2020-02-28 - Tea and TROs

It is night when August gets to Lawson's, well after the time they accept visitors for funerals, but there is always someone there to answer the door because Beth lives there. After the doorbell is rang it takes a few minutes for her to get down the stairs and unlock the door. "Hi." She says when she sees it is August, and she steps out of the way of the door to let him inside out of the cold. The downstairs looks a bit ominous with the lights off in the large viewing and service room. "How are you?" She asks, a slight amount of concern spreading across her face. After all no one comes to funeral homes for a good time.

August realizes that coming by at this hour will Raise Concerns, since of course, there's almost always just one reason that happens. Fortunately, it's not that, at least not this time. As a result, he says, "I'm fine, thanks. More or less." He dusts the snow off before stepping in; he's dressed against the cold, and was probably on his way home from work.

He pauses there at the entrance, awkward for a half-second. "So, look, I didn't mention it at the bar in case it was a bad time to talk about it, but you mentioned a stalker. And not the sort that would care about a TRO." He raises his eyebrows. "You okay?"

Beth hesitates a moment at the question before she sort of just...shrugs. "I don't know." She admits. A soft sigh escapes her lips before she asks, "Do you want some tea or hot cocoa? I can tell you about it upstairs if you've got the time." She motions towards the stairs before starting up them herself.

August makes a low sound, ducks his head. He can relate to 'I don't know', oh yes he can. "Yeah, ah, tea'd be fine, thanks." He pulls off his knit cap and scarf, which reveals a few thin, fine lines, like long paper cuts, along his neck. "I'll admit, on the list of possible bullshit I thought this life would bring, supernatural stalkers and gnomes wasn't anywhere on it."

Beth leads the way upstairs to the apartment which is much less formal and stiff looking than the downstairs portion of the house. "Have a seat." She says with a motion towards the living room furniture. "Make yourself comfortable." She notices and observes the paper cuts but says nothing just yet. Instead she goes to the kitchen to put a kettle on the stove and comes back into the living room. "I've always known things weren't normal." She says as she sits down on the couch. "But stuff that would happen maybe once or twice a year is now happening almost weekly. I don't know if it's like...you learn more so more keeps happening, but..." She shrugs again. Then she waves her hand over her own neck. "What happened?"

"Thanks," August murmurs, and settles down on a couch, his cap and scarf in his lap. "Confirmation bias," he says on a nod. "I kinda feel that way too. Though, I also think something is happening. That there's some kind of...upheaval, underway." His eyes are on a random point in the room as he says all that, like he's going over his memories to confirm this is how he feels, though the motion she makes draws his attention back to her. "Oh, ah," he touches one of the slices self-consciously. "A couple of friends and I were in one of those...things, of Theirs. A tower shattered into little fragments, cut me up some on the way out." He snots, shakes his head. "Mostly just annoying as hell."

"A disturbance over there?" Beth wonders. She nods her head in sympathetic understanding. "It would be nice to not be beat the hell up half the time, wouldn't it?" She smiles a little ruefully. "Anyways I have attracted the attention of something from over there. An unpleasant something. It seems like the Veil's poor interpretation of love? It's obsessive and twisted. It keeps murdering people. Pulling their hearts out of their chests. It's come here twice. The first time was when I was crying at If Two By Sea. I think you were there? I was an absolute mess. Had to run out of here because of it and didn't know where else to go but a bar. The second time Clayton was here and he pissed it off real good and it caught my office door on fire."

"I just count myself lucky I haven't," August pauses and swallows, "wound up as bad off as some others." He bites his lip. "Maybe a disturbance, yeah. Or--something. Hyacinth saying her grandfather up and disappeared, at the bar? The Addingtons are knee-deep in all the shit we have going on around here, so I wonder if something happeend to him and it kicked off some kind of...something." He shakes his head, sets that aside as Beth described her predicament. He winces when she stops. "Jesus. I assume it's not just a case of something you can kill?" Here he is, the guy who can't hurt people, wondering if they can just off a Veil thing to make it stop.

"The Addingtons have always been weird. Was Thomas Addington her grandpa? I heard that guy is a nut. I did the funerals of those ones that were killed last year and you could just..I don't know, sense it in the room? The tension and distrust and whatever else was going on between all of them." Beth shifts a little on the couch, "I hope we can kill it. Or someone can. It's literally murdering people. But...like...can you kill things from Over There?"

August grunts, nods and runs a hand through his hair. "Yeah, that's him. I...well. Not sure how much you know, about that whole story. And admittedly I'm not sure I'm the one to tell it, but, Thomas was possessed." Which might also explain the 'always drunk' part he's better known for in town lore. "I won't speak ill or well of him, since I didn't really know him, but it's not a surprise to hear that's how they...all deal with death. By not trusting one another." His mouth twitches in a rueful smile.

