asgardchrysalis | ( open ) you cut me deep

Entry tags:

( open ) you cut me deep

Who: James T. Kirk & you!
What: Finding out about his blood magic spell (blood telepathy) + Odin's compulsive honesty curse
When: Early/mid April
Where: Around
Rating: PG? Just a bit of blood but not expecting anything more.

I ▹ BLOOD MAGIC

Jim should have figured they wouldn't come back from that cave entirely unaffected. The last time he died he ended up with a soreness in his shoulder and down his side that has never quite vanished, sometimes even prickling and feeling a little numb, so when he actually can't sense anything different in him for days after they come back, it starts to feel like something is just strange or off.

It starts with vague dreams, at first; he can hear droplets fall, something dripping, dripping... it's not until the third night that he notices that the droplets are dark red, thick, pooling on the ground, spattering around. Then he begins to hear voices. Unintelligible words, and it's his voice reaching out, calling, the whispers and the sound of the falling blood drops growing louder and louder, almost deafening, until everything goes still and quiet and all he can hear is his own voice:

Listen to me.

He doesn't know what compels him to try this in the morning, but he does: he goes out to the field at the farm, and he takes out a sharp knife and nicks himself on the finger with it. There's a prickle of pain and he hisses, but instead of focusing on that, he closes his eyes and thinks of a specific person, someone he knows, and reaches out with his mind.

The message is short. A test, just to see if it really does what he thinks it should or not. Somewhere in the city, someone should be getting Jim's voice ringing in their head...

This is Jim Kirk. I'm at the farmland in Sigyn's district. If you can hear this message, please come meet me here.

II ▹ COMPELLED TRUTHS

Like many others, Jim doesn't escape Odin's curse. He's not a secretive person by nature, however, nor does he tend to lie, so he doesn't worry much that he might say something he doesn't want to. However, depending on what hour of the day someone runs into him, he may be feeling less or more frustrated with the curse that compels him to speak the truth, even when unasked or unprompted.

On the other hand, he might instead run into someone else who's affected. He won't use that to his own personal gain, though he might tease just a bit if he's comfortable with the person... But he won't be mean, really.

((ooc: for this prompt, basically feel free to write up your own starter as you think might best suit the compelled truth curse! I'm open to anything at all.))

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Voices in his head. That's new. Not as new as he'd like, but...yeah. New enough to raise some red flags. Jet was more or less on the cusp of dozing off when the voice cracks into his head and he snaps awake promptly.

He's not sure if he can answer it. Nonetheless, the idea of someone being able to speak to him in his head is enough to drive him to seek some fucking answers for it. The whole thing reeks, to Jet, someone who's survived due to being a hyper-paranoid jackass, as a fucking trap.

So he arms himself before heading out. He approaches warily, combing the farmlands for anyone who might be suspicious. Armed, though not visibly. Looking for all the world like someone who expects to be ambushed at any second.

The farmlands aren't too occupied today. The only person in the vicinity gets the full brunt of Jet's suspicion, which isn't admittedly terribly overt as he draws near. He's laconic as ever when he speaks:

"You Jim?"

It all looks like anything but a trap, although for anyone that's sufficiently paranoid and with just enough bad experiences, that may seem all the more suspicious. But no, it's just Jim in the middle of the wide open fields, with his shepherd dog by his side, a couple cows walking off in the distance. He's pressing a cloth to his hand, finger curled into the fabric to try and stop the bleeding, when he hears his name.

He looks up, realizing he doesn't know the guy. Message must've derailed again, huh. He'll have to work on that.

"I am. Sorry-- you got my message, I take it," he smiles, making his way to the new visitor. "I'm still getting the hang of that ability, but I wanted to give it a try anyway. It was supposed to reach someone I know."

Jet takes him in with the same seeming neutrality he uses to take in everything. Sizing someone up as a prospective threat comes as second nature to him. That being said, nothing about this guy screams ambush. Dogs. Cows. A bleeding hand?

There've been more auspicious beginnings to traps.

"Yeah," he answers at last, the word a low, rasping pull. "Voice in my head."

What was that about, by the way? Suspicious as hell if you ask him.

