2022-03-25 - Hotel California, Yet Another Take

(TXT to Ravn) Della : Hello, Ravn? This is Della from next door. It's about the Hotel California.

(TXT to Della) Ravn : You can check out but you can never leave. So-o, given that you're not somebody to usually see ghosts or strange things -- I take it you did see something. I could fall out on the porch with a couple of cold beers or soda if you like, chat about the weather, the faerie circle, and the Hotel California?

(TXT to Ravn) Della : Nothing else that could refer to, eh? Thanks for cutting to the chase. (Una and Jules sent me your way.) Bring what you like and I'll come up with something too. [availability]

Una Irving's house mate obviously has come into her gift. That math is not difficult to do; she's asking for the Hotel California speech, and the day after she is poking around the basement of Addington House, and burning her hands on the left-over emotional residue from a letter from the early 20th century. If that's not coming into the gift, Ravn isn't sure what it would take.

She's probably also noticed by now that somehow it's summer in the yards of Oak Avenue 1, 3, and 5. Everyone does -- it's difficult to not notice the sudden green, the warmth of the summer breeze, the butterflies, the occasional curious rabbit or deer -- but those without the shine, Song, gift, Art, any other name, manage to rationalise it away. It's really quite impressive when you think about it: Disneyfy three yards to the wrong season and all the regulars have to say is, curious little microclimate, isn't it? Must be a leak from a heating pipe somewhere.

He'll never stop being amazed at just how far the human mind will go, in order to rationalise things that should be possible to rationalise. He can only guess at the headache Della must be having, coming into all of this as an adult, getting tossed into the deep end of the pool and told to learn to swim.

The front porch of 3, Oak Avenue has a couple of comfortable rocking chairs and seattees that do not in any way match one another, whether in wood type or upholstery. Ravn settles on a wooden bench painted white, and puts the two cold beers he's carrying on the patio table. They're pale ales; he does not know Della's tastes but in case she is one of those heathens who need their beer dark and syrupy, he can always go switch it out (and get her a knife too, in case she likes it syrupy enough to cut. Seriously, why does anyone drink Guiness?).

It's a good summer at that, not the arid kind where the grass turns brown and people have to leave their shades down to ward off sun and heat. Della -- on time, with a sack in one hand that clinks lightly, and also her small purse despite the short journey -- eases a fraction once she's back off the sidewalk and into the grounds; her stride is steady, not tentative or hurried, up the stairs and all the way up to a settee. "Thanks, by the way. And seriously, someday, someone's going to just be an Eagles fan who heard you had paraphernalia."

"There has to be an Eagles fan out there somewhere. I mean, I've never met him, but given that the band exists, he has to exist too. Right?" Ravn looks up and chuckles. "Maybe we'll talk at each other for a while and then stare blankly. And then we'll go our separate ways, thinking that the other man was obviously a nut job. It's a song, man, don't take it literally."

He chuckles again and nudges a beer over. "Except, of course, we do take it kind of literally here, that's the whole point. People come into town all the time, unable to explain why they ended up here of all places. All they know is that it had to be here, and they're not about to move on. Then they start seeing things and instead of doing the rational thing and run away, they just dig in."

"So we won't stare blankly, then," Della inflects just shy of a question, wry. She draws the beer a tad closer to her but doesn't yet pick it up, though she does nod thanks. Her brown eyes consider him instead. "It's a little different for me, so far. I'd been here for summer camp, back when; but, there are a lot of places that I could have gone, could still go. I don't want to leave Jules and Una -- it doesn't hurt that the internet is fast," this even wryer, "But. So far, this has been..." her shrug is a deliberate cousin of a shudder.

"What brought you here, Ravn?" It isn't right, yet, but she's listened. "Why didn't you leave?"

"The pitcher plant offers some pretty good nectar." Ravn's lip curls into a small, lopsided smile. "I came into town completely ignorant of it all. I was hitch-hiking my way down from Seattle, heading towards Portland. Got into an argument with the bloke I'd hitched a ride from, and he dumped my arse on Main Street. I wandered into the nearest shop to ask where the hell I was. Two weeks later I realised I'd found a place to live and been adopted by a cat, and I probably wasn't moving on anytime soon."

He toys with his own beer bottle in his hands. "I did try to leave once. Someone told me that if you go away it may try to pull you back, and I wanted to test that. I got on a plane back home and spent Christmas '20 in Copenhagen and in my home town. I wasn't out of US airspace before I was aching to go back."

"Slipperier than the lotus," Della says lightly; her gaze has already unfocused slightly, but just for a moment, because: "Seattle... towards Portland. Bit of a detour." She hasn't sat back, yet, is still leaning slightly forward.

