abraxaslogs | WELCOME TO THE FREE CITIES!

Entry tags:

WELCOME TO THE FREE CITIES!

WELCOME TO THE FREE CITIES!

Welcome to The Free Cities! The portal exits outside the capital city of Cadens. The first impression of the city is its sheer size. It sprawls out across the landscape like a great hulking beast at rest. The wall that encircles it barely contains it, the buildings of Cadens practically bulging against its restraint.

The air here seems thicker somehow, tinged with a scent that’s acrid and smoky. Smog hangs high over the city, belched out by smokestacks that tower over the industrial district. The desert stretches out behind it, dotted with towers and dust clouds that disappear into the horizon. Multiple gates lead inside and each is staffed by soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms that wave a steady stream of people through without appearing to pay much attention. People are coming and going almost all of the time, to and from the outposts and areas of activity around the city proper. It’s difficult to tell just what’s out there beyond the impression of tall metal structures and a great deal of labor. Wagons carrying travelers to Libertas and Aquila roll out from the Travel Post outside the city wall.

Anyone who can sense magic will notice a much lower concentration here. No one will be stopped or questioned at the gate, even if the soldiers seem to take note of the fugitives from Thorne.

The activity and sheer number of citizens can be overwhelming. It’s crowded and loud and feels constantly in motion with everyone talking and yelling over each other. It’s easy to get swept up in the ever-moving throng or find oneself ducking into the mouth of a narrow alley just to breathe.

Anyone who’s willing to make their way to the northern part of the city and Portham Hall will find Prime Minister Marlo Reiner available to receive them.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ There is something nice about not being argued with. People can think whatever they like. It's not like it'll make a difference. But there are only so many ways you can respond to someone insisting you're better than you are, and really, with Geralt the acceptance is a hell of a lot easier. It's the kind of people who want to think the best of others that Amos doesn't get. They just don't exist where he's from. The world weeds them out pretty quick.

And the two of them are still here, yeah. Amos is the kind to take up whatever space he wants. Won't ask for permission; won't ask for forgiveness, either. Probably helps that he's not greedy, at least. Can't help but wonder if Geralt is similar. They didn't have a choice in being here, and maybe they didn't have a choice back home, either. Amos didn't. Not for a long time, but it was too late for him by then.

Doesn't matter anymore. He nods at Geralt's assessment; he's right. Then he cocks his head, looking directly into his eyes as though that'll help get his point across in what he's about to ask. The unnatural colour. ]

So, when you say your kind. What do you mean by that? [ His voice is a casual drawl. Geralt can answer or not, but it's been referenced too many times in this conversation for Amos to just let it hang there any further — by Geralt himself, no less. ] I take it you're not human. Look plenty human to me, though that's really all we got back where I'm from.

[ Geralt looks right back. It’s not that the question catches him off guard so much as, by this point, he’s presumed Amos put it together some time ago and has merely chosen not to ask. Both his hair and his eyes have always given him away immediately back home; the medallion marks him on top of that. Blending in has never been a priority for them, and especially not for him. ]

It means exactly that. [ His answer comes without hesitation. Almost as though he not only doesn’t care who knows, but that he’d prefer not to be taken as human. He indicates the structure around them. ] I wasn’t only raised in this place. I was made here. One of the last.

[ Home becomes complicated in the face of that, but what isn’t? At least the mages who created them are long dead, though he understands, on some level, that he was shaped by more than the mutations that physically altered him. It just. It isn’t something he reflects on too much, his childhood. He can’t change it. And he didn’t choose it, no. Not really. What semblance of choice existed was given to him when he was only a boy, long after too much had happened.

