Log: Illyana and Alison, backdated to October 25

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Alison and Illyana have That Conversation About Limbo, in which Illyana's past (much edited on her part) is made semi-public knowledge. Backdated massively not because we didn't finish but because my brain has been taking a vacation for a while. Like... a month. It tells me Bermuda is nice this time of year.

It was, for once, relatively easy to find Illyana - go to her room, and knock on the door. Humming idly to herself Alison waited for the response, ready to knock until the girl gave up and admitted that she was 1) there and 2) going to have to open the door or else Alison would just start singing one of the really bad Asgardian taverns songs at her. They both knew the routine, after all.

The door opened slowly after a few moments where it was obvious the habitant was weighing her options. Despite her apparent health on the journals, Illyana in person looked utterly awful, from the bruising that trailed down her face to disappear underneath her tank top to the heavy cast that physically weighed down the right side of her body to her unnatural thinness, aquired after a few weeks without much in the way of solid food. Nonetheless, she raised her eyebrows slightly when she saw Alison, never one to be fainting dramatically in the hallway. "Hi," she said, a bit warily. Alison always managed to breeze right by her defenses, and this was not a time she wanted that to happen.

"Hrm. You need to eat more." Alison made a mental note to find a way to let Lorna know about that which would be discreet and leaned in the doorway, not pushing to be allowed inside in the least. "You look like someone dropped a mountain on your head." Alison nodded wisely, not in the least inclined to coo over sympathetically over the girl - likely to get her hand bitten off, that.

"Thanks ever so," Illyana said dryly; after a moment of thought, she stepped back, gesturing that Alison should enter. "So is this a social call, or are you here for some other reason? And you try eating with a concussion," she added defensively, never one to keep good track of her conversations even at the best of times.

"Talk to Lorna about food you can stomach? It only makes sense," Alison pointed out idly, walking in with a nod of thanks. Selecting one of the chairs she dragged it a bit closer to the bed and turned it around to straddle it, gesturing for Illyana to lie down again. "Actually, I did come with a specific question in mind. Now that I've seen you dragging yourself about for myself anyway." She grinned cheerfully, leaning on the back of the chair.

Illyana sat on the edge of the bed, unwilling to take orders completely -- a habit left over from when the only kind of rebellion she'd had was the quiet kind. "Ask away," she said tiredly, sure she knew what to expect. You're going to anyway. Better you than someone else, I guess, she added mentally. She couldn't quite keep her face neutral, and some wariness crept back into her eyes.

The best way to go about things with Illyana, Alison had discovered in Asgard, was to be as straightforward and blunt as a brick to the head. You just laid it out for her and that was that. "The whole demon thing," Alison said, absently peeking about the room to see if
Miles had been successful in his stuffed frog gifting. "Would you mind much explaining that a bit to me?" The looking around gave Illyana a brief moment of semi-privacy and was a remnant of how they'd interacted in Asgard.

Well. Straight to the point. At least you couldn't accuse her of beating around the bush. "Which bit?" Illyana asked after a moment spent weighing her options. She'd known this was coming -- had actually expected Strange, if she was being honest, and had planned to do her usual threatening queen bit for him. With Alison, things worked differently, although she couldn't quite figure out why. "I mean, you have to be more specific. The demon who broke my arm -- " and oh had he paid for that mistake -- "the one who kidnapped me to Limbo, or . . . demons in general?" There was a catch in her voice just before the last, just a vocal glitch she regretted almost as soon as it registered. Alison caught everything, she knew that, and she wasn't sure how far she wanted to go with this yet.

Alison kept a neutral expression as Illyana spoke - pity would get her kicked out, likely by the window, which would only be fair. Compassion might be acceptable, but she knew it made Illyana highly uncomfortable even at the very best of times. "How about we start at
the beginning and you just stop when you need a break? Doesn't have to be all covered now if you'd rather wait a while between all the bits and stuff." She settled down on the chair though - clearly waiting until this was all done wasn't something she minded doing.

The beginning. Huh. Well. Starting there was . . . a start. She knew she had to do this; much longer and Amanda Sefton would have the Secrecy Police pointing guns at her head, and she was kind of sick of dealing with the peasants on their level anyway.

