legionworld | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Who| Marjara and YOU.
What| Avoiding these time ripple shenanigans, thank you very much. She's had enough tampering with time for one lifetime. So she's camping this one out. Feel free to take refuge in the forest for a while.
Where| Marjara's Biome
When| During the Time Ripple event.

Marjara hadn't seen magic work this way in quite some time, not since the Magister Alexius decided to tamper with time and thrust her into an alternate future. What a horrifying glimpse of how things could be that had been. She had understandably no desire to be wrapped up in time-bending yet again. It didn't seem to be doing anyone the same amount of harm as ripping open time's fabric seemed to have done before, anyway.

So here she was, retiring to her little scrap of the station, fashioned into the likeness of the woods she had grown up in. Lush green forests stood tall, nearly blocking the sunlight with their broad canopy save in a few small clearings. Elven ruins stood bleached and bare, half-buried and crumbling, but they were such a facet of even her subconscious memory of these places she was almost glad to see them.

And a warm campire had been set up in the embrace of one of these ruins. Against a half-collapsed stone wall a tent stood, as well as a table for gathering ingredients to brew potions. The lap of luxury and technology it wasn't, but...

Well. She slept better at night, anyway.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Tucker thought on it for a minute; it wasn't wrong, even for him. The sword never worked for anyone else, wouldn't until he died, until this life was over with him, until he had nothing left to give. It had happened with Doyle. One day, it would happen with him.

He just hoped he was around someone good when it did.

"It was different for me." Loads of bullshit, reasons to get pregnant and fancy ships that were destroyed five minutes later. But then Chorus came, and survival was a little different when people depended on you. "How'd it happen with you? Glowing light? Prophecy? Birthmarks like lightning bolt? What exactly were you a Chosen One for?"

He took another drink, slow, before smiling. "Show me your Chosen One status, and I'll show you mine."

At that, she lowered her drinking, smiling a little oddly at him. Why, it wasn't clear.

Not until she lifted what remained of her left arm, her sleeve shifting away to show the vein-like scars that radiated upwards from where the limb ended abruptly.

"Mine...took a toll, after a while."

Oh. Oh, shit. He stared, then rolled his eyes up to hers, before back down to the stump. That looked painful as hell, and he wanted to ask more, but instead—

“I know a guy who would be able to build you a new arm. It might be painted red and he would probably tell old man war stories about how Blue Team sucks, but it’d be an arm.”

It’s just that Sarge wasn’t here, and they were all probably better for it. Especially Grif.

“I can’t show you my scar without taking half this stuff off.” He shrugged his shoulders, waving at his own armor. “It’s nowhere near as epic as yours, though, but if you want me to be naked, I can’ blame you.”

God, his accounts seemed so minor in comparison. He got off lucky with the entirety of all of his limbs still in tact. “What happened?”

"The long version?"

She settles back again, lifting the can to her lips and taking another sip. "You remember those gods I mentioned? One had arisen after many years of slumber, but the world he awoke to was very, very different than the one he'd left behind. So different and so flawed in his eyes that it needed to be destroyed and remade. Perfectly reasonable reaction, don't you think?"

Her eyebrow flicked upwards. Obviously, she'd had time to swallow all this, and develop something of a wry sense of humor about the whole thing. What else could you do?

"To this end, he used an ancient artifact of my people. If it worked, it would have torn down the barriers between our world and the Fade. A land that exists parallel to our own, a land of abstracts, dreams, magic, and creatures of spirit both benevolent and malicious. A vast improvement in his eyes, I'm certain."

Bitter, her? No. Never.

Okay, global level of dickishness there. Tucker listened quietly, carefully not interjecting because sometimes he could bite his tongue. Sometimes. Rarely. This was one of them.

“And this is why I call bullshit on religion.” His mother was religious and by proxy, he had been as well until he was old enough to learn that sex was super frowned upon without a ring. His reaction had been a predictable fuuuuck that. God, she’d been pissed.

He sat back, frowned a little. “So, he was willing to kill a ton of people just because he wasn’t happy? What a temper tantrum; my son is more mature than that.” Granted, his kid was a little special in his own right… “So, it was up to you to get the artifact back? Cue cliché instrumental quest music here?”

"Not quite."

