[Closed]
Who: Near (isfinethanks) and River Tam (impossibly)
When: 5/29
Where: Near's place.
Format: Intro's prose for thinky-thoughts. As to the rest? W/e works.
What: Hellcat attack with a surprise ending.
Warnings: Hellcats.
The foyer of the house he was renting was big, and its floor was filled with tarot cards. Nate River was a small, crumpled white lump in the middle of the room. He reached out and picked up a card, drew it not-quite-but-almost randomly from those lying in front of him. The Fool. He flipped it in his hand a few times, looked it over with a dull frown.
He had a cursory knowledge of the symbolism of the tarot. In fact, that symbolism often played a part in the algorithmic method that dictated his placement of the cards. Drawing from the meanings of the major arcana and from mathematical manipulations performed to the numbers attributed the minor arcana, he built towering structures which were actually elaborate maps of the situational, behavioral or probabilistic analyses he was thinking through. The cards served as coded cognitive props- as did most of the little knick-knacks he perpetually fidgeted with.
And he’d been doing a hell of a lot of thinking, in Anatole.
Feelings of abject powerlessness tended to send his brain into overdrive. So, the structures he’d created during his time in the city were larger and more complex than anything he’d previously built - and more tentatively balanced, carefully and delicately constructed to preserve the gaps that peppered his actual hypotheses about this horrible, probabilistically unwieldy place. He’d built them so that they radiated out from a cell-like center in a labyrinthine composition of twists, turns and dead ends: a lab rat’s maze of cards - a configuration pretty apt to the source material, so far as he was concerned.
But there wasn’t a maze, anymore. Instead, he was surrounded by chaotic little piles of paper rubble. And no amount of cognitive churning or rationalization could silence the sense of foreboding this brought him. Beneath his knees, the floor still shook with the tremors that had toppled his towers, and in the distance, he heard the shrill cries and the rumblings of someone else’s battle. Thankfully, it hadn’t yet come to his doorstep. He wasn’t much for hoping, but he was hoping, nonetheless, that it didn’t. Considering the nauseatingly awesome power of the beings in this place, there wasn’t much else he could do.
Still, it was better to at least attempt to be safe than to be stupid, so despite the fact that he had his doubts about what a couple of extra walls might do if the things outside did descend on his place, here he was, gathering a few extra supplies to take with him into the basement, where he’d hole up until the rest of this passed. He had an armful of off-world and Anatolian toys cradled to his chest and half a deck of tarot cards wedged between the fingers of his free hand, and he was crawling across the floor on threes in search of the remaining members of a full deck. Food was an afterthought, but there was already a small store of non-perishables waiting downstairs - along with the sacks of ivories he’d managed to acquire since his arrival.
He had about all he could grab, but as the floor was still littered with his things, it didn’t feel like he’d gathered enough. Stuffing The Fool into the deck forming between his index finger and thumb, he thought, maybe one more trip.
(ooc: here's that Forge convo.)
When: 5/29
Where: Near's place.
Format: Intro's prose for thinky-thoughts. As to the rest? W/e works.
What: Hellcat attack with a surprise ending.
Warnings: Hellcats.
The foyer of the house he was renting was big, and its floor was filled with tarot cards. Nate River was a small, crumpled white lump in the middle of the room. He reached out and picked up a card, drew it not-quite-but-almost randomly from those lying in front of him. The Fool. He flipped it in his hand a few times, looked it over with a dull frown.
He had a cursory knowledge of the symbolism of the tarot. In fact, that symbolism often played a part in the algorithmic method that dictated his placement of the cards. Drawing from the meanings of the major arcana and from mathematical manipulations performed to the numbers attributed the minor arcana, he built towering structures which were actually elaborate maps of the situational, behavioral or probabilistic analyses he was thinking through. The cards served as coded cognitive props- as did most of the little knick-knacks he perpetually fidgeted with.
And he’d been doing a hell of a lot of thinking, in Anatole.
Feelings of abject powerlessness tended to send his brain into overdrive. So, the structures he’d created during his time in the city were larger and more complex than anything he’d previously built - and more tentatively balanced, carefully and delicately constructed to preserve the gaps that peppered his actual hypotheses about this horrible, probabilistically unwieldy place. He’d built them so that they radiated out from a cell-like center in a labyrinthine composition of twists, turns and dead ends: a lab rat’s maze of cards - a configuration pretty apt to the source material, so far as he was concerned.
But there wasn’t a maze, anymore. Instead, he was surrounded by chaotic little piles of paper rubble. And no amount of cognitive churning or rationalization could silence the sense of foreboding this brought him. Beneath his knees, the floor still shook with the tremors that had toppled his towers, and in the distance, he heard the shrill cries and the rumblings of someone else’s battle. Thankfully, it hadn’t yet come to his doorstep. He wasn’t much for hoping, but he was hoping, nonetheless, that it didn’t. Considering the nauseatingly awesome power of the beings in this place, there wasn’t much else he could do.
Still, it was better to at least attempt to be safe than to be stupid, so despite the fact that he had his doubts about what a couple of extra walls might do if the things outside did descend on his place, here he was, gathering a few extra supplies to take with him into the basement, where he’d hole up until the rest of this passed. He had an armful of off-world and Anatolian toys cradled to his chest and half a deck of tarot cards wedged between the fingers of his free hand, and he was crawling across the floor on threes in search of the remaining members of a full deck. Food was an afterthought, but there was already a small store of non-perishables waiting downstairs - along with the sacks of ivories he’d managed to acquire since his arrival.
He had about all he could grab, but as the floor was still littered with his things, it didn’t feel like he’d gathered enough. Stuffing The Fool into the deck forming between his index finger and thumb, he thought, maybe one more trip.
(ooc: here's that Forge convo.)