Rain Rain Rain Come Down Down Down [open to multiple]

[biscuit_powered]

Very little in this place has proved familiar, and that which is familiar has proved uncanny. Asmodia's life has run the gamut from metropolis to frontier and back again, but until being taken by this Rift she had never seen anything like Manhattan. Bustling port cities she's seen, but this city is like something out of fantasy. The word 'skyscraper' is oddly appealing in its imaginative accuracy, even if the buildings it denotes are less appealing. They blot out the sky in a way even Kintargo's grizzled skyline never managed, and they make her feel simultaneously trapped and as though she should expect one to topple down on top of her at any moment.

This is far from the first time circumstances have called upon her to adapt herself to a foreign culture, but she had never imagined she would encounter one this foreign...or that she would find herself nearly powerless with no indication of when or how she might regain her magic. She's been keenly aware of her relative inability to kill her enemies defend herself since being returned here; it's as though Biscuit has completely forgotten most of the spells she taught him. It's a struggle to prepare each of the spells that remain for even one use each day, and all Biscuit can give her are Deception's spells. Maybe she should be grateful for what she has given that their survival here will likely be predicated on their ability to pass unnoticed, but she has grown accustomed to living openly and to responding to threats with violence, not subterfuge.

Not that anyone has threatened her. True, she's spent most of her time hiding out in the little living space assigned to her, quietly testing her new limits, but the worst she's gotten on her brief forays outdoors are odd looks. Odd looks she's used to, but sooner or later she'll have to make another attempt to buy some local clothing because the human guise alone isn't cutting it. Her first attempt was a miserable failure, the layout of the stores and labeling of the goods even more confusing than the grocers she's visited, and since then she's simply worn the clothes in which she arrived, washing them in her new abode's sink a few times at great inconvenience and with mixed success.

Today, at last, she is growing bolder...if only from boredom. Trouble is, she doesn't know where to go or what to do with herself, and she doesn't have any money with which to do it anyhow. She heads down to the ground level and outside only to wander aimlessly a few minutes, listless and annoyed at the realization that she has no idea what to do with herself.

If there's one thing she's always known how to do, though, it's how to take out her frustrations on strangers. An idea forms as she passes one stranger after another on the street, and once it occurs to her it sticks. It wouldn't hurt anyone, not really, and it would give her something to do for the next hour or so, and maybe most importantly, it would remind her that she's not helpless.

So that's why Asmodia and Biscuit have picked out a spot in the Sheep Meadow and commenced dancing. They're both pretty bad at it, and Asmodia's eldritch chanting is almost entirely unmusical, but for the first time in a while she's starting to feel a reassuring (if likely fleeting) sense of control. She's Asmodia Antarion. She's faced devils and felled giants, and she can and she will command the elements themselves for her own petty amusement. Enjoy the coming rainstorm, Manhattan. Or just enjoy the performance art; it's not every day you see a LARPer and a giant rodent performing a rain dance.


[OOC: Asmodia is using a hex to control the weather! Unfortunately for pranking purposes, this hex requires a literal solid hour of dancing and chanting with her familiar and she's chosen to do it in a public place, whoops. She might try to brush aside briefer distractions, but whenever anyone gets her mind too far off what she's doing she's going to have to start over. Subsequent interrupters will get an increasingly frustrated Asmodia.]

Comments

[biscuit_powered]

"What, seriously?" If she was expecting some kind of consolation from him, she didn't expect it to be that. There's no way a mortal being is more powerful than someone who can legitimately describe himself as 'ascended' and pop around here and there seeing through people's illusions at will.

Or...maybe not. A grimace settles over her features as she reflects on how much power she's lost since arriving here, until she catches herself and schools her features into a tight smile. "I mean, yeah! Yeah, if it's, uh, stopping you doing stuff, that's not -- great. You're right, you're completely right, at least I still have my magic. Alll of my magic."

She never was a very good devotee of Deception.

[peacefulexplorer]

That affirmation sounds a little too repetitive to be completely - well. Being what he is doesn't allow everyone the same measure of privacy as it would if he were human, as he has no grasp over how to turn each sensory capability off.

"Just, uh. Be careful, maybe," he offers, skirting the topic, lifting his gaze skyward speculatively. "If you try anything too big the Rift tends to, ah - hit back."

His tone doesn't seem to know whether to settle on wry or melancholic.

[biscuit_powered]

"I think it's more if you try anything too direct," says Asmodia, perfectly happy to skate right on by the subject of her current power level. "I tried to, uh...look at it, the first day I was back here, the same way I looked at you just now. From what I've heard I shouldn't have been able to see anything at all, it's not really magic making this all happen, exactly, but it knocked me flat. Literally."

[peacefulexplorer]

"It's more like, uh - an entity." Is that even the right word for it? It's beyond his conception no matter what form he's in, even while on a whole other plane. "It's sentient to an extent, it has moods and it - experiments with us when it feels like it. But it doesn't really lend itself to being understood."

Either it doesn't want to or it's just entirely on another level, and neither option is all that consoling.

