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A Fugue of the Continuous [Closed] - Printable Version

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A Fugue of the Continuous [Closed] - SolitareLee - 06-28-2017

[Image: qhlmxw7.png]
A Galway Girl AU



RE: A Fugue of the Continuous [Closed] - ambientmagic - 06-28-2017

Evan always rose with the sun. In this season, when the leaves were beginning to dry and fall and the wind whistled with just a little bite, sunrise came later and later every morning. Still, there were more than enough sunlight hours to do everything that must be done, especially when one didn't need to eat much.

Like he had done every day for for longer than any mortal had been alive, the first thing Evan did every morning was straighten his little one-room hut, sweeping the dust out and opening the windows to let the fresh air in. When everything indoors was settled, he went out to putter in his herb garden.

Sometimes as he worked he would chat to the rabbits and birds that preyed on his herbs, but otherwise weeks, even months would pass in silence as he fell into the rhythms of the forest. Little things would break up the flow of days--like today, for instance.

Something had gotten into his garden last night and eaten most of his favorite mint plant. It wasn't the usual suspect, a magpie he'd been feuding with for seasons. This culprit was something new. Evan decided that that would be his next project--to find whatever it had been and figure out how to chase it off. Over time he'd come to an understanding with most of the animals in his particular part of the forest, but there was always something else to argue with. With a sigh, he started out from his garden and followed the trail of broken leaves and astringent oils into the trees.


RE: A Fugue of the Continuous [Closed] - SolitareLee - 06-28-2017

It had been the end of summer when Bree finally broke. She had almost made it eighteen years.

She’d had a vague sort of plan that once she was eighteen, she could leave and go do... something. Somewhere. She had only the vaguest, most nebulous plans. Maybe she could go to college? Somewhere far, far away from Maine. But that summer after she’d “graduated,” it became clear that her great-grandparents had absolutely no intention of her leaving. When her desire to leave grew more and more evident, their desire to keep her safe grew more and more...

Well...

She’d seen enough movies to know where it was headed.

She made a break for it.

No money. No plan. She’d just run towards the setting sun, as far into the woods to the west of their farm as she could before nightfall swept her form away. Then she was forced to stay still, find shelter, lest she be eaten by a bear at worst, or face the next day nude at best. It had been the longest, scariest night of her life.

That had been... She didn’t know. Weeks? Months? Every day, she went west. She’d gotten lost in the woods for weeks, the first time, before finding her way out to civilization. At which point she’d seen her face on a missing person’s poster. The cops were looking for her. She didn’t have any money, anyway. She didn’t know how to interact with people, how to talk to them in a way that seemed normal.

Civilization held nothing for her.

She stuck to the forests, traveling ever west. She scavenged what she could and stole more. She’d probably fucked a lot of campers over to a pretty extreme degree. But no more than a passing bear would, she told herself. They should have been ready.

She had a system now, and the nights were always long and dark but she’d grown numb to the fear. She’d grown numb to most things, really. Her body, once the peak of physical perfection, muscular and powerful, had withered. She still had strength under her skin, but her skin, once healthy and glowing, had grown sallow with malnutrition, and her face, once full and soft, had grown haggard. Her hair was a nightmare that didn’t really bear thinking about.

Clothing was always an issue. Currently, she was clad in a pair of jeans that... barely still qualified, one leg torn off entirely and the other in tatters. Over it was a dress, or a tunic maybe... it was hard to tell what it had once been. Now it was a dirty grey-brown and in worn tatters. Over it she wore someone else’s flannel, oversized and filthy. She covered her ears, and kept the worst of sticks and dirt from her hair, with what had once been the red hoodie she’d escaped in, which was now little more than a misshapen bolt of cloth that she wore like a headscarf.

She had no idea where she was. She hadn’t come across hikers in weeks. She was out of food. Out of water. Out of everything. Her backpack was barren of anything she could use, just scraps of cloth and empty bottles.

It was a miracle she came across the little hut in the woods. She’d assumed it was abandoned, at first, until she realized that there were herbs growing around it, herbs that someone presumably planted. Maybe a long time ago? It didn’t matter. She recognized them. And a well, bless every god there might be, a well.

