milliways_bar | Leesha is bored and / has the day off, so you get / multi-pup haiku!

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Leesha is bored and / has the day off, so you get / multi-pup haiku!

Humanoid gerbil
Reading Blake and drinking chai:
A moment of bliss.

* * *

Osaka is out
By the lake shore, skipping stones.
(She's not very good.)

* * *

Tourism brochures
Surround the Guardian as he
Munches on his chips.

* * *

Grumpy oracle
Frowning at his crystal ball--
Something's not right here.

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"Fifty... oh, dear. Given that, he's probably lucky he made it back alive."

"And that's the other weird thing," says Dominic. "He didn't age a day in all that time."

Morwen has to consider that one for a bit before even trying to answer.
"While I can think of a few spells to that effect, most of them are so nasty that only wizards would bother to try them. One of them does involve a forced abduction of sorts, but the person on the receiving end isn't aware of the passage of time, so far as I remember."

"He thinks it might be alchemical in nature, because he worked in an alchemy lab for a while when he first arrived... if that's the case, then I for one would like to know what the hell he took."

"You and no small number of other people, I should think. Then again, if he wasn't aware of the matter, the exposure was probably accidental. Or it might have been something that happened here - this place is certainly odd enough to allow for the possibility."
Random abductions, random lack of aging... certainly, they're no worse than the random earthquakes were.
"Do you know if anyone else has disappeared?"

"I don't know yet. That's next on my list."

"If they have, it would be worth asking whether the other victims also stopped aging."
Which Dominic probably knows already, but Morwen still thinks it's worth noting.

"Exactly. God only knows why that would happen, but..."

"Quite. If this place weren't such a mix of people, I'd be tempted to chalk the whole matter up to wizards. The abduction part, at least, sounds like something the wizards in my world would do just because they could."

Dominic raises an eyebrow. "What, don't mages on your world have better things to do than kidnap people for shits and giggles?"

"Witches and magicians do, yes, as do most beings with innate magic. Wizards, though, are a rather unscrupulous lot - they siphon magic off anything and anyone in the area. They also have a tendency to stick their noses into politics, which usually means trying to rig leader-selection trials or kidnapping whoever's in charge. It's rather annoying, especially when they keep making moves against good friends of mine."
Morwen sighs. "And sadly, melting them only gets rid of them for a few days."

"That does sound unpleas--wait, melting them??"

"Yes, melting them. Water with soap suds and lemon juice does the trick - a friend of a friend discovered it quite by accident. Telemain's been trying to work out what he calls a less sloppy method since he found out about it, I think."

"...wizards in your world must be very different from wizards in mine," says Dominic. "Otherwise I'd have been melted every time Mom made me do the dishes as a kid."

"I've found the use of the term varies from one world to the next. And my world is, as far as I know, the only one where wizards melt."
Unless Telemain got to experimenting on other patrons of the bar and didn't tell her, but even he tends to have more common sense than that. (That and she told him as soon as she thought he'd absorb it not to melt people first and ask questions later.)

"I hope so. Otherwise, magic in general would be really unsanitary."

"One of them tried to put me between himself and the person with the bucket of water, once. It didn't work, but then, I keep a clean house anyway."
As clean as it can be with nine cats around, anyway.

"I guess if I had to choose between being melted and being soaking wet..."

"Being soaking wet is definitely the more pleasant alternative. Granted, the cats weren't particularly pleased when I got home, though I think that was more from the residual lemon smell."

"There are worse things to come home smelling like. Trust me."

"Oh, I'm well aware of that, and I suspect the cats are as well. Sometimes they just feel like complaining, though."

"I know what that's like," laughs Dominic. "Spark does his 'starving to death at the hands of my cruel master' act whenever I'm more than five minutes late feeding him."

"Most of mine gave up on that approach some time ago. I think they got the idea that it takes a while to prepare dinner for nine cats. They find other ways to keep themselves amused."
Fiddlesticks still tries the 'food? food for me?' approach pretty consistently, and sometimes Trouble does it just to live up to his name.

"Good God, you have nine cats? And they all talk? One is plenty for me..."

Morwen shrugs. "I like cats, and they're useful enough to be worth keeping around. You're not the only person who thinks I'm mad for it."
Telemain's thought so for years. Then again, the cats think she's mad for keeping him around. It balances.

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grumpyseer.livejournal.com - 2007-09-25 04:32 (UTC) - Expand

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