Summary - Several months have passed since they defeated the Author but the victory feels uneasy. Mark is still out there planning who knows what, Silver's soul is still missing, and some of them suddenly find themselves in possession of power they have no clue what to do with.
A new enemy is lurking, and the stakes have never been higher. Everyone is looking for something, but will they be happy with what they ultimately find?
A/N - this is the first part of the main plot of season 2, a sequel to Not As You Know Them: Season One. You don't have to have read s1, but I recommend it if you don't want to wind up completely lost. - This is the second attempt at Season 2, the first having been moved to a non-canon archive on AO3 and removed from canon.
Tag list: @mightnightmooon @thelittleautisticgirl
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The bus station is awful.
To one side of the waiting area, King is sitting (and I use that term loosely) upside down on a plastic chair. His legs are going up, leaning against the wall while his head and shoulders are dangling from the chair where a normal person would put their legs. His hands are folded on his chest as he watches the people go past.
“What the hell delays a bus for an hour and a half?”
“You can always go back and wait with the others.” Bim offers.
King snorts at that. Not be here? That’s funny.
Bim is seated beside King, casually flicking through a magazine and wholly unbothered by the dryad’s unusual sitting position. King has never been patient, and being in such an artificial environment can’t be helping.
Green approaches in silence, nervously fidgeting with his fingers as he takes the empty seat on the other side of King. Bim glances over with a chuckle.
“I tried to warn you.”
“What?” King looks between them.
Green shakes his head gently. “Nothing.”
“Seriously what?!”
Bim turns the page of his magazine as he turns his attention back to it, “Bus station bathrooms are not a safe place for data collection.”
“Green!” the dryad grimaces, looking to the droid who very purposefully avoids his look. It’s a good thing the Googles are not equipped to blush in embarrassment.
They fall into an impatient silence that seems to amplify the noise going on around them. A steady murmur of people chatting amongst themselves, figuring out where it is that they need to go, the loud beep from the nearby convenience store, and the distant honking of cars along the pick up tunnel.
The air con blasts cool air but it’s stale and dry and lightly scented. King can feel it crawling all over his skin as only artificial air can. Since he recovered his trees, King finds himself sickened by anything less than pure outdoor freshness, and frankly being in here is making him queasy, though that could be the blood rushing to his head.
The dryad winces as a nearby speaker fritzes into life and a bored-sounding monotone voice murmurs through it. He strains to listen but it’s impossible to make out a single word. All mumbly and garbled with an undercurrent of the electronic whine that accompanies everything in this place.
Bim gently tosses his magazine onto a nearby table, “That’s the one, come on.”
Green nods in agreement and they both stand and move while King looks in utter confusion at them.
“You understood that?!”
King kicks away from the wall, rolling off the chair backwards and somehow landing gracefully in a crouch before straightening up and hurrying to catch up
Around them, several people are rushing past, dragging heaving suitcases along with them, not even stopping to acknowledge when they bump into someone. More than once King gets knocked and he says nothing but he's cursing internally pretty loudly in their general direction.
The large see-through wall of the gate lets the waiting people see every bus as it arrives and leaves, interspersed with built-in automatic doors at each gate. An easy way to control the flow of passengers while making sure no one can run out in front of the buses.
By the time they can see the gate, the bus has already arrived and the doors are already open. It’s a mess of people, some pushing through the doors, some coming through, while several are milling around waiting for their luggage to come free from storage.
“I don’t see him.” King huffs impatiently.
“Be patient.” Bim says calmly.
“I’ve been patient!” he snarks. “I just want-”
“There!” Green interrupts pointing towards the bus.
Sure enough, just this side of the doors stands Bing. Scruffy overgrown hair, sneakers, worn jeans, black t-shirt, and Google’s old royal blue zip hoodie half zipped up. There’s no one else in the world that could be.
Before anyone says anything, King’s running. Bim shouts after him but sod Bim. It’s been months. months, since Bing left to stay at Ed’s ranch. Months of only having the Jims to keep King company. Sure they’ve grown on him after everything that happened but they’re still loud and obnoxious and very extroverted, and very much not Bing.
At just the right moment Bing turns and sees him, beaming that lopsided grin of his and shifting his stance, arms raised, feet shoulder width apart. He knows what’s coming and he’s not going to stop it. The pair collide with force, Bing skidding across the ground from it before King practically lifts him off his feet.
They’re smiling, laughing, holding tight as they stand, not caring if anyone is staring at them.
“I’m guessing you didn’t forget me then.” Bing chuckles.
“Never.” King puts him down.
The others soon catch up, Green giving Bing an equally tight, if somewhat less airborne hug while Bim glances over the heads of the people around them.
“Where’s Ed?”
“He changed his mind.” Bing shrugs over Green’s shoulder. “Something about having had enough of our crazy shenanigans and it being safer at the ranch.”
- beep beep beep beep -
Shrill beeping pierces the air and Bing winces, covering his left ear, “What’s that?”