Maybe Amos understands how that is. That feeling of, even if you could walk away, you wouldn't even know where to go. More than one person has asked him what he'd be, if not a Witcher, if at some point in his life he could've decided otherwise, and he's never been able to explain that that's not a concept he can grasp in any meaningful sense. He can tell by the look in their eyes they don't understand. For them, having dreams they can hope for, however distant and unlikely, is ingrained in a way it no longer is for him. (Except here. In the Horizon, once. When they'd all been stripped of their past.) ]

[ A blink, a furrowing of the brows at the simple answer. There's not a whole lot to go off of, but for the most obvious statement, the actual direct answer to his question: as human as he looks to Amos, Geralt's not actually human.

He's also definitely not a hybrid protomolecule monster, so that's fine by him. They can communicate; they've reached some level of understanding. And his eyes are golden, very much not an unnatural blue. It's not like there's a threat.

Amos looks up, around at the empty hall they're in. Whatever being made here means — he can only assume something happened to Geralt to make him what he is; something different from what Amos went through considering how, much as he doesn't really feel like a person, he still very much is one. Still, considering how well they get along, who's to say if whatever Geralt went through was anything good — it's a really nice place. Spacious. Something he'd have never been able to conceive of.

He takes that much longer to soak it all in. What it would have meant to grow up somewhere like this. Homely. Places to hide.

Shit. Though, yeah. Nothing to be done about childhoods once you grow out of them. They are what they are, and all you can really do after is play the hand you're dealt. You get a shit hand, you play a shit life. Not a whole lot else to it.

(There are no dreams, no. Not even without a past to look back on, understand why you are the way you are. It's just one day after another until you're dead. And hopefully you don't fuck up too bad along the way.)

He looks back at Geralt. ]

Seems like a nice place to be raised. [ A beat. ] How come they stopped making your kind?

[ He thinks he can harbour a guess, though his only real experience comes from protomolecule hybrids. And whatever kind of threat Geralt might have posed back where he's from, he's not that. ]

[ The truth is, Geralt hasn’t got a proper term for what he is for those who don’t know what a Witcher means, though hybrid would be fairly close. His understanding of what was done to him is rudimentary at best; most of the research's been set ablaze and he was all but five when he underwent it—but he knows enough to realize that he shares more than a few aspects in common with the creatures he hunts.

He doesn’t expect that comment, though, and it shows. A nice place. He glances up at the high ceilings, the old walls. To him, it’s comforting; where he goes to leave behind the rest of the world. He also knows Kaer Morhen is crumbling, dying. No one ever comes here other than his own back on the Continent, but he’s always imagined if they did, they’d think it cold and lonely. Foreboding. Fitting, for an equally dying breed. He’s curious, suddenly, what Amos’ world looks like if he finds this nice.

His gaze drifts for a moment to the medallions hanging before it returns to Amos. It’s not a secret, what happened, and the way he answers suggests he's long buried how he feels about it. ] We were created, at first, to kill the monsters that roamed. More and more, those monsters dwindled. People turned their fears elsewhere. After that night, the process was lost. Amongst other things.

[ What’s left is left. Geralt has only brief memories of a time when there were dozens of them. He was a boy when the mob stormed the fortress. Freshly out of the Trials that killed more than half of the children taken with him, before the violence outside ever came knocking. So. The bones that fill the snow and the scattering of Witchers who remained in these hollowed out halls—that’s what he grew up with. ]

[ Amos thinks he's got a decent handle on Geralt. At the very least, there's no real confusion between them; what you see tends to be what you get, and Amos appreciates that. So the way Geralt reacts to his analysis of where they are — and he doesn't say shit to be polite, it genuinely is nice — well. So he missed something there.

Maybe it used to be nicer. He'd think that unheard of, but considering how much of the actual world they're in is shit he's never experienced before, yeah. Maybe it was better before.

He follows Geralt's gaze towards the medallions, meets his eyes again when he comes back. Doesn't know the significance there, but there clearly is one. What he does recognize is the straightforward way Geralt talks; the meaning behind the words. Despite the vast differences between where they came from, there's that understanding again. Amos absorbs what he says. Doesn't really have a whole lot to say in return. Except. ]

You still hunted after, though. Got paid for it. If someone stiffed you, you just walked away. [ Don't fit into the world around you, check; try anyway, check. ] Why?

