thecrossinglogs | Bless of Magic Caster

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Bless of Magic Caster | OTA

WHO: Arche and YOU
WHAT: Arche is acclimating to her new circumstances, looking for help getting a staff around, and attempting to be curious without being a pest. Godspeed to her on that last one.
WHERE: Strictly within the lantern's light
WHEN: Shortly after her arrival from the River
WARNINGS: If you ask how she died, you might get an answer (CW violence, death of a teenager); potential CWs for child neglect/abuse mentions & descriptions, existentialism, Arche Needs A Fucking Drink So God Damn Bad

Fifth Tier Magic: Fabricate | Near The Water

If the weather is decent, or seems like it will be decent (more than a few of these instances might get caught out by a storm, necessitating shelter), one can find Arche near the water and, more importantly, near the woody plants that grow by it. She's running her gloved hands along branches and trunks, frowning to herself, pondering. If she only had a decent knife and whetstone...or someone else did...

It's possible that you catch her during another part of this process! Arche is not above sketching blueprints into the dust, displaying a simple staff with rounded bulbs at the ends, though other designs eventually flower - walking sticks, odd little two-handed clubs more like a blunt glaive than anything, and, curiously enough, something that can't be wood.

Do you own a knife? Is this public knowledge? Arche may be asking for help, or at least to borrow the blade.

Skill: Message | Network/You Pick The Location

workaday: Arche, new arrival, seeking information about prior experiences within this hereafter. No expectations had, be as personal or impersonal as you please, willing to meet in private or speak via this strange text-based common communication. Available at all hours presuming my experiments with sleeplessness bear fruit, all daylight hours otherwise. Thank you for your consideration.

Skill: The Goal Of All Life Is Death | Shelters At Night

She's dead, right? They're all dead. And yet Arche still perceives herself as having the needs of the living, and that fact is curious to her. Perhaps that's the 'life' in 'afterlife', but perhaps not. It isn't as if she could seriously hurt herself by experimenting, right? Arche starts by trying not to breathe but this quickly proves to be a difficult mental hurdle (or she has to breathe, but Arche is going to be stubbon on this point). So she aims at something that she's already good at - going without sleep. Why sleep? Why should that be a need of the dead? Undead don't sleep, and that surely is a trait they inherit from death - even fish sleep, somehow, after all.

It's at night, alone with her thoughts and sitting on the roof of her new home(?), when the weight of it all hits Arche. She tries to keep it in, tells herself that she's being silly, being childish. She got a lifetime, same as everyone else, right? She took a dangerous job and it didn't pan out. Death was always on the table, right next to the money she never got to spend because she had to save up for...save...save up for...

The first sob is a hesitant thing, but it blows the floodgates open. Arche cries with ugly sounds and bone-shaking sobs, tears streaming down her face, and when she tries to make herself stop it only gets worse.

Profession (Nerd) | Wildcard

Come at me. Maybe you catch Arche patching up holes in the shelters. Perhaps she's giving that odd look at the hamsters again or conspicuously avoiding the dracolisks with the nervous air of someone who is not used to horses. Or something comes up that you decide! Fuck me up! I'm right here!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Strange, to be called something like that. He's heard something similar from Pekoyama-san toward Kuzuryu-kun, and under that kind of context, it feels ill-suited to him. But the way Arche is using it, it clearly means something more generalized than that. Well, he's not going to make a fuss over what she calls him, regardless.

"Oh, I wasn't expecting anything," Nagito says with a casual wave of his flesh hand. The other is metal, robotic, though he isn't drawing particular attention to it at the moment. "That I woke up in any sense after I died was a shock to me! Did you have expectations?"

"Despite myself, yes. There are competing ideas on the topic, with the only agreement being that a hereafter must exist, as people can be drawn from it and placed back into their mortal shells through resurrection magic. Though most wish you hadn't, at least immediately. To be returned to life is a painful and draining process that may well be more unpleasant and humiliating than death was."

"Well, if you're from someplace like that, I imagine it would be more strange if you didn't believe in some sort of afterlife," Nagito says thoughtfully. "There's no magic where I'm from, and dead is dead. A lot of people come up with ideas of things that come after, but anyone can make up a story."

"...Master Komaeda, are you meaning to tell me that you were born partly metal, with no sorcerous prosthesis?"

Nagito looks confused for a moment before his eyes flick down to his robotic hand in recognition. He waves it dismissively; it whirs as it moves. "Oh, this is technology, not magic! It's true it's very advanced, but there wasn't any magic involved, only talent."

He leans on "talent" a little as he says it; he's proud to be able to show off the work of his former classmates. That they would allow him to put their hard work on his worthless body is still nearly unbelievable to him.

"...I suspect we are experiencing a difference of context. You say 'technology' as if it's a different axis of innovation. That is...not how I have experienced my former life."

She's trying to retain an academic curiosity. She really is. But the words 'former life' take something out of Arche, and she looks down at her drawing in the dust again.

One angry stroke with her palm mars it and the notes written around it, rendering it all nonsense.

"Ah. A learning curve is to be expected whenever someone new arrives, probably." Nagito has had difficulty explaining talent as his world defines it; he's not unfamiliar with the concept. Watching her scrub out her drawings, though, suggests more frustration than that. "When you say magic, my first thought is shooting fire at someone out of a wand, or flying on a broomstick, or something like that. Technology is something you put together out of materials."

"...I understand that materials themselves may be magical. Magic underpins many professional fields in my home, medicine among them. I've never seen a prosthetic like yours before, but I can think of how I might make one. If I were allowed to do my work here. Not that there'd be any point." Arche closes her eyes. This world is too much right now. "...Still, I'll not make the mistake of Elder Dankovsky. I believe you when you say that you don't understand the underpinnings as magical; possibly we mean something different by that word anyway, though I confess the biggest gap I'm hearing right now is that I would understand the wand and the broomstick to, themselves, be technological devices, methods of bringing magic to those not able to use it naturally."

"Ah, you've met Dankovsky-san, have you?" Nagito says with some wry amusement. And Elder Dankovsky? He'll remember that if he needs it later. "Aside from him, I think we're all pretty open-minded about our situation. I'd show you how my arm works, but I can't repair it on my own. Maybe this would be easier if you define magic for me? It's always more difficult to explain a lack of something."

"...To be frank, sir, my thoughts wander to why it might still be present. We're dead; surely infirmities of the body should be beyond us? And yet I am still this." Here she gestures, eyes still closed, to her body which has the approximate size and muscle mass of a Smurf. "But I suppose I should make my best effort. It was my career..."

The explanation is not immediately forthcoming. Eventually Arche opens her eyes and stands up (her knees click, making her wince; relics of a hard career, and just as absurd as any part of her body still having issues post-mortem) before walking over to Nagito. She kneels in the dust beside him. "Pictures may be helpful." Beat. "For me."

"Well, I'd definitely rather have it than not," Nagito says, robotic digits drumming against the back of his book. "Strictly speaking, we shouldn't need clothes in the afterlife, either, but so far I haven't seen anyone arrive naked."

It is probably worth considering, though; they've all lost most of what they carried, but not clothing or prosthetics or glasses. Another mystery, perhaps.

Nagito sits up a little, leaning forward to better see the dust. It's like being in a very low-resources school. "Go ahead."

"With my apologies in advance to Archmage Fluder; I am no teacher." To be honest she's not this formal either, not in her day job, but something about, oh, being brutally murdered in terror and despair specifically over being perceived as rude has Arche being real formal in the hereafter. Can't imagine why that might be.

Her first drawing in the dust is a small, stylized fire, with wavy lines rising above it. "My home has, as I suspect all worlds have in some way or another, observable relationships between cause and effect. Hot air rises. Objects fall towards the earth. Sites of massacre and atrocity generate the undead. Uninfluenced by the actions of those within the world, it will proceed under those conditions. In that sense, many of what the lay person would call magic is not understood that way academically; a mass grave that produces the undead is referred to as magical, but it's no more, and no less, magical than a flying bird or a swimming fish. Referring to such a thing, or to 'magical' materials such as herbs, is useful for practical communication but academically frustrating."

The next picture is a stylized bottle, inside which she etches a little droplet. "An alchemist and a brewer are fundamentally performing the same work, but the former requires magical talent. This is where the academic definition attains its relevance; to do magic, or to be magical, whether this be the lost Wild Magic retained by the dragons or the Tier Magic that humans favor, is to - temporarily or permanently - dictate new terms of cause and effect, harnessing ambient power to do so. Much hay is made of a theoretical field or space in which the necessary power is absent, but it's never been created or proven to exist - it would be like a space in which objects do not fall. To do magic, one must be magical, have an inborn talent for the work. Not all magic-casters are born equal, but it is like having a sixth sense, but also like having a third arm. It is not enough to be born able to perceive the power; one must also be able to touch it. Weak 'sight', or a weak 'arm', means a weak magic-caster."

Nagito turns her words over in his head repeatedly. "I'm sure there are others here who would understand this all much more clearly, but to me, it seems like the laws of physics just work differently in our two worlds. Hot air rises, objects fall toward the earth, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that sites of atrocity don't create undead." Nagito says that with the kind of confidence that makes it clear coming across sites of massacre and atrocity is something he takes for granted. "There's no ambient power like that for us to harness; my world's inborn talents are for other things. ...So I guess my world would be that theoretical space your academics debate about!"

"Physics." She laughs, she really does, merry and sad. "How direct! If I'm understanding you correctly, your understanding is that your arm and other technologies of your home are rooted in the principles embodied in the six simple machines...only..." Arche frowns thoughtfully. "How was it powered? Necromancy has some definite statements about the total power one can wring from a human body, and I can't envision a solely mechanical way that it could be siphoning from the soul..."

Edited 2025-03-09 09:05 (UTC)

Nagito frowns. "Ah--well, Hinata-kun could explain it if he were here, but--not that I want him to be here-- I'll do the best I can, but it's not going to be exact."

Nagito pulls off his jacket, revealing the t-shirt underneath and, more pointedly, the place not far below his elbow where his prosthetic ends. There are also long, ragged scars from some sort of toothed blade, but Nagito ignores those.

"A lot of the movement is mechanical. You can hear it." He wiggles his fingers exaggeratedly to make the whirring louder. "But I control it with my mind, the same as I control my other arm, via electrical impulses. That's far, far beyond someone like me to explain the details of, but the whole human body works like that, so it's sort of hijacking systems that already exist."

"Fascinating..." Arche starts to reach out, only to drop her hand as a sobering thought crosses her mind.

Her voice is so small when she asks, "Does it hurt?"

"Not any more than having lost the limb hurts in the first place! And not at all since I arrived here, actually." It's something he'd made note of before, talking to Sunny--he hasn't had any pain in his limb at all. Not phantom pain, not regular pain.

"How odd." Arche blows out a long breath and lets her hand fall to her lap. Curiosity is no reason to just touch a person out of nowhere; that was childish of her to even consider. "...Master Komaeda, if you can provide descriptions of your friends, I will do my best to let you know if they arrive. I would consider it a great favor if you might keep an eye out for a few people from my own life; three are most certainly either dead already or dead shortly. Two...I hope not to see."

"Ah, it would probably be arrogant to refer to them as my friends, but..." Nagito would like to know if the others show up here. But is asking someone else to look for them if they arrive jinxing them? (No, no, he shouldn't have to worry about that anymore. He shouldn't have to, but it twists in his gut regardless.) "I'll just ask you to keep en eye out for one--no, two, if you really don't mind. A man my age, just a little shorter, with spiky hair and a red and green eye. And--a girl, sixteen, with pink eyes and brown-pink hair who always looks kind of sleepy. She'd probably be asking about video games. Hinata Hajime and Nanami Chiaki."

And oh, doesn't he just feel like he's speaking Hinata's death into existence? He tries to push the feeling away.

"Now, who do you want me to look out for?"

Arche dutifully pays attention to those descriptions, committing them to her memory and sealing her promise with a small nod. She will keep her weather eye out, as best she can.

She sketches three figures in the dust first, still displaying that fine draftsman's hand despite her lack of materials. This isn't the first time she's had to use her finger for the job, it seems. "These three are the other members of Foresight, my...the team I belonged to. The woman there is Imina, no family name, and can be picked out by her vibrant violet hair and quick-sharp movements. Do not refer to her as an elf; if you must refer to her heritage, she is a half-elf, but honestly..." Arche sighs. "Honestly before you open your mouth about her parentage ask yourself how much you want to continue owning genitals that are both functional and attached."

"The shorter blonde gentleman is Hekkeran Termite. He is in no small way responsible for my death and will be stupid enough to say so. Please don't hit him."

"The last gentleman there is Roberdyck Goltron, a holy man and member of an odd, pagan faith with only one supreme god. He will be in some distress, should his magic fail to work here, and may well believe he has lost divine favor. Treat him gently, please."

Nagito watches dutifully as Arche draws the sketches and explains each of them. Honestly, it sounds like a group out of a video game or light novel, but that isn't all that unusual here. Maybe the people he's looking for sound just as strange to others.

"They sound like an interesting group!" Nagito says, smiling. "I'll make sure to keep an eye out for them, as best I can, and I won't hit anyone. ...Do you want to hit, ah--Termite-san?--yourself?"

That's the kind of reaction he would expect out of the people he knows, anyway.

"Not as such. I want him to agree that I can and watch him sweat and stew in the full knowledge that his actions have brought this to pass while he spends his first months in the hereafter consumed by paranoia about when I will finally strike."

Nagito nods without a hint of unease, and indeed, perhaps some eagerness to be helpful. "Then if I do find him I'll make sure I send him to see you right away!"

"I will appreciate it greatly." Arche wipes the images smooth, and begins again. the first image gets 'Ureirika' written beneath it, while the second is labeled 'Kuuderika'.

"The twins," Arche explains softly. "...My younger sisters. If I am to be perfectly candid, sir, unless something changes our parents' neglect will kill them, and not slowly. I can hope. I can pray to the Thirteen that they meet a better fate. But I was trained as a realist, not an optimist. They died when I did, they just don't know it yet." There's a pause here, long and defined by a faint shudder in Arche's breathing. "...They're only five, Master Komaeda. They'll need me."

Edited 2025-03-09 22:18 (UTC)

Nagito looks at her drawings. If these two were to arrive, they would be much younger than anyone else. Relying on their older sister to survive--he thinks about Owari-san, at home. Then he immediately stops thinking about that, because he knows what happened to Owari-san. What happened to her younger siblings.

"You know, it's out of great despair that great hope blooms," Nagito says, looking at Arche seriously. "I'm not saying not to be realistic, but you should have some hope that your death will inspire their survival in some way, even if you can't see how."

Makoto could do this better. Hinata could do this better. Nanami could do this better. But right now it's him here and his belief in hope that nobody else seems to ever understand.

Bless of Magic Caster | OTA

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