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07:30, 29th March 2024 (GMT+0)

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies.

Posted by ArbiterFor group 0
Dusk Neva
player, 43 posts
E 2/2 I 2/2 HP 11/11 D 0
Fri 3 Dec 2021
at 04:29
  • msg #132

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

Dusk, for her part, seems only too glad to slide forward into that hollow space. Smoothie, right, that's what was in here. Grinning, she walks up right past the audience of staring people and cheerfully begins ordering a smoothie (Sunrise Sunset, according to the menu - what did that even mean?). "You want anything?" she asks Rosemary. Her lean grin doesn't even flicker when she notices the man trying to stand, on the other side of a window.
Rosemary O'Rourke
player, 95 posts
Patience
It's aspirational.
Fri 3 Dec 2021
at 04:58
  • msg #133

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

  "I—"

  It's a solid three-count before the redhead pushes back the internal noise far enough to catch first what Dusk asked, and second her own staring.  She turns sharply away.  "It won't have enough papaya," she mumbles indistinctly.  But now she is facing the staring eyes again.  Her breathing grows almost as tight as her grip, but only with the tension that's keeping it steady.  It even slows a little, as she forces herself to make eye contact and eventually processes that the gawkers are mostly admiring.

  "No. I don't think I...  Well..."  A whole table blushes and looks away at once, and Rosemary's fast exhalation is the subtlest possible gloating.  "Not a smoothie.  I never did get the, you know.  It's just fruit in a blender!  But if anyone has a smoke..."
Arbiter
GM, 215 posts
Tue 7 Dec 2021
at 03:04
  • msg #134

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

Goth college student two tables over offers a pack of cigarettes. Clove, of course. Poor guy looks like he can't decide rather to flail about or lock up like a stone.
Rosemary O'Rourke
player, 97 posts
Patience
It's aspirational.
Tue 7 Dec 2021
at 04:44
  • msg #135

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

  "Thanks.  Hold on to this for me until I get in touch, okay?" says Rosemary to this complete stranger, patting the young man on the hand without taking a cigarette.  If anything, the pack is heavier when she turns back around.  While she waits for Dusk's order to come up, she takes out the other ruby, apparently unconcerned now with who's looking.

  "Okay.  So, this is the only clue I even have, whatever comes of the... you know.  Stuff.  The creepy German guy had eyes that were red where they should have been white, and he said Ereshkigal's rubies hadn't been lost.  I think?"  She holds the gem up to an overhead light and squints at it again.  "Hm.  I think I want to put them back.  In the statue they came from, you know?  Either he was right about, er, me, or that'll be the one place they don't follow me away from, I'm betting.  You know anything about artifacts from the Levant?"
Dusk Neva
player, 44 posts
E 2/2 I 2/2 HP 11/11 D 0
Wed 8 Dec 2021
at 01:49
  • msg #136

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

"Not a thing!" Dusk says cheerfully. "History was never my strongest topic. Except in the ways it intersects with the arts, I suppose. Fuckin' Baroque music." Her order comes up (apparently they dropped the ones earlier in the queue to do hers first) and she takes a sip, noting that it has a bit of a papaya flavor. A good addition to the mix. "I can probably swing a flight, though."
Rosemary O'Rourke
player, 98 posts
Patience
It's aspirational.
Wed 8 Dec 2021
at 02:20
  • msg #137

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

  "What?  You don't just hold up one arm and zoom around yourself??"  Rosemary sounds scandalized.  She also sounds like she's catching up to Dusk's nonverbals more than half a second late, dissociating enough the delay is clear.  Only way to make an omelet, right?  But the laughter is sincere enough.  "Some superhero!  I bet you don't even have a secret identity."

  On the way back out—the door this time, she insisted—Rosemary grabs a copy of the local indie daily, the one that does the cryptid advice column in the back.  "I feel you though.  I never wanted much to do with the past.  But I don't think it's up to me for now, so I better get some researching done, find out where to fly.  Wait, are you saying you want to come along?"
Arbiter
GM, 217 posts
Wed 8 Dec 2021
at 03:08
  • msg #138

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

Indie Daily is a roughly half smaller concerts, farmer markets, community classes, fan conventions of one stripe or another. The other half is ads ranging from thinly veiled off-book sex work to sketchy auctions and talent agency/development services. It takes a minute to hunt down the columns.

