deathsmajesty | Halloween Party, Creepy But Nowhere Near Abandoned Mansion, Tuesday Night

Halloween Party, Creepy But Nowhere Near Abandoned Mansion, Tuesday Night

After basically being dared to do it by Tony Stark (and putting in six weeks of renovations, bless Hannibal for the contractor), Liliana, dressed as an empress, hair pulled back in a profusion of curls by her angelic headpiece, was ready to throw her first Fandom party. Sure, it was for a holiday she didn't really understand, but she'd heard enough about it to make due: there was supposed to be candy and people were supposed to be in costume. Done. Everything else was just the same as a regular party, right?

Granted, the last party she'd hosted had actually been for a bunch of vampires and that had been seventy years ago on a completely different plane, but bah, details. You had food to eat, music to dance to, dark corners to sneak off to, and either enough witty people or enough alcohol to keep the conversation flowing. Liliana was hoping that there would be plenty of the former showing up, but just in case, she'd made sure to stock plenty of the latter.

Though her newly refurbished ballroom was actually very light and airy, she had done her best to recreate some of the spookiest elements she'd seen in her travels. The dancefloor was covered in about a foot of heavy fog that swirled and eddied with every movement. While most of the chandeliers were shrouded in fabric and false webbing, she personally found the main chandelier was decorated in something she much more unnerving. Black and red candles flickered about the room held by ghostly hands, dripping skulls, and the occasional elegant standing candelabra. One of the few concessions to magic she'd used tonight was to have the candles lit with tongues of false fire, which provided light but no heat. And they glowed blues and greens and purples, which was a nice effect. Red roses were placed upside down in vases, while more questionable arrangements sat in decorative vases. Out of deference to her guests' ~~squeamishness~~ sensibilities, all creepy critters, skeletons, and dead bodies were all cunningly crafted fakes, not a single real bone or drop of blood in the place.

Other than, of course, what her guests brought in with them. And should they leave with fewer of either than they'd come in with, well, that was hardly her fault. Probably.

Arrive and Mingle / Photos / Dark Corners [NFB] / Refreshments / Dance / Gardens / OOC

[~~Please hold for~~ OCD up! Do the thing!]

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Liliana hadn't been back to her homeworld for two hundred years.

"Knife and herb healing," Liliana agreed. "No magic, just skill and the properties of the plants."

"Some say magic is just science that hasn't been figured out yet," Steven said. "Plants were considered magical until people understood how they actually helped with things like healing. Chemical makeup and the like. No real magic there in the end."

Unless you were Nell of course. Then the plants were probably magical regardless.

"I would have to first ask how you're defining science," Liliana said. "I mean, magic is magic, what would make it science?"

"Where I'm from, usually if someone says scientific they mean quantifiable in some way," Steven said. "And magic is more - " Steven made a hand gesture to indicate the concept of vagueness " - unknown. It happens but no one knows why."

"So magic could still be science if it broke the usual rules of reality, so long as how it had done so was explicable?" Liliana mused.

"Something like that, yeah," Steven said. "Sort of the idea that magic can be knowable, we just haven't caught up to the ins and outs of it is all. Not yet."

Liliana considered that. "I mean, I suppose, in that way, all magic would need to be a science," she said eventually. "After all, magic itself needs to follow rules, otherwise it would simply be chaos any time we tried to cast something. Like wild magic, almost, which is chaos, but using it is not unlike trying to get as much order out of it as possible before the chaos reasserts itself." She couldn't help but grin, this was exactly the kind of conversation that she loved. "At its heart, I suppose magic is taking a specific kind of energy and using your will to give it shape and form. But there are so many different rules and methods out there for how one goes about doing that."

Steven enjoyed this sort of conversation as well. Especially since it was a good distraction from other things best not focused on during a party.

"Right," he said, glad for Liliana's wording. "And when you think about it what's a light bulb if not taking energy and giving it shape and form? Or, er, a candle for that matter? It's just that in my world more people understand how lights and candles work, not as many do spells and the like."

