singillatim | Ruby Rose August Open

Entry tags:

Ruby Rose August Open

Who: Ruby and you!
What: TDM Prompts anything else that comes up.
When: Throughout August

Content Warnings: Tea Time, and Lying Next To Me CW's as apply. Tea Time may include suicide, torture, suicide ideation.

Tea Time
CW: Mentions of torture and suicide will probably come up here. And the memory will definitely include it if we go down that road! If you'd like something lighter or another option. Let me know.

Mysterious campfire in the middle of the night? Ruby was absolutely not the kind of person who wouldn't go investigate to see what was going on. But she'd also learned that bringing back up was good idea along with her wasn't exactly a bad idea either. Fortunately that didn't seem to be completely necessary when it turned out that the woman was clearly not a Forest Talker, and better yet, was actually friendly.

It's only when the teas end up coming out that Ruby suddenly takes a little turn. The usual smile on her face falters just a touch and she looks visibly shaken. Though she does her best to shrug it off.

"No thanks. I think I'm good- Let's just not do any tea, okay?"

Lying Next To Me

A. More Lighthearted

There are two booted feet sticking out of the snow from where the ground had recently opened up from one of the quakes. As someone gets closer they quickly start kicking and flailing around.

It's Ruby, and she's stuck in the snow.

Help a girl out?

B.

The terrain had become a lot more treacherous but they unfortunately didn't have the luxury to stop moving. Ruby was travelling between Lakeside and Milton when she came across a frozen river. The ice looked sturdy enough, but you could never be too careful. She pulled out her large scythe and tapped it over the surface of the ice.

After a brief pause she smiled, it seemed sturdy enough.

She stood up and with scythe in hand she moved to start trying to cross the river. …And that's when she felt a crack in the ice below her. Shoot.

Hot Springs

Ruby had a bad habit of not knowing when to stop and running herself ragged. It was something she was working on but that was easier said than done. Which is why she's made her way to the hot springs to take some time to relax.

…Or well relax in the best way that Ruby knew how. As she makes a mad dash toward the water before leaping in and shouting out "CANNON BALL!"

Wildcard

[Feel free to choose your own adventure or hit me up at jjabarrett plurk or discord to plot.]

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"The weird aurora thing, yes," Snow echoes, albeit with a bit of a chuckle — it doesn't make Ruby's description any less fitting, particularly in the wake of what seems to have happened to several of them.

Not all, as it turns out, and Snow surprisingly feels a pang of sympathy for Ruby in that regard; she's been so busy trying to navigate all these unexpected abilities that she hasn't considered what it would feel like to see everyone around you ending up with powers while you yourself remain unchanged.

"Would it make a difference at all if I said it's not all it's cracked up to be?" she offers, with an effort at an encouraging smile. That said, others are adjusting to it rather well; it may not be the same exact power that Bigby had before they arrived here, but she knows he's missed being able to shift at his own leisure.

Ruby shifted her head in thought. For a moment she did consider what it would be like if she had been born without the unique gifts she had back at home, what would her life be like if all that had hadn't been a factor.

She actually gives a knowing little nod. "Actually, it kind of does. It's a long story but I guess I knew some people back home with unique powers back at home. There were a lot of things they struggled with that I don't think normal people had to."

"Did you?" The question that comes from Snow's end isn't rooted in any doubt, more like surprise; it hasn't taken her long being in anyone's presence to tell that most worlds aren't that resemblant of her own, and Fabletown, and while those who live there can't necessarily all be described as having powers, they're certainly not human either.

It's then that she decides to broach the subject a little further, though she won't do so without asking a question of her own.

"Has Bigby told you anything about Fabletown? What it's like, who lives there?"

"Kind of. I didn't really understand what was actually going on until recently though." She starts and then realizes this is a little vague and decides to elaborate a little. "I've got a unique set of eyes. And apparently one of the reasons they're unique is that there was a group actively killing us." Yeah. A little awkward to talk about. A pause and then.

There were a lot of other examples she could give that might have suited what she was saying better, but it was the best example she got.

She raises a brow and gives a little shrug.

"No. He hasn't said a whole lot about it. ...He might have mentioned that he wasn't super well liked there. But I'm not sure how much he likes to gab about that either."

Snow does her best to bite back a grin, at least, when Ruby makes a passing mention of Bigby's lack of favor among the Fables. Some of it is certainly justified, at least when taking into account some of the Big Bad Wolf's past actions against their fellow citizens — there's no love lost between Bigby and the Pigs, for instance.

But she isn't going to dwell on Bigby's popularity status, not when it feels more important to offer something up about who they really are and where they come from. She hasn't told many others that they're not human — the only one of their fellow Interlopers who's really privy to that information is Connor, and only because he's a Fable himself.

"Where we come from... most of the people who live there have powers too, of a sort," she admits. "Some of it is closer to magic, some of it just helps us live longer than regular folk. But here, we're just like anybody else."

Bigby had tried to be gruff about talking about his popularity there, and by Snow's grin she felt like she was on the money about him. He might have done some bad things in the past, but it's clear there were some people there who could see he had a good heart.

She does listen with interest when Snow talks about her world like that and Ruby does give an interested little nod at that.

