And it's freaking me out a little because the Cousine official website uses the font (as a default display, default paired with the much more legible-as-a-body-font Open Sans) to talk about, in its John Munro-penned sample text, the exact same high-atmospheric conditions that I wrote about in yesterday's entry.
The spectacle was indeed sublime. Apparently we had reached a great height in the atmosphere, for the sky was a dead black, and the stars had ceased to twinkle. By the same illusion which lifts the horizon of the sea to the level of the spectator on a hillside, the sable cloud beneath was dished out, and the car seemed to float in the middle of an immense dark sphere, whose upper half was strewn with silver. Looking down into the dark gulf below, I could see a ruddy light streaming through a rift in the clouds.
-John Munro, A Trip to Venus
He wrote that in 1897; how the heck did he know what it was like in the mesosphere??
Yeah lowkey freaking me out.
moone eats (freewrite)
A server offered Moone an hors d'oeuvre off of a conspicuously silver tray. He took one, thanking the lanky angular man curtly. Moone was as comfortable eating fancy foods as he was mixing boxed macaroni and cheese into his canned beef stew just to get a little variety into his diet. He moved in both circles, eating ramen and drinking glasses of sparkling bubbly. Recent trends in cuisine that treated rustic fare as somehow upper-crust intrigued and fascinated him, in an ironic and amusing way, but he ate what he could get nonetheless, accepting the dish without really pine for caviar or anything. The stone-fired ~[90s trend thing]~ was samey, but it was what he was used to as well. Pomegranates had always had mythological connotations. There was the toothfish, sounds unappetizing till you call it Chilean Sea Bass, even though the only accuracy in that name is the word "sea." And suddenly the food was fancy again.
before the storm
Moone turned his gaze forward, and wondered why all the animals were so curiously and suddenly silent. He didn't sense any danger coming on... The air may have been a bit heavy, but Moone had assumed it was the climate.
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an old golden watch on a fob, tapping it as though to remove a grain of sand from its gear. Why was the pocket watch not working? He tapped at it again; it had once been the container for a genie. The residue of the djinn magic caused by the djinn inhabitancy of the watch did render it with a few powers still.
Djinn would select vessels occasionally into the human world; they couldn't directly take over human bodies as hosts, not while the humans were alive at least, but a ghoul is a corpse that's possessed by a djinn spirit, usually to perform some errand in the human world but all too easily conscripted by wizards or necromages. That was the price of doing business in the human realm. The djinn that used inanimate objects as their bodies, objects that had never been alive hike brass oil lamps or this pocketwatch, were essentially ghosts in the machine, but genies generally don't actually tend to live in lamps. The objects weren't their bodies, but were closer to the phylacteries which bound souls to earth; the genie of Aladdin wasn't consigned inside the lamp but was rather bound to it, and rubbing it summoned the djinn from elsewhere rather than releasing it.
Djinn were indeed more powerful than humans but what made the story of Aladdin's lamp (not actually one of the 1,001 nights but possibly of a related oral tradition; there was some valid speculation that the translator Antoine Galland had made the whole thing up himself) so unusual was that Aladdin had managed to conscript the genie of the lamp to grant wishes. There was also a genie, not as powerful, inside the ring that the sorcerer had given him. There was probably a contract going on, like the contract between Moone and the Pontifex, which conscripted the genie into granting wishes. It was typical of ring-bound djinn.
Rubbing at the lamp or jar or anything of a djinn who had actually been physically imprisonment inside a container, such as Kissifer was trapped inside the phylactery, resulted in releasing an angry grumpy djinn who had gone mad from thousands of years of isolation, more likely to murder you upon releasing them than to grant you magical boons. Not recommended. And you totally know that that's how Moone came into the possession of this pocket watch.
The power to turn back time was a different pocket watch, now in MacBeth's possession. This watch being the shape of the magic gave no clues to its power, not even by sympathetic magic, or superstition surrounding the magic- no supposition that the watch could allow its wearer or bearer to travel through time would make it so, not with this type of magic. Not all magic watches have to be time travel watches, geez. Moone kept several such items on his person, and would combine them in different ways as the moment's uses dictated.
The fox had many tricks, but another way of describing Moone's abilities was that he could choose to be the hedgehog, could recognize the hedgehog's way to do in any situation, even though Moone himself had a myriad of foxy tricks at his disposal. Did that not make Moone the trickster, and not the Pontifex? Of their relationship, Moone did not do any tricks, but he was the trickster archetype; Pontifex was not a trickster archetype but that was the role he played in the microcosm, the little universe of the bubble combined of their powers. It was some world topsy-turvy. That was the truth of things, and it may seem a cliche to say "that's the truth of things," but that should actually be the most profound statement of all. The truth. Moone pondered the truth now, as he turned the watch nervously over in his fingers, casting his eyes round about in search of the Pontifex.
