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The Perk | Friday Morning

Lucy had had a strange day or so, yes -- but it had also been more than a little productive.

She was, apparently, over 250 years in the past, and in Maryland, and that was fine! That was totally fine. And it kind of was, too -- obviously, she (and the Ghoul) had gotten a little sidetracked from the whole hunting-down-Dad thing, and that wasn't great. But as far as places to get stuck...like, everyone here had been so kind, already? And the way they all knew she was new -- as someone who'd grown up in a very small, tight-knit community, it was...kind of really nice.

(Maybe a little suspicious. She'd still learned a lot, even if her first impulse was to allow herself to feel the warmth of that community spirit.)

In any case, Friday morning found her running a couple little errands -- she'd located the bank and changed her few caps over to even-fewer dollars, before taking another little walk around the island (and indulging in a little staring at the ocean, because that much water was still very new.) But, eventually, the idea of breakfast started to appeal even more than watching the water move.

It took a little doing, but the people behind the counter eventually helped her figure out she wanted just a plain coffee, and could add her own cream and sugar -- there were so many words on the menu in...Italian? -- and with her minimally-dressed coffee and an enormous cinnamon roll, Lucy settled down at a table, and turned her Pip-Boy to her radio to keep her company while she ate.

"-- don't [BEEP]-ing know, but they and their dog wandered into town and tried to figure out why everything wasn't terrible, ohhhh, so they're those kind of newbies! Fun! Welcome to the island, guys!"

And that was how Lucy learned that sometimes, the radio was about her.

...okey-dokey.

[open!]

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Lucy -- who, more due to no one trying before than anything else, had totally allowed Liliana to keep ahold of her hand -- made a little face. "I lost it a week or so back," she replied, stepping right around how she had lost it so she didn't hurt anyone's feelings or, moreover, shatter any mildly-uneasy alliances. "But the new one works pretty well, actually! See?"

She hooked the finger in question, demonstrating that it was just as dexterous as her other eight.

"I'm kinda impressed," she admitted to Liliana, in spite of herself. Even if it was gross and a little sad. She kind of missed her original finger, you know? It had been hers! She should have gotten to keep it, at least!

Edited 2024-05-10 15:00 (UTC)

"So am I, darling," Liliana admitted, brushing a truly chilly index finger down Lucy's dead one. "I truly loathe to admit it, but I couldn't possibly do as fine work, reattaching a finger in this state of decay and getting it to work so smoothly and cleanly. And you have full sensation? No nerve damage or tingling? Why, this is a marvel!"

Lucy may have wanted her old finger back - and, on grounds of vanity, Liliana could completely understand - but her current one was so much more interesting.

"It's a little less sensitive," Lucy replied honestly, "but yeah, it works fine otherwise!"

She'd shot the most important bullet of her life with that finger on the trigger the other day. No complaints about its functionality.

"A robot did it," she shared. "Are you a doctor?"

She did not dress like a doctor, but to be fair, no one here seemed to dress how Lucy was used to.

"Oh no, darling, not anymore," Liliana said. "And never a doctor proper, I was a cleric in a healing order as a girl. But no, my calling is distinctly on the opposite side, now." She looked up from Lucy's finger to her face as she - somewhat reluctantly - let go of her hand. "I'm a necromancer."

"Oh!" Lucy's face initially registered polite surprise, before giving way to a slightly-sheepish smile. "I...don't know what that is, I'm sorry."

But she was very curious!

"Wait, were you in the Brotherhood?" She was pretty sure they had a rank called Cleric, right? (Again, not helping with missing Maximus, at the moment.)

Liliana also did not look like she was in the Brotherhood, but -- you know. We were on day two, here. It was worth a shot.

"It's fine, darling, you don't strike me as coming from a plane with magic," Liliana said. "Err, have you gotten that whole spiel? Dimensional nexus, timeline convergence, all that? Or are we still at the point where you politely disbelieve everything you hear until someone shows you otherwise and you have to decide whether to cling to your skepticism or accept proof."

Don't worry, Lucy, it was a different journey for everybody.

