sporesprouter | Open Post: Treat

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?"

"Well, they found a rat on the ship. But they didn't throw him overboard because he could talk, so they thought they might be able to sell him somewhere as a curiosity. At the start, we were just introducing ourselves, mostly." She can't help but laugh a little at that. "Of course, while we were doing that, pirates attacked the ship."

"Of course pirates attacked the ship," says Aziraphale, with a companionable air. "Nothing else could possibly have happened in that moment. How did you fare against them? Or were you trapped belowdecks all the while?"

"Well, nobody thought they were pirates at first, because they were just shooting and not demanding anything to steal. They thought it was a royal ship tracking them down as smugglers. So when the ship's sprouter came down to patch a hole... that was the first time I ever even found out that sprouting existed, by the way... I suggested that maybe having a royal inspector on board as a hostage might make them stop shooting. So the sprouter dragged me up to the deck. But since it was a pirate ship, they just kept firing. So they dragged me back belowdecks."

She frowns. "That's when the Seethe stopped, and both ships were stuck in the sea unable to move. The pirate ship had the advantage, because the cannon was pointed right at the smugglers' ship. They kept firing holes into the ship, and I knew there was no way it wasn't going to sink once the stilling ended. So I grabbed my bag and broke the lock on the rat-- that's when he told me his name was Huck-- Huck's cage to at least try something. And I climbed out a big hole in the side of the ship and walked out onto the spores."

Aziraphale is quite pleased with himself that he took the time to read Tress' welcome table literature, and that he doesn't need to stop her for any frivolous explanations. His eyes do widen, then, with sincere surprise. "Dear girl, that was incredibly brave of you." She is most definitely a protagonist.

"It was going from certain death to just almost certain death. I'm not sure if it was brave as much as practical, really. And I was terrified. There were still cannonballs flying overhead, the seethe could easily start up again at any moment, and even if it didn't, the spores were not easy to walk on, and if I fell, or if even one spore drifted into my eyes or anything..." She actually shivers a bit, thinking back on that torturous walk. "A couple of the smugglers tried to follow me. One did get spores in his eyes. Another one got shot by... by the captain of the pirate ship, which killed him and set off more verdant vines. And moons, that's where I was heading."

She takes a slow breath. "Anyway, I managed to get near the ship. I had thought that maybe I could climb the hull or something, but after a few tries, I knew I couldn't manage. So I did the only thing I could think of at the time. I flicked a bit of spit toward the spores, and a vine started growing. So I climbed the vine."

This may be even better than Twelfth Night. Well -- no. But hearing it from the horse's mouth, and not knowing precisely where the story is going? It does enhance the experience.

"Brave and resourceful," Aziraphale declares. "And -- in your own words -- very practical. Did it get you where you needed to go?"

"I got high up enough that I could grab onto a porthole on the side of the ship. Just in time, too, because the Seethe started back up pretty soon after that and the vine I was climbing sunk into the sea. And so did the ship I'd come from. The pirate ship was floating again and I was just clinging to the side with Huck on my shoulder." A small fond smile. "He stayed with me even after I told him he could probably make the climb without me. It honestly felt like forever. But just as I was about to slip off, they dropped a rope and they actually pulled me up when I grabbed it. Captain Crow had told them they could pull me up if I lasted for fifteen minutes on the hull.

"I just lay on the deck for a bit. I could honestly barely feel my arms. Of course, then Crow came up and told them to just throw me overboard again anyway, because she wouldn't have anyone without a use on board. The crew had thankfully gotten invested enough in those fifteen minutes, though, that they hesitated, so I dragged myself over to a bucket I had seen and started scrubbing the deck. It worked, and Crow didn't insist they toss me overboard again."

"A brave and loyal rat, too," says Aziraphale with some delight. "This Captain Crow sounds like quite a tough character."

"The most brave and loyal rat, yes. And Crow... Crow is awful. The rest of the crew, though..." She smiles for a moment, but pauses. "I'm trying to decide how much I should tell you about the rest of the crew. If I talked about them as much as I wanted to, this story would be about three times longer than it's already going to be, but I have to tell you some, because they're important."

"Don't let me keep you," says Aziraphale a bit reluctantly, "but don't stop on my account, either. I have, quite literally, all the time in the world." He can imagine showing up late to drinks with Crowley and explaining that the lateness is because he was caught up in hearing a story from a human. Crowley would certainly understand.

Tress nods. "I'll bring up the crew as they come up specifically, then. I woke up on the deck the next day and Laggart, who was the first officer and cannonmaster, put me on third watch as far as meal rotation. Of course, third watch never got called, because I'm pretty sure it was only me. So I just scrubbed the deck and tried to get used to the crew movements so I could stay out of the way. The cabin boy brought me a fresh bucket of water, at least. Oh, he's important. Hoid. He was one of the crew members I'd met here and there that had been on various ships passing through the Rock. He's nice, but he was... well, he was strange."

Edited 2023-11-26 22:53 (UTC)

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