Lizards and snakes are big in this batch, including reports of a baby godzilla wrecking a factory. Alien sightings. Apparently a sheriff in the next county had the tar beat out of him by a 'amazon' who through a patrol car into a reservoir.
Dusk Neva
player, 45 posts
E 2/2 I 2/2 HP 11/11 D 0
Wed 8 Dec 2021
at 05:07
  • msg #139

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

Dusk habitually glances at the talent agency section before remembering that she will never need their services again and shrugging. "Sure, if you want. I've got nowhere to be." Her voice is, for just a split heartbeat, achingly lonely. And then she shrugs again, this one another infinitely expressive shrug that conveys volumes of casual companionship and loose, easy familiarity.

The casual ease of the moment is, perhaps, somewhat broken when she gets bored a moment later and walks up the side of the smoothie shop to sit casually on the wall, sipping her smoothie. It couldn't be more obviously giving gravity the finger if she tried. It doesn't seem that it takes any real work for her to do.

I love All Directions As One.
Rosemary O'Rourke
player, 102 posts
Patience
It's aspirational.
Wed 8 Dec 2021
at 07:11
  • msg #140

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

  Her far less ready companion just boggles for a moment, and looks over the people nearby hastily, as though this were embarrassing instead of amazing.  "Dusk!  What are you doing?" she begins in a hiss, but laughter, nervous only at first, detours her.  "All right, all right, you're a perfectly adequate super—

  —hero of the day.  Everyone who survives in Nibbur owes their lives to your daring,
   and I'm told the king is parting his herd even now.  But I don't understand; there's no
   way you could have..."
  That night, the warrior at last revealed the secret of his strength, and her shears were never sharper.


  Rosemary starts.  Dusk.  She's looking at Dusk.  Is she staring?  Was she talking?  Did she finish?  Before she has a chance to properly work herself up though, something lost finds itself.  The words come almost on their own.  "You know what comes after pride.  Everybody does.  Tsk"  And then gravity gives Dusk the finger right back.

So do I.  In ur base, stealin ur crowns.
Dusk Neva
player, 46 posts
E 2/2 I 2/2 HP 11/11 D 0
Wed 8 Dec 2021
at 19:17
  • msg #141

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

Dusk, for her part, runs down the wall easily, and lands in a crouch, staring at Rosemary out of eyes gone strange, lambent and feral. "I know," she says, and her voice is a thing of rasps and hoarseness and pain. "I have been taught a thousand times, by teachers greater than you; and yet I reject it. I reject it all. I will not be bound. I will not be your - "

Blink. Her eyes are just eyes. Her voice is just a voice. "Bit rude, don't you think? I could have fallen and cracked my skull." It turns out that the ability to convey impossibly detailed things with body language includes the option to convey nothing, absolutely nothing at all.
Rosemary O'Rourke
player, 103 posts
Patience
It's aspirational.
Wed 8 Dec 2021
at 21:10
  • msg #142

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

  Rosemary's hair is even brighter as the sunlight reddens, especially viewed from below. It distinctly ripples when she shifts her weight toward the beast, and her hint of a smile hints at pleasant surprise. She's more simply amused by the time Dusk snaps back, but it's buried under Listening. "I'd have caught you," she says, transmuting a smirk into an apologetic smile before an ordinary observer would recognize the dodge.

  The wall distracts her anyway; she lays a hand on it hesitantly, looks up and Elsewhere, then tries a foot. She's two meters up before she leaves a climbing pposture "This is amazing. This is... Oh! The stunts you could do with something like this! I have to try!" Rising to her feet, she climbs to the second story with a maybe ill-advised back handspring that becomes a couple of flips on the, uh, dismount.  It's a little surreal in the long skirt. She lands in a crouch beside Dusk, flushed with exhilaration, and offers frankly enough, "I didn't really think it would work."
This message was last edited by the player at 21:21, Thu 09 Dec 2021.
Dusk Neva
player, 47 posts
E 2/2 I 2/2 HP 11/11 D 0
Thu 9 Dec 2021
at 18:30
  • msg #143

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

"Neither did I," Dusk says dryly. "Gave me a startle, you did." She stretches. Bones pop in her back. "So you need to research, uh, you; and I need to figure out a flight to the Middle East. Sounds like a plan." She takes a sip of her smoothie. "Maybe I'll figure something about myself while I'm at it. Probably some god of capitalism or something. That'd be my luck."
Arbiter
GM, 221 posts
Fri 10 Dec 2021
at 03:07
  • msg #144

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

Unsurprisingly, the two are drawing-well, not a crowd but an equivalent amount of attention. If there are less than a hundred social media shared videos by now it has to be by act of digital deity.
Rosemary O'Rourke
player, 104 posts
Patience
It's aspirational.
Fri 10 Dec 2021
at 08:01
  • msg #145

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

  Red gives black the most ironically baffled blank expression but declines to push further about the economy. She brushes her clothes back into place as she stands and holds a wince while surveying the audience. No flinching though. Posture for a stage, really.

