semi-open post: portraiture

[peaklordshen]

After shifting his way through oil pastels, watercolors, house paint, colored pencils, and an endless variety of paint markers, Shen Yuan has finally managed to get the Mansion to produce a decent set of oil paints, and—wonder of wonders—an easel. He's set up in a spacious, well-lit hall, probably for dancing or salons or whatever, where he's arranged a bunch of furniture in various configurations—wooden screens that he's draped cloth¹ over for backdrops; armchairs stolen from the lounge, wooden stools and high-backed dining chairs from the kitchens; even a lovely chaise lounge in a deep purple that he wistfully thinks he won't actually use, because it would definitely be for Aleksander, and he doubts he'll be doing that entry in his protagonists of the Mansion series after all. He has one of the stools pulled up next to the easel to hold his paints, and is wearing a wide-necked sweater over a black turtleneck and some loose, worn jeans that already have a few flecks of paint on them from when he was doing his color tests.² He's pulled his hair back in a practical bun, and he's currently laying down a layer of gesso on his canvas.

¹ Look, he has to do something with all of those robes he accidentally conjured in his last post.
² After days of feeling very lost and confused about how he's not required to LARP anymore, he's pretty much decided that it actually means he can just change who he's LARPing as at will, and the main way to do this is through fashion. Today he is An Artist.

[Primarily for those Shen Yuan has offered to paint, but anyone else is also welcome to come bother him while he works.]

Comments

[peaklordshen]

Shen Yuan resumes painting, but he frowns and moves Magnus up several places in his Worry List. "Well, I don't like that."

[summerdude]

"I don't think there's anything to worry about," Magnus says. "I heal pretty fast, and there's a real lack of activities-to-the-death in this place."

[peaklordshen]

"Galahad mentioned you healed Claudius, too," says Shen Yuan, blocking in the basic shapes of the tree Magnus is in. "I wish I could do more of that, but cultivation is really more about your own spiritual energy than other people's."

[summerdude]

"Oh yeah, Claudius was easy," Magnus says. "But I'm also a lot better at healing other people than myself." He remembers that he was reassuring Shen Yuan that he's not at huge risk of disintegrating forever, and hastens to add: "But I can still fix, like, a broken leg or a gut stab before they get bad. Like this one time I broke most of the bones in my body jumping off the top of a ship when I was practicing falling in case Ran realized I was sailing across the Atlantic Ocean and decided to follow through with her threats... or no, wait, that time Alex flew me back to Valhalla so I could die there and respawn, or whatever. The second time that day, when I only broke half the bones in my body, I healed them in like fifteen minutes? Twenty tops. Definitely by lunchtime."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Yuan laughs, only slightly horrified. "Dude, you are not good at this whole reassurance thing." He remembers he'd wanted to ask about Magnus' Big Destiny. "Is the healing thing part of like, the thing you're supposed to do?"

[summerdude]

Magnus blinks. "What thing I'm supposed to do?"

[peaklordshen]

"You know," says Shen Yuan, "your destiny, or whatever." It has never crossed his mind that Magnus might not have one, until right now. "You are destined for something, right?"

[summerdude]

"I mean, the only for-sure thing is dying in Ragnarok like all the other einherjar," Magnus says, shrugging; the shrug is largely a careful affectation of nonchalance. "My dad said I was the final burst of summer before the last eternal winter, but I dunno. I think I may have finished with all that when I defeated Loki that last time."

[peaklordshen]

"Oh, okay, interesting," says Shen Yuan. He'd assumed Magnus had ended up here closer to the beginning of his story than that for some reason. "But, wait, Ragnarok is like, a long way off, right? That's some eventual but not imminent end of the world stuff?"

[summerdude]

"Uhhhh, nope, could be any time," Magnus says. "I've stopped Loki from kickstarting it a few times already. It almost happened in 2015, and 2016, and 2017, and then I flyted him, so -- oh hey dude, by the way, I figured it out!" He's remembering one of his first conversations with Shen Yuan, when Shen Yuan seemed to have a vested interest in knowing what year it was back home. "It's 2023 back home. So, like... eight years. For both of us I guess."

