2022-03-13 - Comfort Goulash

Ravn Abildgaard makes a bit of a point out of not owning a silk pyjamas for lounging about in like the upper class ponce he sometimes gets accused of being. What he does own is a pair of black sweatpants and a black t-shirt, and a pair of -- nope, sorry, those are white tennis socks. They're probably Aidan's. He's lounging on the living room sofa when the door bell rings -- and while his arms do in fact hurt quite a bit, the generous amounts of Tylenol have done their thing, in collaboration with Ava's on-site crisis aid and a couple of subsequent boosters from his room mate.

He's not looking entirely miserable when he opens the door. Surprised a bit, maybe. And the usual two-day stubble may have become a four-day stubble; his beard grows in a couple of shades darker than his chair, a genuine dark brown.

"Didn't expect to find you on my door step," he tells the barista with a smile that suggests that this does not mean that finding her was a bad thing. And then he amends, "Well, maybe I did enough that I pestered Una for a tin of snickerdoodles earlier. Bribes, you know?"

Front door opens to reveal Ariadne, which apparently isn't a surprise -- or at least, not that much of one. In her black windbreaker and a pair of jeans and sneakers, her hands are currently occupied by what appears to be a large Tupperware container of stew. We're talking at least a gallon of it. With deeply-auburn hair braided down her back, she gives the far-taller Dane a slant-smirk.

"I don't know if I'm dubious about being predictable or honored that somebody remembered how I just about squee'd over Una's snickerdoodles. I guess the big question is what am I being bribed for if all I did was bring this absolute deliciousness over because somebody still can't duck." Arch brow. She toes off her sneakers at the front mat and proceeds towards the kitchen with her Tupperware, red lid and all. "This is goulash. Once I figured out what Una was texting about a few days back at the café, I went and dug up a recipe. I definitely had to pull a few strings to get it figured out, but la voila: my mum's recipe and all."

The Tupperware makes a satisfying thump on the kitchen counter. Ariadne blows a quiet sigh and shakes out her wrists. "Bad grip on it," comes the mutter followed by a quirk-browed look at Ravn. "Well, you're upright. On the mend?"

"Far more on the mend than I have any right to be," Ravn agrees and closes the door behind them, padding after Ariadne into the open kitchen slash living room area -- in this household, social cooking is obviously a thing. Or more realistically, Ravn watching Aidan cook is more likely a thing. "I have a feeling that it was a lot worse than Dr Brennon wants to tell me. But maybe I'm better off not knowing. It's hard to duck when you get no indication whatsoever that shit is about to go down, though. She blinked, and then, boom."

There is a plate of snickerdoodles sitting right there, looking great and definitely Una-produced. Surprisingly, there's not a cat in sight. Maybe Her Furry Majesty is not a cookie thief (or maybe she already was bribed off with canned tuna).

"You're being bribed to bring me food, of course." Ravn shuffles towards the cabinets. "I am guessing we should give it a try? I have had the real thing once, I think. We have a dish in Denmark we call goulash, but it tends to make actual Hungarians cry -- and not in that nostalgic, home sick way. Does this go with a cold beer, wine, or sparkling water? I should probably go with sparkling water myself, Tylenol in large quantities and all."

Ravn gets a sympathetic nod. Indeed, hard to duck when nobody knows the detonation is about to happen.

"Ah-hah, bribed to bring food," murmurs the barista. Like she'll turn down a snickerdoodle anyways. "Hey, no, shoo, go sit." How 5'8" of redhead can be suddenly and confidently in the way of a travel towards the cabinet is a thing of slightly audacious care. "If the bowls are here, let me do it. I'd say red wine because it's beef and a tomato broth, but I'm not going to break out any bottles, no. I have a shift in a few hours and if you've been on the amount of Tylenol I'm going to guess at, no alcohol whatsoever allowed right now. Sparkling water will do just fine. Point and tell me where things are, like bowls and spoons and glasses and stuff, and I'll dish up."

