Liv Moore. Pun intended. (theworkingdead) wrote in welcomethreads, @ 2015-05-17 19:02:00 |
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Entry tags: | gretel, hansel |
Who: Hansel and Liv, then later Gretel
What: Hansel arrives in Storybrooke
Where: The park.
When: Sat. May 16, afternoon.
Rating: Language.
Somehow, in the space of just a few seconds, Hansel had gone from the dense forests of a small town outside Austria hunting for a cavern that might be a witch’s lair, to an open, less dank forest with live birds in the air. Confusing, really. There hadn’t been any talk of a witch that could alter space, and he and Gretel were unusually careful about the mushrooms or growth they used for food when needed.
It definitely was not a mushroom.
And while it might be a form of magic, that didn’t explain the weird explanation nor the ‘kit’ he was given. Wandering only led to more questions, especially as Gretel was nowhere to be found -probably with Edward, right? She’d been with Edward, and that would be logical. But in which case, where the hell was Ben?
What the fuck was going on?
Liv, in the meantime, was having herself a nice lunch out in the open air- a suggestion made by more than one Winchester brother, that locking herself in the morgue was only going to compound her antisocial tendencies. Plus, it was nice out. Kids were playing in the park, and this bench she’d claimed wasn’t anywhere near a TV. Ever since watching herself on the thing two weeks ago, she’d avoided them- all of them, in the off chance she might catch an errant commercial or something.
The tupperware container balanced on her knee was a mix of Ramen, snow peas, and the minced frontal lobe of a man that’d succumbed to liver cancer earlier last week. Fairly normal personality, save for the hatred of the color yellow and strange obsession with Christmas. At least she managed to resist the urge to wear the Cosby sweater, and her lab coat was hanging up back at the morgue. Using a pair of chop sticks to saturate a lump of motor-center in Sriracha, Liv glanced up to enjoy the kids playing Freeze Tag across the grass, but someone else off to the side was much more attention-grabbing. Namely the plethora of old leather, big gun, and extremely confused look on his face.
“Oh boy..” Liv felt the ghostly impression of a spike in blood pressure, which had to be all in her head because she didn’t have blood pressure anymore. New guy- definitely a new guy, and not someone who looked all that at ease with his new surroundings. Quickly snapping her lunch shut and stuffing it in her bag, the white-haired medical examiner trotted her way toward him.
“Hey-uh... Hi.” Liv smiled hopefully, though it felt more awkward. “Let me guess… You were somewhere else, now you’re here, with no clue how, right?”
Honestly it was the sound of children that stopped him from raising his gun. Now, normally he’d be all for keeping it up; strange place, strange people, no Gretel, no clue. All of those things added up to a host of possibilities that were not good in any way. They also didn’t make sense. At all.
But there wouldn’t be children running around and laughing in the middle of the day, with absolutely no care in the world, that just didn’t happen in towns where a witch was believed to live. Even if their tastes didn’t run towards children (which was largely uncommon) there was still the hesitation to allow anyone young out of sight.
The white girl -and he meant that very literally, because she was white like a fresh linen shirt- gave an awkward attempt at a smile, which Hansel knew very well because it felt awkward on his end too, before explaining to him exactly what he already knew.
“Right.” A glance over at the group of kids playing just had Hansel glancing back, because no one was being remotely helpful about this at all. “The other one said something about a story?” Which, okay, he’d been called a lunatic before himself, and everyone believed that lunatics were meant to be avoided, and sometimes it wasn’t really lunacy but awareness of more than people suspected but this was absolute lunacy. “Is there an actual explanation coming soon? And where the hell is my sister?”
Story? Story… Liv racked her brain for a match to what he was talking about, folding her lips together in habit before the answer cracked her confusion. “Oh- Storybrooke. That’s the name of this town,” she explained. Or, tried to explain, because she wasn’t exactly a veteran of this either. “I don’t know what the other said, but I’m told it’s pretty uniform- the whole ‘greeting’ schpiel. The same thing happened to me like a month ago.”
