deercountry | 11 . clockhouse rebuilding!

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11 . clockhouse rebuilding!

Who: Those who have offered to help rebuild the Clockhouse, and anyone else who'd like to pitch in!
What: An open mingle log to repair after fires and floods.
When: Throughout September, precise dates not specified.
Where: In Gaze, at the forest's edge.

[ When the weather and chaos dies down, work on the Clockhouse picks up. The building was once an old Deerington mansion, luridly green and eccentric; age faded it into half a ruin, and July's fire did the rest. August's flooding came fast and hard, and now there's very little left to salvage.

The first step has been a damage assessment, with volunteers picking through the structurally unstable ruins, finding singed fiction novels, crisped houseplants, and a weird number of melted grandfather clocks. Demolition goes quickly, while Ozpin stands by and does not even try to control the situation.

Volunteers are needed to design the new structure, carry in materials, and build... and then to decorate and enchant what they've created. The few Sleepers with genuine construction experience provide direction, Ozpin sometimes among them, but things are largely chaotic. A few Sleepers provide snacks and cheerleading.

This is a mingle log. Please feel free to make a toplevel, and comment with your character's contributions below! ]

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"Well how would you when you're all the way up there?"

Lance crosses his arms and sighs. Shiro can stay up there on the ladder and not look at the boobs if he wants, he'll find someone more fun to joke about them with later! He grins.

"Iiii'm gonna leave 'em for now."

"What, no - you're not leaving metal cleavage in Ange and Ruby's house."

Ange would murder someone. Probably Lance. Or Shiro. He has visions of Ange with her eyes glowing, going some kind of magical nuclear when she realized what these two left in her house.

"We need to fix it."

[ Ange tightly presses her lips together.

Not just because of the secret she's keeping here - the knowledge of what Peter did after that argument, the state Ange found him in. It's a big part of why this conversation is kind of uncomfortable for her, but it's not all of it.

After all, she-- ]

I understand him.

[ She is-- no, was the same. Ange's voice is still kind of soft as she admits that, though she tries to keep her tone calm. Not directly looking at Luna while she speaks helps with it, makes all of this easier to say. ]

I've thought that too. For years. [ There's also the fact that she actually acted upon those thoughts, but Ange keeps those to herself. She doesn't want to make this all about her, and it's not like she needs it for what she's trying to say here. ] When you get like that, it gets.. hard. Hard to accept that people care about you, even when it's obvious they do. I can imagine it might be hard to deal with for the people around someone who feels that way in turn.

[ She inhales, and then slowly exhales. ]

Did you.. really resent him for that? Or did Trench just make you say that..?

[ How much of that was part of Luna's feelings? Ange can't imagine all of it, can't imagine her friend truly being cruel enough to wish that upon someone with all her heart. That isn't Luna. ]

"Are you kidding? Ruby would love it!"

He gestures to the boobs with both hands almost dramatically as he looks up at Shiro. Then he pulls them together in front of himself and almost puppy dog pouts.

"Just let me leave it until she sees it, pleeaaaase!"

"Ruby isn't the one I'm worried about."

Seriously, Lance. Ruby isn't the one either of you need to be worried about. You know that.

"If Ange even so much as hears about that, you're dead. You know that, right?"

Right???

( The demon watches the glow to the boy begin to fade, and he listens to the words, still tense against his own strained fury, but he tilts his head sharply as the boy says he could (maybe) get him more.

The thing is... Paimon had these from back in Deerington, where there were shops that sold more modern items than what can be found here in Trench. He's yet to encounter any crafts stores that carry things such as googly eyes, which is why they are so precious to him.

He's staring hard at the boy, and then finally he lets him go. It's not particularly gently; he just kind of... drops him from his telekinetic hold, but he's not too far up in the air, so it shouldn't hurt him... )

You know where these may be found?

"Yeah..." Keith laughed a bit at the irony. "I mean, being a coldblood, I could just set fire to it on my own, too." He smirked a little. Then, he went over to drop what he had into the pile where they were disposing of the unusable stuff.

"That is true!" Luz sighed. "It's been a bit since the house had a Cold blood. And it was Varian, so he wasn't likely to be using it too much anyway."

She paused, "Can you control how much fire you can put out?"

Keith just groaned and weakly threw his shirt in that general direction to help if needed, and then attempted to roll out of the way so he didn't get burned or something.

Sorry, it was the best he could do in the moment...

"Mostly." Keith shrugged. The only time he couldn't was when his emotions got away from him. As long as he stayed calm, he could control it. "Plus, if it gets out of hand, I can always make ice to stop the flames from getting too bad." That was the easy part, at least. If he did get angry enough to accidentally set something on fire, it often scared him enough to be able to trigger an ice blast to quell the flames.

"Oh, that's pretty good! Man, you've got some nifty powers! I'd need my glyphs to make all that stuff happen! I don't regret it of course, but it would be pretty easy to make it happen with my hands! I can also do some pretty neat combinations, so I won't complain!"

She looked over at the debris. "And that means that you can take care of that stuff pretty good! We just have to be careful about where to redirect all the smoke. Don't want it getting too out of control and making people cough."

Sound like Luz might have some experience doing this the wrong way.

Keith looked thoughtful as he stared at the growing pile for a moment. Smoke, huh? Blowing in the wrong or right direction... He didn't exactly have wind magic... but...

