[When Jonathan returns to his room after breakfast, he'll find a certain brooch sitting on the desk next to the computer. Underneath it is a note, written in a careful hand.]
Jonathan,
I had no intention of keeping the brooch, despite your actions today. I don't have any need of it nor any desire for it. I don't need things like that.
I have my reasons for the way I act. Perhaps they'd mean nothing to you, I don't know. They're somewhat difficult for other people to understand. I'm willing to explain it to you even if it's unlikely you'll accept it.
Either way, I have no desire to hate you. If I did, things would have been different yesterday. I suppose maybe it's a sign that I've gone a bit soft... or something like that.
Come find me if you want to talk. I won't force the issue.
[He's baffled by the letter, but immediately pins the brooch to his left lapel. (He doesn't wear ties, after all. Can't put it where she would.) Why would Naoya just let something like what he did slide? If he hadn't dodged, if he'd messed up even once, he would've been seriously hurt... and if he was serious with what he didn't quite write, there, then....
It takes Jonathan until about noon to gather the nerve to compose a short message to be sent via the wristwatch. An early breakfast and the conversation that went with it had... it helped settle his head, a bit, but he's still well aware that his outburst last night probably put him pretty high on everyone's "dangerous little shit" list.]
never was good at hide-and-seek, where are you now?
[Jonathan nods, and accepts the book without saying anything.
The handwritten marginalia is... frankly, the kind of stuff that gets passed around among kids at a Catholic school who think they're being innovative and daringly blasphemous. Those just get an eyeroll, he's seen that before, even written some of it.
The Bible itself is just slightly unfamiliar enough that it must be a different translation than he's used to, but that printout, next to the section it had marked... any thought of checking who published it vanishes as he starts reading both texts, looking back and forth. The further down he reads, the more differences there are. He looks back and forth between them a few more times, growing more and more visibly confused, and then looks up at Naoya.]
The looseleaf, that's - yours? Did you translate this? Or... I don't understand.
[The statement is so completely impossible that what he says comes out tangled in a baffled laugh.]
What?
[But he's serious. He's completely serious. Everything he'd said, every last thing he's said for the past two weeks was serious.]
Naoya, that's - but the vengeance against anyone who'd dare harm - the destruction of the world before, that - I mean, yes, there's evidence for the transmigration of souls, fuck, my father got his deathcurse fighting a piece of it, but that's - the - the first Covenant meant anything that went before it was forgi -
[Growing horror steadily raises the pitch of his voice, steadily widens his eyes, raises his brows and drawn them together, and sends him collapsing against the bookcase behind him with a hand clapped over his mouth, cutting himself off mid-word as the other grasps desperately for a shelf to keep himself upright. He doesn't even know if it's horror at the knowledge of someone living with thousands upon thousands of years of memory, horror at the knowledge that someone he's laughed with and has started to like is none other than the First Murderer, horror mixed with pity at the thought of Cain unforgiven for untold ages, or horror at the sheer concept that in some place, in some time, God is truly not the forgiving love of a kind Father, but the cold cruelty of a bullying child whose terrified friends "won't play pretend right".
Eli, Eli, lamma sabachthani - The thought runs through his mind before he can stop it.]
[... Interesting. He's not immediately rejecting or attacking him. The information about his family is worth remembering. He's wrong about some of those things - at least in his world.]
[As difficult as it is for him to accept that in other worlds, God is different. That there's a world where this did happen as written, that there's a Cain that isn't suffering like he is. And it's not fair - he's hurting and no one else is and -]
[He flinches slightly, pushing away a headache. Later. He can deal with it later.]
... Apparently that didn't extend to me. You only know about part of the story because God needed someone to point to as an example. You might be told not to touch a hot stove, but you won't really know why until you see someone else do it. I was set up to be the 'someone else'.
[Maybe not literally, but Jonathan's not in the right place to split hairs about that right now. He shakes his head slowly, trying to stand back up from his awkward slump against the bookshelf and failing to do so. He always struggled with the story of Cain's punishment, and this version... this, that makes all of Naoya's seething hate make perfect awful sense....]
