ᴡɪᴛᴄʜ ᴅᴏᴄᴛᴏʀ (spellcasts) wrote in valloic, @ 2021-09-23 18:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | !: action/thread/log, petshop of horrors: leon orcot, ₴ inactive: james barlow |
WHO: James & Leon
WHAT: A Bagel Meeting - and James tries to give Leon some good advice. Will he listen? PROBABLY NOT, BUT STAY TUNED
WHERE: Glenn's Bagel Cart and then to a waypoint
WHEN: Yesterday
WARNINGS: Naaaaah
STATUS: Complete
The last ten years of Leon’s life had consisted, mostly, of flying to a new country, getting a new job in said new country while living in the cheapest hostel he could find - roomed with up to half-a-dozen people who were also looking for the cheapest hostel the could find - or sleeping under bridges or in doorways, whatever suited his wallet best at the time - scouring the internet for any leads on D’s location, and getting whatever under-the-table work he could find until it was time to fly off to his next destination. So maybe, maybe it was the security of having his own apartment that was causing this change in him. This laughing with his boss, and this buying clothes he actually liked instead of buying the cheapest thing he could find to replace his clothing once it started falling apart (today, he was wearing a nice button-down over his jeans), and this buying his team baked goods before his shift like he was back in LA buying doughnuts for the guys. Joining social media filled with people in his local area - an area that he knew, for a fact, did not contain a D. He’d even been tempted, very tempted, to join this hockey team that he’d read about, and it was only by telling himself, outloud, “You’re not going to be here that long, don’t even think about it,” that he managed to talk himself out of avoiding the whole situation together. Because while there was no harm in being friendly, there was no sense in making friends with these people. Not when he was going to be taking off the first chance he got. He’d had exactly one friend in LA, and leaving her behind had sucked. She’d e-mailed him for years, first checking on his progress and feeding him leads, then asking when he was going to be coming home, before she’d finally stopped e-mailing. Probably because he’d stopped responding after she’d started hinting that she expected him to give up and come home. She still e-mailed him on his birthday and on Christmas every year, though she never seemed especially hopeful that she’d get a response. He wasn’t making a new life here. This was just a temporary setback in his search for D. Hell, he’d been stuck in Rio de Janeiro for months after he’d found D in Tokyo, before he could earn enough money for a trip to Japan. This was no different. Which is why he was still kicking himself for half-assedly inviting this James guy for what passed, in Leon’s world, for breakfast. It wasn’t all social, he told himself. Hell, it had hardly even been an invite. But Vorerra was on his List. His first step was to try and charter a ship to take him off this island, one that was shady enough to not have any conniptions about smuggling Leon out - he’d been hanging out at the docks when he wasn’t working, and he thought he had one in mind - and if that failed, then he’d follow his black market leads, and if those failed, then, then he’d start poking around Vorerra and see he could work out a deal with them to get a one-way ticket back out of this place. He knew that James probably wouldn’t be much help in setting up a meeting if he had left Vorerra, and he knew James wasn’t going to be spilling any Vorerra secrets, because if he did they would come after him whatever clemency they were offering him now. But Leon could convince himself that this was all part of some longer term strategy anyway. Anyway, it might not be such a bad idea to learn how to put up mental shields so they wouldn’t know exactly how desperate he was to get off this island if he did eventually resort to them. He ordered his bagel, egg everything, and a tea, green, and stood off to the side to wait and to check out anyone who approached. When he saw someone he thought might be James, he raised a hand in greeting. Now, it wasn’t as if James claimed to know everything about Outlanders - he knew their stories, their art, their names. He knew that some of them were here and some of them vanished just as quick as they arrived. Most seemed eager to try to start over in literally a whole new world, and he respected the fact that they tried despite the incredible odds stacked against them. But he hadn’t met one yet that was so eager to leave - at least not as much as his bagel companion here. James caught a whiff of that ants-in-the-pants feeling of needing to bolt, even over the network - and wasn’t that interesting? If Leon was contemplating trying to work with Vorerra, James was going to do everything he could to get him away from that idea. There was no working with Vorerra - and whatever Leon wanted, it wasn’t worth the actual pain that would happen when he poked a hornet’s nest with a stick. He’d been up for awhile, showered, got dressed (a crisp shirt rolled up to the elbows, dress pants, and scented lightly of his cologne, notes of cinnamon and spice) - then he was on his way out the door to make his first stop, before he went to the hospital to slip into that doctor’s coat (James B. Barlow, MD, Psychiatry, stitched right on there). “You showed up,” he flashed a bright, pearly-toothed smile as he reached for his wallet to place his own order - honey whole wheat bagel with plain cream cheese and a hot coffee. “Here I thought you’d