...And I walk away

        ❝ caleb… ❞ something about the name is enough to give pause. it’s right there             in the back of his mind but he can’t, for the life of him, figure out the              connection. ❝ pleasure t’meet you. ❞ a quick and firm shake marks their              acquaintanceship before he withdraws. 

         ❝ ah’ll be honest with you. ah can’t tell you honestly how long i’ve been on that              boat. feels like a lifetime, but ah… can only really clearly remember stuff               from about two months ago. everything before that– couldn’t tell ya. it’s like              it never happened. maybe that’s where ah got this ‘ tusk love ‘ idea from,               but ah couldn’t tell ya. ❞

“And you as well, I suppose,” he said, a grimaced smile on his face as he withdrew his hand. It was unpleasant, to say the least, to have to introduce himself as a stranger to a man he had grown so close to over the past few months of travel. It left something of a bitter taste in his mouth as an irrational part of the wizard wanted to shake the warlock in hopes of somehow jostling some sort of memory. 

@ofwidogasts || closed

*· ☆,.- Peter needed to drink away his sorrows, which was the only reason why he was up and sitting in a bar already at this early point of the day. The frown on his face was deeper than usual as the scavenger stared down at the drink in his hand. . 

“Hello,” the muttered eventually, when feeling like someone was maybe talking to him from the side. But maybe he was only imagining things. Could be both possible, after all. Arching an eyebrow, Peter slowly turned his head at the stranger. “Do I know you?” 

Caleb, though tempted as he may be to drink his issues away, was doing his best to abstain from drinking too much from his large cup of ale. Except, such an endeavor did not seem to be going so well, as the wizard found himself muttering under his breath to himself, catching the attention of the man situated nearby.

“i suppose so. but i never personally looked at it that way.”

melinda was trying to figure out what time she was in, what had happened. she obviously wasn’t in the same time or universe as she had been when she’d fallen asleep in her room at the manor. she’d picked up several history books, wanting to see if maybe this place didn’t know about magic. if maybe there was peace. 

she chewed on her lip a bit as she looked around the library for a table where she could work. most of them seemed to be full except a table with a lone person, surrounded by what seemed to be similar type books. “maybe you just don’t have the right book,” she offered. “sorry, all the other tables are full. do you mind if we share one?” 

“Ja, I figured that much on my own,” came his reply, a suffering sigh just barely being stifled as it threatened to fall from his mouth. Caleb idly went to grab from the pile of books he had yet to touch, grabbing the topmost few and bringing them closer, spreading them in front of him.

Looking around, as he wasn’t one to take the blind word of a stranger, he was surprised to find her words rang true. In the time he had been here, it seems as though the originally peaceful library had filled up with patrons, taking up almost every chair to be offered. And while he saw a handful of loose ones scattered about, he wasn’t so gluttonous to deny one of his own. “I suppose it is not a bother,” he told her, moving aside a book or two in a sad attempt to clear up space for the woman. 

She had thought about it a lot. When she first came to this land, she thought it was another curse brought on by someone in the UR. The only difference between this one and the one that cased her to end up in Chicago was that she was fully aware of who she was and she had all of her memories. “Yes,” she said. “It is very similar and it could be related. Except these people in this land are all from different realms that I have never come into contact with before. Its quite curious,” she explained. “I have memories of being Robin and Margot. Except my memories of Margot were all made up, basically. I was always Robin and always will be,” she said. She had never really explained this to anyone before. So, putting it into words was seeming much more complicated than she imagined. 

“So perhaps slightly beyond the scope of what you have witnessed,” he mused, nodding in an absent understanding, slowly trying to draw conclusions from the evidence offered up by the woman’s word. “Okay, alright.... And eh, when you were ‘Margot’ was there any time where you had an inkling of something that was not right? Dreams or a- a- a faint niggling in the back of your mind reminding you about your true life?” Because if that were the sense- if these curses were similar- then perhaps there would be a way to get his friends to at least see the light. Jester had seemed to show signs of recognition, but those could simply be a fluke- or intervention from the Traveler, if he was so inclined. 

Oliver enjoyed scanning the pages of a book every now and then, finding out new pieces of information or just finding a good story to read. It helped that libraries were also nice and quiet places to get work done. He’d often find himself going to the library to work if he knew that Connor was going to try and distract him from said work. 

This day happened to be like all others, looking for a table that he could sit down at. Finding a mostly empty one, he was about to ask the other if he could join him when the question was addressed to him. “Oh.. what kind of information are you in search of?” he asked, knowing that things could be difficult to find at times. 

He had not been expecting an answer to his lament, and yet, Caleb recieved one. Tensing, the man looked to the newcomer hovering nearby, hands falling to his lap as he got a good look at his new companion. 

“Nothing that does not seem to be fiction here.” Caleb responded vaguely, looking to the newcomer with a critical eye. The man looked fairly plain if he were to go by the people he had encountered already within this town, but that hardly meant anything in the face of inexperience. For all he knew of this world’s customs this man could be anyone from a powerful foe to a mindless schmuck. That being said, Caleb was not one to discount the man as of yet, nor was he ready to let down his guard.

