The Bear and Barnacle

The below is an IM continuation (of sorts) from Ed's arrival post, wherein Ed is kindly offered a place to sleep by Jack and (in a slightly less enthusiastic manner) Zelgadis. Players involved in the IM convo will, in all hopes, be able to continue the thread this way without so much reliance on coordinated schedules. :D Even so, others can feel free to comment and/or threadcrash about Ed's living situation, or whatever strikes their fancy!


Jack: *pushes open the Pub door and pulls his jacket around him* It's not a long walk ( -- just a few blocks. )

The first thing he feels - ( ouch )

Spike pulled the last of his clothes out of the small closet and stuffed them in his duffel bag. Now that he has the necessities taken care of...refrigerator, microwave, bed, TV (yeah, that is a necessity), he's ready to officially move into his new place.

It couldn't have been planned better. Basement flat, dark, private. He's got the back bedroom blacked out already, but figures heavy curtains will do in the front room. Just in case, sometimes, someone visiting wants the sunlight.

He figures Holmes probably suspects something is up, he's been there less and less, but he still isn't sure what to say. Thank you and goodbye are both things he's not big on.

Gaav stares at his sister with his arms folded over his chest and radiates Not Amused. Dolphin moves a pawn in a direction that pawns are not generally allowed to move, she seems to be playing both sides, or possibly more as there seem to be three queens and four colors. "Well?" he says flatly.

Dolphin looks up and does a pretty good impression of an excited little girl seeing her favorite uncle, though the bouncing this results in inside her top is less little-girlish and pushes the chessboard carelessly aside so the pieces topple. "Brother! You look different. Did you cut your hair?"

( Read more... )

Minerva's memory has yet to fail her, but she's been prepared for it to do so since about eighteen. The habit of keeping extensive, diaristic notes on her research and activities came from her mother, an apothecary renowned for the efficacy of her precisely-prepared remedies. In compact black books Minerva logs her research activities, notes down interesting page numbers from the books she's using, jots questions for later consideration. She also tends to mark things like visits, and interesting weather patterns, and her time of the month back when it mattered, and any interesting newspaper headlines.

Lately the books have been all about Zelgadis Grayweir. There are notes of other things, mind -- "Explosion in Severus' lab, am assured was to be expected," and "Unnaturally hot," and "Rain of fish -- for God's sake," and "Am being haunted by the ghost of Ginny Weasley, with passenger. Am assured of current sanity, but not of its continuance."

( But rarely do three days pass ... )

Val has been four for rather more than half a year when he decides enough is enough. Each year he ages is one year closer to adulthood ... or as close as he ever got, anyway. Two hundred is maybe not quite adult for a dragon.

First he quells lurking fears by having Jack measure his height and wingspan to ensure that he actually is growing. Lacking any real idea of when he was born the first time beyond "when it was warm," he chooses Midsummer Day to serve as his birthday. In the incredibly convoluted calendar of this locale that falls on the twenty-first of June.

What he didn't expect was Dora's resistance to the idea.

"I'm going to grow up," he said at last, stubbornly, to she who had been five over two birthdays now. "If you want to stay older then you have to grow up too." He added generously: "I'll share my birthday with you this year." At last she agreed.

So a compromise cake was baked, lemon with pink icing on one side and chocolate on the other. The pink side has six blue candles and the chocolate side has five. The whole vast, sticky confection, grimly but perfectly iced by Ivonka, sits proudly in the center of the bar at the Pub.

Val thinks this is an incredibly bizarre way to mark the turning of age, but he's not about to argue with tradition ... or cake.

Zel has managed fairly well to keep himself in practice but he knows that after years of fighting humans, trolls, berserkers, mazoku (including Val and his nearly successful bringing about of the Apocalypse) that he needs more. Jack's too inexperienced and too worried about hurting him to be more than casual practice. And he grows bored defending himself against his own spelled fireballs, rocks, etc. He knows Iago is skilled with a sword- probably not nearly as great as Dora would claim- but the Venetian is too much of an asshole for Zelgadis not to wish to actually injure him and he really doesn't want to have to deal with the fall out of that one. He's seen a few things Xellos is capable of.

