bigapplesauce | And this isn't Shadowfoot Island, either! [closed]

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And this isn't Shadowfoot Island, either! [closed]

This again. The second time around the place is more familiar, which is weird because right up until reappearing in the exact same spot as the first time (minus weird lying man and helpful druid) Asmodia had completely forgotten that New York was ever anything more than a strange dream. And of course it took her from home when she was resting, again, so she and Biscuit are just as woefully unequipped as before. She's got her spell component pouch and a little bit of cash in her pockets this time, but no corset, no protective wonders, and no dagger or rod. What's really weird is that she does have her cloak of human guise, which she knows she didn't have on her before she got here.

At least this time she knows to put it on right away. A quick test proves that she can lie, too, which is just about the greatest mercy she's ever received. That begs the question of whether her magic is going to work this time, and another quick test confirms that yes, it does. That the test also renders Biscuit invisible is a bonus considering she's pretty sure she remembers that druid telling her this world lacks donkey rats.

Right. Strange world that's not as strange to her as she'd like it to be, no sign of her friends, and no gear. The situation is ~~terrifying~~ more than a little worrying, but she sternly reminds herself that as a slayer of devils and a traveler of demiplanes she can damned well handle this. Just let anyone try to hurt her and they'll find out firsthand why one doesn't meddle with witches. Alright, so there was a bit of panicked sobbing in the bushes in those first few minutes, but she is a mighty caster and a force to be reckoned with and no one is ever going to find out that the first thing she did when she realized she was back here was have a cry with her rat. No one is going to find out, either, that the second thing she did was to get hopelessly lost in a city park.

The third thing, though? Yeah, she's pretty sure the third thing is going to be good. She was aiming for the underground lair she'd been taken to before, but this fountain isn't a bad thing to come across -- this was supposed to be the center, wasn't it? No one would ever know it from all the people milling around it. She's been lurking at the edge of the crowd for a while, trying to remember which way to go, when it strikes her: She can use her magic this time. Portals and gates aren't exactly her thing, but it won't be hard to at least get a read on just what this thing is. Glancing around to make sure no one's watching her too closely, she mutters the words under her breath and curls the fingers of one hand just so --

Blinding waves of what her brain interprets as lime green and magenta light erupt across her entire field of vision, and her ears fill with the roar of her own blood rushing through her veins. The light parts and for a moment she thinks she's going blind until she realizes that no, she can see but there's nothing to see in the yawning chasm of nothingness that opens before her --

Then, mercifully, all perception shuts off as her stunned mind loses concentration on the spell. She doesn't register her knees buckling under her until she hits the ground, landing awkwardly on her invisible tail. She sways blindly, seeming not to hear the urgent squeaking of her invisible familiar, and finally gives up and slumps the rest of the way to the ground in the hope that it will make her head stop spinning.

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The nice thing about all the carthaginian faction-related nonsense that's been happening lately is how little of it has involved Sunshine. None of it has involved her, in fact - what a frigging mercy. And, okay, it's not exactly good news that the Rift is officially common knowledge. She likes flying under the radar. She is comfortable flying under the radar. But speaking of frigging mercies: so long as she keeps her otherworldly slang in check and refrains from any overt magic handling, no one has any reason to think she's anything but local.

There is nothing local about the person who wanders up to the fountain, though. At least she looks outwardly human, for all that her shadows are screaming 'partblood,' but her clothes are attention-grabbing in ways that Sunshine's own predilection towards bright hues can't match. What's the term people here use for that kind of thing? LARPer? Yeesh.

Sunshine's not the only one who's noticed, either - a few other presumed locals are giving the woman uneasy looks - and she's wondering if she's going to have to Do Something About This when the woman makes up her mind for her by suddenly collapsing in an inelegant heap.

"Spartan," Sunshine mutters, scrambling off the edge of the fountain and dropping to her knees beside the woman. Shit. This is outside her wheelhouse, magically or otherwise. She barely knows CPR, and her affinity only heals vampires. But the woman's still breathing, she still has a pulse, okay, okay, at least she doesn't have a corpse on her hands. Another one for the mercy pile.

