The Past is Prologue: Mercade

The Past is Prologue: Mercade
Date of Scene:	13 July 2013
Location:	Castle Oblivion
Synopsis:	The past is prologue. All else is chicanry and nonsense. Until it's not.
Thanks to:	Mercade. for patience
Cast of Characters:	Mercade Alexander
Tinyplot:	Fragmentary Passage

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Mysterious Can has posed:
There is another feeling of distortion and perspective shift on going through the doors. "Yes." Lucas says with a bemused smirk. "I believe we would have much to speak on."

Beyond the white double doors is.. a perfect copy of the corridor (sans sorcerer) and since there is no longer a sorcerer on THIS side as well it is an even more perfect reflection. --Which turns out to be an accurate wording as the pillars, the blue markings, everything is a mirrored reverse.

There are the doors he came through (although the glyph above the door has changed shape on the door's opening) and several doors down the corridor that they passed on the way here. There is also the mural, although this time it's the rolling green hills in the grip of high summer, the grass prickling yellow and scarred brown in places. The heat can almost be felt baking from the moving picture.

Although there is no blue line on the floor, there is one cutting it's way across the ceiling. There is a door towards the far left those symbol is similar to that on the wayfinder charm. There are in total four doors not including the way he came in, and more further down the corridor.

Mercade Alexander has posed:
Mercade walks out of a hall.

And into a hall.

He looks up, blinking, as he considers the complete amount of utter <goosehonk> this place is. He allows himself a couple minutes on this because it deserves a thorough mental expounding.

Once complete, Mercade walks down the hall, glancing at the picture as he passes. Hmm.

He looks over the doors, considering where to go next. Lucas gave him an obvious choice. The Wayfinder will be the guide. He flicks his hand, reproducing the object from his sleeve. He looks at it to see if it gives any indications, or if he should just go through the obvious door which is obvious with the star and all on it.

Because sometimes words have two meanings, and at the moment he might be in the market for a stairway to heaven.

Mysterious Can has posed:
Obvious door is no long obvious by virtue of no longer being a door.

The wayfinder shines, the smooth glass starting at one edge and moving across the face to the farthest point. There is a brief shifting flash and the obvious door makes a faint but noticable 'click-clunk' as if something has been unlocked on the other side.

The glyph above the door freezes, then evaporates like so much smoke leaving the door so sheer that it almost completely fades back into the texture of the surrounding walls save for a thin shimmering line that drops away like a curtain.

Since the room beyond is as white as the corridor, there is a visual distortion when the door is no longer there, just a white doorway leading into another white room

Apparantly, he was taken seriously about that stairway because there is one leading upwards into another part of the castle. There are several more of those heart shaped symbols on the walls, the bottom edges almost jagged.

At the top of the stairs?

City noise. Cars. People talking. The buzz of electricity. Come up the stairs leads out.. onto street level manhattan, or at least somewhere that looks mighty close to the Southern reaches of it.

Mercade Alexander has posed:
Mercade is just... He just makes a face at this turn of events. "Well, it's doing what it's supposed to do, I guess?" He says to himself as he looks up at the ex-door. This door is no more. It is no longer here. He frowns, and walks through it, looking around at the decor. Hearts. Huh. Interesting.

Mercade walks up the stairway, following the path as he moves upwards, heading for the top of the stairwell. There's nowhere else to go at the moment.

When he reaches the top, he looks around, blinking. Southern Manhattan? "Well, this is a surprise." He says to himself. He examines the area in more detail. Should he be heading somewhere? Maybe there is something he can pick up on as to the purpose of this... apparition? Is this even real? IS ANYTHING REAL?

Magic is <goosehonk>.

Stormfall has posed:
Magic is indeed, goosehonk. And the room as it comes into focus seems to echo the same. The details of the room slowly come into focus, a general sense that only starts to come into focus when examined carefully. It is small and everyday, almost defiantly normal in a place that outside was full of impossibilities.

It is a small and dingy apartment. In some vague sense it could be called an office but that would be an act of charity.

Newspapers line the walls.

