2022-05-05 - Just One Little Favor

Oh Raaaaaaaaaavn.

Jules comes calling. When her erstwhile neighbor isn't answering the door at the house next door, she goes looking for him in the next location he's likely to be: at the marina. It's gray and drizzly, because of course it is, being spring on the Pacific Northwest coast. This hardly stops the native PNW-er, who wouldn't be caught dead with an umbrella. The rain makes the docks slick underfoot, but she's got on sturdy ankle boots and just tromps right along towards his boat. "Hey Ravn? You around?" She could have texted. She didn't.

Ravn's copper blond mop pops out from the interior of one of these smaller yachts; a blue and white affair sporting the name The Vagabond. It's not a huge boat; smaller than Mikaere's though much similar in design. Capable of crossing the Atlantic -- and indeed, to get here, it must have done so, and then gone through the Panama Canal and up the West Coast, because it is of Finnish make, from the 1970s. And in this weather, her inhabitants -- both of them -- are definitely not sitting around in the open aft but making themselves comfortable under deck.

"Where's the fire?" Maybe Jules is not the first visitor the Dane would expect to see wandering in. The weather is not the kind of weather that begs a random stroll. And Jules is not the first person he'd expect to wander out for a chat and a beer; it's questionable whether she's even on the list of those in the first place. "Everything okay?"

"Everything's fine," Jules assures. She's got two large coffees in hand, stoppered with little plastic doo-dads to keep them from spilling. "I brought you black coffee." Bribery. It's totally bribery. "I just have some time before class and I actually finished my reading, so I thought I'd save you from Della's wrath like a good neighbor. And you were saying you wanted to hear about my trip."

Wait for it.

"Also I have a favor to ask."

There it is.

"You'd better come in out of the rain, then." Ravn offers a smile -- and keeps an eye on Jules' movements because he does not want to presume she needs his help in making it on to the boat and to its aft end, but he also doesn't want to see her slide and fall into the harbour. "I'm always for sale for black coffee and bad puns but let's start with the adulting first: What's up, what do you need?"

Jules can handle getting on board without any trouble; she's familiar with boats. "Sweet. Glad to hear you can be bought," she replies, flashing Ravn a grin. She holds out one of the coffees to him once she's safely aboard. "Sooooo. Can I borrow your leather jacket for Saturday? I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important." Look at those big eyes. How can he refuse?

The folklorist blinks, even as he guides his guest into the boat's interior. It's a small space, cramped in the very utilitarian way of sail boats that aren't millionaire floating villas; the seating area no doubt is the sleeping area at night, the kitchenette is one cupboard, counter, and sink, and the shower doesn't exist. There's a small door to what's presumably a toilet of the kind where there's no room for excitement or deep breaths.

"My jacket?" He echoes. A wry smile spreads across the man's face. "Yes, you can borrow it. If you tell me whether it's because you need a leather jacket, or it's because you want to parade a torn sleeve with a bullet hole around. Because it's got both, and since it's the second leather jacket I've ruined that way, I got stubborn and refused to replace it."

Jules squishes herself into one of the seats and positively beams when Ravn says yes. Her puppy-dog eyes were pretty transparent especially for someone used to seeing through fraud; grifter, she is not. "It's absolutely both. Column A and Column B," she says. "Basically, I'm going to a big picnic up on the res, and my ex is going to be there, and I would like him to think I'm dating a badass biker so he leaves me alone." This part is true. It may not be the whole truth, but it's definitely true.

Ravn makes a little shrug, the kind that strongly says, Hey, I've heard worse. "Why not? It's worth a shot. I take it your ex is the kind of bloke you can't just tell to sod off, then. If you think a jacket with a bullet hole is going to make him keep his distance, by all means. Wish I'd kept the first, it had a bullet hole through the chest and a stitched sleeve from a meat cleaver, for even more 'look at this asshole who doesn't know how to duck' points."

"Yes and no. Yes, I can tell him to fuck off, but also no, he may not actually listen to me without additional encouragement because he's a shitty listener." Jules shrugs. Talking about that ex doesn't seem to upset her. It is what it is, and it's in the past, and that is that. "Thank you. I appreciate it. Can I drop by Friday night to pick it up? And for what it's worth, you can totally sell the 'I'm a badass who gets in badass fights' vibe instead of the 'dumb target practice' vibe. Just give your best scowl." Jules demonstrates. Grr.

Ravn laughs softly. "Sure thing. As for me, though? Anyone who knows me also knows I don't get in fights. Fights sometimes happens to me, and I'm usually the one who needs to be carried out. I'm a one hit wonder -- tap me once and I'm down for the count."

