9720/A Vampire Visits the Vower.

A Vampire Visits the Vower.
Date of Scene:	19 January 2022
Location:	Main Room - Titan's Tower
Synopsis:	Lydia comes over to the Tower to give Terry his talisman. Then things get theological.
Cast of Characters:	Lydia Dietrich, Terry O'Neil
Tinyplot:	Path of Glory

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Lydia Dietrich has posed:
It's early evening, and the sun has already set, which makes it an ideal time for Lydia to come and visit Terry at home. A purple portal opens up and she steps out of it onto the walkway leading up to the Tower. She looks up, up, up to the gigantic T and can't help but feel a little awed. She also feels that she shouldn't be because, after all, she /is/ part of the Justice League after a fashion.

She's dressed nicely, with a grey woolen skirt and a long sleeved cream button up blouse with a maroon cardigan thrown over that. Something's changed about her though. Instead of those motes of darkness that she's had since she's changed, she's now surrounded by little points of golden light, as if a colony of fireflies have found her rather interesting.

She walks up to the front door and searches for a doorbell. "Uh, hello?" She asks, looking around for a camera as well. "I'm here to see Terry? I've got something for him."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
It is only a few seconds before a voice answers: "Please come in, Lydia."

Terry is, indeed, at the tower. He is in the lobby, as a matter of fact, laying on his back on one of the couches, and smiling a little while he looks at the ceiling. There are little stars and planets flying above him, and a little bird jumping from star to star, making a 'boioioiing' sound as it does so. The Cheshire is still tripping balls a little, and entertaining himself.

He blinks and looks at the door as it opens. "OH hey, Lydia!" he calls out, "I thought the computer told me you were here. I wasn't sure I hadn't hallucinated it, though." A pause. A squint. "You /are/ here, right/"

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
"Hi Terry," she says, once she's made her way up the elevator and into the main room. She tries not to ogle at it, but this kind of thing is beyond her experience. The Brotherhood's only opulent area is the Gardens, which is a different thing all together, and the JLD ... well ... they don't really have much in the way of a headquarters right now.

She refocuses and smiles at the prone cat. "I'm really here. I'm glad to see you made it out in one piece. Michael blasted you pretty hard. I was pretty high myself by the time the fight ended so I didn't really get a chance to see if you managed to get up." She chuckles, "At least I stopped glowing."

She walks around the couch and joins Terry on it. "I brought you something that might help. I know your last amulet kind of exploded the other night, so I started working on a new one." She opens her purse and rummages around in it before she pulls out another amulet. It's... a tuning fork with runes etched into the tines, and a corded metal loop around it's handle that looks, for all the world, to be a violin string.

"I took the idea of resonance to the next logical step," she says handing it over. "This should survive your next encounter with the angels. There's a downside that I wasn't able to work out. It starts humming when in the presence of the holy. Gets louder the more there is."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Oh yyeaaah... you /were/ glowing, I didn't dream that." So many things have been uncertain to him, after all. "God that was a /wild/ time..." he glances at Lydia. Or, rather, a few inches to her left, "Do you want coffee? Coke? Tiramisu? There's some in..." he tries to sit up, fails, and gestures towards the kitchen. "There..."

He stares at the tuning fork and reaches for it when she hands it over. "Oh... wow... so this starts, like, /vibrating/ when in the presence of holy? What if I muffle it with, like, cloth to stop it from vibrating? Does that help? Or will it sing like that animated sword in the Roger Rabbit movie?"

And, just like that, that sword is in his hand, crooning out one of Sinatra's classics. He glances at it. "... he's a little sharp."

OH god, the pun.

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
Lydia facepalms. "That was so bad, Terry," she groans. "Thank you for the offer, though. I don't really eat or drink anymore other than, you know, blood."