"Hey." She gives the woman's shoulder a little jiggle. "Can you hear me?"

What the hell is that squeaking? Sunshine glances towards the sound, brow furrowing as her eyes pick up... something. Some weird, vague shape near the woman's other shoulder, outlines of shadows she shouldn't be able to see. An animal? An invisible animal. Gods and frigging angels, what a time to be surrounded by twitchy locals. She gives the woman's shoulder another, more urgent shake. "You're gonna want to get up," she advises in a tense undertone.

She's on the ground and it isn't so bad now that she's got cold pavement under her head and shoulders. The light's gone, at least, but so's her vision in general, which she'll soon realize is down to her eyes having rolled back up under their lids. The sounds of the world are coming back even if her equilibrium really isn't, and she distantly registers Biscuit's squeaking and -- and a voice --

And that's definitely someone shaking her.

"'m alright," she lies, lifting her hand in a vague wavey motion that bonks against Biscuit. He quiets, but it's the way the woman looked right at him that has him going still and sending a thrum of suppressed alarm across the link to his mistress. Asmodia grimaces, face scrunching tight before she forces her eyes open wide, blinking several times and struggling to focus on the face of the woman crouching over her.

Oh. She fell down. That's not good. "It's okay," she mutters, clumsily propping herself up on an elbow and pausing there as the world spins again. "Nothing to -- nothing to worry about."

Some lies are so obvious that Sunshine doesn't even need a shadow's input to catch them. But it's in both of their best interests to sell this one. The partblood woman is pretty obviously not from around here, and now Sunshine's sticking out by association, and she doesn't want to find out the hard way that someone in their impromptu audience is violently disposed towards rifties.

At least the mystery animal is still invisible. Hell if Sunshine knows what it is - it's hard to get a clear picture from just its shadows, and she kind of needs to focus on the obviously visible, here - but she can't fathom why it would feel the need to go unseen if it looked like your average mutt.

"Okay," she says to the woman. Then, to the gathering crowd at large, "It's okay, she's fine." Some people don't seem inclined to disperse, and there are phones at the ready on the not-so-off chance that things get weird enough to be worth filming, but no one appears to be calling 911, and no one else seems inclined to take charge of the situation.

Which means it's down to her.

"Can you stand?" she asks, a bracing hand under the woman's elbow. Then, low enough that the gawkers shouldn't hear, "We should, uh... not hang around."

"Yep." She's not sure of that, really, but she's got enough of her senses and enough of her sense back to see the people gathered around them. There's no telling who this woman is or what she wants, but getting up and getting away is a good idea. The last thing she needs is for someone to run for a healer. "Just felt a little faint in the heat," she says because that sounds likely enough, doesn't it?

With enough help she does manage to clamber to her feet, and she all but latches on to the mystery woman in order to stay vertical. The world is looking normal enough behind the spots that still crowd her vision whenever she blinks, but if it weren't for the fact that she doesn't actually feel hurt she could swear she feels like she was just hit by a lightning bolt. Biscuit crowds against her ankle on the side opposite their new acquaintance, and she curls her tail around to brush against him reassuringly. From the flash of indignation he gives her it's clear she just poked him in the eye, but it's the thought that counts, isn't it?

"Not dying," she says to the crowd, still swaying on her feet. "False alarm."

Sunshine offers the crowd a tight-lipped smile - nothing to see here - then proceeds to half guide, half carry the potential newbie away from Bethesda as quickly as they can collectively go, which isn't very. A few sidelong glances confirm that the mystery animal is keeping up, at least.

"Sorry," she mutters as they go. "I know this is weird. But the Rift went public a few days ago, and the natives are still a bit twitchy. It's, uh... not a good time to be conspicuously... foreign." Which is saying a lot, for a melting pot like Manhattan. Not that the locals are uniformly welcoming to those who have the audacity to be from a mere other country - humanity seems pretty content to turn on itself in the absence of a healthy Other population on which to focus their collective ire. But now they all know that - surprise! - there's a healthy Other population here after all, one that includes her, and she has a pretty good idea of how at least some of the locals are going to react to that.

