Character Mansion

[Parlor]

"Keeping an entire society secret was incredibly difficult," said Xavier, nodding. "Half the reason we came out was because it wouldn't be long before we were found out anyway. And let's just say that I am really glad that I don't have to live under that any more."

He leaned back in his chair and the grid faded away. "The state of affairs is... complicated, to say the least. Even with magic, stories about us trickled out, and..." He coughed. "Different regions have different perceptions of us. There's one country whose patron saint is most well-known for killing one of us, while directly to the west of it, there's a country so proud of the role one of us played in its mythology that he's on their flag. Oh, and Mai — you might have seen here, kind of like me, but without wings — Mai comes from an area where we were once worshiped as gods." He waved a hand all around. "Go to three different countries, and you'll find five different states of affairs. Minimum."

He nibbled on a claw to get his mind together. "But in my country, specifically, it's caused a bit of a paradigm shift. For the most part, we've got relatively equal rights, but there's still talk in politics and whatnot. Industries have changed to take advantage of our abilities, religions are still rethinking their orthodoxy, we want different kinds of products from most humans..." He nibbled again, then sighed and said, "I can't really give a definite answer, though, since I didn't live there before. Only looked in with an incomplete perspective."

[Library]

Samira looked over at Sven and said, "it's... complicated. Her religion's founder, Suela, had a strangely libertine view on such matters..." she frowned, "which doesn't quite map up with a lot of the other things she said. Like I said, complicated."

edited 11th Feb '13 7:16:40 PM by KillerClowns

[Dining Hall]

Linna shook her head. "No aliens. NR say she can do it, I believe her. Why they'd equip that, I don't know. I suspect she doesn't know either." Linna's expression suggested ironic amusement. "I think we're both happier not knowing, too. She's speculated a few times that people who worked on different features weren't talking to each other, because if they knew everything she could do then they'd have trouble avoiding why she could do it, and they'd then eat a gun realizing they were manufacturing an intelligent AI for a sex toy."

edited 11th Feb '13 7:14:38 PM by Night

Now Agustin looked downright incredulous. He seemed to have only just realized something that had eluded him before. “Wait a minute- you mean to say that your people, more than just revealing themselves to Humans, now take part in their society? Humans and chimeras live together? How do you manage it?” Seeming flustered for a moment, he quickly went on to ask, “Just how many of there are you that live in Human society? Ideally, in both absolute number and as a percentage of the overall population?”

edited 11th Feb '13 7:16:47 PM by Gault

[Dining hall]

Mai glanced at Nara, then turned back to Linna. "From my point of view, two options," she said, holding up two fingers. "One: she's pulling your leg. Because, seriously, why? Doesn't make a whole lot of sense any way you look at it. Or, two: it was included not to be actually used, but as part of misdirection." Mai put on a slightly more authoritative voice. "'Well, of course the unit can't be a sexbot. Why would she have reptile pheromones if that were the case? She's intended for high-risk zookeeping. The pheromones are for calming down the particularly nasty crocs and whatnot.'" She shrugged. "Or something like that. That example's kind of stupid, but you get the idea, right?"

She paused. Wait a moment... Okay, not exactly tasteful, but still possible. "Or, three: her developer was remarkably kinky, crazy, or both. In which case, we should change the subject to something bland like airline food or the weather."

[Parlor]

Xavier nibbled on a claw again, then said, "I'm not sure of the actual number, but in the whole world, I think it's something like five hundred million chimeras, compared to around seven billion humans. So, that's..." He frowned. "...a little less than ten percent. So if we keep that proportion, in my country alone, there are three hundred million humans and about..." He tapped the tabletop as his mouth moved soundlessly. "...twenty million chimeras." He paused, then nodded to himself. Yeah, that's right.

