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 Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 10:17 pm
table of contents
stage i > stage ii WHY IS THIS SUCH A BOTHER. o1. table of contentsWHY IS THIS SUCH A BOTHER. o2. prompt response.WHY IS THIS SUCH A BOTHER. o3. solo one.WHY IS THIS SUCH A BOTHER. o4. solo two.WHY IS THIS SUCH A BOTHER. o5. prp one.WHY IS THIS SUCH A BOTHER. o6. prp two.WHY IS THIS SUCH A BOTHER. o7. prp three.WHY IS THIS SUCH A BOTHER. o8. pact formation.WHY IS THIS SUCH A BOTHER. o9. placeholder.
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Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 10:20 pm
prompt response
title DERP.roleplay detailsWHATABOTH. featuringWHATABOTH. ➔ valka tverskaya & noll anthem.WHATABOTH. locationWHATABOTH. ➔ a carriage, summer.WHATABOTH. summaryWHATABOTH. ➔ august 3rd.WHATABOTH. ➔ in which valka and anthem discuss the heat.He could feel every bump of the wheels against the uneven road; around him, the carriage shuddered and started violently at every turn, making him feel claustrophobic. The world, it seemed, was closing in on him. Outside, the sun beat down mercilessly on hapless passersby, making even the shade seem blistering hot. Everything was flooded with light, a light so bright and so white that Valka thought perhaps an old man could have gone blind that day, simply by staring out the window.
A frown riddled his brow at that thought, and silently he withdrew his gaze from the world rolling past outside. He turned to Anthem, who sat beside him staring into the body of the carriage but at nothing in particular inside. Anthem was statuesque in his motionlessness, and even the jumping carriage seemed unable to move him. “Noll Anthem,” Valka said somberly, watching the demon’s amber hair sway. It seemed the only part of Anthem that seemed capable of movement.
At the sound of Valka’s voice, Anthem’s opal eyes shifted to fixate upon the boy. Nothing else moved. “Valka Andreyovitch Tverskaya,” he said in return, sounding uncharacteristically grave and every bit as solemn as his master. “You haven’t melted yet.” Everything he did was kept to a minimal; his lips barely moved when he spoke, and yet somehow, his voice still resonated inside the chamber as Valka’s never did, still rolled with a power that Valka had never known.
“Yet.” Valka emphasized, staring pointedly at Anthem. “You, on the other hand, seem as close to melting as I’ve ever seen.” That seemed some sort of evidence, some point to prove what would come next. Anthem was familiar enough with the routine. There had come into Valka’s voice a strange, lilting quality that could mean only one thing: “I have a theory.”
Beside the dark-haired boy, Anthem let his gaze remain on his master for a moment before it flitted briefly to the world outside, and then back into the carriage to rest on no particular spot. “Of course you do,” he replied after a silence, restraining the sigh that threatened to make its way into the world. Theories were Valka’s specialty; he could not sigh at something that gave the boy such obvious escape from reality.
“The sun is tormenting us.” Valka’s words were greeted by a fleeting frown on Anthem’s brow that seemed to say, well what else is it doing? The boy shook his head, persisting. “I mean, it’s doing so intentionally.” Intentionally as in, there was something they could do about it; intentionally as in, they were not simply sitting at the mercy of some faraway ball of fire; intentionally as in, the force that followed them was more human and therefore less immovable, less powerful than they thought it was.
Again, the opal eyes flitted sideways to stare at the boy. This was far from the worst thing Anthem had heard come out of Valka’s mouth (at times, he wondered how and where the boy managed find his theories), but it seemed a strange enough proposition. But he had learned enough to consider dissuading Valka from this particular train of thought; tolerating the theories came with certain perks that Anthem found difficult to let up. “And your plan of action is… what, exactly?” He asked cautiously. There was something here that could spark Anthem’s interest and bring him out of the zen-like stillness that he had chosen as a means to combat the heat. It wasn’t the ideal choice; for every minute that went by with Anthem sitting so very still, he felt a little more tension in the way he clasped his hands together. Sooner or later, he would have to do something, move somehow. Something had to give. “Some kind of ritual, maybe? An ode to the sun? A sacrifice?” The last seemed to have piqued his interest. Had he been moving at the moment, he might have grabbed the sides of the carriage and vaulted right off.