The world was young. You were younger. You... y-you... your version of things, not just that you didn't know what you were doing, he was your - your most - and you didn't even know what happened, did you? Fuck. You don't... you don't raise a child like that. You don't punish them and go "hey, look at this, this could be you" to every kid in the fucking neighborhood and then never stop with the punishment on top of that. Punishing an adult, that's... that's why we have prisons, that's different, but children, people who are new to the world or don't understand it, you don't... you don't.
[He shakes his head, slowly, and when he starts talking again his voice increases in pace more than pitch.]
Your dad stands there cooking eggs and you look at the stove and he tells you no don't touch that it's hot, you'll be hurt, and you slap your whole palm down on it anyway... the pain of your hand is the just the first part, getting punished for not listening makes it even worse because you know you disappointed him when you just wanted to know for yourself what he meant, and this is a stupid metaphor because being exiled and forced to watch your children's children's children and all their kind wiped off the face of the Earth in the Flood just because you didn't understand is - it's - that's unimaginable to something like me, it's nothing like being smacked upside the head and told you're studying inside instead of throwin' axes if you can't even be trusted to -
[Of all the things - of all the things he's learned here, the horrible things he's seen so far, here - it is sorrowful horror and sorrowing pity that finally breaks years of self-control. His voice breaks and the tears standing in his eyes spill over and he folds almost as though he's about to be sick, both hands at his mouth. It's a few moments before he can even breathe steadily enough to look up at Naoya, eyes wide and still streaming, horrified and terrified and sorrow-sick all at once.]
Naoya. That's... that is the name you want, right? I didn't think... I didn't... I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I didn't know, I couldn't even begin to imagine... I'm so sorry....
... I understood what death was, vaguely. I knew it was something that you didn't come back from. I just... when you're raised to love something, and then you realize that you'll never be approved of, that you were set up for failure all of your life -
[That's not even getting into the possibility of him and Abel potentially being related to Lucifer. Abel has his own demonic thing going on, but as for himself... he's only heard of hints, nothing solid. It's not as if he can talk to Lucifer and ask.]
The Flood. The wars. The endless lives that were cut short, either by my hand or by someone else's. The suffering, the injustice - so many things that God could have stepped in and stopped, but He didn't. So either He hadn't paid attention for a long time, or He enjoyed watching it. I'm sure it's the latter, given how often misfortune has struck me in my lives.
I've had people taken from me over and over again. I've been killed in more ways than you could count. This is far beyond 'punishment'.
Physical torture... being crushed, being beaten, feeling every cell in your body die... it's nothing. That's why I'm not afraid of this place.
... But it's not as if you knew. Most people wouldn't believe me. Akira did, but... well.
It'd be a hell of a lot of effort for it just to be a lie.
[His breathing still isn't steady, and he's making no move to dry his face, still a mask of horror.]
Naoya, I... to be honest I don't want to believe you, I don't want to believe you have to carry all that by yourself, but everything you've said, what you wrote, where we are - even human cruelty is almost too much to believe in sometimes.
[He pauses, and bows his head for a few moments, tangling his hands in his hair as though he's trying to pull the thoughts from his brain.]
Before I came here I was in a place that can be drawn out of Chaos by two things: the return of its ruler, or by suffering on a scale humanity is only starting to figure out how to inflict on itself, which... also calls that bastard out of whatever piece of Hell he sleeps in. The anguish of every murdered soul, the terror of the people on the ships my country turned away, the rage of those who died fighting, the horror of people who welcomed the Red Army and then watched their cities fall all over again... they prayed to a God I was told was loving to save them, and instead their rage called forth one of those absolutes you told me don't exist. All because we've figured out how to do this to ourselves. Why should the Divine kind of cruelty be any different, if we're made in that image?
It's not that Akira believed you that's got me agreeing with him. It's my own doubts, and it's your anger. You don't have a reason to lie about something like this.