[biscuit_powered]

"Yeah, I don't know if what I saw was actually the Rift or if it was what the Rift wanted to show me, but it was...something else." Something else she's surprised in hindsight didn't give her an aneurism. "It's not like you are, if that's any comfort," she adds, because while Daniel's just a magical nonentity the Rift was...something visible, kind of, or a void, or both. She frowns, trying to steer her mind away from the memory of how it had just opened into nothingness -- no, let's not talk about that, either, it's another subject to avoid.

"Experiments how?"

[peacefulexplorer]

"Like, well, like this, for starters." He gestures at himself, mouth twisting wryly. "I think it wanted to see what would happen. See if I could do it. And that's not even getting into the dreams."

Whether it had been curious or vindictive or both, he's left with little doubt that the Rift did what it did to him purposefully.

"We're its things," he finishes glumly. "To toy with whenever it feels like it."

[biscuit_powered]

"So it killed you?!" Because he was pretty clear on death being a primary component of how this happened to him. "Dawn's mercy," she mutters. And for something like him, too, to consider himself one of its things...not promising. Not promising in the slightest.

[peacefulexplorer]

"Ah." He winces. "Yeah, that. Hopefully that was limited to just me, seeing as I've - done that before."

He rearranges his features into something approaching sympathetic uncertainty. "Just pays to be careful is, is all."

[biscuit_powered]

"Yeah, I don't --" The facade of the brave adventurer immune to all weirdness is crumbling (if it ever really existed) as she crosses her arms across her belly in unconscious defensiveness. "I'm not used to this kind of thing," she admits. "The things we've fought were --"

She grimaces, regretting giving out the information that she's any kind of a fighter, but finishes out the thought. "More...corporeal. Killable, frankly. This is like having a god for an enemy."

[peacefulexplorer]

He winces in sympathy. Gods have been his enemies for the better part of the past eight years, but they were seldom gods in the genuinely powerful, unkillable sense, unless one counted the Ancients themselves.

Like what he is now.

"An unsolvable problem," he says, soft and grim. Because this one, frankly, isn't solvable - he can't even see a clear solution from where he's standing, and he happens to be what is essentially a metaphysical construct of ill-proportioned magnitude.

[biscuit_powered]

There are moments when she can almost pretend that this is all just another strange interlude in a series of weird adventures, moments when she can pretend that she really does believe she'll find a way out of this. She's not an idiot, though. She knows that 'finding a way out,' for her and her friends, usually means going on the attack...and so, this is not one of those moments.

Asmodia nods, sniffs, and raises a hand to wipe at her nose. She's not crying, and she's not about to cry, nope. "I've lived with worse," she says, frustrated to hear how unsteady her voice suddenly is. She's not going to do this. She's not going to get emotional about it.

[peacefulexplorer]

Even without the physical signs of her distress, the building wave of hopelessness stemming from his pronouncement is impossible to ignore. He stretches out a hand before closing it into a helpless, frustrated fist, knowing full well he's utterly beyond the capacity to offer comfort in any immediate fashion.

"We're all in the same boat here," he says gently. "And we help each other as much as we can. No one's given up looking for a way back."

[biscuit_powered]

"I don't belong here," admits Asmodia. That's true for all the people -- all the 'rifties' -- that have been brought here, but he's seen what she looks like, he should know that there's more to it for her, a bigger divide. "I really, really don't."

Biscuit chitters, 'How do you think I feel,' and she can't help the brief flicker of a smile that fights its way onto her face. "Sorry," she says to Daniel.

[peacefulexplorer]

None of them do, it's true, but the cultural and personal differences separating Asmodia from her home in comparison to everyone else are, potentially, immense.

"No, I'm sorry," he says, shaking his head ruefully. "I didn't mean to interrupt. And if it helps you feel a little more at home, well." A faint smile touches the corner of his incorporeal lips to match her own. "The people here are used to things being kinda weird, let's just say."

[biscuit_powered]

She huffs out a little laugh and shrugs one shoulder. "Believe it or not, getting interrupted was more like home than anything else. I've only ever finished it a handful of times."

And at least Daniel didn't vomit on her. She lifts a hand like she's going to pat him on the shoulder, then remembers she can't. "It's alright. I mean, it's not, it's not alright, but I'll live. I've survived worse things, I'm sure."

[peacefulexplorer]

"Here's hoping you won't have to," he says wryly. It's not so difficult to notice the reflexive twitch of motion, and he looks at her hand with a trace of wistfulness. He should be able to penetrate the veil of incorporeality smothering him, shielding him from actual interaction with this world. It should be well within his power.

"I'll, ah - I can leave you to it." He flashes her a smile, a mild twitch of one side of his mouth, and with an abruptness and finality he doesn't mean, really, he slips out from physical sight between breaths.

[biscuit_powered]

And then he's just -- gone, no incantation, no detectable effort to dismiss himself from her plane. Asmodia takes in a sharp breath, and a moment later she's stepped forward to sweep her arms through the space, forgetting momentarily that she won't be able to feel him even if he is still secretly there. There's nothing, of course, at least nothing that she can feel, and she drops her hands sheepishly to her sides before turning to Biscuit.

"You heard the man," she says, trying to find humor in it. "Time to get back to work."