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Welcome to Charming, the year is now 1894. It’s time to join us and immerse yourself in scandal and drama interlaced with magic both light and dark.

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Queen Victoria was known for putting jackets and dresses on her pups, causing clothing for dogs to become so popular that fashion houses for just dog clothes started popping up all over Paris. — Fox
It would be easy to assume that Evangeline came to the Lady Morgana only to pick fights. That wasn't true at all. They also had very good biscuits.
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#1
August 17th, 1889 — A secluded portion of the English coastline

Alfred had regretted this job even before he'd officially accepted it. Even just the premise was tedious; teaching wealthy girls, who had no particular interest anything but clothes and men, how to sail. Presumably they wanted to seem more accomplished, and adding the talent to their repertoire of things to be listed off in conversation appealed to them. Certainly, they had no innate talent for the sport and no particular desire to learn how to actually handle a boat.

The job was partly an appeasement to his brother, who wanted him to find some sort of work that kept him home in England (although he would never actually admit that to Evander) and partly a portion of his scheme to put away as much money as possible over the course of the summer so that he could maybe, eventually, someday have a chance of winning Brannon Fisk's approval to court his daughter. The family who had organized this event was paying a frankly absurd amount for him to come and facilitate it, and they had provided the sailboat and the dock from which to launch it, so he supposed he really shouldn't complain about the experience — but at times it was difficult to keep that in mind. Particularly at the beginning of the session, when he'd taken time to explain what all of the lines and sails were called, how to use them, and which bollards they were associated with, then asked for questions — only to have one of the bolder young ladies inquire whether he really did have tattoos over his whole torso.

He'd gritted his teeth and gotten through it, though, and had managed to launch the boat with some minimal help from the ladies. Now they were underway, and he was trying to take more of a backseat so that they could actually get some experience steering and working the lines — which was going rather miserably.

"Take in the spinnaker," he told one of the girls, who was practically sitting on the relevant line. "See how slack it is?"



MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
#2
Regret was burning at Pet's insides. She had only accepted the invitation because she couldn't think of a polite way to decline and she felt guilty enough as it was for not making enough of an effort, socially speaking. Now she was stranded in a boat with girls she despised more by the second and a man who was allegedly an infamous cannibal. Or so one of the girls had whispered in her ear just as they were stepping onto the boat. It was a shame she hadn't been so precariously placed that she could have fallen into the water accidentally and been sent home a soggy mess. He probably wasn't one, or if he was it must've been under dire circumstances to be allowed to roam around untouched by the law. Then again there may simply have been a complete lack of evidence... No, she didn't want to give any vile gossip that had come from these girls any credence.

Pet was trying to distract herself from the uncomfortable situation at hand by thinking of more pleasant things like the contents of the book she had been reading before breakfast and what sort of creatures might be in the water that could capsize the boat so she could swim away or drown trying. How long would she have before her stupid dress did actually drown her? And what were the odds that she'd be a strong enough swimmer to make it to land before she exhausted herself?

While she couldn't physically escape the boat without compromising a number of etiquette rules, Pet had succeeded rather well at mentally escaping the boat, so well in fact that she was startled to find that she was being spoken to. She looked down and realized the rope was brushing against her hand. Reluctantly she took hold of it and gave it a tug. Hopefully that was good enough and she could return to minimal participation. She glanced in the direction of the other girls and immediately felt their eyes on her and wished she hadn't looked.
""






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#3
Well, this girl could not have been any more overtly uninterested if she had tried. For all Alfred knew, maybe she was trying to seem uninterested. Girls did some silly things like that — ruin their own experiences in order to send a clear message to one of their friends that they were displeased about something menial. Maybe something like that was going on behind the scenes — this blond had decided she hated the hostess for some reason no one would remember tomorrow — and she was taking it out on the spinnaker.

Whatever. This wasn't his problem; he was getting paid to get them through this silly outing.

"Not quite like that," he said, trying to keep his tone helpful and positive while the boat was veering sharply to starboard. "See how taut it is? That's what's making us turn like this. You'll want to let it out some. The sail should be just tight enough to hold the wind, not so much that it starts to fight it."



MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
#4
The boat seemed to react to her pull of the rope and started redirecting itself sharply in another direction. It was a rare thing for Pet to feel completely ignorant, usually she had at least a basic understanding of a situation or how something worked. This was something completely new. She didn't like it. She also didn't like having to engage with this ill-conceived outing but at least she might actually learn something.

"Like this?" Pet slackened her grip and observed the effects of her action. It seemed to calm the boat down some. She experimented a little with how tight she held it to get an idea of where it seemed like it ought to be.






Thank you Bee for my stunning Secret Swap gift <3
#5
"That's — better," Alfred admitted, although it still wasn't where he would have liked it. He tried to find words to instruct her a little more precisely from where he was sitting, but he wasn't sure what to say. These girls had no vocabulary for the task at hand, and translating sailing jargon into anything else just sounded silly, and was rather imprecise, besides. See the wavy bit? Pull the rope here and make it a flat bit. His stomach almost churned at the mere thought of letting something so ridiculous leave his mouth.

