open rp.

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for kitty.

[reshapes]

The thing with humans is they never really change, do they? Not really. Oh, sure. Here and there one of them might bump into a good intention like finding a sharp sofa corner with a shin while trying to navigate a dark room, but give it two hundred years and that bruised leg is a dusty old bone and everyone who even overheard the cursing is long dead. And what remains? Ambition, greed, powerlust, a frankly single minded selfishness that can only be attributed to a base survival instinct honed by sabertooth tigers and then left to grow bored and fat. In short: the usual.

Which begs the question: What's even the point to any of it? When you've only got a measely eighty years in you, you'd think the least a person could do would be to scrounge up some basic decency. Honestly, if you ask him humanity would be vastly improved by either doubling their average life span or chopping it straight in half. Now there's a way to teach them to appreciate the simple things in life like not poking one another in the eyes with sharp sticks for millennia.

But that's just the trouble, isn't it? No one's ever asking for his opinion.

In retrospect, he'd made just one mistake in London. If he'd really been thinking, he'd have gone all in on the last heroic stand thing with a final request: 'Do me a favor, won't you? Make sure someone crosses my name out of all those dusty old books in that horrible little excuse of a library.'

Would it have stopped any of this? Definitely not. But he thinks now he could have found it satisfying on the smallest personal level. He just hadn't been thinking far enough ahead at the time, and can you blame him? --Oh and see, there it is again. No one thinks of the future when they're getting ready to bite it. The worst part about being enslaved to humans for centuries is the part where their bad habits start to wear off on you. Disgusting.

Oh well; if he had died, it would've been a real shame not to be remembered for it.

At least that's what he tells himself when untold centuries after the fact, a hundred grasping hands finally reach into the Other Place, sink their razor sharp nails into his essence, and rip him from the swirling lack of shape and time and identity with the snarling sound of Bartimaeus.


He materializes as a floating ember. The flames from the room's forest of candles are plucked effortlessly from their wicks and drift as if hypnotized to the pentacle's middle where they join it to become a rapidly elongating shape. The lit form twists, elegant as a dancer under a desert's cold night sky. Smoke from the extinguished candles wind through the darkened room to the circle's center, beckoned by the growing flame into a drifting pattern of latticework as intricate and beautiful as the finest lace lace. There the combination of smoke and fire beget heady smells of spice and perfume. In its beguiling shape there flickers first the suggestion of flexing wings, then the feathers too spiral and corkcrew to form an endless loop until the unheated flame in the pentacle becomes a perfect spinning disk.

It's all very sophisticated. But it's been a while and he might as well make an impression on whatever moon-eyed idiot finally thought to summon such a great spirit.

At last, an eye opens at the disk's center. It is black and endless and beautiful. It looks with infinite, ancient and unknowable wisdom upon the magician standing protected inside the second circle.

"You?!" Bartimaeus spits.

𓅁 𓅁 𓅁
Two days later, he is a common cuckoo¹ on a rooftop very distant to the room in which he was summoned. He sits perched in the steel gray morning and watches a third floor window with two dark eyes. There's a parallel here and he finds he doesn't appreciate it at all. In fact, he'd spent all of yesterday wheeling around after his target trying in vain to think of a way to avoid this very moment as she'd made her way through various markets and bazaars and into leaning old shops on cramped old roads where thousands of years ago the dye baths there had stained the very earth purple and red and still the scent of chalk and lye lived in the stones.

1. Horrible, duplicitous, and traitorous birds not fit to eat from even the smelliest garbage heap. The lowest of the absolute low and rather indicative of his present mood.

But like it or not he has a schedule to keep, so at last the bird grudgingly tips off the roof tile's edge, gives its wings an unenthusiastic flap, and comes to land with a graceless thump on the window ledge. It looks into a simple but pleasant rented room where an aging woman with graying hair and surprisingly youthful eyes is just getting ready to leave for the day. He tries not to study her for too long through the glass and instead begins to peck with miserable insistence first at the window frame, then on the pane itself: tap, tap, tap.