sporesprouter | Open Post: Treat

"The zombies were a touch alarming," says Aziraphale. All right; he helps himself to one more nut and honey ball. "Even viewed through the kitchen window."

Tress nods. "At least none of them got inside. That could have been bad."

"Quite," agrees Aziraphale. "If they had, I would have taken care of them with a bit more alacrity. All those strapping young people just seemed to be having such a nice time slaying them."

"I don't think it was exactly an entertainment opportunity..." It does give her pause, though. "But yes, I think some people were entertained anyway."

"Humans and their violence." But Aziraphale doesn't sound as judgmental as he could. "I take it you got through it all safely?"

"I was fine. Most of them didn't get anywhere near me. I was just at the door stopping them from moving before they could get in."

Aziraphale actually does straighten with interest. He slides a spontaneously-appearing bookmark into his book and sets it aside, next to the now well-picked-over tray of Tress' baking. Never let it be said that he isn't appreciative of her efforts.

"Your spores, yes? I did read what you wrote, you know. I've never heard of such a thing."

"Verdant spores, yes." She shrugs. "I've... gotten used to people never having heard of anything like it. I guess it's fair, because I'd never even thought about seas made of water before I got here either."

Aziraphale widens his eyes, although the gesture is partly for dramatic effect. "You know, She put quite a lot of thought into all of Her designs... well, perhaps someone else put quite a lot of thought into designing your world.¹"

¹Someone did. It was a Mormon. Let's not open that theological can of worms, shall we?

"Maybe someone did. I never really put all that much thought into it myself, I guess? Just busy living on it. Some times more busy than others, of course."

Thoughtful, Aziraphale observes Tress. Several of the people here are, as far as he can tell, literary characters made flesh. It stands to reason that Tress may be, too, but from a book he hasn't read. "Did you have some sort of grand adventure, then?"

She wrinkles her nose a bit as she thinks over the question. "I suppose you could probably call it a grand adventure when you look at it from a distance. It didn't feel all that grand when it was happening, though."

"I suspect anyone who's been on a grand adventure might say that," says Aziraphale gently. "I like a good yarn, but if you'd rather not relive it, I understand."

Tress shrugs. "It's fine. It ended up all right in the end, anyway." She looks around and takes a seat. "First, I'm sorry if I won't be the best storyteller. But I know enough at least to start at the beginning." She settles in. "All right. So I grew up on a little rock near the middle of the Verdant Sea. It was just big enough for a town and the duke's mansion on a hill. Nobody was allowed to leave, but that was fine, because I was comfortable there. I washed windows and collected cups and I was content."

Valiantly, Aziraphale tries his utmost not to look too enthralled. Tress is -- well, she may or not be real, but she's real in this context. But still! "You washed windows," he says. "Of course you did."

She nods. "When I'd get a new cup, I'd take it up to Charlie... Oh, Charlie's the duke's son." Her expression becomes almost impossibly fond. "He pretended he was just a groundskeeper, but he didn't pretend very well. He'd make up stories about the cups, imagine where they'd been. I love his stories. They're wonderful. And then he'd ask me about my day and even though my days were just getting a good deal on fish or other little things like that, he still thought they were interesting." She smiles. "You know when someone just fits like the perfect pair of gloves that you've had for a while and have taken such good care of that you can barely even feel them? That's Charlie."

There's a flicker of some kind of recognition in the back of Aziraphale's vast and inhuman mind. It's gone as quick as it's there, but he still says, "Yes, I understand your meaning. This is all very--"

He'd begun to say twee, then hastily stopped himself. This isn't book club. "It's very sweet. I imagine something happened next to disrupt the peace?"

"Yes. Almost as soon as Charlie and I really realized what we actually meant to each other, the duke decided to leave with his family to go find a princess to marry his son off to. Because the heir has to have a nice political match, of course." She's not any happier about the whole situation than she was when it happened. Probably less happy than she was when it happened, really, because she was too shocked when it was happening to actually process it, and her expression indicates it.

"Charlie and I found each other at the docks just as he was about to leave. He told me he'd manage to bore all of the princesses he met, so that none of them would want to marry him." The smile creeps back. It really can't stay away long when she's talking about him. "And that he'd send me back a cup from each stop, along with a story about how he managed to avoid it.

"He kept his promise, and kept sending cups. I got four of them, notes included. And then... it just stopped. I never got a fifth cup. I wasn't sure what had happened, whether the delivery had just gotten waylaid or.. well, I didn't know. For months. And then after they'd been gone for about a year, word finally came back to the Rock that the duke was returning with his heir and new daughter-in-law."

Her smile's been slipping off her face for the duration of the wait for the fifth cup and it's well and truly gone by this point. "He got back... with a new heir. A nephew named Dirk, and a princess for him. And no Charlie."

"Ah," says Aziraphale with understanding.¹ He wouldn't have necessarily identified Tress as a pining love interest, but narratives do as narratives must. "Something calamitous must have befallen Charlie at sea. And did several years pass in your despair?²"

¹This is an understanding "ah" of when he's about to be wrong about something. Crowley would recognize it, were he here.
²To be slightly fair, Aziraphale has a fairly hard time judging human ages.

She shakes her head. "Calamitous makes it sound more unavoidable than what actually happened. Charlie's father figured out what he was trying to do, so he and the king decided to send him into the Midnight Sea to die. I mean, they didn't say that. It was supposedly to appease the Sorceress, but they knew. It's politics. Get rid of an inconvenient heir and have another excuse to try to go to war with the Sorceress, all at once. She even offered a ransom but they--" She shakes her head again.

"I was in almost a daze for about two months before I decided that if I was going to be the only person who bothered to care about what happened to Charlie, common sense said that I'd have to find a way to go and rescue him myself."

Oh, this is even better, because it's not going the way that Aziraphale expected it to. He sets his chin in his hand, elbow on the arm of his chair, as he listens. "Very brave and sensible of you," he says admiringly. "The Sorceress? That can only be the villain of the piece."

"Well, she's one of them," Tress replies simply. "She'd had her tower in the Midnight Sea for years, even though it's the most dangerous of all of them, and she used it to her advantage. Hardly anyone who ever entered the Midnight left again unless she let them. But I'm getting ahead of myself."

She looks thoughtful. "I asked my parents for advice, and they ended up working with me to come up with a plan to get off the island. We got information about comings and goings on the docks, how things worked, and my father called in some favors. In the end, I manged to impersonate the royal inspector and compel a ship to take me on board, supposedly to sail back to report to the king about people in town trying to get around the laws. It worked, and I got on board and the ship sailed off. Honestly, I was a little bit terrified the entire time."

A tower in the Midnight Sea! Aziraphale hides a smile behind his other hand, in the pursuit of continuing to appear attentive.

"That's quite resourceful," he says encouragingly. "Was your disguise successful throughout or were you eventually discovered?"

"It worked a little too well. Once we were well enough away from land, they poisoned my drink to send me unconscious and threw me into the brig because they actually believed I was a royal inspector and it turned out that they were smugglers, so didn't actually want a royal inspector on board."

She pushes some of her hair out of her face, a bit sheepishly. But her smile returns as she continues. "When I was in the brig, I met another prisoner they had in there. A talking rat."

Well, if Aziraphale hadn't been certain before that Tress was a fictional character, that little detail would have instantly sealed the deal. This time he lets his smile show. "A talking rat, really? Very quaint. And what topics did he speak of? What had he done to earn imprisonment?"

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject