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crisis_inverted((Setting here is the Ars Arcanum [![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
arcanum_logs] universe, but not canon to it. This is meant as an open!verse post, in which any character from any 'verse can ping in and it won't count as canon. I may post this to AA later I did post this to AA, as a canon log-opener post, so AA canonmates will want to ping o'er there—but anyone else go right ahead. Big City, at war with itself, Ashlar and other outsiders called in to fight a war in the City, magic against technology. Ashlar's tech-side, and recently got hisself shot in the kneecap by Suzie Costello, fellow tech-sider. He's really good at teamwork, Ashlar.))
Ashlar Doxon (whose face ought to be familiar to anyone who knows the Master—or Sam Tyler or Edward Sexby or . . .) sits at one of the few outdoor tables in a city under siege. The City, as it flatters itself. He knows better—any city is the City to its residents, and he has borrowed memories of enough cities to know this is just another city.
A promising city, nonetheless, with its stuccoed walls and beyond-21st-century-modern plastics and ceramics, its churches straight out of a fantasy Middle Ages, the eclectic mix of a very, very old city, a long-established center for human life and death.
It's the death that interests him.
He sips his drink in its delicate white cup (the liquid startlingly dark, with a disconcerting blue sheen—but it tastes like cinnamon, laced with bitter spice) and watches people scurry and hunch and challenge and worry by. This City is used to death. The people walk like victims, keeping distances between themselves and others, aware of everything—aware of the rooftops, aware of the business going on behind storefront windows they pass, aware of open drains leading down into the infrastructure under the City. People in cities that take life for granted live on a line—where they've come from and where they're going. People in cities of death live in four dimensions—up, down, left, right, time. Limited time, ticking time, time stopping for them if they don't watch those other three dimensions closely enough.
They notice him, every one of them. A stranger dressed in light clothes of a style that isn't local, dried blood caking the right leg of his trousers, with a ragged hole right where the knee should be—and the glint of silver metal visible through that tatter of fabric. A crutch rests against the back of his chair.
It's only been a few hours since Suzie Costello shot him, but the good doctors of the City (not the good Doctor—it took thirty minutes of argument to convince the other metacrisis that yes, yes, he could walk home on his own, go away Doctor who isn't the Doctor, shoo) have already patched him up to some level of mobility. Nice new semi-cybernetic patella and joint assembly (we can rebuild you, had gone inevitably through his mind, courtesy of Earth overexposure), promises to come back regularly to check in on his body's acceptance of the new hardware, other promises to dear God not come back again any more times that day, they had other less accident-prone patients to see to (he touches the bruising on his right cheek, where Jack Harkness broke his cheekbone earlier), and cautions not to put weight on the leg for any length of time but to spend at least an hour working with the knee's range of motion every day.
He'll use the crutch, for now. It's a novelty, and he enjoys novelty. The pain is a novelty, too, and he takes pleasure in that, as he took pleasure in watching the surgeons take apart his leg. Local anesthetic only, let me watch, and they had.
They think he's mad at the hospital, he knows that.
He smiles pleasantly at a young woman walking by, and she stares back, defiant, not letting herself be intimated by this outsider. His smile shifts to a Cheshire-cat grin, and her eyes shudder away, defeated, disturbed.
Oh, he is mad. But he's yet to let it bother him.
arcanum_logs] universe, but not canon to it. This is meant as an open!verse post, in which any character from any 'verse can ping in and it won't count as canon. Ashlar Doxon (whose face ought to be familiar to anyone who knows the Master—or Sam Tyler or Edward Sexby or . . .) sits at one of the few outdoor tables in a city under siege. The City, as it flatters itself. He knows better—any city is the City to its residents, and he has borrowed memories of enough cities to know this is just another city.
A promising city, nonetheless, with its stuccoed walls and beyond-21st-century-modern plastics and ceramics, its churches straight out of a fantasy Middle Ages, the eclectic mix of a very, very old city, a long-established center for human life and death.
It's the death that interests him.
He sips his drink in its delicate white cup (the liquid startlingly dark, with a disconcerting blue sheen—but it tastes like cinnamon, laced with bitter spice) and watches people scurry and hunch and challenge and worry by. This City is used to death. The people walk like victims, keeping distances between themselves and others, aware of everything—aware of the rooftops, aware of the business going on behind storefront windows they pass, aware of open drains leading down into the infrastructure under the City. People in cities that take life for granted live on a line—where they've come from and where they're going. People in cities of death live in four dimensions—up, down, left, right, time. Limited time, ticking time, time stopping for them if they don't watch those other three dimensions closely enough.
They notice him, every one of them. A stranger dressed in light clothes of a style that isn't local, dried blood caking the right leg of his trousers, with a ragged hole right where the knee should be—and the glint of silver metal visible through that tatter of fabric. A crutch rests against the back of his chair.
It's only been a few hours since Suzie Costello shot him, but the good doctors of the City (not the good Doctor—it took thirty minutes of argument to convince the other metacrisis that yes, yes, he could walk home on his own, go away Doctor who isn't the Doctor, shoo) have already patched him up to some level of mobility. Nice new semi-cybernetic patella and joint assembly (we can rebuild you, had gone inevitably through his mind, courtesy of Earth overexposure), promises to come back regularly to check in on his body's acceptance of the new hardware, other promises to dear God not come back again any more times that day, they had other less accident-prone patients to see to (he touches the bruising on his right cheek, where Jack Harkness broke his cheekbone earlier), and cautions not to put weight on the leg for any length of time but to spend at least an hour working with the knee's range of motion every day.
He'll use the crutch, for now. It's a novelty, and he enjoys novelty. The pain is a novelty, too, and he takes pleasure in that, as he took pleasure in watching the surgeons take apart his leg. Local anesthetic only, let me watch, and they had.
They think he's mad at the hospital, he knows that.
He smiles pleasantly at a young woman walking by, and she stares back, defiant, not letting herself be intimated by this outsider. His smile shifts to a Cheshire-cat grin, and her eyes shudder away, defeated, disturbed.
Oh, he is mad. But he's yet to let it bother him.
