Under What Influence?

[Infinity Theory]

((Closed))

A faint pull, a small feeling of intuition. Just for a second. A twinge. Then it was gone.

It was enough. The spirit knew what it meant. It was time to intercede in the lives of mortals, and to do so with a clear and definite purpose.

Chance spared just a second to think about his nature and the general question of, "why?" He was a spirit, a Catalyst, an agent of change in the cosmos, and his purpose was to influence the events of mortals. He often wondered why, as a spirit, he was a more perfect being, and yet the humans and other mortals were blessed with ambiguity of purpose and free will, and yet his only purpose was to facilitate events for them. It was almost ironic.

Willing himself to move, Chance began slowly floating through a forest. He was still ethereal, invisible to anyone who might happen to glance his way. He was also not subject to the physical laws of the world, as he proved by floating through a tree.

A small village slowly came into view as he willed himself to move faster. He circled it several times, keeping a close watch on anything that appeared out of the ordinary. It seemed to be business as usual for a small village. Perhaps he would materialize to get a better idea of what was going on.

Concentrating his being from the ethereal realm to this world, he took the shape of a nondescript middle-aged man, and clothed himself in clothes typical for a traveler of the region. He wandered into the village, shambling around aimlessly, until he found something that could very well need his attention.

Two armed and armored men leading a man in chains in the general direction of the center of the village.

Chance found the first part of the puzzle, or so it seemed.

An execution.

[Smoker]

"Another experiment about to end," Dusk sighed. The room he rented at the inn had a window that overlooked the town square, and he was able to watch the proceedings from his bed.

Still, his albino housecat familiar, rubbed her head against his leg to comfort him. He glanced down at her and smiled weakly, then looked back out the window. They were just slipping the noose over the man's head.

And the worst irony is that I'll never know exactly what he's thinking right now. Dusk shook his head, sad not that the man was dying, but sad the data he collected on this man would be incomplete.

The man's name was Pierre, but everyone called him Jackson, because his father, Jack, was more well-liked and admired than Pierre was. Dusk had spent the past several months preying upon that fact, driving Pierre slowly out of his mind, convincing him that all his father had was rightfully his.

It wasn't easy work, especially when he had to fight the Aspects in his own personality, the dark parts of his mind that reflected various animals. The only powerful aspect he had to contend with, the Cat, was more than enough to deal with now, especially when conducting experiments.

Dusk dismissed the thought of the Aspect from his mind, and thought instead of the chain of events which lead to this untimely end of his experiment. It was a deceptively simple plan, really. Dusk kept a low profile in the village, then pretended to be a newcomer once he got his bearings. He planted the initial seed of doubt in Pierre by simply inquiring why a grown man still was overshadowed by his father, and even his own son. From there, a few "chance" meetings and innocent-seeming conversations set Pierre down a dark path.

He was initially power-hungry, trying to win himself some respect by training with an old sword. But when he was badly beaten in a practice fight in front of an audience, he succeeded only in looking like a fool; his opponent was his son. From there, it took two days of late night visits where Dusk would whisper suggestions to Pierre in his sleep.

It was hard to tell if the whispers worked, but it was only a few days later that Pierre killed his father, Jack. A broken man, Pierre confessed to his crime within the hour.

"Jealousy, desire to succeed, or something else?" It was always so hard to tell. Dusk only wished he would get a chance to analyze his subject once more. He absent-mindedly wondered if he could rebuild this broken man stronger than he was before.

"Idle speculations," Dusk sighed again, and resigned himself to watching the proceedings and distractedly petting Still.

[Infinity Theory]

It was a flash of confusion followed by a quick and total surety, the completeness that comes with certainty of purpose.

"So a man is slated to be killed...but have they factored in the random effects of Chance?" He murmured quietly under his breath at the rear of the crowd.

Startled by such strange words being spoken at such an odd time, an elderly woman who had brought some snacks to watch the proceedings turned to question him. But there was no one there. Puzzled, she looked around for a moment, decided it must have been the wind, and continued crunching on what appeared to be honey-glazed insects of some sort.

Chance had, in fact, shifted planes just at that moment, removing himself entirely from the physical realm. There was work to be done.

He watched carefully as the man bowed his head, allowing the noose to be slipped around his neck. He was crying, violent sobs and heaves that shook his entire body with uncontrollable convolusions. He was as good as dead already.

