This post is William's IC inbox at ataraxion. You can drop network or action stuff that doesn't quite feel like it fits or warrants a post on the main communities in here.
[Not everyone does, though. And cloning has its inconveniences, its side-effects; Kate Bishop made that clear. William's eyes widen. He looks immediately interest. If you lose a limb.] That's brilliant, [he says.] Absolutely brilliant.
I can see that working in conjunction with the usual nature of violence aboard here and Medical Bay really well. [William nods his head a few times, scuffing his knuckles along his chin.] You fucking did that, though? [He looks at her curiously.] You reattached some poor cunt's leg?
Yes. The most straightforward foci I can use for any of this is my own blood; some people may find that alarming or unsanitary, but while I can't do anything-- ( AND HONESTLY WON'T EVEN ATTEMPT) --about the former, I can assure you that my practises are perfectly safe. I know what I'm doing.
[William's eyebrows go up, surprised, but no real judgment in it.] Would you mind demonstrating some time? [The question seems to escape him with relatively little consideration-- he's quick the next instant to add,] not that I don't believe you. It'd be good to achieve a rudimentary fucking understanding, though.
The, uh, diversity of this shit is a lot to stay on tp of.
I've been a part of two of nine different traditions, and each of those - nine - has their own particular subgroups and internal disagreements as to the best methodology.
( mila's tone is dry; she finds a lot of the in-fighting extremely wearying, particularly as wrangling it has become actually her job. this perhaps accounts for some of her disinterest in putting herself out there on the tranquility, where there's yet more diversity and differing opinions and frankly she doesn't give a shit about the opinions of most of the people who are actually contextually relevant to her. wading into whatever this ship has to offer sounds like the opposite of anything remotely entertaining or worthwhile.
but that's the nice thing about being mila gallo. bringing this up with him will mean, inevitably, sooner or later, going public; she will welcome, warily, the opportunities to discuss and develop that it brings. she will also have absolutely no difficulty dismissing, firmly, anything she finds pointless or irrelevant.
which is going to happen, sooner or later. she's seen the network, ever. )
That headache is perfectly normal. But no, I wouldn't mind.
[Coming from a tradition that's little understood but tightly controlled by government entities, much of this in-fighting and intellectual debate is foreign to William. He'd be envious, almost, about this notion of having colleagues and parallel abilities with diverse applications and something like a team, except that it does seem to entail a lot of headaches.
And maybe Medbay is close enough.] All right. If I nick myself right here and now, would that be sufficient, you think?
( if it makes him feel better, there's absolutely nothing like a team that includes people of more than one tradition. there is, occasionally, some extremely reluctant collaboration and when it happens, mila is usually the one who has to stand over the rest of them with a bat to get the job done without solomon punching an etherite and starting a feud that results in killing each other before they kill whoever they're working together to take out. they have enough of a grasp of the necessity of not wiping each other out - generally - for there to be delegates sent yearly to new york from each tradition to navigate ... not wiping each other out, but it's tense at best and the verbena, often considered savagely barbaric and unfashionably old fashioned, tend to show up prepared to throw down.
she may have actually told lindberg at one point that she was only there to stop solomon killing him before he stopped being useful and that he should try being a little more fucking useful and a little less annoying before she suddenly remembered a nail appointment and left their executioner unattended. world of darkness, where everyone different from you is terrible. )
[It is scary. And William, who generally markets himself (or is marketed by his player) as the consummate coward, doesn't seem like the type to court pain and danger as such. However, he is also a coward under perpetual threat of intolerable guilt, and while he doesn't exactly have an elaborate, standardized process for vetting magical powers, the whole conversation sort of suggests to him that maybe there should be one. Or at any rate, that it seems irresponsible right now not to know more or less what Dr. Gallo can do.
He pulls out a drawer nearby, pokes around in there for a moment. Finds a thin blade-- not surgical or anything like that, used for cutting packages and bandages probably, usually.] All right, [he says, mostly to himself. He rolls back one sleeve with his fingers, winds up twisting his wrist around a few times, trying to decide where exactly. An arterial wound would probably be helpful for no one. If he loses consciousness, he'll not exactly be the ideal audience. A moment, and then he chooses the back of his forearm.
Schtck. There's a tearing sound of skin and flesh, and dark blood bubbles to the surface. Mostly he just stabs himself, but after the initial grimace, he gives the blade a little wiggle too. He releases it while his arm is still impaled, twists his head around to look at the woman expectantly, his pupils already swelling from pain. Ahhhhh.] Ow, [he announces.]
( she can do a lot of things. further concerning behaviour on the part of the lovely doctor: apparently she makes it a habit of just carrying knives, rolling up her trouser-leg to display a neat sheath strapped to her calf, from which she produces a slim, terrifyingly sharp blade. old habits die hard, you know, and frankly mila sees no reason to get out of a habit that has kept her alive for so long.
she wraps her hand around the knife, blood welling between her knuckles. there's something sort of businesslike about it, like she's worked to figure out the most efficient of options - but when she holds her fist above his bleeding arm, roses form where her blood drips, sinking into his skin and pulling the wound taut, knitting it back together.
it is not a painless process. )
There are more straightforward ways, ( she says, watching their progress, ) more direct vitakinetic manipulation. It requires much less of me. But I thought you might appreciate a demonstration of something more visible.
[William makes a sound that starts out like 'Wow' and folds itself elegantly, almost indistinguishably into 'ow' as it goes on. The sentiment behind wow doesn't fade, though, even as he becomes cognizant of the fact that this treatment is far from pain-free. He stares at her blood leaking onto his arm. It seems dreadfully unsanitary by the standards of space-age medicine, but he couldn't have really expected anything else.
And besides, the mess of demons, angels, and other supernatural creatures running amok on his homeworld really only lends itself to the understanding that sterilization and organization and methodization and other -zations, generally, are a desperate and sometimes quite mistaken effort to impose order on the fact that reality is messy.] Yes, [he says eventually. He looks up.] Yeah. Can I move it 'round now or will that fuck something up?
Give it a minute, ( she advises, as the last blood-rose melts into flesh, leaving for a moment a red trace of its shape before disappearing entirely. ) You don't want to pull anything while it's still working.
[William doesn't know why he was expecting a scar or something-- his own gifts don't scar, generally. This is so strange, though. The shape of the flower, finer than any tattoo artist he's ever seen, the way it disappears like a fractal subsumed by warm water.]
Why's it got -- why's it got that symbolic stuff? Does the rose mean something? [He hasn't forgotten her friend, the one who liked nude gardening or whatnot, but that seemed different.]
We are one of the only traditions, if not the only, that can create where others only manipulate. We draw from the natural world in all things, and roses are - a fitting symbol, one that many of us reach for, figuratively and practically.
( she turns her hand palm-up, draws the sharp edge of her pinky-nail across it, a red line following-- her head tilts, eyes closed, and a rose - a true rose, not a blood simulacrum like those that buried themselves in him to heal his flesh - rises and unfurls, slowly, from within her. she curves her fist around it when it has enough of a stem, and uses her other hand to break it off; a little blood drips between her clenched fingers, but her palm is smooth and unbroken when her hand releases. )
We find beauty where we look for it. In, sometimes, the ugliest of places.
[William sits forward slightly as the flower begins to grow. He probably should be done feeling surprised by any of this by now, but this is not like the magic that he's watched the wizards work. It turns in a different universe to what he wields.]
Ain't terms scientists usually use, but beautiful works all right for me today. [His gaze lingers on the rose. He'd rather like to do some analyses, but that'd be rude-- or something.] Could you start a garden, down with the herbs and the farm crop? With that-- what you can do. [He'd been thinking in terms of flesh and blood, which is his wont; but this, too, is important.]
I don't consider myself beholden to scientific terminology, ( terribly mildly, for a woman who just grew a rose out of her hand, but then-- ) as that would be an incredibly simple thing to do, and it could be coaxed to grow simply to give me pleasure.
( edgeworth had thought her background in agricultural engineering could be useful, and...it could, incredibly, but she can also weave life out of desire and bond with it, persuade it to do her will. )
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I can see that working in conjunction with the usual nature of violence aboard here and Medical Bay really well. [William nods his head a few times, scuffing his knuckles along his chin.] You fucking did that, though? [He looks at her curiously.] You reattached some poor cunt's leg?
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He needed it. We needed him. We were lucky enough to be able to get him out before everything went tits up.
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Is there anything else I ought to know?
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The, uh, diversity of this shit is a lot to stay on tp of.
no subject
( mila's tone is dry; she finds a lot of the in-fighting extremely wearying, particularly as wrangling it has become actually her job. this perhaps accounts for some of her disinterest in putting herself out there on the tranquility, where there's yet more diversity and differing opinions and frankly she doesn't give a shit about the opinions of most of the people who are actually contextually relevant to her. wading into whatever this ship has to offer sounds like the opposite of anything remotely entertaining or worthwhile.
but that's the nice thing about being mila gallo. bringing this up with him will mean, inevitably, sooner or later, going public; she will welcome, warily, the opportunities to discuss and develop that it brings. she will also have absolutely no difficulty dismissing, firmly, anything she finds pointless or irrelevant.
which is going to happen, sooner or later. she's seen the network, ever. )
That headache is perfectly normal. But no, I wouldn't mind.
no subject
And maybe Medbay is close enough.] All right. If I nick myself right here and now, would that be sufficient, you think?
no subject
she may have actually told lindberg at one point that she was only there to stop solomon killing him before he stopped being useful and that he should try being a little more fucking useful and a little less annoying before she suddenly remembered a nail appointment and left their executioner unattended. world of darkness, where everyone different from you is terrible. )
Make it deep.
( --and scary. )
no subject
He pulls out a drawer nearby, pokes around in there for a moment. Finds a thin blade-- not surgical or anything like that, used for cutting packages and bandages probably, usually.] All right, [he says, mostly to himself. He rolls back one sleeve with his fingers, winds up twisting his wrist around a few times, trying to decide where exactly. An arterial wound would probably be helpful for no one. If he loses consciousness, he'll not exactly be the ideal audience. A moment, and then he chooses the back of his forearm.
Schtck. There's a tearing sound of skin and flesh, and dark blood bubbles to the surface. Mostly he just stabs himself, but after the initial grimace, he gives the blade a little wiggle too. He releases it while his arm is still impaled, twists his head around to look at the woman expectantly, his pupils already swelling from pain. Ahhhhh.] Ow, [he announces.]
no subject
she wraps her hand around the knife, blood welling between her knuckles. there's something sort of businesslike about it, like she's worked to figure out the most efficient of options - but when she holds her fist above his bleeding arm, roses form where her blood drips, sinking into his skin and pulling the wound taut, knitting it back together.
it is not a painless process. )
There are more straightforward ways, ( she says, watching their progress, ) more direct vitakinetic manipulation. It requires much less of me. But I thought you might appreciate a demonstration of something more visible.
no subject
And besides, the mess of demons, angels, and other supernatural creatures running amok on his homeworld really only lends itself to the understanding that sterilization and organization and methodization and other -zations, generally, are a desperate and sometimes quite mistaken effort to impose order on the fact that reality is messy.] Yes, [he says eventually. He looks up.] Yeah. Can I move it 'round now or will that fuck something up?
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[William doesn't know why he was expecting a scar or something-- his own gifts don't scar, generally. This is so strange, though. The shape of the flower, finer than any tattoo artist he's ever seen, the way it disappears like a fractal subsumed by warm water.]
Why's it got -- why's it got that symbolic stuff? Does the rose mean something? [He hasn't forgotten her friend, the one who liked nude gardening or whatnot, but that seemed different.]
no subject
( she turns her hand palm-up, draws the sharp edge of her pinky-nail across it, a red line following-- her head tilts, eyes closed, and a rose - a true rose, not a blood simulacrum like those that buried themselves in him to heal his flesh - rises and unfurls, slowly, from within her. she curves her fist around it when it has enough of a stem, and uses her other hand to break it off; a little blood drips between her clenched fingers, but her palm is smooth and unbroken when her hand releases. )
We find beauty where we look for it. In, sometimes, the ugliest of places.
( a memory- she lets it alone. )
no subject
Ain't terms scientists usually use, but beautiful works all right for me today. [His gaze lingers on the rose. He'd rather like to do some analyses, but that'd be rude-- or something.] Could you start a garden, down with the herbs and the farm crop? With that-- what you can do. [He'd been thinking in terms of flesh and blood, which is his wont; but this, too, is important.]
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( edgeworth had thought her background in agricultural engineering could be useful, and...it could, incredibly, but she can also weave life out of desire and bond with it, persuade it to do her will. )