mundus_alius | take me over to that other side

It's actually rare these days that Grey gets into creating magic that should be more in his wheelhouse than banishing demons. Building wards, healing, soul searching, divination - these should be his bread and butter but it's something that has been lacking in his calendar for too many years. There's something profoundly satisfying in the knowledge that he is going to be doing something lasting and good with his talents. And something bittersweet in knowing that he hasn't been even trying for a long, long while.

He arrives to Cash's apartment with the afternoon sun, carrying a full tote bag with ingredients and casting tools. Under his black coat he's wearing lighter colours than usual, faded grey jeans and a linen shirt of pale bluish grey colour. Even the heavy coat feels too much after a day of fasting and cleansing.

He knocks on the door and settles to wait.

Cash's apartment is nothing fancy. Unlike some people back home, he doesn't operate in opulence when he gets sent to another world -- though he never turns down a visit to opulence. The apartment is spartan, the walls white, the floors hardwood that's been polished to a dull sheen through sheer use and age. There's a kitchen, a connected living area, a small bedroom, and a bathroom. Neat, efficient; how he prefers things.

The morning's been used for dusting and sweeping, just about the only cleaning his apartment really needs, and Cash is stretched out on his couch reading a newspaper when he hears the knock on his door. Grunting softly, he sets the book on his singular end table and stands, dressed simply in jeans, a black t-shirt, and a grey hooded sweatshirt. For someone fairly known for wearing buttoned shirts and waistcoats, this is clearly a day for comfort.

He smiles as he opens the door, having peeked briefly through the peephole.

"Hey. C'mon in," he says, stepping to the side. "Thanks for coming."

Grey proves that he does pay attention by giving Cash a quick once over with a small quirk at the corners of his mouth. Apparently it is an unusual day for the both of them. He nods as a greeting and toes off his shoes at the hall. It's not just the way he was raised but also the fact that he gets a better feeling of the space with his feet on the ground.

He hangs away his coat and picks up his bag again before walking in, his nose lifting almost as if he's sniffing the air. He's taking in the aura of the place before he looks around curiously. This could be his home to be honest, no useless clutter taking space and collecting dust. It's a mild surprise to be honest. He expected Cash to have at least something fanciful around, maybe items of particular aesthetic pleasures...

It makes his job easier but he wonders what it tells about Cash himself.

Grey eyes find the other man with a lengthy silent gaze before Grey aims for the kitchen without being invited to do so. "Let's get this out of the way," he says in a way that suggests that he's hoping there will be perhaps something else at the end of it. Maybe some leisure time, just to hang around. An unusual desire for Grey to be honest, he's rarely looking to take time just to be with people. But perhaps there are those who are exceptions for that rule.

Tossing his newspaper onto the kitchen counter, Cash finds himself vaguely self-conscious about the way his apartment looks as Grey glances around it. He's never sure how long he's going to be in a specific place, and decorating seems a moot point if he's just going to have to shove everything in boxes and make a scene going somewhere. Much better to just pay someone to move a few pieces of furniture -- that way it's done, with limited exposure.

But on the other hand, someone could come into his apartment and draw some odd conclusions. Or... correct conclusions.

"Sure," he says, shrugging; it's a comfortable motion in his sweatshirt. Maybe he should wear them more often. "What do you need me to do? Anything?"

Cash anticipates that the answer is staying out of the way, or staying quiet, but still. If he can help, he will. Grey is doing him a solid.

"Do you have a bowl I could use?" Grey asks as he puts the bag on the counter before turning to look at Cash, actually considering him now that he's gotten a sense of the apartment itself. He's always liked the semi-formal look that Cash has with his waistcoats and buttoned shirts, this feels much more relaxed, though. Perhaps a touch more intimate.

"I'd like for you to sit with me while I cast a spell." It'd be easier to connect the spell to the person living inside the house if Cash will participate. "So I can hook you up, sort of like giving the spell your scent."

His lips quirk and he gives an easy shrug. "And maybe a few strands of hair or something like that."

