fandomtownies | The unexplored wooded area, Thursday morning

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The unexplored wooded area, Thursday morning

An island full of weird didn't stop every day accidents from happening. In fact, as was the case for the rickshaw collision Travis was called to by the woods in town, the weirdness sometimes contributed. Near as he could tell from the two drivers' bickering, one had been distracted by the mist and had swerved right into the other.

Both checked out fine in a cursory roadside exam, and while Travis made them promise to go straight to the clinic if they decided at any point they weren't feeling okay, he let them head off on their way without any further complaint.

Honestly, it was just nice to work a straight forward, human motor vehicle accident for once.

Nice work, probie.

The voice from the woods sent a shiver down Travis's back. He spun on his heel and peered through the fog. A familiar shape looked back.

"Michael?"

This island was full of weird, inexplicable magic. Stark had had a kid show up that he'd never gotten to have with a dead loved one. Why couldn't the weird, inexplicable magic bring Travis's husband back, too?

"Michael!"

He ran into the mist and the woods as the Michael shaped figure opened its arms. Travis didn't hesitate for a moment before flinging himself into them. "Michael. Michael, I --"

The thing that looked like Michael didn't hesitate for a moment before dragging Travis down into the mud.

[Open! I'M BREAKING THE NEWBIE. Obviously he'll be fine either way, but why not show up for the dramatic part?]

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Nell was passing by just in time to see the government man run into the woods, which was just a horrible bad idea right now, 'cause there was something just Not Right. She had hesitated, watching him for a moment, not sure if she should say anything or just let him be, when a figure had grabbed him and dragged him into the mud.

That couldn't be good.

She stooped to pick up a rock, yelling, "Hey! You'un leave him be!"

[OOC: Please let me know if this isn't okay. I can delete or change it.]

[totally fine!]

There was yelling. Travis was distantly aware of it as mud filled his ears. The thing that was 100% definitely not Michael loosened its grip a bit as it turned its attention on Nell changing shapes to take on someone she’d lost instead.

Travis shoved at the rest of the mud as it tried to suck him down, reminded of the handful of mudslides he’d worked over the years.

“Stay back!” he shouted to the person doing the yelling. “Ground’s unstable! And—mean!”

Edited 2021-04-29 20:30 (UTC)

She'd already let the stone fly, straight at the figure's head - and her aim was good - but then it turned and...

"Leah?"

Nell couldn't catch her breath for a moment and she stopped right where she was. Her brain tried to catch up with what she was seeing, but all her mouth could come up with was, "Why are you grabbing the government man?"

“Not Leah,” Travis told her. The trouble with wearing his turnouts everywhere was that they were heavy And Duke absolutely nothing to protect him from being grabbed and half-buried by mud. He worked on trying to shrug out of the jacket, trying to keep an eye on the kid at the same time. “Or Michael. It’s some kind of...evil, shape shifting mud monster.”

The things that were coming out of his mouth this week.

Well, that was just unacceptable. No evil mud monster thing was going to pretend to be Leah and get away with it.

Nell scooped up a handful of small rocks and waded in. Maybe if she could distract the thing, the man could have a second to get free of his heavy jacket. She pinged the rocks at it as she looked around for something that might be more useful against the mud. Maybe she could encourage some of the trees to lean in more and give the man something to grab onto.

"Nononono!" Travis's eyes went wide when he realized she was coming towards him. "You'll get stuck too!"

He managed to get the turnout jacket off--it was at least made to be gotten into and out of quickly--but still had the heavy pants and boots to deal with. As all the flailing created air pockets, leading to him getting sucked deeper into the mud. He froze, arms out, and waited.

At least there weren't any other mud monsters trying to grab him again? It was too focused on Nell, trying to lure her closer.

"Don't move, you ninny!" Nell yelled at him as he was flailing around - possibly just as he stopped on his own. He was going to get sucked right down if he wasn't careful.

She had to think. The Leah Mud Monster was reaching out towards her, but leah hadn't ever looked that eager to see Nell but never.