She had been in the middle of practically bathing in well water when she’d heard the footsteps. It was all she needed to scamper into the woods; she always ran from sounds of life.

But she stayed close, and came back that night to feast on herbs that tasted bitter but filled her aching stomach. She always ate as a dog. Less filled her up, and it carried over, sort of. She’d long since stopped questioning it, instead abusing the loophole of magic to make small rations stretch impossibly far.

It was daytime now, and she’d yanked her clothes, or what passed for them, back on, and climbed a tree along a path she could only assume was there for use by whoever lived in the mysterious cottage. She was waiting for whoever it was to leave again, so she could slake her desperate thirst with the well, fill all her bottles, and perhaps even break a window and steal anything edible she could find.

Once upon a time, she might have cringed at the thought of stealing from an innocent stranger, but she was far past that now. Survival was on her mind, and escape. She didn’t know when she could stop running, but she knew that if she kept going west, she’d eventually hit another ocean and be as far away from that fucking cage of a farm as it was possible to be.


RE: A Fugue of the Continuous [Closed] - ambientmagic - 06-30-2017

The trail didn't get far--just to the nearby spring--before it dissipated past Evan's tracking abilities. The only clue he had left was a paw print in the mud.

"A fox's, maybe," he mused to a nearby sparrow. "Or a dog's. Do they make dogs this small?" His voice was a bit hoarse from disuse, a light baritone rather than the tenor it once was.

Still, he continued musing, allegedly to the bird, just in case his small visitor was nearby. If it was a fox, his voice would scare it off. If it was a lost pet... Well, Evan liked dogs just fine. And the poor thing must be starving to subsist only on his mint plant.

It must be a lost puppy, Evan decided. Clearly it couldn't be a wild animal, because it couldn't hunt for shit and wasn't a particularly stealthy thief, either. Whistling, the man hopped the stream and set a couple of fishing traps. If he wanted a new pet, he'd have to keep it fed. Especially if he wanted any of his mint to come back.

As Evan repaired one of his old traps--when was the last time he'd had fish?--he mused over what else a dog (or maybe fox) in distress might need. It was getting a bit chilly in the evenings. Once the trap was repaired and set, he went out back to look at the old chicken coop.

By the time the shadows lengthened and it was too dark to bother with anything outdoors without a witchlight, Evan had done all he was going to do for his little visitor. A freshly caught fish, cleaned and boned, sat on the stump next to the chicken coop, which had been filled with newly gathered reeds. He'd tried to mitigate the effects the thief had had on his herbs, but even magic could only do so much to straighten broken stalks and mend bruised leaves.

With a sigh, Evan went to check the trees just outside his garden one last time. He spotted something odd under the branches of an old oak. The ground looked... churned, almost, like something large had been digging at it. It almost certainly hadn't looked like that this morning. He looked closer.

There, next to a large pile of crushed grass and foliage, was a bare human footprint.


RE: A Fugue of the Continuous [Closed] - SolitareLee - 06-30-2017

Bree was not a naturally stealthy person. A crash course in the woods had helped only a little. It was a miracle that the man didn't see her as he walked past, on a path that barely qualified as such, more of a deer trail really. She wasn't even breathing, too scared he woukd somehow hear her. She could tell from here he was a large sort of man, more in height than in breadth. But she was a very obviously lost woman, very, very far from civilization. She wasn't risking shit.

She waited until he was out of eyesight before she scurried down the tree like a squirrel and bolted back towards his cottage. She tried to be as quiet as possible, hands shaking as she brought the well bucket up time and time again, awkwardly pouring as much as she could into her worn plastic bottles. This wasn't even stealing. It was water in the ground. You couldn't steal water in the ground.

What she was going to do next was definitely going to be stealing, though.

She tried the windows first, gripping at the bottoms in case she could just pry them open. They were filthy with dirt; she couldn't even see through them. But they seemed to just be glass. And also locked. The front door also refused to open. Who lived alone in the woods and locked all their shit?! Fucking paranoid weirdo... She even climbed up the wall and tried the second story window, balancing precariously on the overhang of the window on the first floor. Also locked. The fuck.

Glancing desperately around, she apologized to no one in particular and picked up the largest rock she could from near the little stone wall that didn't quite surround his property so much as suggest vaguely at boundaries, in places. With a grunt of effort, she hefted it at the window, praying the crash wouldn't bring him immediately running back. She needed supplies.

