epidemiology | EVENT ★ BACK TO THE FUTURE

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EVENT ★ BACK TO THE FUTURE

BENDED TIME

As outlined in the OOC post, things start to slow down and grow quiet in Oska for a few days as the bugs crawl away and slowly disappear. But then the cocoons hatch. Fully grown temporal insects claw their way out of them, each about the size and temperament of raging bulls.

They come out far more aggressive and eager to fight, are are willing to take on anything that moves with jaws and claws alike. Except, of course, another insect — when two of them encounter each other, they enter into a mating dance and then slip away into another dimension, leaving behind only the temporary ghosts of years gone by. If you can’t find a way to pierce that thick shell to take one down, better find another one to pair it off with instead. Just try not to get bit while leading them around and find yourself suddenly 5 years old again.

The insects aren’t the only thing going on in Oska, though. As it turns out, unicorns really hate this adult form of the temporal insects, and will start kicking their way out of their stalls in the stables to get at the insects in an attempt to impale or trample them. According to Uruz they’re gallant warriors, but not always quite cut out to take on a bug, and can easily get themselves hurt or killed. She would really appreciate recruits taking a moment to recapture any stray unicorns they may come across and leading them back to the stables. Try to avoid any insects on the way, or you’ll find yourself suddenly fighting insect and irate unicorn, which is no one’s idea of a good time.

The lake is getting more active, too. All the fighting has woken up something in the depths of it. Dark red tentacles sometimes creep up onto shore — and don’t worry, this time they don’t belong to a sea goddess. The tentacles don’t attack unless attacked, and can in fact be quite agreeable. Nodes along the length of them act as primitive eyes, which see well enough to interact with anyone nearby. They’re also all a little peckish. Toss a tentacle a bit of food and watch it curl around and ingest it using tiny mouths on the underside. It might even be willing to play a few rounds of fetch or slap a bug into the sky for you if you put it in a good mood with a morsel of food.

The senior ALASTAIR members can be seen out and about and doing their part, too. Uruz and Dagny fight as a team, centaur and elf, sometimes fighting back to back and sometimes as mount and rider. They’ll stop and lend a hand, but the cats are a little less generous. Cherenkov and Crowley fight inseparably and use magic and science in deadly combination to ward off and destroy the bugs, but can usually only be seen darting on their way from one place to another. They have a lot of magitek to repair in the destructive wake of the insects. Pomarr, neither as senior nor as invested in actively picking off the bugs, offers shelter near a tentacle-free portion of the lake, calling down storms to toss away bugs for her and anyone in the vicinity.

OOC NOTES

This log spans a week ICly. Characters will find themselves beginning to understand each other again as the bugs first vanish, as the effects of the cats’ work on the magitek pays off. The translation problem will be completely fixed by the time the cocoons hatch. All of the bugs will have been killed or shipped off by the sixth day, leaving the last day before their departure to the next mission blissfully relaxing. Any temporally misplaced recruits will be back to normal by the last day, as well.

A reminder to anyone still texting: the texting feature of magitek jewelry operates based on thought! There are no physical keyboards, recruits merely think the message that they’d like to send to another recruit.

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"Hmm." Two years is perhaps a more significant drop in the bucket than the better part of two hundred; he's long since forgotten the specifics of her touch too much to miss it. On the flipside of that, it's quite a thing to discover anew. He finds himself distracted by the intimate, exploratory quality of her fingers. No one in quite some time has seen him in the way that these people who knew his young self seem to see him... Serene in particular.

He pulls his eyes back up to her face, though the hooded quality of her gaze is not much less provocative. He feels his attention sharpening in a particular way, though he's not such a slave to his interests that he's wholly distracted from her question.

After all, it is a pertinent one, and an intriguing proposition. "Hmmmmm," he repeats, drawing the syllable out longer as he attends to the idea. "I suppose I could have that impact, even as a figment. Perhaps..."