“Ach, shotlandskii…” Valka muttered, rolling his eyes. Scotts. Violent, silly. “We hide.” He corrected the demon, raising his brow expectantly, as if waiting for Anthem to realize his mistakes and agree.
Anthem did neither. He blinked. “We hide?” He echoed, dark-eyed gaze dropping to the floor of the carriage as he ruminated on Valka’s suggestion. “I may be Scottish, (he was… kind of Scottish; no real ties other than the fact that he happened to be a Scottish terrier, but technicalities didn’t much interest him) but at least my ideas were less…” he struggled to find the right word. Juvenile? Ridiculous?
“I’m right, damn it. You know it.” Valka interjected vehemently. A familiar fire had alighted in his hazel eyes, one that indicated to Anthem that it was the end of the conversation. He could waste time and energy trying to convince Valka otherwise, but they were both painfully aware of the fact that it would get them nowhere in return. In the scorching heat, there was nothing that Anthem wanted to do less.
He shut his eyes and let the sigh that had been building inside him out with a whisper. “If’n ye say so, pakhan,” he relented. For a moment, he stayed as still as he had been the entire ride. Then, as if some secret button hidden on his body had been tapped, he sprang into action, all the energy he had built up in the past minutes in the carriage flooding from his body. In a blink, he had become as animated as he usually was when fixing to pull a practical joke on some poor soul. His eyes came alive with the brilliant gleam of mischief, and he straightened his back, rubbing his hands together. A smile, half sinister, flashed across his mouth as he turned to face Valka directly. “If we’re going to hide, pakhan, I’ll have to seal those windows.” His eyes shifted meaningfully down from Valka’s face. “I’m going to need those clothes.”
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Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 10:24 pm
solo one
to the darkness turn DERP.roleplay detailsWHATABOTH. featuringWHATABOTH. ➔ valka tverskaya.WHATABOTH. locationWHATABOTH. ➔ tverskaya household.WHATABOTH. ➔ two days after father's death.WHATABOTH. summaryWHATABOTH. ➔ october 5th, 2011.WHATABOTH. ➔ in which valka determines the identity of his father's killer and finds a new meaning to life.Night hung like a curtain over the Old Nichol rookery, its darkness draped especially thick over the single room that had housed the Tverskaya family of three for nearly a decade. Now a family it was no longer, and Valka remained, the sole survivor of the difficult life imposed upon his kin by fate or by the hand of God. Yet, the survival of the young boy lay enshrouded by mystery, for many thing in his life had no answer: could he, a boy of eleven, make a living for himself? would he have a place to call home come the end of this stifling month of march? had he the strength to rise above the horrors he had witnessed two nights before, and toil to become the man his father had raised him to be?
For horrors, indeed, they had been. From his usual nighttime perch upon the steps that led to the house in which their room lay, Valka had witnessed the murder of his father. The sight would forever remain scarred into the boy's memory: the darkness, the ominous crunch of heel against ground, the eerie glint of light off metal blade micromoments before it was plunged eleven times into his father's hapless body.
Neither Valka nor his father had cried out. The boy could remember nothing of himself other than the sudden tightness that had restricted every inch of his body, and he had sat frozen upon his perch, watching the murder and watching his father's life ebb away into his own pooling blood until dawn. At dawn, the rookery had awakened, and people had hustled along the narrow streets to begin their days, some even stepping over the dead man's corpse in order to reach their destinations. Deaths were not uncommon in Old Nichol.
