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 Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 1:26 am
The laughter cutting out made him wince, rubbing his upper arm. Oh, no. He'd messed up. He should have been clearer from the beginning that he had had no idea what Kaifeng was talking about. He thought he'd gotten better at communication, but... He wilted a little himself as Kaifeng did, shaking his head. "No, I haven't. I'm guessing that's a movie, but..."
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Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 1:40 am
Although Kaifeng continued pouting about how Selenga apparently had not been in on the Very Special Moment that they’d just had together, listening to Selenga’s answer made his posture shift again. Back to something upright, and serious, complete with folding his arms over his chest and huffing.
“Ugh, your ******** parents,” he said, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. Because seriously: nobody else could have possibly screwed Selenga over so badly except for his ******** parents. “They deprived you of such a good movie—and yeah, it’s a movie, directed by Jim Henson, the Muppets guy. David Bowie plays a Goblin King called Jareth, and there’s this teenage girl called Sarah, right? And she has to babysit her little brother, and she fights with her dad and stepmom, and then she accidentally summons Jareth and his goblins to take her little brother away. So, Jareth gives her a chance to save baby Toby, but first, she has to solve his labyrinth and get to his castle in the center. She meets all kinds of weird friends along the way, gets into shenanigans, and Jim Henson did it, so the puppets are all so on-point. Trevor Jones did the score and David Bowie wrote some new original songs—what we just did? It’s the intro to one of the songs. It……”
Kaifeng’s face had gone on a whole journey from Annoyed At Selenga’s ******** Parents to Eagerly Chattering About A Movie He Liked, before finally settling on a softer, sympathetic expression to look right at Selenga. “……You got all of the beats right? So I just……thought you knew.…… But it’s okay, okay? If you want, we and Qi-jie can watch the movie together when we get back to Earth.” A moment, and then he added, “Well. After I take a shower, anyway, because hauling water down from the spring I found is sweaty work.”
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Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 1:47 am
Selenga thought the entire plot sounded ridiculous—but Kaifeng was one of the most ridiculous people he'd ever met, so that tracked, actually. But... after what just happened, he supposed he could at least suffer through the movie for Kaifeng. It was the least he could do. "I'm sorry, I had no idea. I was just... trying to get to the bottom of whatever you were talking about," he said a bit dully. "But... Yes, we can. Definitely after you shower." He smiled. "Can't have your stinky sweat on my nice leather couch, now."
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Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 2:20 am
That comment out of Selenga got Kaifeng to laugh again—good-naturedly, and maybe not quite as uproarious as before, but still warm and heartfelt. “No, you surely cannot,” he agreed, then motioned for Selenga to follow him. They’d had a misunderstanding, yes, but none of it was Selenga’s fault—truly, how could the poor boy be blamed for the fact that his parents were awful and had deprived him of such a good movie? (well, they’d also done several other terrible things to Selenga, but the Labyrinth thing was the one that happened to be on Kaifeng’s mind right now)—and Kaifeng didn’t want to dwell on it or hold anything against Selenga when, again, he’d done nothing wrong.
“Anyway, we’re up at what I really wanted to show you.…” Kaifeng trusted Selenga to follow him, over to the massive black door, with the decorative danse macabre carvings framing it, and the sliding tiles puzzle on the floor. As he knelt by the puzzle, Kaifeng explained, “When you move the tiles around, you can sort of see mechanisms underneath? I don’t really know how all of it works—that memory of Xingyi’s hasn’t come back to me; they’ve mostly been about his husband—but……I think if we can solve the puzzle, then maybe the door will open and we can find what Xingyi wanted to hide in there? And I thought you’re good at puzzles and things, so……why not get you to come help?”
Kaifeng hummed, looking down at the puzzle. After a three-week break, he wasn’t sure how at-ease he felt with it. “I sorta picked out some tiles that might be hands? And eyes? So I think we’re looking at a portrait? But……then I got sort of stumped on how to proceed.”
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Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 2:36 am
Selenga relaxed a bit, grateful that Kaifeng seemed to want to move on quickly from it. He moved forward, frowning in thought at the puzzle. "I love puzzle games," he said idly as he began to slide the tiles around, trying to see how the whole picture came together. "I usually prefer having the finished picture to compare to when doing these particular ones, though. Sometimes the more... esoteric ones can be a little difficult when it comes to placing tiles in the correct position. You think you've got it right, but that shade of blue over there is two shades different from the one you're meant to have, that sort of thing." As he talked, he toyed with the puzzle, brow furrowed. Hmm... He was pretty sure he'd figured out how the arrangement of the hair was meant to go, at least, even if getting it all aligned properly would take more effort.