Cracking open the Tupperware releases the siren scent of onion, slow-cooked beef, caraway seeds and sweet paprika, and to Ariadne at least, it's a reminder of home. She smiles to herself while she collects up necessities. Glancing over her shoulder, she adds, "I've also got enough puzzle pieces to put together a period drama about what happened, so you might as well give me the run-down of what you remember so I can snort and roll my eyes at the more dramatic renditions."

Exploring the cabinets of the Kinney-Abildgaard house hold is always interesting. Oh, there's the things you'd expect in a kitchen all right. Just, most of them, you'd probably not expect to find together. Who said anything about Aidan limiting his thrift store raids to furniture?

"The Darkwing Duck glass is mine," Ravn murmurs, a little sheepish. Maybe he does think it's a little embarrassing. Maybe he finds it hilarious, but realises that at least some other people might find this utter chaos of a household odd or outright bizarre. "Top cabinet for glasses -- yes. And if it needs to be re-heated, both the stove and the microwave work perfectly. You may even find matching plates if you dig deep enough."

His parents, were they to turn up to haunt him, would no doubt turn right on their ghostly heels to leave, ectoplasmic heads shaking. Maybe that's the point.

The Dane settles on a chair at the kitchen table before he can get bossed into doing so. "I actually don't remember very much. Brennon invited me to come see her at her clinic to look into my neuropathy. I've seen a near endless of specialists about it, my house mate included, but -- there's always a sliver of hope, and it's not like I'm not downtown often enough anyway, so I did. She said something told her 'denied'. And then the room pretty much exploded, and I woke up in hospital with a weird feeling that the nurse didn't know half of what this must have looked like. I presume Ava did some healing quick before calling an ambulance -- had that tingly feeling still. She was still there, which also tells me it must have been pretty bad. Said there was a pink post-it note, even, with the word 'denied' on."

He steeples his fingers and looks interested. "So what did you hear?"

"Darkwing Duck," echoes Ariadne in intrigued confirmation. It's been years since she'd encountered reference to that particular cartoon. She finds this glass and another one etched with a frosted design about some microbrewery somewhere. These are filled with sparkling water located from one of the shelves of the fridge and delivered to the table while she listens to the true version of things. Brows lift. "Geeeeeez..." The barista elongates the word in, again, sympathy. She's still shaking her head as she dollops out servings of goulash into two bowls, one plain and appearing to be a reject from some pottery class by the uneven burgundy glaze as well as chip at its lip. The other looks like honest-to-god Chinoiserie and it just might be, she muses with vague amusement. The cupboards are, after all, a pack-rat's dream of mishmash anti-theme.

First bowl goes into the microwave on forty-five seconds to bump the heat and Ariadne leans on the counter, looking pensive. "Post-It note. Hmm. Well," and she sighs, considering the ceiling as she thinks. "I've heard the plain old Men in Black variant of things. Gas leak, spark, boom. I've heard a planted bomb. Fairy uprising. Assassination attempt. That it's entirely fake, the whole thing, and the local news made it up. I was rather fond of the one about the ghost rave party gone wrong, I actually laughed out loud at that one even if I probably shouldn't have. Oh well. I can't be professional all of the time," she shrugs.

"Ghost rave party sounds like something I'd be mad I missed." Ravn laughs; he can't help it -- he's seen some of the ghosts of the Bauer Building and really, flapper dress wearing Great Gatsby escapists with glow sticks and techno music is a pretty hilarious image to the mind's eye.

Then he shakes his head. "Gas leak is the usual explanation. Had that one at HOPE as well when the basement blew out. Except it didn't, actually. It was just the most plausible explanation as to why five or six people ended up in the ICU with glass lacerations and blunt force trauma. We couldn't quite tell anyone that we solved the mystery of the missing previous owner of the butcher shop, and for that matter, a number of other disappearances around that time. All I'm going to say is, I ate vegetarian for a while."

