| We Found Waldo! | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary: Caliga FINALLY resurfaces and we get a glimpse of where he's spent the last (IRL) thirteen months along with the first official reappearance of two pre-unification characters to discuss some of the reboot's aftermath... among other important things.    |
Nancy stands completely motionless, despite her hair and clothing whipping around by unfelt winds. Absently she smiles at Caliga while her eyes remain locked on the buildings in the distance. "You've set me back a bit, but it's fine. Although there's no telling how long you've been here." She glances back nervously. "Keeping this place out of phase is hard enough without trying to keep it in sync with the rest of Diablo's Twisted." Of course she'd refer to it as such. As it rests now Twisted is very much Diablo's property and creation. "Diablo's Twisted.. I suppose it is." Caliga doesn't turn to look at the young woman who brought him here. He does drop his left arm. "I'm running low on time, aren't I?" He scoots over on the bench some, patting it now for Nancy to sit beside him. "Diablo's in for a surprise, and I'm glad it'll be you giving it. However.. I still need your assistance with one more request. Knoweledge or Light.. Preferbly Light as he's a tad bit more agreeable. Do you think you could signal him?" The woman's shoulders drop at the request and the fog thickens a little around them. "Who exactly do I look like to you? I'm not Emepherea. I can't just snap my fingers and make the heavens part at your beckon call." Nancy sighs and pushes a strand of hair out of her eyes. "Besides, I don't know who you're talking about." The fog around them continues to thicken until most of the park around them is gone. "Now, if you'd be so kind as to focus on him I could probably bring him here. You're going to break my park, though. Hopefully he's not somewhere that's going to miss about 20 feet of room vanishing along with him." Caliga chuckles slightly as he climbs to his feet. "Don't summon him. If you're able to.. just let him know you're pulling on him. It should get his attention." He closes his eyes to picture the Advent of Light in all his laziness. All Caliga can do is picture the man most likely sitting in some dimension, sipping margaritas and griping about having to turn down the air conditioning. Of course, Crux Caedon could just be sleeping in some random place making it rather difficult for people to do their jobs, such as cleaing the counters at a bar. "Then again, if you can grab him fully... It may just be better to do it that way. Crux Caedon does like to run away if he gets the chance to." There are a number of inopportune moments in time and space that Crux Caedon could be pulled from. The endless amount of time he spends sleeping at a bar with people drawing on his face, the times when he's actually gotten drunk and his wings are leaking into the world again, that one time he got captured by the Exalts... naked... that was not a good time. All things considered, he really shouldn't be that upset when he finds himself yanked into the park, along with his armory. Not many people have an armory these days, and few people would expect someone who is generally either unarmed, or carries around nothing but a broken sword, to have their own room dedicated to weapons. Nonetheless, as Nancy pulls, the park is quickly crushed under the weight of a thousand artifacts, racks, walls, scrolls, and other such things. A golden naginata sits on a rack, perpetually frosted, and immediately starts causing a hoarfrost to appear on the ground beneath the rack - it landed atop the grass, so it's pretty, but not too destructive. A rack of various impressive and stylized swords falls on a pigeon. Poor thing. A blood-red lance with stylized vein-work carved into it lands (along with the surrounding tub of liquid nitrogen) on a planter. Some of the liquid splashes out and freezes the flowers within, but inside the tub, the spear is still glowing blood red and hissing as it perpetually evaporates the nitrogen - apparently not cold enough to cool whatever perpetual heat-source resides within. There are many other artifacts, some famous, some not. A familiar axe with inlaid nordic runes, a greatsword three times the size that any human could surely heft with celtic knotwork running along the edge, and even a katana so long that it could probably slice a boat from stem to stern. Overall, each weapon, even the weird black and red glowing stick with a golden hilt that looks more like a drill than an actual weapon, is of the kind of craftsmanship legends and myths are spawned from. Thousands of them now litter the park in the small 20-foot radius of Nancy's choosing. A hammer falls directly on Caliga. It's not very heavy, but should he let himself get hit by it, it's very hard to budge. Might be easier to just roll to one side and let it fall through the bench. Scratch that - would definitely be easier. In the midst of what is probably the largest conflux of illegal legendary artifacts to have ever graced the park, stands a white-haired man in a white t-shirt and black jeans. His white hair is getting a bit long, but the circles under his eyes have never gone away - in his hands he holds a small black dagger that seems to cut light as it flows over it - blackness simply drips from the dagger until it pools on the ground below, until the man twists it slightly, and the pool of black shifts over to the closest vertical surface, as if gravity were insignificant, only direction that the light was heading before it was cut. "..." The man slowly looks left, then right, assessing how much of his stuff has fallen out into the park, and then sighs. "...God. Damnit. Caliga." The fog pulls back to where it was originally once the park becomes cluttered. Nancy watches everything fall with eyes full of sadness. With a heavy sigh she kneels down to pick up one of the blades, at least until she notices the flowers. Dashing over to them she holds her hands out as if she was going to hug them but hesitated. A tear rolls down her cheek which she wipes away quickly. Rising up she marches back to Caliga, almost happy to see that he almost got hit. "I raised everything up to keep it from merging with the park and you STILL damaged most of it!" She wipes her eyes again, "Do you have ANY idea how hard it is for me to remove things when they get drug here?" Nancy turns to Crux with a sniffle. "I'm sorry... I'm so sorry..." Falling hammers generally have a way of making one move right on out of the way, and Caliga isn't any exception in this case. The man's eyes widen slightly as the hammer crushes through the bench, only to remain stationary once it touches the fog covered ground. However, the utterance that escapes Crux Caedon's mouth is one that causes him to frown. "I'm sorry Crux." There's a general sincerity to his words, only for him to turn towards Nancy, bowing deeply towards the young woman once again. "Nancy... Thank you. I do apologize for this, but this is most likely going to be the single most important thing I do." The man strides quickly towards the Advent, easily covering the distance between the two. "Crux Caedon, Advent of Light. Student of Kalean Senretsu, Advent of Knowledge, forbear of my originating race. You can damn me all you want, but I'm not going to play around, and joke. You wanted to stay gone, and I would respect that, however I need your assitance as you are the only one who can do this." He quickly drops to a bow, once more, completely putting himself at the Advent's mercy. "Please, hear me out Crux. Then you can damn me all you well want." "You should be sorry." Crux frowns at Caliga, and glances past him at the hammer before sighing. "To me." The hammer literally flies past Caliga and into Crux's hand. He moves and sets it down in the liquid nitrogen next to the red spear and looks to Nancy. "You probably don't need to be sorry, though. It's usually his fault." The Advent turns to look at Caliga, again, and sighs. This one's a heave sigh. "Oh, get up. You look stupid like that and you talk too much today." He sets his jaw, then scrunches up his face a bit into something combining a grimance and a thoughtful expression. Unsurprisingly, he looks grumpy. "Why the formality?" As he looks over Caliga, tiny little portals open underneath the various weapons in the park, and that liquid nitrogen tub drops away from the flowers and onto the walkway, where it can't kill any more flowers. Bit late, but whatever. All of the weapons are re-racked pretty quickly, though the dagger just keeps falling into one portal and out of another above it endlessly. Looks pretty sharp - probably not a lot of things that can hold it save maybe anti-gravity. A brilliant silver lance strangely seems to come to rest against a bow, as if it were an arrow to be drawn rather than a lance. The bow is also quite silver, even the string, and the lance has flames etched into the sides. Nancy doesn't say much given that she has little to say at the moment. But the girl watches Crux's art with the portals and begins to clap. A lifetime of drawing things to her location has at the very least taught her to appreciate someone who can send things away again, especially with Crux's level of skill. Or his amazing talent of making his accidents look deliberate, but who's going to correct her when she doesn't say it out loud? "You don't notice it, do you?" Caliga shakes his head slightly as he rises, a slight frown resting on his face. "Kaldrath is dead, Crux. He's been dead for some time now." He moves to sit back on his bench, then realizes that it's fairly broken due to that hammer. He sighs loudly as he moves to sit on another bench. "Man, that bench and I have been through a lot recently. The boards had finally been formed to my shape, making it forever uncomfortable for anyone else to sit there..." "Nancy's the only reason I'm still in this form, Crux. I'm a time bomb, and really you're the only one who can assist me with what.. well.. what I really want this time. I could have asked Kalean, but I'd rather deal with you. We both know you're lazy and apathetic and can't be bothered to do more then sigh and bitch about having to do something.." For someone whose asking a favor, Caliga sure is doing a lot of pointing out the flaws in the Advent's personality. "Yet, you're still someone who will do what it takes in the end if its truly nessicary. Crux." Caliga closes his eyes and falls silent for a few moments only to lower his voice as if he were afraid of something that could interpret his wish the wrong way. "Crux. I want to die." As the various weapons eventually regain some semblance of order, Crux looks over them, trying his best to ignore Caliga's initial remark about Kaldrath being dead. His eyes did narrow a bit at the statement, though. He seems mostly satisfied, but then furrows his brows, and looks around for a moment, before a hissing king cobra jumps out of the grass nearby and aims to bite his face. He catches it by the throat, and it hisses, before turning back into a gnarled old staff that looks crappy and ancient and not-at-all magical. "Oh, get back with the others." He tosses it through a portal, and it ends up on another rack. When it lands, the rock walkway beneath the rack splits open loudly and violently. "Yes, yes, nobody cares." He shakes his head and looks back to Caliga finally. "So go off yourself. Hell's nice this time of year. Especially the desert." He pauses, and narrows his eyes further. "That fucking desert." Fixated much? After a moment, his eyes open fully again, which still looks