Difference between revisions of "Log:Mavis meets a Faerie Queen"

20 November, 2019

November happens upon Mavis at NSP shortly after Amity has told Mavis that fairies exist. Mavis gets to see just what the difference is, between a wee little near-human like her girlfriend and a sublime, deific rainbow like November.

Ninth Spectrum Paintball, FB10

      Mavis is taking her break out in the parking lot. She has the luxury of being able to hit the time clock to punch out whenever she pleases and also the luxury of checking back in whenever she felt like she'd had a long enough break.

      Tonight, Mavis is taking a long one and she's sat alone on the back of her pickup truck with the tailgate thrown down. She's bundled up in a hoodie, wool-lined aviator jacket, scarf, and beanie and gloves knitted by Amity in gradients of slate greys and pale yellows. The mortal has the keys in the Ford Ranger's ignition and the radio runs off of the battery, broadcasting one of the local stations and some 90's music that Mavis vaguely hums the tune to while she kicks her booted feet into the empty air. She looks up, heavenward at the sky, searching for stars but it looked like it was going to rain instead.

      November, on the other hand, is not out in the parking lot. At least, she wasn't at first, but after a while, she steps out of rental building, streeeetches long, slender arms up toward the icy sky, and breathes a slow and blissful exhalation. Notably, an exhalation which does not puff out in a foggy little cloud the way Mavis' does...

      Noting the younger woman on her way toward her own car, the rainbow pauses, then veers thataway to ask, "Car troubles?"

      Mavis listens to Alanis Morissette belt it out while tapping her thumbs against her lap. She's one of those weird people who back into a parking space and Mavis doesn't hear November's approach, nor does she see the Lost walking over to her parked truck. When her boss finally does make it over to her, Mavis has just pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and thumbed it open. There's a Camel Crush Green Menthol perched between her lips when that voice greets her. The mortal gives a startled jump, drops her lighter on the ground, and squeaks in surprise.

      "November!" She looks caught and guilty and her boss had asked her a question. She snatches the un-lit cigarette out of her mouth. "N-No. I was just on a break, thought the fresh air would be nice." Mavis looks at November from top to bottom. "Aren't you cold?" She couldn't help but ask this, the mortal always seemed to be fretting about November dressing appropriately for the weather.

      The rainbow steps closer, head tilting at the unfamiliar sight of the cigarette held in the younger woman's lips, then drops to an easy crouch to retrieve the fallen lighter, movements fluid, graceful and efficient, as if she were performing the first steps in a dance and only awaited the music's next cue to continue. The lighter is offered on an open palm.

      November shakes her head when asked if she is cold, however, bright eyes lively and alert, attentive, so very, very -present- in the moment. As always, there is just SOMEthing about her that seems more...real...than anyone, and anything, around her. "The air IS wonderful, isn't it?" she answers, rhetorical question offered with a smile and a twirl which sends that glittering hair of hers spinning out in a curtain of beauty and colour. It almost seems to float, drifting with the wind so easily in response to her motion, but surely that is just a trick of the shadows in the parking lot. "The scent of it, the way the world feels as though it is preparing, making itself ready, eager for the storm to come..."

      Mavis watches November sweep down and sweep back up then offer her hand out. She looks down at that outstretched arm and hand, the red Bic lighter balanced atop November's pale, narrow palm. "Thanks," she says in a low voice, peeking over to spill a glimpse into November strange, bright eyes. She plucks the lighter out of the Lost woman's hand, hesitating at the last second then warily taking it.

      Little, misty puffs punctuate each of Mavis' exhales and her cheeks and nose are ruddy from the cold. She listens to November, eyes guarded and seldom leaving the woman as she puts her cigarette back in her mouth and lights it. Mavis looks away as she pulls the first drag from the Camel into her lungs, sighing it back through her nose. She stares ahead, flicks her cigarette, then asks in a flat voice, "You're one of them, aren't you?" It wasn't really a question, not the way Mavis phrases it. She glances at November without turning her head and brings the cigarette to her lips again. Her hands are shaking inside of their fingerless gloves and her shoulders shudder as she sighs out a hazy, gray cloud.

      As before, there is no hint of a similar puff anywhere near the faerie rainbow, and unlike Mavis, there isn't even the faintest trace of pink on those smooth, pale cheeks. Really, dressed in white as she is, it only draws attention to how very close -to- white her skin is: a few shades peachier than cream, utterly unblemished, not a wrinkle or a freckle to be seen.