[ Amos has his why: Lydia taught him, and he'd seen direct rewards from those lessons. But it's still not a fix. There is no fix. There's no repairing those parts of his brain; there's only damaging them further.

Except fucking magic exists here. And Geralt's from somewhere like that. There's suddenly a new variable to the equation. And Amos knows better than to get his hopes up, but data collection never hurt. ]

[ Why indeed. Amos is not the first to ask him why. Geralt seems to be thinking it over, like he has an answer, several answers, but isn't sure which one is the right one to put forwards in this moment. It's the first time that someone has asked him where he hasn't gotten the sense that they have their own ideas about his whys. Or that he should be doing something other than what he's chosen to. ]

People see monsters where they want to see them. [ Easier, is it not? To look for strange creatures lurking outside than the shadows that lie inside their own homes. ] They'll think of me as they will. But I know what I am. I know what I'm not.

[ That's what he has. It's all he has, because without it, he simply becomes...what everyone else has decided for him. A shadow, manifested at their whims. They are either taken in by the stories that frightened them as children or the romantic tales that Jaskier has built his fame off of, and neither are true. People believe what they need to, to get through the dredge of their lives. That's all. He knows, when he dies face down in the mud somewhere, he will not be missed. Not like that. The White Wolf. A shame, about the bard's muse. May he find another to continue entertaining the masses.

He's long stopped caring what the world wants or thinks of him. As long as he knows, that's enough. Maybe that's why Ciri's presence continues to leave him on such fucking uneven footing, every time she turns to him like he has answers no one else does, like he's more than just the man who happened to put a sword in her hand and taught her how to use it. It is, possibly, the first time he wants to be what another sees in him. And he doesn't think he can. ]

[ Oh, yeah. He's all too familiar with monsters. Not so much the literal kind — and he's perfectly happy to keep his interactions with those protomolecule fuckers as limited as possible, which, fortunately, doesn't seem like it's going to be a problem here — but the everyday ones? The ones you see on the street, the ones who come to where you live? Yeah. Sure. Amos knows them. Knows there are degrees to them. Knows that for as much as he himself is one, there's a far more evil kind out there; the kind he'll kill on sight and be done with it.

So Geralt's the same kind of monster he is, Amos takes it. Can't change what people think, but there are worse out there. Not the kind Amos is familiar with, he's pretty sure, but still. The kind that've got to be taken out. And Geralt does that.

Amos nods, plenty satisfied with that answer. ] Because there are people who can't fight them. And they don't deserve to die by them. Yeah. That makes sense.

[ Fucking magic probably isn't going to be a solve for Amos, either. But, shit. Maybe there is something comforting in knowing there's someone else here who kinda gets it. He's never going to improve, but if he can remind himself of Geralt's approach, maybe he can stop himself from doing anything stupid. Not like he's got a ton of options out here.

He glances back the way he originally came in, from out in the snow and bones and swords and shit; back at Geralt, perfectly at ease. ]

Swords are enough to kill your monsters? [ It's a real question, though it seems kinda quaint to him. But everything here is kinda quaint to him. Just one of those things he's not gonna be able to avoid. ]

[ His eyes stay on Amos: not scrutinizing, just watching. The man is both difficult to read and oddly transparent at the same time. It's interesting. And perhaps makes him easy to trust, in the sense that Geralt can ask where Amos stands at any given moment and know he'll always get a straight answer.

