♤ Cause and Effect

[deal_me_in]

WHO: Cayde-6, OTA
WHERE: The Library, the Hangar, the Clocktower
WHAT: A bored Hunter is a restless Hunter
WHEN: Now throughout the week
WARNINGS: N/A
NOTES: Will match tagging preference!


The Library (Closed to Jon and Tony)
If there's one thing a Hunter's good at, it's sneaking around. He's scoped out his destination, made sure key parties were present. It would be a wasted effort if he went through so much trouble and found himself without his intended audience, after all.

And so it is that Cayde hauls along a couch, of all things, which might be an odd sight in itself considering he's seen pulling it out from the Whale Comb Sent Her. He has it resting over his back part of the way, and by the time he gets to the library itself, he's simply dragging it by one end, rather noisily once its feet leave the weed-ridden, patchy earth and start to screech across the smoother floors. But his intention is not stealth, not now. Now? He's clearly asking for attention.

He pulls that couch right up into the most open space of the library, looks around, and then sets it right down. Then picks it up and turns it about to adjust it just so after consulting his hidden Ghost for something or another. And just like that, he walks right back out.


The Hangar (Open)
Some time later in the week one might find the Exo skulking about the hangar. Mainly he's prowling around the Starduck if not ineffectually pawing at the door hatch. His Ghost hovers nearby, watching.

If no one comes around to open the thing up for him, then he'll be wandering around the other ships, holding his tablet as he squints between the screen and each ship he passes as he looks for a certain one.


The Clocktower (Openish?)
Cayde's been seen with a giant coil of rope slung over an arm, fresh from the replicator. He's made a beeline for his tower (not the nest of buildings the bar's in), humming along. If Ikora's about the lower levels that she's claimed, then he wouldn't be surprised if she'd try to hold him up for questioning. Which is why he goes up to his own levels the usual way- jumping. Dare someone brave the Warlock's domain to head up those stupidly tall stairs to find him? -it's fine, she won't bite.

If you catch up to him at the top floor of the clocktower, you'll find him setting the rope down as he looks on out of one of the gaping holes that face the neighboring tower by the flood plains, stroking his chin thoughtfully. After a moment he turns to you, grinning as he picks up the rope and starts pulling half of it loose before tossing the rest over. "Hey, do me a solid and hold onto that. -and make sure to keep feedin' me some line!" And then without further explanation he leaps out the hole, somehow jumping again in midair just before he can hit the ground and break his ankles, rope winding out in his wake.

Comments

[demjiin]

At this point, Kaz had been in Temba long enough that seeing the law of physics being broken wasn't much of a surprise. But the relief of not being flattened by an Exo washed through him. At the moment he just leaned on his cane, voice as dry as dust;

"That's one hell of a hobby."

[deal_me_in]

Cayde looked over at Kaz then with a crooked grin. "Clearly you haven't seen me come and go from the bar," he laughed. Leaping around from dangerous heights was practically a Hunter pasttime. It was definitely his favorite way to shortcut across the city.

[demjiin]

Since Cayde was apparently making this kind of traveling a habit, Kaz's tone was still as dry as dust.

"Like I just said."

He turned his frown onto the rope Cayde had tied around him.

"Which then begs the question what you were planning to do with that?"

[deal_me_in]

He might have questioned the Hunter's sanity earlier if he'd seen Cayde's escapades in Coruscant.

"Hm? Oh!" Cayde looked down at the rope before glancing up where it dangled from. He grinned, giving it a tug. "I was just heading over to my neighbor's," he said. As though that explained anything.

[demjiin]

"You'll have to give me more than that to work with."

Kaz figured Cayde was doing something that was semi-permanent with the rope, but that was still hard to guess since this was Cayde and his behavior would baffle Kaz at times. The googly eyes on everything, for instance.

"Why are you stringing a rope between where you live and the next building?"

[deal_me_in]

Kaz would hardly be the first. The Hunter did things as he pleased, and often without any real depth in planning. And that cane still needed some eyeballs in his opinion. He still had extras~~~

"Zipline," Cayde said. "Echo's set up shop next door, see, so..."

[demjiin]

"...well I hope he's not sleeping there, at least."

Kaz muttered that bit, imagining Cayde using a zipline to drop in on the clone unexpectedly at any given time. Kaz tilted his head back to look at the next building's top.

"So, what now? Now that your rope is now down here I mean."

Surely Cayde didn't mean to jump the tower again. ...right?

