And now... owls.
((Link goes to a post in Mayday's journal. Didn't want to spam the comm with a socking.))
After a shower, a good night's sleep and another awkward meeting, Jaime managed to get some breakfast and make his way to the Owlery without further incident ( Read more... )
After a shower, a good night's sleep and another awkward meeting, Jaime managed to get some breakfast and make his way to the Owlery without further incident ( Read more... )
The wind was making Lola's hair whip around her face, making her wish she had put it up in a ponytail or something, but it would just have to do until they could find a place to sit. It was a good thing that she wasn't cold. Angels didn't have to freeze, though sometimes they did forget that and got cold purely out of habit. She gave her hair an angry little glare and tried to keep it down as best she could, though it wasn't really behaving at all. Gah. Stupid hair.
She shrugged at his question. "Well, there are shops. I haven't checked them out yet. I'm pretty sure there's a clothes shop, but that's definitely robes and things." Because it wouldn't have been like Lola to not know where the nearest clothes store was. She nodded solemnly. "Not really my style." Oh, such a pity... Because hot new clothes within walking distance? Would have been sweet. Hm, they would have to go into London for Jaime's new clothes, probably... Oh, Lola had plans for him. Many, many plans.
Leading him down a small path towards the lake, where the wind was less fierce, Lola finally settled for a calm little spot for him to set down the basket. They had a clear view of the water from here, and she wondered a bit about the Giant Squid and what it might be up to at the moment. She couldn't see it anywhere, but that wasn't really new. She had only heard the rumour that it was there at all... Maybe it was just hear-say? Anyway, this was a good place for a picnic. Some small rocks to sit on in case the grass was wet, a nice view, sitting in the sun away from the chilly wind...
Why WAS the Forbidden Forest forbidden? "I don't really know," said Lola and shrugged. "There are more things than just unicorns in there, though... You pick up stuff here. Giant spiders, centaurs... I don't know what else. I guess the people in charge just don't want any students poking around in there in case they'd get hurt." She raised a finger importantly. "I support this rule!" She was in favour of students not being hurt!
"So is this place good?" she asked lightly, waving her hand at the spot she'd picked. "We'll be left alone here."
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Hair blowing in the face? Now how could Jaime possibly identify with that? For his own part, he was used to it and could ignore it. His hair wasn't that long no matter what certain sociopathic invisible guys said. But he did have the brief, irrational urge to reach over and brush a strand of hair out of Lola's face as she fussed with it. He quashed the urge, but had to smile a little bit as she pushed it away again and glared at it.
"Not mine either. I'd probably trip over them all the time. And in a place with moving staircases, that's just asking for trouble." He was still curious about the village. "Wonder what kind of non-clothes stuff a wizarding village sells." By now, he'd pretty much resigned himself to his fate. But there might be more interesting things there than clothes.
"Giant spiders?" he repeated, making a face. "Yeah, I can see why they'd want students to stay out." He laughed at her raised finger. "Yeah, me too. Completely." Definitely in favor of nobody getting hurt. "Hope you're getting that," he added under his breath, too quietly for Lola to hear.
Hey, the view wasn't bad. "Looks good to me." Setting the basket down gently in the spot Lola had indicated, Jaime glanced around. There didn't seem to be anyone within earshot, and nothing was really tripping the scarab's radar. Although it seemed to be telling him that there was something large currently sleeping in the lake - but the scarab wasn't sure. Jaime dismissed it. Not like they were going swimming anyway.
Jaime knelt down beside the basket and opened it up, pulling out the soda bottles first as those could be put down on the grass. It was a little bit damp, but not so much; the sun was warmer here and drying the ground fairly well. "Should've grabbed a blanket or something." He tested one of the nearby rocks. "This one's dry if you want to sit here."
Carefully, to keep from smashing anything together - he was kind of surprised nothing had been squashed or juiced or crushed - he retrieved a couple of sandwiches from the depths. Quickly checking them over, he offered her the tomato and mozzarella one, keeping the other for himself.
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Lola seated herself on the rock, adjusting her now tousled hair as well as she could without a mirror at hand, and accepted the sandwich he gave her with a smile. "Thanks." Mmm, mozzarella...
"Exactly." She nodded solemnly, pinching a piece of bread from her sandwich and putting it in her mouth, swallowing before saying, "Well, we'll have to investigate! I'm guessing... wands. Cauldrons." Let's see, what other things had she seen around here? "Oddly-smelling potion-y things... Eyes of newt and whatnot. Oh, and books. They're very keen on books, wizards." She took a bottle of Coke, twisted it open, and had a thoughtful sip.
So they were just going to... chat. Yeah, okay. Maybe he needed some time to get his brain working again from what she'd told him, or something. That was fine. She could understand the need for it.
"Not to mention that it's a big, dark, creepy forest," Lola added with a bit of a grin. "I'd like to go in there some day though, just to see the unicorns. Up until recently I thought they were mythic beings. This place is just so... magical. And the people here are used to it."
A small sparrow landed a few feet away from them, probably drawn there both by the prospect of food, and by the angel sitting there. Lola smiled at it, tossing a crumb in its direction before turning her attention back to Jaime. He seemed more relaxed now, but she couldn't really know for sure. He was at least still willing to sit down and eat with her, which was a good sign... of something.
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Not to mention that it was harder to think clearly on an empty stomach. And his mun was braindead last night. The last people he'd explained the story to who had no real frame of reference were his family and his two best friends, and those explanations hadn't gone too well. (Dani Garrett didn't count. Aside from the fact that her granddad was the last to use the scarab, the lady was so bugnuts the story barely fazed her.) He might explain some of it to Steph tomorrow, but she already at least understood the superhero part of it.
Besides, it was actually nice sitting out here with Lola. He wanted to enjoy the respite from crazy for a couple minutes, at least.
He sat down on the grass beside her, finding a spot that was fairly dry. "Eye of newt? Really? That's not a stereotype I'd get slapped for? Someone I met at my Sorting said there were a lot of stereotypes that didn't make sense. Although I've heard wands are necessary if you want to do anything around here." Like protective wards and screening conversations. Those would be the first things he would try to learn to do. "Homework's universal. It's a school, right? You kind of expect to have to read a ton of stuff anyway."
Taking a bite of the sandwich he'd grabbed - mmm, roast beef - he glanced in the general direction of the forest, thinking her words over as he chewed. He was already getting used to creepy, sadly. But her comment about unicorns made him smile. "You didn't know they were real?" he asked once he'd swallowed. "I mean, it's news to me too, but I'd think you would."
He took a swig from the Dr. Pepper bottle he'd grabbed. "You know, back when I told you I didn't know much about the superhero thing? I wasn't lying then. I mean, back where I'm from, metas and superheroes are all over the place, but I didn't pay an obscene amount of attention. Didn't have to until about a year ago, and I still don't know what I'm doing."
Jaime paused for a second, watching the sparrow peck at the crumb Lola had tossed to it as he tried to figure out where he was taking this. And to gauge her reaction.
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"Shakespeare's influenced my thoughts on witchcraft quite a lot, I guess," said Lola after she'd swallowed down the bite with more Coke, and laughed a little. "I wouldn't be surprised if these wizards and witches actually did use newt eyes, though." She grimaced. "They just put a lot of weird things in their potions, including bits from animals I never even knew existed." The angel took the opportunity here to take off her shoes, nestling her toes into the fresh green grass by her feet. No blisters yet!
Lola gave him a bit of a wry smile. "It's a school, but we don't really have a whole lot of classes. Everyone just... mills about, having parties, fighting, going to Sortings..." Not to mention getting caught up in the evil schemes of sentient headwear. "If you want to actually learn magic you have to do it yourself in the library. Not that the library isn't interesting." She grinned. Okay, so the library here at Hogwarts was nothing like the one at her school in Heaven, which had walls made of glass and a ceiling glittering with stars and comets, but the books were definitely intriguing.
"Well, I would have liked them to be real, sure," she said after a moment's pause. "I just never thought I'd actually be in a place where they were. I've seen a lot of things, doing, um, what I do." Lola began to twirl a long strand of grass between her fingers, watching that as she spoke, voice a little distant. "Unicorns were never one of them. Guess I kind of gave up hope." The bird got another crumb, which it attacked with great enthusiasm. Lola smiled brightly at it. "As it turned out, I was stupid to do that."
She fell silent, listening to his story. She had a feeling this was the Big One, his Weird Thing, the explanation for what was off about him. So she treated it with the seriousness it deserved, regarding his face attentively as she sank down in the grass beside the rock instead. More comfortable to sit on, she could use the rock itself like some sort of table, and more importantly, she was at Jaime's level now.
"Why do you have to pay attention now?" she asked softly, trying to keep her tone as light as possible. She wanted him to feel like he could trust her with this. Hello, he could trust her! Keeping secrets and understanding people, that was basically in her job description!
The superheroes thing... Well, it was new. Lola did know that humans had this really strong inner energy, capable of using it for amazing things, changing the world with it... Maybe that was a sort of superhero, though she doubted it was what Jaime meant. Her brothers had been really into comic books once upon a time, so she had a vague idea of what the deal was. ...Wow. Superheroes.
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Yay angel indeed. The sparrow was close enough for Jaime to touch at this point. Not that he would. He was content to watch it inch towards Lola in expectation of more crumbs. Her description of potions made him grin. "Still sounds like freshman chemistry. Of course, my chem teacher had a weird sense of humor." Oh, yeah. "Speaking of Shakespeare, when's the play you're in?" He'd almost forgotten about that.
He was surprised at her description of the school. "Really? Could have fooled me, I just saw a class sign-up sheet this morning." Mental note: find out where the library was.
"I wouldn't say it was stupid, really." He shrugged. "But I've found out that the second you think you've seen it all or things can't get weirder, you get proven wrong. Usually if you say it out loud."
It was a good thing Lola had a vague idea of superheroes, because if she didn't have that, this was going to be even harder to explain. "None of them were even local before," he began. "You'd see them on the news, saving people from burning buildings, catching criminals and cleaning up disasters and stuff - but they were all out of town. Metropolis had Superman, Gotham had Batman, Keystone City had the Flash, and El Paso... nada. You'd still have to live under a rock not to at least recognize most of the big ones, and I was going somewhere with this, really. Give me a minute."
Why was he telling her this? He did trust her, but everyone he trusted who found out tended to get hurt somehow. But with so much magic and so many people that hit the scarab's panic button, he wasn't going to be able to keep a lid on it so easily. It'd be nice to have someone know who didn't freak the armor out beyond belief.
He took a deep breath. "Then I found something that I thought was an ordinary rock, but it - it gave me superpowers. Forced them on me, to be honest. And now El Paso's got me." He leaned back a bit, resting on his elbows, still holding the sandwich. "Agh, it's not the superhero part that's the problem. It's the incredibly creepy powers with a mind of their own that would probably send most people screaming." Himself included. If he could get away from them, that is.
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"Teachers are a different breed," sighed Lola, shaking her head. It was the same at the Academy. Not even the fact that the students were from different eras in time stopped the teachers from being from another century entirely... It was a universal rule. She wriggled her toes a bit. "Not sure when, exactly. Our director is a bit, uh, unfocused at the moment. There'll be posters about it in due time, I'm sure." And Jaime was still going to have a good seat, she was making sure of that!
And of course, since she had just claimed classes being pretty much non-existent, a sign-up sheet just had to show up. There should be some law against that sort of thing. "We get them sometimes, but they're really rare," she amended, licking some tomato juice off her thumb. "That the Care of Magical Creatures class? I've got a friend who signed up for that." Maia had also signed up for that, which Lola was, thankfully, not aware of just yet.
And then there it was. The Weird Thing. Lola listened to the relatively short story, nipping pieces of bread with her fingers and tossing them absentmindedly to the soon to be over-fed sparrow, which was now pecking around her bare feet, happy as a clam. Superpowers... Not something that had fitted into her world before, at least not his definition of it. Forced superpowers sounded kind of nasty too, so she twitched her nose.
"Mind of their own?" she repeated, frowning in concern. She was, for the moment at least, taking this whole thing rather well. No signs of freaking out just yet. Jaime was just Jaime, superhero or not, but powers with minds of their own just never sounded good no matter the context, so naturally she worried.
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Worrying was an appropriate reaction, really. Jaime nodded. "I took this beetle-shaped rock home and it disappeared that night. I didn't think much of it. Thought Milagro grabbed it or something." His sister did stuff like that all the time, so it wasn't a farfetched assumption.
He wrapped the sandwich up and put it aside before lying back on the grass. "But the next day, things got weirder. I started seeing things I wasn't supposed to see. People who should have been invisible. Kept hearing this voice. Got ganged up on by a bunch of bullies and - I don't really remember how I got away. I thought I was losing it."
"Then Booster Gold - he's a superhero, I don't get the name either - showed up in the middle of the night looking for the scarab. Which was the rock. Which I insisted I didn't have. So he used some high-tech gadgets to scan everything in the room. Everything. And he did find it." He bit his lip. "Inside me. It was - it was in my spine. Still is." He brushed his hair out of his face, still staring at the sky. "It's not even a rock. It's - it's some piece of alien tech that thinks for itself. And I don't think it'll come out."
He closed his eyes for a second, half-afraid to see Lola's expression. It happened to him months ago, but it still freaks him out. It probably always will.
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Wow, there was a lot of information to take in, here. Lola felt how her mouth fell open the longer he spoke, until she had to remind herself to close it so that she wouldn't look completely empty-headed. Okay, so... Most of what he said just brough up a huge amount of questions. Superheroes, aliens... New things that hadn't fitted before, either. Angels, demons, time-travel, being dead, those were things that she could handle. This was just a whole new level of weirdness, all the technology reminding her a bit of science labs in the future, with creepy tests trying to define what species she was. Wow. Jaime was really right... Things always could get weirder, huh?
Silence reigned for ten long seconds. Then Lola bit her lip, frowning a little.
"Your... spine?" she repeated hesitantly. "Does... does it hurt?"
Why yes, that was her main worry. Her brain had not quite processed everything he'd told her, yet. She hugged her knees, face revealing nothing but concern, and resisted the sudden unexpected impulse to stroke his cheek. He looked sort of... young. And huggable.
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Jaime opened his eyes when she spoke, looking at her with surprise. He wasn't surprised that she'd spoken at all, but that she was still sitting right there. As opposed to several feet away.
It took him a moment to realize what she'd asked, and he couldn't hold back a small, choked laugh. "It - it doesn't now. It did then." He shifted uneasily. "Ow. Wait, I take that back. ...Oh. No, I think that's an actual rock poking into my spine now. I gotta sit up."
He did so with a little difficulty, feeling behind him until he retrieved the small sharp rock that had been poking him. Glaring at it, he tossed it into the lake. It skipped once before disappearing beneath the surface. Jaime leaned forward, watching the ripples spread and fade away. Real rocks, he could deal with.
Turning back to Lola, who was still there despite everything, he sighed. "I'm sorry. I don't think there's a way to explain it that's not creepy." He hesitated, absently toying with a few blades of grass. "There's more, but if you want to leave now, I won't blame you. Running and screaming's kind of the natural response."
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"I've heard a lot of creepy stories," she said eventually, turning back to him. "I try and make a habit out of not running away, so I won't this time either." It was a statement, and a promise. She raised her head, sitting up straight and stretched out her legs in the grass. "You can tell me more if you like. I never mind listening. It's what I do."
Natural response? Didn't apply to her. She was a supernatural being, after all.
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Hey, his contact with supernatural beings so far had been next to nil, and the way his family had reacted tended to steel him for the worst. The only other people to find out the truth who weren't completely creeped out by it were Brenda and Paco, but... okay, Paco was already helping out a magic-users street gang and Brenda found out when he kept a couple of walking trees from pulping his best friends. "Thanks," he said. "I just - my folks didn't react well when they found out, and Milagro ran screaming. She wouldn't come near me for weeks. Of course, I dumped the whole thing on them right then and there."
Looking out at the lake again, though, he seriously considered just leaving it at that. Probably not a good idea, though. He was going to have to explain why he needed someone around here who knew, somebody he could trust. "It actually gets worse. You know how I said the scarab has a mind of its own? That's because it talks to me. I'm the only one who can hear it, but it can only hear me if I talk back. Which is really bad because it scans everything on every possible level and classifies just about everything and everyone as a potential threat and has its own ideas about how to handle it. It's also really bad at telling me why it's freaking out unless I tell it to. Out loud. Usually in public." He rubbed his temples. "No concept of personal space whatsoever, I swear."
He took a long drink of Dr. Pepper before continuing. "I can usually ignore it, but here - man, almost everybody I talked to hit its panic button. A couple of girls, or whatever they really were, scared it so bad it turned on my powers itself and tried to get the hell away. I've got the feeling stuff like that is going to happen again around here."
Jaime turned back to her. "I knew there was something different about you when I met you because it was picking something up, but I didn't ask because it wasn't my business. It didn't figure out what was different until you told me and it confirmed it, sort of. I can't get it to stop scanning. Or freaking out. Well, no, when I'm around you it stops unnecessarily spazzing about everything, but that's about it."
His appetite was coming back again, and he reached for his own sandwich, noticing the sparrow pecking at Lola's sandwich. "Oops. I think your lunch just got commandeered." But there was more where that came from at least. He opened up the basket, searching for another one of the sandwiches she'd picked.
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The scarab sounded a little like her own powers, except more intense and difficult to control. Well, impossible to control. Lola's powers were at least adapted to her and by now came as natural to her as breathing. She could sense if a being was vicious, benevolent, upset, in despair, or blissfully happy, and she could modify her response accordingly, trusting what her senses told her. It had been a bit new and frightening in the beginning, but she'd had people to go to for advice. She couldn't imagine having all this power and not really knowing why it reacted the way it did, not to mention not having anyone to ask...
Lola smiled upon hearing what the scarab picked up around herself. It was a bit flattering, to be honest. "There are a lot of powerful people at Hogwarts," she agreed thoughtfully. "Not all of them are bad. Mm." She pursed her lips together, thinking. "If the scarab is at least less prone to spazzing around me, then maybe that's a key to make it calm down more while you're here." Her cheeks turned a little pink as she realised how that sounded. "I'm not saying that you should have me follow you around everywhere you go, because that would be, um, weird." Oh dear. Yes, she needed to stop talking.
Lola took a breath. "I told you there were a few more angels around here? Well, one of them is way more powerful than I am. His name is Michael. I don't know, maybe there's something he could do." She waved a hand vaguely in the air, searching for the proper words to use. "He might be able to help. Make it easier for you." She really hoped he could. Well, he might be able to. Michael was an archangel, after all. An archangel who really liked and cared about humans. And also, he was the headmaster of her school. She was used to coming to him if there was anything she wasn't sure about.
Blinking, she turned towards the sparrow, which did not look the least bit innocent as it sat on her sandwich. "Rude of you," she told it sternly, but didn't shoo it off. Sparrows need food, too! Lola simply picked off the pieces of mozzarella, uncertain on whether or not the cheese would be good for birds, and put them aside, leaving the rest for the pretty damn cheeky sparrow. "There's one with avocado and watercress somewhere in there," she sighed, peering over at the basket. "And muffins. A must on every picnic, muffins." Obviously.
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"I noticed. Problem is, it's hard convincing the scarab that. It does listen to me, though, it takes someone really scary to set it off all the way. It didn't reach boiling point around what's-her-name, the scorpion-throwing girl, but it didn't like her at all. ...which is why they didn't manage to sting me. Although she was distracted." Where was this going? "Anyway, when it 'turns on' all the way, so to speak, it's really, really obvious and kind of freaky. Not something I want to happen in, say, the middle of the Great Hall during lunch rush."
He took another bite as Lola mentioned how to calm down the scarab, and had to cough to keep from choking and laughing, turning red. "Mmph. That's okay, I didn't think so. You'd probably get bored after a while anyway."
"Avocado and what?" Definitely one of her picks. He pulled out a sandwich with a lot of green stuff in it that he didn't recognize. "Is this it?" The muffins were easily identifiable, and he retrieved a muffin and a cookie for himself before sitting back down beside her. He smirked at the sight of the extremely smug sparrow sitting atop its prize.
He considered her suggestion for a second. "I'll think about it. Thing is - yeah, I know, another thing - I found out it was defective. Broken. According to the guys who made it, that was because it was repeatedly exposed to magic for years before I picked it up. I don't want it 'fixed' - I don't trust the guys who made it and that's an entirely different story." Oh, is it ever. And he's probably overloaded her enough as it is. "So, I don't know how much magic it was exposed to or how it was exposed, but there's so much around here... I just don't want it more broken, you know?"
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She grinned, still a little embarrassed at what she'd said, and gave him a friendly biff on the shoulder. "I doubt I'd be bored, babe. You have to admit you're kind of interesting." He certainly had a lot of stories to tell, anyway.
"Watercress." Lola shook her head, laughing a little as she took the sandwich. "It's got this sort of... peppery flavour. You can have a bite, if you like," she offered. "Leaf vegetables. It's good for you."
She laughed again, a light, genuinely amused laugh. "You're just shock-full of things, aren't you?" she smiled teasingly, before having a sip of her Coke. Then she turned more serious again, and nodded. "Think about it. How is it broken?" Because that might be important. Healing something was one thing angels in general were very good at, but just keeping something just broken enough, that was a different matter. She hadn't really heard of a need for that before.
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He returned her grin in spite of himself. "Interesting? Nah, I'm the normal one in my group of friends if you can believe it. Weird just comes after me. You want entertainment, spend five minutes with Brenda and Paco."
"I've heard rumors about that. I'm good, though, thanks." Well, he does have lettuce and tomato on his sandwich, too, so he's not a total loss.
"You hsve no idea." But he smiled anyway at that, his own smile fading at the next question. "They weren't very clear on the how so much as the why.
I'm not sure what it was supposed to do, but I can probably guess. And I really don't think it involved me being in control." He frowned. "If it wasn't supposed to be good, I don't know what that makes it now. Or me."
((Taking off! Should be back late Sunday night!))
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