Post by Callimpsest on Jan 26, 2012 19:22:19 GMT
[OOC: Continued from Merry KM Xmas! Taking a cue from Coriolis' Retrofit thread, I have used 'Retro' to indicate that this thread is retrospective i.e. entirely set in the past.]
*Callimwold bowed his head in gratitude at Lanesra as she brought him his second ale. He was pleased to note the surprise on her face at his display of courtesy, and watched as she hastened over to fellow barmaid Slevela to tell her about it. The first drink had disappeared down his throat in a trice and he was determined to make its successor last longer. Grimwold had been raging inside their head for attention, causing a splitting headache - not literally, to Callimpsest's chagrin - but the alcohol seemed to have remedied that, making Callimpsest the zookeeper to a tranquilised beast in a cage. This helped, as did the accommodating atmosphere of the tavern. While all the other patrons this day were human, an ogre was neither remarkable nor unwelcome here, and even the rowdiest drinkers showed no inclination towards bothering him. Within this living nightmare of a cross-time mission of mercy gone dreadfully and indefinitely wrong, within a body that was barely his to command and sported enough hair to make a satyr feel nude, Callimwold could almost relax. He swilled the ale around his mouth, savouring its uncustomary lack of bitterness, and letting fragments of conversation from neighbouring tables drift to his.*
"Have you seen all the strange folk wandering into town from the school? Interesting times ahead..."
"...Coming onto my turf, smashing up my tools..."
"Ice Killer? Never 'eard of 'im."
"Sorry, Patrick, I don't lie after eight beers, and I tell you your bald patch is twice the size it was last week."
"Akash the Headache Healer? Never 'eard of 'im."
*Callimwold drags his mind back to his own situation. He had noticed a quite decent line drawing, or tattoo possibly, of a fish head on his arm: if Grimwold could draw that well, then what had gone wrong with the sketch in the marketplace? Never mind that. How had his time journey gone so awry? He'd prepared properly, hadn't he? And he'd clearly stated where he wanted to go. No, wait, he hadn't.
I wish to return to a time after the Knightmare Boarding School was opened but before the explosion destroyed the library.
It was time he'd specified, not place. And as far as he could tell, the time was right. So what had sent him to... his palm hair brushed his face as he recalled his final thought before entering the time gate:
Damn and blast. If only he'd kept the school and only the school at the front of his mind. What a price to pay for a moment of mental indiscipline. His thoughts returned to the idea that he was being punished for his careless use of the Tower of Time. It was certainly a delicate mistress. And a demanding one. Not to mention - Callimwold sniffed with laughter at the unintended wordplay - temperamental.
It seemed reasonable to assume, then, that the Tower had its own sensitivities, its own will, and had exerted some control over his trip. Was it necessarily punishment though? I'm a good man: how can a perennial victim be anything else? And if the Tower wanted to punish me, why not simply prevent me from time travelling at all? Callimwold mentally replayed his departure through the time gate, and it was then that he remembered what he had said in full:
Could it be that Callimpsest was here, in this re-embodied form that he could never have foreseen, because there was something the Tower needed him to do? Something unrelated to the explosion at the school? And if so, how in the Underworld was he supposed to find out what it was? He couldn't ask anyone and he doubted he could so much as open a book without tearing the cover off.
Callimwold closed his eyes. Although he found the tavern noise - the battery of chatter, the clanking of tankards on tabletops - more bearable than usual, he missed the melodies of the piper. The closest thing he had to musical accompaniment was the rumbling in his stomach: a sound he was trying to ignore, because he dreaded to think what it would take to satisfy a full-blooded ogre's hunger. Ambling through the dark behind his eyelids, he wandered past the various conversations in the room and chose one to loiter by.
Doake: Weren't you listening? I told you the whole story.
Clagger: You carried on talking while I was outside round the back. You must expect there to be some gaps in my understanding. You say you were tending your field.
Doake: The lower field, Clagger, yes.
Clagger: Ah, the one with the drainage problem?
Doake: Right. I hoped that dethatching the soil would help.
*Callimwold recalled a conversation long ago at the Knightmare Boarding School (though not as long ago as it used to be), between two of the teachers, Malefact and Thanatos, about how best to dethatch the croquet lawn. Callimwold could remember no details - only that Thanatos kept referring to the process as scarifying, which was a legitimate synonym, and Malefact kept mispronouncing his colleague's name.*
[OOC: Doake & Clagger were previously seen in A stranger to the Realm.]
Clagger: And that was when you received the trespasser?
Doake: Over he came, slow as Nigel, just to annoy me.
Clagger sneezed. Doake paused while he wondered if he should say something about it.*
Doake: You just sneezed.
Clagger: Yes I did. *Long pause* Crying out for a post-Classical superstition, isn't it?