"As for how we live together, we just... live together." Xavier flared his wings. "I hate to sound obvious, but I don't know any better way to say it. There were conflicts early on, but both sides have adjusted. Mostly, anyway. We coexist and generally tolerate each other." He wrung his hands. "I hate being so vague," he said, a little nervous, "but that's the way it is."

edited 11th Feb '13 7:37:38 PM by TeraChimera

[Library]

"Ah." Sven pivots in slightly towards Anne and Samira. "That must be one unique religion. Nothing like anything I know of." He laughs nervously, "Still, I know how it is, explaining religion turns into a speech. One moment you're having a nice chat the next it's midnight and your brain's turned to mush." He looks at Samira and cocks his head a couple degrees to the right, "Known Aseyu for a long time?"

edited 11th Feb '13 9:06:07 PM by Aqueos

[Library]

"Oh..." Said Tammy, quietly. "Okay..." She seemed quite disappointed, and she probably wanted to know more, but she was well-mannered enough to not ask unwanted questions. She sat down next to Samira - her feet not quite touching the ground, as she was a bit short even by the standards of eight year old girls - and sighed quietly as she began to twiddle her thumbs. That probably wouldn't last long, though. A young girl as curious as Tamara would quickly get very bored of just sitting idly. She briefly looked around the room, and while there was certainly no shortage of interesting characters around, talking like an adult with all the adults was getting a little bit boring, too. She eyed the door to the Dining Room and wondered what else was in the mansion... Then she wondered if it was worth exploring while this 'Alice' person everyone seemed to hate and that scary demon-thing from before were both still around.

Library

Anne could tell Tamara was still somewhat curious; however, the whole story behind her appearance was something she'd been hiding even from the dwarfs. There wasn't much of a chance that she'd tell it to people she hadn't known for a full day yet, Tamara and Samira included.

She then turned her head to listen into the conversation Samira and Sven had gotten into. By the sounds of things, it sounded like it was either going to be about Aseyu or about religion. The former might go to places Anne would rather not know about, and the latter was similar to politics - while Anne could say more about that then she could politics, it was still something that wound up causing heated conversations and something that generally bored her. A few seconds of this, and she turned to Tamara. The little girl was probably the best shot she had at having a decent conversation partner at the moment.

"Um..." she said, "I could tell you some details about my day-to-day life, if you'd like...?"

edited 11th Feb '13 9:09:32 PM by Yomegami

[entry hall]

Matthias let Oswald go on his merry way, shrugged, and turned back to Alice. If he didn't want to go claim heron upstairs so he could change and shower and stop shivering, then so be it. His choice.

"Er, London?" he repeated, not entirely sure of what she was asking. "My mum's from there, but I haven't actually been there in a couple years..."

[north guest room]

Ryu stirred a little, groaning softly in a mix of dull pain and exhaustion. His head turned lazily to the side, where Ran happily tucked her warm body and scratched her lightly near the neck, her tiny tail flicking back and forth against his side.

"When did Matt lose them?" His voice was soft, as if he had just been woken up.

Sora took another sip of his canteen, barely noticing that it was almost gone already- by now, he practically downed entire bottles of water in less than an hour whenever he wasn't swimming.

"I'd say around midday- it's sundown right now. The moment he spotted this place, he said that it was as if they evaporated. This place feels separate from the forest we fled through, similar to a campus I found- it's doubtful they'll ever find us." He got up to go fill his canteen in the bathroom sink, but of the automated servants apparently read his mind and offered to clean and fill it for him. He accepted the offer, and it headed off.

"'Doubtful'." Ryu rested his eyes, stroking Ran with his thumb once more. "Matthias has been wrong before, but 'doubtful' is good enough right now."

The automaton returned with his canteen. Sora took it back, nodded appreciatively before it headed off once more, and took a sip of the ice-cold water.

I will be having Ryu and Sora leave in my next post.

[Entry Hall]

Alice said, "was just askin' where you were from. Guessin' a bit. Small talk, it's what ya do places like this, right?" She shrugged. "I ain't really an expert — I can talk my way through a magazine interview just fine, don't get me wrong, but after that incident with the coat hangers and the baby shower, I usually stay away from the fancy. But somebody had to snoop this place out."

[Dining Room]

Irilemi's voice dripped with sarcasm as she said, "you truly are a cunning and masterful thief." She raised an eyebrow. "I am curious how this story would have been altered had I gotten it from Mr. Peng instead. And after such a blatant display of low cunning, I find myself feeling rather sympathetic to him."

