7607/1000 Faces: The Sunlight Dialogues

1000 Faces: The Sunlight Dialogues
Date of Scene:	30 August 2021
Location:	The Underworld
Synopsis:	May meets Isis, and discovers a weapon to throw into the mix against the Court of Death. But how to deliver it, that remains an open question...
Cast of Characters:	Jane Foster, Melinda May, Hela
Tinyplot:	1000 Faces of Death

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Jane Foster has posed:
In the Barbican, Melinda slides down the glass path threading through an inverted glass pyramid suspended somewhere in the Underworld. Footing already made treacherous by the smooth incline becomes outright perilous to navigate under ice and shattered glass created when destructive spells hurled liberally shattered statues and punched holes in the pyramid's walls. Falling shards may have scored her flesh, but the wounds don't bleed as much as experience likely tells her they could. Neither does the pain bite nearly so deep. Nothing eases the slide sending her descending down the walkway, and after she reaches the first corner where two walls converge, the ice largely misses.

Her compromised slide comes with painful stings to exposed flesh, though after reaching the corner where the path makes a ninety turn. Ice fades away to the thinnest veneer of frost, then back to the smooth glass. Here she can choose to stop or keep sliding, though the shades hurrying to get to lower levels are loathe to stop and help her. They exude fear and anxiety, looking up to the platform when that pale emotion blooms. It's not strong.

Broken bits of metal and the occasional pane can be heard falling above, several going over the lip or landing outside. Neither is it silent, with frightened sounds from the shades above and those below percolating through groaning metal. She can see that source: black iron and tarnished bronze pipes under fresh white snowflakes, swiveling and turning relentlessly. The revolving arcing pipes swivel over the open central 'skylight' of the pyramid, essentially an open-air gallery.

Even further down, a sharp eye might spot sweeping grey hedge rows of an actual maze, possibly to entertain waiting passengers. Whatever lies at the centre is obscured by a passing sweep of the shrinking path, but with each level the path gets closer, and it's rather easy to reach with a little care.

Melinda May has posed:
Somewhere along the line, May lost her plasma blades. When she finally regains her feet, the dense nanomesh of her tac suit scored and even torn in a couple of places -- mostly at joints where she tried to catch herself as she fell, she checks herself over, wincing in pain at the myriad of cuts that split her hide. On her feet, she starts sifting through shards and ice with her booted feet. Eventually, she manages to find the hilts and pull them from the refuse. She wipes her face with back of one hand, a smear of blood coming away, though not really as much as she'd like.

Igniting the swords again, she lifts one of them to act as a light. Seeing that she can regain the path without likely killing herself, she moves toward it, scanning for other threats or signs of the others... wherever they may be.

Hela has posed:
The plasma blade comes to life in a brighter shade of greyish-white, any colour it maintains otherwise principally limited to the edges. Even in the Underworld, anything bright comes at a price. Its steady radiance licks off the glass wall showing her reflection, the floor beneath her feet transparent to the few shades in their curious brown or monochrome hues going as quick as they can. One or two stop to perform the repetitive actions, utterly nonsensical to a viewer, like hitching up their belt and straightening their lapels, facing into a mirror that isn't there. Another sinks onto a bench and seems to mime drinking from a bottle, oblivious to anything else. He hasn't a bottle or liquor to care about.

Whatever dark shadows existed have fled. The only figure in a grey hoodie is well below, past the hedge row garden, going up the path and abruptly turning back before he reaches that level. It. Morrigan proved there's no face under there, only shadow. Her companions that she descended with may be higher up, but without traversing the ice it's difficult to say. The path below is smooth but easier to navigate, the wall intact and little to no debris left behind. She might well just walk all the way to the city proper, or stop a while. Slowly the cries die down, the fear that shimmers like oil on water retreating.

Melinda May has posed:
The blades have always been white. So, the greyish halo is more something May now associates with with damned place than anything else. She starts walking along the path, the swords held loosely but defensively in her hands. That the shades have mostly retreated is interesting enough, however May's grateful for that fact. They're distracting, more than unnerving.

She figures it's better to keep moving than to stop without purpose. She's left the flaming river of the damned largely behind. That's probably a good thing, too. Thus, her current concern, now, is trying to find a way out. She'd *like* to find Sara, but the reality is she knows the Witchblade is probably better equipped for all this than she is.