[peaklordshen]

"Twenty—" Shen Yuan has to sit down. Shen Yuan does sit down, carefully, on Xiu Ya, still hanging in the air, his feet dangling. "Oh." That doesn't seem fair. If he's only lived five and a bit years in here—well not here here, but PIDW here—how come it was eight years out there?

[summerdude]

"Dude??" Magnus is tempted to jump to Shen Yuan's side, because he looks thrown, but he can't fly without Jack's help, and he doesn't really feel like passing out today, so he just leans forward instead, one arm extended toward Shen Yuan. "You good?"

[peaklordshen]

"Yeah, um." Shen Yuan waves a hand at him. "I'm cool. It's just—my sister's 26, now. My brothers—my brothers probably have kids."

[summerdude]

Oh. Yeah. Magnus's few mortal people keep getting older, too, but at least he can see them regularly. "I'm sorry," he says.

[peaklordshen]

Shen Yuan shrugs. "Not your fault," he says, but he's abruptly not in a painting mood. He in favor of skating over on Xiu Ya to hover in front of Magnus. "Can I sit with you?"

[summerdude]

"Yeah, of course," says Magnus. He sits up a little straighter, scooting to make sure there's enough room for Shen Yuan. "Please."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Yuan steps up next to him and then sits with a sigh, their shoulders brushing together. Xiu Ya spirals down into its sheathe and comes to a rest next to his painting supplies.

He kind of wants to tell Magnus about his dream--his sister's voice at the door. He kind of wants to explain that the idea of his family moving on from his death and the idea of them not moving on from his death are equally terrifying, but one of them has to be true. Eight years.

But--he doesn't want to be a bummer, and it seems like Magnus is already kind of going through it. So he just says, "I wonder if you could learn to sword surf. If Jack would let you, anyway."

[summerdude]

"Nah, I'd pass out," Magnus says; his tone makes it clear that he knows this intimately. "I mean, he can fly me, but anything he does uses my own strength and it all hits me when I pick him up again. Feels like I did whatever it was he accomplished. So flying is like I, like, literally picked myself up and carried myself through the air."

[peaklordshen]

"Oh, damn," says Shen Yuan. "That sucks." He glances sideways at Magnus. "You must have had a bad time after the zombie fight."

[summerdude]

"Yeah, it wasn't great," Magnus laughs. "I'm surprised you didn't stumble across me, actually, I picked him up in the middle of a hallway. It's fine, though, Hanguang-jun and Galahad found me."

[peaklordshen]

"Oh," says Shen Yuan, flushing. "Yeah, um. Sorry I didn't, like. Come make sure you were okay. I didn't know you got such backlash, and I was... distracted."

[summerdude]

Magnus gives Shen Yuan a piercing look, then laughs again. "Loverboy?" he guesses. Then he shakes his head. "Don't worry about it, man, I'm fine. It's all good."

[peaklordshen]

"Still," says Shen Yuan, disgruntled. "We're friends, I should have your back, and not let myself be seduced away by beautiful men just because they use my sword in battle and it's, like, really hot and intimately charged. Not that—we didn't—we just took a bath. Separate. Baths. There's a room at the back of the Mansion with a bunch of screens—Anyway." He subsides. "I'm rambling."

[summerdude]

"Bro, I'm fine," says Magnus, who demonstrably has not been, lately. "Everyone has my back here, basically. Did some good fighting when the zombies were here, and some good damsel-in-distressing afterwards." He nudges Shen Yuan with his shoulder, and then decides to Helheim with it and wraps his arm around Shen Yuan's back, pulling him in for a little tree-cuddle. "My post-battle existential crisis is not on you, my dude. I want to hear more about these totally innocent baths."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Yuan allows himself to be cuddled, glad of it both because it's nice and because it means he doesn't have to look at Magnus while he talks about this. He knows he's not really sixteen, but the cognitive dissonance is easier when he's cuddled into him like this and can't see his face. "Those zombies were gross," he says, "and I cut the sleeve off my date outfit to bind up Sagramore's shoulder, so I was kind of looking a wreck, but I, like. Really like Binghe, obviously. So we just kept hanging out while also taking baths." He sits up, a little. "And it really was mostly innocent. Way more innocent than I expected, actually, but I think maybe Binghe is trying to figure out, like. Not living in erotica world anymore?"