Cash arches his brows, turning to open a cupboard and pull out a large white ceramic bowl that, mysteriously, came with the apartment. He hands it to Grey without much thought. Whatever the other man's going to need a bowl for, he doesn't mind sacrificing the mysterious Resident Bowl.

"Is it going to like me if it knows what I smell like?" he jokes. He understands it, in theory, he's just teasing him. "Whatever you need."

Joking around with him always feels comfortable, even if he gets the driest of looks in return sometimes. The idea of watching Grey work is an intriguing, vaguely exciting thought. They each have very different magic and he's never really gotten an opportunity like this before, to watch him at ground zero, as it were.

"Unless it involves a lot of blood or giving up my firstborn."

"You do smell pretty good," Grey says casually as he takes the bowl and turns to the tap to draw some water, filling the bowl almost completely. He's not exactly a flirty person, but sometimes he says something that can't be read as anything else without even a hint of shame.

Only with people he finds attractive, though.

He picks up the bowl and the stuff he was carrying and makes his way out of the kitchen. He takes a moment before he settles for a place, roughly at the centre of the apartment, in a corner that leads to the living room, a place that isn't constantly under foot and sits down on the floor.

"I don't use blood," he replies even if he knows Cash is just joking. Blood is a common ingredient in spells, though. "Water does the job just as well. We have a lot of that in our systems as well." He sets the bowl on the floor and gestures Cash to sit at the other side.

Somehow it's always a surprise when Grey flirts with him. Cash blinks, just for half a second, before he chuckles and smiles, shaking his head and watching the other man find a spot on the floor that works for him.

"Have to make sure I smell good for my guests," he quips. He favors woodsy scents in cologne, typically, but today it's just good old meticulous hygiene that leaves him smelling nice. It's not just his attire that's casual.

Maybe he's surprised, still, because Grey isn't the type of person who's normally receptive to Cash. In that way, at least. Cash prides himself on being friendly and having a positive rapport with most people, but there are some people who just never seem to be interested in him in that way.

He shakes his head slightly, as though to pull himself from that line of thinking, and moves closer as Grey gestures, sitting down with an agreeable slouch.

"So my firstborn is still on the table?" Cash tilts his head to the side, eyeing the bowl as he cracks his follow-up joke. "I don't know how to feel about that." He takes a deep breath. "So I just sit?"

"Are we really in a place where we want to talk about offspring?" Grey asks, again, deadpan and without even a touch of mirth on portrayed on his face while he organises his equipment, pulling out jars and pouches from his shoulder bag.

A plate goes onto the floor and he arranges some herbs on top of it, lighting them on a small flame with magic. It takes some brow furrowing on his part, fire magic is definitely his weakest point and producing even a little flame makes him struggle a little. The smoke that rises from the dry pile of herbs smells sweet and spicy. It's not quite enough to make them trip but enough to make the head dizzy.

"Don't be afraid to inhale," Grey says mildly. "It'll open the mind's eye."

A jar full of sand goes next, forming a circle on the ground around the the bowl and the plate. Another colour of sand form a circle around both of them. For this Grey needs to reach quite a bit, resting carefully his weight on his palm as he reaches past Cash to draw that line.

"If you wouldn't mind yanking out a few hairs for the fire, that'd be great."

Cash snorts and any other joke is quickly defused out of him as he watches Grey light his fire on the plate. He knows only his two specialties, one strong and one weak; seeing someone with more abilities than just that is fascinating to him, still. He has a brief thought about the smoke detector, but the windows are open — they're safe from horrible beeping.

"I don't know if that's a great idea," he murmurs, watching Grey 'draw' his line. There's a joke about drawing lines on or in the sand somewhere in this, but it's not worth mentioning. "My mind's eye is a jackass."

Learning magic hadn't exactly been easy for him. For one thing, he'd run away from home before the state could send him to the government-funded crash courses designed to prevent children from accidentally burning their homes down or the like. He'd learned on his own how to heal himself, and how to control his dreams and the dreams of others. It had been a long, slow process. And his mind was, and is, part of the difficulty.

