Introducing Gideon Nav, Cavalier Primary to the Ninth House, Keepers of the Locked Tomb...

[ninth_cavalier]

...House of the Sewn Tongue, The Black Vestals. We pray that the tomb is shut forever. We pray the rock is never rolled away. We pray that which was buried remains buried, insensate, in perpetual rest, with closed eye and stilled brain. We pray it lives, we pray it sleeps, we pray for the needs of the Emperor All-Giving, the Undying King...

One minute Gideon is doing the stupidest and most perfect thing she has ever done, heroically sacrificing herself so her necromancer can eat her and achieve true Lyctorhood and break Cytherea the First's body into so many little shards of bone and ribbons of fat and flesh that even her own mother (thousands of years dead, and most likely a huge bitch) couldn't recognize her, and the next she's—standing. Whole, the aches in her leg and shoulder gone, her sunglasses perched on her nose, the comforting weight of her longsword¹ on her back. She takes a breath, just for the novelty of it, and looks around.

The first thing she notices is how clean it is. No blood, no mold, no grime, no layers of bone dust. When she breathes, she just breathes air, and it feels like extra clean air, which—she looks further around—is probably due to the actual grass on the actual ground. In the distance there are trees. With birds in them.

Is this—this can't possibly be what the inside of Harrow's brain looks like. The inside of Harrow's brain is undoubtedly as spooky as the outside of Harrow's brain, because where would she even have found the imagination to dream up something this—idyllic?? There's nothing even close to it in any of her experience on Drearbruh, and Gideon would know, having been there and actively making that experience worse for all of Harrow's sorry little life.

No, what she's looking at is—a house. A big, boring, white-painted house, not a bone to be seen. "Okay," says Gideon. "What the fuck."

Anyone looking at her will see a tallish (though not for Mansion standards), broad-shouldered and very ripped butch woman, dressed all in black (black tank top, black pants, black stompy boots). She has short-cropped red hair, medium-brown skin, and her face has been painted with stark black and white skull makeup, atop which she has incongruously perched very old-looking aviator sunglasses. Slung over her back is the aforementioned sword.

¹ Typist note: the books consistently refer to this as both a "longsword" and a "two-hander," and from the way its weight and length is constantly emphasized I interpret it to be more toward zweihander than longsword. Also, bigger sword sexier.

Comments

[kadewest]

Kade has been exploring, trying to get a measure of the place, when he sees the hot butch appear. No visible Door, but then, if it's not a Door he could use, he wouldn't see it anyway. He's already in cataloguing-mode: the skull makeup speaks to some Underworld or other Mortis-adjacent space; the sword might imply a Fairyland that likes its heroes.

She does look like she could fit right in at his school, though. "Hey," he says, pausing just outside of what's probably her striking range--sometimes, recent travelers can be highly reactive.

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon stares at him. No visible weapons, not that that means shit, but more than that a distinctly nonthreatening aura. She can't decide if she should relax or worry about that more, considering the last person she considered 'nonthreatening' was fucking Dulcinea. "Uh," she says. "'Sup?"

[kadewest]

He gives her a nod. "I'm Kade. I'm new here, too. Was this your first time traveling between Worlds?"

[sporesprouter]

Tress is heading back to the house from the stable and sees Gideon, pausing to take her in. "Oh, hello. New arrival, I'm guessing?"

[ninth_cavalier]

Kade—no House designation, or affiliation at all. Gideon gives him a slow look, then turns around, scanning the sky—grey and dismal, the only thing around here properly depressing—for any sign of a transport ship. Had someone stopped her from sacrificing herself after all? Harrow? And then what? Had they won, somehow, or Cytherea relented, and then— someone knocked her out, dropped her on some transport, and she ended up here? But who? And why didn't she remember any of it?

"No," she says finally, deciding to not be a total dumbass and reveal her memory loss to a total stranger. "I came by transport once before, from the Ninth to Canaan House."

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji spots an unfamiliar figure from above as he is directing Bichen lower to the ground and preparing to return to the mansion to coax his husband into a late breakfast. At first, all he registers is that there is another newcomer. Bichen drops in a quick but controlled descent until it is near enough to the grass that Lan Wangji can jump lightly to the ground and let the sword slide home in its sheath.

He bows, and then hastily keeps his expression neutral as he sees the woman's face. It twists time around him for the space of a breath, bringing him back to Mo Manor, the juniors summoning him for help and the sight of Mo Xuanyu's body and his face smeared with messy hanged-ghost makeup. His first glimpse of Wei Ying in thirteen years. The memory clears quickly -- the resemblance is negligible -- but it does leave him more curious than usual.