Chaos - Does your character accept their lack of control over the world?

Ananke - Does your character believe in coincidence?

Jester listened, truly listened for a moment even if her face was buried within her sketchbook.  Flipping through the pages with a new revived ferver.  “Like this?” Jester questioned revealing a page of a sketch she did of herself that reminded her of herself but just as if she were crossed with a blue demon (a blue hellboy if you’d will.).. “I’ve always wanted to be blue.. it is my favorite color.” Jester added more as a thought to herself.   “But how come you know me, but I don’t remember you? I mean if we’ve met before, shouldn’t it be still in here?” Jester questioned tapping her forehead with the tip of her pencil.  “Is there a spell, maybe we can reach out to the magic shop in town… I don’t know if its real magic, but there are people in this town that can do magic.” Jester added trying to figure out a solution for the problem now inside her.

Bringing his gaze from where it had wondered back to his cat, Caleb was a small bit surprised to be presented with an accurate representation of how Jester’s true form looked like. He knew she could draw, but the fact that this woman could come up with such a thing under circumstances left him leaning towards the idea that memories were the core of this problem, not alter planes. “Uh, Ja, exactly like that.” 

He made a noncommittal noise at her inquiry, grimacing a bit. “There are magics that can... sway one’s mind to believe it’s experienced things it has not. To break the spell it could take...” His voice trailed off, mind falling back to his own experience with breaking such spells. He did not want to see Jester to go through his punishments. She was not deserving of such. “No, you say there’s a magic store? Perhaps they have someone there that is knowledgeable in abjuration. Or can point us in the right direction. Though, if I thought it would work, I would ask you to try dispelling the magic.”

“Well, I guess it’s led to believe that we live like the fairy tales. I learned that in my time in Hyperion Heights when I was known as Margot. We were living in Chicago and I wasn’t aware that I was actually Robin. So, once I became aware, it all made sense to me,” she said. “Oh that sounds interesting,” she thought about the lack of technology that the United Realms had compared to here. It was a lot for her, so she couldn’t imagine anything more than this. “Im not too familiar with technology. Again, I was when I was Margot, but we don’t really need it at home.”

“Yes, technology is something I’ve yet to become used to yet. I am unsure I will completely ever get used to it.” That is not to say, he hadnt found uses for some of the odd things, they were just not something he wanted to rely. Still getting back to her words, Caleb found himself returning the subject back to the aforementioned curse. “’As Margot’,’As Robin’, how do you keep your head straight with these two lives? Unless your memories faded when you regained others once this supposed curse broke? Pardon my curiosity, but your curse sounds an awful lot like the magics plaguing this land. Perhaps it is similar in nature?” This had been the first person to speak to him of magic in anyway in arriving in this world, and from what he could tell, the most knowledgeable in similar happenings. He was keen to know if she could direct him towards an answer.

“Well, you see,” she explained. “Curses can be broken in different ways where I come from. The last curse I was under was broken by true belief and true loves kiss. Not me, but the person which whom the curse was made for. The curses require a lot of dark magic, which all the realms have. It’s hard to explain,” she said. “But, what about you. Where do you come from?”

To say the least, her answer left him a bit flummoxed. He had been expecting to hear some sort of school of magic or divine power had led to their relief, so it took him a second when such an odd answer was presented to him. “Belief and a kiss? That sounds like something a friend would read in one of her romance books,” he commented. “Ah, right, me. There’s not much interesting about my origins really. I come from a small town within the Dwendalian Empire of Exandria. I suppose the largest difference between my home and here are the lack of other races. And the technology, of course.”

“Oh,” she said, surprised. Nobody has really asked her about her land or where she comes from before. Well, she’s never really met somebody who didn’t already know about it. “Well,” she said, “I was born in a place called the enchanted forest. Im now from a place called the United Realms. It has united everyone from the all the realms, like, the enchanted forest, Agrabah, Wonderland, Neverland, and so-on,” she explained. “But the part that made me assume terrible things is because I’ve actually been put under a couple curses. The most recent one sent me to a new land. Sort of like this one, except I wasn’t aware of who I actually was. I had a new life and a new identity,” she said, “So it’s a bit hard to trust people these days.”

“Interesting,” he idly responding, mulling over her words. He was still trying to get it through his head that there were a lot more worlds out there than he had originally thought. Still, one thing she said did catch his attention. “You say you had been cursed, making me think that these had been broken- or was it that this land negated that curse once you came here? A clashing of magics perhaps?”  

“Im Robin,” she smiled and extended her arm for him to shake. “And you are?” she questioned him. She often started conversations with strangers as she found everyone interesting. Being the journalist that she is, she liked to get to know people.

“I am Caleb. It’s a pleasure, Ms. Robin.” he responded, a tight smile stretching across his face as he took the offered hand with his own bandaged covered one. “I apologize if this is too forward, but I must admit, I’m curious about a land that makes one assume the other is out to get them. Tell me about it?”