applesaucedream | Between the Roots and Branches [Open to All]

Current Music: Evening of August 30th/Morning of August 31st

Between the Roots and Branches [Open to All]

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Don't worry, dreamers of Manhattan. There will be no humiliating episodes of sudden-onset-clumsiness tonight - at least, nothing more severe than what you might experience naturally. Your physical and mental faculties will be left perfectly intact. What a treat! And what luck, because if you do lose your footing, it's a long way down to the forest floor.

But hey, who wants to be on the boring old ground when there are so many wonderful treehouses to explore? There are dozens of them spread throughout the surrounding forest, connected by a series of bridges and catwalks (some, admittedly, a bit more stable than others). It's easy to forget - or fail to notice - that there really is no easy or conventional way down to the ground when you're surrounded by such splendor.

The houses' styles range from charming and rustic to modern and sleek, with many falling somewhere in between. There are viewing platforms for bird-watching or simply taking in the scenery (trees, mostly, though if you venture high enough, you'll be treated the sight of the forest canopy stretched across a valley far below). But the insides of the treehouses are comfortably furnished to varying degrees as well, so there's no need to immerse yourself in nature if you'd really rather not. Some are complete houses in their own right, with all the amenities of a Manhattan apartment and then some.

Go for a climb, or kick back and relax. The only enemies you'll find here are other dreamers... and, potentially, gravity.

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"Okay, good." The Balladeer bends to put her down, having quickly glanced over her for injuries. She does seem fine, and very self-possessed too for having just dropped out of a tree. It's enough that he doesn't bother to tell her to be careful about standing on the slight slope of the roof; anyway, it's perfectly easy to stand on compared to walking along a branch.

He scans the canopy again, but it looks like she was definitely alone. That's no great surprise; the Rift doesn't seem to bring people in groups. "I'm the Balladeer," he says, turning a smile on the girl. "Nice dream, isn't it?"

"I'm--" Melanie cuts herself off, frowning. ROMAC is actively looking for her; she knows that, now. And while she has complete confidence in Aziraphale's ability to protect her, that only covers her safety. If ROMAC finds out that people know her - this man, or Bee, or Daniel - then they won't be safe, either.

Still, she doesn't want to lie to him. He seems nice. "I can't tell you my name," she states plainly. "But this is a nice dream." Pressing onward before he can get too curious about her, she adds, "'Balladeer' sounds more like a title than a name. What does it mean?"

Oh? The Balladeer arches an eyebrow. If there were anything designed to pique his curiosity...

...ah, but she's just a kid. He's not going to pry, though he's certain he could glean her name from about three seconds of tuning into her song. It just doesn't seem right to do that to someone so young. "It's both," he replies instead with a shrug. "It means I travel around, write and play ballads." For, you know, a given value of write. He can write music, but he never did before; when would he have played it?

He's not sure what he can assume of her knowledge, so he adds, "Ballads are like...story-songs."

Melanie's eyes widen. 'Artist' is a profession that suffered after the Breakdown. Teachers might read or tell stories, but that was only part of their job, and they didn't write the stories they were telling. Art survives; artists, she tends to assume, are long gone.

"I've never heard a ballad before," she says. "Well, I've heard of them, but never actually heard one. What sort of stories do you tell?" That was always her favorite part of class; she loved it when Miss Justineau would sideline whatever the lesson was supposed to be and tell stories, instead. "I like the Greek myths best so far, but I'm sure there are lots of stories I've missed."

The Balladeer brightens at her obvious interest, and the question about what he sings isn't enough to dim his enthusiasm. Hey, he dislikes them personally, but it's educational! "I do history, too! Just American, nothing as old as the Greeks...or the Romans," he adds wryly. Because if you want to hear about the merits of Julius Caesar's assassins for five goddamn hours...he knows a guy.

"Lots of ballads are about history," he continues, "or folk stories. That kind of thing. I bet there's some about Greek myths, too!"

He's in luck; education is Melanie's favorite thing. "I don't know too much about American history," she admits, a bit sheepishly. She probably should, now that she lives in some pre-Breakdown version of it. Not that she anticipates being quizzed by strangers, but being kept isolated has never been presented as an excuse for ignorance.

Of course, when she and the other hungry children attended classes, they were never just learning for the sake of it. They were always being tested, Dr. Caldwell and the others wanting to know just how much they could learn, how close to human they could be under just the right conditions. But Melanie likes learning, and while Aziraphale, Bee, and Daniel are happy to teach her things, she wouldn't say no to another teacher. If it's safe - which it is, here. And he knows history ballads.

