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Infinite Consortium, Monday

Last year, Liliana had had no idea what the mistletoe meant when a cluster of it began bobbing after her oh-so-innocently. This year, however, she was well-aware of its tricks and so was regarding the bits of greenery in the air with narrowed eyes and a distinctly aggressive expression. There were several piles of necromatically rotted mistletoe in front of the building, left there as a warning for the others. Not that any of the cheerfully hovering mistletoe in the shop seemed to be paying them any mind.

There was also a sign in the window. Not one offering the newest weird item for sale, but a head's up.

BEWARE OF MISTLETOE
Proprietress makes no promises of safety

The one person who couldn't read the sign was the one person who didn't need to worry about it, so that, at least, worked out.

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Could Don have done this on another day, when he wasn't having to swat mistletoe with his walking stick every third step? Probably. But he was fresh out of excuses, so here he was, letting himself into the shop and swatting another bundle of mistletoe in the process. "Ms. Vess."

Was there more of it? There was more of it. It was behind him, wasn't it?

Edited 2024-12-16 16:41 (UTC)

There was a wet splat of something deliquescent hitting the ground behind him.

...So, no. Not anymore.

"Dr. Blake," she said, rising to greet him. "A fascinating choice of day for a visit, darling. Were you much mobbed on the way over?"

"I go armed," Don joked, holding up his walking stick.

Okay, it was rather less of a joke than it sounded, all things about the stick considered, but using it as a bat for swatting away horndog greenery was pretty funny, you had to admit.

"And mistletoe and I have a...mixed relationship on the best of days." Demanding kissing and heralding the end of the world? Truly, a plant that did it all.

Get you a plant that did both! (Liliana had also done both in her time, but she didn't tell stories about it.)

"Not a plan of poisonous greenery?" she asked. "Or just don't enjoy being bullied into kissing people?)

"A certain person being killed by mistletoe used to kick off the end of the world where I'm from," Don explained. "I'm not that person, but I'm still a little nervous about being dive-bombed by the stuff," he admitted. "It is still poisonous, after all, even if you're unlikely to take a lethal dose from getting it tangled in your hair." Your hair wasn't even long enough for that, Don.

"The best way to deal with it is to just kiss whoever it's pushing at you and be done with it," Liliana said with a sigh. "Also, darling, would you like a chair? Perhaps some tea? Since I don't think this is a business call."

"If you don't mind," Don said. "If you're busy, of course I can come back at another time." Would he, though?

Liliana gestured to the empty store. "I think I shall be able to squeeze you in," she said wryly.

There was an entirely normal armchair surprisingly close to where Don was standing, but Liliana glared at it before saying, "Let me go get you a suitable seat." And, as she passed by that one, she wagged a finger and said "Don't!" very sharply.

Several moments later, she had returned with another, perfectly serviceable (if less comfortable-looking) chair and what sounded like a full suit of armor had gone clanking into the back room. "There," she said, returning to her own chair. "That's better. Please sit, darling, the tea should be out shortly."

Don knew enough about magical bullshit to take a subtle step away from the aforementioned entirely normal armchair and give it a wary side eye until Liliana came back. Actually...hm.

"Is that the chair Dean was dragging through the park once?" he asked curiously as he sat down in the chair apparently deemed safe.

Liliana laughed. "Indeed," she said. "When he has annoyed me overmuch, I make him do nice things for the chair. Or things I can say are nice for the chair but really just entertain me. Though, considering the feathers on the upholstery I found after that trip, I think the chair enjoyed the walk as well."

She should make Dean do that again.

"I am not going to ask about the feathers," Don decided.

She should definitely make Dean do that again.

She was absolutely going to make Dean do that again.

"Ambush predator," Liliana said with a smile. Was that true or was this all an elaborate joke to amuse herself with? Who knew?

Though she was reaching for a piece of paper and, in an elegant hand, wrote a quick note:

Dean.
I think the chair is getting restless. It needs more exercise. Take it for another walk through the park, it seemed to enjoy that.
-L

"There," she said as she tucked the note into the chair's upper cushion. "Now where were we, darling?"

