recreatable | open post.

There it is. That half-obscured, quickly pivoted flicker of sincerity when he speaks about himself. As if lifting a cup in a shell game and revealing, briefly, where the trinket actually lies. It sharpens her attention to a knife's edge. Her appetite, too. And despite his reassurance, she resolves to ease off. To go slowly.

(But something bone-deep and quietly lovely settles in her chest at the simple fact of being told I don't mind that you have questions.)

She chews her bottom lip, thinking. Then, reaching to the small pile of cards on the divan, she deals him a third card. A third for herself as well.

Jasnah is self-aware enough to recognize how easily she can sound like an interrogator. Self-aware enough to note how thin the semantic line is between between abduction and being stranded in a strange world, dependent on a single, familiar person. Silently, she resolves to do better. Be better. It's the kind of quiet promise Ivory would have approved of. Meet your potential, he would say.

"—Is there," she begins, carefully, "any manner of demonstrating your regenerative qualities that you find...acceptable?"

No. Even that is the wrong word. Acceptable? Surely it still hurts. She frowns, recalibrates.

"Is there a way you prefer to demonstrate it?"

There. Better.

Lightly: "Well, as long as I'm not being torn in half by a Nevron, it's a step up."

It does still hurt, yeah, but he likes to think he's gained a sort of tolerance to it. Or maybe he's just gotten good enough at mentally leaving his body that nearly anything has become endurable. He takes a look at his cards—the King of Spades, a 3, a 4—and sets them back down.

"I'll stand."

Nevron. The monsters out on the continent? Her nose crinkles at the thought of him torn in two. No, thank you. Not the kind of evidence she'd be eager to witness. Although it does make wonder all kinds of inevitable questions. Namely, what happens if both halves are separated? Do both heal into two separate men? Does one falter and die, while the other regrows its missing portion? Maybe those questions are a bit too steep for this inchoate, tentative peace-making on the topic.

"Same," Jasnah says as she flips her three cards against her knee for him to see: a six, a four, a ten. Twenty, total. She's quite chuffed with this one.

Carefully, approaching her curiosity from a more careful angle: "Would you regrow a lost limb whole-cloth or would you require the original limb in order to heal it...back together? So to speak."

Verso flips his cards, too, and shakes his head at the defeat. With a competitive glint in his eye, he holds up his finger. One. One out of three, currently. He reaches for the deck beside her, then carefully slides her cards off of her knee. Of course it excites him to be so close to touching her knee; at this point, the excitement is so often and so predictable that it's hardly notable to mention.

As he reshuffles the cards, he answers, "That... depends. I have some measure of control over it." Not enough to stop it from happening completely. Staying alive isn't a choice, but the body in which he does that is, hence the unhealed scar. "If a limb were to, say, disintegrate entirely, I would regrow it."

This time, he holds the deck back out to her. Go ahead, deal. "But if it's still around, I prefer to bring the parts together. Feels less weird that way."

Edited 2025-12-20 19:01 (UTC)

To be fair, she simply assumed his scar predated his immortality. Something, perhaps, about the housefire he once described. Given how such healing works on Roshar — old wounds cement into one's self-image, and then remain fixed — it seems like a straightforward assumption.

But his measure of control is interesting. She nods along to his description, watching as he generously shuffles for her. Card shuffling would be a masculine art, to be sure. When he finishes, she takes the deck with a murmured word of gratitude. Loud enough to b heard; not so loud as to detour their conversation.

"—Can you be tattooed? Is that what you mean by having some measure of control over it?"

A serious, legitimate, academic inquiry. She knows of a man whose nascent Knight Radiant abilities foiled every attempt to set ink in skin. It would just wipe away, apparently. Jasnah had not been able to secure a primary source on this anecdote, of course, on account of her thinking Kaladin Stormblessed is a self-righteous annoyance and she can't be bothered to ask him herself.

Good question. "I've never tried," he admits. "There aren't exactly any gestral tattoo artists on the Continent." Then, explaining, because he's not sure if he ever has— "They're made of wood. They wouldn't know what to do with human flesh."

He wouldn't actually mind a tattoo or two, honestly, but it's never really been an option. The last thing he wants is a sentient paintbrush coming at him with a needle. Sure, he could heal any artwork mistakes—which they'd probably make—but the trauma would last forever.