try to walk on water to get out of here.” “I was coming here,” he said, pointing at the ground at his feet, “anyway, and I’m pretty freaking hungry, so of course I showed up. Thanks, Glenn.” He grabbed the bagel and his tea from the cart. “Might come as a shock to you, but I haven’t learned how to walk on water in the last half hour.” He frowned and looked the doctor up and down. “So you don’t poke around in people’s brains when you’re… you know, trying to fix their brains?” he asked, because somehow the mind reading and the psychiatry hadn’t actually lined up in his mind until he saw him here, in his labcoat. For good measure, Leon thought, forcefully, of his favourite pin-up girl poster - the one he’d had hanging over his bed eleven years ago, before D had taken it upon himself to clean Leon’s apartment for him and had ripped them all down - just to make sure that James wasn’t in his head. “Occasionally,” James replied, taking his bagel wrapped in wax paper. His change was tucked away, and he juggled the dough-with-a-hole-in-the-middle and his coffee - managing to do it effectively, even, and get himself situated. “The hospitals are a good mix of magic and medicine - doctors who utilize both, others who prefer one over the other. It’s a mix of a world in general, really.” He’d grown up here and knew of no other world besides Vallo - and within that, being raised cloaked in the shadows of Vorerra and their experiences was a whole other thing as well. His father was friends with bank presidents, had accounts with plenty of fictitious names, and paid cash for everything - even the manor James and his siblings called home. Honor was a big deal (though their definition varied). Velvet walls were big too. Wealth, excess, luxury. There were things he as a young kid considered normal that probably weren’t very. “So what about you? What’s your world like?” he asked, reaching for one of the sugar packets to add some to his coffee. “You’re telling me,” Leon muttered, in response to it being a mix of a world. He couldn’t make much sense of this world at all. He could navigate it just fine, and the people all made sense. People were people wherever they were. Some of them were alright, most of them were the fucking worst, and everyone found a way to get by with a surprisingly little amount of murder. But people getting sucked in from nowhere, these disappearances that people just seemed to take as par the course - oh no, little Jimmy ‘disappeared,’ that’s sad but there’s nothing nefarious going on here! - and everyone just accepting that they couldn’t get out. It made his skin crawl. Not to mention the whole ‘people and their shit just falling from the sky’ crap in general. It was like this world was missing a piece of itself and was trying desperately to fill it with whatever it could get its otherworldly tendrils on. Maybe that’s why some of the people who got pulled here just accepted it. Maybe, this world filled some hole that they had in them too, maybe they fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Leon took a sip of his tea - a small sip, because it was still too hot to gulp - and frowned at James’ question. “I don’t know. It’s normal, I guess,” he said, not really knowing how to answer. “There’s a lot more we’re allowed to see. We’re not all just like, stuck on a couple of islands. There’s pretty close to two-hundred countries out there, and a lot of them are bigger than this island. “Technology’s about the same, maybe not quite as refined. The internet’s just starting to really catch on with the masses, so we don’t really have shit like Netflix or Spotify or whatever. We don’t have magic though.” He paused, tilting his head a little. “Or at least, we don’t have the same kind of magic. It’s a lot.. I don’t know, subtler? Quieter? I didn’t even know it existed until about ten years ago, and it’s not the same. It’s like…” If he wasn’t holding his bagel in one hand and his tea in the other, he might have tried gesturing with his hands as if he could grab the answer from the air. As it was, he still kind of moved them vaguely. “Like hatching a fully grown dragon from an egg the size of a turtle’s egg, and then having it disappear into starlight. Or like… or like a plant that gives up its life for you. Or jumping off a skyscraper, sure you’re going to die, and flying instead. Endless corridors, and doors that open to places they have no right opening to.” Not that Leon had ever been willing to acknowledge any of the magic happening at all until that last evening with D, when it had been impossible to escape it anymore. It was all stuff he’d worked out later, years later, when he’d spend his evenings just thinking of the two years he’d spent with D and trying to make all the pieces fit. “You’ve lived in this place your whole life, haven’t you?” he asked. “Has it always been so… this?” James listened, tilting his head a bit. “An interesting description of magic - sounds a bit romantic. You’ve got a way with words,” he grinned, popping the lid back onto his cup of coffee before taking a sip to test it out - just a little sweet, just a little bit bitter, so it was perfect for a morning snack and pick-me-up. He didn’t enjoy his coffee bitter (and if it got too bitter, it just tasted like it had sat in the pot all night - not fun for anyone) though he knew some people did. “But yes, I’ve lived here my whole life. Magic has always been the life force of Vallo - and Vallo’s always shifted and changed. It’s always been hard to map, or get a read on. When more and more people started coming from other