"Well," she said drily, "in the beginning, there was apparently light. I have this on dubious authority, however. Once you've seen Limbo, you can't really imagine it being a regular dimension. But that's what they always told me." She declined to say who 'they' were -- that, at least, could be hers safely. "Then some stupid bastard demon from Italy or thereabouts came along and turned it different. It doesn't take much with dimensions -- he sacrificed his life to the Elder Gods, who in turn made him their emissary on our plane on existence, and granted him not-so-eternal life in return for his service."

She paused, taking a moment to collect her thoughts; in no way did her face reflect any emotion. "So this demon, whom you'll probably have heard called Belasco, which was a name he chose for himself because he thought it sounded cool if you ask me, wanted to bring the Elder Gods to Earth. And to do that, he needed a pure human soul to corrupt. You'd think that was where I come in, but this is back in the day practically before they invented civilisation. Around the fourteenth century or something," she added
blithely. "He was sitting around in fourteenth-century hell, which looked a lot like twenty-first-century hell, with a bunch of demons, including the one who showed up a few days ago demanding his sovereign rights. So he went off looking for the pure human soul back in Italy, where at the time a sort of underground magical community was researching the kind of thing he wanted to use -- blood rites. And he found a woman there. Her name was Beatrix. She was supposed to be totally brilliant, sort of a magical prodigy back then --
and she was beautiful, too. Only nineteen or twenty, when he took her, I think.

"She didn't want to go. She was a Catholic -- aren't they all in Italy -- and she knew he was taking her to hell. Literally. She left some journals behind in Limbo, academic stuff, the things he did to perfect the rituals, lists of her sins, actually she went pretty crazy by the
end, babbling about redemption and rubbish like that." She was silent for a moment, as though waiting for that to sink in. "The thing was, there isn't just one ritual with enough power to completely turn a pure human soul bad. You have to do about five of them. Beatrix, maybe she was too old or too impure, which she certainly seemed to think after a while, but she couldn't take it. When he did the first ceremony all the way, she died. He turned her to stone afterward. The statue is still in the throne room." She didn't say she hadn't been able to bring herself to remove it -- that she'd talked to it as a child, one hand trustingly on the stone leg, the way the eyes almost seemed to move, just almost. Too creepy.

"He didn't try again for another three centuries. I think he probably drank himself through them in Limbo. Anyway, the next girl, Maire, same story. Brilliant sorceress, beautiful, a bit younger at sixteen or so, and on the second ceremony, something went wrong. She hadn't kept journals or anything, but I think it drove her completely mad. She committed suicide in the river -- the demons still talk about it, her screaming about nonsense the whole way down. Anyway, so she was the second one. No statue of her, but I get the feeling he didn't like her as much as Beatrix. Which brings me to myself, several centuries after that. I don't actually know why he picked me, he wasn't big on the demon-kidnappee heart-to-hearts, but there I was. He did the first ritual almost immediately after everyone had
gone."

She'd been babbling, she realised, going too quickly in an attempt to have it said and be done with it, albeit at least in a calm, matter-of-fact way. There was another pause, one where she lifted her chin ever-so-slightly and steeled herself against going too quickly. For anything else, it wouldn't have been so bad; this, this was bloody awful, worse than she'd expected. She'd lose it if she wasn't careful. "He cut my throat in his courtyard," she said clearly, her words practically a weapon, fingers rising unbidden to finger the place a scar should have been, just momentarily. Her skin remained pale but unmarred, almost mild. "I bled everywhere -- he didn't speak Russian and my English wasn't good enough then to communicate, not that it mattered. I probably mostly screamed. Once I was close
to dead -- it didn't take long -- the ceremony was done." A small portal hovered in the air for a moment, and something fell through it into Illyana's hand, landing with a light plunk. She swung it to Alison: A gold locket missing its cover, delicately engraved, hanging from an even more delicate gold chain, with a pentagram carved into the middle. At the points were stones; from the top, going counter-clockwise, three were red, and the other two clear. "That ceremony was the top one."