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon looks her up and down - she's cute, in a kind of Rapunzel-type way, and seems improbably cheerful. "What gave it away?" she asks. "The air of general befuddlement? The fact that someone clearly brought me here and then just—left me, standing around like an idiot? Or—let me guess. If you'd seen me before you'd remember me." She waggles her eyebrows, and hears Harrow's voice—figuratively, unfortunately,¹ not literally, go you're disgusting.

¹ Not she wants Harrow in her head—it should be the other way around, from her limited understanding of Lyctorhood—but right now she'll take anything familiar, even her. Okay, who's she kidding, especially her.

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon whistles admiringly. "Nice trick," she says, and wishes he hadn't sheathed his sword so quickly. "How'd you do that, then? Bone blade, just plated in steel?" This guy kind of looks like a necromancer, though it's totally ballsy to dress in white. That's real confidence—or arrogance. She looks forward to finding out which.

[kadewest]

"This is a pretty small World! Not the smallest I've been to--I don't think anything will surpass the Halls of the Dead--but pretty tiny," Kade says, as she looks around. "Do you have a name, traveler? They don't have special magic here, by the way."

[sporesprouter]

"Mostly the first one," she replies with a slight shrug. "It's possible you've been around a while and I just hadn't run into you yet. But everyone is at some point brought here confused, at least."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Oh, well, that makes me feel much better," says Gideon. (It doesn't.) "Where is here, exactly?" It's gotta be one of the richer houses—the Fifth, maybe, or the Third. Fuck, if it's the Third, does that mean Ianthe brought her here? Gross.

[ninth_cavalier]

"I mean, the Ninth is a barren rock full of skeletons, so this place already has a leg up," says Gideon. "Also, hi. I'm Gideon—" She attempts to stop her mouth there, but it fills in without her permission and with something horrifyingly like pride, "—Nav, cavalier primary to Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House."

[lightbearinglord]

Immediate interest in Bichen is a handy way to gain some quick approval from Hanguang-jun. "There is no bone," he says, and does, in fact, draw Bichen again, this time by hand, to hold it aloft for her inspection. As ever, the glassy-thin blade glows faintly but steadily blue. "Bichen is my spiritual weapon."

[sporesprouter]

"It's a strange house that grabs people from different worlds. Nowhere anyone's ever heard of before getting here, anyway. We've just taken to calling it 'the mansion'."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon's eyebrows go all the way up. "Your sword is haunted?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"The house grabs people," says Gideon, flatly. "The house." She turns to frown at it, dubious. "What, like it grows long-ass arms and pulls their transport ships from orbit?"

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji maintains a deliberately neutral expression. He has been here for long enough, at least, to understand that there can be considerable miscommunications between travelers from disparate worlds. "It is not, but it has a spirit. It answers to my spiritual power."

[ninth_cavalier]

That sounds exactly like the definition of haunted, to Gideon, but she's not about to argue with a necromancer powerful enough to wield a sword with a full guy trapped in it. "Cool," she says, instead, because it is extremely cool. The ghost shit, combined with the white clothes & silver ornamented headband—"You must be Eighth, then." She puts a hand to her chest. "Ninth. If, you know, the paint didn't give it away."

[sporesprouter]

She shakes her head. "No, people just arrive here out of nowhere. I was walking out of a shop and wound up on the lawn by the trees, for example."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon stares at her. "That's impossible. This isn't even the same planet as Canaan House, and you can't just walk through space. You'd die, and not just like a normal schmuck dies. Like, an all of your insides boil and your eye jellies burst horribly kind of death."

[kadewest]

Well, there's a lot of words that clearly make internal sense to a World Kade has never heard of! "Reverend in the clerical sense, or the venerated one?" he asks, and manfully resists the urge to take his notebook out and start jotting things down, and then: "I went to a Fairyland. Called Prism."

[sporesprouter]

"Impossible or not, it's what happens." She looks up at the sky. "There are twelve moons on my planet. Wherever we are, there are only two, and they're a lot farther away than the ones I'm used to."

[lightbearinglord]

Naturally, the paint gave away nothing, nor do any of these numbers mean anything to Lan Wangji. "I am a second son, but I imagine that is not what you mean." He releases his hold on Bichen so that it can, again, tuck itself back into its sheath.

[ninth_cavalier]

"Uh, both?" says Gideon. What a weird question. "Sorry, hang on. A of all, what the fuck is a fairyland, and why are you telling me about it? Secondly, you really don't know who Harrowhark is? Like, not—I don't expect you to know who she is personally, basically no one but me and a bunch of hideous old corpses, and now I guess some less hideous new corpses, RIP"—she salutes skyward, "—knows that, but she's like. Heir to the Ninth. Where are you from that that means nothing to you?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"Yeah," says Gideon slowly. "Because it's a different planet. Different planets have different numbers of moons." It's clear they're not really going to get anywhere with the whole 'you can't just walk between planets' thing, so she settles on this as a safe enough topic. "The Ninth—where I grew up—had five."