  "It could be in Europe. Or on loan. But yeah, sounds... Sounds like a good plan. And like we should probably move on before we get a news crew. I'm going to be in so much trouble when I get back already..."
Dusk Neva
player, 48 posts
E 2/2 I 2/2 HP 11/11 D 0
Sat 11 Dec 2021
at 07:30
  • msg #146

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

"You know where to find me," Dusk says, raising her smoothie in an ironic salute before tossing the still-mostly-full cup to one of the people watching. "Don't be a stranger." She turns and sways off, right through the crowd, somehow never quite requiring anyone to move out of her way, yet always looking as though the crowd is parting before her.

Next stop: Home, computer, internet searches for flights, hotel bookings, figuring out exactly how much of her current lush net worth the above will drain. Maybe looking up Russian divinities.
Rosemary O'Rourke
player, 106 posts
Patience
It's aspirational.
Sun 12 Dec 2021
at 02:38
  • msg #147

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

  Rosemary nods, and waves, and watches rapt, impressed on purely technical grounds by Dusk's weaving.  She consults The Map again, this time spotting a shortcut through some parking lots, and starts walking briskly in that direction.  She's almost back to the convent when she realizes she doesn't know that at all.  That goes fourth on the list, because first is looming.  The door barely even shifts to admit her, and she could be a ghost on the way back to the maintenance room, but she can't turn back the clock any.

  She probably can't turn back the clock any.
Arbiter
GM, 231 posts
Sun 19 Dec 2021
at 04:05
  • msg #148

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

Dusk found that international flights were never quite cheap but as with all things time could be traded for money. A series of unpopular flights, a bus ride or two, and some layovers could minimize the expense.

She's flush enough to be okay afterwards but more than one or two indulgences and she'll need to hunt for a new project to bridge her finances to the next casino payment.

---------------------------------------------------------------

It looks like the repairs were finished and he locked up on his way out. Slipping around undetected was easy here but that social media splash will make its way through even the relatively technology avoidant community.
Rosemary O'Rourke
player, 109 posts
Patience
It's aspirational.
Mon 20 Dec 2021
at 03:02
  • msg #149

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

  It will.  It inescapably will.  She definitely did not mean to make a spectacle of herself, even largely calmed by that time.  Movement was such joy though, especially after she—

  Rosemary frowns and takes a little time to play brownie, tending to a few things she probably would have been assigned were she not stuck with Rosales all day.  Having been just that.  Naturally.  It doesn't help much with the uncomfortable thoughts though.  What exactly had she done to Dusk?  It felt so familiar—not the power but the seizing—but those dreams weren't...

  "Memories," she reminds herself firmly.  Whatever she had done, the effects couldn't be missed.  Her new friend lost something, and then it was briefly hers, and she felt so free it was almost frightening.  Something physical and real and out there in the not-her-head world changed when she tried to recall the exact feeling of doing exactly that.

  "Shi-ns!"  Rosemary claps both hands over her mouth, but the chapel is mostly empty anyway.  Still, it's not a terrific place to think through what All Of This means, and she quietly finishes her chores before starting for her apartment.
Dusk Neva
player, 49 posts
E 2/2 I 2/2 HP 11/11 D 0
Mon 20 Dec 2021
at 23:06
  • msg #150

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

Dusk grins as she wraps up the preparations, finalizes the orders, and texts the relevant travel planning information to Rosemary's number with a signoff of simply "- D". Then, without quite meaning to be, she's sitting at her computer.

She had meant to research Slavic deities that walked on walls and poured out springs of water. But instead, she finds herself pulling up the videos of herself that had been circulating. The dancing, the walking on walls. In some of them - not all, just the ones that really captured her, that showed exactly how she moved - she began to leave little comments.

"Thanks for the applause, lovelies."

"You got a great view of my face there. It looks funny upside down."

"This was a good night. Thanks for sharing. - D <3"

"Wanna know a secret? I can dance on the ceiling too."

So many comments from the same account, all claiming to be the person in the videos, eventually has people taking it seriously. Comments turn into conversations. Dusk invariably plays coy, refusing to clarify her identity beyond that - D signature. She occasionally mentions that for the right inducement, she might be convinced to put on a private performance. She occasionally posts selfies, partial images, and the like, teasing with the promise of another public outing "soon," leading people forward without it ever quite feeling like she's leading them on.

