2020-03-24 - Tree Scabs

Alas, Steelhead Service Center is no longer as homey as once it was. It's been in this devastated, cracked, walls-at-non-Euclidian-angles mess ever since the Bad Men came to collect from Itzhak. And Itzhak, heartbroken, terrified (though he'd never admit it), furious, hadn't been able to cope with starting on repairing it. Not after he spent all spring and summer working on getting it operational, only to have it kicked out from under him.

But, still all those things, he's now unloading a ton of equipment from his shop truck. The weather is just this side of warm, enhanced with soft gray drizzle. Itzhak is piling too many boxes on a new dolly, hauling them with ease. No matter what they actually have inside them, he moves them as if they contain nothing but starch packing peanuts.

August arrives in his barely functional Outback, limping along thanks to Itzhak. Soon, it's getting driven down to Portland to be traded in for something else. An Outback? An Audi? They'll see.

He gets out, looking a little less harried and exhausted. Ignacio's alive, if not exactly happy about the circumstances surrounding his stay in the hospital. He has Finch keeping an eye on him 24/7. This gives August leave to rest, and not be in the hospital. Which means he's come with his workbag, dressed in work clothes: black, white, and red flannel, a black waffle knit Henley, heavy hikers, denim jeans. "Hey," he says, smiling to see Itzhak getting equipment out of his truck. "Getting ready to tear this place down?"

Hyacinth came dressed for the occasion! She is wearing jeans. They're fitted but they go great with the legwarmers and the keeled hiking boots. Mmhmm. She has no idea how the out doors works past cutting it down and building on it. Still she arrives with, beyond the incredulity of it all, a serious expression.

While she appears (ans is) all high and mighty she would count hem among oddly chosen friends and companions. They stood together to deal with her family's problem and while she is persistently and imperiously picky? She cares. Sortof. She cares in a very Hya driven logic based pattern of shit that is working and things that are not.

The end result is August and Itzhak asked for help and she took the time out of running a company, starting a company, and still heading the zoning commission to traipse out here and assist. "Please tell me we are tearing it down." She is helping! ...in a very judgmental and supportive way. Somehow.

Itzhak grunts as he piles the boxes five deep. They have equipment printed on their sides. "Why should I tear it down? I can make it work, also fuck Them." He glares up at the sky and yells, "Ya hear that? FUCK YOU!" Hoooo boy somebody is in a mood. Also, he'd said before he was thinking about tearing it down. Maybe he's just being his obstreperous self. He stomps on the dolly's rung to tip it back on its wheels. The boxes all stay where he damned well put them as he wheels the dolly into the garage.

Lemondrop is awake--it's spring! Sort of. Her enclosure is fixed and repopulated with sturdy branches and thick silk foliage for her to hide in or climb over. She periscopes up, tongue coming out to go flicky as her favorite human comes in.

August asides to Hyacinth, "I told him the Munroe ladies would cut him a deal on a Bobcat, could be done in an afternoon." He shrugs, one side of his face scrunching in a 'it's Itzhak, what can you do' expression.

But, "Fuck them," he agrees, and sets his workbag down near Lemondrop's enclosure. He reaches out with his mind to give her a brief touch of hello, reaches down to pull out a large, glass jar full of large, woody, scab-like chunks. "Got these when we fixed that situation I caused in the Veil forest," he says, offering the jar for inspection. "Wanted to talk about what I found out from them."

looking back to August there is animation in her agreement, "Oh they are. I'm so glad they have a reprieve for me from having to go to Lowe's. I keep trying the asshole in the lumber section he doesn't get to explain wood to me. They keep doing it. MMmm!" She has some feelings about this which simmer with a look back to Itzhak moving things around. "So where are we going with all of this, Rosenkrantz?" The snake gets a look but she neither gets excited nor disturbed with her here, but possibly conferring to her with a tilt of her head for an answer that will not come. This is broken up by August's announcement. Eyes go to Roen, the jar, then Roen. "You brought back your favourite mistake just for us? I'm touched." THere's a pause before she asks, "Why are you bringing things out of the veil, Roen?" Does this stop her from getting nosy? Of course not.

