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Entry tags:

taylor hebert; death

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Who Taylor and OTA
Where Solvunn, Primary Settlement
When Late October into November
What Taylor's just been yanked out of jail into fantasyland and she's pretty sure she's come just in time for their reenactment of Wickerman, so she's going the safety-in-knowledge route, investigating both in person and with sneaky bug scouts.
Warnings Taylor is always cw: bugs, cw spiders. The particularly buggy prompt is behind the click. Will edit as more things come up.

Arrival

Taylor only spends a single night in the small transient apartment above the tavern before the baker, who came in before dawn and found her asleep in the main room, offers her a room in his home. His daughter is her age, and there's a cot for her in the long loft at the top of his well-heated home.

She doesn't quite know what to feel about the generosity, but she accepts it with quiet, practical gratitude. Since being pulled from the pool, she's barely said a dozen words – the world around her feels muffled and dark, empty and disjointed. Trying to move through it with only her own senses is all she can manage to do. Still, she doesn't allow herself to idle. She helps the baker's daughter and twin sons with the work of cleaning, listening to her endless stream of sharing – Maira is perfectly eager to tell this newcomer everything she might want to know about Solvunn, about rigid Thorne and the filthy, lonely Free Cities. About the gods, and about upcoming Eifstide. She has just as many questions at first, and Taylor struggles to be present enough to answer, but then her father pulls her aside. After that, the questions are replaced by pitying looks, and Taylor finds them easier to ignore. Later, she tells herself.

Rowan March told her her powers would come back in a week. But for that week, she can scarcely tolerate being inside, especially in the low-ceiling spaces of the baker's home. She uses the excuse of her indisposition to leave every afternoon, walking to 'get her stamina back' as she looks for the others she's been told were also snatched from other worlds.

Recovery

The first morning she wakes up and can feel every ant in the hill behind the baker's wood-pile, every spider in the surrounding homes and woods and grass, the little hive of something swarmy and predatory walling themselves in for the winter under the eaves, she feels alive again. She's up before the baker for the first time, hurrying to do the chores she's taken on. Before Maira and her brothers are even up, Taylor is out, going to actually explore the settlement for the first time. In every detail.

A New Presence

Taylor settles in as the days grow tangibly cooler, darker. The first time she sends a swarm clone walking, it's a practical exercise – so many bugs here are sorts she's never encountered before, and Taylor has been investigating their capabilities. There's a kind of moth-thing that makes massive hives in the loose, dead-leaf soil of wooded copses, fluttery paper things with locust-like bodies. She takes control of an entire hive in one go, mounding them up onto each other into a fluttering, whispering mass the size of a grown man. Half flying, half clinging to each other, she directs them into a human shape.

Taylor herself is nowhere near the whispering, dense mannequin of bugs when she sends it 'walking' along the fringes of the settlement, at the far reach of her range. But the moth-things' senses are excellent, and she is watching and listening more to what it passes than what she does.

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Even wearing something much more in line with the general aesthetics of Solvunn than he might be inclined to were he back on the world he had been pulled from, Emet-Selch has something of a way of standing out. Some of this is no doubt due to the way he carries himself - even with his tendency to slouch slightly he still carries himself with a certain gravitas. One that might easily befit a ruler - or someone who is very very certain that there's relatively little that can cause him significant difficult, although there doesn't seem to be any sort of innate smugness to it either. Just a quiet sort of surety.

Of course, it could also be due to the dramatic streak of white in his otherwise brown hair, and the strange bauble set into the middle of his forehead, but one way or another he pauses at the sight of Taylor before making his way towards her.

"I don't believe I've seen you here before."

The tone of his voice is casual: it's an observation, rather than an accusation, and there's not the slightest trace of suspicion in it either, for all that he's not yet entirely aware that there have been new arrivals.

Taylor's still getting used to Solvunn's dress herself - Maira's dress swims on her a bit, and a shawl is not a coat. As someone who mostly wears a silk bodysuit and armor, she feels awkward in the loose layers, and looks it too. She's sitting outside the bakery when she's spotted, forcing her wildly curly hair back into a tight braid.

At least he doesn't startle her. She's already sick of that. She's become far too dependent on her swarm-sense to track those around her.

"Probably not." Taylor looks up, fingers still working. "Day before yesterday." Her eyes flick up to the bauble on his brow, just briefly. "Not a local either?"

For the time being, at least, it's not his intent to startle anyone. He certainly could, had he reason to. But it takes a certain amount of effort - effort that he sees no reason to bother with, at the moment. Not least of all for the fact that he can't imagine it will win him any favors in the attempt.

No, much easier to not and let that brief moment of graciousness serve as a way to ease his way into people's better graces.

"I am not." It's offered easily, with a brief incline of his head. "Although I hadn't been aware that other people were being brought in. My own arrival was... less recent."

He was certainly not among the first to arrive, certainly. But if people have been doing so again, that is certainly something to keep in mind. Especially since there is little denying that this cannot be laid at the feet of those in Thorne. Or certainly not entirely so, at the very least, given that he can hardly imagine she would be in Solvunn otherwise.

