agogelogs | let fury have the hour,

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let fury have the hour,

WHO? Everybody!
WHAT? Agoge's third TDM! And the death of an important guy. And some very upset royalty.
WHEN? Late 1792, Paris.
ANYTHING ELSE? Violence, as always. Please warn in subject lines for anything beyond physical violence, and move to a personal journal if things go beyond PG-13.

IT'LL BE FINE;

Paris, 1792: revolutionary france.

read the France setting infopages

arrival for new recruits

(Note: If you were one of the people who used the previous TDM and want to use that as canon while still participating in this one, feel free! The following will still happen, though the guide will apologize for a malfunction in your BCE causing you to zap through the intervening month instead of joining your comrades like you should have. You'll be assured the glitch is fixed now, and it probably is. Probably.)

You wake up in a Parisian hotel room with a kind woman standing near the door, waiting for you to awaken. You have none of your clothing, just black military-issued underwear, and none of your previous possessions beyond the one you chose (if you remember choosing) to bring with you.

The woman by the door speaks French, and if you didn't understand the language before, you do now. If you have questions as to what's going on, she'll answer: you are a member of COST, a paramilitary organization of time travelers fighting against the Regency, a tyrannous kingdom of the future who are trying to stamp out freedom and individuality in the name of peace.

She will provide you with the clothing necessary to fit in at this time, and show you how to use your BCE implant to look up information on this time period and its social and political mores. She won't let you leave until you're properly dressed to fit in, but once you are, she'll wish you luck.

oops papercut.

KILL THE KING

It doesn't matter if you're new, or if you've been here a while. You'll hear about the execution going on today. It's as though the barely restrained urban chaos of Paris has ground to a halt. Everything is about the king. Is it really going to happen? Are they really going to do it? Can they do it? Is it even possible?

Anyone out of the loop will be filled in, but with no small amount of ridicule: Today is the day of the king's execution. His trial has wrapped up, and the National Convention voted to execute him for treason and tyranny.

The crowd at the execution is enormous, a riotous mob of passion barely restrained. Everyone is jockeying for a better view, with children and adults climbing up on nearby statues, lampposts, the sides of houses, rooves, some even hang from windows. Everyone watches the scaffold.

The prison cart arrives with no fanfare save the yells of the crowd. Within it sits a small, fat little man, looking like he's doing his best to remain composed. He's brought to the scaffold, and his crimes are read out: colluding with foreign powers, and the crime of royalty, which is anathema to the republic of France.

When asked for his final words, Louis Capet, known to some as King Louis XVI, speaks in a quiet voice. "I forgive my enemies."

When the blade comes down, the crowd errupts into cheers. Many rush forward to touch the blood of a king, dipping bits of cloth in it in an attempt to save it.

and then everyone went home peacefully

I PREDICT A RIOT

It's as though all the built up tension in Paris exploded when the king was killed.

Who knows what started it. Rumors spread like wildfire, and it doesn't matter, does it? In the end, most of Paris is swarmed with chaos, especially in the areas nearest to where the king was executed. There's no doubt that the riot and the king's death are directly related; no peasant currently throwing stones and breaking windows will deny it.

Fights are happening with great frequency. It only takes a word, a half sentence, for someone to decide you're some kind of counter-revolutionary. There is a current of anxiety in Paris that hasn't gone away; after reaching a fever pitch, it has expressed itself with violence and chaos.

let's visit the tuileries

The Tuileries was the royal palace in Paris, the last residence of the king before his death. Of course the people of France end up clamoring at its gates, screaming profanities and attempting to scale them.

The majority of the guard let them do this, making only the most token of efforts to keep the peasantry back. But one guard, a man by the name of Antoine Colin, seems to become spooked and shoots repeatedly into the crowd before someone knocks him out.

By then, though, it's too late. The crowd was rambunctious, but not murderous. Now it's bloodthirsty, and the gates are stormed. It isn't long before the common people of France are trampling through the corridors of power. Inside, they'll mostly find servants running and hiding, and lots of valuables to steal.

Most are content with that, but not all. Some clamor for the deaths of the queen and the royal children-- per the laws of inheritance, Marie Capet's remaining son is now King of France. Should he not die as well?

