un: eudaimonikos; video

[eudaimonikos]

Hello, Trench! Boy, that's a fun name for a city, isn't it? Trrrrrrench. Sounds...about like what it is, I guess.

So! [He claps his hands together.] Who's here from Deerington? Man, it must've been at least a century since I saw you guys! How's it been? Oh - oh, and look! Eleanor made it too!

[He reaches off-screen to fling his arm around the neck of what, when he pulls it over in front of the camera, proves to be an enormous dappled grey Warg. Her teeth are huge. She's still wearing her enchanted leather war-armor, which really just makes the optics here worse.]

This is my dog, Eleanor! Also, I'm Michael, for all the new folks. I was in the nightmare city before this one, and then I went home for a little bit.

So - what's everyone up to? And what's with the new phones? Are we all using weird, smoky first-generation birds as phones now?

Comments

[entreats]

Yeah, it's also good to see your particular [ weird ] brand of cheer.

[ It brings a bit more of a sense to normalcy to this weird, weird town they ended up in. ]

And I'm glad you didn't end up in some sort of weird future where all of us were dead. [ .. there's a slight pause, and then she adds: ] You would care whether all of us were dead, right?

[ She likes to think he would, since they're friends, but you never know for sure with the way Michael tends to say things. ]

[eudaimonikos]

[He frowns, having...not really noticed how he said that, honestly.]

Of course I would! I mean - this is a completely different world. Who knows what the afterlife's like? And either way, I don't think I can get there.

[entreats]

[ .. oh. Right. Michael's whole afterlife deal. She did kind of forget about that for a second, but it's coming back to her now he's replying like that. ]

Yeah, I'm.. not exactly eager to find out. This place is already kind of strange enough in and of itself. It's like some old-fashioned horror movie set.

[eudaimonikos]

Yeah, it seems...Trench-y. [.....] Reminds me a little of that one October.

[It's been a while, but that one October he spent in Deerington was pretty traumatizing! He remembers it quite well!]

[entreats]

[ Without missing even a single beat: ]

You mean that time the blood was dripping down the walls?

[ It's a true testament as to what kind of stuff they've seen in Deerington that Ange is able to say that as calmly and kind of dryly as she does.. ]

[eudaimonikos]

Yeah. That one.

[Nobody had fun!]

I think my cloak I got then would really fit in here...I had a whole outfit, actually.

[entreats]

You did?

[ It sounds a little surprised. Ange is trying to think back on that month, if people had special outfits..

.. now she thinks about it, she might have seen Shiro walking around in something different outside during that month. But it's all a little hazy by now. ]

What happened to it? Just didn't come along with you to this place?

[eudaimonikos]

No...but I didn't take it back to the afterlife with me. 'Course, I didn't do that with Eleanor either.

[So maybe some of his old outfits are just laying around somewhere, strewn across Trench? Who knows.]

[entreats]

Then they could still be somewhere out here. [ Okay, maybe Ange could have said that with a little bit more excitement..

But this is Ange we're talking about. She only does excitement in very rare circumstances. And apparently this isn't one of them. ]

Maybe your stuff was left all over the place, like some sort of treasure hunt.

[eudaimonikos]

Ah, the Legend of the Lurking Clothes! Wooooooo~

[He waggles his fingers, spookily.]

[entreats]

[ At least that gets an amused huff from her. ]

Why are you immediately turning it into some sort of horror story? Maybe I was thinking of the fun pirate kind of treasure hunt.

[eudaimonikos]

It could be both! Like Pirates of the Caribbean - there's zombie pirates and things in it, and it literally never ends.

[that's hell media for you]

[entreats]

[ ...

Give her a moment. Ange frowns, thinking.. ]

Pirates of the Caribbean? [ She wonders if it's a Michael's-world-only sort of thing, but no, it's just that Ange was born too early. And also is so not up to the date with pop culture even for her own time. ]

Wait, why were people combining zombies and pirates?

[eudaimonikos]

I don't know, it's fun? They do look cool...

[entreats]

Yes, but wouldn't that severely reduce their dialogue to.. you know.

[ Don't make her try to imitate zombie noises in public. It'd be embarrassing. ]

I don't think that would make for a very compelling movie.

[eudaimonikos]

Oh, no! They're great! The one pirate guy is really cool, he's like..."You best start believin' in ghost stories...yer in one."

[Actually a fairly solid Geoffrey Rush impression!]

[entreats]

[ Michael's career options are clearly still wide open. ]

Wait, really?

[ She sighs. ]

How come he's a zombie if he can talk like that? If that's the case, they might as well just have made them regular ghost pirates! [ ... apparently genre conventions are really important to Ange. ]

[eudaimonikos]

I don't know, they're cursed by evil gold.

[Or something? Look, he's seen it, but he's not exactly huge into the POTC lore.]

And they walk along the ocean floor to board other ships sometimes? When they're near their island lair. Probably be too deep otherwise.

[entreats]

Ah.

[ She sighs.

At least that's a familiar trope, even if it's caught in the middle of odd genre mismatching hell. ]

It's always some sort of gold curse, isn't it..

[eudaimonikos]

Humans do really seem to like it. Personally - I mean, the color's fine, I guess, but there's shiny rocks all over the place.

[entreats]

I think it's got something to do with scarcity.

[ ... though she pauses after that. It's not like Ange paid too much attention during economics classes, so like she'd know.. ]

Or it's just that some guy decided gold was valuable a long time ago, and now we've all just convinced ourselves of that idea.

[eudaimonikos]

Oh, I'm sure it was something like that. You all like diamonds too, and those are all over the place. Not even that hard to make.

[yo I just realized Michael could probably in theory use all of his demon powers to just crunch coal into diamonds with his bare hands and that's sick af]

[entreats]

[ Time to start up a business, Michael. ]

Doesn't that have something to do with wedding rings? [ Ange vaguely recalls people just loving flaunting them with huge diamonds in them. For.. some reason. She doesn't quite see the appeal herself. ]

I wonder if the people here are as obsessed with gemstones and gold.

[eudaimonikos]

Isn't that sort of a recent thing?

[Well, by Michael's standards, it is.]

Oh, I don't know. Some of them seem pretty flashy! Although they are also giving away a lot of stuff for free...

[entreats]

Michael.

[ A brief beat. ]

I'm twenty. I'm from 1998. Anything that's 'recent' to me is probably five minutes ago in your perception. [ She's still a little baby witch, Michael, let her live.. She only just escaped her teens!! ]