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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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."

"What, you're telling me you can just become the absence of sound?" He guesses he sort of can, if you squint, but the joke stands.

"Perhaps it has to be liquid water? You don't become powerless when it's humid out, do you? One could argue that doesn't count as 'still water', but some nights it certainly isn't going anywhere." He thinks a moment, staring into the coffee that he is most definitely not drinking anymore.

"You know, if you were up for it, we could experiment with that, too. We'd just have to devise some safety precautions."

"Paramecia," he says briefly as he shakes his head, amused. Maybe he never really got around to explaining all that to Will, though. Anyway, trying to picture becoming the embodiment of silence itself is both funny and nearly impossible.

And it's also not that important compared to what Will is suggesting. He furrows his brows a little as he thinks about it - because no, obviously he's never become powerless or weak or anything of the sort in high humidity, and he's not sure what there is to test.

"Humid air's still mostly air," he points out. "Not an actual body of water. Why, what were you thinking of?"

"Paramecia? What do they have to do with this?" Do these fruit powers have something to do with protozoa? Because that's the definition that immediately comes to Will's mind. Tiny, single-celled organisms, often one of the first things they introduce to a newly terraformed environment to test its livability.

"I was just thinking it would be smart to know your exact limits. How much water it takes, how still is 'still', things like that. Unless you already happen to know." It's not something they've talked about extensively.

"Maybe. Hold that thought, though," he says with a finger raised to ask him to pause as he finishes off his cigarette, then snuffs it out and drops the butt in his ashtray before continuing.

"Paramecia's the type of fruit I have. I guess I never really explained all that." So little from home carries over to how things work here that some topics just never once came up.

"There's three types. Zoan fruit lets people take on animal-like features, and even transform completely. Logia fruit lets someone control or become a natural non-animal material, like fire, or ice, or light. Then the rest of us have what's called Paramecia fruits, which... don't fall into neat categories like those, though some people call it being 'superhuman'. So the guy who can become ice, he has a different type of devil fruit. So that's what I was saying, it'd be interesting to talk to someone like that, because I bet he thinks about water differently than how you or I do."

At least he didn't drop the cigarette on the paper.

Will listens with a puzzled expression on his face. He knows these words, he knows what they mean, but put together like this they're a completely new idea. "-zoan", like the classification suffix? "Logia", like something to do with words? And "Paramecia", other than the organism, he's pretty sure is just a reference to shape. Once again, he's fascinated by how things exist in other worlds as completely different concepts.

"I— hm. Back home, paramecia are tiny, microscopic creatures, only one cell. They're easy to reproduce, so we use them in various applications." A sudden thought occurs to him that makes him feel uneasy. "Those names wouldn't happen to have anything to do with the way the fruit changes you, would they? The way it gives you your abilities?"

Who knows what Zoan and Logia would mean, but the idea of single-celled organisms giving Rosinante powers like some kind of supernatural parasites is... unpleasant.

"I... don't know. Don't think so. Not sure how a one-celled creature would be involved. Can they change the genetics of other things?"

At least that word, "genetics", has become more familiar to him as a sort of intercultural translation for the "lineage factor" he'd normally use. The rest of Will's confusion isn't something he thinks he can help with. It's all just the words he's known for those fruits forever, they just mean what they mean, right?

"I always thought Zoan just means animal, like in zoo," he says as he folds his arms across the table and tries to think of explanations. "I don't know what language that comes from, though. Must be old. Could pre-date the Void Century. Same with Paramecia and Logia, since I don't recognize them as meaning anything else. But Zoan, at least, doesn't seem like it's related to the way people get abilities. More like the type of abilities they get."

"Not those ones, no." But they're not here to talk about bacteria. "Zoan, I think it means something like that, we use it to talk about classes of animals. Types of animals. Like the paramecia, they're protozoans. Proto-animals." That's simplifying it a bit, but how else is he supposed to explain that?

"In my world, those words come from... Latin, or Greek or something. Usually Latin. A very old language, thousands of years old, no one speaks it anymore. Logia is something to do with words, I think. Paramecia just means... oblong, roughly." But words and oblong-ness have nothing to do with those powers, so his hypothesis is moot. Still, very interesting that they have one word in common.

"I've wondered sometimes if our worlds don't share some common background. If they might be different versions of the same place. Perhaps their history is much the same until some event or other diverts it."

"I've been wondering that too," he admits, though he says it cautiously, like he's not supposed to. It's another one of those things that just doesn't matter here and he knows it, but talking openly about the Void Century and the lost history of the world just isn't done back home, except as passing mentions that it happened and is best left forgotten.

He even glances around the room to make sure nobody is listening in. Old habits. But to his credit, he's lost enough of his old paranoia where he doesn't bubble off the conversation at the table so that nobody could even accidentally hear them talk. Thinks about it, though.

"There are old stories told by... some people, that we came from the moon. Or the stars, depending on whose version you listen to. And I'd always just passed it off as meaningless creation myths, since every tribe, every race has their own. Because, you know, obviously people couldn't come from stars. Except now I know about space travel, and how some of the things in my world are shared with yours and others here. Fragments of languages and religions. But any actual records have been gone a long time, because they were gathered up and burned a long time ago."

"It almost seems too convenient to be pure coincidence." He notes how Rosinante looks around before continuing, as if he's about to say something seditious. Are they not allowed to talk about this where he's from? If all the information was lost, then why not?

"So your history is just... gone? No one knows about the distant past?" Extremely suspicious. "There has to be something interesting to know, otherwise it wouldn't have been suppressed. And surely whoever was responsible for suppressing it, they must still know what that is."

Will knows quite a bit about the suppression of information, given he's been complicit in it his entire adult life. But that doesn't mean he likes it that there are things he's not allowed to know.

"In my world that sort of thing happens all the time, but there's always some remaining record, some person who remembers, something. And no one has ever been successful in erasing an entire era of history."

"If they were completely successful, I wouldn't even know that much," he replies with a shake of his head. "There was a group of scholars who had operated quietly for centuries, gathering artifacts and scraps of knowledge to preserve it. But... let's see. Nine? Nine years ago, they were found out. The whole island was bombed back into dust."

It's both unnerving and oddly liberating to be able to actually talk about this sort of thing with someone, and a sort of spiteful, cautious enthusiasm lights up his eyes. Ohara and its destruction isn't itself taboo, but it was tiny and unknown, and if he hadn't already been enlisted, if he hadn't been raised by Sengoku, he might never have heard it happened. Most people in the world likely never will.

"That's why it's hard. I'd bet that wasn't the first time something like that had happened, either. The government has had nearly a thousand years now to keep suppressing it. That's a long time for the world to forget what it lost. I - all I do know for sure was there was a war between some prosperous civilization and a coalition of twenty other kingdoms. The coalition won, vowed to stamp out all traces of the ones who lost, and labeled the survivors the 'enemies of the gods'. ... And then," he shakes his head and digs for his lighter. Not too soon for another cigarette, not with all this talk about this subject in particular.

"...Then they named themselves gods, because who else would come from the stars and win big wars and rule the world, right?" A brief history of the world, a mix of old legends and old bullshit and new bullshit too, with a bunch of omissions he doesn't have the ability to fill because he was too young to know the secrets told to the eldest son, another truly bullshit tradition.

Anyway, poor Will probably has even more questions after all this, and for once he feels eager to clarify, because truly, really and truly, fuck his kin and all his ancestors.

He sure does have a lot of questions.

"So they thoroughly destroyed them, just so they could become them." Typical politics. Except typical politics doesn't span generations of cover-ups and violently-enforced secrecy. "Are there still survivors? Well, descendants of survivors." Probably not, but it would be interesting to know what stories they tell.

Talking about all this, about powerful government conspiracies and secret cabals of scholars who were subsequently destroyed— it makes him think just a little about the situation he left behind in his own world. They'd been hired on to assist in the investigation of something very, very old. And then they'd started dying. It's not too much of a stretch to think that someone might not have wanted something found.

Did he really die for such a stupid reason? Didn't they know how easy he was to pay off? Or maybe they took the "no chances" approach. Whatever happened, it's a discussion for a time that isn't right now.