Doake: Oh absolutely.
Clagger: Anyway, I'm well again, so continue.
Doake: So he's come right over, me shouting at him all the way to scram, then he's stood right by me, damn hood stopping me seeing his face. He didn't say a word, he just stood there. I say, "Can't you see, you're on my field, interfering with my dethatching, so state your business or begone so's I can dethatch my territory in peace."
Clagger: You'd think someone would come up with a nice succinct phrase, four words at the most, which impatient country bumpkins could use to tell strangers to get off their land. Something like... oh I don't know. We should put our heads together and coin one. Talking of which, next round's coming from your purse.
Doake: Hang on a moment: what's a bumpkin?
Clagger: I'll explain later. So at this point did the man leave?
Doake: Oh alas not. I repeated myself several times, changing the words each time to show my intellectical dominiance, and then... *he swigged his ale* ...then the bastard knight twisted up my dethatcher in his gauntleted hands like it was a ribbon and kicked up my soil with his dirty great boots, just for the Hades of it! And only then did he take his leave.
Clagger: Ah yes, I remember that part. A veritable outrage, Doake. But you didn't mention he was a knight.
Doake: Well he was wearing a full suit of armour under his cape. I'm sure of it. Clank-clank-clanking he was.
Clagger: A veritable clanker. But that's the aristocracy for you. Put a 'Sir' before their names and they think they can do as they wish.
Doake: And while we're on the subject: radishes.
Clagger: We weren't on the-
Doake: Why in the Underworld do radishes insist on-
*Callimwold was thinking about the violent stranger. Surely he was the same man who battered Scaramonger's breastplate? But what man would act so peculiarly and with such vim? It sounded more like an ogre's behaviour. No: with an ogre sitting so close by, Doake would have remarked on it. As would the market folk. And an ogre could never be so disciplined in its attacks, so... mechanical.
The Dungeon had its own mechanical warrior, the Automatum. Although it was also mindless, and the attacks sounded far from that. What about the Behemoth then, who walked about wordlessly in full armour? Callimwold was sure he once heard that Merlin disassembled the Behemoth in preparation for a Christmas jigsaw session that never was. Could the Opposition have put it back together? There again, why would Lord Fear need the Behemoth when he had the-
Dreadnort. Callimwold put a hand to his chest: he'd never felt a heart beat so hard. The more he thought about the Dreadnort, the more it fitted: the slowness, the violence, the specific objectives, not to mention the rumours that after its decommissioning it had reactivated itself and wandered out of Marblehead. What else? Callimwold gripped the table as he tried to call up Callimpsest's factual knowledge. He'd cast an eye over the Lexicon entry on the Dreadnort just hours earlier (and years later) while Shadow read the one on dragons. And he'd read the entry many times previously on solitary starless nights. Active during the Sixth Phase of Adventuring. One victim. Several encounters in which five other dungeoneers were spared. Because they gave the Dreadnort a password. Words like... passport. No, that was a blocker. Words like... like...
Breastplate! Callimwold opened his eyes. He grabbed his tankard and gulped the ale away, evincing none of the drainage problems of Doake's lower field. Breastplate. [Team 5.] There was no way that was a coincidence. There were more words, and he knew that he knew them. Wait, the breastplate attack was focused on the engraving of Heracles invading Troy. Striking at the fortified city. Striking or... storming. [Team 4.] And there was another image that was wrecked, the one with the amalgamated monst- monstrous. [Team 1.] Callimwold felt like punching something, and luckily it was just the air. There was no doubting the pattern of the attacks. And so it followed that the violence against Doake's turf was a swipe at his territory [Team 6] and at the tool he was using to scarify it [Team 3]. Five words, five teams.
Callimwold exhaled and looked over at the barmaids, as if expecting them to applaud his triumph. Rather irritatingly, his headache was coming back, and he knew it was coming from his ogre constituent. Perhaps it was jealous. How sad. There was more he could have recalled about the Dreadnort, but now that the mystery was solved it didn't matter. He pictured the rogue automaton completing its attack in the marketplace and trudging off towards Bruin. He felt a sharp twinge in his head. What did it expect to find out among the rocks, if anything? It had crossed off all its words.
No it hadn't. It had marked off five words from five dungeoneers. One dungeoneer [Team 6] met it twice. There was one more password.
And he remembered what that password was. And his belly forgot its hunger pangs amidst the knots. And he remembered the ogre family that had set up home in Bruin. And the beast in his mind was screaming through the bars of the cage. And he knew that although the merciless metallic murderer would find one Grimwold not at home, it was all too possible that it would find that another was. And-
A few seconds later and Callimwold was gone, leaving no evidence that he had ever set foot in the Crazed Heifer. Aside from the upturned future, the puzzled drinkers, the startled serving wenches and the ogre-shaped hole in the unopened door.*
[OOC: Continued in Journey's End?]
