faderift | [OPEN] Heaven bend to take my hand

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[OPEN] Heaven bend to take my hand

WHO: Hermione Granger and YOU
WHAT: Hermione's seen some shit and is trying to get over it.
WHEN: Mid-Kingsway through the end of the month.
WHERE: In and around Skyhold.
NOTES: Takes place after this plot, so some threads will likely have mentions of child death and/or signs of depression. Please let me know if you'd like me to avoid any triggery topics.

Library

Though the curly-haired rifter has become a staple in the library over the past six months, Hermione has been relatively scarce there lately. She has no real heart for research anymore, not after the things she'd uncovered in those journals in that cave in Fromage, and there's so much more to Thedas than what can be found in books. She'd learned that the hard way, and now instead of reading and taking notes, she finds her thoughts wandering as they rarely do. For once, she can use a distraction from her failed attempts at studying.

Stables

Avoiding people isn't always as easy as she'd like it to be. But if she can preoccupy herself with animals, Hermione can withstand a bit of small talk. There's usually a kitten or two playing around the stables, and if not, at least helping to feed some of the horses will make her feel productive as well as distracted. And if that doesn't work, there's a certain dracolisk that she'd been slowly learning to get friendly with, assuming it won't sense her dour mood and become agitated.

Battlements

The battlements are actually quite pretty. She'd never really come up here before - if she wasn't in the library then that usually means she wanted to be social, and so the courtyards were where she'd spent more of her time - but now that she's looking for a change of scenery... well, there are worse places to get some quiet with a beautiful view. She's not always alone, since there are always people passing back and forth, but most people don't seem all that keen on hassling the young woman perched in between two turrets, staring out into the mountains. Indeed, unless someone happens to recognize her or just manages to catch her as she wipes at a stray tear, most probably wouldn't even know she's there.

Healing Tents

Returning from Emprise had been difficult, for more reasons than one. Beyond the obvious, Hermione still had a few physical injuries that she'd intended to ask the healers in her group to help with on their way back, but had clearly never gotten around to it due to the extenuating circumstances. Of course, she can't indefinitely deal with waking up with a sharp pain in her back and some of the bruises had begun to look particularly gruesome, so there's nothing wrong with making the occasional visit to the healing tents. If she takes care of one thing at a time and sees a different healer each time, it minimizes the chance of any awkward questions being asked, which is all the better; she's not ready to talk about that dreadful day and is in no rush to change that.

Wildcard!

She probably won't be quite so cheery until later on in the month, but Hermione still needs to eat, drink, bathe, and presumably sleep. She may be a little awkward around those that had gone to Emprise du Lion with her, but she isn't about to actively ignore anyone or send them off. Her nerves might be a bit frayed, but there's still such a thing as etiquette, after all.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

While this entire conversation has consisted of different levels of confusion for Hermione, Mac's response to her being from Earth might just have been the most bewildering aspect of the whole thing. Clearly, he'd heard of it, and he knows enough of the planet to at least know what the U.K. is, though it's clear - at least from all outward appearances - that he isn't from the same place.

And being asked what year she's from somehow makes everything seem a bit more ominous.

"I arrived in Thedas in October of 1998," she replies. "That was six months ago. Time seems to be a bit relative, since that seems to have been the third month of the Thedosian calendar, and I've spoken to other people from various... versions of Earth, I suppose. One is from Scotland in the 1960s, and another is from a starship somewhere in the 24th century, I believe, with a few others scattered around between and beyond those points. Why? Where and when are you from?"

Excuse his moment of shocked silence as he swallows his excitement because baby, you're from his favorite era of human history! A few ticks later and the weird lip twitching is finally under control enough for him to inhale, exhale slowly and reply with some sense of intelligent speech.

So far as he's able to accomplish that normally, at any rate.

"28th century Earth. I don't know where I was born, but I spend most of my time in Old Russia or the Reef. That's...what we call the asteroid belt, now. Er, then, I guess," he murmurs, pulling his bottom lip between his teeth and looking on Hermione with new fascination. "More people from Earth...all different times. That's...wow. I don't think I could have imagined anything more amazing than already being in a crazy fantasy world. I'm sorry," he stops, leaning back a bit and taking on a whole new bearing.

