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[youngtimer]

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/thumbs up

[youngtimer]

[she would have had to surrender the gun, but that holster is still just as admirable as when he first took note of it. he leads her up to the VIP lounge, sliding behind the bar with practiced ease]

Please, have a seat. Would you like something to drink? I've got a nice house sangria: this week it's white wine with blackberries and raspberries. Or if you don't want alcohol, there's a prickly pear lemonade.

[alchepistol]

[ Saint-Germain makes a mental note to come here with Cagliostro. She thinks her companion would enjoy this atmosphere.

And the variety on the drinks menu! Saint-Germain tends to match her drinks to occasions, when she bothers to not just drink the same thing all the time. If she is here to learn more about Horatio Hargreeves, then his recommended drink is the perfect selection. ]

Sangria, please.

[ A seat is taken. ]

[youngtimer]

You got it.

[he proceeds to pour her the glass, then one for himself, and rounds the bar to sit next to her]

So ... where do you want me to start on the whole two truths one lie thing?

[alchepistol]

[ Saint-Germain wets her lips with the sangria before replying. It's sweet...but she doesn't mind. ]

The aging delay. I've never heard of such a thing, so I'd like to know how it came about.

[youngtimer]

[he nods: Saint Germain is a very logically driven person, so he's not surprised by the choice.]

I'll start at the beginning, then. I was born on the same day as forty-one other babies, all to women who hadn't shown any indication of being pregnant. My adopted father tried to adopt as many of us as he could. He ended up with seven, and each of us developed a unique ability. Mine is that I can move through space at will. We called it Blinking. Need a napkin?

[with a flash of blue light, he disappears and reappears at the other end of the bar, grabs a handful of napkins, and Blinks back.]

Eventually I realized that I could use my power to attempt to travel through time as well, but Dad didn't want me to. We fought about it a lot.

[alchepistol]

[ She doesn't need a napkin, but she'll take one regardless, as it was good of him to incorporate this into his demonstration. Blinking....spatial warping. Interesting that he has retained (or regained) some use of this ability in Ryslig. Also interesting that, despite this, he seems to remain trapped here. Saint-Germain decides she'll bring that up later. ]

Then you used it, and there were consequences.

[youngtimer]

I love it when people who get brought here still have enough braincells to rub together.

[he smiles at her as he starts to get her drink ready, talking as he works - ice, sangria, freshly cut fruit garnish.]

Yeah, exactly. I was able to jump ahead a season. But because I was young and dumb, that wasn't enough. I wanted to see what I could do, so I kept going. Another season. A year. A decade. And then I made one more jump ... and the city around me was in ruins. And I was out of energy. I couldn't go back.

[he pours himself a couple of fingers of neat whiskey and raises his glass to her in a silent toast]

The first of those three apocalypses in my comment to the game.

[alchepistol]

[ She nods in response to that toast. If her own drink is ready, she'll return the gesture.

The city in ruins.....That would be a horrible sight to behold for anyone. And he did so while a child. Terrible. ]

What caused it?

[ The apocalypse, that is. What made him run empty, from the described sequence of events, seems plain. ]

[youngtimer]

Well ... at the time, I didn't know. But my brothers and sisters were all in the rubble. None of them had powers strong enough to stop it. My only clue was that Luther - who was known for his strength of muscle and weakness of brain - had a glass eye clutched in his hand. As though he'd pulled it out of someone while he was fighting them.

[he takes another sip of his drink at the memory that still chills him after all these years: the six of them lying dead beneath all that stone and debris, so much older than him, and him so small and unable to do a thing.]

I had to find shelter and wait for my powers to come back. I found a newspaper with the date, so I knew when it happened. When they came back, I figured I'd just travel back and warn them all. So I camped out in the ruins of the library. Found a friend: Dolores. My only companion. We waited for my powers to come back... for forty years.

[alchepistol]

[ Forty years. That's a blink of an eye for Saint-Germain, but for a child faced with the destruction of everything they knew, it would seem an eternity. And hasn't she, too, been a child who came home to discover a corpse.....?

She would have waited, as well. If she'd had a chance of keeping her mother alive. She blinks. ]

Thus the discrepancy.