"Maybe," he says, though he sounds less certain now, and far less full of buried anger. He retrieves the pack of cigarettes to take another from it while he decides how to answer.

"Where I'm from, there are stories about those people still. They're treated like, you know, the monster under the bed, a warning to kids that the enemies of the gods are still out there, waiting to snatch them off the streets and gobble them up," he says with a snort, then lights the cigarette and takes a draw. "But these days they're just people like anyone else. They don't remember any better. It's been too long. If there are any who managed to keep their old traditions and knowledge alive for all this time I've never heard of it, but I'd guess if they're that good at hiding what they know, they wouldn't want anyone else to know."

He debates a moment whether he should give names or not. After all, thirteen (no, fifteen, now?) years ago, he's the one who had urged secrecy, but that was because of Doflamingo. Otherwise, most people in their world don't know the significance of that lone initial. There's no threat like that here, and most of the D clan go about their lives openly with their full names on display, because it doesn't mean a damn thing to anyone else who hasn't been privy to a few secrets here and there.

"You could ask Law about it if you want, but like I said. They're no different from anyone else," he says with a shrug.

That's also probably not true, but there's only so much he's willing to say about someone who isn't at the table.

"Is he one of them?" It surprises him that, without the continuous tradition, they might even know who is and who isn't. He hasn't got the slightest clue where his family comes from, they left Earth behind generations ago. He can only make vague guesses based on his name.

But then he doubts his people, whoever they were, were nearly so infamous.

"To be blunt, I'm surprised your government allowed any of them to survive." They seemed rather hell-bent on removing any traces of their enemies, and yet they left the enemies themselves alone?

"He is." And he'll leave it at that, just a simple acknowledgment, made unfortunate by Will's next statement. With Law's whole family dead, Law now included, that's another one of those surviving families wiped from the seas.

"I don't know how any of them did," he says with a shake of his head. "These days, it usually doesn't matter. There's the one who was a notorious pirate who was executed, but there's another who's a Vice Admiral. Back around the time of the war, though, it must have been really hard. I'm guessing they probably scattered, got good at hiding and assimilating."

He can only speculate, but that's what he did after all, right? He hid, and he assimilated. And outside the Red Line, his family name isn't recognized as anything more or less than just another name, so he doesn't bother concealing it.

Too late Will realizes that Law didn't exactly survive, now did he? Poor choice of words on his part.

"Perhaps they're not seen as a threat anymore, without... whatever it is that was destroyed." Whatever dangerous ideas or knowledge was lost. "Or perhaps the government doesn't want to bring any further attention to it by hunting them down." Or Rosinante's idea, which is probably most likely. "Could be a bit of all three."

And now for the awkward question: "The ones who won, who declared themselves to be gods... were those... ?"

A bit of all three is probably right, he agrees, but who can say. Actually, no, he knows there are people who can say, but Sengoku never did divulge secrets beyond what was necessary, probably for Rosinante's own safety. And the elders surely know, but that's knowledge that will only be passed to their successors.

He appreciates that Will doesn't voice the rest of that question. It's enough to go off of, left as it is, and so he nods and focuses on the cigarette in his hand, smoldering away.

Well, so much for overcoming paranoia. With a snap of his fingers, he seals their conversation to the two of them, just in case anyone else were to walk by. It feels safer that way.

"That's actually the reason I broke some of my cover, back then. Hadn't said a word in years except to call back in to base, make sure Sengoku knew I was still alive. But I found out what Law was because I overheard him talking to the other kids, and had to tell him to keep quiet about it, hide that part of his history and name so Doflamingo wouldn't find out. My brother would've killed him. He'd take it as a direct threat to his own aspirations, knowing there was a kid like that around."

But why? Aren't they just normal people, like everyone else? Apparently some people are still holding on to very, very old grudges. Not that he can't sort of relate to that, but still. A child? Everything he's learned about Doflamingo leads him to believe the man is a massive asshole of the highest order, so maybe it makes sense to him... but still.

"Why would he bother to continue that—" you don't normally call murder a "tradition"... "Why continue that way of thinking if most people don't even know of it?"

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