Raistlin Majere of the Red Robes (hourglass_mage) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2015-12-30 17:49:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, raistlin majere, tasslehoff burrfoot |
Who: Raistlin and Tas
What: Bouncy Castles R Us!
Where: Tas and Raistlin's apartment
When: Sometime before Christmas
Rating/Warnings: Low/None
Status: Complete!
Tas was one of those annoying people who, as soon as they woke up, they were wide awake. There was no groggy rolling around, pulling the blankets up, hoping to steal a couple more minutes of sleep. Tas had alway hated sleeping - imagine all the cool things he could do if he didn’t have to sleep.
His hatred of sleep had been quelled somewhat with the coming of the Dreams. Now, he was going on adventures when he slept and when he was awake, which really seemed like the best possible compromise for his body constantly forcing him to sleep.
He’d just had a really interesting dream, about ghosts and Rastlin using his magic so they could talk to them through him, and then being led through the woods by centaurs, and he was really excited to tell Raistlin all about it. Even though Raistlin had actually been there. Maybe Raistlin had had the same dream and they could discuss how cool his magic was and try to see if he could talk to ghosts here. Though, he didn’t think they had any cursed souls wandering around their apartment. Either way, they might have and maybe Raistlin could talk to them if they did! So, not taking time to glance into the room, he hopped off his bed.
And then he bounced directly into the wall. Which wasn’t as unpleasant as Tas might have expected, because the wall wasn’t hard, and he bounced right off of it onto the floor again. And then he looked around. He sucked in a sharp intake of air, all thoughts of his dream disappearing, and then he very eagerly ran/bounced out of his room into Raistlin’s. “Raist! Raistlin! Wake up! The most wonderful thing has happened!”
One of the few traits Raistlin and Tas shared was not keeping the best sleep schedule. He could easily – and often did – stay up all hours to read or study. It was peaceful and he could actually get work done. It was a habit he had developed in high school and it carried well into his adult life.
As such, Raistlin’s bed currently was being used as a secondary desk: books, charts and notes pertaining to his current project at Stark Industries spread out over the sheets. Raistlin himself had fallen asleep at his actual desk. His laptop was still on in front of him and displaying a simple screen saver of a ball bouncing back and forth across the screen indicating he’d been asleep for at least 30 minutes.
Unlike Tas, however, Raistlin wasn’t anywhere near as quick waking up once he had fallen asleep. He heard Tas calling his name – his roommate’s voice slicing its way into Raistlin’s sleep unapologetically. He moaned and attempted to cover his head with his arms to block Tas out. His desk chair, cheap and not really designed for sitting in for hours on end, seemed strangely comfortable that morning and he was in no mood to move now.
Then, before Raist knew it, Tas was in his room. Any attempts to ignore the whirlwind of a roommate were thwarted immediately when Raistlin’s chair was suddenly moving under him. The next thing Raistlin knew he’d been thrown to the floor, watching with wide blue eyes as everything in his room was shaking. All the items that had been meticulously spread across his bed went flying as the bed itself jiggled as though it were made of jelly.
For a moment Raistlin thought he was dreaming. It was one of the stranger dreams he’d ever had, but compared to the nightmare visions he’d been having recently, this was actually….well, it was still weird as hell. It took Raistlin several seconds before it dawned on him that this was no dream.
“What the…” He tried to get to his feet, only to find the floor under him was just as unstable as everything else in the room. It took several tries (and several rude words uttered under his breath) before he could get some kind of footing, unstable as it was. “Tas! Stop moving! What the hell did you do?!”
Well, it sure didn't take a genius to realize that Raistlin wasn't as pleased with their home makeover as Tas was. He stopped moving completely when Raistlin told him to, balancing precariously on one leg. It stuck him that maybe the wish he had made a few days had something to do with this, so he gave Raistlin his most wide-eyed, too-innocent look. “Me?” He asked. “I didn't do anything! But there's nothing we can do now so you should just enjoy it!”
Oh, Raistlin knew that wide-eyed look. He’d seen it countless times before, often paired with a similar, albeit much more sheepish/guilty, look on his brother’s face. It only served to convince him even more that Tas had somehow converted their apartment into one of those bouncy castles for kiddy parties.
