longestnight_old | Fustercluck

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Fustercluck

As far as Jack and Bunny could tell, they'd gathered up all the people they would find tonight. They'd have to sweep by in the coming days just to catch any possible stragglers.

Jack looked somewhat awkward as he stood in front of the group. A leader he was not, and public speaking wasn't something he was used to since being seen by the public was a whole new thing for him.

Still, he gave it his best shot.

"Okay, so most of you have gotten an explanation of who we are and why we think you're here, right? If you have any more questions about that, you can ask 'em. Then we need to talk about where you guys wanna stay. We have a few places in mind that are safe - and trust me, with Kuk's minions running around kidnapping any myths It thinks is a threat, you'll need somewhere safe - but you should have some say in where you live, so we want to see what works best for everyone."

[ooc: Clusterfuck thread! Always tag the most recent comment near the bottom.]

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Bunny, no more a strong candidate for leadership than Jack, added "One at a time, please."

"...Are you going to actually tell us what our options are, or are we supposed to guess?"

Nico had collected Molly when Jack called for the team huddle, and the two of them were standing near the edge of the assembled group. Not that she knew where they'd run if they had to, but it made her feel better not to have her back to any of the adults here.

"Can it be somewhere with a shower? I mean, I'm not looking forward to finding out if wet rabbit smells like wet dog, but I'm a serious fan of running water."

Howard is no more keen than Nico to be near the middle of the group. He is off to the side, hands clenched in his hoodie pockets around the berries he's been gathering.

"Do we even...emit odors in this form?" Mami wondered. She turned away to delicately sniff her arm, crinkling her nose. It was difficult to tell.

"Ah."

The rabbit of the group raised a meaningful finger.

"Y'do."

"You do," Jack interjected. "I don't sweat anymore unless we're taking a field trip somewhere nearly Saharan."

He turned back to the others. "So it depends on what exactly you've become as a myth. You don't need to eat or drink anymore, and you'll only need to sleep every few months or so, if that. Otherwise, it's optional. A lot of it is pretty individual, though, based on whatever you've become."

He gestured to each of them with his staff as he spoke to answer each of their questions.

To Howard, "As for where you'll be staying, yes, it'll be somewhere with a shower."

To Nico, "And we were thinking either the Tooth Palace - that's in the mountains in India, or you guys could live at the Pole."

Edited 2013-05-11 00:14 (UTC)

Sam was standing in the back of the group, since his height meant he didn't exactly need to be up front to see. So he was listening to the questions, mind turning over the name Frosty had given them. A name he hadn't heard yet.

"Wait, wait," he said, holding up his hands. "You mean we're basically up against one of the Ogdoad?" He paused, then realized not everybody would know what he did. "Ah. Sorry. Basically the eight personifications of the primal, fundamental states of the beginnings of the world. Well, four, really. Because they were in male and female pairs. Kuk being the personification of the primordial darkness, though practically it means he's the god of the unknown or chaos."

Yeah. After the whole Osiris thing, Sam had done a LOT of research into the Egyptian pantheon.

Jack stood there for a moment, his jaw hanging open slightly at that infodump.

"Yeah, I don't actually know much about Kuk other than the primordial darkness thing and the specifics I need to know to fight him, since I spent, like, three hundred years being completely antisocial."

He looked over at Bunny.

"So is he all...that stuff? We were just working on the theory that it was just one facet people were worshiping as a dark god, right?"

Edited 2013-05-11 01:19 (UTC)

"The Egyptians might have caught a bigger facet of him than any other culture in the world did, but I wouldn't assume they caught sight of the whole thing either."

Bunny repressed a shudder, his thick mane puffing up as he recalled their own look into Kuk's, ah, facets.

"Otherwise there'd have been fewer pyramids, and more nationwide screams of madness."

He went on - "We think what we're fighting isn't limited to one human story. We're operating on the assumption that a lot of evil god myths trace their origin back to this thing we're calling Kuk, so don't rely on the Ogdoad myths to give you the edge." He paused. "Though, we've got no call to rule the Ogdoad mythology out as a means to an edge, if we're talking research."

Bunny nodded, eyebrows raised with esteem, in Sam's direction.

"I like this guy. He knows his stuff."

That someone among the new folks did was encouraging.

"Well, even Kuk was only a facet of the larger Ogdoad myths. Maybe the darkest of them, but there's no reason to think that they aren't all the same thing." Sam frowned, considering. "It's a place to start, but I wouldn't have thought Kuk would have been a name known well enough these days to still give it power. It's as good a name as any to call it, though. Few enough other people will use it that it won't give much power, I wouldn't think."

If they were here because of belief, belief was definitely something they needed to be careful of here.

He did smile at Bunny, though. "I told you. This is the kind of thing my brother and I do back home."

Edited 2013-05-11 02:24 (UTC)

Never one to shy away from strangers, Diana stood near the front of the group, somewhat in the middle.

Some of this was difficult for the Amazon princess to digest, seeing as how she had actually met gods of various pantheons back home. Her own Olympian gods who had breathed life into her, the Egyptian gods that were sacred to the Amazons of Bana-Mighdall, the Hindu pantheon, the Norse pantheon, even Kane, whose champion Diana had been for a short time.

But this was a different world. It was possible that this meant that the mythology also slightly differed.

After all, here, Diana was fictional.

"Some do keep their religion and beliefs behind closed doors," Diana said. "It is unlikely, but not improbable that there are enough followers or believers of this Kuk to give it just enough power that Kuk has an edge."

