#drabble!post

[knowingoverseer]

==>

==> Be Past Callie Your name is Callie Strider, and you're setting up a tea party.

You've been at this for a few days now, nervously but excitedly hyping yourself up to actually meet with Serket's friend Nepeta. Just the other night, you and Serket had gone fishing at the coast to prepare. You're going to be making sea bass! It apparently goes really well with tea.

All you were needing to do now was clean up all the glass figures strewn about the hotel lobby you've crafted, move around some furniture, cook and finish painting the glass broach you'd made for Nepeta. Simple, well, mostly. You've been dragging your feet a bit on the later cause you keep waffling between two design ideas... hoo.... but! Neither here nor there, you had a room full of weird glass statues to clean up!

You've been doing this the long way, admittedly; you use to be able to just pick everything up using your space powers, or even pulling everything into your inventory with a snap, but the atmosphere of Serket's timeline has been particularly dense and it dampens space powers- or at the very least, it's been dampening yours. You're pretty sure it has to do with it sort of... self-regulating the fact there's so much cosmic nonsense going on. What between the Horrorterrors and the whole Antarctic-rift that happened some years back...

Eldergods especially, you think, after all when you'd been fighting to get to Serket you'd all but lost your space powers. Instead you had to rely on your magic alone, which has been... uh, wild. Yeah wild is a good word for it. You're still not quite ready to face the fact you massively screwed yourself up, even if you've confided in Serket about it.

Ha.

Yeah, you're just going to hem and haw about how you need to be grabbing these guys one at a time to put them away. Sure, they could go all in your sylledex, but even that seems to have limitations right now which is. Not something you're use to! Whatever is lurking out there, it must be strong.

You know Serket seemed worried. She hadn't exactly liked how close the hotel you'd chosen to hole up in was so close to the shore. Of course, you dismissed her worries, insisted you'd be fine. You've fought off those fish people in droves before, you're seasoned at this!

Right?

Of course, your overconfidence to get yourself out of a fight has been your undoing before. And with the odds stacked so neatly against you, well...

...

==> Stop being past Callie

Nowadays, the hotel lobby is covered in broken glass. Furniture overturned, a smashed tea set, deep burn marks in the floor like an elemental blade etched into them. Or, at least you think it is. That's how you left it, anyway. You're not... in a good spot. No... Not in a good spot at all. You don't know how long it's been, or where you are exactly. But it's.... been a long time. So long that you're no longer even really scared, just.... apathetic. They haven't killed you, but god you wish they would. Then you'd have a chance to escape. A chance... If the atmosphere was dense at the hotel, here you were suffocating. So whatever was lurking down here... Honestly, it was better if you didn't try to fathom it.

[knowingoverseer]

==>

It hadn't taken you too long to get back up to the theater, having made your way there plenty of times from the resort at this point. You had never noticed any birds on your previous trips, but honestly you hadn't really paid much attention either. Now you and Murdock were sitting on the steps outside, watching and waiting. In front of you was a birthday cake, made mostly of seeds and honey, with cashew butter ‘frosting’, topped with 9 blackberries and an apple-rose. It was.... dumb, really really dumb, you know. But last year you had made him a real cake and it had gone bad, you had barely been able to eat a piece of it. This year at least it won’t go to waste. You hope, you really hope your presence isn’t scaring away the birds. You sit there for a while, in the dark, ears drooped. Idlily you pet Murdock who seems to resent this entire ordeal. You’d already offered him bits from the cake, but he really didn’t care for seeds. “thanks for coming oUt here with me mUr... i appreciate it.” It was a shame there was so much cloud cover tonight, it would have been nice for star gazing. There’s a swooping sound and you look up toward the seed cake, grinning. An owl had indeed come to inspect it, but finding nothing of value to it took off again as soon as it came. Murdock snorted before starting to caw in laughter. You slump back into your sitting position, defeated. Right, owls were carnivores, weren't they?

[knowingoverseer]

There is in fact a cake waiting at the front door of the room! Seems fresh too! No Serket to be seen however.

==>

You're just about to head out, present for Serket under your arm, wrapped in green- but you stop in the doorway at the sight of the cake.

Looking down either side of the hallway you fail to see the birthday bot in question or any of the Prospitians, then frown back at the cake. Really, she should be the one getting treats right now!

Your expression softens to a warm smile as you reach forward to grab at the cake's plate, picking it up only for it to disappear into your sylledex. Much too early for that, this way it stays fresh.

You set aside anything it might have been sitting on beside your door, lock up, and head out toward the lobby. Your hunt was for Serket, but honestly you haven't spent enough time out of your room yet.

[knowingoverseer]

==>

Man, you really need to stop moping around Valentines day. But in truth, you're not really sure what that looks like. You know you need to get back to New York soon, you've got some searching to do. But that almost feels like the worse option right now. There's at least people here to communicate with, even if you do keep sort of dropping off the face of the earth. Regardless of any of the aggressive fish folk it feels like the better option. But, you promised Lil Guy you'd return. And that was a while ago. The Banette already left around the beginning of the year, with the intent of checking for you at the hideout when it was convenient. But returning would just lead to isolation, and a burnout of whatever narrative energy you can currently muster. Still, no matter what you did the first step you needed to take was to be social again.

