Britannia, NY

Andrea's wandering down main street, trying to decide whether to eat out or cook at home. She just finished up at the bakery, flour still dusting her clothes and under her fingernails. While she loves to cook, she still has unpacking to do, and she really should get to that, even if she just wants to curl up on her mattress and go to sleep.

On the other hand, she has no idea where, or even if, there's any place to eat here, aside from Cup o' Tom, but she just left there after working since nine. So, Andrea supposes that she has to cook for herself tonight, which means locating the supermarket. Or general store. Or whatever the equivalent was here in Britannia.

It's her lunch break, and Elaine is writing. Or attempting to do so, at least; her focus just isn't happening today.

That happens, when you're scared of sleeping.

She almost feels like it's a Jekyll and Hyde sort of deal, these days. For all Cecilia says she shouldn't fight it, she hates not knowing what she's done, or what she's capable of doing. At least Lexi's gone away; a small part of her is hurt, but most of her is relieved, because Lexi made it worse. (And, of course, Lexi had hurt her, here-and-now her, but that wasn't really something she wanted to be thinking about either.)

She'd thought by now she'd be long gone. But she can't quite seem to go. Instead, she's sitting on a bench about a half block away from the store, with a notebook open in her lap, blank.

James is, of course, not sleeping well, which turns out to be a problem. After waking up in a cold sweat for three nights running, he decides to cut out the middleman and just not go to bed.

Which explains what he's doing signed into assorted messaging services at this hour, while he makes a half-hearted attempt at writing a paper in between fruitless Google searches. He's a multitasker.

Elaine is taking Gary's advice. If for no other reason than she can feel something building; she can feel her other self getting impatient, and (if she's honest with herself) getting stronger.

So she heads to the library on her next day off. It can't hurt to ask, at least.

Because if Elaine's sure of anything, it's that something is going to change, and soon.

He's conscious of how it affects Mike when he has a bad day, so he's avoiding the apartment, he can't help it. The most obvious solution seems to be the one that always worked back in New York, to find someplace selling beer cheap and see how quick he can get drunk. He's aware, however, that that's not a terribly good idea, so he's trying to stave it off by taking a walk.

It's warmer than usual to-day, the snow, which is dirty by now, is starting to melt. Gaheris is a worn and tired-looking man with his jacket wrapped close around his body, walking against the light.

( Now I'm held hostage in my head/With every word you said/God, all those lessons in my past/I spit them out so fast/I see myself with you, I act so small/I see myself with you, I always crawl/So someone leave a raft for me/The water's getting deep/At the turn of the tide/I feel this part of me die/Am I washed on your shore and barely alive? )

The holidays have treated Gary fairly well. The therapist visits still go on weekly, and they still make him nervous and uncomfortable, but he's managing, and the medicine the psychiatrist prescribed keeps his nightmares away. For the most part he's been well enough to leave the house and do errands, with only one or two days where he had to stay in bed watching the light patterns on the wall, his heart to heavy for the rest of his body to move.

He's still waiting, like Patience on a monument, for Mike to wake up and remember; he doesn't say anything about it, he hasn't said a word about his dreams or his memories or the two halves of a self that are in him, which has kept things quiet.

The revolver is still in their room untouched, buried at the bottom of his sock drawer.

He doesn't really expect either of his models to come during the Twelfth Night stretch, so he's not very busy, his studio a little put by for the moment. There are some half-finished paintings, a multitude of sketches, and a table set up with a large wodge of clay on it; he's been experimenting with sculpture lately.

At the moment, though, he's at the kitchen table, doing sketches of himself and Mike in his workbook in soft, elegant charcoal lines.

Elaine dialed Clara's phone number, with shaky fingers. Please. God, please be there before I... She sat on the bare floor of her apartment, trying not to touch anything, trying not to breathe too hard.

She wondered if this was how Gary felt. She hoped not - for both their sakes.

Elaine wasn't stupid enough to go to the Britannia library for information about magic. Nor was she going to trust anything she found on the internet. But her dreams, more and more vivid of late, had led her to two conclusions.