When Grey leans in, Cash doesn't shy away. He does, however, lean slightly to the right or left to help him accomplish the circle, smiling. At the same time, reaching up, he plucks a hair or two and drops them into the smoke.

"Good thing my landlord doesn't check up on me, she'd be pissed."

Grey looks up at the comment about Cash's mind's eye, their eyes meeting while Grey is leaning past Cash to draw a line behind him. His brows arch in a question that isn't vocalised otherwise, an inquiry that isn't pressed any further. Cash can elaborate on that if he feels like it, or not.

He shakes his head when he straightens up, putting the jars away. "We'll clean up when we're done."

He dips into the bag for another pouch and brings out a few crystals, clear white and uneven. They go into the bowl of water with an unimpressive slosh. He looks at Cash as his magic pushes the windows open further, inviting in a breeze that sweeps past them, swaying the flame and the smoke. But instead of dissipating, it spirals, counter clock wise, around the perimeters the outer sand circle describes.

"Just relax," Grey tells Cash finally. "If you happen to trip, it's fine. You're not going to wander far, the circle has you bound for now." Opening the eye takes some people beyond the veil of this world just like that, but some are too grounded to step beyond it without some serious help.

Grey brings out as drum from his bag. It's an old and worn out thing, the skin over the wooden frame so thin the flames glow right through it. It rings deep and soft when Grey starts to drum, a steady, meditative beat.

Brows are shifted at him and Cash inhales slowly, shaking his head. In learning to use his magic he'd had to master the art of clearing his mind — for Veilism specifically, as it's a much more mentally focused branch. But his mind doesn't clear easily. Maybe that's why his Veilism is his secondary specialty; using his magic as an Archon feels as easy as breathing.

While his mind isn't his worst enemy, exactly, it's unhelpful and likes to spiral. So he closes his eyes, keeping his breathing at a normal rate. He's had a few good experiences with hallucinogenics in his past and he hopes it translates to... whatever this is, if it should come to that.

"Relaxing," he murmurs, affirmatively. Trying to. A moment later and he gets a thick nostril full of the sweet smell. Suddenly the black behind his eyelids looks a lot like the void when he briefly glimpsed punching through it as a void traveler. It had looked inky and luminous all at once, shimmering for the briefest second he'd seen it — the void between universes.

Cash takes a deep breath and, wrinkling his nose, opens his eyes again. The fact that he's not originally from this universe isn't something he's shared with anyone here. For one, it's in his contract, and for another, it's considered unsafe. If word gets out, everyone will want to know how and unscrupulous people might think about cutting into the flesh of his arm to get at the device that's surgically attached to the bone of his forearm.

He doesn't say anything, not wanting to be a distraction.

It is hard, Grey knows. He had to learn as a child, that's why it is a second nature to him to clear his mind and focus only on the immediate. It's why he's so very good at compartmentalizing as well, his thought processes are very aware, very deliberate and meditated. He had been no more than six when his mother had left him in the woods for a full day and night to find his own inner peace. This is also why his anger and joy are both quite rare and very intense when they happen, because there is no other option for him when those moments come, it's meant to consume and burn through until there's nothing left.

The drumming never changes, it stays the same meditative booming sound with a precise rhythm and tenor. Grey drops into trance just like that, his eyes remaining open but growing distant, looking beyond this world into the other ones that he's familiar visiting. The apartment has disappeared, he's standing on a flat stone in the middle of a dark lake, black waves touching the stony ground relentlessly. The grey skyline is broken with the jagged tops of tree shadows. Grey expects seeing Cash there, wearing nothing but his true skin. It's revealing to look at people in the spirit realm, their inner selves drawn out. Grey himself has a crown of antlers on top of his head, his chest marked with a big bear claw, the scar of it rather impressive. There's several strings that lead outward from him, some of them bright and healthy, some limp and dead, some severed.