Tapping the floor: "Deal me in."

"...Wood," she repeats. It's the tone of someone who is both surprised but not surprised. Like, oh this sounds unlikely but so much so far has also been unlikely so of course this, too, is true.

Anyway. As she registers that mild not-surprise, she hands him first one card, then another. Appropriately interspersed with the cards she deals herself, of course. She turns over her top card, again using her knee as a makeshift play surface. A three.

"Hn," Jasnah makes a small, thoughtful sound. "Talking, animated wood?"

Well. Talking for a certain definition thereof. She hasn't forgotten his boast about only Monaco learning to communicate with humans.

"Sounds like Awakening."

Not a Rosharan magic, but one she's passingly familiar with.

"Hit me," he says immediately upon seeing his cards, then sets them down, a Seven of Diamonds facing up.

"Awakening is... animating an object?" 'Awakening' it, so to speak? "They're not objects." This, at least, he's adamant about. Yes, they might be made of wood, and yes, they might be unable to die, and yes, they might be unable to reproduce in any way one might expect of a living creature—

But those are his babies, okay.

"They're... their own breed of creature." And if they don't make sense, then it's because a little boy made them. "Most people in Lumière think they're mythical."

Jasnah peels a card from the top of the deck and holds it lightly between two fingers before offering it to Verso.

"There is often a kernel of truth in most mythic things," she allows — still, somewhat, wrestling with the implication that undying wooden beings are, in fact, beings at all. It sounds uncomfortably adjacent to Awakening, at least as Wit once described it. Demonstrated it.

Once he takes his card, she deals one to herself as well.

"I once witnessed a man breathe life — briefly — into a cloth doll," she says, thoughtful. "I assumed this might be something similar."

Although the gestrals themselves were never inanimate, the concept of being dolls that have had life breathed into them isn't so far off. He'd rather not get into that, though, for obvious reasons, so he says his favorite thing: "Yeah, I don't know."

He wishes—not for the first time—that he could explain everything, but he doesn't know how to without digging himself into a deeper hole. If he explains that the gestrals were purposefully designed, then he'll have to explain how he knows that. And if he explains that he knows that because his mother is the Paintress who designed all of the humans in Lumière including himself, then he'll have to explain that he's just as close to a doll as the gestrals are. And if he explains that, then—

It gives him a migraine just thinking about it.

"I'll stand." And when Jasnah finally decides to stand herself, she'll find that he has a seven and two sixes. He's pretty pleased with this hand.

Edited 2025-12-21 02:42 (UTC)

"It isn't a Rosharan art," she says at last, easing into the silence with the measured calm of someone who — just now — feels safe enough to indulge her special interests unrelated to knives, plots, or the statistical likelihood of being murdered in a foreign city. "It's from an entirely different world. Where we use stormlight, they use something called BioChromatic Breath. And when you mentioned Chroma before..."

Her voice tapers as she glances down at her cards, considering them with the same faintly critical focus she brings to so many things. Two threes and a ten. Unsatisfactory. She draws again. A two — bringing her neatly to eighteen. That will do. She turns her hand face-up, satisfied.

"I suppose," she concludes lightly, "I wondered whether there might be some overlap after all."

Her satisfaction evaporates when she realizes he's beaten her by one. That earns him a quiet-but-earnest Storms, said beneath her very normal, very not BioChromatic breath.

Edited 2025-12-21 02:52 (UTC)

Pleased with himself, he gathers the cards up again and begins the shuffle. She might like to learn if she doesn't already know how, he considers, but he saves that particular lesson for when she's healed. And maybe when they've got cards made of actual stock, too. He'd consider himself an expert in playing cards, and even he has a little difficulty with shuffling such flimsy ones.

Handing them back, he asks, "How did you learn so much about other worlds?"

Jasnah finds that she enjoys the quiet cooperation of it. He shuffles; she deals. It takes only two rounds for the rhythm to settle in, the deck passing back and forth between them without comment, each anticipating the other's turn as if they'd practiced this together for years rather than minutes.

