2022-03-21 - Books are Heavenly

Coffee has been obtained. But Ava didn't want to sit and discuss it at the coffee house, rather wanting to get out and get a little fresh air instead. The park wasn't terribly far away, and with a little help with balancing on his end every now and then, Ava manages to hobble her way through it and leads him towards her favorite bench. "This is where I'll have lunch sometime, and just contemplate stuff. It sounds boring, I know, but it gets me out of the morgue."

Settling into the seat, she settles the one leg in front of her, stretched out, the other settling a little more ladylike under the bench as she clings to the coffee cup to let it warm up her hands. "It's been a hell of a month, so far. I have to be honest. I only got back to town a month ago. I almost forgot how crazy things here could get." There's a soft chuckle. "Is it crazy to say how much I missed it? Even the parts where I get blown into walls?

Conner is a consummate gentleman and is more than happy to help. He's also endlessly laid back and unconcerned. Drink coffee here or there or anywhere, he's happy to do it. Today he looks just as rumpled as the first several times she's seen him. Only the color of the shirt really changes: sometimes denim, sometimes some manner of plaid, always a work shirt, always jeans, always sturdy waterproof boots, always hair that doesn't quite behave. He sits placidly beside her, shaking his head in silent protest; he doesn't find her choice boring, or particularly objectionable.

Her comment brings a half a smile though and he shakes his head at that, too.

"Most people," he points out, "go through their whole lives feeling like they can't make any kind of difference or impact. Of feeling like their lives don't have much significance. Of never knowing whether there's anything beyond the mundane grind."

He shrugs his shoulders. "We get all that. I think if we weren't here, contending with some of these things, they might spill out and harm more people who aren't equipped. It might all have the hazy logic of a dream half the time, even when we're awake, but...it matters, too."

Ava looks down at her coffee while he speaks, letting the words soak up into herself. There's a faint nodding of her head in agreement before she finally glances up to study his profile. "I believe you're right. There's a way that we can help people here that we just don't have the ability to anywhere else in the world. Or, not that I have seen, anyway, from what little I've been out in it. I don't know how such a small piece of the world is so important, but it is."

She glances out over the park with a thoughtful expression. "We just have to keep things in check as much as we can. Have you brought anyone else in on the missing people case? Folks you wanted to bring in on the hunt?" she wonders.

"I have a couple ideas of who might be good to bring along. One I know kind of well enough to ask if she'd like to come. The other I only know in passing. But I know his friend well enough to talk to him for us?"

"I haven't," Conner says, with a shake of his head. "Last time I suggested someone get pulled in I...kind of didn't realize they were super traumatized and I almost caused kind of a disaster. So anyone you want to bring along is kind of great. Who do you want to bring along?" He's curious. He doesn't know everyone or even a whole lot of people, but if Ava already has ideas on this front he's happy to go along with them. He does add: "Itzhak, maybe, just cause, you know, Itzhak is fierce. Very fierce. Ravn doesn't like fighting but I'd trust him anywhere. He knows things. At the same time I don't want to get him eaten so...there's that."

He sips at his coffee, slowly waking up, which really doesn't change his demeanor overmuch; settling in to listen to the people she'd add to her list.

"Oh no!" Ava gives a little wince. "That sounds awful. Did it end up okay? Are they okay? Are you okay? You shouldn't let that stop you." Ava pauses, a tiny smile touching her lips. "Maybe just have a slightly more intense kind of screening system before inviting people along?" Maybe she is attempting humor? It's hard to say.

"Itzhak was going to be one of those suggestions, yeah. That's the one that I don't really know very well. But I know Ravn pretty well. He's a good friend and a neighbor. I'm sure he could talk to him. But if you have a good rapport with the guy, you might be able to talk to him. Honestly, he seems like the type, that if you just told him he could fight the thing, he'd be more than willing to come." She shrugs, unsure if that's true. "It's just the vibe I get. The other suggestion was Kailey. She's pretty powerful and has a solid head on her shoulders. I imagine she'd probably want to help. I can ask her?" A hand rubs the back of her neck. "I got Ravn blown up the other day. I would feel bad putting him in danger again. But we can ask if he wants to come. He's smart, sneaky, sees things others don't, sometimes. Good to have on a team."