[He shakes his head, then.]
So... yes. I believe you. But I can't give up my faith for it. Even with everything I've just said, everything I saw as the Church smuggled us through Europe to investigate that place... even if it's just an excuse for people to treat each other decently, I saw enough good people working under the aegis of the Church that I didn't lose hope when I came close to it. Even if it's calling out to an empty throne, aspiring towards something that never existed, I don't want to leave behind people united in trying to set the world to rights. I don't want to stop hoping that maybe there's a reason for all the good in the world, somewhere, even though I know that's childish. I'm not as strong as I should be, probably.
[the narration would just like to say that for the record, Jonathan's obliquely referring to and looking at Pius XII's efforts to stop genocide with contemporary eyes and the historical community's "could have done a lot more" came afterwards, and the narration's own opinions are not her character's.]
... You have no idea what kind of horrors humanity can inflict. Just wait until you get home...
[But that's not the main point, even if that life was painfully short in every meaning of the phrase imaginable.]
It would be nice if there was a God who wasn't the sort of being as the one in my world. If I could believe that like I did a long time ago. ... I can't imagine one existing, though. But I'll grant that I don't know every other world.
Still... heh. Sometimes the Church can do good. Occasionally, when it gets its head out of its ass and starts living by the ideals that it claims. And when it goes far enough, which isn't often.
The war's ending next year, there's... there're books in here that say so, enough that I don't think it's going to go different where I'm from....
[He's focusing on the wrong part of this and he knows it, but there was that phrase neither he nor Rosenkreuz could make sense of, that just went unexplained like everyone would know what it meant. Two bombs ended the war, somehow, and the book had just carried on after that like everyone knew how and why....]
I'll tell you about the Castle if you'll... there was something Rosenkreuz and I couldn't figure out, things were written like everyone ever would know what it meant but he's from fifteen-seventy-something and the last calendar I saw said September 1944 on it. They wrote that Hitler went out first, and then later that year two cities being bombed ended the war in Japan.
Just two. One bomb each. Naoya... what the hell did we do?
[He lets out a soft sigh, physically steeling himself.]
Right. You should know what an atom is... well. When you split one, it releases energy. Sometimes it's a little, and sometimes it's a lot - it depends on the element. If you fill a bomb with radioactive material and then set it to explode and split those atoms, you can release a huge amount of energy.
Do that over a city... and you can kill a huge amount of people. Even now they still don't know how many died directly from the bomb, because there was widespread structural damage. And right near the blast zone, some people were simply... vaporized. The first bomb in Hiroshima killed about twenty thousand soldiers... and between seventy and a hundred twenty six thousand civilians, including the injuries and sickness after the first few weeks. In Nagasaki there were between thirty nine and eighty thousand killed.
... But the long term damage was much worse. Cancer rates spiked - especially in children - in addition to birth defects. Radiation sickness was widespread - and deaths from those are absolutely agonizing. Not to mention that a good portion of the cities were destroyed. All in all it was a... an awful thing.
[He's familiar with how victors' histories will downplay deaths. The range of those numbers is dizzying. There's a heavy pause while the color drains almost completely from Jonathan's face.]
How could they - how could they justify that?
[He's from a few months before the incendiary raids on Tokyo began in earnest, too, after all. March Tenth is months away. He doesn't have a frame of reference for "the good guys" killing and leaving homeless hundreds of thousands of civilians. Then he freezes, some of the things Naoya said finally snapping horribly into place.]
You were there, too, weren't you. My - I'm sorry. I know I keep saying that, but....
[He is helpless in the face of that scale of atrocity.]
... I was. Abel - or a person who inherited some of his essence, since his soul basically shattered when he was killed - was my uncle that life. He shielded me from the blast, but died from falling debris. I lasted... eight or nine months? Considering how I was relatively close, it was fairly impressive.
[Anyway... the other question.]
They've justified it in a number of ways. Do any of them really matter, though? People always find ways to be more and more horrific.