"I want to note that I don't actually owe you an explanation," Don said, "but we know what a powerful force curiosity can be," and that she was a necromancer, "and we have decided transparency is the better policy." A beat. "Pun not intended."

"So noted," Liliana said. "Abyss knows that I don't encourage people to go poking about in my personal matters, either. In fact--"

She held up a finger to him and announced, "Any squirrel remaining in my store in one minute will get to discover that I can absolutely adjust several mass kill spells to target a specific creature type. I suggest you leave now, because I will animate any dead squirrels I find afterwards as a warning to the rest of you."

Ten seconds later, a squirrel dashed out of the rafters, joined by another from behind some of the shelves. At fifty seconds, a third darted out from the back room.

"There," she said. "Relative privacy assured."

"I was going to remind them of the understanding we've reached regarding lightning," Don admitted, "but that works, too. I believe I already told you the short version of the situation, which is that Thor and I can't exist at the same time?"

Listen, a lot had happened since then. Thor had been a goat. It had been a whole thing.

The store darkened for a moment, almost as if the lighted had dimmed and the air got very thin while wisps of purple smoke curled and eddied around them both before disappearing, and the air and light returned.

"Neither of you are meant to exist, and so you 'timeshare' existence here and the void," Liliana said, not acknowledging any of that. "Your existences are too intertwined for you to go far and while you can manifest as some ghostly apparition, it's generally tiring and you prefer not to. Though certain circumstances do require it, like when Thor is a child in need of a nanny. Am I remembering that correctly?"

"Very close. You've got some of the particulars a bit off, I'm afraid," Don said apologetically, "but that may be in how I explained it when I was trying to talk around things I thought a child version of Thor shouldn't hear." Which, considering he'd been willing to explain that much within earshot of a kid who had no idea what he was talking about, was saying something. "I believe what I said was that Thor should be dead, and I shouldn't exist. That's critical. You see, I was never supposed to exist in the first place. I'm not supposed to be real."

But you are, Thor murmured in his mind.

"But I am," Don affirmed. "I'm a...metaphysical oops baby."

Liliana's eyebrows raised briefly and then lowered. "Why weren't you supposed to exist?" she asks. "What were you supposed to do? Are you some kind of magical...proof of concept that gained sentience? We had a few of those at Strixhaven, actually."

"Something like that, maybe. I was a disguise," Don told her. "I was a...character building exercise. Odin, Thor's father, wanted him to learn what it was like to be human. To have human failings and limitations. He wanted him to be more humble." It was fine. He was fine. "So he turned him into Donald Blake, and I didn't know that I had been Thor. I was just...me, for several years. And then I gained the ability to transform into Thor, but I still thought I was just...wielding the power of Thor, as the hammer says. Later, of course, Odin decided the lesson had gone far enough, restored Thor's memory, and told him that Donald Blake was a fiction. A seeming." Totally fine.

"A whole separate set of memories, ideas, ideals, a full life, all created as a punishment for a godling's arrogance and hubris, a mask meant to be discarded." She regarded him with deep violet eyes. "But you became more than simply a mask. You became a whole person...somehow. Through the arrogance and hubris of Thor's own father...?"

"I don't know. We think that I had to be complex enough that I was always real, even though Odin didn't intend it. Looking back, even when we thought we were one person--either person--we can see times where there were definitely two lines of thought in play. When we were conflicted, and we didn't know why. It's very muddy, as you can probably tell from how I keep jumbling up the pronouns." He added, wry, "Also, it turns out you get a lot more drama when no one involved knows there's a third person in the relationship. Go figure."

Liliana snorted at that. "Relationships are hard enough to finagle when you do know everyone that is involved," she said. "Though, you still lived - for want of a better verb - those times too, yes? Have those memories? Believe me, darling, as someone who was once involved with a telepath who thought he was his dead best friend...I do understand complicated."

She wasn't going explain her part in all of that for...reasons.

