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Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2017 9:01 am
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Right. Okay. This is fine. Leila nodded and followed Liam's cue, stepping inside and finding a seat. She barely knew either version of this man at all, of course, but there was some shared eccentricity between them, as far as she could tell.
"I came so I could drop these off, for Renard." A carton of eggs was produced from her bag. There was also a tiger beetle clinging to the lid, which she apologetically shooed back into a pocket. "He helped us figure out a binding spell a while back."
And so, gifts of food. Hopefully they liked eggs. "They're from, uh, my hens."
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Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2017 1:59 pm
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Liam gave her a perplexed look. "The Otherworld's been here for at least a century," he said, which was downplaying his knowledge - he could time its birth to the hour, the minute, and the day. It was printed in neat block script on Ascencion's birth certificate.
"Of course, I've been... out of the action, so to speak, for quite some time. If it's changed, please."
He leaned forward in his seat, elbow resting on his knees.
"I'm all ears."
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Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2017 11:45 am
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"The ones you just mentioned," replied Liam. "Whatever my counterpart did, and whatever the efforts to stop it were. We knew that the universe just next to ours was dangerously unstable, that something had caused time to go horrifically awry there. And we feared that it might spread like a metastasizing cancer and come to affect our own."
He cleared his throat. "I was, and still am, one of the foremost experts in wardcraft that this world has ever seen. My husband is a self-taught master of enchantment and magical history. With our powers combined, we devised a spell - a protective ward that would encircle our world's borders and protect it from the off-kilter universe next door, and we undertook the tremendous task of casting it."
"I've explained this all to you before," he sighed. "Or, the other you, anyway. I can't believe I've been so rude - can I offer you a drink?"
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Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2017 12:08 pm
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"Um, sure. Nothing with alcohol, though, I'm a pretty powerful telepath." The two did not mix very well, and Leila really missed day drinking.
Having to give up some of her vices made her feel more out of place than she already did. She was hardly an expert on magic, and didn't have quite the same academic history as the counterpart she replaced. And there was also, of course, the absolute shitshow of guilt she had about Ezra -- she wasn't his real mother, and by arriving here had taken her away.
"There was chronomancy involved in this other Renard's project, so we think caging him made this four-hundred-year time loop as a side effect," she confirmed. "And a lot of awful things happened for the sake of keeping it that way. That part never made sense to me."
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