pennysheets | Voicetesting: For Misty

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Voicetesting: For Misty

Finding a little one-room shack in the boggy woods is harder than it sounds. Magic is good for a lot of things, but finding shit is not one of them, it seems. Or maybe he just doesn't know that particular spell.

But he does find it. Eventually. He's tired, he's hungry, he's cranky, and there's a witch in there who supposedly came back from the dead. After bringing a bird back from the dead. He asked around, he tortured a couple people when his more friendly mask didn't work, and he got his answers. Apparently there are things his abandoning asshole father didn't know about the Power-- and things the sainted little Covenant didn't know, either.

There are mistakes that need corrected, and he's going to figure out how to correct them. So he's here to learn. Even if he has to beat the lessons out of her.

He stalks towards the shack, eyes already pitch black, power at the ready. His friendly mask isn't even making an appearance today. He needs this too badly, and he needs the power too much.

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Difficult to find by design. Already difficult and unpleasant terrain for the uninitiated, by winding as deep as she has Misty has all but ensured no one will ever accidentally happen onto her. It's only dogged hunters, or people looking for someone.

His approach is only known throughout the final mile, initially settling as an ache in her jaw. Changing pressure, an important point of focus oncoming, nothing - she thought - particularly foreboding. Only as he broke the clearing, emerged from proper wetland to the more solid ground of her sprawling garden, does any of him bleed through.

Not Zoe. Not the Coven. Not good, but little out here is. Appearing behind them only increases likelihood it would come to violence, and if that can be avoided...

Whatever dramatic entry he may want, it's absent. The door swings freely open before he reaches the wrap-around porch, the creak underscoring the ambient humming of cicadas. Too willowy to fill the doorway, she makes up for it by standing firm. Taking root.

"You lost?"

Ruin his dramatics, why doncha, Misty. He stops when she plants herself in the doorway, narrows his eyes at her.

"I'm exactly where I want to be." There's a split second where he debates using magic, but like always, the debate lands on "yes". He flicks a hand and the door slams all the way open against the outer wall of the shack and sticks there with an unhappy rattle. Poor shack. "I'm here to learn about bringing back the dead. I know you can do it."

No sense denying it when he's clearly something magical himself. Caught off guard the movement would get a flinch, but now remaining planted is a specific and important effort - she's occupied with giving a once-over, and otherwise impassive.

"Ain't something you learn," she says, clear and deliberate. "You're born with it or you're not. Sorry you wasted the trip."

"I can summon a darkling." And, because her Power is not the same as his Power, he explains grudgingly, "A ghost. It's temporary and insubstantial but I can do it." His hands make fists, magic warping the air around them, shaking. He can't help it. "I just need a body. There has to be a way!"

She thinks of the academy, of the man with the axe. Of Zoe, with whom she can on second thought sense some commonality. Ghosts, simultaneously within and beyond ber wheelhouse. Her brow furrows. "A ghost is different from a specific ghost," she cautions. Could just as easily be crafting demons.

But the power is visible, and difficult to write off entirely. His appeal seems an emotional one, both reassuring and more precarious. "Breathe. You go blowing my house apart, you'll never see me again. If you have bodies, you could just bring them to me."

He might be a power-mad, over-dramatic addict, but he's also an eighteen year old kid. For a second, his expression twists, like he might cry. It's brief, before a flat, desperate kind of rage takes its place. "If I had bodies do you think I'd waste months tracking down a rumor of Power?"

Frankly, Chase doesn't even really know how to disperse power without letting it go anymore. He loses his grip long enough for it to explode downwards, rattling and cracking the boards of her porch, but at least it's not blowing up her house?

People do all kinds of stupid shit about death, she doesn't say. Because they're egotistical, or because they're hurting. He implies both in such a short time she's still processing it when the boards in front of her seize, splinter, break between them. Spends another long, silent moment trying to decide if it was a threat or some restraint.

"If you're telling me you summon ghosts, I would." The gap is too wide. It's strong, but different, and not an art she's been led to believe anyone is intended to pick up. "You want anything from or out of me, you're gonna stop posturing."

Manners.

He swallows hard, keeps his hands in fists, but manages not to pull any more power. He can control himself. Sort of. For a little while. "I'm not posturing," he grounds out. If you want posturing, then you get cocky and theatrical, not angry. He's frustrated and desperate, but thankfully, all straight-forward and honest. This is a grown woman, not the stupid kids he tried to threaten last.

(He's still a stupid kid, too, of course, but he's not acknowledging that.)

Voice still tight, he says, "All I have are a pair of urns in the family home. I need to make new ones."

"I don't know what to do about ash," she says, allowing her tone to be gentle in the face of seemingly understood direction. "You come here to demand something, or to ask?"

There is a wrong answer.

What kind of stupid question is that, resurrection lady. However he gets what he needs, he'll do it.

He is... capable of being polite. Sort of. Sometimes. Just not right out of the gate after a day of tramping around in a bog, it seems. So he slowly forces his hands to relax and says, "Please."

Good start. She takes a half-step back, more indicative of ushering him in than retreating. "You're gonna come in, and you break one thing, I'm gone. You take an aggressive tone with me, I'm gone. You try something funny, I break you. We can talk. That good?"

Okay. Okay, polite. Quiet. Calm. He can do this. He's talked his way out of the dean finding his ID in the back of a dead kid's car. He'd been cheerful and amiable to those asshole covenant kids for weeks before he made his move.