"You used more words I don't know," Lucy answered after a half-beat, which probably confirmed what stage of Fandom Acceptance she was in. "I know I'm in the past, and I apparently teleported across the country?"

These facts were very relative, however, weren't they? Her past was everyone else's present, and her present was their distant future, and -- okay, making her brain hurt again, ouch.

"What do you mean by magic?"

"Well, what I mean by magic and what others mean differ slightly, but mine--" and therefore, the most important one to know, clearly "--means tapping into the energy produced by healthy lands and using it to cast a variety of spells," Liliana explained. "I'm a necromancer, so my magic focuses on death and the undead."

She gave Lucy a smile. "I would normally say that you were free to be skeptical about these claims, but I feel like already having experienced time travel and teleportation, you've already accepted that there are more things on heaven and Earth...? Or does your society have those things already?"

Like their most excellent healing techniques.

...so she meant actual fucking magic. The whys and hows and using the healthy land of it all didn't really matter -- Lucy's eyes (somehow) got wider on cast a variety of spells, and stayed there.

Okey. Dokey.

"We have -- you know, I'm kind of finding out on the fly about a lot of things my society, as a whole, has," Lucy said briskly, the way she cleared her throat perhaps a betrayal of how totally fine she was with receiving all this information. "But we don't have that."

A beat.

"Honestly, we don't even really have healthy land, so that might be part of it." Had they had fucking magic in the past? And they still used bombs?

Bombs were a more effective way of killing a vast number of people, as mass death spells were really expensive. Unless you were Urza, of course, in which case using magic to fuck the entire Multiverse was just one of those days that ended in -y for you.

Liliana opened her mouth to explain that there were substitutes for healthy land, at least if you were using black mana and then decided, you know, that wasn't information she needed getting spread around. Or that Lucy really needed, judging on that throat clearing.

"And that gets us back to that 'dimensional nexus' I mentioned. This place is a...central gathering point for various planes of existence and realities, a place where they converge. So you have someone like me, who is from a different plane of reality entirely, talking to someone like you, who is from Earth, but displaced completely in time. And many of your early conversations will go like this, as everyone attempts to situate one another in their understanding of the Multiverse."

Lucy's mouth opened, and then closed as her brow furrowed. She raised a finger, as though to make a point -- and then caught herself, again, frowning.

A long moment passed before she finally just slowly said, "Okey-dokey. So you're telling me when we came here, the Ghoul and I jumped...realities?"

That made a weird sort of sense, actually. It explained not only why they were so far in the past, but also why so far, this hadn't looked like the past she had been told about. Technology, even at a cursory glance, seemed a little off from what she understood to be possible in this time, and --

Well. Even in 2024, she was pretty sure no one had looked like Liliana. Except, maybe, on a movie set.

"Huh. And you're from -- not planet Earth at all?"

Huh.

"Almost certainly, darling," Liliana said. "I have found that even the people who are from Earth and this approximate date find things different than they are used to back home. I would suspect, given what I know about planar nexuses, it resides in its own special dimension, meant to keep it separate from everywhere and everywhen else that converges upon it."

Quandrix students would have a field day with Fandom. And possibly an emotional breakdown.

"And, no, I'm not from Earth. But nor am I an alien in a traditional sense. I'm not from some other planet within your universe, I'm from an entirely different plane of existence. Does that distinction make sense?"

"You aren't from, like, Mars, you're from somewhere that doesn't even exist here?" Lucy supplied, following along. "Holy moly."

She blew out a long breath, clearly trying to make peace with this new knowledge -- at least she was able to participate in this conversation, though! The last time someone had rocked her entire world off its axis like this, Lucy had kind of...shut down, for a little while.

Not this time. And, really, she couldn't ever let that happen again. That time she took for herself was the reason they didn't know where her dad was, still.

"Sorry. This is a lot," she admitted, having to actually let a little laugh spill out of her. "I'm -- it was already incredible that there's green trees here."

Outside! Aboveground! And grass!

"And that I teleported, and we're in the past, and...this is -- do you know how it happened? Any guesses?" She was suspecting it would be a no, probably. Kind of sounded like a 'wrong place, wrong time,' thing, more than anything else.