Martin is familiar with the majority of the children living in the Primary Settlement, now. He's not got a fantastic head for names but he's great at faces and by now he does tend to recognise them on sight and can at least make a sporting guess. And they usually laugh if he's wrong, so that's fine.

He doesn't know this small, curly girl at all, as she approaches him while he works, poorly, on weaving a new wreath for the library that he's sitting just outside of in the cool weather.

"Sorry- can I help you at all, miss?" He gives her a small smile with the sincere question.

Taylor's arrested mostly by his accent. That isn't local, is it? And neither is hers, pure Maine.

"No, still just getting my bearings. I just wanted to ask, what are you working on?"

His London accent is absolutely not local, and hers makes him blink in surprise, hands pausing in his methodical work.

"I'm-- sorry, but - are you new? Oh- no, I-I mean--" His tone isn't insulting, just baffled, and he turns pink.

She lets her smile stiffen slightly, lets the odd loss of being here show through.

"Ah... yeah. Three days now. How long for you?"

He just gives a soft hum, his pursed lips matching her energy but more so. "Two months, coming on three."

He shifts his grip so his wreath doesn't unwind and offers his hand. "I'm Martin, Martin Blackwood. There's something like fifty of us, who all came out that well, so at least you always know you're not alone."

But then he frowns. "But... h-how'd you get here so fast, anyway?"

She tilts her head towards the road that leads out of town as she shakes his hand. "Taylor Hebert. "Mister March gave me a ride in his carriage. Maybe two hours?

"You aren't the first person to sound surprised about me being brought here, specifically, though."

"Oh- oh, oh no that's-- bad, actually. Um--"

He puts his wreath down next to a small shrine, maybe four inches tall. "Most of us were brought to this place about-- nearly four months ago, um. I was in the second lot, but we were all summoned by High Mage Ambrose in Thorne, not-- not just anywhere."

She nods after a moment, processing. "So this sort of kidnapping was one guy, and now it's becoming more widespread."

"One very powerful guy and his apprentices, yeah. They could just-- turn off other people's magic, if they wanted to imprison them. Which, they did. A lot." He gives another small hum, and for a moment looks very stressed and tired.

But then he takes a small breath, and it's gone again. "So, yeah. Hearing other people can do it is... well. In a word - disheartening."

Taylor sits down beside him on the bench, pulling her slightly-too-long skirt so it doesn't trail in the dust.

"I got a bit of red carpet here - they gave me an apartment to stay in, but I've found somewhere else already. It's not prison-" That makes her smile, something inward-directed and secret and brief. "But people really have magic?"

"Oh, yeah, loads of people do. Some of them even have it from their own worlds." His tone implies a certain level of 'other' there. Not him, not his. "B-but people can learn it here, too. Solvunn tends to focus on, uh. I suppose pacts or bargains with the Old Gods? That's what all this is, actually," he adds, gesturing at the somber atmosphere. "Everyone preparing for Eifstide. It's like--"

He pauses, gives her a curious look. "Do you have Halloween on your world?"

She nods. "Yeah, we've got Halloween. I'm from Earth Bet, 2011. Brockton Bay," she adds, in case that means anything to him. More... smart phones and superheroes than this sort of thing."

"Oh good, that saves some time. Yes to smartphones, no to superheros, I can't say I know what Earth Bet means, unfortunately, but I'm from 2017." They can unpack the rest of it later. "You're going to find a lot of us are from different universes, but most of us have at least one other person from the same world. Maybe not the same time, but... well. Don't get your hopes up too high, I suppose," he adds wryly.

And looks back at his wreath so he can pick it up. "So! There's a lot of nuance I can go into, but essentially Solvunn celebrates a really old-school, quite formal All Hallow's Eve, sort of Eifstide."

"Julie - the woman who sent out the-" Spooky fingers stand in for the floating shimmering text she saw. "Told me some of that. My world's in contact with a few other Earths already, but like. In a two-way-street sort of way. I'm clinging to optimism about getting back home."

"Oh- yes, we can all do that now. It's really convenient, actually, now we can talk to each other more than once in a blue moon, o-or if we happen to stumble across each other in Horizon." He unknots his pause point and continues working as he talks. "But I'm not sure how much about this place I can tell you, really, we're all sort of learning on the fly."

Taylor leans back against the wall, crossing her arms across her chest.

"If they're going to be snatching people across worlds, they could at least give us a tutorial."

That gets a light chuckle out of Martin. "Wouldn't that have been lovely. No, uh. Only the people who were 'welcomed'-" and he lifts one hand to make air quotes "-got anything even remotely approaching a proper explanation. Anyone who started in prison, we had to learn it all second-hand."

She looks sidelong at him. "How was prison here?"

He hums non-committally. "Four to a room, old-fashioned stone cells with iron bars, one hour of exercise in the daylight. I was there for about a month, but a lot of people had started there, must've been like twenty or so."

