hadriel_logs | [OPEN] Use Your Heart Like a Weapon

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[OPEN] Use Your Heart Like a Weapon

Who: Amos and YOU
What: Amos is bumming around Hadriel, feeding the fish and being a nuisance. Careful, he’ll see you and start talking to you!
Where: The river, the orchard, Delight’s bar
When: June 22nd onward
Warnings: Alcohol and probably swearing?

Hurts Like Heaven, by Coldplay

Pisces: Amos sits beside the river, near the bridge that crosses close to Rage’s temple. He’s throwing out handfuls of bread to the fish in the water, and occasionally making nonsensical commentary out loud. Half the conversation is mental, as he listens to the piscis thoughts and small details of daily lives, which is generally rather boring to anyone not interested in algae, rocks, mating, or territorial squabbles. Amos, being Amos, is somewhat interested. Mostly he comes to see if there’ve been any changes to the river: monitoring the fish is a good way to keep track of that.

“Well, it’s nice of you to offer, an’ I do appreciate it, but I think you’d better keep that patch of riverbed to yourself. You’ll find a nice lady fish you can spawn with, I bet.”

Orchard: With a basket under his arm, Amos is wandering the strange orchard and picking likely-looking fruits. As he walks under the cave-trees, two of the jabberjays swoop back and forth, pecking at fruits and Amos’s head as they pass. Amos tends to duck right as they dive at him, but he doesn’t always: it’s a game. Occasionally he throws a twig at them, not to hurt but in play.

While Amos’s walk is nearly silent, the birds are cheerfully screaming at and scolding him in various voices.

Delight’s Bar: Amos comes here often enough: he enjoys the bar and the company more than the alcohol, truth be told, but he’s not above a nice drink or two every few nights. He’s quite pleased to find Delight herself is behind the bar this evening, and he promptly bops over to pay his respects to the goddess.

“Hey there, sugar. How’re you this fine evening?”

He’ll scan the rest of the room in a minute, see who else of his friends is here and make the rounds, but first things first.

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"Yeah," she nods as she speaks. "We know each other back home."

...Knew? She's having trouble with verb tenses, especially since she was just back on Earth and with the two Winchester brothers.

"How'd you meet him?"

Amos's grin widens in delight. Oh most excellent! So somebody who probably already knows how sam leaps in with both feet first and might be roped into helping make him sit down and rest every know and then. "Oh, we met here. An' since he an' I come from similar-soundin' worlds, we been hangin' out a bit." That and once Amos attaches himself to someone, it's nearly impossible for them to escape. He likes company.

"So I guess you're new here? I ain't seen you around. I'd remember a pretty face like yours, sugar."

An easy compliment, with only the lightest overtones of flirting.

She laughs quietly, shaking her head at everything about this.

"I just got here." So, he's right. "I'm exploring the city, trying to find my way."

Amos beams, happy to have made her laugh. "If you like, I can give directions. Or show you 'round a bit. I was just comin' out here to see what fruits might be worth eatin', since the gods ain't familiar with humans." So he intends to pick a variety of fruits and taste-test in tiny amounts...and offer some to the jays and fish. Animals have keener senses and are more likely to know if anything will have an unpleasant effect.

Of course, the pitfall in that is animals often tolerate toxins far better than humans, so Amos will take their advice with a grain of salt.

One of the jays flies down to land on Amos's shoulder, and pecks at one of his many earrings. "Ow! Hey, be nice."

"Oh, is it not all safe?" She had been thinking that surely it was.

...Now she's rethinking that.

"Well, Sorrow said they weren't poisonous, but he wasn't sure they'd all agree with us, we not bein' the original inhabitants of the cave," Amos explains with a rolling shrug. "I'm probably being more careful'n I need to, but yanno. Caution never killed nobody."

That, and he's more used to food being enchanted or poisoned than good to eat. But that's the breaks of his world....and being a yakuza member.

"Yeah." She has been curious about the previous inhabitants of the cave. What happened to them? Why were they here in the first place?

"Can we trust the gods?"

"Weeeellll...." Amos makes a slight face. "That's something you'll haveta decide for yourself. Me? I think they're telling the truth: we're an accidental catch and our arrival ain't intentional. But a lot of people don't believe that. An' most don't believe the gods intend to send us home. Hope says he will, as soon as he can find someone who knows how. He seems pretty straightforward to me, long as you're polite, an' so far he ain't outright lied to me."

Shifting his basket, Amos adds, "I can't say for sure that he's telling the whole truth or that he's not got a hidden agenda, but he seems pretty honest to me."

Jo is quiet and still as he explains. She hasn't sought out the gods for anything, or talked to any of them but Fear, so she hasn't quite formed an opinion yet.

"Have you talked to them a lot?"

"Mmm, a good bit. Mostly Hope, but also Rage an' Delight," Amos answers. "They've got inboxes, of all things, so anyone can leave 'em messages by the phones. Or y'can go to their temples an' leave messages there." He shifts his weight a little as he talks, gestures with a hand. Amos is always fidgeting, moving, talking with his hands. He can't help it, he likes to move.

He doesn't expect his spiel to change Jo's mind: most people fall right into the camp of 'humans vs gods' and as far as he can tell, he's the lone outlier here.

"And here I'm used to being ignored." She doesn't believe in God back home, she thinks. She hasn't quite decided or even thought about it for a while, but he never seemed to do anything useful when she was little...

And Osiris was just a jerk.

Her experience with gods so far has been a poor one.

"They all have temples?"

"Not sure if that's lucky or not. Me, I've learned to be really damned careful 'bout what I pray for."

Because if you pray for a miracle, in his world, you might just get one. Amos is very content to never ask for another one: one vengeful angel is one angel too many for his constitution, thank you very much.

"They do." He considers where they are, tilting his head as he lines up his mental map, then lists off the temples and points in the various directions.

Jo tries to keep up and add the temples to her own mental map of the city, but after the second or third one she gets lost and gives up on the effort.

She'll find them eventually.

"That's good. It's...nice that they're trying to be available for us."

Amos sees when she loses track. He reaches up and breaks a branch off the trees, then crouches down and sets some of his fruits in his basket out in a pattern. In the dirt he sketches out a rough map of the city, with the fruits as the temples. He names them off again, tapping each fruit with his stick.

The jay on his shoulder flutters down to the dirt and hops over to peck at a fruit. "No, no, that's my map. Come sit here?" He offers his hand, and the bird flies up again to perch on his spread fingers, tiny scaly toes gripping, claws digging in. He grins. "Thank you. I'll share my fruits with you in a bit, 'kay?"

The bird chirps and tips its head to watch as Amos sketches a few other details into his dirt map: clinic, housing towers, the river, the bridge.

Jo crouches as soon as she realizes what Amo was doing, watching carefully as he drew the city and started adding landmarks.

"Someone should do this on the phones." She murmurs quietly as she tries to memorize the tableau before her.

"They may have, honestly. I don't keep up with the network real well. Too used to fallin' off the grid. My job, I travel a lot."

And he ends up in unsavory places, working for the yakuza, where internet access is spotty if at all there. It's true, he gets to go to glamorous places too, but mostly his job as the boss's personal messenger and enforcer means he gets to go do the dirty work in dirty places.

Amos finishes his sketch. He has an excellent visual memory and is a fair hand at drawing; the end result is a decently detailed map. He's had experience detailing areas overseen by animal scouts to his less-gifted companions, either for battle or espionage, and this helps ensure his map is easily read. "River's here, full of fish, good for eating even if they look funny. Cave fish do, yanno, some are albino an' blind. But don't go swimming, the current's fast an' tricky. An' definitely don't go swimming' in the lake. I don't know what's in there, but it eats the fish. I don't wanna see if it'll eat us too."

Amos has "heard" the tiny deaths from the lake, and does not intend to join them.

"How do you know it eats the fish?" She looks over the map as she speaks before grabbing her phone and taking a picture of it.

That will help.

"Are there worms for bait?"

"There ain't worms. There ain't any damn bugs in this whole cave and it is fuckin' freaky." Amos shakes his head. "An' I can talk to animals, so that's how I know it's eatin' the fish. I can hear 'em."

This with a steady tone that might seem callous, but Amos is quite used to the "circle of life." Prey animals exist to be eaten, predator animals exist to eat. Things gotta live, and Amos begrudges none of them the effort or the need to survive.

"That is weird." But then he mentions that he can talk to animals and suddenly things make a little more sense.

But that is weird.

"You listen to them die and that doesn't bother you?"

Amos grimaces a little and reaches up to stroke the breast-feathers of the jay perched on his shoulder. "Well. It ain't like I can really do anything about it. They're much louder here than I'm used to, 'cause it's only them an' the jays an' what other animals people've brought with 'em." He shakes his head. The fact that nothing else screens it is more bothersome than the deaths themselves. "Nothing lives forever. Animals die - eaten or just old age. An' even if I warned the fish off whatever's in the lake, they won't remember for long, and they eat eachother too."

"At home, it's so much louder. Animals are everywhere - mice in the walls, roaches in the floor, birds on the roof, neighbor's dogs, alley cats...if it's in a half-mile of me I can hear it. I hear a lotta death. An' that's just how it is, 'till the world's made new again."

Amos is generally very careful not to let on he still believes in his Catholic upbringing, but sometimes it slips through.

Jo looks around them and then at the cave ceiling and shakes her head. It was pretty lifeless here, and to be the one that hears the deaths...

"That's gotta be rough."

"A little."

But one can become accustomed to anything. The hard part is not becoming numb to it as well.

"I feed the fish right off the bridge, so try not to fish just right there if you can help it." Easy pickings and too much like cheating and trickery.

Jo nods. If there's someone feeding the fish somewhere it's not exactly fair to fish there.

...Plus she's never really liked fish anyway.

"Yeah, I'll avoid it."

"Thanks." Amos beams at her, grateful. Not everyone goes out of their way to be fair and Amos is glad she will. It's kind of her. "Anything else I can help you with, sweetheart?"

"I think that's enough for now." The map will help a lot and she doesn't want to make him sick of her.

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