"I should try to be a little more collected. I'm just so excited about things - everything - here. The events, the people, the wildlife," he chuckles softly, patting the open pages of the book.

"I'll start over. My name is Macklemore Journey. I'm a Warlock Guardian, from Earth. I'm very pleased to meet you, Miss Hermione. Genuinely." There, that sounded pretty good to him.

Not for the first time in this conversation, Hermione is unsure of what to make of Mac's response. There's clearly some sort of emotion there, but whether it's positive, negative, or vaguely horrified is anybody's guess. And his response doesn't really clear things up one way or another, at least not right away.

"Twenty-eighth century," she murmurs under her breath. "That's even further along than Kirk." She'd already thought the starship captain had come from an incredibly distant time, speaking of Hermione's future as though he'd read about her era in a history textbook and referring to several technological advances that sounded more like fictional equipment in a science fiction novel. She can only imagine what any further discussions with Mac might be like.

"It's nice to meet you too, Mr. Journey," she manages after a moment. "Or Mac, if you prefer it. I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with the term Warlock Guardian. Is it a specific title, or...?"

"Mac is best, thanks. Anything else is a mouthful, I'm told. As for that, it's what I am as much as anything. I'm a Guardian, which is a blanket term for any immortal warrior in the war against the Darkness, and I'm a Warlock, which is my specific form and skill. I use magic to fight. We all do, a little, but only Warlocks manipulate the ambient forces around them quite the way we do. Mostly by letting them react as they naturally would," he admits with a shrug. If she wants more details she'll ask, he figures. At the moment he's more curious about her.

He sits there, silent and unsure because what exactly is he to ask without sounding strange? He knows, at least from the writings, that humans in her time were very different from those in his era. No Guardians, no space colonies, still fighting among themselves over things like oil or civil rights; not that his time didn't have it's fights, though real war was reserved for combating the Darkness, not each other. Usually.

"Do...you know any songs by Journey?" he asks after a moment, eyes wide as he struggles to re-break the ice. "Like, you know..." he pauses, clearing his throat before humming a few bars of Don't Stop Belivin'".

Edited 2016-09-26 15:02 (UTC)

"... immortal warrior in a war against darkness," Hermione echoes, more to herself than to him. Somehow, it sounds even more ridiculous when she says it. It must be the immortal bit. Most immortals that she knows of couldn't care less about fighting evil so long as it doesn't interrupt tea time. And they also happen to be vampires or some other sort of supernatural being. Which makes Mac a curiosity, even if he's claiming that he's little more than a futuristic Auror.

But there's a fine line between curiosity and nosiness, and while Hermione has learned how to walk that line, she can see that he seems to be struggling with it himself. At that point, it's probably best to let him ask the first question so they can start off on a relatively level playing field.

... except that asking about American rock music from the 80s doesn't feel particularly level to her.

"Um...." The name of the band escapes her, and it isn't until he starts humming that she realizes that he means that song. Anything else that band might have done is irrelevant, considering that she isn't really a go-to source for pop culture. "Just a city boy, born and raised in-... somewhere in Detroit? That one?"

"South Detroit," he corrects with a crooked smile, cocking his head to the side and nodding. That was good enough for him, for the moment. He still trembled internally, eager to ask dozens of questions but sensible enough to know by now he ought to hold back. He's socially inept in a lot of ways, but he makes his best efforts when given any time to remember his graces, few though they may be.

"What about you, though? You're from the old world - that's amazing to me. You're...well. What do you do there? What's it like?"

He seems satisfied with her answer, even if she still isn't sure what the relevance of it is. But then, he seems to have some sort of fascination with the "old world", which makes her wonder just what's happened to it, and what the new world is like.

"I-... it's hard to really answer that if I don't know what would be considered normal for you," she remarks after a moment. "I wake up, go to class, review my notes, go to sleep, and do it all over again. I'm in my last year of school, so once I finish my final exams, I'll get a job in a field that interests me and live out the rest of my life in relative peace and quiet, or so I hope."

Granted, it isn't as though her life has ever really been quite so simple, so she pauses for a moment before adding, "That's presuming another war doesn't break out at some point, of course. Or that magic won't somehow complicate things, as it's wont to do. Most of the world isn't aware that magic even exists unless they or someone very close to them happens to be a witch or wizard."