"Quite a test. I hope it didn't make your reunion uncomfortable." She pauses. "The little black cat, or the tabby? And... what quality of 'aching,' if you don't mind?" Unlike with the cats, Della doesn't offer alternatives -- an itch, homesickness for a new home, worse -- she leaves it all open for him.

"The little black one. Her name is Kitty Pryde. There's another one like her but larger -- don't mess with that one, she's not quite real, and she doesn't like people very much." Ravn keeps a straight face like this is a perfectly normal topic of conversation, too. Who doesn't have ghost cats roaming their perpetual-summer backyard?

He thinks back. "I'm not sure how to describe it, to be honest. It felt like home wasn't home. I knew intellectually that of course it's my home, I lived there my entire childhood and teenage years. But it felt like I was visiting some place I didn't really have a lot of connection to. It probably doesn't help that my immediate family passed, so there wasn't anyone there to catch up with. And then a friend from here actually flew out to keep me company, and at that point I realised that somehow or other, this pitcher plant does not let its trapped fly go."

"Fair," Della murmurs with a hint of a smile; of course, she can't have yet twigged to how much larger.

But the humor isn't long-lived; she stays where she is, but lets her handbag shift to rest on top of her foot, its thin strap pooling over her knee. Finally, quietly, "Can't imagine it would help. I'm sorry." For his loss, for his losses. But, "Quite a friend."

"Do you... feel like a fly? Sliding towards the maw? Or more of a skate pipe, faster but you get to do flips?"

"I think that a pitcher plant is the best description of Gray Harbor I have heard to date, and I wish I came up with it." Ravn nods slightly. "You know it's going to end badly. But the nectar is sweet, the view's pretty, and you're actually kind of interested in seeing where this ride will take you. So you stay, even when you know you shouldn't. You find ways to justify not leaving. Might as well just own it, I figure, and agree that I'm here, and making the best of it."

He grins a little. "Thing is, the nectar is sweet. I like living here -- even when it's awful sometimes. To someone like me, having a clearly defined line of us against them is a good thing. We have a good little community here, something I'm proud to be part of. If I was to make it out? I'd now that there are really monsters under the bed, and I'd never feel safe. I'd always know I'd bailed on one of the greatest mysteries of human history. I'd always be wondering if that was the right choice. So I stay, and while I will swear to heaven high about this place sometimes, I do think that I'd regret going."

"Are you going to credit the originator," is even half-teasing, but in passing. Della's nodding in her turn: interested in seeing, finding ways to justify. And mysteries.

"Do you want to tell me about who are us, and what, who are 'them'?"

"Yeah." Ravn sips his beer, letting Della decide whether she wants to open hers and join him, or she prefers to maybe take notes without the excuse of even a single pale ale. "There's several them. Nothing is ever simple, after all. Gray Harbor is a place where the stuff or fabric that usually keep realities from bumping into each other is worn very, very thin. Whether you call it the spirit world, or faerie land, or maybe manifestations of the subconscious mind -- it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that sometimes, other realities superimpose themselves on ours. That's when we feel like we are dreaming, that we're pulled into some strange story or series of events where we sometimes aren't even ourselves."

He pauses for a moment, perhaps to allow that to sink in (or maybe to allow Della time to nope out on the crazy guy). "There's things out there that are very much not friendly. Entities that feed on what we'd call negative emotions, and who toss us into terrible experiences in order to harvest those emotions from us. Those are the Them -- they go by a lot of names, I think Dark Men and dolorphages are the most common. But there's even more things and entities that are just alien -- we're bleeding into their world or they're bleeding into ours. Those experiences tend to be frightening too -- because just like real dreams, a lot of this takes shape based on our own feelings. You nearly get hit by a car on your way home from work, you have a nightmare about cars -- it's natural. We're afraid of these things, so often, the dreams turn awful."

And then, perhaps as a little bit of hope, "And sometimes, it's just exciting or hilarious. Have you talked to Una about this at all? Ask her about that time she got to be Zorro in a dream. I was there, as was another mutual friend. These dreams are often shared experiences, and the sooner you understand that, the sooner you'll understand that you are not in fact insane."

Time to pull out her phone and catch up on notes, definitely; Della isn't shy about it, and if that becomes a problem, he can say so. If it means her expression isn't as easy to read, her face generally downturned even when she's fixing him with those dark, brown eyes, there isn't much to miss; she's taking notes, collating information, and this is what she does. Occasionally there's a particularly emphatic tap, is all.

Until the end, when Della gains a small, quirky smile. "I would love to see Una as Zorro, and I will ask her." She'll open up that beer here and now, too. "Since it wasn't terrible, at least; don't need an opening for the 'landlord's black-eyed daughter.'"

She then asks, with a lift of a brow, "Ready?" Here's the amusement, a fraction of it allowed to play, with one question followed by others when he's ready: "So: no useful distinction between magic and psionics, say?"

