agentlelog | [OPEN] you can change the darkness in the broad daylight

Entry tags:

[OPEN] you can change the darkness in the broad daylight

Who: Molly and various
When: Throughout May
Where: ~Various places~
What: Open influence prompts, plus any and all planned meet-ups and shenanigans.
Warnings: Self-harm for any fighting threads because of Molly's stupid powers, otherwise I'll keep you updated.
Other: The influence prompts are OPEN TO ALL, but if you want a specific casual meet-up, you can post a wildcard top-level here or get in touch with me via PM or plurk and I'll put up something specific for you!

i. PALATE CLEANSER

Molly is so disdainful of the Black Widows that he's absolutely fine with taking this job. "Leave places better than you found them," he always says- well the Black Widows sure did their part in making them worse. The truth of the matter is Molly is still not used to the finer details of this kind of magic, even with as dark a Jewel as he has. The cleansing webs he gets the hang of easily, but the trap webs keep tripping him up.

Fortunately, he's not the only one doing the work. "They make this look so bloody easy, don't they?"

ii. TRADE WARS

At the moment, the mercenaries are playing nicely, and Molly watches from his position sitting on top of one of the poles spaced along the dock and tied off with rope to keep people from falling off the damn thing. Every time one of the groups starts to eye each other like they're about to fight, he throws in a cheerful comment or a teasing insult and their attention diverts back to him. It's luck that they haven't just tried to attack him and some of the guards are exasperated by his attempt at "helping" but... No fights have started since he's been there distracting them.

Yet.

He has his swords and his Jewel if that changes, but for now giving them a target to be pissy at that isn't each other is a little more useful and involves less bleeding on the docks.

iii. STREET RATS

Of course he's sympathetic to the people starving in the slums. Molly would be doing this even if he wasn't being asked. He's not wanting for food after all, and he gets along better with the poorer sort having lived with the downtrodden who found joy in the world through the circus.

You can find him doing one of two things here:

(1. Sharing food and entertaining the children with card tricks.

(2. Fighting off the rats with a kind of bored air that says that this is more irritating than fun, but necessary. Their functional ecosystem is making other people sick. Away with you, rats.

iv. RUMOR HAS IT

Molly is entranced by stories from farther reaches that aren't available to him now, so of course he's going to do some heavy lifting- well... not really. He's not very strong, but he does what he can and has probably dragged someone more fit along to help him, whether it be friend or stranger lured with the promise of drink.

"This isn't such a bad way to spend an afternoon, is it?" Says Molly, who is carting the bare minimum, while his associate deals with heavier loads. Look, you're getting free drinks out of it, and he is built for speed and grace, not lifting.

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[The message on the Far-Caster directs Mordred to Molly's preferred pub that tends to try to sell decent mead despite everything. His usual cheerfulness is replaced with mild irritation, and he only perks up when he sees his drinking buddy approach the table.]

I took the liberty of ordering for you. Drink up... It's been one hell of a month.

Yeah, this was bad.

[She'll take a seat, and glad the drink is something she recognizes and not something weird.]

I've had worse months, but this was still...well, bad.

[Definitely the worst month she's had since showing up here.]

Did you get caught in the webs, too?

[Molly's shoulders tense, but the burn of the ale eases that.] It wasn't enough they went after that little girl. They had to make the whole fucking town a living hell.

[Under other circumstances, Mordred might brag about it. Yeah, she dealt with the webs no problem, or something like that. Instead, she sits there, an annoyed look on her face, as she studies her drink.]

It's a bunch of bullshit is what it was. What they did to that girl's terrible. That's worth a death sentence on its own, but leaving those things throughout the town to trap people...

[She stops, knocking back her drink, both to try and steel herself and ward off saying too much about her own situation. It helps, for the most part.]

I've seen my share of bad before, but not anyone who did things like that.

You're not alone in that. [Molly hooks his arm around the back of his chair and, rather than swig, takes his drink at a reserved pace.] It's like they've been hurt and they're gonna take it out on everyone else by making them hurt just the same, instead of getting past it. The world is shite sometimes. People get hurt- that's no reason to inflict your fucking pain back on other people just because you can't deal with it.

I feel like I should want to help them get over themselves and get them to be better than that, just on principle, but mostly I just kind of want to slap them senseless.

Yeah, who does that kind of crap?

[Mordred is completely oblivious to the fact that someone could very well say that inflicting her pain on other people because she couldn't deal with it is kind of what she did in Camelot. Then again, that's completely different, and it's not like she strung trauma webs throughout the kingdom or anything like that. Nope, wrecking the whole kingdom and plunging Camelot into ruin because she got rejected as heir is different. All she did was kill her enemies like a normal person.

But after not thinking about any of that, she'll look at her mostly empty glass and think some more.]

How would you even help somebody like that anyways?

Bad people.

[It's a rhetorical question, but Molly is still going to reiterate his irritation at what awful, awful people the Black Widows are. The question just makes him sigh, because while he's thought about it on occasion, for the most part, he's come up with nothing.]

Reason with them? 'Cept you probably can't. I could have used Devil's Tongue on one of the ones that were brought in like I did with that landen kid, but I don't think they'd take to it. Just add it to another list of violations.

Reasoning with people's never been my strong suit anyways.

[Which is probably obvious, but she admitted as much, so that's something.]

Think you're right though, probably wouldn't have helped in this case.

So we deal with it. We fix the webs and protect the bloody city and hope that it doesn't happen again.

[He drags a hand over his face.] I'm gonna need to get on the former part of that sooner, rather than later. My skin crawls just thinking about those fucking webs.

Not looking forward to that. Cleanup's always the worst, and this'll be even worse than normal.

[If she weren't Mordred, she'd be dreading it, but since she is, she's just pissed off about the whole thing.]

I don't really want to deal with that crap anymore than I have to either, but somebody's got to do it.

And I've seen the way it fucks with the landens. They're liable to just start an uprising instead of taking care of it. [And they don't need that, not after finally talking them down from that kind of shit several times now.] Once again, it all falls on the heroes of Draega. How did everything even function before Fayura brought us here?

[Evidently, not well, or else Fayura wouldn't have brought them at all.]

Yeah, every freaking time, it sets someone else off. Don't get me wrong, my kingdom had a bunch of problems too, but you didn't have crap like this happening all the time.

[At least not until the end, then there was all sorts of crap happening that kept Camelot from functioning.]

So I've got no clue how this place functions when everything sets off everyone else and everything you do to try and fix it just pisses someone else off.

It's no wonder Fayura's in a fucking state and needed outside help. [He presses his finger to the woodgrain of the table.] She's really the only person here besides us who just wants to find a nice balance.

[Well, that's not true. He's sure there's people who pick sides. He just hasn't met them yet.] Back home, the idea of heroism was just a gateway to expectations I didn't want on me and being useful to people I don't give a fuck about. And it's almost entirely true of here, too, but here we are. [He lifts his tankard.] To fixing a broken city.

Yeah, here's to it.

[She'll raise her now empty glass and then decide to order another one.]

Here's to her and the rest of us, trying our best while everyone else does the opposite.

[She knows they're sort of trying their best too, but a lot of the townspeople's best sucks in Mordred's opinion.]

Of course, I didn't mind the expectations and all that, but this place is a hell of a lot harder to deal with than being a knight was.

If his companion's aim had been to search out someone capable of heavy lifting, well, he's more than succeeded. Bucky might not be much for conversations, or for facial expressions other than neutral, but heavy lifting? Heavy lifting is easy given his enhancements and physical work is preferable to all the Jewel stuff.

In contrast to the bare minimum, he's got, well, quite a bit more. It's fine. It'll get the work done, and there's always the chance of overhearing something interesting. "Could think of worse."

There might be a second, underlying intention in inviting Bucky. The fact is he's spent so much time with Sansa and heard so much secondhand information about the man and they've never so much as talked. That has to change. Molly's a big believer in consolidating groups, not keeping them separate. If he had his druthers, he'd be bringing everyone he knew together into one cohesive pile, but it doesn't quite work that way. Draega is not a circus or a traveling party. It's a city. Cities are a different ecosystem.

Won't stop him from trying, however. And, besides, he wants a better read on Bucky anyway, though so far his original read has remained accurate. Molly deposits a small box of spices in the correct location and goes to retrieve something else interesting.

"Breaking up fights? That comes to mind. Gods, I'm tired of the pissing contests."

In Molly's defense, Bucky's not exactly the most social creature. Helping out with the heavy lifting? Fine. Breaking up fights in town? Getting a little repetitive, but fine. Making small talk? A challenge. But on the plus side — and it's a fucked up plus — the fact that Draega seems constantly on the brink of going to hell definitely helps with some sense of camaraderie among the Strangers.

Well. Kind of.

At least he shares the view that breaking up the latest pissing match is getting tiring. Maybe it's because of not being a native, he's not sure. But all these politics that amount to petty squabbling just seem so dumb. "Sometimes I think we just need to give everyone a good, solid knock on the head. Except if it was that simple, it would've happened already."

