2021-05-28 - Tangled

It's been a weird few days around Branch & Bole. Weird because August, who in Spring and Summer is nearly always outside working in the allotments, or in his greenhouse, or in the outdoor collection, is doing none of those things. He's either in his office, or not at the shop, working remote in some fashion or another.

An explanation has not been forthcoming, until now, when he comes to find Finch in between appointments. "Hey." He looks tired, frazzled even, though there's no obvious sign of injury. "You got a second? I need your help with a couple of things."

Finch tends to spend her breaks between appointments outside on the grounds, in a lawn chair she set up in the shade, with binoculars in hand to birdwatch. She has been at work regularly, but socializing has been mostly off the table until the Revisionist undid the rumors about her. Being thought of as an attempted murderer who walked free because the Interim Chief of Police is your dad, despite the utter lack of logic like the fact Ruiz was nowhere near Gray Harbor back then, is incentive to be a hermit.

She looks up from her seat, her coveralls half unzipped with the arms tied around her waist, a "My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad" tee visible. "Hey stranger, what's up?" she asks with a quirk of a grin.

August eyes the shirt, amused, shakes his head. "Uh, unfortunately, nothing good." He glances over his shoulder, like he's checking to make sure no one else is paying attention. "I have something I need you to fix. With ah," he rubs his fingers together, his personal gesture for 'Glimmer'. A pause, and he reluctantly adds, "Something I can't do myself."

Finch blinks and she tucks her binoculars back into her messenger bag and stands up. "All right. Though I'm pretty sure anything I can do you can do better." Because he's August. "What's going on, Boss?" Dark eyes narrow, her expression that perfect replica of her father's when he suspects something isn't good.

"Yeah," August says on a grimace, "not really the case. In general, but...especially not right now." He jerks his head towards his private greenhouse, heads that way. More of that furtive glancing around, like he's trying to make sure no one sees this.

The answer to Finch's question of 'what's going on' is clear the second they get inside the greenhouse: most of the plants inside it are, if not dead, actively dying. "Can you, ah," he gestures, "heal them. Because," he swallows, "I can't. Right now."

Finch follows him, and when she steps inside, she pauses, shock written on her features. "Holy shit, what happened? What do you mean you can't heal them?" She looks at him in confusion. "What the hell happened!?" She's asked that three times now hasn't she? Worried whatever messed up his plant healing might be universal, she reaches out her hands, letting those unseen threads of Glimmer move out and into the plants in the private greenhouse.

"I don't...really know." August runs a hand over his face. "Kailey can't draw, either. Not just art block, she can't draw, at all. She said it's like a two year old scribbling." He licks his lips, nervous and whipping himself into an emotional frenzy while he waits for Finch to work her magic.

There's nothing particularly odd about the state the plants are in; her Glimmer tells her they're dehydrated, low on necessary nutrients and compounds. She reverses this, which perks them right up, good as new.

It doesn't just improve the plants. August sighs with obvious relief, rubs at his eyes. "Thanks. It, ah--it's not just if I use the Art. It's if I do anything. Water them, or prune them--they die within a day or so. I came in yesterday, saw this..." He sighs. "Got drunk as hell on a bottle of Maker's Mark, walked into the Veil to Itzhak's garage, got yelled at by him for being a moron. So."

He sits heavily on a stool, hands between his knees. "I'm a botanist that kills plants." He laughs, bitter. "Those assholes sure know how to fuck someone over, don't They?"

Finch coaxes the plants back to health. "Ok, so I need to man the shop for a while. It's spring, not as many tree calls anyway, should be all right there." She straightens and comes over to him. "Let me try something. You might not register as 'damaged' but maybe it's just something we can't see." She lays hands on him, trying to let her Spirit energies flow into him, to heal him, to heal his art.

Oddly...there's nothing to heal. No wound, no injury. Perhaps, at best, a lack of something, but it's hard for Finch to really place it. Like she doesn't have the right senses for what's actually happened. She knows, in some corner of her Glimmer, that there's an issue. What it is, that's not clear.