He chuckles. "I had assumed I'd simply carry on throughout these halls to entertain my own nostalgia, for however long I exist here. But you're right; I could save myself a great deal of casting-about with a few pointed words of good advice." His eyes drift down to where she's got a grip on his wrist again. Now, is that advice he wants to leave his younger self, too? Would he even take it?

Or perhaps she's the one he should leave advice to? When he looks up again, it's with a speculative gleam in his eye.

She meets his gaze and her smile deepens as she recognises his stare. There's that taut string of interest glimmering between them, the one that she recognises from the glances his younger self gives her. She lets go of his wrist and nods.

"I have never hidden that I can be a selfish woman. Let me keep you for a while and remind you of all the worries that you could assuage for my favourite friend."

She breaks their gaze and glances about Evan's room, knowing that he'll have a stack of papers and notebooks hidden about somewhere here.

"Would you keep your writing tools in those desk drawers? I have no idea how long you will continue to keep existing, so it is foolish to put off our most important task..." She glances back to him again, shooting him a deeper smile. "No matter how fun it is to stare at and to touch you."

She's never been one for ignoring the elephants.

Evan at this age is not the gormless young thing who had at once known and willfully not known what that string of interest suggested and entailed. He knows, and knows well, where Serene would like this to go, and had known for certain from the moment she'd touched his wrist like she had.

It gathers behind his sternum, that familiar buzz, but he is not swept away by it. There's a curiosity in him, a sharp inquisitiveness bent on her and her very clear intentions. "Oh, no," he tells her, voice low, "that is a set of instructions I'm going to have to think on for a time. The experience in question is a difficult one to put into words... and sometimes bad advice is worse than no advice."

He pushes himself upright again, from where he'd been leaning on the windowsill. "You'll forgive me if I let that percolate. I think it's time to attend to more immediate concerns." He approaches her, comes close, a little smile on his face. When he stops in front of her he cocks his head, teasing, "now, were there other things you wanted to ask me about eldering, or was there something else on your mind?" As he speaks, he reaches up to brush fingers feather-light over her curls.

She stills in her search for paper as he pauses her hunt for paper. She pinkens as he strokes her hair, looking down at him there. He's a changed man, that is as obvious as the nose on his face, and yet she had not been expecting him to so openly call her out on her wants.

"There is always much on my mind, no matter how I try to find stillness." She demurs even as she tilts her cheek into his touch. He is so different, almost a stranger to her... "But if you wish to find what is on the end of the thread you're pulling on, ahh... I am caught between wondering if I am taking advantage of the real you by being so open with you, the altered state, or wondering if you are taking advantage of my sweetness for the man you used to be."

Her eyes had sunk closed as she'd leaned into his touch but now they snap open again as she fixes him with a direct stare.

"For you would not be touching my hair if consorting with me was not on your mind." There's a glint of warning in her eyes against toying with her.

As she wonders over their mutual intentions, he feathers his fingers over her cheek as he had over her hair. She is so soft; but of course she is, beautiful thing, though there had been some metaphor-conscious part of him that had expected her to be as bright and hard and shimmering as her quality of character.

He tilts his head when she offers him that warning, unshy about meeting her gaze. "And you wouldn't have been touching me as you were if you didn't have the same thing on your mind. Or were you just not expecting me to pursue?" If there is warning in her, he echoes it; he had always wondered, a little, if his young self had been nothing more than an ego boost to a woman who could tell he was attracted to her.

Still, he lets his hand drop and tucks it back to his side, mild again in a moment. Should he be honest? Or should he tell her what she wants to hear?

In the end, it's solidarity to his younger self that informs his choice, and he levels with her. "However, it's likely that you're right in some sense. The young man that I was... he wouldn't climb into bed with a person for any reason short of being in love with them, or being on his way to that. You would be taking advantage of the fact that I am not that young man anymore... and in turn I'd be using your affection for that younger self to assuage my own curiosity about what it is that I had missed, having failed to take up your offer for something more casual so long ago.

