Carcosa, pt. 2

[polymods]

✖ Carcosa

Ⅰ. CARCOSA
You Are Still Here.

Another month, and you’re still in the city of Carcosa! Isn’t that just wonderful?

You still have access to the city’s temple and the High Temple.

The side effects you may have suffered from throughout the month of May are now at an end - if you had a pesky mask glued to your face the whole time it will now fall off. You might need a little moisturizer, but otherwise you’ll be just fine.

You could sit around inside the relative safety of the temples, of course, but why not get out there and explore the city some more? Come on, grumpypants!

---

Ⅱ. SPEAK EASY
CW: Optional alcohol consumption.
What kind of pet shop is filled with rambunctious yahoos and hot jazz music at 1 AM? That's right - the best damn pet shop in town! Sidle up to the back door of Curly's Pet Shop and a panel will open enough to reveal a pair of eyes. "What's the password?" you'll be asked. Whatever word first comes to your mind, well, that apparently is correct because you're let in at once.

The front of the building definitely does indeed house fish and birds and kittens, but the back room is definitely not a good place to find a new animal companion; you find yourself in a crowded little room with low lighting and a small bar crammed into one corner. There's seats and some tables, and most importantly there's a band playing jazz music across from the bar.

Why not take a seat and have a drink? It's probably not paint thinner. Probably. Maybe you'll spot some of your fellow Travelers and you can sit and have a chat. Make a new friend who can hold your hair back if you party too hard.

And you better hope that the place doesn’t get raided!

Notes:
1. The drinks are all era-appropriate - you’re not getting Redbull with vodka here - and even if your character has non-human physiology they will work the same as they would on a baseline human. That’s right, your magic or your healing-factor or your vampire blood is no match for these Gin Rickeys!

2. If Curly’s does get raided while you’re there, you can run and hide or choose to engage with the police, who are armed and not too shy about opening fire if you go on the offensive. As with the rest of the regular residents of Carcosa, the officers are human and can be killed. Killing them may affect the colour grading of your Scrywatch depending on the situation. (Is it beneficial to personal growth to kill in order to save someone else, for example? You tell me!)

3. Did you want a pet from the front of the building? Well, just remember that baby turtles and alligators might SEEM like a good idea, but they grow up! Also any animal you take will not travel with you to the next island. So sorry.

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Ⅲ. EXPRESSIONISM YOURSELF
CW: Optional paranoia, hallucinations.
If you wander the streets at night, you may find yourself getting turned around. You'll find that the streets have lost their many lights, and the beautiful and delicate art deco architecture has given way to something much more stark and heavy. The buildings are block-like, but they curve in exaggerated ways that hurt the eye if looked at too long. All are in blacks and whites and greys. Nothing looks quite real, but you can walk along just fine. Probably better not to go off alone, though.


Periodically you will encounter that pesky sign of some sort painted on the walls. If you follow the sigils, you will eventually be led to a long staircase that winds down and down until it finally terminates in a large white room lit by a few electric lanterns. There's black paint there, with brushes. Maybe you're feeling creative?

Notes:
1. You’re pretty sick of this stupid sigil, aren’t you? In fact, you consider yourself QUITE the detective and have been searching after its meaning! Or maybe you played Call of Cthulhu a lot in college, you nerd!

Painting the sigil on the wall will cause you to feel disoriented and paranoid until you leave the white room. From that point on you can discover a copy of a play entitled The King In Yellow anywhere in the city you choose. Reading the first act of the play has no effect on you, however if you choose to read beyond the first line of the second act you will spend the rest of the month suffering from periodic hallucinations, often of a tall man in a pallid mask.

2. While there is no compulsion to paint, choosing to work out any of your character’s issues through art therapy can be reflected in your Scrywatch colour if it is significant enough.

---

Ⅳ. AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER, I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A GANGSTER
CW: Optional gun violence, injury.
Art? Theatre? Music? BAH! Boring!

Maybe your tastes are a little more on the dangerous side? Whatever this island may be, it seems to offer plenty of opportunities to get into the seedy underbelly. Maybe you feel the need to steal a car, rob a bank, transport some illegal hooch for a smiling fellow in a yellow fedora. Grab your tommy guns, kids, it's time to outrun the Feds!

Naturally, you could wind up injured having all of this fun, but surely you could get some help from your fellow Travelers, either directly or by having them haul you to some sort of underground doctor. These doctors do exist, although it might take a while to get referred to one by a local.

