milliways_bar | OOM and EP: Max Caulfield

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oom

OOM and EP: Max Caulfield

(OOM: (Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.)

Breaking the early morning quiet of the bar, Max Caulfield stumbled backwards through the door, the impact sending the door swinging open to bounce off the wall behind it. Beyond its frame is a trashed dorm room, clothes and books strewn across the floor and with angry red graffiti scrawled across a photo collage wall over a twin bed.

With shaking hands, Max grabbed the door and shut it firmly, leaning against its solidity to brace against the dizziness that threatens to overwhelm her and trying like mad to regulate her shallow, frantic breaths into something that will calm her racing heart.

[oom content warnings include bullying, depression, reference to potential sexual assault, terroristic threatening]

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"Tea is... probably the best option." Max generally shies away from drinking plain water or coffee on an empty stomach.

She glances up - the eye contact is brief, but it's there. "I-it's good to meet you, Kim. I'm Max. Max Caulfield. Thanks for, um, your help."

"It's nice to meet you too, Max." Kim waves to the nearest waitrat. In response to its inquisitive squeak, she says, "Let's have a pot of tea and a plate of scones on the side. Max, does anything else sound good to you?"

Max smiles slightly at the waitrat - they're always so friendly.

"I think tea and scones will be plenty. I'm... supposed to meet a friend at the diner for breakfast in half an hour or so."

It'll be the first Two Whales' (locally) famous Belgian Waffle she will have had in five years. Max doesn't want to be too full to fully appreciate it.

"Does time pass for you on the other side of the door while you're here?" she asks. The rat scurries off in the direction of the kitchen. "If so, we'll make sure to get you back for that."

"Thankfully, time is frozen on the other side of the door when I'm here," Max replies, assured. She has tested it thoroughly. "I can't say I know how it works, but I'm glad it does."

"Can I ask what kind of doctor you are?" She can read some of the text in the books upside-down, even if she doesn't know what much of the medical terminology means.

"Of course. I'm a family medicine doctor," Kim tells her, smiling. "I have a practice in Glastonbury, in England."

The journals scattered into a haphazard couple of piles look to be reporting on practice advances in primary care, for the most part, but there are also a few that Kim's carefully curated into a group that all look to be discussing something called 'acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.'

"If I had to guess, I'd say you were a student of some kind?"

Edited 2024-03-19 20:00 (UTC)

Max is vaguely realizing she has never seen it written out like that when Kim's question makes her smile and duck her head a little.

"Is it that obvious?" she replies, wry. Though she admits to herself, with a lurch of her still unsettled nerves, that Kim may have glimpsed her trashed dorm room through the door earlier. "I'm a photography student at Blackwell Academy, in Arcadia Bay, Oregon."

"More of a guess, but I'm a pretty good guesser sometimes," Kim laughs. She should be, given her seer's vision, even when she's not consciously trying to see into someone. "Mostly your age and that you don't dress like someone from - let's call it an older world, how's that?"

A pang of wistfulness for Fionavar, first and fairest, runs through her. She suspects one always will.

"Oregon! I know a few Americans, but I don't think I've met anyone from Oregon before."

Max smiles, glancing up from the table. "I've met a few folks here from what you could call 'older' worlds. It's kind of a fun challenge explaining what photography is."

Showing them is even better, though means she has to go through the sharp anxiety spike that always accompanies showing anyone her photographs.

"You're the first English person I've met, too." She thinks so, anyway. "Can I ask... when you're from? It's 2013 on the other side of the door, for me."

"I can well imagine. That kind of cultural collision can be confusing for everyone involved." The certainty in her words is the kind that comes from knowing.

"It's nineteen-ninety for me. I'm not actually English though, sorry," Kim adds. "I'm Canadian. Just relocated."

"Ah! Sorry," she replies, stilling her hands from the urge to fidget. "I shouldn't have assumed."

Max has met Canadians before, but Canada is a big place.

"Nineteen-ninety, though," there's a definite glance towards the medical journal again, "that's five years before I was born. Super close in the grand scheme of things, but it still feels like another era."

"In a way I suppose it is, when you think about it." Catching that glance, Kim turns the journal so she can see it more clearly.

"It's a writeup of a conference that happened a few months ago in Montreal. Don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to tell me the future. It's already pretty clear that we're going to be dealing with this for a while. But at least there's a medication for it now, and hopefully there'll be more soon."

Max nods, glancing at Kim, though it's unclear if it is in agreement with that hope or agreeing that there will be more medications for it. "I... it's not like I've made any study on it, but I've heard a little about it in the early nineties from my mom. She's a nurse."

She remembers hearing that it was the number one cause of death for adults between the ages of 25 and 40 for a few years there.

"Scary stuff, in any case. It would be overwhelming to... to be faced with something new and dangerous and unknown, and to try and figure out how it works and how it could possibly be stopped, with lives on the line." Her voice wavers a little, but doesn't crack. She pushes away memories of the feeling of electricity in the air, and the giant storm bearing down on her tiny town.

"It is." Her seemingly-simple observation carries a hint of deeper resonance. "That kind of weight is a burden to bear."

She is ever and always the Seer of Brennin, even though it has been years since setting foot in Fionavar, even though she never expects to return. Even so.

There's compassion in the clear-eyed look Kim gives the young woman. "It seems like you know something about that."

Max, who has avoided most eye contact so far, looks at Kim and catches that gaze. Only a little like a deer in the headlights.

"There's just... a lot going on. High school drama is a lot at the best of times, and it's... really not been the best of times," she admits. "Things were actually pretty weird even before the interdimensional bar started showing up."

"Do you want to tell me about it?" She asks it without even a hint of judgement.

