Booth off to the side, booth off to the side - that was Richie’s mantra, as he headed past the entrance to the Barns property, toward the location of the farmer’s market. It was his first time at the place, and he tried to be diligent and look for Adam, just head straight there without getting sidetracked, but well....
He was Trashmouth Tozier but also ADHD Tozier. So that was a battle.
The flowers were a myriad of vibrant color, the petals striking; they were like rainbow freckles against so much green of the forest - he was definitely distracted by those, and by petting animals. Goats and cows and just - fluffballs that he guessed were sheep or whatever, but they wore smiles and it was so fucking cute. The whole thing was very wholesome, so he would have to come back on another day when he wasn’t vibrating from nervous energy about being fucking psychic.
After wandering the city and learning more about the layout and also the public transportation system, and hitting up a few magic shops (magic shops, like real ones, holy shit) - he just couldn’t connect with anything he really liked, in terms of dispersing residual psychic energy voodoohoodoo. So imagine his surprise when he returned to his apartment and found his arcade token on the bedside table; immediately, he attached it to a chain and rigged up a pendulum, so hopefully that would do. It was tucked away when he went to the farmer’s market, ceasing with petting this goat, baaaaah, to head to Adam’s booth.
“Hey,” he greeted, slipping his hands into the front pocket of his hoodie - not exactly t-shirt weather, it was too cool and crisp for that. “I’ve come to be your psychic pupil.”
Readings at the market were hit or miss. Adam had plenty of regulars who wanted the same thing told different ways, skeptics who found fault in every card yet tipped him high for the effort, cautious but interested patrons who listened intently while he explained a simple spread. Most days Adam spent time giving scarily accurate advice while Cabeswater whispered in the back of his mind. It felt like cheating, if Adam didn't already know he was a psychic without the forest.
But every so often today, between readings, he'd look around for Richie. His mind was struggling to supply an older version to where the younger one took up space. He wasn't sure what to expect—Adam had never taught anyone before when it came to all of his psychicness, but Persephone thought he was ready, clearly. And with Cabeswater buzzing around inside him, Adam knew inherently he was too.
He was shuffling his cards after a particularly gloomy reading from a woman wanting to know if her relationship with a merman would last, when Cabeswater called to him, Respice, amicus meus. Adam looked up and there was Richie standing in front of him, shoving his hands into his pockets.
This was weird. But Adam had told Richie to get used to weird shit.
"Uh, yeah. Hi. Sit," Adam said gesturing to the chair across from him. He moved his tip jar and sign off the table, and pushed his deck off to the side. "Did you find an item? What did it end up being? I have to admit, I'm curious."
Adam was pretty young, but he was also so serious - he reminded Richie a little of Stanley, who was there to provide a dry sarcastic comment whenever he could slip one in, the friend who was just kind of rolling his eyes in the background because he was surrounded by a bunch of lovable dumbasses. It made Richie miss him even more, and maybe he understood why Stan thought he had to do what he did - but it wasn’t a goddamn heroic thing to do, and Richie was still pissed about it. That, and a general sadness hung over him - a deeper sadness than when you dropped your ice cream cone on the sidewalk without getting a chance to eat it. Grieving was an experience.
But he’d deal with that some other time. He was trying to get his shit together, and that included figuring out some psychic stuff and learning from someone who obviously wasn’t such a dumpster fire.
“Yeah, I did,’ Richie confirmed, sitting in the chair. He fished into his jeans pocket for the would-be pendulum, grabbing it by the chain and setting it on the table. “Will this work? It’s - my arcade token. It just showed up here.” Silver, with NO CASH VALUE stamped onto the back. Didn’t look like much, but it was personal to him. He thought he’d lost it in the failboat ritual in the sewers, but apparently he hadn’t. It was kind of nice to see it again, despite the cacophony of strange feelings associated with the arcade - a place he once felt safe in, but feeling that way had been destroyed that one summer along with the rest of any childhood innocence.
Adam was attentive as Richie sat down. He couldn't sense auras in the way Persephone or Maura did. But Cabeswater was so attuned to the world that Adam was getting a direct line into the people around him, and right now Richie was a mess of things—sadness, for one; an eagerness to learn another. Adam didn't think these two things were mutually exclusive, but he knew when to press on one and not the other.
He eyed the token that Richie placed on the table. Then back to Richie. Then back to the token. Adam picked it up letting it dangle over the compass printed on the center of the table cloth. Cabeswater murmured something in overlapping Latin in his deaf ear, agreeing with Adam’s assessment.
"Yeah, this will work. Here—" Adam was grabbing for Richie's hand now, placing the makeshift pendulum into it, and positioning it over the circle so it could swing appropriately.
"This is just to help you focus the energy. You need to be able to do that first before you can do bigger things, like scrying. When there is too much energy inside of you, and it has nowhere to go? That's how you get blindsided—see, too much." Adam nodded to the pendulum, where it wasn't swinging at all, the chain was taut, the coin stiff on the end, as if magnetized below.
Well, to be honest, Richie was a little concerned about the energy inside of him as a result of nearly being burned up in the Deadlights. Maybe it was good, maybe it was bad, maybe it was neutral since Pennywise was now gone - but the last thing he wanted was to see too much in these visions, or go tumbling off into the abyss; the future, fate, whatever - it didn’t seem so simple as to be like the cut of a blade. Instead it was like what happened when paths formed, when a hammer cracked ice. It was easy to get lost in.
“Okay, right - that focus thing,” he said, holding the pendulum in the way Adam had positioned his hand - he squinted, watching it, and for once in his life maybe he could just be still and do what he needed to do.
So he tried to focus, tried to push any residual energy out of him - he pulled it up all throughout his body, and maybe normally it would have just exploded out of his skull or something but the pendulum was here and it swung one way and then the next. He hadn’t touched it so it kind of freaked him out a little, and he dropped the thing.
“Shit, sorry,” he apologized, picking it back up. “...was that it?”
Adam's whole face lit up, pleased in the same way when he solved a problem or understood a particularly difficult translation, when the pendulum swung. "Holy shit, yeah," Adam breathed out, quick to reposition the pendulum over the center in Richie's hand when he picked it back up again. Adam had barely noticed Richie dropping it, he was so fascinated. And maybe, a small tiny part, a little terrified at how abrupt the energy was leaking out of Richie to move the token.
Cabeswater hummed again, another confirmation that Adam absolutely should be concerned. He felt that sliver of protectiveness slide down his back, and it took a strong mental effort to tell Cabeswater to step back, for just a moment.
"It's going to swing all over the place because you're pushing out a lot of loose energy. Pendulums, or any divination objects are there to communicate with your—" Adam made a hand gesture, to indicate psychicness. "Like with tarot, you ask questions you need guidance with. Same with this, but it's a little more objective."
Adam touched each point of the compass on the cloth as he spoke. "Yes, north. No, south. Searching, east. No answer, west. Like a magic eight ball." Adam sat back. "Try again, and ask a question."
Well, at least he hadn’t fucked it up. Even if the thought of a divination object communicating with his psychicness was odd as hell. Still, he was going to assume that pushing out loose energy was a good thing. “Better out than in, I always say,” he quipped, and sorry Adam, your prized pupil made fart jokes sometimes.
Right, okay, serious business again. He tried to think of a question to ask, holding the pendulum above the compass. “Are my finances doomed?” was his inquiry, because he guessed he needed guidance about that. He had a few auditions lined up but didn’t want to rely on money magically appearing in his bank account (which - was that a thing here? It was probably a thing here).
He focused, and the energy was like waves - just kind of throbbing, rippling, a strong current that felt like air blowing up the sleeve of his hoodie toward his hand; he wasn’t sure what he looked like (constipated, most likely) but he was trying really hard to pick up on some kind of answer - something, anything. Though he managed to keep ahold of the pendulum, and it did this weirdo dance before swinging definitively toward the east. And then north. And back east. Cool.
“That’s reassuring,” Richie snorted. “Is it always that frustrating?”
Adam gave Richie a really now? look about the fart joke, before focusing on the pendulum. He was a little surprised that anyone would ask about their finances first—and that they weren't him. Usually it was about personal relationships or laborious sacrifices (or the "when am I going to die?" question, which Adam would always remind customers that his readings accurate but not specific.)
The indecisiveness of the swing only meant that perhaps the question wasn't phrased right. Doomed was a hard quantifier, but the good news was that the answer wasn't simply yes. "It means things are changing for you, in the financial department. You're on the right path, and not completely doomed."
He sighed a little and nodded. "But yeah, always. If you do it enough, eventually you'll be able to cut through the bullshit of vague and come to a conclusion faster, but it's not infallible. Sometimes you get shit wrong. Sometimes you get blindsided by visions." Adam paused, before turning the token on the chain, centering it again. "When you knew they started happening, did you really just wait for them to happen?"
“Um, well - yeah?” Richie pushed his glasses up, since they tended to slip down his nose when he was looking down at something, or concentrating so hard he just about burst a blood vessel. Vaguely, his head throbbed - but he was new at this so he imagined the response from Yoda Adam would be SUCK IT UP AND TAKE A TYLENOL, which he was totally cool with. “I didn’t really know much about it. Or about what was going on with me - getting pulled into the Deadlights actually didn’t happen that long ago anyway, and then I ended up here, so.”
But when he went to see Persephone it was basically to confirm that he was afflicted with the same Deadlights thing that Beverly had endured. Now his ass was here. In this seat - he was trying to get a handle on it before it like, consumed him. He imagined that would kind of suck.
“Beverly didn’t know what was happening either, after we left Derry - our memories sort of faded, because of the magic of the town. So she had all these visions but couldn’t connect them to anyone she knew,” he explained. Or tried to. “I just wanted to - maybe not deal with all that. Learn how to...actually be a psychic.”
Adam's expression grew very serious as Richie spoke. The events he was describing were sad, painful, and completely unlike the things he knew of Bev and Richie before.
"You're not going to have to deal with all of that, not here," Adam said, in that factual, assertive way he often did. Adam had his own self-esteem problems but there was a certain confidence that being wholly into psychic learning gave him. He had bonded himself to an ancient sentient forest—Adam was sure he could literally do anything at this point if he put his mind to it.
"If you can't connect your visions together, there are plenty of people, including myself that can and will help you. But it won't do you any good to wait for answers. You have to go seek them out yourself. I do that. I pull a card every day, I meditate. If something is going to happen in the future, if that's what your visions are showing you, then you can't waste time waiting."
Adam nodded to the pendulum. "I wasn't kidding about that by the way. You'll probably have to use it every day for a while, just asking simple questions to show you're in control rather than it controlling you. Channelling your focus and all that Deadlight stuff inside of you. And then I can—maybe, Persephone and I can show you how to scry."
Richie was pretty sure that meditating was not going to be for him - he just didn’t couldn’t clear his mind enough to prevent it from pinging in a thousand different directions; still, maybe someone here knew a different method of meditation besides sitting down and listening to a CD recording of whale sounds or whatever. He could promise, at the very least, that he’d use the pendulum everyday - practice at it, asking those simple questions. Until he could move to the next step of this whole thing.
He already felt better, having a plan. Some kind of instruction, anyway, to ensure that this didn’t grab him by the balls and make his life a living hell.
There was a lot he had to figure out, but he would do it; he just had to try to be patient. “I swear I’ll go for a pendulum question everyday,” he said, clasping the token in his hand. “I wanna be able to like, do that. Connect visions together, make sense of them, I dunno. Something useful. Anything else I need to know for now?”
"Different questions. Harder questions as you go on. Things you don't want answered consume more energy than asking if it's going to rain. It will start to feel like it's giving you the answers you need than you asking and hoping for one. That's kind of the feeling you want as you start searching out your visions. Small scale, then big."
Adam was being so hypocritical, which might have been to blame for his hesitation to start Richie on something stronger than pendulum divination. Adam had thrown his body into a circle to sacrifice himself to Cabeswater. At least when he did it the second time in Vallo, he had control, focus, experience. He wanted Richie to not make his same mistakes despite being just as desperate for the answers as Adam had been when he was first exposed to his psychic abilities.
"I'd invest in some ibuprofen for headaches. You'll get those a lot," Adam suggested. His attention was back on the token. "You could start asking yes or no questions about your Macarena skeletons, too. It's going to feel tedious, but—" Adam nodded encouragingly for Richie to set up the pendulum again. "Be a real specific asshole about your yes and no questions so it can't trip you up. Something like, 'will I see the dancing skeletons from my vision soon?'"
He guessed that made sense - complicated questions took more energy than simpler questions. And Richie did have a lot of complicated questions, but even he knew not to jump right into bullshit like ‘is Eddie okay?’ because it would just lead to a lot of heartburn, most likey. “Okay,” he agreed, picking up the pendulum and holding it above the compass; he steeled himself. “If there’s anything I can be, it’s an asshole of any type.” Although maybe that wasn’t entirely true - he was called Trashmouth for a reason but didn’t actually like hurting people’s feelings; he projected the image that he didn’t care, but he really did care and that sucked sometimes.
Just because you were a good person didn’t mean the world was going to be kind to you - that was a really shitty lesson for him to learn, for anyone to learn.