You might also find yourself under arrest and stuck in an old-timey jail cell for a month. What fun!

Notes:
1. As was stated in the first prompt, the regular residents of Carcosa are normal humans. Killing them is possible and may affect the colour grading of your Scrywatch depending on the situation. Any weapons you find are era-appropriate.

2. You can break out of jail if you’re resourceful enough.

3. The underground doctors aren’t working in a real hospital for a reason. In fact, some of them might be less doctors and more, well. Vets.

You still jamming to that Carcosa playlist?

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Comments

[sketchbookings]

[ While the statement on my time still seems strange to hear, by now Benedict's met enough people from a broad scope of both time and places that it's not quite as alarming as it once use.

Mostly, he finds himself curious about it all now, because most of those he's met seem to be from a time after his own. The future seems both exciting and alarming when put into the words of other travelers. ]

And what time is that? It was 1813 for me.

[ He holds up his own books - more specifically, the book of Byron poems and the Goethe work. ]

A period of romanticism in the arts.

[nightschool]

[1813. Not the largest leap forward he's encountered, but not the smallest, either. And yet that night on the beach had opened a window onto a familiar view: people like Benedict living their lives just as everyone in every time, the milieu of human drama the same. There's the same distance in that as he'd felt contemplating Matthew's foray into the centuries ahead, but a comfort, too, that he hadn't gotten from all the unanswered questions and deliberate deflections.]

1591. The same city, centuries apart. Incredible, isn't it, how the forces that carried us here bend time like it's no more than a child's toy.

[What was Matthew doing in 1813, before his witch but without Walter? Henry? Himself? He hates that he must wonder. He hates that all the textual traces of him in the world won't satisfy an answer.

Kit wrests his focus to the other's chosen volumes for the first time. He reaches to take them for a proper look, another peek into the young man's nineteenth century life.]

Poetry? [Pleasantry surprised as he opens the Byron work.]

[sketchbookings]

[ Benedict blinks for a moment. He's stunned enough that not only does Kit come from a time before him, but that there's such a distance between them, that he just lets the other man take the books freely. ]

Uh - Yes. [ He composes himself, reminds himself of being well mannered. ] I've always rather liked poetry. Byron is only two years younger than I am. He's the same age as my brother Colin, actually, though we hardly run in similar circles. He's rather popular all the same, though. I'm not surprised his writing seems to have endured.

[nightschool]

I'll refrain from estimating if you seem the poetic sort and say only I'd like to see an age without romance in its arts.

[Hm. Eyes on the volume, he starts at the beginning, turning to the cover and title pages, running his finger along the neat, straight typeface. He stops just under the publication date--a number that would have, at one time, looked inane in ink.

I'm not surprised his writing seems to have endured. What does one call modern successors in verse? Descendants, then? Kit may have a headstart coming to terms with the ravages of time and on the surface seem to take it in stride, but he'd be lying if he said he didn't feel a complicated pang of interest and competitive envy as if he has some claim to relevance.]

And who endures from my time? Does yours hold up any great names from mine?

[He fears the burn, but he can't resist.]

[sketchbookings]

Of course. I'd wager you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone, regardless of social status, who doesn't know at least a bit of Shakespeare. There's almost always a troupe of players somewhere performing something of his. I think I heard once that for an actor to be considered a great performer of the stage, he should have a striking Shakespearean performance.

[ But it can't all be Shakespeare, right? Certainly, without question, the Bard is easily the most famous of the time. He's maybe even more famous than the contemporary writers that London society rubs elbows with. Benedict has to think a moment. ]

I suppose there's also Marlowe, though I can't imagine his name might come as easily to people. I don't particularly mind his Doctor Faustus, I much prefer Goethe's rendition of the story.

[ And Benedict holds up the book containing Goethe's Faust, since he's conveniently got it on hand. ]

[nightschool]

[He barks a harsh and rather--he wouldn't deny it--contemptuous laugh. Concluding, within reason, that they're playing at jests and humor. Has Benedict made him? Has he figured out Kit's personal stake in the asking? Because he only knows one Shakespeare, and a dozen of his betters who surpass him by a wide margin, with himself very much at the top of the pile. To list it the other way around is quite funny.

He doesn't think it terribly high-handed to agree with his mother country on that point.]