So he decided the best thing to do would be to go over and show her. Turning to one of the nearest girls, he said, "Here, can you take the tiller for a minute? Just keep us going straight. Towards — that point there," he said, picking an object in the distance. That was a learn-to-sail basic; always have something in the distance to look at when you're trying to steer. Believing that he'd given her all the necessary directions, Alfred headed up towards where the blond was sitting.

"So," he said as he took a seat next to her. "Let's let it out just a bit more. You've almost got it. Oh — and you see this cleat, here? You want to keep the end of the line knotted there — just a quick half-hitch will do — so that if you drop the line for some reason, it doesn't fall out to sea," he explained. Having been distracted from his original task he hadn't paid particular attention to the sailing terminology slipping back into his directions. "If it goes out and your jib starts luffing, and you don't have it hitched here, you have to stand up at the front and draw it back in from the edge of the sail, and that can be dangerous depending on where you're at and what the boat's doing."



MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
#6
Pet's heart sank the moment she realized he was moving towards her. Why couldn't she have simply gotten it first try, unless she had and she was just unlucky that she'd somehow caught the interest of this questionable man. In what seemed like the shortest span of time he'd used numerous words which she either was unfamiliar with or knew only in other contexts and her innate curiosity was waging war against her desire to endure the rest of the outing in undisturbed silence. Her reluctance to willfully remain ignorant won out in the end.

She took in what he'd said and tried to piece together what she hadn't been sure about from context but that didn't clear everything up. "What exactly is 'luffing' and what is the jib?" It was a little unsettling to think there could be so many words she didn't understand in a language she thought she'd mastered years ago, even though she knew these words were not the sort in common parlance with normal people. Luffing sounded like some sort of slang and why would anyone but a sailor talk about jibs if, as she had deduced, it was some part of the boat.



The following 1 user Likes Petra Sleptova's post:
   J. Alfred Darrow



Thank you Bee for my stunning Secret Swap gift <3
#7
Oh, right. She had no idea what he was talking about. Alfred couldn't help but let out a short sigh, then he tried to start over, slower. "The jib is this sail here. It's the one in the front - you can steer the boat just fine without it sometimes, but it really adds to your speed."

Speaking of steering, something was wrong, Alfred noticed. They'd drifted to the right when he'd moved up and started talking, they had only started veering off more. They still hadn't quite corrected course from a moment ago when the sails had been poorly dressed, so now they were getting rather close to a group of rocks.

"Hey, watch the till!" he called back to the girl he'd left in charge of steering. On looking back, though, he immediately realized what the problem was: he'd failed to tell her that in order to make the boat go one way, the tiller had to be pushed in the opposite direction. She was trying to correct the course — and she looked quite frantic about it, to be honest — and was only making things worse by continuing to pull the tiller in towards her.

"Other way, other way!" he said, standing to cross back to her. He didn't get far before he had to reach out and steady himself on one of the lines, though, as she made a sharp course change (in, again, the wrong direction) that nearly made him lose his balance. "Push it away from you. You have to—"

That, unfortunately, was as far as he'd gotten before they ran aground. The force of the collision sent him roughly falling towards the bottom of the boat — and he heard at least a few startled cries from the ladies, whom he could only pray had managed to remain seated despite the displacement.



MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
#8
Quite suddenly things started to go very wrong. It was amazing in a rather horrible way how little time it took for things to go from fine to imminently dangerous. Was there a way she could make the boat slow down? Possibly, but she thought she was far more likely to make the situation even worse by trying so she sat tight and willed the boat to turn the other way. Naturally that had no effect and with a rough jolt they crashed.

This would have been very disturbing anyway but then Pet's eye popped out and started rolling along the bottom of the boat. Great. Maybe she would be so fortunate as to have a kraken surface nearby and pluck her off the ship with one of its tentacles and kindly drown her. Placing a hand over her now empty eye socket, Pet sat in uneasy silence hoping no one had noticed. She finally then noticed that Mr. Darrow was sprawled within rolling range of her eyeball and groaned. At least it gave her a good excuse to discreetly recover her lost eye.

Rather clumsily for her sense of balance was a little thrown, she picked her way over to him and started looking around for her eye. She probably ought to ask after his well being though. "Are you alright?"



The following 1 user Likes Petra Sleptova's post:
   J. Alfred Darrow



Thank you Bee for my stunning Secret Swap gift <3
#9
There hadn't been any possible way to recover gracefully, given the force of the collision and where he'd been standing when it happened, but Alfred was still a little miffed that he, the experienced sailor who was supposed to be imparting seafaring wisdom to these young ladies, had been sent sprawling on the deck. Luckily, he didn't think anyone was looking at him when it happened, since they'd all been clinging to their respective seats. He could get back on his feet and start assessing the damage to the boat (and, Merlin forbid, to the ladies) before anyone noticed his tumble.

Or that was his intention, anyway. Before he could move, the girl whom he'd just been sitting by was at his side, which made Alfred let out a little involuntary groan. "Fine," he answered. "And hopefully we can say the same of your friends."



MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
#10
Quite abruptly - while Mr. Darrow was still speaking in fact - Pet knelt down. She wobbled slightly but was undeterred for there was her eyeball, miraculously unseen by anyone else, as far as she knew. One hand still covering her vacant socket, her other fumbled in her haste to pick up the eye.

Foolishly, she picked it up between her thumb and forefinger trying to touch it as little as she could rather than holding it in the palm of her hand. Foolish, for she lost her grasp of it and there it flew, directly toward Mr. Darrow. Pet stared after it, horror plain to see on her face.
""






Thank you Bee for my stunning Secret Swap gift <3
#11
Alfred was about to turn his attention towards said friends, but as he was looking over his shoulder in that direction he heard a small thwack of something hitting the wooden deck, then felt something small nudge his hand. He glanced down and...

"Holy hell," he said immediately upon recognizing the thing that had hit him. He looked up at the blond to see if she knew where it had come from, and was quite horrified to see her covering one eye with her hand. Had she just lost an eye? And if so, why the hell was she being so cavalier about it? Maybe she was still in shock?

Except... the eye that had rolled into him didn't really seem gooey enough to be a human eye. Not that Alfred had any experience handling human eyes, but he knew the texture of fish eyes, and he expected that eyes of other varieties would be similar. Not so smooth and firm. But if it hadn't come from the girl in front of him, why was she holding her hand like that?!



MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
#12
Whilst his obvious shock was embarrassing, it was nothing to the pure mortification she was preparing herself for when the other girls realized what had happened. It was one thing to know of her eye situation, another entirely to witness it and in such close confines with those girls she didn't doubt they'd be unkind about it.

Pet's free hand made a few jerky movements as she repeatedly fought the urge to grab her eye while reasoning that she probably shouldn't go grabbing for it when it was so close to him. What if she accidentally touched him? "Erm... Would you mind, please, could I have that back please? Sorry."






Thank you Bee for my stunning Secret Swap gift <3
#13
He'd pulled his hand away reflexively when he'd determined what it was, but the eye was still sitting there next to his trousers, looking vaguely upward. She still had one hand over her eye — or, he supposed, a hole where her eye would have been, had it not been on the deck. And she was asking him to give it back. Two horrified thoughts occurred to him in rapid succession: first, that she wanted him to touch her eye, on purpose; second, that if she was asking for it back that meant she was intending to do something with it. But what? She couldn't just shove it back in there. Alfred wasn't an anatomy expert or anything, but he knew there were connections there that were fairly essential for the whole seeing things aspect of having eyes.

He was too flabbergasted by the entire situation to argue with her, however, so he merely picked it up — smooth and hard and a little slimy, but not nearly as much as he thought it should have been — and held it out to her, wordlessly.



MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
#14
He wasn't saying anything. This was uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. Increasingly so. And yet she couldn't quite break the eye contact as she accepted her prosthetic. What she really wanted to do was properly rinse the thing with some water but it was simply too awkward and uncomfortable for her to do anything more involved than wiping it against her skirt.

Pet started to turn her back towards him when she realized she had to make an important choice; pop it back in in front of the girls or pop it back in in front of him. Well she probably wasn't going to see this man again and while she didn't particularly want to spend another second with those girls, it was a sad reality that she probably would cross paths with them again unless she transfigured herself into a fish, dived off the boat, and swam to Siberia to live a cold, solitary life churning butter.

Turning her head to the side as much as she could without being overly visible to all parties on the boat, Petra shielded her eye with her hand while the other prodded the glass orb back from whence it came. She could feel her face burning and wondered whether endless butter churning was really as bad as it sounded. "Uh thank you." This genuinely was the boat ride from hell. How had she ended up in this situation? It was beyond anything. How bad would it actually be if she did try to turn herself into a fish or simply disapparated without another word?






Thank you Bee for my stunning Secret Swap gift <3
#15
Alfred watched with barely contained horror as she took the eye from him and did exactly as he'd feared. She really was just going to put it straight back into her head, wasn't she? He felt he out to stop her, or at least protest, because she clearly was not in her right mind. She must have been in shock from the crash, or hit her head in the collision or something. That being said, he did nothing but ineffectively try to find the words as she put the eye back in place. Much to his surprise, it didn't seem to hurt her (or the eye) to shove it back in. When she looked back in his direction, it even looked... normal-ish, he supposed. Normal considering that half a second ago she'd been down to one eye.

"Uh. You're welcome," he said, at an utter loss. He had quite forgotten about trying to right the boat from the collision of a moment earlier, since this thing with the eye had taken him so entirely out of his comfort zone.



MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
#16
Even with one eye, her face turned, and her vision partially blocked by her hands and wrist as she put her eye back in, she could see there was a horrified look on the man's face. Lowering her hands, she turned her face back to him and pretended she couldn't feel the warmth in her face. "Do you need a hand, sir?" Pet hesitantly extended her hand and hoped he'd forget what he'd just seen or at the very least not mention it.






Thank you Bee for my stunning Secret Swap gift <3

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