He nods slowly, finding the mundane life to have a certain sort of beauty, really, before Hermione mentions magic and he stops, leaning back a little more and squinting. Turning his face away and moving his lips, mumbling to himself, Mac tries to recall anything about magic existing on Earth and comes up dry. Which isn't to say it never did, but his fascination with the pre-Golden Age Earth meant he did a lot of research.

"Magic?" he asks eventually, reaching up and smoothing a bit of hair from his face to looking more directly at the girl. "As in...? Nothing like here or like what I do, I would think? We...well, as far as I know, there's no records of magic existing before the Traveler came. And that would have been long after your time, I should think," he muses, fingers wiggling slightly as he counts to himself before nodding.

"Yes, centuries out of the way before it was common. You're saying there's magic even before then? That's...well, brilliant! Mercy, I wonder what the colleges would think of that...if they don't already know, but I would have thought they'd make it common knowledge if they knew. Certainly would change the way people look at Guardians, at any rate."

At first, she thinks that something about what she's said has upset him, but then it seems that he's tripping over the magic bit, despite the fact that he's well aware of magic existing. That's a bit confusing, since she can't imagine anyone believing that magic simply appeared one day without it having been there all along.

"Well... there's always been magic," she points out, frowning a little. "I don't know who this 'Traveler' is, but magic is a primal force of nature. Even the people who were born without it and who think it's only fiction know what it is, even if they don't believe in it. Muggles - people who can't do magic - used to know about witches and wizards, but relations got a bit strained, so the wizarding world retreated into its own secret communities around the world and made it so that most Muggles believe that magic is little more than a myth. That may be why there are no widely-known records of magic having existed during my time."

But the wizarding world keeps records of its history, as she's learned from the History of Magic classes that had seemed to drag on even for her. That leads Hermione to wonder just what's happened between her time and Mac's that such records would no longer exist, or that they'd be kept locked away.

"What exactly... happened? You make it sound as though Earth as I know it no longer exists, rather than it simply progressed through time."

"Muggles?" Mac remarks, not because he doesn't hear the definition but because the word seems so peculiar. Almost childish fancy, really, like when someone says polliwog instead of tadpole. Still a real word, though, and he's not rude enough to question it more than noting the oddity.

"Ah, well, there were witch burnings, I know that. Inquisitions - my sole reason for unease about the title here, if I'm honest - and there were always magicians and shamans and the like. I suppose magic might have always been there, but there's never been common record to the degree you're mentioning. Still..."

He glances up from his thoughts at the question and nods slowly, drawing a similar conclusion with the subject brought up. Maybe the cataclysm erased that history like it did so much else.

"Hm. We...well, we went to war again. Again and again and again, as humans do," Mac shrugs, running his tongue over his teeth and making a soft clucking sound.

"Over stupid things we thought were important, like always. We nearly collapsed. But, as usual, we managed to persevere, to survive. We attracted the attention of...something," he shakes his head, making a vague, helpless gesture, unable to describe everything the Traveler is in a single word.

"An entity, massive and benevolent and for whatever reason finding us worthy of it's compassion and generosity. We only know it as the Traveler. It came from far out in space and stayed with us long enough to raise humanity up. We had a Golden Age spanning lifetimes. New art and music, cessation of war, curing of disease. We squabbled a bit, messed up as we sometimes do, but we always came back from it. Then one day the Darkness came and everything went to shit," he concludes abruptly, smacking his hands together liking closing a book.

"The Darkness is...really it's no easier to describe than the Traveler; only it's the antithesis of all things good. The Darkness to the Light, you know? But so vast. Just overwhelming," he sighs, sniffing and leaning back to scratch under his chin before laughing with an apologetic look.

"I could go on, but I'm already getting kinda verbose. It doesn't get any less weird from here...or more pretty. You sure you wanna know?"

Hermione is well aware that Muggles isn't exactly the most scientific word, but then, the wizarding community doesn't really have much in the way of scientists. So she wouldn't have been insulted if Mac had chosen to comment further on it, given that it was a silly enough term even within a vocabulary that included words such as Floo powder and flobberworms.

She nods at the mention of witch burnings and inquisitions. Those had been an unfortunate part of her own world's history as well, and a major reason behind why the magical world had largely retreated from the Muggle one and instituted the International Statute of Secrecy, among other things. Though something in what he says strikes her, she lets him talk, trying to piece everything together and not wanting to interrupt.