Edited 2013-05-11 03:15 (UTC)

"Nah mates, you're assuming Kuk is of the same stuff we are. Strike that thought from the record. There are things out there that exist whether humans believe in them or not - here, those things tend to get called gods. Jack and I, and the other Guardians - we're below that pay grade."

Bunny shook his head, stepping in again.

"This thing came back without a moment's weakness, when Pitch - the Boogeyman - cracked open the universe enough to let it in. If we're gonna take Kuk down, it's gonna take something more than preventing kids from believing in him."

After all, they'd done that once, and it had worked like a charm - but that had been on Pitch. Not the primordial essence of evil.

Edited 2013-05-11 03:38 (UTC)

"We're just gonna get ourselves killed if this is all we know."

Al had fought gods and things that thought they were gods without knowing much, but he was far stronger then, and even with that he still got his ass kicked most of the time. As it was now, everyone would just get killed if they tried anything directly.

"In my experience, if there's an ancient evil, there's also an ancient doesn't-give-a-crap-either-way. If we can find something like that, we might be able to find out more about Kuk. Wouldn't count much on direct help, though."

Bitter? Al? Nooooo.

"What's it feeding off of?" Nico asked. "If we can disrupt its food supply, we might be able to shunt it back to where ever if came from. Maybe stuff this Pitch jerk back through with it, since he let it in."

"We can just make up a nickname for the Big Bad, if using its name gives it power. I mean. Duh." Howard rolls his eyes and folds his arms, slouching against a tree. It makes him look even shorter.

"It won't be that simple," Mami supposed, bowing her head. She chewed on her lip.

"Is there any hope that we can find more reinforcements? Surely we're not the only lowly myths around."

"It doesn't get power from belief or being named, it doesn't feed off of anything," Jack explained. "That's the problem. It just...is. It draws its power from itself. The reason it kidnapped the other myths for their power isn't to take it for himself, it's to use it to open the door even more so that someday it can come all the way into this world. The more it gets in, the more power it has here. We can stop it by shutting the door again but that's easier said than done."

He went on, "There are some other myths we can maybe ask for help, but at this point, most of the myths left aren't powerful enough or they probably won't be willing to work with us. We can try but there are no guarantees."

To Al, he said, "An ancient doesn't-give-a...hoot-either-way? What do you mean by that?"

"If there's one ancient incredibly powerful evil," Al says to Jack, "there could be more things on the same power level. Of course, in my experience, they either just don't care or they can't be assed to help directly. But we might be able to convince them to give us something worthwhile."

He shrugged. The gesture seemed almost comical coming from the massive, grim looking figure.

"Just my experience. I don't know how this world works, but that was the way mine did."

"Like gods? But not the smaller myth ones like us? No, we don't have those. Not big creator deities." Jack shrugged. "At least as far as we know."

"Look, I don't think you get the reason you're here yet. It's because there is no one else."

Bunny was starting to get frustrated.

"If Kuk has an equal OR an opposite, the only place I'd look for it is among the Ogdoad, but there's no reason to assume any of them would be helpful to us, or even safe to contact. They might be as bad for the world as Kuk, just in different ways."

His frustration was actually getting the best of him. How could it not? His oldest friends, some of the strongest myths the world had to offer, had already been taken, and this supposed cavalry was already scrabbling for reinforcements.

"You think we haven't already gone looking for help? All the reinforcements fell through before you got here. You're the only fixes we've got."

He directed his frown at Spawn and Sam.

"If you two wanna tag-team on investigating the Ogdoad, I won't say it's a dead end. Maybe something from the other side could help us pull Kuk back through, but there's nothing on this to help us with the shoving. We're all we've got. We need to shove Kuk back where it came and close the door behind it. That's our hope, and if I were you, I'd focus on it."

"Bunny, cool it," Jack said, nudging the rabbit's arm. He paused, and added, "No pun intended. Obviously."

Gesturing at them, he said, "They're new, they don't know this world, they don't know all of this, okay? Some of them aren't even fighters. They don't know the situation or what we've tried yet or who got taken."

Realizing something, he said, "I know you're mad that we're where we're at, and Manny dropped this on our lap like they're our last great hope without any explanations or help, but that's not their fault. Be mad at the situation, don't take it out on them."

Edited 2013-05-12 04:16 (UTC)

"Some of them won't be fighting," Bunny snarked back. "Anybody here isn't prepared to push back, they should stand back now."

The truth was, there wasn't any shame in that. Not everyone in the world needed to be a warrior with the mettle to stare down the primordial evil of the cosmos.

The point of their world was to be safe for the people who weren't. And the point of the Guardians - at least, as the Guardians were before most of them were captured, before Manny chose these new ones - was to keep it that way.

Not everyone in the new group needed to be one, either, since clearly, not all of them were. They certainly weren't going to ask Howard to step on any kind of battlefield, at least.

"I don't deal in false hope, Jack. We HAVE a way to stop this, and that way is to put Kuk back where he came from."

But if they could have already done that - if SOMEONE out there could have already done it - then the world wouldn't already be short as many heroes as it was. He wouldn't already be missing so many friends.

Jack had a little more patience for people who didn't understand that, so Bunny stood back, crossing his arms, to let the Frost Spirit speak.

"Yes, we do," said Jack, looking amused, "but they're going to have questions about what's possible and we've tried so far, Cottontail. As far as they know, we're characters from hokey stop-motion Christmas specials."

He turned back to the others.

"Any other questions?"

A hand raises.

In the back.

"You there in the back. The guy who wasn't standing there before. Because...we must have missed one," Jack said, standing up straighter.

Edited 2013-05-12 05:43 (UTC)

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