Edited 2024-05-10 18:42 (UTC)

"Precisely!" Liliana beamed at Lucy, that smile the teacher's pet gets from said proud teacher after answering a difficult question.

But, sadly, she wasn't able to answer Lucy's question in return. "I'm sorry, darling, but not at all. I Planeswalked here under my own power, I know several people who came her knowing there was a school present, though generally unaware of what else this island was like, and I know some people have gotten here accidentally. And then there are those who are able to come and go freely, and those who can leave the island and go anywhere but home, and there may be one or two who can't leave the island at all. If I may offer a bit of unsolicited advice, I'd suggest you get very used to just shrugging your shoulders and saying, 'Well, that sure happened,' in a very exhausted, slightly confused sigh."

"You 'Planeswalked,'" Lucy repeated, actually pointing a finger at Liliana in interest. (Slightly impolite, yes, but she was trying to learn, here, and this woman had been the most informative teacher she'd come across yet. "Does that mean you can do it on purpose?"

Jealous much, Lucy?

"Indeed," Liliana said, not minding the pointing at all. "I am what is creatively described as a Planeswalker." Her smile grew teasing. "You'll never guess how we coined that."

"Nothing wrong with a very practical, descriptive name," Lucy acknowledged, hailing from a vault full of such descriptors. "Let me guess -- that's a magic thing?"

A thought was forming, though. "If I showed you a picture, do you think you'd be able to tell me if you've seen someone in your...Planeswalking adventures?"

Maybe Dad had skipped dimensions? It seemed worth asking about, at least.

"A Magic thing indeed," Liliana said. "And I'll certainly take a look, though the odds are very slim. I haven't been off the island much here on Earth - though I have been off, so it's still possible. Show me."

"He would have been wearing a suit of power armor," Lucy added, helpfully, as she pulled out a faded photograph of an older, greying man and offered it to Liliana. "Probably real, real noticeable."

She was pretty sure her dad was well on his way to wherever the hell they'd been tracking him to, but it made sense to her, too, that he might have gotten sucked through whatever dimensional...rift, or hole, or whatever that she, the Ghoul, and Dogmeat had traveled through, as well.

Liliana barely had to look at the picture to know that she hadn't, though she was still looking it over very carefully. "I do not recognize the face," she said, inexplicably tense, "but what can you tell me of this power armor. Is it...part of him? A fusion of metal and flesh?"

"Oh, goodness, no." That sounded kind of horrifying. "No, it's a, um, large, mechanized suit that he can climb into and out of, powered with a fusion core. And, honestly, I don't know how good he is at using it."

That was one of her hopes as far as being able to track him down quickly. Did Dad even know how to drive that thing? (Apparently it was pretty easy to pick up, but still!)

But then she remembered that there was a lot she hadn't known and still didn't know about her father, and she reconsidered whether he might not actually know a whole lot about T-60 power armor, after all.

It was! Phyrexia was terrible!

Liliana breathed out a sigh of relief and returned the picture. "I'm sorry, darling. I have not seen him. Are you looking for him? Or hunting?"

Lucy took a moment -- ostensibly to place the photo in a pocket, but also to think about it. "The latter," she supplied, her expression hardening a little. "He kind of left in the middle of an important conversation."

And now he was probably on his way to a spot where it would be much harder to pin him down and follow up for some answers.

Ugh. Why didn't people ever make it easy to hunt them down. Liliana could relate - look at all the trouble she'd had to go through to hunt down Griselbrand!

It was honestly rudeness. Just pure rudeness.

"Ah," she said with a slight nod. "And you're looking to finish that up. The last time you saw him, what he in the same general..." She waved at them. "Area? The two of you came from?"

"Yep. And we were following him pretty well, I think, until we ended up here," Lucy supplied with a sigh. "But if he didn't come flying through here before us, honestly, that might be for the better. It just means we lost his trail."

But the Ghoul could just find it again. She believed in him (in this one specific way!)

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deathsmajesty - 2024-05-11 20:49 (UTC) - Expand

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