And later, "Dolorphages. Spell it, please? And, actually, would you say your name a few more times? Different inflections? I'd like to get it right."

And, "I've had lucid dreams," not capitalized, "sometimes; and they do... how did you put it: get me interested in where the ride will take me. Once the lucidity comes, at any rate. Do you recommend playing along? Trying to guide the path, or revolting against it, or attempting to shut it down? If this happens again," though she doesn't lean on the conditional, "I'd like to know the most functional path; I don't assume it works the same way."

While she's at it, "What about the positive emotions? What... role... do they have?"

And: "Is there a manual?"

Then she lifts the bottle in toast before taking an appreciative sip.

"The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas," Ravn smiles slightly. "Point to you for Alfred Noyes, he who has sent many a high school student to sleep but always delighted me. Phil Ochs put that poem to music beautifully, look it up if you haven't."

Engage lecturer mode. Ravn has certainly answered most of these questions before, and he will answer them again, and on some level this is how it should be; knowledge needs to be passed on, just like others before him passed it on to him. The fact that in the age of technology, Gray Harbor's little special community survives largely on an oral tradition does not escape him -- nor does the irony of it falling to him, the folklorist, the collector of tales, to be the current steward of the strange tales department.

One question at a time, and answers that largely will make more sense later on.

"No really useful distinction between magic and other words for 'stuff that doesn't play along with the laws of nature as we know them', no." Ravn shakes his head. "There's stage magic, of course -- sleight of hand, smoke and mirrors. Once we get into using the shine, though, I'm going to have to go with Arthur C. Clarke and the idea that any technology sufficiently advanced might as well be magic. We don't know how it works. We know what it can do. Call it voodoo, magic, psionics, Jedi mind tricks, paranormal abilities -- whatever makes the most sense for you."

He spells out dolorphages (and his own name -- Ravn is a bit like round but with the hard 'd' sound at the end, Abildgaard is something along the lines of a-beel-gord, Danish is clearly an assault on the tongue). "Alexander Clayton coined the term, I think -- 'pain eaters' is more accurate than the Dark Men -- that's the more traditional take. Doesn't hurt to lose any unfortunate implications about skin colour, either, they're not colour coded that I know of. It's a good term, gets to the point -- these bastards feed on making you suffer."

Then the Dane shakes his head. "Sadly, no manual. A bit of advice: Keep your notes in a fiction format if you ever intend to share them. I write mine as the crappiest Young Adult novel in the history of mankind, but it means at least I get to keep them. The Veil is pretty adamant about keeping up appearances, but shitty Stephen King rip-offs tend to slip past because no one will think they're anything but shitty Stephen King rip-offs."

He toys with the bottle, passing it from one gloved hand to the other. "Positive emotions, though -- truth is, we don't actually know. At a guess -- there are happiness eaters too. Thing is, when you wake up screaming with a bleeding injury sustained in a dream, you remember that. You know the monsters got you. But if you dream something nice -- let's say you dream of going out with a good friend and having a great dinner, you wake up feeling kind of full and you skip breakfast, but you don't really consider the option that maybe you did actually have a great dinner while sleeping, and something in turn fed on your enjoyment. So they may exist -- but we haven't noticed them. It's viable that they exist -- nature does tend to have a predator for every possible prey, after all."

"Same, but early elementary -- but it was our first language," mostly-first, anyway; Della follows it with a quick check about Ochs' spelling, just as she checks about his use of 'shine' and, "Alexander Clayton? Local or long-ago?" Or both?

Along the way, 'sleight of hand' earns a frankly interested glance; Clarke's third law must be familiar, given her slight smile; 'pain eaters' get flared-nostril distaste, with her nod for color-coding just acknowledgement, too reserved and transitory for explicit approval.

That bit about why no manual, though: that's a patent affront, dark eyes gone wide and even more direct. That she doesn't address until after the possible happiness eaters, however fascinating the latter concept might ordinarily be, her free hand all the while cupped around her phone and its data: no longer an extension of herself so much as something to be protected. "'The Veil.' 'Keeping up appearances. What exactly do you mean? What could happen, what does it do?"

"Clayton's a local," Ravn agrees. "Good bloke. Private investigator -- he kind of comes and goes. He's lived here most of his lfe so it's all pretty natural to him, for good and bad. He's got an office at the Bauer Building but I think he's been out of town again for a bit."

Then he leans back on his chair and glances skyward. The Veil. Where to begin. "The Veil is -- all of it. It's just one word for it -- all of it. The fabric that usually keeps realities apart. Thing is, the entities on the Other Side don't want the world to know that there are other realities out there. That's why we don't have the Men in Black, the X-Files, and the FBI all over the place -- because reality gets rewritten ever so subtly so that word doesn't get out. It protects itself -- they protect their feeding grounds. You've noticed already, I'm sure -- things that aren't what they should be, and how people seem to -- just not notice. They find explanations that make sense. It's not always summer here in our yards -- has to be some kind of heating pipe leak. There's not a faerie circle on the lawn -- just mushrooms growing funny, you know? There are no monsters, and when people disappear, they probably just moved away without leaving a notice."

Protect their feeding grounds. Della parts her lips just short of repeating it; her fingers shift, an abortive move to the bottle that re-secures the hold on her phone instead. Her phone, with its notes now on Clayton as well. Carefully, "Some people, such as Ava the other day, speak quite freely. Right out in the middle of things. Is there rewriting, do I need to worry about my notes, if they stay in this place? Or just if they're sent out to someone else away? What about off-site backups? And what are the borders, anyway? Not just the city limits, I'd hope?"

"I wonder if verse would make them less... or more noticeable."

Ravn shakes his head with a hint of regret; he'd like to be able to say, just upload it to the cloud. Alas. "It's pretty global, as far as I have been able to make out. There are other places like Gray Harbor all over the world -- I was born at one, though it wasn't quite as thin as here, we just had a lot of ghosts who largely minded their own business."

Then he nods as Della catches on; that's a relief. "That's what I do -- I write it as crappy fiction. If I was to show it to someone? They'd tell me to stop trying to be Stephen King but they wouldn't think I was for real, unless they were also one of us. Dr Brennon is -- Ava, I mean. Once you start to notice, it's really easy to tell if people have that kind of sparkle or aura. If they do -- they don't get their memories rewritten, or at least not as easily. It works both ways -- there are times we end up speaking quite freely of it all because the guys at the next table over won't remember anyway."

"Ah. At least something's convenient," that last. But: "What I meant was..." how to put it? "When you're writing your crappy wannabe Stephen King et cetera, how long do you have? As long as you and your writing stay in Gray Harbor, that is? I imagine it doesn't transmute immediately, or you'd have said something when I started," Della taps her phone's edge rather than its screen, "all this."

"As long as you keep it to yourself and don't show anyone, it'll probably take a while. If someone sneaks a look who shouldn't -- it's pretty instantaneous. That's why I figure I might as well just cave and write my horribly bad fiction about a small town named Bleak Harbour where the Bakers and the Rattingtons have feuded for a long time." Ravn makes a face. No one wants to read it -- at least not for the literary value, that's for sure.

He sips his beer and gives Della a sympathetic look. "I'm sorry. I mean, not that any of this is my doing. But it's a pretty rude awakening all the same. I try to remind myself that even here, if you're a little careful, you have better odds than traffic in downtown Manhattan still."

"Subtle," Della says -- happily. "Bleak Harbor, Bleak House, Bleak Driveway. Fine." She taps her thumb again, this just a touch of punctuation rather than anything pointed. "Manhattan traffic isn't exactly a high bar."

With that, she sits back; looks at Ravn for a long, thoughtful moment; and permits herself the beer again, gazing out over the garden.

Eventually, "So, other than not wanting to be harvested for horror: is there reason to believe everyone's... interests... are otherwise aligned?"

"Most of us realise that we're better off having each other's backs than trying to toss each other to the monsters." Ravn winces slightly. "Of course there are exceptions. Most people like us though -- you never know who's going to be next to you in the next strange Dream. You need to be ready to help them out, and they need to be ready to help you out. There's usually only one way through, and that's finding out what the story is and playing it out. Someone decides to wander off on their own, they tend to not come back. It's easy to get Lost if you try to go it alone. Don't try to go it alone."

He adds, almost apologetically, "I'm sorry this has to be such a downer. This town is a pitcher plant and we are flies. But it doesn't have to be a nightmare. For me, personally, this town is a good place. I've overcome anxieties here that crippled me in the past. I've made friends. I'm part of a community where I used to keep to myself. There's always a silver lining."

"Practical," Della says without particular emotion. She looks back again, intent again. "So noping out, all fingers-in-ears 'la la la,' isn't a good survival technique." Just to double-check.

Still looking, looking.

"I'm glad it's helped you," she says, and quite genuinely at that, for what that's worth.

"Is there very much... getting into things, usually, or did I just walk into it the other day?"

"Well, to an extent. There are people like us who manage to go largely undisturbed." Ravn returns the look evenly; this, at least, is one out of two fields where he tends to feel confident; anxiety are for the rest. "You'd need to not use your power lest it attracts something. Pretend to not notice anything lest you get involved. And walk away from anything strange, same reason. And even then, you'll probably get dragged into dream experiences randomly. I don't recommend it, to be honest -- you don't have to embrace this all the way, live and breathe it, but denial doesn't sound like a good survival strategy, either. It's better to -- well, be part of the team, I figure."

