~ Tнє Pαяα∂σχ Hσυѕє ~ now back to regularly scheduled chaos

Kelsier | Living Room | <Raintalon>

It was easy to see her as an enemy. Easy to see her as someone to fight, as someone to end. He was a killer, through and through, it seemed.

But not this time.

He wasn’t fighting to kill this time, though he knew she thought he was. He just had to stop her, had to make her listen to him. And, hopefully, make her realize that he wasn’t a threat to her.

The irony of the situation was not lost on him. Only this time, he had no desire to kill.

He listened to her, and his heart broke a little for her, the fear adding venom to her defiant words. Here she was, expecting to die, refusing to give in.

“Believe it or not,” he said softly, “I wasn’t lying. You’re in the Paradox House. I am not a threat to you. I am not a dove, as you would know if you thought about the way I was fighting. Just now. I’ll demonstrate all you like if you stop trying to kill me.”

He released her, backing up, daggers held loosely at his side. “Let’s try that again.” He suggested pleasantly. “I’m Kelsier. Nice to meet you.”

Kelsier | Living Room | <Raintalon>

Kelsier didn’t have time to do so much as let out a gasp of surprise before he was pinned and staring at the strange weapon pointed at his eye.

Damn.

He stared at the girl, expression calm. This was not the first or the last time he would face death. He would rather she not kill him, overall. He didn’t have any guarantees about coming back this time. But if she expected him to beg, she had the wrong man.

His words were all that stood between him and death.

It was a good thing he’d always had plenty of those.

“You can kill me.” He told her, voice calm. “But I’m guessing you’re scared and confused and angry and you don’t have a clue what’s going on. And I’m guessing you want answers.”

Kelsier smiled. “If you want me to beg you for mercy, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint. But if you want me to tell you what’s going on, you’ll need to think this through. You saw me fight just now. I don’t know what your world is like, but I’m guessing people can’t do what I just did.”

He could, technically, have Pulled on a lamp and crashed it into her. He didn’t know whether that would have made her back off, but he could have tried.

He didn’t do that. Instead he stood there, looking at her, waiting.

“You’re choice,” he told her. “I’m happy to explain. Or you can kill me and figure it out on your own.”

Orpheus appeared, the last note of a song ringing through the room before he realized where he was. The lyre dropped down, hanging from his fingertips. The House had let him keep his bandana, but it had replaced his other clothes with suitably soft ones – a plain old shirt with a guitar printed on it and a loose sweatshirt that was exceedingly soft on the inside. He pulled it a little closer, then glanced down at the red, white, and black fuzzy socks the House had given him. Shame it hadn’t thought about making him warm like this when he’d been in the middle of a snowstorm. Still… he would enjoy a nice room whenever he could.
“Oh,” he whispered, realizing he wasn’t alone. “Hi,” he smiled, raising a hand at Eurydice. It was the girl from before. He set his instrument down against one of the couches, trusting the House wouldn’t destroy it. He didn’t know what the room was supposed to be, but the blankets looked soft.

“Bandana guy?” Orpheus repeated, awkwardly scratching at his neck. Well… if she didn’t remember his name, was it weird that he remembered hers?
“It was Eurydice, right?” Too late now, if it was weird. He couldn’t just… unremember it… unless she wanted him to, in which case… he could try. He offered a sort of shy smile, unsure if he was doing the right thing. He couldn’t read her smile, but he found he liked it. It was sharp, but not quite sharp enough to cut. Still… what would it look like softer, more genuine? Part of him wanted to try to make that smile just a little bit softer, wanted to open up Eurydice’s shell and offer her a soft place to land. The House… wasn’t probably the best place to do that, though.

“That’s me,” Orpheus replied, a smile spreading across his face at that. He obviously had no way to hide that he was pleased she had remembered.
“Yeah… this is a room,” he added, looking around. He frowned for just a moment before he grabbed one of the blankets that had been folded up on the couch and wrapped it around himself like a cape. It looked soft, and he wasn’t going to pass that opportunity up. “A lot of them are dangerous, and they technically say you shouldn’t enter them alone, but… we’re not alone. And we didn’t really have a choice this time.” Was he rambling? Probably a little bit. “At least it seems like a nice room!”

“No I mean… you ran into the hallway last time, so you saw all the doors… this is where one of the doors leads to,” Orpheus explained earnestly, not even considering the possibility that he was making fun of her. He was just… explaining it as best he could. He still felt like a new blinker himself. Most people had been in plenty more room than he had… plenty of people would be able to explain this better.
His expression immediately dropped at the question. “There was one,” he murmured, voice soft as though he didn’t really want to explain, but he felt explaining to be worth something anyway, “where everyone was told they had to kill each other to ‘win.’ They were all brought back, but… I watched a lot of good people die.” There was a note of grief in his tone, though he had been there when they had each blinked back into the room that served as a sort of ‘afterlife.’ He pulled the blanket just a little bit closer around him.
Glancing around the room one more time, he picked up a second blanket, spreading it out and then draping it over part of the couch.
“Now it looks like the rest of the room,” he explained softly, the smile returning to his face, albeit a bit more subdued than it had been.

