Topic: Return of the Raggedy Man (Forgetting Fate)

Pharlen · Date: 2013-02-23 13:35 EST

It was said that Jack Von Tombs was of such skill that he could make even his own victims appear lifelike within the casket, which was something of pumped up praise: Jack would only create that sort of a mess if the hit required it. He had been working at both of his trades for far too long to make amateur mistakes.

The world had changed considerably since Jack returned from medical school to once more take up a place at the mortuary tables beside his father. Every advance in technology, much as Jack loathed it, had to be thoroughly investigated and defused.

He remained the shadowy assassin's assassin, an enforcer called upon only by the most desperate, the greediest, the most vengeance seeking? And a mortician who could take a casket full of spare change and a few long bones and turn it into something that the family could look upon one final time.

"Okay, Princess, now remove the IV tubing, and don't let the fluid splash all over, you'll get bleach spots on your dress. Why don't you go put on a lab coat?" Jack murmured as he oversaw his most precious of possessions cheerfully helping him with a cadaver.

Young Miss Jacqueline Von Tombs was all business as she removed the IV, with only a glance at her colorful red print dress.

"Ruining this dress would be just reward for not being careful, Daddy," she noted primly. Jack laughed. That was his girl. He still grabbed one of of the lab coats and threw it over her slim shoulders.

"And listening to your mother bitch about me letting you do that is my just reward for not making you wear a lab coat, little minx. Now. What do you propose we do about this subject's face?" Jack chuckled, turning from the table to lift up a pole. He used the hook on the end of that to open the transom windows, letting fresh air and light into the cellar morgue.

"Uhmm? Well, first we have to find out how much money his family paid to make him look good?" Jackie mused, turning to find the work order on the cadaver. Jack just beamed so proudly, he thought he might bust.

"Wowsers, Dad, this cat must have been loaded," the girl reported a moment later, "Okay, so I ? How do I do it?"

"You have to focus, Princess. The flesh is putty, and you are the sculptor. Put the photo by the head, and first, close up the wounds, make sure the eyeballs are in their sockets," Jack explained, setting a full face photograph of the cadaver in life beside the head of the deceased.

He hadn't been a handsome man, and in Jack's experience, those were actually more difficult to work with than the beautiful. There was an awesome asymmetrical elegance to the ugly: they were far more beautiful to an artist than perfection.

Jackie's brow knit. She carefully pressed at gaping wounds, torn muscle, loose fat, and under her fingers, the flesh melded back together seamlessly.

"How did you find out you could do this, Daddy?" Jackie asked, a bit cautiously. Her father was rarely willing to share his past with even his beloved children. They knew he had been born in 1910. They knew he died in 1931.

"Working on a stiff. I just pushed the flesh into place and hey, presto," Jack responded with a slight shrug, watching his daughter's work keenly.

"How did it happen? Like, you just ? it just happened?" the girl wondered.

"Just like your mother, take an inch for a mile," Jack chuckled softly. Folding his arms, he half sat on an enameled countertop, intense green gaze lifting towards the elaborate tin ceiling overhead. Needed to be painted again, he decided.

"Best I can explain to you, Princess, is that Lady Fate is a bitch goddess to follow, and I always did. She shaped me and made me just as sure as you're shaping that face to look like Johnny Depp, stop that and use the photo, girl." Jack finally murmured, the musical tenor turning to a scold. Jackie paused, flushing scarlet, and quickly redirected herself.

"She's thrown every madness she possibly could at me, and I have grappled with each and every one of them and if I couldn't make it work for me, I damn well cut it away from me. I don't understand it, that's your mother's thing, trying to figure it out, but I don't waste my time," Jack went on thoughtfully, "Lady Fate does as she does."

"That's kind of ? really being Fate's cabana boy, Daddy," Jackie pointed out with a giggle. Jack chuckled, lifting cruel brows.

"That's exactly it, Princess. Only now, I figure I'm her best boy. I command what she's laid on me."

"Nngg. Daddy, I can't get this nose right," Jackie admitted, scowling at the cadaver's face.

"You need to pull more flesh into it," Jack replied, moving to get a closer look. Jackie bit her lower lip and did as he said, then blinked as her watch started to play a tinny version of 'Night on Bald Mountain'. "Oops! I have to get to swing choir practice. Love you, Daddy!"