"Mmm. In the dream for la-la-la, is what I'd meant. But it's good to know that too." Della's quiet a moment or two, the bottle ringing condensation on her knee. "'Power.' Ha. Why couldn't this have happened when I was a teenager." And then, "Is being part of the team going to protect Una? Or to help her protect herself? She looks up to you."

Ravn fixes his blue-greys on Della. "Yeah, it is. I like Una. She's a good friend and a good neighbour. But even if she was the worst bitch this side of the Rockies, part of the team means protecting Una -- because that's what we do, we try to look out for Team Humanity. Opposable thumbs and team spirit, it's the only thing we've got that makes us more than cows in this game."

Her gaze stays on him. This isn't a don't-blink situation, but she looks at him as though that's how, somehow, she'll find out what she needs to know.

Which doesn't mean her lips don't allude to a smile, just briefly, and then again. Perhaps she was a cheerleader in another lifetime. Or a cow.

But: "Also good to know. It's important to me too." Not just the hybrid, not just an affectation. "I hope that's true for most."

And: "As much as I like my manuals, there's a lot to be said for talking with people in person," Della says at last, her own expression less sheltered now, "to get a sense of what's going on beyond what's written down. I imagine that goes both ways. ... Is it hard?"

"Honestly?" Ravn breaks eye contact and looks down. "It is. I'm not -- actually a very social creature. My instinct is to just keep my head down and mind my own business, let other people mind theirs. But that's not how Gray Harbor works -- and it's what makes me want to be here. It still takes effort, though."

He glances out over the avenue, and the city beyond. "And then there's trying to figure it all out. I've lived here a year and a half -- and let me just be up front with you, I don't know half of it. Every time I talk to people who have lived here longer or were born here, they'll tell me things I've never heard until then. I suspect this is the ride that never ends in that regard. Almost two hundred years of history since the first settlers -- and before that, the indigenous people for ten thousand years or so. It's a never-ending journey of discovery."

So maybe that's another reason the man likes it here. He's a historian. He's living history.

A historian, which she isn't. But there's a wry turn to her expression: perhaps she might understand.

In time, "If it's all right with you," Della says to the city, and then to the garden again, "I'd like to sit here a little longer. If we could talk another time about this sort of thing, the encyclopedia-slash-YouTube of history and happenings? Would that be all right? You needn't stay," despite its being his own porch, "if you don't like."

"I've got nowhere I need to be anytime soon, and I know how disturbing all of this is when you're first settling into it," Ravn returns with a small smile. "Believe me, at first I thought this was all some kind of local businesses trying to get a spooky story going, for the tourists. It took me a while to realise that everyone I talked to seemed to be in on it. And then the Dreams began."

He taps a couple of gloved fingers against the bottle. "It's kind of hard to argue with being chased through the woods by the Headless Horseman along with another bloke -- and then you wake up on the beach, next to that bloke. His arm slashed by a sword, like it happened in the Dream. That's where disbelief kind of ... stops."

"I just woke up with sand," Della gives him in return. "Well, and bruises." And there was her hair, which used to be long, but that was another time. "But I swept it up; funny how it can get dusty in an old house, and so on."

She's speaking more slowly, not so much going after the wheat amidst the chaff, several of those questions saved. Which doesn't mean she doesn't ask, "Was that your first, or simply -- all right, not so simply -- the one that made the difference?"

"It was the first I knew to be, well, real. I've had nightmares before. But never ones that made me go somewhere else, or come back injured. That's what made it real for me -- that that guy was literally holding his arm together with his other hand after the Headless Horseman tried to chop it off." Ravn makes a face at the memory. "You can rationalise sand, I guess -- bruises, okay, you sleep walked. But sleep walking across town to wake up on the beach together with the guy you dreamed about, and he needs an ambulance? I couldn't work my mind around that one."

He looks up. "I've always known I had something most people don't. I've always been able to float lighters, operate a latch key without touching it, things like that. But I thought I was special -- not that there's a whole community of special people, most of whom who can do so much more."

"Did he turn out all right?" is what Della checks first. "I mean, as much as these things can. Brr." She blows moodily across the top of her beer bottle, catches herself at the sound, stops. She also gets that look again, the one of questions getting tucked away, but a little tapping takes care of that for now.

What she allows herself: "'Most'? Like Una and Ava, with the plants?"

"He turned out fine, or as fine as he ever was. I mean, he's an upper crust Brit whose coping advice for this place was to tell me to drink a lot and screw a lot." Ravn half-smirks. "I guess everyone finds what works for them. I stuck to the drink a lot part of that, though."

Then he glances at the yard, in all its summer glory. "Dr Brennon is -- I mean, look at this. If that's not power, I don't know what is. And you see people who can open doors from one reality to another, or read the history of an object just by touching it. And then there's me -- bending the occasional spoon. It was a bit of an eye opener. Bit humiliating too, not going to lie."