"Well, you know how it goes. If this person in power knocks someone without power in the head, then it's an attack on the downtrodden and when they fight back, it's a power play, and it goes on and on in a circle."

He definitely shouldn't be opening every box that he can easily open to see what's inside, but that's what he's doing. If anyone official asks, he's checking for damages, and not just being a nosy brat seeing if he can cut a deal with the sailors for cheaper wares as payment for services rendered.

"Much as I hate it, we're the uninvolved third parties, and even then they're pushing us to take sides."

"Worst part of politics is the people." That at least seems to be a universal constant.

The box opening gets a little bit of a sideeye but honestly? It's not exactly hurting anything. A little snooping could actually prove helpful, truth be told; there could be items in the shipments that they need to know about. Which is just an excuse for justification, but that's beside the point.

"What side is there, except our own? Every faction is going to look out for their own interests; in that regard we're as good as pawns."

He slams the box shut when it reveals itself to just be dyed fabric and adds it to his growing pile of goods, taking a moment to watch the area, out of a habitual paranoia about being overheard saying anything that could be taken out of context or used against him or just to make sure there's no shady characters around.

"The one thing I never planned on becoming, but I suppose no one plans on becoming a pawn. It just bloody happens because of where you step. And we... definitely stepped in something." He huffs and blows one of his errant curls out of his face. "But we agreed to something when Fayura called us. If it were easy, I'd feel like it was a trap. At least it's all out there in the open what we're in for. And we have these." He holds up the chain that holds his green Jewel, exquisitely shaped into a upside down crescent moon and heavily decorated with silver filigree. "Freaky though they are."

“Might be to our advantage,” he replies, setting down another two boxes (with no doubt that his companion will peek inside). “Pawns can go almost anywhere on the board, and no one pays them much mind. You can find out a lot that way.” It’s a risky game of course but what do they have to lose? For all intents and purposes they’re stuck here, at least in the short term.

Taking a moment to roll his shoulders back and stretch out the side of his neck, Bucky lets his attention flicker to the Jewel his companion holds. It’s been worked into a thing of beauty by clearly skilled hands. He wonders idly if he should bother finding someone who can fashion such a thing from his own, but jewelry suits him ill. “I admit I do question them. It’s almost too good to be true, isn’t it? Especially for those of us on the darker end of the spectrum. So what’s the catch?”

He almost doesn't, if only not to seem obvious, but they're just there and available and it feels like an understanding has been reached, so he uses one of his scimitars and pries open the biggest, praying it's fancy ales. It isn't. It's some sort of produce, and that's a bit disappointing. Maybe the next one will yield a better result. "I'd rather not be on the board at all, but thank you for almost actually making me feel better about it."

It's sincere, albeit in a mocking way. Molly's slightly Irish lilt comes with sarcasm built right into it. "And the catch is what happens when you get in over your head. If it weren't for the fact that I have to use it or I'll die, I wouldn't. All of those broken Jewels from women who got pushed into situations where they needed to be stronger to save themselves and it wrecked them. It's cruel. It isn't right. I don't like any of that."

Ouch. That got deeper than he wanted it to get. He pulls a face, pausing before he fully opens the second box. "That, however, is not a drinking conversation."

He's certainly not going to stop Molly's snooping. Molly's a lot better at it anyway, and Bucky's bulk more useful in blocking sight lines in case anyone looks like they might have noticed. Fortunately no one seems to be paying them that much mind — likely they don't care beyond the reality of how much they can lift and move. "The choice not to be on the board disappeared when we accepted what we did to come here. The choice now is to make it what we want."

Pep talks are clearly not his forte. But Molly's sarcasm makes him crack a smile, a lopsided sort of thing. "I'd agree that it's unsettling, especially given the potential. I don't know that I like the potential of what it could make me."

It's also a little more honest than he would have preferred, but Molly had likewise revealed more than it seems he had meant. To the drinking comment though, Bucky just shrugs. "Is this a bad time to tell you that I don't drink alcohol?"

The second box has bottled wines tucked neatly and wrapped to prevent breaking and Molly sighs in contentment that there's something interesting at long last. He scratches out his initial in the wood with the tip of a sharp nail so he can find it again and resumes his work.

"You don't?" Bucky might not be big on pep talks, but what he says is enough that Molly doesn't feel inclined to keep pressing the matter- again, not a drinking conversation. Or a conversation-conversation since Bucky isn't a drinker, which strikes Molly as surprising. The only person he knew who didn't drink before he came here was Jester. "I'm beginning to think where I'm from, pub culture's more common than it is in other places. I don't meet a whole lot of people who swear off the stuff entirely."

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[OPEN] you can change the darkness in the broad daylight

Mordred;

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