video; un: v | cw for creepy dolls i guess?

[mehanizovati]

[the video starts focused on a shelf, and on that shelf is a doll. absolutely the kind that just exudes 'listed on ebay for having the spirit of an angry victorian child in it' vibes with its dead eyes.

when viktor speaks his tone could not be more dry.] Some of you might have noticed the unpleasant dolls that, when ignored instead of bought, come to life violently. This is a matter our household is not entirely aware of because Palamedes continues to gladly buy any unpleasant doll he sets his sights upon.

[offscreen, but not like, very far offscreen (it is not a big living space), palamedes chimes in with a pointed, 'While I respect your aesthetic tastes, you're wrong, they're delightful,' that viktor will pointedly ignore as he continues.]

He will not stop bringing them. Some of them vanish after a week or two. He calls this one Sensible Bethany.

['She calls herself that, actually, I explained this already,' from the peanut gallery. the camera shifts as viktor turns to address him back]

Is this entire place not haunted enough without ugly dolls, I ask again? There is a limit, Palamedes.

[in the unfocused corner of the camera the doll absolutely turns its head to stare directly at the screen.]

Comments

[xiaoxiuya]

[Image: a selfie of Shen Yuan, wearing a smock, with a paintbrush held in front of his face like it's a fan. He's giving the camera a coolly amused look.]

I did. Now what's this about a sports jersey? You seem more like the "doesn't work out at all, ever, unless lifting books counts" type. (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧

[megatheorem]

[Oh no, he's a dork. Despite himself Palamedes finds this endearing, but not in a very flattering way, no offense, dork.]

Thanks! Anyway, that's precisely it. There's a guy around here called Shoyo, who organized a volleyball team for children and wheedled me into being the manager. It means I touch no sports equipment but I do have to wear the shirt.

[xiaoxiuya]

[Takes one to know one, dork!]

Pffffft. As a guy who spent three years coaching an entire mountain peak full of 11-18 year olds, trust me. They're going to have you wrapped up in the net and covered in dirt before the year's out.

[megatheorem]

Well, was it a big mountain?

[he has never been to a mountain]

That's still not playing the sport, technically, so I'm calling it a win.

[xiaoxiuya]

Oh sure, it was

[Hold on, how tall is Qing Jing Peak? He knows it's big, the thousand-step staircase down to the bottom of the mountain has way more than a thousand steps and it takes like two hours to climb down, which is why he nearly always flew unless he was shepherding some disciples around. And the peak itself is picturesquely large, in that cloud-piercing kind of way. But numerically? In a way SexPal would both understand and appreciate?

Wait.

He's got an idea.]

It was respectably-sized. In addition to all the people we had three of these that were always turning up to cause a ruckus. Mostly on my front lawn. Terrible creatures.

[Cute, but terrible.]

[megatheorem]

'Respectably-sized,' huh. There's a joke or twenty in there somewhere, but I wouldn't want to overcompensate.

[oop there's one now. anyway what the hell is this Creature. a Ninth mascot if he ever did see one, although fuzzier than possibly expected.]

What is that.

[xiaoxiuya]

[Har har har. A master jester if ever SY saw one.

His reaction to the panda bear, however, is everything SY wanted.]

What, never seen a Giant Panda before? I'm not surprised, I've been skim-reading some of the posts on this network and I saw you tell someone you're from Mercury? As in the planet? I'll admit to some curiosity about that; the Mercury in my home universe wasn't exactly hospitable to human life.

So. If you don't mind my asking, are you an alien? Or did you live in some kind of high-tech bunker? Or maybe Mercury was completely different in your universe? I'd love to know!

[No really, talk to science fiction to him. Please!]

[megatheorem]

You showed me a— 'giant panda' so you could ask me about the Mercury thing, didn't you.

[It's not a question. He can tell. He knows that trick, sir, he's done it plenty of times himself, although not with pandas.]

We call it the Sixth, unrelated to distance from the sun, and you're right: it's still an inhospitable rock sitting out there. I'd never been outside until this place, not really— unless I wanted my skull to melt.

People of the Sixth live in a high-tech bunker, yes. More or less. I'm a human person, but if you want to think of me as an alien anyway, I'll let it slide. I've been on a spaceship and you haven't, so I've got that going for me.

[Shot in the dark about the spaceship, but like, he thinks he's on to something.]

[xiaoxiuya]

You caught me. ₍₍٩( ᐛ )۶₎₎♪ We used to tell stories about people living in spaceships or on other planets on my home world, but our actual technology hadn't advanced any further than unmanned probes and sending humans to Earth's moon. So it's pretty exciting to meet someone who's actually done it!

[As with his conversation with Viktor, he is chomping at the bit to talk sci fi with someone after years living in fantasy worlds. Even if Palamedes also technically came from a fantasy world, with his sword-talking abilities. He hales from a real genre-buster, apparently!]

Fair's fair though, so I'll explain further: pandas are a type of land animal that live in mountain forests, where they subsist entirely on a type of very tall, very tough grass called bamboo. They're obligate herbivores, but this doesn't mean they're helpless; their jaws alone are strong enough to bite a human's hand off if provoked. Usually when they showed up on my peak to do their freaky mating behaviors, I had the students all leave them alone unless they were about to actually break into a building or something. Our world was dangerous enough without losing a hand to a glorified teddy bear.

So, how long had the Sixth (out of what?) lived on Mercury? :3c

[megatheorem]

[hm why would anyone want to let these big fluffy murder bears into their mountain school, seems wack]

The Sixth out of Nine Houses, [he begins, instead,] and it's been in the ballpark of ten thousand years. I've been to the First, that's your Earth, but no one lives there anymore.

[Weird huh! No need to explain any of that!]

Why did you have your school in a place where bears come to do 'mating behaviors'?

[xiaoxiuya]

[Well you see Ivan Palamedes, building a bear-proof fence around an entire mountain peak is no simple matter.]

What, for real? What happened, was there a war or something? And what about the other eight Houses, do they live on other planets in the solar system or what?

[Spill the beans, SexPal! He even capitalized House as a show of respect for your culture and everything ;3]

I genuinely have no idea why the school was built there Airplane never wrote that part, but at a guess the ancient cultivators thought it would build character. Or they chased the bears off before building and at some point in the intervening centuries they came back, idk.

Before you ask, cultivators cultivate spiritual energy. Magic, basically.

[You were totally going to ask, weren't you SexPal? Everyone does!]

[megatheorem]

[Put the school somewhere else!! Surely!]

I don't know every detail; I'm not ten thousand years old. And yes, they do, more or less. Obviously, we're not in any kind of logical order in physical space, which is what most people seem to have a problem with when they hear about this.

[Silliness... who cares about numerical order of planets... goofy.]

Anyway, I'll give you that magic cultivators would logically have more of a defensive chance against vegetable cultivators. Maybe it's my Sixth sensibilities showing, but the top of a mountain never sounds like a great place to be.

[xiaoxiuya]

If Earth is (was?) the First, then it stands to reason that the Houses were numbered in order of colonization. That's the assumption I'd have made, anyway. Am I totally off?

Anyway, you're asking me to justify the decisions made by people who left the mortal plane centuries ago. XD I don't know why they did what they did, maybe they really liked the view. Maybe they were all batshit insane, and the sect's been engaged in a thousand year+ game of whitewashing history. Who knows?

[The author would, maybe, if he weren't a fucking hack. SY is going to bully him so hard if he ever turns up here.]

I will say that the bamboo forest on my peak in particular was very pretty, when the bears weren't tearing up my lawn. Very restful, so long as one remembered to put up some wards before trying to meditate.