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. )

She's accustomed to being sent to odd places with little warning or explanation. So when the Crown informs her that she's needed in Margate, Mrs Mina Harker raises an eyebrow then starts preparing to move. By the end of the day, she has her essentials packed in a traveling trunk. By the next day she's selected and secured a flat out of the stack of brochures that were brought to her with word of her relocation. She'll purchase most of her furniture when she arrives, actually less expensive and less of a hassle than shipping her existing furniture, as she's discovered; but a healthy selection of her books, lab, and her bed are supposed to arrive when she does.

Early on Wednesday evening, her hired driver carries two small cases up to the top floor flat while she manages the larger trunk in one hand and a large rectangular case in the other hand. She can smell the closeness of the ocean, only a block away, and the fresh paint in the flat. Tipping the driver, she dismisses him and puts the trunk in the larger of the bedrooms. She considers the other case then carries it to the other bedroom and leans it against the wall commenting while brusquely, "Stay out of trouble for now, if you please."

Mina runs one hand over her hair, still pinned neatly up. Her white shirt is clean, the black skirt unwrinkled, and the red scarf still neatly wrapped once around her throat. In her pocket is a torn page from one those regional magazines that publish places to eat, things to see, and people to admire. Then with a final glance at the address that's been circled and the attached map, she leaves her new residence and strides down the street, wondering just what is going on at this pub.

‘It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine actor when he became a specialist in crime.’ Watson on Holmes A Scandal in Bohemia

Wearing a rumpled brown suit, blue shirt and a blue and orange striped tie, Holmes inspected himself in the mirror. His hair was parted in the middle and slicked down and he’d put on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles (no prescription). He also hadn’t shaved that day and he looked appropriately seedy but not objectionable. If anyone noticed him, they’d remember the hair and the glasses. And the tie, which looked as if it had come from a novelty shop because it had. Such superficial accents were crucial to a disguise in that they could be easily removed and ones normal appearance restored with ease. Mindful of the precautions already in place, Holmes was merely going to the council meeting to observe. Slumping to conceal his height and armed with his laptop and one of those excessively large (and excessively overpriced!) coffees, he stepped out, confident that no one who didn’t know him wouldn’t recognise him.

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... )

“Of course it would be you,” Val says crabbily to the transparent figure. Crabbily because he's painfully aware of his smallness, of his still-faltering speech; also because on Val's personal list of favorite fellow-servants, Rigo is exactly two spaces from the bottom. “Couldn't be anyone else.”

Rigo stands with his arms folded and says nothing. He's a tall, dark man, lean and well-built with eyes that burn an uncanny deep red around diamond pupils. This is if one is lucky enough to see his eyes; he rarely makes eye contact, preferring usually a point in the vicinity of the left ear or shoulder of whoever he's speaking to.

Val crosses his chubby arms right back at him and at last Rigo sighs and speaks. “What happened to you, Val-san?”

“Got shrunk,” is the succinct answer. “So what? You're dead.”

Rigo nods, once, measuredly. And does not speak.

“This is gonna be a long month,” Val mourns softly, and hops off his bed to go tell Jack and Zel (and Amy, and Amelia) that they have yet more company.

He walks into this town as he's walked into a thousand thousand towns, cities, kingdoms and battlefields at a measured saunter, long strides eating up the ground below him. There's a broadsword the size of a sapling resting casually on the shoulder of a yellow trench coat that glares like a caution sign with grudge. He surveys the misty evening, the rows of houses with televisions flickering through windows and the now empty beach. He doesn't look impressed.

He keeps walking, the strolling sightseers parting before him like pedestrians ducking an ugly exchange of words on a sidewalk.

Nearly nine feet tall with a flame-red ponytail to his knees and a face like a jagged cliff, he should be stopping traffic. But only a few people glance at him more than once. People know him, not consciously, but for those who fight or soldier, he's a familiar presence. Even though he's just walked into Margate, he was already there. Chaos Dragon Gaav is everywhere. All that changes is if he lets you know it or not.

As he walks in even strides, he tastes the astral flavors of the city: the revolting joy of families on vacation, the more satisfying bitterness of the regular inhabitants who's town has been invaded, a pleasant rolling anger from a fighting couple. These tastes grow stronger as he makes his way through the town, mixing with resentment, hunger, drunkeness and friendship. It's the oddity of many species in one place that draws him toward the pub. Not to mention a few astral signatures that are familiar.

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.

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.

He didn’t like this joke. This game was not fun.

On first glance, you would look right over the boy. Just a child, nothing of consequence.
The boy, gangly and awkward as most 11 year olds, sat cross-legged on the sidewalk. On closer inspection one would see the very un-childlike look in his eyes, or the mix of small burns and shallow cuts lining his arms beneath the oversized t-shirt he wore. As if possibly he was not convinced he was real and kept testing the theory. Occasionally he would lift his head to watch the passerby in the street, strands of green dangling over his eyes, before his eyes returned to the ground and his hands to the box of matches he was currently lighting one by one. A pile of ash, burnt items, and spent matches lay in front of him. Every few moments, one small hand would reach up to touch the sides of his face, and the scars there, as if to assure him of their continued presence.

He was small, but anyone assuming he was also helpless would be startled to find themselves spilt from navel to nose in a matter of seconds.