"Good. I didn't want to ask right off about supernatural infection." Good and very good, and the rest gets a laugh to go with it.

"It's amazing," Della agrees with great sincerity. Which doesn't mean she won't side-eye Ravn thereafter. Not that those other things don't sound exciting, but, "You're saying you can unlock your car door when you left your keys inside? Apply Super Glue without having to get out the hazmat gear? Grab the the remote when it's just so comfortable on the couch and there's no reason whatsoever to get up? Grab the beer, for that matter. Grab the covers. Let the cat in or out."

The Dane can't help laugh. "Well, yes. I can do those things. Keep in mind, though, every time you use these powers it's shining a flashlight into the dark. Nothing's probably going to come off it. But sometimes, something sees the light. So it migh tbe better to just go get those keys or that remote the old fashioned way."

"So changing the litterbox is -- " Della sits up. "Wait. Did anything happen with this garden, when it came to be? And is it just using the powers or also the afterward, the, the results lingering?" Do they have a spotlight still shining on their shared yard, 'Land here please'?

Ravn glances towards the back yard (hint: the house is in the way). "There's a faerie ring in the yard. That's what's sustaining it -- the summer thing, I mean. Brennon got it going but they're the ones shining a torch, and to be honest, I think they can handle it. Una brings them milk and cookies, I leave out sandwiches -- I mean, summer is nice, and also, who wants to not be on good terms with the local backyard trickster demigods?"

Della's eyes are wider, but not displeased. "When you put it that way. Hmn. Although -- hmm." Another sip later, "And flashlights aside, it's 'only' spoon-bending for you? Not hauling potting soil or... or! Clearing a pipe blockage, getting rid of gallstones? My father had those; I'm told they're awful."

"Probably not the latter. The gallstones may not be organic but the plumbing they're in is. I can't manipulate anything that's alive -- but someone like Brennon can." Ravn laughs softly. "Potting soil or clearing a blockage -- definitely. I try to not fall into the trap of using power frivolously -- but I'm not going to lie and say I always succeed. I fail, a lot. And that's one of the reasons I also tend to end up over There a lot."

He smiles a bit. "And that's not always bad. Seriously you need to ask Una about Zorro. I got to be a preacher in that one, wed her to whatever local beauty was played by Ariadne Scullins. We're still laughing about it."

More tapping.

"Delightful. I'll ask her about nosing around in back, too." Della admits, "And I hear your warning, though I don't know that I can do anything, really. There was that letter -- do you want the pictures? -- but that was more it doing something to me, it seemed like," said with a slight frown in her voice.

"What letter is this?" Ravn quirks an eyebrow. "I wouldn't say it's unheard of, corresponding with Veil entities, but to the best of my knowledge, only one of them has a fixed mail address."

He sips his beer and stretches those long legs. "All we can do, if we want to avoid trouble, is keep our heads down, don't ask questions, and don't interact too much with others like us. The dolorphages like that -- if we're already miserable and terrified, they don't have to do much besides, well, harvest. So at least for me, that's not an option. I'm making the most of this, and if me living the good life sours their dinner, all the better."

Her brows lift, and she gives into a swift smile that just takes over. "Really." Tap tap tap. "No," reluctantly, "this was from Addington House. What I meant was, I don't know that I can do anything in particular, powers-wise."

But Della doesn't let herself stop there; more buoyantly, "So this is the good life. What, short-term, would make it better?" Surprise packages?

"I suppose that to me, the good life means having friends and feeling like I am part of a community." Ravn smiles slightly. "But I guess it depends on whom you ask. To me, Gray Harbor is a good place. I feel like I belong here, that I have found my own tribe if you'll pardon the cultural appropriation. I feel like I'm home, that I should have been here all along. Maybe I'm just well and soundly on the hook."

"Of course." And then Della might repeat herself, but her wry smile does it for her.

"You haven't asked questions, particularly. Do you want to?"

Ravn offers a small, lopsided smile. "I'd love to get to know you as a neighbour -- but I don't feel any particular inclination to put you through the third degree. You need to know these things so obviously you're asking a lot of questions about them. I think the proper question to ask here might be, what do you need? Are you going to try to pack your bags and move on? Are you going to try to find out more about yourself, and your abilities?"

He cants his head speculatively. "You burned your hand on that letter from Addington House. Has that happened to you before, picking up things from touching things? There are people in town who can read an object's history from touching it."

Della listens intently, that hasn't changed, but it's the last she answers first. "No." A moment later, "Or, rather: not that I recall," dry emphasis on the last. "I've read of people picking up associations, though in a less bite-y sort of way."

