RP:Watashiato
Part of the The God of Undeath Arc
Part of the Once Upon a Midnight Dreary Arc
Summary:
Watashiato - noun. Curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see.
Lanlan departed the arena with a doubt for his future favorite coat and the seamstress who'd spin it, but Inks would be fine, Lanlan realized eventually. The more important occurrence was much more subtle than a fight between father and daughter. Lanlan saw her. It should've been a rumor or senseless gossip, propaganda perhaps; to dissuade chaos among the schemers of Vailkrin. Instead, it was true. Quintessa was there. He knew it was really her when she looked at him. He arrived back home at the tower, and seems to have become in her office. Her old office. "Still has your stink," he says bitterly, though maybe with a wisp of regret. He knew she was vulnerable to Caluss, and did nothing to intervene. Might've isolated her, exacerbating his potential further. "What kind of weakling falls under the profane temptations of a creature such as that," he says, shifting all the blame.
This place was going to be emptied soon, and he needed to know if there were any clues that would suggest her future plans. Or anything he missed in the days leading up to her betrayal. At first, his snooping was tactful. He peruses daintily, moving things and replacing them, careful to leave everything as it had been left for him. A grotesque skull of a razurath, a profane trophy. "Who would willingly remember this." He tips it over from its place as he moves on to a dark book. "The Compendium Toxicum," he says dramatically as he randomly turns pages over. "More like the Compendium Plagiarism." He knew there wouldn't be evidence of anything here. No plans. None written at least, even if this is where they conspired.
The silliness of treating the office she rejected dawns on him suddenly, followed by a violent arcane wind. Crystals, books, skulls, and all manner of Tessa-tainted objects twist around the room before rolling and settling into a mess. And as a cupboard door opens, shuts, opens, shuts, applauding him, he spies something winking at him from within. A single vial. He pops the cork and confirms its contents with a wiff. Sure, it recalls. But he's not about to drink it. Suddenly consumed by conviction, he tears the drapes from their place on the window beckoning moonlight watch over him. The vial of belladonna (plus whatever) is placed on the sill. A sprinkling glitterant is added, and the moonlight is 'encouraged' to reflect the night sky on the surfaces of the room.
He sits on the fallen drape and looks into a hand mirror. Red eyes stare unblinking into each other as the room and the sky trapped within it spin around his reflection. As it does, he hones in on the faint touch of lingering swamp left in these objects scattered around him. He awakens. Without remembering he shut them, he opens his eyes and pulls the mirror down from his face. A great stone castle is here in front of him. Windowless, and shrouded in mist. As he walks toward a set of steel doors, they open. Seeming to invite him inside. Though he can't quite remember why, he does know he came here on purpose, and it hardly occurs to him to reconsider.
Quintessa stirs in her sleep, safely tucked away in her castle but she does not wake. Nightmares were normal for her but they had grown increasingly frequent since making a new pact with Caluss, a decision she felt she had no other choice but to make. Regret and guilt lingered in her dreams like a toxic sludge, a black goop that coated the mossy green stone of the cyclopean network laid out before Lanlan. Sensing the objects Quintessa had left behind, her dreamscape was now wide open to the invader. Setting just one foot inside this Dream Castle would allow Lanlan to hear the cursing and the sobbing of Quintessa, her strained voice echoing down the walls like a beacon leading him to her. Twisted halls of pitch blackness lead to a workshop of somesort, Quintessa’s back towards the half-drow in the threshold.
“Nonononono…” The changeling whispers to herself, trying to frantically put something back together on her workbench. “This isn’t right… Something’s not… Please!!” She sets an object to the side, a wooden figurine of a smiling dark elf dressed in purple wizard’s robes. As Quintessa picks up a new object from the table, the unattended dark elf figurine slowly begins to disassemble itself, arms and legs slowly popping out of their sockets as if an invisible hand was pulling them apart.
