[prp] Eggs? (leila + liam)

[cibarium]

Leila had never been to the Shore estate in person. The closest she'd gotten was forwarding a marmalade jar there via Jeremiah, as some kind of half-apology-half-acknowledgement. The reasons behind that had been pretty complicated. She and Eve were big on traditional gift-giving, and at the time it had felt important to acknowledge the man who'd once been important enough to them to officiate their wedding in another cycle. That was something they'd probably be less inclined to do nowadays.

Thankfully the reasoning behind this gift was much, much simpler. She'd called ahead about dropping something off the other day, and now she was ringing the doorbell.

silverah

this start is terrible

 

[Silverah]

For a moment, standing there on the porch, it was very likely that Leila was overcome by the peculiar sensation that she was being watched. And then the door swung open. Liam Noor stood before her, arms outstretched, wearing a polo shirt and a pair of tragically-patterned Bermuda shorts.

"Leila!" he crowed. "Get a load of you! New haircut?"

He paused, hand going to his chin. "No. Moisturizer? No. Anti-aging spell? Well, whatever it is, you look great."

And he went in for the hug.

"How's the wife? How's that boy of yours?"

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

"Oh God, you don't know."

Leila did not accept the hug. Instead she turned pale and had a look like she just discovered she had been fed poison.

silverah

 

[Silverah]

Liam lowered his arms and frowned slightly at Leila. "I know many things," he replied, "and don't know many others. For example, I know that our world collided with an alternate dimension and caused all manner of havoc. I know that I was forced to use a failsafe to trap my double - where he remains - so that he could not disrupt my life any further than he already has. I know that something has gone seriously wrong with how magic works and that concerns me greatly."

He paused.

"I do not know why you are regarding me like I have just eaten a live canary."

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

After a tense few seconds, Leila replied, "I'm one of the doubles." She sagged a little bit, guiltily. "Eve, too. I hadn't thought... should I leave? I can leave."

silverah

 

[Silverah]

Liam laughed, though it sounded slightly forced. "Oh," he said. "That's all water under the bridge - you're here now, aren't you?"

He stepped to the side, holding the door open for her. "Please. Step into my parlor. We're all in this together, aren't we?"

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

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."

silverah

 

[Silverah]

Liam leaned forward, taking the carton and offering her a smile in exchange. "Thank you," he said, peering at the eggs. "I'll be sure he gets them. I'm sure he'll be pleased."

He set the carton down on the coffee table and took a seat.

"So," he said. "Catch me up. Fill me in. What's the latest?"

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

"It's all gonna be a long story, I think," Leila admitted, thinking about all the recent developments -- even the ones in her personal life had a lot of context around them. "Do you know much about the otherworld we brought here? It ties in to pretty much everything I could talk about..."

silverah

 

[Silverah]

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."

Cibarium

 

[cibarium]

"It's much older than that, from our perspective," said Leila. "Thousands of years. It came into existence because of a sigil meant to cage our reality's version of Renard... the people who made this sigil thought they were saving the world, I guess." She frowned a bit more, her head tilting downward.

"They didn't really know what he was working on, didn't ask, just decided to stop a big secret project with another big secret project. That's kind of a recurring theme to this whole thing."

silverah

 

[Silverah]

Liam nodded slowly. "Ah, yes," he said, "So it's been supplanted by yours. Just as so many other things were when your lot went mucking around with the seal. The timelines don't match up, won't match up - and I wouldn't expect them to."

"I mean," he added consideringly, "Our efforts at creating Ascencion in order to keep the two worlds separate was a Big Secret Project of its own. One we undertook in response to the prior two. It's all a mess of interconnected causes and effects."

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

That meant Sonny was wanted here? That thought made the corner of Leila's mouth twitch upward a little. A child and a project. She wasn't sure how to feel about that.

"Sounds like ecology," she sighed. Then she looked up again. "Prior two?"

Of course there was more. Of course.

silverah

 

[Silverah]

"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?"

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

"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."

slverah