ioduanlogs | I Want to Try Everything!

Entry tags:

I Want to Try Everything!

Characters: Nita Callahan, starring as One Confused Wizard, and YOU.
Date: First half of February, basically (1st - 16th, depending on prompt.)
Location: The Dreaming Bridge to start, then basically anywhere you'd expect a new Dreamfolk to wander into!
Situation: Multiple - see prompts below the cut~
Warnings/Ratings: None yet!

At the Dreaming Bridge:
... Well, in retrospect, given that warning dream!Carmela had given her, Nita really shouldn't have been surprised. Even if she had been dumped in a new dimensional intersection, with a strange tattoo on the inside of her right elbow, isolated from Manual communications (but not her stored notes, strangely enough) and her claudication's contents but not the claudication itself, and in a place that knew more about her current status than she did about its own!

With no clue where to start, Nita turned to the local resources to check out as much as possible. Please let this just be an errantry thing... was her (probably in vain) hope.

• Oh God, Youths!: Nita should have counted herself lucky the (admittedly cute) kids had gotten her charm bracelet, which would have been replaceable with time, instead of her Manual, which wouldn't.

Instead, she was just mad.

"Hey! Wait a minute! What do you need that for?!"

Someone might want to help a wizard out.

• Pricey Divination: "Hey! I know you! I've seen you in a vision!"

Nita stopped in her tracks, turning her head hard to look the vendor in the eye.

"Oh, really?" she said. She was curious - and concerned. The fortune-teller might have just balked a little under the force of her stare, but she walked on over from her sightseeing trek anyway.

"I- uh, Yes! I did. I can only tell you more if you can spare a rhinn, though."

"Oh really," Nita repeated, tone in her voice dropping somewhere into the temperature realms of Pluto's service in just those two words.

People were beginning to stare.

"Because, and this is just from one oracular talent to another, if I were able to charge for every time I recognized someone in a vision that contained potentially vital information? I'd be a millionaire. Or I'd be dead. Either way..." As she spoke, she walked all the way over to the fortune-teller's stall and leaned gently on the table.

There was definitely a crowd now.

• Third Hand’s Third Hand Store: The bell rung, and Nita really hoped it was another customer, or else someone who could distract the shopkeeper. She bent carefully over a shelf as the owner breathed - or at least looked and felt like they were breathing - on her neck.

/I'm having difficulty making a decision when you're watching every move I make, okay?/ she said in the Speech, hoping that would have some effect and that it hadn't come out in as much of a hiss as she thought it had.

• Rosemary and Thyme: Nita had been doing a fair job of injecting herself in the local cultures - or so she had thought. Getting an assignment from a rather enthusiastic young-adult-adjacent (that had, strangely enough, reminded her of Kit's friend Cheleb) should have been a good sign.

But she just could not find the thing, and part of her was frustrated beyond words. Another was beginning to think it was a setup. The rest had been relegated to asking for help:

"Uh, excuse me, have you seen or heard of an, ah...?"

• Hydroponic Bounty: [Locked to Kai]
Nita looked over her new in-home hydroponic farm unit.

This might just be the easiest job I've ever had...

Still, something seemed like it was missing - and she sighed out loud as she recognized it as nostalgia for home.

I haven't even been here a week. Her shoulders slumped, though she didn't quite sink back onto her bed to go with it.

META RANK 4
• Woven Words: "Are you sure?" Nita asked.

The little old lady - even in her species, somehow the age signs remained similar - nodded, smile cryptic.

"Well, all right." Nita put her hands on the offered yarn and began to knot in the indicated pattern.
/cut>

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Kai is in a pretty good mood lately. Cheating getting splatted'll do that to you. When she walks into the room that she now shares with someone else who she hasn't met yet, she blinks in surprise. Not that her roommate's another human, 'cause they're pretty common here, but that there's some kind of...plant...setup...thing.

"Whoa, what's this?" Yeah, that's how you introduce yourself.

"Hydroponic farm unit," is what falls out of Nita's mouth first, before she turns to look at Kai and fully realizes that yes of course this is a shared room and the far more basic someone else is right here.

"We can grow our own plants this way, but... have we met yet?"

Nothing better than meeting a stranger to shake someone out of their reverie, apparently.

"Hydroponic? Water-something?" She knows what words are.

Then she grins, showing squidbeak-like teeth, two on top, one on the bottom. "I don't think we have! I'm Kai." She steps forward and holds her hand out to shake.

Nita shakes that hand, internally noting the texture but not letting herself make a point about it. Nothing to be bothered about, Neets...

"Mm-hmm. My dad's a gardener, but we've never had anything like this to help out in the shop back home."

His assistant Mike might have appreciated it, though... Hell, Filif might even have found a use for it, if by distinctly different purposes.

"I'm Nita, Nita Callahan. Betting you know your way around this place better than I do?"

"I'm no good with plants," she says. "Never really tried, but I don't think it's the kind of thing I'd be good at. I'm more the Turf War type. Super cool that your dad gardens, though. That's really great stuff!"

Kai peers at the machine again before turning back to Nita. "I guess! I've been here a few months, so I'm sure I could show you around!"

"... War?" Nita asks, voice soft on that word only.

Once the topic's clearly shifted again, she does her best to shake the sudden tone out of her voice.

"That'd be great, yeah."

Kai, completely oblivious to Nita's tone, continues with great enthusiasm. "Yeah! It's totally fun, everyone does it. Kind of bummed there isn't any here, but there aren't any other Inklings, so I guess it'd be kind of difficult, haha."

Then she grins again. "Sure, I'll take you some places. Aifaran's pretty neat, but I still miss Inkopolis. Food's pretty dece, though."

"... Nnnnot the kind of war I'm familiar with."

Though it being difficult to recreate here is probably a good thing regardless.

"Just want to finish looking over this, make sure it's not going to need a close eye on it when we're both out," she continued, gesturing to the hydroponic unit.

"It's a game! It's a lot of fun." She's also splatted Octarians, but maybe since Nita doesn't need to know that.

Kai looks nervous all of a sudden when Nita mentions maybe needing to keep a close eye on the hydro-whatever. "It's not gonna...leak, is it?" That'd be several shades of Very Bad.

"... Like Tug-of-War?"

It's picked strictly for the name, not the game content - though if Kai volunteers a description of the Turf Wars in response, that's good too.

Nita shakes her head.

"Not if it knows what's good for it, or rather its designer knew what they were doing. Is water bad for you? I can talk to it to keep the humidity's range limited, too."

An odd offer, made so casually - but Nita really could manage that, or else she wouldn't have offered.

"What's tug-of-war?" Kai asks, nonplussed. "We're not tugging on anything. We're just trying to cover the arena in more ink than the other team. Is it kind of like that?"

When Nita asks about water, she shifts from foot to foot. "Yeah, uh, I can't really. Touch it." She can have drinks, but being submerged in water is not something she can handle. She hadn't been paying attention in class when they were teaching that. Something about pressure?

Nita paused, trying to imagine what that looked like: two whole teams of beings like Kai, shooting ink around an enclosed space...

"Only in the point of it not being violence, I guess? Tug-of-War's just trying to outpull the other team while you're both holding one rope."

Nita made a grimace. "Not gonna let you dissolve, don't worry."

"Oh! Yeah, that's kind of the idea, then." That explanation was a lot simpler than Kai had expected.

She looks relieved when Nita vows not to let her dissolve. "Thanks. Already had a close-ish call with that lately."

Nita's eyebrows rose.

"Uhh, how soon ago? Assuming it was a one-time danger."

She put one hand gently onto the hydroponic unit, trying to scope out the device's self-containment the way Kit would have.

"Uh, it was during the storm. I got stuck in one of those flooding buildings." Kai shifts from foot to foot, feeling a little dumb about it. "But I'm okay now!"

Nita winces in sympathy.

"Glad you got out of there. I got called in to help handle the aftermath of one of those buildings; couldn't even tell what was anchoring it..."

Still, she was willing to believe Kai about being okay now - she wasn't that much of a hypocrite.

The hydroponic unit buzzed beneath her hand, cutting off her train of thought and snapping her attention down to it.

/Wasn't talking about you,/ she muttered, attempting to be reassuring.

X didn't pay much attention to his surroundings on his way home. His mind was full of maps, charts, history texts, and cross-references. A part of him worried that if he didn't keep focusing on them for as long as he could, he wouldn't remember any of it when he went back to the library the next day.

Then there was a minor commotion in the market, and it would have broken his concentration no matter how badly X wanted to keep it. It didn't sound like anyone was in trouble, but it definitely sounded like someone was angry.

There really wasn't any reason to get involved, he tried to persuade himself.

Oh, look, he was at the head of the crowd.

"What's going on?" X asked, stepping up and gently intervening, as no one else had done yet. "Is everything alright?"

Nita's own concentration broke, and the fortune teller looked visible relieved as the wizard stopped concentrating on him to focus on X.

"I... yeah. Just, passing on some words of advice, from someone who's had some experience with visions."

Turning to face the stranger more fully, she sighed.

"What's paying a rhinn for a fortune sound like to you?"

X answered quickly, because the fortune teller looked like they were about to, and with the way they drew themselves up -- haughty and offended -- there was no way anything they said would lead anywhere good.

"It sounds like a way to make a living," said X, "for someone without much skill they can use doing anything else."

The fortune teller deflated, subdued enough not to try and interfere further.

When X spoke next, it was to introduce himself, all little warm smiles and curiosity. "I'm X. You're Dreamfolk, I take it? I didn't think any of the people living here had enough visions to become millionaires."

Nita really appreciated the cut-off - and to that effect, stepped more away from the table (and confrontation) herself.

"Fair compromise, though that mostly just makes me feel sorry for him, and I don't want to feel sorry for him right now," Nita admitted in a whisper, glancing only once to where she knew the vendor stood behind her.

/Dai Stiho,/ she greeted, though the cheerfulness implied by her words hadn't caught up in her tone yet.

"And yes, I think that's what I am here. Though it's not so much a matter of winning money anyway... life just gets hectic, sometimes, and I can't always make sense of what I see until I'm right in the moment."

She shook her head.

/Dai Stiho,/ X replied -- not quite absentmindedly, but in the way of someone who had just realised they'd forgotten to be polite in their excitement. "That's alright, and very self-aware of you. Let's move on, so you don't need to feel sorry for him anymore."

And X led the way back out onto the street, stepping carefully backwards so he could keep talking to Nita.

"I have a friend who sees glimpses of the future," he said. "Or at least, that's what I think she does. She's never made it clear. I think sometimes she can't make sense of them, and just pretends she knows everything."

It didn't take Nita immediately by surprise - even being the lone wizard in an are couldn't preclude anyone else from knowing the Speech.

She could hit herself for missing anything about this picture later; she had other things on her mind.

"Better for both of us that way," she agreed. As they walked, she nodded... then snorted.

"Probably wants to avoid questions of legitimacy, but that's not a fair plan. Acting confident is one thing; pretending to know everything is another."

Because sometimes you had to fake it til you made it... but it could still come back to bite you.

"I hear the part about them not making sense, though."

X nodded. "To be fair, she's a god. I don't think they're capable of making sense."

He said this as easily and casually as 'To be fair, she's from Chesedonia'; like being friends with gods was a normal and commonplace thing where X was from. It wasn't, as a matter of fact, but he'd long since forgotten first meeting Lakshmi.

"What sorts of visions do you normally see?" he asked instead. "Are they about people, or events?"

And that made Nita do a double-take; sure, she had more evidence than she thought one person could get that the Powers weren't infallible, or even omnipotent - but she didn't count herself as a personal friend of one of Them!

Though, she still probably had more person-to-person contact with Them than most wizards did, not that she thought on it constantly.

"Think that gets on Their nerves too, sometimes," she replied, capitalizing the pronoun subconsciously.

"Especially when They don't normally live a linear-timeline lifestyle."

Again, she made a wry face.

"Both, really; sometimes even at the same time. Some of the most gripping ones were like clip shows, but other times it was just one scenario with one other person."

"Making sense?" X nodded in agreement. "My husband and I believed she was allergic to the concept."

And Liz had been dead certain Lakshmi didn't live through time linearly the way normal people did. Gods existed on a very different level, and X had the feeling further discussions with Nita about that sort of thing would be very interesting.

X looked over at Nita as they walked, brow furrowed. "Clip shows? I don't know what that means."

And here he thought their worlds were more similar than others.

"Pieces of different videos all pasted together, basically. Usually they're supposed to imply some wider narrative, but with visions? Not a guarantee."

Then the first part of what X said hit her.

"Husband?"

X's expression became all bemused curiosity. "When you see visions of the future, they play out in your mind like videos -- ?"

Nita cut him off before he could finish the question properly, and X was forcibly reminded of what Liz told him years before. He briefly considered answering carefully, and then decided that was disrespectful to Luci.

"Yes," he said, simply and cheerfully. "Husband. He's not here, I'm afraid, but I'm told we return home to the moment we left."

"Not like there's a screen, but close. I get more visions than audio or other senses, anyway."

She finished following up on that as best she could before the topic shift struck again.

"Oh. I... it still seems unfair, that you're split like that."

Not unlike me and Kit, put that way, she thought wryly. Though the both of them were far from considering marriage, mostly by merit of age and societal norms alone.

"How long have you been married?"

"I couldn't agree more," said X, still cheerful. "But it's not forever, and when I go back home, no time will have passed. If I had to be kidnapped, this was certainly the kinder way to do it."

He was pretty sure he hadn't imagined Nita's surprise, but she recovered quickly, and seemed genuinely curious. That was better than X had been led to expect, and there was a certain warmth in his cheerful smile when he answered her question.

"Eight years, when I first came here."

Nita gave a low whistle. She didn't quite know how long Tom Swale and Carl Romeo had known each other, but eight years was far from an insignificant timeframe all the same, even without the comparison.

"And you've been here how long? If you're okay sharing," she amended, catching the phrasing of her own question.

"I don't mind at all," X said. "It's been over a year now." Maybe less than that, if you didn't count the month that X spent in a coma, but that didn't really strike X as a good thing to bring up during an initial meeting.

Over a year. X felt the familiar pang of loss in his gut, and moved to change the subject. He couldn't do anything about getting home, and that didn't give him any leverage for dealing with the feelings.

"What about you?" he asked, turning his gaze on Nita. "You sound like you're still getting used to all of this."

Nita shifted in place; the crowd had resumed its regular currents, though they were still in its way.

Her look in turn was sympathetic.

"Yeah," she admitted, "But I've been a fish out of water before. I've gotten experience having to find my own way, make my own plans - or at least friends."

And the latter could be more helpful than anyone could imagine.

"Friends can be a big help," X agreed with a nod and a smile. "I'm happy to help you, if there's anything you're still confused or concerned about. If not, then... well, I suppose I can be a quiet friend. I should warn you, though, I might have to intervene again if it looks like you, or... someone you're talking to needs help."

His smile turned teasing, and it came accompanied with an affectionate and amused huff.

Nita gave him the most heartfelt smile she'd had that day.

"Thanks. Hopefully I'll be snapping at people less as I adjust..."

Though, whether she'd even be here for a full year, she couldn't say - and wasn't sure she wanted to.

And then she realizes something:

"Wait, we don't even know each other's names! I am so sorry."

She holds out her hand - partway, in case X prefers something different.

"I'm Nita. Nita Callahan."

Edited 2019-02-25 18:45 (UTC)

X shakes his head, laughing. "You don't need to apologise! That's how you know a conversation's gotten interesting."

Nita Callahan. X shakes her hand without hesitation. "It's good to meet you, Nita Callahan," he says warmly. "I'm X. Just X, no last name."

"Ain't that the truth," Nita said, cheerful yet wry.

"Must make some kinds of paperwork a pain, though; no one here's bugged you by making filing errors, have they?"

"Filing errors, no," X answered, thoughtful. "I think most of the staff here, particularly at the Bridge, are used to strange and unfamiliar names by now. It has been a problem, but only during the occasional chaotic Dreaming periods."

Which X was happy to tell Nita more about, if she asked, but he'd refrain from it if she didn't. The Dreaming still unnerved him, and discussing it still unsettled him.

Nita nodded, though she was frowning.

"It's good that it's not their faults, then. How have they been messed with before, though?"

Those periods of chaotic Dreaming were going to need a lot of study, she could tell.

The Fool does not have much occasion to visit the Dreaming Bridge anymore--at least, not prior to the storm that swept through Aifaran and left so many of its inhabitants reeling. He considers himself fortunate that, unlike many of the city's residents, he had a place to go when his apartment 'drowned.'

Maintaining his small business without a studio is proving to be difficult, however, and so it is with this goal in mind that he arrives at the Bridge with a small selection of his carvings. Not to sell them, of course, but to put them on display. Exposure is better than obsolescence.

He is in the process of arranging three small bibiru carvings on a windowsill when he spots Nita at her research in the common room, and offers her a wry smile. "Are you a new arrival to our illustrious archipelago?" he asks.

Nita sits up, inadvertently leaning back into a stretch as she's addressed and quickly correcting herself.

"I'm new here, yeah," she admits.

"So I've got a lot to catch up on. Those are nice," she adds, nodding at the bibiru carvings.

"Take it they're yours?"

"Those are nice. Take it they're yours?"

"At present, they belong to nobody." His tone is light and whimsical, coupled with a sly look as he peers back at Nita again over his shoulder. With a flourish, he reaches out a slim hand (one sporting a curious leather glove) to turn one of the bibiru carvings just so; a bit of light from the common room strikes the wood grain at just the right angle to bring out the intricate detailing done on the little creature's folded wings. But for its size and composition, it looks startlingly lifelike.

He sighs. "It is no matter, of course. They shall find their way." A moment later and he turns to Nita properly, dipping his head in greeting. "I am called the Fool. What shall I call you?"

"I've got no place buying things just yet, though, or else I guess I would have one," Nita says, wrinkling her nose - then winking.

What a curious title! Nita has no doubt of his sense of humor, if he's willing to be called such a thing.

"Nita Callahan - or just Nita if you don't want to be formal all the time," comes the reply. She stands up from her table; nodding in return when she's just sitting doesn't sit right with her.

At her words, the Fool plucks up the little figurine under his fingertips, and extends it out to Nita.

"Stories are as much a form of currency where I am from, as currency," he tells her. "Why don't you tell me about yourself?"

"... I think I know of a few places like that," Nita says, fondness in her voice.

Taking the figurine carefully, cupping it in two hands, she sits down and places it in front of her before speaking.

"Well, I'm sixteen, I'm from Hempstead New York - a New York," she corrects, "I've always loved reading and growing things... and I'm a wizard. Not sure how much that means in the grand scheme of things, here, though, let alone what the Powers might want with me here."

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I Want to Try Everything!

Supersonic, electronic, hydroponic

Re: Supersonic, electronic, hydroponic

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pricey divination

I love your username btw. Also, Nita does have a permissions post if you want to tag that.

aw, thanks! i'm fond of it. filled out permissions too. :3

Fun times are ahead! :>>>

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This happens in my 'first talk' threads more often than it probably should... |D

hahahahahaha tell me about it

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the dreaming bridge!

\o/ And Nita does have a Permissions post if you wanna poke that.

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