Dancing skeletons. Dancing fucking skeletons. “Will I see the dancing skeletons from my vision within...the next week?” he asked, closing his eyes and trying to focus - and not be like ooh, squirrel about the fact that there were adorable sheeps in the vicinity. He thought he could at least start to get used to the energy that buzzed through him, the ebb and flow of it - and when he opened his eyes they slitted into a squint again, the pendulum swinging north.
Ah-ha.
“There, I did it, it did the thing,” he was so excited about it he dropped the coin again. Oops.
"You'd be surprised at how many people would never admit being an asshole when they are one," Adam said, off-handedly watching Richie position the pendulum again. He folded his arms on the table, and rested his chin on them watching the pendulum calibrate to answer the question about dancing fucking skeletons—which, admittedly, had Adam worried if it wasn't just a sign for a restaurant.
Cabeswater was tuning in now, Adam's pupils blown wide as the pendulum swung north. There was a current here, psychic energy charging other psychic energy, and Adam blindly reached for the top card of his deck, flipping it as Richie dropped the token. Ace of Cups, a positive card. A yes.
Adam sat back up abruptly. His first thought was this isn't good, but he didn't want to diminish the fact that Richie had inherently connected his vision to an answer. It was the whole point of this little lesson, a step in the direction of gaining control. "You okay? Do you think you can ask another question? I can, but it's better coming from the source."
“I’m good,” Richie promised, despite how he did feel a bit of an ache in his head - if ‘bit of an ache’ counted as somebody plunging a screwdriver into his brain and wiggling it around in there. Whatever, he’d press on. “I can ask another question.”
But what to ask was the question - he wanted to keep it simple as instructed, but also not leave it open-ended for an essay answer that would just end up in the token having a seizure. Direct, to the point, and no wiggle room - just a yes or no answer. So he did keep it simple, and also stupid - because honestly, dancing skeletons were kind of stupid. Like something from a cartoon.
“Will there be dancing ghosts with the dancing skeletons?” he asked, turning his focus to the pendulum - more of him concentrating, more of his head pounding, but there was a jolt he felt within him, and extending outward. More like a current, not just him buzzing, but passing back and forth between them.
The pendulum swung east. So at least he got an answer but also - what the shit. “I don’t even know,” he huffed. “I mean does this sound - normal? For here?”
"That's not—alright," Adam said, sighing. He couldn't stop the swing of the pendulum, or the answer it gave. And Adam did tell Richie to ask easy questions, but Adam's choice of another question was something more critical and serious. Not if there were skeletons and ghosts. But concern crossed his face when the token went toward the east. That meant the rest of the week open to possibilities, that it was probably skeletons and something else. Adam should have expected Vallo to not leave them alone this close to Samhain.
He rubbed at the bridge of his nose, feeling his own headache coming on. But Cabeswater gave a small mental tap to his temples, keenly aware of what Adam's worry brought: stress, anxiety, over-analyzing everything. Cabeswater wanted to catch it in its tracks until Ronan could take up the mantle. "It is absolutely normal. For here. You're going to get used to that really quick, probably quicker than getting your visions under control. I would like to think anything dancing is harmless though, but..."
After the bunnies, Adam couldn't make those assumptions.
Adam started folding up the cloth on his table. "Here, borrow this. Until you can get your own to ask questions with. It said your finances weren't doomed, so I don't expect it to be a long loan."
Richie chuckled, a rueful grin on his face as he took the folded up cloth. “Not doomed, so yeah, hopefully by our next lesson I’ll have my own,” he said. In fact, he planned to head to the Magic Shop very soon and pick one up for himself. Normally, he wasn’t fond of homework but he actually was sort of into it now - it helped to have steps to check off, or like, assignments. Short term and long term goals - it all didn’t make him feel as if he was a fucking failure, drifting in the wind.
“I’ll let you get back to farmer’s market stuff? Thanks again, for meeting with me.” He’d probably scratch under the chin of one of those sheeps on his way out. Fluffy animals usually helped to take the edge off.
You don't need to thank me was Adam's default response. He often undermined his contributions in order to convince himself he needed to do more. But he paused as he brought his tarot cards back in front of him, cutting the deck a few times. Back to market stuff it was. "You're welcome, Richie," Adam said, with a bit of a commiserating smile. He knew how hard starting out could be, and it took a lot from a person to ask for help. "I'm here every Tuesday and Thursday if you need to get in touch."
He almost let Richie go, but there was that psychic nudge from Cabeswater again, and Adam reached across the table, as if to say wait. "And the sheep are good, but you should also see the alpacas."