"Yeah, if you and Ignacio can help Cy, I'll take over his admin stuff for now." At least he can't kill paper and computers and websites. Well, he can, but only if he tries, which he doesn't plan on. He waits, letting her check, yet seems resigned. It's an old habit, the resignation, a hard lesson learned after Bosnia. 'Sorry, your back and leg and shoulder are too fucked up for dockwork.' This time, it's, 'Sorry, something fucked you up and now you kill plants.' Time is a flat circle.

He clears his throat. "Ah, so, I've got another thing I need you to do, along these lines."

A brow arches at the 'but wait, there's more!' moment in this conversation. "I can tell something isn't right, but I can't figure out just what. Hopefully it's not permanent. You said Kailey lost something too? Were you in a Dream together?" Finch queries. She dusts her hands off and moves to make sure what he has isn't contagious, encouraging a sapling to grow a little more.

"And yeah, Iggy and I can handle things. I'll keep the shop stock and the greenhouses alive and flourishing."

August nods, dredges up a wry smile. "How'd you guess? Her, and me, Woods, Wilkerson, Hecker." He pauses, adds, "Woods, his right arm's completely non-functional, Kailey said, but uh," his eyebrows go up, "you didn't get that from me."

He watches the tree grow, nods in an absent fashion. "Thanks." He sits like that a bit, plainly wanting to touch the sapling but not daring.

Instead, he gets up. "Okay, the other shoe." He nods towards the greenbelt. "Out in the clearing."

"Shit, I'm not used to those things having lasting effects. I mean, when you shut down the Asylum, sure. We closed some doors. But a Dream?" Finch scowls. "Speaking of which, have you had any weird ones lately?" She follows him back out of the greenhouse to head for the clearing.

More furtive glancing as August leads her to the game trail that crosses the small creek over a log. "Yeah, usually whatever happens in those heals up. Even the bad shit. So, maybe this will." Maybe. In the mean time, he has to apologize to his wife for getting astoundingly drunk and flailing around in the Veil. What is he, 17? Christ.

He looks askance at Finch as they move through the spruce and hemlock. "Yeah. Dream of a couple of rivers. Two hands." He pauses. "The old lady who read the cards for me. You?"

"Same dream. The lady didn't read cards for me but I've heard she was doing it in the park. That doesn't bode well. Iggy dreamt something else, similar but not the same. I think there is big trouble coming. Maybe that storm whacky Cliff is talking about all the time?" Finch suggests. She strolls alongside him, worrying at her lower lip. "Maybe we need to make some preparations, just in case. Even if it's a mundane cyclone, that can really do some damage."

August pauses, one hand on a spruce for reassurance. "Jesus, I hope not. My parents talk about the Big Blow. Parts of the city didn't have power for a month. Trees down for thousands of miles." He grimaces. That was before his time, when his parents were in their teens and had only just met. They remember it, though, like it was yesterday.

He shakes his head, continues up to a clearing. "Yeah, we should get things stocked and prepped. Move the more delicate stuff out of the Quonset." He pauses next to a fir, surveying what's beyond them. "Okay. So, try not to...do anything sudden."

It's a modest-sized clearing, at the center of which is a large, 6'x6' plot that was clearly dug out by hand. At one end of it stands a strange tree; it's like a fig tree, though the undersides of the leaves are red and velvety, like a magnolia's. Something about it teases Finch's Glimmer, makes her eyes struggle to focus on it.

Curled up at the base of this tree is a strange creature, like a large dog made of bone and wood. It's surrounding the tree's narrow trunk, protective; the ghastly blue-yellow eyes in its skull eye-sockets stare blankly, though Finch can feel it watching her. The ground around tree and dog-thing is littered with something sparkly and shimmering: tiny wasp corpses.

"I want a big blackberry and salmonberry wall around this," he explains. Six feet tall at least. Maybe even eight."

