November 5th, 1891 — Sanditon Resort; Menagerie Area

The destruction done by the hurricane was pretty horrible. There had been a lot of deaths and substantial damage done to his cousins resort. It was all so terribly sad. Would the Sanditon be able to bounce back from this? Considering there still seemed to be other visitors, the outlook was cautiously positive. He had walked through the resort and assessed the reparations that had been done thus far.

His friend had just moved here, too. He hoped it had not shaken the newly married couple too badly to have something like this happen so soon after they had wed and moved to the Sanditon.

Heading into the menagerie area, he went to check up on the golden snidgets. They had been especially in a tizzy after the events. One of the small, fat birds landed on his hand as it recognized him. They were such fragile birds that Pablo was being very careful.

Invitational: J. Alfred Darrow

  

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Alfred and Zelda had gotten off pretty lightly in the aftermath of the hurricane. Their home needed some repairs, but was structurally still sound, and the damage wasn't so severe that they needed to live elsewhere while they managed it. They were both healthy and uninjured, despite having been in the thick of things on the night of the storm. The biggest impact to them was going to be their finances — the repairs needed on the house would delay Alfred's winter sailing plans with the Voyager, which meant money would be a little tighter until spring than he'd anticipated, but overall they were still doing just fine. Zelda's Ministry income was stable regardless, and without any children they had few pressing monetary needs.

They were handling most of the repairs themselves. Zelda was good with spellwork, and Alfred liked working with his hands, and so while neither of them had a background in architecture they were well equipped to do the minimal work that needed to be accomplished. It was sort of nice to be handling things on their own, too — it made Alfred feel like the house was properly theirs, not just another feature of the Sanditon. He'd been replacing roof shingles that morning, and was taking a break now to walk off the growing ache in his back from being hunched over the roof for the past two hours. Alfred was walking aimlessly at first, but when he spotted Pablo in the menagerie he swerved that direction.

"I see how it is," he called sarcastically. "You come to check up on the birds before your nearest and dearest friend, hm?"

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

Pablo turned at the sound of his friends voice and smiled sheepishly. It had been over a month since the event so there was a quite large grain of truth in Alfreds words. "Sorry, I had a magizoologist lecture to give and have been travelling around. The incident didn't cancel my obligations," he sighed. He had been lucky to not have been injured himself at the event.

"Besides," he said, a smirk growing on his face. "I hear newlyweds don't like to be disrupted at home for months afterward>" His friend, a married man. He had been best man and given a speech at the festivities and even now, it somehow still surprised him to remember. Maybe because he had been 90% sure Alfred would someday find a way to legally marry his ship.

  

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Despite all his efforts to behave as a respectable Victorian gentleman for the most part Alfred was still a sailor at heart; he grinned unabashedly at Pablo's remark about not being disturbed at home. "The first thing we repaired was the front door." Less because they'd needed privacy for sex and more because it was terribly drafty with it hanging off one hinge, but that part didn't contribute to the joke, so he omitted it.

"It did cancel some of my obligations, though," he continued, in a much less chipper tone. "With the damage to the house I had to pass up the first contract I had for the Voyager. Now I don't leave until the end of the month, and we're only going as far as Freetown. It's basically the same trip as when we took those church folks down on their mission. Though hopefully with fewer church folks," he joked with a shrug.

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

Pablo chortled in response to Alfreds comment. Not that he had personally always made use of a door. There was an exhibitionist joke to be made somewhere there, he thought but stayed silent.

"Oh Merlin. Now that was an adventure," he joked when Alfred mentioned the church trip. "Though I did have some fun there despite the repeated attempts to save my soul."

  

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"I was surprised at their tenacity," Alfred agreed with a nod. "I'd thought after we returned to England, that type wrote us off as not having souls anymore." No one had said as much to him explicitly, but there had been explicit rumors of cannibalism, which was not exactly encouraged behavior. Between that and the rumors that they'd engaged in some sort of tribal dark magic or had walked around naked for years, they certainly weren't in a position to be perceived very highly by the most moral Englishmen. The clarification that the tribal magic had been mostly mundane, however much chanting it had involved, or that they had only been mostly naked most of the time, did not particularly help their case.

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

"I suppose they saw something worth saving in us, who knows? Do you think that Church of Magical Jesus has a point or what?" Pablo asked. He personally was more a spiritual, man of nature type of person rather than organized religion. Especially after their experiences with the tribe. Some of their teachings had stuck with him and made a lot more sense to him than most other religious beliefs.

  

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Alfred snorted. After everything he'd been through, he didn't imagine he'd step foot in a church again unless it was to attend someone's wedding. With most people he would have at least pretended to respect the church as an institution, even if he didn't attend, but with Pablo he saw no reason to sugar coat anything. The idea of Alfred ever engaging in organized religious was as ridiculous as the idea of Evander becoming a pirate.

"No, I think you're well beyond saving," he teased lightly. "And if someone did convert you, it'd probably have less to do with the religion and more to do with whatever exotic animal they had living in their temple."

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

"Oh, my poor sorry soul," Pablo said in faux-melodramatics. He couldn't say anything against what Alfred said next though. Because - well - it was true. "I ought to look into that. I could be a monk for a while if it meant seeing some rare critter." Though monks were typically celibate so perhaps not.

  

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"Don't," Alfred protested (as though he believed for one second that Pablo might be serious about becoming a monk, rare creature or not). "England would be boring without you." Not that one necessarily needed to leave the country to become a monk, but monks weren't known for having particularly free social lives. Whether he was here or abroad, Pablo being a monk was bound to mean Alfred had no one to talk to. No one who understood, anyway.

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

Pablo chuckled as Alfred protested the idea of Pablo becoming a monk. "I will find my rare, undiscovered creature one day, I'm sure. Perhaps not in a monastery though."

  

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