He looks at his hand, gloved in black kidskin. "The whole -- getting up in someone's face and acting aggressive -- works a lot better when they can't just flick your nose and tell you to sit the fuck back down, Fido."

Jules lets her overly dramatic scowl transform into a small smile. "Well, there's a lot to be said for not going the testosterone-fueled looking for a fight route. You're all good." She settles in to sip her coffee, careful not to burn her tongue. It's quite hot, fresh out of the pot. "So, my trip. I told you I'd tell you stuff. What do you want to know?"

"Myeah, I tend to look for a way out of a fight, personally." Ravn chuckles and inspects his coffee in turn; black as sin, hot as hell -- score. "I guess -- anything you want to tell me? I mean, you can tell me about how ants ate your breakfast and you woke up with a hedgehog in your sleeping bag and we can laugh at it because camping mishaps are funny. But you also came home with a severe injury, and an expression like you'd found some kind of clarity. I guess I'm pretty curious about both of those."

"Hmm." Jules takes her time to answer. It's a change of manner, too, from the playful to the more pensive. "Hedgehogs aren't native to the US," she begins, because of course Jules is going to talk about native wildlife above all else. "Porcupines are, though. One was grumpy because I put up my tent in its feeding ground, apparently. They're rare to see in the Olympics -- but I ended up seeing several rare animals, which is pretty cool." She flicks back her sleeve to inspect her own wrist, the one with the bite marks. "Cougar," she tells Ravn, holding her forearm up for inspection. "I got off pretty light, all things considered."

But this isn't just an episode of Jules, Wild Animal Wrangler. Her brow is furrowed as she pieces together just how to talk about her experience. "I didn't end up using the white stick you gave me," she ends up saying, "but I think it was more important to be seen than to be invisible, when I was out there."

Ravn whistles. Cougar bite scars? Beats meat cleaver by a mile on the badass scale as far as he is concerned. "I didn't know about the hedgehogs. One of those things I'm so used to, I think I assume there's some variety of them everywhere. Are they actually related to porcupines at all? I know they're related to mustelids."

He shakes his head about the stick, though. "I mean, as far as I am concerned, the fact that you didn't have to try to turn yourself invisible to hide is a good thing. I have no idea whether it would even work. It was more of a -- this is something I can give you that would have worked in our stories, and on some level, that's what it all is about, yes? Stories. Knowledge and life skills, passed down as stories."

"No idea," Jules says about the hedgehogs with a bit of a grin. "I can talk your ear off about what's local but beyond that..." Her shoulders lift in a shrug.

She nods along with his other remarks. "Yeah. Exactly." It's still hard to figure out what to say, how to share the details of her experience, and after another moment of thought, Jules cops to it. "I kind of don't know where to begin. I think it's easier when someone just asks straight out, 'Hey Jules, how'd you end up with that nasty scratch?' Instead of trying to tell it as a story myself. I don't think I'd make a very good storyteller." She admits this with a smile and a wrinkle of her nose. "To try to summarize, I hiked out to the Enchanted Valley -- which is gorgeous, by the way. It's nestled right up against the mountains, and the Quinault River runs through it, and it's spectacular. All these waterfalls with the spring runoff. Lots of black bears. Anyway, I tried to see if I could find a way to...open a door, I think. It didn't work, but that night, animals came out and found me."

"So you went into the woods in a clear mindset of something please come talk to me, and something did." Ravn nods his agreement. "It makes sense -- most stories of vision quests or walkabouts or similar experiences all involve various tricks and rituals to that effect. To make the questor receptive to the spirit world, the ancestors, or whatever the case may be. You might have been able to skip a step or two insofar you know that these spirits exist. You have interacted with them before."

He sips his coffee. "I guess the really important part is, did you learn something useful? About them, or about yourself, or -- well, anything?"

"Yes. Exactly." Jules looks a little relieved that Ravn has the words for it when she does not. Folklorist to the rescue. "I tried smoking a joint when the sun went down, but I don't know how much that affected anything. I mean, it did make me want to cry over how beautiful everything was. So there's that."

As for learning? She takes another swallow of coffee too and leans back a little, as much as the interior of the boat and its seating arrangement will allow. "Yeah. I think I did. I'm still sorting through it. They told me to let go. I think that's what the cougar was trying to get me to do. Let go and trust myself. And trust others, too." A wry expression pulls her mouth to one side. "Which as you probably know I'm not terribly good at."

"Yeah, me either. You know where you've got yourself. Knowing where you got others -- that's another can of beans entirely." Ravn offers a wry smile. "It's bloody hard, that's what it is. When you've crashed hard a few times and no one was there to pick you up, you stop believing deep down. You learn that words are cheap."