It uuuuuuuuuuuh.

Uuuuuuuuuh.

It bounced off.

The rock. Bounced off the glass.

She stared at it, equal parts alarmed, confused, and an emotion she could only describe as 'welp.'

Bare ears perked up on top of her head. The sound of leaves crunching. She bolted, not waiting to see if it was just a raccoon or something. No risks for this girl, no thanks. She had already been cursed once. Something that lived alone in the woods with no other people around and had glass that repelled rocks was almost certainly trouble. With a capitol T.

However, as she lurked outside the boundaries to his domain, she realized that just water wasn't enough. She needed food. Desperately. And not just enough to stave off the constant dizzying pain... enough to get her out of this forest. That had been why she was going to break in. She had to figure out something that wasn't just eating his herbs, or she would be stuck here, and eventually starve to death. Or get caught. Both of which were really bad.

Before night fell, she found a safe sort of little hollow around the edges of his property. A nook in a tree, when dug out a bit more, gave her a good place to stash her bag. It wasn't big enough for her, too, not even in dog form, but it was really well hidden. She covered it back up partially with dirt, just to be safe, after she'd stripped nude in preparation for the setting of the sun.

She hid under a nearby bush until it was properly dark. She'd never stopped hating the dark, actually, she'd just grown numb to it. When fear was omnipresent, you just sort of... adjusted. But she was so near his place because she didn't trust herself not to get terribly lost alone at night, still.

It was a good thing she had hidden, too, because not long after true sunset, not long after she'd gone from girl to pup, the man happened by her little hiding place. Her heart stopped in her chest as he squatted by her tree. No. Nononono. But thank god, he didn't seem to notice the little hidey hole with all her belongings. She'd buried it well. He might have noticed the loose dirt, though... What a sharp eye... but surely he'd blame it on a wild animal? Plenty of things dug at tree roots.

She held her breath until he was gone, and then waited until all signs of life had been gone from his hut for a while before she risked scrambling back into his property. She was almost too scared to, but the ever present agony of hunger pushed her to things she would really rather not do.

She'd been ready to find something edible in his garden again when a scent caught her nose. Meat. She would recognize the smell of meat, cooked or raw, anywhere. Yes, he'd left something on top of a stump. Getting up to it was a bit of a challenge, small as she was, but she had quite a jump on her for a dog so small, and her parkour skills carried over... somewhat. She managed to get up a stump that for anything over six inches, would have been effortless.

There was a raw fish, already fileted and... possibly deboned. She would have to be cautious anyway. A pinbone at this size would be disastrous. This wasn't something that she could save, but at her size, it was a veritable feast, and she ate it as such despite the rawness. She was not in a position to be picky. She gorged herself; she felt very much like puking halfway through the second filet, but forced it to stay down. She would not lose this.

Afterwards, she set to exploring his property a bit more throughly under the cover of night. She found something more conveniently portable, and outside his house... potatoes. She recognized the leaves from back home... who knew growing up on a farm would ever have a use? She dug furiously and carelessly, probably damaging nearby plants in the process, until she managed to find those sweet, sweet tubers, which she grabbed, one by one, and dragged back to her tree, to hide when she had thumbs at dawn.

Potatoes safely stolen, she also took note of his very nice, seemingly abandoned chicken coop. It was clean... ish... and would do well for overnight shelter, especially since it was getting colder every night, and her dirty, somewhat matted fur was more for decoration then any practical use. She rested there for a bit after she had stolen his potatoes, but left it well before dawn, scared of the man rising before she had a chance to escape back into the woods.

As soon as dawn hit, she stuffed the potatoes into her bag. What had seemed like so much as a small dog was really not much at all... so much effort for so little, as always when she was five pounds. At least that much fish, digested in such a small body, would stave off starvation for another day.

She dressed quickly, then climbed back into a tree near the little footpath, this time at an angle where she could sort of see the house as well. If she could learn his pattern, perhaps she could find some way of breaking into his house to steal more than just a few potatoes.