Chance began concentrating, gathering all his strength as he tried to bring the two planes he inhabited into an overlapping point, concentrated on himself. He willed himself right up to, and then inside of, the rope that was being tightened around this man's neck. As he inhabited the a location on his natural plane that was analgous to that of the rope, when the pulsing effort became a low, subtle throb and then finally a full-pitched vibration, the planar collision occured just at a point that was roughly halfway between the man's neck and the knot securing the rope to the gallow.

*snap!*

As Chance would have it, they selected a particularly old rope that morning, because the hangman had taken most of the good lengths of strong rope for his own personal use not too long ago.

But the man was hardly concerned with the specifics of why the rope snapped so suddenly. He was preoccupied with attempting to escape into the nearby woods. Normally, a man of good health would have found it no trouble to sprint the thirty-odd wagonslengths to the edge of the woods, and once in the safety of the trees, a man who had grown up here would certainly find some means of escape.

It was unfortunate, then, that he was bound by manacles at the wrists and ankles. Had he not been so, he certainly would not have tripped off the platform and been reduced to rolling through the crowd.

One of the armed and armored men who had lead the condemned one earlier caught him up, and began the arduous task of dragging him back to the platform for a second attempt.

Chance had already made provisions, and he was not going to allow his efforts to go to waste. He smiled inwardly as he watched the events unfold. Fate had been kind when setting up this situation, to be sure, though it did not seem that way at first glance.

But if one looked closer, they could see a friend in the crowd...

[Smoker]

Dusk blinked. He shook his head slightly from side to side, and counted the fingers of his left hand. His vision was fine.

But then what he saw didn't make sense.

He thought-he swore-he saw a man at the back of the crowd, an unremarkable traveler of some sort, interesting only because Dusk had never seen him before. As one who studies people, it was mildly interesting to note that he had absolutely no expression on his face whatsoever, a rather peculiar thing to see in a crowd full of eager, bloodthirsty spectators about to witness an execution.

But then suddenly, he was gone. Just simply...disappeared. Vanished. Ceased to exist. Even an older woman in the crowd noticed something was amiss.

Could that mean that Pierre might have a friend in the crowd? Dusk had studied his subject thoroughly, and was sure he had no friends. Maybe a childhood buddy from out of town came back to aid him? Highly unlikely.

Still looked up at him questioningly, and he smiled briefly as he continued to stroke her. It was a far-fetched idea, a fantasy that comes from desperation. He had oft heard that when one wants a thing too badly, they will sometimes imagine it. He had seen such things occur in his studies, but had never experienced it firsthand. It would make an interesting footnote, perhaps.

He sighed as he watched them tighten the rope and begin the all-too-familiar process. He failed to understand why he himself was so distraught at the termination of a successful project. He had achieved every objective he had set for himself, had learned a great deal about the intricacies of human thought and emotion, and even had a village fully prepared to clean up his mess, allowing him to make a clean and easy escape to the next experiment at some distant location.

And the gods whose very existence Dusk doubted only knew that clean and easy escapes were hard to come by these days. The fiasco at Scara Brae was barely contained, and in the end, he was saved by his careful choice of subjects: the town guard decided not to punish him since all his victims were criminals that routinely gave them trouble. And he managed to do a bit of sneaking and aplm-greasing on the side which had no small effect on the outcome of that one.

Lost in his own thoughts, his own analysis of human experience as represented by himself, he almost failed to notice the sudden snap of the rope. Almost.

He started to go into his disbelieving blinking routine again as Pierre tried to flee with the one chance that he was given. He was still chained, though, and he tripped and fell.

"Wha-what?!" Dusk was in shock. There was no time for a carefully planned, methodical action. There was only time for action.

He yielded his consciousness to the dark Cat Aspect. Much more decisive, the Cat wasted no time springing claws, and then springing from the window. With all the grace and balance of a true cat, he landed on all fours and scrambled towards Pierre.

One of the village's three full-time guards had already beaten him to it. Dusk watched, a captive in his own body, as he pounced on the guard, knocking him to the ground, and Pierre with him. A burst of feline strength pulled Pierre to him feet, and a steady, clawed hand helped keep him steady as they ran. Pierre was in too much of a blind rush to freedom to think twice about anything, and the Cat never had need to think twice about his actions.

A small detachment of the crowd, led by the guard the Cat had toppled, gave chase, but anger will never match desperation for sheer strength, speed, or courage.

By the time Dusk regained control of himself, he and Pierre were perched safely in a tree, the former calculating his next move, the latter working furiously to free himself from the manacles that bound him.

Neither of us can afford to waste a second chance, he thought.

He was right.