Hela has posed:
May bears arms and a suggestion of wielding them knowingly. They have no reason to stay. The poor victims of the fall must wait for another to cart them away, and pity's in short supply in this place. Outside, a cart drawn by a gaunt figure reaches down to grasp one of the passengers blown out through the window. No corpse to haul up, just a broken body that ends up moved efficiently into the back. Every realm has its rules, even in the living world. Whether this one has a field hospital or Bedlam tucked away among the bizarre, fractured mashup of Victorian English, Mughal Indian, and imperial and then Republican French styles spanning two centuries is another matter.

Down she moves, the way out probably contained where the point of a pyramid meets the ground. Or close enough. The Barbican is, at its heart, defensive and one entry through a gate makes sense.

Before she gets there, however, she trips an emotional wire. One step, there is the static coolness of the place and the next, a lush stream of green compassion as clear as a river spanning the desert. Three steps of that pure emotion in a place devoid of it, then back to the heavy psychic weight descends again. Step backward, the effect is the same. Sideways along that line, and it persists, right into the greyish labyrinth.

Melinda May has posed:
The spike of compassion is like a breath of fresh air to the empath. May pauses in the midst of it. She inhales a deep breath, her eyes closing for just a moment, but refuses to allow herself to get lost in the feeling. It's too easy a trap. As she discovers the width of the 'path', however, and the way that thread of emotion pulls, she pauses again. Her eyes sweep the grey landscape and fall on the labyrinth.

"How many death cultures use labyrinths?" she asks herself. It's actually rhetorical. She's never been obsessed with death, but she's hunted down 084's most of her career. She's learned some pretty strange, esoteric things over the years. All of which boils down to... "Follow the yellow brick road." Or, the compassionate one, as it may be.

She turns her head towards the labyrinth and, swords still in hand, sets herself in the middle of that compassionate line and begins following it carefully into the belly of the beast.

Hela has posed:
Three steps wide, maybe a touch more, and easily overlooked by sliding on past. The hedges in their pewter vintage aren't simply box plants clipped into shrubs, but stranger yet. Raised boxes lift up the outer row from the glass floor. Plants inside have a nearly uniform height, skinny leaves threaded by bone-white veins. Sprays weave and wind together, a tangled array like hair caught in a waving stream. The skinny twigs are pale too, shrouded in fuzz. It all gives a fairly impenetrable wall with a weird softness.

Walking through the gap in the hedges is quite easy. A pair of stone animals only about knee high are set on flat bases, one a hawk with its wings folded at its side. Another seems to be a kite, head tucked under its plumage. As May approaches, the hawk's eyes, stony and set with crystal as they are, seem to glitter. But it doesn't move. No answer from that beak, either.

The rest of the Underworld is cold. Here, too, is cool. The paths fork in a curve, facing a wall of the ashen shrubbery. They spill and switchback to some kind of plan. Any kind of pacing reveals two things; the first, the ground isn't the same clear glass, but covered by absorbent sand in places, or soft-packed, pale dirt in others. Dead ends, when found, produce small reliefs: a round basin with still water, a flat little pool with a single bone-white lotus, a bench to sit on. At almost every vantage there is shade, at least, some quiet relief from the ominous silence. Leaves shiver in a serene rustle now or then. Strange little pewter bugs with jeweled wings and opalescent bodies scamper among the foliage, here or there. They shuffle about, flitting around.

Above the higher bushy walls, branches tipped in pale seafoam leaves no longer than her pinky finger and skinnier than a pencil. It takes time -- not a little, but not too many. But wandering inward gives glimpses that become a rather curious spot in the middle of the maze: a small tree standing there, green and clumped from roots to crown. Nothing else distinguishes the spot but for a heap of brown soil.

Melinda May has posed:
May follows the trail, keeping mostly to the center of the path, save those places where she paces back and forth to find which way the thread goes. She avoids the plants, as much as she can, more because she's not sure how they might react to traces of blood still on her skin and clothes. Of course, the plasma blades might be a good deterrent against that.

Still, she eventually finds her way to the strange tree in the center of the maze. Carefully, she walks around it, looking as much at what surrounds it as the tree itself.