[He takes a deep breath, in the manner of someone about to begin telling a story they've heard many, many times.]
So we don't know which came first, the Castle or Dracula. What we do know is that the Castle is alive, and a creature of chaos. That description came straight from the son of its master. It's never reappeared with the same interior twice, though the layout is always roughly the same. When its master is defeated, it... the exterior usually partially collapses, sometimes completely. Knowing what we do now, I think it's safe to say that's the chaos creature leaving the way a snake wiggles out of an old skin.
I don't know where to start talking about the one I've seen myself. It's not a normal manifestation, there are monsters the old stories definitely didn't describe, and with Brauner in charge it's... he's running his own power through it to control it.
[He's not quite bristling - after all, he's used to people recognizing the book.]
We're not sure if he's resurrected or not, Brauner's got the Castle's power so bound up with his own that for all we know he could be sealed off somewhere. As to the Harkers... who d'you think I'm named for?
[He heaves a sigh. He's not going to touch that "generic" remark, wouldn't even if he didn't have the kind of post-cry headache he hasn't had in years starting to clang around behind his eyes.]
Brauner is... we aren't totally sure. He was a painter when he was human, we know that much... the way he's got the Castle contained is running power through pieces of his work. He's taking its power for himself. He thinks of Dracula as a failure, since he's never managed to conquer humanity... he thinks he can do better.
... Ah, one of those types. So he's some sort of demonic mage or some sort? Do you have anyone searching for his paintings? Destroying those sounds like it would cut him off...
"Or some sort", yeah. Rumors were that he got himself turned on purpose, or did it to himself... and yeah, my partner and I were working on that. Not destroying, but neutralizing them, she'd match her power to the... I guess you'd call it current? Frequency? The way the paintings were real. We'd go in and fight through to the embodiment of his will in the painting, kill it, and that'd take care of that. Problem is we don't know how many he's got linked in. Could be eight, could be eighty....
Ah, like the Harmonizer. I understand. Somewhat similar to how Kazuya and his friends went inside of Kuzuryu's mind... but heh. Don't give up. Even if it takes forever, there's at least a solution.
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Sunday, Week 3
Jonathan,
I had no intention of keeping the brooch, despite your actions today. I don't have any need of it nor any desire for it. I don't need things like that.
I have my reasons for the way I act. Perhaps they'd mean nothing to you, I don't know. They're somewhat difficult for other people to understand. I'm willing to explain it to you even if it's unlikely you'll accept it.
Either way, I have no desire to hate you. If I did, things would have been different yesterday. I suppose maybe it's a sign that I've gone a bit soft... or something like that.
Come find me if you want to talk. I won't force the issue.
- Naoya
Re: Sunday, Week 3
It takes Jonathan until about noon to gather the nerve to compose a short message to be sent via the wristwatch. An early breakfast and the conversation that went with it had... it helped settle his head, a bit, but he's still well aware that his outburst last night probably put him pretty high on everyone's "dangerous little shit" list.]
never was good at hide-and-seek, where are you now?
(no subject)
The arcade. I’ll meet you in the library in ten minutes.
[He’s about to beat this high score.]
(no subject)
[Seems like his initial plan to visit the library alone today just isn't going to happen, but... well, at least it's not the weapons room.]
(no subject)
[In any case Naoya's leaning against a bookcase, holding a Bible. It's got some printed paper stuck in it. He tosses it to Jonathan.]
[In addition to the Book Killer's notes, the printed paper seems to offer an... alternative version of Genesis 4.]
You might want to read that addition.
(no subject)
The handwritten marginalia is... frankly, the kind of stuff that gets passed around among kids at a Catholic school who think they're being innovative and daringly blasphemous. Those just get an eyeroll, he's seen that before, even written some of it.
The Bible itself is just slightly unfamiliar enough that it must be a different translation than he's used to, but that printout, next to the section it had marked... any thought of checking who published it vanishes as he starts reading both texts, looking back and forth. The further down he reads, the more differences there are. He looks back and forth between them a few more times, growing more and more visibly confused, and then looks up at Naoya.]
