logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: AULD LANG SYNE

Entry tags:

EVENT LOG: AULD LANG SYNE

characters: everyone.
location: Everywhere
date/time: December 31-January 1
content: Another year gone by, and a sunny future ahead
warnings: n/a

Most of a year has passed since the World Eater was defeated and light began to trickle its way back in to the world. Spring brought new green growth, summer brought the first few pale flowers, and fall saw ever-longer days even as the crispness of frost returned to the air. Now, the longest nights of winter have passed (which still were shorter than those in that first spring), and as the sun rises on the new year, it does so with reassuring warmth that cuts through the ice and snow.

we've wandered far beneath the stars

Many left in those early days, lured by the chances to take the portal home, or to new worlds - and hopefully they made it successfully. The few who stayed behind in Beacon have worked hard on making the place into a home, or at least a solid base of operations for future work, whatever that might entail. Exploring has become easier thanks to the longer, brighter days, revealing a seemingly endless expanse of forest pockmarked by ruined, overgrown cities. Beacon stands at the center of it all, somehow harbors the brightest light, and so out at the edges of the explored areas, forest spirits still linger. They're generally friendly and curious, encouraged by stories spread by the spirits who fled Beacon and its sunlight in order to carry news of the lantern-folk and their success at bringing the aurora to the ground.

All right, so the story may not always be accurate, but it has been told.

And given the spirits still understand the emotional meaning to the start of a new year, counted not on a calendar they follow but on one they barely remember, they begin a strange sort of pilgrimage in those long winter nights. On the night of December 31 they swarm the darkened town of Beacon with whoops and hollers and gifts of ancient decayed (but possibly still viable) seed packets looted from broken cities, crude jewelry made of bones and shards of pottery, and something that looks a bit like it was probably modeled after bread, but are actually buns of baked clay. Before the sun rises, they depart again, leaving Beacon quiet in the snow except for the strange, eerie noises of ice breaking around the edges of the lake.

Should anyone, intentionally or by mistake, break one of these clay buns, they'll find there was something inside. Is your luck good or bad, or will their token object be too obscure to decipher?

and we ran into the night

You probably have your own way of celebrating, too. The portal works, and experimenting with it and the old lighthouse keeper's notes have provided a means to bring in gifts, food and drinks, and even sometimes living creatures, plants, or fungi, though things don't always go intended (an order for goats one day instead brought in a pair of these).

Those who live in Beacon have generally agreed not to bring in new people, but accidents sometimes happen. If you're new on the new year, this must all be awfully confusing, but if you've been here a month or so, maybe you've had time to settle in. It's certainly been made easier by those studying lantern repair over the last many months, as small dents and cracks can often be patched back up, usually with good success (but sometimes with temporary side effects).

Enjoy the new year from the shore of the lake, the warmth of The Invincible, or wherever you like - you've chosen to stay, at least for now, and Beacon isn't a bad place to call home.

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Are their mountains made of crystal? He thinks on that for a moment and then squints at the article again to see if it's mentioned anywhere, but between the imperfect translation of the text and the casual mention of the event as if it's just another day's weather, there's plenty of information missing.

And maybe it doesn't really matter anyway, since Will is content to move on, and so is he. Though mountains made of crystal sound pretty damn cool, he thinks.

"Sure, could be like that. I mean, that's important stuff," he says with a nod. He was thinking something a little more conceptual, maybe more self-reflective, but Will's mind is clearly on full concrete science tangible reality mode.

"Get that worked out and we don't have to worry as much about what we might accidentally bring in," he adds as he draws a cigarette from a pack, then slides the pack toward Will in case he'd care for one too. There's no need to specifically call out what kind of things could go wrong eventually if they don't figure it out - they all know why they're here, after all. Dr. Solis might not have been fishing for giant, horrifying, world-consuming space cattle, but apparently those are out there, so what else is?

Hm. That wording says he's clearly doing it wrong. He finally looks up, marking his place with the nearest pen.

"We don't really do this sort of thing back home." He reaches for the pack and takes one. "A year is relatively meaningless in space, especially when every planet's year is a different length." They only really use the Terran calendar because they have to use something, and then they don't use it for everything.

"So what am I supposed to be resolving?"

Right, different worlds and different calendars, makes sense. Even back home some islands use different systems - though they still celebrate their new year wherever it falls. Maybe some things about Will's world will always seem strange to him.

