Video / un: of corpse not /day of the senate speech

[nothinglikefather]

[ Jacob is not used to these strange devices, the pocket-watch style communicator didn't come with a set of instructions and while he has used it once or twice, it always takes a few minutes of pressing the crown, turning it, and cursing at it before he realises its been recording for a few minutes. ]

This bloody thing's finally working?

Right. Right. Some of you people know me, those that don't- my name is Jacob Frye. I deal with... not very nice people who need dealing with.

I hope you've all had a chance to listen to that senate meeting. Something came up during all of that and it's got me thinking.

This arsehole- Silvanus- said we couldn't be sure that Justus might not even be in the temple. That no one could go in or out to check. So who could prove if he was praying or if he was dead?

Asked the other Speaker, Martellius, who tried to warn me off heading there.

So I'm going. Anyone want to come along?

voice | un: yiling laozu

[weifinder]

( at speaking volume, head pounding, he offers a just shy of chipper address to everyone on network, in their ragtag group and those tied into it peripherally, over the scattered memories empathy left him with: )

Had a moment or two in the formerly living Tavernus's head. The sorts of lingering regrets a person has, and all that. How a man, before he learned to drown in drink, finds himself in uniform taking reports from farmers who say "it cannot go on further" as their wives and children grow more frightened. Screams heard in the distance, and Tavernus tells the farmers to leave, to keep wrestling "it" from the ground and taking it "to the granaries." The same place he directs a frightened solider to bring a summoned legion, with a sigh.

( A cluck of his tongue. )

Years later, how a different regret slides in around the alcohol he's drowning himself in on the pleas of his brother, Narula. Begging him to stop, stop the drinking and whatever else he's indulging, to return to the Hand. Tavernus slurs his own feelings about that, how it was Narula and his Hand that led him to this path to try and forget, before he rouses himself to hasten Narula's exit. Still looking like the soldier he'd been once, back when the farmers were complaining about what they were harvesting and storing in the granaries.

( His tone shifts now, less in the cadence of one sharing a story, a memory, and more of one opening a conversation. Like there aren't echoes of a very different set of circumstances he finds in the words of another man's memories, and maybe he doesn't: maybe he's long since learned to let go. )

Strange crops all around. What lingers out of them that's here today, that Tavernus couldn't live with remembering?