The queen is hidden in a safe room, a hollow wall inside her apartments. Do you try to find her? Try to save her? Try to kill her yourself?

...And what about those kids hiding in there with her?

BRING IN THE TROOPS

The riot in the Tuileries lasts several hours, well past nightfall. It's beginning to peter off, people loosing their energy or vigor, when the sound of gunfire echoes from the front courtyard.

General Lafayette has arrived to save the queen, and brought with him a retinue of personal soldiers. All on horseback, brandishing firearms and sabers, they stream through the expansive halls of the Tuileries and attack anyone who looks out of place. They're here to clean up this mess with no concern for more filthy peasants getting in the way.

Aftermath

The night is a long one. Several fires break out in various parts of Paris, shops are looted, and several die in the Tuileries. The queen has disappeared, along with Lafayette. Some say she and Lafayette died, and they'll show you the bodies for a couple sou. Others claim they saw them riding off into safety just before sunrise. There are already talks of hunting them down, trying to find the traitors.

Only one thing is known for sure: It may be advisable to stay inside for the foreseeable future.

read the France setting infopages

oops you might have saved the life of a woman famous for dying???

NAV NETWORK LOGS OOC PLURK DISCORD

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She isn't doing - great - crammed into a boy's clothes at her height and young looking face. She's just a little too clean to be any street child, but give her a few hours, and she might look the part. Little too scrubbed over, little too wide-eyed. She had thrown up, profusely, for the sight of that king and his blood. Bloodied stump at all. The taste of something holy and ugly in her mouth for it. She's so dizzy with it, she is aching for it.

Of how something could be so terrifyingly, glorifying real.

"No." She shakes her head, after her silence where she is standing still long enough beside him in all these people, he is just one more, she is just one more. "It's not that they think its holy, it's that it is proof." The words come out of her mouth before she means it too - maybe it means something to her but she can't tell. Go fuck yourself, Jack. "If they take the blood, no matter what happens now, they can hold it up and say, we did this. It was us." She's shaking and white as a sheet but it's all ugly sick behind the eyes. "If they keep that blood they can look at it every day they wake up, every day they know. Know that this really, really, happened. They killed their king and no one can ever take it from them. Never again."

She's aching and it isn't right but she's aching so very, very badly over it. That ugly light in her skin that she desperately tries to keep down. Whether she's talking to him or at him or to herself just selfishly, what this means to her - it's all betrayed, when she looks up at him - and it is up, she couldn't come to anyone's shoulder even if she stepped up on her tip-toes - her eyes glow and glow and glow before she blinks and forces her gaze away.

Edited 2017-12-03 12:21 (UTC)

Having her vomit nearby wasn't particularly fantastic, but she hadn't been the only one to react that way. The place already stank anyway and with death now in the air (and emptied bowels likely), none of it was making for a particularly pleasant aroma. He could claim to have smelled worst and it would be absolutely true, but the memory of that didn't particularly help here. This place was vile.

And the girl with him had a pair of goddamn headlights in her eyes. Something like that was going to get a witch hunt started if someone started to notice. Not my problem he would like to think, but he was supposed to play along. That's why he had the coin back. He was being a right and proper good lad. Fucking hell.

"Give them a few years. They'll have some different bastard to rule them instead. By tomorrow they'll be peddling their bloody rags for pennies in the street." But the deed was done. The king was dead. Mission accomplished, right? He saw no point in lingering, so he took her by the shoulder to guide her away. "Now try and get those peepers on low beams before they try and do a repeat performance on you, right?"

She wants to tell him all sorts of things almost immediately: you're wrong, it does matter they did it, they killed him and no one can ever take that off them., haven't you ever wanted someone dead that badly - ?, and she knows that people are awful, he doesn't have to be like that about it. A hundred different objections and they all come down to, is she really talking about this King? Or someone else entirely.

All that comes out, however: "Hey - !" before he brings up that her eyes and well, doing what sirens do and. "Sh-" Ah, language, Angel. "-Sugar." Yeah, that'll show the world, good job.

Which is to say she goes with the shove. It's not hard, she's light than she looks, and she doesn't exactly like very much. But she takes the cue, grabbing her hat and jamming it down over her face a little lower as she takes deep breath to will the light back down again.