"Could you sing something now?" she asks a bit shyly. Maybe it's not a polite request; maybe he just wants to enjoy the dream without having to do his job on top of it. But she can't not ask. "One of the history ones?"

The Balladeer grins immediately, not at all bothered. "Sure! Let me just - oh, y'know? Give me a second."

He walks to the edge of the roof - the one over the porch, not out above thin air - and crouches down to get a good grip on the edge before dropping himself over. "I saw an instrument in here!" he calls merrily from inside the house a second later. "I was going to come back and have a better look anyway."

A minute later he ascends again, hoisting himself up through a few nearby branches. He's always been pretty good at climbing; sometimes when they get the weird abandoned fairground, he just ditches everyone else and scales the Ferris wheel. You can sort of pretend there's a sun from up there! There's a guitar on his back now, strap tightened against the climb, but it's a short enough climb that it isn't much of a hindrance.

"Ooookay..." He plays a few chords, adjusts a few knobs, but it's already pretty much in tune. Fair enough; it's a dream instrument. The Balladeer nods to himself, then launches into one of his more upbeat ballads. It's a little funny performing it for an audience of one, all by himself, but he just does a few different voices where the locals would ordinarily chime in. He thinks it works!

Well, except for the usual gunshot and bells. But that's a dramatic touch that - while effective - he's fine with leaving out.

Melanie grins in turn, excited to learn something new from such an eager teacher. Her first thought is to follow him down, but she stills herself when he indicates that she should wait. And a few moments later, he's scrambling back up with a guitar slung over his back.

An instrument. And he's going to play it for her. That's a whole different kind of lesson - she's never seen or heard live music before - and as he tunes it, she sits down on top of the roof and wraps her arms around her knees, watching him with rapt attention.

An audience of one she might be, but she is exceptionally attentive. Her open little face displays delight at the upbeat music, amusement at his putting on of different voices, and general intrigue at the actual story, which is challenging to place without context. If she doesn't clap when the final chord fades away, it's only because she doesn't know about applause. Instead, she shows her appreciation by clutching her own knees and crowing, "That was beautiful! But what happened to Big Bill and Czolgosz? Did Bill die?" She is invested.

An audience of one is all he needs! The Balladeer grins and gives a small mock bow - old habit, really. "Thank you!"

It feels strange having a conversation while towering quite this much over Melanie, so he sits as well, removing the guitar and laying it across his lap. "Bill did die. About a week later." It was a lingering death, but still nowhere near as bad as Garfield. Poor old Garfield. "They didn't have the kind of medical practices then that they do now - there was an early X-ray machine on display at the fair, but they didn't use it." Not that he necessarily would have survived if they tried to remove the bullets, either. The Balladeer isn't entirely sure if Garfield's death actually taught them the importance of hand-washing by then.

"Czolgosz almost died right there - the rest of the fairgoers attacked him. Big mob. But McKinley called them off, so he got arrested instead. He ended up getting the electric chair," he concludes matter-of-factly. "And then sulfuric acid!"

You know - for kids!

Melanie nods thoughtfully. It's a little surprising to think of an angry mob obeying an order from anyone. A president must be a lot higher up the ladder than a sergeant, but the people weren't soldiers. They wouldn't have been used to taking orders.

But it would have been before the Breakdown. They wouldn't have been used to needing to kill people, either.

"Sulfuric acid?" she repeats, brow furrowing. If was executed, what was the acid for?

The Balladeer has stood and watched it more than a few times; it's still fairly impressive to him that Czolgosz managed to get out of that. More impressive that, even after having his life briefly saved by the man he killed, he has learned absolutely nothing!

"To dissolve the body," he explains. Melanie is going to give him a very wrong impression of what he can and cannot tell children he meets while busking. "I'm not really sure why they thought they had to do that. Might've just got in the habit after the previous assassin, or it was spite!" He does feel vaguely sorry for Leon's brother, but...well, that grave wouldn't have been left unmolested anyway.

She lapses into a pensive silence. Acid. Would that have worked on the cordyceps? Maybe it wouldn't have mattered - the Breakdown had happened so long ago, and mass production of anything wouldn't have been a possibility. And if any spores, any trace of the fungus had remained... well, that would have made the whole thing pointless.

But if it was only one body, only one little body...

She knows what her eventual future will be. She's seen it. And if there was a way to make sure her remains were safe, a way to just get rid of the body entirely, all of it gone, so she couldn't hurt anyone, ever, not even when the best part of her is no longer alive to see it... she'd have to make sure people knew.

