bitterguardian | Crashing a (tea) party

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Crashing a (tea) party

It's funny how quickly Balthazar and Horvath have become fast friends again. They were almost brothers, once upon a time, and without the nasty complication of being on opposite sides, or Balthazar being insane, they've fallen straight back into old ways.

So it's not all that unusual for Horvath to be visiting the Arcana Cabana, leaning casually against a counter and playing with a little stone statue of a bird while Balthazar rummages in a stack of cardboard boxes nearby, regaling him with stories of his travels, punctuated by the occasional sneeze from the dust he's stirring up. Horvath's hat and coat are still on, but only because he's just gotten there a few minutes ago, and they haven't moved to the back room for tea yet. Both the old sorcerers are looking forward to a peaceful afternoon of nostalgia, tea, and cookies.

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"...The subway...?" His eyebrows rise a little, but that doesn't sound quite like an alternate version of his home, although it might be close. "You should be careful who you give pieces of yourself away to, you know..." He seriously hopes Dave's Balthazar has covered that.

Still intending to help, Horvath shifts to the edge of his chair and picks up his cane, but he hesitates with a glance at Dave as if he's afraid so much as standing up will send the boy cowering.

A Balthazar that doesn't pull hair and a Horvath who isn't out to destroy the world. Dave looks between the pair, relaxes considerably, and wonders if staying here would really be so bad.

And then promptly realizes yes, it would be. Oh, well.

"You don't know what a subway is?" he asks Horvath, blinking. When Horvath glances at him, he shakes his head and holds his hands up in a 'please, be my guest' motion.

"Sorry, dude. I'm not gonna freak out again."

It's a safe bet both Balthazar and Horvath have plenty of unsettling habits to pick up the slack of not pulling hair. And there are always people looking to destroy the world.

Plus, if Dave stuck around, they'd expect him to destroy Morgana. Again. Maybe even twice more.

Balthazar stands up to head to the basement, then gives a soft, sputtering laugh at Dave's question. "He's familiar with the subway system, I think."

He's not going to give away the location to Horvath's bat-cave, but he can't help but be amused. And then wonder how the locations of the boy's lab and Horvath's home would match up, were they in the same dimension.

Horvath rolls his eyes, levering himself up. "I'm not that badly out of touch, thank you. I was merely... struck by a certain synchronicity..." He's not eager to explain he lives down there, himself, partly because Dave might get the wrong impression. His home looks very little like the lab, and more like a gentleman's club from the 1920's, but that's not the first assumption most people make.

He follows Balthazar, but pauses and makes a little gesture, to let Dave go ahead of him. Considering how bad that might look, he adds gruffly, "I'm not going to hurt you, but I'm slow on the stairs..." He's embarrassed about it, in fact, but trying to give the boy a little trust.

Dave hadn't thought about the Morgana thing. Truth be told, he hasn't thought about that for a while. Call it a defense mechanism.

He makes a face. "Well, I don't know what it's like in your... world..." He falters on the word, the realization of what's happened hitting him all over again. "Give a time traveler a break, jeez."

He then follows after Horvath, bottle of water still in-hand, with the most understanding look he can manage plastered on his face. "It's cool. No rush."

"Fair point," Balthazar takes the stairs down to the basement in a series of bounds, two at a time. Which he really shouldn't do, because his knees aren't that great.

At the bottom, he flicks a few switches, revealing the layout of the place. A couple crickets scatter at the sudden glow. There's patches of old carpet, and some side rooms are curtained off, and it smells like mildew and sandalwood (odd combination, that), but compared to the shop, it looks very prosaic. There are wine bottles, several file boxes on high shelves, and what looks like some out-of-date Christmas decorations. Also a battered rolltop desk along one wall, and a broken rocking chair.

In the center of the room, engraved into the floor, is the Merlin circle. The grooves around the outermost ring seem to be set with metal.

"The odds thus far seem to be in favor of close parallels, unless there's something truly outlandish in yours like..." He pauses to wave a hand, "The aliens appointed Elvis world dictator or something." His progress down the stairs is careful, using both can and the railing, but he's not as bad at it as he thinks he is, and soon enough he's glancing around and studying the circle with professional interest.

Dave gasps theatrically.

"How did you know that? Did you just read my mind? I thought that sort of thing was frowned upon." And then he chuckles, falling silent once his feet leave the final step.

It's a nice place, but what really has his attention is the circle. He steps over to it slowly, bending down to get a closer look. "Whoa. Fancy."

"Which aliens?" Balthazar asks cheerfully, but he's setting things out on the desktop, businesslike. "The grays or the reptillianoids?"

...what? He doesn't watch television, but he does listen to the radio and frequent independent bookstores.

Following Dave's gaze, he looks subtly pleased. "The outer circle is mostly silver. It has a stabilizing effect, without cancelling any spellwork withing the ring."

Horvath just rolls his eyes, and leans on his cane to study the ring more closely. "The tripods. Mostly silver? It's very nice... hard to find a good metalsmith for these things, sometimes."

He's watching Dave in his peripheral vision, relieved that he seems to be relaxing a little. It struck him as a terrible start, considering he may someday be teaching some version of the same boy.

"The grays," Dave answers promptly, happy to play along.

(And let's not mention how his little nerd heart is so thrilled that Balthazar knows they are grey, not green.)

