sixthiterationlogs | [fox ota] throw my hours on your line, no need to rush

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[fox ota] throw my hours on your line, no need to rush

WHO: Owen Prichard
WHERE: 7I; the beach; near house 120
WHEN: September 16-17th
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: Fox mischief, language, possible mention of burn scars

i. beach, 9/16 (open to 2)

The foxes--are new.

Everything about the side of the canyon he calls home is relatively new, he’s found, but he’d had some time to get settled before they started coming out of the woodwork. Not so settled that he can’t adjust more than a few behaviors to preserve his meager belonging: he’d seen someone out in the water one morning--that welcome-wagon guy who’d left a note and fucked off--tying his bag and clothes to man-made stakes. A decent brain to pick, he still believes, but getting close has proven difficult. Maybe it’s the dog or the bird, but he always sees the man at a distance, and he’s always gone by the time Owen catches up.

At least he figured out how to hide his stuff. Not everything fits in the bag, and he’s wary of leaving his belongings out overnight. He’s got food locked in the cellar, clothes and notes stuffed into corners of the attic. At night he puts the clothes he isn’t wearing under the mattress, guarding them with his own weight.

It’s a nuisance, and in the early days when his food stores were being dug into, the long-term consequences were troubling. Cautious new habits in place, however, he’s returned his attention to the boats. If he’s out on a canoe, he’s as safe as his bag tied to a stick out in the tide.

Today he’s flipped the boat over on its makeshift cradle, giving himself shade to work in. It’s early enough that the wet rocks and sand are cool against his back, but the sun is high enough to drive him underneath the log. The center has been hacked into a generally hollowed shape, but he’s taking his time to smooth and shape the edges, guiding the ax with a hand flat to its side as he pushes it along the grain of the wood.

Just when he thinks it time for a break, curling shaves of wood littering the ground and his chest, the sounds outside the canoe change. Pebbles scatter, wood creaks, a sound like grass on grass hisses between something like--laughter.

Owen stills himself to listen, puts his ax flat on the ground at his hip and steadies his hands on the canoe’s smoothing edges, trying to pinpoint the sounds as they dance too-close and too-far. The next time they come in close, he almost ducks out to look, but a sharp crack pulls him in and puts his arms instinctively over his head. The rough canoe drops off its cradle of branches, one end and then the other, trapping him in the dark.

When the weight of the log proves too much to shove off on his own, he lays there, staring at the dark until pinpricks of light form at the edges--spaces between stones. There’s slight ventilation, and he can dig at the edges, maybe even carve himself out if it came to it.

He’d rather not, considering the work he’s put into getting it this far. Scrabbling his hand at the nearest meeting of beach and wood, he gets his fingers through, and keeps going. “HELLO,” he calls, coughing against the dust shaken free of the log. “IS ANYONE THERE? I NEED SOME HELP.”

ii. house 120, 9/17 (open to 2)

After the canoe, he’s been a little more on edge. That could have been a bad day, made worse if he’d had any of his body turned out of the log’s shadow. He’ll get back to it tomorrow: turn it right-side-up and do without the cradle now that he’s got the basic shapes. He might enlist some company just in case.

That’s harder to find this side of the wall, and he’d spent the last night back in the other village, tending to his notes in what felt like relative safety. He marked a third day with no sign of the guy with the bird and dog, and he wonders if they crossed back over as well, if they ran into some surprisingly malicious mischief. Maybe he’ll finally catch up the guy’s corpse.

Not today, he won’t: today he’s staying at home. Every other path he tried to take seemed to have a fox at its end, some in mirrored poses, blocking the gap. They’d seemed a little childish, compared to other obstacles the villagers have faced, but--it’s a creeping kind of unease, rather than the terror of an earthquake.

The house isn’t safe. His belongings can be taken at any time. The forest is a little more dangerous than before.

“Feels like home,” he mutters wryly, turning away from another fox-laden shortcut to the house. When he catches sight of it from the main path, he breaks into a jog: the door is ajar, and there’s a long tail lifting up from the porch, where he’d buried a bag of fish behind the latticework. “Hey,” he yells, then louder upon approach. It isn’t until he’s cornered the thing that he realizes--not a bushy fox tail, just a tail.

