[ gods above, that's a fancy pen. ness takes it with an appropriate amount of interest and respect without letting herself get distracted trying to inspect it too closely, even though she absolutely wants to inspect it closely. ]
It has been very difficult as a consummate note-taker to find new paper sources—you should see my personal sheaf, it's a mess.
[ a mess she WILL be transferring to an actual journal as soon as such a thing is available again.
ness quickly sets about making notes of what stephen's already mentioned, muttering energy build-up, painkiller treating symptoms to herself to keep on track. as soon as that's sorted, she pivots back to his question, making rapid notes as she explains. ]
The tentacles seem to be made of some kind of concentrated shadow, or darkness—they're fully physical, and they interact with the world, but they aren't like real animal flesh in any way. They don't last very long once they actually, ah, assert themselves, but the build-up to that can last a while, it's kind of variable? Like I said, though, it's been happening faster and more often since the magebane.
I had some magic prior to this, but nothing impressive, I could make little lights, that was all. Vazeiros—my father—he taught me. It's not unheard of to gain magic after contact with magical forces, and I—I—
[ here, ness finally stumbles, the rapid scratch of the pen on paper halted as she blinks, remembering exactly what had happened that she thinks started this whole stupid tentacle saga. carefully, minding the sudden tremor in her hands, she sets the pen back on the desk.
she'd done so well being impartial, impersonal in her explanation, only the facts, no value judgments or emotion clouding the important bits. now look at her. ]
I'm sorry, I just need—I have to gather my thoughts, I apologize.
[ The doctor’s fairly accustomed to people sitting in this room, door closed, giving a report about deeply personal topics. (Orlov, discussing things he absolutely did not want to discuss. Baynrac, the same.) He’s had months of practicing his actively-listening face. ]
Take your time.
[ The problem with Ennaris doing the notes, however, is that Strange doesn’t have anything to do with his hands while he waits for her to re-compose herself. So he folds them over his stomach instead and tries to affect casual patience, as if this exchange is perfectly normal, as if her hands aren’t shaking as his normally do. And eventually his nudging question, when it comes, is almost brutally straightforward: ]
Was that your death? Contact with magical forces. Gaining magic.
Yes, [ she says, and tries to stay steady. tries not to lean too far away from the back of her seat, tries not to twitch at every sound. her fingers start to flex and she clenches them into fists instead. for a moment she tries to explain, tries to open her mouth and let the words flow out, but they won't come. she's never had to explain this before, she doesn't know how.
but maybe she doesn't have to. ness looks up and catches stephen's eye, asking with her gaze if she can enter his mind and tell him there, instead. whatever she sees on his face is the permission she needs, even if it wasn't really.
the walls around minds are permeable, she's learning. not for most, not for the vast majority of people—but once you learn how to look, you can see the holes, the places you can slide out of your own consciousness and into someone else's. doing it on command is a difficult proposition, one she still hasn't gotten the hang of, but she's under duress and she doesn't want to use her words, so: telepathy.
she slips through the walls of her own mind and pours herself into stephen's, instead, poking and prodding until she finds a hole in the wall to slip through. she's small, there, doesn't want to take up too much space, not here to intrude, just to show: the terror of the abduction, the horror of looking a mindflayer in the eye and seeing something soulless stare back.
watching the people you traveled with, some you'd known for years, get a tadpole urged into their eyes, knowing it would be your turn, soon.
the ship you're in jolts, rocks, tumbles you away from the mindflayers and straight into a vat of brine. you keep your eyes shut but inhale a mouthful of the liquid and you don't know it but in that moment something inside of you wakes up, or changes, or wakes up and changes.
you cough brine out of your lungs and when you open your eyes the mindflayers don't care about you anymore. you're too smart to really think you're free, but you hope anyway.
what a stupid thing to do.
the first stab is such a shock you don't even feel it. you only know you've been impaled when you feel your stomach get wet and look down to find a blade sticking out of you. you make some stupid noise of surprise, and the blade disappears, and this time you feel it when it pierces your ribcage, and then again when it punctures a lung.
you fall to your knees, then your front, gasping and coughing up blood. your sight dims, and the aliens who killed you slit the throat of the merchant you've known since you were seven. they're going to kill everyone.
you want your father. you'd call out for him, but all you can manage is a faint, gurgling rattle. you're dying. it's a very calm thought, but maybe that's because you're so tired you can't be alarmed anymore. you hurt, but you know if you close your eyes, it'll be over soon. you want it to be over. everything is getting so cold.
you close your eyes.
ness pulls away from stephen's mind and has to press her hand to her stomach, to her breast. no wounds. no scars, even, to suggest she'd ever been injured at all. ]
This, too, is distressingly familiar. Gwenaëlle’s panicked hand clawing at her spine searching for the mortal wound, remembering her own death, re-living it. Stephen’s own mind afire with his own death, I’m sorry on a whisper and that wave of force colliding with another him, slowly peeling his body apart. He had watched the execution happen from outside himself, seen from a professor’s steady remorseful gaze.