      Upon hearing the mortal's statement, November's focus drops down from the clouds to settle on her face, and she sidesteps to avoid the smoke while asking a polite, "One of which, lovely? I am many things." Her eyes, however, are knowing, and encouraging, both amused by and silently waiting for the prospect of a more direct question.

      Mavis does do her best not to smoke November out, directing her sighs and the streams of wispy clouds away from her boss. She puffs out twin cones of smoke from her nostrils when November sidesteps her question and she cuts her a look that's very close to being a glare. Mavis gives her head a little shake, closes her eyes, and undoubtedly rolls them behind her eyelids before she opens them again.

      "You know what I'm talking about," she mutters, pulling off her hat, bunching it in her fist, and lowering her hand down to the truck bed. Her ears are stung by the cold, but Mavis doesn't mind it. Helped to keep her head clear while November grinned at her like that. She talks while not looking at her boss, made it easier that way. "Don't deny it. There's something different about you, I knew it when you interviewed me and then that knowing never really left. Stuck around. Somewhere," she taps her skull with her cigarette still pinched between her fingers, "in the back of my head." She ashes her cigarette with a hard flick then sadly looks at November. "I'm sorry." Pause. Puff. Sigh. Mavis takes awhile to speak more, but there's the sense that's she's not finished. Just taking her time. Then, she says in a tight rasp, "For what you went through."

      "Mmmm. I wondered when she would tell you." The words are quietly spoken, pitched not to carry beyond their immediate area, though she needn't worry overmuch; the employee parking is a bit out of the way to begin with, and the laughter and chaos of games in progress, even at this late hour and in this chill, is more than enough to disguise their conversation.

      The rainbow's head tilts, inquisitive. "Or did she show you?" Standing so still, she almost doesn't seem to be breathing at all. As if the thought were only just now occurring to her, she brightens and asks a willing, "Would you like to see -my- truth? There's little pleasure in lying to those who know full well they're being lied to, but fate has its own plans for us."

      Mavis lowers her hand to her lap, cigarette still smoldering between her index and middle fingers. She just shrugs her shoulders helplessly when November says that about how she'd wondered when Amity was going to tell her. The mortal kicks her legs in the air then kicks one ankle up onto her knee to stub the cigarette out on the sole of her boot.

      "She TRIED to tell me," murmurs Mavis, guiltily not meeting November's eyes. "I didn't believe her." And she had said some things then that she wished she hadn't and Amity had forgiven her, but she didn't feel absolved. "I.. I thought she was nuts, she was acting so crazy. Breaking mugs in the kitchen."

      Mavis picks up an empty soda can that had been rolling around in the back of her truck by the looks of it and pokes her cigarette butt into the empty can. There's three or four other crushed filters inside of there, too. Apparently, this what she's using as an ashtray for her recently recovered habit.

      Her honey-brown eyes creep back over to November's face when she offers to show her a true glimpse rather than the false image. Mavis' brows pinch ever so slightly, but she's no doubt curious about this. "Isn't THAT your real face? I thought.. 'cos.. you know," she trails off, gesturing at November's otherworldly exterior as if it were explanation enough. Obviously, Amity had shown hers to the mortal, because she knows exactly what November is talking about and isn't surprised by the offer beyond the fact that she'd assumed this was the Lost's true visage. Mavis tilts her head. "What do you mean. Fate's plans for us?"

      Sympathetic, but gently so, the faerie rainbow's posture is .. well, it's what it nearly always is: regal, a queen offering her support to one in need. "No, lovely. What you see is a mask, only, to veil the truth from mortal sight. Amity...she is very nearly human." She quirks a small, wry smile. "I am not." That smile broadens, amusement deepening. "Not even the mask can veil -every-thing."

      There is no warning before the Mask's release, and unlike Amity's nearly-human visage, November...no. Just...no. November is a god. November is a force of nature, her beauty, unveiled, enough to make the heart ache -- it is sublime, awesome in the truest sense of the word, in the soul-deep awareness of primordial power beyond anything Mavis has felt before, in the fickle sense that anything and everything is possible if one just dares to dream.

      Amity is the house fairy, the sprite who aids the lonely traveler and sends them on their way. November is the Faerie queen a hero begs for wishes and miracles.

