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

[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?"

[summerdude]

"Sagramore got hurt??" Magnus asks, thinking, and didn't ask me to heal him?

And then: "Erotica world?" He pauses. "Because of all the wives?"

[peaklordshen]

"Oh, I mean, kind of? The wives are a symptom of the erotica thing. I told you I got sucked into another world, right?" He's certain they touched on this when he was hight. "It was a fictional one. Binghe's literally from an erotic web novel, I know the guy who wrote it."

He doubles back: "And Sagramore's fine, I've seen him since. I got worried he might turn, because, you know, zombies, but they weren't that type, I guess."

[summerdude]

"They weren't any type I'm familiar with," Magnus agrees. "I had to heal Claudius. And," he sighs. "Lancelot."

[peaklordshen]

"I still haven't even met Lancelot," says Shen Yuan. "I kind of intend not to. He sounds like he extremely sucks, and there are enough people here now that I simply don't have to hang out with people who suck." He does kind of want to see Lancelot, though. He imagines he kind of looks like dilf Galahad, which is obviously deeply compelling.

[summerdude]

"Oh, he's the worst," Magnus says, enthusiastically, with all of the energy of someone newly able to unleash all of their feelings on a person mutually detested. "I hate that guy. Motherfucker doesn't know how lucky he has it that I've committed to not killing him even though if they ever decided to give me a moniker in Valhalla it should probably be Bad Dad Destroyer."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Yuan blinks. He's not sure he knew Magnus had, like, killed people, or at least not people who weren't like him and came back immediately. But destroyer seems pretty final. Huh. "Yeah, I don't think Galahad would like that," he says. "There's a lot of room to play around in between killing someone and treating them nicely, though."

[summerdude]

"Oh, I know," Magnus says, to both of Shen Yuan's points. "Mostly I try to avoid the guy. But you can see how it was super annoying to have to heal him, right?"

[peaklordshen]

"Totally," says Shen Yuan. "You're very brave. I don't suppose next time you could heal him but like, also give him poison ivy or something, could you?"

[summerdude]

"It doesn't work like that," Magnus says, a little sadly. He leans his head against Shen Yuan's shoulder. "But enough about that dude."

[peaklordshen]

"Right," says Shen Yuan, his hand coming up automatically to pet Magnus' head. "...What were we talking about before him?"

[summerdude]

"Zombies, destiny, Luo Binghe's erotica world," Magnus says, promptly. "Hey, do you think I'm the age I was when I died or age of the number of years I've existed?"

[peaklordshen]

"Number of years you've existed, definitely," says Shen Yuan immediately, because that's what he is, and he doesn't know why it should be different for Magnus just because he got to keep his own body.

[summerdude]

So far the only consistency Magnus has been getting is that he's not sixteen. "How old are you?"

[peaklordshen]

"Twenty...six?" says Shen Yuan. "Twenty-seven? One of those. I was, like, in the process of turning twenty-two when I died, and then I was in Proud Immortal Demon Way for like five years. So yeah, twenty-seven. Although it's fall now, so maybe I'm twenty-eight?" He looks down at himself. "My body's—actually, I have no fucking idea how old my body is. Piece of shit cultivated to immortality, so he could've been anywhere from thirty to like, four hundred."<sup>1

1</sup> He was 35.

[summerdude]

"You died on your birthday? I died on my birthday!"

[peaklordshen]

"Oh, shit, really??" Shen Yuan shakes his head. He supposes it is pretty dramatic, so he shouldn't be surprised that what was a coincidence for him was like, a plot choice for whoever wrote Magnus' canon. "Can we make shirts for that, too?"

[summerdude]

"Dudes who died on their birthdays in 2015 and then later figured out they were into dudes," Magnus says, spreading his hands wide for effect. "The most exclusive club that I've ever been in." He grins. "That makes me twenty-four, by the way."

[peaklordshen]

"Nice," says Shen Yuan. "That does make me feel better about talking to you about romantic baths and erotica world." He cocks his head. "Does it suck? To look sixteen when you're not?"

[summerdude]

Magnus shakes his head. "Age is weird in Valhalla," he says. "The floors are divided by age at time of death, so me and all the other sixteen to nineteen year olds feast together or whatever, and everyone on my floor also died at sixteen. But Mallory died in the 1970s, and her boyfriend Halfborn died in the 800s, and TJ died in the Civil War. Alex died the year after me. But once you're there, everything is mostly so same-y? You wake up, you die, you eat, you fight, you die, you eat, you dick around... And some of the people around you look older but are younger than you, and some of them look younger but are centuries older. So I didn't really think about it till I got here. I guess really the most annoying part back home was that it was hard to do stuff on my own for the Chase Space, because people thought I was just another kid staying there, and not the guy who organized it all. Other than that, it can be nice to be underestimated?" He shrugs. "Here is different, though. I'm the only einherji. So I've been thinking about it differently."