trans_9 | Sometimes research just doesn't help. [Open]

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Sometimes research just doesn't help. [Open]

Patsy Walker was quickly discovering that the media library onboard Stacy had vast amounts of information on almost any subject that she wished to look up. After having been distracted by looking up the history of lipstick, reading about Marie Antoinette, and discovering a trashy beach read, she had gotten down to business and started researching Hell and Satan and all of that stuff. And boy, do I wish I hadn’t. All of this information couldn’t be more contradictory if it tried, she mused. I mean, okay, I want to understand Daimon, I do – why, I don’t know, but I’m drawn towards it just the same – but so much of this just refuses to make any coherent sense!

Clearly, if she was going to understand him, she’d have to approach this from a different route.

Whatever that route was. Talk to him some more?

She shook her head and went back to some light, fluffy reading. Not that Joan Collins was light and fluffy. Really, it was more hot and heavy.

And bad on you for imagining Daimon as your bodice-ripping stud!

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Roxie had been--well, wandering, basically. She hasn't been intense enough about it to really count as 'patrolling', but some impulse has still led her to poke her nose into the nooks and crannies of the ship.

And so she finds herself here, peering silently (but for the sound of her plantsuit-clad feet against the floor) into the media library.

Patsy hears the soft, padded foot steps behind her and she turns to look at a young, bespectacled woman peering into the media library. "Hey," she says, offering the girl a friendly smile. "Uhm. Welcome to the library?" Crap. Were you supposed to use your library voice in here? Patsy wasn't sure.

"Hi," Roxie says, adjusting her glasses a little. "I don't think I've been in here yet," she says, glancing around.

Her voice is quiet and crisp, but her demeanor suggests that that's a default, not any library reaction.

"It's my first time in here too," Patsy says, nodding her head. She lowers her voice a little to match Roxie's tone. "I'm new around here." You can tell that because Patsy still has that awe-struck-am-i-dreaming expression in her eyes. "They've got a lot of stuff in here. I'm Patsy, by the way." She stands up to shake Roxie's hand.

Roxie's expression is fairly placid—but, then, it always is. She shakes Patsy's hand, her grip disproportionately firm for her small frame. "I'm Roxie. I'm new too." She's weirdly calm for a young girl thrust into this situation.

Patsy's noticing that. Her own first reaction, when she'd popped, was to "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!" for a good long while.

And then Stacy filled her with motherly looooooove.

Patsy tilted her head. The girl looked awfully young, at least to her. Not that Patsy was old by any standards, but she wasn't a spring chicken either.

Strong, too, this girl was.

"You have quite a grip there, Roxie."

"Thank you," Roxie says mildly, a hand reaching up to adjust her glasses a little.

"..." Bright smile for the slightly awkward silence. But it was always that way when talking to someone new. "How do you like it here so far?"

"It could be worse," the girl says with a little bit of a shrug. "Boring so far, though."

She leans over to get a bit of a look at what Patsy was reading. Oh, that's interesting...

Patsy follows Roxie's gaze to the stuff on demonology, hell, and trashy hollywood wives. She smiles awkwardly. "I have odd interests."

"You're going to corrupt the impressionable youth," Roxie comments dryly, as her suddenly-keen eyes flick across the active displays. "Most of that stuff," she says, looking at the demonology texts, "is all mistranslation or misattribution," she adds, adjusting her glasses again. "A lot of the 'demons the Hebrews dealt with were regional deities who got added to the roster to make fighting the locals more attractive."

"..."

Blink blink blink.

"I...how...where...what?"

"Like Baal," Roxie says. "He was probably a city god—nobody's completely sure of where—who got written in as a demon, Beelzebub, by the makers of the Old Testament."

She's stayed quite composed. Not even seemingly-proud of the knowledge.

"...how do you know all this?" Patsy asked after another moment of stunned silence. "And what can you tell me about...Satan...and any children he might have?"

"I read a lot," Roxie says with a little hint of a smile. "And that depends on what point in the timeline you're talking about. The idea of a Devil separate from God's command only really started in Christianity. Children... ah, that's kind of a pop-culture invention, I think."

"Except for the part where there's a man calling himself the Son of Satan on the ship," Patsy replies. She leaves out the part where he's in love with her. Because awkward.

That breaks through Roxie's coolness a bit. She seems... kind of incredulous.

"There'd have to be somebody else using the name. The religious Satan, if you're looking at Christianity, was basically given an invented background once they decided that's how it was all along, even though it wasn't."

Patsy's brow furrows. "You mean that his entire past was fabricated?" She tucked back a lock of her hair, confused by that. "So...maybe Satan isn't really Satan?" She's so going to need pain killers after this.