Did she just call me sugar? Sweeney stares at the back of her incredulously, but he uses his height to navigate them through the throng. Someone like him, people tended to more inclined to move when he pushed his way through. But things were already starting to get a little rowdy and it was only going to get worse. His better sense told him this would be a good time to split. He didn't owe them anything. But he felt the weight of his coin and the knowledge that he was, by his very existence, a guardian. God fucking dammit.

"This way." It's a whisper, but a loud and sharp one so it can be heard over the ruckus. He was leading her to the right, which meant she would need to follow rather than be pushed along. Things were a little less hairy that way, though not by much.

She has to trot to keep up pace with him, this was harder when she was winged and three feet off the ground at all times. Hard - hard because the touches, whether it is his hand or the the brush of other people - she flinches, crawls out of herself for the effort. It's. Too much. So much. More than she's ever had and - it isn't fair or right:

But when she has to follow rather than be pushed, she miss a beat in tucking herself as close behind him as she can. Terrified that she'll lose this person that is being kind enough to help - well maybe just himself, but her just as much. The second she thinks she might lose him, her hand grabs his wrist, willing down the too fast breathes against the well of panic. Don't go, please don't go.

Among the list of things that Sweeney would have considered to be a complete and total tragedy, he would not count losing his traveling companion as particularly high among that list. It wasn't that he didn't like her, it was just that she didn't really matter even if she did have headlight eyes. Or maybe because she did have headlight eyes, which made her more trouble than she was probably worth.

But their hands stayed connected, helped by her resolve and Sweeney just being that damn good at holding onto things. If you could pluck a coin from the air, then you had to have a good grip on things far more tangible. So eventually he found the two of them standing next to the wall of an alehouse that afforded them a few feet of space to breathe and contemplate the finer mysteries of survival.

"I hope the planning committee learns from this. Next time you off a king, find a better fucking venue."

He's so wonderfully solid - which isn't something she ever... knew outside of particular circumstance to know whether that was something she would often find with other people. Right now, it's a relief though, letting him take the brunt of the force of people around them. All she has to do is hang on like a skag to a hot dinner as he leads them to a sheltered spot.

( Or maybe not, her jaw didn't unhinge quite that far and her fingers definitely couldn't grip that hard, and it probably wasn't flattering to either of them. )

Quiet as she watches people go back and forth past them. Piling in further on to the square where the king had been killed. "When I see these things happen normally, it's in a big arena, lots of people fighting to the death to kill other people."

She doesn't let go of him. Holding on as tightly as she can. His wrist broader than the small of her hand but she does as decent effort as she can. "Everyone cheers, no matter who dies when that happens." Obviously, it's Pandora. It's the thrill that someone is dying and for once, it's not you. "Guess that really would be better than this."

He was already past the point of handholding, which made the continued act of handholding a smidge irritating. But she was like a sleeping cat and like the laps of so many people, he made peace with the fact that he was simply a one handed man now. This was his life now. Maybe she'd be happier if he just removed it and gave it to her.

"People love a good death, especially if they're not the ones doing the dying. Why do you think the rich love wars so fucking much?"

Her attention is back and forth - switching between him and the people passing by, cheering - laughing - jeering. Cacophonous loud, terrifyingly close, and she gets a few steps out - like she might almost let go, but the second he might get his hand again?

She comes straight back.

Granted, his words draw her - she looks up at him and rather than be miserable over what he's saying, she starts to laugh. Her hand coming up to hide it from being too obvious or loud. "I heard one of them once - 'nothing like the sound of orphans crying'."

There was no one as rich as the Baroness, and there weren't as many as thoughtlessly cruel. Even so - she points to the alehouse. That was where he wanted to go right? He moved like a bandit, or maybe one of the Raiders. When they weren't fighting ( killing ) they were usually piling themselves into Moxxi's bars. "Aren't you going to go in?"

"It had crossed my mind."

