hadriel_logs | Event Log: A Hope for the Future

Entry tags:

Event Log: A Hope for the Future

Who: All characters participating in the event
What: The event log for the A Hope for the Future event
Where: All over the city!
When: April 15th-April 19th
Warnings: Stealth Rock

It's finally time to reap the rewards you've earned from all that hard work collecting and returning the Hope orbs! Be careful walking the streets during the small earthquakes, but feel free to admire the scenery as your beautiful city reassembles its way back into its former glory.

There are new houses where the destroyed buildings once were, and they're perfect for a single person or pair of lovebirds. In addition, you'll find that the electricity to these new houses, and all other homes and shops in the city is restored. The food is better, the monsters are gone- hey, this city might be livable again!

To cap it all off, we've got a feast waiting for you on the 19th! Come one, come all, and enjoy all of your favorite foods, drinks, and party games. It's been awhile since we've all gotten together to celebrate something good, so get your party on and toss all your troubles away!

► This log covers April 14th-April 19th.
► Feel free to make your own logs as well!
► Please tag headers of threads with content warnings where they apply
► Please put your character's name and open/closed in the subject line of your starters!
► If you get hit by levitating rubble or eat a food that wasn't meant for you, please let us know here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Caedra turns toward him with a smile and lowers her cup to her plate. "No. Just cream." Rich, smooth, and just the way she likes it, and she will mourn it when it is finally gone.

She's not familiar with this individual - probably has glanced him in passing here and there but never took much notice. But now she quickly finds herself appraising him - square jaw, thick neck, broad shoulders. Face is a bit bland, maybe, but she's seen less exciting men. And then she catches herself and contains a laugh because wow, she really has been here a month and been very alone all that time, hasn't she? Mortals aren't normally even worth considering.

"Did you want some?"

Color him relieved he won't find any people-faced grubs floating in a cup of joe à la Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, because judging by what he thinks is her plate he's fairly certain her palate is a little more eccentric than his own. Which is saying something, because he's traveled a lot.

Jesus, the pitch-black eyes are way more unnerving up close.

"Yeah, sure." He reaches for a fresh cup, gesturing that she pass the pot his way. "I'm Nate."

Just be glad more of the buffet isn't devoted to her preferred tastes. Roast cherub is a much rarer delicacy that would probably freak even more people out.

She passes the coffee his way, and steps back from the pitcher of cream to allow him access to it if he so desires. And feels a little conflicted, really, because sharing the coffee means it will go away faster, but it also means she gets to ogle him a little longer, which seems like a reasonable tradeoff. Why aren't more people here able to maintain a decent physique? It's so disappointing.

"I'm Caedra," she responds, pleased she doesn't have to dig for a name for once - finally someone who knows basic courtesy. "Did the gods botch your drink order?" she teases as he helps himself.

Nate quirks a crooked smile, huffing a laugh and feeling the effects of his most recent drink a little more strongly. Consequently, he is feeling a little more loose - on a good day he makes bad decisions, and supplementing his usual sarcasm with booze is unwise, at best. He pours a cup, adding a splash of cream to dilute it.

People who drink black coffee are, without a doubt, the true devils here.

"The gods sent me alcohol, not this stuff."

He already knows her name, but saying so would raise too many questions that he is neither willing nor equipped to answer at the present junction. Better to feign ignorance for the sake of avoiding potential evisceration. She watches him - or he thinks she does, it's hard to tell when her eyes are entirely dark - and Nate pretends not to notice, leaning up against the table, taking a sip and relishing the caffeine. He speaks again before he can stop himself, tone conversational.

"And I know who you are."

So much for subtlety.

"Oh, do you!" she replies, her teasing tone taking on a more sarcastic bent, though nothing outright malicious. Not yet. She's enjoying herself, damnit, and she hopes to keep having a pleasant night despite these people. Some of them seem to want to make that very difficult.

"See, a lot of people seem to be under that impression right now," she continues. "What with everyone warning everyone else about the terrible woman with her black eyes. Suddenly, everyone knows everything about me and how I should be avoided at all costs. So if you've seen all that then I have to ask: what sort of person sees that and comes for a cup of coffee?"

Probably to see if she's as scary as they all make her out to be, or some sort of know-your-enemy thing. But she'll let him answer that for himself.

Nate supposes that I know your name, and I know you used blood to rend some sort of hole in space-time to cause mass chaos, and I know that you're currently about as physically vulnerable as I am isn't the wisest of retorts, given the occasion. She's so much smaller in person, but Nate would never hold twelve inches against her. He's had his ass handed to him plenty of times by women half his size.