Firstly, that not everyone had the talent for magic, even back when Arthur ruled. If she hadn't had any natural ability, no matter how carefully she'd prepared the spell, no matter how powerful the charm, nothing would have happened. But clearly, it had worked, the magic if not the larger plan.

Secondly, she had no idea if magic would work at all anymore. But on the other hand... her past self and Lancelot were both apparently back from the dead, so her threshold for skepticism had changed quite a bit in the past year.

She'd not been dishonest - she had spent a lot of time writing, when she wasn't at work or at Gary's. But she'd also been ordering certain used books to be shipped to her home, studying and meditating and thinking a great deal. She'd made a plan, carefully. She knew that, if this worked at all, it wasn't something to be taken lightly.

It was a candle she'd start with. Lighting it without striking a match. That seemed both satisfyingly symbolic and of a modest enough scale. She waited until after sundown, though well before midnight, not wanting to tempt fate. Then she began to try.

For a long while, there was nothing much. Just enough to convince her to keep trying.

Then at about a quarter til midnight... the words seemed to turn to molten as she spoken them, pouring out between her lips in a heavy stream. The hair on the back of her arms stood up, and she felt an odd buzzing at her temples and in her fingertips. Then she finished the spell, and the candle lit, like a switch flicking on.

But Elaine didn't see that, because at the same moment, blinding pain knocked her to the floor and out of consciousness.

The candle burned down to a stub on the plate she'd luckily placed it on. All the other lights in the apartment being out, her landlord assumed she'd gone to sleep.

The candle guttered, and eventually went out a bit before the sun rose.

Open to concerned friends or those who may have felt a relatively small but noticable magical disturbance within the city limits. Her phone is on, or the landlord is available at the house itself.

The novel isn't going well. A week or two ago, sure, his agent had been ecstatic and he'd been all set to redefine the genre and make his millions and build a goddamned castle right here with the money...

… and then a week or two had gone, and he'd not sat down and put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. Probably because he'd been too busy stalking Lexi...

… and then it's today and said agent is hounding him for the first chapter and all he's got thus far is a sonnet about some guy in red armour and it doesn't even rhyme properly.

Shit.

Normally the best way to break writer's block is to get drunk and end up tangled up in the nearest amenable warm body, but knowing his luck they'd turn out to be Malehaut or Guinevere or something and he'd be even more screwed than he is now, and he doesn't need a new obsession (not, he thinks, that anything would measure up to Lexi-Lance-whoever, but he's not quite naïve enough to believe that finding her's undone the habits of this lifetime in one magic moment). Instead he's trying this 'going for a walk and clearing your head' thing, kicking his way through the first casualties of autumn – no, wait, they call it Fall here, right? Crazy damn yanks – like a little kid in wellies and a souwester except that he's a grown man in faded red knock-off Converse and a Prose before Hos t-shirt. The words probably aren't hiding under the fallen leaves, but they look pretty as they tumble around.

It's Friday afternoon, and Mike is cautiously optimistic. The kids haven't been giving much trouble lately; Gary's been to the doctor and back again, and begun to loosen up a little on the subject; and any week in which Nathan minds his own business, he feels, can be counted as a net gain. So he's reasonably cheerful as he heads back to the apartment building, ankle deep in dead leaves. It's good walking weather.

Elaine is exhausted, from all the emotions she's been through in the last couple weeks, but she's finally accepted who she was. She isn't totally ready to accept that's who she is, but she's trying to work out a truce between her present and former selves.

And to that end, she's looking for the man who triggered it all - partially to apologize for flipping out at him, and partially to see if he still wants to draw her. But as she doesn't know how to ask after him, or where he lives, so she's kind of wandering around downtown Britannia, hoping fate will be on her side.

For once.

Elaine, oblivious to any bad timing the visit may suffer from, is heading toward the Round Table (the bakery, not the actual table, though the two are near one another). She told Lexi she would come, after all, and she intends to pursue this as far as the other woman will allow. Elaine feels like the two parts of her, past and present, are blurring, and the modern, younger part is a little worried. But she's not letting that drag her down just now. She'll ride the high of current events until she has no choice.

But for the first time in months, she's been looking happy pretty regularly.