He looks down, at his gloved hands. "I trust myself. I know my limitations. Know what I can't do, what situations I need to not get myself into. Trusting others is a work in progress. There's a couple of people in Gray Harbor I know would take a bullet for me or me for them, but deep down, instinctively, I think I'll probably always try to not need anyone to stand up for me."

She gets it. Her expression says that much. There's no pity or sympathy, just a look of being struck: yes, this.

"Yeah," Jules says quietly, and for a few seconds, it seems that's all she'll say. Except then she carefully begins again. "I don't think people are meant to be lone wolves, at the end of the day. There's a lot of different ways to be, and they're all good, but they have to be right for you. Otherwise it's just trying to turn into something you're not. And deep down, people are social creatures. We're not good at being completely alone."

"We're not meant to be alone. But a lot of us still find that when we really need those other people, they aren't there. And we learn that the only one who always will be there, is ourselves. Sometimes we go too far. We start to think no one will ever be there, with us. It's a harsh lesson to have to unlearn." Ravn does not seem to wish to go into any greater detail on the matter, either.

Instead, he nods again. "We're not meant to be alone," the folklorist reiterates his agreement. "But we do get to be critical. Picky, even. It's when we're not we end up with asshole exes, yeah?"

Ravn's final remarks earns a little smile and a puff of breath, not quite laughter. "Yeah. Things I wish I knew earlier in life. Can't change the past, though. Unless you're the Revisionist." Jules tips her chin at a side-angle as she regards Ravn now, speculative. "So the other day, Ava said you're planning to end up on the Other Side as the Folklorist. That really what you want to do, or is she talking out of her ass?"

Ravn does a double take over his coffee, and then laughs. "Eh -- I've said it a few times, I think. That I could see myself going that way, some day. And who knows? But, I don't think it's really something I get to decide in the first place. Also, I'm a bit busy right here, so I'll probably not put in a job application anytime soon, you know? It's . . ."

He pauses and thinks a moment, perhaps looking for the right words. "Most of us here -- either move on at some point, or we go over there, and don't come back. I want to think that there are places out there where you'd want to stay. But it leads back to what you said about not being alone. The less attachment we have, the more likely that something over there might seem, well, better."

"Would it change you?" Color Jules fascinated. Of course she's fascinated: by the unknown, the mystery of it, and likely at least a little bit by its dangerous potential. "Would you still be you? What would you do?"

"Fuck if I even know," Ravn replies with a small laugh. "It's all theory. Some people think they were once human -- the Revisionist, the Exorcist, the whole damned lot of them. That they were taken at the moment of death and somehow kept alive and changed. They seem to run things -- at least in the immediate next reality and to some extent in this one. So if the Exorcist is sort of dealing with ghosts and hauntings -- I guess I'd be telling stories? I used to joke that I'd do my best to make Dreams make sense, at least."

"And ideally to teach you something, not just to fuck you up." So says Jules, who still believes in the power of Dreams to affect change for the better. "No turning yourself into the Folklorist just yet, though, okay? You got friends here who will miss you, and a girl who likes you." The last part comes with a knowing grin. "You've still got a life left in you right here."

"Yeah. I'm not about to run into the Veil screaming for the powers that be to take me." Ravn laughs softly. "I do think that the odds of eventually ending up over there -- are very high, for all of us. But I say that and also stress, I'm still not convinced that this is a bad thing. We talk about people being Lost -- but we have no way of knowing whether some of them were indeed Found. In this, I think you and I are a bit on the same page -- we don't believe that it all is inherently evil, created just to torture us. Too many thousands of years of indigenous people oral tradition tell us that spirits and dream beings are not inherently evil. Some of them are. Just like some humans."

Ravn's prediction has Jules raising her eyebrows. "Huh." She nods then, because yes, they are on the same page. "I'd like to see more of it," she admits right then and there. "And not just through a Dream. I'd like to learn how to go there and how to come back. Almost the stories I know talk about how it's a place where all sorts of things happen. People fall in love with animals and build a life with them. People ascend to the stars. Just because something is dangerous doesn't mean it's to be avoided at all costs, I think. Sometimes the risk is worth the reward."

"That's the logic I was trying to explain a few times, yes. The one that leads to me perhaps ending up over there some day, when I'm done with this world. Which, I stress, is not a week from now, so don't call the suicide hotline just yet, all right?" Ravn smiles, a little wry. Rumour, in this town, makes it around the world twice before His Dark Majesty gets out of bed.

He sips his coffee and looks at Jules over the rim. "I'm kind of -- experimenting with it. Trying to learn how to move over there and back. Rosencrantz can do it, and according to him, so can I. It's a lot to wrap my mind around -- I've always been able to move little things, now I can fold dimensions? It's a trip for sure."