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Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 4:06 am
Kaifeng nodded, listening attentively as Selenga spoke and watching as he shifted the tiles around. Things seemed like they made more sense, letting Selenga take the lead on this, even if he hadn’t shifted things around very much yet. Or at least, the ways that he had shifted things around seemed like maybe they hadn’t made much of a dent in the larger scale picture yet. But Selenga had more experience with puzzles than Kaifeng did, and maybe, however this shook out, Kaifeng could stand to learn something from him.
“Oh!” Perking up at something that he thought he noticed, Kaifeng started gesturing at the tiles. “If you move that purple one that looks like fabric? That might help with migrating the hair pieces? Toward the top, I think?” He leaned over and traced his finger through the air over one of the pieces with the hair. “The way the light falls on it, seems like the light source should be coming from above, right? So, the top would make more sense?”
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Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 5:06 am
Selenga startled a bit, having nearly forgotten Kaifeng was there after studying the tiles so intensely. He turned to the one Kaifeng pointed out and made a pleased sound in the back of his throat. "Oh, yes. Definitely!" he said, excitement thrumming through him. He started sliding the tiles with more purpose and surety, confident as he arranged the left side of the hair and a small part of the face. "Hmm... I can't figure out the purple fabric, here, did she wear a hairpiece...? I'm not seeing any indications, but..."
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Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2023 1:09 pm
Letting Selenga have peace and quiet while he worked made the most sense, on one hand. After all, random interruptions were not always cute things like Táotáo sticking her nose into a livestream and inviting herself up into Liánlí’s lap for pets and attention, which got all kinds of positive responses from the chat, even though it was once again full of danmei fans who inexplicably wanted to give Liánlí money for things like “a thorough explanation, with help from his prop dry-erase board, of the differences between the dizi and the Western concert flute” and “some spit-balling about how he might go about the process of adapting ‘Careless Whisper’ for the guqin.” Cute Dog doing Cute Dog Things hadn’t initially seemed like it would’ve fallen under the heading of “Stuff People Who Watched Liánlí’s Streams Wanted To Pay Him For” but……apparently he’d been wrong about that?
Plenty of other forms of distraction, however, mostly just succeeded in making a giant mess for everyone involved.
On the other hand, though, Selenga did ask for input, so Kaifeng leaned in closer—humming Aurelio Voltaire’s “Oubliette” as he did because, truly, it had the best track record for providing him with Thinky Music at his Wonder—and squinted at the tiles that Selenga was having trouble with. “Oh! Oh, oh oh,” Kaifeng burst out after a couple moments of consideration, “there are two different textures and shades of purple going on here. And yeah, they’re both purple, but look closely, right? The purple that’s on the viewer’s right-hand side looks closer to the texture of the hair. And like……so, Xingyi, right?”
Kaifeng sat up a bit straighter and vaguely gestured around his head, neck, and shoulders, tracing an outline sorta kinda like the partial updo and flowy bangs that Xingyi favored wearing. “Most of his hair was black. But it also did this ombré into pink at the tips. So, like, maybe the subject in the portrait has something similar going on with their hair? Y’know, like……” Kaifeng swallowed thickly as he slouched back closer to the puzzle, and hoped that his tone came off less like guilt and more like literally anything else. “Like my da-jie’s hair.”
Xiuying and Jiayi had both gotten blessed with natural, brightly-colored ombrés in their hair, now that Kaifeng thought about it. Jiayi’s had a similar black-to-pink thing as Xingyi’s, but……was it really so implausible? The idea of this portrait’s subject having a purple ombré in their hair, just like Liánlí’s da-jie?
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Posted: Wed Aug 09, 2023 12:14 am
Selenga started sliding tiles again the moment Kaifeng pointed out that the purple blotches were also hair, hands sipping across the puzzle quickly to construct most of it correctly. This kind of thing brought him a joy that nothing else could reach. But as he worked, he listened, and his hands slowed down as the portrait mostly came together—it seemed pretty obviously finishable to him, at this point, but Kaifeng needed him. "...Do you think, maybe...?" he trailed off, reaching out to pat Kaifeng's shoulder. "His da-jie and your da-jie...?"
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Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:50 pm
“He didn’t have a da-jie,” Kaifeng answered easily, simply, shaking his head but otherwise without adornment. “The first memory I got up here, right? Xīngyì, his husband Huanxi, and this pair of twins, who were Xīngyì’s paternal side cousins. Aside from calling him Huanxi’s wife—” In somewhat less than positive terms, but eh, Kaifeng felt perfectly content to just ignore that. “—the mouthy girl-twin said something about Xīngyì being his parents’ only child. So……no da-jie for it to be a portrait of.”
