The Arrival [closed]

[thekohakuriver]

WHO: Haku and Bartimaeus, aka the spirit squad
WHAT: Haku enters the world
WHEN: Now
WHERE: a somewhat remote and lonely rift
NOTES: TBD

Things had been going so well, for once.

It had been a long time since Haku had defied his mistress, really defied her, gone against what she had ordered rather than simply doing a little more, or a little less. Sometimes he had even stubbornly done as he'd been told, that much and not an ounce more, which was often much better than outright insolence, in it's own way. But this time, this time he'd really done it. He'd even claimed responsibility for Zeniba's hostage, though that had been Chihiro's cleverness, and no real fault of his. He'd flown away, without reporting in, which he excused to his sense of honor because she'd treated him as dead when he'd only been dying. She'd thrown him in the trash, the actual trash.

And she hadn't been able to stop him, this time. It had seemed, just for a few hours, with the clean sea below him and the clean sky above, that he was, if not free, then the very next thing to it. And, more importantly, he was for once in the service of someone he actually wanted to help. There are worse things than death; not being able to choose your own master, for example.

Then... And then...

And now, this.

One moment he'd been flying, dreaming of freedom, daydreaming really. And then he'd been crashing chaotically through trees that hadn't been there a moment before, snarled up and scratched. The light had gone acid-green, and the air as close and oppressive as the depths of the bathhouse steamworks, as if the very veil of reality were somehow too heavy, too solid and real. That was when the screaming started, the outraged, hateful shrieks of black, broken things. And when Haku turned and saw the rift, he knew that he was among their number; Spirits, twisted and broken, somehow wrested by force and flung down here, outside of the Spirit World.

He didn't know where he was. But he knew where he wasn't, and he knew what pain was. Everything else was an unknown. And so it was when Bartimaeus found him; a long white snake of a spirit dragon, snapping and snarling, keeping the demons at bay with only reluctant violence, and a shining green shard in the palm of one talon.

Comments

[reshapes]

Here's the thing.

It is a truth universally known in more or less every world that when someone says that they are minding their own business, that there is at least a solid 50/50 chance they are doing exactly the opposite of that. Everyone does it. Somewhere there are burly Nile crocodiles innocently meandering around certain mud flats, insisting to every crane they paddle past that No no, I'm not here for you or your fat round eggs; I'm only taking an afternoon dip. For my health, you know. Every now and again, one finds ways to work 'keeping to oneself' into 'sticking my nose into places it only technically belongs.'

So let it be known that this isn't one of those times. He is a completely innocent third party in all of this. Can he help it if, while wheeling about a remote and forested bit of country, he happens across a rift in need of investigation? No. Definitely not. It certainly has nothing at all to do with looking for one. Why really, if he was being particular about it he almost wishes someone were around to see him as he rapidly changed direction when he'd caught sight of that tell tale glimmer of sickly green, turning wing over wing from his morning constitutional to heroically investigate the threat.

Alas, there are no witnesses. Tragically, no one will see the expertly executed double handspring with which he plans to go backflipping through the rift into whatever lies beyond. No one will be able to--

Hold on.

"Ugh. What are you doing here?" squawks the sporty (if conspicuously over sized) falcon which drops in through the treetops.

In retrospect, it is maybe not the most respectful thing one might say to the spirit twisting about among the throng of aggressive Fade escapees - particularly given that revealing pulse of power exuding off the dragin from all planes visible to him. But hey! He's out of practice. No one should really blame him for that either.

[thekohakuriver]

And Haku, who is currently wearing a mouth and form not suited to speech, snaps at the terror demon harrying him from the other side, driving it back, then turns towards the voice and— a talking bird? Have a snarl for your trouble, Bartimaeus, if that's the best you can do for a first impression.

All he wants is to get to the tear, the thing he'd fallen from, and escape back to what he'd been doing. But it's barely half a tear now, gone strangely crystalline in the air, something twisted and torn. And besides, it's all but impossible to bull past the corrupted spirits tumbling through, howling as they went.

It's getting desperate, on the ground, but he doesn't dare abandon his scant advantage. And now there's a talking bird— He glances at it again, and revises his opinion. Not a bird at all. Some kind of Spirit, smart enough to know better, and old enough too. He gives it a demanding bark; help me, unless you mean to attack! The threat is equally implicit: or don't, and be attacked yourself.

It isn't as if Haku's opponents aren't about to notice Bartimaeus too.

[reshapes]

Honestly. There's no need to throw your weight around. Never mind how recently you fell out of a hole through the Worlds; there's no need to be vulgar and dramatic about it.

Which is to say: he knows trouble when he sees it, and there's no point in making an enemy of a powerful spirit over some measly old rift. There's plenty of the latter and just enough of the former to be inconvenient.

So with a sigh and a sporty back wing, the falcon wheels around and Bartimaeus kisses his trip to the Fade goodbye. Next time, he thinks, then flicks a Detonation into the midst of the twisted spirits falling free of the Rift. It explodes in a burst of heat, scorching a broad swath of earth and setting fire to the tall grass. It also does a fair bit of damage to a number of spirits crowding the dance floor, but the descriptions would be grotesque enough that we won't go into it.

"Well don't just stand there, handsome. Leg it or lose it."