"Ugh. Sounds very Barber of Fleet Street," Ariadne surmises with a wrinkled nose. "I'm glad it got resolved, though of course I wish it hadn't been apparently with things like broken glass and bruises." The microwave dings and she wraps her hands with a hanging dish towel each to deliver the bowl to Ravn. A spoon is added a second later. Now, he's got everything before him, including sparkling water; maybe someone will think about napkins. "It needs nothing, I promise," she assures the Dane before returning to the microwave to see about heating up her own bowl more.

Clunk beep beep beep boop whirrrrrrrrrr. Food reheating. Taking a moment to shrug out of her windbreaker, the barista hangs the jacket on the chair one over from Ravn at the kitchen table. She's in a black ribbed sweater with hour glass-inducing red panels along each side of her ribs. "Still. It's pretty stupid you're stuck with two bum arms for a bit. Not cool." Her smile is sympathetic. "Sounds like you've got a good support system though?"

"I'll be fine," Ravn replies and actually sounds like he means it. "I know I'm an inbred ponce but I'm not completely helpless. And as you say -- a good support network gets you far in this town. I'm more worried about what Brennon is going to get up to, because she does not strike me as someone who takes 'denied' for an answer."

He leans forward and sniffs the goulash. "This smells divine. And it contains tomato, you say? The Danish version does not -- it's beef and carrots and onions, in a dark wine sauce. It can easily get a little too sweet, depending on what wine was used and how much the carrots have been boiled to mush."

There must be some table manners in there, though, because he waits to pick up his fork, watching Ariadne go through the motions of heating portion number two. "Nice sweater, by the way."

Gone back to reclining against the counter, Ariadne's lightly folded her arms under her chest. Tipping up one socked foot to a toe (the socks appear to be baby-teal at base with...those must be Pop-Tarts as a pattern in cream and pink), she nods concern about what might come of aggressively confronting a 'denied'. To her, at least, it doesn't sound like a wise decision -- but the barista isn't so stupid as to think she's anywhere on the totem pole of Scary Powers around this city.

She blinks. "Oh." A glance down at the sweater. "Gosh, thanks, that's sweet of you. It's one of my warmer ones, since it's drizzly outside today." A gesture towards the outdoors, which is indeed busily doing one of those many variants of 'Pacific Northwest precipitation'. "But yeah, mum's recipe has tomatoes in it. I can't imagine it with wine because yeah, there's already paprika in there. Why would anyone make it sweeter. Blugh." Thus opines the purveyor of goulash; she retrieves her own bowl and finally settles down at the table.

"So...what about a sticky note? Who left the sticky note?"

"Something or someone on the Other Side, presumably." Ravn reaches for his fork at last. "Who or what gets to -- control? Approve? Direct? attempts to heal? I have no idea. Does that always happen? Or just on some occasions and requests? It's difficult to imagine that every bit of power thrown at a scraped knee goes through some invisible bureaucratic process. But when we don't know where the power comes from, I guess we also don't know who controls it. I'm pretty sure I heard someone laughing but then, I may have hit my head. I'm mostly torn between my own urge to push the issue and find out what the deal is -- or telling Brennon that it might be wiser to stand down this time lest she brings a whole lot of trouble down on her own head.

He samples the sauce. And smiles, quietly. "Yes. This is very good. Not the too sweet Danish beef carrot stew with paprika. This tastes like, well, beef. Do you do take-out?"

"At the moment, I have to do take-out. Moving is tonight and through tomorrow. I put the deposit down for the place over at the Broadleaf," explains the barista as she stirs her own fork through the thick broth of the goulash. Steaming rising up is gentle on her face and she nods, looking down into it with a slight frown. "It'll go fine, the move, I don't have a lot of things. Russ said he'd help me out with the furniture. I still have to find another couch, somehow, and a bed frame. I only have the mattress."