[knowingoverseer]

==>

Once again, for the umpteenth time just this week alone, you emerge from a flooded basement unsuccessful. Your body hurt, your eyes stung, and you were dead tired. Gods, how long has this search taken so far? A month? Two? Probably much more... You lost count whenever you had stashed your Rotom Phone away into your sylledex to keep it from getting soaked; asking the Rotom, Akasha, to keep up your queue. Whenever you do fish that out of your inventory, you'll be able to see, but until then it'd just be disheartening and a distraction. You need to find Serket.

Thankfully she was a mechanoid or else you'd have had to give up hope in this endeavor long ago, but the weight of knowing you'd have long since failed if it was someone else didn't leave you feeling any better about it. Upstairs you momentarily rest on a dilapidated armchair in a collapsed building. There's a strong smell of sea water and mold permeating the residence, among other things, and light filtering through the holes in the ceiling. You reach out your hand and try and focus on your magic. You can get in one more of these damn buildings today, surely, you can push yourself to do one more. The sun is still up, and the people- no, creatures outside still seemed less likely to be outright hostile when it was bright enough to see them coming. You can get one more in... A bright orb of light shines in your palm as you reach for your magic, doing you best to hold it back and focus your search on Serket, find Serket- But alas. Eight separate tendrils of light begin to morph and stretch from the orb, pointing in different directions. It was always like this. Your magic misbehaving here, too powerful but in weird and not always pleasant ways. Your finding spell finding instead every flooded book-filled basement within your area. A grey-spell to change into a violet blood for better searching of said flooded basements giving you almost fandom-esqu features and appendages. Any offensive magic you've cast has been disastrous for both you and the hostile entities that have been roaming this fallen city... On top of that, your space powers seemed to be dampened here almost entirely; and you've had a sneaking suspicion Serket can't be tracked magically. So yeah, it's been a fun time. Unceremoniously you pull yourself up from the old chair, keeping the orb in your hand almost like a compass, and set off toward an opening in the wall, only to trip over the most obvious of your magical augmentation, your tail. To think you wanted one for so long, it's been getting in your way near constantly since you implemented this damn spell! Yeesh! Gods you just want to be DONE WITH THIS ALREADY-!? The orb flickers and flashes, momentarily pointing all together toward one direction, toward where you know the harbor to be, before flickering further and dissipating into eight little trails of light. Alright. One more building. You'll mark this one to know where to come back to start your search in the morning when this obviously ends up fruitless. But for now.... one more house. Your name is Calliope Ohpeee Strider and you've been searching the east side of a long-since fallen Boston for 4 months now in search of your friend Serket. It's about time you found her. @artificialgrievand

[knowingoverseer]

==>

You've been wrapped up for a few hours now, and unfortunately you're once again in need of a distraction.

There aren't birds around this year due to the potential existence of certain guests, and Meenah refused to let you exchange one of your pokemon for Buddy through your Rotom Phone's box system. She's been worried about his unstable dna, really pushing for you to decide on an evolution stone to attempt to stabilize him. She also seems to think being exposed to more than a little Green Sun radiation could trigger a mutation.... and apparently there was an incident late last year with an Eevee that she won't go into details on... but, regardless, hanging with Buddy had been kind of what you'd banked on today and.... whelp. You hope he's doing alright at least. Still, with all the excitement you felt earlier, you weren't ready to just go back to working on your project or anything you've been doing for the past few weeks, and you didn't want to bug Serket if she was still entertaining, so you just kind of found yourself at the window of the room you've been using, staring up at the sky. Unfortunately, you don't really sleep much tonight.

[knowingoverseer]

==>

Well, that was certainly something of a distraction, breaking into every home and business within a few blocks of the train yard to see which had the best tornado shelter. You had a rough map of all the spots you thought could make for good refuge, the hotel you and the Prospitians had been holed up in unsurprisingly made the list of better places. Unfortunately now all you really had left to do was wait, and admittedly you weren't really convinced anything would happen. There's a lot of things Serket has warned you all about while traveling now, and not much has come to pass. Still, she had given you very useful information all the same, you now knew that Titan's migratory habits, and that... that was useful. Hoo, you... you really didn't think you'd ever see that creature again, no, it's been several years now and the entirety of the Antarctic fight had been one giant outlier for what you could find there. But no, Serket confirmed it herself, it was the very same.... you, you didn't know what to think. What to feel. It... it really wasn't much of a distraction from the thing that's been bothering you all day but by golly were you in better spirits about it. 11 years existing, 7 years dead and 5 since you'd seen that Titan. Hoo, for a Muse of Space you sure held on to dates and times like your existence hindered on it. Still, returning to those thoughts will just get you moping again. For now, what can you do, what can you prepare for? And, if the stars align, what will you do? What were you willing to do? And what could you stop yourself from doing? Things to muse on, but for now, preparing a shelter for the Prospitians should they need it sounded smart. You weren't really sure if the timeline was still hosting guests. Could a 10 foot tall cat even fit in a hotel basement? And, given what she was, would she need to?

[knowingoverseer]

==>

@artificialgrievand

It's... it's been hours now. Is Serket still out in the snow? Callie doesn't want to overstep her boundaries, Serket had said she didn't need help, but it was getting late and she really didn't think she could keep ignoring the fact Serket wasn't back in yet. She'd packed up half a floor's guest rooms worth of things in the time since she'd last checked in on the mechanoid, it was time to go try and help dig her out. After gathering up a dry coat and a thick blanket, and calling out her Mismagius, Arcane, Callie heads out the front door of the resort to hunt down this snow pile.