( Ask every person if he's heard the story, and tell it loud and clear if he has not )


_{OOC: Drop-in sessions with the newly-illuminated Merlin, even if she is just a tad distracted and off-form. Get 'em while they're hot. She's anywhere you need her to be, except obviously at Of The Lake.}

Elaine made her way home around lunch time, and walked through the epic fight she'd been expecting calmly, ending it with the simple announcement that she was getting her own place. It was and wasn't about Lexi; suddenly, she knew she'd needed to do this for awhile, and working full time, she had enough money for a crappy little place, at least.

She's got her bag slung over one shoulder, the newspaper in the other with a few ads circled. As she walks, she calls Clara because the need to talk to someone is overwhelming. But despite everything... she looks happy.

( A knight of the Table Round should be invincible,/Suceed where a less fantastic man would fail./Climb a wall no one else can climb,/Cleave a dragon in record time,/Swim a moat in a coat of heavy iron mail./No matter the pain, he ought to be unwinceable,/Impossible deeds should be his daily fare./But where in the world/Is there in the world/A man so extraordinaire?/C'est moi! C'est moi, I'm forced to admit./'Tis I, I humbly reply./That mortal who/These marvels can do,/C'est moi, c'est moi, 'tis I. )

((OOC Note about setting: Nathan has become Donald Trump leased an empty restaurant area next door to Of the Lake because he had a dream, which seems to be his primary motivation for most things these days. Of course, it's him, so instead of just leaving it alone, he built some tables and refaced the cabinets, in some vague idea that someone was going to need it some day. So now Lexi has a bakery right next to Nathan and will be opening as soon as she figures out how to turn on the ovens. Soon everyone in Britannia will have a source for their chocolate fix needs, which, I know, is what you all were concerned about.

Right now, though, they're chillin in the diner, should anyone want to greet them. :D))

Adia is working in the store as usual--it's the last few weeks of tourist season. The kids are all going back to school, the first of the leaves are turning, but people are still trickling through looking for kitsch to remind them of how beautiful it is here.

She's humming Daniel's song again. She looks bored, the way she usually does when she's working, but part of her also seems happier, and her clothes are brighter.

There was only one logical conclusion of what to do after a successful concert with seven thousand attendance: find the nearest bar, and get drunk. Coming off a three month tour, with tonight being the last concert, Jasper felt that there was only one thing left to do.

The bar that he found was relatively empty, and the rest of his band had wandered off elsewhere. Jasper, due to the fact that he'd been drinking around singing and playing, didn't seem to notice that his guitar was still slung over his back. Why should he notice that when there was alcohol to be had? Besides, he liked sticking close to this guitar, it was his favorite.

Unfortunately for the other patrons of the bar, Jasper was not a quiet person. So far he'd restrained himself from climbing up onto the bar counter and giving everybody an impromptu show, but it was a close thing. He'd managed to remain near the bar tender instead, keeping up a steady stream of drinks, happily hanging off whoever was closest.

"Free drinks for whoever wants them," he announced cheerfully to the bar at large, throwing out his arms as if it were a grand statement. Which it was, thank you very much, Jasper felt. The whisky in his left hand barely avoided being spilled. Luck was on his side tonight!

Clara finished reading that darn book what feels like ages ago, but she has avoided seeking out Elaine to talk about it because she hasn't been able to think of what on earth she wants to say. But she knows she can't avoid the subject forever-- or at least, she feels fairly certain if she doesn't talk about it with somebody, she'll go crazy-- so she's headed over to Elaine's house at last (though she didn't call ahead, in a last-ditch hope that she wouldn't be home and she could continue to put it off), looking far more unhappy than such a beautiful summer day merits.

Mid-summer at the library, and things have, for the most part, been calm and quiet. Cecilia has helped a few of the high school students with college application information, and she's done her usual summertime routines of helping monitor the few public computer terminals (middle schoolers, mostly, in the afternoons) as well as her usual, more mundane, reference desk tasks.

Today, she's at the public desk, working on building a few orders for replacement books, keeping an eye on the section, and answering whatever questions come her way. She looks calm, accessible, and relatively well-rested.