TDM 1 ⬡ The Oval Portrait

[liburuzaina]

	Casting Call The Oval Portrait Edgar Allan Poe »» "Long — long I read — and devoutly, devotedly I gazed." Name: The Aristocrat Casting Call: Characters with a Birthday from September through December Physical Notes: Desperately wounded, to the point of being bedridden, but not losing consciousness. Personality Notes: Curious, and prone to becoming enraptured by the pursuit of learning about whatever has caught their curiosity. Mildly delirious due to injury. Compulsions: To learn about their surroundings, whether through study of the portraits in the chateau apartment, conversation with a companion, or ill-advised exploration. «« »» "We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments." Name: The Valet Casting Call: Characters with an Unknown Birthday Physical Notes: Older than The Aristocrat by ≥ 5 years. Personality Notes: Willing and able (by force or by cleverness) to break in to a home for the well-being of their employer. A caretaker by nature. Compulsions: To see that The Aristocrat is comfortable for the night and their wounds are tended to, and to get some rest themselves once their duty is complete. In the absence of The Aristocrat, The Valet is free to act as they please. «« »» "She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee." Name: The Maiden Casting Call: Characters with a birthday from May through August Physical Notes: Young, aged from 15-20. Personality Notes: All smiles, loving and cherishing of all things, hating only The Painter's art, for they deprive them of their lover. Compulsions: To live life to the fullest, to love, to be happy... But also to make their husband, The Painter happy, by being a good and willing subject for his portraiture, should he ask. ⬡ Will slowly waste away and die, should they sit and allow themselves to be painted. «« »» "And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter." Name: The Painter Casting Call: Characters with a birthday from January through April Physical Notes: Older than the maiden by ≥ 10 years. Personality Notes: Passionate, studious, austere, wild, moody. More in love with his art than his wife. Compulsions: To paint. To paint, and paint, and paint some more. To ask their lovely wife to be the subject for their next piece, and to throw themselves into the completion of it. ⬡ Unaware they are doing harm with their painting, until it is complete. «« code @ efryndiel The Chateau ⬡ Common Cast Characters most likely to originate in The Chateau are The Aristocrat and The Valet ⬡ Literary Description "To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments. It lay in a remote turret of the building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique. Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque." ⬡ For Your Exploration Characters may attempt to explore the Chateau, but it will be shrouded in darkness, and every room they enter will bring them back to the apartment chosen by The Valet. What decorations may be seen are dark and victorian in design, and the room and halls may be lit by candlelight. The Maiden's portrait is on the wall, and will initially be cloaked in shadow for The Aristocrat to find. It appears remarkably lifelike, almost as though it is a window instead of a portrait. The other paintings on the walls will contain figures that are almost familiar to The Aristocrat and The Valet - as though they could be someone they know, but only if they squint. There is no electricity. Characters will not have access to any powers. The Artist's Tower ⬡ Common Cast Characters most likely to originate in The Artist's Tower are The Maiden and The Painter ⬡ Literary Description "But she was humble and obedient, and sat meekly for many weeks in the dark, high turret-chamber where the light dripped upon the pale canvas only from overhead. But he, the painter, took glory in his work, which went on from hour to hour, and from day to day." ⬡ For Your Exploration Should characters leave the Painter's studio, they will immediately be transported outside, to a sprawling field of wildflowers. There won't seem to be anything else around, but there will be a light breeze and the sound of the sea in the distance. Inside the studio, the air is stale and musty, smelling of oil paints and turpentine. It's dim, lit only by a skylight. There is a stool for the subject and an easel with canvas sitting in the light, but everything else - art materials, more canvases, both empty and with the beginnings of paintings, and props - are all pushed to the sides of the room and cloaked in shadow. Like The Chateau, there is no electricity, and characters will not have access to their powers. The Library ⬡ Welcome! Free from their roles, through either death, completion of the Story, or from not being pulled into the tale in the first place, characters will find themselves in the gardens outside of the Library itself. As always, it will look and feel like a temperate, autumn afternoon. As this setting is part of the Library itself, characters will have full access to all their powers. ⬡ Grand Opening Coming Soon! The front door will, unfortunately, be locked, and a sign will be taped on the doors, detailing how the Library will be opening soon, but in the meantime to please enjoy the grounds and the pizza party in the courtyard. ⬡ Pizza party? Pizza party! In the courtyard, there will be tables set up that will be absolutely covered in stacks of paper plates, 2-liter bottles of any soda one could dream of, and stacks and stacks of pizza boxes, containing any flavor combination that could be desired. Opening a random box will provide a random, but popular, flavor. Opening a box with an Intent and a Desire for something specific will provide exactly that. Enjoy! It won't run out. navigation • premise • reserves • faq

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Shen Qingqiu (Shen Yuan flavour) | SVSSS | The Aristocrat

