March 30th, 1888 - Magical Dock Just Outside London, England

I got your runaway smile in my piggybank baby
Gonna cash it right in for a new Mercedes
You were worth the hundred thousand miles
But you couldn't stay a while

There was a gravitational singularity at one of the magical docks by the Thames, which was, in shorthand, a Big Fucking Problem. Typically caused by the natural entropy of aging spells whose capacities had been stretched, Zelda had seen these before but had not yet been called in to deal with them. But with her office-mate for the day stuck handling fiendfyre in Wales - MA&C was really having a Day - Zelda was the only person immediately available to deal with it, and so she apparated from the Ministry of Magic to the dockfront with a crack!

She arrived. It was easy enough to spot the sailboat - while it was not unusual to see flying magical boats, this one was obviously in a bad way. It floated far above the dock and water from the river was streaming up towards it, as were ropes, sticks, and small objects. Zelda squinted to see wisps of cloud also flicking in to circle the sailboat. The boats near it were rocking awkwardly in the water as if they, too, would start floating aimlessly towards the other boat. (This was, of course, a possibility. Zelda made a mental note to keep her distance, for now.)

And there, also on the dock, was a skinny man with a wild mane of hair. Zelda's heart stuttered. "Mr. Darrow!" she yelled, trotting towards him in her purple Ministry robes. Her cheeks were pink. She hadn't seen him since he really kissed her, and she was once again reminded quite starkly of how she wanted very much to really kiss him again. Except she was at work, and that was how you got fired for being a whore. And if she ignored the boat long enough, it would start trying to suck up not only the people and the boats and docks around it, but also the buildings of muggle London.

So she settled for: "Please tell me that isn't your boat."

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The following 1 user Likes Zelda Darrow's post:1 user Likes Zelda Darrow's post
   Ophelia Devine

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred had been all for doing this the old fashioned way, with only minimal magical help. He'd come to rely more on things he could touch and see during his adventure abroad than on spellwork, which had become increasingly unreliable as he'd struggled with the wand that didn't care for him. Besides, there was nothing particularly difficult about hoisting a lifeboat into position on the side of a ship. A few well-tied knots in some lengths of rope, two pulleys, and a handful of strong men (all of which were available in abundance on the docks) were all it took to get just about anything out of the water and into the air. He might have used a quick spell to help with the knots, but he would have preferred to do it mostly the Muggle way. Alfred, however, had been outnumbered by a few officers who thought they could work smarter, not harder, and look how that had turned out.

The boat had been in the air for thirty minutes, nowhere near where it was supposed to be on the side of the Ophelia (though at approximately the right height, so he had to give them that). A few people had tried casting spells at it, to no avail. The majority of the crew — primarily composed of uneducated men whose experience with magic was limited to only the most practical and pragmatic aspects, and many of whom did not even possess a wand of their own — was content to watch with curious interest as the officers, the ones who were supposed to solve problems, went on to make everything worse. It hadn't started out with the little backwards waterfall beneath it, nor any of the other debris that had accumulated around it in the interim, but that was the progress they had made. Alfred, despite outranking nearly all of them, was largely doing the same thing the uneducated men were doing — watching the boat curiously and wondering whether it would eventually come down of its own accord.

He was interrupted from this admittedly not very helpful process by a familiar voice, though when he turned to see who it belonged to he was rather surprised to find Miss Zelda Fisk on the other side of it. A tinge of color went to his cheeks, which he hated himself for but couldn't help. He hadn't seen her since the mistletoe incident, and in the meantime he'd thought that incident over and over in his head and was largely convinced that she must hate him for it. Not that it had been his fault, but if she had to blame someone he was the likeliest candidate, and he had perhaps accidentally let on that he'd enjoyed kissing her more than he should have. Besides, he had no idea whether that little interlude had gotten her into any trouble or not, and was rather afraid to bring it up now to ask.

"It's one of them," he admitted. "But that wasn't my idea," he continued, with a gesture towards the sailboat's current status of levitation. He glanced back at it as though it required his attention, mostly because he wasn't sure he wanted to look at her. He didn't know whether he could trust himself not to say something stupid if he looked at her. Unfortunately, it seemed he couldn't trust himself not to say something stupid, anyway, because with hardly any real pause at all he turned back to her and asked abruptly, "What are you doing here?"

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Of course it was his boat. Of course. Zelda pressed her lips together into a thin line, and looked up at the boat. This would have been enough of a pain if she wasn't immediately flustered by the presence of Mr. Darrow, but she was, and she couldn't very damn well send him away while she solved the problem of his boat. Especially not when he was asking why she was here.

Zelda gestured to her Ministry robes. "I work for Magical Accidents & Catastrophes," she said, "Of which, this very much is one."  