[Library]

Samira said, "yeah... very strange." She cleared her throat, then changed the topic. "I've known her ten years: we met back in 2010, when my daughter was still in college. She was chasing down some assassins trying to claim the bounty Amu put on our family's heads." She smirked. "Luckily for the assassins, Aseyu killed them before Kokabiel could get its claws on them. But she took a few nasty wounds herself, so we ended up caring for her. And... well, her boss sent her a message saying for her to stick around, keep us protected in case anything happened to Kokabiel." She looked around conspiratorially and quietly added, "I think Irilemi was trying to keep Aseyu out of her hair."

[Dining Hall]

"Believe me, airline food is very bland. And also the weather..." Linna paused, and briefly chewed on her lower lip. "The weather here is terrible. Swamps and fog. I have no idea what time it is here, honestly, it could morning or evening, no way to tell when you can't see the sky."

[Dining Hall]

"Well, Peng is the kind of guy who builds funk generators, so it's kind of hard to tell.

We went up to the roof where Peng was. He pulled a tommy gun out of the hat and pointed it at us, but I was sure he was bluffing. He quickly proved he wasn't messing around by uh, shooting Heinz 37 times in the chest.

He ran out of ammo, so when he was reaching for another weapon, I kicked him in the face and grabbed the hat. I pulled out a hammer and swung it into him, but he managed to grab the hat and pull out a buncha piranhas. Now while most people have never gotten a buncha piranhas thrown at them, It's definitely some thing I would leave off my "Doing it all again" list.

This whole business continued for a while. I attack Peng with a lightsaber, He attacks me with a frost thrower. I huck a throwing axe at him, He responds with a boomerang made of lightning. So on and so forth.

Eventually, the roof was cluttered with so much random crap that it was hard to move, so we just had a mexican standoff of sorts, except with machine guns. after about an hour of this, we both fell asleep.

I woke up to the sound of some one kicking a bird in the face repeatedly. It was Herman! Don't ask anyone how he got there because no one knows. Me and Herman cornered Peng but he grabbed the hat, jumped off the roof and landed next to his car. after resting his horribly bleeding ankles, he called his goons and drove off. We weren't having any of that so we climbed down the ladder right next to where Peng jumped off and drove off after him in the van.

Boaris mentioned seeing a hooded figure walk into the museum, but that's not important."

edited 12th Feb '13 1:27:25 PM by BiggerBen

[Smoking Room]

"People who wanted me dead." Thomas said, "...I had to leave home to keep my family safe, but it only gotten worse in the summer." He sighed. "I-I'm sorry for dampening the mood, Markus."

[Cellar]

"If you want." Mary said, taking a sip of her whine. "Of course, Agustin could come after you, you know..."

[Dining hall]

Mai chuckled softly. "Someone's never lived in Michigan's Upper Peninsula," she said. "Gray skies a good chunk of the time up there, especially in winter. After a while, you start to get a..." She frowned and scratched her head. "...kind of a feel for the time of day. It's kind of hard to describe, but eventually you can make a rough guess about the time based on what it feels like around you. I'm not talking about anything like, 'It's just after 3:15', but more like, 'It's between 2 and 4'. Hardly close, but that's what watches are for, right?"

She tapped her chin as she dug into her memories, trying to figure out where that came from. After a while, she got an idea. "I think it has something to do with the wildlife," she said. As she was still gathering her thoughts, it was a bit slow. "The sounds and stuff. You get an idea of the time based on the activity and sounds of the animals. It helps that the area's not particularly densely populated."

[entry hall]

...Oh.

Matthias smiled awkwardly.

Just small talk? That's all it was? He sucked at small talk.

Coat hangers and a baby shower. Ah. Weren't coat hangers allegedly used, at one time, in do-it-yourself abortions? Either way, he was regretting his decision to think any further into what she had said. That's just lovely.

"We had to stop sometime, and this place just happened to spring out of the woodwork. I was sensing people everywhere, I could even hear their voices as I hid the chancellor, then we lost them through some fog and couldn't feel them anymore. Found a giant-ass resort the same way a few years back."