Sherlock Holmes peered into the mirror, having to lean in close and squint a bit. His vision seemed cloudy. He ran a hand through thinning hair. “I should be grateful the whole hundred-six years weren’t dropped on me in one go,” he commented dryly to himself. He needed to go to the pub and see if he was the only one affected by this sudden onset of age. He turned, wincing as his joints protested the sudden movement. Sighing, Holmes made his was slowly downstairs, hanging onto the rail. It seemed chillier than it ought, and Holmes put on his coat and cap, having a dreadful time doing up the buttons. It appeared his fingers weren’t as nimble as they once were. Taking a cane from the stand, Holmes walked slowly of necessity, finding it amusingly ironic that he had on more than one occasion assumed the disguise of an old man. He’d gotten the pace wrong, he thought as he ambled his way along. Arriving at the pub, slightly breathless, Holmes struggled just a bit with the door and carefully negotiated the step up. He had to wait as his eyes adjusted to the dimness within. He scanned the patrons, scowling as he had to squint once more. “Ah,” Holmes murmured to himself, noting the sudden profusion of youngsters in the pub, a couple of whom he was able to identify. “Not an individualised phenomenon then.” He shuffled over to his usual table and sank gratefully into a seat.

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.

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? )

Admittedly, Val was slightly alarmed when Dora handed him Mary Poppins' name, given that they've never actually spoken, but he spends a great deal of time in the pub, coloring with Dora and getting under Xel's feet and stealing Iago's liqueurs and staring at people until they get nervous and go away, so he knows what kind of tea she likes.

He weaves his way through the pub lugging a wicker basket, one of the ones with a handle and a double lid, perfectly sized for a small picnic, lined in cheery white and purple plaid. Inside the basket can be found a blanket and dishes for two. Val has occupied the remaining space with black currant tea; a jar of currant preserves; currant-flavored mustard, syrup, and balsamic vinegar; a black currant-scented candle; and a box of homemade black currant coffee cakes.



The basket is dragged to Mary's chair and Val plops down to sit next to it, looking up eagerly.

It's not a pretty sight.

The Joker is happily humming a tune, bustling around the pub's kitchen in a frilly, lacy, white apron which is already covered in varios food-stuffs. He pauses and looks over to the corner, where Ivonka is bound and gagged. "How are we doing over there?" he asks, only getting a glare in response. "Well, if you hadn't been so, ah, difficult...you wouldn't be in this little, uh, situation." He taps her head with the wooden spoon he's holding. "I don't CARE if this is Merry Old England, I don't care if it's the beginnings of the Second Flood outside, I WANT MY THANKSGIVING."

Even if it means he's cooking it himself. He played with the turkey (it joined him in a waltz) more than he seasoned it, and it was very possibly going to be very under cooked or very overcooked by the time he was done with it. The stuffing had 3 kinds of bread products and any random food he could find to chop up and add. The potatoes, that was easy. If there was one thing he could do, it was SMASH, er, mash, potatoes. He loved them. Too many servings of Arkham's nasty instant-from-a-box-those-flakes-were-never-REAL-potatoes meant that he made sure to figure out how to make the real thing.

So the sides are about ready, the turkey is (hopefully) cooking, and now he's faced with the TRUE challenge. Pie. Because you can't have Thanksgiving without PIE. The prep table is covered in flour, and bowls of what may or may not be pie fillings. The Joker resumes stirring vigoursly at the bowl of, what he hopes, what will make the pie crust dough.

He pauses again, frowns at the mix, and holds out the bowl towards his captive. "Does this look right to you?" When all he gets is what sounds like muffled cursing, he sighs and rolls his eyes. "Now, now, that's not very helpful..." He licks his lips before shaking his head at her and leaning down close to her face. "You KNOW I can't eat all this by myself, so you might want to be more proactive with the advice, unless you WANT to be the reason I poison everyone."

He grins widely, and reaches to untie her gag. "But I warn you, you try anything, YOU'LL be the one being carved on the table."


Happy Turkey Day to all my American friends!

Val is very pleased with his pumpkin effort. Even though it didn't actually work to bite the design into the rind, it has a very nice effect now that Jack cautiously let him have a knife.



At first he sort of wished the fire were a different color, but since it's occurred to him that the pumpkin will perhaps catch alight, and will certainly eventually rot and shrivel, maybe that shade's all right after all. ^,^

Er. And this is, what exactly?

Sucking a bleeding thumb, Cesare glares over his shoulder. "Well, what does it look like?"

I don't know; you tell me. An ass on a pumpkin? Miquel straddles a chair, props his chin on the backrest.

"That's the Borgia bull, you git." Cesare squints. It does look a bit like an ass, true, but then carving the thing was a bitch. Really, as a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, he should be above such heathen rites. Ridiculous; positively ridiculous. Not to mention the smell of pumpkin everywhere. He may need a grappa soon.

Which, historically speaking, used to be a peaceful, grazing ox... at least while your grand-uncle was alive. No es verdad?

"An ox. You are fucking mental."

And you are starting to sound like a native, Miquel beams. You never used to be that thick. Venga, venga. Why not show me ( whether it's a bull or an ox? )

The Joker sat on the ground outside the pub, looking angry and frustrated. Several of his knives lay on a pile of orange goo & seeds. Despite his propensity for knives, and his normal skill with them, this damn Halloween Pumpkin thing seemed to be beyond him. He had hacked diligently at it for a while, cleaning out the guts (though not very well), attempting eyes, then a nose, then a smile. It had been the smile where he might have gotten carried away. He ended up slicing the pumpkin almost in half. Tried to fix it, made it worse. And then came the throwing.

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.