“Please, I’m begging you…” Quintessa sobs into her work, hunched over in tattered black rags that hangs across her skinny frame like the curtains in her old office. She has yet to notice that the drow figurine has been undone, but the sound of helplessness in her voice alludes that she already knew. “I’m trying so hard… Believe me…” A metal door in the room with heavy chains begins to clatter, the door bouncing in the frame as something slams against it like a battering ram on the other side. A woman’s screams of fury call out, muffled from the other side, also Quintessa’s voice.
“Shut up!!” Quintessa screams at the version of herself hidden behind the door. She must have chained it up for a reason…
Lanlan wisely keeps his hands tucked toward himself as he browses this strange place. Not strange enough, he laments. The black ooze is far too familiar. It infected everything. He tries to keep his mind as blank as possible, knowing that a second (or third?) consciousness could become known to the master of the realm, and that might ruin any chance of learning what he wanted to know. Honing in on the anguished echoes leads him toward a workshop, where he stands momentarily in the threshold. He didn't know what to expect, but it wasn't this. And the overwhelming feeling of remorse seems to reverberate into him the nearer he gets, to the point that he becomes more interested perhaps in finding out why, than his original purpose.
To be as innocent and harmless as possible, and also someone she might hate less, he becomes Freckles. She must at least know he's there, being aware of everything on some level, perhaps even his disguise. But in this place, he didn't just look like Freckles. He is Freckles. But smaller. "Remember me? I'm Freckles," he says with a smile and a catlike trill, "Oh no..."he says after seeing the broken and breaking dark elf doll. "Did you break it?" He doesn't want to accuse her, merely to understand. "Maybe I can help," he pulls a small glass jar out of his pocket, one with a brush made into the jar's lid. "Could you fix it?" It was glue.
Quintessa turns suddenly when she hears the voice, “Freckles?” She remembered him, how cute she thought he was with the way his freckles dotted his face like Karasu. This form put her at ease but her brows furrowed in confusion. “Why are -you- here?” She looks at the elf on the table, quickly ignoring her own question to refocus on the wooden poppets on her workbench.
“Look at them,” She laments, showing off maybe a dozen small figurines, all undoing themselves like the dark elf had. There was a blonde human in a white dress, a red-haired woman in black, a shorter white-haired doll in a blue kimono, a gentleman in a black coat and calico cat ears- Everyone was here. The only figurine that didn’t pull itself apart was the purple haired feline with the angry face. “I can’t make them stay together… I’m losing my grasp on them… They all hate me now…”
Quintessa wants to cry, and in this vulnerable state supposedly safe in her dreamscape she would, but Freckles offers her something; Glue. “This… might help.” Slowly Quintessa returns to the dark elf figurine, painting the pegs with the dream-paste and returning them back inside the holes. She waits for a moment… and the figurine stays put together. “H-how!” There is a smile that spreads across her face in juxtaposition with her bloodshot and tear-filled eyes. “He’s one of my oldest friends… but this isn’t the first time his figurine came apart.” Mismatched eyes flicker back to Freckles filled with suspicion, her smile fading away. She knows something is wrong now, that this isn’t a normal dream. “Who are you?”
“I’m here because…I missed you. And I knew you needed help.” He sees all the broken pieces and gradually begins to recognize them, and they seem to become more lively to him as he does. It’s a little off putting to see himself in pieces. “They hate you?” She wasn’t talking about the dolls, he knew. “Didn’t you know they would and do it anyway?”
The doll she glues together holds firm and stares blankly back at Tessa, blankly or expectantly. “He is?” Asks Freckles, stalling. “I don’t think he knew that. That you considered him a friend.” The face on the doll seems to change minutely, shifting toward surprise as its slotted mouth slides open, as if by gravity.
“Who am I?” Asks Freckles, as Quintessa begins to see through him. Her will over the realm begins to undo his will over himself. His eyebrow whiskers entwine and his yellow cat eyes redden and the slitted pupils see their corners become rounded. “The real question is,” says the doll in her hand, “is who are you?” It pushes itself stiffly off her hand and back onto the table. “You think you can treat us so roughly and we won’t get hurt?” It picks up the glue brush in both hands and brushes the black coat wearing doll’s dismembered head. Then he affixes the doll’s butt to its head.