*Callimwold bowed his head in gratitude at Lanesra as she brought him his second ale. He was pleased to note the surprise on her face at his display of courtesy, and watched as she hastened over to fellow barmaid Slevela to tell her about it. The first drink had disappeared down his throat in a trice and he was determined to make its successor last longer. Grimwold had been raging inside their head for attention, causing a splitting headache - not literally, to Callimpsest's chagrin - but the alcohol seemed to have remedied that, making Callimpsest the zookeeper to a tranquilised beast in a cage. This helped, as did the accommodating atmosphere of the tavern. While all the other patrons this day were human, an ogre was neither remarkable nor unwelcome here, and even the rowdiest drinkers showed no inclination towards bothering him. Within this living nightmare of a cross-time mission of mercy gone dreadfully and indefinitely wrong, within a body that was barely his to command and sported enough hair to make a satyr feel nude, Callimwold could almost relax. He swilled the ale around his mouth, savouring its uncustomary lack of bitterness, and letting fragments of conversation from neighbouring tables drift to his.*
"Have you seen all the strange folk wandering into town from the school? Interesting times ahead..."
"...Coming onto my turf, smashing up my tools..."
"Ice Killer? Never 'eard of 'im."
"Sorry, Patrick, I don't lie after eight beers, and I tell you your bald patch is twice the size it was last week."
"Akash the Headache Healer? Never 'eard of 'im."
*Callimwold drags his mind back to his own situation. He had noticed a quite decent line drawing, or tattoo possibly, of a fish head on his arm: if Grimwold could draw that well, then what had gone wrong with the sketch in the marketplace? Never mind that. How had his time journey gone so awry? He'd prepared properly, hadn't he? And he'd clearly stated where he wanted to go. No, wait, he hadn't.
It was time he'd specified, not place. And as far as he could tell, the time was right. So what had sent him to... his palm hair brushed his face as he recalled his final thought before entering the time gate:
It's too late to go to market now!
Damn and blast. If only he'd kept the school and only the school at the front of his mind. What a price to pay for a moment of mental indiscipline. His thoughts returned to the idea that he was being punished for his careless use of the Tower of Time. It was certainly a delicate mistress. And a demanding one. Not to mention - Callimwold sniffed with laughter at the unintended wordplay - temperamental.
It seemed reasonable to assume, then, that the Tower had its own sensitivities, its own will, and had exerted some control over his trip. Was it necessarily punishment though? I'm a good man: how can a perennial victim be anything else? And if the Tower wanted to punish me, why not simply prevent me from time travelling at all? Callimwold mentally replayed his departure through the time gate, and it was then that he remembered what he had said in full:
I wish to return to a time after the Knightmare Boarding School was opened but before the explosion destroyed the library ... When I was needed.
Could it be that Callimpsest was here, in this re-embodied form that he could never have foreseen, because there was something the Tower needed him to do? Something unrelated to the explosion at the school? And if so, how in the Underworld was he supposed to find out what it was? He couldn't ask anyone and he doubted he could so much as open a book without tearing the cover off.
Callimwold closed his eyes. Although he found the tavern noise - the battery of chatter, the clanking of tankards on tabletops - more bearable than usual, he missed the melodies of the piper. The closest thing he had to musical accompaniment was the rumbling in his stomach: a sound he was trying to ignore, because he dreaded to think what it would take to satisfy a full-blooded ogre's hunger. Ambling through the dark behind his eyelids, he wandered past the various conversations in the room and chose one to loiter by.
Doake: Weren't you listening? I told you the whole story.
Clagger: You carried on talking while I was outside round the back. You must expect there to be some gaps in my understanding. You say you were tending your field.
Doake: The lower field, Clagger, yes.
Clagger: Ah, the one with the drainage problem?
Doake: Right. I hoped that dethatching the soil would help.
*Callimwold recalled a conversation long ago at the Knightmare Boarding School (though not as long ago as it used to be), between two of the teachers, Malefact and Thanatos, about how best to dethatch the croquet lawn. Callimwold could remember no details - only that Thanatos kept referring to the process as scarifying, which was a legitimate synonym, and Malefact kept mispronouncing his colleague's name.*
[OOC: Doake & Clagger were previously seen in A stranger to the Realm.]
Clagger: And that was when you received the trespasser?
Doake: Over he came, slow as Nigel, just to annoy me.
Clagger sneezed. Doake paused while he wondered if he should say something about it.*
Doake: You just sneezed.
Clagger: Yes I did. *Long pause* Crying out for a post-Classical superstition, isn't it?
Doake: Oh absolutely.
Clagger: Anyway, I'm well again, so continue.