"In Judaism, there's ha-satan... God's chief prosecutor, basically. Not a cause of evil, just a searcher-out of it." Roxie is regaining a little of her cool, now. "When the Christians came along they decided they didn't like the existing arrangement."

"So they gave him a promotion and made him the king of all evil," Patsy says, wondering if she's got the gist of it right. "Am I sort of close?"

"Well, yes, except there wasn't really a 'him' in the first place. It was used as a job title, not a particular figure."

Roxie's starting to look juuust a bit smug at having the chance to talk about all this pent-up information.

Oh, go ahead and look as smug as you like, sweetheart. Patsy appreciates this. She's a little disturbed that someone who's so young-looking knows all this...but she appreciates it just the same. "Kind of like a black smith is what a person did by trade, before Blacksmith became a last name?"

"Yes, actually," Roxie says with a little bit of a nod. "But the analogy would work better if you had a guy named Prosecutor who was actually a serial killer or something."

"..." Patsy wrinkled her nose. "That's disturbing."

"But it gives you an idea of how they changed the text," Roxie says, smiling just a little again. "Like I said, a lot of the most-known 'demons' were just local deities that got written into the role. Satan's the same kind of thing, just with a local name instead of a foreign one."

Patsy smiled back at Roxie this time. "That's...actually good to know," she says. "And it gives me something to sift through while I try to understand Daimon. Which is complicated enough as it is." She tilts her head. "Have you met anyone weird here from your home, someone who just...confused you?"

Roxie shakes her head. "I think I'm the only person here from where I'm from," she says. "But I'm not sure if I'd even recognize someone, unless they work for the same being I do." That's an interesting choice of words—'being', not 'person'.

It's one that Patsy picks up on as well. She tilts her head, obviously confused. Who is this girl? "Being?"

"My god, Shyama the Night-Time," Roxie says, as if this were someone it were possible to just go and visit on one's off-hours.

She said it so matter-of-factly, so casually that Patsy's jaw drops just a little bit. She composes herself quickly. "That's...quite the name."

"Not really," Roxie says, adjusting her glasses. "A lot of deities go for more ostentatious titles. Look at what Yahweh made of himself."

Yahweh! A name that Patsy has heard! She nods in agreement. "I see your point," she says. "So...what is...Shyama the Night-Time god of?"

"The night-time, obviously," Roxie says with a hinting smile. "He watches over dreams and mysteries, and he finds people like me to help guard against the things that don't belong that creep in through the night."

"Oh! So he's kind of like the Sandman. In theory." Please don't hate her for that generalization, Roxie.

"Not really," Roxie says. She doesn't hate, but she does grudge some. "Shyama crafts a lot of nightmares, and deaths in darkness fall under his domain. But he helps uphold the natural order of things most of the time. Gives structure for people to live in. People like me are exceptions to balance out the things that don't belong in the world."

"..." She listens to that, taking it in. It sounds interesting, if a little scary. Patsy wonders what purpose the ship has had in choosing Roxie. Whatever it is...the girl is certainly unique. "And what do people like you do exactly?"

"Hunt down the cho and kill them." She halfway adjusts her glasses again. "They infect other creatures and eat them from the inside out. A lot of the time they hide as normal-looking people."

Impressive. That's really impressive. Here, Patsy's starting out to be a hero, to do amazing things, and this girl standing in front of her...she already does amazing things. The awe on Patsy's face is clear as she asks, "What happens to the creatures who are eaten from inside-out? Can they be saved?"

"Not really," Roxie says. "Maybe if you get there quick enough and have a good surgeon, but there's a point where it's impossible to remove the cho without killing them anyway." She sounds remarkably cool and logical about the subject. Maybe it's a defensive reaction.

Maybe it is. Patsy would imagine that you'd need to be able to compartmentalize to deal with something like this on a regular basis.

But it did bring up a question.

"Do you like it? What you do?"

"It's okay." She shrugs. "And it's... well, I figure out where one of the cho is, and I hit it until it stops moving." Small girl, to do something like that. But her handshake... "On a good day, the first part is the hard one."

"That's a lot to have on your shoulders," Patsy says, trying to place herself in Roxie's shoes. "I want to be a hero myself, but I sometimes don't know if I'd have the moxie to do something like that."

"It's not really a hero thing," Roxie says. "It's a job."

A job she spends her time getting beaten halfway to death for, but a job.

"Some superheroes take what they do to be a job as well," Patsy says, nodding her head. "Not that I am one. Yet. But I hope to be someday."

"Superheroes?" Roxie asks. "So, what, there are people from comic books here now..." She looks a little weirded out as she processes this fact.

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Sometimes research just doesn't help. [Open]

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