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Ari is out on a nice walk. It's never cold enough for his tastes in Vancouver (why'd he have to pick the one city in Canada that hardly goes below zero?) but it's January, so it's at least pleasantly brisk. He outright refused Sally's offer of a coat. Her mothering instinct would be more appropriate if he hadn't grown up in a climate that shaded from "harsh Midwestern November" to "the Arctic Circle."
He reaches a nice little coffee shop he found near the harbor and decides to go in for one of those icy coffee slush drinks they have. He opens the door.
That is not the nice little coffee shop.
He looks through the glass of the window. That is the coffee shop. He looks through the door. That is not the coffee shop.
He shrugs and makes his way in, trusting in his knowledge of the Ways and his ability to turn most threats into gravel.
Inside the not-coffee shop is a bar. It's a nice bar. The floors are clean, the furnishings look fairly high-quality, there's a cool illusion of exploding stars out the window; he's willing to give this one a firm three stars on decor alone. He strides up to the counter and knocks to see if he can summon a bartender of some kind.
bitterchill
bitterchill
"Well- she didn't while she was raising me. She never really left me alone and unsupervised, the Nevernever is pretty dangerous. Maybe she visited them while I was sleeping and she could ward me properly, magically protecting a sleeping child from a distance is easier than doing it for one who's running around trying to punch trees."
powershines
"If she adopted them too wouldn't they be your brothers and sisters who you could visit too, even if they were a lot older? I mean, I don't know how this works except from books, I don't have any siblings, but I think usually when people have them they... meet."
bitterchill
"...I don't know. Maybe they were all killed in the vampire war. Maybe they broke the Laws. Maybe I'm a test run for Parenting Mode Belinda and she just kept them all locked in a tower until unceremoniously dropping them off in Eastern Europe when they turned seventeen, maybe she-" He freezes. "We don't know. I don't know."
bitterchill
"We, you, me. Don't know. We don't know what happened to them. Or, not what happened, why they didn't come back. She was a good mom, she helped me as much as she could, I would've come back, and they didn't. I don't know why none of them came, I don't know if it was- if it was them or- if it was- her."
He's crying now, into the sludgy dregs of his coffee drink. It looks like the amateur therapy he talked about may not quite have cleansed the depths of his psyche.
He's crying now, into the sludgy dregs of his coffee drink. It looks like the amateur therapy he talked about may not quite have cleansed the depths of his psyche.
powershines
Rapunzel sips her orange beverage, looking sympathetic but thoroughly out of her depth.
"If it was her...?"
bitterchill
He breathes in and out. "If she... did something. That made them not want to visit. Or... not able to visit. She was always so nice, but- like I said, she never had any reason not to be nice. And it... would have made sense, that if she was just in it for power, she wouldn't just. Let them go. Or let us go, I guess. There's... a lot you can do, to get power out of someone, if you don't need them anymore."
bitterchill
"Yeah."
He hisses in a sharp breath. "And if they're dead, then the magic in the teeth will last. It's- of course. Of course."
He hisses in a sharp breath. "And if they're dead, then the magic in the teeth will last. It's- of course. Of course."
powershines
"Oh, they don't get used up when they're - used? They're the sort of thing you'd want to, uh, preserve, if you were a bad faerie?"
bitterchill
"Well, they won't last forever, but if you leave the kid alive then the power all just drains away on their seventeenth birthday. When the child is full-grown, by the- the weird mystical standards of these things, that's it, no more magic of innocence to draw on. That's the cutoff point. She always said she'd paced herself so she'd use up my teeth before I passed it, that- lying, wicked grig."
powershines
"You seem awfully sure all of a sudden. Did a bunch of stuff just add up in retrospect?"
bitterchill
"Yeah. It's... there's no way it wasn't this, now I see it. She never lied, that's the thing, faeries can't lie, she just- , she'd never talk about a child from less than a few hundred years ago. She'd say they "died a long time ago," that was how she said it every time. And even with the teeth, she never- she never said something like "I've got a schedule that'll use them up in time," she made it into a little game, like "don't you think I can do enough magic in ten years to eat up one little tooth?" and "oh, I've got it all planned out, you'll see." I just... ugh. It just makes sense. Faeries aren't nice. She said it herself."
bitterchill
"It's not your fault." He thinks for a moment, sniffling slightly, then amends, "Well, it's kind of your fault, but not your fault she was- like that. And I'd... probably rather know than not. So. No need to apologize."
bitterchill
He gives a slightly watery smile. "Oh, yeah, I'm set up. My friends and I kill evil things, I live with one of them. She's rich and nice, it's all good."
bitterchill
"Oh, you know. Demons. Vampires, the ones that aren't just whiny little pissants. Particularly nasty faeries. The occasional warlock, that's someone who breaks the Laws. That general sort."
bitterchill
"Ah. No evil plants, I suppose. Well, my world has a number of things that are really quite sincerely evil, and don't come in any other flavors, and for the most part we kill those. Sometimes we kill things that are only incidentally evil, but we try to make very sure that they are. Sally'd be awfully upset if we accidentally killed someone we didn't have to."
powershines
"Well, yes, you shouldn't go around killing people if they don't really, really need it. What do the evil things do? I guess you explained warlocks, but the others."
bitterchill
"Weeeeell, let's see. Demons are these things that you can summon to ask questions or have them do things for you. All well and good, but they're also very, very mean. So people will have them do things like kill their enemies, which is where we come in; I punch the demon until it dies, Sally tracks it back to the summoner, Peter has his ghosts scare the pants off him and we induce him to change his ways. Vampires actually come in three sorts, but the relevant ones are horrible monsters who drink people's blood and keep a lot of human slaves. Usually fatal, always nasty. We kill them. And, what else... Faeries, we've covered. There's a lot of other things. Most of them eat people. That's usually why we kill them."