When he asks how she's learned so much about other worlds, she pauses only briefly. There are two answers, both true, both incomplete. She chooses the simpler one.

"By sitting with worldhoppers and asking them many questions."

The third and final round begins. She deals with practiced economy, then turns her top card face-up.

Seven.

Edited 2025-12-21 11:53 (UTC)

"Ah," he says, although that isn't really much of an explanation in his eyes. It's the only one she's giving, so he might as well accept it for now. Choosing not to interrogate goes both ways.

"And here I thought I was special." With a mild little smile, he sets down his cards. Nine on top, eight underneath. Not the best hand, but not the worst, either; it's too high for him to risk busting on their final game, playing pragmatically. "I'll stand."

He is special — though Jasnah strongly suspects he wouldn't care for the particular ways in which that is true. Most off-worlders she's heard about arrived by intent: they located Cultivation's Perpendicularity, prepared themselves, and chose to cross. Verso, by contrast, seems to have been...deposited. An anomaly of circumstance rather than ambition.

She deals herself a third card. Only then does she stand, turning her hand to reveal a five and an eight alongside her seven. An expression flickers across her face. Smile-adjacent, carefully restrained. The look of a woman suppressing a boast. She's pleased with the outcome, but she is trying, very earnestly, to be a gracious victor.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Her three cards mark time against the curve of her knee.

"I have a request," she says, cutting her own satisfaction short with a small, deliberate clearing of her throat. "Unconventional. Presumptuous, really. But would you let me amend my wager after the fact?"

The thought has been needling at her ever since his critique of what she'd asked for before. A chapter, read aloud. It no longer satisfies her. She wants something else now.

If he'll permit it.

"It's not very sportsmanlike to change your wager once you've already won," he points out as he flips his cards over, a bit of a sore loser. His soreness is alleviated only by the fact that this is a game of chance, too, and that letting Jasnah win now (did he let her win?) means she'll want to play with him more in the future.

"But," he continues, "you've piqued my curiosity."

Which cuts through all accusations of poor sportsmanship, obviously. He's a little worried that now she's going to request he chop a limb off in front of her—he's not opposed, necessarily, but he doesn't really feel like bleeding all over Jochi's floor and then having to clean it up—but he shoves that down in favor of finding out what she wants.

"I'll hear you out."

She waves away his mild accusation of unsportsmanlike behaviour. Who does he think she is? A Windrunner? Her oaths have little to nothing to do with honor. Well. Aside from the First Ideal. She can already hear Dalinar lecturing her on journey before destination and the many ways this might obliquely violate it. Fortunately for Jasnah, Ivory was never such a stickler.

(He's fine. He'll be back. Just wait.)

"You and I can understand one another," she begins, framing her change of heart by pointing out the obvious. "I assume it's due to some quirk of Connection."

She does not linker here. Explaining Connection is a headache and a half. Tl;dr — outsiders can, intentionally or not, hijack Connection to a place they're visiting and effectively speedrun language acquisition. Jasnah assumes that's what happened to him.

"But your native tongue still surfaces from time to time," she continues. "Whether you notice or not." It's obvious to her; she's less certain it is to him. She lifts the seven of diamonds between two fingers. "For example, the characters in the corners are unintelligible to me. I infer the value only because I can count the shapes."

That is likely a sufficient preamble. Ultimately, her request is no more or less intrusive than the original. It's simply...different. Different, and longer-term. Although it's the kind of broader knowledge Wit would always deny her when she asked.

"I would amend my boon to learning your language." She lifts a hand before he can object. "I'm a confident autodidact. I would need only the alphabet and a few sample passages to begin."

A pause. A faint, intent look.

"Continued consultation, of course."

Verso's eyebrows raise, primarily at the idea that she doesn't even know the numbers he's written down. He's even more surprised that she didn't say anything up until this point. It seems like it would be intolerable to Jasnah not to know something for even a second longer than she has to.

"All right," he says, easy acceptance. It's probably more useful than having him read a chapter of some boring book aloud, albeit not by much. The only person she'll be able to converse in this language with is him, and he has no problem translating anything she might not understand for her.

But that's the whole problem, he assumes. She'd still have to depend on him to translate instead of just knowing. She'd have to admit that she doesn't understand something.