He looked back at Luz for a moment.

"Can your glyphs create wind?" he asked. "Maybe you can create a focused breeze to blow the smoke away from the construction?"

"You know, funny thing: they can! I have to cast a lot larger one, since the regular size makes them too small to be effective, but it can be done. I didn't even learn it until I started experimenting here!"

Luz was already starting on making said glyph since it DID actually demand quite a bit of space.

"I'll draw it out, and once you start the fire, I can activate it then!"

Keith nodded. "Alright." Hopefully, it wouldn't be too much, but he was going to trust Luz's idea for the moment.

Once he and her vines had moved the junk that was safe to burn into the appropriate pile and he saw that her wind glyph was ready, Keith put his hand out to grab one of the boards that was sticking out. After a quick moment, his hand started to burn with flames, and then it spread to the board and into the pile.

"There you go." In his other hand, he generated a large chunk of ice that he could hold for a while and drop into the fire to put out the flames if they needed to. Just trying to be safe and not burn down the clockhouse again while they were rebuilding it, after all.

Luz knew by now how to draw out and manage the new glyphs she learned. She was just going to have to make sure she had it going on time.

Luz waited until Keith had his fire going properly, then activated the glyph. The whirlwind popped up quickly and moved the smoke downwind where there weren't a lot of people in it's path.

"Nice ice chunk!" Luz commented, giving him a wink. "Have you ever done a pillar?"

Keith was mildly confused for a second and shook his head.

"No, I haven't," he said, completely serious. He really hadn't done anything fancy or creative with his ice powers at all, and he was also bad at picking up on when someone might be joking...

Oh, Luz wasn't joking about that. That had actually been the first type of ice magic she glyphed!

"No? Hmm. I'm curious. What goes through your head, when you're doing ice magic?"

"Um... just... making ice?" He frowned. "I'm not really sure how to describe it. There's like... an energy. And I focus on that. Sometimes, though, it just happens on it's own. Same with the fire." He looked at the chunk he was holding. "Like, I don't have trouble making it happen, but I have trouble stopping it from happening sometimes. It reacts to my emotions."

"On its own?" Luz was surprised. "Whoa. That would probably throw me off a LOT. So it's influenced by your emotions. That means you have to regulate what your whole temperament is like when you're harnessing magic. That is rough."

She reached into her pocket and pulled out an ice glyph. "I use these to summon my magic. Before I do it, I have to clear my mind and make my aim clear. Then I need to focus on making it happen. It's not easy, but it can have some awesome results!"

Granted, Luz creating an ice platform had been influenced by her need to get free at the time. Necessity always played a part.

Oh, Luz... Keith was pretty sure she really had no idea just how hard that was for him.

He looked at the glyph then. He'd seen her use them a few times now... not just for this, but also when they were repainting the wall that time. She'd used one to animate the mural.

"So... is the power in the glyph itself? Or does the glyph channel it from you?"

Nope, not at all! Luz was just going by what he said, and what he described? If her magic had come the way his did, she had a feeling she'd be having a rough time too!

And that? Was a very good question.

"Well, where I can from? The glyph appeared to me in the world I traveled to, and it's believed it is a gift from the Titan, the body of the being that makes up that world. But it's not enough to just draw the glyph: you have to do it correctly, and then you have to focus your energy into the task you're performing. It takes a LOT of practice, and I'm the only human that performs magic that way."

As far as she knew, anyway, in the Boiling Isles.

Well, he certainly wasn't one to advertise his issues, either. And Keith definitely had issues when it came to controlling certain emotions. He usually tried really hard to keep that under wraps.

But he nodded as she explained.

"I think I get it?" But he shrugged. "It's still pretty cool, either way." Though, now he was curious if he could make more definite shapes with his ice than just controlling the size of them and making chunks vs icicles. "I'm going to have to try making other stuff now." He looked at his hand for a second. "I haven't really done much beyond the basics since getting here. I didn't have magic back home."

Luz couldn't blame him. She was sure that was a time where she was far easier at controlling her emotions. Living in Trench had made that even more of a necessity, given the kind of things that would happen to them all the time.

Even Luz would have had trouble.

"Heh, thanks! I always think magic is pretty cool, no matter how it happens. And I hear you about not getting the ability down yet. I got abilities because of the change in my blood here, and I still haven't learned how they all work. The glyphs are actually something I learned the first time I left my world. But I'm more familiar with that magic than this stuff."

"Dammit… screw it."

He's gonna do it, he's gonna absorb the energy again, like he did with Keith's fire after the Karate tournament. That wasn't the best experience for him, but he's gonna chalk that up to it being fire that wasn't from his own body. Or something. It had felt like more than that, but regardless, this fire was created by him, so… might as well give it a go. He reaches out till his fingers are right in the flame and focuses, drawing the energy into himself like he used to need to do back in Deerington. The energy swirls up his arm and over his neck and face like a wave of blue-gold-orange under his skin and he grits his teeth, grunting with some discomfort.

"Okay… good news is I stopped the floor from burning…"

Keith laid there on his stomach for a moment, waiting for Lance to continue. But, when he didn't, well...

"Okay. What's the bad news?"

Because that was where this was going, right?

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11 . clockhouse rebuilding!

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cw: mentions of suicide ideation

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