"Knock 'em dead, Princess," Jack chuckled, turning back to the cadaver to finish up the girl's work. Not bad at all, all things considered, he decided, reaching over to make a few minor adjustments to the face.

The man had been a something less than ethical manager of many sporting venues. He made his fortune setting up matches just so, and profited from his larceny enough to end up in an alley with his face beat in with a baseball bat.

Sloppy work on the killer's part, Jack deplored that sort of mundane violence. Not to mention that it inevitably ended up with DNA evidence splattered everywhere. There were few cleaners that would reliably pick up all traces of blood evidence anymore, and cops were one hell of a lot smarter and better educated. Not worth the hassle.

Jack paused as he went to refine the line of the cadaver's jaw. His brow beetled. He pressed with his finger, the flesh should have shaped at Jack's will. All he did was dent the cold skin briefly. Perplexed, Jack redoubled his focus. This time, the flesh shaped at his command.

That shouldn't have happened. Jack inspected his hands, though they remained the same elegantly long and slender things they had always been. He made a few more experimental digs and presses at the corpse's body. Most left no impression.

"What the hell??" Jack whispered, baffled, then his face settled into a snarl of sheer annoyance.

"Lady Fate?" he hissed, "You are not pulling this crap on me again?"

(Jack Von Tombs used with permission of his original player)

(Story is in conjunction with Sadhbh's "Forgetting Fate" story line: )http://rdi.dragonsmark.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24938

Pharlen · Date: 2013-03-04 14:17 EST

Amor Fati

To Jack, Fate was the ultimate femme fatale. A jealous bitch goddess who wanted only one thing: his cracked sanity devoted only to her. Every step through his life she countered with the harsh madness of a jealousy blinded lover.

She took his mother. Replaced her with an earthly representative of her very obsession, his Aunt

His aunt turned an average kid into a hate filled teenager, precariously balanced between duty and escape.

Escape beckoned and he fled. For the first time in his life, he had a neutral place to examine his life. Anger built him. Anger at his father, for letting his heart die with his wife when he had a son that needed him. At his aunt, for turning her madness upon him for so long and without repercussion. At his mother, for dying at all.

It wasn't fair, but it was Fate. Turning and spinning like a bullroarer caught in a window frame, and with far more power.

Finally, sent to medical school, it was time away from her claws. Brilliance had never been lacking in the young man, it had always been directed towards simple survival. Now shone like a jewel in the laboratories and theaters of the college, his anger turning to intense curiosity, his frustration to opportunity, his isolation to friendships? and dates.

With the fury of a woman scorned, Fate exercised her might and sent the youth home broken beyond repair, devastated heart, mind, and soul, a blank eyed cipher.

Legally deceased.

No pulse, no breath, blood rotting black in his veins and heart, skin a ghastly pallor, the light within his eyes dimmed, vivid greens filmed and white, it took a morticians skill to make him look presentable once more.

It should have been the first time in their lives that father and son truly bonded, but Fate pushed too hard. Her paramour was gone, retreated into a dark place of mind, unreachable even by her clawed hands. In his place?

Another. A second, quickly developing personality. An infestation of a ghost or spirit, perhaps. No one was ever certain. What was certain, however, was that he had control of the body, and its death didn't bother it in the slightest.

In fact, that made its aims so much easier.

Mocking Fate at every chance - protecting the wounded soul, in a sense, but as such things will, it went too far. It cooly nurtured Jack back to the world of reality, and in that reality? they were the finest of assassins.

By the time Jack fully realized what his alter ego had done, it was really too late to do anything about it but to do it to his best affect.

Then She came into the picture. The Dame. The most perfect of women. Jack and his second self were utterly smitten with her. They would die for her, if they weren't already dead.

Fate saw her chance and cracked the whip.

Now it was personal. Now with his beloved dead, torn to shreds before his very eyes, now both sides of the monster that was Jack turned upon Lady Fate. Every gift and pestilence she set upon him, he used, he learned, he perfected. Determined that he would use them against her.

Their battle continued to escalate, decade by decade, a madness of thwarted plans and broken destinies, until the very earth cried out in horror.

Fate could not be turned, but Jack? Jack had been mortal. Now, no one was really certain what he was, what his true capabilities were: he commanded the dead. He fed upon ghosts. Brains, and took the knowledge within them for himself. Worst of all, insects coming near him died.