Before the sky was fully lit, a carriage had come and borne away his father's body. Where it had gone, Valka did not know. And still, he had sat, motionless upon the steps until a young woman with a painted face and lacy attire had come to reassure him with a brief embrace and the end of a loaf of bread. She must have been a prostitute, he thought, but she alone came to console him in his time of grief.
Just like that, his father was gone. The body disposed of, and the blood pooled in the street eventually washed away with a bucket of rancid water. And the rookery went on with its daily routine. It was almost as if nothing had changed, and Valka might even have been fooled, had it not been for the dark and conspicuously empty room he had come home to for two nights. Yet, when he glanced about the room that had once been home, nothing seemed amiss. His father's journals stood upon the table, leaning against against the wall. The candle in the lamp stood half-used, wax running down its sides to collect at its base. The sheet curtain hung askew against the window, only half filtering the bright light of the waxing moon.
But where warmth had once engulfed the room, even in the deepest winters, there now seemed only emptiness, bitterness, loneliness. Darkness seemed to reach into every corner, and no amount of candles that Valka couldn't afford would chase it away. There was no hope left in that room, no kindness. There was no longer anything to come home to, and Valka wanted nothing but to abandon it and leave the past behind him. He didn't want the memories, because they only tugged at his heart and made him yearn for things that would never come to pass again. He didn't want the cold, because it only made him wonder where the light had gone. Why couldn't he just leave this painful part of his life in the past?
But even as he asked the question, he knew the answer. Because somebody had to stay. Somebody had to do something. He remembered the bitter vow he had made in the dark, half numb and frozen in shock: he would avenge his father's death. Somehow, no matter how, he would exact revenge on the man who had taken from him the most important part of his life. Without his father, Valka was alone. There was nothing left to lose, nothing left to live for save revenge. He was not prepared to let his father's death come without impacting the world. Old Nichol had moved on, but Valka would not... could not.
But still, he needed some answers. He knew nothing about his father's murderer, nothing save for two physical traits: gray eyes, broken nose. But why had this man come? What purpose could he have had to kill a working man?
The scene of the murder flashed before Valka's eyes once more. The horrid sounds of knife entering flesh rang in his ears, more terrifying than thunder. In the dark, the boy groped for the tinder box. His hands shook as he lit the candle on the lamp. Slowly, the feeble light came awake, encircling him with a flickering yellow glow. It was soothing somehow, the unpredictable bobbing of the light. If anything it was the one remaining source of stability in his life - he could always count on a candle to flicker.
He took a breath, and another, willing the images to fade from his mind. Two days after the murder, and he could still almost smell the blood dripping from his father's wounds. And what could he have done? Valka didn't know. He was a boy; he was no doctor, and he had not the money for a doctor. Even if he had had the fees for a surgery, what doctor would treat the likes of them? They were nothing, just sewer rats from somewhere deep in the heart of Russia, where cold reigned and money bought power.
As if that wasn't the case here. Valka let out a breath. In the eerie silence that pervaded the room, it was loud. He got to his feet and took shaky steps toward the table where his father's scrappy journals stood. Setting down the candle, he pulled out the wooden chair. Its legs scraped heavily against the thin planks of the floor, and he froze, half expecting Mrs. Whitlock to burst in and expel him from the house for disturbing her sleep.
He stood waiting, listening for the tell-tale creaking of floorboards outside to alert him of somebody's arrival, but when nobody appeared, he climbed solemnly into the chair and reached for the nearest journal. His breath came shallow and frantic as he opened to the last pages of the book. The familiar sight of his father's crude, self-taught handwriting greeted his hazel eyes. The rustle of the pages came as a reassurance, and he could picture his father hunched over the table, laboriously noting his daily thoughts.
Valka felt water well in his eyes, and he shut the book with a snap. He had not cried over his father's death. He didn't want to. There was too strong a sense of morbidity in the act of crying. So he waited until the emotion faded from him, and his breathing became more regular, and then he opened the book again.
Reading was not Valka's forte. He had been taught by a man who had taught himself, so he knew few than a score of words printed onto the page. Each word he understood came with agonizing slowness, and he pored over the pages with concentration.