But what he sees when he looks at Cash is peculiar and makes his trance shake a little, his brows furrowing as he studies the man quietly. There something Grey's never seen before, something completely unfamiliar, something he hadn't even heard about. It's almost as if there are no ways for the spirit realm to describe what Cash is. Or maybe it's Grey who has no words for those things.

"You sure are full of surprises," he says quietly.

One moment he's in the apartment, trying to forget the void, and in the next...

Cash sees just his hand, at first, and the stone in the background. He blinks, studying it, surprised. Thin vertical stripes — as thin as his veins — run over his flesh, like tiny strings of light that occasionally pulsate. When he glances down at his torso, legs, and feet, he can see that the golden light strings run all over his body. They flow up into his hair, joining into part of the strands and glowing even brighter there.

But as he stares at himself more, he notices that something else happens every once in a while. His body darkens erratically and then disappears, just for a second, before reappearing, like a bad piece of video footage. He could miss it if he wasn't staring straight at it. Is it because of how he's displaced himself here, somewhere he's not 'supposed' to be? Or does it mean something else?

It takes two more times for him to realize that, when it happens, he can hear the distant echo of something. A guttural, wild noise, like a snarl or a growl. It doesn't exactly soothe him.

Cash hears Grey's voice and looks up, taking in the sight of him with the antlered crown and the scar. He smiles wryly.

"Bad surprise or good surprise?"

It's baffling to say the least. Grey thought he had seen it all, demons with hollows inside them, little children with glowing auras, the little people with never changing visage. But this, this is something different. He can't put his finger on it, it eludes him, even while it feels like he should know this, somehow...

He yanks his gaze up at Cash's eyes when he hears the snarl that echoes over the body of the water that has gone eerily still. He feels the rip before it suddenly appears, twisting the transparent reality and tearing it like some cheap fabric. The drum has gone silent, so has the lake around them.

It's not the first time unwanted, uninvited entities have invaded Grey's space, but when he tries to push it back, there's nothing that he can grasp. And yet, there it is. As if whatever is coming through doesn't exist in this place.

"Cash," he manages to say as he moves between the man and the tear in the darkness. It almost seems like the scenery has been reduced to something two dimensional, like a painted portray on a giant canvas. Whatever is coming through has a pair of bottomless eyes and a shapeless form, one that seems to invent itself constantly, sporting claws now and spindly human hands next. It is not a human, though, that much is certain.

"What the hell is that thing?" Grey asks softly as the thing starts towards them, apparently not caring that the "ground" it is walking on is liquid. It doesn't seem to stop it.

By the time Cash realizes he's grown very fond of the consistent sound of the drum, which is downright soothing, it's stopped. He blinks and opens his mouth, but his question is swallowed up by a jarring and peculiar noise as it crashes over the lake like thunder. Frowning, Cash turns as Grey moves, squinting at the screen-like quality of the opposite side of the rock.

It bothers something in his brain, or perhaps his soul, to stare at the rip. But then it settles over him as he wonders if he, too, has made a rip like this in his own reality. Was the energy of the Angel Gate like a knife, slicing him into this world through the void?

The void.

What comes out of the rip is dark in one moment and light in another, reflecting the water and then almost matte in the next. It changes with such speed that Cash rubs at his face, starting to feel an ache in his temple just looking at it. He shakes his head.

"I don't know. I've never seen anything like it." Cash frowns deeply. "Can we, uh... stop? Go back?"

This type of magic is beyond him. It's not dreaming. Dreaming has concrete rules, despite how random it looks, and you never actually go anywhere. His fingers itch for a weapon, especially when he notices thin blade-like protrusions in a few of the creature's switched forms.

"I think it likes us a little too much."

This was definitely not Grey's plan all along. This is nothing even close to the plan he had. And honestly, this creature should not be here. This place is Grey's own little safe haven where he shoots off into the layered horizons of the worlds known to him. Nothing has yet managed to penetrate his defences like this.

He shakes his head, and tries to detach them both from the spirit realm, bring them back. And nothing happens. His chest rises and falls a little faster as he grabs Cash by his elbow and pushes him back into the black water, trying to connect through it to the bowl of water he knows is sitting between them.