RE: A Fugue of the Continuous [Closed] - ambientmagic - 07-02-2017

Evan stared at his garden, aghast. The puppy-person stole his potatoes. After he'd left them a nice meal and everything! He huffed, crossing his arms and glaring at his ruined root vegetables. He dug through the loam with his fingers, seeing if there were any left behind. No such luck, and most of his turnips were ruined as well.

He stood, strode into his house, and came back with a small hatchet with an odd reddish head. Evan strode around his herbs and vegetables, muttering in a language long dormant and striking a rock against the head of his axe at key points. After he'd made three circuits of the garden, he gave a sharp nod and put the rock in his pocket.

That would stop anyone from taking any vegetation without his consent. It was a variant on the ward around his house, but where that barrier was glass, this one was sparks.

Not bad enough to hurt the little thief, of course. It was the same hex he used in the spring to keep the crows out of his strawberries. But they would get a nasty shock the next time they tried that game. As an afterthought, Evan ran a finger over the stone in his pocket, concentrating on the house-hex. They'd tried to get into the house as well.

Evan contemplated what to do about his little thief as he tried to repair the new damage to his plants, filling in the holes where his potatoes had been and digging up the destroyed turnips for replanting. "This is how I live, you know!" he complained to the forest. "If I don't get enough from this garden I'll die. And then who will leave you nice fish fillets out of the goodness of their hearts?"


RE: A Fugue of the Continuous [Closed] - SolitareLee - 07-02-2017

Bree was close enough to see, but not hear, when the man came out in the morning and witnessed the damage she'd done to his garden. She felt a little bad; she wasn't normally around to witness the distress her thieving caused. She wished the potatoes were enough for her to get the whole way out of this forest, but she had no real idea how much farther it was.

She felt even worse after he brought out some sort of... axe? Maybe? Or stave? And did something really creepy and obviously witch-esque to the garden. Her stomach did terrified flips in her gut as she watched him circle around it, doing something with the ax and... she wasn't sure. She couldn't tell. But it was completely fucked. She was completely fucked.

I stole potatoes from a witch, she thought, running hands against her tangled hair. Wasn't getting cursed once enough for me?!

She should get out of there. She knew she should. She should absolutely not continue to steal from the obvious witch in the middle of the abandoned woods. But... if she did, just took the potatoes and ran... She doubted she'd make it out of the forest alive. All she knew to do was head west. Would she run into more campers? She was willing to bet there wouldn't be any for at least as long as it'd been since saw the last one. How long had that been? Ten days? Fourteen?

Oh god, I'm gonna die or get cursed or get eaten by a witch which is also dying, Bree panicked. But what else could she do? She had to just keep mixing it up. She had to stay... one step ahead of the witch. He'd gone down the path yesterday. He was clearly going to be dealing with his garden for a while. She should head down the path and see what he'd been doing. She was willing to bet she'd find where he got those fish... a fishing spot. A potential source of food, and she'd slowed him enough to risk it.

She scurried down from the tree and bolted down the path, trying to balance speed with relative quietness. She came to a creek... too small to be a river. She paused. It looked a bit small to fish in, but maybe if she crafted a spear or... wait. Wait wait wait. That was a line! Weighed down with a rock, yes, there in the mud.

Grinning at her own sharp eye, she gave it a pull, and sure enough, pulled up a simple wicker fish trap. Well, 'simple,' but she could never have crafted anything like this in a million years. She allowed herself a moment to pause and admire the craftsmanship. If she could do this, maybe she wouldn't be starving out here in the woods like an idiot.

But the important part was that it had fish! It took her at least ten minutes of fucking around with the trap to figure out how to open it without breaking it--there was stealing, and then there was just being a dick--and get out not one but two relatively small but furious fish, which she just threw wholesale into her bag to suffocate in peace. She didn't have anything to re-bait the trap with, nor any idea how to even do that, but she managed to close it back up and put it back into the water, facing what she hoped was the correct direction. She had the other trap most of the way onto land when she heard footsteps. She paused, listening. YES SHIT THAT WAS FOOTSTEPS. She rolled the trap haphazardly back into the water and bolted across the creek, jumping from rock to rock with agility that hadn't yet been drained from her battered body. She vanished into the woods on the other side.


