[open] channeling angels in a new age, now.

[priorly]

Who: Prior Walter (priorly) & you??
What: Catch all logs for October!
When: October!
Where: various
Warning(s): language, likely mention of terminal illness (AIDS). Adult themes?
Notes: Please PM me if you'd like a starter, or feel free to wildcard me anytime.

Comments

no worries at all, it's been a hectic time here too.

[priorly]

Works for me. Everything we have in tastes like vinegar, anyway.

[Just about everything alcoholic tastes that way to him, though, it's just how things are. Taste buds admitted defeat and ran for the hills weeks ago.

Of course he takes Giovanni's arm.]

You would think one advantage of being cast back into the dark ages, the way this place is, would be artisan cuisine. Everything has to be artisan here, after all, doesn't it? No mass production. No 7-Eleven. And yet the vast majority of things I've tried have been a disappointment: mud or vinegar. Sometimes I long for wonder bread.

[He's nothing if not dramatic, but with a faint smile tucked into the corner of his mouth that implies it's all a scene.]

Well, home comforts, you know how it is. You must miss things, too?

then we can slowly plod through together!

[ofobedience]

Vinegar, hahah. Doesn't it always?

[Alcohol isn't something he'd ever indulged in back there-- there'd been no need for it, no time, and no point besides, considering that he's immune to all known poisons and pathogens. As such, he's never had the opportunity to develop a taste for it, never actually tried it at all until arriving here. It all tastes bitter and strange, to him.

The same goes for much of what Prior is talking about now, and as he takes Giovanni's arm and they step out into the early evening streets, he listens with vague curiosity and a distinct lack of understanding. He has only ever known the bland fare they were fed in the Below, doesn't need to eat in order to live and so often it slips his mind entirely now there's no set meal times or people around to tell him he ought to. But missing things-- well. That's something he knows right down to the core of himself, felt like a pain behind the ribs every second of every day.

Lightly, he laughs.]

Whilst I wouldn't go so far as to call anything from my home a comfort, I do know how it is, yes. I miss things. This world is strange to me and I'll admit that I don't understand it.

[priorly]

No home comforts? Do you come from a world of cacti?

[He's spoken to people who prefer their situation here to the one they came from, and understandably so. But still, there are things to miss. Prior himself can't manage much nostalgia for his empty apartment: the bloodstains he couldn't get out. All the places where Louis used to be and isn't.

But the city he misses. The park. The quality of the light. Times Square neon and the clubs he used to frequent, their windows papered with posters for the latest protest against being shut down.

He misses home, the parts of it that make up the fibres of him.]

The strangest thing in this world is how we all find it strange in different ways, I think. But we can learn about it together.

[ofobedience]

[Another quiet ripple of laughter at that, as though he understands the joke when in truth he isn't sure what cacti might be. But there are things he misses, things he longs for sickly despite that there is no comfort in them, only a sense of grounding, a sense of knowing the world and one's place within it. The flickering electric lights and the bright white walls and halls of the buried facility he calls home, the antiseptic overlay that could never quite hide the scent of blood. Even the madding crowds of the Underground, of looking up at twisting wires and concrete darkness, of that sensation of being securely contained.

He misses those things. The sky, big and bright and open as a wound-- it unsettles him. He isn't sure he'll ever get used to it. All this freedom that he doesn't know what to do with.]

Not comforts, but reassurances, perhaps. Certainties. Although I suppose one could say there's comfort to be taken from the familiar, no matter how hard that familiar might be.

[And as they walk through this strange new city's streets, he carefully keeps his gaze from straying too far upward, toward the wide openness above them. Tries to focus, instead, on the things he understands.]

And perhaps a different question, then. What is the strangest thing about this place, for you?

[priorly]

You miss the familiar, even when the familiar was cruel to you? I do understand that.

[He'd like not to, but has spent far too long missing the man who walked out on him when he was dying to dispute it. It's a bare trifle compared to Gio's past life. But missing something that hurt you? Prior can speak to that.

Certainties, though, are a less solid thing. Certainty is something you get conned into believing. A cosmic pyramid scheme that only tumbles under you in the end. Best not dwell on anything he used to think was certain.]

As for the strangest thing - magic perhaps. Although even then, we had stories about it. We were just taught it wasn't real. It's hard to pick one thing, though. This whole world's a trip.

[ofobedience]

[He understands it, he says, missing the familiar even when it's hard and cruel and cutting, and as a result Giovanni smiles his lopsided smile. A small thing, maybe, that assertion of understanding, but in their current situation (and perhaps even beyond that, perhaps always, as far back as he can remember) small things are worth holding onto.

But he says nothing of it, not overtly, turns his focus instead onto Prior's answer to the question he'd asked. Finds himself nodding, just once. Perhaps their words were wildly divergent things, he's yet to hear much about the one Prior hails from, but this - at least - provides a point of commonality.]

There was no magic in my world, either. At least, none that I'd ever seen or heard of outside of fictional tales and the slight of hand kind one finds amongst street performers. We had only science with which to create our wonders.

[Said a little dryly, a little slyly. Wonders-- it isn't the right word. Isn't how he'd refer to himself.]