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Jamie is . . . getting twitchy.

Beyond that door somewhere is his Home. It's close. He knows it. But he needs Joris to get there, and Joris - and Helen - aren't ready to leave yet.

And Jamie isn't ready to tell them about his hopes of getting Home soon.

So there they are.

In an attempt to stave off twitchiness, Jamie's doing his best to fill his time with as many activities as possible. Today it's toasting marshmallows in the fireplace. It's fun to see the rats make faces as the goo drips!

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"Probably," he says, making his way over. "I don't really remember what the display was for," given that he was pretty busy getting knocked out and falling on a bunch of rubber balls, "but it's not like there's a lot of other uses for it."

Wary: "Right, but you don't mean someone stamped it on your head on purpose?"

Jamie would not put it past the rats to have turned to eating humans! It's the other way round in some places, after all.

"Nah. It was kinda an accident."

Not that someone stamped it on his head by accident. That would be just weird.

Jamie relaxes rather.

"It sounds like there must be a story there," he says, grinning now. "Not that you're obliged to tell it, of course."

Homeward Bounder etiquette: you don't push people to tell about their past! Even if it is clearly Wacky.

"I think I'd kinda stumbled into a domestic robbery."

>>

Jamie's eyebrows go up, and he leans back.

To the air, he remarks: "Tricky things, those robberies. You can find yourself in the middle of one awfully easily."

Especially if you happen to be hungry . . . or in need of cash . . .

Shrug.

He doesn't really go looking for them, exactly, but he's not a fan of force or threat of force in thievery. Pickpocketing is so much better.

"Yeah, well."

Edited 2008-09-24 00:48 (UTC)

Jamie is all in favor of the pickpocketing. Also of the avoiding violence. He is not exactly the Hulk, here.

Bart doesn't seem to want to talk about it anyways, so: "Marshmallow?" Jamie offers instead, in a friendly fashion.

He thought Jamie would never ask.

"Yeah, thanks."

Beat.

"You sure the waitrats don't mind you roasting marshmallows here?"

Cause if the answer is 'no', Bart is so doing it on his own sometime.

"The rules don't say anything about it," Jamie points out, with great serenity.

"There's nothing in the rules about anything really other than violence and running about starkers. So however the rats feel about it, there's not much they can say one way or the other."

He likes how you think, kid.

"Can't argue with that."

It's LOGIC.

Jamie grins - he has experience with loopholes, oh yes - and passes Bart a stick and the plate of marshmallows.

"I'm not doing anything that'd get me in trouble with the Security around here," he says with a laugh. "Have you met any of them? The one I know best, she's very sweet and fully able to bite your head off at a moment's notice. No thanks."

"Yeah, one of my friends is on Security. He's a stick-in-the-mud."

He accepts the stick and marshmallows with glee and proceeds to toast one.

"Which one's the one you know?

"Her name's Elda. She's a griffin - you know, part-bird, part-lion. I haven't seen her in a bit, though," he says, thoughtfully. "I'd like to before I move on next. She's nice. Who's the one that you know?"

"Clark. Tall, disturbing tendency to wear plaid. You'll know him when he starts lecturing you."

What.

Clearly Clark lectures everyone, not just Bart.

Right?

. . . and clearly the lecturing has triggered a memory, because Jamie brightens.

"You know what, I think I did meet him. Dark-haired fellow, idealistic in that bright-eyed and chipper way?"

"If," he says cheerfully, as he turns his marshmallow over for the best toasted marshmallow-ness, "he automatically started worrying about you like a mother hen, regardless of whether or not you needed it, than that was probably him."

"That," says Jamie, grinning as he picks the next marshmallow off his own stick, "would be the one."

In other words: easy mark!

"And how d'you know the mother hen, then? He decided you were a poor soul in need of aid?"

"Something like that. He's from the same world as me, and, uh, I kinda stole his dad's wallet."

Mmmm. He has achieved marshmallow perfection!

"After I saved him from being run over by a truck," he adds, just in case.

"Sounds like a fair trade to me," says an unperturbed Jamie.

He pops the marshmallow in his mouth, and then commences licking his fingers as he adds, "Though I reckon he wouldn't see it that way."

"Yeah."

People can be so blind to the small mercies of life. ._.

Change of subject time!

"So where're you from?"

He will, in fact, accept lying, as long as it is interesting lying.

Jamie names a city in England that no one has ever heard of because it does not, in fact, exist outside his own world, and then adds, "But you won't have heard of it. It's in England, on my world, for the record. I haven't been back there in ages anyways, though. These days, I am -" he places a sugar-covered hand over his heart and looks nobly upward - "a lonely wanderer."

Ah-hah.

Bart is Moved.

"Yeah? Where you wandering through?"

People like Clark often are, which is the important thing.

"Worlds," Jamie says easily.

"World boundaries, to be exact - the bits where you get from one to another."

In this case, the truth is indeed stranger than fiction!

Huh.

Now he is impressed.

"How's that happen?"

Assuming, that is, that Jamie is not just making 'I wander through other people's Doors' sound cool.