[OPEN]

[daddyscythe]

Characters: OPEN to the people who didn't go to the cruise
Location: Creeping Crypts
Rating: Gen...?
Time: October 26 evening to morning of October 27
Description: Spirit still wants to have fun even if it's not in the Maldives. So let's have a barbecue and sleepover!

Comments

[strongjump]

Equius had spent most of his time in Death City trying to figure out how humans worked - in particular, their social strata. It was confusing and unpleasant - they didn't separate themselves by class, apparently, nor did any of them communicate with a proper color. According to Karkat, they didn't work on a blood-caste system, anyway, so that was useless to try and figure out. Merit was a foolish thing to base an entire social system around, but so far, that was what seemed to be his best bet. It was all very ... distressing.

So, in an effort to get out and see who he could determine to be of a matching (or higher) status than him, he decided to go to that advertised 'barbecue'. He wasn't quite sure what that would entail, cooking not being one of his exceptional strengths, but there was no harm in going to see. Probably. He'd started to get used to the presence of the sun, so that wouldn't bother him, either. Probably.

He paused near the edge of the slowly-growing gathering, not far from another human, and observed the happenings. There was that man, Spirit, apparently taking care of the proceedings. It ... smelled interesting, from the distance. Equius folded his arms across his chest and eyed the nearest human from behind his sunglasses.

"Do you know what goes on at one of these?" he asked, not entirely willing to go into the situation blind.

[want_the_world]

Mello sized the stranger up, taking in the horns, the cracked sunglasses. What the fuck was this guy supposed to be, anyway? He'd seen a lot weirder, though, so he only allowed himself to hike an eyebrow in reaction.

"Eating, pointless small talk, et cetera. I take it you've never been to one?" Not that Mello had. For all that he'd been blessed with better social skills than the average Wammy's kid, he seldom used them to socialize for its own sake, and wasn't intending to here. This guy was probably a weirdo, but compared to the kids and that cheery imbecile Spirit, he struck Mello as the least annoying person available to talk to right now.

[strongjump]

"No. Such social interaction between the classes was unsuitable on my world." An open invitation to anybody ... who would have the audacity on Alternia? Aside from everyone, apparently, given the poor state everything had been in before the game started. It disgusted him to think about it. And it was commonplace, here! Or at least not foolish enough to warrant an outcry.

Eating, hm. What precisely would they be eating? Humans had a much larger variety of foodstuffs than anything he'd ever encountered, so maybe this excursion would educate him further on what it was that made humans go for such a variety, rather than a few set, nutritious options.

[want_the_world]

Mello remembered what tA had said about the castes, and took a more considering look at the guy. "You're one of them, aren't you? The trolls." Unfortunately (or possibly fortunately) for him, he didn't know the zodiac symbols, not even his own.

He thought, too, of how tA had used the word culling, more than once, and of how any sentient being could be convinced it was the way to go, so long as they believed it wouldn't be their ass on the line. "I doubt human nature and troll nature are as different as they might seem on the surface."

[strongjump]

One of them. Lumped in with the lowbloods (and the highbloods). It was almost infuriating, but he figured that since there were only so many trolls, it was as suitable a descriptor as a stranger could provide.

"Yes. One of the former residents of the planet Alternia." Equius took another look at the human he was speaking to. Outwardly, he didn't look terrifically strong, but appearances could be deceiving. Strength could come from unexpected quarters. "Maybe not, but so far I've found far more differences than similarities. Even setting aside the physiological aspects, I haven't seen more than a minor handful of even remotely similar social developments." He could deal with their non-gray skin tones and lack of horns and even their unnatural decision to live in the daylight, but ... there had to be standards, if at least in the way they acted.

[want_the_world]

Mello was trying to figure out if he'd talked to this particular troll before, and he wasn't certain he had. Gemini was off with Matt; the cloud girl was, well, a girl; the one who typed in grey and wouldn't say which sign he was would have pissed him off by now; and Sagittarius was a loon.

Based on the little he knew about the way their world worked, he couldn't have said he completely disapproved, as far as the evolutionary aspect of it went. Be smarter, be stronger, do the shit no one else had the guts to do; he'd lived that way for years after leaving Winchester, and he'd been damn good at it. It was only when people started cheating that the system fell apart.

"You have a society at all, you have people who think they know how it ought to be." He shrugged, one-shouldered. "Which sign do you go with?"

[strongjump]

Of course there were people who thought they knew how it ought to be. He was one of them! And it was more than just thinking it; there was the knowing, the absolute knowledge of the past's successes to base his opinions on. That no-one else could understand and adhere to that was more their loss than his. An infuriating loss.

But before he could address this topic further to the nearby human, there came the question of his sign. Again with this zodiac business Terezi had been so obsessed with. Foolish as it had been, Equius had to admit that the idea of people's very existences being somehow linked to them in any way, almost as if they were their patrons, was a little flattering. Now, what had his been called again?

