blindwatchersees | The Madgod's Mailbox/Sending Stone

"Oh, I got days like that too, sir, don't worry," says Radar. "Sometimes it's nice to see people and sometimes you just wanna be alone with nobody to bother you, even if you like 'em. But -- yeah, okay, I can come over for tea, sure."

A pause.

"...Where do I go?"

“Well, you could stop by my parlor. You know, the building that looks as if it can’t make up its mind. Or if it’s later in the evening, you could stop by the little townhome with the fungus-covered logs and lavender in the window boxes.”

"Oh! Yeah, I know where that is." (Like Sheogorath just told him to look for the house with the purple shutters or something.) "Okay, yeah, I'll -- uh, I'll see you there."

He shoves his hat back into place. "Thanks again, sir, I really appreciate it," he adds before scurrying from the temple.

Not very long after, a slightly tentative knock sounds on Sheo's door.

The figure that opens the door doesn’t look like a god so much as a frail old man with a twinkle in his eyes.

“Radar, yes? Come on in, I’ve nearly finished boiling water for tea.”

"Yeah, that's me."

He flashes a nervy grin at Sheo as he steps inside. Mortanne looked pretty normal, too, he guesses, and Serranai would've looked completely normal without the horns or the goat legs, so... maybe he shouldn't be too surprised another god looks like a regular guy, too? Funny how he always expects gods to be bigger and instead they're just normal human size.

"It's nice to meet you in person so fast, sir. Um, can I help with anything?"

"Help? Help? Aren't you the one who was asking for help, and now you're wandering in here as if you're offering to do a god's dishes!" He sounds exasperated, almost angry, but then a huge smile plasters itself across his face.

"I like you! Come in, sit down, have some tea. If you like, you can help me scrub up afterwards, but I'm hardly going to demand that of a guest."

Oh, good, he's not gonna smite him! (Yet.) Radar lets out a brief, jittery laugh and says, "Oh I'm just used to helping out everywhere, sir -- it's what I do back home and kinda what I do here too. So it's no problem helping with the dishes after, honest."

But! That's after. Tea first. He takes a seat where he's directed, trying not to fidget too much. Should he take off his hat? Nah, he's left his hat on while talking to Serranai in person, it's probably okay if he leaves it on unless Sheogorath tells him not to.

Sheogorath comes over, carrying a rather chipped tea set on a tray. He sets it down in front of Radar, pouring him a cup, and then sitting back in his chair, legs crossed and looking for all the world like an old gentleman poet.

"Now. Tell me more about what's troubling you."

"Okay, um."

Radar picks up the tea, wrapping both hands around the cup without drinking from it quite yet.

"So... so like I said, I got real good ears. I always have ever since I was little. I could hear a cow gettin' mad all the way on the other side of the farm or rain coming in when it was twenty miles out. And some of the stuff I heard, well, it wasn't always with my ears, y'know? Sometimes it was more like -- " Just as he's done almost every time he's tried to explain it, Radar taps the back of his head. "Like it starts back here first and then makes it to my ears. I hear stuff that's gonna happen before it happens, or what people're gonna say before they say it. Or even if they never say it at all, if they just stick with thinking it, I can still hear everything."

He falters a little. Rotates the cup between his hands as he studies the surface of the tea.

"Anyway, it's never bothered me too bad. I'm good at knowing what I oughta pay attention to and what I shouldn't be hearing. But... sometimes it gets scrambled. Like if I'm real drunk, I get it all mixed up and everything's louder than it should be. Which is fine 'cause it's me doing it and not somebody else, but, but then you've got what happened at Dahlia's party, or what some of the other guys have been saying about Gnarly-thotep scrambling their brains, and -- and gee, I been worrying a lot."

He shoves his glasses further up his nose and meets Sheo's eyes. "If I'm just a receiver, then somebody else who's better at all this than me can mess with the dials like Mendel did. I don't want that to happen again."

"You're not the first person to come to me about something like this. Though that's as much as I can reveal."

He's keeping his promise to Erin, Divines help him not. The most unpredictable thing a mad god can do is be steadfast about a matter.

"Tell me, the name Radar... that means something, doesn't it? Is it a character from a book?"

Radar finally takes a sip of his tea while Sheo's talking, and hastily swallows as soon as the question arrives.

"Oh, no sir," he says, "it's a kind of machine where I'm from. It bounces radio waves off things so you can see 'em before they show up. My unit started calling me that three weeks after I got to Korea 'cause I could hear the choppers coming in before anybody else did. My, um, my real name's Walter."

