strangetrip | [GP] Check-In Day: What a nice surprise; bring your alibis

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[GP] Check-In Day: What a nice surprise; bring your alibis

Every check-in day conjured memories of her first, and all of the others, which inevitably meant she spent the day with Lara on her mind, and Petey, Illyana, and Wyatt. She'd been blessed with dear friends and loves arriving, and yet she never stopped hoping she'd figure out the mess that was this pocket universe and get home.

It was starting to become complicated, though, almost a year later. It would hurt to lose the people she'd grown fond of here, almost as much as it would be good to get home. She didn't know what to do with that feeling, but it was what it was. All she could do was tend the bar with patience and understanding, and keep an eye on the readings her crude energy measuring devices out on the road sent to her.

For all the people that came in and out, it was a quiet day. So between drinks, she spent most of it bent over a notebook with a cup of coffee in her hand, trying to design better instruments to dismantle Yana's shackles. Maybe Percy could help her build them.

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A lot can happen in the space of two heartbeats. For all that the young lady Kitty had intercepted was lovely, fair-skinned, with long red hair and grass-green eyes, Vax knew in the next heartbeat after he saw her that she wasn't Keyleth. What he spent more time working out after was how, even for hoping in that first heartbeat that it could be, would be their Kiki, he hadn't felt what he would have expected to feel. There was still a sense of longing and loss, the shape of the empty place where she ought to be. But there wasn't any pang of guilt, or regret, even before he knew for sure. He'd thought there might be, so that came as a surprise.

It was with some of the same grisly fascination that you'd prod a mending wound that he decided he should talk to her, introduce himself. "Hello," he tried an uncertain smile. "Has Kitty helped you get your bearings a little?"

Surprised that anyone else would choose to come talk to her, Emma glanced up shyly without lifting her head fully. She made herself stop fiddling with the stem of her wine glass, resting her hand in her lap instead, bruised knuckles hidden by the sleeves of her cardi, by a pocket holding her cards... just in case. In case of what, she wasn't sure, just in case

"She was very welcoming," she answered, offering a hesitant smile of her own. Kitty had had some answers, which had helped a lot. But if Emma believed what Kitty told her – or that Kitty and the rest of this were real at all – then she had worse things to worry about.

He had to remind himself, again, that she wasn't Keyleth. Keyleth was skinnier, more excitable, more inherently awkward. But the redhead was shy, in a way that did remind him of how sweetly Keyleth could be shy.

And that... He had to stop doing that. That wasn't fair. She was her own person.

"It's a lot though," he suggested, sensing some reservation in her reply. His dark eyes reflected sympathy. "Too much to take in all at once."

Emma shrugged. "I don't do well with unknowns. I'm trying to tell myself it could be a lot worse." She knew that much, but it didn't help a whole lot, when no one at home would know where she was or what had happened. Only that she was gone.

"Sorry. I should've said. I'm Em." Look at her, remembering to introduce herself this time.

"There's a big difference between 'could be worse' and something being okay." Here they were at introductions, but he was still sort of...hovering. "I'm Vax'ildan," he explained. "Would you mind if I sit with you a bit?"

"Oh! Uh, yeah. Please." Emma could feel a 'sorry' wanting to slip past her lips again, but managed to keep it back. It already felt like all she was doing today was apologizing to people. Not just friendly, he was being careful with her. It kind of reminded her of when she and Sabine and first come to the castle. But if everybody showed up here like she had, it would be kind of the same. Flotsam and jetsam instead of refugees, but getting used to a whole new world.

"It's nice to meet you, Vax'ildan... if the circumstances could be better." She wondered if he was a mutant too. His ears reminded her of JP, and Kitty had said there were others here. He sounded like a Brit, but she couldn't be more specific than that. Her hands itched for her cards, but she resisted.

Vax caught her glancing at his ears, which wasn't unusual, though she seemed too polite (or just too shy) to say anything about them straightaway. "I'm half-elf," he saved her the trouble as he eased out a chair and slid himself into it, comfortably mindful of the feathery cape as if he was quite used to moving in the slippery drape of it by now. "That's what makes for my funny ears. Do you not have elves where you're from?"

"Not funny. Just pointed," Emma corrected, as though pointed ears were no less normal than rounded. No one here was going to kill her or throw her in a camp for being what she was. She didn't have to hide. The added they can fuck off if they don't like it in her head was definitely in Pyro's voice.

"I know someone with pointed ears, that's all. He's not elven though. He's like me, a mutant. So when I saw yours... I was only trying to decide if you were too. I've never met an elf before, or a half-elf." Identities mattered. So if he called himself half, then she should too.

"There's a whole race of them in Exandria, where I've come from. Elves tend to have longer, pointier ears than mine, and much bigger poles up their asses." He felt it was well within his rights to say so, having Syldor Vessar as his father. "My sister and I don't seem to have inherited that quality, thanks to our mother."

"You're a mutant though?" He'd heard others from here call themselves as much, but he wasn't sure how some of them would feel about being outed by a third party when they more or less looked human. "Is it rude, if I ask what that means to you?"

"Where I've come from," Emma began, borrowing his words a shortcut she'd picked up for talking to the public when doing readings, "Mutants have a gene that makes them different in some way from other humans." She barely noticed she pulled out her cards, cutting the larger than average deck one handed before absently shuffling them.