Nell crouched down slowly, not taking her eyes off the mud monster and the government man, and placed her hand on the ground. Her mind reached out to the plant life there. Weren't they thirsty? Couldn't they use some of the water from that muddy place over there? She encouraged their roots to drink deep, hopefully drying up some of the mud and tried to get one of the trees closest to the man to grow its branches down a little closer to where he could reach them.

A little further...

Travis couldn't help the faintly affronted "Ninny?!" that burst out. It sounded like an insult that was too cheesy for even his mother to bust out.

There was something happening, though, he realized. Something he couldn't quite get a grasp on. The girl was doing--something--to the dirt, shriveling the mud monster. Travis continued to hold still, watching her in return, and wondering what craziness the island was throwing at him now.

If he'd grown up in the God's Cloud of Glory church he'd probably have heard it a lot. He'd clearly never gotten a tongue lashing from one of the church wives.

Nell didn't have time to worry about that now, though. The further she pushed her mind into the soil, the more wrong she felt. So many wrong growing things that had never been here before. They made her feel dirty and bad all over, but she was sooo close to getting the tree's new sprout of branch to lengthen towards the man.

The mud was drying up more, but now she was afraid that she was also helping the bad wrong things to grow more. Help the man first and then she could see about the bad things. If she had any energy left. Her eyes had closed as she focused on what she wanted the tree to do, feeding it what she could of herself, pulling more energy from the ground.

It took a second for her to get her voice to work and she wasn't sure she sounded at all like herself, but she managed to yell, "On your left! The tree on your left!"

Well. Not by the wives at that church, anyway. Travis had been a childhood champion at competitive bible quoting.

Travis was focused so hard on watching the traces of fear and distress on her face that he startled when she suddenly spoke. Then startled more when he saw the branch hanging down that had definitely not been right there a moment ago. He grabbed onto it carefully, testing to see if it would hold both his weight and any force the mud might exert on his legs, then wrapped his hands around it and started dragging himself up and along, careful to move at as much of an angle as possible so he wasn't fighting the muddy vacuum directly.

He lost a boot. And he wasn't sure he was ever getting that turnout jacket back. But there were spares back at the station.

As soon as his feet finished clearing the mud, he scrambled upright and ran, intent on scooping the kid up and carrying them both right back out to the road. They could worry about the mud monster again once they were both on nice, solid asphalt. Or cobblestone. He didn't really care which, so long as it wasn't mud.

Maybe they could have their own competition one day. Fair warning, though, Nell pretty much knew the entire thing front to back. And back to front and every way in between.

Once he pulled himself free, Nell let herself slump down and focused on the bad wrong things, but this far from Soulwood, they were stronger than she was - especially right now.

She wouldn't object to Travis scooping her up - far too drained to protest - but he'd find that she was, well, sort of attached to the ground, with grass growing through her hands. Still, with a good enough tug...

She'd definitely win. Travis was quite out of practice, having broken away from the Church around the time he realized that the community there would never accept his love for other men.

Travis felt the resistance when he picked her up, and tugged without entirely registering it. When he glanced down, he just assumed the grass had been around or on top of her hands, rather than through them. He headed for the aid car--aid rickshaw--and set her down gently on the back of it, moving immediately to check her pulse. "You okay, kid?" he asked, disconcerted by her silence, after her yelling and insults earlier. "Thanks for the save back there."

Nell tried to brush off his hands as she groaned and rolled to the side. "Ow..." She struggled to sit upright, but her hands hurt too much to push herself up. Her hands were... bleeding? Little pinpricks of blood where the grass had ben ripped out of her hands. She looked at them in confusion, then up at the man as his words registered.

"I think, mostly okay?" Laying back down was much better. Except, wait. She struggled up on a shoulder. "And I'll have you know I'm not a kid, government man. I'm a respectably married woman."

Who'd probably get burned at the stake if anyone from the church ever saw her do something like that.

Travis frowned, but was in professional mode, so didn't comment any further on that. Even while on the inside he was screaming over who had married off a girl her age.

"My apologies, ma'am," he said, crouching down so he could get a look at her eyes. "Can you tell me your name?"

Maybe she as just aggressively disoriented? Wait, no, that wasn't better.