"I was ... " Of course the proper name had been mangled by the alien evolution, and the new one was harder on the tongue. Sagi ... something? Sagit ... right. "Sagittarius."

[want_the_world]

"Are you shitting me? Heh, I've talked to you before. I'm one of yours, apparently."

Now that was interesting, and Mello wondered if these trolls weren't more sophisticated at their efforts than he'd first thought, assuming personae for the sake of interacting with people online.

[strongjump]

Now Equius turned fully to look at the human he was speaking to. This had been one of his? Again, not quite what he'd expected - not an obvious pinnacle of strength, no high-blooded perfection visible (or whatever the human equivalent was, anyway, if it was a visible thing) - but there was a way this human held himself that assured self-confidence and determination. He leaned a little closer to get a better look.

"Are you?" He shifted, still uncomfortable in the heat of the afternoon sun. "You must have used the text function, because I don't recognize you." He scowled slightly. "How strong are you?"

[want_the_world]

"I always use text."

There it was, the odd fixation on being strong, and Mello couldn't help but bristle at the implication he wasn't, intentional or not. He didn't excel at physical prowess, and he knew it, but he knew just as well that he could give anyone a fair contest in being strong enough to do the unpleasant, but necessary, things.

"Strong enough to end a war in my world."

[strongjump]

"There's nothing wrong with the text function." Absolutely true. Equius used it whenever possible. Though it did lead to these little confusions. Otherwise, he would have known this was one of 'his' humans, the ones born under his apparent sign ... well, probably, anyway.

Ended a war? That was strong. He nodded approvingly, stepping back so as not to be so close any longer. How many legions had this human slain? How many battles won? Or did humans even have the same sorts of wars?

"How'd you do that?" Equius was legitimately interested now; any other points of interest at the barbecue weren't important at the moment. "I assume you crushed your foolish enemies beneath the might of your greatest weapons."

[want_the_world]

"I outsmarted my enemy, yes."

With a human, this might have been sufficient, but Mello had a feeling a troll would find it less than impressive, so he elaborated, as he didn't often do. It was thanks to Near that he knew what had happened, but any inconvenient gratitude was far from his mind.

"I found the hole in his plan, and exploited it. Understand, this wasn't someone who wanted to take over the world through might. He wanted to be worshiped, without getting his own hands dirty. If you think of it in terms of chess, I'm the one who took his queen, and flipped the board over, when he thought no one could."

He quirked a corner of his mouth in the equivalent of tipping his head inquisitively. "Trolls know chess, right?"

[strongjump]

The highblood method of backstabbings and outsmartings, of underhanded tactics being used to outdo one's enemies was something Equius was part of on almost a daily basis thanks to his neighbors (or had been, anyway), so he was pleased to hear that someone sharing his sign was capable of similar actions, especially against someone, though he had no idea who that someone may have been. Maybe they'd been higher, socially, if they'd been seeking to be worshiped ... or lower, aiming for a goal outside their reach.

"Of course we know chess," he said. Apparently it was a universal constant. "So you forced him from his goals and destroyed his plans ... very admirable." Strength did come in a variety of forms, he supposed, and this was all very acceptable by him. "I assume he was attempting to rise above his otherwise low station in life?"

[want_the_world]

A couple of brief conversations with Yagami here had done little to make Mello revise his original profile of him. Well-off, spoiled, even, free enough from the grit of daily life to look down on it, and used to getting everything he wanted. And he had that one bit of rot in his soul that made him think he should get to say how the entire world should be.

"He didn't start out that low. He was greedy, and almost certainly a sociopath. He didn't think of other people as people," he clarified, on the assumption that the concept was either unknown to trolls, or such a universal condition that they might not have had a word for it. "He thought of them as trash to be swept away. The thing is, he cheated to do it. Wanted to keep his own hands clean."

[strongjump]

Equius frowned slightly. How low was 'not that low'? If it turned out that someone rightfully of the higher classes had been foiled by someone in a lower caste, then that would be unacceptable - but for that matter, what class was this human in? He certainly held himself well, and had the strength and intelligence to back himself up. Ugh, why couldn't humans have a simpler method of determining all this?

At least he could sympathize with the idea of battling someone aiming to sweep away entire peoples. Eridan's time-honored concepts of land-dweller genocide were suitably familiar to this situation. But at least Eridan had gone ahead to try that with his own two hands and various weaponry. Cheating was all well and good, but ...

"How did he cheat? If he used others to further his goals, then provided they didn't have superiority over him, I see no fault in that particular aspect, at least."

[want_the_world]

Mello didn't see anything wrong with the concept; that was what the stupid and the easily-led were for, after all. It was perfectly clear to him that using people in service to his goal had been necessary, while Yagami had done it out of what Mello couldn't help but think of as squeamishness.

He glanced around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. "He had a way of killing people without having to do it himself. From afar. All he had to do was pick a target." It was a simplification that was good enough. "Never even had to be in the same room as the corpse."