripped it up, instead. Lots of people ripped it up."
Sheogorath pages: Sure!
Quoz shrugs. "We didn't really do anything special, we just kept attacking it until it was dead. It didn't have blood or organs, just this black ichor that also seemed alive and it was freezing cold." He points to a healing wound on his shoulder. "It speared me with its beak and the wound felt cold and numb, I couldn't use my arm for a minute. It had two heads, one tangible and one that was some kind of shadowy substance that was hard to see."
Nicodemus listens and nods his ackowledgement once the two garou have explained how they killed the creature. "Interesting. So it was killed in much the same way that the Spirals were killed on the Great Hunt? And the black ooze that remained--Rite of Cleansing dealt with it fairly efficiently, I'd imagine?"
"The rain," Duke says, his tone somewhat impatient. "The rain washed away all the black. It washed it off the people and off the ground." That said, he sidesteps a few feet to get a view of the spirits in the center from yet a different angle.
.
Quoz nods. "Jacinta conducted the rite, I and a few others helped. We killed it pretty much the same way we kill most things, claws, teeth, gifts, etc."
Nicodemus hmms at this information, digesting it. Speaking of digestion.... "I'm going to go step out and use the facilities. Back in a short bit," he says.
Duke reaches down and picks up a good sized pebble. He rolls it between his fingers and then tosses it, side-arm, into the caern, the way one might skip a stone across the lake.
Nicodemus returns from the woods in short order: mission accomplished. "So," he resumes. "Cleansing took care of the black ooze. But cleansing didn't take care of the chilled feeling that seemed to be persisting afterwards in those who'd touched the stuff?"
Duke's gaze follows the bouncing of the pebble until it comes to rest, taking in the scattering of spirits in its wake. "I don't know," he says, looking over to Nick at his return. "I didn't get cold. I got bruised, but I didn't let the black get inside me."
"That's probably for the best." Nick then wonders aloud, "I wonder what the ooze would do to just a plain old person? Someone who wasn't a garou. Not that I think we ought to find out by testing it on someone," he clarifies.
"They were talking about what it did to the bad werewolves," Duke says, boot scuffing the ground as he seeks out another good sized rock. "It turned them into other monsters. And that raven person said that the bird got all weird." He hefts the rock he finds, tossing it up and catching it again. "So probably that's what it'd do to a normal."
You say "Turns them into slaves. Zombies. Puppets, right? I'd heard that the Spirals from the Great Hunt had all been wearing metal collars. Designed to have chains run through them to secure prisoners."
Duke tenses, just briefly, at that suggestion, and then throws the second rock. He doesn't aim directly at the lune by the tree, but the rock comes near enough that the shimmering spirit seems to feel the need to dodge, regardless. "I didn't see them," he says. "I heard somebody say they were trying to do a magic trick with them. But I don't know what."
Nicodemus eyes the thrown rock and the resulting dodge from the lune spirit. "Might not be a good idea to chuck rocks at spirits," Nick suggests helpfully before he asks, "Any idea what kind of magic--gift, ritual, or god-knows-what--or who was doing it?"
The cub looks as if he might have been planning a repeat performance, but dusts his hands on his oversized jeans, instead. "I don't know. The bad werewolves, I think? But maybe it was the black stuff inside them that was doing the magic trick."
Nicodemus steps up to where the gauntlet ceases to exist, then looks in. "I've got a theory about that. The only way to get rid of the black ooze is to use Cleansing on it. So it's damn hard to get rid of or otherwise affect. What if the reason it's hard to effect is because it's from a parallel universe--not another spirit realm, but another universe that mirrors all the levels of our own. And the two are incompatible. When they touch, they dissolve and negate one another. But we have a hard time touching. What if the--whatever--from this parallel universe found that the easiest way to influence the public's will was not physically controlling, but instead mental controling? Puppets. Who could act in concert with the puppetmaster's desires."
Duke blinks at Nicodemus, actually blinks, though an otherwise blank stare.
Nicodemus looks suddenly a little sheepish. He waves a hand dismissively. "Wild theories and speculations," he says, self-dismissing what he's said.
"Oh," Duke says usefully. He looks past Nick and then to the kin. "How do you get another universe? And how would it get here?"
Nicodemus hesitates for a few seconds, perhaps considering the merits of even attempting to explain the idea he just proposed and dismissed. In the end... "Okay. So. Imagine you asked some guy on the street where Heaven was and where Hell was. Which ways would he point?"
The question seems to bring far more confusion to the youth than the kin might expect, and he gives it serious thought. Eventually, he points toward the cave with an expression that implies guesswork.
Nicodemus picks it up there and runs with it. "Right. Most people point downwards for Hell and upwards for Heaven. I bet a lot of garou even point upwards--or think upwards--when talking about the near umbra. Even though it's clearly not up," Nick says, gesturing with his hand towards the right-there-and-intermingling realm/umbral coexistence in the caern. "You still with me?"
Duke nods, slowly at first, but then with more confidence. "Because they can't think about something being in the same place but not in the same place. It has to be in a direction."
"Precisely. And that's probably because the human mind--and the wolf mind as well--thinks in purely three-dimensional space." Nick picks up a twig and sketches a cube in the dirt. "Now here we have a cube. Except it's not a cube. It's a representation of a three-dimensional object that's been compressed into a plane--two dimensions. That make sense?"
"You drew a picture," says the cub, perhaps not quite as enthusiastically as might be hoped for. "It's flat. Because you can't draw it the way it really is."
"If I had a sheet of paper, I could construct it in three dimensions. And then I could flatten it two make it two dimensions. Or, well, nearly so. But.... I'm digressing," Nick says as he starts picking up leaves that've fallen here and there. He holds one leaf up. "So imagine that this leaf is the physical world, but made flat. Or seen as being flat as that's the only way to represent it with our own reality."
