nexus_crossings | New Moriarty just dropped.

New Moriarty just dropped.

Behind an unreadable expression, he is satisfied. Despite how unbelievable the existence of a place that led to other worlds seemed to his logical mind, the time spent investigating the rumours had paid off. He had been right to think that the otherwise absurd whisperings of such a place combined to form a compellingly coherent and specific picture.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...

He is awake, alert, and even somewhat giddy. It is the same sensation he gets when deriving a particularly difficult equation. He compartmentalizes that feeling, folding it away neatly in one of the many organized drawers that exist in his psyche. This place, the Nexus, is too powerful of a wild card. He must stay focused so that, should he ever have need of it, he will be able to use it wisely.

He sticks to the populated areas. After taking some time to read over the welcoming guide, he finds a cafe, one that looks suitable for socializing. Once he is seated with a drink, he will strike up a conversation with whoever happens to be nearby and willing to talk. He has a book with him, and he drums his fingers lightly on it.

"Liberty, egality, and solidarity," he says cutting right to the chase. An innocent smile graces his features. "Do they have those things where you come from?"

[This is just a voice test because I simply couldn't resist having fun with the most kawaii of crime lords, lol.]

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Lucifer is known in the Nexus for dropping in on places and eating them out of ice cream in one sitting; gluttony is a sin after all. He is minding his own business sitting at a table with a truly enormous sundae of strawberry ice cream and fruit. If we're honest, it is more like a mixing bowl in side but no one argues with the devil when he asks for a 20 scoop sundae and pays with gold.

He's reading a text in the angelic Enochian native to the Fallen angels alone, even those of heaven can't read it. His four white wings shift around as he tries to find a comfortable place for them over the back of the chair. Damned chair backs to hell. His suit is crisp, neat, all black and three piece that contrasts heavily with his pale skin and white blonde hair.

His feathers ruffle up in annoyance when the person at the next table starts talking and his eyes finally come up from the book when he realizes this person is actually talking to him, probably.

He gives a perturbed sigh and a raised brow. "In my realm, yes, elsewhere? Not until I pike God in the face for his lies and stupidity."

He's mildly annoyed by being interrupted and surly in speech but it is an honest answer either way.

[I couldn't resist. This needed to happen. XD]

Moriarty marks the annoyance but simply continues to smile affably, unperturbed. He takes in the veritable swamp of ice cream and fruit, the text, the wings, and catalogues whatever other details he can gleam from the man's appearance. It is interesting. His words were interesting too, and as Moriarty makes his hypotheses about who or what the stranger might be, he lets his blasé smile twist into a cynical smirk--but only for a moment.

He nods agreeably. "If God spreads lies and stupidity, then he needs to be piked." He has many questions, but has chosen first to establish good will and test his interlocutor's vanity, after having apparently annoyed him. "You are very noble to have set yourself such a task," he says with the unerring politeness of an aristocrat. "I'm guessing it won't be easy, and if lies and stupidity are in his forte then he must have many followers."

[Yessss, absolutely it needed to happen!]

Lucifer resigns himself to this person continuing to speak to him but he does turn back to his sundae. Soupy ice cream is the worst and of course, he could keep it cold but why not just eat it before then.

"I have already speared him once. Unfortunately, one of his more irritating followers interfered and I missed the good parts." Michael was easily at the top of the list of annoying things in creation, sometimes even managing to surpass God momentarily. He scoffs between bites. "It is a necessary task; regardless of noble goals or repercussions. Tyrants have always lead the masses. The blind are easy to lead into more blindness."

Lucifer kept his voice neutral but the slight ruffle of the wing feathers are a cue to his feelings about the subject. He finds God reprehensible and infuriating.

Edited 2021-06-25 02:16 (UTC)

Moriarty has never thought much of God himself, except to dismiss Christianity as a fairy tale that the nobility use to justify their place in the hierarchy. He takes a sip of his boba tea. The drink is a new one for him, and it is cold and refreshing on a hot summer day, but ultimately of limited interest compared to the conversation. If Lucifer wants to be left alone, he should try being more boring.

"I don't disagree, but I'm curious why you call it a necessity," he says mildly, once the feathers have settled.

"Murdering tyrants should be removed from power?" It's somewhere between a comment and a question as he licks ice cream off the spoon and glances over at the other man. The arrogance is coming out but not overly so, yet.

"Non serviam, is that not what your writers have called my manners?" Lucifer smiles around another bite of ice cream. "Sometimes.. they do stumble upon the truth."