The other problem with the boat - other than the singularity, other than the belonging-to-Mr.-Darrow - was the number of men with wands pointed at them. If they didn't know what they were doing, and Zelda was very much willing to bet that they did not, then they were going to advance the problem. They probably already had.

"If I don't get your boat back to normal," Zelda said, "It's going to start sucking up people, too. Not to mention whatever else."

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AMAZING set by MJ

Oh. She was here for work. That explained the Ministry robes, he figured. Had he known, prior to this, that she worked for the Ministry? He felt as though he had vaguely known that she worked somewhere, but he wasn't sure he'd ever paid much attention to exactly where, and he'd never found himself having to deal with her in a professional capacity. He almost felt a little defensive about her job title — a hovering boat was hardly a catastrophe — but he wasn't sure he was feeling articulate enough to argue the point, even if he had had the faintest idea what did constitute a magical catastrophe, which he really didn't. He wasn't in the habit of getting into arguments on subjects he had no experience with, especially when the person on the other side of the argument was a cute girl an expert in the field.

"Oh, well," he said, with an ineffectual shrug; it wasn't as though he had any ideas about how to get it down. "By all means. I'm, uh, not sure exactly what they cast to get it up there. Or what they were trying to cast, I suppose I should say."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

"It could have been anything," Zelda murmured. This was the trouble. The other trouble was that she was going to look like an idiot if she couldn't solve this quickly, and she really, really didn't want to look like an idiot in front of Mr. Darrow. She had looked stupid in front of Mr. Williams-Jameshill countless times, and he hadn't seemed to mind, but just look at how that turned out for her in the end.

"Can you get them to stop? Casting on it?" she asked, not entirely sure how well her authority would float in front of, well, a bunch of men pointing their wands at a floating boat.

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AMAZING set by MJ

Luckily for her, Alfred was far too busy being self-conscious himself to notice any tremulousness on her end. He had been preoccupied with wondering whether she had the authority to get him in any kind of trouble, if this really was, as she said, a catastrophe (and, if she had the authority, whether she would feel inclined to do so or not — he was not at all sure that their shared time under the mistletoe had entitled him to any special treatment where her career was concerned and it seemed presumptuous to suppose she liked him enough to make exceptions). When she asked him to get the sailors to stop casting on it, he wondered why on earth it hadn't occurred to him to do that already — the moment she'd arrived, at least, or possibly even beforehand. It certainly wasn't making anything better, but up until now he hadn't had any alternative ideas.

"Er, right," he said, tips of his ears beginning to turn red. It occurred to him that she was about to watch him interact with (some of) the men that he'd be leading on his expedition, and he wanted very much to seem cool and collected and commanding — like the Captain that this expedition had made of him, not like the washed-up castaway the Sycorax had left him.

Unfortunately, his experience was not as a Captain — it was as a sailor. He had no magic tricks in his back pocket for fixing situations like this, and no surefire way of gathering the attention of a large group of men scattered about the docks, so when he turned to leave Miss Zelda (momentarily), he didn't know what else to do except to holler out, "Oi!" and make a sweeping gesture for the men to gather round. It sounded rather too Scottish; the Captain of the Sycorax had been an English gentleman and had the mannerisms and accent to match, which Alfred would never acquire.

He managed to disperse the sailors and all the rest of their good-idea fairies regarding solving the boat issue by telling them (not entirely untruthfully) that there was a Ministry representative on the scene, asking questions about who had begun this whole mess. He may have exaggerated her scariness quite a bit, but it had the desired effect, and it sent them scattering like mice towards a variety of other tasks that had them looking, at least, very busy. That done, he turned his attention back to their visitor, and to the boat.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda watched with a small degree of awe as Mr. Darrow managed to scatter the wand-holding men, leaving her with a conundrum of a boat that was, at least, no longer being worsened by idiots. While he scattered them, she considered the boat, mentally evaluating the best course of action for the boat. She was going to have to reverse the most recent spells, yes, but she was likely also going to have to undo the original spells. It occurred to her that, good-looking men aside, she had handled things worse than this before. She may be alone, but she could take a boat.

But now that the men were busy, Mr. Darrow was looking at her, and Zelda could again feel herself becoming flustered. Her cheeks turned a faint pink. She tugged her wand from her pocket. "Right," she said, "Thank you." She took several strides closer to the boat, going for proximity in access.

Zelda squinted up at the boat and pointed her wand at it. "Finite Incantatem," she stated, hoping to clear out the most recent spells impacting the ship. The waterfall halved in size, and the boats nearest to the floating ship stopped rocking where they were docked. She grinned to herself.