kind of half-hearted, and he raises both eyebrows. "But you didn't have me pulled here so I could tell you to go to hell." Nancy glares at Caliga as he expresses his request, barely willing to let Crux say his piece before interrupting. "Oh, no. No no no no. I did not risk everything dragging your broken body back here from the Wastelands just to have you go and throw it all away. I could have left you out there to be broken apart by the chaos." She turns her head to watch Crux and the amazing cobra toss with an exasperated sigh before returning her attention to the matter at hand. "Senior Diablo is at the breaking point of his balance. Either we get some horrible, terrible evil to show up and risk hurting all the people of Twisted, or we get those people out of there." The woman marches up to Caliga and lightly smacks his chest with her fist. Actually she hits as hard as she can but that's not saying much. "You PROMISED you'd help them!!" Tears are running down her cheeks as she drops her head and backs away, not wanting to look at him any longer. This time she makes no effort to wipe her eyes. Her hands remain balled into fists at her sides. "Crux, for someone as smart as you are, you don't seem to understand." Caliga closes his eyes, remembering everything that's transpired recently. "I want to /die/. You're one of the only beings that can help me with what needs to be done." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a single white feather, only to cause it to burst into flames. As the feather burns, no ash falls. Nothing remains of it. "It's the last thing I can ever ask of you, and you have every right to tell me no. However, I'll just have to go asking the others who are capable of it. I'd just rather it'd be you." Caliga smiles slightly after he says that, then sighs. "No, I won't. I'm just asking you. So I won't threaten you either. Such a nice change of pace, isn't it?" He does move to stand once more, only to have Nancy start beating on him like he's a punching bag. "I didn't know you cared about me that much, Nancy." He moves to gently pat the young woman's head as she vents, nodding his head along with everything she says. "Nancy. Listen to me. I will be that big, horrible evil that would show up, and unless we had beings like Crux to intervene... I would destroy Twisted. Eventually I would be beaten, but the cost would be far to high. If it had to be that way, then getting those people out of there, and away from Diablo's permenant control is the best thing of all. There are those who would aid you in doing just that. My son.. he would assist you as well. Maybe even bitch far more then Crux bitches.." "Noone's better at complaining than me." Crux jerks his thumb towards his own chest instinctively, as if people needed reminding who 'me' is. "I just get to the point." He looks over them all for a moment, and then slowly his weapons start disappearing, one by one. He glances over to one of them, and with a gesture, the blade slides into his hand through another portal. It's a red katana, with a gear for a blade-guard, and black kanji running along the blade that spell out something inane about hell and hope. "Could seal you in here and lock you in my basement. But I don't know if you've noticed much, I don't actually go around killing immortals very often." The Advent points to the only weapon that wasn't scattered about, the one on his hip. "Last time I killed one, it cost me my sword. And she still whines whenever I unsheath the thing. You think I like having butterflies come out when I draw my sword? It's very masculine." The former Councilwoman ignores Crux for the most part. None of it matters to her. She waits her turn to speak as was drilled into her from the moment she was finally set free and then glares back at Caliga. "...I don't care about you. I don't even LIKE you. What I care about is those people! They don't have a say in this. Just like I used to be, they don't matter to anyone as everyone goes and plays God around them! These peasants beneath your feet are just background noise to the likes of you. BUT NOT ME!" The wave of her hand as she spoke included Crux in her comment about background noise. "I've seen them. I've met them. I've broken bread with them. Do you remember the cemetery on the end of Park Road? I -BURRIED- those people. ALL of them. Does that matter to the likes of you?! I brought it out with me when I was finally set free from that PRISON they locked me in for millennia!" Her attention goes back to Caliga directly. "BUT YOU!! I've met your daughter, at least I was told she was your daughter, and your former wife! She was erased when Diablo 'unified' everything with the help of that empathy demon. DO YOU EVEN CARE?!" She marches a few steps away, keeping her back to the both of them again. "I won't let them, or their memories down!! You PROMISED me you'd help them. If you're going back on that now, for whatever reason, then you might as well have your friend here take your life now and spare me the pain of putting up with you any longer!" "The Cemetary on Park Road, the farm house in the wasteland. I remember all of it, Nancy Dark." Caliga's body starts to glow slightly as more energy leaks from his being, tendrils of power flowing upwards. "The child that was erased, the lives destroyed. Do you know what my answer to that is?" He reaches into his left jacket pocket and pulls out a thin package which he tosses towards the girl. "/She/ will be the one to do what Diablo failed to do. She'll unify them all and he won't even realize it. He treated her like a tool. Just like Concordance treated you as one. However, they were victims of their own 'tools' in the end, now weren't they? Your role in this, Nancy Dark, is to do what I cannot. I cannot create worlds such as this, free from Diablo's influence. You