      Her voice, too, is dramatically different, though still distantly similar to the voice to which Mavis has become accustomed. The Irish lilt is still there, accent the same, but that voice...it is as terrifying, beautiful, and as alien, as the winged and crowned figure who speaks with it, too pure and too musical to be human even without the little fact that Mavis is HEARING COLOUR. Every word November speaks draws forth a hint of colour in the mind.

      "We are creatures of two worlds, Mavis, but we are all of us bound into fate, into the Wyrd, by virtue of what we have become. The True Fae are creatures of one world: fate itself. They need us. They need your kind to -become- 'us.'" Calm, poised, her demeanour is no different than usual, and woo! Now Mavis can see WHY she holds herself like a gosh darned queen.

      Mavis frowns, because she doesn't like to be patronized and she feels like November is patronizing her just the littlest bit. It's not a particularly hostile frown, merely a downwards twitch at the corners of her mouth. She's still frowning at November when the Lost releases that mask of hers. For some odd reason, Mavis had expected November to get her expressed permission before dropping the veil. Something about being human with a human sense of proprieties had mislead to this assumption.

      She sighs out a sudden, hard exhale as if a cold fist had driven into her gut. Mavis' eyes go wide and alarmed, the whites visible all around her irises, and her nostrils flare as she sucks in a sharp breathe to replace that one she'd lost. Her gaze flits from wingtip to wingtip, pointed ears, shifting eyes. She scoots back across the truck bed, getting the heel of a boot up onto the tailgate to scuttle her backwards. Each word November speaks, she hears and sees with deafening clarity and vivid bursts of color. It's like some dim corner of her brain had been dark her whole life and now it was flooding with every hue and shade. She has a boot under her, two hands braced against the cold bed of the truck, and other other leg it kicked out. Mavis still clutches her hat in one hand and the color has drained from her tawny features, leaving them uncharacteristically grayish. It took every ounce of her courage not to scramble into the corner of and cower or hop the side of the truck and make a run for it.

      "So," she says shakily, trembling as much as her voice, "what.. What do we DO about it?" Mavis blinks, swallowing her fear and fueling on the rage she'd felt when Amity told her what the Gentry had done to her. Some of it, anyway. She's too awestruck to embrace that temper she'd kicked into when she'd heard about this Keeper, but there's a cold block of rage Mavis is keeping chilled for that Woman. Creature. THING. Mavis hated that Keeper and, by extension, the Gentry.

      "I'm... I'm angry," she admits, pushing herself up then slouching and dropping her hands into her lap. Mavis peers up at November imploringly. "I want to bake a cake for that bitch that hurt Amity. She.. She can't even talk about all of what happened. Told me when she got back to this side, her parents were old and they would've been expecting someone 30 years older." She looks down at her lap and rubs her face with a curled fist. "Amity's not even her real name."

      November, wise creature that she is, doesn't move while Mavis is retreating. She doesn't even -hint- at stepping closer, and even when the mortal gathers herself enough to speak, -she- stays precisely where she is, in all her colourful glory, radiant and quite literally lighting up the world.

      Hearing the human out, she dips her head and urges, "Use that anger. Use the power it grants you, the drive, but for Amity's sake and your own, take great care." The faerie queen advises the incautious knight. "You were in danger the moment you were loved by her, the moment you loved her yourself. You are in danger now, and you are both each other's weakness and strength. The Fae who kept her -will- want her back, and will be quite pleased to have you, as well."

      The faerie Ancient tilts her head, studying Mavis' expressions, before admitting, "I have pushed her, for your sake and for her own. It hurt her, which I regret, but she is stronger for it." Conscious of the fact that she IS a flipping night-light in a dark parking lot, all of that...THATness...is abruptly veiled by the pale and lovely, androgynous young woman Mavis knew before, ageless, with eyes older than her years would seem to allow. "There are a number of us in the area. We gather to protect each other from the Fae, to have a society among which we can be -ourselves-, without the lies, without the pain of never truly fitting in. Promises are binding; that much, the fairy tales have right. Amity, and I, and many others are bound to protect the humans who know of us here. By telling you of our existence, Amity has forced that protection upon you. We mean no slight against you; I know you are a capable young woman, but this is a fight you can't win alone. The Fae are stronger even than I, lovely, and their reach is long."

