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

[eudaimonikos]

You too. Or - [He makes a bit of a rolling gesture.] - you know, the other way around. I'd missed everyone here!

[Not so much the general...Deerington-ness of it all, but you know.]

[onerthes]

Of course. You are a people person after all.

[That seemed in her mind to be one of the most accurate things to say about Michael. he seemed to draw his energy from social interactions after all.]

It is always the people that make this place bearable.

[eudaimonikos]

Yeah, it is.

[He strokes the side of Eleanor's big furry neck for a moment.]

The locals here seem nice? [Although his tone makes it clear that he doesn't entirely trust that, and is probably fishing for her opinion.]

[onerthes]

I... will trust them if they are like this in six months. I'm a little too "Once burned, twice shy" when it comes to the locals, though I will yield that they're not actively causing us any troubles and seem more or less pleased to have us.

It's just the nightmare. that's all. I know they're real, but that's not the same as trusting them.

[eudaimonikos]

No, no, you're right. I'm glad there's plenty of us around.

[He can trust other Sleepers. Or, well, most of them.]

Would've been pretty easy to kill us on the beach, but that doesn't mean much. It wouldn't have been all that fun, either.

[onerthes]

I'm torn when it comes to the natives. On the one hand is the last years of my life. On the other is the knowledge that I understand what they were, and what they were not. The true natives were the wastes, who were harmless. The natives of the nightmare were just figments of a dying child's imaginings of townspeople who feared and hated her.

These people... what I hope is that they are actually people. Because if they are real, not just some poor girl's madness given flesh? We can reason with them.

[eudaimonikos]

Yeah. I mean, it sort of seems like we don't even have to...if they keep on acting like regular people.

[Of course, it's the possibility they won't that's the problem. But then, once you put it that way...Michael shrugs.]

Maybe that's unfair. We all had our...moments, in Deerington. [He's certainly stopped acting like a regular, reasonable person before.]

[onerthes]

Yes, I suppose we all did...

[An uncomfortable silence followed for a moment. She was remembering a time or two that she'd lost her mind.]

I can give them room to breathe, watch them before I truly judge. I'll hope for the best with them. And if we're rewarded for that hope? Perhaps in coming years people can arrive who have no reason to fear them.