[OPEN] ish?

[uncurse]

WHO: EMMA SWAN, and OPEN!
WHERE: De Chima #002
WHEN: September 5th
WHAT: Emma arrives and scopes out her new digs.
WARNINGS: Updated as needed.

As days go, this one has proven itself a special brand of confusing.

When she’d first come toppling through into this world, she had to guess that Zelena’s time portal had worked. Granted, she’d really expected it to take her to the Enchanted Forest’s past—not the World Without Magic’s. The more she saw of this world, and the more the government explained, the more she realized that something had gone wrong. Really wrong.

This wasn’t the past of any world she was familiar with. Armed with a cell phone, a file detailing her magical abilities, and not much else, she made her way to her assigned housing, tense and suspicious. The best thing she could do was to follow the rabbit hole down at this point (a notion she had become entirely too familiar with in the past year), and yet …

Looking up at the building, she sighed.

She hated public housing. Almost ten years since she’d had to live in it, and now she was right back. Her eyes drop down to her phone to confirm she’s in the right place. For a moment, she lingers outside, scanning the network they’d briefed her on, but …

The last thing she needs is some kind of digital footprint in a world that she doesn’t even understand. Swapping her phone for her keys, she lets herself into the house and begins to explore, skimming the fridge, and checking bedroom doors until she finds the empty one.

Comments

[proteus]

"I stopped being girl when my twenties started ending in composite numbers," Bader clicked her tongue and eyed the woman as she debated calling her miss or ma'am in retaliation, "Ma'am."

Bader was petty. Sure, she was immortal but that did not mean much when you were literally still only twenty-six. Of course, this woman did just have her world and life uprooted because she came up short on a seriously warped came of cosmic roulette. That thought stemmed Bader's knee-jerk response to start giving her shit.

"Let me show you around? Nice thing about this place is the roomies don't have sticky notes attached to everything in the fridge so it's all free game if whoever drove you here didn't have the decency to swing around a drive thru when you got here."

[uncurse]

Her eyebrows arch up high on her forehead at the biting return, and Emma steadily raises her hands in a passing gesture of surrender—no hard feelings, but it’s clear that Bader’s sharp intolerance for the phrasing comes across. Tilting her head a bit, Emma turns on her heels and starts down the stairs to follow Bader’s invitation into the kitchen.

“How long have you been living here?” Clearly long enough to get familiar with the roommate situation, at least. Whether that means Emma gets to throw herself into an already-established environment that she’ll be at odds with (again) remains to be seen, but even if that’s the case, it’s no harder than any group home or foster family that she’d been packed in with during her youth.

[proteus]

"Three months? I can bring you up to speed in that time frame." Bader offered, not sure of the precise answer herself because when you live your concept of the passage of time is the first thing to go after the whole 'lose of humanity' caveat. Though she said rather cavalier as she waltzed into the den and fell into the first seat she came across like she was less a roommate and more a strange and very forward interloper.

"Nothing in the fridge is mine, by the way," Bader pointed to the kitchen that was split from the main area of the house by a half wall. "Except the frozen red bags in the freezer, but you wouldn't want those."

[uncurse]

“Frozen, red bags of …” Emma slowly turns back to look at Bader, uncertainty toe-ing the line of disgust as she imagines a whole slew of nightmarish things that might be the answer to that question. Before an answer can come, she holds up her hands. “I don’t wanna know.”

Wolf, after all. She doesn’t want to hear about Ruby’s diet, either.

“How many people with us?”

[proteus]

"Probably not," Bader agreed recalling an incident where a friend of hers had very nearly gotten a mouthful of frozen blood after confusing them for popsicles. It was not pretty.

"Three men," She replied with a bit of a drawn out sigh tacked on at the end because it was nice to have another roommate that was another roommate. "There is Mike who comes in every night smelling a bit...alright, to put it nice I think he's an addict. Harmless, but there is a small kid I babysit and as a rule I don't bring her over while he lives in this house."

Shrugging she then had a small smile tug her lips, "And then there is Will; he and I moved here together about a month ago. A bit people shy and owns a dog. He comes across as the oddest of the three but he's perfectly nice so best I can say of him is to be nice to him. One of those sensitive quiet types, but the tolerable kind."

Wrapping her legs under herself she sits comfortably on the couch watching Emma move around with eyes that are, well, a bit wolfish.

"Someone else lives here but I've never had the pleasure of his acquaintance. Some asshole who works with clocks at odd hours with a hook for a hand."

[uncurse]

“Hook,” She notes, grimacing. Hard to mistake the description for anyone else—having run into him, then, only makes it that much easier. “I know him. We … ran into each other earlier.” She waves a hand towards the kitchen, leaning on the living room-facing side of the counter rather than dipping back inside. “Any way to look at getting reassigned?”

Wow what a great segue. A second grimace follows when it occurs to her how desperate she sounds to bail out of there. Truthfully, it’s not that far off, but she’d rather bail all the way out to New York with her kid than just a house away from Killian.

[proteus]

Bader arches her back, sitting up stiff with an alert sharpness to her conformation. All very wolfish, all very alert.

"Is he a problem?" Bader asked with a hardness to her voice that was not there a moment ago. She watched Emma carefully with that penetrating gaze she had back from her days as beat cop asking after frightened girlfriends with good looking eyes with the dark eyes that were more trouble than they were worth.

NO SECOND CHANCES

[uncurse]

Bader would have no trouble reading Emma’s body language and noting that it’s not remotely similar to frightened girlfriends who can’t get away. Rather, she looks sheepish, and she carries herself like someone younger than her physical appearance would suggest she has any right to resemble. Her eyes skate right up to the stairs, hesitating a beat.

In fact, for a moment, she seems to flipflop and battle some inward uncertainty over how to answer the question. Certainly, whatever feelings she has on the matter are conflicting, but any discomfort is plainly not born out of fear or animosity.

She takes Bader’s question to heart, in more than just the way her new roommate could have possibly intended. Given her plans to uproot herself and bail on Storybrooke entirely, she can’t help but hear it in her perspective as the question that Emma has been asking herself since Hook dragged her back from New York: is leaving him going to prove problematic, when it comes down to it? Will he make that harder, or even impossible for her?

Finally, her gaze drags back to Bader and she shakes her head, decisive in her reply, “No. No, he’s just … someone from my world.” Blinking back any gut reaction, she smooths her hands down the side seams of her jeans, wiping her palms as much as she’s smoothing ruffled feathers. Her expression quickly schools back into something more neutral. “He’s not as scary as he looks.”