ph_logs | (open) and these thoughts are in my head

(open) and these thoughts are in my head

Who: Fever & open
What: Settling into the town in varied ways.
When: Second half of March/early part of April.
Where: Varied locations - see prompts.
Warning(s): Likely intrusive murder thoughts, others to be added should they arise.

work - town hall.
The newest clerk at Town Hall is a woman with a scar on her face and an eagerness to learn the system. Soon enough, she's figured things out, as if she'd been working there for months instead of the short time it really has been. Things flow easily, aided by both the strange item she'd retrieved from that one shop and what seems to be an innate understanding. But then again, if one can negotiate tactics midbattle, a job with paperwork and filing is practically nothing. So, if you need something, she's likely the one to dispense the forms or take them, working through the level of administration that all the new arrivals warranted.

Of course, it's not always business, and at the right time, someone might catch her at break, a novel from the library at hand and a dictionary close by as she needs to look up words. Some concepts and items are as of yet unknown to her, but she believes firmly with a bit of study, it can all be sorted.

training - "fight club."

When she joins the ranks of those sparring, talking her way into a day when the militia and the Enforcers are doing their training, it's really to satisfy her own desires for combat no matter what she tells them. Sure, she can go out in search of monsters, but that requires a companion and planning. This is more freeform, and fighting against someone else here lets her look at their capabilities. No magic to start with - best to be fair to all involved - and instead, Fever relies on a sturdier branch. Peter's not done with the staff yet, so this is the closest she can get. She fights with a clear joy in her movements, happy to test herself against anyone until either her opponent yields or someone outside calls the match.

That said, there are moments of downtime, where one has to catch their breath and drink water, where she's just leaning against the side observing or lightly applauding at the end of one spar. Catching a fighter's eye, they're offered an amused but restrained smile, and win, lose, or neither, it's clear something impressed her.

They're still never getting her to sign up with the Enforcers, though.

festival green - picnic.

Though she shies from the doll making, Fever can't deny the appeal of being able to picnic on the green, and waits until the event is over and dealt with before she takes her inspiration and heads outdoors. It's not perhaps the most ideal weather for it - clouds, the wind - but it's not so bad as to keep her from it. So here she is, with a simple lunch that's been ferried over and a blanket to sit on, trying to think about if she's ever done this before. Had reason to, really. But a passerby will interrupt her thoughts, and she'll raise her hand to get their attention.

"Does it seem like rain to you?"

Of course, there's enough room on the blanket for two, if you're feeling particularly sociable or are eyeing a free snack. Or, it can start to do as much as lightly rain, and she's not budging from where she is, considering it still fine weather.

wildcard.

Different idea? Throw it at me, I'm wide open for other scenarios. Will match the format of any tag-ins. Opt out post.

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"So more like King Arthur, then. Or Merlin in your case."

Or that nutty Hobbit thing he read a while back. He's rifling through the bag of candy.

"What's being a sorceress, then? Is that like... a specialization, like how I do chest-cutting specifically?"

They're hard honey drops, and she would have given him a pointed look about not taking from what's not offered, but he is helping her look. A little payment is allowed, and so it is merely a look to let him know that she sees him and his wandering hands.

"Not exactly. It's something you are rather than what you do." She leans her hand on the edge of her desk, gesturing a little. "There's many ways to gain the capacity for magic - study, faith, a bargain struck to name a few - and a sorcerer is born with it. I've had this within me my whole life. What I do for work is a separate category. Think of it like me noting that you have blue eyes and also that you're a doctor."

Both hands go up in mock surrender- he's just looking!! The bag gets placed back on the desk and he leans to peer over a little, looking over her chair for anywhere it might have gotten wedged.

"Probably a good thing you got that magic and I just got these baby blue eyes. However much trouble I got myself in when I was younger, it would've been worse if I could do your hand thing."

The hand thing is really the only thing he knows she can do.

No key. But she does fish out one honey drop for each of them.

"The key difference is I can't change my eye color and you could learn how to do that cantrip yourself. Interested?"

Like she said. Many ways to gain the capacity. But her tone says she won't be put off by a refusal. It's as much a offer as someone might invite someone else out to dinner.

There's a long and thoughtful pause, Hawk taking the sweet into his mouth and sucking on it. He'd be lying if the idea of not having to hold a scalpel himself wasn't immensely appealing, how much it'd save his hand cramping. Plus the ability to retrieve things without getting up, perform his own retraction.

But he can't. Sure, it might be terribly unfair that he drew the short straw and ended up in a world without magic, but it's the straw he's got. He doesn't know if the magic hand will explode or what it'd do to a patient- can you even sterilise something made of magic? No, no. For once in his life, Hawkeye is old-fashioned, and he intends on staying just that way, as long as it still works. No magic, no giant robots, just the art he's dedicated his life to pursuing. The honey drop gets deposited in his cheek to answer.

"Naw, I think I'll keep using yours if it's all the same to you."

"As you would. I can hardly object to an excuse to be called upon when needed."

It's light, breezy. To him it might have been an exciting offer, or a change in his very being he'd like to avoid. Whatever his reasons, his refusal is accepted, even as she can't understand it - it's not for her to understand, then. If he ever changes his mind and she's still around, they can revisit it, but until then?

"Library next, then? I went there before I came here."

"And it's a great excuse to call on you. I might start keeping my plates on top of my cupboards."

Since, y'know, he can reach the highest shelves.

"I'll carry your book, so you can un-borrow it, just to keep the timeline intact."

"And then have to recheck it out tomorrow morning? No way, then I'll have to reread everything I already have in the name of preserving the timeline. We'll have to risk deviance and all its consequences."

Did she have to phrase it like that? No. Did she anyway? Yes.

A bright laugh, and Hawk puts the book back down on her desk.

"If everything goes awry and we wake up tomorrow with dinosaurs roaming the streets, I'll know who to blame."

And like a gentleman, he offers her his elbow.

"That wouldn't be so bad. I saw one at the circus, once."

She'll take his offered arm, and they'll go on their merry way.

"No idea how it got there, though, I was a little busy at the time."

"Hang on hang on hang on- what do you mean you saw one at a circus. You saw a dinosaur at a circus?"

He's not moving another step until this is addressed.

"Yes. I remember it in passing...not a whole lot of the entire circus, though. The ringmaster, and the task she set, but not all of it."

She pauses, trying to sort out when that happened, and how to explain it all in a way that doesn't sound completely odd.

"...Some pieces of my memory don't exactly fit together the right way. Part of that is in the process of getting here - it still hasn't become clear to me what happened right before I was on the ferry. And the rest is-"

She looks away, mildly dismayed that she's got to potentially spoil a nice walk like this. Hopefully, he can take this as a person, and not as a physician.

"...I have amnesia. Before a certain fairly recent point in my life, I remember almost nothing about myself. It's no great secret I hide, it's just something I live with."

"Oh," he says carefully. Memory loss isn't that foreign to him- he worked at a damn army hospital. Between traumatic brain injuries and battle fatigue, every so often there'd be people who woke up in bed and didn't know how they got there.

"I'm sorry to hear that," he starts cautiously, remembering the great bit of wisdom his dad passed on to him, to never treat someone like they're sick.

"Why don't you tell me what you remember and we'll go from there? I want to hear more about this nutty dinosaur circus. I have a couple of memories of the circus as a kid, but it was much smaller- y'know, ponies and acrobats. The only dinosaurs around were some of our neighbours- the patriarch of the Wilkins clan who lived a few streets down was so old that if you got close enough, you could hear the grim reaper breathing down his neck."

"Sounds like the man that my friends and I had hanging around camp. He always looked fresh from the sarcophagus, and we called him Withers, because he refused to give us any name to refer to him by. I half think he just wanted to be there to judge our decisions."

She appreciates the consideration. People could say it must be rough all they wanted, but at this point, she would respond that it wasn't so bad just to not retread the same conversation. It's a complicated thing with so many facets, and a scar hidden at the back of her head, and something she doesn't feel like skirting around the truth of.

"What I do remember...there were a number of different stalls, they'd set up in a good area in the city. Decently sized, rather popular - there was something involving plants, and then of course the dinosaur. It was red, I know that much. And the ringmaster, I was talking to her - I'd helped her find a missing clown who was quite popular. She was grateful, because they were planning to leave soon. Not enough time to make a new friend in full, but who knows, the next time they drop into the city there might be more time for that."

A tiny pause, as they approach the door to the library.

