unfinishedlibrary | perhaps you have learned it without a book

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perhaps you have learned it without a book - MOONLIT RIVALS LOG 1

Who: Readers and Actors galore!
What: The Story begins- and so do preparations for the Masquerade!
When: The three days prior to the Masquerade [ooc timeline: 1/23-2/5]
Where: The city of Montica
Content warnings: Please include any warnings in headers!

First Quarter Moon

Now that most of the Editors know what to expect, the draw into the Story is likely more obvious this time. There’s a subtle urge that encourages their feet to turn towards the Stacks; a slight shimmer in the air that thickens the closer they get to the book laying open on an innocuous library cart.

Those who resist the Story’s pull will be drawn in eventually. Whether the compulsion is successful, or whether the Librarian passes by to sweep them in - all Editors will enter, and all will experience the Story’s start together.

(Editors who have gained the skill Ex Media Res will be able to resist the Story’s pull and hang out in the Library. Drop us a note if they’re using this skill!)

Our Beginning

The Story begins as night makes its transition to morning. Montica is a city that never sleeps, and some Editors may find themselves taken aback at how the absence of sunlight has done nothing to deter the nightlife.

In particular, at the hour our Readers arrive, there is a clean-up going on at the centre of town. People are grumbling as they sweep debris from the streets, and those who are familiar with supernaturally-powered fights will recognise this scene for exactly what it is: the aftermath of some powerful entities having had at it. Hang around too long and you may find yourself with a broom or hammer thrust into your hands, the expectation that you’ll help having been made clear.

Those who leave the clean-up will find themselves welcome in the city’s inn, where visitors hover by the windows, chattering excitedly about the fight that had just broken up. Some people think they’re lucky to have seen it - others think they’ll be luckier if they go the next few days without seeing another one.

The inn is warm, full of gossip, and by some marvel still has private rooms available to rent. Readers will find themselves with enough coin in their pocket to afford quite a bit, this time around - but don’t go spending it all at once. Those who are astute will hear the talk of a masquerade going around, and if you want to attend, you’re going to have to dress appropriately.

Welcome to Montica

Montica itself is a city built from stone, with the buildings packed closely together along cobblestone streets. Flowering vines creep along trellises, their gentle fragrance perfuming the air. The sky is clear and smog-free, the water flows cleanly, and a sense of magic drifts comfortably in the breeze.

The city is almost evenly bisected by loyalties, a hard divide running clearly through the centre of the town. Only a small ring in the centre is considered to be neutral territory - though that’s becoming more and more disputed with each passing moon.

To the north, buildings seem to have a fondness for silver. It seems they’ll take any excuse to work the precious metal into everyday items, from cutlery to window fastenings; and some particularly zealous citizens proudly don silver jewellery and pins in their day-to-day wear. In this section of town you will find the dwellings of the old vampire clans, littered with antiquities and casual opulence.

To the south, the people are fond of spices. Garlic flowers pepper garden beds and the dried bulbs hang from doorframes, and there’s hardly a meal cooked without it. Some industrious workers are busy building small moats of flowing water through this half of the city – you’d better mind your step, lest you get in their way. Located amongst these homes are the dens of the werewolf packs, warmly furnished and brimming with life.

No matter where you are in town, whether you’re surrounded by silver or dodging moat diggers, whether it’s day or night or nebulous twilight, there’s one topic that’s on everyone’s lips: the Umbra Masquerade.

It’s a once in a human lifetime event, and the city is abuzz. Some of the elderly may have been once before, in their youth - but likely at an age where they were too young to remember. There are stories about these masquerades, of the favours that can be won and the deals that can be made. More than one wealthy family attributes their successes to parties of the past, and while the werewolves shouldn’t be there – who’s going to stop them?.

The Market

At the centre of the city are Montica’s most dreary buildings. Markets are held here during the day, bright banners and exuberant stallholders calling out their wares. People of all kinds shop here, and it’s the best place to find quality goods. Some patrons give each-other hearty side-eyes, some sneer and mutter insults under their breath - but by and large, this a neutral zone, and the regular citizens treat it as such.

Behind the fuss of the market, astute observers will note the broken and boarded-up windows hidden by the bold stalls. Some buildings are outright abandoned, damaged beyond repair. It becomes even more obvious as night falls and the number of stalls thins, the night vendors setting up with wary looks in their eyes.