Finch's eyes go wide...and there may be hearts in them. It's no secret she is particularly fond of the creatures of the Veil, and has been making hand written texts and sketches of those she has met. Lots of it are of Clever Girl, of course. "Where did the wasps come from?" she whispers. She's not keen on stinging insects. Her hands rise up, and she sends her Spirit tendrils down into the earth to find and grow salmonberry and blackberry into an effective cage. The brambles and bushes twine their vines and branches together in braids, the blackberry's thorns filling in gaps to make them impassible.

"This creature, it's like it was willed into being, by our ability to grow things. Who did this? Did you plant Veil stuff over here? Again? Does your wife know? Has she kicked your ass for it yet?"

The elk-dog-bone-wood-thing raises its head as Finch begins growing the brambles. It watches, keenly interested, even gets up and moves to sniff at them. August tenses, wary at the oncoming reaction, but...there isn't one. Once it and the tree are enclosed, the creature shuffles back under the tree and encircles its base again.

With that potential crisis bottled up for the moment, he turns to the other issue Finch has raised. He opens his mouth, makes a few awkward faces, closes it. Rubs the back of his neck. "So, Conner Hawthorne--you know him? Guy who owns Broadleaf, kind of a shut in? He wound up with a thing that looked kind of like a fig. So we figured, okay, maybe plant it. And I already know what planting stuff over there does, so," he gestures.

This would be a no. Eleanor doesn't know yet. "Once you had it caged up I figured I could bring her by," he asides. So between the Maker's Mark and this he's got some explaining to do. ...a lot of it.

He clears his throat. "The ones I planted, those just died." He shrugs that aside. "The ones Hawthorne planted turned into," he flicks his fingers at elk-dog and tree. "The wasps, they came out of the initial fig. A bunch grew on that tree, Conner collected them."

Finch seems surprised. "They came out of the figs? Well that's ass backwards isn't it? I though wild figs get made by wasps dying inside them and getting consumed to make the fruit or whatever..." She peers through the bramble cage to study the creature. "I think it's related to the Dryads, August. It feels like they did. Did anything escape?" She grimaces.

"Well I have lots of guest rooms if your wife kicks you out over this. Really...if we want to experiment we need to make a safe place to do it BEFORE we start these things."

"Well the young females that hatch, they crawl out of the male figs. We just eat female figs, no wasps in those. ...usually." August bobs his eyebrows. So now Finch might never eat a fig again.

He sobers, peers at the dead wasps. "A couple did get away, I started killing them the second they," he gestures, "popped up. So we should keep our ears to the ground for anything...weird." Like plants getting weird because they were pollinated by Veil wasps.

He sighs heavily. "It's fine, I can sleep with the goats if she's that mad." Of course, now he looks concerned about that. One more thing to have anxiety about.

Let's focus on something more constructive. Such as, "Yeah, I was thinking we should," he looks around them, "maybe start with this. Once we sort out these two, maybe sink a concrete pad, build a greenhouse out here."

"Between Itzhak and I, we should be able to build anything we need, out of any natural or man-made substances." The massive telekinetic Jewnicorn and the massive punk Druidess. Yep. Nothing is beyond them as builders of stuff. "This felt like it could only be contained by something grown with Healer arts, I'm assuming other things might reflect Mover ones."

She begins moving her hands again, and the vines and brambles and branches move and conform to something that is the equivalent of a hinged door, complete with bolt lock, so they can get in if they need to. "Put a padlock on that and the bolt should hold."

August narrows his eyes. "So, only something built with shaping?" He eyes the dog, which eyes him back. Interplay between types of Glimmer wasn't something he'd ever expected to come across. "Yeah...we might need to start keeping an eye out for that kind of thing."

He watches Finch form the door, smiles at the results. "Not bad," he says, giving her a sidelong, teasing smile of approval. It's not even half-hearted. Not that he's remotely close to over losing what he has, but, it's nice to see someone still has the touch.

"I'll get one." He sighs. "And let some folks know to...keep people out of this spot." He nods back at the shop. "Let's get the schedule straightened out. Then I can go home and...beg forgiveness."