"You weighed heavily on mind when I went home, Serene," he tells her, "I often wondered if I shouldn't have tried to decouple love and sex, just to see how we would have worked, or wondered what would have happened if I'd been here long enough... well. But in all likelihood I am only a figment, and so I have a unique opportunity to cheat fate, and very little to lose for the asking."

Edited 2016-09-10 12:26 (UTC)

In her heart of hearts, Serene still feels that her love died that day on the mountainside when Cinder was murdered. That had been a love that had grown over years, forming between two children who only had each other against the terrible world. She looks down for a moment as the part of her that has never let go of him quails at the thought of putting anyone in his place.

"...Love is a weighty word, but I still crave for affection and attraction." They are being honest here and that is as honest as she can be without souring her own mood. She looks up at him and shrugs, shooting him a half smile.

"I have spent the last year riding with the oryx, and though I had friends to sate my sexual urges, my flat faced appearance was off-putting. I am so tired of mere fucking with my faced turned down, no matter how clever their tongues and their thrusts."

There is only so far she herself can decouple as well. She steps in closer, raising her fingers to stroke his jaw as she murmurs. "May I kiss you?"

This Evan, old as he is, has been well versed in the language and look of loss, and in the devastating effects of love, though none of his have been lifetime-spanning romances. That equivocation that she does is so, so familiar to him and he feels a pang for one so young being subject to the need for it.

But instead of asking after her loss, or immediately answering her question, he reaches up and catches her hand. His eyes stay locked on hers, full of measured consideration, even as he tilts his head down to kiss her fingertips.

He pauses when he's done her index and middle fingers. The need for due diligence weighs on him, although the part of him that deeply and privately resents the fact that he's a creature of limited existence bucks at that need for responsibility.

"Hmmmm." He decides on a middle road, one she can brush off if she'd like. "Remember that, although he may someday become someone like me, I am not that boy you're thinking of. If this will too much change your view of him..." He lets that hang long enough to try for another press of lips, this to her ring fingertip. "Then I suppose you should stop me." He does not want her to stop him, he realizes.

Had he asked her that before he'd taken her hand she would have stepped back and considered more carefully, but now? She sighs as she stares back at him kissing her.

"Is it considered romantic to kiss another's wrist on earth? In Gallia, a kiss upon another's pulse point is considered the most ardent declaration of desire and respect."

That gives him pause, connecting it with another moment they'd shared, and he pulls back a bit to look up at her with the raised eyebrows of amusement. "So that's why you went for my wrist with the fire," he wonders aloud, so recently reminded of the moment in question. "That explains more than it doesn't."

He takes a moment to kiss the tip of her pinky finger, still smiling amusement, before he replies to the question proper. "Not with such passionate specificity, no, although hands and wrists are sensuous things. On Earth it's more... hmm, throat, ear, maybe the pulse point at the neck. Back of the wrist for a much drier gesture of affection." He's still holding her hand, and now he pulls it up to examine her wrist. He touches with fingers rather than lip, where he can see the subtle shift of skin behind which the radial artery pulses. "But for you... here?"

She pinkens as she protests, tucking her chin down. "I told you that you were teasing me unbearably with that fire game." But she's not embarrassed enough to fluster and his lips are soft on her smallest finger, so she stares and listens deeply to his explanation.

"Those are sensual places too." His brush is tugging at her attention; she's more starved for true gestures of longing than she'd realised. "But yes, that is the place beyond all others..."

He eschews words, then, as he's gotten the information he'd like and he can see the distraction growing in her. Now is the time for action, since she has not stopped him. He dips his head once more, holding her wrist firmly still, and presses his lips where a moment ago his fingers were. Perhaps in truth they're not indulging quite the level of affection that he suspects the gesture is intended to convey, but in that, they are in accord.

This, he decides, shall not be in the note he leaves for his younger self. He presses his lips for a long moment before he pulls away and releases her hand, eyes on her the whole time.

Her heart thumps loud within her ears when he presses his lips to that most delicate skin and the heat of kiss makes the small vessels underneath dilate. She's dark eyed by the time he pulls away, already reaching with her free hand to pull him by the collar to close the last distance between them.