This particular memory is more visceral, bone-deep; when he looks down at his chest he half-expects to see the blade still extruding. A gasp, a startled breath, his hand splayed on the table. Strange is rattled, but not as much if he hadn’t already witnessed his own death. When he looks at Ennaris, however, his gaze is soft and apologetic.
He doesn’t really have the words. Doesn’t know the right thing to say. So what comes out instead, lodged on the sight of those tentacles, that pitiless inhuman face pressing the tadpole to an eye: ]
[ he could be referring to the githyanki, too, inhuman and bizarre as they both must be to his eyes... but he's not. ness knows he's not.
she breathes in, breathes out. tries to find equilibrium. ]
They're some of the most horrifying creatures in my world, [ too rattled to maintain the distance she's been carefully cultivating since she arrived, ] because their goal isn't to kill, or to conquer. They propogate by infecting other species with their parasites, which grows within their victims in a process called ceremorphosis. For seven days, the infected experience a series of...
[ she flounders, momentarily, searching for the words, the clinical vocabulary that will keep this at arm's length. ]
Of symptoms, I suppose. Transformations. Fever, graying skin, loss of memory. [ among other things. ] At the end, the adult illithid emerges, with all of the memories but none of the soul of their victims.
[ she pauses, lets that sink in. the person that mindflayer was is destroyed. obliterated. from the inside out, they are unmade. understand? ]
There's no known cure. No recourse. Once you're infected, you're already dead.
[ Strange sizes her up. There are other, more anthropological questions he wants to ask, but suspects would be too impolitic and unwelcome; what are illithids like outside of their reproduction? Is this the only way they can reproduce? Do they have any choice? What looks unsavoury in a parasite might just be a fact of biology—
But at least he’s tactful enough not to go down that route. Instead: ]
I’ve known you for several weeks now, and your skin doesn’t seem particularly grey, and your memory is as sharp as any student I’ve known.
[ at any other time, ness might be willing to answer all those questions—she could even genuinely enjoy the conversation, despite the subject matter—but for now, it's probably best that stephen listens to the little voice of tact in his head.
she nods, understanding his implication, but doesn't look much happier about it. ]
But that's where this magic comes from, I think. Contact with strong magic can... leave an impression, sometimes, in my world. Like the rifts leave a bit of themselves in us, in the anchor, I've been left with... Aberration. Invisible but ever-present difference.
[ ...hang on, she's getting maudlin, this is supposed to be about practicing magic. ness visibly pulls herself back together, shaking her head and straightening out her shoulders. deep breath, chin up, pen back in hand, where were we? ]
So that's where I think it came from. Mindflayers are psychic, and you saw the tentacles, ergo. It is, at least, the strongest theory I have, given I'm not likely to ever know for sure.
What makes it aberration? [ Strange repeats, drilling in on that particular word choice. His voice has taken on a faintly professorial air as if he’s questioning a theorem, interrogating an assumption. ] You and I, we’ve got glowing green shards in our hands that can seal rips in reality. Anyone who sees them knows we’re rifters. We’re already visibly aberrant. And just because you can read minds and get a little tentacle-y sometimes, I don’t think that necessarily entails a judgment call either way.
[ This angle is perhaps a little self-serving and biased, considering Stephen Stranges across the multiverse and their predilection towards alarming-looking spells, but. He folds his hands on the desk in front of him. ]
Magic’s gross and ugly and a little slimy sometimes, sure. But if it gets the job done, I don’t see what the problem is. Any tool in a kit.
Ah, [ she presses her lips together—there has been a miscommunication, here. ]
I don't mean aberrant as in... morally repugnant, or reprehensible in any way, [ although that debate may be worth having too, considering the unfortunate bent of enchantment magic in general, ] but instead...
[ ness rolls the pen between her hands, squinting softly, a delicate crinkle between her brows. ]
There is a plane of existence known to my world as the Far Realm. It's a place of madness, by all accounts, where many layers of reality blend together. From that Realm come Aberrations, creatures that don't fit in the natural order. Creatures inexplicable by the laws of man or gods.
[ she looks up to catch stephen's eye and spreads her fingers; see what she means now? ]
Mindflayers are one such creature. And now, touched by their magic as I am...