But he nods as he considers it, because it's just different, not wrong, and then passes his lighter over too.

"I think most people use it as more of a... self-improvement goal. Or a personal challenge," he explains, then rests an elbow on the table, cigarette in hand. "But what you said still counts. Figuring that out probably won't be easy."

"Self-improvement?" Will flicks the lighter and takes a draw off the cigarette. "Why tamper with perfection?" He exhales with a grin and passes the lighter back.

But it is bothering him that he can't actually think of anything, so he stalls a bit. "What about you? What's yours?" Surely he's got one if he's asking.

He laughs in return as he pockets the lighter. Yeah, yeah. It's a good thing he finds Will's confidence endearing.

"Haven't decided," he admits. "Been thinking about it, though. Law says I should quit smoking," he offers as an option, though the smile on his lips is a pretty solid hint that he's not going to. And also he's sure Law meant it as a very deadpan joke, anyway, or at least a throwaway comment not meant to be taken seriously. Smoking can't possibly hurt him worse than anything he's gone through here.

"Thinking I might try to learn something. How to use my devil fruit better," he then says with a shrug. "Always thought it had more potential that I'm just not using well."

"The day you stop smoking is the day I stop being a smart-ass." So in other words, it's never going to happen.

"If learning something counts as self-improvement, then I hardly need a resolution for that." He glances pointedly at the book he's working through. "And I'm certainly not going to quit doing anything that I actually enjoy." What's the point of life otherwise?

"Maybe I'll try to remember to eat more often." As it is, he gets busy. Or at least he gets so far into what he's doing that he loses track of not just time, but his basic human needs. It's an old habit that's made its way back, now that he's able to throw himself into projects at his leisure. "Would that count?"

"Don't see why it wouldn't. Besides, I don't think there's any rules to it anyway." Certainly not any he takes especially seriously.

"I've made a lot of resolutions I didn't manage to follow through on. Just don't always have the time. This one, though, I've been meaning to get to for a while, you know that. I wasn't just bugging you about the physics of sound back a year or two just because I wanted to talk to you more."

Though in retrospect, yeah, probably some of that too, which makes him grin. He just never really registers these things until much later.

"You mean that wasn't just about basking in my wonderful company?" He pretends to be offended, but he's grinning too, so it doesn't last.

"So how exactly were you planning to practice? If you're looking to use it offensively, we could use the firing range, or the armory. Though if this is indeed just practice," meaning a probable lack of control, "we might want to go out by the lake. You know, to avoid destroying anything."

Not that destruction in the name of science isn't fun, but it would be nice to keep the few remaining structures in this city around.

Apparently, Will has simply attached himself to this resolution project without being asked.

And clearly he's welcome to have done so, given how Rosinante's eyes light up at the suggestions. Besides, it only makes sense, right? He's the one with the powers, but Will is the one with the knowledge to help him put them to better use, otherwise it might just be another few years of fumbling around with nothing to show for it.

"I'm not sure it's the sort of thing that the firing range would be much use for," he says, as he purses his lips in thought, then takes a slow drag from his cigarette and watches the smoke. "Not even sure it can be offensive. How do you quiet something offensively?"

But he's probably thinking too narrowly, which has been the problem all along. For all his quick thinking and people-reading skills, this one's going to take a different kind of thought.

"If I wanted to try that, I'd really have to test it on things that make sound," he says, that expression turning to a frown. If he ever wants to use it in actual combat he'll need to either test it on people first, or test it on people there at the time, and both come with downsides, don't they. But there are other types of things that make sound, and also, in truth, he's not even sure he has to stay so limited. If he can drop sound waves to a standstill, can he do that with other types of waves?

... Yeah, he's going to need some science help.

"Are we certain that this only goes in one direction? The energy from the stopped sound waves has to go somewhere. Are you simply dissipating it, or could you turn it around on its source?" And have they had this conversation before? Entirely possible.

"If that turns out to be the case, we've opened up much more versatility. Sound waves alone can be used as a weapon, or to levitate objects. Let alone what the energy could do if you weren't limited to that form." Not that they really need weapons right now, but it can't hurt, can it?

"And if we think of it as more or less intercepting the waves, maybe it's possible you could interpret them in some form. Translate them. You'd essentially be a living radio." Maybe he's going a bit far with how little information they have, but it's worth thinking about— they're not short on time, after all.