[Dining]

Iriliemi just blinked several times, a forkful of salad greens and nautilus meat held just inches from her mouth. "I do not know," she said, "if I envy your world, or pity it. It is a very strange place — although I am sure it does not seem so to you." Then she shrugged, and continued eating her salad.

[Entry Hall]

"I think Sig mentioned something about that," Alice muttered. "Okay," she said. "Hold on, silly question. You work in security professionally as well? You seemed pretty competent at it, I gotta say. The whole outwitting-assassins thing. Pays good money, and gives you some great stories and wonderful factoids with which to make 'ladies of weak constitution'" — she said this phrase in an exaggeratedly old-fashioned English accent — "faint. Good times, gotta say."

[Entry Hall]

Halfway to his aimless destination, Ozzy stopped, seeming once again confused as to what he was doing, where he was going, where he was now, and how he had gotten there. "This... thisiz... siz silly. Whahem I doing? Sillys ssstupid, stupid silly, everythinin between. Frrruhr..."

Oswald became silent then. His attention seemed to have been caught by the staircase at the end of the room, and the balcony above it, as he spent a long time staring at one, then the other. With one look back at the rest of the room, Alice, and Matthias, he moved towards the bottom of the staircase, taking slow, unsteady step. A squidgy noise eked out of his boots every time they touched the ground.

As he walked, Ozzy's head began to slump forward, and when he brought it back up it would slump forward again. A few more times, and it stayed down. By the time he reached the staircase, he was staring at his feet and the bottom step, moving at a snail's pace.

After a terribly long time spent blinking and running his eyes over the bottom step again and again, trying to determine what it was, Ozzy tried to climb the stairs. He slowly lifted one foot, bumped it against the first step and collapsed.

He fell forward, sprawled atop the bottommost stairs, and passed out with little more than a weak grunt of surprise.

edited 12th Feb '13 4:50:01 PM by Ryuhza

[Dining Hall]

"Same for cities. There's a rhythm. You get a feel for it." Linna paused. "I wouldn't have been the best to ask, but outside...it seemed real quiet. I kept feeling I should have been armored up, out there." A pause. "I'm a city girl, born and bred, but...well. I think it was quieter outside than it was that time I went walking on the lunar surface during my SSD familiarization course. And believe me, even with a space suit on, hard vacuum is very quiet." Linna looked around the room briefly. "Didn't seem natural. There or here."

edited 12th Feb '13 5:21:07 PM by Night

[Library]

"Huh?" Said Tammy, her attention diverted from more adventurous thoughts. "Oh. Sure, okay, yeah." She said, nodding. It hadn't occurred to her before, but she had no idea what someone looking like Anne would do on a daily basis. Since she wasn't a ghost, or even dead, Tammy guessed that she didn't hang around graveyards and scare people all day.

[Cellar]

"I'm not too worried about that." Friedrich walks back to the stairs. "He can't kill what he can't see." He vanishes and his footsteps can be heard as he goes back to the kitchen. His light remains behind slowly dimming.

[Library]

"Kokabiel? Irelemi?" both of Sven's eyebrows move up slightly. "Still though, I didn't think Aseyu would be so powerful. You never can really judge by looks."

[Outside=> Entry Hall => Stairs]

Given ordinary circumstances Bianca would have arrived at the mansion through a portal in a dress, her hair perfectly done, and with her pockets full of clockwork rose petals if only out of habit. Today she made her way out of the woods, her newly short black hair combed with nothing but her hand, her leather boots heavy with mud, and her green pants splashed with dirt. Her green top is missing it's left sleeve, in place of where her left arm should be there's a ragged bloody hole and what appears to be what is left of her shoulder beginning to heal back up.

She reaches the door and opens it with great effort, she smiles and gently walks through the entry hall past Alice. She notices Ozzy sprawled out on the stairs and hurries over. She shakes him slightly with her arm. "Are you alright?"

edited 12th Feb '13 6:08:46 PM by Aqueos

Library

"Well then," Anne began, trying her best to sound as friendly as possible, "Here's the short of it: I live out in the woods with seven dwarfs. I take care of chores around their house - cooking, gardening, and suchlike - and in return they give me a place to live."