He nods in response to her question. "It can be done. I mean--to some things. Maybe even all things, just have to know how. But--" He stops short, makes a face. "I've been Over There a few times now, so I know, things can be killed, if they need to be. It just might not be as simple as killing them. Like in a fairy tale? Sometimes it's a little complicated."

"I mean the younger ones seem alright? But there's always been crazy stories about the older Addingtons." Beth looks surprised when she learns that one of the Addingtons was possessed. "Jesus. I didn't know that was possible but I don't know why I'm surprised. I heard a rumor that he was the one who...you know..." Committed the murders from last year, including those two Addingtons who were killed, "But you'd think even he would go to jail for that."

Just then the kettle whistles. She stands up from the couch to go back to the kitchen and returns with two cups of tea and a little bear filled with honey in the crook of her arm. All three items are put down on the coffee table. "Well this thing needs to die." She picks up her cup of tea to blow across it. "You said you need to do something else for the gnomes?"

August looks distinctly uncomfortable, but waits for Beth to come back before he says anything. By then he's managed to compose himself. "It's a matter of, could the cops have ever proved anything, and the answer was, not really. Because he...wasn't directly responsible." He lifts a shoulder in a half-shrug. "Kind of the fucking problem around here. Even if you know what did happen, who'd ever believe it, yeah?"

He nods about the thing needing to die. "Yeah, with them, they claimed to be from some part of Firefly Forest, and they eat trees. But the trees where they used to live turned against them one day, started attacking them, so they had to flee. Since we, uh...didn't impress them on first meeting, and Enzo in particular pissed them off, we cut a deal to fix the problem." He looks a bit abashed as he puts a bit of honey in his tea and stirs it up. "Honestly, it might even be my fault. I was trying a few things out with the trees Over There, testing to see how they'd respond to certain things. But I can't be sure until we lay eyes on them."

Beth can only nod in agreement when August lays out what the problem is with criminal justice in Gray Harbor with a slightly grim expression on her face.

"Can you return to the same place over there?" She asks when he mentions the trees. "I've never gone voluntarily. It always seems so..." She trails off before settling on a word. "Unnormal. Like a dream or nightmare. I've never seen the same spot in there before."

"Well, you can try," August says, tone turning wry again. He sips from the tea, nods and sips a bit more. Settling back, he continues, "Our thought was to mark the trees on the way to the grafting site with chalk. Except when Enzo took us across, the chalk was on all the trees." He sighs in a 'just my luck' sort of way. "Most of those who can open the doors easily, they say it varies. Some places are more stable than others. I can," he gestures, "cross over, but only if it's thin enough. Someone like Enzo can do it wherever he wants."

Beth blows across her before she takes a sip and absorbs the information shared with her. "What were you grafting onto the trees?" She wonders, wincing in sympathy when he says all of the trees were grafted. "I've seen doors be opened to leave but never to go in. The people who can move things are the ones who can open up the doors, right? With their minds, I mean."

August shrugs helplessly in response to the wince, a 'I paid my money I took my chances' gesture if ever their was one. "Just, other trees--our trees, from this side. A piece of Sitka spruce. If nothing else, I've got my answer: mixing life from our side and that side is a bad idea. And the plants I planted in the Park all died, which raises a lot of questions about the viability of a person being over there long-term. If there's no rain or the right radiation for a plant to live, how does a person get water or food?" An endless array of questions.

He nods in confirmation. "Right. We can do some other things too--find stuff, got really good spatial and area perception. And stronger people can make a sort of endless bag to put things in. I can't do that one, though--only know one person who can." He tips his head. "Seems there a lot of people who are, maybe, middle strong in that one, not so many very strong. But my sample size," he gestures around them, meaning the town, "isn't all that big either, so maybe that's just here."

"We're not..." Beth begins before she stops as if thinking how she should word her question, "We're really not supposed to be able to go there, right? When I went away to college the strange things stopped happening. It was because it's thicker. In other places I mean. The space between this world and the Veil. I couldn't feel people like I can here, either. Maybe under normal circumstances we aren't meant to cross at all?"

Beth looks slightly surprised as she listens to him describe the things those who can open the doors can do. "I think I know someone who can? But he's...well, he's very conservative with using it. Doesn't want to attract Them." She glances down into her cup after she says Them as if afraid mentioning Them at all will summon Them forth.