"Me? I'm always okay. He just nearly fed his shine to some elk fish monster who wanted it because he was tired of everything. And he was a friend of a friend, and the friend said he should come, but I pushed it on the text thread and he nearly got hurt, is all."

He clears his throat. What a long-winded explanation! He adds: "It was months and months ago though. And I think? The Elk-Fish is gone? Handled? I dunno. I don't know what ever happened with it. We had that storm that wiped out a lot of time and suddenly lots of things were just. Done. And nobody knew how."

As for Ravn?

A fond smile. "Ravn has good rapport with everyone," he says. "I don't have any special rapport with him. He's just the guy who helps everyone and looks out for everyone and cares about everyone. And oh yes, Kailey for sure. Baxter and Vyn maybe...I don't know if they're busy or not. Really we could probably just put out a call and get anywhere from 5 to 10 people who would help us do it. I wish there were some method for dealing with it other than...you know...burnination, though."

Head tilting, Ava studies Conner's profile a little bit longer. It's hard to tell exactly what kind of gaze hers is for the moment. "I've found that the people who say that they are always okay, tend to be the biggest liars when it comes to the subject," she states rather matter of factly. It's said almost as if someone might know from experience. Either their own or through the expense of someone else. "But I am glad to hear that he didn't feed his shine to the Elk-Fish."

"That's a lot of people. But it seems to me that a group that big might be able to pull something else off besides just a burnination," Ava suggests. "Is there something else that you had in mind? Some kind of catch and release? Itz is able to create doors to the Veil. We've both seen it, right? Maybe we can get him back to where he's supposed to be? My question is, how did he get here in the first place? Escaped, or placed?"

"I don't know," Conner admits. "That really is bothering me. Because he's way out of his zone, right? Arkansas, Missouri, Northern Texas. But the Veil is also weird and for all I know there's some southerner here who dreamed him up. Itz being able to send it back would be a nice solution. Maybe we can herd it or drive it back. I wish we could just talk to it, ask it to stop hurting people, but I don't think it's going to listen just for the asking. I just. Don't like getting violent if we don't have to get violent. At the same time...if it leaps at our heads...."

He half shakes his head with a little sigh. "I wish we had more information before we tried to do anything at all."

"It's not going to listen just for asking, but that's what we have mental suggestion for. Communication, insistence. Guidance. It's mind is animal like, right? Enough that we can trigger instincts and help usher it back towards where Itz can open a gate back to where it should be. All it takes is some proper planning. Then, when the plan fails, because they always do, some proper making things up on the fly!"

Ava offers a small smile. "We have to be fairly quick to avoid more deaths, but there's nothing to say we can't go investigate a little more, first. Do you want to do a little road trip. Try to get some intel and the layout. See if we can get more details before we come back with the group?"

"I don't know if it's intelligent or not," Conner admits. "That's not in the lore. Nobody has encountered enough of them. But...a road trip sounds just fine to me. We might be able to learn more without getting eaten. Especially if our answer to getting attacked by it is to retreat..."

He frowns thoughtfully and says, "We could start at the crash site maybe, walk around the immediate area, see if there's anything else to be found. I didn't think of visiting it just cause I assumed the police had cleaned everything up already. But if they haven't...yeah. Let's learn more. We should anyway, before calling people out to tromp and roam around woods and stuff. Though we might want one or two others with us for that field trip too, just for back-up."

"Well, here's our chance to learn a little bit more about the creature. Who knows, maybe you can add to some of the lore. How often does that stuff really get updated?" Ava wonder with a brief grin. She takes another sip of her coffee. "Oh yeah. We'll be bringing some kind of animal carcass with us to leave in another part of the woods so that it has food elsewhere to distract from us. Far from us. That should also help with retreat, I think. Give us time."

"Sounds like a solid plan to me. Small road trip, small group. Two cars, just in case. We aren't risking a horror movie scenario where one suddenly stops working, especially with your powers on the fritz, hm? I'm assuming that it messes with all sorts of electronics and such. Does that include car batteries?" That's good to know before being stuck in the woods with a Veil monster and only one vehicle, after all.

