EP - tiny!Emcee

[i_am_your_host]

The door works in the strangest of ways.

So when a certain someone is holed up in his room, his younger self, his much, much younger self, enters the bar.

Small and pale and undernourished, the elfin ten-year-old boy (who could be mistaken for even younger than that) is dressed in secondhand school clothes from a distant era: knickerbockers and knee socks, a cardigan and cloth cap. He stares at his surroundings with large brown doe eyes.

Has he been here before? Perhaps in a dream? Why does it feel so familiar, when the door shouldn't have led here at all?

But this is a pub, and the little boy knows pubs. He goes up to the counter, peeking over it on tiptoes, to look for the barman. But there is none. How odd.

Even odder is the glass of milk and the plate of cookies that suddenly appear out of thin air.

This must be a dream.

Comments

[thewidewideworld]

"At least when the door is kind. Although it's easier now the tree is part of the bar. It's another path I can travel along. Not an easy one but-" He shrugs,

"What of you? What do you wish to do when you're grown?"

[i_am_your_host]

"The tree?" he asks quizzically.

And then he shrugs at Sinric's question, a delicate movement of his thin shoulders.

"I don't know. I...haven't really thought about it."

A formerly homeless child with no parents doesn't have much to aspire to. Or the hope to consider that there's more beyond finding the next meal and surviving the night.

[thewidewideworld]

"It's difficult to explain but as the bar is attached to the world by the doors, other worlds are connected by the branches of the world tree. I have- abilities that connect me to the tree. Once, in a moment of desperation I used the tree to reach this place and now the roots reach here as well."

He smiles fondly. "Learn everything people can teach you. Learn to watch and read them. That will give you a great advantage than you know."