As a point of fact, he had noticed that alehouse before the execution itself. He had considered it would've been more valuable on the whole to actually just go spend the entire time drinking. But the last time this particular king had been executed, he'd been busy in America doing fuck all. So it seemed only right that in this second go, he could at least pay attention to something that was at least somewhat historically significant. He wasn't entirely sure if he regretted that decision or not.

"I'm all for getting hammered if you are, but I think things are going to be a bit rough out there before long."

Rougher still if he decided to get drunk and start throwing punches.

More and more like a bandit, every second.

But she looks suddenly - exactly like a teenager that has just been offered her first cigarette. She looks up guilty, "Are you sure - ?" About taking her in there, she means and then her mouth opens again. Yes, Angel, don't be an idiot, he wouldn't say it if he didn't mean. What was the drinking age on Pandora anyway? Probably birth. She was definitely over it if it mattered anyway but - "I've never had anything to drink before."

Then more seriously: "But... if you want to fight, that's fine, just tell me so I can get out of the way."

"Drinking, fighting. All the same to me. And besides, I owe it to the world as an Irishman to see you have your first drink. Even in this shithole."

So because his hand was irrevocably in the possession of another, he pushed his way into the alehouse. The place was no abandoned, because things hadn't got quite that bad yet. But the place was quiet and things only seemed to grow more tense as Sweeney stood in the doorway. Nobody here was looking for trouble, otherwise they'd have been out there watching the show. These people just wanted to be left alone and drink. Royal sympathizers, most likely. It was not the best crowd to be found among, but Sweeney didn't particularly care.

It was an alehouse, so ale is what they got. Two half pints for the both of them. "Be sure to drink it up. You'll need it to make it through the rest of this shit."

Holy shit.

She eyes it before she drinks it. Finally, after all that, she lets go of his hand that though she doesn't let herself stray far. Nervously taking the handle of the first one and bringing it closer to her. Looking over it, tapping her finger against the side. She's doing this, she's really doing this and no one -

( stop, pause, a look over her both her shoulders. No Jack yet. Not yet. Okay, back to the ale. )

- no one was going to tell her no.

"So, uhm..." pick a topic, any topic. So he'll talk and she can hide behind it. "... Irishman. That's from earth right?"

Good job, and she carefully picks up the half pint in both hands, making sure not to drop it with a nervous little giggle that makes her feel younger than she, stupider than she is. Drinking isn't smart. Better or worse than eridium she can't tell. Maybe the same, given what she's seen. Okay. How did they do it on Pandora?

All at once right?

Don't think about it, don't think about it. She puts it to her lips, tastes that first bitter mouthful, thick and ugly tasting against her tongue, and tip her head back to drink as much of it as she can all at once.

It was fortunate that the two escaped attention once he had herded her off to a table where they could drink and not be the subject of intense scrutiny. Again, this was fortunate because asking a man if they're from Earth was the sort of thing that invited normal and completely sane people to either question their own sanity or that of the other person. Depending on the amount of alcohol they had consumed, their usually came to a rational conclusion.

"You're a real master of subterfuge aren't you?"

Sweeney drank his slower, because he didn't need to impress anyone and also because this was old ale and she was entirely justified in thinking it tasted like shit, because it did. People could yearn for the old days all they wanted, but the modern world had figured out how to make a good ale. The people here hadn't.

She does a valiant job - she gets three mouthfuls in before she chokes on it. Hand coming up to her mouth to stop it coming back out her mouth. Forcing herself to swallow. Lilith didn't choke on this. Lilith drank like the rest of them.

Finally she swallows, coughing a little, to answer his question. "Sorry, I thought - " she lowers her voice, leaning in a little. "- thought you'd be like me." Yeah, nailed.

Edited 2017-12-10 07:49 (UTC)

Sweeney pretended not to notice. Or maybe he didn't notice at all. When you've been drinking as long as he had, everyone might as well seem 'new' to it.

"You're gonna need to clarify what 'me' is. I just got here and I don't even know your fucking name yet."

This bit, the bit that never really mattered because there wasn't a single thing she couldn't know about a person. Not really, not on Pandora, not if they'd ever worked in front of a camera connected to the echonet - and for the few that she had ever talked too, the introduction was one-sided. She never needed them to say anything. They never had to speak, not really.

I'm your Guardian Angel. Jack's words. Not hers. Her fingers fiddle a moment longer. There wasn't anyone she had to be. Did she even want to be Angel anymore? She didn't have too, she supposed. She was doing a lot of things in the last hour that she had never done anyway. Drunk something alcolic, thrown up on the side of the street, been taken out of a mess by a man that talked like one of Pandora's gangs.

But she was a little sick of pretending.

"I just got here too, I'm Angel." The words are unsure, maybe, this is new too. No mysterious inflection, no pretty sentiments. "Just... Angel. Nice to meet you." Subtle, well, that was the easy bit now that he reminded her. Figures he could fill in the empty space.

Angel. It was one of those peculiar names that people liked to use for their children, presumably because all of the virtues had grown dull and 'Seraphim' didn't quite have the same ring to it. But at least she didn't look the part. He always appreciated when that was the case.

"Sweeney." He did not offer his hand in any kind of greeting this time. Now that he had it in his possession again, he was disinclined towards relinquishing it again. It wasn't just Sweeney, but titles were for kings. And it had been awhile for him. "Funny meeting you at a time like this."

"No! No, you see this is just how it should be. Don't you see -"

Maybe it's the booze, hits someone this size like a technical through a skag, but from her palatable nervousness and fear she smiles now it's big and wide, huge and beaming. At least this time there isn't any glowing to go along with it. "There is a revolution, I am getting to have a drink for the first time and - "

She takes the warning about subterfuge, she pushes up a little bit, leaning into his ear to whisper. " - we're on earth!"

That said, she settles back down and goes to have another drink of the ale. "It's exactly how we should meet. This how it always starts."

Now all they need to do is be on a bus, or train, or spaceship.

"I was," he stated in slow and precise words, "being facetious."

Mad Sweeney, grim in the face of pep. But he was dealing with someone not of Earth now and while there were plenty of fairy folk of the fairy realm that would claim not to be of Earth, everyone knew better. Everyone was from Earth. Even the aliens that people believed in were just a different kind of being claiming to be from other realm. So not of this Earth was a story he was having difficulty finding credibility in.

"But, you know, I've spent a lot of time on Earth. You?"

She hiccups after her last mouthful, covering it quickly. But still the answer, she shakes her head. "No, no try about uhm - six galaxies that - " she looks up, around, she doesn't know how to walk in a straight line, but she knows her stars.

Which she can't see right now. Whoops.

" - that way probably." She puts up and out. Safe perhaps because it is the sort of claim too big to be true. "Pandora. But I've seen pictures of uhm, here. It looks a little different in those though, than this..."

Ah. Wonderful. Space aliens. And they came in human shapes with human names and used Greek names to call home. These were exactly the sorts of things you would just expect aliens to do if anything he had learned from television was true. Because he'd never expended much time in believing in other things (that would be flipping the relationship), he decided to just accept that this was just how things there. Aliens existed and they were here to plagiarize.

"Oh well, don't worry about that. This is just one of the better bits."

"It kinda seems like it." She's giggling again, muffled behind her hand.

"It definitely is like Pandora. Just no one is eating each other." Or maybe they were, she just hadn't seen it. Granted, everyone seemed hungry enough to do it. The faces might not be mutated as much, the bodies not as twisted. Not marred and no one buzzing for another hit of eridium - but that look, that empty flat hunger, she knew that. "But they look the same. I don't think that changes much from - place to place."

"Ah." He looked pointedly at her. "Well, let's try not and tell people about that."

He hadn't pegged her for a cannibal, but he knew that was definitely high on the list of faux pas that you did not want to admit to. For her own sake, he hoped he could discourage these tendencies.

"Oh - no!" She starts laughing again. Takes another drink, a big mouthful. Swallowing, shaking her head. "Not me. Just the bandits. We call them psychos, raiders, they live in the badlands - for uh, obvious reasons. There are people who are still kind of sane. Still really violent - "

Anyway. "But what's it like in uh Irish? I know a gang that talks like you. They're called uhm, uhm the - the - " her eyes scrunch up, nose wrinkling as she tries to think, that isn't the alcohol, she knows, that's not being hooked into a database. " - the Zafords."

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let fury have the hour,

kill a king

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