hadriel_logs | Event Log: Regret This

Entry tags:

Event Log: Regret This

Who: Everyone!
What: The Regret This event
Where: Throughout the city
When: June 25th-July 3rd
Warnings: Sorrow is resurrected, and everyone is immediately full of regrets

Hope has finally managed another god resurrection, and the people have spoken! On June 25th, he musters his powers and brings Sorrow back to Hadriel. An orchard appears across the river, in the until now ruined part of the city, and Sorrow's temple is also restored. Hooray! One more god to make things a little more livable in this place.

Of course, it's not that easy. It never is. Along with Sorrow himself comes a wave of regret and guilt that blankets the city. All those affected will be inclined to not only be sad, but to linger over past regrets and things they feel guilty about. They can distract themselves with everyday tasks or whatever else they please, but they'll find that their thoughts drift back to these regrets regardless of what they do.

And of course, the best way to purge a guilty conscience is confession, right? On top of these persistent sad thoughts, people will feel the urge to tell others about them, to air their past mistakes or misdeeds and possibly receive some kind of forgiveness. So what if your neighbor doesn't care that you cheated on your final exams all through school? You have to tell someone, and they're right there. If it doesn't make you feel better, that probably means you haven't confessed to enough people yet, or maybe you just haven't found the right person. Better try again!

On July 3rd, Sorrow has settled in and this urge to confess your sins will die down, along with the constant regret. Let's hope you didn't confess anything too personal. Remember, you're gonna have to see some of these people every day.

► This log covers June 25th-July 3rd.
► 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 somehow manage to end up regretfully dead, please remember to hit up our death post!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ It had been an ugly shock to learn of Miss Maketh's death from that post. Before they'd broken the machine in Haven, there had been resurrection there as well, but it seemed a thing to resist getting used to -- the impermanence of death, as if life was cheap and easily recycled, simply hit the reset button.

He doesn't go to the bar with the anticipation of finding her there. It is, in fact, not a place he would have expected to find her. He goes with the intent to compare the coffee with the tinned variety he's been subsisting on and not to drink anything heavier, despite the thoughts wanting to circle through his skull. Wanting, but largely and ably denied.

None of them are unfamiliar. Long stewed, processed, and put away, walled off, far, far from mind. The coding helped, as any work usually did.

Still, better to avoid alcohol, and so: coffee. With the excuse to stretch his legs and step outside the house.

Hermann doesn't notice immediately, not until he's halfway to the bar. His inattention to people lead to little inclination to look carefully at each figure as he initially examined the room on entering. The sight of her stops him, a hiccup in his steps, his fingers flexing on his cane, then he continues, his voice cautious, wary of interrupting intended isolation. ]

Miss Maketh?

[Maketh looks up slowly, blinking.] Doctor.

[She's well on her way to smashed and has resigned herself to sleeping on the floor of the bar. It's the only way she's found to avoid the nightmares in this place and tonight she can't quite find the strength to deal with that horror, one among hundreds. There is too much and she needs to be out of herself. Just for a little while.

Thus, the drinking. It's been said she has something of a problem in that area.

She raises her glass in a grim salute.] Come for a drink?

[ Unsurprisingly -- not that he'd formed any expectations about how Miss Maketh might behave while drinking -- she holds herself well despite what he thinks is thorough inebriation, or nearly that.

He's not very good at reading a room, but he can do it well enough, and the whole bar's mood feels decidedly weighted, as dark as that salute. Doubtless not what the god Delight had had in mind, but after what had transpired with that girl's sloppy attempt for control, but given what purportedly could be and had been inflicted by the gods themselves, it could hardly be a surprise that people would come just as much to -- so to speak -- drink away their sorrows.

Not that Hermann's particularly sympathetic toward Delight, or interested in her feelings on the matter. He's simply attempting to gauge, and brief if irrelevant analysis helps to hold at bay the unwieldiness of the knowledge that she'd died.

He's quiet a second too long before he nods, his gaze measuring, shuttered. ]

Yes, but I'd only intended coffee.

[ Stepping closer still. ]

It isn't my business, but how long have you been here?

[ As everyone holds their alcohol differently and shows it in equal variety, he cannot discern how far she is, but he's uncomfortable with the idea of -- well, she's grown, and it isn't his business. ]

There's always coffee.

[Under different circumstances, it would have been said fondly. Maketh practically runs on coffee, right up until the insomnia finally catches up to her. But there are limits even to that, and eventually she will sleep. She's off-duty, though, and has nothing to stop her from getting black out drunk in the meantime.

She examines her glass for a moment.] Not long.

[She's just been drinking heavily the entire time]

These days, yes.

[ Allowing it, though it had not been so in Haven (/here). Only in the jail within their cage, instant and awful and horribly welcome. He's been fair guzzling the stuff since waking up here, enough so that for coffee alone he's risked getting sick, both wary of taking it for granted and of losing the opportunity before it's again unavailable.

He didn't even need the cup right now. Only, again, intending to compare, to walk, and to not fall into the trappings of alcohol.