It still sounds like there’s a big of an implicit judgment call in the name. Although, who am I to say— my mentor drew her power from an outside plane of existence known as the Dark Dimension.
[ Also arguable as to whether or not that was wise.
He’s looking at Ennaris across that table, sizing her up and feeling her out. Part of this is getting a sense of what her abilities are, and how she feels about them, considering how skittish she’d been in their earliest conversations about it. If only he can help guide her away from the fear, and back to that pleased beaming smile when she displayed her telepathy; the pride, the delight that he remembered magic sparking in him, too. ]
Well. Regardless of origin, you have those tools now. So: you want to be able to practice this— telepathy, this mind-link, in addition to the tentacles? We can do that.
Dark Dimension surely sounds more judgmental than Far Realm, come now—
[ she smiles at him, tight-lipped but sincere, and mouths dark dimension to herself, gesturing—attach the words to a motion, and she's more likely to remember to come back to it later, if she can't take her own notes just yet. ]
I need to practice both, but the telepathy seems to be the most immediate concern. Imagine if I accidentally linked with Ser Keen!
[ he already hates them all enough, from what she's heard, no reason to give him cause to get the whole organization shut down.
(annulled? they're not a circle, but they've so many mages, would the chantry brand it on annulment even so? ]
[ Wry admission, camaraderie: ] I’m always half a breath away from assuming he’s going to clap me in chains if I say the wrong thing. His priorities and mine are— very different.
[ And Strange hadn’t missed what she’d said, the implication that it’s already been happening out-of-control, and so he segues easily into the next question: ]
[ an understatement if ever ness has heard one, but she just smiles, because—yes. very different priorities, indeed.
she doesn't bother to pretend that she has to think about the answer to his question. ]
There was the elf, Tav, Captain Baudin, the Warden von Skraedder, the Griffon Keeper, and the giant qunari. None seemed terribly perturbed by it, and it has been long enough they could have certainly said something if they'd a mind to, but. That's still more than I'm comfortable with, and I'd like to make sure the number doesn't grow any larger.
[ A longer list than he’d expected or hoped for, either; this is the sort of secret that ought to stay on as short a leash as possible, particularly around the locals. Von Skraedder could be a problem; he doesn’t know her well enough to say. But the rest are fine: rifters all, and then Gwenaëlle. He trusts her more than himself, some days. ]
Hmm. Yeah. That’s a lot of rifters, which gives you a leg up in terms of acceptance. And Riftwatch as a whole has gotten accustomed to stranger magic than anyone else you’ll run into on the street. But we can work with that. We’ll want to get you in enough control that the list doesn’t get much longer.
[ And they start to delve into it, their training starting in earnest: forging that link and Strange counting the seconds for how long it lasts, until Ness gets tired, until the connection peters out and she slumps in her seat. Magic and telepathy is a muscle like any other; it needs practice. They work, her reserves run low, they try again. They part for food and he summons her the next day for more: straightforward, business-like, occasionally sprinkling his own insane anecdote into the conversation so she feels better and less alone about her own circumstances, but he carves out the time for her as surely as if it’s scheduled office hours.
Can’t have the locals tarring and feathering the nice young scholar from Candlekeep, after all. ]
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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no subject
[ gods above, that's a fancy pen. ness takes it with an appropriate amount of interest and respect without letting herself get distracted trying to inspect it too closely, even though she absolutely wants to inspect it closely. ]
It has been very difficult as a consummate note-taker to find new paper sources—you should see my personal sheaf, it's a mess.
[ a mess she WILL be transferring to an actual journal as soon as such a thing is available again.
ness quickly sets about making notes of what stephen's already mentioned, muttering energy build-up, painkiller treating symptoms to herself to keep on track. as soon as that's sorted, she pivots back to his question, making rapid notes as she explains. ]
The tentacles seem to be made of some kind of concentrated shadow, or darkness—they're fully physical, and they interact with the world, but they aren't like real animal flesh in any way. They don't last very long once they actually, ah, assert themselves, but the build-up to that can last a while, it's kind of variable? Like I said, though, it's been happening faster and more often since the magebane.
I had some magic prior to this, but nothing impressive, I could make little lights, that was all. Vazeiros—my father—he taught me. It's not unheard of to gain magic after contact with magical forces, and I—I—
[ here, ness finally stumbles, the rapid scratch of the pen on paper halted as she blinks, remembering exactly what had happened that she thinks started this whole stupid tentacle saga. carefully, minding the sudden tremor in her hands, she sets the pen back on the desk.
she'd done so well being impartial, impersonal in her explanation, only the facts, no value judgments or emotion clouding the important bits. now look at her. ]
I'm sorry, I just need—I have to gather my thoughts, I apologize.
no subject
Take your time.