Honestly, she probably shouldn't have been hanging around Bethesda at all. But she knows that's the center of it all, and she trusts her passing privilege, and... and she doesn't like bullies. If someone's going to have the godsbloodyawful luck to show up in the next week or so, better for her to clock them before some paranoid would-be-SOF-type does.

Once they've reached someplace greener and less crowded, she slows a bit. "I'm Sunshine," she says, attempting another smile, this one sans heavy 'fuck off' vibes. "Are you new?"

Edited 2015-05-19 23:46 (UTC)

The news that she's conspicuous wakes Asmodia right up, and there's a moment in which Sunshine has to do a bit of extra dragging/carrying owing to her charge giving a violent start and looking down at herself with more surprise and fear than she has any apparent business feeling. A frantic look at her own hands reveals only pale human skin, and at first she can't understand what the other woman could possibly have meant. She gives the human a boggle-eyed look -- what does she mean, foreign?

It dawns on her somewhere between the fountain and where the woman slows down that it's the clothes, not the skin. By then she's at least trying not to lean on her new acquaintance quite so hard. Sunshine. The woman's name is Sunshine. That's a new one. "Asmodia," she admits hesitantly, forgetting again that the people here tended not to recognize the name. "In a way. I was here before, but I--I thought it wasn't real. Is it that obvious?"

Edited 2015-05-20 00:36 (UTC)

"... Not that obvious," Sunshine allows, because the idea is to avert a panic, not cause one. "I mean, if you'd arrived a week or so ago, I don't think anyone would have looked twice." They might have looked once, in that get-up, but she wouldn't have been interrogated by anyone (except maybe a really pushy tourist). "Everyone's still kind of on edge, though, so they're paying more attention than normal."

After a beat - and another glance down at the mystery animal, which seems a bit less invisible than it was a few minutes ago - she adds, "It was obvious to me, but that's because I'm not from around here, either. And I'm, um. I'm a magic-handler, so I can see things that other people miss. Including your..." she squints, then hazards, "... pet?"

"Great timing as always," mutters Asmodia, realizing now that maybe it was kind of stupid to cast a spell in the middle o a crowd in a strange world. It was supposed to be a little spell, though, just a cantrip. It shouldn't have shown her anything like what she saw.

She follows Sunshine's gaze downward. "Uh," she says. "Yeah! My pet." She gives Biscuit a stern look, reminding herself to give him a talking-to about failing to hide before the spell wore off. There's sticking close because he's concerned for her, and then there's just being stupid.

"Arcane or divine?" she asks, gaze flicking back to Sunshine. "And what did you mean, it 'went public'?"

Edited 2015-05-20 01:25 (UTC)

Sunshine blinks, then decides to take the questions in order of how much sense they make, most to least. "Okay, so, there's the rift - it's a giant cosmic carthaginian hole in the sky that dumped you here and occasionally messes with the general populace." She flaps a hand in a vague, upward direction. "About a week ago, it threw a tantrum. Think, uh... weird isolated weather incidents, bits of forest turning into bits of jungle, that kind of thing. Hard to miss."

They seem to have left any witnesses behind them, so Sunshine steers Asmodia over to the nearest bench and sits. "Usually it just spits out the occasional person like you or me," she continues, "but what it did last week was..." She shakes her head and lets out a humorless huff of laughter. "Drastic, shall we say. Enough so that pretty much everyone noticed, and they couldn't cover it up as mass hysteria or whatever, so the secret's out. Everyone knows about the rift, now."

As for her first question... it's actually kind of encouraging, because at least it means magic is a Thing where Asmodia comes from. Sunshine's probably less likely than ever to have her claim of being a magic handler laughed off, but that doesn't mean she's stopped half-expecting that kind of reaction.

Hell if she knows what 'arcane or divine' means in that context, though. "I'm not sure what you're asking, magic-wise," she admits. "It... probably works differently, where I'm from."