The woman's been making her beer last, but she takes another sip now. "As to what I need, I don't know yet, no. Other than more answers," she has that luxury with a job, health care and a mostly-not-on-fire place to live. "Are you up for more questions, another time? I've a lot to..." she flexes her fingers in the air, somewhere between adjust and put in place and something more amorphous yet.

Moving on: "I don't plan to move on, yet, but I'm thinking about it. My footprint is small. My parents aren't so old that they need my care, and," Della briefly holds up her left hand, ring finger paler where a wedding band had belonged. Which doesn't say anything about her friends and communities from before -- but the Internet is a thing. "It isn't quite starting over, but there's room to maneuver. And I'd rather go somewhere than just run."

"I'm far from the only person in town who has answers." Ravn smiles slightly. "But for what it's worth and what I know? Anytime."

He nods at the hand and then glances at his own hand, gloved in black kidskin. "I'd do the same but, since I don't get sun on my hands, you wouldn't be able to see that I used to wear an engagement ring. Gray Harbor is -- not a bad place to start over, if you can get used to the weirdness. Lots of people here with stories of their own -- easy to find sympathetic ears, people who have seen some things."

"Thanks. If you have a couple names and numbers, I'd like to look them up too," and Della taps that off her to-ask list.

His story, his gloves merit further consideration, her gaze hooded for a moment; she looks up, then, and nods. She doesn't tap; she doesn't ask. Instead, Della admits with a half-smile, "I'd rather be the ear than go hunting one." To a point. "But maybe I should try working in a coffee shop more often."

"Heavens, two Dellas in Espresso Yourself and I refuse to enter." Ravn laughs softly; his feud with the other Della is becoming town legend -- that's a woman who knows how to hold a grudge.

He cants his head and thinks. "When you look at me, or Irving, or someone else you know is like us -- do you see or feel anything that's different from most people? Some of us see an aura or see light. I feel heat, my best friend hears music. Anyone who does is like us, whether they realise it or not. Right away though? People like Kailey Holt in number six -- she's strong in the kind of shine that tends to go with psychometry, object reading. Itzhak Rosencrantz is really, really good at moving things and opening doors. Then you got someone like Dr Brennon who can heal wounds or convince things to be on fire. It's pretty amazing, the things some of the skilled people can do."

A hint of wryness. "Me, I'm great with making nuts disappear from under one of three cups."

She crinkles her nose; "My ex is 'Bella,'" so he can imagine how that went.

'Irving' -- oh, Una; "I do lately. ...So you can tell what people can do by looki-- sensing? Or is that not 'the kind of shine' you meant?" Della asks. "And are those people I should talk to, or just examples of different people who do different things? And," she's back to the edge of her seat now, "Is that sleight of hand or actual teleportation? Or... chewing?" The smile's in her eyes.

"Some of us can look at others and see what we can do exactly. I'm not one of those -- I just feel some degree of heat or pull from someone, and it tells me they're like me. They have some kind of strange power, realised or not, and their minds don't get forced to rationalise the weird around here." Ravn chuckles. "I'm sure you've noticed -- something strange happens, and then most people seem to just not notice? Or they have some kind of bizarre explanation -- such as the gas leak explosion in Dr Brennon's office. There was no gas leak, believe me, I was there."

Then he smiles. "And yeah, those are real people. Kailey lives in number six right over there. Rosencrantz comes by here often enough, we practise our violins together in the garage. Brennon, she's in number one. That's kind of why I suggest those three, one for each kind of shine, and all of them around the block so to speak."

Then he puts his beer down and glances at the bottle cap, still on the table. "See that? Like this."

Yep, that's a floating bottle cap. Hovering up and happily hanging in the air, in front of Della's face. Hi.

"Mmm." Tap tap. "Look, I'm that person," says Della, and it'd be even more dry if she weren't so amused. After the usual request for spelling, she looks up --

Looks again --

"Well." Quickly, "Don't stop." Because she's going to blow air at it, and then if it holds up to that, try to touch it and give it a little tug.

"Can you fly?"

Ravn can't resist a lopsided grin. "Don't worry -- feel free to do your worst. For what it's worth, I am making that thing fly. That's what movers do -- we influence dead matter. So no, I can't fly -- because my flesh is alive, and I can't affect anything that is. I could probably move a dead body, though it might get complicated with the microorganisms inside."

So Della does -- not her worst, yet, but certainly there's testing going on, and little Della might have been much like this on Presents Day morning. "Yes," she says distractedly, "but you can make your belt fly, or no? That's not alive. Or your shoes? Or something you stand on? Or that someone else stands on?"

Initial tests range from, say, will it move with a little pressure or a lot; will it sound differently if tapped with her bottle; will it bend.