Miss Maketh seemed less inclined to avoid that trap, but he won't judge that. Not long, she says, and he won't be able to gauge, but he can't help but guess she's been drinking plenty, then, to sound like that. He cannot judge. She had died. ]

Right. [ His fingers work on his cane's handle, fidgeting. ] Shall I leave you to it?

[Maketh shrugs.] If you wish. Or you could stay. I don't mind either way.

[ Neither encouragement nor discouragement. It leaves him something at a loss. His inclination would thus be to go, to leave her to it. Certainly, had he been drinking alone in a bar, he'd want to be alone. In fact, he wouldn't be there to begin with, to make certain no one could interrupt him.

Only, he shouldn't take the cup out of the bar, and it may be strange to then go sit by himself in a different part of the bar while he goes through the coffee. Only, sitting by her and having coffee while she dives into the bottle, seems a bit odd.

His fingers continue fidgeting, then he sees to obtaining a cup of coffee, before sitting in a proximate stool. ]

I'll be blunt, though you needn't answer. What is resurrection here like?

That is blunt.

[For better or worse, she's drunk enough not to feel overly bothered by the question. Maketh picks up her glass, peering at it, watching the play of light over the whiskey.]

It's not like anything. I lost time. I woke up in the temple and my mind was convinced it was still happening.

[She smiles, not kindly.] Painful, you might say.

[ Too blunt, he knows. The thought of tiptoeing around it, creeping toward it, seemed unbearable, especially with how it stuck in his head, heavy and corrosive.

He should be more delicate, that he also knows. Especially as she speaks of knowing the pain still, and he cringes, grimacing down at his cup. ]

Is that -- No. I apologize. For being blunt and that you experienced that.

[It already happened. Thus it's over with and has no right to bother her any longer. The pain is not useful, therefore it will be ignored.]

It doesn't matter.

[Maketh shrugs, tipping back her glass. She's drinking heavily, perhaps too much, but can't find it in herself to stop just yet. Sobriety hurts.]

And it's hardly the first time.

That doesn't make it all right.

[ An expulsion, an exasperated, helpless protest, and he feels stupid for having said it. He feels stupid before he's even finished saying it. ]

I mean -- it isn't, it shouldn't be -- getting used to death, treating it like nothing, it's --

[ He's fumbling. It's not his place, to start. Second, he doesn't want her to stew in it, has no right to question another person's coping methods, especially when they resemble his own insofar as a focus on utility (not that he knows how she's handling it). He doesn't intent to suggest that she should feel worse and be paralyzed by horror. Third, he cannot understand why it bothers him so. Yes, he had developed a surprising amount of respect for Miss Maketh in a short period, but for all that he finds normalizing death and resurrection to be discomfiting and unnatural, he'd inevitably become deadened to it in Haven, too. He needs to be horrified by what happened -- so she isn't simply another statistic -- but why so horrified?

Hermann takes a choking sip of the coffee, sure he's only shoving his foot farther into his mouth. ]

How many times?

[ Might as well swallow the foot. ]

[This time she does meet his eyes. Maketh feels a mess of things then; sadness, vague amusement at what might very well be his optimism, and a looming exhaustion. She feels tired all the time in this place.

She holds up three fingers.]

Two here. One--before.

...Ah.

[ What follows is a horrendously stupid question. He knows it before he says it. He considers it, weighing it. It is not a matter of a tongue inexplicably loosened by his own disturbed emotions (and really, he might as well drink then).

It is clarification of the unnecessary and likely painful kind. ]

I assume there was no resurrection in your world?

[ What then may be assumed without saying so directly: she has nowhere to which to return. It thickly layers her adamant opposition to the gods, even Hope. ]

There is not.

[Maketh tips back her drink with a sigh. She's wondered what will become of her in the aftermath. Perhaps she will die again, fall into the lasting kind of silence. In happier times, she imagines seeing another world - Lilith's, perhaps.]

[ No, of course not. Hermann looks at his cup of coffee, the dark liquid unhelpful and cooling.

Why this compulsion to offer reassuring but empty platitudes, empty because with so little known of the Door, of the physics in taking and expelling them, there could be no guarantee or even comfortably high probability of putting her elsewhere. Some had hoped as much in Haven (or here), he knows. Furthermore, had the Door taken her corpse and revived it? Was she taken at the instant of or the microsecond before, enough to be certain of it?

That he won't ask. It's rather soon in his knowing her for it, yet he cannot help the dismay at thinking of her as certainly dead. That and his compulsion--he is human, after all, yet it isn't so swiftly him.

Perhaps it is because of the faint familiarity (or subconsciously sought familiarity) in her approach, her order, her command. Perhaps because he and Newton had been taken before hearing of his death, but they'd heard it from Rangers Becket and More, and Marshal Hansen.

He is silent for a time before, finally, he sips his coffee, and finds he's lost the taste for it presently. ]

Bad luck.

[ Dryly, wryly, because there's nothing else good to say, not because he puts anything in luck. ]

I --

[ It is unasked for oversharing and he wouldn't ever normally, and so why it's pushing at his teeth, he cannot suss -- ]

Where I was before -- if here isn't -- anyway, not my world, but the place before this. Twice for me, too. Jolly good time. Really, it should have been more.

[Him as well. Maketh raises her glass in a grim toast. For the dead. She taught Henry the saying once. May they not be lonely and may we not join them too soon. A favorite prayer of the TIE pilots she'd been friends with at the Academy. There had been Itani, then - a friend, then something more - and for a while Maketh had thought herself among family while in their company. All of them cadets, children striving towards rank and respectability, until--

Until her friends had had enough, and Maketh had been too afraid to join them.

She wonders what happened to Itani, sometimes. Maketh knows very well what happened to the others.]

I saw others die in training.

[She says this casually, wondering at it. Why is she saying this thing? It doesn't matter at all.]

Even killed a man, once. It was ordered. I told myself it was--righteous. But there should be no secret, it's so easy--

[Maketh tips her glass back with a grimace. Death is simple until it is not.]

Do you think this is revenge? For the things we've done. I wonder.

[ Mirroring the gesture, Hermann then takes another sip. As for his goal in coming to the bar, the coffee is better, much better, than the tinned variety found in the store. Too bad he's lost his taste for it.

He still knows better than to order an alcoholic drink and feed whatever's come over him.

As she speaks, he turns slightly toward her, observing. Nodding once. He hadn't seen it so intimately, so directly, but he'd stood like the rest in Loccent when the Jaegers fell and pilots died. Watched as some welcomed it, those pilots from the Mark I days, wanting to die in the Jaeger rather than wither from cancer. It was impractical, illogical, to blame himself for any of it. He'd only coded them, had minimal involvement in their design. Though, insofar as predicting the kaiju, analyzing the Breach, the data of both, data which became the foundation of PPDC strategy --

Illogical. So 94.78% of the time, he didn't.

It isn't horrifying, that she's killed. 'Orders' provides the sense to it, and 'righteous', and people tended to. He's even agreed. Yet, 'I was only following orders' has long had a taint. Even him, with his deep respect for authority, especially military authority -- he's also German, Jewish. The distinction of what is righteous may be too fine to see when within the system. Hermann doesn't know what organization she served.

Here, it doesn't matter.

Revenge, however -- Hermann laughs, short and clipped. ]

Are you asking if this is Hell? I doubt it.

[ Once, the suggestion that he'd done things to deserve this, or Haven, would have offended him. He's taken such pride in his work. He'd lost his damn mobility for it. Not that he's such a good person, not that he'd lay claim on Heaven -- but this sort of Hell, Haven's? ]

Even if we've been very bad, the easiest way to refute it is by looking to our fellow prisoners. Some have been much worse, I imagine, while others are innocent. Some have killed very many and some have killed not at all. There's no sense in meting out the same revenge for disproportionate wrongs.

[ Might as well finish the coffee. Another sip. ]

Besides, I hate that sort of talk. [ A little too blunt. He hasn't been drinking. ] It's sloppy, it's an excuse. Thinking like that closes off proper analysis.

[Maketh gives him a humorless smile.] Hmm. Inefficient. Of course. It's an indulgence and must be stamped out.

[She means every word, and yet--

Well. She's drunk. It is allowed, momentarily. This weakness of hers.

In the morning, she will be better.]

I am--it does not matter what I was, so long as I protect these people. [She nods to herself, clasping at her glass.] They will live. I will do anything to see them live.

I wouldn't go quite that far.

[ As to say stamp it out. It isn't a matter of indulgence, his aversion to it, but the possible effect. As said: closing off analysis. Think of it as revenge or divine retribution, and one might stop questioning it. ]

But, nearly.

[ For those reasons. Yet, he'd excuse much of her at the moment, especially as she's clearly not the sort, otherwise. ]

Noble, proper aspirations. [ He also nods. ] They are fortunate to have you. If they appreciate that, then you might consider, they likely care about your well-being as well.

[Maketh snorts. She's been told as much.] Indeed. But tonight I wish to drink.

By God, I hope they wouldn't oppose that.

[ Amused. His coffee's done. Does he overstay? ]

[Maketh only smiles.] Was the coffee to your liking, Doctor?

Better than from the store, thank you.

Honestly, ever since I stepped foot in here, I've been fighting a craving for something harder. I suppose it's Pavlovian.

[ Enter bar, want some alcohol. Only, he hasn't had the conditioning. ]

[Maketh nods, though not without humor.] So it goes. For what it's worth, there's much to recommend here. The coffee is excellent.

[As is whatever she's drinking.]

I'm reluctant to get to used to it.

[ Perhaps an odd, little admission.

After having this brew, he cannot say 'coffee is coffee' -- much like Newton always managed a superior batch in their lab -- yet, he'd been so pleased by the store tins alone. It hadn't been available in Haven, with a single exception. He continues to expect 'the other shoe to drop', so to speak.

An unessential luxury, in any case. ]

Quality coffee and alcohol, she truly is a delight. I wonder if she anticipated that a bar's just a like to bring out this sort of mood?

[ He doesn't mean Miss Maketh specifically. The entire room's bleak. ]

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