Orpheus held Eurydice’s gaze, hoping he hadn’t upset her too much with his description of the room. It hadn’t been pleasant to experience, even if he hadn’t been in danger. He’d still seen people he had started to think of as friends put in positions they had never wanted to be in. The people he had cared about then had died first, too. He shook his head of the thought. It was easier to focus on the room they were in.
“Don’t worry,” he murmured, his voice serious but still gentle, “I made a promise to a friend that I was going to make it even, here. So that the good experiences are just as common and powerful as the bad.” He didn’t seem to acknowledge that it might be an impossible task. He just gestured at the instrument leaning up against the couch, then stepped back to adjust the blanket he’d put up.
When he looked back, Eurydice had wrapped herself in the blanket, and Orpheus couldn’t hide the way his smile widened. Extra fabric like this wasn’t something most of the people he knew could spare. Judging from the coat Eurydice had worn last time… he had a feeling it was similar for her.
“Maybe,” he replied, pulling his own blanket a little bit closer. “It looks a little bit like a tiny city,” he mused, tilting his head so the blankets that were already up looked a little bit more like slanted roofs. “Even if it doesn’t want us to… maybe it would be nice to finish it anyway.”

“-it could heal the historic rift…” Nico’s eyes widened as he noticed his blink, and he let the pomegranate he’d been eaten fall down to his side. He’d lost his appetite, but he was still trying to eat at least a little bit. If only so if Kelsier asked him if he’d eaten, he could say he had. Kelsier worried too much about his health. The thought almost made him smile, but he pushed it away before it could.
He wasn’t alone, he realized, shifting how he was sitting so he could see the room a little bit better.
“You were alive last time I saw you,” he commented, tilting his head a little bit. The words were a little bit more blunt than he’d meant to make them, but… it was the truth. She’d been alive in the room where they’d all been told to kill each other. Blunt though it may have been, there was no judgment in his tone. It was just an observation.

Rue | Living Room | strider <Raintalon>

Rue looked up as a boy blinked in, and she paused, considering him. She recognized him from the arena room, though she hadn’t seen him for more than a few seconds in the actual arena. Then she’d seen him in the next room, the one where they’d had to watch on the screens. He hadn’t taken it well. She didn’t blame him.
She pushed herself up, to a sitting position before she spoke, shrugging a little. “I wouldn’t have been for much longer,” she told him. “Remember the arena room? That’s my world. That’s where I am now,”
She shrugged a little, wrapping her arms around her knees. “But I’m gonna live.” She added firmly, half to herself.
Another voice made her turn her head and she paused, remembering their last encounter.
“It’s me. Rue.” She said cautiously, watching her. She didn’t know what to expect.

Solaris | Living room | ®Hawkpath® strider |

"Oh. Hey Rue."

Sol paused in her snacking to stare down at the floor, the room getting heavy all of a sudden like someone had draped a too-hot blanket over everyone here. She didn't like that feeling. Especially when she could feel goosebumps on the back of her neck again.

She took a little breath, and then turned to the other voice - oh, she recognized him, too.

"Oh yeah, from the skyplane room," she said, seemingly unaware that she'd gotten the word wrong. "Boy, that was fun. I'm Sol, by the way." She paused, waiting for him to give his name.

“Fun is one word for it,” Nico grumbled, shaking his head a little bit. He didn’t want to think about what it had felt like to be plummeting through the air like that. Sol hadn’t seemed nearly as terrified as the rest of them. Perhaps it was just because she couldn’t see how fast they had been hurtling towards the ground. Or maybe she just wasn’t afraid of heights. Nico hadn’t been afraid of heights until he’d been given a very good reason to be. Stupid Zeus.
“I’m Nico,” he added, picking a few more seeds out of the pomegranate and popping them in his mouth. Was he ever going to get used to the taste of pomegranate again? He figured he probably wouldn’t. Oh well. It wasn’t like some great, tremendous loss.
Seeing Rue stand up, he decided it would probably be best to follow her lead. A room sounded nicer than sitting there, forced to think about the insane thing he was going to do when he blinked back to his world. And it was probably better than letting the two of them wallow in whatever tension was between them.
“Room?” he asked, scarcely waiting for an answer before he began to head for the hall.

