HokumPocus

The Five Senses

---

His fingers continued to trace the cracks in the stone surrounding him, quietly responding to his thoughts. When he remembered his past encounters with danger they skipped across the jagged rock, only steadying whenever he or Lynx would put an end to one of his mental tangents.

It was when Chres spoke that his index finger dug deep into a hole in the rock with a soft crack, nearly causing Octavio to stop moving entirely.

"Awfully quiet? Me?" he chuckled. He wiped his hand clean of debris and continued. "You're not in the wrong there."

Intuition told him the woman would know if he was loose-lipped about their encounter, but he also reasoned she'd be prepared for it. Why wouldn't she expect Octavio to talk? He bit his lip for a moment. At times it felt like clairvoyancy and good connections were identical.

"I had an encounter with a woman not too long ago. She knew too much about me." Another chuckle escaped him. "Now, I've been the subject of dossiers and wanted posters in the past, I'm well acquainted with the typical amount of information one person can gather on another. This was beyond that by a grand margin." His eyebrows widened as he shook his head.

"Even making some, some silly little nursery rhyme about me. Me and... my sister."

He let out a deep breath he hadn't realized he was holding in. "An awful lot of bizarre people in this world."

The Five Senses

---

Octavio's fingers traced jagged lines across the surface of the walls. It filled him with a particularly hopeless sense of deja vu to know it hadn't been his first time in this situation. Skulking around in tunnels, but not by choice, the same way alleyway cats knew to stray from light to keep their heads from being torn off.

He had been previously approached by a strange woman who knew far too much about him. Although he hated the idea of someone like that running loose, he had to admit she had been a good source of information, if a little esoteric. She taunted him with implications and fairytales, preferring to watch the show that was Octavio drawing his own conclusions. That was fine by him. A performer had to entertain to eat. And he ate well that day.

His sister was hunting him down. It was the one thing he could be sure of. The mysterious woman's stories seemed to point towards Lynx as Octavio's most pressing issue, but she'd also left traces of his sister's presence linger in his mind. It was all so cruelly intentional, and he was aware that by mulling over it he was playing into the hands of others stronger than him.

"Will you not answer the question?" asked Lynx. He plodded along listlessly.

Octavio shook his head longer than was probably necessary. "Argh."

"Not holding up well," stated Lynx, in a tone so dry only Octavio could have understood it.

The others split resources amongst themselves and talked each other out of their troubles. He listened to their conversations, their confessions and their troubles. The last battle had been especially difficult, and they'd been a lot more trusting of one another. Octavio had been too, even if he didn't realize it. He remembered the story this woman had told, and his counterpoint.

"Because there was distrust. And ignorance. Had they been civilized little animals," his eyes followed the taken candle, "then they would have known that cooperation is the wisest choice. It's why we're the civilized species." The wording. I'm going to come to regret that.

"Civilized? Us?" Svephraey said. "That there is the real comedy. Cooperation? We cooperate only for as long as it serves us. In the end, no matter how much we pretend, our species is no different."

The more he thought back to that day, the more his own words surprised him. But he was right. They'd proven it, all of them, time and time again.

Enter: Into an Isekai World

Apologies for the delay this test week has kind of been beating my ass LOL

Enter: Into an Isekai World

---

"Oh..."

Kaito received the card with both hands as a sign of respect. His body snapped into its more awkward natural state as he finished, shuffling through the contents of the pocket of his dress shirt. His fingers skipped over the hard metal of a couple of paper clips before settling on a business card of his own. Digging it out took both hands, the other holding the pocket in place to keep anything from spilling.

"I am Iyasu Kaito," he said, thrusting the card forward. He'd introduced himself before, but enough odd events had happened to them that he didn't fault the tired-looking salaryman from either not caring enough to remember or not having registered his name in the first place. It was another one of those observations that had been neatly arranged behind gunman on the loose in his mind.

He gave the new business card in his shirt pocket a firm squeeze and carried onwards. "Therapy isn't a traditional office career, but there are many similarities." A twang of defensiveness seeped through his smile, a byproduct of conversations with other men his age who pursued more typical lines of work.

Pariah Online: A Voyage into the Intangible Aether

Location: Drox Fraternity House - The City-State of Thorinn, Aetheria

---

The pipe smoke trailed as lazy ribbons a mere head's length from Alex, and he made a conscious effort to ignore both them and the odd team name Taasha had puffed out. She had been a hard woman to read, communicating entirely through her words rather than a face so calm and pale it was corpselike.

As she spoke it ocurred to Alex just how appropriate for the job an unaffected demeanor like that was. Hostile breakdowns, investigations, words that felt at home wrapped around dark smoke all permeated the air with dread. It was the sort of talk you'd hear on the news or a gruesome television show, now accompanied by a pipe instead of a cigarette. Thinking on the events from a different perspective, the confusion and disorder seemed to be a breeding ground for situations like this. He refused to say it out loud, but it seemed like things were only going to escalate from here on.

"Too much noise," he grumbled. The collective outburst of wayfarers had established a ever present fog that no previous investigator had been able to cut through. The kind that he struggled with even before the phrase Pariah Online had become a regular part of his lexicon, now amplified. One on one interviews would probably be worthless in a situation like this. They'd need some way to cover more ground, make bigger connections.

He let Seele gather the most useful of the papers before thumbing through and keeping a couple to himself. He focused on the initial insights, the kinds of thoughts investigators had jotted down before developing the tunnel vision that probably kept them from drawing any larger conclusions. Or at least, it was what he theorized.

"Mmph," he said, agreeing with Seele's compliments. "This is all good stuff. I think I'm getting some ideas already." He ventured a gaze into Taasha's eyes, only to be met with unmoving amber suns that drilled holes into his skull. He turned away reflexively. Baby steps.

"Extra hands, perfect. I think I know how we can take this on."

Enter: Into an Isekai World

---

Long, slender fingers traced meaningless shapes across the surface of an ancient statue. It was as if his body was responding to the buckling happening in his mind, the tracing of the statue's meaningless engravings into words and then sentences. Between the darkness that engulfed everything and the effects of heavy weathering, however, it made sense to Kaito that he'd struggle to read their message. Or at least initially.

"They have such an unkempt appearance," he commented, furrowing his brows. "Perhaps using some old regional variant of Japanese." It made sense. Their was nothing more Japanese than a shrine that was tended to diligently. This could've well been the outskirts of some ancient site.

He knew he was wrong though. He undoubtedly, viscerally, knew he was wrong. And yet he spoke anyways, desperate to put a label on any of the steadily growing list of bizarre occurrences. There was an unstable man with a gun on the loose, it was fine to assign a quick answer for the time being. Cathartic, even.

It was only when... the salaryman spoke that he snapped out of it. "We should, shouldn't we..." His eyes lingered on the man for another moment, unintentionally transmitting the space his name would've taken as silence. "...I don't believe you've introduced yourself."

Enter: Into an Isekai World

---

Thunder. Sudden, roaring thunder. It was another warning from the world around him that he wasn't in an office anymore, and would be completely exposed to the elements unless he found shelter. Someone familiar with the workings of nature would have noticed the disconnect between the sound of thunder and the lack of visual cues accompanying it, but he remained ignorant. Instead, he focused on the statues of two warriors they encountered. Warriors from another time. He couldn't really tell from when, but that didn't surprise him in the slightest.

"Leaving him alone would be bad," he added, quietly. "But someone like that is too dangerous for people without the proper training to confront." He was referring almost entirely to himself, yet still worried the others would see the statement as rude. If he had just known this would have happened somehow, he might have been able to calm the man down or at the very least avoid having other people around or...

He shook his head to refocus. He had to keep his mind sharp and breathe, breathe the strange air that filled his lungs like no other ever had.

Pariah Online: A Voyage into the Intangible Aether

Location: Drox Fraternity House - The City-State of Thorinn, Aetheria

---

Alex gave a stiff wave to the wayfarer ahead of him, only to realize the greeting had been meant for Seele. It hadn't been the first time this happened. With his tongue nervously clamped between his teeth, he hoped no one noticed again. He'd done a decent enough job at making an impression on the rest of the wayfarers and denizens, so it didn't bother him after the fact. He was the sort of person people approached for idle chatter and a pleasant evening rather than any serious advice or consolation, so he didn't have much experience with the members of their faction that wore the more concerning expressions on their face.

