in the case: ren & adrian. WHO: Ren Solitaire & Adrian March WHEN: Shortly following this. WHERE: Ren's apartment, and then inside the case. SUMMARY: These two disasters are back together again. WARNINGS: With these two honestly who knows? I'll note/lock if necessary.
It would have been obvious which was the trunk he was looking for even had it not been, well, obvious. The case itself looked like an antique steamer trunk, which wasn't what Ren had been expecting from Adrian's description, but the magic was something he could feel. For a smaller man moving a steamer trunk alone might have proved a challenge, but Ren was a long way from smaller and he had magical abilities on top of that. He lifted it up as carefully as he could, minimizing any movement to the contents of the case as he moved it. He had no idea how it worked. Mentally thinking of Adrian being IN the case was something that was almost impossible to really wrap his head around. Did the magic somehow make Adrian smaller? Would it make him smaller? He'd not really asked Newt about that, and this wasn't entirely like anything - that he could tell anyway - that he knew from his Uncle. This seemed different and unique.
The closest thing maybe would be some sort of alternate dimension, where you moved between the two. That seemed like a possibility. There'd been that one type in the Alps, and they'd been in some temple that Ren was pretty certain he'd never find again, and he was also certain they'd moved between normal world and something entirely else, but his Uncle had been maddeningly lacking in clarity of what it was they were doing, and that had been typical - par for the course with his Uncle - but no less frustrating for its familiarity. But that was then, and this was now, and regardless, he was carrying a trunk that was smaller than Adrian, and presumably would have a cottage and room for the two of them to spread out inside.
Arriving at his place meant that he could put away the questions about how the case worked in concept, and simply focus on moving it into his apartment. Ren sat it down carefully and was quiet as he reached for the key, turned it, and then glancing around him, this time used his magical abilities to slide the case forward, following behind it through the door. Once inside he locked the front door behind him and then he pushed the coffee table out further so that he could put the trunk in front of the sofa.
He really didn't know if he could help and part of him felt like an imposter. He'd said he could do something, but what had he ever really been able to accomplish with magic? But the other part of him, the part that was sheer determination, was noting that if he didn't succeed then this case became Adrian's world, probably and that Ren needed to succeed. And this might be a better cage than the Facility - no, it was better than the Facility - but a prison was still a prison.
Ren stared at it for a moment and then reached to write to Adrian. He assumed that if he opened the case he'd be able to get into it somehow but he wasn't really sure how, and it just looked really small. While waiting, he went to the kitchen for a beer and then came back without one, because if they were going to do work, he should be mentally focused on this task. After a moment he flipped open the lock, and after another heartbeats hesitation, he pulled the lid open and looked down into it and then pulled his head back and stared at the poster across from him.
Pulling his attention back, he looked down again. It was like looking down into a cellar, a ladder that went down into somewhere… it was a little hard to see from where he was. Which, he supposed meant it was time to check it out. He stood up, leaned over to put a hand down into it, testing from above the ladder, but it seemed to be solid and the case itself didn't move, and so he stared for a couple of heartbeats more and then turned around to put a foot in, down onto one of the ladder rungs.
"Here goes fucking nothing," he murmured to himself as he stepped down.
The ladder held, and he was going down into a shed, and the apartment was disappearing above him, and it was fucking with his mind just a little bit that there should have been a bottom to this case, and that presumably there was, but it was not where he thought it should be. Like intellectually he'd talked to Newt and he understood, but actually experiencing it was kind of a whole other thing.
He stepped down into what seemed to be some sort of shed, a nearby wood framed opening promised daylight and possibly woods. He'd asked for woods, so that made sense. The question at the forefront of his mind was where Adrian was because it wasn't this particular place. He glanced up at the top of the ladder that he'd just climbed down, and then, first checking that he had his phone on him in case he'd need to contact Newt to come rescue them for some reason, he used his magic to flip the lid closed. He then headed for the woods, and told himself to stop thinking about the fact that this was all in a trunk. What it was, was a safe place for Adrian, recreated at least partially from Ren's own memories of that night they'd worked with magic in the woods, as some place that the two of them could work together, letting things lose, and not worrying about the repercussions.
Stepping out into the woods he glanced around. Trees, and the sound of a stream nearby, that when he walked towards it was just over a bit of a raise in the ground, and on the other side of that was the water, and he could see a cottage, which felt like the place he might find Adrian. Ren headed towards it, and as he approached, he decided to call: "Adrian?" His voice felt loud to him in the otherwise quiet of the space, but when he reached out, he was reasonably certain that he was there, and his heartbeat quickened from the sheer relief of having Adrian back where he could see him.