So he finally figures "what the hell" and pins a note to the noticeboard in the pub:

Experienced swordsman seeks equal or better for rigorous sparring.
Contact Zelgadis Grayweir
23 Northdown Way

They haven't left the house since the morning they woke up years younger -- Jack about twelve, Zelgadis about five. And apart from everything else -- the interruption to work, to their schedules, to, well, their sex life -- Jack doesn't think this whole hiding-from-the-world thing is healthy.

He's sure Zel will stop panicking at the notion eventually ...

But the days pass, and even the threat of running out of coffee doesn't seem sufficient to lure him out of the shelter of home, so at last Jack resorts to desperate measures.

He goes into the lounge, where Zel is playing his guitar by laying it flat on the ground so he can reach the frets with one hand and pluck the strings with the other. Funny how they seem to have kept the age difference between them even though the ages themselves have changed. "Come on," Jack says.

Zel gives him that narrow-eyed, infinitely suspicious look of his -- the one that makes his ears flatten almost indetectably. "Where?"

At this point Jack picks him up bodily (by some weird magic Jack has little hope of understanding, Zel's stone body only seems heavy when it's forcibly placed somewhere he doesn't want to be -- which is fortunate for the furniture. Jack's arms don't seem to qualify as not-wanting-to-be). Zel flails a little and squeaks but he doesn't struggle particularly hard.

"The Pub," Jack tells him, checks that he has his wallet and keys and goes out the front door.

Val vaguely remembers crawling last night into Jack and Zel's bed, wanting the body heat (or so he would insist). He was expecting to be unceremoniously put out when his guardians decided they wanted their privacy back. This, though ... it's definitely unceremonious to suddenly have a tiny body struggling under his, but not at all expected.

( A YM thread. In which Zel is very small, Jack is very embarrassed, and Val is very wicked. )

Once he's fed his pet rat, Val dresses in Zelgadis's clothes (the jeans are too tight, but they're wearable, and the zippered sweatshirt fits) and walks down to the pub. He imagines Dora will have grown up just as he has. And everyone else ... well, this he ought to see.

Val weaves across the lawn at a dead run, dodging patches of sunlight that would make him more visible to aerial attackers. The disguised hole in the hedge is ahead; he reaches it, drops flat, folds his wings tight, and crawls through at the cost of a few feathers that were coming out anyway (he's almost too big for the hole now; it was a perfect fit when he discovered it). On the other side, he skulks along the hedge, surveying the area before he leaves cover and makes a mad dash to the neighbors' front porch. He wedges his arm through the hole and then there's a storm of barking -- damn it, he's been seen! He seizes the prize, tears his arm out of the opening and flees. No stealth this time -- he has to get to safety.

Back on his own turf, he pauses to take deep, calming breaths. The next stage of the mission is not so easy.

He sneaks around the corner of the house, slowly, carefully, trying to avoid the view of the neighbor's windows. Two enemies are within; a girl his own apparent age, and her mother. Either could chance to look out the window at any time. Stealth is of the essence.

Creeping along in the shadow of the front stoop, he watches for any sign of motion, then attacks. Adrenaline making his heart race, he drops back to the shadow, but he can't run this time; he must sneak back, darting low from tree to bush to flowerbed to hedge, sticking to the shade, moving only when he's sure he's unseen.

Mission accomplished, he plops down on the driveway and reviews his loot. From the family on the right, three flimsy envelopes of junk mail; from the elderly couple on the left, what looks like a greeting card and the real prize, their water bill.

He takes the contents of the neighbors' letter boxes inside and climbs on a chair to leave them in the coffee grounds, where they're sure to be found soon.

Stealing the post shows how low he's sunk, for a former priest of War, but it gives him something to do.

