ablativeholopleather | IC Contact/Inbox/HMD

"Yeah I get that a lot," he replies with a small shrug. "If it helps any, it was really cool getting to see the place. I haven't been able to just explore like that in a while now without something specifically trying to kill me. Besides the skeleton, anyway. That was rad. I hope Cam's still doing okay." He's pretty sure he'd remember her if she were here on the boat.

Palamedes’ heart clenches hard. Though he has spoken about Camilla to plenty of people on the ship, this is the first person, besides Gideon, who has actually met her—and Gideon is gone now. He’s part grateful, part irrationally jealous, the hurt of her absence aching afresh in his chest.

“I hope so, too,” he says with a sad sort of smile. “When we last saw each other, our situation had become rather precarious.” A small breath. “But she’s stubborn. And a hell of a fighter, as you saw first-hand.”

That look tells him that either something bad had happened, or it was just the ache of missing someone close, he knows that feeling very, very well. He stops himself from reaching out, instead just keeping his hands around his cup, thumb pressed against the lip of it.

"If what we did is anything to go by, I totally believe that she's going to be fine. What about you though?" he asks quietly. "I did kind of walk in where I didn't belong. I was trying not to like...break the illusion and give you a headache or something but I did kind of trample all over your memory there. Even if it went well in either version I know it's gotta be uncomfortable."

“Me? Oh, I’ll be fine.” Wayne isn’t completely wrong—the experience of having multiple memories completing in his mind has been far from pleasant. But that isn’t Wayne’s fault. It might not be anyone’s fault. “You didn’t trample. You were extraordinarily helpful, in fact. And it was easy to assume that you were some kind of strange being lurking in the bowels of Canaan House. No one had been down there for thousands of years.”

He smiles. “But thank you for the concern.”

Rolling over the events just before the memory had figuratively spat him back out again, Wayne debates momentarily, a small smile coming over him in kind.

"You guys ever find out who got that key first?"

“Mm, yes, that was the Ninth House,” Palamedes says, nodding and sipping his tea. “Harrowhark Nonagesimus and Gideon Nav. Did you ever meeting Gideon? She was here for a time.” Again, a certain amount of wistfulness crosses his face, though not at all to the degree it does when he speaks of Cam. Gideon was a friend, and Gideon had been a link to home. It hurts to have her gone, particularly knowing that she has been sucked into the Captain’s machinery.

“The four of us ended up working well together, by the end.”

"I only ever got to meet you and Camilla. If you were all able to get through Canaan house that's good though."

Still, he can sort of feel the dip in mood, and hopes that talking about these things isn't too much of a downer. He'd hoped to be able to get to know Palamedes after the way they'd managed to work together after all.

"I'm sorry you lost them though. Maybe at the end of it all you'll be able to see them again. I'm kind of hoping that that's what's waiting for a lot of us."

“As do I.” Palamedes’ expression turns thoughtful. When Wayne spoke of the end of it all, did he mean the end of the Serena Eterna? Or something more metaphorical? Talking about going home can be tricky these. Some people think the idea is impossible; others are so horrified by the thought of returning to their own lives that they would prefer to bar everyone from doing so.

“Are there people you wish to see again. Wayne?”

Wayne has run into such instances many times by now. He doesn't talk about his own desperate desire to go home anymore unless people ask, or at least seem open to talking about such things. He's hoping that this means that Pal is the latter.

"More than anything," he admits quietly. "I was just about to finally go home after four cycles- like seven years away when I ended up here. I had plans, you know? Mostly involving my couch and TV and cat, but that still counts."

Pal might not know what ‘cycles’ are in this context, or what going through four of them would mean for Wayne, but oh, he understands that longing in his new friend’s eyes. He sees it in his own face every morning before he can diligently tuck it away. Even his closest friends, people like Natsuno and Clarke, people he trusts with his life and heart, cannot entirely relate.

“Oh, that more than counts,” he says with a sad smile. After a hesitation he quietly admits, “I would do anything to see Camilla again, and I would do anything to stop her from becoming a victim of this place. So I have to go home.”

He's learning not to take it so harshly when he learns that he's among the minority even in things like this. So many people seem to hate where they came from, or at least like this place more than home, and talking about what he lived with seems like such a slap in the face to the rest of them. At least it seems like they're in agreement over going home if only for the sakes of their friends, and their peace of mind.

"If I can do anything to help, let me know, okay? I might never get to meet her again, but I want to hope that she's gonna be okay and that's easier to do when you're not alone. I know that at least my crew have each other, and my sister, but I miss them. I've never been cut off from them completely before."

“That’s very kind of you,” Palamedes says to the creature he had first mistaken for one of Canaan House’s horrors. Oh, how wrong they had been! “And to be honest, there may be a time when I need your help. I am working on a way to bring us home—at least, those of us who wish to return home, of course. But the Captain has deemed such an act impossible. If he’s right, then our attempts to leave this universe and enter our own may prove to have disastrous consequences. And even if it does work, I am sure he won’t let us go easily. Either way, I'll need all the help I can get."

Wayne listens, a soft frown on his face, weight on his elbows on the edge of the table.