They've talked about part of this before, for sure, but he didn't have solid answers then and he doesn't have new ones now. Still, it gives him a lot to think about. He idly taps ash off his cigarette, not noticing that it's landing on the newspaper which is probably going to start smoldering any second.

"It's called the calm-calm fruit for a reason," he says thoughtfully, as if doing so will unlock some new secret. "All I know is the waves... flatten, I guess. Wonder if I'm absorbing the energy when I do that, or if it just goes into whatever else is nearby. Do you think it'd show up as heat?"

He's trying to remember what he learned from the stuff he read months ago, but the possibilities have him pretty excited, and he has to share his other idea before he forgets it. "I don't know that I'm limited to sound. That's what comes naturally, and it's all I've ever read about when I tried to look up info on the fruit later once I had access to the Marine archives, but what if the 'calming' can be done to anything that's a wave?" Could he snap his fingers and turn out lights, short electrical circuits? Stop someone's heart? Not that he relishes the idea but he can't argue that it could be useful.

"It's possible it could show up as heat. It certainly isn't showing up as light." Those being the two main indicators. "We'd need a heat-sensitive camera to see it, though." Add that to the list of things to figure out.

The idea of stopping other waves gives Will a second of pause. There are multiple ways to test that theory, and one of them is very simple.

"We could start with water. It's a waveform, it carries energy. If you can make water still, we might be onto something—" He stops as he notes the presence of smoke that isn't coming from either of them. All he can think to do is point. "Your paper."

His paper? He follows the gesture, and - oh, his paper. Right. Caught it early enough where he can just lick his finger and press on the spot, immediately putting it out.

"Thanks. So, calming water? Yeah, that sounds... Damn, that sounds really useful, actually," he says with a short laugh. "More at home than here. Can't believe I didn't think of trying that."

Because, well, still water and devil fruit users don't really mix, do they? But more to Will's point is that it would make for an easy way to test what he's capable of, and then they can build on it from there. The grin on his face spreads.

No no, he's not just ignoring that potential disaster. "Try to be more careful next time, if you please." It's said firm enough that it's clearly not a request. "The last thing we need is to have finally gotten the light back, only to shortly after use it to burn down the place."

He takes a long breath, inhaling smoke, then lets it out all at once. Now they can move on.

"It would be easier to start with just a glass or something. A bowl, maybe. You can try freezing the lake sometime in the future." He glances around a bit, then reaches for his coffee cup. "This could work. It's not pure water, but it's liquid. Close enough."

Will's serious, isn't he? Well, Rosinante can't blame him, and gives a solemn nod in return. Yeah, he'll try to be more careful. He's always trying, it's just that he's eternally failing. At this point it's unlikely to change.

But he can learn new things to make up for it, maybe. He looks at the cup of coffee, and tries to see if he can get a sense of the properties of the liquid as if it were sound instead. Obviously if it were easy he would have done this long ago, but it was sound that came to him easily, almost innately. Knowing what he knows now about devil fruits, it's probably because of what his life was like at that age. He needed to hide, and not be found.

"Guess it's a little like an optical illusion," he muses aloud as he puts a hand around the cup just to see if that helps. "You see it one way, and sometimes your brain refuses to see it a different way, even though both are valid interpretations."

And just in case it helps, he closes his eyes. Is that the vibration of the water he feels? Is he just imagining it? This is almost certainly going to be more than a one-day project, but he has to start somewhere.

He'll accept the promise to try. For now.

In the meantime, he watches Rosinante with a distinctly scientific curiosity.

"Does this help?" He reaches over and taps the side of the cup a few times, creating ripples that fold in on each other. "You can think of it like an echo." Since, you know, sound. "I won't pretend to know how your powers work from the inside, but if you could try to silence the echo... ?" He'll leave it at that because who knows what's going to happen, if anything.

This is definitely going to be a longterm project. But a project needs a hypothesis to test, and a proof of concept. That's what this is, he's decided.

"Right." An echo. He can work with that. Maybe he's approaching this from just slightly the wrong angle. If the cup was making noise by rattling around on the floor, he'd calm the cup, setting off the chain reaction that drops the sound waves to nothing. The water is just the medium the waves travel in from the cup's vibration, just like sound in the air.