After the words came out, she realized it really wasn’t much of an explanation at all. Not like she actually had one that would be satisfying. None of them were ever satisfying to her, either. “Um.” Time for the direct approach? “I don’t know who your sister is, but if she’s here, I can show you how to find her… As for the rest, it’s...kind of a hard thing to explain.” Totally chickened out on the direct approach. “What’s uh… what’s your name?”
This town sounded ridiculous. Like worse than that one south of Augsburgh with the plaited everything. Apparently the woman that had no colour to her at all -was that possible? Was it normal? Maybe something to be questioned because how did someone not have some colour to their skin? At the very least the blood should’ve coloured something- either way, she didn’t know a lot more than he’d already been told.
Which wasn’t a lot at all either.
“If? If she’s here?” He didn’t like the vagueness of that. Where he went Gretel went and where Gretel went he went. That was how they functioned, it was how they worked. With Edward and Ben joining their group, it hadn’t exactly changed. Just the distance between where one was and the other stayed had extended a little. “It’s Hansel.” Sometimes people knew who they were, sometimes they didn’t. It wasn’t so much their names that people knew sometimes, just what they did.
Before Liv knew it, her eyebrows bounced up- way up.
“Hansel, like… Hansel and Gretel?” The second she’d said it, she realized how much of a Captain Obvious she probably sounded like. Unless this Hansel had nothing to do with any Gretel, but her gut seriously doubted that. “Is your sister about...yay tall, long brown hair?” Liv added a hand gesture indicating a good five or six inches above her head. There was a reason why people in her family occasionally called her ‘Teacup’.
Okay, maybe more people knew their names than not, but the description of Gretel on top of the surprise really didn’t lead Hansel to believe that there was another Gretel somewhere. “Yes.” It seemed more likely that the ‘if’ was no longer an issue. “You’ve seen her then?”
More important than where he was and how he got there was where Gretel was, first and foremost. But Hansel had always put that before anything else. It didn’t matter where he was or what was going on, it only matter that he knew where his sister was and they were in it together.
Liv nodded, a small slightly less awkward half-smile tugging at her lips, because yay! She could actually be useful. “Yeah, I… I mean, once. A few days ago, but she was here then, at least.” There’d been a very brief introduction from Dean at Sam’s birthday not-party, but how often did you meet someone named ‘Gretel’ nowadays? It stuck out in her mind, especially now with her other half standing right in front of her. “I don’t know where she is right now, but like I said, I can help you figure that out. My name’s Liv, by the way.”
The wording was making him a little wary. How exactly could Liv -probably better to use a name than just ‘woman who resembles a corpse’ even in his own head- know how to reach Gretel without knowing where she was? And the concept of her being here then, like there was a chance that had changed somehow.
“How could you know that?” Was this another of those ‘hello you are in Storybrooke, here’s your kit, answer the Sheriff’s question’ things? “What is this place?”
"Um, well..." Liv winced at herself for the potential complete failure this could turn out to be if she couldn't choose her words correctly, and leave the poor (heavily armed) guy more confused than before. "You have the PDA the nun gave you?"
The blank, slightly incredulous look he pegged her with answered that question. Liv cleared her throat. New approach needed. "Okay... humor me. What year do you think it is?"
What year did he think it was? Setting aside her strange appearance, her colloquialisms (what in the name of the hells was a PDA?) and the fact that apparently he could be in one place and then in another entirely different place -which he was absolutely sure was not Austria, or Germany at all to be honest- she was making things even more confusing.
“1734.” But it was probably easier to answer that question than the one about the other thing, the PDA thing. No, really, what was a PDA? And when did the nun give it to him. All she gave him was a kit. He didn’t even know what a kit was.
"Oh. Oh boy. Um." Liv suddenly had a strong urge to call Dean and let him handle this, but she'd taken this big bite. Try not to choke. "See, this town is apparently surrounded by magic portals that... well, kidnap people from different times and places." She left off the fictional TV and movie stuff for now, probably wisely. "The current year is 2015... which should at least explain a lot about the look of this place. The nun gave you a bunch of stuff to help you out... in it is something called a PDA. It's um-" Comparable eighteenth century gadgets were a tall order. Especially on the fly. "It's technology, helps you talk to others in the town, it has a map, too. Here, this is mine." She dug her device out of her sidebag and activated it to show him.