It soon becomes clear, though, that encompassing such a large portion of history into a short, simple summary is nothing short of impossible, so she decides that asking a few questions should at least help him shape his tale in such a way that she can actually follow it.

"So this Traveler is the embodiment of good, whereas the Darkness is that of evil? That sounds a bit too black and white, doesn't it? Even where I'm from, the Dark Arts aren't so much evil as they're used to harm people, which means that sometimes - though rarely - they can be used towards good people towards the right reasons."

She pauses, then, before lowering her voice and trying not to be insulting as she asks, "And-... I'm sorry, but you keep saying 'we' when you talk about humans. Does that mean-...? It's just, well, you look like a Qunari, so unless you normally look more human-like or they've evolved to look quite different from what I'm used to...."

In case the round of questions don't make it clear, yes, Hermione clearly wants to know whatever Mac is willing to tell her.

"When you get that big, I think maybe black and white are the only colors to work with," Mac replied, gesturing vaguely with his hands in attempt to indicate that the Traveler was quite gigantic. He'd really have to make a few sketches to carry around for when explaining things to people.

"The Darkness is something we've never even seen, so far as I know. It's more a concept than a physical thing, but anyone and everything in service to it has been cruel and monstrous in the extreme. There is no negotiating or reasoning with the Hive. They operate on the level of insects, pouring out of their Dreadnoughts en masse, swarming across the field, overwhelming the opposition. They take prisoners, but not to trade or torture for information or anything like that...they process them. They...I don't know how to explain it, but they process and refine people into material they use to build their armor and their ships. If that's not just evil in the strictest sense, I have no idea where the line gets drawn, I'm afraid," he chuckles uncomfortably, looking away for a moment and tapping his fingers on the open pages of another book.

"The Traveler might not be entirely benevolent, but to a race on the brink of self-destruction it was about as close as you could get to what people thought of as God, back then. When it finished raising us up it left and could have stayed away, but the Darkness came and when we would have died, the Traveler returned and saved us, sacrificing itself. Again, as close to the flat definition of good as we could imagine," the Guardian expresses without any note of insult. It's really no less uncertain and confusing for a native. Even one that directly owes his life to the Traveler.

"Oh! Oh, yeah. Sorry. Well, when I fell through the hole in the sky, seems the world tried to make of me something more sensible. I was reading a bit about Spirits coming out of the Fade here, and how their forms are affected. I guess what I looked like before didn't quite fit into the fabric, here."

He reaches up, tugging his horns a bit and shaking his head.

"I had on a helmet with horns, but no horns myself. The pallor of my skin is right, my hair is right, but my eyes glowed, and my skin shimmered in the light the way the inside of an abalone shell would," he sighs, looking at his gloved hands with a vague pout. He wasn't vain, really, but he did miss his own skin, to a degree.

"Back home I'm called Awoken. Some humans went off planet and out into deep space. Generations later they showed up again, changed forever. Evolution, y'know? Human but...different. Being out in all that dark strangeness changed them. Now, Awoken know magic without the Traveler's help. Maybe that's where all the magic people went, and the records just got lost to time? Or the Awoken might have those records and no one else does...I wouldn't know, thought. I'm not considered a proper part of the people. Guardians, like myself, don't have direct connections to them anymore. No memory, no place."

Edited 2016-10-06 14:47 (UTC)

"So the Darkness is less a single being with numerous minions and allies as it is a hivemind?" Hermione murmurs. The rest of that explanation, about prisoners being processed, makes her wrinkle her nose with absolutely no subtlety, but she still absently breathes out, "It's efficient, if nothing else." Macabre and disgusting, but at least it doesn't sound wasteful. She's clearly seen too much in her life if she's thinking of things along those lines.

"So... is the story of the Traveler and the Darkness a sort of religious allegory?" That would certainly impact whether or not Hermione is particularly willing to believe it as legitimate history, since anything with any sort of spiritual attachment tends to have a fair amount of fabrication behind it. She doesn't like thinking of things that way, but given everything she's seen both in her world an this one, it seems like a logical conclusion to draw.

What's illogical, however, is Mac's explanation for his appearance. "I don't... understand. Are you saying that going through the Fade resulted in you merging with your helmet? Or that the Fade tried to make you look more like one of the Thedosian races? That doesn't make any sense."