Some whispered that should he ever gain control of that power, he could even cause the gods to die.

Some whispered Fate was grooming him to end all times.

Some whispered Fate had no control over the creature she had so lovingly crafted.

Some whispered she had gone mad and here was the means to ending her long rein.

Though Jack always believed that it was Fate opening the door between Los Angeles and RhyDin, it was not.

RhyDin freed him from her clutches. And he used that time wisely.

By the time Jack returned to his home, he was a new man. A wife who stood beyond the touch of Fate. His mind his own once more. His heart beating, blood pumping, alive. His aunt good and dead. A beautiful daughter. A son, another daughter?

Finally?

It seemed Fate had been chastised and left the man, ironically, to his fate.

(Jack Von Tombs used with permission of his original player)

(Story is in conjunction with Sadhbh's "Forgetting Fate" story line:
http://rdi.dragonsmark.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24938)

Pharlen · Date: 2013-03-09 13:04 EST

Der Wille Zur Macht

The week ran on. Badly. Bizarrely. Jack's powers failed in bits and pieces, until he was forced to rely on hands just as talented - but he really hated the feel of the putty used to rebuild human faces. It was a windfall for Jackie, as he called upon her to assist more and more.

But why weren't Jackie's powers fading, they had the same source? She was only quarter human, in all truth. Not enough human blood for Fate to get her hooks into, Jack decided. Not to mention that Jackie followed the Spirits Who Never Sleep as gods.

Much better than the Dreaming Ones, whom Jack suspected heavily in his ongoing issues with Fate.

Jack watched in amusement as Pharlen bundled little Desdenova up so heavily that the boy could scarcely move. A winter storm was due in RhyDin, and the boy wanted to see his friends and family there before it hit. Pharlen was a thorough Californian girl, she did not have a clue about heavy winter weather.

As he watched, Jack staggered. His hands, elegant and strong, withered before his eyes to nearly skeletal, wrapped in papery skin, blue veins weak and collapsing with each beat of heart.

Jack closed his eyes and concentrated. Impossible. He couldn't age. Not like that. He opened his eyes. It was just a momentary phantom. A vision born of worry. He squeezed his hand into a fist. It felt right and strong. There was nothing to concern him with it.

Jackie skipped off to swim practice. Pharlen took Alice to her play group.

For decades, Jack collected books of forbidden knowledge and now and then, would read them to try and ascertain why he was as he was. There were hints, threads, little things. Pharlen could tell him that the deities and demons of humankind were bizarre, jealous, strange creatures, and often enough, the very humans they served had to be protected from them.

That was what she did, after all. Removed the gifts of overzealous gods, thwarted the aims of angered demons, allowed humankind to develop normally without outside influence.

The problem was, once someone was known to be connected to a celestial, there was little she could do. She could rescue Io from Zeus and Hera's dysfunctional relationship, but never could keep her from wandering about as a cow.

The Great Old Ones slept, but their progeny were many. Jack took down a book and opened it, brows knitting as he read.

There was only madness in any of the old ones. Their touch was not of divinity, but of death, of devouring, of agonies unending. There was no sweet surcease, only eternities of wakeful horror kept fresh as the moment they first arose. As if in a void of time.

But are you not Fated to become the mysterious Zindarek? To trigger the end of all times and end Fate's unholy hold over all forever??

The words whispered sibilantly into Jack's hearing, the voice so hideously familiar that he nearly dropped the book. His other soul, the shattered fragment of his personality that he had removed from his body so long ago, it was within his mind once more. Pressing for domination.

"Don't you remember, Jackie? When it was just you and me? We could do anything wanted. Make that bitch goddess rue the day she ever met us??" the other purred, the heavy, clammy sensation of the presence demanding control of the living body.

"I gave you your own body, get out of mine," Jack snarled, terse.

"Oh come on Jackie. Don't you get it? Fate's not messing with you now. She's run away, she's dropped her reins, she's off playing tra-la without her powers, and now it's time to make her Pay," the other hissed, playing upon the chord of Jack's fury, and playing it well.

"You think she's backed off. That's only for now. She's not done with us, oh hell no. She made us for a reason. Don't you remember, Jackie-boy?"

"Be quiet," Jack snarled, wrenching from the bizarre conversation with himself to snatch up the telephone as it rang.