[ The problem with Ennaris doing the notes, however, is that Strange doesn’t have anything to do with his hands while he waits for her to re-compose herself. So he folds them over his stomach instead and tries to affect casual patience, as if this exchange is perfectly normal, as if her hands aren’t shaking as his normally do. And eventually his nudging question, when it comes, is almost brutally straightforward: ]
Was that your death? Contact with magical forces. Gaining magic.
cw description of death, trauma dumping
Yes, [ she says, and tries to stay steady. tries not to lean too far away from the back of her seat, tries not to twitch at every sound. her fingers start to flex and she clenches them into fists instead. for a moment she tries to explain, tries to open her mouth and let the words flow out, but they won't come. she's never had to explain this before, she doesn't know how.
but maybe she doesn't have to. ness looks up and catches stephen's eye, asking with her gaze if she can enter his mind and tell him there, instead. whatever she sees on his face is the permission she needs, even if it wasn't really.
the walls around minds are permeable, she's learning. not for most, not for the vast majority of people—but once you learn how to look, you can see the holes, the places you can slide out of your own consciousness and into someone else's. doing it on command is a difficult proposition, one she still hasn't gotten the hang of, but she's under duress and she doesn't want to use her words, so: telepathy.
she slips through the walls of her own mind and pours herself into stephen's, instead, poking and prodding until she finds a hole in the wall to slip through. she's small, there, doesn't want to take up too much space, not here to intrude, just to show: the terror of the abduction, the horror of looking a mindflayer in the eye and seeing something soulless stare back.
watching the people you traveled with, some you'd known for years, get a tadpole urged into their eyes, knowing it would be your turn, soon.
the ship you're in jolts, rocks, tumbles you away from the mindflayers and straight into a vat of brine. you keep your eyes shut but inhale a mouthful of the liquid and you don't know it but in that moment something inside of you wakes up, or changes, or wakes up and changes.
you cough brine out of your lungs and when you open your eyes the mindflayers don't care about you anymore. you're too smart to really think you're free, but you hope anyway.
what a stupid thing to do.
the first stab is such a shock you don't even feel it. you only know you've been impaled when you feel your stomach get wet and look down to find a blade sticking out of you. you make some stupid noise of surprise, and the blade disappears, and this time you feel it when it pierces your ribcage, and then again when it punctures a lung.
you fall to your knees, then your front, gasping and coughing up blood. your sight dims, and the aliens who killed you slit the throat of the merchant you've known since you were seven. they're going to kill everyone.
you want your father. you'd call out for him, but all you can manage is a faint, gurgling rattle. you're dying. it's a very calm thought, but maybe that's because you're so tired you can't be alarmed anymore. you hurt, but you know if you close your eyes, it'll be over soon. you want it to be over. everything is getting so cold.
you close your eyes.
ness pulls away from stephen's mind and has to press her hand to her stomach, to her breast. no wounds. no scars, even, to suggest she'd ever been injured at all. ]
no subject
This, too, is distressingly familiar. Gwenaëlle’s panicked hand clawing at her spine searching for the mortal wound, remembering her own death, re-living it. Stephen’s own mind afire with his own death, I’m sorry on a whisper and that wave of force colliding with another him, slowly peeling his body apart. He had watched the execution happen from outside himself, seen from a professor’s steady remorseful gaze.
This particular memory is more visceral, bone-deep; when he looks down at his chest he half-expects to see the blade still extruding. A gasp, a startled breath, his hand splayed on the table. Strange is rattled, but not as much if he hadn’t already witnessed his own death. When he looks at Ennaris, however, his gaze is soft and apologetic.
He doesn’t really have the words. Doesn’t know the right thing to say. So what comes out instead, lodged on the sight of those tentacles, that pitiless inhuman face pressing the tadpole to an eye: ]
What are they?
no subject
Mindflayers, [ she says softly, ] illithid.
[ he could be referring to the githyanki, too, inhuman and bizarre as they both must be to his eyes... but he's not. ness knows he's not.
she breathes in, breathes out. tries to find equilibrium. ]
They're some of the most horrifying creatures in my world, [ too rattled to maintain the distance she's been carefully cultivating since she arrived, ] because their goal isn't to kill, or to conquer. They propogate by infecting other species with their parasites, which grows within their victims in a process called ceremorphosis. For seven days, the infected experience a series of...
[ she flounders, momentarily, searching for the words, the clinical vocabulary that will keep this at arm's length. ]
Of symptoms, I suppose. Transformations. Fever, graying skin, loss of memory. [ among other things. ] At the end, the adult illithid emerges, with all of the memories but none of the soul of their victims.
[ she pauses, lets that sink in. the person that mindflayer was is destroyed. obliterated. from the inside out, they are unmade. understand? ]
There's no known cure. No recourse. Once you're infected, you're already dead.
no subject
But at least he’s tactful enough not to go down that route. Instead: ]
I’ve known you for several weeks now, and your skin doesn’t seem particularly grey, and your memory is as sharp as any student I’ve known.
[ A hint, an implication. ]
It seems it hasn’t followed you here, at least.
no subject
she nods, understanding his implication, but doesn't look much happier about it. ]
But that's where this magic comes from, I think. Contact with strong magic can... leave an impression, sometimes, in my world. Like the rifts leave a bit of themselves in us, in the anchor, I've been left with... Aberration. Invisible but ever-present difference.
[ ...hang on, she's getting maudlin, this is supposed to be about practicing magic. ness visibly pulls herself back together, shaking her head and straightening out her shoulders. deep breath, chin up, pen back in hand, where were we? ]
So that's where I think it came from. Mindflayers are psychic, and you saw the tentacles, ergo. It is, at least, the strongest theory I have, given I'm not likely to ever know for sure.
no subject
[ This angle is perhaps a little self-serving and biased, considering Stephen Stranges across the multiverse and their predilection towards alarming-looking spells, but. He folds his hands on the desk in front of him. ]
Magic’s gross and ugly and a little slimy sometimes, sure. But if it gets the job done, I don’t see what the problem is. Any tool in a kit.
no subject
I don't mean aberrant as in... morally repugnant, or reprehensible in any way, [ although that debate may be worth having too, considering the unfortunate bent of enchantment magic in general, ] but instead...
[ ness rolls the pen between her hands, squinting softly, a delicate crinkle between her brows. ]
There is a plane of existence known to my world as the Far Realm. It's a place of madness, by all accounts, where many layers of reality blend together. From that Realm come Aberrations, creatures that don't fit in the natural order. Creatures inexplicable by the laws of man or gods.
[ she looks up to catch stephen's eye and spreads her fingers; see what she means now? ]
Mindflayers are one such creature. And now, touched by their magic as I am...
no subject
[ Also arguable as to whether or not that was wise.
He’s looking at Ennaris across that table, sizing her up and feeling her out. Part of this is getting a sense of what her abilities are, and how she feels about them, considering how skittish she’d been in their earliest conversations about it. If only he can help guide her away from the fear, and back to that pleased beaming smile when she displayed her telepathy; the pride, the delight that he remembered magic sparking in him, too. ]
Well. Regardless of origin, you have those tools now. So: you want to be able to practice this— telepathy, this mind-link, in addition to the tentacles? We can do that.
no subject
[ she smiles at him, tight-lipped but sincere, and mouths dark dimension to herself, gesturing—attach the words to a motion, and she's more likely to remember to come back to it later, if she can't take her own notes just yet. ]
I need to practice both, but the telepathy seems to be the most immediate concern. Imagine if I accidentally linked with Ser Keen!
[ he already hates them all enough, from what she's heard, no reason to give him cause to get the whole organization shut down.
(annulled? they're not a circle, but they've so many mages, would the chantry brand it on annulment even so? ]
no subject
[ And Strange hadn’t missed what she’d said, the implication that it’s already been happening out-of-control, and so he segues easily into the next question: ]
Who have you already told on accident?
no subject
she doesn't bother to pretend that she has to think about the answer to his question. ]
There was the elf, Tav, Captain Baudin, the Warden von Skraedder, the Griffon Keeper, and the giant qunari. None seemed terribly perturbed by it, and it has been long enough they could have certainly said something if they'd a mind to, but. That's still more than I'm comfortable with, and I'd like to make sure the number doesn't grow any larger.
potential 🎀
Hmm. Yeah. That’s a lot of rifters, which gives you a leg up in terms of acceptance. And Riftwatch as a whole has gotten accustomed to stranger magic than anyone else you’ll run into on the street. But we can work with that. We’ll want to get you in enough control that the list doesn’t get much longer.
[ And they start to delve into it, their training starting in earnest: forging that link and Strange counting the seconds for how long it lasts, until Ness gets tired, until the connection peters out and she slumps in her seat. Magic and telepathy is a muscle like any other; it needs practice. They work, her reserves run low, they try again. They part for food and he summons her the next day for more: straightforward, business-like, occasionally sprinkling his own insane anecdote into the conversation so she feels better and less alone about her own circumstances, but he carves out the time for her as surely as if it’s scheduled office hours.
Can’t have the locals tarring and feathering the nice young scholar from Candlekeep, after all. ]