He shifts, free hand in his pocket, allowing her the opportunity to voice her mild frustration for the circumstances she created. The saccharine-sweet edges of Caedra's tone suggest he isn't the first to say something to this effect this evening, and that while she is presently indulging shenanigans she may not for much longer.

Nate blinks at her with wide, affronted eyes over his drink, taking another slow sip.

"A guy who wanted some coffee."

She nods a little at his answer, at the sheer audacity of it, because she knows people and she knows when they're playing dumb. Caedra, of course, has no idea what Nate's role in all of this is - maybe he just likes dangerous women. Some men are really into that sort of thing.

"Right. Of course. I'm sure that's all. But me giving away my coffee for free isn't fair, now is it? When do I get some of your alcohol?"

Which - she doesn't expect he'll actually deliver, or maybe he'll run off under the pretense of fetching it and not come back. If he does, though, she knows now that she has to go easy, because getting tipsy on booze happens a lot faster now than it once did. Fuck the gods, really.

Lady, buy him a drink before you tell him how ballsy he is.

Her assumption about his personal preferences isn't wrong - Nate does love a woman who can throw a mean right hook, or chuck him out a five-story window - but he's happily married to a girl he's sure is getting her booze on somewhere nearby. Elena's liver is a lot smaller than his, and he anticipates having to carry her later.

"It's behind you, actually." Nate points with his coffee to a straw-wrapped bottle on the table, a few feet back. He kind of expected a limited supply of the stuff, but Hope seems to be pulling out all the stops tonight. It almost makes Nate feel bad for smuggling a tiny, formerly Null-affiliated robot to safety.

He raises his eyebrows, an expression intended to be encouraging.

"Help yourself. I'd hate to not return the favor."

She catches a glimpse of that wedding ring, in fact, when he points to the drink. Not that it really matters to her, but it's interesting. Something to keep in mind. Chances are good his partner isn't here. Chances are also good, knowing what she knows about men, that it doesn't matter much either way.

But Caedra follows the point to the bottle, and eyes it curiously. "Never heard of that," she comments, and empties the last sip of coffee into her mouth so she can pour a bit of the drink into her cup. "Sugar cane - so it's like rum, then?"

Depending on the strength of her interest in the brick shithouse currently sipping coffee across from her, Caedra may find herself unfathomably disappointed that Nate would rather fall off another train in the Himalayas with a gunshot wound to the stomach than cheat on his wife. He isn't so lacking in self-awareness as to not notice her less-than-subtle glances, though - if he leans on it to glean information, then it's worth the risk.

Also, he's still a little drunk, so, you know. His judgment isn't great.

"Sort of. But it's distilled from sugarcane juice, instead of molasses. They call it cachaça."

A drink on par with ouzo in terms of being the alcoholic kiss of death. Nate has never known other beverages to slam an unsuspecting imbiber harder.

"I kind of grew up with it in Colombia, though I'm...not sure you know where that is."

"No idea," she admits, as she has a taste of the alcohol. My, but that goes down easy, and as a pleased expression spreads across her face, she pours a more generous portion into the cup to sip at while they talk, and sets the bottle aside.

"I can see why this is your favorite. So, tell me about Colombia. What's it like? What did you do back home?" Something involving physical labor, perhaps, by the look of him. Or a soldier, perhaps.

"It's hot...humid. Packed with jungles and deserts and a long coastline, port cities and old buildings."

He thinks it would be difficult and winding to explain the orphanage in Boston, the departure when he was twelve, an extensive life on the road, and frankly, she hasn't exactly earned the candor. Half-truths flow a lot freer from the source when he's unencumbered by a stranger knowing his reputation. Her world probably doesn't have a Colombia, or a Panama, or a Mexico, so what does it matter that he abridges a few things?

What did you do is somewhat more complicated, but- Honestly, fuck it. He can make it sound as romantically impossible as he wants, when the truth is stranger than fiction. Nate rubs his thumb idly against his glass.

"I was a thief."

Caedra nods along with the description but doesn't have much to say about it. She's heard of places like that, she thinks, with exotic flowers and parrots and crocodiles. There are such things in Pantai, places her grandson told her about, but her brief visit to that empire to see the boy and to try and steal the Grunfjell temple stone did not leave time for a holiday. And although Pantai has its tropical jungles she only saw tall mountain peaks, damp and frigid still in the middle of spring. It would be nice to return some day.

Something stirs deep in her memory. Thick green trees around a lake. Hot, expansive grasslands bordering desert. She ignores it.

"A thief! That sounds exciting," she says with a giggle, as she casually has another sip of the cachaça. Tasty stuff. "I always pictured thieves as scrawny little things, though. You're definitely not." Mm. Otherwise she wouldn't be so eager to hang around and chat with him. The booze is a pleasant bonus, though. "What was your favorite heist?"

"Ehhh...I was scrawny when I was fifteen, I guess."

He concedes with a shrug, and maybe the stereotype exists for a reason. People usually think of thieves as waifish street rats stealing from market vendors and scrambling across the rooftop. It's a fairly accurate description to a Nathan Drake from twenty years ago. All the climbing and fighting ended up building significant muscle mass.

She feeds him a difficult question to answer, however, and Nate sucks air between his teeth as he mulls it over. It's hard to pick a favorite, particularly when his work consists of a combination of theft, exploration, research, and discovery. He settles for the most recent one.

"Not sure I've got a favorite, but I did have a job just before I showed up here. Upscale black market auction. Infiltration and, uh," Nate huffs a laugh. "Acquisition."

"Hmm, you're a terrible storyteller. Acquisition of what? Something expensive, I hope."

There aren't many thieves she can say she trusts, where she comes from. Sending someone out to steal something means they'll likely keep it. One is far more likely to find someone who considers themself a collector. The exception, of course, are the yugolothi mercenaries who drift through the city from time to time. When paid well, they're more than happy to take jobs of any sort. Sometimes they even succeed without getting themselves killed.

But all that aside, it's an exciting lifestyle to hear about. Makes for good stories.

"Hey," he says, mildly offended. "I am a great storyteller. I'm just getting started."

Leaning up against the table he does the objectively rude thing - pointing with his cup - and takes another sip of coffee. Her assumption isn't wrong; Nate has, in the past, screwed a couple clients out of larger prizes affiliated with the one they were searching for. He's also assisted in the aversion of complete assholes getting a hold of major sources of old world ephemera that would have qualified as biological warfare. Sometimes ya gotta.

"We've been looking for this stuff for...Jesus, years. Decades. This was our break."

As he speaks Nate gets considerably more animated, tugged into his own narrative.

"See, there was this pirate - Henry Avery - who managed to pull off one of the biggest naval heists in known history. Hundreds of millions in gold from a fleet of ships that he stowed away, and then he disappeared off the face of the earth. Nobody knows what happened to him or the treasure."

Oh good, the mild insult has paid off. Caedra has no patience for 'just getting started', has no interest in buildup. Hasn't had time, really, to develop the finer skills of patience and caution. Immediate gratification and impulse satisfaction or bust.

Well, okay, perhaps she's not quite that bad or she'd be failing completely at keeping her hands to herself. Already she can feel a slight buzz from the alcohol creeping in and she finds herself leaning closer as she listens eagerly to his tale. She drinks, and listens, eyes fixed on him with rapt attention.

"Mm. And?" She doesn't really want to interrupt beyond that, not when it's just getting interesting.

Nate realizes that with her general everything she probably needs some context, as any respectable person would, and given that he's imbibed a decent amount of liquor he isn't as impatient as usual to barrel through to the revelations he came to before arriving here.

"So the last affiliated artifacts that we found were these- these crosses, with a man tied to them. Representations of a saint from my world, who had been a thief and repented as he was dying, and his god led him to paradise. Avery had given them to other successful pirates, and the crosses themselves were hollow. They had this...sort of invitation inside, clues we originally thought would lead to the treasure."

Fifteen years, and Nate had assumed that Avery either hid his haul superbly well in the highlands of the Hebrides, or never hid it at all. Stayed rich and got fat and happy somewhere more tropical up until his dying days, or went down with his ship somewhere in the Atlantic, or around the Cape of Good Hope. He wouldn't be the first man to let the sea overtake him.

"We followed it to the last place he had been sighted before his disappearance and found this-" For a moment Nate frowns, trying to accurately articulate what he wants to say in his enthusiasm. As a very passionate history nerd, he has the tendency to get worked up once he's on a roll. "-this series of elaborate puzzles and traps. Like a test. Like he was testing the people he had invited to see if they were worthy of joining him, wherever he was. We reached this final chamber and before our, uh, competitors blew it up, got the next location which was hundreds of miles away, and barely got out with our lives."

By the skin of their teeth, really.

"But- but here's the thing, he wouldn't go to that much trouble to hide it, right? What's the point?" Perhaps less to her, and more introspectively, Nate takes another sip of coffee and hastily shrugs and continues. "Because it's- I mean, it just makes more sense if he was recruiting other pirates. Getting them to join him, pool their resources, their gold, away from the arm of the monarchy. Like a...nautical thief coalition."