But how had he done it?! It wasn’t as though the floor and walls had been covered with inflatable plastic. They themselves had been inflated with air and converted to plastic, or at least that’s how it looked. The walls were the same off-white looking color, complete with peeling paint, although the paint itself didn’t seem to be cracking more with the rough movement, which was a small blessing otherwise they’d be cleaning up paint chips forever at the rate the wall was moving, even with Tas standing still - on one leg like some kind of weird looking stork.
Raistlin narrowed his eyes at him accusingly, but didn’t say anything, not right away. He had to figure out how Tas had done this before he could really accuse him of anything. This required an inspection of the rest of the apartment to see if the entire thing had been converted, or just their bedrooms.
Attempting to leave his bedroom was an act of utter will and patience (and a lot more rude words). It took several attempts at starting and stopping before taking a face plant into the floor before Raistlin finally made it out into the hall and to the living room to find that indeed not just their bedrooms had been converted. The entire apartment had.
“How…?”
Tas very poorly tried to stifle a giggle behind his hand as he watched Raistlin try to walk out of the room. “It’s much easier if you hop!” Tas said, bounding past Raistlin on the way into the living room with giant leaps, not thinking about how his jumps might be moving the ground under Raistlin’s feet.
“It’s gotta be magic!” Tas said cheerfully at Raistlin’s question, as though it was the most obvious answer in the world. “Oh! Maybe you accidentally turned our apartment into a bouncy castle in your sleep!” Raistlin could do magic in the dreams after all, even if Tas had never actually seen him do anything like this. Besides, Raistlin couldn’t be mad if he thought he was the cause instead of Tas. Maybe he’d even enjoy it. “I bet your inner child was like ‘I wish I lived in a bouncy castle!’ and then just poof! Magicked the apartment into a bouncy castle!”
As he fought vainly to keep his footing while Tas bounced around him, Raistlin was hit with the alarming notion that maybe he had turned the apartment into a bouncy castle. Isabela had said that there was apt to be bleed through or carry over or whatever. However, Raistlin was certain that the magic he was capable of didn’t include changing anything into a bouncy castle.
But he could not deny that this was, probably, the result of some kind of magic. As much as he had resisted the idea that magic was real, there was irrefutable proof that it existed: Christmas and holiday characters appearing at random in the streets (or office buildings of all places), snow continuously falling from the sky and that weird feeling he’d gotten during the meteor shower all pointed to magic being real. Who would have thought?
That being said, turning their apartment into a nausea inducing playground did not seem like something Raistlin would do, even in his sleep. He hadn’t been in touch with his “inner child” in years. “Why the hell would I wish that,” Raistlin demanded, trying (and failing) to gain footing along the wall so not to be catapulted into the middle of the living room. “That sounds like something you’d-”
His eyes narrowed sharply in Tas’s direction and for an instant forgot all about the rubbery floor under him. Accusation practically dripped from his voice. “You wished for this, didn’t you?”
Tas’ eyes widened with surprise at Raistlin’s accusation, but the surprise disappeared from his face soon enough. “Well, there was all those falling stars a few nights ago, and I thought I ought to make some kind of wish. So I might have made a teeny tiny wish along those lines. You have to admit that it’s pretty neat though, right?”
“Teeny tiny wish?” Raistlin repeated. “You turned our apartment into goddamn bouncy castle!”
There was nothing even remotely neat about any of this! This was not exactly an improvement to the apartment. Not in the slightest. Constant peeling paint and ever present mysterious smell of dog that continued to linger despite what they attempted to do to be rid of it were one thing. But this?! How could Raistlin possibly live in a place that bounced every time either one of them moved?! The point was punctuated when Raistlin attempted to move towards Tasslehoff to throttle him and was promptly thrown back against the wall and once again to the floor.
At least it was soft. That was a minor blessing in all of this.
“It wasn’t on purpose,” Tas insisted. How was he supposed to know that making a wish would turn his apartment into a bouncy castle. On purpose or not though, Tas was still pretty sure that this was the greatest thing to ever happen to him in his entire life.
He laughed when Raistin fell. “You’ll get better at walking though! You really ought to try to enjoy it instead of just being a bit of a grumpypants. I mean, we do have a six month lease.” Though, with a bouncy castle apartment, Tas was pretty sure he and Raistlin would be thrilled to renew the lease.
Six months?! There was no way in hell Raistlin could live like this for a week, forget six months. There was just…there was no way. It hadn’t even been an hour yet and already the novelty had worn off – not that there had been any to begin with. And he liked to think that after a few days Tas too would get bored with the whole thing.