That totally sounded like something that would happen to the X-Men, so Don didn't so much as bat an eyelash. "Yeah, well. Eventually, I...usually I say I died. That's a shorthand. I was removed from existence, except no one, me included, knew there was a 'me' involved...actually, we don't know if Odin figured it out at some point before he deleted me from reality or not. Thor's chosen to believe he didn't." Don was...letting him believe that. "I also say it was accidental. That's a lie. Odin very much on purpose removed the spell that allowed Thor to become Donald Blake and transferred it to someone else who needed to be able to switch between a mortal and godly form."

Relatedly, Beta Ray Bill was going to shit when he found out that that little decision had actually killed Don.

Don took a deep, slow breath, in through his nose, out through his mouth, and said, "And then I was in the void of nonexistence, and that's how I found out I was a real, separate person. Zero stars. Would not recommend."

Hey, Liliana, did you have anything stronger than tea in this shop?

Her thoughts were trending in a similar direction, because while the haunted armor carefully carried a tea tray over to them, Liliana was reaching under the counter and pulling out the bottle of cheap whiskey Dean didn't think she knew about. "Here," she said, pushing it his way. "I cannot imagine--" She shook her head. "That seems exceptionally cruel. Even by...accident."

Yeah, she also sounded very dubious about that.

"I don't know," Don said as he took the whiskey. "I think 'cruel' is the wrong word, unless he knew, and by that I mean knew exactly what would happen. If he thought I really would just...stop...I can't blame him for wanting to untangle his son from a mistake that was changing who he was."

You are not a mistake, Thor protested.

"I am, though. Sorry," he said to Liliana. "Thor objects." Hey, Dean, you didn't mind if Don drank your whiskey, right? He was drinking your whiskey. "Anyway. Several years later, Thor died, and suddenly I was standing on a street corner in New York, because it turns out Odin removed the transformation spell, but the condition that only one of us could exist at one time was more...fundamental, I guess, than that. And the world...the world needed Thor. So I went and got Mjolnir, and went back into the void and told Thor how to get out." And if Liliana thought about that for a minute, she'd wonder how Don knew how to do that when apparently he had gotten out by accident, but honestly Don never noticed all of his weird little bits of void-earned knowledge. "It's different now. We're separate, obviously. But we can only exist one at a time. And it's a complicated mess and eventually we have to explain the part where I'm not supposed to exist in the first place, so we just...don't."

After a beat, he added, "You may have noticed the increase in lightning strikes around the island since we took up residence. Sorry. That's us. Which you may also have guessed, but yeah, it happens when we switch."

"Fascinating," Liliana said thoughtfully. "So how did Thor get out of the void? I doubt that it involved you dying the way his death freed you."

NO REASON, JUST IDLE CURIOSITY.

"Birth, like death, comes only through pain," Don said, a little vague around the edges. That was...probably fine, right? "It was only possible once I reactivated our connection through Mjolnir, but after that it was more him deciding to live than anything. He could have not. He was asleep before. It was peaceful."

Of course, if he had not decided to live, Don would have told him about the stupid cyborg clone that had murdered Bill Foster, and then he would have been too mad to stay dead, but they hadn't even had to get to that part.

"Birth far moreso than death, or so I've seen," Liliana said. "Death can be swift and a comfort, no birth I've ever seen or assisted with ever has been."

But, dammit, that didn't seem like something she could steal on the off-chance she ended up in the void.

"There's always pain," Don countered. "Maybe it's left to those left behind, but there's always pain." Unless Odin deleted you from reality and most people forgot you had ever existed, and those who did remember didn't know you had been an actual person. It was fine. Don was fine.

"It's not so bad, you know," Don told her. "The void. It's quiet there. I had a lot of time to think, which I really needed at first." It was pretty horrible, actually, but it turned out you could get used to anything if you were stuck in it long enough.

Liliana's lips curled upwards in a smile that held absolutely no humor. "I am happy to take your word for it," she said, since she knew what awaited her in the Void and it was not quiet. "I would say I knew plenty of people who have died and left no one behind to mourn them, but their deaths usually tend to be...messy."

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Infinite Consortium, Monday

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NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!

Re: NFB after this, pls!