synopsychic | let's take Sora to a bar (but also ask about skills)

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let's take Sora to a bar (but also ask about skills)

[Okay, so this whole being someone else for a number of weeks? Definitely disorienting.

That whole having gotten a fucking sunburn all over, and lived mostly outside during the day? Well, THAT might be approaching faintly traumatic. If nothing else it is at least deeply unsettling.

But he also feels like Jayden - or Humansona, which, honestly, is such an excellent response to the situation and subconsciously making himself less threatening to those humans that were watching, Jackie couldn't have done it better himself - was not super popular and his family relationships... were just. Uncomfortable when translated into the people here. Luckily that got kind of separated by Thorne being there as herself, too. He does wonder a bit about the Phillip kid, but...

No. Not going to do that. Instead, he's going to occupy his mind elsewhere, with much more important things than the easily ignored jaunt experience. Right. Good. Very easily ignored in a box, shoved in the back of the shed. Here we go.]

I have two questions, perhaps someone can help me.

First, is there a complete and thorough list of all the skills that could be learned here? And what other skills are needed for them, and so on? I've found a few things in the library, but they were incomplete and either overly detailed or lacking in description.

Secondly, does anyone know if there's a bar somewhere around here? Particularly one that serves all kinds of sweet cocktails and other such beginner's drinks? And maybe even has hookahs?

[And then, a few hours later, there is an addition - Jackie is trying really hard to not laugh while he's speaking, but it's not really working, and he sounds like he's just short of rolling around the floor.

The sensory livestream coming with the addition is of Malin's Bar. In particular, it focuses on the giant inverted ankh on the window for a long moment before sliding back to survey the bar, and then trails over the much more tasteful and understated ways in which the same symbol has been worked into small patterns all over the room.]

This is hilarious, who made this?

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Hokay, so. Answer one: not that I know of, but that would be a super great thing to have and we should all compile one as a big joint project. That would be rad.

Answer two: there have been multiple bars over the course of my time here. Most of them were created by people who aren't here anymore, though. I think one of them got taken over by someone else after its creator left us? I don't really go to that one anymore. It's too weird for me without her there.

[Honestly, she doesn't do the bar scene. It was never her way of finding people to eat--that was her sire's thing. Gaming stores were hers. And here needing to find people she can surreptitiously eat from hasn't been a priority with Liminal Manipulation even before she got non-vampire forms.]

Oh, but there's Yomi? Naoki does that one and he's still around. He's got a bunch of stuff that will get you varying levels of fucked up and although I've never seen him with hookahs, I'm sure he can, uh, hook you up.

Edited 2019-06-27 18:15 (UTC)

Oh. Yeah, that was Malin's. She was... I mean, I think you can guess she was one of us? I mean, she was a Gangrel, not a Malkavian or a Cait-- Pander, but she was Kindred. And my friend, even if I bullied her a little to keep her in line when she first got here. At least, I thought of her as my friend.

She was... mm. She'd had a hard life and it showed and her instincts on how to be a good person were about as shitty as any of ours are, which is pretty fucking shitty... but for one of us, she was a decent person? Which is not fucking nothing, you know. And when we pulled her out of the trap her head had made for her, it helped me come to terms with just... some stuff I really needed to come to terms with back home. And let me figure out some stuff about my sire in retrospect.

And she used to, like, help out with Imri--all us vampire girls did, really--but she did it more than I did, which I kind of regret because I felt like, I dunno, since I was the only one of us who could even speak his native language even if it's my third, you would think I'd have been better with him... um, Imri was this kid who'd been through a lot of shit and he's gone now, but anyway, Malin was really good with him and I really admired that about her... shit, I wish I'd told her that.

She liked Buffy too.

I really miss her, actually. And Melissa. It's been just me for almost a whole year.

Edited 2019-06-27 19:01 (UTC)

[There is a lot to pick apart in all of that, and a lot of good and useful information, and a lot-

But. Right now all of that everything pales in comparison to something else.

He could be wrong. Malin isn't an unusual name, and Gangrel aren't that terribly infrequent. There may well be more than one out there with that combination, especially when they can come from any time and world. And the description doesn't sound entirely spot on. But-]

Gangrel as in snake head and bat ears and lots of fur except for the wings?

Holy shit.

Yeah, that's her. Holy fucking shit, Jackie, you're from her world. Why didn't I recognize you from-- except you were probably looking like someone else then, I guess, since her dungeon was doing weird, interesting bullshit. You had a Lasombra lady in your crew, right, this Sabbat lady who was, like, a Noddist? I had to play her part for one of Malin's... not exactly memories, because they hadn't happened to her yet, but yeah. Shit. Jeez.

[That sounds like Elle. Which means...

The hell.] Blond and the most annoying older sister in existence?

And if that's really the same Malin we're talking about here, we're not just from the same world, she recently joined my pack. [Which he's only been a part of for under a month, but still. Seniority.

But also. What.] ...Dungeon?

I don't know what she really looked like. I was being her. Possibly one of the others was being you, only I didn't get all the names of the people they were being, so I don't know who was 'Jackie.' And holy shit, that's crazy. What a small fucking world.

