Tasslehoff Burrfoot is not a thief (tas_wanderlust) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2017-03-22 11:08:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, regina mills (evil queen), tasslehoff burrfoot |
Who: Tas and Regina
What: Regina whips up some shapeshifting potions of Tas' use.
When: Early morning. Recently, before the reaper plot.
Where: Regina's house
Rating/Warning: Low/none
Status: Complete
Tas didn’t understand why Regina didn’t want to get started on the potions first thing in the morning. It sounded like a fun way to spend the day together, but he’d known enough people who got weirdly angry when he showed up at their doorstep with the rising sun. Still, he was sure that making a potion took longer than just an evening, so he still made sure to come bright and early.
Tas opened the front door, and once he was in the entryway knocked on the door. “Hi Regina!” he called shrilly, already closing the door behind him. “I’m here!”
No, no. Regina did not want him to come in during the asscrack of dawn at all, and let out a string of curses from under her breath because who let him in? Kenzi and Killian had an early day ahead of them so they head out, and she was warming up Meara’s bottle to start the day off when a voice she never, ever wanted to hear this early in the morning pierced through the quiet air of her home and roused her infant up from her daze.
It didn’t cause her to shriek, mind you, but the little thing was definitely a little more awake now.
“It’s too early for mommy to deal with a moron, isn’t it,” she grumbled to her daughter, gently scratching that chunky little double-chin - that chub was forming quite nicely, but sadly she knew Meara would probably never get to Niko proportions. “Tas. I’m in here. And I told you six in the evening, not six in the morning.”
Tas followed the sound of Regina’s voice, and entered into the nursery. “Are you sure?” Tas asked. “I thought that’s what you said, but then I thought that there’s no way that could be true! How are we supposed to spend the whole day together making potions if we don’t get started until the afternoon. Hi Meara! You’re looking good today! Are you going to be helping us make potions too?”
“There’s a doorbell, you could have just rung it,” Regina greeted, and it really was like scolding a child. Henry seemed taller than he was nowadays. The baby, on the other hand, seemed to respond to the home intruder somewhat positively - one could interpret the babbling coo as an affirmative response, maybe.
A tremendous amount of constraint always had to be practice with this particular pest around. Politeness was often forced, and she had to play nice because Kenzi seemed to actually like him, and so did Killian (that or he was just entertaining the manchild out of pity). Sometimes he could be alright and semi-bearable but more often than not, she struggled.
What was that saying hipsters said these days? ‘The struggle was real’?
Meara was scooped into her arms, bottle ready for nursing, and she bounced her some. “This sort of thing doesn’t take long, Tas, and I can’t spend an entire day making potions that turn you into a cat.”
“I knocked!” Tas chirped. And that much was true, even if he hadn’t quite grasped the fact that knocking was more asking permission to enter a room rather than announcing one’s presence. “Well, not just a cat! I want to be all the animals? Will that one take longer?” he asked hopefully, in between making faces at the cooing babies.
Regina rolled her eyes.
With an armful of child, she was still able to make the motion of her wrist - the one that would envelop them in that puff of ultra-violet smoke that’d whisk them from the nursery to the lair below. Magic filled these tunnels, and the rooms were filled with archaic knick-knacks oozing enchantments. Mirrors hung from the walls of various sizes, small to large, and there was already a portable crib in place for when she had to accompany mommy down for a little witchy action.
“It won’t be one,” she informed, back to making sure the little one got every drop of milk she wanted before she got settled down. “It’ll be a couple. One for each form - combining them could be a little messy. Each will last for a couple hours.”
Regina was talking, but Tas wasn’t listening. One minute, he had been in the nursery, the next there had been purple smoke and now he was most certainly not in the nursery. Now he was somewhere surrounded by all sorts of interesting knick-knacks that he absolutely had to see and to lay his little hands all over. Some of those objects were very likely to end up in one of the many pouches that hung around his waist as he flitted from object to object.
Forget the potions. Regina was going to murder the little fucker.
“Tas,” she snapped, careful with the volume (hi, her baby was in the room) but made sure her tone was full of complete and utter venom. “Get your greedy little midget hands off my things before I make it rain with your insides - you remember that threat, yes? Now sit down, and listen to me if you want those damn potions.”