Geralt rarely speaks to who deserves or doesn't deserve. How he tells it, it's a simple matter of a worthwhile contract or not. He does not play at being judge and executioner. That's not what he's here for. But underneath—yeah. Sometimes he makes that call. Maybe more than he should, maybe more than he realizes for every time he decides to turn down a job in favour of another. Whether he's right to or not is another story. Amos seems to get what he needs out of the answer, so Geralt doesn't add anything further. ]

Depends on who's holding the sword. [ Geralt reaches over for a sword that wasn't there before on the table. He holds it out for Amos to take, if he wants. Normally he wouldn't—he never gives his sword over to anyone—but this one's not actually his. Or even real. Feels real enough, though. It's about as plain as a sword can be, other than a brooch affixed to the hilt: gold, adorned with gems, and clearly not a piece belonging to him.

His eyebrow lifts, curious. ] Blade feels fair enough for you?

[ That'd make two of them, then. Not in so much as Amos cares about reading people — once he's got the basics down of who someone is, he's good; if it goes further than that then, well, he'll have to figure that out when the time comes — but knowing that at least, between the two of them, there's never going to be any bullshit. He might never call Geralt a brother in the way he would Holden, but a fraction of the sentiment could be there.

Nothing's real here, so Amos can reach out and take the sharp object, weigh it in his own hands. It's different from a gun, that's for sure. He blinks at the gems — now, why would you put those on a weapon — and turns his attention to the actual blade itself. Shifts so he can give it an experimental poke at its tip, doesn't react when a bead of blood wells up on his finger, whether it hurts or not. Was kinda expecting that.

He looks back up at Geralt, something of a grin on his lips. They're just talking shop; he can appreciate the basic craftsmanship. Less the gold and shit, but the way the thing is built. ] Sure. This'd kill a person, easy. I mean, not as easy as a gun. Kinda at a disadvantage with the whole limited distance thing. But anything that's got flesh 'n blood, this'd do in a pinch. [ He speaks as though he's considering something that actually doesn't necessarily have flesh and blood, but it's casual enough. That shit isn't here. ] How long it take you to get the hang of one of these things?

[ A gun, you just pull the trigger and that's about it. He'd learned to disassemble and reassemble them at an early enough age, too; turned out he had an aptitude for that. This, though — a sword would take more physical exertion, that much is obvious. Not that Amos isn't the kind of guy who couldn't handle that, but it's also very much not a memory his muscles would be familiar with. And when it comes to shit you can use to kill other people, he's pretty respectful of it, not the type to go off half-cocked. So. It's kinda an important question. ]

[ Were it anyone else, Geralt might've said something about slicing yourself on his blade, but it's Amos and both the lack of reaction and the fact that the man's done it at all no longer strikes him as unusual. Eventually, he'll ask Amos to explain what the fuck a gun is to him, in detail, or just show him right here in the Horizon. A topic for another time. Even if he is intrigued now that Amos has brought it up more than once.

He does catch that expression, though. He feels it, too: this is what he knows, his weapons, his blades. How to use them. It's an easy conversation to have. Geralt doesn't think twice about the flesh and blood comment—plenty who have neither in his world—though it'll kill more than just that. ]

Mm. [ A thoughtful sound. He studies the way Amos is holding the sword, examining it. Hard question to answer, really. He'd been trained from an early age, so early it feels as though he's always known how. ] I held my first sword before I could reach my horse. But for you...give it a few months. You need only be better than what you're killing. Provided you have a decent instructor.

[ Is he offering? He might be. It isn't an offer he'd normally make, but what the hell. He likes Amos well enough, already knows they get along fine, and more than that, it's probably worthwhile to arm someone he's beginning to consider an ally. That they can do so inside this place makes it even simpler. No watchful eyes; no real injuries that can be inflicted. It'll work. ]

[ Not that Amos is fishing whenever he brings up guns — he doesn't fish, he's as straightforward as one can get — but the day Geralt asks him what a gun is, shit, Amos'll be more than happy to show him. He misses guns so much. The more he holds the sword, the more he thinks he can like the feel of it, but... guns, man.