Hela has posed:
The wall of grey hedgerows pulls back with at least two meters of clearance around the tree. Unlike the largely serpentine rows, this space is a neat square that properly descends two steps - like everything else - into the sunken garden at the heart of the labyrinth. Each step provides a makeshift bench to sit on. Only that soft soil remains, and the fact it turns a deeper brown around the leafy base of the tree makes it stand out. The branches look to be both wood, rare here, and made from wire or fine thread twisted around a central structure, giving the impression of lifelike branches. Leaves shift and move in passing, following the plasma blades only a little.

With multiple trunks and stems, the tree is more of a colony than a single mass, but contained all the same. The central trunk is the hardest to see without pushing a bough out of the way. May might spot the rugged bark that suggests shapes in there, the hook of a nose, the jut of a brow or a bulging protuberance more like a shoulder or hip. Near the end of her circuit, she can find a broken off column near the base, round in the Egyptian fashion, the legs and linen kilts of people walking around it. A hint of a scroll in a hand, another in a scale. The top where the alabaster was snapped, there's a small rectangular depression.

Melinda May has posed:
May frowns some as she explores the space. The combination of organic and inorganic aspects would be more disconcerting if she wasn't coming to expect it in this place. The whole place is a mishmash of colliding times, places, and technologies. On some level, it's Giger's version of an Escher painting.

The broken column captures more of her attention than the grotesque tree trunk, though mainly because it bears the Egyptian motifs that have been recurring since the beginning. The fact that it's broken is also a factor, what with that depression in it. She extinquishes one of the blades, using the cool end of the hilt to prod the depression, though she doesn't expect it to yield anything.

What she does find curious, however, is the imagery of an isolated tree in the middle of a garden someone has gone to some care to defend, and hints of a treasure removed from it. Any number of myths and legends call up the motifs -- from Eden to Avalon to tales out of Asgard. She doesn't know most of them intimately well, but she's dealt with weird things just long enough to have some rough idea of the linkages.

Hela has posed:
The depression isn't large, about the size of a ticket. The one she has, in fact, might fit. The clean cuts to the sides sink down only about two inches at most, and the prod from the saber produces nothing but the refreshing sound of something heavy clanking into it.

None of the insects approach the tree or its swaying branches. The tamarisk bides its time and the path of calm and tranquility leads right to that spot. Being in proxomity hasn't changed the rest of the impressions from the maze for May: calm, compassion deep and strong, a steady presence that lies in the heart of it all.

Melinda May has posed:
The emotional calm is steadying, to be sure. It gives May a little more clarity of thought, which does help. There's no pull into the darkness. And it drains some of that anger she carries with her, perhaps even lends her some hope -- even if it's not the hope she started with.

Inserting the ticket into the depression really isn't the first thing that comes to her mind, however. She's really looking for something that might have been removed from it. Especially since she's inclinded to see the ticket as good to ride the rail. Why should it have anything to do with this place.

Except, of course, this place doesn't follow normal rules and expectations. Eventually, the dimensions register with her, even if she doesn't see why a deep depression for the ticket might be needed. Curious, since it's the only 084 she has in this pace, and 084s always do weird things when you least expect it, she places the ticket within the depression and steps back.

Hela has posed:
Whatever may be missing from the cracked depression comes clear not when May pokes at it with a sword or looks around. That's because the great date palm only comes into completion when the ticket is laid down. Ends curl up, and the ink bleeds from the statement: TALAYA. THE WHITE HALL OF BURNING WORDS.

The tall pillar completes the figures carved on it, Isis' profile with feathered wings from her arms coming into detail with that sun-disc atop her horns. Scrolls at her feet and carried in Ma'at's scale are brought into translucent detail. The bulging tamarisk bark splits open, and a pair of statues touch their fingers -- green on one side, white on the other -- over the entranceway that leads into a softly lit stairwell leading down. The light in there is warm, golden, something entirely different from the rest of the pyramid.

A kite swoops quietly to rest on a branch over the entrance. <<No visitor may harm a shade in this Realm.>> It speaks, though the voice pipes a trill. Hardly scary. <<The Great Lady offers you the benefit of hospitality within the hall, provided for all true knowledge-seekers. Libations and nourishment will be provided.>>

Melinda May has posed:
Huhn. A talking bird. May should be surprised. In this place, though... weird just means it's Tuesday. "So," she says dryly, a faintly twisted smile on her lips. "Put the swords away?" At this point, in the stream of calm and compassion, she is willing to do that. Nothing's trying to attack her. And while she's still wary this could be a trap, that the emotions have been created to lull her, she maintains confidence in the fact that she doesn't need weapons to defend herself.

Too, to be fair, the only thing she's intentionally attacked in this place is the weird shadow version of Rien. There wasn't any getting around that.

"They don't harm me, I won't harm them." It's the best she can promise. All of which means it's time to meet 'the wizard' at the end of the 'yellow brick road'... She shoves the hilts to her swords back into her belt and heads for the entrance.

Hela has posed:
The kite tilts its head, eye bright as a bead rimmed in silver. It clutches at the branch, claws wickedly sharp, and its wings thinned. <<It would be appropriate,>> it agrees when May offers to put the swords away. The avian tone resonates approval, and a jot of surprise. Bobbing its head, it continues: <<No ghost shall start violence against a visitor here.>>

That it should speak the tongue of Upper Egypt makes no difference to Japanese or English. All tongues are the same in the end. <<Straight down the stairs, you will find refreshment. Consider what you seek as you go.>>

It preens one of its wing-feathers then, leaving the route open. There are no lights on the stairs themselves, but there need not be. Stone tunneled and smoothed by time bears hallmarks of the golden sandstone beloved and plentiful in Egypt, though the steps themselves are softer and rough-hewn, dipping in the middle, suggestive of so many steps taking them over time. The glow of light comes from the proper room ahead, a chamber that must be quite large given how much trickles up the stairs. May descends, and those thirteen steps take far longer to get down than they ought to.

The White Hall of Burning Words
But what she finds after she crosses under a scorched archway is an indoor gallery, expansive and built up-and-down, completely lit by sunlight at the golden hour. The same arch she passed is burnt, fallen and damaged in places. But beyond, honeycombed floors shine dark amber, the windows above arranged in a procession of the seasons contained in four great stained glass wheels around a tree. A very large tree, heavy with fruit, tall and splendidly smooth. All the furnishings -- desks, tables, deep chairs -- are likewise made from wood and plump upholstery.

Not a sign of a candle, lamp, or brazier is anywhere to be seen, and many cunningly placed mirrors and windows seek to reflect the light into smaller rooms branching off the periphery. Everywhere outside the trees are bookcases, scrollcases, whole troves of art and coffers filled by paper. Music comes from somewhere, stringed. A few hawks flit around, the addition of a few curious butterflies that land how they will. Shades are very few, at least not engaged in reading, and a single figure basks in the sunshine with her copper hands raised.

She doesn't need the blue and green stoned torc at her throat to announce who she is: the Lady of Life, or a good example of Isis everywhere.

Melinda May has posed:
As May enters the library, her steps slow. She smiles faintly. God, how Phil would love this. History geek that he is. There's fondness in her thoughts for him, though she says nothing aloud to break the silence. Even her steps are carefully muted as she walks, toe to heel, almost catlike in her progress.

Her eyes fall upon the figure of the Lady. She pauses. Then, since the bird implied this is her hostess in this place, she approaches. Melinda May is not the world's best diplomat, but she is Chinese and she spent years in China making nice with people from across all walks of life on SHIELD's behalf. So, she's not nearly the slouch at it people who only know her as a fighter might think. Between that and enough stints into the Middle East to have picked up a few cultural insights, she offers the Lady a shallow bow in the Asian style, saying softly, "Peace be upon you."

Hela has posed:
Footfalls come in a hush indeed. May's the only one making much sound other than the hawks winging by around the tree or the pages being turned by those caught up in research. As she walks, she might see the shadows cast through dappled stained glass: Only flames lit in the Spring may burn in this Realm.

Another scrawled message on a table laden in noodles in a wide bowl, with heaps of herbs and fresh sliced vegetables to go with olive oil in abundance: Sacrifice your name. Speak it not aloud in this Realm.

The woman with her hair in countless black braids adorned in beads shifts her head when Melinda approaches. She wears that pale linen dress, the colour around her limited especially to the beaded collar and her sandals. "And lift you up in dark times," she replies in that soft-spoken murmur. "Be welcome to sit or explore as you would. I can offer you shelter within these halls. Your hands are maimed." More than that, but she offers her copper palms upright. "Have your eyes shown you the truth of the world outside?"

Melinda May has posed:
May's interpretation of the scrawled message basically boils down to 'Don't introduce yourself.' Fine by her. Still, the question arrests her. She frowns faintly. "I don't know," she admits. "It all looks pretty broken to me. Should it be? I'm not magic user. I'm a SHIELD agent." She channels her inner Phil. "Have to admit, I'm a little out of my depth, here."

Still, she's an investigator and a profiler. "Everything's upsidedown and pushed together in ways that don't make sense in the real world. London, India, and New York don't usually mix so closely. I saw things that looked like the mess left behind when Loki tried to take over the world." Yeah, she's still pissed with him about that. "And all those glass statues, the way the ghosts move. I don't know what ghosts usually do, but they were stuck in a loop. And all the ghosts outside the Met before we entered. They felt... like they were waiting for something. Anticipating something. What? Crossing over? Is there something preventing them?"

Hela has posed:
Putting her fingers to her cheek, the broad lines swept into delicate proportions, Isis causes her beaded braids to clack together softly. Not a sound altogether different from the insects outside. "You must have your own views on what the afterlife is." An invitation to speak, as the Egyptian smooths over one of the hawks landing nearby. It approaches her, eyes bright, listening as she strokes its fierce head. "Very different from someone on the Ganges, another in the markets of the Middle Kingdom or the children from the frozen north country." The measured way she speaks has a rhythm, rolling like water, soft and poetic.

"Good. You see things mismatched, then," she encourages May. "The worlds of your belief hang like fruits from a tree. Sometimes in clusters, sometimes apart, but each separate. " She plucks a fat, reddish fruit down from a heavy branch not quite so close before. Holding out the fruit, she says, "But hunger brought them together. They declared it time for a feast, and all fruit would be treated as one harvest for the select, instead of going only to the community that worked the field or laboured in the orchard. Can you imagine how a starving man toiling in the stone-hard dirt looks at a lush city like your young York? How his mouth would water, and he wants nothing of his difficult plot. Not when something riper was there in the field for the taking. Can you imagine what he did?"

A sad smile touches her lips. Kohled eyes lift. Her gaze isn't at all cold, but the warmest green of leaves and rivers. Even her pupils aren't black but a deep, rich brown. "Perceptive. What wisdom we need in the House. You are not too late." Her palms hold up the pomegranate. "The deceased await their masters, though they wish to go to the Fields of Green, their rightful place. They have no choice. The lords of death have called for a great feast to celebrate their kingship in one realm, not many. The first laws that ordered our world are violated, and chaos must follow. The dead suffer. We have failed in our duties."

Melinda May has posed:
May's never been entirely sure about the afterlife. It's one thing to tell a HYDRA agent to 'go to hell' when you pull the trigger on them. It's another thing entirely to contemplate that hell just might be a real place your own actions could damn you to. And, certainly, after Bahrain, she became more convinced that hell was more a state of mind than a place waiting to torment you after death. Death, it always seemed to her, would be a relief.

But in this place, in the confusion of realms and clashing motifs... she really has no clue what to believe or not. Other than the fact that, yes. Hell is a real place. And that's disturbing.

"So... You've got a death god out there -- or maybe a handful of them who decided it was time to join forces because they're jealous of... who? You? Or the living? Whichever, they got greedy and now things are screwed up down here. Enough that the dead waiting for the afterlife they're expecting are now in a holding pattern until you can get things sorted out enough to send them home."

She recalls the ghosts disappearing as they entered past the obelisk. "In the meantime, though, the gods that caused all this are... what? Eating souls of the dead at random -- sucking their energy or something? Using it to power..." She glances back to entry she passed through. "All that craziness out there?" It's a guess.

"And you basically need us to find some way to fix it."

She considers that for a moment and rakes a hand through her hair. "Okay. So... how do we do that? We already cut out one woman's heart. And I've already figured out I don't bleed nearly as much here as I do back home. I'm alive, though. I'm guessing that gives me some sort of advantage, now that I'm here. We've given up hopes to get here. What more do we need to give up to fix this?"

For a moment she wonders if it's their lives, but... why bring the living in here for that? No. Not their lives, then. At least, not everyone's lives. But something else, she's sure.

Jane Foster has posed:
Afterlives don't hold the sway they used to in earlier times. Cultural touchstones wrapped around life and death still permeate the modern world, though usually as an afterthought when writing a will or forced to contemplate the inconveniences surrounding a loved one passing. Devotion looked very different two centuries, two millennia ago.