She finishes the first pour of her drink as he talks, but she's paying close attention, surprising herself by finding how invested she already feels in his tale. Now that he's gotten going, he really is a decent storyteller - and tales of high adventure and pirate treasure have a wide appeal that reaches even to her. No surprise, perhaps, given her own background, as she struck out on her own as a child in search of something greater than what she had, and how she now revels in luxury and freedoms she could never have dreamed of. But Nate's own enthusiasm is luring her in as well, and she can't help but picture him out at sea, facing into the wind, looking over the horizon - shirtless. Nice.

And the clever pirate lord! The adventures, the seafaring, the puzzles and traps, oh her grandson would be so jealous. Nate's life sounds quite a lot like Malthus' in some ways, and she does miss that clever boy who hopefully is being taken care of by his grandfather. Caedra follows along, and grins at Nate's deduction. "A coalition of the most cunning thieves in particular, by the sound of things. It's brilliant."

And hopefully there's more to this story still to come, so she pours herself another drink, noticing but not minding how she awkwardly clunks the bottle against the rim of her cup. It's fine. She's fine. Alcohol is great.

He's spent more than his fair share of time on ships of all sizes, from dinghies in the Caribbean to pirate-commandeered cruise liners off the coast of Yemen, so her mental image - discounting the shirtless part - isn't altogether inaccurate. People, Nate believes, love an adventure story, and he milks her renewed interest for all it is worth. Hard not to be enthused by a tale of historical conspiracy and lost treasures.

"That's what I was thinking!"

He interjects eagerly, distractedly reaching for the bottle of cachaça and pouring some into his coffee mug. It mixes with the dregs and he takes another sip, leaning back against the table.

"There are plenty of other pirates who have disappeared, or escaped hanging. The thing is, we- we didn't get to follow the lead, because then we ended up here." Nate's frustration is abundantly apparent, because King's Bay had been within their reach. "But I've spent all this time in Hadriel racking my brain over the reason why they would pool their money like that, if they weren't trying to build some kind of settlement."

"Well," she starts, then pauses. Her brain feels a little more muddled than she had expected and it takes her a moment to formulate a thought. There are other reasons to pool money - to buy out politicians, to use it as a magical catalyst in certain spells if the gold is pure, or possibly to pay off an even larger threat. But. Isn't Nate from ... From one of those awful worlds where the mortals haven't discovered magic?

No, wait, that sounds amazing, it would leave them powerless. What a good world. What a good, good world.

Caedra takes a long drink, then smiles lazily as she approaches Nate and reaches for one of his arms. "I have a few ideas. About pirates but more importantly about you. Ideas that really ought to be shared privately. Will you come with me?"

Fuck it, he's hot, and she wants him. The cachaça brought her some clarity.

Nate is halfway done with his third (fourth? probably fifth, he's lost count) drink, caffeine mixing fairly well with the alcohol - like an Irish coffee, but better - and he's a split second away from swaying to the other side of the table to grab something to eat when a delicate, fur-clad arm loops through his.

He blinks at it.

"Uh. Sure? Where are we going?"

"Hmm." She draws the syllable out, leaning on him a little for both contact and support as her knees wobble a little.

"My house isn't that far. I'll take you there."

Walking... walking is hard. What about a teleport? That would be faster. Does she dare risk a teleport while drunk though?

Probably.

It takes him a second, which is long enough to push into two seconds - maybe three - before it sinks in that the lean is something bordering on affectionate in such a way that he is no longer buoyed by the comfortable embrace of the alcohol he's imbibed. It is a distinctly flirtatious gesture, and one he should have recognized a Hell of a lot sooner.

House. Touching. Privacy. Shit.

"Yeah, um-"

Perhaps more gently than is outright deserved, Nate makes an effort to extricate himself from her surprisingly strong grasp.

"Listen, I'm- flattered, but I'm married."

Edited 2018-05-21 23:43 (UTC)

She giggles as he pries her hand off and instead she reaches for the nearest table to stabilize herself, then flashes her own ring at him.

"Me too! Come on, it's not like your partner's here, right?"

Are they? Caedra looks around for some jealous lover but nope, looks like Nate's alone. Shame, a threesome might have been even more fun. Especially if then she took them both by surprise and killed them afterward! Alcohol gives her the best ideas when she's not immune to its effects, it seems.

Event Log: A Hope for the Future

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