Hopefully this would distract Tessa from Freckles long enough. When she looks back at Freckles, he would be gone. Lanlan was the doll now. It wisely keeps its distance from the grumpy feline doll, in case that one came to life too. “Why did you betray us?”
Quintessa lets go of the doll, dropping it as she wraps her lanky arms around her body as the Lanlan figurine takes on a more literal form. “I… I didn’t mean to…” She whispers, her eyes wide and pleading. She understood now, the weight of the revelation bringing her to her knees. “I’m so frakking sorry…” Her form crumples on the floor and she sobs quietly.
Across the room the door bangs louder and louder, a rabid scream echoing from the other side. “I want to kill that thing!” The door clatters against the chains once more but it holds against her wrath. When the voice speaks again it is colder, more sinister, as if she’s dropped to the floor to speak under the crack. “And when I finally get out of here I’ll have my revenge… You haven’t even seen my last betrayal, make no mistake about that.”
“Be quiet,” the Quintessa on the floor weakly protests, wiping the tears from her eyes as she pulls herself up to the table. “It will hear us…” Mismatched eyes return to the Lanlan figuring before her, a tremble in her lips. “I don’t want to do its bidding,” she admits in a fearful whisper, “But it’s watching me now… It knew I was going to help cure the Xalious Tree like I had the Eternal Tree and it intercepted me… Forced me into an ultimatum…” She looks over her shoulder as if she expect Caluss to be there, listening in. Then Quintessa gets even closer, her voice lower. “It's starting to suspect I’m not loyal to it, that I’m letting you win… I don’t know what to do anymore Lanlan…”
Lanlan finds himself unable to disbelieve her at this time. It doesn’t seem like she would be capable, here. “You have to fix it,” he says sympathetically. “You just have to.” It’s hard to tell with his porcelain features, so stiff and brittle. But here in this realm of unbridled emotion, he’s deeply affected by such a raw display. As she collapses to her knees, he walks to the edge of the table. He wants to console her more than anything, temporarily forgetting what she’s done and who she’s been to him, being so overwhelmed by what he knows is true remorse and despair. “You can fix it.” She’s just a kid, he remembers. It’s not the first time he’s forgotten.
And then he remembers why. The shock of hearing the angry girl behind the door causes such a jolt that he almost loses his footing. He could’ve crashed into a million little pieces. “I’m not safe here,” he says in his little doll voice. Quintessa understands, and doesn’t explain yet. And though he wants to ask, he’s too afraid to at this time, knowing the rules of this realm depend on her, and only by following her instructions can he not break them. He scoots closer to her at the edge of the table, inching on his butt, fearful of the edge now. “I have a plan,” he whispers as quietly as he can. “Maybe you can help. But what do you mean it’s watching you? How?”
Quintessa nods her head enthusiastically at the pint-sized archmage, a light sparkling in her mismatched eyes. “Yes, yes, I can fix it!” She scoops Lanlan up into her hands so he doesn’t fall and break, holding him close like a baby as she continues to speak in a hushed tone down to him. “I’ll keep you safe here… perhaps a different room? Not so close to the Door to Darkness…” She stands and heads the direction the half-drow had entered, wandering down the cyclopian halls in her bare feet. “It’s watching me Lanlan,” Quintessa repeats, skulking around corners that did not exist when Lanlan passed through here. “I’ll show you what I mean…” Slipping into a new room, large and domed, crystalline structures in the floor rising up to create a massive crystal ball in the center of the room, she places the doll of the Archmage on one of the man pillows that encircled this scrying device. “The Hall of Memories…”
As Quintessa recalls the moment she was forced to betray them, the swirling mist of the crystal ball manifests into something complete. A voice. A whisper, hoarse and grating like a death rattle. The monster is quite close. "I've come for my bequeathment," It says plainly, "My testament was that you act out my will upon three embodiments. You agreed... You reneged." The crystal ball shows the moment Alithyk Caluss placed a black gemstone the size of a grapefruit into the changeling’s hands. "My enemies," Its voice rattles. "Your friends." The corpse holds Tessa's arm in place and puts an object covered in a viscous black tar in her mutilated hand. "You'll keep this on you at all times," It says, neither a command nor a suggestion. Simply a fact. "Another piece of me. Still mine. I'll use it to see what you see.” It pauses to remind her what awaits her if she disobeys. “I'll use it to take you if need be." The corpse of the boy puppeted by Caluss releases her and collapses into a lifeless heap as the toxic fumes rapidly dissipate, until the entire memory faded into the abyssal blackness of her crystal ball.
“The Eye of Alithyk Caluss.” She sinks into the pillows next to Lanlan, defeated. “If I mess up it will kill me… I can’t just openly defy it anymore. I have to keep this object on me and act like I’m furthering its goals.” Her voice is dejected, uncertain about how she’s going to survive this mess she’s gotten involved in. “I want to help you,” she says, finally lifting her gaze from the floor to meet him. “But I don’t know how to fool a god.”
Lanlan clings to strands of hair as if his life depended on it. Does it? What happens to him if he dies here? He doesn’t know, yet. He silently agrees that they should go away from that door, the thing behind it was threatening to unravel his fragile grasp on his composure. The strange halls seem to lead an impossible path and though he tries his best to remember how they got there in case he needs to escape, he can’t be sure if anything he saw would be the same the next time he sees it. “What’s watching you?” She doesn’t need to answer, she shows him. Its a memory of Alithyk Caluss. If what he saw was real, at least in some degree, then he would understand her reasons for keeping far away from them, even now that she was on the surface. She wasn’t free.
It made sense now, if he believed her. And in here he did. “Then do it,” he says assertively. “Further its goals, do anything you can to keep its faith in you. You can’t let it kill you because…” He silently quantified the risk of revealing too much and accidentally routing himself. “I have a plan. I can’t tell you everything yet, I don’t know everything yet.” He ponders a little more. The one pitfall of his plan so far was having no way to get Caluss to meet them at the ritual. Why would It willingly meet its own end? It had to do so without suspecting. And then Lanlan got a magical and wonderful and terrible idea. “We need to meet. In person I mean. I think I know how to fool a god."
Quintessa felt like a child sitting on these oversized pillows talking to a doll of Lanlan, and subtly so her form begins to shift into one, her hair growing long and matted, her form smaller and skinnier. Wide-eyed she nods, following along until he tells her to keep working for it. “But they’re going to kill me… Khitti and Kasyr especially- And they can really do it too. I’m scared of them.” Her voice too had shifted into a child’s and her little form trembles at the thought. Reactively the crystal ball shows memories of them fighting each other; Kasyr throwing a scalpel through Tessa's torso, Khitti neutralizing Quintessa’s dark energy with light magic, and then finally, curiously enough, it shows the fight between the Crimson Mantis and Kasyr, thought the Mantis comes out on top in the end. These and other clips from various fights featuring Quintessa, Khitti, and Kasyr begin to play absentmindedly in the background.
“But I trust you,” she finally continues, “I’ll keep doing what it wants but it’s going to want results. I can’t keep using its power to entertain people- it’s getting annoyed I haven’t killed you yet.” She frowns, her voice straining like she’s going to cry. “I have to… I have to fight you… I need it to look like we’re winning. We can trick it if it thinks it’s winning. It’s short-sighted that way. Easily distracted. It’s that insect brain.. More advanced but more prone to hubris…” She regains her composure. “I will put your name back on the list of people allowed within my citadel but Karasu knows… She’ll likely be suspicious of you if you visit… Unless we meet somewhere else… Not in Cenril… Or Xalious… or Frostmaw… Elazul’s Bite, the number of safe places in the world is dwindling fast.”
Lanlan stared blankly at her with his painted eyes. “Then stay away from them! You keep putting yourself on a platter for your enemies to carve you up then of course they will.” The dangers she faces at her former friends’ hands is only all too familiar to him, he averts his eyes rather than be tempted to relive any of it. Though knowing that she is in fact the Crimson Mantis could prove useful in some way, he’s sure of it. “That’s you? Who else knows that’s you?”
She trusts him, that was good. But now she’s asking him to trust her, potentially with his life. Less than good. On some level, the idea that Caluss had noticed him and wanted him targeted especially was flattering. It was also terrifying. “Karasu knows?” Of course she does. He hasn’t seen her in a while, did that mean she was in league with them? Or that she was recusing herself, he didn’t know. “Fine. We’ll meet in Fog Forest a week from today, where I will tell you what Caluss needs to see, and you will ‘betray’ me and leave me to die. I think it’s best that neither of our people know what we’re up to. The less people who know, the less people who will be tortured for information."
Quintessa’s head snaps up at the oversized crystal ball, watching as the Crimson Mantis fights on the glowing orb. “What!?” She did not mean to allow this memory to slip. Quickly she scoops up Lanlan, picking him up and standing to leave this room. “Nobody knows! And don’t tell anyone either- The Crimson Mantis is a symbol of rebellion against Larket and solidarity with the witches that were persecuted. She’s a hero! And if people find out she’s really me they won’t feel the same about her. My identity will taint the symbolic meaning.” She rushes out of the room, the twisted halls yet again different than they were before and a loud banging echoing from one direction. Quintessa heads away from that sound, through another threshold that takes her to a stone spiral staircase leading down, deeper into her dreamscape.
“I can’t avoid Khitti or Kasyr, they always come to my tournament! Khitti can find me no matter where I go, it's only by her mercy she hasn’t killed me yet, and Kasyr?” Quintessa turns more pale than she already is. “I don’t know why he hasn’t slain me publicly yet. What a spectacle that would be, to rain pendere down on my little commentarter’s booth…” When Lanlan asks about Karasu she shakes her head. “She doesn’t know the details, only that I’m being forced to work for it against my will. I told her I have a plan but… I’m making this all up as I go, stalling in hopes you all get your act together and kill this thing but if my divination magic is accurate you’re all been running around not working together!”
Finally Quintessa reaches a foyer, rotten red carpet lining the floor leading to a rusty iron gate leading back out into the dream wilds, a thick layer of fog obscuring them from seeing anything outside of Quintessa’s dreamscape. Setting Lanlan down on the floor she continues speaking. “Okay, so like, a play? Theatre is an art I’ve come to enjoy. Drama! Acting!” She seems excited now- too excited. “In the fog forest- assuming I’m not dead by then. I’ll play the most convincing villain Caluss has even seen and you’ll feed us false information that I’ll blindly act on. I’ll lead Caluss like a lamb to slaughter- like the Fermin Piper of yore!”
Lanlan drew his hands into himself and tries to rub them together approvingly, but his articulation as a toy is limited. They just wiggle toward each other as his smile cracks the paint on his face. "Another secret! A fun one too. Don't worry, I won't tell." He was thinking about who he might tell. A dream within a dream! They go further away from the scary door, Lanlan clinging to her hair like a yule tree ornament in a blizzard as she runs. Part of him wonders if she's leading him to his doom. But he has to let her.
He tugs on her hair a little. "That's exactly what I'm talking about! Hosting a tournament? I'm surprised they haven't killed you yet either, it's like you're taunting us all. It's like you're asking for it." Sentimentality makes weaklings of them all. He rolled his whole head in lieu of his stuck, painted on eyes. Maybe he was getting to comfortable and feeling to safe. When she corrects him about Karasu, he merely nods and says, "Mhm."
Together they find an avenue into the dream wilds, a place Lanlan has only incidentally experienced. Some day there would be time. After Caluss was dead. But they were finally going to! If they could manage to keep from killing each other that is. Better save that for after. Leave the drama at the theater for now...except in this instance. They were taking the stage with them. "Exactly like a play! But there's only one idiot in the audience. And it won't be clapping at the end, we'll be clapping them." He was getting excited just thinking about it. The biggest lie ever told, large enough to save the world. Honesty is officially the second best policy.
Quintessa shrugs, “Maybe I -am- asking for it. After all, isn't it what I deserve? Trick or not I almost permanently destroyed the Xalious Tree trying to lure Caluss out and save Kanna. I was foolish to try that by myself… But I trusted that you all would not let that happen. You and Valrae and Khitti and Kailani and Penelope… I trusted you all to save the Xalious Tree despite me having to set it up. We needed to get Kanna back. She is important in fixing this mess.”
As she speaks she moves over to touch the iron gates, which causes her hands to bleed and her body to fall limply to the floor onto her butt. “Ouch.” She stares down at her bleeding palms. “Weird… I can't leave while you are here… I suppose that makes sense.” Quintessa peers back over her shoulder, back at Lanlan. “Just promise me that once I get into character you’ll remember that it’s just that; a character. The real me would never sacrifice free will for power- I think deep down you know that about me. All that ‘Great Defier’ nonsense from before… It’s not a defier at all- it’s an enslaver trying to turn us into puppets. I can’t allow that to happen. We have to stop it.”
Lanlan couldn’t argue. They succeeded in saving the Xalious tree, but they didn’t have to. They nearly died. In fact, Lanlan did die, whether he was ready to admit that to himself, or even conscious of it entirely. “Then you’ll have to answer for your crimes,” he says. “But why should it be to them? They’re none to judge. They’d sacrifice the world for their hurt feelings.” It was almost time to go. “I’ll send a letter to the Crimson Mantis, ‘my old friend’, requesting to meet me in the fog forest. I’ll tell them of our plan. Then it’ll be time for the ‘betrayal’. And…don’t let them kill you. I have a feeling you’re important to untangling this mess too.”
Why does she collapse at the touch of the gate? He inches toward it, reluctantly placing a wooden hand on it. An experiment. Nothing came of it. “Hmm.” It meant something, he knew. But he wasn’t sure if he should know exactly what. He considered the heap she became blankly for a moment. “I need to leave,” he says to her. And he passes between the iron bars, preparing his foray into the wilds. “Remember. Don’t die.”
Quintessa nods solemnly at the assertion that she’d had to answer for her crimes, “When that time comes I will do whatever it takes to pay reparations for my actions, I swear it. Whatever you deem appropriate, my archmage.” Quintessa gets to her feet, watching the blood in her hands pool in her palm until it becomes solid and flat, like a massive scale of a crimson creature. “I’ll do what I have to to survive…” She murmurs in response to not letting them kill her. “I’ll see this to the end.”
Something about this statement, about being a survivor, stirred the thoughts of Gospel and then the red scale’s purpose in her palm became apparent. “Lanlan, wait!” Quintessa carefully slips her hand through the gaps in the portcullis, holding out the crimson shaded scale for him to take. “I feel like I should give this to you…” She didn’t know how to convince him to take it but she made the offer anyway. “Sometimes the objects we possess in the dream realm can lead us to different places. Maybe this can lead you where you need to go.”
Lanlan had no illusions about his role in Quintessa’s future, in the event that she actually had one. If any of them did. There was going to be consequences whether she proved faithful in this endeavor or not. Mercy might fail. “I hope that’s true,” he says solemnly. It seemed bleak, no matter what she chose, but he doesn’t voice that. “I’ll make sure your heroism is considered.”
Now it was nearing time to wake up. But she had one last gift for him. A red scale. There was something minutely familiar about it, something on the tip of his tongue that invited anxiety…or was it excitement? Danger, he felt. That much he knew, ominous choices. All heralded by this beautiful scale. He narrows his eyes on her curiously as he accepts it. He was depending on her right now, there seemed to be almost no other choice. But there was a sense, that were this not the case? They could easily become enemies again. “Farewell,” he says, as he disappears into the mist.