Horror at first swept through Jack, enervating him. It was his son - but not. Desdenova. Older. In his twenties. From an entirely different reality.

Fate had cracked, the balance of order and chaos was askew, it was driving Fae to madness. It had flung the little boy Desdenova into other realities. The older Desdenova collected the child and put him someplace safe, but until the rifts were repaired?

"It's a perfect time to strike, Jackie-boy. She took your boy, Jackie. She stole the kid you spent so much time keeping alive. She's weak, she's helpless, let's end her!"

"Stop it!" Jack snarled, "It isn't as simple as that, you moron, if we take her out, it creates a void -"

"A void she planned upon, don't you remember, Jackie-boy? Don't you remember the burning flames of purification?!"

In the fading tones of the other-souls exaltation of voice, Jack remembered.

Screaming hysteria, eyes wide open and still burned into his retinae the image of the cowled vampires gleefully slaughtering his long-ago beloved. Carving her alive into shuddering meat while he was helpless to intervene.

They shoved him into his own crematoria, the blast furnace already howling hot enough to reduce bone to powder. They tried to shove him into it. The flames, the heat, the horror?

He made them all die. The power that killed insects in his presense was suddenly an unstoppable tidal wave of force. It tore the existence from the vampires. Wrung from them every drop of vital force until they were nothing more than dusty rags.

Jack screamed, the agony welling up as fresh as if it was happening all over again. His beloved Betty, dead all over again? His failure to protect her? His?

Jack stopped himself, shuddering. That was over fifty years ago. He was married now, a family man, a living man, he fulfilled dreams every day he didn't know to have when he couldn't dream.

"I don't know who you are. You're not my other side, though you're making a big effort to sound like him. Get the hell away from me," Jack hissed, eyes of green flashing brilliant.

It was his will, Jack's father and grandfather both used to say, that set their boy apart. He was a willful child, his aunt hissed in fury when over and over again, she failed to break that. He has so much will power, the dean of the college wrote in high admiration?

There was only one point in Jack's life where his will had been shattered.

"I gave you the chance to get your own back, but you want to play the hero," the voice snarled, "Fine then. I only need your body, it doesn't matter what shape it's in."

1931. October thirty first. Halloween, Jack's birthday. Six P.M. He laughed as he stepped, light footed from a costume party held by his fraternity, heading for his pride and joy, a souped up road rocket of a Model A Ford.

"Jackie! You're not leaving?!" one of the young men called, "Party's just getting started!"

"Promised Pa I'd swing by tonight, Brad, he's giving me the best twenty first birthday present ever - gonna let me watch him throw my Aunt Hagitha out!" Jack laughed, swinging behind the wheel.

"That old witch!" Brad laughed, and as Jack started his car, he ran for his own. A few other young men dashed for theirs. Jack was a fine mechanic, and a better driver. The road back to his home was two lanes and perfect for racing.

Within miles and minutes, it was a wild road race, six cars jostling for position and speed on the dirt road. Jack triumphantly pulled out ahead, drifting precisely around a sharp turn and then?

There was a white figure, a female, a girl in white, a girl in a ghost costume, it all ran through Jack's mind as he stared at the apparition in the middle of the road. He put everything he had into turning the car to keep from hitting her.

Everything he had.

The Ford flew off of the road and into a ditch beside it. Jack was thrown forward, the steering wheel shattering under his weight, the steering column plunging through his chest. The car sputtered to a halt.

On the road above, five cars went careening by.

Pharlen walked into the library, agitated and turned just in time to see Jack lurch foreword, eyes wide open, blood expelling from his mouth and chest with enough force to paint the wall and herself, in it.

She screamed, and with her scream, reality came to a halt.

(Jack Von Tombs used with permission of his original player)

(Story is in conjunction with Sadhbh's "Forgetting Fate" story line:
http://rdi.dragonsmark.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t= 24938)

Pharlen · Date: 2013-03-19 14:41 EST

Interlude: Firetaker

For so long as there had been Irishmen, there had been O'Malley. In fact, he bragged, he came in a little before the first of his human brethren started scattering their lithics about.

It wasn't until the rise of the humanoid gods that the trouble started. As the humans were made in their image, they took advantage of the favor in ways that would never dawn upon the earlier divinities with their simple forms and functions.

