Closed RP: Tent City FTW
Hogwarts, Susan decided, had been much less confusing when her humanity had had the upper hand. She’d only been back one day, and apparently she’d been married to someone she’d never met before, for reasons wholly unknown. WTF.
She’d known when her grandfather popcorned, though she’d been relatively far away when it happened. Back on the Disc, she had been pulled in before when Death got, as she put it, ‘distracted’; someone had to fill the hole left by his absence, and unfortunately she was the only ‘someone’ who could. She could fight it, if she chose--could hang onto her humanity against the sudden surge of the immortal part of her soul--but with things the way they were, she had no desire to. Her unhappy humanity had quite gladly gone into hibernation--really, it was the most sensible thing it could do, and it let the inhuman aspect of herself subsume it almost entirely.
The problem with being like this was that mortals--their motivations, their emotions, their idiosyncrasies--confused the hell out of her, just as they did her grandfather. Added onto a situation that was confusing just about every normal person who was also affected, it left her completely and utterly bewildered. She took her token and allowed herself to be herded along by the house-elves, though she instructed one to go to her grandfather’s old room and bring her any and all cats it could find.
The world looked slightly different, when she was like this. It was nothing she could put a name to--an almost-imperceptible shift in the way her eyes perceived shape, color; the way her ears processed sound and the texture of things beneath her fingers. As a result, the tent village looked spectacularly odd indeed, and she eyed it somewhat askance as the elves shooed her inside.
Ryder, for his part, was also wondering just what the hell was going on here. When he’d been told about this place, nobody had mentioned the fact that you could wind up force-married as soon as you’d been Sorted. The conversation he’d had with a young woman at his Sorting now seemed infinitely ironic, all things considered. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know just what the Hat had saddled him with for a spouse--especially since he was on vacation, and thus couldn’t kill whoever he was stuck with. Dammit.
He was just inside the tent when he heard the flap-flap of elf feet and the slight electric buzzing of their cattle prods. Cattle prods, of all damn things--quasi-demonic or not, he could still feel pain, and after smacking a few elves he’d had little choice but to let them drag him along. He sighed, lighting a cigarette--he’d been smoking like a chimney since he’d been shoved in here, mostly for lack of anything better to do--they wouldn’t let him out of his tent until he’d found his spouse, apparently, and as a result he was irritated as all get out.
As the elf-footsteps drew closer, they were joined by another sound--meowing. A lot of meowing. Enough meowing for at least ten cats, if not more. God, if the Hat had married him to a Crazy Cat Lady, he was going to ignore the fact that he was on vacation and introduce the Hat to his switchblade.
About thirty seconds later the cavalcade of elves trooped into the tent, surrounded by a herd of cats--at least twenty of them, weaving in and out of the mobile forest of the elves’ legs, purring and attacking shadows. The woman they were escorting was carrying a token, and he held his own up, idly eying both cats and elves--he was somewhat savagely delighted to see that the elves were having a difficult time dealing with so many of the furballs.
“Where do you belong?” he asked, looking at the woman. To his surprise, she wasn’t human--or at least, no more human than he himself. He couldn’t say just what she actually was, though; she wasn’t a demon, or an angel, or anything else he’d ever run across. Huh.
Susan consulted her own ticket, idly prying a cat off her boot. “A-4,” she said. “I THINK--I mean, I think you’re meant to be my spouse.” How odd. Just as Ryder knew she wasn’t human, she could tell at once that he wasn’t, either, at least not in the strictly accepted sense of the word. “What exactly is going on here?”
He shrugged, still regarding her. “I have no goddamn clue,” he said. “I just got here.” All right, what the hell was this woman? Her first words had manifested in his brain without bothering to pass through his ears. Who knew? This might not be completely boring after all.
I JUST GOT BACK--I mean, I just got back, myself,” Susan said. “I can’t imagine what in hell the Hat might have been thinking.” The Hat really was even weirder than most of the denizens of Hogwarts--and that was really saying something.
Susan in her human state was a forthright creature, but she at least had some concept of the word ‘politeness’. Now, however, much like her grandfather, the word was more or less meaningless to her, and she looked at Ryder with a kind of half-detached curiosity. “What are you?” she asked.
Ryder’s eyebrows went up. He’d been asked that question before, but it was usually by someone who knew he was about to slice them up like a Mixmaster. He’d never had it asked by someone who was arguably less human than himself, and for once he answered honestly and without preamble. “A demon,” he said bluntly. “And occasionally a serial killer. What are you?”
A demon? Oh, well that was all right, then. Susan herself had never really dealt with demons, but her grandfather had, and at present she had a great deal of his memories rattling around in her head. “My grandfather is Death,” she said. “For now I am, too.” Her speech was…not flat, precisely, but even when it was actually passing through via the ears, it was not a voice that could ever belong to a mortal creature. She was Death, was she? He didn’t know if he believed that, but the fact remained that she was something, and it was as good an explanation as any.
“Well, granddaughter of Death, do you have a name?” he asked. Ryder did know what politeness was--he just didn’t often exercise it. Rudeness was lost on Susan, though.
“Susan,” she said. “I’m Susan Sto Helit.” The ordinary thing to do would be to shake hands, but most social niceties, much like rudeness, were mystifying.
Ryder watched her for a moment, silent. Unafraid and unoffended…good, so far she'd given him no reason to want to strangle her. “John Ryder,” he said, and he did offer a hand. “Seems like we’re going to be stuck together for a while.”
Susan looked at his hand blankly for a second before shaking it. I WISH I KNEW WHY, she said, and shook her head--keeping the Voice in check was not easy. He didn’t comment, though--just arched an eyebrow. “If we can find the Hat, maybe we can persuade it to let us off this mess.”
Ryder laughed, a laugh that somehow managed to be black and wholehearted all at once. “Persuade it,” he said, pulling his knife out of his boot and standing up. “Right.” His methods of ‘persuasion’ could be either terribly devious or straight to the (usually literal) point. The Hat, should he find it, was likely to receive the latter treatment. If he had to be married by force, Susan was something of a relief as a nominal spouse, since she was both weird as hell and seemed to want out as much as he did, but he’d rather not have to deal with it at all. And hell, maybe if he did indeed have Death with him, he could get around the school’s no-kill rule. “Shall we?”
Susan shrugged. WHY NOT? She pried several more kittens from her skirt and boots, shooing them into the tent. Damn, she was short--Ryder almost didn’t want to follow her too closely, in case he stepped on her. Once out the door she paused, taking in the expanse of the tent village. “Where the hell do we even start?”
He’d been wondering that himself. “That way,” he said, pointing. Not because he had any real idea--he didn’t--but because hey, it was as good a direction as any. They started off along the grassy lanes between tents, trailing a retinue of cats. “So--Death? Really? How does that even work?”