For a moment he watches the waves ripple across the surface of the cup, then focuses and lightly settles his hand on the rim. The ripples stop, but what's more, the steam rising from the coffee's surface dissipates as no more is produced from the liquid's own internal vibration. Enjoy your cold coffee, Will.

"I... think I did it," he says, as he withdraws his hand and lifts his eyes to meet Will's. "Felt strange, though. Like walking through mud."

And there it is, proof of concept. So he can stop other waveforms. And judging by how ice cold the coffee is when Will inspects it, other forms of energy, too. He grins as he sets the cup back down.

"You even took the heat out of it." He's less upset by this than he will be once he realizes he has to make more coffee. Right now he's just impressed.

"Was it harder or just different?" If this experiment exhausts Rosinante then they'll be limited on how much they can do at a time. "All we need to do now is figure out where that energy goes."

"Both? I had to think about it, and it felt slow, somehow. That's not even the right word, but the closest I can get. Might just be because it's water."

Though, whether that's because water seems thicker than air to him or if it's because still water is an actual hazard, he's not sure. Obviously a cup of coffee or a glass of water has never even made him a little bit sluggish, it's not enough to matter. And there are devil fruit users that can do things with water as long as they're not in it, so it can't be a real problem.

"But I did it," he says, and smiles brightly as that part dawns on him. "I did actually do something to it."

"It's certainly a start." He's not intentionally downplaying Rosinante's accomplishment, he's just already thinking ten steps ahead. "We need to figure out if it's possible for you to get better at it, which I suspect is a yes. And either way, we'll eventually have to move on to larger bodies of water. A bucket, a bathtub." The lake. But that's probably far off.

Will's brain doubles back onto the first thing Rosinante said. "Because it's water? Because you can't go in water?" Not entirely true, but he'll get the point, right? Standing water is generally bad for his health. But does its neutralizing ability extend beyond that?

He nods. "But I don't know if that's why it felt strange. Might just be because I'm not used to working with it. But people are mostly water, right? Just in a different form. If I can stop all sounds a person creates, then I'm stopping sounds going through water... But, I - don't take that too literally. I don't know exactly why that felt the way it did, and most likely it's because it was something I hadn't ever tried."

That's the simpler explanation, and he knows that simpler tends to be more correct in the majority of situations. Better than trying to speculate about how water interacts with his powers on some kind of molecular scale. That's for another day, if ever.

That's for when they have a better lab to work with, in any case. Will nods at the explanation, because it's just as good as any. Plus it sounds nice and scientific, and he likes to think he had something to do with that.

"Do you think you could... still the water inside a living thing?" Would that stop their blood? Just hold them in place? Make them very, very cold? "I suppose that answers the question of how you might use it offensively."

"Maybe," he says with a slow nod. "Might be a slow, awful thing to do to someone."

But that can have its place, even he will admit that. If used sparingly, it could just slow someone down, throw them off just enough to allow him or someone else to catch up to them. Or prevent an attack, save someone else.

"Won't know until I try it, and I'd rather not try it on a person for the first time." Which makes him frown, since experimenting on animals is nobody's idea of fun, or at least, certainly not his. Better than people, though.

Slow, awful things do have their uses; getting information, defending oneself— thankfully nothing they urgently need right now.

"We'll... cross that bridge when we get to it." He's no animal lover, he's been in laboratories that used them in the past. But trying intentionally to do what you know will probably kill them? Not a pleasant thought. He doesn't like hurting things, and he knows Rosinante doesn't either.

"For now I suppose you can just stick to the non-living material. See where that gets us." Us, as if he's going to have anything to do with it. He'll be there, at least, furiously taking notes. "We've got plenty of time."

Everything is "us" and "we" and Rosinante is truly glad for it. Law will probably help too, he knows, not only from the scientific side of things but also as someone insanely competent and inventive with his own devil fruit. This means he has two people who can support him in whatever he does, and he's never really had that before. Certainly not as an adult.

"That we do," he agrees. It's a common refrain and he hasn't gotten tired of it. Time is their most abundant luxury, and what a treasure to have that be the case.

"Back home, there was an officer who could control ice," he says, sitting back in his seat so he won't drop ashes onto the newspaper so easily - and in fact he slides it away, too. "He could become it, though, so I'm guessing his abilities have almost nothing to do with mine. Still, makes me wish I could ask him some things about how he dealt with water."

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