Hey, she was 17. And a half! Of course she'd been married for five and a half years, although she'd been here for three of them with apparently no way home.

She put her head back down, feeling as if she'd run a marathon. "I'm Nell Ingram. Are you okay? Did that mud thing hurt you?"

What she would do if he said yes, she had no idea.

"Nell." Travis kept up with his exam as best he could. "Nice to meet you. My name's Travis." A faint quirk of the lips. "Not 'government man'. Can you tell me where you are?"

He was just going to glide right past the question of if he was okay or if the mud thing hurt him. He'd honestly thought his dead husband had somehow come back to him. He was anything but okay.

But he wasn't the one bleeding, or looking ready to pass out.

"Are you asking to see if I know where I am or because you'un don't?" Nell asked. "We're in Fandom right by the now-scary woods where there was some wrestling with a mud monster who looked like my dead sister wife."

She sighed. "Which is one way to be sure we're in Fandom, I suppose. You wouldn't happen to have any water, would you'un? I feel like I could drink a lake dry right about now."

Sister wife.

Travis was clinging to his professionalism by his fingernails.

"I'm checking on you," he said. He straightened up and grabbed a bottle of drinking water, passing it down to her. "That's what I do, I'm a firefighter and paramedic. And by the way, I also would have accepted just 'Fandom' or 'this fucking island' as an answer." He grabbed a pack of gauze and some disinfectant, then with another glance at her, an IV kit and some glucose pill, then crouched back down. "Can you tell me if you have any medical conditions I need to know about? Because I'm pretty sure whatever you just did stressed out your system and sent your blood sugar into the toilet."

He was looking over her hands again. The wounds were too tiny to be too much of a concern for bleeding, but they were still potential vectors of infection and would need to be cleaned out and wrapped....

"Language," Nell said mildly, mostly because she was too tired to complain much.

"And I'm healthy as a horse. Except for right now. I think, I think... I never did anything like that before. Not that big."

She looked up at him. "I think that grass was growing right up through my hands. Maybe we shouldn't be tellin' anybdy else about that?"

Travis's eyes shot up. He looked from her face to her hands and the tiny pinprick wounds again.

"...Yeah. Noted. Okay."

He shook off the shock and handed her the pills. "These will help the shocky feeling. As will this." He held up the IV kit. "So how about we just sit tight for a bit, let your body cool back down, and I'll wrap your hands up for you, huh?"

"That... sounds like a really good idea," Nell said, taking the pills. "I, I thank you. Thank you, Mr. Travis. Thank you for getting me onto the road and takin' care of me."

She was quiet for a moment, watching him as he got the IV ready. "I'm sorry you lost your jacket. And your boot."

Travis huffed a little laugh. "Better them than either of us, Nell. And it's just Travis. Or Mr. Montgomery if you need to be formal." He swapped his turnout gloves for a fresh pair of latex ones and showed her the disinfectant bottle before squeezing it into some fresh gauze. "This may sting a little. You, uh. Mind if I ask just what it was you did back there?"

"Guess you'un is right about that," Nell said, managing a small laugh herself.

She nodded at the disinfectant and braced herself, managing just a small hiss as he worked on her hands. "Um. That. I... I can sorta talk to the land," Nell said in a very small voice. "And sometimes, usually, make things grow and... I just sorta told the trees and plants that they should take water from the muddy area. And talked the tree into growing a little more on that branch. Quickly. But it was hard. And there's bad stuff growing too. Wrong stuff that didn't want the good stuff to listen."

She bit her lip. "And if the church knew, back home, what I can do...? it would be bad."

"Ahhhh." Travis nodded. "Yeah, they can be a little judgmental that way." He looked up at her with a little smile as he finished cleaning off her hands and started wrapping them in more fresh gauze. "If it helps, my church back home doesn't much approve of me, either."

He had absolutely no idea what to think about her talking to the land, or about bad things growing, so he was just going to skip that right now, thanks.

"In my church men can do most anything and get away with it." Nell might have sounded a little bitter. "You seem like a right upstanding young man. You're all right by me."

She watched him wrap up her hands. "They feel a lot better now. I think once I get home and can put my hands in some of my own soil they'll be all good."

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