Looking up at his horns and fighting the almost painfully obvious temptation to reach out and touch them, she bites on her lip for a moment before her gaze flits over the rest of his appearance, trying to imagine what he normally looks like. "And you're also saying that wizards and witches - what my world knows of as wizards and witches - ended up evolving to look like... you?" Realizing how that sounds, she shakes her head and corrects, "Sorry, that came out badly. There's nothing wrong with how you look, of course, it's just... I've seen magic have an effect on a person's appearance, but never in a positive way before."

"Religious allegory? Oh, you mean like burning bushes and frog plagues, or blue-skinned destroyers, or what have you? No. The Traveler is real. I should really carry around sketches or--oh good grief, I'm an idiot," Mac mutters to himself, sighing softly and patting around on his person before tugging a thick leather-bound book from a satchel at his side. Dropping it onto the table with a heavy thump he pats the tome, drumming a fingertip on the gold embossed designs decorating the cover.

"My personal grimoire. Haven't written anything of consequence in it since I got here. Too busy sucking up new things to bother with the old. Just a few scribbled notes, but..." he sniffs, parting the pages and flipping through until he found his old sketches of the Traveler, different diagrams and notes on measurements. The sketches aren't dramatically artistic, but they're crisp and utilitarian, and stress accuracy, according to the surrounding notes. Quite literally a giant lifeform hovering over a city (also sketched) and casting it's shadow against a backdrop of mountains.

"That's The Last City," Mac explains, tapping the sketch and indicating the space below the large orb. "And that's the Traveler. It died there. Or went silent and inert, at any rate. Hard to tell what alive and dead really means anymore," the Guardian mused with a small shrug. The formerly dead, like himself, didn't really have a qualified opinion.

"I don't know why I look like this, miss. Just speculating, really. Based on what other people and the books tell me, people in the Fade are dreaming, and not necessarily physically there. So maybe when you come out of the Fade on the other side, is has to fabricate a body for you, and it's just using the blueprints it's familiar with. Frankly I'm just glad I didn't come out looking more like a demon. At least this way people think I'm reasonably local," he smirks, leaning to tap a finger against one horn.

"It's definitely been tedious learning how to function with these, though. Get them caught in everything and sleeping with them? Not exactly easy. They look neat, so there's that." He pauses, arching a brow at Hermione before leaning his head down a little more and reaching up to pat the horns with both hands.

"Check 'em out. On there pretty good," he chuckles, glancing up with a crooked grin. "I'm to take it that you find my appearance a positive thing? Ooh, flattery. Be still, my beating heart," the warlock drawls with a fluttery sigh before laying his head on the table, pushing his grimoire towards her as he does. He's merely teasing for the sake of it, but his offer for perusal is genuine, including the invitation to test his horns.

"Dunno what exactly happened to wizards and witches, though. Assuming we come from the same universe and not just extremely close parallels, they have to have gone somewhere, right? And they wouldn't just let life end, I assume? So maybe they went off and when they came back the Awoken were the result. They're pretty canny with their records, though, so I don't know much, myself. I would have asked, but I never had the time. Wish I did."

She's a bit surprised when he retrieves a book of his own from his bag, though Hermione honestly couldn't have expected that hers were the only books from a different world. She doesn't have anything she considers valuable, but she keeps them locked away in a small box hidden with magic, along with whatever coin she manages to earn around Skyhold. There's no promise that her anti-detection charms and such are even working, but at least no one has walked off with them yet. She doesn't know that she'd be able to cope with it if she couldn't cross-reference what she's learned in Skyhold's library with the magic she knows in her own world.

A month ago, Hermione would have been beyond excited to see a grimoire containing notes from an entirely different world, and might have lost all interest in actually conversing with Mac in favor of absorbing every word within those pages that she could manage. Instead, she's too wary of even her own magic to get too excited, and so she gives the tome a weary look before leaning in to look at the sketches Mac points out.

"Do the dead in your world usually exhibit brain activity and a viable pulse?" Hermione asks, not sure whether or not she's joking. She has no idea what people are like in other worlds; there may be one where they've transcended beyond physical bodies entirely, which might be what he's talking about.