[youcanyouup]

【THE CHATEAU】
Waking up in an unfamiliar bed feeling like absolute garbage is a more familiar experience for Shen Qingqiu than he would personally prefer, but just kind of finding yourself in an unfamiliar bed with no clear memory of waking up, or having been asleep at any point at all -- and also still feeling like absolute garbage -- is pretty new to him! He blinks accusingly into the dimly candlelit room, but no explanation is forthcoming -- and also, while he vaguely considers the possibility that he might have died again, his thoughts kind of skim away from trying to work out how he got here. Instead his attention is drawn to the decor...

i) He sits up in bed wincing, but he's increasingly preoccupied enough that the pain of his injury seems like... something he's used to dealing with, maybe? It doesn't matter. The paintings matter. It occurs to him that there's someone else here with him, more as if he's remembered than a realisation, and he leans over to elbow the Valet rudely in the ribs.

"Hey," Shen Qingqiu snaps. "Wake up. I need you to get one of those picture frames down for me."


ii) Or maybe that doesn't work out, and for whatever reason he's left to his own devices -- which sees him dragging himself out of the musty, antique bed and making his way across the room to peer at the paintings. Leaning heavily against the wall in his Victorian invalid nightgown, he does look like he might fall over... but it would probably be kind of funny if he did, so don't feel obliged to help him out.

【THE LIBRARY】
Shen Qingqiu stumbles a little as he abruptly finds himself freed from that gothic horror experience, and then stands there a moment taking in his new surroundings. He takes his fan from his belt automatically, so that he can hide some of his dumbfounded reaction at suddenly finding himself somewhere that looks... modern? He pats himself down on a wild impulse, but he does seem to still be Shen Qingqiu, multiple layers of ornate xianxia robes and everything. That can't be right?

iii) He approaches the nearest person, fanning himself lightly and internally panicking.

"Excuse me." He smiles over the top of his fan. There's a veneer of calm about him that's mainly ruined by the fact that he hasn't bothered to make sure the person he's asking looks more like they belong in this kind of setting than he does. "This is going to seem like a stupid question, but do you know the date?"


iv) Shen Qingqiu has sunk to the ground on the grass a little way away from the pizza tables. There is a paper plate in his hands with a slice of pepperoni on it. He is staring at it almost numbly.

"I haven't seen pizza for three years," he mumbles.

ooc // feel free to reply with brackets if you prefer, i'll match format!

pizza party

[nocannobb]

Shang Qinghua has already flopped down on his stomach nearby, holding his own plate in front of him like an altar offering. There are actually tears standing in his eyes. He's spent a literal lifetime away from any world where pizza exists. In all his years of cultivating, this is the closest thing he has ever had to a religious experience.

"Bro, you don't have to tell me. It's been like, decades for me." How many? Hahahaha who knows how old they actually are. Shang Qinghua lifts a slice from his plate to shove it into his mouth, but he stops, his expression shifting into something apprehensive. "Do you get the feeling that something fucked up's gonna happen the second you take a bite? Like, I dunno, this all turns out to be some fucked up illusion and it turns out the pizza was a lie?"

[youcanyouup]

Shen Qingqiu turns his weary gaze on Shang Qinghua, the look in his eyes communicating fairly clearly that while the idea of a decades-long transmigration experience is absolutely fucking nightmarish to him, Shang Qinghua has already negated any sympathy this might have gained him by saying stupid shit.

"No. I think there is real pizza here because at this point there might as well be." He reaches to pick up the slice on his plate, mainly out of contrariness, and then hesitates with a long-suffering sigh. "Ugh, I'm going to get grease on these robes," he says, as if he has ever washed his own laundry even once in his awful life.

[nocannobb]

Shang Qinghua, whose job it had been to make sure all of Cang Qiong Mountain's laundry got done, does not look particularly daunted. Probably because Shen Qingqiu's laundry isn't his responsibility anymore, hahaha. And he's never going to have to look at another fucking ledger book again. Fuck it, the pizza is real.

"So?" he says around a mouthful of pizza, rolling over onto his side. He props his head up in one hand, lying on the grass in a position that might be cool or dignified if he weren't shoving pizza into his mouth and was anyone but Shang Qinghua. "You are an immortal cultivator. What's a little pizza grease to your golden core?"

[youcanyouup]

Shen Qingqiu wrinkles his nose and turns away to look out at the park so he doesn't have to watch Shang Qinghua talk with his mouth full.

"Yes, and you wrote that immortal cultivators still have to do laundry," he says snippily. Or, well, you know. Immortal cultivators still have to get their laundry done. By someone. Shen Qingqiu is pretty sure Luo Binghe used to handle it, but he never really kept track of what happened to it after that ...

He sighs and tries the pizza. It's a little bit underwhelming.