Asmodia hesitates, belatedly asking herself whether this is some kind of trap, but she dismisses the thought. She rendered herself helpless a moment ago; if Sunshine had wanted to try anything she wouldn't have hauled her out of there and waited for her to recover. She sits crookedly on the bench, torso turned toward the other woman, and manages to look painfully tense even as she all but slumps against the back of the bench. Biscuit slinks underneath to lurk in the shade, still sending a constant stream of unease to bolster her own.

"Ohhhh." She winces. "Oh. I feel stupid now. Wow, that was...not smart. It's not a gate at all, it's an actual hole. It's a wonder my brain didn't melt out my ears."

She shakes her head, already frustrated by the disconnect after it had seemed for a moment like Sunshine might be someone normal. "It doesn't matter. What matters is that that thing took me here and back once already, and I need to work out how to get it to take me home a second time."

Wait, was Asmodia trying to do something magic-related to the Rift? Sunshine pauses midway through shifting her bag onto her lap. "What, were you trying to get back through or something?" Wincing to herself, she opens her bag and starts to rummage. "You... don't want to do that. Last time I tried it, it knocked me unconscious and gave me a killer migraine." It could have been worse. She's probably lucky it didn't put her halfway through a wall. But still. "The Rift doesn't really appreciate being prodded."

Not that Asmodia's in any state to try anything impressive, magically or physically - at least not by the look of her. Sunshine pulls out a slightly squashed bakery bag and starts to unroll the top. "Are you hungry?" she asks. She doesn't know just how new Asmodia is - it all gets kind of nebulous considering she's apparently been here before (and what's up with that?). But regardless, she looks like she could use something... restorative. "I work at a bake shop." She turns the bag a little, emphasizing the Glaser's logo. She's not just carrying around random baked goods of dubious quality and offering them to new acquaintances and/or pigeons, here; she has standards.

"J-just like that? No. No, I wasn't -- I looked at it. I was trying to see its aura." She's hardly going to walk up and start tampering with a portal of unknown origin and type without getting a good idea what it is first. Of course, it turns out she absolutely is the sort of idiot who'd walk up to a planar puncture and stare straight into whatever untamed magic is leaking out of it.

That's the second time Sunshine has described its actions in terms of behavior rather than phenomena. One time and it's an affectation, twice and maybe it's a sign that people here actually personify the thing. She glances down at the bag, noting the maker's mark on the packaging. "Must be quite the bake shop," she says, lifting an eyebrow. She reaches over to hook a finger into the top of the bag and look inside, then snakes her hand inside to pluck out the first shape she spots. A glance at her own hand as she pulls it back confirms a suspicion, and she lets out a little sigh as she mutters, "Sun and fury, I'll have to eat on top of everything else, too."

Sunshine arches an eyebrow. It's a little dubious at first, because 'aura' is one of those terms she has a hard time taking seriously. Granted, anyone who reads shadows has no room to talk, but the shadow-reading is still a comparatively recent development. But whatever. She can only assume Asmodia has a decent idea of what she should be able to do, magic-wise, and she can't blame anyone for wanting a better understanding of the thing that brought them here.

'Sun and fury' is a hell of an expression, though, and she looks a bit more pleased at that. "Does eating not come standard?" she asks, right before it occurs to her that it might be an issue not because Asmodia doesn't typically eat, but because she typically eats something really damn weird. It's not unheard of for partbloods to have some off-brand dietary needs.

Or maybe she really is brand new. "Um. We can find you someplace to stay and get your pantry stocked, if that's what you're worried about. The people who used to handle that have kind of been ousted, but I know a guy who can help." An angel, really, but one step at a time. Sunshine shrugs. "We try to look after one another - rifties, I mean."

Asmodia waves off the question -- of course, most people outside the adventuring profession wouldn't think to magically remove their need to eat even if they had the money for it. "Oh, I normally have a ring for that," she says as if that explains everything. "But it looks as though most of my things didn't come with me."