      Mavis sniffs with her head still bowed and her glossy, black hair slips around her face to shadow it. The sniff is a thick, wet sound and when Mavis looks up again there are the glimmers of scattered tears clinging to her bottom eyelashes. She sniffs again, this time in disgust and her head shakes. Mavis loots fit to spit when November speaks about Amity's old Keeper and what would please the awful creature, but she's too polite for that sort of foul display and doubly so in front of November. Triply whilt November was like __THIS__, all shimmery and regal. She can't help but recall the pristine, white cloak November had worn that one night when Mavis had worried again about her catching the frost, but she probably wasn't going to keep asking November if she was cold. Not anymore.

      She opens her mouth, about to object, but she senses that she's not supposed to do that. A errant knight doesn't just /interrupt/ the Queen when she is speaking, not to mention glOWinG in the parking lot. It never in a million years occurs to Mavis that someone might see them. November wasn't worried about it... Why should she be?

      "What'd you do to her?" asks Mavis after a couple seconds of silence when November has finished speaking. She was relieved to break between the bursts of color that rode along with November's words. It made her want to paint again. She hadn't done that seriously in years. "I mean... how did you hurt her? Pushing her to tell me wasn't wrong. It was the right thing to do." Mavis crosses her arms. "I knew she wasn't being honest about something." She shakes her head. "It's one of those gay things. Women's intuition. One of us catches a notion of something's off and the other, intuitive as well, senses we've picked up the line and they give themselves away." The way she describes it, it's almost like a dance but it must be one that exhausts her because she sighs tiredly. She and Amity had tangoed to this tune for awhile. Begrudgingly, she points out, "I've been fine my entire life, never got snatched up by fairy-god-nappers. One thing you all got in common though is ya did, though. Think about that."

      And a well-behaved young Knight Mavis is. November, too, speaks very politely of things which weren't, at the time, polite at all.

      "I used her inculcated manners against her, brought discomfort into what had been her sanctuary, and introduced her to a very disagreeable person, to teach her that getting angry and pushing back are not bad things." Pause. "I'm banned from your home at her request as a result." Her tone was -mostly- serious before, albeit with a hint of wry humour when she mentions the banning, but it sobers further as she lowers her voice to explain, "She was a -slave-, Mavis. A servant to a Lady of power, with absolute control over life, death, and every agony in between." Her lips tug to the left, amusement that never quite becomes amusement proper. "You have seen me, felt what I am like. Now imagine yourself in your Amity's place, in the place of one to whom creatures like myself are all-powerful. I hit every little button she tries desperately to forget."

      After a quiet moment, the rainbow breathes a rush of sudden laughter, mercurial creature that she is, and turns to head back toward the rental building, calling over her shoulder, "You're passionate, combative and determined to have your way. Now that you're in -our- company, you may as well be standing naked on a mountaintop screaming 'Eat me!' to the wolves. Don't -ever- think you're safe again. We don't. We know better. Oh, and watch out for Vampires. Those are real, too."

      So helpful. SO reassuring.

      Mavis listens, albeit she does so with an incredulous look etched on her face. She couldn't believe what November was telling her, but... then Amity was really wound tight sometimes and even Mavis agreed that she needed to embrace her comfort zones and set her own boundaries. She'd tried to help the Lost cultivate that and Mavis finds herself nodding a little. That is, until she barks out a startled laugh and blinks up at November.

      "Banned?" A slow grin spreads across Mavis' lips, the sliver-gap between her incisors peeking out between her smile. She muses aloud, "We'll have to do something about that." Then Mavis looks at November again with that expression she gets when she's fixing something around the range and /really/ hyper-focused on the task. "You're not Her." Amity saw her like this all of the time? There's a little sting of jealousy that made Mavis feel down-right plain in comparison, as if she hadn't already before.

      All too soon, November is whisking back off to the rental building. Mavis calls after her, promising, "I wouldn't be tasty! Full'a metal screws and plates, might break a tooth on one." Then, she frowns again. Vampires, too? Christ. She scoots to reach the lip of the truck-bed and hops down, closing it up with a slam and a muttered, "Seriously.. damn vampires, going to have to," mutter-mutter, "Buffy it up." Grumble, grumble. She opens the driver's door, gets in, turns OFF the radio because silence is nice for a change, and cranks the engine. She was goin' home.