"Chelovek..." he whispered to himself. A man. "Rossiya... brat'ya." Russia, brothers. Nothing else seemed to make sense, until, toward the bottom of the page, he saw, "ya boyus'." I fear.
Valka stared at the words. I fear. Had his father known? Had his father foreseen his imminent death at the hands of this man? There was no doubt in the boy's mind that the man mentioned was his father's murderer. The coincidence was too great. A man from Russia who had reason to kill his father. Brothers. The boy thought back to the stories his mother had told him before her death. Stories of a village, a corrupt band of "brothers", a death warrant.
Valka slumped in his seat. So it had been this way all along, his parents had been marked to be taken away and he left behind. What was it for? Was there really some grander scheme behind all their lives, or was it just the cruel sport of some unknowable Being, hidden behind a shroud of anonymity? Was it even worth it to battle onward?
To that question too, Valka knew the answer. Yes, and no. There seemed no sense in pushing on if he was doomed to come to an end, just like his parents. There was no sense in achieving anything, or doing anything when he could be here one day and gone the next without so much as riling the attention of his neighbors. They wouldn't notice when he died, nor would they care, and now that he had no family to grieve for him when he was gone, nobody would.
But in another sense, it was worth it. It would be worth well enough to find justice for his father. Revenge alone would make his life worth living, for as long as he was living. He didn't expect that would be long; he didn't expect to outlive his parents. That no longer seemed to matter. Had it ever? Valka was sure. But now... now, there was nothing left to lose.
Now, he could do anything.
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Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 10:25 pm
solo two
hesitation DERP.roleplay detailsWHATABOTH. featuringWHATABOTH. ➔ valka tverskaya.WHATABOTH. locationWHATABOTH. ➔ tverskaya household.WHATABOTH. summaryWHATABOTH. ➔ oct 15th, 2011 ~ 11-12-11.WHATABOTH. ➔ valka finds notes regarding the summoning of a demon.Now he could do anything. He could do anything.
The idea churned inside his mind, speaking constantly to him and giving him no rest. With every repetition, they seemed to mean more, to be more, until by and by he realized that they had become more. They had become a reality. Where once, they had been nothing more than the unfettered fancies of a child traumatized by his lot in life, they now seemed as real, as tangible as any other thought he might have.
Valka was standing on the precipice of something altogether new and unexplored, that much he understood.
How far would he go to avenge his father's death? How low might he have to stoop - and would he? What if he had to sacrifice a part of his old self, the part that had been given and taught him by his parents, in order to let their memories rest in peace? A thousand queries ran through his head, and he hadn't the answer to a single one. He was in unfamiliar waters, struggling just to keep his head above the water; he couldn't predict when the tide would turn, or anything else about the water for that matter. How he should react - or would react - were entirely out of his hands now, He wondered if he should reach for the shore, reach for some sort of foothold to catch his breath. He was swimming with a current that was battering him and slowly drowning his will to fight.
Because he was tired, so tired. For so many weeks, he had been fending off the hunger, the cold, the loneliness. His solitude had yet to fully register, but only because he had been holding it at bay. He wouldn't let himself realize how terribly alone he was now in the vast and unforgiving world, but it seemed only a matter of time. Sooner or later, something had to give, and Valka had the sinking feeling that it would be him. Something inside him would snap, and then... then any number of things could happen.
Already, he was beginning to fray. Day by day, he grew more and more tired, more and more desperate for a way out, or a way in - whichever it was, it no longer mattered. He just needed something other than the monotonous plod toward the uncertainty that lay beckoning before him. He couldn't enter that void. He wouldn't.
And yet, what else was there to do? He had no guidance, no wisdom by which to live, for his father had given him none, save the numerous scribbled journals that Valka could barely read. What use were they to him when he couldn't decipher the writings? Did anything lie within those scratches that meant more than the worthless daily observations of a poor janitor? Somehow, Valka doubted it. But try as he might to deny the possibility of any residual wisdom lying inside the tattered pages of the journals, he couldn't help but peruse them constantly.