The woman in her tight, pleated linen dress still kneels beneath the great tree dwarfed in kind by the hall's vertical and horizontal proportions. Warm light passes through the stained glass depicting four seasons, and she turns her face up to bask in the warmth. "Powers," she agrees, clarifying the first question. Smart braids smoothly race over her shoulders in a curtain. "Would it have been better to arrange an equal portion for each? Maybe it was meant to be that way in the beginning? I have often asked that, as the garden grew and new plants from places we scarce imagined existed came."

A look meaningfully weighed to one of the wings honeycombed through the wall leads her to a small, unhappy smile. "Great change requires great power, has it not? When things are set in their ways, what does it take you to transform them to your liking?" She exudes that compassion but likewise, occasional flashes of frustration coinciding with turning statements on their head to questions. May might realize certain things cannot have a direct action, applying the later Socratic method to reply.

"The Inundation brought hope to my people and they gladdened to the touch of life renewed. But in these changes, how can I step forth when the jealous lords who destroyed my husband would steal the fruit and jewels from my very chest?" A question to rest there. "I cannot offer a solution directly, can I? What am I to do for them when my hope is scattered in each direction?"

Her river-bright eyes tilt back. "I may offer the hospitality of this hall. Many answers can be found if you seek them, with the admonishment you may not take anything preserved on these shelves from the hall. Others govern their houses with their own laws, but these are mine." The bird under her fingers stirs, tilting its head, staring, focusing again.

Melinda May has posed:
Questions answered by questions. May can sense that frustration, beneath the compassion. She tries not to let it feed her own. She pinches the bridge of her nose in thought and then glances to Isis. "Is it significant that all of those who've helped us thus far are female? Who's doing all this?" It seems an odd question, really, but she's trying to figure out who their opponents really are. Maybe it doesn't matter.

She shakes her head slightly. "Okay. So, the Death Gang are eating souls for power in order to make some major renovations." She looks about, understanding she's in a library. She grimaces. Research is not her strong suit. "But the answer's in here somewhere..." She inhales a soft breath and glances over her shoulder to the goddess. "I don't suppose you can point me to the right shelf? I'm not good with magic stuff..." She moves toward the shelves, regardless, looking to see what the organization may be. Chances are, they need a ritual or some arcane process to solve this. Even if it's not her weilding the magic. But maybe she can get the info out to someone else that can use it.

Jane Foster has posed:
"I am a mother," Isis replies softly, "a sister, a daughter." Her eyes harden and the ground around her trembles, the grass blowing and flattened against the tree. Leaves shake. Heavy pomegranates bob and bounce in the supportive boughs, none of them broken away despite this. The fruit she holds in one hand is again lifted, and the slant of her meticulous gullwing brows increases. "A widow twice over. I am not alone. Who else knows the loss so well and the pain you share than those who bear it?"

Baring her teeth would be utterly untoward, and she maintains no malice in May's direction. It is not her way. She takes a deep breath and the grass tirs again. "What they have taken was never their right to claim."

One of the shelves that May touches relinquishes a book into her hand, though it bears much more in common with the illuminated manuscripts from fallen monasteries sacked by the Norse raids. Luscious illustrations within are purely in monochromes, the arcane Latin realized into clearer English. <<The dead have always been the backbone of an economy in the realms of the dead. It is their faith that strengthens the deity they worshipped. Their numbers insinuate an importance to the realm and give its power a metaphysical weight. As in life, the significance for the divine ebbs and flows. More who place their beliefs in the god will see the swelling flood of faith empower that god. Then too those forgotten will be diminished as the floodwaters retreat and leave behind only baked desert soils incapable of supporting but the most meagre of crops. Dominion is not only possession of a number of dead, else the oldest domains would hold greatest sway for the sheer population they command. It originates from a complex balance...>>

Another scroll falls, unspooled, a stream of backwards cuneiform inflicted in a simple statement: <<When he stole the mantle of the Baron Samedi, the Lord of Mictlan assumed the Ghede's power. Consuming the Baron's worshippers accrued the remnants of divinity to his own might...>>

Melinda May has posed:
May flips through the book, frowning as she reads. When the scroll unspools, her eyes track its words, too. "Mictlan," she muses. She recognizes the name Baron Samedi. But South American death cults aren't her forte. Still, she gets the gist. There's a coup going on. Or, more accurately, a series of conquests that are changing the landscapes and the power balance. "'Dominon is not only possession of a number of dead...'" She begins to pace. "Belief lends a god power. So, gods without a lot of believers are at a disadvantage." A random question flits through her mind. "I wonder how that affects the Asgardians..." Since, you know, as far as she's concerned they're aliens, not gods. It's an idle thought. She pushes it aside.