Still nothing.

It's somewhere there, Grey can feel it, but the way is blocked. Why and how? He doesn't know.

"No," he replies simply. "We'll have to find a way back." And as he speaks, rocks pop out of the water like mushrooms under misty rain. As if they always were there, a path leading away from the rock.

"Go," Grey snaps at Cash and urges him to take the path, faster.

Find a way back. Cash glances out around them, trying to imagine how that even works. Suddenly his Veilism seems like it might be handier than he'd thought, and not in the way he would have liked. He looks back at the creature, walking over the water as though it's glass, and a chill runs up his back.

When the path appears and Grey tells him to go, he's already right there and readily sticks a foot out. Then another. They feel colder to him than the rest of his surroundings, reminding him of the cold that ebbs over your skin when you first void travel into another universe. It's been months, but he still recalls it keenly.

Wherever the path goes, wherever the stones pop up, Cash keeps moving forward. He tries not to look behind them too much, since the creature's gait hasn't changed at all. It reminds him a little of a herding dog, towing the outward edge.

"What are we looking for, here?" he wonders. "Road signs? Vague feelings?"

"Anything at all," Grey replies in a hurry behind him. But it seems as if the underworld has frozen around them. It's never done this before. It feels as if there's components in it that Grey doesn't know at all, something completely alien. It feels like the first times he ventured into the different realms through trance. A new world where nothing was familiar.

He looks back at the rock and the creature that has now reached his safe haven and is leaping to pursuit, chasing after them over the rocks, gaining ground.

"We need an exit," Grey mutters but has no time to say anything else before the hunter is upon them, suddenly accelerating. He gasps and turns around, his hands going up and the waters from around them rush to form a shield between them and the monster. It's heavy when it leans against it. Grey lets out a rushed breath and takes half a step back towards Cash. He isn't going to be able to hold this for long. Cash has some kind of magical properties, right? He's some kind of a caster, isn't he? Grey hopes he'll come up with a way to puncture an exit for them somehow. Grey is putting all his focus on keeping the creature back. It reeks of evil, the same way demons do.

It's a desperate, strange situation, but how is that different from the rest of Cash's life? Maybe he should feel right at home. He remembers the smell of soil baked under the heat of a summer sun, and the sound of wild grasses as they rustle in a lazy wind, and—

That's it.

A sliver of warmth opens up in the cold darkness, a shard of light; it bathes over Cash and makes him remember the first time he woke up in a new universe, the Celestial Interface putting him back together in less than a seconds' time.

"Got it," says Cash suddenly, and, purely on instinct fine-tuned by years of adrenaline, he takes Grey's hand and tugs.

In his mind, the resulting flood of sunlight and ground under his feet is like rushing through a door, but he knows it's more complicated than that. Cash turns, thinking of the creature, but all he sees is Grey — and a vast expanse of wilderness in all directions. Temperate forest, only broken by the occasional patch of dense meadow and tall grass. It practically whistles in Cash's ear. Is this what he heard? Because it's not what he was thinking of, exactly.

"Uh." He squints, before turning his attention to Grey. "You good?"

Whatever he's doing, Grey doesn't pay much attention, he's almost doubled down while bending backwards under the pressure the demon is putting on him, a mask of concentration over his features. Eventually he's going to snap and that's the start of an end. No human can endure an entity like this unprotected. Grey is used to dealing with them through a medium of spells and protective circles, not wrestling with them hands on.

How it got into his space, he doesn't know, but it definitely is dominating it without a problem.

Water rushes in his ears and he barely hears what Cash says behind him. At least until his hand is grabbed and he's yanked backward. Unfortunately that also means his focus is shot to hell and the creature manages to push through. He grunts as something cold smashes against his chest, burning through his clothes, through his skin, finger-like claws ripping right through his chest and into his core.

Then he's engulfed by white light and yanked further, Cash's hand in his, pulling him through something. He ends up on his knees clutching Cash' hand in one of his and his chest in the other. Those damned things, always persistently fucking up his life...

