2025-04-29 - Never Gonna Give You Up

It's been a very wild month or so, from everything that's gone on at the park, Trace's sister's visit, Enzo's father's attempt to steal the magical doodad from the bottom of the lake, the earthquake and big blue ball of light just like at New Year's, to Trace getting kidnapped and shot and being in a coma, the park shutdown, and then the return to the park.

It's a quiet night up on the roof deck of the Turning Leaf. Last night, Trace had driven out to Ann Arbor with Enzo and Angelo to get some of Enzo's things and bring them back into storage. Now, tonight, he has nowhere to be and nothing to do but just take in some air and catch up with Fin. He's got some drinks in a little cooler and some snacks for a little picnic in the cool night air.

It has been a wild time at the park, for sure. And Fin has missed it all, off on her own adventures, which were honestly less full of adventure and just work in a different location. Trace and friends have tried to keep her in the loop, though, texting and face-timing when they could, so she didn't feel completely cut off from everything—even if she may have suffered some serious FOMO.

But she's back now, back at Spellbound, back with her friends who have become like family, and back to her normal job. She was on her feet most of the day, so chill time on the roof deck sounded fabulous, especially since it was time spent with the Best Roommate Ever!

Stepping out onto the deck, Fin stops and lets her shoulders relax with an exaggerated release of breath. "I am so happy you suggested this," she says to Trace, heading over to sit with him. She has at least changed out of her uniform and is now wearing some comfy clothes and fluffy slippers. "I know I've said it a million times, but I have missed you so much. Everyone here, really, but especially you."

Trace is dressed in his usual jeans and a comfortable long-sleeved dark red Henley with some old worn running shoes on his feet, comfy enough for a night on the roof with the weather warming around Spellbound. He reaches into the cooler and pulls out a drink and hands it over to Fin once she gets herself settled in and he grins at her. "We are long overdue for some hangout time. I missed you, too. It's really good to have you back. You're not allowed to go on any more long assignments. The world goes to hell without you," he teases very lightly.

Taking the drink in hand, Fin opens it and takes a sip. "Apparently!" she exclaims with a small laugh. "Maybe the lack of my chaotic presence upsets the balance of things so the rest of the world has to compensate."

"It was fun though, at first, seeing the other places like that. Had I known though...." Had she known ALL THE THINGS would happen, well, maybe she wouldn't have agreed to the assignment. "I still can't believe you were locked in a coma in a hospital and I wasn't able to hover over you like a worried ninny." She makes light of it, but then says more quietly, "I am just... I'm glad you recovered."

"That is clearly it," Trace laughs. "The world was definitely overcompensating." He takes a swig from his own bottle, a hard cider, crisp and lightly sweet.

"Had any of us known, there's a lot of things that might have happened differently. But there were a lot of things that we didn't know," Trace is quick to say, waving that off. There's no changing what choices were made with the information that they had at the time. He leans over and bumps shoulders with her. "Don't worry. I had plenty of people fretting over me and visiting me. And like I told Avery, I'm way more fun conscious, anyway." He, too, makes light of it, but he gives her a warm smile and says, "Yeah, me too. I owe King bigtime. If it wasn't for her magical healing, I'd still be in a pretty bad spot."

"What can I say," Fin says with a tilt of her chin up in a haughty manner. "I'm special."

"I suppose that's how things go. Like, the fates don't tell us ahead of time what to prepare for, or what have you. They like to keep us on our toes. Surprise!" She does a lef-handed jazz hand and takes a sip from the bottle she holds in her right. "Oh, I am sure you did. But now I can fret over you and lament about not getting adequate fret time when the thing was actually happening." She grins with a small chuckle. "Oh, absolutely! I mean, most people are..." more fun conscious. "Most...." She could probably think of a couple people she'd prefer to be unconscious.

"I'm gonna send King a thank you note. Maybe some cookies."

"You are," Trace confirms, earnestly and without a hint of sarcasm.

He chuckles then and says, "You can fret over me now if you want. I'll allow it, just a bit, as a treat."

When she mentions sending King some cookies he nods and says, "I'm going to send her on a trip somewhere sunny with umbrella drinks. Because she deserves it."

Fin smiles at Trace and says, "I'll save the permission and use it when you are least expecting it. If I do it now it won't feel special."

"Psh. Showoff," she grins. "Sunshine and umbrella drinks is way better than cookies. But I suppose it was your life she saved... or well, healed."

Stretching her legs out in front of her, she crosses them at the ankles, leaning her head back to relax a bit more. "What else have I been missing? What other news do you have for me? When's our next party?"

"Fair," Trace says, agreeing to her terms with an easy smile. But then he nods and says, "It was a real long and hard recovery that she saved me from and I think that warrants some serious appreciation. But I bet she'll love the cookies, too." There is no shade given to the cookies!