Itzhak grunts. He sets the dolly down on its flat, then turns to face Hya, his expression grouch prime. "...Do you really think we should demolish the place?" From the look of him, he knows the answer is yes, and he needs help hearing it. Nobody needs to be a mind reader to figure that out.

He wrinkles his nose at the jar August is holding. "Yeah, whaddaya wanna talk about?"

August gazes around the building, sighs. "Look. You could keep the main structure, and gut it. Reframe the doorways so they'll shut, same with the windows. You can even reframe with some weird patch jobs to make look very hipster, I mean maybe you want that." Somehow he doesn't laugh when he says this. He does grin, though. "Seriously, though, unless you want to make some kind of statement about patching it--and you could--it'll be easier on you to tear most of it down." He scans the interior, moves to a wall. "Leave one of these, a load bearing wall, and you don't need new permits. It counts as an in-place reno."

He holds out the jar again, shakes it. He says to Hyacinth, "Because I put them there. But I only did one graft, and it was a branch." The chunks in the jar are definitely not branch-like. "And they made a fucking mess. So I figured least I could do is dispose of them. But then I thought, maybe I should have a look at them." He cuts a rueful look at Itzhak. "Itzhak and Niall kept an eye on me while I gave one a read, and," he taps his right eye, still a bit more bloodshot than the left, "I got my ass kicked."

Hyacinth really wants to snap answer. Her jaw opens and then clamps shut, fingers curling under her chin thoughtfully. Eyes, sharp and scrutinizing, survey the damages for a long time instead of giving him her initial snap judgement... then she gives him her initial snap judgement with a wrinkle of her nose and the rare apologetic tone, "I hate it." Uncurling her fingers she presses for a pause before his inevitable reaction. "It's not living up to the potential you can use it for and it's like totes wasting some serious space. So do you want me to tell you to stay in an abusive relationship with non-Euclidean nightmare oooooor do you want your dream garage? I mean It can be the space you have , or like it can be the one you want. but if you want to hang onto this because you're going to let change whoop your ass," There's a pause and she glances the are again noting, "which it has, or do you want to be the hand controlling change?" A gesture to August inclues the subcontext: listen to him. He's not wrong.

Itzhak sighs out gustily between his teeth. He's about to run his hand through his hair when he visibly remembers he's been working, and doesn't. "God dammit," he mutters. "Yeah. You're right. I just...I worked so hard on it." Which sounds lame even to himself. "I hate it too. I just. UGH!" Rubbing his eyes on his arm in sheer aggravation, he complains, "Okay. Okay yeah you're right. I'll knock it down. I can build something new, something way better." So he wipes his hands off and swaggers over to August to peer at the chunks of plant in a jar. "I can read things now," he says to August and Hya. "Not as good as you guys can, but I can. So when I read that--" point, "I remembered, uhm, an entire forest." His gaze goes unfocused, blank. "Thousands of years, musta been. The years blinked by like days on fast forward."

August beams at Hyacinth. It's not often she makes the 'listen to someone else' gesture, but she's just done it for him. Boy does that feel good. He sobers a little as Itzhak wrestled with the reality of the situation. "Remember, you can gut it rather than just nuke the whole thing. But either way, you don't have to put up with it. I for one am happy to help you get it put back to rights."

He grunts in sympathy, nods. "Yeah. Same thing with me. I'm still...dreaming about it, sometimes." He stares down at the scabs, expression distant, shakes his head. "Anyways, I've been thinking about what that means. That the chalk marks we made," a glance at Itzhak, "to mark our way spread all over, and this graft did too. And I think...the graft became part of the Veil. Fused with it, the way a donor piece is supposed to fuse to an acceptor." He raises his eyebrows to see if they follow or have objections to his thinking.