It was an obsession, one that had come to occupy every spare moment of every day. He would return home from work and simply read until the wee hours of the morning, deciphering the shaky Russian characters with agonizing slowness. And still, he only understood bits and pieces - not enough to tell him what he really wanted to know, what he was hoping to see in his father's handwriting.
Something meaningful was all he wanted, something to tell him that his father's life was worth giving everything for, was worth even dying for, and beyond that, how he was supposed to do any of that. He was just a boy, and ever he had left the dealings of the adult world to his parents. What was he to do, now that he had to do it himself? Who was going to teach him how, if not his father? Still, it seemed his father would not come to his aid.
Maybe it was innocence; maybe it was plain stupidity. Either way, something drove him each night to his father's journals to spend hours slaving away at understanding the script. Something would speak to him from within the covers of the journals, of that he was convinced, and so he sat hunched in the rickety wooden chair, rifling through every page of each and every notebook. Over the years, Andrey had accumulated plenty of diaries, and within them, there were any number of observations. But lately, Valka had found that he was looking for some things in particular. He hadn't a definite image in his mind, just the vaguest ideas, the shadows of memories long since faded to the back of his mind. If he but saw them again, he thought maybe he would recall, and his desire for some aid from beyond the grave would be fulfilled.
His father had, for many years, served as an assistant to an intellectual, a man of odd tastes and even odder studies. He dabbled in the supernatural, which Andrey had never believed, but had recorded anyway. At the beginning, anyway, and his efforts had trailed off after several years of recording and not understanding. Andrey had not the mind for such abstractions. Ghosts and demons could not, and did not exist for him. He had no use for them. The only things he had use for were the pieces of silver that paid for his family's food and rent, and always it had been that way with the Tverskaya family. They had invested in materials, and nothing more. It was all they could afford.
Now, Valka thought, maybe there was something outside of the material world that could help him. He wasn't sure what, and perhaps he would never find it, but still he had to try.
But after weeks of trying, hope was beginning to run out. He sat, as always, hunched over the old wooden desk, flipping page after page with a concentrated furrow fixed upon his brow. He was a slow, inefficient reader and that alone was disheartening enough. But he had begun to think that maybe he wasn't meant to find whatever he was looking for.
The words and occasional sketches etched into the pages of the journals slipped in and out of his mind meaninglessly. So late into the night, the only sound the broke the deathly silence was the stiff rustle of flipping pages. One by one, he pushed past them, seeking the one page that would put to rest his whispering doubts. That one page that would give him some hope, that would give him an opportunity to triumph over the material world with something quite the opposite. Something otherworldly, even.
There were signs that he did his best to make sense of, though no amount of pondering could riddle through their arcane and secret meanings. There were pages scribbled with hasty notes referring back to past sketches. There were even what Valka understood to be elaborate accounts of rituals, half-seen and eavesdropped.
And then, at last, there was a sentence - a phrase, even - that struck gold. "...rituala vyzova slug iz drugogo mira..." A ritual summoning of servants from another world. "...vystupal spoemoĭ... unikalʹny dlya kazhdogo slugu." Performed with a poem. Unique to each servant.
Valka's eyes rose ponderously from the page to fix on nothing in particular. What exactly did it mean? Were the poems already written, that they had to be found to be used, or was it a matter of creativity only? The latter seemed to make less sense. Surely, a good number of these "servants" would have been seen strolling through the streets of London of any poem could have the power to summon. So there had to be something deeper to these summoning poems, something more ancient, forgotten. Valka had to wonder what that was.
His eyes slid downward to fix their gaze back onto the notebook. Laboriously, they scanned through the lines of text, seeking to read and understand more about this archaic craft and its foreboding results. There was more talk about summoning, more talk about servants. Some about souls.
