Ruby Rose August Open

[guidemyway]

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.]

Comments

[guidemyway]

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."

[powersuited]

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."

[guidemyway]

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."

[powersuited]

"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."

[guidemyway]

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."

[powersuited]

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."