Oh. Right. Dungeons. Okay, so the thing is, Liminal Space is basically made of solid thought, right? Which means that your state of mind can affect the world around you in ways that it wouldn't in a normal place. Which means if you get sort of stuck in your head, you can get stuck physically somewhere else as well and other people will have to get you out.

We call those dungeons and people will generally go into them if they find them to rescue whoever's making them, because we all want someone to get us out if we dungeon. And sometimes when we're stuck in them they'll show us what's going on back in our worlds or give us memories from things we haven't lived yet.

And the thing is that they're all different. Some of them you just end up fighting a bunch of monsters. Sometimes you talk to the representations in their mind of their important people. Sometimes you end up watching things happen to them, either from their point of view or an exterior one.

With Malin, we all ended up playing the roles of people she knew or would come to know during important moments in her life. We were given enough information about the people we were to do the thing and the start of the scene and then, like, turned loose to finish it.

And I ended up being Elle when she was recruiting Malin to the Sabbat side of the force. It came with a big old infodump on how the Sabbat actually rolls, which is how I reached my current conclusion that both sides suck, just in different ways--but at least the Sabbat isn't jamming their heads in the ground when the Vampocalypse is coming.

[Oh. That. He'd technically been told about it, but he still wouldn't have recognized her description as the same thing that he'd been told about earlier. There really is a massive variety in those ...dungeons, is what they're called apparently.

He's quiet for a bit as he sorts through all the information that Thorne just deluged him with.

Back home he would take offence with her likening Sabbat and Camarilla like that, but it's not like there's anyone but the two of them here to judge, so what's the point? Which means, however, that he needs to find something different to react to... Hm... Well. Throw a dart at the giant board and see where it hits.]

So you typically learn a lot from those dungeons.

[Look, she came up as a vampire in Camarilla territory. Given all the anti-Sabbat sentiment that goes around in Camarilla towns, the fact that she's decided that they're just both bullshit in different ways is... well, it's something?]

Yeah. Pretty much. Even if it's only just how completely bullshit their world can get.

Sounds like it's worth going.

Good entertainment, if nothing else. [Deets on fellow travellers that might be something to worked with later if it becomes necessary, is what he doesn't say. Entertainment might be offensive, but also sounds a lot more harmless.]

[There's the mental equivalent of a snort.] Try not to let them know it's entertainment. There's a difference between someone who went into a dungeon because it was there so why not and a dungeon tourist.

I'm not going to bring a camera, I promise.

Or wear a Hawaii shirt.

Or tennis socks in sandals.

No one should wear tennis socks in sandals. If you must wear socks in sandals, at least have the dignity to wear toe socks or really tall ones with rainbow stripes.

And only in fancy sandals, not in practical ones.

Rainbow socks in silver high heels probably don't look too bad. [It's worth a try?] Depending on the fabric.

Edited 2019-07-22 07:30 (UTC)

Oh man, yeah. I usually don't do high heels unless there's no getting around it [it's her medieval boyfriend who is more likely to put them on] but I could see how that would work.

And then a curtain of silver hair around that. All silver - clothes, hair, heels - and then the rainbow socks. Or tights, even.

Oh shit, that's nice. I should try putting my boyfriend in that. He's white-blond technically, but he's got hair long enough to pull it off and there's ways to color that shit.

If you need any help with that, like a fashionable eye to judge, I'd be happy to be present for that.

Sure. I should probably introduce you eventually anyway. Just remember: he's my human. Nobody else gets to eat him.

The lack of the first is a clear oversight on our part.

[She should have thought of that ages ago really]

Will you see to that oversight getting fixed, then?

I'd be quite happy to. I already organize classes, this seems a natural extension.

There's children here?

[He hasn't seen any children of school age up to this point, but maybe they're in one of these rooms...]

Just the little ones now. But for a time we had quite a lot of teenagers.

Doesn't really seem like the ideal place to have kids, this.

It isn't.

[No one really pretends it is]

But we have to do what we can since they're here anyway.

So the people who bring us here sometimes accidentally grab toddlers?

[That doesn't sound particularly competent, really.]

Pregnant women, at least in one case. The other... was probably a statistical inevitability.

People didn't use proper protection?

[Well, he guesses, that is the issue with Kine. They reproduction can be an unwanted side product of a fairly popular activity of theirs.]

I was hardly going to ask that question.

[It's a little rude]

But there's always a chance of failure and in the years that this has been going on it was probably inevitable.

In a place like this where people have all kinds of powers you'd think there'd be foolproof options...

Foolproof is one of those words that just invites a challenge.

[SHe doesn't necessarily think Tara's parents fools]

The exact details of how the babe came to be are not terribly relevant at this point.

Wouldn't it be relevant to prevent further accidents of that nature, though?

I mean, it's not like it wasn't on offer. Helena has been making birth control for years.

To be fair it can be pretty hard to count hours and days in this place, so taking it correctly is probably hard.

True.

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let's take Sora to a bar (but also ask about skills)

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