What turns and shimmies out of the gap is the right size, but it’s--one of those exotic pets, minus the rhinestone collar, rough around the edges and hackles up against the wall of his house.

He had wanted some company, and he isn’t getting home to Emrys any time soon.

“Shhh,” he says, putting his pack down to one side, lowering himself into a crouch. “Thought you were a fox, calm down.” He doesn’t expect the cat to respond to anything but the quieting of his voice: he keeps low, eventually shifting to sit on the ground after his long hike home. Slowly, he reaches for his pack and opens it, leaving it for inspection as he finds some of the crumbling bread from the other inn to break apart and toss between them. “Can’t imagine how you’re dealing with these things,” he tells it.

Alone at the end of a long and unpredictable day, talking to a cat? This isn’t so different from home either.

iii. wildcard, any day (open to all)

If you have your own fox related hijinks or starters to play out, feel free to toss one at him, I’m happy to play out anything with anyone!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Taako's explorations on this side seem more productive. The foxes are annoying, but he has so little to his name thus far that being stolen from is only a problem as a matter of principle. And, more importantly, they're clearly at least somewhat magical. If he can pin one down, there's a slim chance he could get it to talk (if talking is something it's capable of, or if his hundred-plus-year-old knowledge of the tongue of beasts from another world is going to do him any good). Or at least poke it with a stick in some way that suggests how to fix the way the magic is shut off.

It's a vanishingly slight chance, but it helps him keep his mood up. He's even humming faintly as he wanders, but not quite enough to drown out the shouts for help. He doesn't stop immediately. He probably would have, even back home, even without any of his moral centers around. He's self-absorbed and callous, not evil. He stops a little sooner here, because there are so few people and he better not chance cheesing any of them off for no reason. Hell, he might even get some brownie points out of this.

So he bangs on the outside of the log, noting that someone's been doing all kinds of... something to it. Stuff he's refused to learn anything about to annoy Magnus, stuff that makes him miss the big lug like hell. His tone's about as gentle as it gets when he calls. "Hey, talking log, what's the sitch on your side? Like, do I just start pushing, or are there squishy organs in the way?"

It's a good question, if posed in such a way that has Owen wondering if he should wait it out for a savior with fewer jokes up his sleeves. Their sleeves? It isn't a voice he recognizes, meaning he's probably lucky to hear it this side of the wall, meaning--don't look the gift horse in the mouth.

Voice, whatever.

"Just me and the sawdust," he says, coughing as more of it drifts into his mouth. "I'm hollowing out the log, I'm underneath it!" He extends the fingers of his hand toward the voice, then retracts them back under the edge.

The talking log is being a pretty good sport. Taako turns over his options, having to work to dismiss the obvious magical solutions. Levitate would make this shit so much easier. He's not likely to have a lot of luck just pushing, despite the hilarious opener, but the tumbled pile of branches make the solution pretty obvious. When magic abandons you, physics are a good backup. Hell, physics are a lot more reliable.

"Go ahead and push when I call it. I mean, if you can do that right now? I don't know your life." He works the sturdiest looking branch in under the side of the canoe. "Punch it!" And he goes ahead and hops onto the branch with his whole weight, because why do shit by halves.

The log is more awkward than weighty at this point, though it's enough of both that he had no leverage from underneath it. He'll need to keep going probably: make it lighter and seal the wood with some kind of wax or resin. No telling how hard that'll be to come across, but a problem for when he isn't the prize under cup number one.

When the branch shoves in against his thigh, he starts to get the picture; lifting his leg up over it until his knee presses into the log, he rolls into the opposite side, shoving at the rough wood until it starts to roll. Between their combined weights, it seems to budge--and mindful of another disaster, once it's opened far enough in one direction, Owen rolls the other way, until he's at the stranger's feet in the pebbles and sand, the log on its side with the roughly opened section exposed.

For a moment Owen coughs and recovers, taking in lungfuls of air devoid of swirling dust, and he finds out how many splinters found his palms when he finally pushes himself up. "Thanks," he says, flashing the state of one hand in lieu of extending it to his savior. "I think the foxes busted the frame it was on while I was working on it."

Glad to be free of having to balance on a mobile stick, Taako hops down as soon as the guy who will always be known to him as Talking Log is free. At his feet is an odd place to be, given the heavy workboots he arrived in below the crookedly-hemmed wrap skirt he made out of his magenta scrubs on arrival. Not the best angle to appreciate the whole, though even Taako isn't quite self-absorbed enough to be thinking about that. He'll return to smug obnoxiousness once he has at least some indication that this guy's basically okay.

He nods thoughtfully and scans their immediate surroundings for foxes. At the moment, the little bastards are out of sight. He wishes he knew how bright orange things could be that sneaky. It'd come in handy. "Sounds like them." After all, it is pretty hilarious. It would be at home, anyway, with magic assists to undo any untoward consequences. "Impromptu PSA about boat safety. Thanks, little dudes." In his experience, even magical creatures can sometimes be thrown off their game by sheer weirdness.

He doesn't really notice the lack of a handshake. Introductions generally escape him. It requires paying too much attention to people who aren't him.

"I appreciate you calling it boat safety instead of log safety," Owen says, starting to pluck splinters from the tips of his fingers and eyeing his project from its new angle. It's at least recognizable for what it will be, if still in need of refinement.

Now that he's up and out of immediate danger, he starts to look around the beach. Moana's boat seems intact, though he imagines a little sabotage might keep her from rushing out into danger before he catches up. His bag is still visible along the horizon, just beyond the reasonable swimming distance of--well, a two foot tall animal. If they weren't after his things, what was the point? Pure malice?

"I'm not really sure what they're after," he says, as if his companion might offer up his own theory. "They started off just trying to steal things, but that could've really hurt me."

Taako doesn't know fuck all about boats, but if he was being flattering, so be it. He's more interested in the problem of the foxes. Spirits and shit aren't really his area of expertise, but he hangs around a cleric of Pan all the time, which is just one step from a druid, honestly. "Not that I've got a lab to send samples to, but if we're dealing with pretty simple arcane constructs or even spirits with limited sapience, giving the little shitgoblins a motivation like mischief gets the fuck out of hand nine times out of ten. That's an educated guess at best, though." Sometimes he has moments of lucidity.

When Moana talks about gods and creatures, Owen at least has some context. Granted, the context lets him assume she's assigning natural phenomenon to the work of known legendary figures, a young woman pulled from another time--but it's easier to nod along with. This guy talks about labs and sapience as readily as he does magic, which is a little easier to follow, but makes his point of view harder to determine.

Which--fuck determining anything, for a few minutes. He needs to get his hands picked clean and dealt with before he acclimates to anyone else's mad origins.

"Fascinating," he answers succinctly, eyeing the toppled structure before wading out into the water. It's too heavy to be messed with further, he hopes, and the gentle roll of the waves up his legs soothes his rattled nerves. "Do you have a lot of experience with these things?"

Any sarcasm in that fascinating is utterly lost on Taako, who works on the assumption that he is always fascinating, all the fucking time. "Spirits aren't really my deal, but I can fake it. You'd really want a warlock? Maybe a druid, who knows that those dipshits get up to." Or just a wizard who actually studied their shit more carefully. Taako does occasionally pull depth and comprehension from his ancient store of arcane knowledge, but he also wings it a hell of a lot.

It feels a bit like being pulled out of your burning car by the man who wears a sandwich board over his shoulders proclaiming the end times: Owen's glad to be free of his wooden trap, but now he has to socialize with the guy who talks about warlocks and druids.

Maybe he shouldn't discount that kind of thing, considering their situation. A group of foxes just tore up his boat frame.

"A broke dipshit is right twice a day," he says, reaching for agreeable but managing it as a question. "Fake it for me: what's your take on this place?"

"My original theory was powerful arcane dampening field, since not only can I not so much as frostify a beverage without using regular laws of physics like a loser, but apparently everyone used to having some kind of power is going without. And there's no apparent contact with other planes or, honestly, I'd have been busted out five minutes in." The fact that he hasn't been disquiets him very deeply. He prefers not to dwell on it. "Buuuuuut, bullshit like the little fox guys means some stuff is working. Since they--using kinda the universal they there, whatevs--seem to be doing a lot of tweaking on the way in, my guess now is everyone's being individually blocked somehow, which if irritating is really fucking technically impressive. I'll tell them how much I like it before I fucking fireball them out of existence." He seems to deliver the whole speech without taking a breath.

It's a bit like coming to America--and the mainland for the first time--the language is the same, but certain words have only hints of meaning, no context for what they might mean to the speaker. Once most of the splinters are plucked from his fingers, Owen feels a little more equipped to engage with it.

But he still takes a walk around the perimeter of his boat, stepping over fallen branches, noting the torn fibers of the ties, the tracks kicked up in the sand. The boat itself is fine: it's just less improved than he'd expected to get it, today.

That's probably the point. Hurting him is just a fun side-effect. Looking back up to his companion, then down to actually meet his gaze, he does his best to process the answer, and his questions. "So, where you're from, magic is--real? Like, a thing you practice with quantifiable and obvious results."

It only lasts a second, but that question is the first thing to slow the constant slurry of egotistical noise that spills out of Taako's mouth every waking moment. He's just completely confused by the question. He's been to worlds where the magic was crap and to worlds where the magic was locked down by some variation on the aforementioned arcane dampening effect, but imagining one where magic... doesn't work? That should be new. He knows about the Plane of Thought, about the world Joaquin comes from, but he's never seen someone incredulous about such a simple fact of life before. It's like being perplexed by air and gravity. "I point at shit that bugs me and unearthly tentacles burst out of another dimension to make it stop doing that. I mean, example. Don't know what else to tell you, my dude."

Someday, Owen's going to meet a person who just says yes or no when confronted with a question, and he's going to hold that person dear for the rest of his days. In the meantime, he's just going to absorb unearthly tentacles and slot it away for later. Yes. It's a yes. This guy is convinced in the existence of magic, via personal experience, and considering their location he can't rule out that the man is telling some absolute truth.

"Part of me just wants to get back under the boat," he sighs, but all he does is tug at the side of it until it rolls onto its carved bottom, slicing into the sand on its own weight. "There are notes," he says, a little louder, "you aren't the only one who lost a power like that. Maybe they consider it the even trade for taking technology from others."

He's going to ignore the boat comment. It's not about him so who cares. He only looks over again when Owen brings the conversation back to an interesting topic like missing powers. It's a very disgruntled look, and Taako's not one to spare the messenger. Or... reminder of a constant and unavoidable truth. "So I've heard. Not that I'd mind a little technology injection either." He was never a remotely competent engineer of anything but arcane energies, but if the tech was functional, well, okay, he wasn't going to try and convince himself he could recreate the Starblaster. But maybe someone could. "But I'm betting whatever sucks here would still suck in space with robots. Because I'm not magic. I do magic. Stopping a magical creature from doing shit is one thing. Stopping a practitioner's spells from functioning is a whole other deal."

Something's got to give between them, or just in Owen's brain, and he decides: this is just going to be his magic guy. This is just another expert on something Wikipedia can't help him with, and if he treats him as a resource instead of a headache, they'll both be better off. "I'm not familiar with the difference," he says, like it isn't obvious. "Do you know how a person might do either?" Information is information: add everything to the notes and something will eventually pop.

An invitation to talk about Taako is always welcome. And at least someone's dealing with their pathetic ignorance here. "Brrrrrroooooooaaaaaadly speaking, magic comes from different places. A cleric or a druid is granted magic by gods or natural powers or whatever that shit is, a warlock makes deals for magic, a sorcerer just does fuckin' magic because they're born that way or whatever, and a wizard uses specific procedures like magic words, diagrams, special ingredients, junk like that, to tell magic what to do." He's a better teacher than he'd own up to. Lucky for a certain twerp apprentice, and, at the moment, lucky for Owen, the first person to get anything remotely like an explanation out of him. "Generally. Whatever. Anyway, if you have a magic creature, stopping them from using their magic, like, Ahuno, a Beholder or some crap, that'd be... hard, in most cases, but they channel or generate their magic like they breathe. It's disabling something internal. Wizards just tell magic what the crap to do. Technically, anyone with a spellbook and the right ingredients should be able to do a spell if they follow the directions, though if they try it without training it either won't work or, well, makes them... dead..."

Owen thinks he might be following, though he wishes he had his journal around to make the immediate, and most accurate notes. "I live near here," he says, "If you want to tell me more about it further away from--" he looks down at the wreckage of his project: "all this." It's time to gather his supplies and eat something anyway. "What if it just doesn't exist like that here," he asks. "It doesn't in my world, so maybe all you get here is what people bring through, and they neutralize that same as other kinds of power. Maybe the stuff you're trying to manipulate isn't held back, maybe it just isn't there at all."

"I've... considered it." He sounds just a little edgy. Considered and fiercely rejected because it's too horrible to contemplate. If there's no magic here, nothing at all, how is anyone supposed to reach him when he can't get himself out?

He doesn't actually agree to follow Owen, but he does drift faintly in the man's direction as he talks, ready to stick with the conversation as long as it's interesting. "There's a problem with that, though. These little fuckers that got all up in your boat carpentry party, the fact that we've all had memories stripped of whatever went into getting us here, there's magic working. I'd expect a world that just didn't fuckin' have it to be like, incapable of supporting any magic."

Drifting works: he has to wander back into the water to get his supplies, strung out on the posts he'd erected days before. If the foxes last much longer, the water will be too cold to safely use as a barrier--though that much more effective for it. As much as he can absorb and agree with what's being said, he tries to carry on the logic of the argument, tries to drive toward some new idea, or something that might ring true.

"Maybe it's different magic than you learned to control," he calls back, then turns when his pack is back on his shoulders. If he thinks of it like--a different kind of phone, or even the boats, going back to sails instead of engines, he can puzzle it out the same way. "Maybe you have to forget what you knew, and start over."

"I'm not gonna say impossible, 'cus very few things are, but... I've been to a hundred different planar systems, and that's never been a thing." Maybe planar systems are clustered in some way and this one is somehow more different than every other different reality, but it's a horrifying idea. "And I did hear people used to be able to do their own magic shit, so I feel like there's a Gordian knot to cut here somewhere. Just need to figure out where it is."

"I'll put that on the list of ideas," he says with a shrug, adjusting the pack on his shoulders to heft it toward home. "No reason to throw any of them out until we know what the fuck's going on." Kidnapping? On the list. Magic, maybe of different kinds? On the list.

Taako might want to cut the knot, but Owen would examine every thread, hoping to unravel it.

He already found the super secret third option to solve the unsolvable once. He's on break. A hundred years is enough. Time to burn whatever's in his way to the ground. If he could just get a fireball to take. "Have you considered that this place is stupid and annoying? 'Cus that's my going theory right now." He says it fairly mildly, barely squeaky at all. He's not being actively antagonized by the place right now, though that might almost be better.

For the first time in a truly less than stellar day, Owen laughs. "Simple explanations are usually best," he agrees, appreciating the--well, candor seems par for the course with this one.

"I'd just like to know how and why it's so stupid and annoying."

As they enter the strip of trees between the beach and home, he holds back a branch. "You got a name to call you," he asks, and adds, because it's true and because as big a pain as it might be, it should prove interesting: "I owe you for today."

"Taako. Y'know, from TV." The latter out of habit. He's been resisting the urge, because people here seem to have nothing better to do than ask follow up questions when he's busy being awesome. But sometimes it just flows naturally.

And reminds him that, really, if he were anywhere near home, everyone here would already know him, everyone would have heard the story, everyone would already be united by the Day of Story and Song, whatever else was going on. He's not sure if he'd rather it be more memory erasure or proof he's outside the planar system he calls home entirely.

He does not ask Owen's name.

"Right, obviously." Owen gives no indication of not believing, or not knowing of the man's apparently famous exploits, thinking it the kind of glib introduction anyone might play at to spare their sanity in a place like this. A step beyond the joke when he introduces himself back home as Owen Prichard, Private Eye. "We probably just didn't get you on TVNZ. What kind of programming was it?"

Alright, he can appreciate someone just rolling with it. That's worth a few points. "Sizzle It Up with Taako. Had a few great seasons, played Neverwinter and the Underdark, currently on indefinite hiatus." Sort of. There's the school and the brand, sure, but he hasn't quite gotten himself together enough to launch even a controlled release of the show as a reboot.

A body count of forty will do that. He wants to say that, but he can't quite force even his tongue to twist that into a glib remark. Maybe someday, knowing it wasn't really his fault, but not now.

Dark eyes flick back, over a shoulder, through brush, and he re-evaluates Taako's ability--or just commitment--to keep up. Slowing his pace puts him out longer with the foxes and the waning light, but the house isn't that far, and hopefully enough trouble has befallen him for one day. Tithed, confessed, and penanced or some shit--people like Taako make it hard to know how to frame anything anymore.

"Magic or cooking," he asks, taking a stab at the name and his limited information. "No, wait, obviously magic cooking."

Oliver has been wary of interacting with much of anyone since he arrived but the recent arrival of the foxes has made that a little more difficult. He's had to hide his things now, work hard to keep them safeguarded, and he has to spend more and more time every day hunting for food since he doesn't dare leave fish out on a drying rack or meat to salt.

He doesn't trust the Inn. Sure, there's plenty of people going in and out of it on a daily basis but he doesn't know them and there's no guarantee that the food and drink there is safe. He can guarantee what he hunts and catches on his own.

He's at the beach when he hears the noise and while it's his natural instinct to bolt, that instinct wars with his desire to help. He decides on the latter and moves toward the noise, realizing someone is trapped under what appears to be the beginnings of a boat.

"Hey, I hear you. Let me wedge something under here and get you out, all right?"

Hey, I hear you is such a simple but effective phrase; Owen's dwindling calm finds new strength, and he stops grating his hand against the side of the boat, retracts the other from under its edge. "Alright," he calls through the wood, tucking himself in.

The dark isn't as suffocating as the dusty air, and he stretches the end of his sleeve across his fingers, holding the filter over his mouth. The fabric has gone damp by the time something shoves into the side of the boat, and subsequently his side as well.

"Watch it," he calls, coughing at the resurgence of dust to his throat, and he shifts onto his side, forming a parenthesis of sorts with the end of the--he thinks it's one of the branches from the frame. "Let me get over it!" Turning a little more, he manages to get onto his elbows, and as much onto his knees as puts his back against the bottom of the hull. Edges from the ax dig into his skin, and he finds it on the ground. There's no reason to think his savior means anything but goodwill, but he feels better knowing he has it. "Alright, let me know when you want to push, I'll try to help."

Oliver casts a glance around before finding a likely piece of wood to lever the boat up with and presses it against the edge, letting it dip down into the sand enough to peek under the lip of the boat. Not too much, as to let sand rush in and choke the guy but just enough to get a start on flipping the thing over.

"All right. On three, got it? One, two, three," Oliver calls out in steady, measured beats. It's more difficult to do this without solid ground beneath him but there's at least some pebbles and rocks on this beach and it isn't pure sand. There's something to give him grip.

The count winds down with Owen's thudding heart, though the presence of another person cancels some of the fear. He wouldn't call it a phobia, but any space this tight, dark, and full of splinters would be less than ideal, and he hopes they can have him out soon enough.

While he presses up with all the leverage he has against the back of the boat, the sand works against him, his knees and elbows sliding on the first attempt. The boat moves, but doesn't quite flip, and he pushes a huff of frustration through his nose as he slips flat on his stomach.

"Count it again," he calls, tucking himself into a tighter position, ignoring the sting of his splinter-covered hands as he finds space to press them against the ground.

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[fox ota] throw my hours on your line, no need to rush

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