strangetrip | [EP] open your hands if you want to be held

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[EP] open your hands if you want to be held

Out beyond the greenhouse and the gardens, in the orchards she'd nurtured with love, and magic, and friends, Regina had stripped her usual business casual battle armor in favor of a softer mien. She rested beneath the shade of a tree, inhabited by an elemental named Manzanita, who understood nothing of fashion, everything of fornication and fertility, and laughed like a babbling brook or syrup sap at the words she didn't understand from the fashion magazines Regina read to her beneath her boughs.

At her feet or more occasionally her head, a puppy-now-nearly-a-dog sprawled, his tail thumping when his mistress laughed unusually loudly. From time to time, inexplicably, a black kitten-cat herded by a spirit Russian Blue appeared to torment the dog. Behind them in a magically constructed paddock, a mare grazed, keeping quiet watch over the antics, and less quiet watch over the picnic basket of fresh fruit (apples, and plums, and pears, and berries and cherries, oh my) on a picnic blanket at Regina's side.

The conversation that was more of a communion took a turn for the sly when Manzanita detected thoughts of a certain wolf in her not-a-druid's mind. It wasn't words, but a suggestion, perhaps Regina might leave this issue of outer-bark wholly behind. Head back, laughing, Regina (briefly, magically) shed her clothes for a light dusting of leaves. (~~Please, let me down, Mama. I'll be good.~~)

On second thought, with a flip of her wrists to replace her clothes, she murmured, "Smelling like forest is freedom enough."

[ooc: Slow because shit is real, but hit me til I scream. Find Regina in the orchards she planted at any time during this post. Avoid seeing her naked if your fireball tolerance is low. Otherwise, fireball forecast: low. Title quote: Rumi.]

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Hurley sits. He hasn't quite pegged what kind of person Regina is yet, but he had kinda been warned about her. So far things seemed pretty good. Maybe that person'd been mistaken.

She definitely had that leader-type attitude, though.

"So, you were a leader back home or something?"

"Queen in one world, mayor in another." And burrough political leader in a third.

She opened the picnic basket and took out a plate of fruit, cheese and crackers. It wasn't actually in there, because leaving cheese to sit outside even in the shade is a recipe for food poisoning, but her summoning legerdemain is superb. She also offered a small plate, cheese knife, and napkin to Hurley, before reaching for her open but corked bottle of wine.

"Here, I'd consider myself more of a crisis planning manager."

Hurley's not going to say no to cheese. He carves a few slices for himself, puts them on the plate, and takes a bite of the first slice.

Pretty good.

"Are there actually like, crisises here?"

Was that crises? Hurley's not really sure, but he goes with his gut.

Regina asked with her eyes and hands whether he wanted a glass of wine after she'd poured her own and continued answering his questions. She didn't allow herself to wince or 'correct' crisises for crises because fuck you, Mother.

"It depends on your age and your definition of crisis," she answered with a hint of a smoky laugh. "If you're sixteen, madly in love, and Valentine's Day magic makes you kiss three other people, that might well be a crisis." Where someone might expect that to sound snide or jaded coming from Regina, it was actually quietly fond. She did have pre and post-teens of her own, or had.

"Honestly, a crisis around here might be anything from vampires without a food supply to insufficient sexual partners, or the complete absence of a mental health professional. But that's just today. Pocket worlds aren't known for stability, and this one might get invaded by alien carpenter ants at any time."

If insufficient sexual partners was a crisis, Hurley's been living in crisis his entire life. He can see how the vampires and lack of mental health care could probably be a problem though. He hadn't been here long, but he had been here long enough to know that a lot of people here had a lot of hangups.

Hurley hopes that the alien carpenters ants aren't actually going to be a thing. They'd probably take him down first because he was the slowest and didn't actually have any real powers like basically everyone here seemed to.

"Pocket world," Hurley says, taking another bite of cheese. "So's that what this place is? You have a lot of experience with pocket worlds?"

There was, Regina reflected, something oddly soothing about someone accepting the things you said with no more or less emphasis than you put on them, and only asking questions about the things that required clarification. It had been a long time since she'd felt as 'at ease' in her Mayor Mills role.

"None of us know what this place is exactly, but pocket world is a useful description of a place that collects people like lint," was her answer to that, but she did elaborate that, "I have more experience than most of places that don't obey the rules of the world I was born in." Curse-worlds, wish-worlds, Wonderland... "And before my daughter and I arrived here, we lived in a larger one that began the size of Gotham City."

Pocket world was kinda a good descriptor for this place, even if it wasn't what it actually was. Place was kinda small and Hurley hadn't felt inclined to go wandering out in the desert. Wandering out in the jungle had been bad enough, and he'd only done that because he had to.

"That's weird," Hurley says, because one Pocket World seemed like more than an enough. "What happened? Did you just pop out of your old pocket world and land here like everybody else?"

Since Hurley seemed more interested in cheese than fruit and Regina was at once the proud 'cook' and forever a mother, she took up a knife and plum and began adding slices of fruit to the plate. He needed the nutrients from it, and she couldn't help wanting the 'attagirl' for how good her fruit was.