Right now the market is bustling with vendors sending goods up to the Umbra Clan's mansion. There is a constant stream of traders passing back and forth, hurrying to get their contributions in place before the ball. Regular goods are still for sale, but the busiest stalls are those selling - of all things - masks with varying levels of decoration. They’ve cleverly set up outside of stores selling clothing; beautiful dresses and tailored suits visible through the cracked and dusty windows. Editors will find they have enough local currency to afford something modest. If their tastes skew toward the more extravagant then, well – they better get to work.

The Umbra Mansion

The sprawling building stands tall, overlooking the city of Montica. Vines budding with fragrant flowers grow up the sides of the building, curling around windowsills and balconies in a curated fashion. A large hedge maze sits at the rear of the mansion, behind the grand ballroom; and the gardeners are in top form today, brandishing tools at anyone who looks like they're about to enter it. It's one of many things being tidied up and decorated for the ball, so you'd better not get in their way.

The mansion's front doors open to a foyer that is connected to an upstairs level by two grand staircases. A gilded chandelier hangs down between them, casting rainbows across the wooden floors as the sunlight strikes its crystal ornaments.

Those wide, curved staircases lead to a mezzanine that overlooks the ballroom below. Doors to private rooms branch off from here; all of them locked.

During the daylight hours, the mansion sports large windows covered by thick curtains that are drawn firmly shut. Those who try to peer through them will find an additional layer of security in the form of tightly-fastened metal blinds that block any slivers of sunlight from eking through.

On all three days the mansion is crawling with people setting up for the masquerade. Over there, someone’s hanging strings of lights. Over here, a florist is carefully arranging flowers. The kitchen is busy, human cooks overseeing the production of hundreds of canapes – and on the third day, over in the ballroom, are a band of musicians getting prepared for the night.

Security is lax everywhere except the underground floors, where the clan sleeps. The doors that lead to the underground complex are barred from the inside, and human guards keep watch outside of them to redirect any wanderers.

[The info/plotting post can be found here!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

At least in this world, it is her own fault. In the other, a moment of compassion caused it, for how was she to know that only magic of its own kind could defeat the beast in front of her?

She sits down on the chest, leans on her knees.

For someone who wishes to master her own destiny, she is unsurprisingly hounded by fate. Of course she would be picked to play a part in this tragedy.

She swallows. "I sought to master why I wish to take the master's place, and did not like the answer I received."

I tire of this game! We could kill him any time we please, and as usual, your cowardice keeps your teeth from his throat! I shall drink deep of love and rage, and spit a poison so foul that none could bear it! "I rejected my wounded pride, and before I could master it, it escaped from me. Or. So I thought. I have wandered this past month like a revenant, cold and numb."

"Hm," is all she says of the first. She doesn't know what's in Amalia's thoughts but of course she knows of the rivalry and contention and the dissatisfaction of losing a place of pride after major personal loss. She does have sympathy. No matter what else, though, if it comes to life and death Jadis will support and defend her lord.

She knows he brought her home and had her cared for, in that awful period after she became soulcracked, when she wept and gibbered and couldn't feed herself, to secure her services should she recover. It doesn't matter. When the people who belonged to her old life abandoned her, Roberte Guildulf saved her and Jadis doesn't take that lightly.

(Besides that, she's aware of the hideous consequences should her lord die, now that the outsiders are here and some of the most dangerous feel kinship with him. Anything is worth preventing that. Anything at all.)

"So it's taken more from you and become embodied, and you are less than yourself," she says, for clarity. Jadis remembers hearing herself say this and she feels obligated to close that loop. "The mind is flexible, to let you function this well with such a gap. You feel you're in the dulled sort of melancholy?"

"Yes, that's correct. All I have are suspicions, but my best guess so far is that it is my passions, without any of my forethought. There are a few other leads, but..."

She shakes her head. "Nothing solider than the shade it left me as. Not yet. That said. I know where it is to be found, if capture it I can."

"'She', surely. This is still the other half of you." Jadis can't imagine any substantial part of Amalia choosing to return to masculinity, and 'it' is a complicated matter. She gets why Amalia might prefer that pronoun for the other part of herself, but immediately believes that caging or destroying the wayward shadow will not help. Might make it worse, actually.

She considers the possibilities and problems if she, herself, seeks out Amalia's shadow. There's a spell she's learned to navigate by, she's not as hopeless as she can seem. "Have you spoken to her?"