"I can move my belt or a pair of shoes, certainly. The limit seems to be alive -- not organic. Dead wood, for example, no problem." Ravn glances down at his boots for some reason; they definitely aren't alive. "There's a limit to how much weight I can shift, though. So in theory, I could lift my chair and move that, and myself with it -- but that's the chair's weight plus my own, which is probably out of at least my range. Rosencrantz probably can do that pretty easily."

Plink, goes the bottle cap when tapped. It sways a little -- almost as if it was floating in water. "I could probably hold it still if I really wanted to," the Dane murmurs. "But then we're back to mass. If you push this way with your bottle, and I push the other with the cap, then I'm technically moving both. Does that make sense?"

Della catches the glance and follows it, but again, distractedly. "So technical clothing," she supposes. "Runners' and the like. ... Mass." She stops torturing the poor bottle cap, or rather, its wielder; with her palm held beneath it, if he lets it go, she could catch it. "Newton. So. Ravn. Does that mean you can jump, and then move your hypothetical belt -- is it easier to move just one thing than two like shoes? -- to lengthen that jump? So it's mostly how it was going anyway, and not for long? Leap from rooftop to rooftop and all that. Or at least soften a fall?"

"Hypothetically, yes. In reality? I don't think I am strong enough, and I'm pretty damn certain that I would not have the focus to pull it off. But in theory -- yes, I imagine someone might be able to 'fly' like that. Maybe it's a skill that can be learned if you practise at it hard enough." Ravn glances at the cap -- and then lets it fall into Della's hand.

"But that's the other side of the coin -- using power is like shining a torch into the dark. Most of the time, nothing happens besides the dark gets a little lighter and you find the key you dropped. But sometimes, something out there sees the light. So, most of us try to not use these powers just for shit and giggles -- because there are things out there that are not friendly, and every time, there's that small risk."

"Hmm." Della brings the cap to her, holding it up to check it over before stacking it with her other one, murmuring something about darts.

And listens.

And then she sighs, audible if only for a moment before she goes quiet.

"Maybe it's just as well my teenaged self wasn't able to." Her gaze touches the bottlecaps again.

(Another sigh, this one inaudible the whole way down.)

"For what it's worth, you don't show less than Una," and her tone suggests the latter's abilities are amazing. "To me. What else do you want me to know, this time?"

Ravn puts his bottle on the table and regards Della, she of no caffeinated torture, in the manner of somebody who realises that this has been a dry and academical lecture, but who also feels that some issues cannot be treated casually. He takes a few breaths to think before replying.

"I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that you're not alone. You're joining a community of people who all have their own ideas and theories and opinions, but ultimately? We're all in this together. It doesn't always feel like it because it's all very disturbing, and humans are -- well, human. Sometimes we're selfish assholes. But we are all just trying to make the best of it. So find people you trust that you can vent to about bad things, or cry with, or go out for a night of laughter and fun. I think that's the single most important thing in this town: To not try to tough it out alone. And I won't deny I'm a complete hypocrite given that I'm usually the one dodging all the so-called fun things, but, you know how it is with teachers and parents: Do what I say, not what I do."

"Mm. If it helps -- " but, in the end, Della doesn't go there; her expression stills, and when she picks her smile back up, it's a little stilted before she smooths it back out. "Well. Again, thank you," and that's quite genuine. "I should get back." It's a moment or two, even so, before she stands with her bags. But before she puts her own drained bottle down, apparently she's at least comfortable enough to ask, "Do you recycle?"

"I do. Leave it and I'll take it out back." Ravn's smile in return is genuine. "I'm not preachy about it, just figure that if I want to sail on a clean ocean, the least I can do is not toss my own trash in it. You going to be okay?"

That might be a strange question but then, given the conversation, maybe it's not. "Something happens, don't be shy about yelling for help. It's one hell of a mirror you've fallen into here, Alice."

Della does add it to the table, then, her quick smile a touch lopsided but pleased. For the rest, "That's my plan." Also, as she starts for the stairs, "Fancy yourself a -- kinder -- Cheshire Cat?"

"Better the Cheshire Cat than the Mad Hatter or the Dormouse." Ravn grins slightly. "Though maybe I'm the Caterpillar -- I sit on my mushroom and smoke my hookah, and pretend that I know everything when in fact, I'm as clueless as everyone else, I've just been around longer."

"That must be it," says Della agreeably, despite the laughter in her eyes; a quick wave and she's headed down the steps... and, again, to the sidewalk. Still no cutting through the yard for her, not today.

The text comes later.

(TXT to Ravn) Della : Have you run into The Invisible Library, Genevieve Cogman? Protag's a librarian, and there's navigating order/chaos and variations of editions, but what reminded me was the fae's co-opting people into their narratives.

(TXT to Della) Ravn : That one goes on the reading list. Barring the fact that ours aren't technically fae -- except the ones from the faerie circle of course -- it's much the same thing happening here, really.