She starts trying to sort through what death myths she actually does know. "Chinese mythology sees us go through a series of judges. If you're really lucky, you get to skip that and choose between the gold and silver bridges -- Nirvana, or godhood."

More thought.

"The Greeks say Hades tricked Persephone into staying in Tartarus by giving her the seeds of a pomegranate to eat." She glances back to the pomegranate in Isis' hands. "Faerie tales say don't eat the food in faery or you'll be trapped there, and fairyland is essentially the land of the dead. So, when Arthur dies and goes to Avalon, he's in the land of the dead... and the apples are the significant. In Norse mythology, Idunn's apples give immortality, but have nothing to do with hell. And the garden of Eden has apples that are the fruit of knowledge or some such thing." A Christian apologeticist, she is not. But she's running out of death stuff.

She looks at Isis. "I'm only thinking about the food angle because the bird out there said something about nourishment, and I'm beginning to think that was important, if the Death Gang are eating souls for power."

Then, however, her head cants. "But, maybe that's not it at all. If Mictlan, or whoever he is, stole Baron Samedi's mantle... what happens if we steal it back for him?"

Jane Foster has posed:
"The man wield a poor field looks covetous upon your young York," Isis repeats. She sets the pomegranate beside her as it has gone untouched. Her hands clasp as she rises from the grass, and the long dress crinkles and unfolds in a narrow sheath that would attest to very different fashion than modern tastes. It's more than a little scandalous. "Not all powers were limited to Earth, daughter of the azure dragon. Certain names and ideas resonate across a multitude of places. Rules remain the very same."

Another page flipped: <<Yama is dead. The fall from his chained rest accelerated the loss of the East and granted the means for Thanatos' end.>> That has to be comforting, then, to absolutely no one.

She moves to one of the tables laden in fruit. "It is a law of this realm that any who seek knowledge may avail themselves of food and drink freely. They may rest here unmolested. Would you believe me likely to trick you and cause you harm?" That pert chin comes up, revealing the pectoral collar and sharp horns glittering softly in the light.

"They consume uncontrollably in their quest for power and I am not safe. Neither was the Lord of Mictlan. He was slain in the mortal plane, in the Younger York." She points to one of the bookshelves. "See for yourself. A monarch of a long-lived people of your Moon struck him dead with a word."

Melinda May has posed:
"No," May says, her brow still knotted in thought. "I'm not saying your food is going to hurt me. Or that you mean me harm." Gently weeping cuts that still mar her face and limbs aside. "The bird established that, and I've offered you no harm. I'm just..." She lets out a rough breath. "I'm trying to think my way through a problem I don't remotely understand. But there's a link between life, death, food and drink. Eden and Idunn, they're about immortality. Never ending life. Hades and Avalon, even faery, they're about death, the end..." Her eye narrow. "No. The transition of life from one state into the next. It's a cycle. Life takes nourishment from death, which is then transformed into life."

She snirks now. "And don't ask me why I'm talking it out. I have no frickin' clue." Because, really... May is not a talker. All evidence to the contrary.

What she's trying to do, though, is draw the Goddess out. Toss enough stuff out there, see what sticks. What she responds to, what she ignores.

Then, something sticks.

Long-lived people on the moon. Dead with a word. Her head comes up. "Boltagon?" Oh, that's... that could be very problematic. Even though it does imply the living can kill death gods.

"Are we dealing with mortals, rather gods, doing all this? Stealing divinity?"

Jane Foster has posed:
Isis may be mollified, though the offense takes a moment or two to seep back where it belongs in the ground. She holds out her wrist. The kite flaps its wings and hops up to her, nestling against her chest and preening there as a regal avian with a like of immortal company.

"Yes," she replies. The bird's feathers shine silvery-pewter as it spreads its wings slightly. It too wants the sunshine.

"You have been an apt conversationalist so far." The tone is not chiding. Mothers rarely do that, especially when of an age that she is.