Her first bite of the goulash is a time-softened chunk of beef and she makes a happy humming sound as she chews. "Yep, that's how you do it," she murmurs of the goulash. Getting over the initial delight in the food, she glances over at Ravn again. "I'm thinking maybe standing down is wiser right now, per the sticky note. If there's not enough information to come to a logical conclusion? Time for more research. Getting bitten in the ass because you were foolish and didn't prep first? That's on you. Proverbial you," she clarifies, then taking another bite.

"I don't get to tell the doctor what to do, of course. But I do get to decide whether I encourage her -- and I think I will need to stress to her that yes, my condition is annoying as all hell but I don't want someone's death or severe injury on my conscience. She got lucky in the blast. She might not have." Ravn nods and allows himself a smile at the flavour explosion in his mouth. "She'll do what she wants to do -- but it will be her choice, not mine. I don't really get a say either way."

Then he cants his head. "Honestly, though? I don't think I would, either. I should have known better than to become the coordinator for HOPE, except I did know better and I did it anyway. Sometimes, you have to stand up for what you believe in, even when you know you're outgunned. Let me know if you need help moving? My arms may be sore at the moment, sure, but I can drive for coffee and levitate small objects like no one's business."

"You get a say about your own body and whether or not somebody can leave well enough alone regarding it, that's for damn sure," mutters the barista. It sounds like no one's convincing her otherwise. She glances up again from forking into another chunk of potato and a hunk of beef to crown the fork's gatherings. It seems she agrees about otherwise allowing people to their decisions and consequences.

A nod. "I'll let you know about whether or not we need a coffee run. I'll owe Russ a twelve-pack or a six-pack of something he wants, beer or whatever. Pretty standard moving dues, in my experience. College was similar. It's either that or I cover one of his shifts, which seems fair to me." She shrugs good-naturedly. "If I get tired of unpacking the small stuff, sure, you can use your powers, Darth Bathrobe." How far we've come since the Hotel California speech. "But standing up for what you believe in? Yeah. I've got a little cross-stitch I did back in college that says, 'Maybe you always have the courage of your convictions'. I hang it where I can always see it." She nods solemnly. "It's important."

"If you believe something is important you have to pursue it. And that's why I can tell Dr Brennon that I don't want her to do what she wants to do for me. But I don't get to tell her to not do it at all." Ravn nods his agreement -- and if the moniker bothers him in the slightest, he does not let it show. Then again, Ariadne is not the first to call him Darth (and if Seth ever hears, she won't be the only one to append 'bathrobe', either).

He chuckles and shakes his head. "It's not about getting to use my powers or show off. I'm a very small fry in that game, and I'm well aware. It's about -- wanting to help? Ours is a very small community. Most of my life, I've not known anyone I could talk to, about these things. I guess I come on a little hard when I meet people who do in fact not think I'm crazy. Or at least, if I am crazy, it's not that way."

"Eh, I understand the enthusiasm. It's nice finding someone who won't look at you like you're crazy, yeah, or like you have a hobby which is beyond them -- like, why would anyone be so interested in X, Y, or Z, that's a waste of time, etc. I get it." Sipping at her sparkling water, Ariadne sets the glass down and then can't help the little laugh. "This tastes like bubbly water possessed by the ghost of tangerines. Hmm." It's hilarious to her. Haunted water. Fancy, haunted water.

More goulash is forked up. "It's...a double-edged sword that the place is small. I don't mind being waved at while jogging with Sam some days because it's nice. People in Colorado were friendly like that. Sometimes, I want to be anonymous though, and that's when it's frustrating. I guess there's not really...getting away with anything? -- around here."

"I think it depends on what what you want to get away with." Ravn sips his water -- and to him it's just sparkling water, a bit too bubbly perhaps but the Americans like it that way. He savours the taste a moment, searching for the tangerine -- nah, just some distant flavour of fruit that probably is called lime or exotic touch of the tropics on the bottle.