Hyacinth glances to August and solemnly nods. Her hands gesture in Vanna White fashion as if to say listen to him telling you to listen to me. "First, if God was involved with this place they were not siding with you, or this is a divine intervention to say, "Bubbeleh, you're one of my chosen people. You deserve better than what you got. Here's encouragement', or? You're on your own. " There's that gesture, palms turning up in lieu of a shrug.

"So, look at it this way," she means hers, "you put work into it. And you did well for yourself, but have you considered you weren't done yet? That was phase one. Then... now. Soon? Next!"

Itzhak grumbles under his breath in Yiddish, wishing elaborate circumstances would come to pass so they can then go horribly wrong. That's his way of saying 'yes, I respect and honor your opinion'. If he's not kvetching, is he really happy? "You're being way too nice about this," he accuses Hya, not seriously, one corner of his mouth tugging upwards. Thumbs hooked in his pockets, he rocks back and forth on his heels a little, listening to both Hya and August. His attention is on the jar. "We bring stuff from there here, it can go weird. So we bring stuff from here there, it goes weird, maybe not such a surprise."

Hyacinth replies solemnly and too honestly, "I hate the look of the building, most of this street, and if I die tomorrow this town is being forever haunted until the buildings step up their game." Okay brutally honest, but honest! Looking to August she arches an eyebrow and says, "Where did you get these things from and did we not learn from the Thomas/Ghol hybrid that crossing the streams is still totes bad, Ray." Yes, she just quoted Ghostbusters as sage advice.

The kvetching is a good thing, at least as far as August is concerned, and it makes him smile a bit to hear it. He considers what Itzhak's said, eyes narrowed, shakes his head. "I don't think it's that straight forward. I think those trees aren't just like a tree here, where I make a graft or a chalkmark and I've effected one tree. I think they're just...extensions of the Veil. They're all part of an ecosystem that's much more tightly linked than ours here." He folds his arms. "Put another way, the trees are the Veil. The carousel, the one I hate, over there? Also the Veil. When we do things over there, we're changing the Veil itself."

He glances at Hyacinth, explains, "These are what the graft turned into. It...poisoned the trees, they said." He looks distinctly uncomfortable at having done that. "We sorted out how to remove them, but I wanted to get a better idea what happened before I disposed of them. Aidan and I are gonna do a bonfire down on the beach and burn 'em up."

Itzhak grunts, working all that information over in his mind. The gears are turning. He sets a hand on the jar, thumb rubbing the glass, less to do anything and more just so he can get physically close with it to think about it. "Changing the Veil itself?" he mutters, tone questioning. "Sometimes, I think, I dream and it changes. Or maybe it's changing, and makes me dream."

Hyacinth takes all this in and looks between the two men, and blinks again when August brings up the bonfire. Her stance shifts off her fabricated leg and back to the other drawing in a deep breath and holding it as if to fuel her forthcoming thought. Ger ready. Arms fold and she asks August curiously, "Do you know why you don't burn wolmanized wood?? Are we entirely certain this is at all, in any plane of existence, a good idea? Asking for a friend. You." The eyebrow arches and the raven-haired carpenter shakes her head, "You guys get so excited to do a thing or destroy a thing it's... like you forgot you are scientists. Have you even scanned them for composite parts or their tie to the veil now removed? Have you done any screening here?"

August makes a low sound of agreement with Itzhak. He's had similar dreams himself. He imagines they all have, ultimately; that it's a shared condition of being able to commune with the Veil.

He tilts his head, frowns at Hyacinth. "In what way did I come across as excited to dispose of these? Because I'm not. But I did the only examination I could come up with, to get an understanding of what happened. Used all three aspects, checked under a microscope. Same way I did for that stuff from FCN." He taps his bloodshot eye again. "That's what I got for my trouble. A subjunctival hemorrhage and a headache size of California. It certainly seems like their fusion with the Veil is still in place, but I don't know that we can even undo that." He shrugs, holds up the jar. "Happy to do other kinds of examinations, if you can think of any. But given what this did to the plants over there, it's got to go."