worlds, through the waypoints - that’s what kind of permanently altered things. Offset the magic a little bit, especially since many Outlanders have magic of their own,” he said, beginning a walk toward one of the large glowing crystals - they could stroll and talk, if Leon didn’t mind. “By the way, if you’re really looking to exit this world - it’s not a matter of simply getting off the island. It’s the waypoints. But I’ve got to warn you that they’re - finicky. Sentient, in a way. I think people have tried to communicate with them in the past to no avail. It’s possible coven elders know how but like I told you, they won’t share.” "It's not romantic," Leon snapped, blushing. He did not have feelings for D, and he kind of wished people would stop implying he did. Nevermind that neither he nor James had mentioned D at all yet. Leon didn't have a problem walking and eating, so while James spoke, Leon opened the wax wrapping of his bagel with his teeth, and once he managed to reveal it, he took a large bite. Malfunctioning waypoint crystals made sense, really. Leon had never trusted them and avoided using them at all costs; he'd even spent the money to rent a car when he'd searched the island for D instead of using the crystals to hop around. He'd never really been much of a fantasy guy, either in his reading choices or his watching choices - the closest he came were monster movies. He didn't know if they could be fixed and he didn't especially care. People seemed happy here and he didn't intend to ruin that, and it would take someone more versed in magic to know if the changing magic was going to wind up screwing them all over in the long run. But if there was a way to use the crystals to get off the island, Leon would find it. He took another bite of his bagel and said, "They've gotta have a price though, right? I can't imagine anyone would turn down a pretty enough penny, especially when the chump paying it is headed somewhere where they can't spill the beans after." The idea of any coven elders having a price was amusing all on its own. But, oh right, he wasn’t supposed to call Leon adorable - James may end up breaking that rule, however. It couldn’t be helped. “What do they say? ‘You may test that assumption at your convenience?’” he replied, with a poke of dark brows upward over the edge of his to-go coffee cup which he sipped from casually. It was a pleasant day for a walk, at least - autumn was starting to show itself in Vallo, and it was mostly a colorful vista of red, gold, and orange with the trees. Scarf weather, cooler weather, but also some of those rainy days - sometimes the rain lasted all day, and he always took a travel umbrella with him wherever he went. The rain itself varied too - one moment it was like walking into mist and then other instances he could only compare it to being smothered by a wet, heavy towel. He had a feeling that Leon would know what he was talking about soon enough though - the guy wasn’t going anywhere unless the waypoints blipped him out, and James hated to be the bearer of bad news. “The more polite version of ‘fuck around and find out, I imagine,” he added. “Is it just that you don’t like being held against your will? Or is it that a version of you being home and one here is just a lot to wrap one’s mind around?” "Well, you're never going to find out if you don't fuck around, right?" Leon said, shrugging. "I don't know why people seem to think the idea of having some weird-ass sci-fi clone of yourself running around living your life while you're trapped in some sort of alternate dimension is supposed to be comforting," he muttered. "And yeah, I don't especially love being held against my will either. I've got something I need to do back home - someone I need to find - and if it's not me who does the finding, then what's the point?" “Understandable, I suppose. Maybe it’s you who is the clone though?” James suggested, though his smile turned sympathetic - Vallo could be a lot, and he didn’t blame someone if they wanted to go home. Not being able to, not having control of your own life (even if the debate about whether or not free will existed at all continued to rage on with philosophers) was an extremely hard pill to swallow. He held one bagel half in his hand, teeth sinking in to take a bite - and somehow he managed to do it without smearing cream cheese all over his upper lip, so that was a bonus. Probably because he was used to cramming food into his face on the way to work; walking and chewing at the same time wasn’t as difficult as rubbing one’s stomach and patting the head, at least. “In that case, I hope that the waypoints do you a favor and send you back to your someone. In the meantime, it’s not so bad - if I can provide any local perspective, I certainly will?” It was the least he could do. Besides, he sort of felt as if someone had to watch this one so he didn’t piss off the wrong witch and end up turned into a tree for an eternity or something. Leon frowned uncomfortably at the idea that he was the clone, but he managed to shrug it off. “Whether I’m the clone or not doesn’t change anything,” he said at last, because it didn’t. He still had all his history, and he still had his goals. “Honestly, aside from the whole kidnapping people against their will and trying to convince them there’s no way out, this place doesn’t seem all bad.” That was still a pretty big black mark against it though, in Leon’s books. He washed down his bite of bagel with his tea and took another. He was used to eating fast - a lot of the time, back in LA, he hadn’t had time to eat