ℓιηα (ιηνєяѕє) ωιѕ∂σм (dragonspooker) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2014-12-02 20:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, elizabeth comstock, lina inverse |
Who: Elizabeth Comstock, Lina Inverse
What: Confessions of things they feel and the things they've done wrong, Part 1.
When: Before Lina left.
Where: Lina and Rogue's house
Rating/Warnings: Language, mentions of murder.
Status: Complete!
Well, as much as Lina loved having Elizabeth over, she really wished it were for better circumstances. That night had been rough, and surely Booker’s phone had been blasted with texts about everything. It was his debt and others were getting punished for it - but lucky for him, those women were more than capable of holding their own.
Her room had been something she kept private from others for awhile. Really, she kept it locked most of the time (she didn’t need a key anyway, it was all arranged by simple spellwork) to avoid people looking at her wall. The wall that she had scribbled all kinds of things on, from sigils to chaos words. It all mostly made sense to her, but it really looked like her entire knowledge of sorcery had been plastered on it. All of it right now, however, was useless.
She had been able to cast what she could of a recovery spell on her nose to repair it some, but that was it. Those bruises had definitely ripened into lovely purple and blue colors but once she could cast a damn spell full-force, she’d take her time and cast recovery again to fix herself up. What she would give for Amelia or Sylphiel to be around and work those priestess-y powers on her right now. Christ.
Aside from all that, Lina was preparing for their new roomie - even if it might be temporary - by actually picking up her shit and clearing the mess in her closet. The mattress had been inflated and covered with blankets and pillows, and there was actually enough space for Elizabeth to put her clothes and any other necessities without it feeling cluttered. Her only concern was Guess - the new addition of the household - would sink her claws into the mattress, but she was mostly outside bathing in the sunlight like most lazy fat cats did, or she was around Lina, rubbing her face against her hands for attention.
Elizabeth said she wouldn’t be long, but Lina still worried and pestered the girl with another concerned text of ‘Where are you? Making sure you didn’t get jumped.’
It'd taken longer than Elizabeth had thought it would to collect the things she'd needed. Probably, in a few days, she'd go home and pick her personal items out of the wreckage of her now twice-wrecked Condo, but for the moment she'd felt better out and about in public places. Places where it was less likely she'd be hurt. Places where it was less liely that she would hurt someone else. Because that was very much a possibility, now. Elizabeth knew what she was capable of when she was pressed, and it terrified her.
There was also the matter of arranging either transportation or portals. At the moment, she wasn't sure how much she trusted the public transportation she liked to use. Taking trips back and forth through tears in the fabric of reality was probably a major abuse of her powers - it was certainly exhausting - but at least she knew what she was risking that way.
She was making one final trip through a store (the grocery store, this time) when she got the text. Elizabeth laughed and tapped out a quick Almost there, just paying.
Not two minutes later, a diamond shaped orb of light appeared in Lina's back yard, and Elizabeth stepped through it carrying a few bags. From the looks of it, she'd gone on a pretty good spree, because there were more bags behind her. In whatever pocket universe she'd been keeping them in.
"Oof! Next time, I'm taking a taxi."
It was the sound of the door opening that Lina had been expecting - not the faint voice of someone familiar in a different direction. Curious, she peeked her head out the door and down the stairs to see if anyone had come in the front, and there was nothing.
Then, just to satisfy a crazy suspicion, she went back into her bedroom and peered out the window facing the backyard - and behold, a wild Elizabeth appeared!
With a grunt, Lina pushed the window open and stuck her head out, impishly grinning. “That portal trick must save a crapload on gas and bus fees.” She examined her haul of bags with a raised eyebrow, then tilted her head to the side. “So this is the ‘few things’ you were out getting, huh? Damn. I’ll come down and help.”
The voice startled Elizabeth at first, and she looked around for a few moments before realising that it was Lina calling down to her from the second story. She looked up and grinned, "Sometimes I still use it, but today I didn't really trust a bus. And it turns out I had a lot to carry, anyway. But most of it is to stock your cupboards! So that I don't eat you out of house and home, like I did last time."
There were a few bags of clothing and toiletries, though, and it was clear that Elizabeth was planning on staying there for a while. As long as they'd let her or she found another place, probably. She grabbed a few bags of groceries and pulled out some of Lina's favorite snacks, "And I stocked up on some essentials, too! Thanks, I think I might need the help. I'm not sure how long I can hold the portal open."
Lina almost felt the need to tell Elizabeth she really wasn’t the one emptying the cupboards and pantry, but that would be admitting to herself that she still ate like a ‘baby hippo’ (one of Elizabeth’s first phrases of endearment when they were first getting to know each other, she was sure), so she kept her mouth shut in that aspect.