"... There's no way this is actually the real world, right?"

[nocannobb]

Shang Qinghua rolls his eyes, but for good measure tosses a balled-up napkin at the back of Shen Qingqiu's head. Which cultivators have to do laundry! Besides, he only wrote that stuff in so he could write those choice post-papapa harem scenes where the girl lovingly washes her new husband's robes, stained with the proof of their...ahem. Anyway.

"Nah," Shang Qinghua says. "We're both dead in the real world, remember? Besides, have you ever read a transmigration novel where someone goes back and brings their new body with them?" I mean, it's possible, Airplane is not as voracious a consumer of that genre. He's not even a particularly attentive consumer of his own fucking genre. He plucks a pepperoni off of his pizza, waving it in demonstration. "No, Cucumber-bro, this is some next-level alternative universe shit."

[youcanyouup]

The napkin beans Shen Qingqiu in the back of the head and he jerks around indignantly to swat Shang Qinghua across the forehead, as is his right. Their conversation just kind of happens around this, it's fine.

"I didn't forget we died," he says, rolling his eyes. "But coming back like this," he gestures at himself, "is the only way we could come back, isn't it? Without just going back to being dead? Obviously some amount of physical interdimensional transport is possible, because wherever this is I'm pretty sure you didn't write about it."

[nocannobb]

Shang Qinghua slaps Shen Qingqiu's hand away, starting on another slice of pizza. As collateral damage, his hand brushes against Shen Qingqiu's sleeve on the downswing, leaving a little smear of grease. Oh no, look at that, a grease stain. How devastating. How tragic.
 
"No, this was definitely not in any of my outlines," he agrees, looking around. None of this is familiar, although he is grateful to whoever wrote it for the pizza and the underwear. He looks thoughtful for a moment, going a little squinty-eyed and scrunch-nosed. Then he suddenly slaps Shen Qingqiu's arm repeatedly. "Oh! Hey! What if we've transmigrated into, like, the Zhongdian Dimension? Like hammerspace but for stories?" He casts a curious glance at the closed library. "You think Proud Immortal Demon Way is in there? I wonder which version?"

So close.

[youcanyouup]

Shen Qingqiu pulls a face. "Fuck, I hope not. If I have to read that shit again I am taking it out on you." A pause, as he glances down at his embroidered sleeve. "Did you just get pizza grease on my robes–"

[nocannobb]

"Why would we read it?" Shang Qinghua, of course, went back and reread his own writing all the time. Although, it would be kind of different if it were the version he and Shen Qingqiu have been living...actually, he's kind of curious? Would it still sound like it was written by Airplane? Anyway-- "But if it's in there, other people could read it."

This prospect is way less daunting to him than it probably is for Shen Qingqiu because Shang Qinghua doesn't bother with silly little things like dignity. He glances at the offending sleeve and shrugs with an easy smile.

"Relax, bro, it's just a tiny little smear. No one else is even gonna notice."

Does Shang Qinghua already have a little smudge of pizza sauce on one sleeve? Absolutely. Welcome to the club, buddy

Chateau, i

[wholeheaded]

Glitch is never at his best when he just wakes up, and with such a rude awakening he's a bit more befuddled.

"Huh...whu?" Sorry, Shen Qingqiu, your valet is confused. "Frame? I didn't frame...oh! Picture frame, right. Uh. Wh-which one?"

Re: Chateau, i

[youcanyouup]

"That one," says Shen Qingqiu, pointing imperiously -- and kind of unhelpfully, although he at least seems to realise that, because he clarifies, "The one with the, the oval frame, the painting of the young woman..."

It seems very urgent to him in this moment!

iv

[cyclonely]

Okay! There aren't chairs, so sitting on the ground is definitely the way to go, here.

"Did you use to be blind?" asks John in a friendly manner, settling down beside this guy who is either in cosplay or just came from an important ceremony John doesn't know about. Or maybe it's left over from a different story! Who can say! Shit's weird.

He also has a paper plate with him that also has a slice of pepperoni, and, beside it, what looks like a bunch of spaghetti dumped on a pizza crust.

[youcanyouup]

"Did I -- what?" Shen Qingqiu gives him a bewildered look. "No, I've been..." Well, okay, now he's actually on the verge of verbalising it, 'I've been trapped in the story of a bad fantasy novel set in an ambiguous anachronistic historical time period where pizza doesn't exist' is a way less reasonable sounding explanation than temporary blindness.

He waves a hand dismissively. "They didn't... have pizza. Where I've been living."

[cyclonely]

"Oh man, that sucks!" John says readily, actually looking really sympathetic. He probably looks excessively sympathetic for the unexplained situation, and yet, somehow, probably the correct amount of sympathetic for SQQ's issue. "I didn't have real pizza for three years once, and that sucked--like, we managed to kind of back-engineer it with the--with a machine we had that could make things but it tasted weird and fake, which was pretty lame since that was the first time J--my sister ever even got to try it!"