"Does that really work? Does it dissolve the body completely?" she asks.

The Balladeer leans back to look up at the sky peeking through the leaves, frowning thoughtfully. "I'm not sure. I've never actually seen it before." Usually when he attends executions, he leaves shortly when it's over; there's no real reason for him to stick around. Sure, he's flung the acid thing around in arguments before, usually only when things are particularly heated, but he has no desire to wait around past his time just to see a thing like that.

"I think the point was more that there wouldn't be a gravesite to visit, or a body to honor," he theorizes, looking back at her. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't; as long as nobody in the South got to throw some kind of lavish funeral for Booth everything was fine.

He's not really sure that anybody would have done that for Czolgosz. But it's the principle of the thing.

It's only now, after all of this, that he thinks to ask, still casually, "Why do you ask?"

"Oh." She looks down at her hands, trying not to appear disappointed by the lack of a clear answer. Maybe she can find out once she's awake - ask Aziraphale for more chemistry books or something. She'd feel a little bad for asking for them without specifying why, but she knows it would upset Aziraphale if she started talking about how best to theoretically dispose of her own body.

The Balladeer probably wouldn't want to hear her talk about that, either.

"I've just never heard of someone doing that before," she says, lifting her gaze and trying to look innocuous. In her experience, bodies were left where they fell - human or hungry. There was no time for burials, and they all knew it. "It was different, where I was from."

"Oh." The Balladeer furrows his brow at her for a second, but then nods, seeming to accept the answer. Sure, people come from all sorts of worlds around here. "Well, it isn't common. Not even for criminals, that I know of. Most people get buried or cremated here."

He hasn't had to actually explain much of anything about this dimension to people of different ones. Most of them, after all, have been here longer than he has. But funerary practices aren't really a topic of everyday conversation, he guesses. At least, they aren't in ordinary worlds. Back home they were still a pretty sore subject, particularly among the Acid Club, but it came up a lot more than normal.

"What's it like where you come from?" Melanie can feel free to interpret that as a question about her world in general, or just its usual way of disposing of bodies. He meant the first, but either's interesting!

"Different." She hesitates, then lifts her shoulders in a little shrug. "Broken." At least it was compared to this one. She fit in there - she and the other hungry children would have been close enough to human to keep things going, art and culture and learning - but it's different here. Here, all she could do is start the Breakdown over from the beginning.

She can't just leave it at that, though. He'll ask questions. "There was a sort of... disease. It killed a lot of people. Almost everyone. The worst of it happened before I was born, so there wasn't much left by the time I..." What, finished everyone off? She can't tell him that. "By the time I came along."

The Balladeer's brow furrows as he listens. "I'm...sorry." It's all he can think to say. He's hardly ever had to comfort anyone after a loss before - but then again, she doesn't seem particularly grieved. That's fair enough. She wasn't born until after everything happened, so she wouldn't know any different. She wouldn't feel it the way someone would who remembered personally what had been lost.

That's probably better.

God, though. That's enough to stop his flow of questions, curious as he still is about how such a world must function. Surely it is functioning to some degree; he never would have known she was from a post-apocalypse if she hadn't told him, or maybe he'd listened to a little bit of her song. She even knows Greek mythology! But he doesn't need to know. She's not one of his, and while her refusal to give her name is a little odd, he doubts she's dangerous to anybody.

"How long have you been here?" he asks, in a completely unsubtle bid to change the subject. It's not that he's uncomfortable talking about death and disaster - clearly not - but for God's sake, it's such a nice dream tonight. "I just showed up at the beginning of the month."

"It's all right," Melanie says agreeably. She never knew it pre-Breakdown - not until she arrived here, anyway. Regardless, there's nothing for her to mourn except her own displacement. It had been worse there - worse for people like the Balladeer - but it had been perfect for her and the other hungry children.

But the change in subject is welcome. "A few months," she says. "But I have someone very nice taking care of me." It hadn't always been that way, but that's how it is, now, and that's all that matters. "It's not so bad if you meet good people."

"That's good! It really isn't so bad," the Balladeer agrees. There's a few questionable types running around New York, but most of the rifties he's met are perfectly nice. "I actually like it here! It's like a free vacation."

Most people are at least ambivalent, he knows. No matter how good things get here, it'll never be their home. But that's exactly why he enjoys it! He's not going to bother going into detail about all that, though, not right now. "And these dream things are interesting too. The ones I've seen have mostly been fine." That thing in the kitchen was the worst of it, and he can sorta see what it was going for. Slapstick comedy is just not his genre.

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Between the Roots and Branches [Open to All]

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