She considers his question, though. "Wrapping it up in cloth should work to muffle the hum, sure. Pure cloth linen would be best for that. Try putting it on to see if it'll help with your trip."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Ooooh right... I'm sorry, I forgot you are an umpire." He blinks. That's night right. "Vamire. Vampire. Sorry. It's a bit hard, being full of holy. Mind just comes and goes like a yo-yo, you know?" he says, making an effort to sit up. He finally succeeds. "Linen... okay. So... this..." He stares at it, and then makes an effort to put it on. It takes three tries before he succeeds. And then, a few moments of silence.

And then.

"Oh... it does help. I am feeling better now!" The fork does start to hum faintly, as Terry continues to drain the residual holiness from Phoebe's healing.

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
Lydia chuckles, "Yes. When I was full of holy I was... well... it wasn't exactly drunk, and it wasn't exactly high, but it was somewhere adjacent to the two. I felt /very/ good for the rest of the evening." She shakes her head, "It's an experience I both do and do not regret." Her tone turns more somber. "I... God. I ate an angel. It's a good things Jews don't believe in hell despite ample proof of its existence or I'd /definitely/ be going there upon my final death.

Her scowl turns into a grin, though. "I'm glad it's working." She stands up and makes her way to the kitchen. "Is there anything you want from here?"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Water... Water's fine. And don't you feel bad- so you ate an angel, who hasn't? They're trying to kill us all... that's self-defense, right there!" Terry points.

"OH. Oh. Speaking of angels. I had a question for you... as soon as the world stops spinning." He chuckles and rubs his forehead, "The amulet helps. But the holy is already inside me, so I guess it can only do so much. Right?"

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
Once in the kitchen Lydia starts rummaging around the cabinets for a glass. "Terry," she says, "I grew up deeply religious. Still am, truth be told, though my perspective of things have... shifted somewhat you can say." It's the third cabinet she checked but she did eventually find a glass. "Eating an angel... even in self defense kind of goes against 25 years of upbringing."

She fills the glass with ice cubes and water from the fridge and brings it back to the couch. "Here you go," she says, holding out the water to him. "If your body has already absorbed the holy, then it'll only cancel out any kind of residual power that might be clinging to you. If nothing else, it'll help you recover faster."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry nods slowly, "Yeah... I went to Catholic school. I'm an atheist now," he chuckles and takes the glass, sipping from it slowly. "I know gods exist. I just don't trust any of them. The Greek goddess of discord is out to get me. And now Angels want to destroy the world. You ask me, none of them is worth a damn."

He brushes his chin with his hand, "And... speaking of that... I know someone who... apparently might be able to tap into saints and angels with... poetry. Or song. So I told him I'd talk to you... to see if maybe that's something we could use, you know? Because... doesn't tapping on something means that some energy is getting redirected?"

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
Lydia gives Terry a grimace as she sits back down on the couch. "If only it was that easy for me. I believed, I truly believed, and I guess I still kind of do." She shakes her head, "Spirituality is only a part of being Jewish. A lot of is is culture, and honoring history. There are Jewish atheists out there who keep kosher, because that's so ingrained in our culture, and it's less about being true to god than it is about cleanliness."

Her gaze goes out to stare in the long distance, "It's just that ... when you understand what's going on, and God's part in it, it's hard not to be entirely disillusioned. They say that God loves, and that's true, but in a broad sense. Think of every universe as a cell in God's body. For you and I, we love and care for our bodies (for the most part), but we do it as a /whole/. We don't think about the individual cells that it's comprised of. Sure, it's a little sad to think about when you hear that millions of them die and get replaced every day, but only when you really think about it. God is like that with us. And with us as individuals? We're the little mitochondria that lives in the universe's cells. God /loves/ but Their love is so vast and so wide that They might as well not care at all."


She shakes her head to snap her attention back to Terry. "Sorry. I'd been thinking about that a lot lately. This guy you know of, send him our way. Give him my number and I'll meet up with him. We can use all the help we can get."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Terry smiles a little, looking at Lydia with eyes that are more focused now than they were a bit ago. "... Marcus Aurelius once said that What is divine deserves our respect because it is divine; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us. If you ask me, I think he was right. So we're not perfect- Cheshires, Amazons, wizards, vampires, fuzzy creatures from Alpha Centauri... but if you think about it, we create more meaning than the creator. He merely created the stage, but we're the ones living the stories."