Bim taps at his watch and the beeping stops, “Don’t worry about it.”
Green takes the handle of Bing’s suitcase, glancing towards the TV host for a moment before turning to Bing, “Let’s get you something to eat.”
According to the smithsonianmag.com, the world’s oldest bristlecone pine was a nearly 5,000 year old tree later named Prometheus. In 1964, a man named Donald Rusk Currey decided to use an increment borer to determine its age (a process that cuts a small hole into the center of the tree trunk, and is not intended to kill the tree). Unfortunately, the borer got stuck. He and a park ranger cut the tree down to remove the equipment, and when they counted the tree rings, they realized their mistake. Oops. This incident lead to better protection of the remaining bristlecone pines.
There’s some wiggle room about what can be called “the world’s oldest living tree.” The world’s oldest living single tree is the tree that the OP is referring to. Its name is Methuselah,and it is also around 5,000 years old. Since its location is unknown, nobody knows what it looks like. But it might be this tree here:
But technically, it isn’t the oldest living tree. Let me explain.
It turns out that root systems of trees can send up genetically identical saplings (aka clones) via their root systems. Like so:
Which means the original trunk can die, but since the root system is attached to other trees which give it nutrients, it lives on. The root system can theoretically do this indefinitely. So the tree trunks could be fairly young, but the roots could be large and very, very, very old. So the oldest “tree” isn’t a small grove, it’s a logic-defying forest.
I’d like you to meet Pando.
This male quaking aspen covers 106 acres and is ancient. I’m talking an estimate of 80,000 years. The trees you can see are just “shoots” he sent up, and their average age is 130 years old. He is his own forest. If trees could talk, I’d love to hear what he had to say.
He might be dying, due to insects and drought (hmm, wonder what could have happened to cause that). A section of Pando is being studied in an attempt to find a solution. But in the meantime, we can enjoy him for his beauty.
King: yesterday i accidentally kicked Wilford in the face while trying to catch my squirrels, and i couldn’t decide between saying “i’m so fucking sorry” or “are you okay?”
King: and i ended up saying “ARE YOU FUCKING SORRY?!”
King: it took Wilford two hours to get up and for Dark to stop laughing at me
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King has never been what you would call a social creature. A few centuries living on your own, focused solely on preserving the trees that are your lifeblood against the unrelenting development of civilisation, and joining what could be lovingly described as an utter madhouse, will do that to you.
When he’d moved in, the whole King of the Squirrels thing was to keep all those weirdos away from him. After losing an unending series of legal battles between fat cat politician types, and environmental weirdos who seemed a fair bit more interested in their own image than the actual outcome, King was more than happy to spend the next fifty years keeping to himself. And everyone else seemed to be okay with that.
Then Bing had moved in. Much like the Jims, he was extroverted, outgoing, very energetic and to be frank, tiring to watch. King kept clear though the kid would always wave at him and give a big doofy grin whenever he passed by.
Their friendship came to fruition one weird November night when Bing came kicking at King’s door, his hands carefully cradling an injured bat, tears dripping down his face. Apparently nobody else in the building cared about the poor little dude and Bing didn’t know the first thing about caring for an animal. Over the next two weeks, the two of them spent every day helping the little guy to get better until he was finally able to flap on his way again.
Turned out that sure, Bing was everything King had expected but that wasn’t all he was. He was a big sap with a love for giving everything a go, who wanted to do what’s best for everyone whenever possible, and made sure no one ever got left out. He was extroverted, but he was open-minded, he was a klutz, but he was imaginative, and though he was a little self-centred he was always well-meaning. Until recently, King and Bing had been nigh-on inseparable and the dryad can’t imagine how he got by without the dork.
So King knows, he knows, that the person stood at the head of the bed, eyes closed in concentration, one hand on either side of Chase’s head is not Bing. Sure he looks like Bing, is wearing Bing’s trademark outfit, complete with his iconic sunglasses and tank top, but the way he moves, the way he smirks, the complete silence. Just everything about it is wrong and this is not Bing.
Still he remains silent as Chase’s eyes finally flutter open, moving only as ‘Bing’ moves to leave, snatching this imposter’s arm and tugging firmly, holding tight to keep him in place.
“Who?” is all he says.
‘Bing’ pauses, turning back to look at the dryad before reaching with Bing’s human hand to press his thumb against King’s forehead, the dryad’s grip loosening in shock as the image of one person fills his mind.
“Who else?” ‘Bing’ doesn’t pull away but calls to the shadows, Phantom stepping from them. The dealmaker raises his cane and the globe begins to glow with his getting-to-be-too-familiar deep red power.
Chase yelps, but King doesn’t flinch as the air around them crackles and sparks with strangely familiar magic. A great weight lifts from both their shoulders as the power holding them in the building is erased.
“Give my love to Dark.” ‘Bing’ says directly to King as he and the world around them fizzles away.
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