[thekohakuriver]

Haku doesn't need to be told twice; before Bartimaeus has quite finished speaking, he's shot forward with all the momentum of wind and water. The rushing of his passage tears the closest few demons to shreds even as they reach for him, reducing their bodies to gobbets and slime, splashed artfully across the browning grass below the rift. One, just barely quick enough, screeches and writhes around its stump of an arm, flinging steaming droplets of ichor in all directions.

A breath of room was all he needed; having gotten that, Haku is now airborne, and the advantage of height gives him a good view of the rift's undulating, crystalline glow. He coils at it, neck strongly curved, like a snake, about to strike. One glaring green eye turns, looking at Bartimaeus; Well?

There's a cost to looking like you know what you're doing, you know.

[reshapes]

Well what?

It's not as if he's here to play tour guide, thank you very much. With the Afrit - no, that isn't with right is it? Power drizzles off of the dragon shape in rivulets, as a particular goopy candle or like a bucket with holes unjustly poked through the bottom and sides. But as to the exact texture and definition of it, he can't quite say. It is, he thinks, something like looking at an eclipse. There's a shape standing right there, blotting out a perfectly good view of the sun.

--Anyway, the point is that with the other spirit airborne, they have a little more maneuvering room now don't they? Or rather, he does, and he could care less what ol' noodle over here decides to do.

"This has been fun, but I have place to be," Bartimaeus announces and, with a flick of tail feathers, he plummets back toward the fray at the falcon's top speed.

He was every intention of zipping his way through the scattered, much-abused spirits littering the mouth of the Rift and, pop, making his way straight on through into whatever lies beyond it. He doesn't mind saying that between the two of them, they've made neat work of the assemblage there so it should be a relatively easy thing to simply saunter on by. That's the theory anyway. In practice what happens is Bartimaeus dive bombs the snarling rift in the world and before he can reach it, it disgorges yet another series of corrupted spirits. There are three immediate downsides to their presence: in his professional opinion, they are considerably uglier than the ones which came before them. They also ooze a particular level of force that he doesn't quite care for. Lastly, they seem to be the advance guard. Even now, he can feel traces of greater and nastier and presumably more hideous beings pressing into this place--

So the falcon twists away yet again, ascending back upward with a distinctly irritated flap. 'So much for that idea,' Bartimaeus thinks.

"Ready to put that new toy of yours to work?" he says, flexing his falcon talons around the sickly green glow of the rift shard buried there at the edge of his Essence. Eugh. He hates this part.

[thekohakuriver]

Haku's body dances a pensive, waiting curve, an oddly stern and vicious expression. Or maybe that's just the teeth; there are quite a lot of them, after all, most on display. He mimics Bartimaeus' gesture with his own talon, feeling around the strange magic, a tongue probing at a broken tooth. It's a strange, ugly magic in that same way, like a pain that almost feels more of nausea than agony, unignorable in any case, a rent in his essence. He shifts focus, abrupt, snakelike, and scribes an affirmative circle with his serpent's length, and the green of the anchor leaps out at the precise moment Bartimaeus' does. It's almost as if they planned it.

The Rift... screams.

There's not another word for it, that rising, grating squeal of two realities grinding against one another. The dissonance increases again and again, climbing towards the limit of tolerance hand-over-hand until it finally breaks, and falls. There is a burst of light which, against the burst of silence seems only anti-climax. Haku stares at where it had been with a sense of betrayal and discomfort; he didn't know what he had expected, here, but it wasn't that.

It wasn't to be trapped. It wasn't... to be cut off, not from the spirit world. Not from Chihiro. Think fast, Bartimaeus, before he thinks to be actually angry, or remembers at whom to point that anger.

[reshapes]

The shapes of the spirits there in the clearing go jagged and strange and briefly awful in the wake of the Rift's closure. There's weakness there, as if by slamming the door shut behind them they've severed a particularly vital limb or two for the corrupted entities. Looking at them, he is struck briefly with an unpleasant and oily feeling. Someone more prone to the indulgence of sentimentality might call it sympathy or pity, but Bartimeaus chooses not to give the sensation much examination past the point of revulsion.

He has other things to worry about. Namely, his own skin¹. By the estimate of his superior consciousness, he has roughly five seconds to make a case for why his new compatriot should follow him as opposed to turning those teeth to bear and simply devouring him. And yes, usually, he'd use those five seconds to get a running head start. Let's face it - he's outrun worse. But this kind of work (the flying and the holding a winged shape and the snapping flashy detonations off sort of thing) really is work these days, and he's not so proud as to pretend a quick escape might not be a little dicier than he'd like.

So: diplomacy. Yuck.

The falcon rides an air current upward, spiraling around the twisting shape of the second spirit like an oxpecker orbiting a rhino's back. It says, in his most flattering tones, "Not too shabby! With a few more pointers from yours truly, you'll have the hang of that thing in no time."

1. Metaphorically speaking.

[thekohakuriver]

Haku gives this all the consideration it is due, and a weather eye to its purpose. He watches Bartimaeus' idle grace with one mud-green eye and the, at the appropriate instant, shifts the turning of his coils in a decisive whip-crack. Should it connect, such a blow would send a bird of his size not just tumbling, but directly down to the ground.

If he'd been a bird, really a bird, such a maneouver might easily kill him. But you aren't a bird, are you bartimaeus? You're a Djinni.

And one easily sat upon and pinned down, whether by a dragon, or a boy who looks no older than sixteen at oldest. An elf, rather, which accounts for the size of his eyes and the narrowness of his wrists.

"What is this?" It's really not the tone a boy usually takes with a dead bird, "Talk, Djinni. Or else."