can." He falls to his knees, wincing slightly as his features blur for just a moment. "Crux. I won't beg you because we both know you're just as indifferent to that as you are to pleading and outright common sense. However, you already know what's happening with me. It won't be now, as there is still more for me to do, but I need your help in the end." When Nancy includes Crux in the mention about godlike beings for whom regular people are just background noise, he furrows his brow, and just gives her an incredulous look. "You don't know me." That's all he says on the subject, because that's all he has to say. To Caliga, though, he gives another look. "Last time I agreed to help someone like this, I ended up cursed three ways from sunday, unable to move, frozen in outer space, dying every six seconds for an hour and a half from explosive decompression." Ew? "Think you can top that?" Nancy continues to keep her back to them allowing the package thrown at her to hit her in the back, her eyes gazing upon it once it hits the ground. At least unill Caliga drops to his knees. The woman turns and begins to move towards him yet catches herself at the last moment. Instead she reaches down to pick up the object with no intent of opening it. His words seem to fall upon deaf ears about her 'role', if her silence is any indication. Instead she opens her mouth to respond, but promptly closes it, looking back at Crux in a patient attempt at letting him speak next. Old habits once again. With four words he shoves a dagger into her heart and she averts her eyes to the ground, clutching the mystery package to her chest. After that she doesn't even want to speak, choosing instead to turn her back on them once more to hide her shame. Caliga's confirmation that he can top continual explosive decompression causes Crux to raise an eyebrow, but when he gets described as a ball of love and hope, he holds up his left hand to flip Caliga off with his fingerless gloves. Does he really think those are cool? With his right hand, he reaches out for a portal, and a flask with a rather amusingly functional compass-like 'fuel gauge' on it. He puts it up to his lips to have a sip, but as he discovers, the fuel gauge is reading empty right now. So much for drunk Russians. "Bah, wasn't as good as Sprecher's anyway." He chucks the flask over his shoulder, but a sharp eye will detect that it falls through a tiny portal, so he wasn't actually discarding it. "You wanna talk, fine." He opens a portal behind Caliga that's roughly person sized, and shakes his head. He'll wait for Caliga to finish up his conversation with Nancy before kicking him through, though. That's Crux. All heart. Over the course of the conversation Nancy has finally turned around again, but she stays quiet and keeps her eyes on the ground. She won't apologize for her words, maybe because even with the speech she gave on her soapbox she still places herself above the need to do so. At least in her defense there's no telling how much of that is the amount of time she spent sealed away from the rest of the multiverse and how much of it was the Council's conditioning when they finally let her out. With the opening of the portal she realizes she's nearly out of time, and she doesn't even understand what's been handed to her. "Wait. What is this? What do I do with it?" Unlike beings like Emi, she's not a goddess. She's just a child who's lived too long in solitude locked in a place where she couldnt die. Her powers aren't divine, they're a result of cruel experiments and testing. "You can't expect me to do something for you if you won't even tell me what it is!" ...and yet that's exactly what she expected of everyone else, irony that doesn't escape her as it leaves a bitter taste in her mouth. "It's something from before Twisted was erased and rebuilt. It belonged to the one who was once my wife. I'm giving it to you, because I expect you, young Nancy, to bridge them, and finally make it free like it should be. There are friends who will help you when you least expect it. I wouldn't expect much from this one though." Caliga grins slightly as he falls backwards, allowing himself to move through the portal before Crux has the chance to boot him. He still has some form of dignity. And so Crux watches Caliga fall backward through the portal, with a lot of words and not a lot of explanation. He shakes his head again - near omnipotent beings are always cryptic when they should be direct, and direct when they should be subtle. He looks to Nancy with a hint of sympathy, and as he walks towards the portal, he reaches out and, provided she doesn't dodge or anything stupid, pats her on the head like she's a little girl. Then again, he's an arrogant bastard, so he probably treats everyone like a kid sometimes. "Eh. At least he's my pain in the ass now, and not yours." He shrugs, and heads throw the portal, throwing a hand up in a passing wave. "You're cute, kid. Go be a bridge, or whatever he said. I've got no idea what he was talking about either." And with that, he walks through the portal and it closes. So helpful. Nancy blinks several times in confusion as everyone goes and leaves her. More so when the portal vanishes with a 'schlorp'. Staring at the space it occupied for a moment or two, the girl finally lowers her eyes at the box in her hands and opens it, staring at the earrings inside with more confusion. "Build a bridge with earrings..." She rolls her eyes briefly and glances back where her companions vanished. "Why can't anyone ever be specific except for Gegoshi?" She shakes her head as she goes back to her handy work once again, starting with trying to replace the items destroyed by Crux's arrival. "Not that I understood anything she was saying half the time, but at least she was specific." | |
Enable comment auto-refresher