Beyond that, though, his appearance is the most troubling aspect of this entire ordeal, since she's never met anyone who claims to have had their entire physical body changed. Hobbits aren't native to Thedas, but the one she knows doesn't look as though he'd been changed to resemble a dwarf, near as she could tell. So just how otherworldly had Mac looked that the Fade had decided-... and how can the Fade decide anything? It's not an actual living thing with sentience, is it?

She's coming out of this with more questions than she'd had going in, and Hermione's beginning to get tired of it. If nothing else, though, Mac's claim that she'd been flirting with him or some such thing bears the same kind of weight now that it always might have had, and she starts noticeably as she gapes at him.

"No, I-... that's not what I-.... I only meant that you don't look-...." Realizing that there's simply no way she's getting out of this with her dignity intact, she huffs softly and remarks, "I've seen excessive use of the Dark Arts effect someone's appearance negatively, to the point where they're hardly recognizable as human. There's no correlation between using more positive forms of magic and attractiveness, so all I meant was that you don't look inhuman. I mean-... you don't look human, but you don't look far removed from human, if that makes sense." This isn't working, and so she weakly remarks, "You still have a nose, if nothing else."

While she hadn't wanted to glance through the book, it seems like a ready distraction, and so she tugs it a little closer to her and gingerly turns the page, frowning a little and ignoring his horns for the time being. "You never had direct access to those records?"

"But it's an attractive nose," he preens, wrinkling the mentioned part briefly before letting it drop. He's had his fun for the moment and she seems genuinely more interested in the schematics and mysteries, so he'll indulge her.

"About the dead, no. They're usually dead-dead. Funeral, what have you. Memorial. Whatever the people left behind choose. Only Guardians are the dead risen for a new purpose. They might have been Earth human, Exo, Awoken or possibly something else when they died, but once they're brought back, they're Guardians. Nothing else. That's why I never had access the the records kept by the Awoken. While I was Awoken up to and at the time of my death, when I was brought back I born anew as a Guardian. The Awoken only allow other Awoken into their secrets. I and others like me are barred from that society. I don't know why," he muses, reaching out and thumbing through the grimoire to mark a spot for her to look at.

"I'm not sure why we're not considered part of our previous people anymore, since they certainly still make use of us, but that's how it is. On that page there I've got a few sketches of the Awoken outposts in the asteroid belt, a few ships and some other things. There's a sketch of the Queen and Prince, too," he trails off, pursing his lips briefly before glancing away and leaning back in his seat, obviously swallowing some thought or word regarding the royals.

He's silent for a moment, lightly tapping a finger on the table before adding offhand, "The only records I have are my own and the bits and pieces from the archives on Venus. To be fair, when I was there I wasn't looking for information on the Awoken; I was looking for information on the Vex, which were the enemy of the moment."

It's obvious that he's teasing her, but that doesn't make it any easier for Hermione to get past that without flushing. Luckily, he seems to drop it easily enough, and so she's more than willing to chat about anything but his nose or any other part of his body, intriguing as his entire sort-of-human-but-also-sort-of-Qunari situation might be.

After hearing what he has to say about Guardians, Hermione frowns just slightly. "So you... died?" she asks uncertainly. "And when you came back, you had no memories of your former life? You must have been privy to the secrets of the Awoken during your lifetime, so...."

But that's only one of many questions she has, and as she looks down at the sketch he points out to her, she asks, "Who brought you back? And how? And why? Why you, I mean? Is there some method as to whom gets picked to be a Guardian?"

"No memory of my death, no memory of my life before, no record of me so far as anyone can find. That's no uncommon, though - many Guardians died well before the record-keeping was quite as solid as it is now. And even then, some of the Guardians come from absolutely ancient remains, I'm told. Centuries upon centuries," Mac shrugs, leaning back a bit and knitting gloved fingers together, resting them against the slope of his belly.

"I was brought back by my Ghost. To clarify, they're just called Ghosts, but they're fully autonomous artificial lifeforms. They were created by the Traveler when it died. Or...went into torpor, more like," he mumbles, running his tongue along his teeth before making a soft clucking sound.

