There are no mistakes in life, some people say; it is true, sometimes, you can see it that way.
{{OOC: Backdated and wobbledy-dated to sometime mid/late Trickster Week}}
Time Agency Eletor 462O1/J, variously known as Jack Harkness, John Thane, and too many other identities and subidentities to make listing them convenient, is having kind of an odd week ( Read more... )
Time Agency Eletor 462O1/J, variously known as Jack Harkness, John Thane, and too many other identities and subidentities to make listing them convenient, is having kind of an odd week ( Read more... )
Comments 117
Makes her wish she'd thought of picking up an instrument instead of a sewing machine.
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It's hard to sneak up on a Neqa'el. And while he does enjoy having an audience, he's technically Tabitha's legal guardian and should probably keep an eye on these things.
And, one knows, it costs nothing to be polite.
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She's pretty sure that was a stupid thing to say. Of course he knows he's good. He has ears too.
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His brow furrows for a moment, and he quickly segues into a few strains from Flight of the Bumblebee before weaving them back down into the more relaxing flow of the fiddling about he's doing now.
"-no end of challenge, for the long-lived."
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The best plan is to of course try to reach out with magics and re-open said portal. Not that Willow has any idea how to do that, but she's a Wicca, and she's not bad at the whole magic thing, so... it's worth a shot, right?
"Um... portal to... wherever you were opening, could you please... re-open? Please? Um, it's just, I don't think you should be opening up like that and eating people in the middle of the street..."
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...three hours in a universe where baseball remained the quintessential American sport rather than football, forever changing the flavor of national and local politics in ways even Dmitri can't quite reconcile, she tumbles back out of the mid-twenty-first-century State of Cook County and onto an intersection about a block away.
About three minutes have passes in Chicago time, not that she can tell, as this particular pair of intersections seems to be criminally devoid of public clocks.
On the plus side, she's managed to come back with a good handful of alternate-future tourism brochures, this time.
She snorts. "You know," she remarks to a woman walking her labradoodle, both of whom just witnessed her tumbling out of the green rift, "I can't decide if this is going to get really old, or if I never want it to go away.
The dog looks at the woman.
The woman looks at the dog.
...they share a quiet laugh and go on their way.
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...have a very awkward witch, Dmi. You've earned it. Or something.
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Hey, look, a person! A person speaking a distinct dialect of Nerdglish, which warms the cockles of Dmitri's heart immediately. She grins back, clapping Willow on the shoulder.
"Inconclusive evidence either way, il mio buon sport, but there is was, and here I am. Dmitri Lang." She offers her hand. "Trans-universal explorer, now with one hundred percent more pleasure of meeting you."
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Watch out for that falling bucket, J.
(The Trickster, meanwhile, will neither confirm nor deny that he did that on purpose.)
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The effect is that J startles and steps deftly out of the bucket's way, picking it up as it clatters against the ground and looking up to see where it came from.
Guy changing the marquee. Okay. Why he needs a bucket for that... well, maybe it's to put the letters in. Whatever.
"You dropped this," he mentions, offering it up.
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The Trickster makes his way down the ladder and halfway to the bottom reaches out and plucks the bucket out of J's hands, half-dangling off of it. He has natural balance. It's awesome. "Thanks," he says with a certain degree of smugness that a thank you doesn't require.
He starts up again, but then stops and looks down. "Not to completely stick my nose where it don't belong, but you look like you're havin' a rough week."
And the Trickster's getting the impression it's because of him. At least this one feels like he's actually getting what's coming to him. HALLELUJAH.
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One of the smarmy ones. Maybe a temeluchus. ...that would seem to be, so far, the one subspecies he hasn't been able to get along with.
"In this place?" he asks, raising an eyebrow. "Biblical plagues were a rough week. This is just inexplicable."
He makes a small, acknowledging gesture.
"See ya."
...what? It's not like he has to strike up a conversation with every last person he meets.
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Luke is sitting in the lobby of the Kashtta at some point when J is either on his way in or way out. He's reading through old journal entries, not only his own but whatever else he can read for as far back as he can read. It's hard to think of how different this city was just on year ago. Two years ago, and it's like looking back on another world.
He coughs into his elbow and then glances up when J enters ever since the blanket fort and flashing back into the past to have sex again, he doesn't feel as easily frightened or awkward even. It's hard to be that way for so long. It starts to wear down on a person.
"Hi," he says with a small smile and a wave.
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He's balancing a basket of parts and oddities - he retrieved his old collecting bike, and with Torchwood's accounts and Lynn's stock, it seems to be coming in handy - but he looks up when he hears Luke, a smile making its way across his features.
That box of parts can just... sit over there. Next to the front desk. Nothing in this box is dangerous or explosive.
"Hey," he says, answering that smile and heading in Luke's direction. "Keeping busy?"
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"If you can count reminiscing about the old times keeping busy then yeah. Course I am. Always," he says, and he's still smiling as he turns back around briefly to flip through the journal again, glancing from one entry to the next. "A lot has happened in two years time, at least more than ever happened to me in all the years I lived here before."
He pauses for a moment. This is before he's seen that Des wants him to be a groomsman even but it's been on his mind.
"I... really want to go to Des and Martha's wedding. I haven't been out of the tower in a while, and-" Luke shrugs his shoulders, hovering over a journal entry where he exchanged words with Becky. Some of the memories are more painful than others.
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Martha is, after all, something of a big name in the political sphere. Luke is, on the balance of an evil organization's ledgers, just a whore - and a whore whose working days are limited, and whose confidential information has almost certainly already been spilled. It wouldn't be worth the chaos.
"I keep thinking I should send something," he says. "But then I think, that would be weird..."
...considering I kidnapped and tortured a bunch of your friends, including the likely third party if Illinois allowed expansible marriage contracts, and also because I fully intend to be dead either ( ... )
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It is never too cold for ice cream, even as this is Snow Country and even being outside is torture. Not so much for him.
A girl has just been eaten by a Rift, however, and that, he's pretty sure, makes up for the fact that today kinda sucks.
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But the rift has sealed, leaving Dmitri brandishing the signed autobiography of a certain First Angel whose autobiography won't be written for another ten years, nor published for another fifteen.
SCORE ONE FOR DMITRI.
She drops it into her bag, pulls on the coat and hat she took off for the book signing, and then turns around to see some guy eating ice cream in the middle of Chicago's freezapalooza. Which, you know, she can get behind.
"I," she announces, "am having a kinda awesome week."
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He turns slowly, notes that... Yep, that is the same girl who was over there 45 seconds ago and yep, this is kind of weird, but weird's pretty relative when you're a Trickster and just sort of stares at her blankly, before finishing off the remainder of his cone.
"Guess if you're into that sort of thing. I don't really see the appeal," he notes with a casualness that a normal human wouldn't normally ascribe to someone being eaten and then spit out by a Rift right in front of them.
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She clips her bag shut.
"And, you know, it's better than crazy people trying to burn down the city and dinosaurs eating our mayor, so there's one thing. ...Orthalicus reses in a hardwood hammock, did I just get through those examples without a single hypothetical?" She pulls a face. "...I desperately need more tequila. Chicago is starting to make sense again."
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