fluxscape | Out Here Alone [OTA]

Who: Adam Parrish and you!
What: Daily life
When: Dec 9th/10th
Where: Various places around Wechester
Warnings: Dated views on being gay

a. I'm sending a raven

Working was a good way to distract himself from things. In this case, he had a lot on his plate, even if it'd been over a week. There was always something to be done at the hardware store, and he was busy stocking shelves right now, moving merchandise from boxes to shelves. It was almost enough to make him forget about what had happened the previous month all together. Almost.

Pushing his emotions down and putting on his best customer service smile when he heard footsteps approaching, he offered a friendly, "Hello, can I help you find anything?" before actually looking over to see who was there.

b. Black bird in the sky

He'd just gotten off shift at work at the hardware store and was going to run some miscellaneous errands when he caught sight of one of the new posters. It had to be new because he didn't remember seeing one before and he was pretty sure Wechester didn't have a ski resort. Stopping to study the poster, he squinted at the poster, reading it carefully, and did a double-take when he reached the blurred out portion of it. Something wasn't right about it, and the longer he looked the worse he felt about everything, but he still couldn't read the blurred part. The blur even seemed to shift and move, like it was alive, which was a lot more unsettling than a simple poster with a hard to read section.

His head started to twinge and ache, and he looked away abruptly, blinking rapidly. That didn't make the headache go away, and he felt distinctly like he'd just walked through the security system at the original Barns. Wrapping his arms around himself, he tried to suppress a shiver. His mood, already low, had plummeted, and he couldn't explain why beyond the poster he'd been looking at.

Still, that didn't stop him from glancing back at the poster and then looking around. "Excuse me," he said to someone, anyone, "But does that poster look weird to you?"

c. Sending a signal that I'm here

There were few things that felt more natural and normal than working on cars. It was soothing in a way, and better at distracting himself from things that stocking shelves was. He was dressed for the job, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, grease smeared across one cheek, hands dirty. He had a rag nearby for when his hands got too grimy, but he was currently working under a hood, happy as a pig in mud.

Except when he heard someone approaching and looked up too fast, slamming his head into the underside of the hood. "Dammit." He dropped his tools, taking a slightly off balance step back and reaching up to feel the top of his head. The skin hadn't broken, but it sure was tender.

d. Some sign of life [for Tobias]

After packing a small lunch for two, a pair of sandwiches, apples, and bottles of water, into a backpack, Adam set out on his motorcycle to Tobias's meadow. Or rather, his tree, specifically. He parked by the road, hanging his helmet off the handlebars, and headed up to the tree, looking around.

"Tobias?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Some of the tension left Beast when Adam didn't seem to mind his looks. He was still getting used to that.

He looked a little clueless at the question. Up to this point, he'd just let the castle generally go to ruin, only bothering to repair things when it was absolutely necessary, considering he was the only person there who actually had hands to do that with anymore. Being on his own here meant it was now all on him to make his home liveable.

"Uh, I'm not sure. When I try to close them, they just open right back up again."

Adam was patient; not everyone knew exactly what they were looking for when they came into a hardware store, just an idea of what they wanted to accomplish.

"That sounds like it could be a problem with the hinges. Either that or you're haunted," he said. He hoped that still counted as professional. But also honestly? In this place he wouldn't be surprised if somewhere was haunted. "Hinges are right over here," he added, taking a few steps down the aisle and gesturing to the racks near the end.

"Haunted?" Beast seems to give this serious thought for moment before he dismisses with a brisk shake that sends all his fur into a state of fluff for a moment before all the hairs relax back down. "I don't think so. Sultan wouldn't be as comfortable if there was a ghost living with us." After all, dogs were supposed to be able to sense supernatural creatures, or so that's what all the stories went.

Beast follows Adam to where he's pointing. He walks on the front part of his feet, toes first followed by the heel, the way some predatory animals did. He picks up one of the hinges on display there, which looks tiny in his massive paw. "So how do you use them to repair the cabinets?"

"Animals do seem to have a sixth sense about some things," Adam agreed. He'd heard stories about cats knowing when an earthquake was about to happen, not to mention all the strange things he'd seen personally.

"Well, sir, assuming the hinges are the same size, you just use a screwdriver to remove the old hinges and put the new ones on," he explained.

"Yes. He seems to have maintained that even as a footstool," Beast thought out loud, not realizing it might seem a little bizarre to others to be owning an enchanted dog-turned-piece of bric-a-brac.

"Then I'm going to need a screwdriver as well," he said. Beast really was starting from the ground up here.

"A footstool?" Adam blinked a few times, sure he'd misheard. Being deaf in one ear, that could happen frequently, though he did his best to keep his right ear turned towards people.

Nodding, he lead the way around the corner and to the aisle with the screwdrivers. "We sell them in large and small sets. I'd recommend a small one if you don't have any screwdrivers at home." It was essential and affordable.

"Yes. He was turned into a footstool by the same magic curse that affected everything in the castle." He'd merely been a shaggy mutt before then. Sometimes, Beast wasn't entirely sure that Sultan even realized he'd been turned into another creature, given his perchance for somehow still being able to maneuver around and bark despite the lack of eyes or mouth on him

Beast picked up the small set of screwdrivers delicately with his clawed fingers, examining them closely. They certainly seemed easy enough to deal with. Maybe he really could repair his home all by himself! "Alright. I'll take the hinges and the screwdrivers"

"You have a castle?" Adam assumed, automatically, that Beast was rich and owned the castle in question. Maybe he wasn't rich here, but poor people didn't own castles. He'd thought mansions were bad enough.

He was curious about the curse, too, but it wasn't every day he heard people talk about castles.

"Excellent. Is there anything else you need?"

"At home yes. But here all I have is just a big house. It's a bit of a dump." Hence why Beast was slowly doing his best to repair it. "Some of the enchanted furniture came with me like Sultan and the palanquin." It tended to freak people out even more than Beast did so he'd told it to stay in the front yard until further notice.

"No. That should do it. Thank you, ah....I never caught your name."

Adam didn't even know what a palanquin was, but he assumed it was some sort of rich people thing.

"How did everything become cursed in the first place? If you don't mind me asking." He would completely understand if Beast didn't want to answer that; Adam wouldn't press the subject.

"I'm Adam," he added politely. "And you're quite welcome."

"Well....." He trails off, looking quite downhearted. He never liked telling this part. "I refused hospitality to an old woman in the dead of winter. Unfortunately, she turned out to be a beautiful Enchantress in disguise. So I, the castle, and everyone in it was cursed."

Some modern people didn't quite understand while breaking the sacred law of hospitality was such a big deal. But back in the eighteenth-century, there was nothing like Motel 6 to turn to if you couldn't find somewhere to shelter. By turning the old woman away in a freezing-cold dismal snowstorm, he'd essentially sentenced her to death, showing how horrible he really had been as a young prince. She'd ultimately done him a favor by turning him into a beast so that he would learn how to care about others.

"You can call me Beast," he says with a sharp-toothed but kind smile on his face.

Out Here Alone [OTA]

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