Holding the pendant delicately, Alison looked at it for a long time without saying a word. It was both a ways for her to order her thoughts after what Illyana had said, which she knew had to be only the top of the iceberg, and also a way to give Illyana a little space of her own. There were three blood colored stones on the pendant - the three fifths of a soul displayed in her hand. Eventually she looked up at Illyana again, a bit pale though her features were still composed, even though within she wanted to do nothing more than to cry at the memory of the bright and happy little girl she'd known not so long ago, now standing before her with far too much horror shadowed in her eyes.

She kept the pendant in hand, cradling it carefully, glancing down at it one last time before looking up again. "Do you want to go on?" she asked, simply - she had told Illyana she could tell as much as she wanted and that was that. Holding herself to the bargain
despite the fact that she wanted to know, if only because someone should know everything that had happened, as if somehow it might make Illyana less... lonely in the knowing.

"I said I would," Illyana replied steadily. Thank every god there was for Storm, who had taught her this kind of calm; she had to swallow to get that thought out of the way. "So anyway, the first ceremony was over. The thing about them was that you can't do them all at once -- he had to give me time to adapt. So he started teaching me."

She stopped herself. "Don't think that means Amanda Sefton's right about my knowing demonic magic -- you can't teach a human to do that, and I'm still human. We did theory. A lot of theory." She smiled, somehow, looking down at her hands; masking the real emotion through sheer force of will. "He wasn't my father or my brother or anything. He just had to keep me alive. That demon from a couple of weeks ago -- S'ym's his name -- used to love scaring me. I was terrified of him, worse than Belasco sometimes -- with
Belasco, you knew he was just going to break your jaw and then heal it mostly and that would be that. He even pretended to be sorry sometimes. Not with S'ym." She shook her head, getting back into the impersonal; this was too much. Much too much. "Anyway, about a year in, someone woke me up in the middle of the night. I had no idea who it was, but she told me she was a friend." This was the part that filled her mouth with dust even to think of it. She had to steady herself, find that calm hidden -very- deep down and
cling to it. "She took me out of there and taught me how to defend myself -- she hated magic, what it did to people, what it had done to everyone she loved. But she took me in anyway. It all sounds very fairy story but it wasn't like that at all."

She paused, thinking of the long days spent running for her life and the caves and coldness and the sense that maybe, just maybe, she'd be saved. "She was trying to get me out of Limbo. There was this place she thought she could ph -- " Illyana stuttered on the 'ph' sound, landing on 'force' to avoid saying 'phase' because gods knew that wouldn't be obvious -- "force her way through to this reality. But he'd been watching. Of course. I mean, how stupid was I, to think he'd just been leaving us to ourselves in his own dimension. He caught us. She died." There it was, black and white. She died. Illyana couldn't quite help the guilt that welled up and made her voice flat and even, totally emotionless -- too emotionless not to be hiding something underneath. "That was the second ceremony. Bloodstone number two." She gestured at the pendant.

"He locked me up for about two weeks after that. I guess he was worried that I'd go nuts like Maire did. I didn't -- I was just sick, and I was just twelve or something by then. By the time he came to get me out, I was gone -- there was more than one person in Limbo after all. A sorceror." Careful. Easy to slip here. "Another fairy story. She took me to the garden -- to hear her tell it, one last place Belasco hadn't ruined in Limbo. I think it was just her. She was that good." Illyana paused calmly, willing her voice to keep steady. "She tried to reverse what he'd done to me. She couldn't. It's irreversable. But she taught me the things he hadn't -- all the good magic she could cram into my head for two years. At the end, she challenged him. And lost." Her lips thinned momentarily at the lie; it was like dishonour. Unavoidable. "Third bloodstone. After that, he was -- well, clearly he'd always been off his rocker, but this shoved him over the edge. He just sent me back to the garden, which by then was dying without the sorcerer, and made it winter."