The looseleaf, that's - yours? Did you translate this? Or... I don't understand.
(no subject)
Translate it? No. Of course there's nothing to translate from - it was covered up. Or... well. Mistold. I didn't translate it, Jonathan. I lived it.
(no subject)
What?
[But he's serious. He's completely serious. Everything he'd said, every last thing he's said for the past two weeks was serious.]
Naoya, that's - but the vengeance against anyone who'd dare harm - the destruction of the world before, that - I mean, yes, there's evidence for the transmigration of souls, fuck, my father got his deathcurse fighting a piece of it, but that's - the - the first Covenant meant anything that went before it was forgi -
[Growing horror steadily raises the pitch of his voice, steadily widens his eyes, raises his brows and drawn them together, and sends him collapsing against the bookcase behind him with a hand clapped over his mouth, cutting himself off mid-word as the other grasps desperately for a shelf to keep himself upright. He doesn't even know if it's horror at the knowledge of someone living with thousands upon thousands of years of memory, horror at the knowledge that someone he's laughed with and has started to like is none other than the First Murderer, horror mixed with pity at the thought of Cain unforgiven for untold ages, or horror at the sheer concept that in some place, in some time, God is truly not the forgiving love of a kind Father, but the cold cruelty of a bullying child whose terrified friends "won't play pretend right".
Eli, Eli, lamma sabachthani - The thought runs through his mind before he can stop it.]
(no subject)
[As difficult as it is for him to accept that in other worlds, God is different. That there's a world where this did happen as written, that there's a Cain that isn't suffering like he is. And it's not fair - he's hurting and no one else is and -]
[He flinches slightly, pushing away a headache. Later. He can deal with it later.]
... Apparently that didn't extend to me. You only know about part of the story because God needed someone to point to as an example. You might be told not to touch a hot stove, but you won't really know why until you see someone else do it. I was set up to be the 'someone else'.
That is the reality of my world.
(no subject)
[Maybe not literally, but Jonathan's not in the right place to split hairs about that right now. He shakes his head slowly, trying to stand back up from his awkward slump against the bookshelf and failing to do so. He always struggled with the story of Cain's punishment, and this version... this, that makes all of Naoya's seething hate make perfect awful sense....]
The world was young. You were younger. You... y-you... your version of things, not just that you didn't know what you were doing, he was your - your most - and you didn't even know what happened, did you? Fuck. You don't... you don't raise a child like that. You don't punish them and go "hey, look at this, this could be you" to every kid in the fucking neighborhood and then never stop with the punishment on top of that. Punishing an adult, that's... that's why we have prisons, that's different, but children, people who are new to the world or don't understand it, you don't... you don't.
[He shakes his head, slowly, and when he starts talking again his voice increases in pace more than pitch.]
Your dad stands there cooking eggs and you look at the stove and he tells you no don't touch that it's hot, you'll be hurt, and you slap your whole palm down on it anyway... the pain of your hand is the just the first part, getting punished for not listening makes it even worse because you know you disappointed him when you just wanted to know for yourself what he meant, and this is a stupid metaphor because being exiled and forced to watch your children's children's children and all their kind wiped off the face of the Earth in the Flood just because you didn't understand is - it's - that's unimaginable to something like me, it's nothing like being smacked upside the head and told you're studying inside instead of throwin' axes if you can't even be trusted to -
[Of all the things - of all the things he's learned here, the horrible things he's seen so far, here - it is sorrowful horror and sorrowing pity that finally breaks years of self-control. His voice breaks and the tears standing in his eyes spill over and he folds almost as though he's about to be sick, both hands at his mouth. It's a few moments before he can even breathe steadily enough to look up at Naoya, eyes wide and still streaming, horrified and terrified and sorrow-sick all at once.]