[ She doesn't know enough to be certain of the mechanics, yet, but the math is beginning to add up. Time travel is complicated, so perhaps he failed to age while in the future despite time passing. Or... ]

[youngtimer]

Almost. You're close.

[he's impressed by Saint-Germain's quick wit, how eager she is to put it all together. he decides he doesn't have to pad it all, and that she'd appreciate just the bare basics.]

I was approached by someone from a time travel agency called the Temps Commission, and she made me an offer: come and work with them for five years, and then they'd give me the means to return to my own timeline the way I wanted to. My powers were back, but I still didn't have the means to figure out how to travel exactly when I needed, so I took the deal. The Commission maintains the timeline by ensuring that important historical events happen the way they're meant to: and to do that, they deployed me as an assassin, killing people who would have otherwise prevented those events in some way. At first I kept count. Then I realized that if I was going to get back to my family and avert the apocalypse, the end justified the means. It didn't mean I stopped looking for any other loophole or way out that I could find, though, and eventually I figured out the math necessary to open a time portal to the exact moment I needed. I skipped out on my deal and went home ... but I misplaced a single decimal in my math, and that's what caused the discrepancy. My consciousness is almost sixty, but my body's still almost sixteen - it was fifty-eight and fourteen, when I arrived here.

[alchepistol]

[ .....He corrected the timeline. He worked for an organization that corrected the timeline, by any means necessary, shouldering what were still no doubt sins...

And he would choose his own justice, to save mankind's future. To ensure it remained in their own hands, not snipped off at the bud.

Saint-Germain absorbs this, and the conclusion of a cautionary tale about being extremely precise with one's math. So it had been unintentional.....It all makes sense now. His results were different than hers because they came about in a completely different fashion.

Yet they have something in common, and Saint-Germain was so little expecting to encounter anyone here with this as a similarity to her, she feels so obliged to repay him for the trust and time he's paid her by telling her, a stranger, all of this, that when she finally replies, it's to say: ]

I'm over a thousand.

[youngtimer]

[well, that's not a response he was expecting by any means. usually people just kind of blank out for a moment, go 'huh' and then say something pithy about second chances, or make jokes to cover up how much they just had to absorb. how foreign all the concepts seem to them.

which is to say, Saint-Germain is not the only one pleasantly surprised by having found someone to relate to. he purses his lips and gives a little acknowledging, non-judgemental bob of his head]

I'm guessing you're not so hale thanks to your own time travel escapades, or even a good moisturizer.

[alchepistol]

[ Saint-Germain's lips thin in what almost might in another life have been the beginnings of a smile. She sips her drink, debating how much to say.

He'd been completely forthright with her, however. So she shall do the same. She is bound by no necessary secrecy here, not like in a world controlled by the Curse of Balal where real magic was frequently punished, or remaining in the shadows of history served a strategic purpose.

Also, if she's being completely honest with herself, she was always terrible at dissembling. Or so Cagliostro claims, and Cagliostro does not lie. ]

My world suffers under a curse that prevents mutual understanding. A priestess who sought to overthrow this curse left behind the results of her investigations into the nature of the world. Magicians who focused on her research into breaking materials down to their primal forms, then reconstituting them, developed a black art known as "alchemy".

[ She sets her glass down. ] Not the charlatanry that served as the forefather of modern chemical thought. Real alchemy, able to achieve true material perfection.

A perfect human body, complete in essence and freed of impurity, does not age.

[ When Saint-Germain calls her physical form "perfect", her tone is devoid of vanity. She is stating a fundamental, quintessential fact. ]

[youngtimer]

[Horatio listens intently: the nature of other people's homes has become a sort of fascination for him, especially since he'd started bartending. there's infinite possibility for conversation and connection that goes so far beyond imbecilic small talk.]

That's fascinating. Of course it wouldn't, degeneration itself is an impurity. But that raises another question for me: if the focus of the research was perfecting physical substance and form ... how is that going to affect a non-corporeal concept like understanding? Did the priestess think it was linked to some change made to people's brains? That wouldn't be magic, it'd just be ... really complicated science. Not a curse, but more like a disease. Right?

[alchepistol]

You're presuming a distinction.