"Everyone's mutation is unique," although some were very similar, even Nate and Nathan's powers weren't exactly the same, and they were basically the same person. "For me specifically, it means I see the future."

Vax'ildan had always had clever fingers. When Em brought out the cards, his eyes strayed from her face to them, and the easy, artful way she manipulated them around was worth watching.

Her claim made his head jerk back up, curiosity on his face. "Do you mean..." He gestured with both hands at her deck. "You can read the cards? We have card readers in Exandria as well." It came out polite enough, but he couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed. He'd feel the same if she'd told him she could fly, then ascended with a rope and pulley.

Emma could read the cards, but Addy had taught her to read people too, and while he tried to be polite, she could tell he wasn't impressed and didn't believe she could actually do what she said she could. That was fair. She'd been depending on people not believing her for a long time. But if she wasn't hiding, she didn't want to be thought a con either.

She wondered what sort of man he was, what would make him believe, and after a moment, she set the cards down between them. "I do know the usual meanings of the cards, but that's not what I meant. The future takes time to confirm, and some people would rather not know what is to come, but I can see the past as well. Draw just one card, and I'll show you."

"The past too?" Vax raised an eyebrow, curious... He looked down to where the seemingly ordinary fortune teller cards waited. He shrugged inwardly and reached to draw one of them out of the deck at random.

Would it be something like, 'you've had troubles in your family,' or 'you wish you would've done something different before you'd come here,' that could be said to nearly anyone?

The card, when she revealed it, was of a woman in a pale dress, with raven black wings, carrying a scythe and riding a horse. Death. Emma eyes went unfocused as she seemed to look through the card rather than at it, then widened in surprised, finally narrowing as she tried to make sense of what she saw.

"How big was that dragon?" she almost whispered, then remembering she was reading for someone, "Being squeezed out the side of the dragon, it was a transition point. You had a new... purpose for your life." Refocusing her attention on Vax, she smiled softly. "People get scared of death, but it's rarely as bad as they fear."

Vax's eyes widened to match how hers had gone, the line of his mouth forming a faint frown. "How did...?" He started to ask, with genuine incredulity. But it was a stupid question, of course, if she'd already told him how.

Taking a moment to smooth his figurative feathers out, he looked at the redhead again, as if he'd not seen her at all before. And maybe he hadn't, for how unassuming she was. It wasn't that she knew he had a very up close and personal relationship with death that struck him, or even that he'd fought dragons before - he'd told people here as much. But how could she know that particular dragon battle, and that particular way he and Scanlan had tried to fight it, and how that was the first moment he truly fought with faith in his patron? "That dragon was... Enormously huge," he lied, but only a little. "You could see that, then? Like you'd seen it with your own eyes?"

"The dragon was black." As she talked, she picked up the lone card and inserted it back into the deck to shuffle again. "You were wearing that armor," she added, flicking a glance toward him. "And carrying a dagger and longsword as you fell." Yes, she'd seen it, like she would if she'd been there, or seen photographs. Sometimes her visions were symbolic, but this one was easy to tell it had been literal.

"The cards show me things. Ever since I was little."

"Umbrasyl," Vax told her quietly, eyes following the card as it went back into the deck. "The ancient black dragon."

"But it that the cards," he tracked their talk back a-ways, "or is that your mutation?"

That was the subject of a longstanding debate, and Emma wasn't entirely sure what the true answer was. The tarot had remained vague on the matter. But if she had to try to put it in words... "The cards are just pieces of paper with pretty pictures on them. But my teacher likes to say that psi minds don't work like other people's. There's a lot of past. And way more future. Too much for anybody's mind to handle. The cards give my mind structure, so I can see moments, and help interpret what I see. So, both?"

"Both," he echoed back, having followed about that much of it.

"...What is that even like, seeing things past and present? What do you do with that knowledge? The stories with oracles in them aren't usually kind."

"The stories of oracles usually end in madness, you mean. And other tragedy." But madness most of all.

Emma gave a tiny shrug, . "I'm not mad yet?"

Vax gave a tip of his head, granting her that she didn't appear mad to him at all. "You seem perfectly pleasant to me."

"Maybe. But if you hadn't been in the belly of a dragon yet and I told you what I saw in the cards, you might start to wonder." And that was just being perceived as crazy. It was what happened when she finally saw too much that really scared Emma. But she wasn't going to dump that on a complete stranger.

"Have you been here long?"

"Is a year long? It feels like it's been ages to me. Most things here still strike me as strange, but they've become a more familiar sort of strange." He gave her a bit of a self-effacing smile. "Did that make any sense at all?"

"You've gotten used to the culture shock," Emma inferred, "Of a world where elves and dragons aren't common – please tell me dragons aren't common here – but kitschy decor and, if I had to guess, I don't mean an offense if I'm wrong, a wide variety of electrical inventions are mundane. Something like that?"

"Very like that, yes." He considered it a moment. "Have you ever seen that moving drawing play they have on the teevees, what was it... The Hobbit? Rather like that one. We call hobbits by the name 'halflings,' but a lot of it's familiar."

[GP] Check-In Day: What a nice surprise; bring your alibis

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