wildestlands | 001: GROUP INTRODUCTIONS

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001: GROUP INTRODUCTIONS

Okay, so everything's settled down a bit and people have stopped trickling in. Great. What a situation we're in, right? We can't even wander too far away or we're teleported right back to the group.

[She's definitely going to be testing those boundaries later.]

Anyhow, I'm willing to accept that this probably isn't a Rig mission now. Wherever we are, it's not the same world. The level of technology isn't too high either, but we know someone out there has a radio transmitter or else the big yellow guy wouldn't keep playing songs at us.

So, since we're stuck together for the foreseeable future, it's probably time we settle in and get to know one another. Names, skillsets, dreams, etc. You know, important things. Don't hold back, we're probably going to need to know each other pretty well if we're going to survive here.

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Yeah, magic seems to be weird here. Mine's pretty simple, but it's not doing all it should oughta - like someone turned the volume way down. You getting similar or something else?

No, that's pretty close. It's not as strong as it should be and it feels wrong. I should have an automatic, always-on tap of healing, not a single scratch should stick if I'm running hot. Now I have to think about it, and it still doesn't work as well.

[Saturday nods. The gesture causes her ragged dark hair to fall from her face, revealing pointed ears]

Sounds right. I've still got my sixth sense and some other stuff, but one of those fucking clicky clacky monster things [meaning the nightrenders. she does little crab pincer gestures with her hands, to illustrate.] fucking tagged me. Not like, hit me an' it mostly glanced off like it usually does. Fucker drew blood.

An' one of those goddamned masked bitches disarmed me. Neither of those things should have happened.

[ Pointed ears, huh. You know, she's already met a half-human half-alien clone, a cat kid, a shapeshifter of some kind, and seen even more, but she hadn't thought about other elves or elf-like people being around. Clearly different, the magic she describes makes that extra clear, but huh. ]

Ouch. Yeah, that doesn't sound like magic you want to be failing.

I haven't been able to keep my shield up more than maybe, 15 minutes, tops, since I got here. It just turns off and bam, I'm visible again. Half the time, I can't turn it on at all. Clearly something about this place just doesn't like magic from elsewhere.

[ She hasn't even really registered that her Gift of Tongues is simply gone. After all, she understands everyone, and they all understand her, so it must be working just fine. ]

You gotta wonder why. I mean, recruit all these people to do Chosen One shit, but hey, let's make sure all their shit's on the fritz just to make it a challenge.

[she cocks her head to one side, considering]

Or maybe it's to do with whatever we got dragged here to handle? Like they've fucked things to where our normal levels can't be sustained... doesn't explain the people whose magic's changed, though.

Could be a ward of some kind, on what people can and can't do. Put in place by something besides whatever dragged us here.

[ That wouldn't be a stretch to her. For thousands of years a single powerful spell forbade all fairy kind entering human dwellings without invitation or they'd lose their magic for doing so, after all. ]

Or maybe certain magic is incompatible, with whatever they have going on here? Ugh. Who knows. This is the kind of thinking I usually leave to Ar— a friend of mine.

[Saturday laughes]

Yeah, I feel that. My bestie Maggie is the mage in the crew. Real crackerjack wizkid. Except she didn't make it here.

Yeah, he didn't either. Though I don't know if this would all be better or worse if my friends had been caught up in it too.

[ She thinks, for a second, and then smirks. ]

Worse, maybe. I'm not sure how much complaining about not being able to wear Armani suits every day I could take.

[ Ah Artemis, such a strange child he is. ]

[Saturday serious considers her question]

Well, I've done the trans-dimensional tango with and without my crew, and I'd say with is better. Yeah, you're all in the shit, but at least you know where they are and vice-versa, and you don't have to as much of the team-building and personality managing. Or at least you gotta do it with known quantities.

Hm. That's a good point.

[ Artemis, Butler, Foaly, Mulch, even Juliet sometimes—they're familiar with each other's idiosyncrasies, by now. They work well together. Even if Fowl still lies like he breathes. ]

No, you're right. I ran a job right before I came here and even though we'd travelled through time, I still ended up working with the exact same crew, past and present versions alike.

What works, works.

[Saturday nods]

Yeah. There's generally enough wild shit without havin' to meet all new people, too.

[she looks rueful]

No offense meant.

[ Holly waves it off with a chuckle. ]

If I took offence that easily, I'd never have made it past the academy let alone made Captain.

[ She left her LEPrecon rank off her introduction, but simply doesn't think about that here. ]

[Oh, Academy? Hell. Time to figure out where she's from, and if she's police or military. Either could be trouble for Saturday, if she's from the Sixth World, too. And she talks like she might be - or at rate she's the first magic elf that talks like a modern person that Saturday's met since she left home.]

Academy? Which one? My best friend's dad, he was LoneStar; worked out Redmond way.

[ If she ever gets home and tells Foaly about all of this, he's going to want to try and figure out how to break the dimensional barrier himself to mindwipe these people of everything she's saying. She guarantees it.

But at the very least, she doesn't have much worry herself that anyone here is from home. Saturday's already mentioned terms that mean little to her and magic unlike home, so she thinks it's safe enough to be honest for now. So long as it's not too honest. ]

The one and only Lower Elements Police Academy. Nowhere near any Redmond.

[ Hundreds of miles underground, in fact. ]

Edited 2021-11-14 01:08 (UTC)

[Saturday's never heard of the place. So not someone on her growing list of people to avoid, so far.]

Shame. I thought you might be local, or close enough. You've never heard of Maria Mercurial, right?

Nope, doesn't ring a bell. And I'm guessing Opal Koboi isn't a name that means anything to you, either?

[ Call it triple confirmation. Basically everyone in the Lower Elements knows that pixie's name by now, considering how many times she's tried to end life as they know it. ]

Make me think 'a the Opal Kobolds, a neo-classical nippon glam duo that never really got the respect they deserved. Don't think that's who you mean, though.

[Saturday can relax, now.]

All right, guess we're not from the same place after all. 'S nice to meet another elf, though. Most people are from places where we're myths, or... really weird.

Yeah, it is nice actually. Back home the mud p— humans still think we are a myth. We encourage it, really. Feed into it every now and then.

[ There's some people who live near fairy mounds and respect them that have very good luck. ]

What's your bar there for 'really weird'?

Ah, yeah, we don't really do that. Be a bit hard to hide it, actually.

[she pauses for a moment to imagine the sheer harm certain parties could do if they had even more secrecy to operate it. Doesn't really bear thinking about.]

Really weird likew - this one guy, the elves he'd met were from space and really into blood sacrifice and slavery? And on the other end of the spectrum, sort of, you know, very fancy and magical and living in cotton candy castles somewhere.

If we didn't, we probably wouldn't be around for much longer. Unfortunately.

[ For all their technological advancements, leagues above anything humanity will have for decades at least, they have a population of less than 100k. Humanity wanted them gone, they'd be gone. ]

Wow. You know, that last one at least sounds like the kind of thing that comes up in human media from time to time [ human fantasy movies run rampant on the Lower Elements black market ] but space, blood sacrifice and slavery really is up there in the weird scale.

Poor guy almost had a heart attack when he saw my ears - apparently there aren't any elves who aren't weird psychos who want humans dead. He got over it, though.

[she nods, glad that Holly recognizes the general idea]

Yeah, like we're something outta Tolkien, or one of those trippy old two-dees that act like we're the same thing as the Fair Folk.

[ That, the idea of a world where it's the humans that have to worry about elves trying to kill them, almost makes Holly laugh. Talk about a reversal of her world. ]

That's definitely weird.

Yeah, exactly. Ha, we have a whole black market of human movies and genres like westerns? People smuggle them in because they enjoy them. Fantasy with any take on us? It's for pure mockery's sake.

'S weird to think of elves having to hide from humans, for me. I mean, I'm sure Tír na nÓg would like to, but you can't disappear half of Ireland from the other half. Not that they don't try. Corny bastards.

For us, elves were myths until about a century ago. We're on a kind of a cycle? Magic flows in an' out, like a tide, only it takes a long while so usually everyone forgets by the time the magic comes back. When it came back this time, and people started waking up as elves and orcs and trolls and the rest, people leaned in to some of that stuff, 'cause they didn't really know what else to make of things.

There were some people - it's a long story, but the shortest version is, wherever you've got scared people looking for a familiar narrative, you've got vile bastards making a power grab. So now you've got the Tirs, which lean into a lot of that shit as PR move basically, and then the, you know, three million or so of us who don't live in either Tir, don't want to, and really wish people'd stop fucking acting like we ought to.

[She runs a hand through her hair]

Sorry. Christ. I'm dumping. 'S just, back home I'da laughed in the face of anyone talking about a universal elven identity - the Tirs don't give a shit about a Redtown girl like me, I'm not part of their fucking vision - but it turns out in most places, being an elf is something special. For better or worse. It's just been a lot of culture shock.

Hey, I've had to listen to longer technical jargon talks than that.

[ Aka 'no worries'. She really has, too. Foaly and Artemis can really talk.

She does take a second to absorb all of that, because it really is all a far cry from her own world. The most familiar thing is the idea of Ireland as some sort of significant place, but it's more of a kinship with a history and a few revered locations than anything material. ]

I'll say. It's surreal to me that hiding isn't how it works everywhere, I'd say I was jealous but it seems more like you switch one lot of baggage out for another.

Magic's a constant, for me; just a facet of nature. And we were driven underground, is the thing. Every one of us, elves, pixies, sprites, centaurs, goblins... [ a vague gesture, there's 8 fairy families ] Humans drove us underground and took over the surface. It's been ten thousand years since.

We've got plenty of fairies who'll cause each other hell, but we're stuck underground together one way or another.

Huh. Well, I won't say that there aren't some people who responded real badly to vanilla human not being the only game in town anymore. Call themselves Humanitas, in my neck of the woods. But it's nothing very special, they're generally just as shitty about race an' once you whittle down to aryan and human you don't have the biggest pool to draw from.

Things were hairier back when the Awakening - the magic coming back - first kicked off. Lots of people getting worked up about the judgement of god, or mutations, or whatever. But people are mostly over it, these days. They have other reasons to hate each other.

[she listens carefully to the rest]

An' they just forgot about you? What about magic, did it go with you?

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