at all and had to shovel food into his mouth while he was on his way to a call. “What sorta things do you do for fun?” Well, yes, kidnapping people was questionable. It was one thing to say ‘you’re here now, go on and build another life’ and quite another to actually do it. Especially when it could be really depressing to get comfortable and then have that yanked out from under you - James’ former coven really didn’t care about the plight of Outlanders, but he’d always felt compassion for them. And admired their resilience. “I - don’t really do much for fun,” he admitted with a sheepish laugh and gods that was depressing, wasn’t it? But it sort of caused James to step back and think about how much of a workaholic he truly was. And there were likely reasons why he was that way too. “I’ve got a friend in one of the other covens who will remind me that I ought to attend coven parties sometimes. I think there’s one coming up, actually. There tend to be many, during the change of seasons.” He had attended some of the Equinox events (not saddled to the exclusivity of Vorerra and it - felt good, actually), and remembered hearing that Asetenarra planned to continue their celebrations - and why not? They were squirreled away in the mountains and could appropriately throw a rager, a chance for the ‘baby goths’ to show off their stuff in that regard. “If you’d like to come with me?” James offered, sipping on his coffee. “These things are usually better in pairs.” Well, Leon felt that. He wasn’t much for doings for fun either. Even back in LA, most of his life had been work, thinking about work, hanging out with D because he was going to arrest him, and occasionally having drinks or playing a couple rounds of poker with his coworkers. He hesitated at James’ invitation, because going to an event with someone seemed like some sort of line that Leon wasn’t supposed to cross if he intended to keep himself separate from this place and these people. Joking with his boss, buying clothes, making nice with his coworkers, that could all fall within the realm of acceptable friendliness. Even getting drunk and watching Fight Club - by himself, thank you, even if he did chat with Adora and a few other people - that was just a way to blow off steam, and if he did participate next month, that added to his ‘buy myself a ticket out of this place’ fund. Assuming he could actually win any fights. But going to some coven party with someone… Well, he told himself, maybe he could pick up some information on the waypoints there. “Yeah, sure, I could probably make that work,” he said after a pause that was just a little too long. “When is it?” He didn’t mind the long pause, clearly fine with giving Leon time to think about it. In fact, James had just about finished his bagel by then too - he tossed the wrapper into a trash can they passed by (because littering was terrible) and focused solely on the coffee, wanting to consume it entirely before he got to the hospital. But the waypoint that would take him there was just up ahead so he likely wouldn’t accomplish that goal in time. “This weekend. Saturday night,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a business card and a pen - the cap was pinned between his lips like a cigarette as he paused to find a solid surface, the edge of a mailbox, where he could scroll his cell phone number. He’d recently joined the network but didn’t have a DOA-issued phone like the other Outlanders, so. Providing contact information it was. “I can come get you, if you’d like. The coven location’s a bit out of the way.” James handed over the business card, and the look in blue velvet eyes turned a bit solemn. Serious as a coffin nail. “I’m not sure if you were planning to or not, but - don’t seek out Vorerra. They don’t help anyone. Even for a price.” Leon pulled out his phone to double check his schedule, and frowned. “I’m working until six, but it shouldn’t take me too long to shower and get dressed after,” he said. Assuming nothing happened that got him stuck on his patrol shift, but they’d all been pretty chill so far. “Is this a fancy or a casual thing?” He took the card, but didn’t quite meet James’ eyes when he made the warning. “I’ll keep that in mind,” Leon said, a little evasively. Satan’s ball sack, he was going to end up needing to get Leon out of hot Vorerra water, wasn’t he? James knew it in that instant. He knew it as well as he knew his own bones. Or maybe not. Maybe he’d be pleasantly surprised. “I’m usually a casual sort of date,” he assured with a wink. “So no need to go fancy, not for this.” He stuck the pen back into the pocket of his jacket (and maybe there was a pocket protector there - so not only was he a casual date, but he was also a nerd). “Anyway, it’s my stop - “ James motioned toward the nearby waypoint, one that would take him to the hospital so he could begin a very long shift; he’d attempt to not think about how long it would truly be. “Try to stay out of trouble before then, alright?” “Alright cool. I’m in apartment 612 at Morningside. If you wanted to come get me around seven, I’ll probably be good to go.” Especially if it wasn’t anything fancy. He snorted, but when he said, “No promises,” he said it lightly. He didn’t have any intention of getting into trouble any time in the next few days. “You have yourself a good day at work.” James chuckled, a smooth laugh that was all velvet and cream. “Oh, I’ll try. See you later, 612,” he said, wiggling fingers in a goodbye before he and his coffee faded into the glow of the crystal. Well, now wasn’t that delightfully fun. |