open post: in a slightly hazy lounge

[peaklordshen]

After a few false starts, Shen Qingqiu has found a proper place to test out Crowley's BL pollen vape pen.

He posts up in one of the lounges, close enough to the bar that anyone leaving there might find him. He's still in his braid and loose robes - no one else had noticeably started dressing gayer¹ when they took the stuff, intentional or not, so neither will he. He also brings snacks,² and the next book in the Blood at Dusk series, Moonless Midnight, in case it takes a while to kick in, or a while for anyone to come along to prove it has, anyway. If no one finds him here he will go looking, but roaming the Mansion's halls newly homosexual feels like a much more risky prospect than just staying put and seeing what happens.

He arrays himself on a couch, feet tucked up under him (although this might not be immediately apparent due to the robes), Crowley's pen tucked behind one ear so he can make more notes now that he has a glimmer of a chance that Binghe will forgive him,³ and takes a drag on the vape.

He coughs. It's smoke, not pollen—the blooms must be dried and then burned, like with tobacco—and has an odd, kind of greenish flavor. Not unpleasant, but not pleasant, either. He expected it to taste of, like. Cherry blossom, or something. Pink rather than green. Shit, maybe he is a little homophobic.

He takes another drag, and lets the smoke out of his mouth slowly this time, watching it curl up to the ceiling.

By the time anyone finds him, he will be staring unblinking at the opposite wall, book open on his lap to the third page of the first chapter.

[Threads with Sagramore and Luo Binghe are NSFW.]

¹ Please explain what you mean by this, Shen Qingqiu. I'll wait.
² Crowley did tell him to.
³ After he confirms that the pollen works. And goes to find Binghe. And kisses him. And— well. Maybe. After. He can raise the book club idea again?

Comments

[rememberettersberg]

"My home is also my workplace. I share it with two... I share it with an apprentice and a housekeeper." Don't think about the other apprentice, Thomas. Don't. "May I ask what these questions are in aid of?" He grins, attempting to lighten his own mood. "I haven't seen you since your arrival here."

[peaklordshen]

"Oh yeah!" Shen Qingqiu turns back to his notebook. He'd been distracted by imagining Nightingale with a tiny little dog, tucked under his arm. Doing like, celebrity photoshoots--maybe in dramatic black & white, the wind stirring his hair. If he were gay back in the real world, Shen Qingqiu would buy magazines from the grocery store just for a photoshoot like that.

"Um--it's kind of a hobby. I've--there's this--" how does he explain Pokemon to someone from--whenever Nightingale is from?? Then again, Shen Qingqiu doesn't exactly look like a guy who knows what Pokemon are. He squints, a little. "Do you, like, know what a video game is?" he asks, just in case.

[rememberettersberg]

"I'm aware of the concept," says Nightingale. He emphatically does not mention his secret attempts to play video games when Peter is nowhere near his tech cave. "The 21st century hasn't entirely passed me by."

[peaklordshen]

Oh! "Honestly," Shen Qingqiu says apologetically, "I wasn't sure you'd met the 21st century at all."

[rememberettersberg]

"If it's any consolation, I really wasn't supposed to." There's a dry humour to his tone that makes the statement less worrying. "Though I must admit that I wouldn't have taken you for the video games type either."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu laughs. "No," he says, "I'm—yeah." He leans a little closer, like he's sharing a secret. "I didn't always look like this."

[rememberettersberg]

Nightingale raises an eyebrow, not sure whether to take this as a comment on normal appearance changes through life or something else. "I last looked like this around 70 years ago," he says. He really does enjoy getting to say these things out loud without worry.

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu blinks out of sharing secrets mode and right into hearing lore mode. "What does that mean?" he asks, fascinated. "Are you, like, aging backwards?"

[rememberettersberg]

"Slowly, yes." Nightingale shrugs and gives a rueful smile. "It began some time in the 1960s, I think, when I was in my sixties too." A pause. "What happened to you?"

[peaklordshen]

"Oh, this isn't my original body," says Shen Qingqiu absently, distracted by trying to do the math. If Nightingale was in his sixties in the 1960s, and he has met the 21st century, that means he's at least a hundred years old. What do you even call a handsome man that age? A gilf? A great-gilf?

[rememberettersberg]

"... What happened to the original one?" It's the first of about a hundred questions crowding for a turn out of his mouth. "And how?"

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu remembers he's really not supposed to be spreading around the whole ghost thing. "I, um." He squints. "My soul... was kidnapped? Into a book I was reading. Kind of like coming here, except it was just my soul. Ended up in the body of the scum villain."

[rememberettersberg]

There's not a hint of disbelief left in Nightingale, not any more. "No wonder you were a different sort of perturbed than the rest of us upon arrival here. What sort of story did you land in?"

[peaklordshen]

"Absolute trash," says Shen Qingqiu, immediately, straightening up. "Just—complete and utter garbage, but the kind of garbage you can't stop reading. There's the seed of a good idea there, you know? A character¹ you really care about. But he's constantly mistreated by the narrative, like, WAY beyond what's necessary for his character arc, and every chapter you're introduced to a thousand useless cannon fodder characters, just for them to be slaughtered offscreen in the next update two weeks later. And don't get me started on the wives." It is very clear he desperately wants Nightingale to get him started on the wives.

¹ This footnote is so obvious the typist forgot to put it in at first, but. Luo Binghe.

[rememberettersberg]

Honestly, Nightingale has sort of forgotten where this conversation even began but he's fascinated by whatever's happening here. "The wives... all of them for the same man? The character you care about?"

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu nods. "There are five or so that really matter," he says, and then lists them out on his fingers. "Ning Yingying, the childhood friend." He experiences a brief pang--he misses Yingying. "Sha Hualing, demon princess of the Southern desert." He does not miss Sha Hualing. "Qiu Haitang, the intended wife of--um, his enemy. Liu Mingyan--she's the best one, she's his empress and she's taking revenge for her brother's murder, except I did kind of accidentally save her brother's life, so. Um. Anyway." He holds up his thumb. "Little Palace Mistress. Can you believe that? Five women that matter, and one of them doesn't even have a name. And then the rest of them might as well be the same woman hundreds of times, only with different stupid kinks or gimmicks attached." He rolls his eyes. "Oh, sexy nuns. Oh, twin sisters. Oh, this one's cursed to have six boobs, or whatever."

[rememberettersberg]

There's a weird, undignified sort of snort; Nightingale forces his face into a semblance of normality. "You fell into some smutty erotica?" He pauses to think. "As the villain?" This is actually cause for concern. "Are you all right? That is to say, were you forced into the narrative as well as the world? Did you suffer?"

[peaklordshen]

That's a weird question. If Shen Qingqiu were forced into the narrative—which he was, thank you System—and he's the villain, shouldn't Nightingale be concerned about the suffering he caused? He shakes his head. "No," he says, and then remembers. "Oh—well, I was poisoned."

[rememberettersberg]

Again, poison? Really? "There's a lot of that going around," he says dryly. "I ask because I've seen people... possessed by stories not their own. It ended as terribly for them as it did for those they hurt." He grimaces. "At least your face hasn't fallen off," he mutters, mostly to himself.

[peaklordshen]

"I think," says Shen Qingqiu slowly, "that for a while I was possessed by the story, and then the story was possessed by me. It would have ended badly for me, if I hadn't gotten whisked away here, though. Dismembered. Pulled limb from limb." He blinks. "Did you say someone's face fell off?"

[rememberettersberg]

Nightingale privately wonders exactly what sort of dismemberment-involving erotica the youth are getting into these days. "Yes. Well, sort of. They were inhabited by the spirit of... are you aware of Punch & Judy shows?"

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu shakes his head. "No, I don't think so?"

[rememberettersberg]

Where to begin. "It's an old British tradition - a little wooden puppet show, often performed for children at seaside resorts. Mr Punch is an outrageous figure who gets into appalling scrapes but gets his comeuppance at the end."

Nightingale flips to a clean page of his notebook and sketches a quick profile of a leering face with a half-moon shape, chin and nose hooked and jutting, an incongruously jaunty pointy hat topping the whole thing off.

"In the case I've mentioned, an unquiet spirit was using Mr Punch as a sort of avatar representing chaos, upheaval, the jostling anger of a crowd. The people possessed by this spirit had their faces twisted into his visage." He taps on the sketch he drew with his pen. "And when the spirit left them, so did whatever magic held the mangled remains of their faces together."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu makes a face. "That's disgusting." It reminds him a little of the Skinner Demon, but in reverse - stealing the bodies of people and mutating them into you, rather than mutating yourself into them.

He shifts uncomfortably. For some reason it suddenly feels very wrong that he isn't wearing a guan and he doesn't have his fan. "I didn't kill him," he says. "The original scum villain. I—I don't think I did, anyway."¹ He certainly called for his death many times, online, along with his castration, but—that doesn't mean he'd killed him. The system had just—yoinked Shen Jiu out and yeeted Shen Yuan in. It wasn't intentional.

^{1 Nightingale has very much not implied that he has.}

[rememberettersberg]

"Your situation, as I understand it, was quite involuntary." Nightingale puts a hand on his shoulder, a little awkward but attempting comfort. "Whatever happened to the original could not have been your fault." He closes the notebook on Mr. Punch's horrible face and smiles gently. "We've wandered far from our original topic, haven't we? What have video games got to do with whether I have pets or not?"