"From my perspective, there are few things outside the realm of mathematics and the physical laws that are actually necessary. Everything else is a matter of power and perspective. What is called necessary evil is necessary because it follows a certain logic that is more or less mathematical, or at least that is what I suspect."

He tilts his head, slightly dismissive of his own rambling. "So you see, I was simply curious what you would say since as a lowly mortal," says he who has never once in his life thought himself to be lowly in any way, "I must rely on reason alone. I refuse to accept truths simply because they're written in a book."

"Mathematics and physics are suggestions that can be changed.. by power and perspective." Lucifer shrugs nonchalantly. "I suppose we could call the annihilation of humans and creation because God is displeased -- something less than evil if you want to sound like the dull personality the men of God have tried to give me for centuries."

Lucifer laughs finally. "You are simply a fool. It is a dangerous thing to make assumptions about what another thinks, especially when you are wrong." He sets the spoon down with a clatter into the bowl. "Lowly human suggests perhaps you could read a few more books and allow them to keep your mind open to possibilities rather than self imposed assumptions about someone you do not know."

There is the pride but is is almost teasing and playful as Lucifer winks at him. "Your reason, so far is flawed, and it has nothing to do with your state as a mortal and everything to do with your imagining you know what I think."

Lucifer isn't even upset, more put out and exhausted by this kind of discussion by his expression. It was old to hear these kinds of lines, especially about his mindset toward humans.

While it is disappointing that his conversation continues to be inane to Lucifer, he can only resolve to do better in the future. He had been seeking a reaction, and the one he got seems disproportionate to the remark. Noted. The devil is touchy and mercurial, or perhaps there are deeper reasons for the behaviour. Either way, Moriarty does not bother to defend himself. His is not that type of ego.

He lowers his eyes, an acknowledgement of the chastisement, and then smiles in good humour. It may seem a mask to hide a wound, but the truth is that he simply enjoys the novelty of being called stupid by a supernatural entity. "What type of books would you recommend? There is one called Alice in Wonderland that I like very much..."

It would perhaps be wiser to simply extricate himself from the conversation, and he would if Lucifer actually seemed upset.

The Lord Mariner notices the younger man, and hums a little as she observes him. Human. Not a native species where she comes from - and it's strange seeing Thra species like Gruenaks and Gelflings in a minority compared to beings from an alien planet.

skekSa is not known as an intellectual, though her mind is sharp. Part of that comes from skeksis politics. They're ruthless and most of them sharpened their cunning, if not their intelligence, just to survive.

"On the planet where I live? Not so long as the Emperor lives. He will not step down from the throne easily. But something may be done about that yet - though it won't be an easy battle. But what I have seen here shows me that there is a place for my people and I to stay while we plan for it. He doesn't know we come here and it's better that way."

William has spent many hours gazing into space from a telescope. He has calculated distances and speeds, and his opinion on the possibility of alien life has always been that while there is no way to know for sure whether or not it existed, it was highly unlikely that any species would make the journey to earth. They would have to be remarkably advanced.

His short time in the Nexus, however, has already informed him of just how primitive his world is. It is a humbling experience, one that he will cherish.

He looks at skekSa with a benign curiosity, relying on body language and tone of voice to read her, fully aware that his appearance may be as strange to her as hers is to him. He listens to her story. It is a sad one, but not particularly surprising. He is cynical enough to wager that most worlds are filled with war and despotism of one kind or another.

"I imagine this place has given shelter to many who needed it. Those who know about it are lucky," he says gently. "And once the emperor is killed, do you plan to put another in his place or create a republic?"

"I am skekSa, the Mariner." The skeksis tips her hat, bluish-purple feathers visible in a mane.

Skeksis aren't space-travel capable, but the urSkeks they were created from most certainly were. She doesn't know how they did it - but she's aware there are space travel-capable peoples here, not all of them human.

"It has. This place is a shelter for me and my crew. I am a pirate and a rogue at home, but I lay down my cutlass here unless it's needed. It never has been and I hope it never is." She considers the question. "If skeksis rule ends, the rule of my people, then control of the planet may be turned back over to the gelflings, as it was before we came. What my place would be in such a world, I don't know. But things can't continue as they are."

"William James Moriarty." He also has a hat, which he can tip in turn.

A pirate and a rogue, she said. In exchange for her honesty, he does not even hint at his own identity as "the lord of crime." He simply accepts the information without judgment, taking note of her role as a leader and her willingness to sacrifice her own place in the hierarchy for the sake of the greater good.

"Based on what you have told me so far, you have my respect. My world is also a wretched place in desperate need of a change, though any kind of violent uprising there would likely be a fiasco. In fact, change is unlikely to happen there for some time." This 24 year old can't help speaking authoritatively, as though these were all simple, evident facts. Which, to him, they are.