He grunts in acknowledgment, a thoughtful huh sound, at Geralt's assessment that Amos could pick up an entirely new weapon within a couple of months. Won't disagree with that. If anything, he's borderline pleased by the idea. ]

Yeah, that's usually me. Last man standing. [ He grips the sword by the hilt with one hand, resting its base on the top of the table while his other hand rests freely on his lap, and peers up at the blade. Around it to look back at Geralt. ] You consider yourself a decent instructor? Or should I find someone better?

[ The last part is teasing; though he isn't outright smiling, he's in a pretty good mood. Has already decided Geralt has cast himself as his instructor. Shit, if the guy learned how to wield one of these things when he was that small... yeah, he probably knows a thing or two. Who better to learn from, really? As if there's anyone else here. And even if there were, Geralt's the one he likes, and Geralt's the one who knows what he's talking about. Thanks for the offer, teach; consider it accepted. ]

[ That's the idea. Last man standing. Skilled handling is only half the picture, and straightforward to teach; the more difficult part is learning not to hesitate, and something tells him Amos has that well internalized. Geralt doesn't cross swords with anyone he isn't willing to kill. That's truthfully what it comes down to. He had that lesson early on, too.

Probably not a lesson meant for a child, but. No one's quite been in a position to tell him that.

Wry amusement tilts his lips. ] You'd need to come home with me and meet the old man for better.

[ Whoever that old man may be to him, Geralt leaves it unsaid. For all the easy confidence in how he speaks of his skill, there's a distinct lack of pride. It's a simple fact: a majority were not raised as he was nor do they possess a full century of experience doing one job and one job only. Though he imagines more than a handful out there somewhere could best him when it comes down to it. They'd just not be human.

Either way, Amos can consider himself one of exactly two students Geralt's ever taken on in his long life, and the first who isn't literally his ward. ]

[ Amos meets that amusement, matches it, though probably for a much different reason. The old man's Geralt's Lydia, he figures, and picturing Lydia with a sword is kinda funny. Now that Amos is holding one in his hands, he can see himself learning to wield one. Lydia, though? Or anyone from Baltimore, really? It'd be a total mismatch. So of course he'd be the one ending up learning.

Fits him well enough, he figures, as someone who was actually able to escape. He's already been marked as different. If he'd grown up in the Belt, maybe he would've grown up to be normal. Instead he grew up in Baltimore, learned things as a child he shouldn't have known until he was an adult, and now he and Geralt get along real well. It's all kinda funny. ]

Guess I'll just have to make do.

[ He sets the sword back down, resting it on the table. Maybe he'll be able to find a one back in Solvunn, get his real body used to the idea, translate whatever it is Geralt ends up teaching him here to the real world. Make it instinct. That part wouldn't be new. ]

Hey, thanks. Looks like wandering around here — [ the Horizon — ] has its advantages after all. Didn't know if I'd see you again, but that turned out alright.

[ Or, you know. They're friends. Better yet, Amos is pretty sure Geralt is someone he can count on if everything goes to hell, and as much as he's looking for someone to tether his own busted moral compass to, it's kinda nice to know he's got that side of things covered now.

Not entirely sure what it says about him, that he's found a brother in arms before anyone else, but not like that's something that's ever really bothered him before. ]

[ The air between them has always been one of relative ease, but now it's particularly so. He decides not to examine it too deeply. The matter is always complicated with him; as slow as he is to trust, there's something to be said for the rare simplicity that comes with having someone he considers reliable but not especially close. There's enough distance between them that it's comfortable.

And the sword does suit Amos somehow. He'll do just fine with it.

A tip of his head acknowledges the thanks. He can admit it's good to find people again—people he's been wondering about in the back of his mind, after the chaos of that day. ]

If the sheep sheering ever grows dull, you know where to find me.

[ Here or, if any future mysterious portals open up, in the Free Cities—either way, it's clear Amos' company can be slotted under the generally welcome category. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

WELCOME TO THE FREE CITIES!

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject