Every Soul Will Taste Death

RP Date: 2026-10-21

Location: Market Square

Participants: Mara, Spizzzo

Summary

Spizzzo tries to calculate his way out of Grimwych, and stockpiles wood for the Watch Tower stairs. Mara gives him a hand, and discusses the inevitability of death.

This archive was published after approval by all listed participants.

Roleplay

Spizzzo is stripped to the waist, sweating profusely, and just punching apart a decrepit old market stall. His right fist is badly damaged, and he winces quietly each time he makes contact with a solid object, but he doesn't change his normal cadence of swings, moving through some sort of boxing warm-up routine his body seems to remember. Stacked beside him on the ground is a pile of more or less useful lumber, and a separate pile of more or less useful firewood. There is significant similarity between the piles. Scrawled on the cobblestones and nearby walls are partially overlapping complex mathematical equations, diagrams of orbiting spheres in various configurations with different angles labeled with symbols. The older of these are sketched in hard dark charcoal lines, and the more recent ones in blood.

Mara 's steps through the abandoned but livening village are quiet but purposeful. She is an easy sight to pick out, or although her robes are dyed with natural colors, they are not the colors of Grimwych. She stands at the edge of the market Square at first and takes in the sight of Spizzzo and his work, taking a moment to study the mathematical calculations he has drawn all over things. It's the blood and his obvious visible injury that compels her to speak and her accent, like her appearance, doesn't match anyone else's. "Hello?" she ventures in cautious Common. "Are you well? You are bleeding."

Spizzzo finishes the next pass of punches and weaves that he seems locked into, wincing again as it culminates in knocking a thick board loose with his injured hand. He grabs it with his left and pulls it free, inspecting it quietly before adding it to the lumber pile. He takes another long moment, breathing in deeply, shoulders back, making no sound other than the sporadic drip of blood rolling down his fingertips. He stretches, neck cracking loudly, and turns around while adopting a gentle smile. "Oh! Hello. Pardon me, I thought I was alone for the moment. I'm quite well, thank you for asking. I don't believe we have met. I am Spizzzo Spizzzoson." He bows deeply, his mangled hand extended, just an ordinary guy standing in a pile of rubble amongst increasingly desperately written insane mathematical scrawlings, bleeding from his hand.

Mara bows deeply in return to Spizzzo. "I do not believe so, no. I am Mara Starseer. It is good to meet you." She steps forward rather than shake the offered hand she takes it gently by the wrist to have a look. "May I?" 

Spizzzo raises an eyebrow slowly, then lifts his hand to pat the sweat from his forehead. His left hand, though it takes him a moment to remember. He doesn't move his injured hand away from Mara, but clarifies, "May you what? I would prefer if you didn't play with it, it hurts a great deal. But, that is my fault. I should not have lost my temper."

Mara regards Spizzzo wuietly, only after a moment of grasping his wrist very gently does a dawn on her that he might just be one of those people from the handshaking cultures and not someone who recognized her gear and what it meant. She blushes a little. "Very sorry, was I supposed to shake it?  I forget sometimes that people do that I thought you were offering me your hand so I could examine and treat your injuries."

Spizzzo watches Mara quizzically for another long moment, then shrugs and smiles. "I don't know. That just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. You would treat my injuries? They're mine, I've earned them."

Mara studies Spizzzo's face with quiet contemplation. "So you have, but your hand looks very damaged; your bones here are broken, and your wounds are open and bleeding. If you do nothing about the injury, you will probably catch a fever. I am willing to use what I know of medicine to aid you."

Spizzzo shrugs again, "Well. If you say so. You could fit what I know about medicine in..." He frowns and starts muttering under his breath, "Everything and nothing? Divide by zero error."

Mara nods quietly a second time and releases Spizzo's hand. "Lay your hand on that stall there please." She motions through the nearest empty stall, which has a flat surface large enough to work. The first thing she does is lay a rectangle of fabric down to serve as a barrier between his hand and the dirt and infectious things that might be on the stall as it is a surface questionable cleanliness.  Beside that, she lays out a bag crafted of some kind of animal hide. 

Spizzzo sets his hand down, forcing his fingers to lay flat by virtue of draping them along the fabric and pressing down from his forearm. He winces again. "This really does seem like a lot of fuss. Surely there are better things to focus on."