[deal_me_in]

"Nah, too drafty for a bedroom." Honestly, Cayde wasn't sure where the ARC Trooper slept. Echo had said something about an outpost but the Hunter hadn't seen much by way of furnishings so far. He blinked and then smiled again as Kaz asked what came next. He brought a hand up like he were aiming a gun, pointing it to his next destination.

"Well, I go run right over to his place, hop up and loop this thing around and then back out and up to my place."

[demjiin]

Kaz looked at Cayde.

"You're making it sound like it's nothing if you do all of this jumping while breaking the laws of physics to make it work."

Kaz had already seen 'magic' powers before he came to Temba. He'd seen more since, but there had to be some level of reality somewhere even in a supremely weird place like Temba.

[deal_me_in]

"It isn't! It's how I get around, I told you. Clearly you haven't seen Ikora. Warlocks glide, you know," the Hunter laughed.

"Look, if jumping in midair is weirding you out I dunno how you'd take seeing us come back from the dead."

[demjiin]

"You once mentioned that death wouldn't mean the same thing to you."

Kaz looked up towards the top of the tower.

"I think it's safe to say that you lot have a very different idea on mortality altogether."

[deal_me_in]

Cayde nodded at that. "It's complicated, yeah." He flashed Kaz a rueful grin.

"No point denying it's probably true. But after kicking around for several centuries you can't help but build up on certain mindsets. Mind you, that won't mean I'm not ever looking to get myself killed, even if I do probably take more risks. Some Guardians out there actually experimented with their mortality, or immortality, however you want to look at it."

[demjiin]

Kaz, who stayed with his head tilted back, shook it at the drop from that towering roof.

"Is that how old you are?"

Back where he came from Grisha had much longer lifespans, but as far as Kaz knew the only Grisha to measure his lifetime in centuries had been the Darkling. But, even though he had been alive for all that time, death caught up to him in the end. It wasn't difficult to accept the concept, to begin with, but at 17 Kaz hadn't been alive long enough to 'build up' that much of any mindset.

[deal_me_in]

"I know, hard to believe when I look this good," Cayde said, waving his free hand. "Ikora's got at least six hundred, and I think I'm sitting around there too."

It got pretty hard to keep track of, save that you could recollect events that would otherwise be a history marker for those without the Light, and fresh Guardians were still being found by their Ghosts even now.

[demjiin]

Kaz's attention shifted back to Cayde.

"You don't actually know how old you are though, do you?"

Adding this to some of the other things Cayde had said is making Kaz re-evaluate the Exo.

"It sounds like you've traded everything that makes memories memorable for that physics-defying ability and longer lifespan."

[deal_me_in]

"You make it sound like I had a choice," the Exo countered, metal brow furrowing. "We don't choose the Light, it's the other way around. And when it happens, it does something weird with Exo memories."

He shook his head, giving a shrug. "Before all that, we'd get wiped if we started remembering things from...before. Gets things in the system complicated or something, the higher-ups don't like that. This is pre-Guardian, before things went bad."

[demjiin]

Kaz nodded, conceding the point Cayde was making about being chosen over doing the choosing.

"Wiping out residual memories doesn't count as things 'getting bad'?"

[deal_me_in]

Cayde chuckled dryly at that. "When the sky looks like it's opened up and something dark's come to swallow everything up and nearly wipe out humanity, I think that trumps a memory wipe."

[demjiin]

While Kaz had not seen the Shadow Fold for himself, it looked like a tear in reality and bisected Ravka for centuries. But that was still a single country. Something large enough to take over the sky would be so much worse. The math behind disastrous calamities being more important was apparent but the idea of losing memories still bothered Kaz.

"The entire thing still sounds like your lot doesn't get a lot of choices. On being chosen by the 'Light' or what parts of your memory you got to keep."

[deal_me_in]

Looking around, Cayde strolled over to the base of the clocktower to sit himself on what was left of some wall that might have been an adjoining building once upon a time. He idly gathered up a bit of the rope that was dragging along after him.

"Oh, choices were involved before and in between, even after. But you still gotta get through the parts where you don't. If I didn't get brought back, I'd still be dead. And as Guardians we're not supposed to go wondering too much about who we used to be. That was another life. Me, I can't help but hoard whatever bits and pieces that come back to me. And like I said, the Light does some funny stuff with the things we thought we forgot. I couldn't tell you the order anything goes in, if one experience was from Cayde-One or Three, but I keep 'em close so I don't lose them again."