She accepts the bit of cake with thanks when Ivonka pokes it onto her table, only looking up to be polite, then dives back into her reading. She's surrounded by three painful-looing books, a half-drunk cup of tea, and a thick diary of notes, heavily scrawled with marginal cross-references and thickly drawn arrows, abloom with question marks. Occasionally she turns a page or two; less frequently, she inks her quill and makes an abbreviated entry.

As she nibbles the brownie, however, the page-turns grow less frequent, and she goes from book to notes more often, as though she's having trouble focusing.

After about ten minutes, she reaches up and pulls a couple of bobby pins from her hair, shaking it out so it falls down her back. It's still thick and heavy and surprisingly long, though the black has been heavily ribboned with grey for fifteen years now. She also appears to have been reading the same paragraph for quite a while now.

Soon she gives up and sits back in her chair, taking a sip from her teacup and grimacing to find it stone cold, finding herself a little more able, at the moment, to focus on people-watching than her endless frustrating research.

Jack walks through the pub, back to the toilets, and comes back out a few minutes later down to just his boxer-briefs simply because he can and he hasn't the slightest bit of shame about it. He tosses out a "Maybe don't look, Dora," before he strolls casually over to the board to pin up a paper as if people in underwear do that all the time.

"Bananas are good," he says. "And so's underwear, and so's what underwear covers up. Does that make it like a banana peel? Anyway, here's an easy recipe because bananas are good."

Baked Bananas
1 banana, ripe or not, either works but it's a good way to use them up

For sauce:
1/4 teaspoon cornstarch
1 tablespoon brown sugar (white works, too)
2 tablespoons water
Big ol' shake of ground nutmeg, cinnamon, or allspice, or any combination
Optional spoon of butter or margarine for more flavor

Scale as needed for more bananas.

1. Preheat oven to 175°C/350°F.
2. In a saucepan over medium-high heat, mix together cornstarch and sugar. Gradually stir in water. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir in spice (and butter/margarine if using). You can also heat it in the microwave just until boiling.
3. Place peeled banana(s) in a casserole dish. Drizzle sauce over the bananas. You might need to turn them over some to get them nice and covered.
4. Bake in the preheated oven for 8-10 minutes and serve warm.

I really don't recommend trying to skip the oven and cook this in the microwave. You'll get a totally different texture on the banana and it's almost creepy— the outside stays about the same but the inside cooks up from within and the banana splits open. The outside still holds it together, so it turns into a sort of dissected banana. Not a very appetizing presentation.

Seventy years ago, or seven thousand in the future, there’s no way to tell, this happened; now, it's a memory in a boy’s mind, too large a memory for him to cope with …

“What happens to us when we die?” Val asked his master once, idly because just then he was most focused on avoiding it, not speculating about it. ( Are mazoku reborn from the Mother like humans? )

On one of the benches overlooking the beach, black-clad arm fallen and long, white fingers brushing the sand, a man lies comatose. Gaunt, framed by nearly eighteenth-century clothes and sea-salted black hair, his face would look twenties-young (and his style the gothic of an over-meticulous modern histrionic) if it weren’t so haggardly drawn, the shadows under the eyes so deep and dark. It’s a striking incongruity, although, when he first appeared, he looked a seventy with little strange about it. The forbidding, heavy-clothed, over-buttoned outfit hangs on him rather, although it isn’t cut for a heavy man.

He has a nearly foot-long piece of pale wood holstered to one thigh--smoothly carved, well-worn, and just slightly rosy, with a few remaining flecks of walnut-stain lingering in its few deep groves--and a collection of intriguing little textured vials to the other. A few men with more respect for value and their own curiosity than dignity or possession have, since his unceremonious appearance on the bench, tried to handle or even make off with one or the other. All ran away quickly in pain and astonishment, clutching hideously blistered hands. One tried gloves, to no avail, and one paused to land a retributive backhanded blow.

The only relief of blackness on him are the odd and varied stains on his bony hands, and the spectacularly attractive mess of blood, bruised swelling, and bone-white cravat at his throat. He looks like a vampire victim, were the vampire diseased and the body stirred to a froth of outraged rejection. From the twin wounds, rather large to have been from a human mouth, emerge a slow, exhausted trickle of almost clear fluid. His skin is cold, his heart beats, perhaps, once a minute, and his breath, while regular and continuous, is so slowly even as to be invisible too all but the most interested observer. Peeking from under the cravat is the edge of a note, its handwriting crabbed, annoyed, and painstakingly legible.

( To_you_who_have_chosen_to_concern_yourself )

And, upside down at the bottom of the paper, in a quite different hand, less irritated than morose,

“Riddle
Though in theory I’m always behind you,
Your shadow, to prop and remind you,
And you may, as you roam,
Wish to make me your home,
Do not dwell on me much: I may blind you.”

And, folded into a hidden pocket, just showing since the departure of the disgruntled tough, is a sheet of heavy paper, so full of linen fiber as to feel nearly cloth, much and madly scribbled on.

---

“Leave me alone,” he says. “Sod off, I’m dead,” he says. “Reports of my demise have been grievously understated,” he says. “Of course I’m sure, stop wittering,” he snaps. Unreliable bratstard. Wait till he realizes he started waking up on his birthday =.=

Holmes sits in his no-longer-spotless kitchen. "Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms."

FWUMP

ought to be the approximate sound made by a small body (say, four-or-five-years-sized) falling from a fair height and faceplanting semiconsciously into the soil.

In this case, it's more like

CRASH
*squeal*
crackle
snap!
thud

because there is a large rose trellis in the way.

He's still for a moment after he hits the ground, shocked -- not so much by the impact as by the presence of any ground to hit -- then he begins thrashing wildly. The winged boy claws his way half-upright. Golden eyes glimmer out at the world from behind a veil of dark feathers, a tangle of briars.

Not quite aware of what has happened, only knowing that what was supposed to be destroyed is still there, still obstinately existent, the last Ancient Dragon has arrived in Margate.

He stays tremblingly quiet for a few long seconds, staring through the ruined shrubbery at the grey and drizzling sky, then continues to fight the thorns caught in his black-feathered wings.

Coffee. Definitely coffee. Which requires going to the kitchen- He still hasn't quite given in to the urge to have a coffee pot in the bedroom.

Zelgadis rolls over in bed, carefully extracting himself from the sleeping form previously half on top of him. He sits up and looks around for the soft ivory trousers he wears and, finding them folded on the dresser, pulls them carefully on over the irregular grey pebbles marring his blue stone skin. Then he pulls on a grey shirt laying next to it. He's long since lost the habit of running a hand over his hair after dressing- nothing's going to move the wires.

( Morning brew-ha-ha. )

The gift shop, and the flat above it, had been vacant and shuttered for years.
Small, neglected, and oddly unnoticed in the busy seaside resort. No one even noticed as he had crept up the back staircase time and again.

( Home Sweet Home )

Pardon our dust, gentle sirs and good ladies, new friends and old, but we assure you that the sounds of your voices are more welcome than your boot-prints.

To begin with, let each of you order up his drink and meal! Tonight, the chef takes requests, and your fancy is limited only by what we find in our pantry. However, all who have recipes must bring them to him, and so we shall set our menu when the time comes.

Come, then, have a seat! Here by the bar I shall keep you amused with talk and good drink, and there by the fire the room is warm, and at every table you shall find good company, and should you choose a place by the half-height walls of the kitchen you may speak with Xellos as he cooks. Come, your order?

For this very simple first topic, everyone can comment to this post with their food and drink choice. Thread-crashing is highly encouraged as otherwise there's not much in the way of interesting conversation to be had. Although Iago can and has discoursed at extreme length on polenta, but whether or not that qualifies for interesting depends on the listener's profession.

Welcome to the Bear and Barnacle!

Oh, and he means it about the recipes.