In less than a minute, Lina met her downstairs and outside and helped gather a few bags to lighten up her load. “You’re really getting a hang of that thing, aren’t you?” She admired the phenomenon as long as it was going - because the entire concept really was fascinating to her, in some nerdy kind of way. “You went from unleashing tornados indoors to using them for groceries. I couldn’t be more proud.”
A pause.
“You can still unleash tornadoes from those things, right? Because that can still be a handy thing if you keep it controlled.”
"Oh I can still unleash tornadoes from it whenever I want. All I have to do is open a portal to an area that's got one going and keep it open while the winds rip through. It's too handy a trick not to keep practice of." Elizabeth assured her as she yanked the last of the groceries through. She looked a bit bashful in the face of Lina's praise. The opinion of the sorceress meant a lot to her.
"I just don't want to use it for things like that unless I have to. I'm finding other ways to fight that don't involve damaging things indoors, too... I got a lot of practice with it while I was away. I had to, I couldn't let myself keep running around without it under control."
There were reasons behind that, bigger ones than just tornadoing her condo, but she didn't mention them as she strung some bags on her arms to carry them inside.
A brow rose from suspicion. “When you were away? Like, when you were in Paris? Visiting your mom?” Unless there was another time Elizabeth was ‘away’ that she couldn’t remember - or some other time that Lina didn’t know about, who knew. But to continue, Lina trudged inside and set the bags on the kitchen countertop to help put away all the food-kind of things first.
Food was important, okay.
Elizabeth hauled in the rest of the groceries, and started pulling out the ones that needed to be kept cold. There were a few pints of ice cream (she figured they'd need them, even if Rogue had sworn off the stuff), and some flavored creamers along with various other snacks and food items.
If there was anything about Lina's question that upset her, it didn't show on her face. She nodded her head, "While I was in Paris, yes. The manor out in the countryside has a lot of open land, it was a good place to brush up on my skills."
She added, as she pulled out some drink mixes, "There's some liquor in one of these bags. I thought we could mix up some girly fizzy drinks, it's a little different than what we usually do."
Well, her explanation seemed to make sense, and while Lina’s gut whispered that’s kinda weird, yo, she shrugged it off and examined Elizabeth’s haul. Icecream - yes! It still had that icy layer of frost from the store’s freezer on the outside, and she pressed it against the minor swelling on her forehead.
“This is gonna taste as amazing as it feels,” Lina sighed, content. A contentment surely replaced by a look of surprise (amused surprise, really) at the mention of liquor. Well, Elizabeth definitely wasn’t Mother Theresa and she sure had seen the girl drink before (she was Booker’s daughter, after all), but she didn’t really remember a time where she would actively suggest a night of drinks. Unless her head got hit hard enough where her memories got scrambled like eggs, who knew.
“Sounds good. We’ll take everything else upstairs. I made some room for you, by the way. And - don’t mind the cat.” Guess was somewhere inside. Or maybe outside, pouncing on an unsuspecting mouse to surprise Lina with in the morning. That’s what love was all about. “She’s around here. Sort of.” The redhead glanced around, nose crinkled, and then shrugged when the little feline continued to be presently MIA. When things were gathered and others put away, Lina led her upstairs to a surprisingly neat room. Normal, except for the wall of crazed magic scribble.
Cats weren't a bad thing at all, as far as Elizabeth was concerned. She only looked slightly disappointed that the feline didn't make an appearance so that she could admire it and give it some attention. But then, she figured, cats never wanted to be around when you wanted to give them attention. Lina's new friend would probably come out of the woodwork when people least expected.
She had a few bags in her hands as she entered the room, and they slowly dropped out of her hands as she stared at the wall with its scribbles on it, "Are you... code breaking? What have you got going on here?"
Lina had mixed feelings about the damn wall. Part of her wanted to grab paint and a roller and cover it up, act like it was never there. But that hurt was a knee-jerk reaction to the recent developments, and after a deep breath, she knew she still needed it up. Just in case.
“It’s magic,” she said, but her short explanation was vague enough and Lina felt the need to clarify with a wince. “Well, the wall itself isn’t magic. I was trying to work on a spell. A really, really complicated one. Hence the crazy.” Her heart knotted, and she felt her throat constrict uncomfortably. She set everything down, scratched the back of her head and approached her creation. “It was supposed to be a mix - black magic, white magic, and spirit magic.”
"Black magic?" Elizabeth asked, while arching a brow. She didn't like the sound of that. Everything she'd read about magic told her that the black kind was the hardest kind to deal with. But then, Lina's world was probably different, "I suppose that's the magic you already did, then? The destructive kind, I mean. White magic sounds like healing and protection, but I'm not sure how it works for you. Black always sounded like the bad kind. Spirit magic, too? What were you trying to DO, exactly?"
She looked over the wall as she spoke, as if she could somehow make some kind of sense of it all if she stared at it long enough.