A veritable plague of gods, O'Malley complained. Arising from their elders and returning to their people like spoiled brat college kids convinced they knew it all. Shouldering down the simple ways and simple worships and becoming nothing more than a lot of hooligans with too much power and not nearly enough sense.

Fortunately for the race of homo sapiens, the eldest of the Entities agreed with O'Malley's aggrieved complaints as the Promethean craze swept through the pantheons.

With every trickster god and their brother defying someone or another and bringing fire to the miserable mortals, how on earth would the humans learn to make it themselves? They couldn't. They wouldn't. Why would they need to? Humans were smart enough to know to keep a flame burning. They were smart enough to lay back and be cared for.

A quick turn of global warming to bring about a thorough flooding of the planet didn't do all that much good. The gods still cherry picked among the mortals for their favorites rather than to step back as they were warned. But when the Unsleeping Ones spoke of removing the race from the god's touch altogether, oh, then the gods paid attention.

So much spin doctoring and astroturfing arose among the deities that it spawned a new form of their ilk: the so called gods of doors, with anywhere from two to a hundred faces.

The deities who had most harshly penalized their firebringers fought nobly for them now. It was the foresight that the humans needed, the reason that the gods blew into them, that the gods taught them to strive for. To learn, not to rot in a homogenous reality of working a days labor and sacrificing that work to the gods. No, not even Jehovah's god wanted that, the whole apple thing was just to get the lazy little human slugs into the wide world to learn and prosper.

No one bought it, of course, but the Unsleeping let them think that. They withdrew quietly to deal with the matter. That matter being the pantheons of the homo sapiens stratifying into increasingly incestuous courts of intrigue and outrage, only to be equalled when humans developed 'Jersey Shore' and 'Game of Thrones'.

O'Malley, the outspoken lesser offspring of the eldest of nature gods, a leprechaun, was set to the unenviable task of assembling forces that would not only undermine, but completely undo, unmake, remove, most acts of interference that the gods and other well meaning entities enacted with the humans.

Soon, it was an entire union: Creatures of the Night, Unicorns and Leprechauns. CNUL, one of the best known and strongest of unions of celestials and inhumans. Though the pantheons, the demons, the angels, agents of a change and entropy, all those wrapped in the eternal godhead of the planet, tried to convince themselves that CNUL was made up of inferior and weak beings, creatures driven from their homelands as the humans became more sophisticated, needing protection from hunters and virgins alike, the real purpose of the union was pure and simple:

Take back the fire given too soon.

The cure for the Black Plague was removed quickly from the hands of monks piously appealing to Mary. Electrical batteries were denounced and buried. Steam motive force was treated as a toy. Computing machinery was quietly sunk. Madmen were allowed to rise, humanitarians were left to die. Heartbreaking as the job could be, it was necessary.

With beings ranging from delicate air sprites to the mighty planet spanning Andreas, CNUL was a force to reckon with. When called upon, they were quick to act, to decide whether or not to allow incidents, and even to cause them. Because it was not just the immortals and celestials that the Firetakers watched - it was the humans themselves. Tossing monkey wrenches into science and religion both was just a perk of the job.

The planet had harbored two previous races of humans. Both failed miserably. Though it was rumored that the remains of the first were now the Unsleeping, only a few of the second race could be found in a corporal form. The Mariners. Homo Marinus. If the third race failed?

No one wanted to think of that.

Pharlen had worked for CNUL for decades, been in fact, O'Malley's star pupil. As heartless as a star when she worked, and slick as a trickster when she did see an opportunity to save a soul or two from a grim end.

Several people she had removed from their home times and shunted over into RhyDin, Captain Briggs and his crew, Richard Halliburton, Jonathan Fries, St. Germaine - but not, as many believed, Anastatia. Some who meant nothing to history's pull, some with names that still echo.

It was an easy matter, the pantheons of earth and the systems of destiny, fate, chance, and luck didn't work the same as they had in RhyDin. They had their own versions of those things. The Agents of Change were never so active in RhyDin as they had been on earth, however. RhyDin was renowned for changing daily, and never changing at all over centuries.

Now the Catalytic forces of Change were skewed. The balance tipped, and it ran wildly from RhyDin in a widening ripple of chaos. What had been the droplet of a tear became a tsunami of devastation.

And through that walked Pharlen, shunting aside the madness in a iced fury of frustration. She moved from reality to reality with ease and could find no one with the answer to what they all sought:

Where the hell was Fate?