August sips from his tea, takes a second to think over the 'supposed to'-ness of their abilities. Eventually, he says, "It's hard to say if we're supposed to, or, not. Dolphins can breathe air, but live in the ocean. Are they 'supposed' to be able to do that, even though it's counter to how fish are?" He shrugs. "I think of it more like...evolution, but," a small, self-deprecating sort of smile, "I would, I'm a scientist. So it seems more like, we wound up this way. I didn't seek out these abilities, they just happened. And there's no real 'supposed to' in a case like that. Any more than there is for anyone or -thing else that finds itself different than its surroundings. There's just what is."

He nods, pulls a face. "Yeah, definitely They make using power a risky proposition." He can't help it; Beth's furitve reaction draws one from him, and he glances around the living room. "Which makes it worse, because how can you learn your limits and how to control it if you can't use it without getting your ass kicked?" He chases that with a small, a frustrated sigh.

Beth smiles a touch, "If I wanted to be pedantic I would say dolphins are not fish but mammals that happen to live in water. But maybe that's also the solution to your question about the Veil and how living things our side can survive? They adapt and change to the point where they are like dolphins. Mammals we call fish."

She looks up and nods her head in agreement. "Well, there's plenty of opportunity for ass kicking even if you're not asking for it."

"Oh, of course they're not," August says of dolphins not being fish, "but that's my point exactly. They evolved from mammals a bit like otters, near as we can tell, gradually moved into the water full time. Fish started there. So which of those was that 'supposed' to happen?" He shrugs, because as he's just said, he doesn't think it was.

He considers, though, the notion of people adapting to survive in the Veil. "Could be," he says, sounding thoughtful. "Though that has me wondering, how long has this been going on?" Another question to answer.

He lets out a long, slow breath, has more tea. "No lack of it," he echoes. And another question: why is there no lack? Why is the border thin here? And so on.

"Clayton said something to me the other day. That he knew of a person who was living in the Veil, but he implied that the person who did it was very off. He seemed to wonder if my stalker was something like that." Beth mentions before adding, "I think it's more like the Veil's warped personification of love." She lets out a wordless sound of agreement. "No. It seems like some people are just spending time between hospital trips." There is a thoughtful pause, "Are you from town?"

August toys with his beard, eyes narrowed. "I guess...that could be what happens to someone who's in the Veil too long? That their, adaptation pushes them in that direction." He tips his head at Beth. "But I'd be just as inclined to your description. I've seen and heard of all kinds of things. Alexander called it, ah, 'highly psychomorphic'. Easily influienced by our emotions. So it'd make sense, if someone's messed up thoughts of love, or several someones', gave rise to that."

He makes a wordless sound of displeasure about the hospital. "Yeah. I've been lucky, so far, but..." But plenty of others haven't, his one says.

"Well, listen. If you need any help with this, ah, thing, let me know. But if you've got Alexander on it, I'm sure he'll get it sorted. He's good at that."

Beth nods her head in agreement that Alexander is good at sorting things out. "He seemed to just know things I had never heard of about it that made sense once he'd said them." She finishes off her tea and puts it down on the table. "Say...are you looking for people who can make doors? In and out of the veil, I mean. If so I could have the person I know contact you if he's interested. It's just a matter of seeing if it's something he wants to pursue."

August finishes off his tea, sets the mug down. "I would absolutely like to know more people who can, so if you could pass it on, I'd greatly appreciate it." He pulls out a double-sided business card for Branch & Bole and Out on a Limb, offers it over. "That's my cell on there, so it's as good a number to reach me on as any. And it's absolutely fine if he's not interested in pursuing it." His nose wrinkles. "Can't blame anyone for wanting nothing to do with all this mess."

Beth takes the business card and puts it down on her coffee table. "I'll definitely let him know. And uh...here." She gets up from the table and goes to her purse to get her own business card out. "My cell and email is on this if you need to get a hold of me." She passes it over to him, and remains standing on the assumption that he is getting ready to go. "I think he's getting to the point where he realizes he can't avoid it." She says a little sadly.

August stands, accepts the card and tucks it into a pocket. He nods, gives Beth an slight, apologetic smile. "He could. Avoid it, I mean, just...it involves leaving." The smile fades, since he knows full well that's probably not something this person intends to do. Oh how he's been there. "Thank you very much for the tea. And the conversation."

"That's certainly true." Beth says with a little laugh. As if August were suggesting her friend go to the moon and not just move out of town. "Thank you for coming over and checking on me. It's nice to know people who have some clue as to what's going on are willing to help." She waits for August to put his winter gear on before she heads to the apartment door to walk him downstairs and to the door leading to the outside world.