"I haven't." She has other things to be doing in the gallery and lobby on those nights she visits the theater. "Well. Other than the extremely disastrous one I had at the start of the mess I'm in. Unrelated to the scents in the air."

She's probably heard plenty about that, already. "... I might try to speak to her, tonight, but a better time might be before a grand performance."

Should Amalia attempt this-- to confront her shadow, Lily, before the Umbran Masquerade--

The shade will certainly escape. Amalia will be left to try and play the shadow's role in her little theater troupe, while Lily-- the Shadow-- will party amongst the guests...

Now that would be a comedy of errors. "I'm not sure about before a performance. She might feel cornered." Jadis wonders if the shadow remaining in public is a sign of wanting to reconnect and reconcile or of a lack of foresight and ability to plan. Or both! "I wonder if I might meet her. I may be my lord's pet Mystic, but if she knows me for that she should know me generally, and might talk."

She doesn't fear for her own safety. During a fight Jadis can be unreliable, as she is human and soft-bodied and what she sees is often a few seconds ahead or behind of what she's actually looking at. It's not an insurmountable problem. Her insights have helped her to develop defensive sorcery that works around that issue, and if she can hit she hits hard.

There are also only a few ways she's foreseen herself dying, and they all seem to happen later on. She won't be killed in the first act.

Oh it's definitely poor planning. that girl is a walking lesbian disaster.

or maybe she thinks Amalia is hot. Who knows? Self-love is a kind of love, and gender euphoria a striking example.

"Don't face her alone. I... have only suspicion, no proof, but don't face her alone." Like, you know, Amalia was going to. Obviously. It's her responsibility.

...of course, the future also is always in motion, and not taking needless risks is probably a better way to reach that act than getting cocky, Jadis muses. The bulk of her attention has been on other matters. Plainly Amalia's shadow is not minor though.

"What's your suspicion? Hers are dangerous passions, then?"

"Dangerous passions, maybe, but my current suspicion for how she gained a human form is that she stole it. It has become urgent because of that suspicion." Prevent her from taking any other bodies, and not dying or getting taken over... that needs more than one person.

"Hmmm. That sort of dangerous. I see." Thinking, Jadis coils some of her dark hair around two fingers and brings it to her lips as if to chew it, then remembers herself and pulls them away. "I know of witches who've extended their lives in such a fashion. It's not widely known, of course. This is the sort of thing that turns people against practitioners of the mystic arts."

Witches often live longer than other humans, but most of the time that's through maintenance and alteration of the bodies they were born into. Body theft is something else entirely.

"If she is truly in possession of another's body, rather than only casting an illusion about herself, I would like to know what she's done with the owner. If dead, well. They are dead. If alive and buried..." A body whose owner still lives in some form lasts longer and there are some possibilities inherent to stopping the thief. But, it does seem that Amalia believes her shadow isn't committing to a body.

"So. Now I come to it. Dealing with this as quietly as we may, if it was not already, is now my most urgent matter. For your sake, as well as mine." To repay Jadis with such trouble sits ill with her in the first place. "... With that in mind, what must I do? What can I do?"

Absently Jadis runs her thumb down the coarse-scaled length of the rattlesnake, which has been quiet and still all this time. It pushes against her hand as if it enjoys the contact.

"You want to reclaim what she took and return to something like your whole self, I'm assuming? So just killing her in a fashion that won't allow her to claim another human won't work." It's the simplest answer, though even if they went with it Jadis would want to do enough readings and bend her insight on the issue of what would happen to this part of Amalia first. The rosiest, most hopeful possibility is that something of those torn-away emotions slowly starts to regenerate in her, but even then she'd never be the same. There are many decidedly worse possibilities.

"...but one to keep in our back pocket, should it come to it. I will accept that fate if it is required." There are signs they're already growing, if stubby and raw, still; it's hardly cold principle that's driving her to protect others... or towards a peace.

"She is... Incensed. Or was, when last we spoke. But time and tide may have changed things..." She pauses. "An... Offering, perhaps...?"

"I'll work out a solution for if it comes to that," Jadis promises, still touching the rattlesnake. Poison to coat a needle or a small knife maybe, she thinks.

"So you've spoken to her. Hm, a peace offering? I do think that the best outcomes are ones where you see eye-to-eye and reconcile entirely. You'll ever be soulcracked, but it could turn to a tight seam." That she only just obliquely brought up a poison with which to kill this other-Amalia doesn't bother her. Jadis is gentle, and generous, and remembers her debts, and has ways in which she's every bit as mercenary and big picture-focused as her lord.