(Story is in conjunction with Sadhbh's "Forgetting Fate" story line:
http://rdi.dragonsmark.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24938

Pharlen · Date: 2013-03-26 12:28 EST

http://www.goldenthrush.2phatgeeks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/page1.jpg

Pharlen · Date: 2013-03-26 12:29 EST

http://www.goldenthrush.2phatgeeks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/page2.jpg

Pharlen · Date: 2013-03-26 12:33 EST

http://www.goldenthrush.2phatgeeks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/page3.jpg

(Story is in conjunction with Sadhbh's "Forgetting Fate" story line:
http://rdi.dragonsmark.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24938

Click for Larger. Or, Click on "quote" because that makes the images even bigger for some reason. :D Hope you enjoy.

A big big big Thank You to 2phatgeeks for image hosting. <3)

Pharlen · Date: 2013-04-02 21:09 EST

Coursers

"What did you do with your sisters?" Pharlen demanded of her son, who now towered over her. The product of a splintered reality, Desdenova was a different creature than the boy she had just sent off to the inn. This young man was colder, harder, half of his face nearly immobile. This was a creature who spent years believing he was dead, a zombie created to replace the son they had lost.

That splintering point was over a year in the past now. Pharlen and Jack realized their son wasn't just moping around after years in a hospital. That changed things. It changed the future for their son, but Desdenova had already established himself as an adult in his own past. It wasn't so complex a matter as his reality closed away from the new one, but it could be confusing to explain.

"I took Alice to Uncle Jareth, and Jackie to Aunt Mary," Desdenova responded quietly. It was as strange for him. His mother, the woman who raised him, was older, but still vicious in watching over her kids.

"You're cute, Aunt Mary is still in the insane asylum. Did you commit your sister?"

Desdenova shrugged faintly. He wasn't apologetic when he did what he felt needed to be done.

"Oh, good," Pharlen exhaled, rubbing her brow. Really, if this could get any better, she did not want to know how, "Now what? The thing that was pursuing Jackie, what was it? Exactly?"

"A demon referred to as a courser, someone had to summon it, and I'm guessing it was whoever did this to Dad," Desdenova responded, turning to indicate the gruesome sculpture of flesh, blood, and suspended time that was his father. He turned to regard his mother with a cool lift of brow. "Clearly, there are a few things that Dad never told us about becoming what he became. What do you know?"

"Everything, he laid on Fate's doorstep. Everything. His mother's death, his father's half-life, his aunt's abuse, the crash that killed him, the force that kept him animate?"

"What was the force that kept him animate?" Desdenova inquired, walking around his father. It was a beautiful grotesquery in the den. His father in extremis, green eyes wide, blood suspended in globules and mist bursting from his chest. Smooth to the touch as carved ivory. Stopped in time while the rest of the world flowed on.

"I don't know. If he knows, he's never said as much," Pharlen responded, rubbing at her brow.

"How did his mother die?" Desdenova inquired abruptly, brows knitted. Pharlen pressed her lips together, shaking her head.

"The Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918."

"Wouldn't it have taken him, too?"

Pharlen was already shaking her head. "The reason it was so devastating was that it was killing mainly people between twenty and fifty years old, leaving the elderly and young. It was a disaster that the first World War helped along, though ironically, it probably helped to end the war simply by killing the fighting age men that hadn't already been killed in the war."

"And his Aunt??" Desdenova frowned, pacing the room, hands loosely locked behind his back.

"Dipped in poison and hated him. Brother's sister. Beautiful, bitter, never married."

"Why?" he persisted. Pharlen shook her head.

"I never found out."

"Then it looks like it's time we do," Desdenova smiled thinly, a slight bow given before he hugged his mother tightly.

"It'll be all right, Mom. Somehow," he whispered before drawing away and looking around the house, "Nineteen eighteen??"

"Nineteen nineteen. She came over a year after his mother died to look after them, she said," Pharlen replied, hand over temple. She reached for a photo album, leather bindings fine and new despite their age, and handed it to him open.

"This was hers. Good luck."

(Story is in conjunction with Sadhbh's "Forgetting Fate" story line:
http://rdi.dragonsmark.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24938

Jack Von Tombs and 'Aunt Agatha' used with permission of the original player.)