He swallows down his rotten day and his bad first impression and pulls up the friendly mask he'd hoped not to have to bother with. Because beating a lesson out of her might not be possible, and he doesn't know if her power can be willed away. (If he could even convince her to. He'd done a shit job with Caleb, hadn't he, and he'd started off from a lot better position there.)

"Yeah. That's good." He'll just have to bite his tongue and keep the power under control, no matter how much it itches.

Another step back, an extending of her arm indicating he's welcome to step up.

"We're gonna talk about my porch later," she murmurs, though on the comedown of this quick adrenaline spike it's so light it could be mistaken for a joke. "Where are you from? How'd you get here?"

"I'll pay for it," he says, off-hand. "Or magic it. Whichever." He has an excess of both power and money. He edges around the damaged wood, then just floats himself over it until he's inside her... house.

If you can even really call this a house. He manages not to look judgey about it, but he definitely does look around and takes in the tininess of it. The spareness. The way he can see through the cracks in the walls. Jesus. How can anyone live in a hovel like this? Especially when she has power and could have anything she wanted?

"I'm from Massachusetts, and I have a car." He's a long ways from home, Misty.

The float is admittedly impressive.

"Hiked in here then, huh?" Because no car, no car, is getting through that swamp. Floated, perhaps, since that's a thing he can do. While she thinks, he's directed toward any of the available seats.

"When did you eat last? Drink last?"

Chase wants to drop casually onto the chair, but he's half-expecting the damn thing to collapse under him. So he sits gingerly. "This morning." And it's late afternoon, now. He really had expected to find this place a lot faster. "It was a lot of bugs and mud. I think I saw an alligator following me for a while."

He was badly tempted to blast the thing, but it never got close enough to really be threatening. (He was still tempted.) How does she live out here.

"Well, that's just swamp." By her estimation, a pretty uneventful trip. Alligators aren't any joke, but a sighting alone - tame. Clearly not enough to turn him back around. "They won't give you trouble unless you're messing around where they hunt," she advises before the topic of alligators slips by entirely. There's rummaging, a clanking of containers somewhere behind him, and she rounds back into view with a bottle of water.

"Where are you supposed to be, right now?" Kids have families, and kids have school. If he has neither, that's its own kind of important.

"Right here." He eyes the water bottle, as if he thinks she might have ulterior motives for offering it, but takes it in the end. He's more thirsty than he thought he'd be, and he didn't really plan this trip as well as he thought. Trudging through bogs-- swamps, apparently-- is not something he's particularly accustomed to. The only reason he's not all over in mud is, in fact, magic.

After a long drink, he adds, "I dropped out of school in October." Okay, well, he tried to kill one of the private school's seniors and his girlfriend. Same difference. Though from the news, no one believes that he is behind any of it but the covenant kids. He did his job of sucking up to (and paying off) the adults in that little town very well, and they haven't exactly been spreading it around. After all, that would implicate them, as well.

"Why is that?" She can hazard a rough guess from what little she knows, urns in the family home, but doesn't presume. "Not to hit the obvious notes, but school's important."

Chase really hadn't been intending to get into all this. It's personal, it's painful, and frankly it's embarrassing, and why does she need to know, anyway. But here he is, trapped into being polite, which means he has to come up with some kind of answer. "My first try at getting enough power to bring people back didn't go very well," he says after a moment.

He'd assumed it was an issue of strength: get enough power, and you force the darkling to last longer, maybe force it into corporeality. He's been reconsidering that, since he found out about this woman. Also since he failed at getting that extra power, and doesn't know of anyone else who he can manipulate into giving theirs to him.

Maybe with a very, very long con, but this woman is the only other person with power he knows, and he's already tipped his fucking hand, hasn't he.

He sure has.

"Anyone looking after you, or is it you alone?" Any kin going to come traipsing through her swamp after him, any police going to be sent. Or seeking him out on their own, the way he answers that doesn't inspire tremendous confidence.

"You have a coven?"

He barks a little laugh. "No coven, Christ. I grew up alone. Not knowing what this was." He holds up a hand and lets the water bottle float above it. "My mother died when I was a baby. My father abandoned her long before that. My adoptive parents didn't have any idea."

Past tense, didn't have any idea. Not definitive proof that they're the ones in the urns, but a hint.

Her eyes stray to the water, helplessly intrigued. Fine control of telekinesis, more than she understands young witches have. Overwhelming force is easy - this isn't quite finesse, but it's finer than shoving. Breaking.

"I did too," she murmurs, gaze still fixed. It's distant, but she sounds more focused as she clarifies, "Grow up no knowing. It all still feels so new to me." Her fingers twitch. "I'm sorry to hear about your parents."

The things he knows how to do, he does pretty well. Maybe with overkill, sometimes, but he's gifted with his magic. "You too, huh? Is that what happened? With the bird? You just felt the power and it just leapt out and that ruined everything?"

He's got the full tale from someone in town of the revival-- the literal revival that happened at the tent revival-- and then what they did to her afterwards, after some... persuasion. Backwater idiot hicks who feared what they didn't understand. That moron had nothing to fear from her, but plenty to fear from him. Because her power brings things back to life; his kills people.

The water bottle wobbles in the air, then cracks with the pressure of his power, starting to leak, until he snatches it out of the air with actual fingers.

"Yeah." Dull, still somewhat guarded for the novelty that speaking to someone that understands. "Nothing else like it - like a draft, through this little whole punched through the world around you." And you know, suddenly, you feel a cord connecting you to what's beyond it. By now she has to take up a corner of shawl to fiddle with, relieved at the distraction the bottle presents.

"Outreach for people like us isn't too great. When did you know you had that?"

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