"It does," Conner says, shaking his head. "I've been walking everywhere. So maybe carry some jump cables and a spare battery in the other car just in case. My abilities seem to be getting stronger but it's sure coming with a lot of backlash lately."

But the idea of adding to the lore excites him. "I should write a bit of a book," he says thoughtfully. "Even if I just locally publish it and put it into the local section of our little library it might help someone else out later. Knowing if they're intelligent or not would be huge." He almost forgets that they're tracking a huge shaggy horned maybe-fae maybe-hell maybe-people-eating monster just on that prospect alone.

"It's always exciting when powers grow, but the backlash really blows." There's a pause as Ava looks at her hands. "I wonder." Her eyes drift. "I wonder if that has anything to do with the clinic exploding. Probably not, but I should probably add it to the list of theories. Either way, extra battery, jumper cables, two cars."

Watching Conner get excited brings a grin to Ava's face. "I would love to read the book you come up with," she insists. "I'm working on something myself, though it's a little more boring, I'm afraid. Biological mapping of the people in town, and the people that come here. Seeing what it is that makes our DNA so special. Or if there's something genetically that makes us special. I love delving into the lore and trying to link it to biology. I wish I could have a lab on That side, too. So I could study stuff there, since I can't bring it back here. I can only imagine what I'd see. The connections I could find."

"Oh? Do you need a blood sample? I can give you one," Conner says, full of curiosity. "My family wasn't crazy influential like the Addingtons and Baxters but the Hawthornes were around about as long. We just sort of ran our hotel until we turned it into our apartment and passed it on and stayed very low key and didn't have quite so many children at a time. If there's some bloodline component maybe it'll help? It sounds like an interesting book to me."

And now he wants to know the answer to that, too.

"If nothing else, I mean...people move here and they start shining. I wonder if thin spots change our DNA."

"I've wondered that, too!" Ava exclaims with excitement at Conner's last statement. "But there's no way I can stop people before they come into town, like, excuse me, can I please have some blood samples to compare to later blood samples incase you develop magical gifts?" She grins. "They'll lock me up!"

There's laughter around the lip of her coffee before she takes another sip. "I'd love to take a sample some time. I will never turn down that kind of offer. I promise I'll keep you in the loop if there's anything funny in there that I find." There's silence for a moment before she's glancing at him again. "I think I mentioned the Historical Society to you before, right? Did you know that it's pretty much completely disbanded, and all the members are basically gone? We don't know what's happened with the information there might be." There's a little sparkle in her eyes.

"Seems like something you might want to help me investigate. I'm planning on taking it over, you see. Una is going to help, too."

"I would like to help investigate it," Conner agrees, eyes lighting up.

He pauses and then tilts his head. "Guess I'm glad I didn't join though. Who were the members before? Have you had a chance to check out their building? Did anything funny happen in the building? What happened to all the members exactly and when? What do you already know?"

Why yes, he will pepper her with all kinds of questions. "Most of all...maybe we should figure this out before you take over any societies. If there's a curse linked to the society directly then you don't want it dragging you off and killing you and Miss Una too. Or me, I guess, because short any disappearing the idea of joining a Historical Society sounds fairly delightful." He just invites himself straight up, apparently, but there you have it.

Watching his eyes light up brings a brilliant smile to Ava's face. Perfect! That's the kind of excitement that she's looking for.

"You mean you were going to earlier? I'm glad you didn't. Everyone just seems to have sort of-- stopped showing up? Wandered off. I think they got Lost, if you catch my meaning. Except for Hyacinth. I hear that she's still in town, but I haven't really seen her. They used to meet up at the old Post Office. That's the official building for it. Nothing outside of the usual Gray Harbor shenanigans seems to have happened there. Plus, most of their collection actually seems to be stored at Addington House, rather than the Post Office. Safe keeping, I guess. Or, it's the Addington's archive, and they don't want it leaving the estate?"

She leans in a little, her voice lowering. "There's an open house at Addington on Friday. I was planning on going to get a peek at the books to see if I could figure anything out. If you're not busy, maybe you can bring those clairvoyant hands of yours and we can piece something together?"

"Oh. Miss Hyacinth is absolutely delightful. And if anything tried to take her off she'd just give them a firm and outraged talking to and they would stop immediately," Conner says with warmth, eyes dancing with amusement. "But we could maybe ask her about it. But alright, I'll be happy to go. And maybe we'll run into her there. She's the only Addington I really know well."

But he takes out his phone as if he's going to add it to his calendar, only for...him to remember it's a brick now.

Sheepishly:

"I'll stop by the bookstore and buy a dayplanner today, and I'll put it in."

"Well, that could be why she's the only one to have survived it. But still, I haven't been able to catch up with her, so there's no telling what's going on. Either way, we're going to find out what's happened, and what we can do about. I plan to get the Historical Society back on it's feet and firmly reestablished. Then we'll have a place for both of our books." Ava grins a little at that. "Imagine all the books that might be there that we've never had access to, though? The knowledge that house has in it?"

Is she drooling? Impossible. It's hidden by a coffee cup which she quickly takes a sip out of. But figuratively, it's enough to drool over. "So much lore," she murmurs dreamily.

That sheepish look is caught, causing her to smile enough that both cheeks dimple in. "Seems like a smart idea. Or a phone with one of those cases that protect from shock?"

"They make those?" Conner says, startled. "Yes, I'm going to try both. I would like to have a working phone. The residents are not pleased when they can't reach me quickly. They need to be able to put their maintenance requests in. And they don't want to handwrite them and stick them in my mailbox. They're already a little grumpy about the brownouts." He frowns thoughtfully and says, "Maybe a good electrician will have a solution to that too. Shock. Absorbers. Or something."

An electrician, he isn't. He knows how to do basic apartment repairs but eventually he calls in experts. "The books," he says dreamily, "Would be lovely. And I'd go ahead and add some of mine. I've already read them, and they're just gathering dust in my apartment."

"They do make those! For people who work in high voltage areas and what not. They're a little pricey, but they make them. Seems like a good idea for you right now. I suggest having the new phone and phone case shipped to a friend's address, having them activate the phone for you, put it in the case, and then giving the phone to you. That way you don't accidentally zap it before you have a chance to get it in the case." Ava considers electricians for a moment. "Do you need some recommendations? I can offer a few names of the Shiny variety who might have ideas on unique ways of insulation?"

"Your apartment sounds like my heaven," Ava states with a laugh. "I may have to come through and pilfer through those books some time." There' a pause a second later as she realizes how that might have sounded. "I meant, because-- the books-- books are heavenly. Just so-- you know." Smooth.

"I'll take those recommendations, and if you don't mind me sending the phone to your address I'll take you up on that one too."

Conner blinks carefully at Ava a few times. It is like he didn't even take it that way until she started stumbling a little bit. "Books are heavenly," he agrees, letting it pass without awkwardness. "You can come up to my apartment any time. And I won't read anything into it."

He frowns thoughtfully as something occurs to him. A way that could be taken, that could be maybe not great, and which might imply something that might insult her unless he just...tackles something head on. Whether she meant to make it sound any kind of way or not, which he's not assuming. He just figures. Truth will bring comfort and that's all to the best. He clears his throat.

"I'm ace and aro, Ava," he says, gently. It's maybe the first time he's said it out loud, but since that awkward stumble was something even he could catch, well... "So...you can come up, have food, have coffee, read books, hang out, and it never really has to be anything awkward. I like having friends."

Ava lets out a breath and sets a hand on his arm with a little laugh. "Okay! Then you really didn't take it that way." The laughter doesn't seem to be at him, but rather meant to defuse any awkwardness left in the situation. "I love coffee, but I'm a little bit of a snob when it comes to it. So I hope you've got the good stuff!" Not a single thing about their interaction seems to change after his affirmation of who he is. It's just taken in stride.

"My address is super easy to remember, when it comes to sending stuff to it. It's 1 Oak Avenue. Fairly impossible to forget. But yeah, I can piece together the phone, and bring it to you. When I do, though, be warned, that I plan on staying for a few hours and pouring over books." Ava grins. "Also, I like having friends too. They make the world go round!"