"Allomancy?" Myrnin asked with curiosity. He personally had no idea what that was, or, for that matter, what it could do. Or, there was Kelsier's world's details and all that, but that didn't give him a practical knowledge.
So of course he jumped at the chance. He rubbed his hands together, grin included, and said, "Yessssssssss."
He had no idea how they would go about this little project of theirs, but it seemed like a good effort was going to be made.
With that in mind, he did indicate the metal tray. 
"I mean, there is frosting, but I don't think it will be sticky enough. Huuum. What if we mixed metal in with it? Could you make the two metal portions stick together? Would that work? Can you do that? I don't know anything about this and I am fascinated." That seemed to be the general reaction of most of what Myrnin had in mind. 
"Sideways, upside down house! Perfect!"

Nico tilted his head a little bit as he listened to Kelsier. He was still disappointed he wasn’t Mistborn – it seemed awfully cool to have superpowers like that – but maybe he could be okay with just being himself. Maybe, if Kelsier saw something cool there, he was right. After all, Kelsier seemed smart. And he was nice. People didn’t tend to be both smart and nice, so the moment Nico found someone who was both… well, he was inclined to believe he might be worth listening to.
He nodded slowly, making sure Kelsier could see the motion. He was listening. He was going to try to be cool, even without superpowers. Maybe he wouldn’t go straight for fighting bad people (even if that was what he hoped he could do at some point in the future), but maybe he could fight in his own way. Maybe he wouldn’t shut up the next time the teachers told him to stop asking questions. Maybe he would be just a little bit braver when it came to saying what he thought, because it seemed like that would make Kelsier proud. He found he wanted to make Kelsier proud, though he couldn’t have quite articulated why.
“That sounds cool too, though!” Nico exclaimed, wondering what it would be like to be able to remember things from before he was born. “I mean… they teach us things in history, and we have to remember what happened, but it would be… it would be a lot more interesting if you could just remember what had happened instead. Because I don’t think a lot of people we learn about in history were much like what they say they were. I think it would be cool to be able to remember how they actually were.” He wasn’t sure he was saying exactly what he meant, but he wasn’t interested in the memorization. He was more interested in the possibility of living through history using someone else’s memories. You couldn’t get hurt in memories, but you could learn a lot, especially if they weren’t yours. At least… Nico thought that was probably how that worked.
“Yours are cooler, though,” he agreed after a long moment, his smile widening. Still… any superpower was better than no superpower at all.
Kelsier’s world wasn’t Nico’s to worry about. He would probably never see it. Yet… he wanted Kelsier to save it. He wanted Kelsier to bring plants and flowers and make it pretty, and he wanted Kelsier to be able to see butterflies whenever he wanted. He didn’t know why he cared so much, especially when he figured a lot of people would tell him it was stupid. Or they would tell him to get his head out of his clouds and insist that other worlds didn’t exist. The second option was more likely.
“Maybe I’ll get to go to your world when it’s fixed,” he whispered, eyes wide. He hoped he’d be able to, though he didn’t really know how travel between worlds worked. Mainly, he didn’t know that it didn’t work.

Heart of the Woods | Myrnin & Rowlin | @shiningdiamobd

"I'm old and I'm still falling over rocks," Myrnin noted. He couldn't exactly trip over one right now as an example, but he still floundered a bit to prove his point. "Age does not delete clumsiness, very unfortunately."

Even still, a lot of his clumsiness was intentional.

It would seem like he was exactly what people thought Rowlin was. He wouldn't enlighten Rowlin on this fact. It just wasn't needed right now. He was much more focused on the fact that falling over in his current state of half frozen was not the best idea. No falling and not being able to get up. Bad for his health.

He did listen to Rowlin's philosophy about life though. Then he paused. Heh. The history teacher was giving him a history lesson on his types of vampires.

"So you're speculating you might be descended from these sorts of constantly cold vampires?" he inquired. "That would be vaaaaastly interesting."

Or was Rowlin implying something else?

Because he'd said these cold vampires couldn't make more. They just made normal vampires. But Rowlin had also said he was always cold. How fascinating.

"Do you have some dark shadow inside you, fighting your human side?" he wondered. "I would think that would tell you for sure which you were. Ice or entity."

His own long life stretched out with its own problems. His own dark shadows. Not like the ones that Rowlin described. His seemed ... harder. But maybe that was just because it was his own.

He did follow Rowlin and his glowing wristband - heh, sorry, crystal. The fact that there were magic crystals in Rowlin's world hardly surprised him. There seemed to be a lot, honestly. A whole lot that just seemed to be going on with that. The fact they were heading for another crystal made sense from what Rowlin had said though.

"It looks damaged," Myrnin noted. "It isn't emitting as much light as yours."

Had someone broken it?

He did however find his attention moving toward the sound, very distantly heard, like wheels. This meant he was not looking toward the wind and icicle related attack.

"There's something over there," he murmured.