we_bring_hell | (no subject)

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The Bar has not relented in her attempts to get Harrow to eat something with slightly more calories than air. After many false starts, she seems to have struck gold with potatoes, a vegetable Harrow has never had before.

Mashed was a success; soup went well, too. But chips--ahhh, chips. Hot, salty, taste like almost nothing at all. Harrow may never eat anything else again. After several false starts in the dipping sauce area she has made peace with a light sprinkling of vinegar. The only problem is they make her gloves and her papers greasy.

Therefore, find Harrowhark Nonagesimus at a table with her journal and a skeletal hand, drawing spirals and... God help us... eating chips with a fork. It could be worse. The hand could be feeding them to her.

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Wei Wuxian nods. Drawing out the portfolio she gave him, he slides the pen free and flips to the pad of paper dolls in the back. "The Observation Window, yes?" he says, jabbing upward with the pen to indicate. "I still hope I may learn how to access that energy someday. It would make my afterlife so much easier!"

He begins to scribble a line of characters down the front of one of the dolls.

"What is the next goal?"

"To cause it to echo my movements. Commanding it is a simple enough matter, but I wish for something more integral; for it to move in resonance with me when activated, without deliberate command. Spooky action at a distance."

"Ah! That is easy enough," he says, making a swift modification to his own talisman. "Though -- I assume when you say leave, that would involve shutting the door behind you? That makes it less easy. Hm."

He taps the pen against the paper doll in thought.

"I have never actually tested whether closing the door severs the link to my own work. I've just assumed that it will. But if there is a way to... hm. Perhaps use the principles that allow someone to open a door to the inn to begin with? That is so unreliable, though."

Case in point, potentially: Lan Zhan's absence.

"My hope is that I can establish the... echo such that I need only bridge the gap for a moment, to activate it. But that remains to be seen."

"I had thought to scribe the theorem into the surface of the bone, on both ends, to establish an unbreakable link."

Yes, she's talking about the bones inside her arm as well as the arm on the table.

Wei Wuxian, who does not really -- as the Ninth House would say -- do bones, glances up from his work with a small furrow between his eyebrows.

"Both ends?" he asks. "You mean -- "

He waves the pen toward Harrow's flesh-and-blood arm.

"Indeed," she says. "It is a minor enough working compared to some I have done."

"Huh." He quirks his eyebrows, intrigued. "I would not have thought of that."

Granted, Wei Wuxian's upbringing means he winces at the idea of even trimming his hair, let alone carving theorems into his bones.

"But it seems like it might work. It could give the link enough power to surmount whatever severing a closed door might attempt."

Edited 2020-10-09 20:38 (UTC)

"I have been studying as well the magic of portals," she says. "But I cannot rely on it to do more than send an immaterial signal, I think."

Wei Wuxian hums thoughtfully again, puts the finishing flourish on the paper doll, and grabs a sheet of talisman paper from the portfolio.

"A sustained portal is not easy," he says, "but a quick one, that appears just long enough to bring you to another location -- " He pens two nearly identical columns of characters on the paper, then carefully tears along one of the sheet's perforations to separate them. "Ah, but one thing at a time, I suppose. I can share that with you in a moment."

He sets them aside before pushing the paper doll closer to Harrow.

"This is one that would mirror any of my actions. Here -- " Lightly, he indicates with the pen without leaving any extra marks on the paper. "This is how any doll begins: animation, allowing it to move. Here and here," another gesture, "these tie it to whoever activates it, giving them control over its movements. And this -- " Pointing at the very bottom. " -- is reflection, to capture anything I do and echo it in the doll. For more complex constructions like I used in Canaan house, I would change the talisman there so it would hold my sight and hearing properly, rather than simply mimic me."

"Ideal for my purpose," she says dryly. And then thoughtfully: "I suppose we never tried thanergy as an activating energy."

"We haven't," he says, equally thoughtful. "If I was able to channel it into the talisman before, however poorly, then I think it ought to work. Though I wonder how the paper will react to prolonged exposure to undiluted thanergy."

And considering talisman paper is crafted for the specific purpose of storing and channeling spiritual -- or resentful -- energy, Wei Wuxian doubts they could simply replace it with the flimsy of Harrow's world.

"I cannot really... 'channel' energy as you or Moiraine Sedai can," she says thoughtfully.

"There must be a medium. But... paper is organic, at least."

He nods. "If I were to make a guess, it will probably not hold your thanergy as well as bone. But it will hold it better than ordinary paper. And if it does not work at all, perhaps the characters could be incorporated into your own work somehow."

A quick grin follows -- perhaps not as radiant as his usual grins, but he is doing his best.

"But we could sit and theorize all day and still be wrong! Would you like to try activating it to find out for certain?"

She nods, and stretches out a finger. She touches it to the first character, visualizing the cells and organic matter of the paper, and lets thanergy flow.

Something happens. Probably not what she intended.

The writing is the first to go. Ballpoint pen ink, at least, does not eat through paper as it degrades; it merely fades as if worn away by the tide.

That alone would be enough to disrupt the talisman and keep it from working, but as the thanergy seeps into the doll, and the talisman paper -- as it is meant to do -- absorbs it and bonds tight, its yellow cast abruptly deepens to a withered brown. Fine cracks appear along its surface as the thanergy gnaws apart the cellulose, burning the paper without heat from the inside out. Soon, all that is left is a blank, brittle doll unmoving against the table.

Gingerly, Wei Wuxian picks up the paper doll. It flakes apart in his hands, crumbling to fragments too small to piece together.

"Damn," he sighs as the remains of the talisman sift between his fingers.

"I killed it," she says dryly. "Rather thoroughly, too."

She worries her thumb at her temple.

"Let me see." She reaches for the radius of her skeletal arm--it slips free of the light animation holding it in place without protest--and rolls it between her hands. The periosteum peels off, becoming a flat surface that she lays carefully on the table and leaving a rod of compact bone between the untouched epiphyses.

She picks up her brass fountain pen and tucks into her cheek, drawing it back loaded with blood. "Can you draw the characters again?"

"Yes," he says; he eyes the fountain pen, but only briefly, before picking up his own pen and tearing off a new sheet of talisman paper. Mindful of his tendency toward slapdash calligraphy, he forces himself to slow down, drawing a line of large, tidy characters that should be easy enough to copy.

He slides the paper across to Harrow once he's done.

She nods and begins to transcribe the characters onto the strip of bone; it is narrow, a ribbon of osseous material, just wide enough for the vertical inscription.

Mindful of her ignorance of the language, Harrow imitates his writing as exactly as she can, in all of her brutal precision. She has to stop several times to reload the pen. When she finishes, she turns and looks at Wei Wuxian.

"Is it correct?"

Edited 2020-10-10 02:09 (UTC)

He skims over the writing. She has copied it with such painstaking precision that it is as if Wei Wuxian himself wrote it onto the bone; she even captured a small, meaningless blot of ink in the upper corner of the reflection character.

"Yes," he says with a nod. "That is perfect."

She nods, and holds out her hand over the ribbon of bone; smoke begins to rise from the characters as the blood eats into the bone like acid etching metal. The smell is like... burning bone, nothing else.

As it burns through, Harrow dabs her nose delicately with a blood-stained handkerchief of blue silk.

When it finishes, she lifts the delicate ribbon--the characters are cut clear through to the tabletop--and wraps it back around the radius. "Perhaps the other away around?" she offers, as she fits it back into the arm. "You activating my work?"

Well, hopefully no other cultivators will arrive at the inn and decide to try animating the table!

"I will try," he says. As always, the surest way to distract Wei Wuxian from his darkest thoughts is to present him with a new challenge; his eyes are alight with fresh enthusiasm as he ignites a spark of red energy between his fingertips. With a flick of his wrist, it leaps toward the bone and streaks down the line of characters.

It is --

It is not impossible. But as the spell activates, it immediately becomes clear to Wei Wuxian that bone is not the ideal medium for a talisman. It is sluggish, like wading through knee-deep mud, where an ordinary talisman would be as easy as sprinting across an open field. Perhaps it is only because of the density of the material, he thinks. Bone is far heavier than paper.

With effort, he turns over his hand. The skeletal arm turns with it, resting palm-up on the table, and snaps its fingers with a muted click as Wei Wuxian snaps his own.

Harrow never laughs and smiles infrequently; but the gleam in her eye is a good as a grin. "It works."

"Is it tied to you forever? Or can I take control?"

After years of translating Lan Zhan's minuscule expressions, he knows a not-really-a-grin when he sees it. He beams back at her, wiggling the arm from side to side as if waving.

"I have never tried to hand control of a talisman to someone else," he says. "I wouldn't know where to start. But it is always worth trying, if you have any ideas!"

"Transferring control of a construct is possible, but I'm unpracticed... not many other necromancers on the Ninth."

But she had to hand over control of the planet's corps of skeletal servants when she left. "I can definitely control it as a puppet--I'm just not sure how to take on the talisman. Hold on... this may get weird."

She has always been a mind controlling a set of bones. She does the alchemy that comes as second nature, and expands that set, tugging the arm against Wei Wuxian's control. It's like... arm-wrestling, almost.

His first instinct is to clamp down on his own control of the construct, as if it were a fierce corpse on the verge of breaking ranks. No; it is safe, he tells himself sternly. It is only Harrow, and it is only a single bony arm.

As effortful as activating the talisman, he lets his grip on the arm slip, fraction by fraction. The glowing characters along its surface flicker and dim like lanterns in a breeze.