“You have to wish it back,” Raistlin insisted. He tried, mostly in vain, to regain his footing.
Tas frowned. “I don’t think that’s how it works, Raistlin,” he said slowly, and not just because he didn’t want to stop living in a bouncy castle. “I mean, there was a whole meteor shower thing for me to wish on, and I don’t think there’s another meteor shower coming up anytime soon. And I think for wishes to work, you have to really, really want them to. I mean, I’m not a wish expert or anything, but I thought that’s how things went. Unless we had a genie! Do you think there’s a genie on the Network? I bet there is. Oh! And my birthday was a couple of weeks ago! Maybe you can make me a birthday cake and when I blow out the candles I could try wishing for our old, boring, not-so-fun apartment back and maybe it will come true?”
Raistlin didn’t want to admit it, but Tas was probably right. He was just starting to understand how magic worked, or at least how it worked in their dreams. The whole issue of wishes coming true and what kind of magic that used hadn’t even come up and Raistlin had a feeling it wasn’t likely to. Even if it was, Raistlin wasn’t able to cast any spells here. At least not yet. Would his magic even work against...whatever magic this was?
Just thinking about it was giving him a headache.
He’d given up trying to get to his feet again and just let the room roll and sway a moment as he rubbed his temples and glancing up at Tas now and then as he tried to figure this out. Annoyingly, he could hear his twin chastising him faintly. Tas had been really excited about the apartment’s transformation and he’d gone and sucked all the joy right out of it.
“I don’t think that’ll work either,” Raistlin said at last, fingers still at his temples, but his voice far calmer than it had been since waking up. “You like this way too much, any wish you make would be false and therefore not come true. And if there is a genie on the network-” please, God, no “-entering into a deal with one never turns out in the favor of the person making the deal.” Raistlin took a breath, “I know you really like this,” pause, “but we won’t be able to get our security deposit back if the apartment stays like this. In fact, if the landlord should happen to see it, we could even be evicted.” The use of logical reasoning sometimes worked on Tas. And sometimes he was able to twist it to his own use, which was amazingly frustrating. Raistlin could only hope that this was not one of those times. “So eventually, we’ll have to figure out how to turn it back. We can keep the apartment like this, for now. At least until I can figure out how to change it back.”
“You just have to be really careful with your wording when you make a deal with a genie!” Tas said cheerfully. “One time I met a genie, and he gave me some wishes, but of course I knew that genies are sneaky so I was really careful to not leave any loopholes for him! And that’s how I met Tanis and Flint and the rest of you guys!” Well, Tas didn’t actually know how he’d met any of the companions in the dreams, but that seemed like just as good a reason as any. The only thing that would make it better was... “And I also got to ride a t-rex! That’s a really great story! I’ll go get us some beers so I can tell it,” Tas said, already hopping into the kitchen.
“If anything I think the landlord should pay us for the improvement,” Tas said. “I bet it won’t stink like dog anymore once we air it out a bit! And that carpet seemed really old. This is probably a lot cleaner too! Oh! And if we get bedbugs, they won’t be able to hide in our mattresses! But I guess if you can figure out how to turn it back that would be okay too.”
It wasn’t very often that Tas’s tall tales got under Raistlin’s skin. Usually he either ignored them or shrugged them off with a humoring sort of nod of the head occasionally accompanied by a roll of the eyes. This morning, though, Raistlin’s patience for such things was very short. Probably due to being jostled awake in a bouncy castle apartment.
“You did not ride a t-rex!” Raistlin shouted after him. “There are no dinosaurs on Krynn.” Well, except for maybe the weird lizardmen he and the others had come across on the path from Solace. “And those clerics we met on the road don’t count. Dinosaurs don’t talk and wear clothes, either.” Or turn to stone when killed. Although, they had bonked Sturm over the head in the skirmish, which Raistlin had found a bit satisfying. Stuck-up, pompous wannabe knight…
“Regardless,” Raistlin was trying to get to his feet again, slowly and carefully this time. “Even if there is a genie here, I’d rather not have anything to do with it until I have my own magic.”
“There might be dinosaurs on Krynn,” Tas pouted, opening the fridge and pulling a couple of beers out of it. “You can’t say that there isn’t just because we haven’t ridden on any yet! Maybe the creepy lizardmen are descendants of dinosaurs!” He shuddered a little, thinking of the lizardmen. It wasn’t often that Tas got scared (and it seemed even less often in his dreams), and he certainly hadn’t been scared when he had come across the lizard clerics, but they had given him a rather eerie feeling.