Max grimaces faintly, wry but unhappy. "See, there's the problem. If I start, where do I stop?"

She can remember Wei Wuxian chastising her for not telling him everything when she tried telling it all in little pieces, trying to gauge his reaction. When she was still not sure of her own sanity.

"Um...okay." Max turns to face Kim, setting her hands flat on the table. "I know this is Milliways, so what might be unbelievable under normal circumstances can... sound not as crazy as it might otherwise."

"So... the guy who trashed my room and left threatening messages across my dorm room wall is... targeting me because I busted him with a gun in the girls restroom yesterday and told the principal. I had seen him... threaten my friend Chloe with it because she was threatening to tell his parents how he'd drugged her drink one night recently."

It's still so scary to think about. A reason to be glad of Chloe's built-up resistance to narcotics, maybe, but not something Kate would've had the benefit of, in the same situation.

"Chloe was able to get away from Nathan in the bathroom because I set off the fire alarm and distracted him. If... if I hadn't, he would have shot her."

Nothing crazy or unbelievable so far. But Max takes a breath.

"I know he would have shot her, because I saw him do it."

Kim listens carefully, her lips tightening as Max describes a series of events that quickly move from bullying into harassment and worse - but as the younger woman admits what she's seen, she draws a quick sharp breath.

"You're a seer?" But no, that doesn't feel quite right somehow. Kim stares at her, searching her face, trying to discern clearly. "No," she breathes. "Or not the same as me, anyway."

"S-same as you?" Max echoes, eyebrows raising. She may never get used to the idea that powers are just a thing some people might have. "N... No, I don't think I'm a seer."

Though there is absolutely something that is making her unsure on that point.

"I was... in the bathroom to try and calm down from something I'd seen in Mr. Jefferson's class. I thought it was a dream at first, even though I would never fall asleep in his class - he's my favorite teacher."

No no, stay on topic, Caulfield, however distracting Mr. Jefferson can be.

"Nathan came in, then Chloe, and they started arguing. I was... hiding behind the stalls. He... shot her, and I- freaked out and stuck out my hand like I could catch her or something, and suddenly I was back in the last part of Mr. Jefferson's class, ten minutes earlier."

"I was freaking out, still, but this... second time through, I was able to set off the fire alarm and Chloe got away."

Edited 2024-04-10 16:32 (UTC)

"So not just to see, or else seeing is secondary to the gift," she murmurs. "But to act, as well."

Unconsciously, her hand tightens, her thumb running over the place where the Baelrath had once ridden her finger.

"Not an easy gift, no." Kim shakes her head and forces herself to focus on the practical. "Waking dreams only? Or do you dream while sleeping, too?"

"Just normal dreams while sleeping," she replies with a shake of her head. "Usually. I can... do the time reversal thing at-will, now I've figured out how. Not just in a moment of panic. The... thing I thought I saw in Mr Jefferson's class, though, that I thought at first was a dream... I've seen it again since then."

The memory is there whenever she closes her eyes. The storm dwarfing the tiny coastal town, raging winds scouring, giant drops of rain stinging where they hit her, the nerve-jangling electricity in the air.

"'Seeing' is the wrong word, though, I think. I didn't see the storm, I was there. I was then. It was real. It... will be real." Tenses are hard, with time travel. "A tornado is going to destroy much of Arcadia Bay, this Friday."

Unless she can do something to change it, and save the town. Like she did for Chloe.

A tornado--

It has always been the ability given to a seer to not only look between the loops and whorls of time on the Weaver's loom, but to see past the words spoken to the meaning behind them. Kim's clear gray eyes widen, the look in them growing distant as the vision engulfs her.

"And not just to act, either." There is an unusual resonance to her soft words now, almost a vibration shimmering at the edges as she speaks. "To change."

(--a flicker of memory, the beloved prince riding down to battle, Diarmuid dan Ailell whose bright and shining spirit refused to accept the doom laid upon Arthur Pendragon--)

"You stand at the center of it, Max Caulfield. The storm bears down from across the waters, lightning and thunder and wind. Alone at the lighthouse--"

(--it is fixed, is destroyed, signals, stands and falls at once as the town is obliterated or hidden from sight, its fate unclear--)

"--or with your blue-haired Chloe, it changes and changes and changes over and over again, but you are the center and your choices will set a path in the end."

Edited 2024-04-12 15:51 (UTC)

Kim's look and words hit home, and Max shudders, looking away. She feels small. Smaller than usual. Caught in the whirling vortex.

When you get so close to something that big, it's hard to see anything at all.

"I-I don't know how to stop a storm. Even... Even if it's not a natural storm. Oregon doesn't get tornadoes, and I imagine normal tornadoes don't usually send out a five day warning."

To a random photography student with anxiety issues.

"I can... only think it has to be connected to what's going on at Blackwell, but I don't know how it could be."

Edited 2024-04-12 16:30 (UTC)

"And it's not as though you're likely to be able to call on Liranan," Kim murmurs, a wry twist to her mouth. "Or that he'd answer if you did."

Paul had paid the highest price for the first calling, after all, and what happened at the Anor Lisen had been a gift from the god, not compelled.

"I think you'd be wise to trust what your intuition is telling you."

Her intuition tells her that the storm is not natural. That it is connected to the weird freak snowfall yesterday afternoon. But how does even unnatural meteorology connect to Kate and Nathan and David Madsen? And Chloe? And presumably Rachel too, though they have no idea what happened to her.

"Einstein and Hawking have been helpful, in learning how to even think about time travel, but not much beyond the hypothetical," she admits, glancing at Kim, caught by curiosity at her remark.

"Who's Liranan?"

Edited 2024-04-21 02:00 (UTC)

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