"I see. Are you good with these machines?"

Radar shrugs and makes a noncommittal noise. "Not really. Honestly I don't got much call to use 'em -- we're a MASH unit, not combat, and even if we were I don't think they'd give us one without a whole lotta dealing. It's hard enough getting the stuff we do need."

"A... MASH unit? Now, you don't look like a bowl of porridge to me, so I'm assuming that means something else than what I'm thinking."

He breaks into a brief laugh.

"Yes, sir. It means Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. I'm the company clerk at the 4077th."

"Ah, so it's not just handsome Hawkeye. Your whole unit is made up of healers?"

...oh, jeez, please don't tell him Hawkeye's flirted with the old god guy who looks like his grandpa, too. Not that Radar would be surprised, but: jeez.

"Yessir," he says, a little quicker. "I mean we're not all doctors and nurses, like I said I'm the clerk, and we got a lot of other enlisted guys that help keep the place running too. But we're all trying to make sure the wounded get out of Korea alive."

“Which you do with your keen ears- the ones on the sides of your head, and the ones in the back of your brain.”

He pauses, thinking.

“Can you hear the sound of other people turning your knobs?”

"No." Radar sighs, and drinks a little more tea. "I just hear what happens after, when everything gets loud or I start seeing stuff that ain't there."

Maybe the hallucinations were a completely different thing Mendel did to him, but... it's also sort of what happened when he was near Edgar, wasn't it? Everything he was thinking got so loud that it was like Radar was right there on the train next to him.

"But you know the dials are there. Do you think, if we practiced a little, you could listen for the sound of someone turning the knobs. And then, perhaps, we could figure out a way to play a little joke on them?"

A pause.

And then Radar smiles -- with astonishing slyness, considering how jittery he's been the whole conversation -- and says, "Yeah, I bet we could figure that out."

He spent almost two years wrangling, tricking, and sneaking around the brass in Korea, and not always just because Hawkeye asked him to. Pulling one over on any gods who wanna mess with his head? Radar is in.

“Excellent! Oh, this is going to be fun!” he claps.

“Now, here’s what I think we’ll do. For as long as you’re able to, I’m going to take rounds of sneaking around your mind, and you’re going to try to catch me. We don’t need to do this all today. So long as you’re willing, we can keep having these lessons. And once you’re able to catch me a few times in a row, I can teach you the next part.”

“Oh, there is one little snag. Obliviously, having a mad god sneak around inside your skull has the potential to move all of your furniture half an inch to the left, so to speak. After our sessions, you may have your ears turned up so high that you start seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. A temporary side effect… hopefully.”

Hopefully. Radar's smile fades.

Because that's why he's asking for help in the first place, isn't it? He doesn't ever want his brain and his ears getting that messed up again. Before Radar arrived on Marrow Isle, he could always count on his senses to tell him the truth, even when they told him stuff nobody else thought was real. The idea that his ears or eyes might get screwed up permanent like that --

A cold lump forms in his stomach, and he has to take another gulp of tea to try and heat it up. It doesn't work too good.

Smaller, he asks, "Am I gonna know what's real and what's not? If that happens?"

“I don’t know. It differs, from person to person.”

He leans in.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Radar. I think you’re rather the pleasant sort, and I tend to like that more often than I don’t. But I’m a Daedric Prince. I don’t get what I want, I get what I am, and what I am is madness. With me, there will always be risks. But sometimes those risks are for things you would be much better with than without. Am I clear?”

...He's right. Isn't he? You take risks all the time if it'll mean something better. Maybe it's just easier to take those risks when it's somebody else's life in danger; maybe if this weren't gonna possibly destroy the only thing Radar truly likes about himself, it'd be easier still.

But sometimes, months after meeting him at Mr. Rambo's barbecue, Radar still catches himself humming the eerie song Nyarlathotep played in Dr. de Kuiper's head. He stops whenever he notices what he's doing, but not before his stomach does a nauseous swoop. I think if he was gonna notice me, he would've already, he said at the time. Maybe he has.

And if one of the demons or Nyarlathotep gets ahold of him and Radar can't protect himself, well, then his head's definitely gonna be screwed up permanently.

So he drains the last of the tea, sets his cup back on the table with a decisive clink, and says, steady as he can, "Yes, sir."

A deep breath.

"I'm ready."

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