He takes a sip of his water, "Maybe that's what all these holy books have been about- trying to make sense of the story by imagining there's someone at the top calling the shots, when all along we're the ones with the reins."

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
"Wise words from a chaos cat," Lydia says, giving Terry a fond grin. "A lot of Rabbis would agree with you, to be honest. There's a lot of argument about just how active God is in our lives, and how much of the bible is literal and how much is parable and what is merely metaphor. Then again, a lot of Rabbis like to argue for just argument's sake."

"Regardless, Judaism focuses more on the here and now than the afterlife," she says as she leans back into the couch. "You should be a good person, not because of some reward after you die, but because it is the right thing to be." She snorts, "But then, there's some argument over what a 'good person' actually /means/."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Eh," Terry says, sipping his water, "I think it's pretty simple: Don't be a schvuntz and don't go around fercockting up other people's lives. So sayeth Molly, so it be truth, gone now these ten years." He makes a toast towards someone who isn't there, and then drinks up the rest of his water. He occasionally has to blink to refocus his eyes- that is, to focus them- but he seems to have a better hold on his coherence now. The illusions are gone at least.

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
Lydia chuckles, "Amen. I don't know who Molly is but she sounds like a wise woman. That's pretty much how I live my life. I help out where I can and I try not to be a jerk. People were worried that might change when I was turned, but.... nope! I'm still me." She grins as she folds her hands in her lap. "Except I glow a different color now."

She falls silent for a moment as she wrestles with asking Terry something. "Hey, that interview you did with Michael? This might be a breach of trust, but is there any way I can get a copy of the unedited interview?" A slight frown pulls at her lips and her eyebrows furrow, "I'm... uh... writing everything that's happening down, and I'm trying to be as impartial as I can. People are going to need to know what happened... what /really/ happened, and I'm in the unique position of being a novelist in the heart of the matter."

"I... uh... also want to talk to Ms. Fairchild when this is over," she admits. "I think that should we win, there's a very real chance that she could be demonized, so I want to give her the chance to tell her side, too. I don't think it's fair to her. I honestly don't think it's been fair to us, either. We're all just ... chess pieces in some game that we're now just beginning to understand the rules. If I'm to be honest, I kind of want to give Michael that chance too, though I'm not sure he cares."

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"Molly Czarninski. She took my mom in when grandma O'Neil, may she rest in peace 'cause she never let /us/ have any, disowned mom when she ended up pregnant with me and no husband. Good ol' Catholic love, that was-- the old witch." But hey, they're not bitter.

He blinks at Lydia, "Oh... the unedited interview? It's up on the Planet website. As a video and an audio-only podcast. I always publish my unedited interviews along with my articles." He grins, "That way, shady people like your President Luthors can't claim that they were quoted out of context, or that they didn't say what I said they said. There /is/ a chunk missing where Michael talked about the nature of reality... but that bit is lost. He stopped time so that was never recorded."

"I don't blame Caitlin. You should talk to her. I spoke to Cael and... I am pretty sure that Michael is doing something to her that isn't too different from what he did to Cael- that 'fill you with divine love' so that you suddenly lose all sense of perspective and everything the angel wants you to do sounds perfectly /reasonable/. Ugh." He shakes his head, "Disgustin'"

Lydia Dietrich has posed:
"That explains the missing part of the interview," Lydia says, nodding. "He couldn't have told you anything untrue. Angels can't lie." A wry grin spreads across her lips, "Oh, they can tell you certain truths to bring you to a false conclusion, but they can't /lie/."


"I don't think I can approach Ms. Fairchild without being attacked or squished," Lydia admits. "She thinks that the Justice League Dark has allied itself with evil which... isn't entirely untrue." Her mind immediately thinks of Lady Death and winces. "But I'm a vampire, and we're traditionally associated with being evil, until recently when we started being sexy." She gets a mischievous glint in her eye, "And according to my girlfriend, I'm /damned/ sexy."