"Like how he can turn into a big wolf, right?" See. She had heard him say that in the last townhall they had been too. "It's kind of the same back where I'm from too. We have semblances such, which are kind of like personalized bits of power." And and what time people could use actual magic, but that was a rarity.

"Did you have some sort of power back where you're from?"

"Semblances," Snow murmurs aloud, musing over what Ruby's just told her. She's never heard anyone refer to the various abilities that Fables can have in that way, but it honestly feels like the most accurate description. After all, no one in Fabletown can do what Bigby can do, exactly, but there's also only one Big Bad Wolf, last she checked — unless there's some new arrival that she's never even heard of.

"Personalized power, huh? I like that," she adds, with an amused look — which quickly becomes the shake of a head when Ruby asks whether she's ever ended up with any power.

"No, not me. Unless you consider a terrible taste in men and an unfortunate association with apples a power." Truly, eating a fruit that her stepmother had poisoned in an effort to kill her once hadn't even been the worst thing that had happened to her, but Snow likes to think she can joke about it now.

"Kidding. Apart from that... I'd been alive for a very long time before arriving here, so I guess that counts?"

Ruby met a different big bad wolf once. She wasn't a huge fan. Wouldn't recommend it.

She gives a little grin, and there was a moment she wished she could show Snow her own semblance but that wasn't going to be happening anytime soon.

"Personally I wouldn't- But I've got a couple friends who've had to deal with the terrible taste in men thing. You aren't alone there." Look, it was nice to be able to joke around about things like this, maybe Ruby will be able to lighten up to tea sometime in the future.

"Yeah- That could definitely count. Is that a normal thing or did you get cursed with immortality by a god?" She has to check on this one. "Because we've got one of those back where I'm from."

Snow chuckles, more of the initial tension in her shoulders easing — some of that is a consequence of sitting here, soaking up the hot water, the heat more definitively sinking into her muscles, but some of it is certainly the result of talking to Ruby, developing a better understanding of what things are like for her back home — and coming to the conclusion that they're not so different.

"No, it's more that... the power we have comes from a certain level of belief in the stories about us," she finally adds, after a slight pause to try and decide on the best way to answer the question. It's difficult to explain that she, and Bigby, and others like them exist in tales that people have read again and again, and those stories persisting is what allows them to endure too.

"But we have tried to live as normally as we can, since it's important that no one knows what we really are back home."

It was nice for Ruby to be able to talk about home too. There was a certain sense about some of the people here, that her world was a bit more fantastical compared to what they went through on a daily basis. It was kind of nice to have someone on a similar sort of level.

That said she does raise a brow as Snow talks about their power coming from a sense of belief. That felt a little a strange. She shifts and thinks on it a little.

"I mean- Even where I come from, there's wound up being a lot more truth to the stories I grew up listening to." She says thinking about it. "I definitely never expected to wind up falling into a fairy tale myself. But it turned out one about a whole other world was a true story."

And she nods, thinking about Ozpin, Salem, and the way they lived their own lives. "I can get wanting to keep on the downlow though."

"Most of the stories that people know — or, at least, the ones they think they know — are a far cry from the real truth," Snow admits, and while she's not really prepared to launch into a full telling of her past and why that brief time she'd spent with the dwarves hadn't been all it was cracked up to be, for more than one reason, she still feels like Ruby will understand her brief skimming over the subject.

"We all used to live in a place called the Homelands — Bigby, and me, and everyone else from our world — before this terrible threat forced us all to leave. An Adversary, who wanted to take over our world and enslave everyone in it. It was safer for us to live among regular people after that, but we had to keep everything about ourselves a secret — partly so it would be harder for the evil to find us in a world that wasn't originally our own."

She raises a bare shoulder in a slight shrug, her mouth quirking in a half-smile.

"When you're trying not to be discovered, you do everything you can to try to blend in."

Most of this tracked with what Ruby had experienced in her own life in one way or another, so she was able to fill in the blanks in her own way. She had already accidentally watched through one immortal beings entire hidden history. She wasn't looking to pry any further.

She thinks back to the way Maria went into hiding after Salem had tried to hunt her down the first time. How that was the safest option for her.

"That must have been really hard for all of you. Leaving your home, and hiding who you really were. I'm sorry you had to do that."

Ruby glanced up at the ceiling of the cave for a moment before she finally said.

"My world has something like that too. An immortal witch who's looking to wipe out life on our world so she can finally die." She pauses before she says. "Most people didn't know about her for the longest time- Including myself, so I didn't have to hide, but she had been hunting down people like me for generations."

What Ruby's telling her now sounds so much like what she and Bigby and the other Fables had to survive that for a moment, Snow's almost tempted to ask if it's possible this witch happened to go by another name. She doesn't, but this conversation is already giving her a lot to think about — most of it pertaining to the fact that they seem to have much more in common than she would have ever guessed at first glance.

"It's been... a long time," Snow admits. "Since we were all forced to leave. So long that I think a lot of us are starting to forget what the Homelands even were. And Fabletown is our home now, for better or worse. We've built something like a community there, the same way that all of us here have been fighting to build something."

She glances over in Ruby's direction again with a slow smile. "But some of us know what it feels like to have to fight to survive."

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Ruby Rose August Open

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