2022-05-18 - Folding Space (And Lawn Chairs)

If you walk up the beach a bit, heading west from the marina and the mouth of the Chehalis, out towards Stafford Creek Correctional Centre, you're pretty much out of sight. There's a road not too far off, but largely, it's you, the trees, and the seagulls. The land here is not being developed at the present at least -- small, winding roads make their way up the hills. This is lumber land, growing and feeding the lumber mill. And below it, the 105 leads out towards the prison and beyond. It's a quiet forest, and a quiet beach with shallow, brackish water often rendered a greenish shade of brown by the silt carried towards the sea by the Chehalis.

It's a good place to do things you don't particularly want anyone to wonder about. Ravn Abildgaard tends to go here when he wants to practise something he doesn't understand. Or just feels like a walk in the woods but near the road. Lola Bianca parked nearby, he's found a good-sized rock to sit on while lighting a cigarette and looking at his friend.

"Something happened the other day," he says at length. The man's voice is slightly raspy, as if he'd just overcome a throat infection of some kind. "Long story short, I had to jump into a door to make sure somebody else could get back out. I had to open a door back here from -- somewhere between 1850 and 1880, would be my guess. An indigenous village on the river bank. I'm still trying to process how I knew where to direct it. Is it always like that? That we have no control over where we open a door to from here -- but once we're over there, we know where to go, to go home?"

Heartbreaker's rumble followed Lola Bianca out to this place. It's not unique, the Pacific coast from Humboldt, California north is almost unbroken with rocky, evergreen beaches and cliffs. But it's the place Ravn chooses and that's good enough for the Stingray's owner.

"Man, you sound like I do the day after I've been deep throating," Itzhak says, wryly, crunching his way over to Ravn. He's got a little canvas bag which appears to hold some bottles of local cider. "Honestly, yeah. It does feel like that. You know how birds got a magnetic field in their heads and that's how they know where North is? It's like that. You just know." He sets the bag down, bottles clinking gently, so he can light up a smoke of his own, hands cupped against the wind.

Ravn nods slowly. This makes sense. An instinctive reaching for the reality he came from. Yes. This clicks.

Then he nods again. "I tried to inhale the Chehalis. Fell into the river during an asthma attack. Jules pulled me out. Apparently, doors don't necessarily lead to the same spot. Or maybe it did but the riverbed moved during the last hundred and fifty."

He runs a tired hand across his face. "I can do that now, you realise? I can open doors. In and out. I predict I'll be asked to run an Other Side taxi service before the month is up."

"Why?" Itzhak says, promptly. "That ain't ya fucking job, don't you risk your neck enough for this town? Anybody tries to make you do that, tell 'em they can find their own damn ride. Fuck's sake."

Inhale, exhale smoke. Itzhak crouches over his canvas bag and rummages in it. He gets his hand around something and pulls and out comes a cylindrical folded camping chair. "Yeah, you can move one place from somewhere else. Here, you don't gotta sit on that rock, I came prepared."

Another chair comes out. Then a rolled up beach towel that turns out to be enormous. Then a Bluetooth speaker. "I coulda just tossed it all in the front seat but I didn't know if you were gonna wanna walk anywhere," he mutters, cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

Ravn laughs and settles on the chair. "Nice. I should have packed a picnic basket, brought a bottle of wine."

He looks over at Itzhak, speculatively. "I think what I'm worried about the most isn't going over and then failing to get back out. I'd just rest, and try again. It's people not understanding that that can happen. Or people thinking that if we can access the -ists and the Other Side, we can just go yell at them about things we don't like. That they don't understand how dangerous those entities are, even when they're well intentioned."

"I learned the hard way." Itzhak slouches into the other chair. Now they look like a couple of guys beach camping. He snags a cider and tosses it lightly over to Ravn. "They can too."

Is he, like, totally uninterested in protecting people from their own foolhardiness? Kinda seems that way. Nothing teaches a child about fire better than a burn.

"Yeah, kind of. But I guess I'll still be telling people too. So at least when the Revisionist turns them into burned-out meth addicts living in a dumpster, they can't say no one warned them." Ravn hitches a shoulder. "It's hard, you know? You want to help. But a lot of the time, people are being reckless."

Itzhak grunts through his nose, a long drawn out Yiddish sound. He doesn't drink anything yet, but stays silent and broods out at the ocean. That hooded expression, all those black curls, and what a profile: he's a photographer's dream right now and nobody to take a picture or get bitched out by him if they did.

Smoke finished, he crushes it under the toe of his boot and retrieves the butt. "Look. It is dangerous. It's also beautiful. People will probably get killed and I don't know if there's much we can do about it. Nobody stops climbing Mt Everest just because it's dangerous. One of us is gonna get killed sooner or later if we keep dicking around, but shit. I ain't about to stop."