"But then what does that mean, that he intends to keep us all here in perpetuity? Even in just the little while that I've been here it feels like his attention span isn't particularly conducive to being a jailer for that long." Of course, that's only based on the observations of the people around him, he has yet to meet the man or his lover.

He spends a moment lost in thought, then reaches to lay his hand in the middle of the table, tapping three different points as he speaks up again. "If you're working on a way to get us home, what's the possibility of giving people options of where they go to? Say, if their world is like yours, but through the medium that is the ship bringing us into the same space, you could feasibly make it so that someone that doesn't want to go back to their world, but has expressed interest in moving permanently to another, to do just that? Maybe it an unwise promise to make, but I offered a man the chance to have a position with my people back at Waynehouse," he explains. "I'd like for him and others to have that choice to make."

“When he gets bored with us, he turns us into fuel.” Palamedes’ voice is quiet and laced with bitterness. “That’s what happens when people disappear. From what I’ve gathered, there have been other ‘voyages’ in the past, ones in which he has eventually tired of everyone, wiped them all out, and started over.” And whatever so-called changes people claim the Captain has gone through, Pal will never believe in their captor’s redemption until he stops grinding them into grist for his magical mill.

But that is neither a practical nor a useful topic for the time being. “In theory, if we can find a way to exit this reality and enter a different one of our choosing, we could choose to go anywhere we like,” he says. “In the event of our escape, I would recommend we all gather on some neutral ground first—somewhere, anywhere away from the Captain’s hold on us. From there, ideally, we could find a safe place in the multiverse for all of us. Or, if not safe, a place each of us wishes to be.”

The corner of his mouth tugs upward. “…Waynehose? You will have to explain that one to me.”

His expression twists and falls as he listens. "Does he not realize we're people? Does he just not care? What's the point of keeping us here on some kind of pleasure cruise if the end result us getting mulched?"

Wayne wraps his hands back around his drink, fingers laced together and pressed tight enough to lightly deform the flesh around his knuckles.

The idea of some neutral space for them all to go in the intervening time, even if they can't get back to their respective homes, is a comforting one. He nods some. "There are enough people that are content here even with all of the bad, that you could probably offer them that as an option and they'd take that neutral ground too. I know even with my own life cycle completely up in the air I'd still prefer that over being stuck here through the end."

He blinks, then mirrors that smile. He's having trouble remembering who all knows what, with as many questions as he's answered in the last month and change.

"Yeah, Waynehouse. It's a small compound where my sister and I were settled in to oversee the growth of new larvae into Waynes, and see to the caretaking of Old Wayne. It was necessary after the first Accretion- the thing that destroyed a lot of the landmass where I used to live."

“I don’t think he does. Or, at least, he has decided that people are not worth very much.” Pal purses his lips. “I think that, when some people live for a very long time, they find it easy to forget the humanity of others. It isn’t inevitable, but it might be fought. And the Captain, well.” He huffs. “He gains something from thinking of us as fuel. Treating us as things is advantageous to him.”

Before he can make further observations on the nature of their captivity, though, Wayne draws him in with the wild story of his home. “Wait, wait. Is ‘Wayne’ the name of your species? Your planet? I thought it was your name—yours alone, I mean—but I believe I may have misunderstood!”

"It just feels wrong, man. Like there should be other options. Like, I don't know, we should have some say in this." But again, what would such things matter to someone that doesn't seem to care about their autonomy as people?

He might be more than a little bit grumpy about this, for reasons that he maybe can't explain to Pal without explaining a whole lot more. If he thinks the concept of a lot of Waynes is wild, he's got a big storm coming.

"I'm a Wayne, but I'm also just, Wayne. Not all of us in my world are Wayne but the ones that look like me are. We get our own names after a while, like...we pick them. My sister's name is Decres, and I adopted a second name. I'm sure that Old Wayne also had his own name at one point, but after a while, he became Old Wayne. For example, my best friends don't look anything like me. Somsnosa's probably the closest to what you might consider familiar. The juice ranchers actually look a lot like some of you here, though their flesh is blue."

“Fascinating.” Palamedes props his chin on his hand, marveling at Wayne anew. The point about Waynes sometimes deciding upon their own, separate name, makes sense to him. And here, on the Serena Eterna, with no other Waynes about, he can see why this Wayne would revert back to his original name. “Is Somsnosa a Wayne? Or do all Waynes look like you? I mean, the yellow skin and the—“ he gestures vaguely above his own head. “Where I come from, people are mostly me-shaped, for a given value thereof, but there are significant genetic differences between necromancers and non-necromancers.”

"None of my crew are Waynes, no. We did have a larva around for a while because it snuck onto my airship when we landed at Waynehouse one day but I think they were happier just keeping the couch warm." The thought is still amusing to him, a soft smile curling up the corner of his lips. "I've noticed basically everyone here is you-shaped, for a given amount of variation based on those genetic differences. We're a little more uniform within the Wayne group, but otherwise there's a lot of serious variation between people at home. Waynes don't look like ranchers don't look like knights don't look like..." A pause. What did Dedusmuln say their people were called? Did they ever actually say? "Well, we're all pretty visually distinct. Maybe one day you'll get to meet them."

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