She did ask, but it still sends a shiver up her back. Like a future she can't abide.

(In another life, a life untouched by the hands of other Editors or the Librarians, this is precisely what happens; her heart mends with the help of a shrine maiden and her best friend back home since elementary school. But it's her who leads that charge, using a beloved childhood dish (fish stew? Really? Why would someone deny something like that?) and a careful aiming of her passionate, unplanning half away from the immediate source of their sorrows and directly at their shared enemy.)

(the feel of slipping a fetter rattles through the air at that thought, as well. A woman with black hair, garnet-brown eyes, unremarkable only in her own mind, with a penchant for athletic women and being a world-class one herself... And wrapped with so many curses and strings of obligation that to admit any of that publicly was to risk her ruin.)

That's not to say Amalia's lost in the trees and forgotten the forest. "So. Attempt to reconcile, learn her proper grievance, and stitch the beating hearts together."

But will she sign on the dotted line, this time?

There is, Jadis won't admit, a little thrill in her at the thought of an excuse to work on poisons and antidotes. Most of what she makes is medicinal and she enjoys that, but it doesn't give her the same feeling of power, like life and death are brilliantly immediate in her hands. As if she can choose to be kind, to be good, rather than it being expected or required.

She sees... something, in the corner of her eye. Metaphorical bindings. When speaking to people with other selves Jadis has a sense, often, of swimming in dark waters and seeing the outline of a great shape gliding down below her. Something there that is whole and complete and outside of her understanding. Not of this world.

"Yes. You don't need to give in on what she wants, if it's a terrible idea. Admitting that it makes sense to want or feel a particular way might be enough." She purses her lips. "I think you could be united without her agreeing to it, but it would leave you divided in yourself."

"And thus, liable to split again, given we would both have access to sorcery. I think I shall pass on that particular opportunity unless it is unavoidable, though it's preferable to killing her, I suppose." She sighs.

Fast-acting poison that doesn't kill immediately, Jadis decides. A poison that slows heartbeat and breath, and the victim collapses and loses consciousness, and still more their vital signs diminish until another person would think them dead, but they linger for a time and can be restored with an antidote. She has a good candidate, she'll just need to work with her captive coral snake to alter its venom and she can put it together. And the counteragent of course. What fun!

"That's right. Merging properly is possible from there, but it might end up that her priorities win out over yours. Better to try the kinder way first. What are you thinking of as a peace offering?"

"I'm not entirely sure. Something..." She closes her eyes and looks at the ceiling, hand gently winding a bit of shadow in between her fingers, like spinning a thread of it. "Something familiar, that I haven't tasted of in ages, perhaps. Something we'll hold in common. Perhaps childish, to think of still enjoying."

She snaps her finger, and the shadow vanishes. "um. um umum-- there's a particular hand-pie I'm thinking on but I don't remember the name--"

Edited 2026-02-04 21:58 (UTC)

Jadis fiddles with the feather-shaped charms attached to her bracelet. Endeavoring to keep all accusation from her voice she says, "Sometimes you sound so much like my lord. Suffering is strength, so you'll remain in pain to provide it, and 'childish' pleasures like foods you've liked as a pup are not to be had, not if they don't fit your reputation."

She cares about her patron quite a bit and will defend him against anything of serious impact but that doesn't mean she acts like he's perfection. Lord Roberte will eat the candy she makes and justify it with the thought that other sweets are childish but her hard candy is like biting through bones! Comparing Amalia to him like this, just now, is both fond and a slight poke.

"Is it sweet or savory? Cheese?"

"Not so much that, as that there are..." She hums. Saying 'she's not allowed to eat like a commoner' is not done, so instead she says, "Expectations on me, when I must present a face, which is most of the time. People expect generosity, and I provide it."

This clarified, she continues. "Savory. No cheese, it's very much a miner's fare, with turnip, pickled beet, onion, sauce that tasted of mutton and maybe even had some, carrot. One side was pinched off and tasted of preserve, though the fruits were quite mixed and seasonal."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

perhaps you have learned it without a book - MOONLIT RIVALS LOG 1

Our Beginning

Welcome to Montica

The Market

The Umbra Mansion

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Placing this firmly in Day 2, now.

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augh sorry for editing more than once.

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