Pharlen · Date: 2013-04-10 13:38 EST

Great Grandfather

"Ah, I know who you are, lad. Yes. Hehe, do not be afraid, do not be worried, it is only your own great grandfather?"

Desdenova stilled at the softly accented voice, the touch of the elder's hand as Corian Von Tombs stepped closer to inspect this young mourner walking through the new cemetery.

How could this old man know? Jack always insisted that his family had been good, solid German and English stock. There was nothing to them other than a strong sense of self and powerful will.

Though his brow knit briefly, Desdenova simply accepted, looking at the worn and age gnarled hand of the old man, and covering it with his own. Gentle, warm, he smoothed over his great grandfather's skin, feeling the bones within, an old break long healed, a simple band of gold. Corian smiled in return, taking in the details of the young man's features, committing them to his memory.

Soon he would be gone, and he wanted to share with his departed beloved what their progeny had become. It had been so long since she had seen her children.

"I need to know what happened," Desdenova whispered, his voice a distant winding of smoke in the open sun of the cemetery. The trees were still young and leafing out in the bright spring. The house looked naked without its glory of rose garden. The pond was a wallow of mud, complete with contented swine.

"Doesn't your father say, lad?" Corian replied with a frown, his hawk keen gray eyes turning from the youth to the house, where a small boy clung to the leg of his father, a tall, strong man whose back was bent and weighted by a loss he could scarcely bear.

"No. Grandpapa? Things? things become very strange and go very wrong. I need to know why before it takes Father," Desdenova admitted, lowering his eyelids and shifting to take both of the old man's hands.

His great grandfather. Corian Von Tombs. A gentle and oddly enigmatic soul, as Jack described him to his own children.

At the close of the Civil War, the mortuary sciences had begun to come into their own. Compassion and the almighty dollar conspired to create chemicals, formulas, anything, to bring deceased soldiers back to their homes in some semblance of order. Everything from refrigeration to photography to actual embalming stepped up.

Corian knew that the best way to study and improve upon these techniques was to be there. His wife had passed away, leaving him with his teen aged son Jacob and young daughter Agatha.

Passing into the United States, they received the name Tombs from Grab, and a sneering immigration officer tacked the honorific 'Von' onto that.

"To be more American, you see," Corian rasped a soft laugh, "The man made our name more German."

"We were Grab??" Desdenova chuckled softly, "That is, Tomb."

"We have always looked after the dead, my boy," Corian agreed, taking Desdenova's hand and leading him through the cemetery, away from the house, "Come, come. Even that little boy that is your father, he will know you right away."

"Why, how?" Desdenova wondered, letting the old one lead him. What would someday become an expensive, exclusive suburb was now new construction, some of it shockingly cheap, with few power lines, and fewer cars.

"We know," Corian replied with a lift of white brows, "We know. We know our blood. From time immemorial, we watch over the dead. That gives us power, lad, to protect. Strength. Will."

Will. It kept coming back to Will. The direction of self. The determination of soul, apart from any outside forces?

(Story is in Conjunction with Sadhbhs "Forgetting Fate" story line:
http://rdi.dragonsmark.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24938

Corian, Agatha, Jacob, and Jack Von Tombs used with permission of the original Player.)

Pharlen · Date: 2013-04-15 11:50 EST

Immortal Fati

"What happened to bring Agatha back here?" Desdenova asked his great grandfather as the old man walked the anomaly that was his kin towards the sparse collection of buildings that would someday become Hollywood Boulevard.

Corian shook his head slowly.

"So beautiful she is, and so quickly did she slip away," he sighed, "I was a fool, young man, and you must never repeat this error, nor let yours repeat it: I trusted another to mind my sacred duty."

"Father and Mother would never let us do that."

"Ah, good, good, very good," Corian exhaled, rubbing at his brow, pained as if with every moment he thought of his failure, "You see. When we came to America, I was quick to establish. Quickly, Jacob and I had formed a reputation and our own mortuary, cemetery, and all. Quickly we were well off, comfortable."

"Yes," Desdenova agreed. He knew that from the records. He had been amazed with how swiftly his great and grand fathers had made something from nearly nothing.

"Then? A woman came to me, insisting that I must turn Agatha to feminine hands lest she grow into an awkward and unmanageable creature. She must have proper womanly guidance, her very sanity was a risk," Corian exhaled, shaking his head, "And Agatha was very difficult at that time. I know now because she had been meeting this woman, the friend of friends of hers, who encouraged her to misbehave that I would gladly turn to any help offered."