[ Saint-Germain takes out a pen and a small leather-bound notebook. She sets it on the bar, turns it so it's oriented towards Horatio Hargreeves. Writing upside-down is not an issue for her. ]

Tangible and intangible realities, what you might call the realms of science and magic, are more linked than strictly scientific thought would have you believe. [ She draws a circle inside of a circle, labels them "microcosm" and "macrocosm" - adds an equals sign, another two circles, labels them "physical" and "spiritual". ] "As above, so below." What affects the spiritual affects the physical, and vice versa. Even if the physical effect of the curse is a disconnect from the realm of universal language, the changes happen not within the material brain but within the conceptual one.

Yet, as they are linked, perfecting tangible forms can give us clues as to how to perform the same transmutation upon intangibles. Certain intangible energy concepts also refuse to affix to any material object not already made perfect.....

[ She sketches a human figure, surrounding it with various glyphs, showing energy attaching itself to the body, then taking the form of armor. ]

The perfect body is a stepping-stone. The end goal is the perfection and re-completion of the world. This is what mankind has developed using the knowledge that was left to us....the pinnacle of alchemic ideology and triumph of the human mind.

[youngtimer]

[he watches her draw - first impressed by her ability to write upside down, then completely compelled by the explanation which follows. it explains so much, to him: particularly in regards to Klaus' abilities, and how their own might have come to be somehow. even if he and Saint-Germain are from vastly different worlds, it's a philosophy he can easily grasp ... especially here in Ryslig, where magic becomes as commonplace as breathing and is, in some ways, more advanced than science.]

So you're saying that you needed to change the physical world somehow in order to fix the curse. Or is that oversimplification?

[alchepistol]

[ It's close enough for her to feel he's following. She nods. ] The curse has a physical source. We sought to command it.

[ She starts to draw again. It's a circle with...there's a piece missing...like someone's taken a bite out of a cookie that's.....orbiting Earth.....beaming down rays..... ]

We intended to amass enough power to gain admin-level access to the ruins the Custodians left on their observation satellite, the Moon, and dismantle the universal language network jammer.

[ AS ONE DOES ]

[youngtimer]

[for some reason he finds this utterly hilarious, but only grins. he has enough tact to not laugh]

Jesus, I'm glad my brother Luther isn't here to hear you say that. He'd feel so goddamned vindicated.

[he pauses, then explains:]

My dad sent him up to work for him on the moon for like ... four years or something like that. He was convinced it was for some higher purpose and not just busy work to keep him out of his hair.

[alchepistol]

Your world has a Moon as well?

[ SHE'D WONDERED WHETHER CURSELESS WORLDS DID

RYSLIG DOES

BUT IT'S CURSED IN DIFFERENT WAYS ]

What's its purpose?

[youngtimer]

Yeah, we do. Its orbit is connected to the movement of the tides.

[he'll take up a napkin of his own and draw a diagram for HER. look at these two nerds, they're so great]

It's basic physics: has to do with the moon's relative gravity or inertia in relation to its position to the earth.

[alchepistol]

[ She studies the napkin carefully, following the explanation. ] A purely physical effect, but greatly preferable.

[ there are presumably also tides in symphoworld but we also didn't hear about them getting screwed up when somebody SHOT A HUGEASS PIECE OFF THE MOON not her; every season a different villain is like /cocks gun MOON'S HAUNTED so who the hell knows ]

[youngtimer]

Tell me about it. But yeah, my dad sent my brother up there to study it for some reason. This is while I was off stuck in time, though, so I don't know much about it. Other than stuff I picked up from reading old newspapers while I was camped out in the ruins of the library.

[he flashes her a little smile]

Good thing I've always liked reading. Always had something to do.

[alchepistol]

A library does sound ideal. If any lodgings under those circumstances can make that claim.

[ ....speaking of, by means of a discussion of "knowledge." ]

I wish I could have read what he found.

[ She never made it to the moon herself. Her goal was usurped and twisted before she had the chance to seize the lunar ruins....And now it seems unclear whether succeeding in this task would have fulfilled her ideals, after all.

Still. As an alchemist, who seeks complete comprehension. It would have been nice. ]

[youngtimer]

Pretty sure all he did was send back bags full of moon rock. Not a clue why Dad wanted them... turns out he didn't even open them.

[if Saint Germain has not made this hypothesis yet, it will surely start to form now: Reginald Hargreeves is an asshole.]