Duke tips his head to the side, watching skeptically. "Okay."
Nicodemus places the leaf flat in the palm of his other hand. He picks up a second leaf. "This is the near umbra, made flat. It stacks on top of the physical world." He places it atop the first leaf. "Now the umbra is on top of the realm. But it's effectively not a big distance beween the two compressed realities, is it?"
This time the cub frowns. "Yeah. Because it's not on top. It's..." He lifts his hands and interlaces his fingers in demonstration. "It's together."
Nicodemus starts layering on leaf after leaf after leaf. "And these are all other umbral realms. Tribal homelands. Deep umbra. Atrocity realm. Digital web. Malfeas. And so on and so on and so on. It looks like it has height to the stack, but--compressed--this reality and all of the spirit realms and God knows what else that's out there are folded down, overlapping and interwoven, into a two-dimensional plane. All just mashed flat."
The frown deepens, and Duke's eyes narrow as he considers all of this. "Okay," he says after a moment, but his voice doesn't sound convinced.
Nicodemus drops all but two of the leaves, letting them fall to the ground. He places one back in his hand. "So this leaf represents everything that was in my hand before. All the realms compressed into a two-dimensional existence." He holds the second leaf over the first with his other hand. "And this is an equally complex parallel reality. Except imagine that our reality is like a clock that goes forward, and there other reality is where the clock goes backwards. An opposite reality that provides balance. But these realities can't touch. Can't be flattened into one. Because when a clock that goes forward meets a clock that goes backwards, time stops. It ceases to exist."
Again, the youth frowns, some part of him skeptical, another struggling to comprehend. "But where'd the other one come from? If the world-- Gaia or whatever-- made this universe, what made that other one? The world made everything there is. Where'd that one come from?"
Nicodemus raises the index finger on his free hand, indicating that you've gotten the basic concept of where he's going with this so far. "If Gaia created all the realities represented by this leaf, and there's another set of realities diametricly opposed to Gaia and everything that represents, then there's an Anti-Gaia with this parallel reality. Here, cold isn't a thing. It's just how we describe the absence of heat. But in this other universe, there'd be cold, and heat would be the absence of cold. Light would be the absence of dark instead of the other way around."
Again the youth frowns, brow furrowing at the description. "Okay," he says, again, only this time it's clear that it's not.
You say "Now these two universes can't touch." He holds one leaf above the other. "Because if they do, where they do, they cease to exist. If you take the hot and the cold and have them touch, you don't get warm. You get nothing. You take the light and the dark and have them touch, you don't get low-light conditions. You get nothing. And normally, this would never be a concern. Because this," Nick moves the two leaves, one hovering over the other, "is so complex and so inconceivable that we wouldn't even know how to start or where to look. We're limited in what we can comprehend at this level. Hell. We're limited to what we can really and truly understand well before this. But just because it's inconceivable to us doesn't mean it's inconceivable to others." He then proposes, "I suspect that whoever--or whatever--is behind our recent troubles is... I think the blackness , the ooze, is the result of reality disappearing via some kind of bridge. Using it like a weapon. But what for?""
Duke gives a rough shake of his head, clearly having difficulty following, now. "I don't know. If it destroys both sides... nothing from either side should want it. Except the Wyrm. The Wyrm wants to destroy everything. Not the... Not the one that makes things bad, but the one that wants it all gone. When the Wyld made stuff, and the Weaver put it together."
Nicodemus nods. "Possibly. I'm unfamiliar with the bit players in the garou cosmology and history. But a spirit that wants to wipe the slate clean? This would be a means to do so. And to bridge the gap, you'd probably need something on the subatomic level. Which explains the attraction the blackness has to radioactive waste." He admits, "It's a lot to think about, and highly speculative."
"The Wyrm's the bad one," Duke explains, taking the opportunity to latch onto something he understands. "Mostly. And the Weaver, too, sort of. But the Wyrm's the one that makes most of the monsters. The Weaver wants everything to be perfect. The Wyld doesn't really want anything. And it's kind of dying. It would probably be bad, too, if it wasn't dying. Like the fruit thing. That's really all the important parts."
"True. But here's the other thing. I've heard that this black ooze doesn't show up when people try to sense Wyrm. Yet it disappears when the Rite of Cleansing is performed. That's because, from what I've heard, the rite of cleansing affects Wyrm, Wyld, and Weaver. It doesn't eliminate them: it rebalances them to where they ought to be." Nick pauses for a second before continuing and driving his point home. "And if there is Nothingness--black ooze--in this realm, then the Cleansing rite should be capable of removing it, like you say happened yesterday in the caern."
"So why don't we just go do the cleaning trick where it came from?" Duke asks, looking from the leaves to the center of the caern.
Nicodemus raises his shoulders in a shrug. "It'd probably have to be done in this reality to close the bridges to the other. And most of the black ooze seems to be concentrated down in Hanford. I don't know about you, but I've already got my grab bag and ready. This will likely get ugly and violent."
Duke grins across at the kin, straightening. "That's better than waiting and doing nothing," he says. "I know how to fight. I know how to hunt the monsters. I don't know how to do the magic tricks, and I don't know how to wait."
"The time for action should be coming swiftly," Nick confides to Duke. "You might want to go turn in for a bit, rest up. Could be tomorrow."
Duke runs his fingers back through his hair, and the grin slips away. "Yeah," he says. "Okay." He turns, taking a few steps away from the merged worlds and then looks back over his shoulder. "Be careful about the spirits. Don't let them get away."
Nicodemus nods agreement. "Sure thing. You be careful out there yourself."