"Wish I knew more. It would be a nice day to remember. But I don't know if an entire troupe will appear off the ferry and make up for all the gaps in my recollection."

"Sounds like a full and rich day," he muses, rubbing at the stubble at his neck.

"Maybe a circus will set up here, eh? That'd be nice- y'know, the best part of the circus that I can remember was the peanuts. Popcorn is fine, but peanuts are dense, hold a coating of whatever you put on them like nothing else. Salt, honey- honey on peanuts, now that's a combo."

"Hawkeye" "Easily distracted by food" Pierce.

"Good of you to help find the clown though- that's the sort of thing you did in your adventuring, yeah? Just kinda helping out?"

"Something like that. Of course, we had our own goals to pursue, but you meet a lot of people. A lot of times they need help with this or that, and if we weren't currently running for our lives, then we could usually make time to do so. It's just...something you do."

She isn't sure how else to express it. That driving force in her that hears someone's exhausted voice looking for their siblings, or who's pinned down by monsters, or begging news from somewhere, or something long lost to return, and answers it because she has the capacity to do it. You just did it.

"Getting a reward for all the hard work never hurt either. Though it was usually something useful, or coin, which is useful all its own. Never any honeyed nuts, else I'd be able to understand your praise for them."

Lesser known side effect of amnesia: you have to try every food again to remember what you like or don't like.

"Hey, that's a pretty sweet gig then. If I wasn't already a doctor, that's the sort of thing I'd like to do. Like a door-to-door help salesman."

She perhaps shouldn't have admitted she doesn't know what they taste like, because Hawk gets a grin like the Cheshire cat on his face.

"I'm marking an extra stop on our trip backwards in time specifically so you can try some, they're worth messing with the timeline even more."

"After here, you can lead me wherever you would, and I'll follow. Consequences to the flow of time be damned."

It's a promise, then, as they enter the library, and her first stop is the desk to quietly ask them if they've seen a key. No luck, but she'll check the shelves she was browsing - fiction, near the S. The air smells like all the books that have passed through this place, bound and beloved by many a reader.

"You might not like my version of adventuring too much, Hawkeye," she adds as they're going through the stacks. "There's a fair amount of fighting involved, as you could probably guess, and unless you're hiding something very well, you don't strike me as someone who'd be happy to engage in combat as often as we do. Of course, that doesn't mean you couldn't come - plenty of things just require talking. A little finesse, a little diplomacy and persuasion...all things you might be able to do."

"Y'know I was kind of hoping that something like art or music would be more of a universal constant than violence," he grumbles, sounding like more of an optimist than he was meaning to.

"Talking, I can do though. I ever tell you about that one time with the guy from the black market? That was some brilliant work, if I do say so myself."

"You didn't, but I'll be glad to hear of it. Trade you for a reassurance that art and music still very much exist - there's even a whole class of adventurers that believes in them, and carries them forward."

She ought to find a way to get that tiefling in his vicinity, let him meet a proper bard.

"Wait- actually? How does that work?"

You have a chance to not make the world endure bard Hawkeye, Fever, you can do it, you can save us all.

The world needs it. There is no salvation to be found.

"Mm, there's someone in town who can give you a better and more exact rundown, and I'll point you in her direction, but they're called bards. Scholars of song and story, masters of speech to such a degree that their music and their speech are where their power is. Their words can harm, confuse, manipulate - but they can also heal, inspire, and aid. And beyond the battlefield, they can be storytellers, entertainers, history keepers - the list goes on."

Hawk listens along, his ears pricking up at some of the description.

"When you put it like that, it doesn't sound like a half-bad gig. Like a one-man touring company."

He's just kinda poking through the books to see if the key is between any of them.

"Who's the bard you know?"

"She introduced herself to me as Music. Horns, a tail, adorable face. You'll wonder why you didn't meet her sooner, when you do."

No key in the books. But that means that they can proceed to their sidequest instead of following the main thread of events.

"Now that's what I call efficiency in a name," he says admiringly, and takes Fever's arm as they walk out.

"Alright- we warp space-time for some peanuts, then we keep going," he says with a few small taps on her arm, "it has to be here somewhere. If not, we stick something up on the notice board. If I have to offer my body as a reward for its safe return, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."

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(open) and these thoughts are in my head

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