She was insane.
Completely insane to the point that Hansel wondered if shooting her just because she was clearly beyond help would technically be all that bad. Would it? Really? She was almost corpse like anyway. Of course then she pulled the thing from her little pouch and Hansel really wished he’d walked in the opposite direction.
“That’s the… PDA.” Was she just unsure of what a pad was and decided the letters when in a different order? Hansel wasn’t the most literate of people, sure. He wasn’t the most tolerant or patient either and he was fast approaching his cut off point. “And that will tell me where Gretel is?” He didn’t care how insane this woman was, he wanted to know where his sister was.
"Well, we can call her and she'll be able to tell you where she is herself," Liv said, making sure to show him how and where her fingers moved over the screen. She typed his sister's name into the search tab, and her picture instantly popped up. "That her?" She asked.
"What in the..." He'd hit his head. He'd been going through a forest and hit his head and now he was unconscious and hallucinating or something. The illustration on the little square was bright and coloured and almost like someone had put Gretel's face in there.
"How is she..." He'd seen a lot of witchcraft in his life, that was what happened when you hunted for a living. This was so much more than this. "What is this magic?" It couldn't be dark, it wouldn't have affected them so. It didn't feel like a threat, but it sure as hell didn't feel natural.
“Not magic- definitely not magic,” Liv wasn’t sure if she was assuring him or herself, but combining the whole weirdness of this place plus nanotechnology that she knew absolutely jack about wasn’t going to help the situation. “It’s just technology. It’s ...a kind of machine made up of millions of tiny machines that work together.”
That was how a microchip worked, right?
“Anyway, you touch this green button to ‘call’ her. Wherever she is, her PDA will ring.” The zombie did so, causing the animations on the screen to indicate at least something was happening. “You can also write messages to her, or to anyone in the town using the--”
“...this is new.” Gretel’s voice chimed in clear as day and obviously a bit confused behind her still picture. “What the hell did I do…”
Hansel was absolutely lost in all this, not really making sense of anything Liv actually said but waiting for the moment that he’d either wake up hanging from a tree or Gretel would slap him awake with witch guts all over them.
But when Gretel’s voice came out of the little box he really wasn’t sure if his imagination was this warped and twisted anyway. “Gretel?” Because it was her, her image and her voice and, what did Liv say about the machines?
“She’s not in there, right?” Because that would be a leap far too far, even for Hansel.
"Hansel?!" Gretel’s voice had a new urgency to it, one Liv hoped wouldn't suddenly trigger the guy.
"Hi, yeah this is Liv... I met you at Sam's party. I guess I found your brother...." She piped in quick to Hansel. "No, she's not in the tablet."
"Where are you? I'll come get you."
"We're at the park."
Okay so, she found him? Was he a lost pet? Wait, was he? If Gretel was here, and apparently met the corpse-girl at a party -what the hell was this place?- then that meant Gretel wasn’t just in the woods with him hunting, right?
“Who’s Sam?” It seemed like any time Hansel almost got an answer, he had five more questions. Like where was Maine anyway? And how did he and Gretel get here at different times when he knew where she was not one hour ago -she was in the tavern they’d taken up at, planning their hunt and telling him off for teasing Ben- but apparently she’d been here long enough to meet these people, know their names and go to a party. What the actual fuck?
“Nothing here is making any sense.” All he had was a bigger headache and more questions. Although at least ‘Where is Gretel’ was getting answered.
“I can’t argue with you there,” Liv told him with a huff, putting her tablet back in her bag. “All I can tell you is you’ll get used to it- I promise.” Actually… as soon as she said it, she wished she hadn’t. How could she possibly promise something like that to someone? Especially as out of place as he was. Liv cleared her throat and moved on. “Sam is… he’s... a guy here.”
Way to go with the details, Liv.
“Someone who was pulled away from wherever he came from and ended up here, like the rest of us. He’s… I think his brother called themselves ‘Hunters’.” She looked at him in a once-over kind of way, thinking the description seemed to fit him, too. Then again, who knew with this place. “Apparently he was the first to find Gretel when she first showed up.”