"Being queer here is easy enough. A surprising amount of us are, and with all the things that's going on in the town, it really makes no sense to quibble over those issues, too. A lot of us have strange hobbies, no doubt -- but as long as you keep your thing in your house or apartment, no one else needs to know if you want to keep it to yourself. The hardest part is probably staying unnoticed in the street -- because we do look out for each other. That was something I had to get used to as well. I have been functionally invisible for a long time, and suddenly I'm the guy in town whom everyone goes to when they need to know who to talk to about a thing."

"Mmmmmmmm...murder." Ariadne's thoughtful consonant turns into a dry and dark blip of humor.

Hey, it was an open-ended kind of comment, about getting away with things.

She smirks and then shakes her head, going back to eating goulash as she listens. Ravn is glanced at a few times, nodded at once or twice. It seems that once again, they're in general agreement about the difficulty of remaining anonymous in a smaller city.

"I don't know that I've ranked as helpful yet around here, but working at a coffee shop, I'm becoming a familiar face. Beware, I'll soon have all of the coffee orders memorized. I mean, yours is a cinch: take any basic cup of black coffee and fuck it up so a toddler would be able to circumnavigate the earth like some demented combination of the Flash and Chucky. Easy-peasy," comments the barista, smirking. "Still...it must be nice to have folks saying hi to you, right? It's not too much or anything?"

Ravn toys with his fork a moment and then admits, "I do kind of like it. I used to have one or the other. I would be a man who's supposedly terrifically important for no reasons of his own doing, or I would be for all intents and purposes invisible. It is something to grow used to, being known simply for who I am and what people remember me doing. I struggled with anxiety quite a bit for a while about it -- but it has been a long time since I locked up in terror because too many people were looking at me at once."

He smiles wryly. "Now I just fall over with asthma attacks, as you may recall. Christ, that is something I will never stop hating -- the way I end up needing someone to drag me along, out of danger, because I can't breathe."

Ravn gets a deeply sympathetic look when he expresses frustration about his asthma. "I seriously can't imagine. And that Dream pulled a dick move not allowing you an inhaler, if you have one. I wonder...if in the future, you could influence the Dream to make it cough up an inhaler. Like, fuck you, Dream, here's how I think things should go. Try it next time," she counsels. "There's where the community and web of friendships comes in handy though. If you have a few of us in the Dream, or hell, around in an every-day situation, we can help you out. Nobody's so heartless as to let you just glorp about like a beached salmon."

Glorp. Whatever that verb is.

"Eat more, seriously," she then chides in a funning mom-like manner.

"Yes, mum." Ravn can't help a smile at that -- and then his smile widens. "Glorp?" Something about that clearly strikes him as hilarious. "I can feel my inner geek having a field day, but I really doubt that you meant to reference an old Don Rosa comic."

He shakes his head. "There's never an inhaler in the dreams. It's the point, after all -- to push us out of our comfort zones. At least when it's one of those dreams, the ones that are purely in the other world. The ones that overlap -- it can be harder to tell. A dream like that pirate dream, I am pretty certain it's all construct. That we did not in fact watch a hundred people get blown up. Some of the others -- when you're not actually certain you're asleep or dreaming, when it's something from the other side that seems to be here, -- that is harder. Then you don't know what the agenda is, or if it even has anything to do with you at all. Sometimes you're just a bystander, and the only reason you're there at all is that apparently, something needs someone like us to be a witness or a gateway."

"Fuckers better give me popcorn if I'm only there to witness nonsense." Ariadne snorts to herself and eats more goulash. In the living room, the cuckoo clock trots out the drink-bearing hamster and pleepchoos cheerily. It's given a look. Yes, that was, in fact, a hamster and not the traditional bird. Okay. Makes sense with the decor.

"And I don't know what a Don Rosa comic is," she adds, glancing back at Ravn again. "I'd rather not have any hyper-vivid dreams like that anyways. Or...well. They've all been hyper-vivid so far. You know what I mean, those early morning ones where you wake up and have to shake off the dream because for a second, your brain struggles to separate it from waking up."