He followed Seele toward the attendant, taking in the sea of yawns, bad posture, and unkempt clothing. As he saw tired faces on some of the more particularly imposing wayfarers, his quip about bad habits rang in his mind. These were now human beings with human flaws, not only failing to keep themselves presentable or sleep properly but having to deal with circumstances that threatened both of those things on a daily basis. He couldn't feel anything but sympathy for them.

"Good morning!" said Alex. His voice trailed behind hers, focus diverted to a particularly nasty tear in some woman's cape. He'd no doubt be end up doing repairs again in the event their workload didn't involve any travel.

Enter: Into an Isekai World

---

Kaito sighed. The movement caused a gulp of pure forest air to rush into his lungs, causing a momentary lapse of thought. It felt pleasant, but far too out of the ordinary to grant him any sort of relief among the darkness. It was just another bullet point on the growing list of idiosyncrasies to be tracked and questioned.

"It's the only recognizable landmark." An obvious statement. Not the least bit satisfactory to him. He hated uncertainty, and this felt like less of an answer and more of a path to more questions. He started thinking of all the possible things they could encounter upon nearing the torii, with his mind naturally getting more creative with the negative outcomes. Among the majority of those were dark and wild streaks of a desperate man with a firearm and no certain location. When no one what a person was doing, not even themselves, predictions had the tendency to get muddled.

He followed the other two at a cautious pace, subconsciously taking faster strides whenever the snapping of a twig or any other noise would sound among the forest. "Going after him could be... dangerous. He asked for some space, so the best course of action should be to respect that." Asked was too soft of a word. Force of habit, he supposed. "But, hm... nevermind. He'll probably also go near the torii since it's the only option available." He brushed away a couple of loose strands of hair near his face, and took a hard look at the darkness surrounding them. "So we should keep going." The words made perfect sense. There certainly was reasoning behind them, and the average person could have agreed that it was the smart thing to do. And yet a certain pain gnawed at him from the inside. A certain desire to help others, not only ignored but intentionally suppressed.

The man could find his own way home. He just had to convince himself that it would be the case.

It wasn't working.

Pariah Online: A Voyage into the Intangible Aether

Location: The City-State of Thorinn, Aetheria

---

"...so since texting isn't a thing we're gonna have to do a lot of... what was that called?" Alex's features froze, a look that combined disgust with the expression people made just as something was about to collide with their face.

"Networking. Eugh."

It concerned him with how automatic of a process it had been to tolerate Thorinn's newfound dreadful atmosphere. Not adapt or thrive, but tolerate. He chalked it up to having come out of a mortal situation covered head to toe in most available bodily fluids. The old Alex that found crowds of people annoying was no longer present, instead replaced by a more weathered man that found relief in strolling past bustling streets towards his destination.

"Is it weird if sewers don't sound that bad to me anymore? I got covered in blood back in the dungeon and that was probably worse than, uh, whatever you'd call the stuff down there. The monsters are easier too." Then again, it was hard to accurately rank preferences now that the entire game had changed. "Oh, but smells are one-hundred percent in game now."

Their slower pace hadn't just been as a result of the increased foot traffic. For Alex at least, his surroundings carried a newfound sense of weight to them. Thorinn's many houses and establishments didn't feel like expensive props anymore, but actual buildings with owners and histories. Every road and signpost and stall felt the same way. It ocurred to him how little he knew of this city-state in comparison to a real world location, and how he'd have to make an active effort to start memorizing names to get around.

These thoughts and more flashed sporadically in his brain as they walked along. He'd usually try and fail to keep them to himself, but he figured Seele would understand. She seemed like the type, those people who were good with other people, the ones that were a godsend for awkward guys like him."I've gone through here so many times, but now it keeps feeling like the first. It's hard to explain. Like this place isn't just one giant toy anymore." The same oddly specific look spread across his face again. "Hmm."