Something wholly exciting gripped him. What was a soul to someone who had nothing to else lose? What value was it to him? How much of his life was yet worth living if it was not devoted to exacting revenge on his father's behalf? If these summons, these servants could do the job, then it seemed a small price to pay for his family.
And yet.
He had to wonder if he could trust in such baseless, formless things. It was everything his family had never wanted because there was too much risk involved. Nothing was set in stone with the devil, and trusting something that seemed so obviously to be the child of evil seemed untenable, an act of unparalleled folly.
What struck the most, however, was the realization that, apart from stabbing and killing his father's murderer by himself, Valka had no better ideas than these untried tricks of magic. He could think of no other way. It was almost brutally ironic that the one thing his father had never trusted would now come to the aid of Valka's revenge. After all, his father must have so carefully documented everything for a reason. Now, his hard work would paid off.
The boy stared at the page. Slowly, he brought a pencil to the rough surface of the table and held it poised there, ready to write down the first incantation that came to mind. Perhaps that was the way it was done, a subconscious transcription of some ancient and undocumented rhymes. But nothing came to him. A frown furrowed his brow, until, reluctantly, he set the pencil down again.
What had he been thinking? He couldn't possibly have thought that it would have worked. Why had he thought that it would have, simply because he was acting on his father's written word? Foolish boy. A spark of frustration flood through him, and he shut the book with a forceful snap. He was turning into some kind of crazy, but he knew why that was. He couldn't let the murderer get away without retribution. He just couldn't, and there had to be a way. There had to be.
He set the candle down on the table and blew it out. Darkness invaded the room, and he groped his way blindly across the room and into the relative comfort of the bed. Even that was hard and the blankets stiff and too thin to provide real warmth. He so missed the feeling of his parents lying on either side of him, all of them squeezed into that one cramped bed. Now, for Valka alone, it seemed to vast and boundless to fill. All he wanted to do was to cry himself to sleep, but he wouldn't. He hadn't cried yet. He wouldn't cry now.
Curling his knees up to his stomach, he hunched over and willed himself into what promised to be a fitful sleep. Tomorrow would be one more day after his father's death, and one more day for the murderer to stay alive. But soon, very soon, Valka would find a way.
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Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 10:27 pm
prp one
into the city DERP.roleplay detailsWHATABOTH. featuringWHATABOTH. ➔ valka tverskaya & robert fieford.WHATABOTH. locationWHATABOTH. ➔ locksmithy, london.WHATABOTH. summaryWHATABOTH. ➔ sept 16th ~ oct 4th.WHATABOTH. ➔ in which valka delivers a package for his master.WHATABOTH.into the city
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Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 10:28 pm
prp two
in wealthier straits DERP.roleplay detailsWHATABOTH. featuringWHATABOTH. ➔ valka tverskaya & deborah griffith.WHATABOTH. locationWHATABOTH. ➔ jewelry store, london.WHATABOTH. summaryWHATABOTH. ➔ oct 15th ~ mar 20th.WHATABOTH. ➔ in which valka searches for semi-precious stones for his master.WHATABOTH.in wealthier straits
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Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 10:29 pm
prp three
title DERP.roleplay detailsWHATABOTH. featuringWHATABOTH. ➔ valka tverskaya & SOMEBODY.WHATABOTH. locationWHATABOTH. ➔ SOMEWHERE, london.WHATABOTH. summaryWHATABOTH. ➔ date.WHATABOTH. ➔ summary.WHATABOTH.name
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Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 10:30 pm
pact formation
title DERP.roleplay detailsWHATABOTH. featuringWHATABOTH. ➔ valka tverskaya & noll anthem.WHATABOTH. locationWHATABOTH. ➔ SOMEWHERE, london.WHATABOTH. summaryWHATABOTH. ➔ date.WHATABOTH. ➔ summary.text
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Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 10:31 pm
DERP.blank post
WHATABOTH. nine
WHATABOTH. ➔ this is a placeholder.
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