Which was a sad thought, but at least Selenga, brilliant puzzle-solver that he was, had gotten the portrait to come together. It did, indeed, depict a woman and aside from the ombré in her hair being violet instead of pink, she was the spitting image of Xīngyì. Same delicately angular face, same hint of mischief gleaming in the eyes. Maybe she wore a softer expression than he seemed to have done for anybody but his husband? But their features remained remarkably similar, and she held in her lap a black violin, so much like the one that Xīngyì had been playing in the last memory that Liánlí-Kāifēng had recovered up here. She definitely wasn’t tricked out in the garb of a Saturn Knight: for one thing, her dress was a wrong shade of purple, and for another, she didn’t wear any Saturn symbols whatsoever.
In fact, she only wore one symbol, engraved in the cameo brooch hanging from her black lace choker. Carved and painted into that charm was an image of a beast standing on its hind legs, forepaws raised. Although the beast largely resembled a black lion, the wings on its back looked far more like a crow’s—that, and normal lions did not have wings, as far as Kāifēng knew—and its tail was long and scaly, like a dragon’s. Little bursts of red sat on the beast’s talons and his tail-tip, and—“This little guy?” Kaifeng leaned in and tapped on the cameo. “The cousins wore stuff with him on it, too. Boy Cousin had him on a necklace, and Girl Cousin had him branded on the inside of her wrist. And they were Xīngyì’s father’s family, but……”
Kaifeng sighed. A woman who looked so much like Xīngyì that it wasn’t even funny, but wearing a symbol associated with his father’s family? “……I think? Maybe she was Xingyi’s mother? Maybe the choker was a gift from his dad?”
Made about as much sense as anything else, Kaifeng supposed. If he was wrong in this guess, then surely something could let him know.
In the meantime, though, Selenga sliding the last pieces into their proper place made Things start happening. The portrait all came together, and before Kāifēng could appreciate it for too long, it sank into the floor with a sound like stone scraping against stone—“Ha! Ingenious!”
Maybe Liánlí-Kaifeng was just easily impressed because Xīngyì had had some very different talents from Liánlí’s own, but nevertheless, the mechanism entranced him. Partly because, for all there didn’t seem to be any magic going on, Kaifeng couldn’t actually see the process working. Oh, he could hear things spinning and shifting in the floor and the wall—he heard the unmistakable, heavy thunk! sound that immediately preceded the door cracking open—but he couldn’t see how the lock-device actually worked, which made all of this feel that much more adventurous.
Once he’d gotten himself up off the floor, and offered Selenga his hand to help him up, Kaifeng headed for the door. Took a deep breath. Pushed it open.……and wrinkled his nose at what sure appeared to be some kind of junk room. Shelves lined the walls, each overflowing to various degrees with stuff, most of which Kāifēng didn’t recognize or see any ostensible purpose for. That said, the dust all over everything didn’t help—so, with a sigh, Kāifēng got one of the charged up hand-vacuums out of his subspace, and a trash bag to empty it into as necessary.
“At least it’s not another wine cellar,” he supposed, heading for one of the shelves to start clearing up the dust. “Xīngyì had two of them. At least two. It’s ******** wild in the most ‘Fam, I’m trying not to judge too harshly because I don’t have all the context? But this seriously seems excessive’ kind of way.”
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Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2023 10:17 pm
Ah, well... a portrait of his mother would make sense—but before he could process much more than that, even to start responding—a door opened in the wall like some kind of murder mystery nonsense (which, well, apparently the whole tower here was a deathtrap and nothing like Ida's cool tower, so maybe there were a few murder mysteries around here...). He waited for Kaifeng to clear out some of the dust before going in, sticking to the cleaner areas. "Two wine cellars doesn't seem that excessive?" he said in a questioning tone, realizing as he spoke that not everyone was insanely rich like his father who had three wine cellars. "Ah... Well... Was he a rather ordinary Knight, then?"
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Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2023 12:13 am
Pausing his cleaning to empty the vacuum into his trash-bag, Kaifeng looked up and over at Selenga for a moment. How did the wine cellars not seem………oh, right. “Y’know, for all the times I ever addressed you as ‘Rich b***h’ instead of your actual name,” he said, shaking his head slowly, “you’d think I’d be better at remembering that your family really is Crazy Rich Asians rich.”
As opposed to Zhìháo’s and Qiye’s families, who also did pretty well for themselves—well enough that there hadn’t been any student debt to run away from after Liánlí had gone to ******** Harvard—but……on a significantly more normal and less obscenely eat the rich level of pretty well for themselves. But since he and Selenga needed to understand each other, Kaifeng sighed and explained, “I’m not talking about the quantity in terms of money spent or anything? Though, both of them are pretty fully stocked. I mean more like……Xingyi lived here alone. His husband’s culture seems like maybe they had laws against alcohol? His parents died while he was at the Knight Academy, his mom’s ex-girlfriend’s kids were like siblings to him and they were Knights on different planets, and……”
Kaifeng shrugged. “It just seems like a lot of alcohol for one person, y’know? And I mean, if I had any right to judge, I’d be able to tell you da-jie’s baby-daddy’s name aside from ‘She calls him Mianmian when they’re being cute.’ But it still feels……concerning, y’know? Plus, I’ve gotten some of Xingyi’s memories up here, and he’s been either drunk or drinking in a lot of them, so it sort of feels like ‘Okay, I’m glad I lost the taste for most recreational drinking when it stopped being forbidden.’”