She gives the soft biscuit sort of thing in her hand a tentative sniff as she listens, frowning to herself. What will she do? Her memories of the last time she was here are vague, but she thinks she can recall a few days on this plane/in this world, all of them spent holed up in a room assigned her as she took stock of her resources and tried to break through whatever block had been put on her and Biscuit's magic. They had fed her, she remembers that now, but they'd also given her quarters in a dismal little space away from the sun, citing a lack of open apartments above ground. 'They' may no longer be a resource, it sounds like, but perhaps it is little wonder that there would be upheaval in her absence when she has been gone from here for several months.

"I was given a living space," she says slowly. "By a rebellion group, underneath the ground?" She watches Sunshine (it's hard not to take that name as some kind of positive omen, but one really can't make assumptions) for some sign of recognition as she takes an absent bite of the food in her hand.

All right, maybe Sunshine is a walking good omen, because Asmodia is surprised to find that the food so freely offered is amazing. "Oh!" she says through a mouthful of crumbs. "Oh," she says again, taking another big, unladylike bite.

Both of her eyebrows creep up at 'I normally have a ring for that,' and she can't help feeling vaguely affronted by the thought of someone bypassing the need of her services with an accessory. Considering how expensive Manhattan can be, maybe she shouldn't begrudge someone the ability to pare down their monthly expenses, but come on. Doesn't everyone enjoy eating?

"The Rebels, yeah," Sunshine says with a nod, her expression slightly troubled (though more, it must be said, as a result of the ring idea than the fate of her benefactors; from what she's gathered, they deserved what they got, and she's self sufficient enough by now that she doesn't miss the loss of that one particular safety net). "They set me up, too. Their base used to be underground, but it's, uh... not habitable anymore. Everyone's in above-ground apartments, now." So much the better, she figures. She doesn't know how anyone could stand living down there full time.

Asmodia's reaction to the cookie pretty well makes up for the whole ring thing - see, this is why eating is important - and Sunshine smiles faintly. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn't offer her baking to animals, but Asmodia's just earned herself some figurative brownie points, and with Sunshine, those can transmute into literal brownie points. Besides, whatever that thing is under the bench, it probably counts as a rifty, too. "Does your, uh... pet want anything?" Sunshine leans out a little to look down at the thing, now fully visible. From a distance, it might be mistaken for some kind of weird mutt, but from where she's sitting, it's clearly some kind of massive carthaginian rodent. "What is that, anyway?" she asks, only a little perturbed. If it was going to start gnawing on her ankles, it would have already, right?

Eating is great until you find yourself stranded in the northern wilds without trail rations or the first clue which plants are safe to eat. Or stuck in a strange city on another planet, for that matter, without a single coin of the local currency in one's pocket. Doing away with food altogether might be a slightly unconventional way to carry out the promise to oneself that one would never go hungry again, but by the time money stopped being a concern in Asmodia's life she had come to rely on the convenience of never having to worry about it at all unless she especially desired the experience.

Not habitable suggests something even more violent than ousted, and Asmodia's eyebrows climb even as she keeps chowing down on the biscuit thing. So much for that residence, though she'll hardly miss it. She swallows thickly, briefly regretting biting off nearly half the thing at once, and glances down at the furry brown nose poking its way out from under the bench. "Donkey rat," she explains. "His name's Biscuit." At an insistent squeak, she rolls her eyes and adds, "Yes, he does -- and it's going to be his own fault if he makes himself sick eating human food." Take that, Biscuit.

"I take it your friend wasn't one of the Rebels?" she asks cautiously.

Sunshine doesn't have a detailed account of what happened in the base, but she's been given to understand that it now has a rat problem so severe that, short of direct Rift intervention, there's no getting rid of it. If she didn't already have sunlight-related reasons for avoiding the base, that would be a pretty effective deterrent.

'Donkey rat' is a little alarming, but 'Biscuit' is a cute name. And his size makes 'rat' seem like the wrong classification, anyway. He could almost be some kind of possum. That's higher up the ladder of Animals You'd Expect To Find In The Garbage, at least. Sunshine pokes through the bag until she finds a relatively plain butter cookie and leans down to offer it to the creature. For some reason, it doesn't feel quite right just dropping the cookie on the grass.