His face lit up at the prospect of Raistlin getting his magic here though. “I can’t wait until you get your magic!” he said cheerfully. “What do you think you’ll be able to do first? Talk to ghosts? That would be exciting! Maybe you should try to talk to some right now! I hope it’s not the one where you put all those goblins to sleep. Don’t get me wrong, it was really useful and I’m glad that they didn’t stick us with arrows or anything, but it’s kind of boring.”
Everything said and done Raistlin wasn’t keen on the ghost communication. It had been as though he’d been possessed by the warrior’s restless spirit, which was disconcerting enough after the fact. To add it, the entire feeling had felt disturbingly familiar.
He did, however, take exception to Tas calling his magic boring. “Next time, maybe I’ll let them shoot you,” he muttered under his breath.” Then he cleared his throat. “I think I need my book before I can do anything here.”
But maybe he didn’t need his book, specifically. Raistlin watched Tas fetch the beer out of the fridge (which oddly enough wasn’t made of bouncy castle material). It was possible that if he was able to do magic here, any spellbook containing the right spell would work.
“Did you say something?” Tas asked as he headed back toward Raistlin, hearing his friend mutter something under his breath. “I didn’t quite catch that. You really need to speak up sometimes, you know? No one’s ever going to hear you if you keep talking all quiet like. At least you’re not as quiet as you are in the…” Tas stopped, frowning. If Killian had lost his hand to the dreams, did that mean that maybe Raistlin might get sick from the dreams as well? He hoped not. Raistlin was super extra miserable in the dreams, and Tas wouldn’t be surprised if it was entirely because of that persistent cough of his.
“Oh, you mean like that creepy book you have in your bedroom?” The one Tas probably wasn’t supposed to see, but he’d accidentally stumbled upon it when he was innocently digging through all of Raistlin’s belongings for a bottle opener (turns out it was in the kitchen drawer. Who would have thought to look there?). “Maybe it has some spells in it you could read!”
Raistlin narrowed his eyes at Tas as he came back, beer in hand. The last thing he wanted to talk about was their dreams. He had yet to tell Tas how he saw their world in them, mostly because he didn’t want it getting back to his brother. Caramon already danced around the subject of dreams and the shenanigans going on in Orange County when they talked, which, admittedly, wasn’t often.
Raistlin’s narrowed eyes were quickly accompanied by a frown when Tas mentioned the witch hunting manual. The manual Raistlin had taken great pains in squirreling away in a place he had thought was well enough hidden. Apparently, not well enough.
“That book is a manual,” he informed his roommate matter-of-factly. “And a rare antique, so don’t touch it.” Sigh. “But yes, probably something along those lines. Next time I talk with Isabela, I’ll ask her if she knows where I might find one.”
“Really? I didn’t know they made antique books,” Tas said casually, and took a sip of his beer. When he thought of antiques, he thought of old, stained figurines of horses or something that he’d find in the living room of some grandma. Though, he supposed he’d probably find books in the living room of some grandma, so he guessed that made sense. “If you don’t want people to touch it though, you should really do a better job of hiding it,” he supplied helpfully.
“They weren’t antiques when they were made,” Raistlin said patiently. “It’s their age that makes them antiques. And,” here he narrowed his eyes a bit more at Tas, “It was hidden very well. I thought we had an agreement about you going in my room.” He was about to ask what Tas thought he was doing in there in the first place, but decided he wouldn’t like the answer no matter what it was.
He cracked open his beer - it wasn’t unusual to drink beer first thing in the morning. Not when your apartment had been literally transformed over night. At least he was getting better at where the place his footing to keep from falling over whenever Tas moved.
“Well, that makes as much sense as anything,” Tas said, in the tone of voice that was obvious to anyone who knew him that the subject interested him not at all. “I thought that was only for when I didn’t have a really, really good reason for going into your room.” Which, to Tas, could be anything from ‘the apartment’s on fire and I need to rescue Raistlin’ to ‘I was bored and thought there might be something interesting in there.’
If there was any occasion that warranted day-drinking, it was celebrating their newfound bouncy castle haven, and Tas was glad that Raistlin felt the same way. He knew his friend would come around eventually.