Is it any wonder Jules tries to keep mum on aspects of her personal life, given how quickly rumor spreads? As of tomorrow, people will likely be saying Ravn has already disappeared for good, leaving one sad Kitty Pryde to yowl at the moon.

"Can you show me?" Jules' eyes light up, and she puts her coffee down for the moment. "It goes with moving things? Like, moving from affecting things to being able to affect how you move through the world? I want to be able to do that." Because of course she does.

"I'm told it does. That people who can do -- well, telekinesis, really -- are also the people who can open doors." Ravn winces. "There's just a slight hitch -- pretty obvious, really. You open a door to somewhere you have no control over, something over there might walk through. And if you walk through -- it's substantially harder to open one back. I'm not at a point where I really dare to experiment on my own. Because I do in fact want to not just be gone one morning."

He curls his gloved fingers around his coffee mug, leeching warmth from it. "If you're interested -- maybe we could try to do some of these things. Together, I mean -- not just you and me, but also the others back on Oak. I feel like one of the things that has gone wrong for a lot of people in this town is that they try to tackle it all alone. You move things as well? I believe Irving does too? I know Ariadne does."

Ariadne, not Scullins. Subtle, dude.

Jules nods, filing the information away. She's not such an adrenaline junkie that she can't hear a warning for what it is, and stories don't end well for those who don't heed them. "I don't know about Una, but I threw a bear canister at the cougar. I'm still figuring out exactly what it is that I can do. I think the Enchanted Valley maybe...unlocked some of it. I didn't know I could move that canister, but I was scrabbling for something, and there it was. I'd very much like to find out more. The way I see it, it's not just woo, look at me with my big strong superpower. It's more...hmm." Jules has to think again, looking for the right words. "It's about knowing yourself," she finally settles on. "Being in touch with yourself and seeing how you're connected to everything else. And maybe that in turn allows you to affect more. Maybe. I don't know."

She abandons all pretense of knowing what she's talking about with a shrug. "Anyway, yes, I'd love to learn more and try this. Safety in numbers."

"Yeah. That sums it up pretty well. Safety in numbers, not trying to do everything alone." Ravn nods again. "But also -- not feeling like you're dead weight. At least that's part of it for me. I came into this town full of people who can do all kinds of amazing things. And then there's me -- I can float a lighter. Can't fight -- flick my nose and I'm down for the count because of neuropathy. All I have is a geek's fountain of information that may or may not apply. I feel that if I can learn to do this, then maybe -- well, maybe I can make more of a difference, keep some people a little safer."

"I think your geeky fountain of knowledge is worth more than you're maybe giving it credit for," Jules replies, though she nods too, recognition in her expression. "Having good information keeps people from doing dumb shit. But I get it. I get wanting to be able to do stuff. I'm that way too. I want to be able to hold my own, and explore, and fight back if I've got a reason to. I don't like the idea of being at someone's mercy, and I don't want to have to hide behind someone else."

"It really does rankle, doesn't it? Having to crouch down, let the big boys do the job." Ravn can't help laugh softly. At 6'3 he's hardly a small man, but a testosterone fueled he-man he certainly isn't. "Makes you feel helpless."

"Drives me nuts," Jules agrees. "Makes me want to punch them."

She gives her head a little shake in recognition of her own temper. "Anyway, keep me in the loop when and if you want to try stuff. I should probably get going. Don't want to be late for class." She makes the last remark light and sing-songy. "And thanks for everything. Not just letting me borrow your jacket. You're a good guy. You know that, right?" Before she climbs up to the deck, Jules pins Ravn with a look that's quite serious.

"When I remember to point out that I'm talking about the 19th century contemporary view, rather than my own." Ravn offers a somewhat lopsided smile back. He gets up all the same to see Jules out safely -- not that he really needs to, he knows that, but, manners. "And speaking of, that's another thing we need to get back on. Maybe sometime next week, picnics and whatnot important out of the way."

"Ugh. Yes. That." Jules makes a face, though Ravn might not see it at first since she's facing away, carefully stepping from boat to dock. It's still there when she turns back to face him. "Other stuff started happening, and we kind of let that drop, didn't we. I know I've kind of been off doing my own thing lately. I'll talk to Una."

"Jules." Ravn straightens up as she steps up on the dock. "No. No, don't feel guilty about pursuing your own problems. Asshole Irving is dead, he can wait. You're the injured party here, so if you feel you have other, more important business? Pretty damn sure it's fine. It's always going to be like that in this town. We're all fucked up, and a lot of the time, you end up having to prioritise. It's how it is."

Her expression shows surprise before turning into something more thoughtful. "I just don't want to let it drop," Jules says after a moment. "For all we know, there's some angry spirit out there that wants its shit back."

On that lovely note, she throws off a wave and begins to head back to shore.