Will? William Shakespeare? You must be speaking of a descendant of some kind. I know of only one playwright by that name, and that charlatan would never touch the heels of Marlowe's career--

[Mine. My career.

Never. Not so long as Kit had ink, paper, and half a brain to command his two hands. Only unless...

He doesn't reach for the bottom book once it's taken back, gaze cutting to the embossed title revealed to him, and then back up. Some of his amusement starts to curdle, nerves registering the burn deep in his belly, slow and cold and insidious.]

[sketchbookings]

[ Regretfully, Benedict has no idea he's putting his foot in his mouth, which seems to be rather his lot in life (and might explain why he prefers to keep to himself). At Kit's defiance, Benedict can't help the amused grin that flashes across his face. Maybe even worse is that there's no sense of malice in the look at all. He genuinely believes Kit is just sputtering. ]

I can't exactly speak for what it may have been like when you graced London, but I'm certainly not jesting about what comes to mind for us when we consider the Elizabethan years. Marlowe may have just been unlucky. I'm better at art history than I am with literature, but if my memory serves, he died rather young. Who knows what he might have given us if he'd survived Shakespeare in years.

[nightschool]

[It is worse, infinitely worse, when not only does the recollection casually elevate a man who'd be hard-pressed to leave his name in anyone's mouth without first paying for the privilege, let alone in the collective memory, it equally etches Diana's promise into the stone of history and the bleeding raw skin of his heart.

Before, it'd only been a shadow he'd been carrying since he stepped off the boat, constant but unsubstantiated. Before, he'd done his damnedest to resist his impulse to press and dig and make it real with knowledge. But in a half-remembered side note, he hears the unforgiving truth. Hears the death rattle in his future and the transitory spark of meaning that had come before.

Bones and ash and irrelevancy. She'd told it true: death isn't gentle, simultaneously looking ahead and behind at it.]

When?

[Worse still, he can't show it, not when the graveyard-cold surges up and hits the top of his head, dousing him, nor when he hears his voice as if coming from the other end of a long, distant tunnel. The imperatives and benefits to concealing himself--from the daemonic outside to the excessive inside--learned in childhood are difficult habits to break. The most he can do is exhale around a constricting heart and croak out the question.]

When did Marlowe die?

[sketchbookings]

I don't really know -

[ Benedict frowns, eyebrows furrowing. He's not sure what it is, exactly, but a large part of him is starting to feel like he's taken a wrong turn somewhere, like he's repeating much of the same thing he'd done upon first meeting Henry.

Perhaps it's the way Kit seems to be so impassioned when it comes to the subject. Were it anyone else, Benedict would put the man down as a literature enthusiast, but that's not right, is it? Kit is from that time, a contemporary of people who shaped England politically and culturally.

He winces a bit. ]

I'm sorry - I've offended you, haven't you? If Marlowe is a friend of yours, my apologies. I hadn't meant anything by it. He's a remarkable writer, if one has the notion to seek out his works.

[nightschool]

[It's too late to hope the other has surmised he and the poor unlucky Christopher Marlowe are one and the same, that this is all an elaborate, darkly humorous way of having him on. It's too late to correct the mistake. It's too late not to throw his whole self onto the bonfire.

And it's too late for the rest of Benedict's reply to catch him-- He's already grimly pivoting on his heel and striding into the row, relinquishing Byron by setting the volume down on the top of the books. That's not the answer he needs.

He can't ignore it anymore. He can't spin time to undo what's done, or run from it. He must know his fate, as Matthew and Diana knew--and now others.

It doesn't take him all that long once he abandons his hesitation to complete his search, and he can't decide if that's a bitter tonic or vinegary injury, that Marlowe should withstand the test of time, but only as an afterthought to an unknown dabbler. When he finds a work of scholarship with the right decades and his own name inked in the contents, he has to fight the surreality that is his present day existence just weeks ago woven into history's tapestry.

Christopher Marlowe
bap. 26 Feb 1564

His gaze lifts from his recorded baptism to the line below it, which starts with the simple but soul-trembling: d.

He's dead silent from the moment he gently eases the text open to when he finishes and gently closes it again. And after, letting long beats pass holding it against his chest in the loose fold of his arms. Eventually he starts back the way he'd came, deaf to whether Benedict had followed his feverish flight or not. Either way, he thinks to add the book to the stack he's gathered for himself on a table. The worst is over. What harm could a closer reading do at this point?]