Naoya. That's... that is the name you want, right? I didn't think... I didn't... I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I didn't know, I couldn't even begin to imagine... I'm so sorry....
cw: suicide/death/etc. mention
[That's not even getting into the possibility of him and Abel potentially being related to Lucifer. Abel has his own demonic thing going on, but as for himself... he's only heard of hints, nothing solid. It's not as if he can talk to Lucifer and ask.]
The Flood. The wars. The endless lives that were cut short, either by my hand or by someone else's. The suffering, the injustice - so many things that God could have stepped in and stopped, but He didn't. So either He hadn't paid attention for a long time, or He enjoyed watching it. I'm sure it's the latter, given how often misfortune has struck me in my lives.
I've had people taken from me over and over again. I've been killed in more ways than you could count. This is far beyond 'punishment'.
Physical torture... being crushed, being beaten, feeling every cell in your body die... it's nothing. That's why I'm not afraid of this place.
... But it's not as if you knew. Most people wouldn't believe me. Akira did, but... well.
i just couldn't go in on the war crimes stuff after all, sorry.
[His breathing still isn't steady, and he's making no move to dry his face, still a mask of horror.]
Naoya, I... to be honest I don't want to believe you, I don't want to believe you have to carry all that by yourself, but everything you've said, what you wrote, where we are - even human cruelty is almost too much to believe in sometimes.
[He pauses, and bows his head for a few moments, tangling his hands in his hair as though he's trying to pull the thoughts from his brain.]
Before I came here I was in a place that can be drawn out of Chaos by two things: the return of its ruler, or by suffering on a scale humanity is only starting to figure out how to inflict on itself, which... also calls that bastard out of whatever piece of Hell he sleeps in. The anguish of every murdered soul, the terror of the people on the ships my country turned away, the rage of those who died fighting, the horror of people who welcomed the Red Army and then watched their cities fall all over again... they prayed to a God I was told was loving to save them, and instead their rage called forth one of those absolutes you told me don't exist. All because we've figured out how to do this to ourselves. Why should the Divine kind of cruelty be any different, if we're made in that image?
It's not that Akira believed you that's got me agreeing with him. It's my own doubts, and it's your anger. You don't have a reason to lie about something like this.
[He shakes his head, then.]
So... yes. I believe you. But I can't give up my faith for it. Even with everything I've just said, everything I saw as the Church smuggled us through Europe to investigate that place... even if it's just an excuse for people to treat each other decently, I saw enough good people working under the aegis of the Church that I didn't lose hope when I came close to it. Even if it's calling out to an empty throne, aspiring towards something that never existed, I don't want to leave behind people united in trying to set the world to rights. I don't want to stop hoping that maybe there's a reason for all the good in the world, somewhere, even though I know that's childish. I'm not as strong as I should be, probably.
[the narration would just like to say that for the record, Jonathan's obliquely referring to and looking at Pius XII's efforts to stop genocide with contemporary eyes and the historical community's "could have done a lot more" came afterwards, and the narration's own opinions are not her character's.]
(no subject)
[But that's not the main point, even if that life was painfully short in every meaning of the phrase imaginable.]
It would be nice if there was a God who wasn't the sort of being as the one in my world. If I could believe that like I did a long time ago. ... I can't imagine one existing, though. But I'll grant that I don't know every other world.
Still... heh. Sometimes the Church can do good. Occasionally, when it gets its head out of its ass and starts living by the ideals that it claims. And when it goes far enough, which isn't often.
... Tell me more about this place you were in.
(no subject)
[He's focusing on the wrong part of this and he knows it, but there was that phrase neither he nor Rosenkreuz could make sense of, that just went unexplained like everyone would know what it meant. Two bombs ended the war, somehow, and the book had just carried on after that like everyone knew how and why....]
I'll tell you about the Castle if you'll... there was something Rosenkreuz and I couldn't figure out, things were written like everyone ever would know what it meant but he's from fifteen-seventy-something and the last calendar I saw said September 1944 on it. They wrote that Hitler went out first, and then later that year two cities being bombed ended the war in Japan.
Just two. One bomb each. Naoya... what the hell did we do?
cw: ... nagasaki and hiroshima, cancer, awful things, etc.
[He lets out a soft sigh, physically steeling himself.]
Right. You should know what an atom is... well. When you split one, it releases energy. Sometimes it's a little, and sometimes it's a lot - it depends on the element. If you fill a bomb with radioactive material and then set it to explode and split those atoms, you can release a huge amount of energy.
Do that over a city... and you can kill a huge amount of people. Even now they still don't know how many died directly from the bomb, because there was widespread structural damage. And right near the blast zone, some people were simply... vaporized. The first bomb in Hiroshima killed about twenty thousand soldiers... and between seventy and a hundred twenty six thousand civilians, including the injuries and sickness after the first few weeks. In Nagasaki there were between thirty nine and eighty thousand killed.
... But the long term damage was much worse. Cancer rates spiked - especially in children - in addition to birth defects. Radiation sickness was widespread - and deaths from those are absolutely agonizing. Not to mention that a good portion of the cities were destroyed. All in all it was a... an awful thing.
cw: mass civilian casualties?
How could they - how could they justify that?
[He's from a few months before the incendiary raids on Tokyo began in earnest, too, after all. March Tenth is months away. He doesn't have a frame of reference for "the good guys" killing and leaving homeless hundreds of thousands of civilians. Then he freezes, some of the things Naoya said finally snapping horribly into place.]
You were there, too, weren't you. My - I'm sorry. I know I keep saying that, but....
[He is helpless in the face of that scale of atrocity.]
cw: death mention
[Anyway... the other question.]
They've justified it in a number of ways. Do any of them really matter, though? People always find ways to be more and more horrific.
(no subject)
"Who needs a Dark Lord when we can do this to ourselves"....
[He shakes his head, eyes clearing.]
I didn't... it was cruel of me to make you answer that, even if I didn't know. I said I'd tell you about the Castle if you did, though, didn't I?
(no subject)
(no subject)
So we don't know which came first, the Castle or Dracula. What we do know is that the Castle is alive, and a creature of chaos. That description came straight from the son of its master. It's never reappeared with the same interior twice, though the layout is always roughly the same. When its master is defeated, it... the exterior usually partially collapses, sometimes completely. Knowing what we do now, I think it's safe to say that's the chaos creature leaving the way a snake wiggles out of an old skin.
I don't know where to start talking about the one I've seen myself. It's not a normal manifestation, there are monsters the old stories definitely didn't describe, and with Brauner in charge it's... he's running his own power through it to control it.
[He shakes his head.]
Give me somethin' I can focus on to answer?
(no subject)
Dracula's castle? So he's not dead? No Harker to k -
[He stares at Jonathan for a moment before laughing.]
Of course. Morris. That makes sense.
(no subject)
[He's not quite bristling - after all, he's used to people recognizing the book.]
We're not sure if he's resurrected or not, Brauner's got the Castle's power so bound up with his own that for all we know he could be sealed off somewhere. As to the Harkers... who d'you think I'm named for?
(no subject)
In any case, I suppose I should ask... who's Brauner?
(no subject)
Brauner is... we aren't totally sure. He was a painter when he was human, we know that much... the way he's got the Castle contained is running power through pieces of his work. He's taking its power for himself. He thinks of Dracula as a failure, since he's never managed to conquer humanity... he thinks he can do better.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
[He makes a noise that's not quite a laugh or a sigh, somewhere between the two.]
Of all the people... but you've been kind to me. Thank you. I just... I wish there was something I could do.
(no subject)
Unless you have the sort of power that can help beat up the future King of Demons - or God Himself - there's not much you can do.
[He'll... ignore that 'kind' comment.]
(no subject)
My father did. He didn't pass it on before he passed on. I'm sorry.
(no subject)
I was being sarcastic, Jonathan. I didn't expect you to. It's fine - there's no need to beat yourself up over it.
... Though what kind of power did he have, out of curiosity?