strangetrip | Missing (OTA)

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Missing (OTA)

Liz stood in the middle of the lobby with a quiet, panicked look on her face. She turned around a second time, surveying the scene around her, but the second pass didn't help any. She ran a hand through her hair and then headed for one of the couches. She pulled back the cushions, digging her hand into the crevice of the gaudy plush decor and when her hand emerged empty, she felt her chest tighten.

Liz's journal was missing.

She thought she had brought it back to the room yesterday after studying in the cafe, but this morning when she went to review her notes from the day before, she had discovered that the familiar book she had so many things in was gone. She had checked the library, the restaurant, the cafe, even the kitchen itself. It had to be somewhere, right?

(ooc: Find her pretty much anywhere. Also! Feel free, if your character would so choose, to find the journal and read all or some of it because I am a cruel mistress.)

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"What happened that day, usually. Though usually only when there's a problem or something I had to wrap my head around... sometimes about the people I meet." She flushed, skirting over the dreams she's had that she wrote down. "And, um. Sometimes I write letters to my best friend, Maria. I know she'll probably never get to read them, but..." Well, it made her feel better.

It didn't take much to know that Liz was keeping something from her. Even as easily as the kid blushed, it still meant something. So while the specifics might not be her business, Corbie tipped her head to one side and gently challenged, "Well, what's so embarrassing about that?"

She looked at Corbie and flushed a little more, thinking, particularly to one part of her letter to Maria. "Sometimes," She winced a little, feeling the bubble of embarrassment float to the top. "Sometimes I write stuff about Peter and I..."She paused, somehow turning more red and she averted her eyes to one of the bookshelves across the room. "...being intimate."

Corbie on the other hand was one of the last people to be embarrassed about this (the last person here probably being Jackson, as she wondered if he could even feel shame). Not that she wanted to think about Liz and Peter getting busy or anything, but it didn't bother her. The best thing for it to her mind was to keep talking like this was perfectly normal. Which is was. So she just nodded. "Okay. Like stuff you've done or like fantasies?" She paused a beat. "Or both, I guess."

Her eyes darted back to Corbie and she paused for a moment, somehow hearing her voice admitting the answer. "Both... But, um. We haven't really... Done a lot." It was sort of confusing because they had taken a shower together, naked, but had yet to go passed making out otherwise.

"Peter's not, um.. ready yet." Liz thought she was, or at least ready to go further, but her expression and tone suggested she was fine with Peter not being ready. She wasn't one to push things like that.

Corbie nodded, because it was obvious to anybody with eyes that they hadn't, but to her eyes especially. Though frankly she didn't think either of them were ready if Liz was this red over this little. "Yeah. Okay. All that sounds normal. What's so embarrassing?"

"Just... if people read that..." She shrugged, pausing for a moment, trying to figure out how to explain it. "That stuff's supposed to be private, you know?" The details especially. The only person she might not leave anything out to is Maria. "And probably anyone reading it would have way more experience and think everything I'm saying is really dumb or something."

Which brought them back to the so then why would you take something that private out in public where you do run the risk of someone else finding it. Hopefully the scare would be enough to convince Liz to handle that journal otherwise if she really cared about keeping the contents to herself. If not, well. Not anybody's fault but her own for not taking the lesson to heart.

But Corbie got stuck on another point. She was silent for a moment before she pointed out, "You say that a lot."

Liz blinked and looked confused. "What do you mean? Say what?"

"Some version or other of 'this is stupid,'" Corbie said simply. "Statement, question, sometimes switch out for dumb, but yeah. You say it a lot."

"Oh." She ducked her head. "I guess, I, um. I guess I never noticed." She wondered briefly what that probably said about her.

Corbie's head tipped again, her brow furrowing lightly. "Who do you think is spending so much time judging everything you do?"

That was a good question. Maybe it stemmed from just being in high school or maybe it was something more solely on Liz and how people looked at her to be the one that didn't make mistakes.

"When you put it that way, it makes it sound silly." She pressed her lips together. "I mean... back home, with high school, sometimes it really does feel like everyone is watching you. Especially when I was dating this guy named Kyle who was like, in 3 different sports and pretty popular."

Corbie's frown deepened. "High school sounds pretty shit, then."

She considered for a moment. "Okay. I'm gonna ask you something that's prolly going to feel weird to answer, but. Indulge me. How much d'you think about me? I don't mean in general 'oh shit everybody's looking at me,' I mean you're thinking just about me and stuff that I've said and done."

She thought about it. "Sometimes... I mean, when we talked last time about Peter and stuff by the pool, I think about what you said." She would occasionally deliberate on what to tell Peter or go to someone else. "And sometimes, I guess, when I see you around, I kind of just wonder how you're doing and stuff."

Corbie nodded. "In other words, occasionally." It wasn't an accusation or a disappointment or anything, just a statement of fact building up to a point. "Sometimes more, sometimes less, but averages out to occasionally. That accurate?"

If felt kind of weird to admit that, though she guessed it would be weird to think of her more frequently too.

"Yeah... I guess so." Somehow she managed to just look a little bit guilty.

Corbie reached out to touch Liz's hand. "That's not a bad thing," she said, and she let that sit for a moment so it'd sink in before she continued.

"My point is, that's about how much I think about you, too. Or most anybody else thinks about you, probably, unless you're close. It's not that I don't like you or I don't care or anything like that, it's that I got my own life to worry about. We've all got our own lives to worry about. If anybody really was watching you as close and critical as you're scared of, they really need something to do."

It made a lot of sense, of course, and really, it wasn't something that Liz didn't know somewhere deep inside, but the inn sometimes felt like a weird version of high school and in high school there were people who spent a lot of time watching what other people did - mostly to make those people's lives miserable. Liz thought of Flash from Peter's world briefly.

Corbie was also right, though, that those people were not the norm and they probably needed to re-evaluate their priorities.

She nodded, pulling back a strand of hair and tucking it behind her ear. "I guess.. sometimes I just feel like people expect me to have like, life figured out or whatever. Or at least to sound like it, because of my grades and life back home. And then I talk to people here who've been through, you know, more things than I have or who've traveled a lot -" More life experiences "- and I realize just how much I don't actually know. Then I feel like I'm failing the people who expect so much out of me."

It hadn't been so very long ago when, barely older than Liz was now, Corbie had had a number of preconceived notions of the world--what real magic was, real wizards were, and whether or not she could ever catch up to that. Felix, in a surprising show of patience from someone with as bad a temper as his, only gently untangled the knots with her until she could take a few steps forward.

There were only two or three years of separation between Corbie and Liz if you looked at a calendar, but the actual gulf between their experiences was far wider than that.

So. Okay. She was going to try to do that adult thing. Felix wouldn't have had patience for any of these particular worries, but she could still try to follow what he'd done for her.

"Nobody's got their life figured out," she said. They'd touched on this point before.

"No, I know. But sometimes it feels like people think I should." She thought about Maria for a moment. She loved Maria to death, but Maria liked to call herself 'the wacky best friend' and Liz was the one 'with her head together' and often the others seemed to look to her for the answers too. Well, except Isabel and occasionally Michael. "It's better here than it was back home."

Corbie put her chin in her hands. "Okay. Why?" And she left it at that.

"That it's different here?" She paused. "I don't know... maybe because most people here are adults?"

Most people everywhere were adults, but fine, Corbie'd take it. "Okay, and who thinks you should have everything figured out already?"

Liz paused, pressing her lips together for a moment. There was an answer there, but she just looked at Corbie. "I'm probably just wrong about that too." She offered a small smile to Corbie.

"I know I need to take myself less seriously. I'm trying to work on that."

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