But his lack of hesitation makes her hesitate, at the last moment redirecting her touch to instead stroke his hair.

"Evan... this isn't your room. I don't think I should lay on that bed until the man who sleeps there invites me." She's quiet and staring hard, wary that this might make his call off this closening before they go any further.

"Will you come downstairs to mine?"

He glances at the bed in question, huffs. "It's my bed for a few days at least."

But he relents the moment he's said it, aware he's let his privately held ire get the better of him. She's got a point, of course, although his feelings about humoring his younger self's squeamishness are complex. It's one thing to wax philosophical about that kid, and quite another to have to work around him. It feels uncomfortably like having a younger sibling: the twenty-year-old Evan whose social mire he's invading feels like a presence, intimately familiar and exasperating and frustrating, but in some odd way, beloved. He shakes his head, shaking the thought off, and steps away from Serene straight-backed.

"I think I recall where your room is, now that I've got my bearings. Let's go." He heads for the door without further prompting, shooting her a wry glance as he does to cover up his brief frustration. "Afraid he'll work out what he's been up to in his old age?"

She thinks she's blown it when he bridles at her ask, pulling her hand away.

"I am keeping your warnings in mind." He should not have given them if he had not wanted her to pay attention to them. "I will not do him the disservice of encroaching upon his private places until I am sure I can offer him something substantial."

She takes his arm again for the walk back down, subtly squeezing his bicep. She lowers her lashes at that definition, shooting him a smile. "But let us not think of your past for now. I like you, you clever flirt. You and I can sate ourselves together and find out if all this between us has ever been more than a mutual admiration."

Oh, to have his little warning thrown back at him. Although the sanctity of his younger self's space had not been what he'd had in mind when he'd made that warning, he can see how his professions that he is a different person than that Evan have led here. She's not wrong, and he ruthlessly wrestles down his spike of irritation as they close the door and carry on down the stairs once more.

The way she then chooses to flirt makes him chuckle, closed-mouth against the sharp quality of that amusement. He gives her a sidelong look. As far as he is concerned there is nothing here but mutual attraction. She does not know him enough for anything more, not as he is, and he has not known her for a century... but now that they're on their way he's not going to ruin the mood by offering such a blunt response to the flirt, whether or not his mood seems to find it appropriate.

His smile and his response, therefore, are indulgent to the illusion. "What an exciting opportunity for a dry run," he teases instead. "You shall have to give me a full review of your conclusions once we've reached completion. You may be gaining the upper hand on my younger self, but I intend to remain as informed as possible until the moment I cease to be."

"A review? You will know exactly how I feel whenever I am free to speak. I enjoy being free with my praise when I am with someone I like, so please do not hold back from doing the same."

She has them practically trotting down the stairs as soon as they hit the staircase, eager to get behind closed doors again. She's sure enough that he's not one for public displays of lust that she restricts herself to shooting him lingering glances through her eyelashes.

"Hmmm." He chuckles again, but then as they're trotting down at pace he silences to focus on the transit. No doubt their haste parses perfectly well to anyone who might glimpse them: certainly they're not running from any bugs, not with that look on her face, and Evan has a moment of wondering if he's going to spark off gossip that his younger self is going to have to deal with.

Well, no matter. It's either turn back or continue on, and the choice is an easy one. He practically feels the weight of her desire when she glances at him. They emerge back into the hallway to her room before he deigns to speak again, this time in a low tone. "If I recall correctly, you carry your own contraceptive, correct?" There is, after all, more due diligence to attend to.

She checks there's no one behind them and that no doors look to be opening before she pulls her hand out from his elbow and wraps her arm about his shoulder. He's the perfect size to tuck in under and against her and she nuzzles his hair as she murmurs.

"I do, but we not be doing anything that needs contraceptive intervention, not unless we go for a second round." She pulls her key out from her pocket and unlocks her door one-handed. "I like to get to know my partner's habits first."

She opens her door...

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EVENT ★ BACK TO THE FUTURE

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