Doake: So he's come right over, me shouting at him all the way to scram, then he's stood right by me, damn hood stopping me seeing his face. He didn't say a word, he just stood there. I say, "Can't you see, you're on my field, interfering with my dethatching, so state your business or begone so's I can dethatch my territory in peace."
Clagger: You'd think someone would come up with a nice succinct phrase, four words at the most, which impatient country bumpkins could use to tell strangers to get off their land. Something like... oh I don't know. We should put our heads together and coin one. Talking of which, next round's coming from your purse.
Doake: Hang on a moment: what's a bumpkin?
Clagger: I'll explain later. So at this point did the man leave?
Doake: Oh alas not. I repeated myself several times, changing the words each time to show my intellectical dominiance, and then... *he swigged his ale* ...then the bastard knight twisted up my dethatcher in his gauntleted hands like it was a ribbon and kicked up my soil with his dirty great boots, just for the Hades of it! And only then did he take his leave.
Clagger: Ah yes, I remember that part. A veritable outrage, Doake. But you didn't mention he was a knight.
Doake: Well he was wearing a full suit of armour under his cape. I'm sure of it. Clank-clank-clanking he was.
Clagger: A veritable clanker. But that's the aristocracy for you. Put a 'Sir' before their names and they think they can do as they wish.
Doake: And while we're on the subject: radishes.
Clagger: We weren't on the-
Doake: Why in the Underworld do radishes insist on-
*Callimwold was thinking about the violent stranger. Surely he was the same man who battered Scaramonger's breastplate? But what man would act so peculiarly and with such vim? It sounded more like an ogre's behaviour. No: with an ogre sitting so close by, Doake would have remarked on it. As would the market folk. And an ogre could never be so disciplined in its attacks, so... mechanical.
The Dungeon had its own mechanical warrior, the Automatum. Although it was also mindless, and the attacks sounded far from that. What about the Behemoth then, who walked about wordlessly in full armour? Callimwold was sure he once heard that Merlin disassembled the Behemoth in preparation for a Christmas jigsaw session that never was. Could the Opposition have put it back together? There again, why would Lord Fear need the Behemoth when he had the-
Dreadnort. Callimwold put a hand to his chest: he'd never felt a heart beat so hard. The more he thought about the Dreadnort, the more it fitted: the slowness, the violence, the specific objectives, not to mention the rumours that after its decommissioning it had reactivated itself and wandered out of Marblehead. What else? Callimwold gripped the table as he tried to call up Callimpsest's factual knowledge. He'd cast an eye over the Lexicon entry on the Dreadnort just hours earlier (and years later) while Shadow read the one on dragons. And he'd read the entry many times previously on solitary starless nights. Active during the Sixth Phase of Adventuring. One victim. Several encounters in which five other dungeoneers were spared. Because they gave the Dreadnort a password. Words like... passport. No, that was a blocker. Words like... like...
Breastplate! Callimwold opened his eyes. He grabbed his tankard and gulped the ale away, evincing none of the drainage problems of Doake's lower field. Breastplate. [Team 5.] There was no way that was a coincidence. There were more words, and he knew that he knew them. Wait, the breastplate attack was focused on the engraving of Heracles invading Troy. Striking at the fortified city. Striking or... storming. [Team 4.] And there was another image that was wrecked, the one with the amalgamated monst- monstrous. [Team 1.] Callimwold felt like punching something, and luckily it was just the air. There was no doubting the pattern of the attacks. And so it followed that the violence against Doake's turf was a swipe at his territory [Team 6] and at the tool he was using to scarify it [Team 3]. Five words, five teams.
Callimwold exhaled and looked over at the barmaids, as if expecting them to applaud his triumph. Rather irritatingly, his headache was coming back, and he knew it was coming from his ogre constituent. Perhaps it was jealous. How sad. There was more he could have recalled about the Dreadnort, but now that the mystery was solved it didn't matter. He pictured the rogue automaton completing its attack in the marketplace and trudging off towards Bruin. He felt a sharp twinge in his head. What did it expect to find out among the rocks, if anything? It had crossed off all its words.
No it hadn't. It had marked off five words from five dungeoneers. One dungeoneer [Team 6] met it twice. There was one more password.
And he remembered what that password was. And his belly forgot its hunger pangs amidst the knots. And he remembered the ogre family that had set up home in Bruin. And the beast in his mind was screaming through the bars of the cage. And he knew that although the merciless metallic murderer would find one Grimwold not at home, it was all too possible that it would find that another was. And-
A few seconds later and Callimwold was gone, leaving no evidence that he had ever set foot in the Crazed Heifer. Aside from the upturned future, the puzzled drinkers, the startled serving wenches and the ogre-shaped hole in the unopened door.*
[OOC: Continued in Journey's End?]