Her resolve was a little more cemented now. As tempting as it’d be to outright poison him, she’d have to add something extra to each concoction for some uncomfortable side effects.
Magic did come with a price, after all.
Tas paused, contemplating the threat. It still sounded like an incredibly interesting experience. He’d never seen it rain anyone’s organs before, let alone his own, but it sure sounded like a spectacle. On the other hand, it didn’t sound like a very pleasant experience, and it sounded like something that might bring his life to a quick end, and that would be before he’d managed to try Regina’s potions.
The object in his hands already forgotten, he absentmindedly placed it into his pouches and skipped over to her. He plopped himself down in front of her, cross-legged and holding onto his ankles with both his hands. “Okay!” he said. “What did you want to tell me? Is it about all the cool stuff you’ve got down here? Where did you get it from? Is it all from your dreams, or did you find some of it elsewhere? When Kenzi brought me down here, I thought that you should decorate the rest of your house like this. Why didn’t you?”
Bless Meara, she was now the one reason why she wasn’t about to commit gruesome murder this very second - she had to make a mental note of hanging Tas upside down to empty his pockets from everything he took (she noticed). Her little one was carefully put into the small crib, stomach down, after a couple little pats to her back. Time for that morning milk coma.
“You need to quiet down,” she warned, rolling her sleeves to the elbow. “And not talk so much, perhaps? Considering you barged in before I managed to have at least one cup of coffee, my tolerance is at its minimum.”
Not to mention the sound of his voice threatened to pop her eardrums.
Checking Tas’ pouches before he left a room was a lesson that his dream friends had learned long ago. “Oh, okay,” Tas said. “I’m pretty good at not talking. People are always shushing me, so I’ve learned really well. Why haven’t you had your coffee yet? I could go make you some if you’d like. I make pretty good coffee. Or hot chocolate! Are you sure you wouldn’t rather some hot chocolate? I can put marshmallows in it if you’d like. My friend Tamaki recently showed me penguin marshmallows! Oh, but I didn’t bring them from home and you probably don’t have them here. Unless you do?”
Tas was, indeed, not ‘pretty good at not talking.’ How did requesting his silence worsen the situation? His voice was like jagged claws down a chalkboard, and she needed to do something to -
Ah hah.
Why not treat him like she’d treated her sister?
Zelena had a habit of talking too much, and Regina had a method of effectively silencing her so she’d put it to practice here. A hand was held up but then she snapped it shut into a fist, the trigger for a silencing spell that’d make Tas lose his voice because she needed that couple minutes of peace.
“Remember those ingredients I had you to get?” Nothing ridiculous - mostly some remains (scales, fur, claws, that sort of thing) from animals he wanted to turn into that were easily obtainable at pet shops. Something told Regina it wouldn’t take much to find them. “Give them to me and behave, and then I’ll lift the spell. Nod if you understand.”
Tas kept talking for a moment longer, before he realized that there was no sound coming out of his mouth. Surprised, he grabbed his throat to make sure that he was still talking through it, and then he delightedly realized what had happened.
“Oh wow! Was that magic? You spelled me? I’ve never been mute before!” he exclaimed. Or tried to, but no sound came out. This was so wonderful.
He nodded cheerfully, lips still moving as he told her that he totally understood. He sat down, cross-legged on the floor, and began to pull the things out of his pouches. The things from the petshop that she’d asked him to get, some colourful feathers he’d found on his way over to Regina’s, the hair he’d plucked from Kit’s horse last night, and even a dragon’s tooth that he had received from his dreams (how exciting would it be to turn into a dragon?)
Sweet, glorious silence. Aside from the soft snuffs and quiet coos coming from her infant, but she actually enjoyed here those. Tas’ shrill voice? Not so much. His lips moved but there was no noise coming from it and, really, Regina almost felt complete bliss.
He was such a headache to deal with but reminded herself that, again, outright murder was frowned upon and people would be cross with her. How he and Raistlin lived together, it was a damn miracle.
Most of the items were harmless, she gathered, and could even feel it when she touched them - it was a level of psychometry - but she paused at the tooth. First thought she had when touching was about Maleficent, curiously enough.
“Tas,” she frowned, waving her fingers in the air to undo the muting spell. “What animal does this belong to?”