Black magic was the hardest category in her world, that similarity held true. Not many wanted to call from it anyway considering the source it called from, which meant the monster race. And the stronger the spell was, the stranger the chaos words became, almost to the point that casting each spell felt like making a pact to the devil himself. I pledge myself to darkness, and all that.
Her question was going to eventually lead to what Lina wanted to tell her in the first place - that she was leaving, for an undisclosed amount of time, because of this. She stepped back until she felt the bed behind her and plopped down with a heavy sigh. “Xelloss,” she answered, as if saying his name would clarify everything. It wouldn’t; not for Elizabeth, anyway. Lina didn’t talk much about the whole problem originally and it wasn’t because she didn’t trust her friends - it’s just something she hated talking about. And when it came to crap that actually hurt, she had always been fairly private about it. “Turns out he’s from my dreams, too. Which I knew about. He shows up as a weird fella that calls himself the ‘trickster priest,’ so that was shady enough. Turns out he’s a monster. And in the world I dream about, the monster race is the source of black magic. They’re beings that reside on the astral plane, but if they’re powerful, they can appear on this plane looking like regular humans. They feed off negative energy, their sole purpose is to bring the world back to the source of chaos, and....they can’t feel any positive emotion. Especially love.”
It was hilarious. Kind of. The Xelloss that was a monster wasn’t anyone to her in that life. Their relationship had been based off the fact that they were mutually useful to one another and as long as one of the higher-ranking monsters didn’t give the order to kill her, they were as civil as can be (unless he did something annoying, which was often). In that life, there was Gourry. Her dream-self was a stupid and naive prude about her relationship with him, but there was definitely something there.
Here, she didn’t have Gourry. All she knew was Xelloss (and the other ‘monsters’), and that’s who she cared about. That’s who she fell for. Weird.
“Long story short, Xelloss started dreaming. And he started turning. Into a monster.” Lina bit the part of her lip that hadn’t been split, even though the flesh was still tender, and looked down at her hands as if picking her nails was the most interesting task in the world. “So...this was my attempt to stop that. Except he disappeared.”
It was obvious to Elizabeth as Lina began to speak that it was a long story, and she took up her own position on the bed so that she could listen comfortably. Her eyes never left the wall, though. She was still trying to puzzle it out, and she thought it would be easier for Lina to speak if she wasn't staring at her.
It was a lot to take in; Some of it, Elizabeth had suspected. She'd thought, before, that Xelloss might have had some place in her friend's heart and that was clearly true. The rest would have sounded crazy to anyone who didn't live here in Orange County, maybe, but Elizabeth was certain she'd heard it all at this point. She nodded her head slowly, "I see... And if he becomes the monster, not only is he a threat to himself and others, but he won't be able to love you anymore, either. But now he's gone? I suppose he didn't... leave a note, did he? Are you worried that he became the monster and ran away? Did he know you were trying to save him?"
“No note, but he did leave me our cat. We picked her up as a stray, back in the day.” Lina shrugged, glancing back up at the wall from her nails. That meant something, she knew. Guess was a walking secret she’d yet to decipher. “But he knew - he knew what I was doing. I had help. And we were working on it. Tried it once, it failed, but there were other routes to go.” And knowing that Garv had human in him - a sublord from Shabranigdo, no less - had given her hope. Granted, it was the doing of the Aqualord, but it still meant that it was possible and she wasn’t just grasping at straws.
Down the center of the wall was the monster hierarchy, all symbols and circles and connected lines. Lina’s eyes looked at the very top - the symbol that represented the Lord of Nightmares - and she slowly surveyed the rest of it.
“I don’t know why he left.” She bit down on her lip, nibbling harshly this time (she sounded calm, but her nerves were shot), and before she knew it she tore the very little thin skin that started to heal and soon it bled without much notice. She was too fixated on the chart, like she was still putting together a puzzle. “I don’t know if he turned completely. I don’t know if it’s because of his grandfather - I don’t know. But I’m going to find out. I’m gonna track the son of a bitch down and hopefully figure this out for good. Which means, that while I’m gone on this adventure, my room is all yours. I’m leaving in a couple days.”
The symbols down the center looked like the ancient symbols of ceremonial magic and various religions that existed here in this world. Elizabeth didn't know what to make of them, though they were obviously important. She stared at them when Lina did, then shook her head slightly.
There was no way she'd make sense of it anyway, not without a cypher, and in this case the cypher was Lina's dreamworld. She drew her attention away from the wall and back towards Lina as the dribble of blood caught the corner of her eye, and frowned, "You're bleeding, hold on..."
Elizabeth ran to the bathroom to fetch something to wash it up with. It wasn't until she was running back with a wet face cloth in her hands that gravity of her friend's words hit her. She'd never been kicked in the chest, but she thought that's what it must feel like. Her voice sounded uncharacteristically small when she opened her mouth, "You're... leaving?"