"Moriarty. Interesting name." She trills, somewhere between a bird and an alien velociraptor. "The Emperor is a dangerous enemy, and his control over the Skeksis Court and Thra is absolute. The last time one of us voiced open disagreement with him...well, the Heretic lives here, so he might tell you himself. Skeksis don't kill skeksis, but anything else is fair game."

She doesn't look forward to confronting the Emperor - skekSa is old enough to know how dangerous he is, and he hasn't lost his cunning or penchant for cruelty - but people she trusts have said that there will be a united front, and together that might have a chance.

"So it is likely to be for us. But there's change in the air, and the Emperor is growing older and more desperate. Dabbling in dark arts that make us sick. Most skeksis do not look like me. We lost our plumage a long time ago, and with few exceptions we aren't what we used to be." Not that the skeksis aren't dangerous through sheer size and power, but they lost their health along with their beauty and colors. "We're hurting ourselves, too."

"SkekSa is an interesting name too." She gets a cheery smile in response to the trill, but it vanishes at the rest of her words. He listens, and he empathizes, but his expression is neutral.

In her position he would question whether the change in the air was superficial, overestimated based on wishful thinking, and thus easily wafted away. A desperate emperor wielding dark magic did not sound promising, but a country's--or planet's--rulers being too sick and weak to rule would be a true crisis that demands some sort of change, just as she said.

His tone is clinical. "Generally speaking, a failed rebellion results only in even harsher repressions--at least in the immediate term. In the medium and long term, it is hard to say." He can't help but wonder if there is a better, more Machiavellian way, or if this is the Machiavellian way and skekSa and her allies are being manipulated into going ahead with a plot that is doomed from the start.

She listens, and nods, having had similar concerns. The Emperor has never treated rebels or dissidents well, including among his own people. She was there when skekSo beat another skeksis to near the point of death for merely questioning the need for an Emperor.

She has no sympathy for skekNa given the nature of his crimes, but it still speaks to the brutality which is skekSo's first instinct for punishment.

"That is the danger, yes. I am the patron Skeksis of the Sifa clan back in my world, and unlike some of the others I take my duties seriously. I would prefer to avoid Sifan deaths - and though skeksis are outnumbered, they have terrible power at their command." She suspects the Scientist might be called on, and perhaps skekNa and skekUng - neither pleasant, but both with a dangerous mix of violence and cunning. "But in war, death...is unavoidable."

"That is true, but often it is unavoidable even without war. It is just a matter of who dies and for what purpose."

He may be a schemer, unlikely to ever encounter a literal battlefield, but he is also a leader and fully committed to civil war against the British Empire. He, like her, takes his responsibilities seriously and understands her resolve, as well as what he senses to be a true hatred of the Emperor and the ruling Skeksis. As his own hatred takes the form of a constantly boiling wrath beneath the surface of his placid face, he consequently thinks he could recognize variations of that emotion anywhere, on any species in the multiverse.

How good is skekSa at reading human expressions? Moriarty, deliberately, looks at her like he wants to ask her something--but he hesitates.

At the table next to the man sits a young man with his small two-person table cluttered up entirely with a stack of textbooks and a few notebooks scattered across its surface. So busy is it, in fact, that the smoothie the kid is sipping at is being held in his off hand while he scribbles equations out on the top open notebook. He glances up at the question--assumes no one is talking to Him, surely--and then doubletakes when he's absolutely the one being addressed.

Neat!

Peter clears his throat and tries to sit up a bit straighter from where he was just hunched over all his homework.

"Well, I mean, nowhere's perfect. But given my world's kinda recovering from a pretty big deal I'd say it's doing pretty well on that front. Probably better than before, to be honest." Losing a huge chunk of the population in one fell swoop kiiiiinda changes priorities for a lot of folks.

William loves textbooks and equations, so he has already taken a few discrete glances at Peter's table and subtly read what he could of both the books and the scribblings of the studious young man. He is admittedly nosy, but the array of maths paraphernalia was bound to catch the professor's attention. He brackets that for now, and once Peter looks up he smiles warmly at the evident surprise.

"May I ask what happened?" He would not accept Thanos' cruel methods nor the dubious reasoning behind them, but that good things can sometimes sprout from bad things is a phenomena well incorporated into his understanding of the world. He would like to hear more.

Peter's collection seems to be a strange mixture of very Public Highschool standard issue history and English textbooks plus some incredibly thick university level chemistry and physics books he's digging into with fervor. The notebooks are a mess of equations and what looks like some kind of shorthand though its all interspersed with little doodles on the corners of the pages.