The next series of spells involved a great deal more muttering and several flicks of her wand, but the upwards-flowing waterfall stopped and the ship came to a gentle stop in the water. Zelda tucked her wand back into the pocket of her robe. "The original spellwork to make it fly will have to be redone, I think," she said.

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AMAZING set by MJ

After so many years without magic — at least, without the proper English variant of magic, which was what she was doing — what Miss Fisk was doing was all but incomprehensible to him, particular at the speed with which she worked. He wasn't sure whether he ought to allow himself to look impressed or whether that would only make him look like an idiot, so he settled for trying to keep as neutral an expression as possible while she brought the boat back down into the water.

"Oh," he said with a curious look at the boat. Had it flown before? He couldn't remember. The two main ships of the expedition were the traditional sort, but the life boats were smaller and may very well have been enchanted. It was the sort of thing he ought to know off the top of his head, but didn't. "Well, I don't really need it to fly," he admitted a bit sheepishly. "It didn't work out so well for us last time, you know. With the mountains and all. We're planning this expedition as a strictly ocean-based cruise."

Speaking of ocean-based, the small boat was, he realized, no longer kept stationary by its levitation spell, and was adrift in the small cove created by the horseshoe of surrounding docks. Which was fine for the moment, but would be significantly less fine if it managed to work its way out into the Thames — which it would do sooner or later, with the tug of the current — and then went on its own little expedition through London.

"Oh, sorry," he said, ducking away from her and heading for the nearest pile of coiled rope. "Just a moment!" he called back as he grabbed the end and tried to lasso the nearest edge of the boat's keel. "Sorry!"

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Ocean-based. So, did he know where he was going? Zelda was about to ask just that when Mr. Darrow launched himself in pursuit of the boat. She couldn't contain her unattractive grimace, immediately feeling quite terrible for not realizing that, you know, boats float away. And here she was thinking herself so clever for the wandwork.

"I'm so sorry!" she yelled, frozen in horror, "Can I -" Rather predictably, Zelda cut herself off, because even if he told her she could help she was not sure what she could do. Her only experience with boats was the piracy incident and the ride Mr. Darrow had taken her on, which amounted to almost zero, and if she fell in the water she was not entirely sure that she would be able to get herself back out.

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AMAZING set by MJ

"I've got it," Alfred called back immediately. He didn't have it (yet), but he didn't want her to think that he needed help wrangling a boat adrift in the harbor. Aside from just the matter of pride, which was not insignificant, it would also probably be far more trouble to include her in the little rescue mission and have to explain how to do everything than it would be to just do it, and he hardly felt inclined to watch the boat float away down the Thames while he tried, tongue-tied, to explain what sort of knot he needed to someone who may very well have never tied one anywhere other than her shoelaces.

Besides, this was hardly the first time in nautical history that a boat had gotten loose; the sailboat was equipped with cleats along the edges of the tiny dock that were specifically meant to easily catch loops of rope, just as the cleats and bollards along the dock did. So long as he could throw that far, getting a boat back to the dock from this side was not any different from bringing one in to moor from a trip underway, and he had plenty of experience with the latter. A quick knot, a toss, and snag; the boat was caught. It was lucky for him that it hadn't been too far from the dock, because if this hadn't worked the alternative was swimming out to it and bringing it in the traditional way. While he recalled that Miss Zelda had already seen him shirtless and dripping wet on one previous occasion, he was trying to be a bit less conspicuous about all of his tattoos since they'd made an appearance in a lady's fashion magazine, of all places.

Tying the boat to the dock with a quick figure-eight, Alfred then returned to his conversation with Miss Fisk, blushing slightly as he approached her. He felt guilty for having run off so abruptly, even if it had been rather necessary. "Sorry," he said, even though he'd said it twice already. "But that's sorted. What were you saying, before?"

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda knotted her fingers together. Clearly, Mr. Darrow had the boat situation handled — at least he said he did — but still. She felt bad. And worse, now that it was handled, she was going to have to successfully talk to him again. She blushed at having to make eye contact.

”You were saying, actually,” Zelda said, ”You were telling me about the expedition. It’s over water, this time?”

It was odd to think of him leaving again, so soon - things had not gone so well for Mr. Darrow last time. What if he died? What if other people died?

  

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred's ears reddened. How embarrassing to have run off in the middle of his own half of the conversation, and then to have forgotten about it, on top of it all. He was too focused on his own social faux pas to notice that Miss Zelda was blushing, too; instead he glanced down at her shoes briefly before reminding himself he ought to be making an effort to look her in the face and struggled to come up with some compelling way to continue the conversation. "Oh, uh, yes," he stumbled; not as suave as he would have liked, and he wasn't entirely sure where he was going with this since he wasn't sure whether she actually cared about his expedition or was just being polite by listening to him talk about it.