"Ghosts carry a some of the Traveler's Light - or magic, if you prefer - and spend their time seeking whatever snuffed spark they're meant to reignite. They don't know why they're driven to seek us out specifically - or they aren't telling - and no one knows what makes us special. Maybe it's nothing? Maybe it's a lottery, maybe it's a gut feeling that even little robots can have. Can't really say. I do know that Ghosts never stop looking for their Guardians, and when they find them, they don't go to another. They live and die together after that. There's only been one instance to the contrary, and theirs are extremely extraordinary circumstances, and not good to base anything off of. Oh...well...two instances, but I guess if you give in to the Darkness, you cut yourself off from your Ghost anyways. Which kind of implies they're our surrogate souls."

His world - or universe or reality or whatever it might be - sounds so remarkably bizarre to Hermione, and Mac can probably see the inquisitive hunger in her eyes as she tries to take in his every word and process it and try to make it make orderly sense in her mind. It isn't working out so well, honestly. To her credit, though, it's quite a lot to take in.

"So... you have a little robot companion known as a Ghost?" she asks, trying not to sound too bewildered. "And it's sort of like a ghost of your own... soul? So is it a physical being, or more of a metaphysical one?"

Magic is magic, but the metaphysical implies something else entirely, something with which Hermione is not at all familiar and would have no idea how to even begin to rationalize within her current worldview.

"Mhm. Ghosts can have their own names, but mine strictly refuses to go by anything I call him, so we'll just stick with O High Snob of the Humorless Plenty," Mac drawls, sticking his tongue out at the thought of his companion. He rolls his eyes dramatically and even adds flopping against the table and sliding back into his seat with a groan for emphasis. Clearly he was regularly kept in check by the robotic companion.

"I think they're kind of both physical and metaphysical. Like...they keep the little robot form to have a face for the masses, but they use transmat a lot. That's transmatter warp. I think by your time it already pops up a lot in science fiction novelizations and shows. Basically they kind of poof themselves and other things in and out of existence on a whim, almost. They don't make it disappear, really...they just put it - or themselves - somewhere else. Break up into atomic particles or something, right?" he tries to explain, sitting up again and gesturing a ball shape with his hands breaking apart, then snapping back together.

"But when they're gone from the physical view, you can still hear them. They still talk to you or through electronics and such. We liken them to fictional ghosts for a lot of reasons, y'see? I suppose they could still possibly interact on a purely molecular level, thereby making them physical all the time, but there isn't any literature on that, so far as I know, and I read a lot," the Guardian reassures her, shaking his head slowly.

"I don't know if it's all spirits and faith or if there's a strictly scientific explanation. You'd think they'd know after so many centuries. What I can tell you is that Warlocks in particular, like myself, deal in some pretty abstract concepts and don't really hold much stock in absolutes. There are a lot of cults and religious groups still. If science explained everything, there wouldn't still be room for faith in my time, hm?"

The idea of ghosts isn't new to her. Each House in Hogwarts has its own ghosts, and she'd even attended Nearly Headless Nick's 500th deathday party. Ghosts are very much real, and so long as she doesn't think too hard about the particulars and the ghost in question means her no harm, Hermione has no trouble accepting that.

But a robot with a piece of someone's soul in it? That sounds remarkably like a horcrux, setting her a little ill at ease even when Mac explains that that's not what they are at all. Anything that has to do with altering the essence of a human soul never tends to work out well, regardless of the intent or planned result.

"We call that Apparition, where I'm from," she explains. "Most witches and wizards can do it with little trouble, though technically we need to have a license for it and can begin taking classes for it at age seventeen. It's a standard enough form of individual travel, though we can also bring one person along with us if we have some sort of physical contact with them - hand-holding, usually."

She does have to pause, though, frowning a little as she admits, "The travel is usually instantaneous, though, or near enough to it. A loud crack can usually be heard when someone Apparates, but you can't hear their voice; they've ceased to exist in that one place, you see, and are immediately being transported to another place."

While she can accept ghosts, faith is another matter entirely, and she tries not to show any skepticism on her face as she concludes, "Some might consider religion a sort of science, albeit one that people haven't gotten around to satisfactorily explaining quite yet. There's proof in life after death, at least in my world, so if someone rational and without the fanaticism of a religious zealot would put in a bit of research, I reckon we'd have an answer to that query before too long, even if the answer is simply, 'The universe is vast and not entirely quantifiable or explainable by the standards of sentient life.'"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[OPEN] Heaven bend to take my hand

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