Mara shrugs gently. "It will not take very long.  What were you calculating there with the numbers?" Mara nods towards the insane scrolling to redirect the conversation and his focus while she examines his hand

Spizzzo frowns quietly, watching his hand for a long moment before offering, "Radius of the globe. It's complicated because we can't travel far enough to get disparate enough measurements to compare angles of incidence from the sun, and I don't actually know if the planet is a sphere, a prolate ellipsoid, or some other shape. I also don't know where we are on it. But I have made a range of guesses at the likely edges of probabilities."

Mara nods quietly along with Spizzzo. "Have you tried going for a walk on the moor?  After a certain point, you can walk for as long as you like, but the village doesn't get any further away." Orange-yellow light flickers between her fingers as the bones in his hand set themselves and begin to mend. Larger first, then smaller.

Spizzzo waves his good hand dismissively, "That's just magic. We can't leave Grimwych and the surrounding environs."

Mara focuses on Spizzzo's hand. There is more flickering light, and the bones finish mending.  The flesh wounds start to seal up, but there will probably be scars. "Yes, but where IS Grimwych? What dimension is it part of?"

Spizzzo contemplates quietly and then lets out a defeated sigh. "You're right. I've been assuming it was a cursed city on a regular planet in space." He flexes the fingers on his hand, smiling his thanks to Mara, then pulls put a bent nail from the wrecked stall and draws a line through some of his equations. "If we assume it is one of the six primary types of demiplane, which is a broad assumption..." He starts scratching new, highly symbolic figures into the cobblestone over his old equations. "Could use a working mana spectrometer..." he mutters, violently crossing something out and then filling it in again with a new range of numbers. "If I work in the size constraints that are observable..." He frowns and draws a quick diagram of irregular oblong and jagged shapes orbiting each other. "Still too many unknowns..."

Mara busies herself  packing up her healer's supplies and folds the square of cloth carefully to be cleaned again at a later date.  She sits on the edge of the stall and observes the man's frantic scrawling. "It is broad," she agrees. "So what variables can we test and eliminate with the resources we have?  I know little of the wizardry behind dimensions, only that once upon a time a group of my friends and I traveled into a piece of one transported into the material plane, and that was an entire thing."

Spizzzo shakes his head, "No idea." He looks up from the equations and smiles, gesturing at the insane overlapping scrawls. "I don't know what any of this means until I'm doing it." He taps one of the symbols, "Apparently if I had a mana spectrometer, it would give me the Zzzilge value. But that's all I remember about that. I don't know what one is, or how it works."

Mara 's eyes move very carefully over the different equations and insane scrawling. "Hmmm."  The equations and numbers don't mean anything to her; it looks like a man's mad ramblings. "What if we tried the water?"

Spizzzo nods, "I boil it in my stews. It seems harmless."

Mara nods. "I mean, going across the lake.  Has anyone traveled to the other side, or does it go on to nowhere like the area west of the tall stones?  I can tell you it is magical water, but have not studied its specific properties compared to nonmagical water."  She pauses. "I should catch some of the sky water and see if it is also magical like the lake water, or simply ordinary?  How does weather function in a contained space like this?"

Spizzzo looks down at his equations and shrugs. It seems there's no place to plug in magic water effects. "Could be. I don't appear to know anything about weather, or weather magic. How are you? I don't think I've seen you near my stew pot." His tension eases as he lets the fact that he simply doesn't have enough information console him over the previous thought that the math was wrong.

Mara smiles at Spizzzo. "We can tell some things about the weather and the climate by the geography and plant life around us.  Is this space magical only in that we can't leave it, or do the basic functions of climate, weather patterns and geology work different here?  All of those things are relative to the rest of the world..."  After a moment she abandones her thoughts to study Spizzo's face. "I have not been near your stew pot; I've been camped outside of the village since I arrived here and studying the local area and wildlife.  Do you stay here in the settlement?"

Spizzzo shakes his head slowly, pointing back toward the lake, and the Watch Tower. "I've been camping near the watch tower, trying to make sure people coming out of the lake have something to eat."

Mara follows where Spizzzo is pointing. "I saw your tower, but it did not occur to me to come close to it.  Have many people come out of the lake?"

Spizzzo nods to Mara, gradually giving up on his equations now that he's established they aren't presently solvable. "Some. More than a dozen that I'm aware of, I think less than two dozen, but I could be wrong."

