And above all, no wishing for more wishes

[consultmybooks]

Characters: Rupert Giles and YOU!
Open? Oh, yes.
Where: All around Schwanheim and the surrounding farmland
When: All day 2nd of Rebirth's Decline
What: Giles is stuck in a bottle. Giles would very much like to let out of the bottle. Giles will grant you a wish should you let him out of the bottle. And if you don't want a messed up poltergeist throwing furniture around, you should probably take him up on that.
Warnings: PG - Mayhem and chaos, but probably nothing much worse.
A bottle catches your eye, as you go about your business

It might be sitting on the dresser of your room, on a windowsill as you walk down the street, or just laying in the grass as though carelessly discarded. It seems, in all aspects, to be a perfectly ordinary bottle...except, well, you probably know by now that it's never a perfectly ordinary anything. For one thing, it seems to contain something, a swirling white mist that seems to move throughout the bottle like a living thing, trapped and testing the walls of its prisons. For another, well, for those who can sense it there's an undeniable spark of power about the bottle, a sense of magic, something that just makes it stand out. And for a third, it's just quite a nice bottle.

Maybe it was left here just for you to find. How else can you explain how it wound up here, just where you happened to look at this very instant, sitting just where it needed to catch your eye?

Go on, pick it up. It will fit nicely in your pocket (even if you don't currently have any pockets) and a bottle is a useful sort of thing to have around, isn't it?

Well, once it's empty. Maybe you should uncork it and shoo that strange mist out, first. Can't tell what it might do to whatever you put inside, otherwise.

Comments

[consultmybooks]

Giles can spare enough sense to wonder just what it is about him that makes people think he would willingly stick himself in a bottle. But, well, he won't say as much, and certainly not to Sif. Instead, he simply shakes his head. "Um, n-no. I didn't, actually. It's, um, n-not at all pleasant, even for, for s-something like me."

[brosif]

If Sif were to guess, she would say that it was something about glasses. They have a very 'put me in situations I would rather now be in' quality to them.

"I can't imagine it would be. You have a more tangible sense of feeling than other ghosts I have come across. And it's a relatively tacky bottle, to boot."

She smiles. "But no matter -- you are freed now. Shall we journey back to town together?"

[consultmybooks]

It's a very sad comment on Sif's life that this seems to be exactly what Giles' glasses communicate, and exactly what he gets.

"Incredibly tacky," he agrees, cheered slightly that he's met someone else who thinks to call things 'tacky'. "Um..." And then, for the first time, Giles notices his surroundings. Specifically, that they're absolutely nowhere he recognizes.

"Good lord. Where are we?"

[brosif]

Sif is taking this quite well -- he's not her first acquaintance to be trapped in a bottle, and she suspects he will not be the last. Such is the life of an Asgardian.

"Near the forest. I was just out for a ride.”

Erm.

“On two legs, this time.”

[consultmybooks]

Erm, indeed.

Giles takes off his glasses to clean them and so he doesn't have to look at Sif just this moment.

At least his fear over pissing off one Asgardian means that he figured out how to possess people.

"...glad to hear it. Y-You're, um, much better conversation this way."

[brosif]

"Indeed."

She would tell him that Loki is in more forgiving spirits since the incident, but she has no such guarantees. Instead, she looks to his glasses with a smile.

"Truly, I have never seen a living man clean their glasses even half as much as the dead one before me. Are specters capable of collecting dust?"

[consultmybooks]

"If only we did."

But, no. Sometimes the dead just appreciate the chance to not look at anything, if only for a few minutes. His glasses have, however, remained spotless, a fact Giles is infinitely grateful for.

"We, um, we can have rather poor eyesight, of course. A-And, um, the force of habit. I'm, I'm fairly certain that's the only thing that's kept me remembering what standing is, a-and stopped me walking through trees." Unless there happens to be a chimera or a roc involved.

[brosif]

“So you have not been dead very long.”

She sounds more curious than anything else. On Asgard, such a question would not be considered inappropriate. Life and death are not delicate.

[consultmybooks]

"It's...rather a complicated matter, actually. In my own world? I, um, I-I have no idea how long I've been dead. Broken neck. It's, um, a very sudden way to die. But before I came here...if, um, i-if you can believe it, I actually found myself in another world entirely, where I had my own body, as though I'd never died. It's, um, it's only after coming here that I found myself like..." Here he gestures at himself, at all his intangibility, all the harder to return to after Faolan had managed to temporarily wish him real again.

"So, um, I suppose I've really only been dead for...a, a little over a week together." Remembering his death in Luceti as though it happened to someone else. "I certainly hope my, um, my friends back home will, will think to take the steps so that I'm not left like this back there, as well."

[brosif]

"You have straddled the line between life and death for some time, then."

There is a frown when she says it -- something primal, from stories her grandmother used to tell her. For all of its might and history, things were quite binary on Asgard. You live and fought, then died and were sung about. Warriors were meant to wait in Valhalla for the day they were needed again. They were not meant to wait with the living.

"What steps? Something with your body?"