Video🌹UN: varré

[blessedwithlove]

[A masked man in stained robes stands before a dense wall of almost unnaturally healthy rose bushes. The view sways slightly, as his Omen's attention drifts in and out.]

Greetings to friends and strangers alike. It is so good to be among you, alive and whole again. [The man makes a slight bow, a bitter edge to his voice quickly replaced by an audible smile.] I am Varré, surgeon and former guide to the lost. Now, I am among the uninitiated in this land's secrets.

But I do bring a gift from my homeland, and from my Lord. Thanks to His blessing, roses bloom in Lumenwood.

[A flurry of motion, and the Omen lands on one of the stems, causing a velvety red rose to sway under its weight. At this distance, it fills half the view. Varré turns to address his audience, voice brimming with pride.]

They drink the blood from the soil, and transform its power into beauty and medicinal strength.

As a former guardian of the Rose Church, I am pleased to offer you all these beloved flowers and their refined extracts, at a price equal to the cost of their manufacture. These preparations can stanch bleeding, drink up rot from unclean wounds, clear excess blood collecting within a patient, and more besides.

And roses that have drunk sleeper blood take on beautiful new properties. By the grace of a Pthumerian I've yet to learn the name of, my own blood spilled by senseless violence has produced a bloom of vileblood roses.

[The view turns, revealing a gently rustling stem of pale roses, edged with streaks of green and pink.]

They've proven invaluable in dulling the pain of the suffering. But with these roses still so rare and fed by my blood alone, I'm afraid I can't part with much. My own patients require their service.

[The omen turns back to Varré.]

I would, of course, welcome the aid of any Sleepers willing to donate blood to such a beautiful cause. You would be compensated, deservedly. And any who wish to propagate the roses, do come see me. I would be pleased to furnish you with all the tools necessary to do so. These are blessings to be had by all.

[ooc: Varré's withholding a bit of information about these roses, which may be relevant to others. For more information, see here! If you want to contribute a new bloodtype to the roses, let me know, and more types will be unlocked and described on the page!]

Comments

[acidjail]

So there is an energetic component to their care.

Easily achieved requirements. Where will I acquire my cuttings? Both specimen types, if you please!

[blessedwithlove]

My, it is good to see such enthusiasm. Come to Lumenwood--follow the main road. You'll see the roses soon enough.

Do you have a supply of vileblood to feed variant seedlings?

text > action

[acidjail]

I do.

Await my arrival.

The message comes swiftly. The woman who sent it follows not long after, with a speed that suggests she was not far from the Lumenwood to begin with. She does not cut an imposing figure in her dark cloak with its full hood drawn up to cover her face, and she walks with the briskness of someone on a tedious but necessary errand instead of a stranger approaching another for access to his mysterious, and slightly sinister, plants.

She stops at the periphery of the roses, her head tilted back in a way that suggests observation, and she waits to be approached. She is used to waiting to be approached, and she is quite good at it.

[blessedwithlove]

Varré has returned inside his surgery in the meantime, but the double doors are left thrown open to air the place, and to watch for visitors. It's barely a moment before he notices the figure stopping beside his beloved roses.

"Ah, welcome. You are the one who goes by 'Woe'?" A dour penname, but he supposes someone dressed so would find it appropriate.

[acidjail]

Woe shamelessly peers into Varré's surgery, cocking her head like a crane examining a plump frog. She makes a perturbed and inarticulate noise at 'goes by', a cross between a cat's displeased mrrp at being moved and the hmph of a spoiled child at an inconvenience.

"As you go by Varré," she says, with a sniff of heady, rose-flooded air, "How long did all of this take to grow?"

[blessedwithlove]

If he notices the sound, there's no visible reaction. His faintly-smiling mask is quite the blessing, when it comes to keeping thoughts private.

The surgery is a mix of the old and the new. The building itself is quite aged, but the walls are whitewashed and the floor's scrubbed clean enough. And the tools of surgery themselves have changed little from the battlefields of the Lands Between to the streets of Trench--though their ideas of mercy are far different. The tools are well cared-for, kept in neat rows and ready for the next patient.

"Three months." One of the branches sways as his Omen hops between the thorns, taking a better vantage point near their guest. "Lumenwood has brought them vigour, as has the intervention of an interested Pthumerian. In soil where less blood has festered, they may take longer to establish themselves. Where are you going to plant them?"

[acidjail]

If the surgery garners no visible approval from her, it also garners no marked disapproval. Woe has the distinct air of one who would waste no time in making her displeasure at anything clear if she felt it, so that might pass for a kind of praise.

Or she's simply focused on the matter at hand, tracing the hopping of his Omen with stormy, wary gaze. There is something of the Seventh to all of this, the elegance and mystery of mask and rose and flighted thing. It does not put her in an entirely terrible frame of mind.

"A secluded place," she informs him, in tones of none of your business, "Rest assured, as I've said, they will be sufficiently doused. This is a considerable amount of growth in that short a time. This - 'Pthumerian' - was it the trigger for this profusion?"

[blessedwithlove]

A shame. He's no ill intent toward anyone with the means to make these roses bloom, but he does still have his curiosity. The fact that she arrived quickly is all he'll know, then. And he's quite willing to be diverted towards more discussion of the roses. Their behaviour has been fascinating.

"I cannot truly say. The taciturn Pthumerian undoubtedly had something to do with the vileblood roses--my own attempts to germinate them failed quite utterly." He still didn't know the thing's name. Only its appreciation of the roses, and its understanding of bloodflame. And for now, that was more than enough.

"Still, the canes were reaching for the windows a month before its visitation," he gestures up above the ground floor, where a few windows are set deep in the wall. They'd be overgrown by now, were it not for the careful reshaping of the vine-like stems with sticks and twine.

"My untimely death left me unable to observe the rest." There's a sour note to his voice at its mention, quickly smoothed over. "It is beyond their usual capacity, however. Even where they are fed by the leavings of great battles, they rarely grow a even a quarter of this height. The blood here agrees with them so spectacularly."

cw: body horror

[acidjail]

Perhaps Woe ought to entertain a sympathetic ear for someone who found their untimely death cutting short their ability to observe their experiments' flourishing, but she's never been prone to thinking much of other people. She's far more interested in reaching out to touch five fingertips to the stem of a rose, splayed to avoid thorns.

"A thanergetic bloom," she murmurs, thinking again of that so recently lost, profaned sister. C.L. would have laughed at these until she was sick, which never took very long at all, and leaned over them to drip the bloody effluvia of her lungs on their roots just to see what would happen.

She misses her terribly.

"How fortunate for you both to be transplanted here, then." She withdraws her touch and turns back to him, expression not exactly softened so much as it is less sharp, and more withdrawn. "I expect you will want reports of their progress. That can be arranged, if you reciprocate."