It all felt so good, so powerful to be able to tug on their heartstrings like this. It made her feel...safe.
Rosemary O'Rourke
player, 112 posts
Patience
It's aspirational.
Tue 21 Dec 2021
at 05:18
  • msg #151

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

  Rosemary, quite to the contrary, spends the evening hours making up a new identity entirely.  Of course, she would need to: she hadn't maintained anything anonymous since father made such a row over it when she was fourteen.  But now she has concerns she doesn't want her name attached to any more than when the—But now she has concerns she doesn't want her name attached to any more than she did back then.  The thought runs aground and disintegrates, and she goes back to following links from sketchy blogs to cryptic twitter accounts to apparently all the useful conspiracy stuff is passed around in snaps now, so it self-destructs?  It's dizzying, but when has Rosemary ever not felt dizzy, really?  And at least fifty people have sent her penises by the third hour, so /u/CompassRosette logs out emphatically and powers down her phone.  A second or two later, she turns it back on and plugs it into the charger while she starts on the artifact hunt she initially meant to conduct.  Surely there would be accessible records of everything removed from an important cultural heritage site.

  Maybe if she tried dowsing...
Arbiter
GM, 238 posts
Wed 5 Jan 2022
at 02:12
  • msg #152

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

Dusk deals with the usual proportion of internet personalities; some admire the skill, a few over the top flirts, a dozen 'not really her' types, and some that are entirely too easy to wrap around her finger. The view counts are steadily rising, someone is going to be making money from these clips. It feeds on itself for hours and the inevitable private messages are probably what she expected.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The rubies turn out to be an urban legend around the Middle East. Excluding the obvious creepy pasta and photoshop the earliest seeming mention are from the mid-nineties. Tons of 'Sadam invaded Kuwait seeking them' conspiracies, a handful of 'alien relic statues that moved' claims, and a missing twelve person archeological expedition. It's sifting for a sandstone tablet in eight square miles of sand dunes.

Dowsing works! The stones pull so hard they smack into her cheek hard enough to leave a small bruise and stopped just short of her left eye. It feels like arm-wrestling a hyperactive child to get them to pay attention to anything but her. Eventually they sullenly circle two points on the map.

One in an empty stretch of flyover country. The other in New York City.
Rosemary O'Rourke
player, 114 posts
Patience
It's aspirational.
Wed 5 Jan 2022
at 05:04
  • msg #153

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

  The stone circles, and a third spot locally, too, that's almost as hard to coax it away from.  For that one, she pulls up a map of Vegas on her phone and immediately regrets it, when corundum turns out to be much harder than tempered glass.  At least she has an address now, in case the goth boy doesn't come when he's called.

  And that reminder is to blame, really, for the cut on her thumb when she slides it to respond to Dawn's text. «I hope you can change those plans.  I think it's in the USA!  Ever been to Iowa?»
This message was last edited by the player at 00:17, Thu 06 Jan 2022.
Dusk Neva
player, 50 posts
E 2/2 I 2/2 HP 11/11 D 0
Wed 5 Jan 2022
at 23:16
  • msg #154

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

The response comes rapidly. Iowa? Think I was in an airport once. Changing plans should still be cheaper than international. Ready to fly tomorrow?
Rosemary O'Rourke
player, 115 posts
Patience
It's aspirational.
Thu 6 Jan 2022
at 00:10
  • msg #155

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

  «Impatient for it.  I need time away.  I'll explain when I see you.»  Bedtime.  Finally.  Rosemary goes through the ritual ablutions without noticing her own motions, too caught up in her review of the day's spectacle.  Had she really forgotten the crowd that easily?  That wouldn't do.  That was dangerous carelessness.  But it felt... so free.  The memory of feeling that way on her own is distant and faded, on the wrong side of Before and Now, but this reminder could be intoxicating.  She says her last prayers of the night still distracted, checks her alarm, and wraps her blanket tight.  That night, she dreams of figs and honey.
Dusk Neva
player, 51 posts
E 2/2 I 2/2 HP 11/11 D 0
Thu 6 Jan 2022
at 22:00
  • msg #156

Rosemary O'Rourke : Thread 1 : Sparkling Rubies

Dusk continues to play with the online posters for a while, and then stands. She considers dancing the night away again; but no. As much as she hates the thought, she needs to sleep. Needs to dream. Needs to see what the dream brings her.
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