Mara nods quietly. "Is this perhaps an attempt to repopulate the area?  There was no one here when you arrived?  Did you come together then?  Who was here first?"

Spizzzo shrugs his shoulders, "It was hard to say in the early days. I was one of the first few, I think. But the city was so empty, and we didn't arrive in batches but one by one, then spread out."

Mara looks up at the sky, but not in the direction that the sun is shining. "Do we know which way is north?  Has anyone determined that?"

Spizzzo points in a direction roughly perpendicular to the path of the rising and setting sun, "Assuming the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that way is north."

Mara says to Spizzzo, "Assuming, yes."

Mara says to Spizzzo, "But the sun no matter which objective direction it is, rises in one side and sets in the other. Days are predictable length, and growing shorter."

Spizzzo nods, "Which made me think we were on a rotating spheroid of some sort. But for all I know, the sun might be an illusion moving across a painted dome, or a grapefruit sized hole into a realm of pure flame, and we're just on a tiny donut-shaped möbius or the like."

Mara nods quietly. "Have you observed animals making preparations for winter?  That would be a good indicator of whether or not seasons actually happen here, or if time and the sun are just trickery.  Have animals come out of the lake, or only people?  I was in the shape of an animal when I passed through, which worked out for me, but it might have known I was just a druid all along." 

Spizzzo shrugs his shoulders, "I don't know what animals do to make preparations for winter. I've observed rats and raccoons, mostly trying to steal my stew, or avoid becoming my stew."

Mara takes a look around, scouting for small critters. "I don't either, unfortunately, not intimately.  I come from an area where the weather is harsh and the climate inhospitable all year round, so there was never a time for them to be more needy than any other time, and traveling through it is not so easy to learn those things.  Takes time." 

Spizzzo says to Mara, "Well, time is one thing we have. Unless a human sacrifice is sufficient to open a portal to return to our homes. And the other refugees are able to perform a human sacrifice. Then we would have less time. Or, even if the sacrifice does not open the portal and we are the sacrifice. That person would also have less time. "

Mara says to Spizzzo, "Well, I will leave the matter of human sacrifice to those interested in it.  That is not the kind of magic I practice or have any knowledge of or interest in.  I will concern myself with which way the wind blows, and where weather originates, and look for ways out by studying the land.  Because if something comes in, then there is a way out.  "

Mara says to Spizzzo, "But where is this idea of human sacrifice coming from?"

Spizzzo says to Mara, "A discovered journal that suggests the last group of people left after performing a sacrifice at the standing stones. "

Mara nods very slowly and thoughtfully. "Did you find evidence of the sacrifice?  The corpse of the dead, or anything of that nature?"

Spizzzo says to Mara, "No."

Mara hmms quietly. "Well, we know that every soul will taste death sooner or later.  If one must die for the good of many.  For the <i>guaranteed </i>good of many, then that is  sometimes just the way of the world.  Sometimes you are thirsting and starving and must kill one or two of your animals to save the lives of everyone else.  It is not a pleasant thing to do the killing, but it is less unpleasant than the destruction of all." 

Spizzzo shakes his head slowly, "I do not know that. Where is that written?"

Mara smiles, a little sadly. "We write very little in my culture, but it is something every tribe has experienced at some point.  My land is a harsh and unforgiving place."

Spizzzo nods with understanding. "Well. This is the first I remember hearing that every soul will taste death. I don't see why that should be the case, and I certainly don't think we should sacrifice someone to open a portal. We'll simply solve it another way."

Mara nods. "If it is absolutely the only way, and you have explored every other option to the most complete of the combined capabilities of everyone in the village, then do it.  If not, look for other ways.  You are not starving here.  You are not thirsty.  You are not harried by monsters.  There is no need to be hasty."

Spizzzo shakes his head slowly, but offers a gentle smile. "Well. Agree to disagree. I should go check my stew, and get this wood back. Thank you for the conversation, and please come by anytime. I apologize for being out of sorts at first." Spizzzo starts gathering the loose wood in his arms.

Mara says to Spizzzo, "There is also the option to stay. Someone stayed and built your watch tower."

Mara watches for a few moments to see if Spizzzzo can carry all the wood by himself, and if not, will gather some up in the spirit of helpfulness.

Spizzzo shakes his head as he hugs the wood against his chest in two piles now that he has two functioning hands again. "Killing a person is not an option." He smiles and nods, heading off through the town.