There speaks the guy who drives a very fast car, drinks like a fish, and made his reputation in prison harsh enough to put those tattoos on his knuckles, a guy in love with biting things. And the harder they bite, the more he loves them.

"I've said it before. Some day I'm going to be lost over there. Going to find myself in a reality I can't find my way back out of, or worse, one that is just so much better I don't want to leave." Ravn looks out at the sea. "Although I'd say that the better my life here gets, the less risk of that last option at least. But I do believe that many who are Lost are in fact choosing to not come back."

He nods slowly. "I feel like -- there's risk to everything. You could get run over tomorrow. Have a health emergency. Fall out of bed and break your neck. I don't want to treat death like it's about to happen any moment so why be careful -- but at the same time, we also need to keep things in perspective. The Veil generally doesn't want to kill us -- we don't feed it if we're dead. I have this theory it kills us when we stop caring. And I care very much."

"You mean the Them." Itzhak glances over. "I think what we call the Veil is their fishing pond, but I don't think it's Them. I think it's more or less the ocean and we're like a ball of herring. Look I was just rewatching Blue Planet while sad drunk, okay?"

Speaking of, he pops the cap off a cider with a careless flick of his thumb. The cap goes flying, then stops and hovers in place, spinning on itself. Itzhak has control, and he's demonstrating.

"Show-off," Ravn murmurs with mild amusement, and then does exactly the same. Watch one bottle cap orbit another.

Then he sips the cider, licks his lips, and says, "I think of us more like free range cattle. You don't shoot healthy cows that give milk and calves. You shoot them when they stop giving. The odds aren't stacked against us in a way that can't be overcome, as long as we are still responding. They want us scared, but they don't want us dead. They want us worried and upset and excited. The only thing they don't want is indifference. So they will make sure we never treat this like routine. But they don't want us to be so scared we stop, either."

He smirks. "In a way, they are grifting us -- and we are grifting them right back."

Itzhak smirks too, right back at Ravn. The metal caps whirl around each other like binary stars. At a glance could be hovering wasps. "Buffalo. You ever seen one a them? They will fuck your shit up. I'd wanna be a buffalo. Basically the size of a house and so tough they just stand in blizzards and wait them out."

"I actually have. Back in Denmark. There's one farm that has free-range buffalo, for the meat. It's expensive as all hell so obviously, the upper crust is all excited about it. But you can go there too, just to watch the animals in the very large paddocks." Ravn looks thoughtful.

Then he laughs. "They remind me of bull meese. The reason Volvo cars are so sturdy? Thing is, when you drive on some mountain or forest road in Sweden, and suddenly there's a moose. The moose doesn't move. He just lowers his antlers. It's usually not the car that wins that joust so they need to be sturdy enough that at least the driver survives the impact."

One bottle cap finally comes to rest atop the other because not just one person here is a show-off. "There's something else I wanted to ask you about. Remember the big guy from the strip club? His sister was a dancer there -- she was going to date Seth Monaghan only then Vic declared them exclusive and they didn't. Anyhow, that bloke, he could do something with dimensional space. Stuff ridiculous amount of stuff into a fanny pack."

Itzhak snorts a laugh and his bottle cap drops to the sand. "Yeah, he worked for me for a while. Played piano, too. No kidding he was a big dude, he had a portable hole full of snacks. Adorable, though. His sister was hot too, Seth missed out."

The cap rolls and bounces to him, leaps into the air and drops into the canvas bag. Itzhak nods at it. "Whaddaya think I'm doing with that?"

It is, come to think, rather a small bag for everything he's taken out of it.

"His sister almost stabbed me the first time we met. Second time, she's crying about Seth leading her on for nothing." Ravn laughs softly. "I don't think I ever registered to her as a human being. Just as a police spy at first, and as Seth's clean-up crew the next time. Anyway."

He glances at the bag. And then he nods. "That's what I was thinking. It's all about dimensions and folding space and other ways to tie the laws of nature into a pretzel. And it seems like the sort of thing I should be able to do, given this all -- well, people who do fire tend to be healers. People who read minds tend to read objects. And people who open doors tend to fuck with dimensional space."

"What kinda freaks me out is that whole, conservation of energy thing. Like every time I hide something does it erase it until I get it back out or is it floating in orbit or what. Yeah you oughta be able to do it, lemme show ya."

Itzhak pops up, snatching the canvas bag on the way.

"I'm not a physicist," Ravn says, and watches the other man get up. "But insofar my understanding of the universe works, nothing ever disappears. It may get put somewhere else."

"Shit, me neither, I don't got no college education like some smart guys around here." Itzhak sets the bag down after judiciously weighing it a couple times. "Here's one trick. Try to pick that up. I stuck it to the ground."

True to his word, it is very tightly stuck in place.