"All of the, uhm, literature and myths on the subject talk about the witches taking King Arthur away by boat," he managed. "To Avalon, I mean. And it's believed that they most likely set off from Wales — so the island has to be somewhere you can reach by boat from Wales. In the days of King Arthur, which — well, it wasn't like they had cross-Atlantic cruises back then," he said with a shrug. Magic could account for some differences in the technology, but going back all the way to the days of Merlin, there was only so much that a little sailboat could do.

Of course, there was also a theory that Avalon was a metaphorical place, rather than a literal one, but Alfred and the rest of the folks who had planned the expedition had handily ignored that interpretation. They couldn't set out in search of a place that actually didn't exist.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda's face lit up at the mention of Arthurian history -- she had NEWTs in Ancient Studies and History of Magic, so it was familiar. Her grin was wide and her eyebrows shot up. "Oh, now, that makes sense," she said cheerfully, "That's really interesting. What - um, what made you pick King Arthur?"

There was another thing that occurred to her, although she did not dare say it. Zelda was not sure that King Arthur was real. The historical sources differed on that one - and while she was sure that Mr. Darrow had brought on historical experts, the possibility that he would turn up nothing bloomed in her chest. Although perhaps that was the point of exploration.

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AMAZING set by MJ

There was nothing at all that had made Alfred pick King Arthur, but he realized with an immediate sense of panic that he couldn't just say that. The way things had actually gone was that he had complained to Paul about his lack of seafaring opportunities (something utterly incomprehensible to the man who was now quite content to stay behind in England) and Paul had made the suggestion — probably at least partly because it was the only thing that he could immediately think of that involved sea travel relatively close to home. That was hardly very glamorous, though. He needed to come up with some of those grand phrases he used for fundraising and ply Miss Zelda with those in order to sound ... well, not insane.

Because he knew, of course, that that was how it looked. What possible reason could a man who had been lost in the wilderness for six years have for wanting to venture out into the unknown again, less than a year later? It had to be some passion, some grand ideal, because no one would do something like that just for the sake of doing it.

"That's — uhm," he stumbled. Where had all his carefully rehearsed lines gone? True, he had been focused on things other than fundraising recently, but when he'd started this whole ordeal he could have said them in his sleep. King Arthur was the most important part of British history; the strongest bridge between the Muggle and magical worlds. Finding more definitive information about him would enlighten them in the United Kingdom's own trying political climate, given the recent reconciliation with the Queen. The island was potentially a treasure trove of archaic magic long since lost by any other means. Honestly, he could make it sound as though there was nothing more important to him or to the world than finding the isle of Avalon; why couldn't he say any of those things now?

"A friend suggested it," he blurted. This could not possibly be going any worse. In an attempt to salvage some of his dignity, he attempted a joke, though it came out sounding rather lame to his ears. "Sailors need somewhere to sail to, that's all."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda could not help but twist her lips at him at that. "So it's for - " don't say boats, Zelda "- sailing?" It seemed odd that he couldn't just sail in all the normal places people sailed, like a lake. But it was also sort of romantic - not in the romantic sense, but in the sense that she felt that she could cut J. Alfred Darrow out of reality and place him in a book, and he would make just as much sense as the protagonist of a doomed adventure novel.

But then, she was thinking of him as doomed.

"You must really love sailing," Zelda blurted. She immediately followed it up with: "I don't mean that in a condescending way. I just mean -- I've just never loved something that much."

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred flushed slightly. He wasn't entirely sure how to respond to that, and he felt like any response he did give would seem just as inadequate as his stumbling attempt to explain why he was sailing off in search of King Arthur. He wasn't very good at articulating things. Except that he was fine at it when he had practiced the lines, as with his fundraising over the prior months; he just wasn't good at articulating anything that mattered.

He was not used to being envied for his passion regarding his career, or for anything, really. He'd stumbled into the nautical realm more or less by chance, after meeting his old Captain at a career fair when he had been a shiftless youth. He'd been seventeen at the time, with no particular direction and nothing tying him down, and although the Captain's vigor had convinced him to join up he hadn't really developed his love of the sea (or of being abroad generally) until much later. He couldn't have placed a pin in the moment that it happened, honestly, so how was he supposed to describe it to her?

The other thing that nagged at him was that she seemed so sure that there was some sort of chasm between what he did and what she did, and he wasn't comfortable with being placed, for any reason, on that sort of pedestal. She couldn't possibly be much older than he had been when he'd first joined the Navy, so it was hardly as though she was running out of time to find something she cared about.

"You will, I bet," he told her quietly. "It takes time. And even after that, it takes time to realize it."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER