sporesprouter | Open Post: Hard at Work

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Open Post: Hard at Work

Yes, Tress might have been up late charting stars, but that doesn't mean that she can't get up at dawn to start doing other work on the continued Operation Get Us Out of Here.

So it's barely light outside when she tucks herself into an out of the way workroom that she's decided to repurpose as a sprouter's workshop. She doesn't have much in the way of spores, just what she arrived with, but that was no reason not to use some. What was the point of hoarding a potential resource? Sitting on something that might be able to help? Not a great idea.

So she currently sits at a table with some supplies laid out carefully before her, carefully taking water from a bowl in front of her with an eyedropper to some pink-red spores and shaping the crystals that spring up from them with a small iron shield-shaped plate and a steel trowel. She's working slowly and incrementally, but several finished spheres sit on the table away from her active work.

On the floor to the side of the table are several full drinking water bottles that she found and commandeered, knowing they'd come in handy if she decides to move on to her next idea.

For now, though, pink crystal spheres.

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Claudius ventures a guess, because the talk of an it that will take over if Tess loses control is alarming enough ... but for some reason, it might sound less alarming if it can be explained in terms of colored spores. "Are these the ... midnight spores you're using?"

She nods. And then out of her pocket, she pulls both the small metal box and a small figurine of a bird that she found in one of the mansion's copious sitting rooms.

"Are you ready?"

"I trust you, Lady Tress," Claudius says. In case that's unclear, he adds, "and I'm ready," and gives a twirling hand gesture. Cut the black line when the lid falls. Cut the black line ... How did he go from volunteering his assistance as an alchemist to holding a knife and waiting for something like possession to happen?

"All right."

She opens the box, carefully withdrawing three spores which she sets on the lid of the box, next to the figurine. Dipping a finger quickly into the open water bottle, she shakes a drop of water onto the spores.

They start to bubble and melt together, growing and inflating, almost balloonlike, until the blob reaches about the size of a fist. It continues to twist, an almost face-shaped tendril emerging from it for a moment as Tress concentrates on the mass. It continues to shift and stretch, mimicking the shape of the bird figurine, trying out its limbs which are moving nearly in a way that match its form.

Tress lifts the open bottle of water to her already parched lips and drinks... and keeps drinking until the bottle is empty. She lets the bottle drop to her side as her eyes almost glaze over, and she stares off into nothingness. As Tress very inadequately described, a black line of shadow starts to form between her mouth and the... not exactly a bird.

The creature hops a few times, flopping around like a fledgling who knows it's supposed to fly but doesn't exactly have the least idea how. A few more tries and it manages to take off, inelegantly wobble-flying upwards, awkwardly taking the lid of the bottle as it goes.

Meanwhile, Tress is sitting motionless, and another meaning to her words makes itself clear as she begins to, slowly but visibly, dry up. Her lips become chapped, her sightless eyes more and more bloodshot, her skin slowly losing elasticity. By the time a few minutes have elapsed and her face and limbs seem to be actively shrinking, the lid to the bottle drops with a soft thwap to the grass.

Claudius truly does trust Tress, which strikes him as naive -- he can't keep doling out his trust to strangers after one or two meetings. The only one he should trust is the demon who knows his secrets and hasn't condemned him for them, which could be because he's a demon and not in the business of condemnation. But Claudius met Tress early enough, was impressed enough by the way her mind worked, and spent enough of that first meeting spinning plans together as though escape were a possibility they could approach by degrees, and not some far-fetched dream.

Which means if she's drained by midnight spores on his watch, then that's one trusted ally down. For all his confidence comparing spores to alchemical compounds, the midnight spores had the most arcane mechanism, the hardest to envision or to explain. In practice, it looks the most like how Claudius would envision summoning a demon, before he met one. The black line, the black line ... That makes the mechanism clearer, at least. There's a direct connection between the source of water, Tress, and the spores she's operating.

It doesn't soften the sight of what looks like Tress draining and dying before his eyes. But he understands what's happening, he's prepared, and when the lid drops the ground he acts at once. The silver knife flashes, like a release of light and heat, and severs the line of shadows hanging in the air.

And then he lets his hand shake, no longer needing them steady. "Lady Tress?"

Edited 2023-10-01 11:58 (UTC)

"Water."

Tress forces the word out, a croak through a throat that feels like sandpaper. She knows she brought more than enough, but it's hard to get her thoughts together through the overwhelming thirst. She reaches out blindly, managing to get her hand on one of the spare bottles.

Dragging it to herself, she opens it, fumblingly, and all but upends it into her mouth, a fair amount of the water missing its target and dousing her.

The water hurts going down, but she fully knew that would happen, and it's enough. Her form fills back in and her coloration returns.

She sits for a moment, catching her breath, and looks up at Claudius.

"Thank you."

"It was nothing," Claudius says, because it rather feels like it was. But Tress isn't dead, or possessed, not by the looks of it. He offers a hand up, if she requires it.

Tress switches her empty bottle for a full one that she'll be able to drink at a more leisurely pace before taking Claudius's hand and pulling herself standing.

"I should have done that at night. Midnight essence much prefers shadows to sunlight and I wouldn't have had to fight it quite so much to keep it going." If she had any concept of it, she almost would have compared the experience to bullriding. It had been continously trying to shed her will and escape to a nice shadowy place. But she was determined enough to keep going. For all the good it ended up doing.

She frowns. "But I found the barrier."

Claudius surmises from her frown that the results are anywhere from disheartening to complicated. "And what did you discover there?"

Disheartening certainly sums it up.

"It was just like Temeraire said. It was like the air itself just... Didn't want to let me pass. Nothing built, no seam, nothing. Just..."

She takes a deep breath. "I don't even know what the next step is."

"That's been the theme, I think. Whatever logic is at work in this place, it seems to stymy progress. It fills with people, and rather than cohering into any community, the house becomes more fractured with every introduction. Or that may just be my experience," he allows. Claudius does grant that he's spent more time socializing than investigating, but it's hardly been absent from his mind. What's the point of all this? He sighs. "The next step is to check 'the sky' off our list of avenues. We've investigated thoroughly. You've investigated thoroughly, and I trust your results. We take the information we have, decide what it might indicate, and that may lead to the next avenue."

"Check the woods off, too. If you go too far into it, you somehow manage to end up right back here. The first time I thought I had just gotten turned around so I got some yarn and tried tying it to the trees I passed. Same thing happened even though I know I didn't retrace my steps. There's no sea, so that's not an option. Maybe we can dig our way out? But that seems just as unlikely."

It's not that Tress hadn't taken on seemingly impossible challenges in the past, but at least when she'd done that, there had been small successes along the way, just enough of a breadcrumb trail of encouragement to keep her pointed at her goal. There has been absolutely nothing of the sort here. Like Claudius said, it stymies progress. And it's starting to take its toll on her.

"You've been doing a great deal of this on your own, haven't you?" asks Claudius. He could be wrong -- she couldn't gotten help with the yarn.

"The parts I can, sure. Some things, I need help with." She gestures to the water bottles still scattered on the lawn for a very recent example. "But if there's something I can do myself without much trouble, why shouldn't I?"

"There are reasons not to trouble anyone, to be sure. If you were up to some fell and secret purpose, I wouldn't blame you for doing it alone with no aid, but this is a common goal for the common good of everyone here." He says it lightly, as though that were only a humorous example of something Tress would not do -- something to lift the mood. "Consider this. You command a crew, don't you?"

"Yes... and they're not very happy when I do this to them, either. I know."

In fairness to Tress, she had made small improvements before getting displaced to the mansion, but inertia only diverts itself in fits and starts.

Claudius has some experience in falling back into self-destructive habits when left to his own devices with only inertia to carry him. But that's an aside, since his habits aren't really worth getting into. "So you've done this before," he says, with a rather wry fondness. "A crew, I imagine, knows there must be a leader at the helm or the ship won't reach its destination. And your crew made you their leader, because I assume they saw the qualities in which you excel. Your determination, your clear-sightedness, your cleverness. Those are skills a leader requires so that she can direct other men to busy work and focus on coming up with brilliant ideas. And you have been brilliant. The trick you pulled off with the midnight spores, there, was something few would have thought to attempt, and I would wager that's true even in your own world. It was even a success." It resembled a terrifying ritual of demonic possession, yes, but it did that successfully. Claudius is well aware there was a worse failure than not finding anything, and it was Tress dead on the lawn. "What I mean is the work you can do without bothering anyone is the work you can easily share ... and people will agree because the goal is shared, too. Galahad is despairing for a purpose, and asking him to walk through the woods with a ball of yarn would no doubt be a kindness. And when circumstances shift again and other paths open up -- as they did with the path in the gardens -- you can approach them as a strategist with a team of able followers. In the meantime, you can recoup and think. As with alchemy, solutions often arise when you step away from an alchemical problem."

She nods slowly. "You're right. I know, but... it's hard sometimes. But you're right. I should work on it. Get better at asking for help."

Tress pauses for a moment then and smiles sweetly. "If it's not too much trouble, could you carry the water bottles back for me?"

"I am willing and able," Claudius says with a flourishing bow, before setting himself to the menial work of gathering up heavy bottles. It occurs to him that Tress may be the only one in this mansion he hasn't introduced himself to as a prince, and there's a freedom to that. He's simply an older man who gardens, knows alchemical reactions, and has some helpful advice about delegation.

Tress laughs and retrieves her box of midnight spores. "You're right. It's a lot easier this way."

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Open Post: Hard at Work

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