"Oh uhm. I actually wasn't around for most of it but uh..." He glances back and forth a few times as unease and less pleasant memories come to mind before he forces a smile on his face. "Half the population kinda got wiped out for a little while. Like...globally. How isn't going to make sense, and neither is how it got mostly fixed. But. It kinda put a lot of things into perspective for a lot of people."

His is not the most expressive face, but the scarlet eyes reveal some alarm. Losing half the world's population is a calamity well beyond his frame of reference, but his mind is one that knows how to make large numbers comprehensible. It is quick to supply him with statistics from his century's various famines and epidemics, and from there he can calculate how many of those crises piled one on top of another it would take to eliminate roughly one half of his world's people, and how many deaths per minute would have to happen on average on every continent were such an event to unfold over, say, the span of three years, five years, ten years... The alarm in his eyes is genuine, and yet there is also a side to him that is morbidly curious and eager to hear more. Peter's warning that explanations will not make sense has functioned more like an advertisement than a deterrent.

"I suppose it would," he says after a short pause. His hands stay white-knuckled fists in his lap, but he softens his expression. Whether out of politeness, consideration for Peter's feelings, or because maths simply has a stronger pull on his attention, he lets his gaze fall pointedly to the books. "You at least seem to have your priorities in order. I wish I could say the same for my own students."

Peter knows what happened academically from second hand reports. But it's incredibly weird to be part of the half that was erased hearing about what life was like while he was....dead? Gone? He doesn't remember any of it. It prickles at some primal mortal fear if he thinks to hard about it. So Peter tries very hard Not to think about it. The moments before when he Knew something was wrong. The last moments he had with...no. None of it.

He has Far too much home work to catch up on for starters. A panic attack would only set him back.

"Well I...uh. I'm behind a year now. Compared to other people I know. So I've been trying really hard to catch back up." He shoots the stranger a quick grin that's a bit twitchy. "You're a teacher?" Peter's not sure how young someone can be and be a teacher but other worlds might have different rules. Mostly he's just never met a teacher or professor that wasn't one of his own. It's strange not to have the obligations and hangups about that relationship sitting over his head.

Not bad-strange though.

"What level? Or rather, what kind of teacher? If--if I mean, you don't mind me asking. I'm not sure if that's polite or not and all so..."

An apparently young man with a similarly innocent-looking face glances up when Moriarty asks his question. Dorian doesn't usually pay much attention to questions that are political or philosophical in nature (why bother with politics when they're bound to change every decade or so?) but it's a pleasant day ripe for socializing.

"Bands of French people in my world would have said so, depending on the century." He pauses, punctuating with a sip of the coffee sitting in front of him. "But no, on the whole, they're aspirational ideals only available to people with the means to buy them. Money is liberté, égalité, fraternité, all."

The book William is reading is Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution. He finds the bands of French people chronicled therein to be admirable. But his society still holds the Great Revolution to be the work of the devil and a blight upon creation, and he is not in the habit of pressing his more controversial opinions onto others.

While it would have been nice to meet broad-minded individuals from worlds more advanced than his own, he is all too aware that the universe was crafted neither to please him nor to suit his ideals. Disappointment hardly registers, and Dorian's comment is received with polite inquiry.

"You are not concerned for the poor?"

Well that's a rude question to be faced with when he's trying to enjoy a cup of coffee in the sun.

"I'm concerned with myself and those important to me, as most people are." And if there's one thing an immortal life has taught him, it's that death is the great, ravenous equalizer. Rich or poor, mortals will always be consumed in the end. Given that, he'll concentrate on his own life and interests, such as they are.

"I gave you the truth of my world as I see it, and in that world true freedom is only available to people with enough time, money, and the proper disposition to have it. Hopefully it's different in your world."

Edited 2021-06-30 00:05 (UTC)

"Forgive me, it wasn't my intention to put you on the spot."

Was he rude? There had been no judgment in his question, at least none that could be detected... and where he comes from it is perfectly acceptable for a wealthy man to declare his prejudices loudly and proudly over breakfast. Perhaps his version of England tends to revel in its decadence and depravity with particular zeal?

His expression quickly shifts to happy and cloyingly wholesome, all perfect white teeth and boyish charm--a face that has served him well over the years. "I actually appreciate your honesty, and nothing you said was exactly wrong." He can't maintain that syrupy smile for long, so he lets it fade into one more blandly neutral as he regards Dorian evenly. "Would you prefer not to discuss politics, though?"

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New Moriarty just dropped.

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