"More walked off one road onto another than 'pop,' but essentially, yes," Regina explained. "Snow had been gone from Gotham several months--" As had Robin and Roland. It was every day less a disappointment she had not found Robin here, but Roland she would miss forever. "And when I arrived, she was already here. But others who had left Gotham were not."

"Well," Hurley says, taking a slice of one of the fruits. "That's something."

He bites into it. It's actually pretty good.

"So what's your whole theory about this place?" They used to talk about all the weirdness on the island all the time. Then again, they didn't have electricity or television or music a good chunk of their time there, so there wasn't really much else to do except talk and explore.

Regina had listened to all of the theories everyone had in Gotham, hypothesized her own. What she'd learned, in the end, was "An interaction between several advanced technologies ripped Gotham out of its universe and it eventually collided with another universe." That sounded ridiculous, she was fully aware, but she made no apologies for it.

"The Inn behaves more like a curse or wish-world." She wasn't prepared to say that it was a curse, but she couldn't say it wasn't, either.

Hurley nods at Regina's first explanation through he doesn't really have any idea what she's talking about. He's found that sometimes it's better to just pretend you know what other people are talking about then speak up and have everyone realize precisely how little you understand.

There's still one thing Hurley understands.

"What do you mean, curse?"

"I mean what I say. Curse." Regina frowned and then let out a quiet sigh. "You're from a world without magic."

She dipped her chin slightly to pull herself back from the edgy place she'd been heady. He didn't mean to be impertinent. Just confused.

"Sorry," she offered -- unusually enough. He was a nice young man. "A curse is a powerful use of magic to affect one or me people negatively in the fashion the caster desires."

Hurley tenses at the explanation. Things had been going great. The numbers weren't appearing in all these weird places like they did at the island. Things were going so well that Hurley was starting to think that maybe this place killed his curse.

But now, Regina's saying this place is a curse or something and maybe Hurley's not getting it, but if so, this sucks.

"I mean, yeah, I know what a curse is," Hurley says. "I'm pretty sure I am cursed, so being brought to a place that might be cursed? Again? Yeah, it kinda puts me on edge."

Regina tuned her arcane senses and studied him for a long minute. She didn't sense any magic on him, but that wasn't anything like infallible. A curse could be attached to an object he wasn't carrying, it could have been on something he ate or touched once. Only a blood curse would probably leave a trace.

If she had pixie dust, or a cellar full of ingredients, she might be able to concoct a blown powder that would reveal any magic entanglements, but she didn't. "I don't sense a curse on you," she said, because it was true and unless he told her a lot more about it, she wouldn't be able to remove it. "As far as I can tell, the Inn is the opposite of cursed. It's as if it's warded for safety. But in terms if how it behaves, it's like a curse or wish world. It's hermetic. Nothing here but what was cursed or wished here in the first place or what the barrier allows in."

Hurley really, really wants to believe he's not cursed. Though he was worried about it when he first showed up, he really was starting to think that maybe whatever curse was on him had faded with his arrival. Yeah, things might not have been perfect since he showed up here, but they had been pretty good. Especially compared to that time before he arrived at the island.

"Okay," he says, though he's still unsure. He really hopes that if Regina's right, whoever wished or cursed them all to be here didn't wish or curse him the same way the numbers were/did.

"This place is really starting to sound like the island," he says. "All this weird stuff happening, us never getting to leave." That might have been about to change if Charlie succeeded, though. Hurley still wasn't sure what happened to Walt.

"Tell me about this island," she suggested, leaning slightly forward to indicate her interest. She lifted her wine to her lips, took a sip, and smiled a motherly sort of encouragement. "What kind of strange things happened there?"

Because islands where strange things happen immediately make her think of Neverland.

"Uh, well." How do you even begin to explain this?

"There was this smoke monster on the island that just kinda went around giving people visions and killing them and stuff. Sometimes it just chased you. And then there were other people on the island. We called them the Others and they started attacking us. And we found some hatches and there was a code you had to enter every 108 minutes or else..."

Hurley pauses there.

"I was never relaly clear on that, but the Others never had anything to do with the hatches. That was the Dharma Initiative. They were running like, some sort of social experiment or something. I'm not really clear on that, either. My friend Charlie and my friend Desmond went to one of the hatches under the water because the Others set up something to block transmissions so no one could get off the island. And there was this French chick named Rousseau and she was like, the only survivor left on the island for a really long time that wasn't an Other."

Some of the details are out of order and some are missing outright and Hurley wouldn't be surprised if it didn't make sense to Regina. A lot of it didn't make any sense to him and he had lived on the island.

When he began rambling, Regina suppressed a sigh and sipped her wine. She could do this. She did know how to listen for content amidst a great outpouring of words. After all, neither Henry nor Roland were particularly restrained in their speech. Henry spoke in volumes and Roland was simply effusive.

Hurley trended more toward Henry's end of the spectrum which made it reasonably simple to pick out the salient points. Which all added up to a peculiar pack of nonsense. "It sounds like someone mated Wonderland and Neverland." She shook her head. "Do you remember how you arrived there?"

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[EP] open your hands if you want to be held

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