Welcome to Gaia! ::

The last time Jordan had been in the Haunted House, he'd been effectively five years old. The time before that, he and his teammates had fought on a glass floor that cracked unpredictably. It was a variable and changing battleground with unknown factors. Caution was a watchword on any mission or duty, and it was all the more important here, where anything might be encountered.

Nevertheless, Jordan hadn't expected the Escher room. He wasn't entirely sure how gravity worked here; to be safe, he moved cautiously along a single plane, picking his way between paths and staircases, uncertain as to whether gravity would reorient if he attempted to step onto a perpendicular surface.

Weird, Ferros commented, sounding nervous.

That's really not comforting, Jordan shot back, and stared across the underside of an arch. If he jumped down into it, would he be able to walk on the underside of the curve? Or would the frame of reference reorient and deposit him upside-down on the wall - or floor - beneath it?

The soft creak of a door and the sound of footsteps caught Jordan's attention; he dropped into a ready stance immediately, Ferros held slightly back, ready to strike, as his eyes scanned rapidly across the chaotic confusion of the room. He spotted the intruder just as the intruder spotted him; half an instant of realization, and then the creature had transformed itself into an illusion of humanity, but not before Jordan had seen its true shape.

It was familiar, and Jordan's memory lagged for a few seconds as he searched his mind. There. Yes. The Apocalypse mission, and two freaks who hadn't wanted to fight. Interesting. He conferred briefly with Ferros, coming to a swift and mutual consensus.

Jordan straightened deliberately out of battle-readiness, watching the creature sharply, and desummoned his weapon. "I see you survived," he called across the room.

"Takes a little doing," Jordan replied. He glanced around, found a nearby staircase, and seated himself on the steps. "Some of us specialize. What's it like, re-forming after an agonizing death? Get a hangover or anything?"

He had his own experiences with death, jolting awake while elsewhere a golem crumbled to pieces, but he saw no reason to share that information. At any rate, he couldn't assume it was the same thing. Being naturally capable of recovering from death was undoubtedly a different experience than the simulations that Hunters went through.

"I wasn't expecting to hear it was fun," Jordan said. "Horrifying agony is horrifying agony, no real way around that." He eyed Zar thoughtfully. "I admit that I can see why some would choose to throw their lot in with a cause. It polarizes points of view and makes the world simpler to interpret. You're with them, or you're against them. I feel that's a bit simplistic, though. The range of personal viewpoints and morality has a lot of gradations."

Syllables, Ferros complained.

Don't grump, you can hear me thinking the meanings of all of that. He doesn't seem the type to fight physically, so his strengths must lie elsewhere. I'm trying the intellectual approach.

"Sounds like some things stay the same no matter what world you live in. Politics, manipulation, facts skewed by whatever group is presenting them to paint themselves in the most positive light." Jordan shrugged. "Most humans don't believe in you either. For the unknown monsters, they generally use some other group of humans. Make them look bad enough, different enough, and the leadership can point at them and say this is the enemy, this is the other side, the embodiment of what we hate."

He touched the red stone in the ring on his finger. "We're still humans. Just people. Set apart by what we can see that others can't and scarred by what's been done to us by your people and our own."

"Mortality is a considerably more pressing concern for humans. It's something we live with, the knowledge that our lives are finite and easily ended. A natural human life lasts seventy years, eighty or ninety for luckier individuals; in advanced age our bodies simply start shutting down. And our lives can be ended much sooner, by accident or illness or murder. It's only logical that we cling all the more tightly to our survival. We only get one chance."

Jordan rested his elbows on his knees. "There are Hunters who feel that Halloween should be wiped out. I can't see it succeeding. Aside the massive expenditure of resources and loss of life that would be involved, the essence of Halloween itself is fueled by human Fear. Fear isn't going to stop being produced. It has to go somewhere. Even if the world could be destroyed, what would prevent it from just reforming?"

He shrugged. "It's a dangerous viewpoint for me to hold. I imagine your opinions aren't too popular with the people around you, either."

"The explosion destroyed the horsemen's world and many of their people," Jordan said. "Eventually they will rebuild and regroup, but what happened at the tower has delayed the threat of their rising by decades, at least." The corners of his mouth pulled down sadly. "While I personally regret that there had to be so much destruction and death, I believe it was necessary. I don't know how much the clans told you, or if they told you at all, but they were gathering their forces and preparing to begin the Apocalypse. They would have taken over the human world by force and reduced humanity to nothing more than caged animals, kept barely alive and milked for Fear."

He watched Zar steadily. "I'm not just repeating what I've been told, either," he added. "I've seen records, seen Lairs in the human world. I've seen human remains covering the floor of an abandoned Lair, and I've walked in a literal sea of rotting human corpses killed by the Horsemen. I'm not particularly important. My rank is low. But I could easily find plenty of information that pointed to that conclusion. In the simplest possible terms, it was us or them. And at that, we've only set them back for a while."

He summoned Ferros, laying the huge hammer across his lap. "I have no problem with Halloween itself. It's when Fear creatures come to the human world to use humans as prey that the intersection becomes a problem. I'm not such an idealist that I believe that all Halloween creatures can be convinced of the cause of peaceful coexistence. But I do think that Hunters and Halloween can work for common goals. There will always be outlaws and killers who must be hunted down."

"I wonder if it was really coincidence. The timing seems convenient. Why introduce a random element into the equation when a long-planned and world-changing event was about to occur? Perhaps they wanted witnesses. Or, if there was backlash from Halloween, perhaps they wanted hostages." Jordan laughed humorlessly. "Their machinations have been in place for longer than anyone knows."

"Communication is difficult when both sides remain militant," he said. "It would be a slow process of change. Swaying public opinion is difficult in either world, I would imagine. But it always starts with a small group determined to make a difference."