“THAT’S A-” Tas yelled, but he cut himself off when he realized that he could actually hear himself talking again. “Oh hey! I can hear myself again! That was really neat, wasn’t it? Did you do that? Did you magic me? I thought I was deaf, but I could still hear you and Meara. That’s a dragon’s tooth. I got it from my dreams, though I can’t remember which dragon I got it from. Maybe it was Fireflash - he’s my close personal friend, you know. But it could have been one of the Evil Dragons. There were a lot of them, too. I think if I had to pick, I’d choose to be a gold dragon! All the gold dragons I met were really nice! Hey! Do you think your silencing spell would work on a dragon?”
There he goes again, talking, loudly. Meara seemed to be having a jolly conversation with him, like the sounds she’d been making were responses to his words so she supposed she’d let it slide. Regina was engrossed in the fact that this came from a dragon, and her mind had been made up to not allow Tas to turn into one - ever.
She’d get creative.
“I haven’t tried it but if there was enough magic to fuel it, I don’t see why not,” she shrugged, sifting through empty glass vials and base ingredients for the first steps of potion mixing. “Though I also suppose it varies on the dragon - I hear there’s many versions in many different dreamscapes. Not all are the same.”
“I guess we can find out once I become a dragon!” Tas said cheerfully. “Do you have dragons in your dreams too? In mine, they come in all sorts of colours and all kinds of powers! Like my friend Fireflash, he’s a bronze dragon - metallic dragons are dragons of good while chromatic,” that was a word he’d read in the dreams, and he was rather proud of it, “dragons are evil - he breathed gas like the green dragons do and lightning like blue dragons do! Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful to breathe lightning?”
It’d be splendid to breathe lightning, and it was a shame Tas wouldn’t be able to because there was no way in hell these potions could bestow any kind of that power, thankfully - they’d shapeshift him into harmless creatures with some interesting side effects. The first one was in the process of being concocted, mesh first with several other ingredients with a mortar and pestle before being added to the base.
“I do,” Regina answered, glancing to him periodically to make sure his greedy thief fingers didn’t ‘accidentally’ grab something of hers and land into his pockets. “I was...friends with one, at some point - for the longest time she was my only friend.” Maleficent had been someone she hadn’t thought of in a while; there had been a strange cocktail of feelings for that particular draconic witch. Attraction, for one, even if she had kept her sealed beneath Storybrooke for almost three decades. Anyway. “It was complicated, but she was terrifying in her own right. You’re familiar with the Sleeping Beauty tale?”
“Really?” Tas asked, his eyes filled with wonder. “Oh, how marvelous! I think I’d be a little lonely if I had only one friend, but if she was a dragon I think that would make up for it! You must have had so many fun adventures!” He sighed wistfully, thinking about all the fun he could have if only he had a dragon companion who’d fly him around. He could explore the whole world from dragon back! He was suddenly filled with regret that, while he’d made close personal friends of dragons, none of them were as close or as personal as the more humanoid people he’d made friends with in his dreams. Not that the Companions were anything to shake a stick at, but none of them could fly. “I do know Sleeping Beauty! That’s the one where the girl sleeps for a hundred years, isn’t it? That sounds awfully boring, sleeping for a hundred years. I think I’d be a little disappointed if it happened to me. Much better to be one of the people who were attacked by a giant man-eating rose bush!” He gasped suddenly. “Was the princess a dragon?!”
Regina often times wondered if he was ever officially diagnosed with a disorder. Maybe it’s time he wa, she thought. Meds would do him some good.
“No,” she answered, hands reaching for a vial of this and that - essential oils, ingredients from the Enchanted Forest, a glass bottle of water. Measurements were carefully taken of each, and she made a splashing motion with her fingers to add a dash of heat to the mixture. “There was a dragon. Maleficent. It’s the same dragon I’m referencing, Tas - remember, Killian and I are tied to fairytales. Her and I were close.” Once. “And we had our adventures, I suppose, but we were always up to no good. It comes with the villain territory.”
There was? Tas’s brow furrowed. He’d never had a TV growing up, and he certainly hadn’t watched a whole lot of movies, but his parents had, of course, told him all the fairy tales. It hadn’t occurred to him that they might have embellished a couple of details. “What’s it like being a villain?” Tas asked, going to fetch Meara from her portable crib. Tas was already bored with just watching Regina, even if she did have some interesting stories to tell. “I’ve never had any villainous adventures! Though I am friends with some villains. Did you know that Raistlin’s evil in the dreams?” He paused, frowning to himself. “Though, I’m not sure if that makes him a villain. He was still always really helpful!”