"Manhattan DA asks to pass Gov's Anti-corruption bill"

"Crime on the rise: New york crime wave continues unabated"

Manhattan DA implicated in ongoing corruption investigations

There are shelves for books, many of the tomes well thumbed through and annotated. Others are simply worn, the spines broken in and slightly peeling with age. A small television in a comfortable corner spits nothing but white noise and peppery static, a constant low drone that quavers and shifts back and forth as the room is examined.

This place looks lived in. Every inch of it used or crammed with ameniable clutter. A comfortable feeling of the familiar has soaked straight into the slightly unappealing carpet. It looks like this place has been just vacated, as if the owner only stepped out for a moment. There is a desk and on the desk, well worn by age is a rather hokey looking box. It is almost magnificently hokey. An exercise in self-aggrandizement in posters and faded circus colors. It is not big enough to be a trunk but carries all the timeworn elements of one. It jars with the rest of the surroundings like the jagged edge of a tooth scrapes across a wound. It is tired and almost resigned, not loud or colorful as it might have been it might have been once upon a time.

The bindings are old and worn but polished to a dull lustre. The surface is covered with postmarks, a closer examination showed the pages of fiction not just glued to the outside but part of the outer exterior itself.

An advertisement for a magic show, with the face of the magician always shrouded is placed center stage and tilted across the top of the trunk.

Tap. Tap.

The TV abruptly clears with a hissing feedback noise and crackle of static. It reveals a monochrome image of an identical small apartment and an identical box. Only in this recounting there is someone standing next to the desk, sitting with casual elegance in a white suit that is far too classy for the dingy surroundings.

Her face is hidden by a white hat, her slender fingers drumming ever so lightly on the top of the box. In the TV image she opens the box and peers into it, her face and expression still shrouded. She pulls something shining and glorious from the box like a conjurer pulling a sword from a top hat. It can't be seen plainly, but the feeling radiates from the image.

Radiates from the television like a heat mirage. It's a similar feeling as in the dream, in the tower of voices. Only here it is not a crackling, static filled /something/ but a physical representation. A presence that dominates the TV as it begins to flicker.

The TV reception fades and there is a shattering of glass. A breaking of wood. Darkness crowds into the picture right as the TV goes dead with a crackling snap and power down of something breaking inside.

The woman looks up, eyes visible and peering out of the television with a quiet and smoldering promise as everything goes dim and dead.

Somewhere a clock chimes. Not an imperious and commanding tone but the gentle scything of seconds from an everyday clock on the wall somewhere.

Mercade Alexander has posed:
Everything comes into focus as Mercade looks up, everyhing changing around him. He looks over the surroundings, examining them intently. Some of the headlines bring back his own past, prickles dragging across his memorry, claws digging in...

And then everything snaps, coming into focus. It was just like his old apartment-office... Before he met the TDA. Something cleanly cut from the past and pasted into the universe...

No. Not so cleanly. Ragged edges, fuzziness, mars his recollection. Things seem subtly different to him, as he runs his hand over the desk, feeling the cheap material. Everything was cheap. The coffee. The disposable plates and silverware. Endless cups of coffee.

He looks back over his shoulder at the tapping, and his blood runs cold. "What is this?" He says to himself. Something is dragging up his past. The woman... He never saw her again after the events which led to-

"No!" He says, moving forward and reaching for the TV. He stops. He can't reach into the screen, that'd be stupid.

Also, this is the wrong MUSH for that.

The sensation of the Darkness rises, Mercade being thrown backwards as the screen blows out. He falls to the ground, slamming his head against the desk as he lands with a loud thud. He grunts, holding the back of his head and glaring up at the edge as if it had personally offended him in some manner...

A few seconds later, he stands up, and looks over at the festooned chest. Magic, huh.

Mercade shakes his head. There's only one way to go at this point. He opens the trunk and looks inside.

Stormfall has posed:
Behold the power of.. the stick?

Inside the hokey old box is a cheap red felt lining, a threadbare covering with a smattering of magical paraphenalia. Only. It is magic as Manhattan knew it before the fall. As a hoax and a trick of the light.

Possibly swamp gas, but this is the wrong genre for men in black suits and an explaination of a gas main explosion.

So instead there is a stick. Completely ordinary and plain, slightly gnarled towards the base and again towards the tip. Someone has painstakingly peeled the bark away although small strips of the brown bark can still be seen here and there.

Nestled on top of the stick is a small note where in a flowing and elegant hand, these words have been enscribed on the starkly white paper.

"Say the magic words."

The clock stops. Between the next whisk and the last, there is a long and held breath of nothing punctuated sharply by something crashing into the door. The impact makes the floor shudder and the air vibrate. The door does not survive a second assault, a menacing crocodile with swirly eyes ramming their head against the door and battering it open as the lock fractures.

There is no view of outside but instead another room as the crocodilian heartless arrives. It is a bizaare shade of magenta and jars just as obviously against the surroundings as the trunk. It opens it's mouth in a loud hiss, jaws splayed wide before it charges straight at Mercade.

Mercade Alexander has posed:
He stares into the trunk. At ome moment, he sees exactly what he expects to see: Useless sleight of hand stuff.

The next, there's a stick. Like some kind of quantum craziness. Mercade went to college, he knows the science and stuff. He was always /entertained/ by this stuff. He even uses some of their tricks occasonally to 'acquire evidence' and give out business cards.

But this?

Mercade reaches in and takes out the stick and the paper. The magic words?

There is a moment of utter confusion.

And then the onslaught begins. Mercade knew this was going to happen. He was /warned/ after all. He spins around, paper in one hand and stick in the other as he sees the huge crocodile Heartless appear. It's ugly. Ugly like the dark side of the city. Ugly, garish.... And very, very hungry. Mercade's brain seizes up. He should go for his gun. It could hurt Heartless, right?

But he can't get to it in time. There /is/ no more time. The charging crocodile is almost upon him, when Mercade, in desperation, thrusts out the stick and yells one word. It is not a majestic word. It's not anything arcane or eldritch. It's nothing he stole from Celina's books or Isaac's iHex in all those times he tried looking over the technomage's shoulder.

"PLEASE!"

He only knows one magic word.

Stormfall has posed:
And this is disney.

Please works as a magic word.

There is an ear-splitting CRACK and the jolt that goes all the way up the arm like a bone-breaking recoil. The repoire echoes in the sudden stillness as if the whole setting had flash frozen, or maybe that was just his arm.

It was not an unpleasant sensation, not entirely. The flash frozen moment gave way to a tingling rush of pins and needles somewhat like waking up too quickly. A feeling of disorientation with a sharp abrupt shock like falling out of bed.

The stick in hand is abruptly not stick-like, in the sleight of hand fashion of exchanging one object for another. The blade is simple and well worn, the same bronzish color as the underlying structure of the magic box.

There is a feeling of unreality about it as strong as the dreams before. As if it could look like anything if he looked away for too long, as if it were still inbetween several states and still shifting even in this instant of Oh Hell Look it's a CROCODILE.

And a pulse of energy, an arc cuts through that gaping maw like scissors cutting through paper. And the heartless explodes in dark fragments of newspaper clippings and dark vapor. A crystalline heart rises from the smouldering ash and then vanishes with a faint noise, almost inaudible, like relief.

Please works as a magic word.

Go figure.

Mercade Alexander has posed:
Mercade remembers that once Avira told him that magic requires belief, intent, and willpower. Being someone firmly grounded in the much more /normal/ side of Manhattan, Mercade grew up with a certain amount of skepticism. Being a detective tends to wear away on you, grinding down your dreams as you run into the darkness again and again

But this ship doesn't run on noir.

In that moment of abandonment of simple, sane logic (get gun, use gun on heartless, do victory dance) he, perhaps, yielded to a belief that something else could exist out there. It's not like he didn't have ample proof even in the face of his skepticism. But old habits die hard.

Regardless, in that moment the Heartless explodes, vanishing as the brilliant power tears through it. Mercade stands there, left with one arm covering his face in an attempt to ward off getting it chomped, while the other holds out...

"Wait, that doesn't feel like a stick."