"You can start by calling me Professeur Dessendre."

"Professeur." She echoes in a tone that somehow automagically clarifies that she is not currently calling him by the word but is instead merely tasting it out on the tip of her tongue. Odd, round, soft sounds.

"A title of some sort?" She ventures. Because she knows his house name already. (And, yes, that's how she thinks of it. Having a second name necessitates it being a house name.)

Jasnah reaches out and pats the divan — the empty expanse of it next to her, wordlessly inviting him to get up off the floor if he'd prefer.

Verso gathers up his cards and hers, putting them back in the deck and placing it beside her on the divan before he settles down on the other side of it. "It's the word for teacher. You'd be la professeure."

He considers, for a second, making her call him something embarrassing instead. But she's trusting him with her education here, so he doesn't have it in him to pull the wool over her eyes. Not about this, anyway.

"Or, technically, I guess you'd be la reine. Queen."

Slow, steady, her eyes track him as he moves from floor to seat. Always on a knife's edge between fascination and indifference. Leaning a little nearer to fascination, clearly, when she repeats the words, mouth moving silently: professeur, again, deaf to the different ending; la reine, for the first time.

"You'll write those down for me, won't you?" At some point. Not now, but — soon. "The beginning of Roshar's first ever interplanetary dictionary."

A little too ambitious. She suspects such things already exist, but in that nebulous social circle of worldhoppers who so often keep to themselves and try not to 'spoil' the relative innocence of different planets. Like how you can get tinned food in Shadesmar, traded with distant other peoples, but those goods have yet to make it the Physical Realm.

"I'll give you a writing credit," she half-smiles.

Interplanetary, she says, and he sort of makes a face at that. He already has a frame of reference for different worlds; the Canvas is one in its own way. What he lacks an understanding of is different planets. The Dessendres had owned an armillary sphere, but more as an art piece than out of an interest in astronomy. Maybe if he'd looked a little closer, he would have noticed that the stars in the sky didn't match any star charts.

It all sounds a little far-fetched, but Jasnah is the expert here.

"A writing credit," he repeats, a little amused. "I was under the interpretation that men weren't allowed to write."

"—Not allowed isn't quite right," she concedes. "Discouraged. Shamed, if they do."

Jasnah shifts on the divan as she speaks, careful of the lingering ache in her side, the movement small but deliberate.

"It's only the Vorin nations who cling so fiercely to male illiteracy," she continues, gaze forward, voice even. "Elsewhere on Roshar, it's quite different. Azir. Shinovar. Herdaz...."

Her hand lifts, palm up, as if setting those cultures on an invisible scale. Then it lowers again, resting near her thigh, planted against the upholstery. She isn't interested in replacing one set of rigid norms with another, but she's interested in progress. Urithiru is uniquely positioned for that. Cultures mingling, assumptions rubbing raw. It creates opportunity. Friction is not inherently bad.

"The ruse we maintained aboard the ship need not follow us back to Urithiru," she concludes. "There, I encourage you to read and write openly. People will object. They will whisper. They may even be offended."

Her eyes sharpen, not unkindly.

"Storm them. You'll be in good company. My uncle is learning to read and write," she adds. "The church excommunicated him for it. Among other things."

Verso's not sure it's such a good idea to publicly get on the wrong side of— well, everyone. Jasnah seems to like the idea of causing objections and whispers and offense, though, so he's hesitant to argue. He's very dependent on her goodwill, after all.

"'Storm them'," he repeats, amused. It sounds so much milder to his ears than putain, merde, va te faire foutre. Almost childlike, although he doesn't dare say it. "That's charming." Especially coming from Jasnah's mouth.

"If you wanted to curse like that, you would say tempêtes." With a conceding cant of his head, he adds, "Although we usually use more... colorful words."

— Join her little social rebellion, Verso. Suffer the slings and arrows of public opinion, sure, but cement yourself as her right hand man. ~~Or left hand man, if you play your cards right~~.

"I'm listening."

You can't just promise more colourful words and not elaborate. There's plenty other oaths and profanities she could use, though most of them are similarly childish. They're just also incredibly religious.

Edited (the strikethrough didn't work!) 2025-12-22 23:26 (UTC)

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