He reaches out and runs a finger along the metal, pressing his lips together in thought. "I always wondered what was down here. Is this where you live?"

"There's a very fine thread of gold in the center," he explains to Horvath. "There were more smiths around when I bought the place."

Balthazar probably has a few boxes of sci-fi pulps and back issues of 'Weird Tales' in his attic. A guy can go through a lot of books in a few decades.

He's mildly surprised by Dave's question. But then, he did imply he hadn't been here in a while. Something may have happened. But then, Balthazar wasn't planning on running the shop forever. "Well, not in the basement," he says. "There's an apartment in the floor above the shop. And a small attic."

It's all a bit oddly-shaped and labyrinthine, much like the way he packs inventory into the shop itself. One gets a distorted sense of physical space.

"I feel out-voted." Horvath sighs. "I used to have one with copper, but it was less stable as a conductor..." Someday Dave, too, may find himself discussing the finer points of crafting a permanent magic circle. There's an art to it, after all.

"We do sleep in beds, you know, and eat, and do all those normal sorts of things. Even if we do count as ancient artifacts." He's a little amused by Dave's questions, as if he's got that grade-school kid mentality where they think their teacher just sleeps in the classroom at night.

"Mine... is also carved into my floor," Dave offers, lamely.

He then looks at Horvath, wrinkling his nose a little. "I didn't mean it like that! I just—I mean, come on. You know Balthazar. He's like a... tall, walking enigma. We don't usually have conversations like this."

"In your lab?" Balthazar glances at Dave with curiosity, but quickly gets distracted by the description of himself. It's not what he would have expected to hear.

Particularly not the tall part. He's not the tallest person in the room. Not the shortest, either, though.

"I'm an enigma?" He looks comically confused...and slightly flattered. He glances at Horvath questioningly.

To be fair, Dave is meeting him under vastly different circumstances. And he has no reason to be professorial, or mysterious, just now.

Horvath gives a quiet snort of amusement. "I don know him. I've known him since he was twelve years old." He flashes his old friend an amused look, and glances at each of them in turn to compare height. At six-foot-three he's the one in the room that's looming, but the heavy build may lessen the impression of height. Even slightly overweight, though, he's lanky and all legs.

His gaze goes back to Dave. "Did you create it yourself, or did he?"

Balthazar might not physically be the tallest, but there's something about him in Dave's mind that makes him seem that way.

He shrugs. It seemed like the best word.

"Balthazar created it," he says, in reply to Horvath's question. "But I've made a few impressive ones in my day."

He is fully capable of being spooky. And grouchy. Having Horvath to lean on has mellowed this version a little. "Twelve and a half," he corrects Horvath with dignity. That half was very important at the time.

Balthazar frowns at the cup of hair, wanting to ask questions, but unwilling to take the risk. "...I'd expect no less of you," he says to Dave after a moment, then looks at Horvath, beckoning him over. "Do you mind dealing with the aqua regia? I'll put out the salt."

"And I was a worldly fifteen." He waves a hand dismissively, and stumps over to look through Balthazar's supplies for the caustic stuff, probably in a glass jar or bottle...

"That's good. The impromptu circles are good practice, but there's something to be said for a carefully crafted, more permanent one, provided you have a safe place to establish one." He fetches things one-handed, as familiar with the ritual as Balthazar is.

Dave is totally not laughing at them. Nooooope.

He's just coughing into his hand, see?

While the two much older sorcerers do their thing, he's content to sit and watch quietly. If there's one thing his Balthazar taught him that he never forgets to do in the presence of other sorcerers, it's to watch.

He may have defeated Morgana, but Dave knows he's nowhere near knowing all he needs to know.

Balthazar is oblivious to the amusement of the other two, considering the ritual before them. The frown of concentration might be more familiar to Dave, at least, than his previous, lighter mannerisms. He scatters grains of salt around the outside of the circle, then steps cautiously within the border and crouches near the symbol that represents Time, pulling out the stick of chalk and twiddling it thoughtfully in his fingers.

"The last time I fiddled with dimensions was when I was teaching Stuart," he says distantly. "I haven't had much call for it. You'd better check my figures after me, Maximus. Actually, you, too, Dave. If you don't know them you'll at least be getting a look at something new."

Horvath, too, sobers quickly with a nod. "Of course. It would be dangerous to get a cavalier attitude toward cross-dimensional magic just because of the Nexus..." On that note, he rummages in his pocket and pulls out his PINpoint, setting it aside on a shelf just in case it has the potential to cause any interference.

Dave is about to watch masters at work...

"Who's Stuart?" Dave asks, standing and stepping over to peer at Balthazar's work.

When Horvath moves his whatever that is—a cell phone?—he feels around in his pockets for his own, which is conveniently sitting back in his lab in the correct time.

He'd be lying (and badly, of course) if he said this wasn't kind of exciting.

He writes figures in chalk on the floor around the circle, pausing to erase and replace one after a moment's consideration. They appear to be a blend of runes and mathematical symbols. It takes him a minute to pull out of whatever zone he's in mentally and answer the question.

"My last apprentice. From 1898 until 1907. But he's long gone." He frowns at nothing in particular, face downturned. "Stuart Prentiss. He was a good man. More of a philosopher than a fighter."

Horvath limps closer, careful of the circle and watching his step, and rests a light hand on Balthazar's shoulder. After a moment of silence and a gentle squeeze, he steps back again to study the chalk markings.

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