RE: A Fugue of the Continuous [Closed] - ambientmagic - 07-07-2017

Evan stood in the middle of the brook, arms akimbo, glaring down at the bright, clear water. First his potatoes, and now the little thief was playing with his fish traps! It was empty even of bait, floating in the middle of the stream like a fallen branch.

“You know those fish were for you anyway!” he called into the trees. “I was going to clean them for you!” He hopped out of the stream and onto one of the rocks, gripping at it with his bare feet. He looked down to check his balance and stopped, thoughtful. The footprint he’d seen had been bare. “Do you have shoes?” he shouted. “I have an extra pair of shoes! They won’t fit without some adjustments so it would be nice if you would come say hello!”

Speech over, Evan strode to the edge of the brook--his legs were so long he only needed to use every other rock. When he made land and slipped his wet feet into his sandals, he stopped and swung back around. “By the way!” he called. “Don’t mess with my plants anymore--you won’t like what happens. I’ll leave you food and if you need anything else, ask for it!” Voice dropping back to a conversational tone, he added, “Back in my day, even enchanted mortals had manners.”

He scooped up a nearby rock which had a sunning garter snake on it and muttered to it all the way back to his hut. When he arrived, he put down the rock next to his garden and strode inside. If he was going to ward the rest of his things before dark and put together a meal for his little thief, he’d have to get started.


RE: A Fugue of the Continuous [Closed] - SolitareLee - 07-07-2017

She had just skipped past the treeline when she heard a voice call angrily after her. She increased speed before finding an appropriately high tree and throwing herself onto it, climbing up like a squirrel being chased by a dog.

A question echoed into the woods after her, making her pause on a branch, ear twitching.

Shoes?

It caught her attention, not because she needed shoes--though she did, desperately--but because it implied he'd got a look at her, or at least her feet. Wild animals didn't need shoes. He thought she was a human--knew she was a human, she corrected herself. She was. She was pretty sure. Probably. Mostly. Sometimes.

That was more interesting than the offer of shoes. Although she did need them. She was still wearing the sneakers she'd run away in, and they hadn't been designed for the hell she put them through. Turned out that most people wear their good boots when out camping, and she'd been unable to steal any. But the shoes thing was probably a trap. She'd stolen from him, what, like, three times now? If she was him, she'd be pissed off. And witches were notoriously unkind to those who'd wronged them. Which she had. Again, three times.

She waited until the yelling stopped, then crept down from her tree and snuck further away, trying her best not to leave a trail that could be followed. She settled a ways away from the creek, but close enough that she was sure she could find her way back quickly, then settled down to work on descaling and fileting the fish. She even started a little fire, something she'd gotten very adept at over the months, and cooked her awkwardly fileted catch--she was working with a swiss army knife--before wrapping it up in some large, flat leaves and putting it back in her bag to be eaten that evening.

She didn't know if he'd been lying or not, but either way, she'd rather have cooked fish than raw filets. Who left raw filets out for someone they thought was human? She was suspicious as heck.

Still, her bad feelings were accumulating. She just kept taking from him, and witch or not, it made her feel like shit. It was necessary, but that didn't mean she liked it. She eyed the second filet sourly. Why did she even take a second fish? She didn't have the salt to dry it, and it might not even still be good tomorrow night. She supposed she could eat it now, but if she just waited until after sunset, one fish would be enough to at least put off starvation. If she ate one at sunset and one just before sunrise, maybe she could keep them both down?

But if he actually was planning on leaving food out for her, too...

She wound up heading back to the witch's cabin well before dark, creeping back along the side of the path, worried of there being a trap on it for her. If there was, she never saw it. She left her pack half-buried in its little hollow, pocketing only one of the fish fillets she'd wrapped up.

She hid in a bush by the side of the witch's clearing, the edge of what she thought of as his domain, even though arguably, this entire section of forest probably was. There she crouched, watching, ears twitching underneath the red headscarf that covered them. It was more important now than ever, since there was a person around who might see her.

She saw movement in the cabin... he was inside, then? She crept closer, scurrying on all fours, low to the ground, until she was on the other side of a little section of stone wall that had yet to collapse. She glanced over the wall, eyes narrow. There was no food out yet... she might have to come back as a dog. But then he might definitely know what she was.

Either way, she knew she couldn't stay here. She'd have to hide in the woods again, and watch from a distance.