you are alive; so live (closed and open)

[100more]

WHO: Hob Gadling + others
WHEN: Between missions Dec - Jan
WHERE: Various
WHAT: Various encounters and catching up
NOTES\WARNINGS: None but will mark threads. Hob has just returned from a canon update.

Closed threads but open Wildcard. Any encounters are welcome. Just start a thread at any Etraya location or DM for plotting.

Comments

[artofrevenge]

"Was immortal life one of the mistakes you freely made?" Mizu asks. It is a mistake, in Mizu's opinion. She hopes Hob remains capable of dying, even if he's capable of living so long. It would be a true torture to live with no chance of a reprieve. He's lived... however long he's lived. Too long for a human. Perhaps he's come to terms with it or told himself as much. Even if that's a lie, Mizu has no reason to pierce it.

"Fate is a fancy way to say it's due to other people's choices," Mizu notes. She doesn't argue it. Plenty in her life has come from other people's decisions. They simply don't stop her, not since the cabin burned down and she swore her oath of revenge. Mizu's made her own choices since then, no matter what ones other people make. She thinks of Vergil and recognizes that her choices have changed, some, but that remains her choice, her decisions. What remains because of others (Mizu's aware the fact she and Hob are here in this library is one of them), she handles. Mizu will not even abdicate her responsibility to her mother, when her mother asked her to change her path. Mizu chose it. All the decisions she's made, good and bad, they're hers.

She glances back down at the map. "Our choices are our own. I've done my fair share of hard and lowly work to get by. I'm no rich merchant judging you for where you are or were."

[100more]

Hob laughs with amusement at the question. "Wasn’t exactly planned. Imagine my surprise when everyone else started getting old and I didn't. Took me a hundred years to discover what happened to me, and even then, I never knew the full story until recently."

There's a note of fondness in Hob's voice. "Still, I see it as a blessing. Life's an adventure, even when it goes on longer than expected." And that’s how Hob sees it, even if the Endless who bet against him didn't anticipate Hob would want to want to live forever. Perhaps a truly sane person would not wish it.

Hob looks down at the map, and in those lines he sees the past and the changes that have unfolded over hundreds of years. There are moments when he looks back and feels sorrow for the times and people he’s lost. There is much about the old ways of the world that Hob prefers. He misses how life used to be compared to the modern age, but there is wonder to be found in advancing years, as well.

"I've lived as both a rich man and a poor man. I prefer the man I am now."

[artofrevenge]

Imagine his surprise. Mizu imagines a tragedy, the heartbreak of slowly losing everyone he cared for no matter how strong and good of relationships he had. It's enough to make her heart race. Mizu is nowhere near a century old, but she's lost most people she's had in her life. Some to death, yes, but not to natural deaths at the end of one's life. There's always been some degree of fucking up, on someone's part (often Mizu's), and that ends things. It hurts to lose people in a way she could not put into words, and Hob... Hob lost everyone, no matter what he did. No matter how right he did his relationships. That seems a cruelty Mizu's never imagined before. It's a curse she's never imagined wishing upon a person.

Yet here he stands speaking of it as fondly as others do riches or power. Long has Mizu prayed at shrines to get her revenge or to be allowed to die. Even now that she has something else to live for, she cannot imagine what Hob describes. Life as an adventure? She shakes her head a little. The only comfort comes in knowing Hob is strange in his own way, not nearly as normal as he seems. Perhaps that's even why he's comfortable helping Mizu find her revenge. He's seen so many people die, what is it to him that she kills her fathers?

That's what matters, in the end, that he'll help her. Whoever, whatever, Hob has become, that is his own business. Not that it stops her from asking more questions.

"What kind of man are you now?"

[100more]

Hob may be far from normal, but perhaps that is also why Death granted him immortality and why Endless noticed him to begin with. Hob has experienced a great deal of loss, all of it painful. He remembers many loved ones he cherished who are gone now. Some died naturally, others had their lives cut short. But never him. And yet, when asked if he's ready to die, even when things were at their lowest, Hob believed he had so much to live for.

The question gets a smile as he glances down to the table with its books and maps, then back up to Mizu's eyes again. "The kind that wants to help you," he says gently. "It sounds like you were deeply wronged. I hope you get the chance to put it right."

[artofrevenge]

The answer is the one Mizu deserves. Anything else is Hob's business. It's fortunate enough, for her, that Hob both can and wants to help her. That's what she should focus on, not his strange avoidance of death so many men would be jealous of but Mizu believes sounds like a punishment worse than death. It's not her place to judge, save that she can and being a person naturally does.

"I wasn't the only one, but I'm the one they failed to kill," Mizu says, eyes back on the table. Her finger traces between the Thames and the neighborhoods Hob mentioned before. She's put everything he's told her about London to memory. So often, once is the only chance she gets to learn something. She will not grow lazy here.

"If you are amenable, I would love to pick your brain about everything you know of these places and the people in them," Mizu says with a grin.

[100more]

Hob blinks in surprise as Mizu expresses a desire to have further conversations. Luckily, history is one of Hob's favorite subjects. Naturally, his inside perspective can't be matched by records and books, though it would be nice if his students back home recognized this a little more often than they checked their phones in class. His immortality is a well-guarded secret in his own world, but he thinks his insight makes his lectures more interesting at the university where he works.

"Of course." An easy smile appears. "I'd be happy to talk more about it. Any time you'd like to continue our chat, just reach out."

[artofrevenge]

Mizu hardly thinks she can learn everything useful for her from Hob in a single conversation. She may not even think of all she should learn from him today, only discovering the right questions over time as she answers other questions. Already, she has topics to investigate, though she's unsure about the quality of this library for information on the topic of interest to her. Hob's ability to find and to share these books and maps is a promising start.

"Thank you," Mizu says earnestly. "I will do so."

And with ease, given the instant delivery of letters without need of a known physical address.