"So, like an actual dungeon. Wow." The very idea makes her glad of her single cell in Boston, and the meager two days she had to spend in it.

Taylor chews the inside of her cheek. "Mister March mentioned Thorne, he wasn't very expansive on the topic. Just said I was lucky I wouldn't have to deal with them."

"Yep. Yeah. Well." He tugs his wreath a little too firmly, and something creaks under the strain. "If you think of Solvunn as sort of like the Shire, then Thorne's kind of like Hogwarts. Very structured, very learned kind of magic. Ambrose is if Dumbledore was an outright prick."

"The Shire reference I get, but who's Dumbledore?"

He blinks. "Huh. No Harry Potter for you, then. The series started, um. Early nineties, I think, off the top of my head. It's about magical boarding school, essentially, Dumbledore was the headmaster. Ambrose is the high wizard of Thorne Castle, or some-such. We didn't exactly get an audience with him, until he was dragging us all out for an execution."

That startles her, her hands gripping on her arms. "An execution? One of the- of us?"

"Yeah, um. Jonathan Sims, Head-- he'd tried to pull information out of Ambrose against his will. Successfully, actually, but--" He sucks in air through his teeth. "Ambrose did not like that. Accused him of treason and set him to be hanged. It was some bloody good timing that these..." He waves a hand vaguely, not sure how to describe them. "I dunno, magic strangers came out, froze time and made us all portals to escape."

She exhales, reflective. "Think he would have stopped with this Sims?"

That gets a tight sigh. "You know what? I really wish I could say yes. That's part of why we didn't stick around - Jon went with some of his friends to the Free Cities, I think they're in Libertas or something now, and I came here."

"To the set of Wickerman." She raises a brow at the wreath in his hands.

"They didn't tell me most of that. Just that there's some disaster on the table, the other countries are making it worse, and me being here is 'a gift from the gods.'"

Yes, there are air quotes.

"Which I don't know what to think about. I mean." She gestures to herself, gawky, ordinary-looking, and plain. "I have no idea if I'm meant to be useful in any way, or how?"

He looks down at the wreath as well, and gives it a bit of a grimace. "Yeah, well. It helps to look like you're a part of the whole community. They're very big on that. And it's not normally so... intense, they just take their traditions very seriously." Still, he's practically finished it, so he starts fixing it to tie off fully.

"The disaster is, there's this thing called the Singularity that's supposed to be the, like. Singular source of magic in the universe? Multiverse, even, and everyone's fighting over how to deal with it."

She frowns - They should have brought Tattle, not her. Or Accord. Or Eidolan. Any of the people with advantages in picking out what's true and what's important. Though her world would feel those lacks more than hers.

"Does your world have magic?" Her tone makes it plain what the real question is - does he believe in magic?

"Umm... yes? Kind of?" He makes a face about it, though. "I'm not sure anyone who practises would call it magic, but-- essentially? Yeah- yeah, it's basically magic." He gives a decivise little hum. "I'm not, though."

"Not mine. I'm- I keep trying to fit it all into what I know. My world has superheroes," she explains. "People with powers, like flight, or healing... or opening doors between dimensions."

"Oh-- s-so I suppose this is all a bit old hat for you, then." But his tone is mild, almost teasing. "Big scary world between worlds, just another Tuesday for our fearless hero."

She chuckles, shaking her head. "Pff. Not me. Run of the mill normie from a shit city. I'd be happy about being here, if only my dad had come along."

And she says it casually, but she lets the real distance show in her eyes, that not-yet-processed grief.

Martin doesn't miss the far-away look in her eye, but he's not going to point it out, either. He just... makes a note. For if she ever brings it up again.

"Well, it's nice to have another normal person on board," he says, with a cheerful little smile. "You wouldn't believe how many super magic warriors, or- or monster people there are. We've got to stick together, hm?"

She smiles crooked, nodding slightly, and offers a fist-bump. "To sticking together. Any monster people I ought to be watching out for?"

He gives a thoughtful hum. "No one currently, but I'd advise against attacking anyone who looks odd. I like to think I'm getting quite close with Himeka, and she looks like a dragon girl, apparently she's a very powerful magic user. Conjurer, I think she called it."

"... How much like a dragon?" she asks, sitting up a little straighter.

"Uhhm... horns and tail? She's quite pretty, actually." Which, he's not sure if it's damning with faint praise. "Her, uh... friend? Estinien, he's an elf, a really tall one."

Dragons and elves. She's not wrong about this place being Dark Hobbiton, is she? She sits with that for a moment, frowning at nothing.

"I'm guessing they're imports, like us? Maira said she'd never met anyone not human until we started arriving."

He hums affirmatively. "Yeah, um. We're not fully high fantasy here, it's predominantly human and anything else is very weird. Though Solvunn seems like it'll accept anyone as long as they make the effort to be, well. Normal about it."

Taylor nods, looking off towards the bakery. "Yeah. Darron spotted me at the tavern my very first night and offered me a place. It's nice people here."

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