"Ah, but lights and candles work on the same principles every time, correct?" Liliana said. "And work the same way for everybody. But magic certainly doesn't do so. Even if you took two black-aspected Planeswalkers, we wouldn't cast magic the same way, even though we're using the same mana to do so, our spells would be different, and a white mana user and someone without the spark at all wouldn't be able to do anything at all."

"It does seem that magic's much more complicated," Steven said. "And on our world sort of... secretive? Like we've only found out it exists fairly recently. And I think you have to have some sort of talent for it? Innate ability maybe? I couldn't go up to a Sorcerer Supreme and ask for lessons, for example."

Possibly get recruited to work with a special group with a cool name, but not get magic lessons.

"For us, the ability to use magic is innate as well," Liliana explained. "But neither my parents nor my siblings were mages. And being a Planeswalker is...vanishingly unlikely, and there's no genetic component or anything that can be pinned down at all. It doesn't follow any rules or laws or logic."

"How do you find out you're a Planeswalker then?" Steven asked. "I mean - if that's not a personal question."

"Your first Planeswalk is always accidental," Liliana explained, matter-of-factly. "Usually something quite traumatic happens, most usually a threat to your life, along with the intense desire to get away. And your Planeswalker spark alights, and you tumble through the Blind Eternities, ending up somewhere else." She took a calm sip of her wine. "Of course, that's true of most races now. I believe the ancient dragons Planeswalk as a part of just what they are, but that's speculation."

"So you sort of blink and find yourself somewhere you might not recognize without knowing how you got there?" Steven asked.

Not that he could relate or anything.

"A little more than a blink, but yes," Liliana said. "More like an eternity of falling compressed into a single moment, along with all of the panic and fear and horror you were feeling before. But then you're somewhere completely different and hopefully dressed for the weather, though your spark will never let you land somewhere that will actively kill you. One of the other Planeswalker abilities is that you immediately speak whatever languages appear on the plane, so you can always be understood, though things like slang and proper nouns and things for which we have no concepts will still trip us up. Reading, however," she sighed heavily. "Much slower. Hours to days, depending on the alphabet."

"Oh that's handy," Steven said, a little envious. "I've woken up with people trying to kill me. The language thing is a bonus as well, isn't it? Shame about the reading though. But if you enjoy translation maybe it's not so bad?"

"I usually start just trying to read everything around me immediately in an attempt to jumpstart it before I need it," Liliana admitted. "I appreciate how many things on this plane come with pictures. That helped immensely."

"Sounds fun actually," Steven said, in case it wasn't obvious that he was a giant nerd. "But hard if it's not close enough to something you know, I imagine. You have things like that with Earth based languages. I can only imagine how much difference there is when it's entirely different planes."

"I have so much more trouble with languages that use pictographs over letters," she sighed. "Because people see things so differently. But it does mean that I get to amass an impressive library wherever I go."

"And does it mean the thing pictured? Does the picture symbolize a sound? Both? Neither?" Steven had some experience here. "I mean fascinating to find out about but a bit hard to pick up without context, agreed. Not often they leave a handy stone about to walk you through it."

"...That must be a reference to something," Liliana said with a laugh. "Otherwise...stone?"

"Rosetta stone," Steven said. He gestured to indicate the fairly descent size of the thing. "Helped translate hieroglyphics, you see. Had the same message three times. Two in Egyptian scripts, one in ancient Greek. People knew the Greek so that helped suss out the rest. Major discovery for understanding ancient Egypt."

"Ahhh!" Liliana said. "Yes, clever! If planes could start doing that with Dominarian, I'd be ever so grateful."

"We certainly were," Steven agreed. "Well, I mean not me personally. Finding it was well before my time. But after the fact, very grateful. Though now your situation makes me wonder if there's a linguist Planeswalker out there who might think to make such a thing."

"There was, once," Liliana said, some of her sparkle dimmed. "Well, I don't know if they made stones like that, but they did make a study of languages over the planes. I didn't know them well, but their work was brilliant."

You know what Liliana hadn't thought of in a hot second and needed to be reiterated right now? Fuck the Mending.

Halloween Party, Creepy But Nowhere Near Abandoned Mansion, Tuesday Night

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