Well, to be fair categorizing people under binary categories of ‘villain’ and ‘hero’ was limiting. Human nature was far more complex than those two words. A couple more motions of grinding, mixing, heating - then things were properly liquefied and poured into bottles with care.
“It’s exhausting,” was her answer to his first question. And as for his second? Regina eyed him. “What makes him ‘evil,’ exactly?” To expect a truthful answer from Tas would be a mistake, but she was curious about his point of view.
“Oh, well, he wears black robes now!” Tas said, the entire time making faces at the small human in his arms, much to her delight. “In the dreams, not in real life, obviously. I don’t think Raistlin’s ever worn robes in his life here, though if he did it would probably be pretty funny. Do you know where I can get any robes? Anyway, he used to wear red robes, which are the robes of neutrality, and I guess they worship the red moon which is supposed to be the neutral moon, but then I lost track of Raistlin for a while and when we met up again he was dressed in black robes, and he was working for the Evil Queen Takhisis - she’s one of our gods - and helping her to take over all of Krynn though I don’t really know how they’d do that since Krynn is so big. Oh! And I guess the people who wear black robes worship the black moon which is the evil moon, though I’ve never seen it. I always wished I could though. Anyway, after he saved my life from a poisoned trap, he flew away on a green dragon, and everyone knows green dragons are evil too, so I think it stands to reason that he’s evil. Even if he is still really nice! Well, I don’t know if nice is really the word for it. Raistlin has never really been nice. Not in either world, really, though he’s even meaner in the dreams than he is here.” He frowned thoughtfully to himself.
It was one of the rare times that she actually listened to his ramblings, letting the information absorb so she could process accordingly - the lore was undeniably interesting, and she supposed the logical thing to surmise was if Raistlin was associating with things that were known as evil, he was evil. Regina detested the word, but.
“Wonder why he saved your life,” she mused out loud, tightening the corks of every vial to keep it properly sealed, and she was working on tagging them with labels. That way he knew what he was drinking, although some of the descriptions were grossly exaggerated. “No one’s ever one hundred percent bad, or good for that matter - we’re all shades of gray, some darker than others.”
There was a small, empty chests she procured from one of the shelves to store the potions. “Anyway, here you are. As promised. Don’t take them all at once unless you want to experiment with becoming some kind of chimera, and I suggest you drink these with a meal.”
“Oh, because he’s my friend, obviously,” Tas said. At least, that’s what Tas assumed. He knew he’d do anything for Raistlin, so it only made sense that Raistlin would do anything for him in return. “And that’s true, isn’t it? Though in my dreams, if you’re really in between you’re red. Grey would make more sense though, since good is white and evil is black. I wonder why they decided to go with red. It must be because grey’s so boring.”
He took the vials from Regina reverently, looking at each one carefully before placing them carefully in his belt pouches. “I would love to be a chimera!” he said excitedly, once they were all safely stowed, and lunged forward to give Regina a tight hug around her hips. “You’re the best, Regina. The absolute best! What’s a chimera?”
Poor, poor mentally challenged Tas. Regina wanted to shrink away like he’d infect her with some kind of braincell eating disease but she opted to...pet him instead. Like some oblivious domesticated animal. There, there. “Don’t worry about what it is,” she sighed, still wondering how she got saddled with the little shit this early in the morning but she guessed that was her own doing - and it’d be worth it down the road. “Just follow my instructions for your own well-being.”
Tas smiled, pleased. Regina really was a lot nicer than she seemed, just like he knew she would be. “I’m glad that we’ve become such close, personal friends,” Tas said happily, already heading back toward the staircase so he could take his leave. “But I will! I’m really good at following directions! If you ever need anything, you can always call me, Regina! I owe you one!”
Regina was happy have her arms occupied with the cooing Meara, contently plump with a milk belly, and watched that compact thing that managed to be such a wild, unbearable pain in the ass hop up the steps. “Don’t have too much fun,” she told him, a smirk tugging at her mouth as he disappeared from sight.
Because, really, let’s be honest - she was the one that was about to have all the fun.