Mercade slowly lowers his arm, looking up into the air as he sees the crystalline heart rise up and vanish. "That's... different." He mutters to himself, his mind seizing upon the mystery and beginning to disassemble it. When he's fought Heartless before, that's never happened. They always just vanish in blackness. He has, however, seen that happen before.

When Sora killed a Heartless. It released a Heart.

He pauses, and slooooowly looks to his hand, and what exactly he is holding.

Stormfall has posed:
The blade that Sora wields is simple and unadorned and in some respects, this is likewise. The bronzed metal still shifts slightly when it is being examined. There is an aura about it that it might never truly be known, even to him. Not completely.

This ship may not run on noir, but there is a slick and classy feel to the metal underneath his hand. The grip is the color of rain-washed bronze. The handle has a guard that folds around the hand, two small arcs that meet at the end of the hilt. That glassy star from the dream before, the only element that he took from that dream except for the memory of it, is attached there, It is attached in miniature but it's now connected as if it belonged there all along.

The blade runs in a smooth, clean lines to where three short tines extend from the end. In a way, the tines in profile look a little like the symbol he saw on the walls on the way into this apartment.

But it's more than a sword. It shimmers with that soap bubble tension just by existing. With that held-breath moment of possibility. There is a rough babble of voices and static as the Television turns on in the next room, which from the battered doorway looks identical to the first.

The scene inside the next TV is that of the TDA offices. People are coming and going. But there is an noticable absence to these movements. It looks a little like security footage, with a little datestamp in the corner of the picture. Even though the movements are normal speed, the date and the hour flicker by.

There is no Mercade Alexander in any of these pictures.

They were carrying on without him.

Worse. There is no conversation. There is no search.

He was not being looked for.

The woman in the white hat sat watching the television with her hands in her lap very elegant and properly. She looked up at him, looking up from the television.. and smiled.

"Hello Detective."

Mercade Alexander has posed:
Mercade, for the moment, feels afraid to hold this object... This... Keyblade..? tightly. As if by holding it too tight it might pop like the bubble it resembles.

Pure potential in his hand. How does that even work? Once again, Mercade's analytical mind rallies to make sense of the senseless, but he firmly puts a stop to it.

There will be time for that /later/. He looks over as he hears the television in the next room. He walks forward, wondering what he'll see next.

And what he sees is... The TDA moving on without him. Where is he? How long has he been gone?

Is this like one of those <goosehonk>ing faerie realms where you come out 100 years later? Worry and uncertainty seize Mercade's chest as cold dread spreads down the back of his neck like ice water.

And then the woman, again. He looks over to the woman, and blinks, frowning, immediately beginning to ask the first question that comes to mind. "Who..."

He pauses. No. That question doesn't matter. "... Why are you here?" Better.

Stormfall has posed:
"Because you asked for me." The woman says in her demur, elegant voice. "After all." she says with the thin razor edge of amusement. "There has to be an explaination for everything."

She slowly stands, straightening her shoulders. The fabric and in fact, the woman shimmers slightly, frayed at the edges like an ancient photograph as she walks over and turns off the television. She speaks down towards it as the image fades and goes dull.

"And I can give you that, if you wish." There is no sound but the faint chuff of her shoes on the carpet as she walks to the door, opening it and saying over her shoulder. "But there is so much more than that, Detective." A faint smile.

"..as I believe, you are beginning to suspect." She pauses at the door. "I will not say it will be an easy road." a gentle chuckle. "But then that would be a lie. And I'd prefer.. the truth. Wouldn't you?"

And she walks through the door into whatever else waits, whether or not he follows her.

Mercade Alexander has posed:
Mercade frowns at the response from the woman, and his mouth opens to retort... But words don't come. He pauses, something in what she says and how she says it causing him to hold back.

An explanation for everything. She says it like it's a joke. Something in him rebels against it, a challenge to his innermost assumptions on life.

When she leaves, Mercade follows. He could certainly stop. Let her go, and turn back and try to find a way out...

But that would just be turning one's back on the truth he's seeking.

A detective is a seeker of truth. Mercade adjusts his hat, drawing down the brim as he scowls. This is going to just get more and more complicated, isn't it... Mercade immediately follows her. If nothing else, he will be true to himself.