"The living took no notice of the risk until the dead gathered at the barred doors, and it will only proceed to become worse," she warns. "No. The theft has been between my..." A shudder runs through her, beads clacking in discomfort. "Between the death lords eager to consolidate their power. They would never stoop to look at the lowliest of the living, except when you show yourself as a danger." A hard, cold stress lies there, pointed sharper than an arrow to the chest. "My hope cannot be delivered from my hands or those of my son's. The lords of death reap their power and might from you. They would not think to look for a fly to bite them and break their necks, even if that is what must happen, yes?"

Melinda May has posed:
It's possible being compared to a fly is somewhat akin to the insult May inadvertently offered Isis about the food -- entirely unintentional. Still, the SHIELD agent has to concede the point. "It's really easy to get way too used to having a superpower," she agrees. She should know, after all. For all that she's still adjusting. She keeps trying to remove the damned thing somehow.

"So, really, we need to go topside and take the fight back to them, rather than traipsing around down here. Find them, stop what they're doing, and... will the natural order reassert itself?"

Jane Foster has posed:
"Before the order is so far broken that it must be rebalanced. For there will always be balance, as the principle of an ordered cosmos. One side grows too strong, the scale descending too low, and another will rise. I fear even now, the consequence for this dereliction of a sacred, ancient duty will be terrible." Isis continues to pet the bird behind its ruff of feathers, and then launches it off her wrist with a smooth rise. Wings snap open and the hunter soars into the air, winging away to one of the vaulted halls open below the gallery. "Nothing is without a price or a consequence."

She looks over the squared-off archways, the myriad of them lit by a soft glow of daylight and nothing else. "What will you use against death? How will you fight it? I have given you the answers for what you need, and now you must find it before you return. To go empty-handed is the law here, but you will be nourished as you seek knowledge. Memorize what you can and hold it to your heart."

Melinda May has posed:
"I'm not sure you can fight against death," May says slowly, thoughtfully. She glances to the goddess. "I'm not saying we shouldn't fight these people who think they can become gods, or who have already killed gods. They need to be stopped. Somehow. But... I'm mortal. A fighter." She leans back against a shelf and lets out a thoughtful breath. "I've thought about my death a million times. How I might go. Who or what might kill me." She gives a wry smile. "I've never really thought about what comes after that."

She pushes off the shelf, strolling the rest of the shelves, looking to see if anything else jumps out at her. "But maybe it's not about fighting death. Maybe, it's about embracing it. Accepting it. And recognizing that it feeds into new life somewhere else. There's hope in that, isn't there?" Even if they don't all make it out alive.

She eventually circumnavigates the entire room, ending up where she started. She reaches for the pommegranate Isis set aside, running her fingers tips over its smooth ridges. Eschewing the use of a knife, since she doesn't really want to offend her hostess, she spends several minutes digging her fingers into the ridges until she eventually breaks it apart. The juice runs over her fingers. She licks some of it away and digs out seeds from one of the sections. A fluttering gold leaf falls from among them, peeling off from the pulp that holds them together.

She sets the fruit down on a bit of stone and plucks up the leaf, looking down at it. "What's this...?"

Jane Foster has posed:
Isis won't argue about who can fight against death, but then, her tales are literally defying death and reassembling her husband. Getting a child with him afterward is merely icing on the cake. "Do you believe the lords of death contemplate their own ends? Death is finite and certain, but even aspects of it can pass."

Her slim fingers bracket her upper arms, and she smiles. "All is a cycle, leading to something more. Let those who forget it regret it, unable to grow. What else is a seed but a world of possibilities?" Her bare feet slide through the grass, creating a path easy enough to follow. Sunshine plays off her hair and the tree heavy with those ripe red fruit, knobby and strange, full of the arils bright as bloody and jewels. Their tartness blooms hard and sweet on the lips.

The leaf carries her engraved words in ancient script, beautifully lavished, something that would be unreadable otherwise. It holds power to it. The sum of a lifetime. The bite of Bahrain, the fight to move past. Growth of the child to the woman. The woman to the soldier. Every slight arcing line and ripple drawn there sums up what she spoke to the conductor and herself.

<<Go.>> A smell of fresh spring flowers and a different voice at her ear give May the farewell that the Lady of Life doesn't. Gentle hands offer a steadying touch, light at the arm, and then withdraw. There is no song, no need to emerge fully from the darkness in this tale. Orpheus wasn't treated so well. Ahead, through mist and strewn flower petals, lies the Met gallery and the waiting dead.