A blink of an eye and a quick breath, then he's on his feet again, looking around, alert. There are rips on his shirt, white burn scars on his chest. No blood but a mark that something went there.

"Where are we?" he asks instead of answering. He's still holding Cash's hand in his, quite tightly too.

Cash sucks a long, uncertain breath into his lungs.

He remembers how the void traveling manual had tried to impress upon potentials that what they would find on the other side of the Angel Gate would be strange. Even if it was another Earth, it could smell different, look entirely different. As he breathes in the brisk forest air, he isn't sure that this is another Earth. While he recognizes the earthy scents as, probably, the plants around them, Cash can't place them at all.

Dirt, though. Dirt smells very similar. Who would have thought?

"I'm not sure," he admits. "I, uh... I saw an opening. Heard an opening? Something like that."

Cash squeezes Grey's hand, sending a tendril of warm healing magic through the gesture at the sight of those burns, just enough to start healing the worst of whatever damage was done. He doesn't want to do more without express permission, but it's hard not to feel responsible. This was just supposed to be the creation of some wards, and now — it's gone dramatically pear-shaped. Grey's magic and his own connection to the multiverse, he hazards, have collided. Maybe it was even the magic in his surgically implanted Celestial Interface, the device that brought him to Grey's world, having a dramatic reaction to being where Grey took them.

And... oh, hell, Cash hasn't even told him that he isn't originally from Grey's Earth, so that's just great, he thinks, as he sighs loudly and focuses himself back on the task at hand.

"What did that thing do to you?"

The new place doesn't seem immediately threatening. Grey relaxes a little but still stays alert, taking in the scene around them, a forest, deep and old. You can sense the age from simply the smells and the sounds of it. But there's something deeply strange about it, Grey can't put his finger on it quite yet but he knows he's never been in any place like this.

He turns half towards Cash as opposed to keeping the man behind his back as he had been doing before. It's an instinct, protecting him. He looks at those perfectly blue eyes and then tilts his head to indicate he was listening. An opening? And he took it. Grey nods. It had been exactly what he had asked back there.

"I'm sorry," he says and then glances at his chest and the claw marks there. "I believe it would have wanted me to stay. We'll figure it out, later." It barely hurts right now, so he's not dying on it. "Cash," he continues. "This has never happened before. I wouldn't put you in danger like that if there was a chance for it."

"Hey, no. Don't worry about it." He shakes his head, offering Grey a wry smile. "I'm just glad that we made it out of there. But I'm sorry it wasn't to my apartment—"

A bird chirps overhead and then dives down nearby, probably hunting insects, and the sight of it makes Cash stop in his verbal tracks. It's sparrow-sized, green, with a blue wedge-shaped head and five toes, like nothing he's ever seen before. A short, harsh melody filters out of its beak before it launches into the air again.

Cash clears his throat. He isn't sure how to broach the topic. Does it need to be discussed right now? Probably, if they're going to get on the same page and come up with a plan of action.

Does he want to have this conversation? No. But when does that ever factor into his life?

"So, uh, on a scale of one to ten, how freaked out would you be if I said we're probably not on your Earth anymore?"

Edited (words......) 2020-04-12 09:55 (UTC)

He seems very easy going and Grey's brows furrow in a little bit of confused worry. It seems this isn't Cash' first rodeo, maybe not even second. He's about to ask why this doesn't make him more nervous, more something, anything at all when the bird flies into their view and Grey stares at it with widening eyes.

He's never seen a bird like that, and there are plenty of birds he's seen. They tend to flock to him, feeling some sort of kindred spirit with him. He isn't surprised that the feathery thing is approaching them, this is what they do when he's around, but the look of it makes him follow the little critter with his gaze until he can't see it anymore.

"What?" he asks, attention snapping back to Cash when he talks. Then he shifts, stepping a little closer until there's barely any room between them. It's not the first time they're this close to each other but perhaps the first time when Grey is looking at Cash like this, searchingly, keen to find what he's missed before. "How would you know that?" he asks, voice a little still.

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