Wow...that specific Jade died without ever tasting real pizza. That is like one of those epic tragedies from the past with a bunch of loud people singing sad things in masks. If he'd thought of it at the time he would have had a pizza party on his lawn before bringing all his teen friends to their deaths. That would have been the right thing to do. He starts eating his slice of pepperoni instead of thinking more about his great mistakes.

"Were you--" he starts with his mouth full, and then finishes his bite and continues, "--in some sort of small town? Uh, Asia has pizza, doesn't it?" He never looked that much into it, despite how he and his dad looked, and then it turned out it was fake anyway, and his race is Slime, so, whatever.

[youcanyouup]

Shen Qingqiu blinks. "Yeah," he says, trying to figure out what kind of question that is along with taking in everything John just said, which is making him feel like maybe he should have led with the whole transmigration thing after all? Is he talking about some kind of Star Trek replicator? What the fuck.

He leans forward a little to squint at him rudely. "Where are you from?"

library iii

[deadvotion]

Suffice to say, Hua Cheng is more than just simply annoyed at being here. He isn't in the mood for a party, definitely isn't in the mood for socializing, severely isn't in the mood for any of this. The food is weird, the drinks are even weirder and Hua Cheng is just Very Unhappy and knows that's radiating off of him.

So, he's a bit surprised when someone approaches as he figured that aura would be enough to keep people away from him.

Well, not everyone is intelligent.

Hua Cheng's gaze shifts over to the person beside him. His eye is critical as it looks the other man over from head to toe and back again. Then he exhales a huff through his nose as he faces forward again, his expression disdainful, his tone icy, "No."

[youcanyouup]

Shen Qingqiu raises his eyebrows.

"Well, I suppose I can't blame you for being in a bad mood," he says, blandly. Honestly he feels dumber for not noticing that this dude is clearly more of a fish out of water here than he is himself (either that or a really dedicated cosplayer, anyway) than he does for not noticing his obvious foul temper, but whatever! We're all kind of freaking out here, devastatingly handsome eyepatch guy!

He'd prefer to just turn around and leave, but he figures he might as well take the opportunity to get more of an idea of what kind of situation he's dealing with here. "Has this sort of thing ever happened to you before...?"

[deadvotion]

Please, call him a cosplayer and see what happens. (Which would probably be nothing because he doesn't know that word, but he'd take it as an insult anyway...)

He's never been to a place before where his disinterested response, the annoyance roiling off of him like particularly acrid smoke, his disdainful reproach all working together to paint one pissed off portrait do nothing and the other person continues their line of incessant babbling.

How bold.

But, in the effort of gathering more information, Hua Cheng supposes he should... put a little in, even if he doesn't really want to (because he should know already and it's bothersome that he doesn't). His lips tighten at the corners and he exhales a slow breath from his nose. "Narrow down what you mean."

Because, after all, several things have happened to him since arriving here. Hua Cheng can likely guess what this man means, but that doesn't mean he's going to make the conversation easy. (i'm sorry)

[youcanyouup]

Shen Qingqiu does not roll his eyes, but he kind of wants to. This guy! Who told you to act so self-important if you're not going to do anything useful!

"Finding yourself... transported to an unfamiliar world." No, a pizza party. What do you think!

[deadvotion]

Nobody taught him, he's self-taught! He will accept praise... probably.

Anyway, he could do something useful if he felt like it, but so far this guy hasn't given him any reason to do anything, therefore, he's going to be very unhelpful until he's given a reason not to be.

So, he sniffs, crosses one arm over his chest to hold the elbow of the opposite arm, and makes a disapproving gesture before resting his chin in that palm. "Unfamiliar world, no." Transported to a place he didn't expect, maybe. Meanwhile, Hua Cheng does roll his eye because he doesn't want to ask but he also kind of does, for the sake of knowledge, "Why, have you?"

[youcanyouup]

"Mm. Something like that." Shen Qingqiu's eyes narrow over the top of his fan as he looks the man up and down (mostly up). "Is this place familiar to you..?"

[deadvotion]

Hua Cheng doesn't respond right away, but that's probably not anything new at this point. Instead he stands there for a moment, then actually turns to face the other man. "Is there any reason you keep covering your face?"

[youcanyouup]

Shen Qingqiu snaps the fan closed, looking vaguely annoyed. Please do not draw attention to his bullshitting accessory. "No. Are you going to answer that question?"

[deadvotion]

A small, yet quite sharp, smile pulls up Hua Cheng's lips, seemingly pleased he's caused some annoyance. "Does it matter if I do or not?" He tilts his head to the side, his smile bigger but very, very obviously fake. "Whether I know this place or not is irrelevant to you. What good will that information do?"