The whole set up looks entirely too peaceful to be a trap, and Jim seems to be completely unarmed, aside from the small pocket knife he's used to cut himself. That's back in the pocket of his jeans by now, and in his plaid shirt and dirty boots, he looks every beat like a farm worker right now.

"Ah. Yes, I... sorry about that, I wasn't sure how that would work," he smiles apologetically. He can only imagine how weird and uncomfortable that must have felt to him. "It's this new ability I just got, apparently I can send messages to other people with my mind. The only downside is I have to make myself bleed in order to do it."

"Bleed?" That...doesn't sound consistent with the magic that most people here seem to end up with. Jet's single eye narrows fractionally as he glances down at the cloth the guy's holding up to his hand. "That an accident?"

It didn't sound much like one. It sounded like an intentional message. An intentional, telepathic message.

That raises some questions. Most of those go unspoken.

Jim looks down at his own hand, checking the cut. It's not bleeding so much anymore, thankfully, but he still keeps it covered for now.

"No. I cut myself to see how the ability would work," he says. More like if the ability would even work, it's not like seeing it in a dream would guarantee that it would work or that he could even control it. All in all, though, he is pretty pleased.

"Again, sorry. I didn't know this would reach just anyone, I didn't mean to drag you all the way out here. But thanks for showing up, anyway."

"You show up with it?" The blood magic, he means. Jet's terse laconicism often leaves him vague to a fault, but he hasn't realized that he's ended up with a brand new blood magic ability of his own after dying in that cave. His instincts for his own magic are poor. Probably because he doesn't have magic where he comes from.

"Doesn't sound like the magic they have here." He's got a general idea of what the magic in Asgard entails, at least.

"No, this is different," he explains, shaking his head. "The magic I was gifted from my god is something else, it's nothing like this."

Eyebrows knitting, Jim looks down at his hand, then back up to the man. A stranger in every meaning of the word, which makes him feel a little less sure about whether or not he wants to share anything more, if only because he doesn't feel like talking about his whole experience at the cave.

The guy doesn't seem like much of a conversationalist, though, so Jim doesn't think he'll pry much. "I got this after... coming back from the cave. I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with that."

Oh. The cave.

Jet tenses up slightly, a brief stiffening in the muscles of his shoulders. He already carries himself pretty rigidly, given his paranoia over this incredibly innocuous situation, but there's a tension that enters his frame once Jim mentions the cave. That's been on everyone's mind lately. Including Jet's.

"You die there?" Plenty of people did. Jet included.

Alright, so, maybe that was the wrong kind of judgment. Not that it's an unreasonable question, but it's so direct, and so sudden, that Jim can't help but tense up at it, even when the answer is expected, inevitable. Everyone in Asgard knows what happened at the cave, regardless of having been there themselves.

"Haven't we all?" He counters, but he knows that he could've been there and not died; he simply would have to be one of the people who stayed outside, waiting. He lets out a breath, nodding as he looks away. "Yes. I was inside the cave, when... Yes, I died."

Again, his mind provides, not so helpfully.

Edited 2020-04-18 13:27 (UTC)

Jet shrugs, a fractional lift and roll of one shoulder. It's not the dying that upsets him. It's the fact that the deaths of everyone else were, in his mind, wholly preventable. And yet that's not what the majority wanted, so that's not what was allowed.

He can't say he cares for that.

"Same." That raises the question, though. He glances down at his own hand, flexes the fingers into a fist and out again. Does magic course through the blood in his veins now too? "Think we all have it?"

That's something Jim's still struggling with himself. In the end he voted in favor of keeping the quarantine, but at what cost? His own life he was willing to sacrifice, actually all the other Wanderers didn't bother him nearly as much, knowing they would be revived once back in Asgard, but those orcs trapped in there...

They went out there to save them, after all. In the end they only sealed their fate. The guilt over that consumes him, though in truth it would just as much had they decided to break the quarantine and let that disease spread.

"I don't know," he says, reluctant to encourage the man to try, since it would mean he'd have to cut himself for that. "Have you... felt any different? Had any strange dreams? That's how I figured out that something had changed."