Ravn gets up and tries to heft the bag. He's not at all surprised to find that it weighs far more than it should. He looks at the handles of the bag and realises that the fabric will give before the bag itself goes anywhere. "So, this feels like you've stuck your entire car into that bag. Which tells me some kind of dimensional fuckery is going on -- because obviously, your canvas bag cannot contain that kind of mass unless you're carrying lead bars around."

He stops trying. "So, I feel this is where science is not our friend. Because science and my," airquotes, "fancy college education is just telling me that this isn't possible so don't try. My eyes are telling me that it might be impossible but you're doing it. So where does it go? Some kind of pocket dimension, Dungeons & Dragons type bag of holding?"

Itzhak rolls a shrug all the way down his shoulders, ending in flipping his palms upwards and a crooked smirk. "Hell if I know. Since you're a mover too, you could fight me to pick it up, but you still couldn't get the stuff out of it. You wanna try?"

Of course Itzhak wants to try.

"Hah, sure. Worst case scenario, jack all happens, right?" Ravn looks at the bag. Then he takes a deep breath and tells himself, this is no different from moving a (very large) pebble around on the beach. Just focus.

He puts his hand on the handles. He lifts.

Itzhak goes 'urk!' in a startled grunt, twitching hard once all over. The sense of his Song is lured aside and look at that, Ravn can pick up the bag.

Itzhak stares out at the ocean. "Jesus," he says, in a tone of reverence no matter how ironic. He's got goosebumps.

Ravn looks just as surprised.

He puts the bag back down gently and swallows. "So, that was not the outcome I expected."

He looks at the bag again. "Do you have any idea where things go? Can I do this? I mean, if I were to take my usual shoulder bag -- would I be able to pull things in and out of it like a Sim stuffs a car up his ass?"

"Nobody's ever beat me like that before." Itzhak slowly looks over, a look that's, well, conflicted. Is he indignant? Is he sad that he's lost a mover's duel for the first time? Is he kind of awkwardly turned on?

Yeah, probably.

Take two blokes with each their own issues and put them on a beach. Ravn, on his end, awkward because the last thing he wants is for anyone to think he's trying to one-up them. They both should talk to a therapist, really. Probably not the same therapist.

"I have no idea how I do this," the folklorist says quietly. "You make it look so natural. Like it's just something you do, like pulling on your pants or scratching your bum. It doesn't feel natural to me. It feels like I'm trying to stop an ocean with a sieve."

Itzhak is trying to remember what the hell they were just talking about but his world's been a little rocked. He blinks blankly. "Do I?" he says, sounding blank. "A few people told me that. That it just seems natural when I do it. I guess kinda like watching Michael Jordan fly across the three point line and smash the backboard, you're just like, yeah that dude can turn off gravity obviously. Jesus, Abildgaard."

Ravn plonks himself down on the chair again. He feels a little woozy. For all his attempting to take the Veil at face value, to put narrative before the laws of physics, displays like this make him uncomfortable. This is now how stuff works. And making his pal uncomfortable isn't a great thing, either.

"It shouldn't be this easy." He rummages in his jacket for a cigarette and his lighter because bloody hell. "I see why people get Lost now, you know? It's so easy. Could get used to this, could do it like it was normal, attract all the things with claws and teeth and end up eaten in my sleep."

Mirroring Ravn, Itzhak plunks down in the hammock of his chair too. Still stunned by the display of Ravn's power, he rubs his hands over his face.

"I been doing it a long, long time." His voice is muffled by his palms. Then he needs another cigarette too, don't question too closely why. "From when I was nineteen trying not to get my ass wrecked in prison. I could steal anything from anyone, hide things where they'd never, ever get found during a cell toss. I guess I made it natural for me."

"That's what I've been doing with small objects. But I'd still break into a sweat if I was moving something heavier. And now it's just... flick a finger, boulders go flying. It kind of scares me because I can see how easy it is to be tempted to just use it all the time."

Ravn nods. He needs the cigarette for a different reason but the end result is the same. "It's useful."

"It's useful, but it's not just useful. It's a part of me. Part of you too now." Itzhak leans forward, elbows on his knees, looking at Ravn with eyebrows performing some indescribable combination of feeling. "I don't even believe in God, but I know He don't hand shit like this out for no reason."

"The small things have always been part of me, yeah." Ravn draws on the cigarette, and watches the sea -- something in Itzhak's gaze makes him a little avoidant; does he believe in God? He doesn't think so -- but the world has changed a lot this last year, and if so many other things are real, who's to say that -- yes, this is a discussion he's going to have with himself some other time, thanks.

"Moving small things, opening doors, pocketing a few small items. Always done those." Ravn looks at the other man at last. "But I've never opened doors or created pocket dimensions before. And now it feels like -- eh, it's not a big deal. Overconfidence isn't great. It leads to bad choices. I'm sure as hell going to use what I've got, whether it came from the Veil or from God or for that matter, from the Devil. But I'm also going to remind myself, every time I do, is like shining a light into the void and yelling fresh bacon, come and get it."