"Donald Duck. The Black Knight whose chemically powered armour glorps its way through everything, by dissolving them -- with a, well, glorp sound." Ravn looks sheepish. Nerd boy, even at age thirty-one, it seems. "Anyway. Yes. Some dreams are like the pirate dreams -- they're real enough insofar we all remember, and if we are injured, we wake up injured. But they are somewhere else -- in a construct reality. The others are here and you are not asleep. That's when you see monsters in the waking world. It's my genuine belief that most of our cryptid legends and fairytales originate from things like that."

He shakes his head and concentrates on his food. "I'm sorry. My mind wanders in strange directions sometimes. That shy, awkward kid who just looked at you until suddenly going off about some very specific or other, that was me. I'm still -- not entirely high functioning as an adult."

Monsters in the waking world. Ariadne gives the Dane a steady, long look almost full of warning -- something along the lines of, don't you dare fracture the lenses of my reality like that. She falls back on her own patterns of thinking, where evidence is required, and conveniently forgets to bring to mind the memory of the grey-furred creature seen out towards Humptulips.

Never mind that, who wants to discuss that.

Ravn then apologizes and fully derails her line of thought. The barista blinks. "Uh. Define 'high functioning', because you seem to be getting along just fine to me...? What's the matter with still enjoying things from childhood? Ask me about pop culture sometime. I'll tell you all sorts of weird, little niche shit about the superhero trend right now and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and book series that I bet you have no idea about."

"No, it's -- my mind wanders. Very easily. It has been a problem for me at times. I zone out, or I lose myself down some tangent while people assume I'm highly eccentric because only poor people are just plain crazy." A wry smile accompanies that remark. He knows very well how arrogant that would sound, at least to some ears. Then he shakes his head. "There is nothing wrong with enjoying things, also after you grow up. But at least where I am from, there is something wrong with showing it, unless you go all overboard and make it 'a thing' -- and even so, you will be thought of as a little... shall we say... eccentric. And given I've dedicated a very large part of my life to going unnoticed, I learned to keep quiet."

Ariadne plops her fork lightly off of the surface of her goulash. Her brows meet and hold. "That's...that really sucks, to be shamed for displaying how you like something. How in the hell are people supposed to know what you like then? To find people like you in turn, who enjoy things like a certain book series or a tennis player or actress or movie series. Like...it's so validating to take joy in what you love. When people do, they shine, in a way, and it's contagious, how happy they are."

Ravn's face is searched and the barista ends up finding her braid-tip in order to fidget with it, fluffing the paintbrush-like end of it with a fingertip. "Quiet's not a bad thing though either. Quiet hears many, many things. Sees many things. Gets to make undisturbed and moderately uninfluenced decisions. Quiet can be wise." She shrugs.

"I am actually not very good with people." Ravn has to smile as he says it; he's well aware that that must seem like quite the statement from a bloke who seems to be swarmed by familiar faces everywhere he goes. He attaches the explanation, "Or I wasn't, until I'd been in town for a while and it started to have an effect on me. I've always preferred my own company -- no expectations, no demands, no standards. Here, it's different. We live under pressure here -- and while that itself is not a good thing, some of the side effects are. Some things stop mattering very much. Other things that seemed insignificant suddenly matter very much."

He toys with his fork a little, perhaps in an unaware mirroring of the braid fidget. "Sometimes we lose sight of what we really want, because we keep being told what others want. We start to think that if we do not want what everyone else desires, we must be broken. And then we end up in a place like this town where all those things are suddenly very far away. A lot of people will tell you, if they haven't already, that this place is hell -- the whole Hotel California speech. They're not wrong. But it can also be where you find out who you truly are, because the things that held you back suddenly seem -- very small and very far away."

"I guess," murmurs Ariadne after a bite or two of goulash's worth of consideration. Her sneaker toe tips off the floor of the kitchen quietly a few times while her gaze lingers on her bowl. "That's part of growing up though, and moving to anyplace new. You bring some of the old with you like the tatters of an old scarf and do your best to embrace the new. Gotta grow or you stagnate and then life's really a form of hell." The tip of her braid gets fiddled with more while her eyes now look at nothing in particular on the table's surface.