"What do you usually dream about?" Strange dreams are a given in Jet's life, and always have been. He can't remember the last time he slept peacefully, assuming he ever did, even back home. The diverging of those dreams from his baseline of borderline nightmares isn't something he's ever thought to keep track of. What would be the point in it?

There are things in his dreams he's got to pay attention to now?

Fantastic.

"A lot of things," he says, purposefully vague, even though it sounds like a rhetorical question. He goes on to explain. "But this was different. It felt different. I felt like it meant something, and when I woke up in the morning there was just something telling me to try this."

Kind of like what drove him to use his God powers the first time, though there hadn't really been a dream involved then. Just a compulsion to reach out, touch a flower and make it bloom.

"Different how?" Jet regards his hands for a moment, opening and closing them into fists and then back out again. Perhaps if he decided opening a vein he'd be able to work out something of whatever strange properties his blood might be capable of now...or he'll just bleed everywhere.

Yeah. Safer to not.

"...think we all have it?"

"I can't explain it. It was just a feeling," he shrugs. Like the dream in itself was a message. He doesn't know how to put that feeling into words.

"It's possible, but I wouldn't advise anyone to go around cutting each other," he says, almost like reading the man's mind. "But we could ask around. Talk to the others who were at that cave and see if anyone else has developed some new ability, like me."

Jet snorts faintly, a nose that coming from him tends to translate to obviously not.

"Might work," he concedes. Then he reaches up, taps two fingers to his temple with a faint, wry twist to his tone. "Maybe not in their heads."

What'd be better is some kind of way to test what kind of ability might have been gained from their deaths in the cave, but considering the context of what those abilities might turn out to be, that's also liable to be a literal bloodbath. No thanks.

Well, one can never be too sure. Some people are a little crazy like that.

Jim's eyebrows lift at that, and his lips stretch into a smile before he lets out a chuckle. "No, I wasn't planning on it. But maybe a public announcement or something of that kind would do the trick. If it really is something that happened to all of us, then I can't be the only one showing signs of it, I'm sure."

On that, they can agree. Jet's barely got a grasp on his own god powers, and now there's another one being thrown into the mix? One that's probably blood-activated? Fantastic.

"Probably not," Jet agrees. "Be good to know."

And it'd be good to know a more effective way of figuring out what that is as opposed to simply pricking your fingers and hoping for the best.

"Careful with the voice." Again, he taps his head. It tripped up Jet for sure, and he's pretty sure that he's not going to be the only one.

"Yes, I know," he nods, sighing. "Again, sorry. I'd like to say it won't happen again, but until I get the hang of this power, I might end up getting a few unsuspecting people."

But he does want to get the hang of it. Even if it means he has to injure himself to make it work, the usefulness of an ability like this is too great for him to ignore.

"What's your name, by the way?"

"Jet Star." And he already knows your name, courtesy of that telepathic message. And, hey, in your defense - "Could've been worse."

A vaguely suspicious message is hardly the worst thing to be flung his way. Given that nothing's come of this besides a civil conversation and some information that Jet himself didn't already have, Jet will take it.

"I suppose so. I wasn't even sure how it was going to work, but it wasn't that bad, no. Still wish I'd gotten the person I was aiming for."

He tilts his head, smiling a bit. Not like he can say much more about his newly discovered power, so he focuses on something else. "Jet Star. That's a pretty cool name, I'm almost jealous."

Well, Jet did pick it himself, the way most killjoys do. Out in the Zones, your name's not given to you. Your name gets found. He shrugs, though there's a very faint twitch to the corner of his mouth that suggests that he thinks his name sounds pretty fucking cool too.

Still, that's not the point.

"Who you looking for?"

"My girlfriend. She's in the city right now, so I thought I'd try reaching out to someone who's not too near me."

Chances are Jet was around where Mary was, either that or Jim's just not that good at reaching out to who he wanted to yet. Doesn't matter for now, anyway. It did work, even if it wasn't flawless, and that's good enough for him.

"How long have you been here? In Asgard, I mean. I don't remember seeing you before the cave."

Fair enough. No idea who that is, but he doesn't know a lot of the people here all that intensively. He's...not the social guy of the crew, typically. At least, not in the conventional sense.

Jet shrugs.

"Couple months." Long enough to have died once already. "You?"

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