silph_co | Voice

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[Good thing technology isn't unheard of in Phandalin, huh? But it's... been a week and she's been through the whole song and dance and is just going to be an absolute asshole about this now that she's really allowed to.]

Anyone else get the feeling that the kinds of people they must have dealt with before you had to have been absolutely braindead to need as much training as they offered? Goodness me, not that I'm saying any of you are or were that braindead, but it certainly seems to be who they thought they would attract the most attention from.

Which reminds me, what the hell is the point of all this nonsense? I get it, steal Pokemon or whatever, but for... what? Is it just some kind of weird power grab or is there some ulterior motive that those of us on the bottom rung aren't privy to? Because I honestly don't appreciate things being hidden from me.

Also~ Steven, I believe it was? If you're hearing this, darling, I would gladly take you up on that offer if you're still extending that particular branch. I'm sure I'm easy enough to find, what with still having a particular feature of mine being rather striking compared to the others here.

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[A strange creature to be sure, even if she's trying to get a good look at it before being startled out of her investigation and thoughts. She hadn't even noticed the shopping bag until it's being presented to her, huh.]

I've made things work in the past no matter the size, so no worries on that. [You learn a lot of things when you have to make do with what you have, but she is absolutely going to investigate that bag with a bit of a gasp, what a nerd.]

Oh~ Honestly, silver is one of my favorite colors. But, to be fair, pretty much anything fairly eye-catching tends to be unless there's a reason to not. [Which really makes the uniform, cloak, and clothing situation all the more tragic in the long run.]

Sincerely, thank you. And... a stipend? I suppose it's more to keep these guys alive or... whatever... but I assume there's more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak. [Like stealing. Or beating the shit out of trainers. One of the many ways.]

[He sits down in the other chair, folding his hands in front of him.]

I mean, it's to keep you alive too. And to give you incentive to keep stealing for the team and generally doing what they ask of you. It's not so much for Grunts, but it's more than the non-Rockets get. And I'm told that it rising with you in rank. We also all get free room and board at the facilities here, in Saffron, in Celadon, in Lavender, and in Mahogany--and you can bill your travel expenses to the Team when you're out on business.

Most of us try to exploit that as much as we can, honestly.

And for all that the greater organization is by and large incompetent, they do reward initiative. Our crew just did a large scale heist on the Pewter Museum and it netted us all some very nice monetary bonuses as well as... some very individual Pokemon. We're going to try to make large heists like that a regular thing going forward. And they reward initiative with individual members too, so if you go above and beyond in bringing back valuable Pokemon for your quota, you'll likely get bonuses there too.

[Then he smiles.]

But. Anyway. I'm glad you like them. The shopping here in Goldenrod is fairly decent, being a big city and all.

Keep doing more and get higher in this nonsense to get more money given to you, that sounds about right for literally any job I have ever had the misfortune of seeing. [That lasted very short amounts of time, but that's neither here nor there at the moment.]

Though the little comforts are at least welcome, I can't imagine trying to figure things out with no money in this type of weather. It's been some time since I've had to worry about weather and I'm not so keen on learning about it while it's cold of all things. [Even elves get frostbite, unfortunately. As much as she would hate to think about it.]

I can't imagine stealing pets from people will be too terribly difficult, I've taken way worse from people before. With or without their permission or understanding of it being possible. If I can steal someone's eye, for example, I doubt some creature in a ball is going to be any more difficult. [They had agreed to that term, Lydia, but the point still probably stands in some shape.

She's sighing softly to herself and just scooping the vulpix in her lap to scratch behind his ears for a moment or two.]

Are there other cities as big as this one or is it all podunk little villages from here on out? Like, don't get me wrong, I'm not unaccustomed to that, but you know. [It's not preferable is what she means.]

Lots of little podunk villages, yeah, but there's a few bigger cities. Here, of course. Ecruteak, more or less. Over in Kanto, there's Saffron, Celadon, and Viridian. You can take a magnet train over to Kanto if you're interested in touring that region. Just bill it to the Team. It's what I did.

[He leans forward.] But no, tell me about the eye. A living one, I assume? [He feels like she might have phrased it differently otherwise.]