"Not exactly," she says, glancing up at Asmodia. "He owns a bookshop. He lives in the same building that I do, but a lot of us were only with the Rebels insofar as we took advantage of the free housing and stipend." She straightens and shrugs once Biscuit has taken the offering. "He's pretty powerful, though. Um, magically speaking. So he's sort of taken over building management."

It's a common name for the species, not a scientific one, and common nomenclature is rife with inaccuracies by nature. Asmodia keeps an eye on Biscuit and Sunshine, not that she's too worried about either of them doing anything untoward. Biscuit creeps a few steps further out from under the bench to inspect the offering, whiskers twitching with interest, before gently taking the item in his mouth and sitting back on his haunches to transfer the bulk of it to his front paws while he chews the first bite. The sounds of tooth clicking and little chirrups of contentment drift upward, and Asmodia's smile deepens as she works on her own biscuit thing. She's feeling less shaken now, whether because she's had time to recover or because the food and conversation have been enough to distract her from the memory of the shock she received.

"I was given the impression this place did not have many casters," she comments, wondering if it was a lie or if she has simply stumbled into a series of systematically unlikely meetings and associations. "If you think he will help, it would be...good. To have a place, I mean, until I can...until I can leave." This is not permanent. It's not entirely unpleasant here now that she's run into Sunshine, but it's absolutely not permanent.

Okay, the cookie seems to be going over well. Hopefully it won't actually make the thing sick. Well, there's no chocolate in it, and if Asmodia's not worried about it, Sunshine's not going to worry, either. Considering how rarely she gives her food to animals, Biscuit can just count himself fortunate.

She sits back against the bench and pulls out a cookie for herself. "If you mean people with innate magic-handling abilities, that's probably right," she says, taking a musing bite. Once she'd swallowed, she adds, "But the Rift tends to gift people with weird, specific stuff they didn't have before. Like, my boyfriend can summon books from nowhere." Or he could, anyway. "Couldn't do that back home." Or walk in sunlight, but let's not out Spike so soon. Things like 'housing' are way higher on the priority list, here.

Speaking of. "But yeah, housing should be doable." If there isn't an empty unit, Aziraphale can probably just miracle one up. "For as long as you're here," she adds, charitably not mentioning just how long that might be. She can handle the feeding and housing and leave the bubble-bursting to time and experience.

Edited 2015-05-26 00:48 (UTC)

That's what healing hexes are for, right? It can't be worse than that time Stig fed Biscuit a laxative.

Innate suggests that Sunshine is limiting the scope to those magic users to whom power comes rather than those who study for it, but it's the second part that's a lot more interesting. She's aware that some people who can't otherwise use magic being born with one ability or another (she herself could cast darkness before she was ever a witch), but to have a small, specific power like that granted later in life is...weird. And why books??

"And that's all he can summon?" That is specific and weird, just as advertised. "I wonder if I'll -- or if I would notice any new powers if I were to stay." She's not stupid. She does realize that she was just put low merely by looking at this Rift, and that her chances of getting back to the other side are slim at best. She has to act like she will, though, because to give up already would go against everything she and her friends have accomplished.

She nods. "Yes, that would be, um...helpful. For as long as it's needful."

"That's all," Sunshine confirms with a nod. "I don't think it does stuff like that to everyone, for whatever that's worth. Pretty sure I didn't get anything, um... extra. But they don't always kick in right away."

She rolls up the bakery bag and stuffs it away, then looks over at Asmodia. "Are you good to start walking? We can head there now, if you're up for it." She doesn't want to make assumptions, considering she was just whammied by the rift. But lingering in the park probably isn't the best idea, either, not when Asmodia has a noticeably weird pet and the locals are so twitchy.

Asmodia winces and shifts herself more properly upright, testing the waters. Her head doesn't start spinning and her legs do not appear to be under the impression that they're gelatinous, so she gives a little nod before leaning forward to peer down at Biscuit. "Finish up," she tells him, and the donkey rat hurries to polish off the remains of his biscuit-thing as his mistress shoves the remains of her own food in her mouth and levers herself to her feet.

"Jus' fine," she decides through a mouthful of crumbs.

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And this isn't Shadowfoot Island, either! [closed]

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