She looked down at the tips of her fingers, trying to remember them blue with frostbite, the nails torn and dirty; flexed them unconsciously when she looked up. "I was there for a year, all of it winter. I nearly died. But the sorceror who'd taught me had told me about creation magic -- it's got to do with your soul, creating things from it. That's where I got this." The room flashed almost too-bright for comfort; and there was the second thing she'd got out of Limbo. The sword she'd used so effectively in Asgard. It blinked out after a econd. "It cuts through magic. Kills demons. Harmless otherwise -- it just disrupts mystical energy or something. Never really figured all of it out. It, like me might I add, is not evil. Anyway, I fought with Belasco with the sword, stripped him of his power and his link to the Elder Gods, shoved him out into rural wherever the hell, and came back here." She was clearly trying to end flippantly, but it came off more as desperate to finish -- anything to stop the flow of words. That she hated this was not immediately clear, but there were definitely indicators.

Alison felt almost dizzy - the urge to just hug Illyana silly was hard to resist and they weren't done yet, not yet. There was one thing she had to do, well, more than one actually but tis one seemed paramount. That the people who had helped Illyana during her
stay in Limbo had shaped her personality in ways Belasco could not anticipate or understand - and so not undermine as much as he might have wanted to, ritual or no, seemed obvious to her. And the entire story explained frighteningly well why Illyana thought the way she did, reacted how she did. Why let anyone close to you when they always died? Never mind how growing up in Limbo had further warped things.

"It only hurts demons, right?" Alison waited for the confirmation to that before stretching her arm out, waiting patiently. "Show me."

Illyana didn't bother to hesitate; there was nothing innately magical about Alison, nothing that would harm her in the slightest. With a quick -- almost lazy -- movement, she summoned the sword and swept it through Alison's arm harmlessly. "See?" she said, dropping the sword; it disappeared before it touched the ground. Her voice was still terse, although the tautness had lessened a bit. "No harm done. Although I probably shouldn't have it out here -- who knows what Amanda Sefton would do if I accidentally destroyed those wards of hers." She didn't express how very funny she found it that the wards were probably meant for her. She suspected the amusement would come out more like hysteria at the moment.

"Huh. Didn't feel a thing, no." Alison blinked at her arm a bit, looking at the place where the sword had sliced through harmlessly. The comment about Amanda was simply ignored - she tended to do that a lot lately, she'd discovered. Take into account what she'd been planning to or what she thought she might be able to get a reasonable response from someone on and just carefully not acknowledge the rest. "Thank you for showing me. And telling me." She took a deep breath, before letting it out slowly, the tension that had crept in her shoulders and back during the talk finally catching her attention. "Would you have any wild objections to my sharing the general details of this with the staff?"

"I wouldn't have told you if I did," Illyana shrugged; she always assumed people would hear about anything she said. That was just the way things worked. Confidence -- such as it was -- only really existed with Kitty.

"Fair enough." Alison showed no sigh of getting up just yet however, instead looking out the window for a moment, chewing on her lower lip. "Limbo. When you feel better, now now - would you show me? Just so no one comes back to me with a 'well, you don't know what you're facing, blah blah blah' speech." She offered Illyana a wry glance.

Illyana shrugged again. "I don't see why not. Besides it not being anyone's favourite tourist destination, anyway -- I'll take whoever wants to go, so long as they promise not to traumatise themselves and freak out. It's mostly just empty." Empty halls, empty rooms, empty libraries full of rare and expensive books, empty wastelands, forests, mountains... pretty lonely, but for the demons (cold comfort).

"Okay." She rested both arms on the back of the chair and leaned her chin on them, sighing a little. Just listening to all of that had been exhausting, really. "Thank you for letting me know this." It was - personal. A lot of what she'd said she wouldn't have hadto
share to still get the essential across.

"Whatever." Illyana was eventually going to have a long talk with herself on the virtues of not talking too much. Until then, dispassionate and emotionless was the best way to deal with this. She realised she was probably yet again missing the social graces imperative to the situation. "It's just not a big deal," she clarified. "Glad I could help." Well, that was a big glaring lie, but it sounded okay, like something someone with a bit more charity in her heart might say.

Oh yes, Alison knew that reaction only too well - their travels in Asgard had been graced by it more than once. "Well then. It's late and you must be exhausted. I'll let you rest, mm? Talk to you later, brat."