"So you allowed her to go to a ladies finishing school?" Desdenova prompted, and Corian nodded, his lips pressed together.

"What else could I do? I did not realize that she was meeting with these creatures literally under my nose?"

"Creatures, what creatures?"

"Heh. Of no good religion, though they believed it was. Progressives, you see. Life should be lived as Fate wills it; completely opposing those that would harness science to religion," Corian explained, "She shall find no love in her own home anymore, until she at the very least apologizes to her brother for telling him that his wife was fated to die, and if he had only bothered to follow some ridiculous rules, he would have known that before he married her and thus have been spared the burden."

Desdenova took in a breath and held it as if tasting the coal heavy air. It was a common misconception that the air was clean in Los Angeles before the advent of the automobile and industry. It wasn't. It never had been. Smog had always been a fact of life for the valley.

"And the very will she was born with prevents her from doing just that."

"She calls it her fati now," Corian responded with a resigned shake of his head, "So she never does release these demons which have taken hold of her??"

"I'm sorry Great Grandfather," Desdenova grimaced faintly.

Corian was silent for a long while, as if completing the mourning he had begun for his daughter, giving up upon her entirely, and Desdenova reached to him, shaking his head.

"Don't, Great Grandfather. Don't turn from her. I am only a shadow, a splinter of a reality that will never be. Perhaps, perhaps you can get through to her again, someday - but it will never be if you give up."

"You are a wise lad, but you are too optimistic, I think," Corian chuckled, a soft crake of sound as he patted Desdenova's hand, "We shall will it, and she shall say she leaves it to Fate and press instead her will against it."

"And she doesn't see it?" Desdenova asked in disbelief. Corian quirked his snowy brows.

"Hehe. That, my boy, I think is the problem. It glares in her face with every moment. Until she accepts it, there is nothing to be done. Come. There is a drugstore now in town. I will buy you a phosphate, and you will tell me of our family."

"I would be honored, Great Grandfather?"

(Story is in Conjunction with Sadhbhs "Forgetting Fate" story line:
http://rdi.dragonsmark.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24938

Corian, Agatha, Jacob, and Jack Von Tombs used with permission of the original Player.)

Pharlen · Date: 2013-04-25 17:06 EST

(Meanwhile...)

But Desdenova, age perpetually twelve going on thirteen, well, he hadn't any idea there was that much of a problem. Except that he knew that there had to be for his parents to let him be cast off into time with a ?

The Prince wasn't a total stranger at all, Desdenova came to realize within just a few days of tagging along behind the genially grumpy man. The Prince seemed to know his mother quite well, and at least of his father.

"Emrys, why do you live in a cave when you're a prince?" Desdenova asked as he followed the man through the crisp woods of early spring. The Prince, six foot tall and a giant for his time, hawks eyes of black with a hawk's nose to match, and an ever-ready smile, simply chuckled as he indicated a small village down hill of his cave.

"Look, child. Not exactly luxury living, is it? Not even a flushing toilet, and you will note, there is quite a fine one in my cave."

"Ohh. Not even the castles are any better?" Desdenova wondered.

"No, worse. They're drafty and damp and worse, they're full of royalty and other scum," the man chuckled, taking the boy's hand and leading him along, "But I will take you to one soon, all the gossip has surely gotten about that I have a little black haired lad here who is certainly my spitting image."

"You're not German," Desdenova scoffed, amused.

"No, Roman you know. Last of the Romans, first of the English."

"Are you Mariner?" the boy wondered, peering at the man.

"Now, m'lad. This is where you learn that your grandmother's breed has their own ways and powers."

"?Grandmother?" Desdenova echoed, but then had to trot to catch up with the man as he broke into a trot to catch his pony. And by the time Emrys had caught the hardly repenting animal and had swung the gleeful boy to its back?

"Now, down to the pasture, you can help the boys there with the goats. I'll be watching, don't worry. Just be another one of the children, heh?"

Desdenova would remember again. But for now, he was happy, and more than that, thrilled to be living out days of 'camping out' and 'roughing it'. For the first time ever, he got to go to summer camp.

(Story is in Conjunction with Sadhbhs "Forgetting Fate" story line:
http://rdi.dragonsmark.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24938