"Still...I'm hearing a lot of other people in what you tell me. Who says you're bad with people? I mean, that you were ever bad with people. Maybe people were bad with you?" Glancing over at Ravn, she half-smiles and lifts a shoulder in a shrug. "I dunno, I know, I sound obtuse. I don't mean to. I agree with you as a whole, that sometimes it's best to be far away from the old in order to see what goodness the new has to bring. Honey doesn't come without a bee sting or two...or some...old, wise-sounding adage or something. Roses, thorns, blah-blah-blah." She laughs quietly.

"No honey without bees, unless you . . . buy your honey filtered and jarred like a sane member of an industrialised society with a complex production chain linking beehive to your dinner table, in which case this metaphor starts to get slightly unwieldy." Ravn can't resist a lopsided smile. "And for some reason that reminds me of birds. The African birds called honey guides -- have you ever seen a video of them? They respond to specific bird calls made by human tribesmen, calling back and flying ahead of the tribesmen to show them where the beehive is -- in order for a share of the loot. Makes you wonder how long honey guides and humans have practised, to get that kind of symbiosis so right that the birds understand it instinctively, doesn't it?"

Well, he did say he goes off on mental tangents.

Then the folklorist shakes his head. "I don't know why you'd think you sound obtuse. I think maybe I am trying very hard to make this town sound better than a lot of people will tell you, because I enjoy having friends. It doesn't hurt that you control the flow of the spice, of course. What's my chance of convincing you to go sailing once the season starts? A number of us already have talked about going on fishing trips. I went last summer with Kailey Holt -- think I mentioned that we saw an actual bloody great white, in the bay."

Ravn gets snorted at for his interpretation of her 'wisdom'. It breaks Ariadne's solemnity enough for her to start working at her bowl of food again. She glances up and nods, smiling. "Yeah, I've heard about those birds. Very cool example of symbiosis."

She finds herself working on a piece of beef with more gristle than usual. The battle to follow is one of manners verses pragmatism. Maybe if she tucks the bite in a back cheek pocket, it won't be see-food. Well, it's not seafood anyways, she argues with herself benignly as she smirks close-lipped at the Dane again. "A Dune reference. Ten out of ten." No food flashes, success. "And I'm game for sailing, my dad rents a boat out of Shilshole Bay Marina up north. I...really hope there's not another instance of a great white, good fucking lord, but orcas? Porpoises or harbor seals or sea lions? I'm down with seeing those. Long story short, twist my arm, I've been on a sailboat enough to be comfortable and like dawdling about on one."

"I don't mind seeing a great white as long as it's behaving itself and acting like a great white." Ravn laughs softly and reaches for his glass. "If it stays in the water and just lets me admire it from a safe position up on deck, and it generally behaves like it's just a marine animal that happened to be going in the same direction, I'm good. If it's longer than my boat and hell-bent on re-enacting Jaws I can do without."

He pauses and thinks back. "Have you ever seen a whale shark, on the other hand? That's one animal I'd like to meet in the wild ocean and swim with. So bloody large and impressive, and yet so harmless and indifferent -- I suppose it'd border on mansplaining to tell a marine biologist they're plankton eaters. I remember seeing a picture in a very old picture book -- a diver letting himself be pulled through the water by a whale shark's dorsal, and it was completely indifferent. I remember that it was a picture from the 1960s -- one of those that came in cereal packets. And that the diver had a very thick, black beard. Swimming with one made it on my bucket list right there."

Tangents.

"Harbor seals, though, plenty of those here. Just, you know, avoid the ones that sing. But the mermaids are supposed to leave shiny people alone, so odds of them dropping past for any other reason than idle curiosity aren't high."

And the mists form, because what is the Veil if not responsive to user requests?