Magnet... train? I'm used to trains, but what the hell is a magnet train? [That's insane and she wants to know more.

Though her demeanor is swiftly changing as he asks that question, her normal sickeningly sweet smile changing into a far more sadistic one.]

Oh of course, why would I take a non-living one?~ Certainly wasn't the only thing we had taken over the hundreds of years, either. Wonderland, a... creation of our's, was quite a trip. Adventurers coming in thinking they would get treasures or their wildest desire, only to instead find a place of absolute suffering~

It was so glorious, a wonderful bright paradise of sorts. Well, for us at least. We had several games set up, you know, one in particular was the Wheel of Sacrifice~ They would go spin the wheel and whatever it landed on you would have to give up relative to the picture enough to satisfy us. It could very much be body parts. Some examples I can remember were eyeballs, fingers, health in general, or anything else if they thought it would get them to the next round of Wonderland~ [She's sounding far, far too proud and happy speaking of such things.]

You see, when you feed off of emotions, you gotta find a way to get creative with it otherwise you get bored.

[Steven laughs in delight. God, it's so nice that one of the newest recruits is like them. Between Lydia, Dirk and of course Jack, this is the least lonely he's ever felt in his life.]

Sounds amazing. I'd like to have seen it.

[God, it's so good to just-- say what he's really thinking now. Hell, just letting himself finish thinking it.]

Were you a lich, then? I've been wondering.

[That's not the reaction she normally gets from people and it's... nice, in a way, for someone to appreciate her work as much as she and her brother had. She's humming for a brief moment and leaning back in her chair, startling the poor zorua who finally finds a more suitable spot on her shoulder.]

Yes, yes we certainly were. I assume you are familiar with the fact they feed off of particularly strong emotions, but most do not know it can literally be anything. You just need to find what works for you. We had used... well, something more positive, but we found that suffering was quite a good bit more powerful than that was.

[Gods, it's so weird talking about this whole mess.]

Wonderland was a glorious place, too bad that three spoilsports ruined it in the end. A shame, but at least we had taken a good chunk out of them before that point.

Adventurers? Yeah. I suppose they're probably a pain that way.

[Hell. He'd taken down some liches himself in tabletop games. It's slightly weird to see it all from the perspective of the guys he usually pretended to fight.]

And yeah, no, I'm actually. Personally familiar with that. I'm not a lich back home, but my kind... our innate magic fed off emotions. The main ones we go for are desire, wrath, fear, and sorrow. I used to use sorrow, a lot of us do when we're starting out, but lately... I'd been wondering if I ought to try fear instead. Not in the least because I usually did it while dreamwalking and it's-- well, pretty easy to turn a dream into a nightmare.

They always are, but they were usually easy to put down with the right thing. These three, however, well. Let's just say they were a different breed than what we had ever dealt with before. [She's using we a lot but sure as hell isn't explaining who "we" even is.]

Your kind? [She's intrigued, given she's shifting once more to watch him far closer, a brow raised. He has her attention at this point, as far as she was aware, liches were the only type that used emotions in that sort of manner.]

Tell me, does your magic still work here? I have yet to figure out if it's because I'm mortal again or if it's something to do with this place in general. But if it were the former option, I would still have access to my illusion spells and those are also inaccessible. It's starting to become a problem that I can't say I appreciate. [At least her zorua can pull some kind of bullshit, but that's not the same.]

Yeah. Poor assholes that got abducted by the Fae and managed to find our way out of their realm. Being stuck there changes the way your body works, even how it looks. But we get a little magic out of it, at least.

And no. It doesn't. I'm just as human as I was before all that bullshit started. Jack says that every once in a while there's these weird weekends where people get their abilities and true bodies back, but it always goes back to being like this.

[Fae, if that's a word she hasn't heard in quite some time. She's rolling her eyes almost immediately, not at him but at her knowledge of that damn race in particular.]

Assholes, the whole lot of them. But that's to be expected of a race that thinks they're better than everyone else. I could understand that with humans before a certain point, but then they went after... you know what, never mind, I'll save that rant for another time. [Elves are finicky creatures. It's fine. This is fine.]

So I'm more or less going to be stuck like this until one of these weird weekends comes around. Unsure if that... is better or worse, to be able to have a taste of my lich form again. It would be nice to not have to worry about this mundane mortality shit, but then if I go back to this... [She's just gesturing to her whole body in general.] Perhaps it'd be better if I didn't.

Mm, yeah. That's the problem.

Although it occurs to me that we could do something spectacular on one of those weird weekends, with your necromancy, the more advanced of my two Contracts of Darkness, and whatever else the others can bring to the table. That's actually why I wanted to get a list of your capabilities?

Edited 2020-03-02 21:40 (UTC)

[Oh goodness, she's actually laughing a bit and leaning back again. This is fine, this is absolutely fine.]

Depends on how much you want to know about what I could do. The majority of my magic was self-taught, at least when it comes to illusion, but every elf tends to have some affinity for a particular school of magic if you're inclined towards magic in general. Necromancy I learned from a cult of stupid assholes that were so intent on becoming necromancers that when we got bored and upset with their uselessness we ended up as liches.

I still remember slaughtering all of them, to be honest with you. It's not that hard when it's primarily human wizards thinking they're special.

[He laughs too.]

I can imagine. And really, just a list of your more useful spells of either school would be nice. Mm, plus your lich powers.

Oh. And if I make my pledge to Autumn, maybe you and I could harvest some fear together when the next weird weekend comes. If you think fear would work as well as suffering, anyway. If not, maybe we could try for both.

[It's. Just so damn nice to have people he doesn't need to pretend at all around]

Edited 2020-03-02 22:12 (UTC)

I mean, the majority of my illusion spells can work on a large area to make the terrain look like something entirely different. Wonderland, for instance, everything in there was fueled on the suffering we stole to use our magic. It was, in reality, really just a huge empty building that made into quite a number of things. So, really, the sky is the limit when it comes to what illusion-type of things I could do. Name it and I could probably figure out a way to work with it.

[The sad part is that she's not even wrong, as for necromancy...]

I have been alive for hundreds of years, darling, I do not think there any liches more powerful than the two of us were. Reanimation is something I'm sure I could pull off if I was given half a chance, alternatively causing necrosis of various forms is more than doable.

Point is, I'm more... a situational mage than I am a "here is a list of all the things I can do" wizard would do. Magic of my kind is easily adapted to situations, after all.

[She is, however, intrigued by this harvesting fear thing.]

We hadn't really messed with fear that much, but depending on the source, I don't doubt that I could use it. But fear and suffering can go hand-in-hand rather easily, don't you think?~

They can. Sorrow and suffering too, if I can't re-pledge myself even during a weird weekend.

[He says this all a bit off-handedly, as if this is just a bit of everyday conversation to him. It's not, really. He wouldn't mind it if it was, but there are not that many perfectly terrible people in his life that he's willing to show his jagged bits to. More than there used to be. And he's more willing to actually admit to these thoughts. To let himself think them at all.

He's so glad Jack helped him get his head on straight.]

We'll see if there's anyone the Team needs to target that weekend. Might as well kill two birds with one stone.

Whichever way it works~ I'm never going to turn down an opportunity to cause some sort of anguish to the foolish. [It'd still be fun, either way.

It's good that she can talk to someone about this mess as well, usually she'd use her brother for these kinds of conversations, but given he's not here... She will take what she's given and this one certainly seems rather intriguing and agreeable to even her worst of moments.

How lovely.]

I look forward to it, to being able to show just why a pretty face is a dangerous thing if one isn't careful~ [Stop that.]

[He snickers.]

Can you ever not vamp?

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Voice

WHAT A LEGEND

HE ALSO GETS TEAM ROCKET TO GIVE HIM PAID TIME OFF FROM HIS RADIO TOWER JOB FOR HEISTS

L E G E N D

CW: STEVEN D IS ACTUALLY NOT A GOOD MAN EVEN THOUGH HE'S YOUR NICE CRIME UNCLE

CW: Removal of body parts and kinda torture

cw: he laughs at death (literally)

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