This watch was, grand total of things and by the end of the day, a benefit, and totally worth getting attacked over. It acted like a spider-sense, a supernatural radar for non-supernatural trouble, something that Moone needed immensely because that was something he had no guarantee over. Counting down or up, ticking slower or faster, depending on the size of the trouble and the degree of urgency.
This watch had stopped entirely.
Neither one was terribly alarming on its own (the watch had never stopped before, and maybe Moone had just forgotten to wind it; he was so much more used to digital) but between the stopped clock and the strange silence where there should have been the sounds of local fauna, like tree frogs and stuff... It may have been a portent. Not a supernatural one, in the animals' case; the way animals naturally acted when something big was coming, a calm before a storm, was the opposite of supernatural, or it was normal for them at least. Supernatural, animals were the most natural thing on the planet, it was humans who were unnatural, but it was humans who by their unnatural natures had no powers of magic, no supernatural, when animals, nature itself, possessed it. Another paradox. There was something coming... a storm on the horizon (research how hurricanes look when they're approaching, the signs like how the water levels drop when there's a typhoon coming.) The water level dropped here too.
But hurricanes are natural, part of nature, and the supernatural caused by man- was that what truly separated man from beast, the ability to imbue magic into things and to shape the way things are and were through their belief?
Animals must have their own superstitions. But what medium would they have to transmit the ideas from one creature to another? Few knew of moone's pocket watch that had genie magic, and it didn't transform for that reason. If all knew of it, would things change? Moone's head spun at the cosmology that Pontifex offered. The pocket watch stopped working because it sensed something big coming.
They'd had no radio or news, they had no idea that something would be coming like this.
Moone wondered about his flesh, giving in that was a different instinct, the instinct he gave in to when he was being seduced by a succubus and not the instinct that would have resisted one. Instincts natural and instincts magical. Moone's instincts, natural, animallike again, told him to run. What was the difference, the supernatural part of him reducing him to a mere animal, reacting on instincts, but these were his human instincts reducing him to an animal, instincts natural to the creature but non-supernatural in themselves, that guided him. Inasmuch as it could be determined that animals aren't supernatural. The magic part of him causing to act like an animal, a natural-and-thus-supernatural being.
Moone had a really really really really odd sense of timing when he was going to go off on a philosophical tangent. As his body acted, raced, his mind took its time. Used to taking the backseat, perhaps.
Where was Pontifex?
They needed to find shelter. And fast. The trees were being to whip around, pulling off leaves, then branches. There was rain, a lot of it all at once. The sky was a mass of gray, eerily shadowless clouds nonetheless dark and heavy with rain.
They found each other.
They got to shelter.
They talked in the shelter.
Well, there was no turning back now. Like the wife of Lot, there would be a sure consequence to any backtracking or inkling of turning around, but the pillar of salt would not be literal.
characterization exploration during the middle of an action scene?
Moone jumped, skidded, bouncing off between two trucks like he was a pinball, ding ding ding, and the paddles compelling him away from darkness. This was tiring. It was very tiring. Moone wondered why he had missed having it in place. But he hadn't missed it, it was just me writing that way and wanting to bring him into a zero conflict zone by this point, with his boon off and his bane at full. It was me causing him to be emotionally dishonest, or me being dishonest with you about his emotions.
This is great. Moone thought to himself. The mere idea of this place toys of desperation, the spirit might drive the young prince mad and cause him to hurdle himself into the sea below. Or however the quote went. That was the ghost of macbeth's father. That was the guide, maybe Hamlet was mad.
Moone was not truly the master of his own fate; his boon was to overcome his bane, not his bane to act as a foil to his boon. It was no geas, a gift with a curse, at all. A geas was a prohibition against something; avoid the thing and you're blessed for it, do the thing and you're cursed. Moone's jinx was just a curse, which happened to be capable of being nullified; he'd been given a bane with a boon and not a boon with a bane.
So Moone wouldn't be able to do anything proactive, all his life he'd react react react, no matter how successfully, it was just a race. And he was mortal, so what was the point there either? Everything is just staving off something. Which left Moone no different from any other man, really.
funny joke
There was a saying in Lovecraft's family. Not to trust Jews! Because, right, Lovecraft. I don't know.
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