Having to sort through a whole-a** Drinking Problem with a therapist on top of everything else that Hayden, Qi-jie, and Ming-er had banded together about making Liánlí take seriously……did not sound like his idea of a good time, thanks much.
Strictly speaking, cleaning wasn’t his idea of a good time either, but it was a necessary evil. No one had been here to take care of Kaifeng The Wonder for a thousand years or so, and Liánlí wanted very badly to be a Good Knight. He wanted to do right by his Wonder, and to do right by all the people who needed his protection—and at least on the former count, that meant cleaning. On the plus, the cleaning offered him a good view of the various odds and ends lurking in this room. He didn’t know what to make of most of the assorted trinkets, but as he worked on one shelf, he eventually came to pause on three……
………dolls?
They looked like maybe they were meant to be dolls?
Taxidermied creatures, definitely, all huddled together in a little line. Two of them looked not entirely unlike opossums? The tails were wrong—they looked like snakes instead of little pink worms, and distinctly had rattles on the end—and last Kaifeng checked, most opossums came in shades of black and white, not some sort of dusty rose shade that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be pink or brown. But the snout shape, the beady eyes, and the paws looked right for opossums. And they had what looked like wigs made out of wire, one of them had a ponytail and the other had floppy hair like some early 2000’s Sensitive Boy character on TV.
Either way, both of the dolls had been dressed up in outfits that reminded Liánlí-Kaifeng of the ones that the Cousin Twins had worn in Xingyi’s memories. The one in the ponytail wore something like a frock coat over a black catsuit, while the floppy-haired one wore a robe that looked more like a yukata than any traditional hanfu that Zhìháo had ever worn for one holiday or another.
Most interesting, though, was the doll in the middle. Its base animal body seemed to be some kind of black, lop-eared rabbit, though it had delicate little antlers like a qilin. Moreover, it had been dressed up in an outfit that Kaifeng couldn’t help but recognize—because he was wearing it. The little guy even came with his own appropriately sized folding fan.
“Awwww,” he cooed, picking it up. “Leng-Leng, come look! It’s a little Kaifeng doll.”
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Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2023 12:27 am
Selenga hummed, nodding along. Yeah, no, for one person... that was definitely excessive. A ridiculous amount, truly. He suddenly felt as though he should thank someone for ensuring that Lianli-Kaifeng had not turned out exactly like Xingyi-Kaifeng—he didn't think he would have made it through befriending Lianli if he had to deal with an alcohol problem on top of everything else. "What's the—oh, uh..." He took a small step back. "Y'know, I'm good. I'm uh, I'm good. You can, uh, stay over there and enjoy those, and I will stay over here and think about something else." Taxidermy had always been one of those things that freaked him out. He just.... didn't like the idea of treating a dead animal like that. That was his problem, though, and if Kaifeng liked them, more power to him.
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Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2023 1:08 am
“I’m gonna keep him,” Kaifeng announced brightly, putting the doll wearing his outfit into his subspace. He hummed, considering for a moment, and then decided to do the same with the other two. “I’m gonna take the ones that look like Xingyi’s cousins, too. They’re really cute, and I don’t wanna break up the set—but don’t worry, I’ll put them somewhere you don’t have to see them when you and Qi-jie come over, okay?”
Somewhere like his bedroom. That sounded perfect. Kaifeng could enjoy the adorable little friends and Selenga wouldn’t need to be creeped out by them, which he obviously was.
Moving on down the shelves in this particular case, Kaifeng mostly found a bunch of other things that he didn’t know what to do with or what to make of. Many of them, he didn’t even know how to describe—not right now, anyway—and he didn’t want to try and force it when words were so determined to fail him. The vial full of mysterious golden liquid, Kaifeng pocketed. He didn’t know what it was, but he was taking it home to find out.
It was on the bottom shelf where Kaifeng found something that actually gave him pause: a violin case.
He recognized what it was immediately, and how could he not? As Liánlí, he’d carried several of them over the years. Even so, once he fumbled through unfastening the holds, through opening up the case, Kaifeng gasped softly at what he found: the black violin from Xingyi’s memories, along with its bow.
“Yùchén,” Liánlí-Kaifeng whispered.
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Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2023 12:29 am
Selenga cautiously turned back to Kaifeng after he whispered something—a name?—and felt relieved when he could no longer see the dolls. Curious, he stepped over, looking over Kaifeng's shoulder and down at one of the most beautiful violins he'd ever seen. "Whoa.... Did your previous incarnation play that, then?" he asked quietly.
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