She paused for a few moments, and then quickly added, "Before you ask; the dwarfs don't care that I look like this. At least, they don't now. When I first met them, I had to do a lot of explaining."

[Entry Hall]

Is that... nah, can't be, Alice thought, then shrugged. A distant memory from a strange time. She left the new girl withe the lopped arm — reminded her of, like, B-something? — to deal with that Ozzy guy.

Upon consideration, Aseyu — but not Samira, unless you'd prefer it — will react the same.

[Library]

Samira nodded and said to Sven, "Aseyu's land is ruled by an insane demigod and his mages, so her and her revolution had to learn how to fight magic without having any magical abilities themselves." She frowned, considering. Best not to mention that the only source of magic in her world was downright diabolical, she decided.

edited 12th Feb '13 7:00:04 PM by KillerClowns

[Stairs]

Ozzy's body remained limp and unresponsive as Bianca shook his arm. His clothes were cold and wet to the touch, and he beneath them was little better. His eyes under his hood, the only visible part of his body, were half closed and unfocused, the pupils dilated in a shape resembling a lemon set on it's end. It was impossible to tell whether he was breathing through all the layers of his clothing.

edited 12th Feb '13 6:01:07 PM by Ryuhza

Agustin seemed at a momentary loss for words. “Well, isn’t there some kind of-…” He petered out into contemplative silence, drumming his fingers on the top of the table. He began to mutter. “Twenty million in your country alone? If chimeras represent such a significant portion of the overall population-“ Looking up all of a sudden, he addressed Xavier directly. “I would think the problems with this system would be obvious. You’re an entirely different species from Humans. You said it yourself- industries have adapted to fill new roles now that chimeras have been discovered to exist, and there are no irreconcilable, fundamental differences? I mean- the Alliance had to deal with this very issue, another problem that Raldism was able to solve- and this IS a problem no matter how you look at it. It’s another one of the main reasons why Raldism was chosen. This state of existence doesn’t sound tenable.”

[Dining hall]

"Was your world devastated by some kind of war?" asked Mai. She squinted at Linna and tilted her head this way and that, as if Linna was some kind of unusual object Mai couldn't get a good look at. "Because if you listen, if you actually listen, it's not that quiet. The wind, the rustling of leaves, the tweeting of birds... There's often a twig snapping from some animal you can't see..." Her eyes grew a bit distant as she continued reminiscing. "I live near Lake Superior, too, so there's always the lapping of waves..." Something yanked her back to the present and she huffed in minor discontent. "Always too cold to swim in, but it's there."

She looked up at the ceiling for a moment to gather her thoughts. "Although I suppose a city slicker would be used to louder sounds, and something like the country would be too quiet to pick up on. Adjustment would take a while. Maybe. I don't know."

[Parlor]

"Oh, I'm not saying there's not," said Xavier, "but I'm a bit surprised myself at how easily it went. The first decade or so was... not exactly pleasant..." He rubbed his neck a little and clamped his wings tightly. "...but a good portion of the things have been smoothed over or adjusted to. A good chunk of the differences are strictly biological or physiological, so those are easily solved by having one version for humans and another for chimeras."

He began pacing, his head slightly downward as he continued to think. "And while you're probably imagining everyone gets along with each other absolutely splendiferously, that's hardly the case. There's still some towns that won't allow the other species in at all, sundown towns where the other species is technically allowed but can't stay the night, discrimination from both sides in all ways, groups proclaiming their species is superior, xenophobia..." He snorted. "Of course, humans have done that to each other if they could justify it in some way. Then again, so have chimeras. The 'different species' excuse is just another route for it." He flapped his wings once in contemplation.

"Besides," Xavier added, "it's hardly like chimeras just decided to jump out one day and yell, 'Here we are! Adjust!' The preparations took about two decades for plans on how to do this, backup plans if those didn't work, and plans for what would happen if everything went snooker loopy and took unlikely turns."