"There was a gathering across Thedas. Political dealings and religious heads, the most important members of the Templar Order, the Circle of Mages, and the Chantry all meeting to prevent a catastrophic war. It was there he chose to unleash the artifact. And..."

She smiles here, shaking her head.

"I stumbled in on the plot by accident. I took the artifact before the ritual could be completed, and instead of tearing the veil between our worlds down entirely? Tears appeared across the land, pouring out corrupted spirits that attacked anything in sight. And the Temple of Sacred Ashes? Gone. Destroyed. Everyone dead...except me. Left behind alive, somehow, with a magical mark the artifact left behind where I'd touched it. I found out later it could close those tears, when nothing else could. You can probably guess what happened after that."

“Now cue cliché quest music?”

Because that sounded like hell, waking up and everyone dead while you’re left alive, trying to figure out things, figure out what to do. Then finding out that only you could fix the whole damn thing, could save everyone at the cost of…well, pieces of yourself.

This was why being the Chosen One sucked sometimes: the level of responsibility was stifling, the pressure enough to break almost anyone, and here she was having a beer with him and able to talk about this. She was tough. Like, real tough. Most people would have broken or failed. Most people wouldn’t be able to say a word about it?

“Did you do it? Save everyone, kiss the princess, get the treasure? Or did you get yanked out before it finished?”

"Two years ago. And in that time the people we've saved have turned on us, and it turns out someone else was behind the initial incident all along. Only dealing with him is going to be difficult with everyone around us claiming we should be disbanded and forgotten about. And?"

She nods towards her arm.

"That finally caught up with me. Magic that strong comes at a price. At first it just twinged. Felt like my arm was asleep all the time. Then it started to burn. Then it started to spread. By the end it was exploding power at random moments, and starting to consume the rest of me. But we managed to remove it in time, so."

Finally, she took another sip of her beer, settling back against her bedroll once more. Something heavy hung around her eyes, but she smiled regardless.

"Not dead. I don't know about you, Tucker, but I'll give an arm for 'not dead'."

"Yeah, don't even have to think about that." He took another drink before digging his feet into the dirt. "Makes masturbating a little boring because you can't ever use that Stranger's Arm trick, but I think it's different for ladies anyway."

His own eyes looked down at his sword arm and he imagined giving it up. Shit, what would he do, other than have Sarge build him a new one? Or maybe Caboose. But it wouldn't be the same, no matter how hard he tried. Could say he lost it in the war, and people dug war heroes with scars, but...give him his natural born arm any day.

Besides, it'd ruin the aesthetic.

"You lost something, and I gained something. Guess it's different for each of us." Of course, he wasn't exactly done with his yet, Wash's warning about Temple - whoever the fuck that was - still stuck in his head.

"So, did you win? After all that?" Was it worth it?

"I thought we did."

Her head shook slowly as she let her incomplete arm fall back to her side, falling under her sleeve once more. "The problem is that 'winning' only lasts so long. Things have a tendency to not stay fixed forever. It is...deeply frustrating."

An understatement, from what it looked like she was working to swallow back. Anger, bitterness, fury and sorrow, all quickly doused with another swift drink from the can Tucker had brought with him.

"Fucking tell me about it." Yeah, that took chugging the rest of his beer and dropping the empty before going to another one. The bitterness was obvious, edged with something almost tired; all he wanted was to find fucking Church and just...retire. Again. Probably with his kid this time. And hang out with his friends and do their normal stupid crap. Was that too much to ask for?

"I mean, every time we defeat whatever, then something else comes and it's more of a pain in the ass than the last thing. Reds versus Blues, Wyoming, time travel, the desert and C.T. and his assholes, the Meta, getting Church back, the Director and a million Texes, fucking Chorus and Felix and Charon and now this. It's always something."

And that's why his habitat looked like a tropical resort. If he wasn't getting peace in the real world, he sure as shit would there.

"But hey, at least we do what we can, right? I mean, sure, it sucks, but...we do it so other people don't have to."

That was quite the litany. There's a glimmer of empathy in her eyes as she reaches out, a hand resting gently against his arm as he spoke. She might not have faced the same problems, but she could roll out a laundry list of her own readily enough.

It's always something.

Isn't that the truth?

"That's the idea, at least," she murmured, her hand sliding away quietly. "It just winds up being that you're the only one who can solve a lot of problems. It gets hard to see a problem and not think you're meant to be the one to fix it."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only