Cirlot

Sorry for the shortish post - writing this on a borrowed laptop. With any luck I'll have the parts in hand for my own within a day or two.

Kit Lee-Shen Wei - Konoru Shrine [Night 1 12.23.18] "Suckers bet - " Kit responds with a dry chuckle as he reaches down and grabs the bottle before Taro can go back for . . . fourths? fifths? His own partaking sat uneasily: there was a detachment ro the process that left him at odds with his vices. To feel the liquor sit, churn and clash but never meld with the vitality that infused him, to just cycle back upon itself with dissipation or consumption. Buzzed without relief or inflection, the whiskey sat as an oilslick over his awareness in a single smoldering, peaty note as thin and as fragile as glass. Hells. Forget Taro, he'd had to much. Shaking his head, Kit played keep away with the bottle even as Aki eyed the monk from the shadows, her eyes fixed on the flushed throb of his neck. It would be easy. So easy. Too easy. " - you're cut off. Rule is when you start betting your inheritance the bottle goes away. Technically you probably broke that earlier tonight, but when you start wagering with ME its past time . . ." gently prodding the monk away with the but off the bottle, he stepped back far enough that the step made his insides slosh unpleasantly and he nearly stumbled over the still-sitting form of Sakura, legs curled beneath her on the grass. She didn't look up as Kit windmilled to keep his balance, instead kept her eyes low, fixed to her phone, thumbing through something Kit couldn't quite see. He almost cursed - not at her, though given his drink and his temper that restrain surprised him - in surprise, before catching himself. It was odd, seeing her on her phone. Despite the lifeline it had provided her art she resisted the terminal online existence that Ava strove for, and to see her searching . . . images flashed under her thumb, to fast to follow, long-limbed specters with glowing eyes, fangs, creepy-pasta horror page after page afer page, tinged with the promise of blood. Kit shook his head and she was gone. Raking fingers through his hair, Kit scowled into dead air for a moment before the scowl went solemn and irritation turned to concentration. "Ask for the originals." He says it aloud, surprising himself as he looks to Taro. "Any recordings. Get the originals - " shifting from his backfoot, Kit straightened, flicked an impatient hand towards his temple, irritated that it took so long for the thoughts to engage. " - two reasons. If this is a mundane thing, you want those images controlled. Gives us leverage on the criminal without having to take this to the police, which - " he blew out a breath through clenched teeth. That was a recipe for all manner of horrors, even when horrors weren't involved. " - would just make things worse. Absent a perp in hand they'll turn this on the parents, beat a confession out of otosan in the name of public order. So if this is just a person, we handle it in house and we need the leverage. And it spares the parents and the kids. Copies means this can get uploaded into the wild, originals can be locked away or destroyed." "And if it ain't mundane, if it's your . . . thing - " an inarticulate shrug. " - horror movie rules. Risk of contagion. This shit gets passed around and it could spread to new targets, or call down attention of things you don't want. Secure. Contain. Protect. Got it? If you get any footage, have 'em scrub the devices and hand over the hard drives or memory cards to me. I'll keep 'em safe."

Short post up to keep the momentum going, and it's the nature of the current Q&A I think; one question leads to another so it's hard to bake a bunch in.

"You, my friend - " Kit sighed, clapping the monk on the back. " - are an asshole, and a master at burying the lead." "Coulda just said you'd seen some shit. Didn't need to do - " a nod to the bottle, to the shrine. All of it. " - whatever all this is. Frankly, I should be insulted. Getting me drunk. Taking advantage to get me agree to some woo-shit. Must think I'm a cheap date." Sighing, Kit got to his feet, brushed off his pants and offered Taro a hand up. From the grass Sakura looked up at him, unreadable before turning away, her attention going back to the koi-pond and some mystery he couldn't fathom. "Look, don't know what I'm gonna find, and I'm skeptical as shit that this some sort of Ringu BS but if I could survive the mundane shit I dealt with tonight, not much worried about tomorrow. I'll be there. And we got the same thought for different reasons - best I do this solo. If it's a spiritual thing, well, it's like you say, and if it's a living perv then they'll have made you whereas I'm so much a stranger." "Any chance any of these worried fathers or childer actually joined the twenty-first freaking century and had I dunno, a phone or webcam or something up when shit went down? Getting eyes on ahead of time might help."

I'll second Rakle's caution - in line dice (and OOC tags) both seem to cause weird interactions where the resultant string gets treated as a unique object in the forum code which can trample formating, erase lines and make even simple things like paragraph breaks go awry. The one thing I've found that helps is build the inline dice rolls into the post first, code them, and then backfill the rest of the post to that point? It's a pain but it's prevented me from losing data since I first stumbled across the issue. Kalan tries to-hit for potential damage EDIT: other odd behavior: the results don't show in-line when I orignally post the response, I need to reload the thread to get the inline results to display what's recorded in the diceroller at the bottom of the post. Odd.

Fair warning I might be offline for a short bit - my laptop is having fan issues so chances are it's going into the shop as soon as I can confirm they have the parts. Hopefully it's a simple swap but no telling 'til someone can look at it.

Kit Lee-Shen Wei - Konoru Shrine [Night 1 12.23.18] Kit goes still - glass half raised to his lips, cig slowly smoldering to ash in his hand - at Taro's description. He knows before Taro speaks of dreams, or crying. Before Taro speaks of blood. He knows without knowing and the false seeming, the pretense of the life he no longer had began to slip away. He still breathed, he still flushed pink at the warmth of the whiskey but his heart stopped and did not beat again. Sakura places a steadying - or is it warning? - hand upon his leg while behind him in the depths of the shrine Aki growled, a low tigress's rumble as she stalked between the gates. Setting his glass down on the bench, Kit frowned, leaning forward and settled his hands beside him on the grass. "Fuck, Taro." Then, with a speed which would have recommended his mortal self but shamed his immortal one, Kit thumped the monk hard on the arm. "You little shit. Seriously? Get me liquored up and tell goddamn ghost stories trying to get me to - " the offending fist opened into a hand, flailed this way and that in the space between them. " - you have a bunch of old men having bad dreams and you think 'this is a problem for my buddy Kit?'" Shaking his head, Kit slumped back against the bench. He made a show of a sigh, picked up his glass, downed it in a single gulp. He barely tasted the burn. Across from him Sakura's eyes were shining glass, wolf's eyes, shimmering with reflected light as her face went calm and still and scared. He could feel her fingers digging into his leg, just to the point of pain but not beyond it. "I'm not sure what you expect me to do." He delays the concession, draws it out the length of his cigarette, letting the the smoke fill the space between them while he thought. Feared. Of course there were more like Rin. Like Ripley. Like this goddamn tower. He hadn't even met the one yet and now another one was here, in his backyard. Which he knew, knew was his problem. Because Sakura wasn't just warning him with those eyes and those claws, she was holding him down, keeping him from pacing like Aki, like a caged thing ready to leap it's enclosure and take on the interloper. "Will they even talk to me?" He gestured to himself, the half-wasted hustler with the wrong way eyes. "Like, I can ask around, and if you can get the details - who, where, when - I can try piecing something together to see if there's something in common. Maybe they're all sitting on landfills, sucking down radon every night, or their wives are part of the same MLM . . " he traffics in the mundane because it's what Kit of two nights ago would do. What the Kit that Taro is drinking with and is laughing and smoking and slightly buzzed should do. " - look, odds that this is an actual, RL fujoshi is pretty damn small. You get you're just trotting me out to make 'em feel like the secular world is taking their concerns as serious as the spiritual one, right?" Running a hand through his hair, Kit stabbed out his cigarette on the grass, grinding out the spark in the dirt. "Just . . . send me the details, I'll see what I can do."

Neve Nevergreen - Smallfolk Rogue "There's danger in ascribing purpose to circumstance, but I agree - " Neve ran her fingers across the blade and pommel of the danger as she scanned the papers from behind and beside and beneath Val's elbow, the spatter of cold wet and drip making the smallfolk more than a little glad that it had been the druid that had braved the muck this time around. "- the facts do seem to suggest something. Or many things. At the very least that the treaty was answered poorly; if there be law of guestright for folk, amongst peoples and those that govern so to stands the right of parley. To kill a messenger is . . ." Neve took in a breath, shook her head, surprised at the brazenness of it despite it all. "That said, we might be seeing an alliance forcibly prevented. I can't think of an easier way to prevent common cause than to make such a courier disappear before delivering their missive. And this - " Neve tapped the blade. " - is an assassins weapon. Magicked to purpose in fact: when used from stealth it would double the killing force of a strike in unskilled hands. In mine or Edgewick's it would triple the heft of the blow." "Useful, if we intend to deal with the Derro by stealth. Though the treaty might serve us as well - could we alter it, perchance? If so we might have means to force them to converse rather than putting the matter straight to arms." At the dubious look of her companions she sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose and raising a hand in surrender at her own naivete. "I am aware 'tis unlikely, but to argue it the messenger was killed from behind. That suggests no more stomach for open confrontation than we have which might give us room to ruse and work if we present our case with forceful diplomacy. Maybe. Or - " at this she eyes the knife somewheres between warily and hungrily. " - we'll fall back to the the blade in the dark, make safe the underhalls that way." Out of Character I'm assuming that between Neve's Read Magic and her Magic User ability to use items she can sus out the dagger without much difficulty.

A much belated (Sorry!) third on the best wishes. Keeping my fingers crossed for you for a solution and/improvement! Also, sympathies and vibes, that . . . Well, it sounds shitty and scary and that deeply sucks.