Trace thinks back to all the things that Fin has missed and just starts rattling things off, "So, Enzo's father tried to take the Siphon, the thing at the bottom of the lake. When he did, there was an earthquake and it rattled the whole islands and another big blue magic flash went off and the dive team disappeared. I wasn't there for that because.." of the whole kidnapping thing, he waves past that. "And the park is sealing it off, burying it in concrete and stuff so people can't just go down there and try to take it again. But meanwhile it's been growing. Sending out these like magic pipeworks beneath all the islands. And it started building a structure out on Spellbound Island in one of the undeveloped areas."

He takes a breath and looks thoughtful then says, "But before that, we met Estella Waverly, and she's related to Alistair Waverly who made the Siphon. We think she might be his daughter. And don't think too hard on that because we'll come back to that." It would mean she was born in the 1800s and that would be impossible, right? "Anyway, we went out to Sault Sainte Marie and we found the lab that they were building out there. That was where they were bringing the Siphon. They were going to combine it with two other devices to make something that could allow people to travel between worlds."

"I mean, true. She deserves it for sure. Maybe she can take the cookies with her." Fin chuckles with a grin.

But then they get down to the meat of things. Fin's brown eyes settle on Trace. Fin listens closely, trying to absorb the information. There is a lot of blinking because it's quite a bit to absorb. Trying not to interrupt, she takes sips from her bottle and occasionally murmurs a small comment. "His father?" "Wait, they disappeared? Did they come back?" That one was said a bit louder. When he brushes past the whole kidnapping thing, she bites the corner her lip and nods. "How's it growing in the concrete?" she wonders. "Wait," she says again. "The Siphon is building a structure, like by itself?"

"Is she a ghost?" Fin asks but nods when he says they'll come back to that. "Enzo's dad is building a lab in Sault Sainte Marie?"

"Wait," she says a third time. "Between worlds?"

Trace smiles a little wryly, knowing that it is a lot of a lot to take in at once. He then clarifies, "The divers disappeared. There was a big explosion of magic and an earthquake and they vanished. We thought maybe they were.. vaporized. But we're not entirely sure about that. And no, they didn't come back." He shakes his head just a little bit. "We're really lucky Enzo didn't go down with them. He was supposed to be on that dive team."

"Okay so, the Siphon sank into the lake when the ship went down in 1871. And since then, it's been growing, extending these pipeworks out under the lake bed and under the islands, growing slowly bit by bit for the past hundred and whatever years. The concrete is a very recent thing. They're just encasing over the top of it that's exposed in the shipwreck. And yes, it's building a structure all on its own."

"Estella is not a ghost, no. She's alive," He confirms.

"And no, the people who built the Siphon were building a lab in Sault Sainte Marie. And Enzo is thinking of buying that land," he explains.

"Yes," is all he clarifies on between worlds since really that's all he knows. What that means is still very much theoretical.

Lowering her bottle, Fin's face goes from confused to concerned. "Who..." There is a bit of a pause after that word, as if she's afraid to ask. "Who went down? Who's, um... gone?" She is glad, however, that Enzo wasn't one of them.

She nods as she listens to him explain the little bits of questions she had, though the fact that the Siphon is building a structure on its own makes her give an expression that seems to read 'HOW' all over it: one eyebrow arched, lip slightly curled, other brow furrowed. The look does not go away when he says Estella is alive.

She lifts her hand and slightly curls most of her fingers save for one, her pointer. She gestures with it, pointing it in one direction, then off to her other side, as if working something out in her mind.

"The people that... built the Siphon... that sank... in 1871... are building a lab? Or like, were building it back then?"

"Enzo's father's men, the ones who tried to steal the siphon," Trace explains. "His father put together a team of divers to go down and try to take it. When they tried, it zapped them. Like you warned us about."

"They built the lab in the 1800s," Trace says. "We went and poked around in it. It's still there though abandoned. There was stuff in there from the late 1800s and early 1900s from before it was entirely closed up and left to rot, basically."

"Oh." Fin suddenly looks way less concerned, though not exactly relieved. "So I helped, even though I was gallivanting about!" Now, she smiles.

"Ohhhh." She nods, finally understanding the lab bit more. "That had to be cool. Like, what does an 1800s lab look like, you know? So cool."

"Is that all that happened?" She says it in a silly little plippant way, like all these huge things were something trivial. "What about the tea? Spill it... there has to have been some tea to talk about, right?"

"You did help," Trace laughs. "And you WERE right. It does not like to be touched and it will defend itself. Even just those who dove that first time and touched it without trying to take it got a bit whammied with visions and zapped. Though not like the divers."

"You want to see it? I was going to go back with Dylan to take a look at it again and wander through, since Enzos thinking about buying the land. We can get access from the caretaker through Estella," Trace says. "Might be some cool photo ops in there."

Trace chuckles. "Is that all? No, that's not all.. but that's a start. There's more.." He hasn't even gotten to WHAT the Siphon is building yet. Though when she asks for tea, he chuckles.

"Umm.. like personal tea?"

"Thank goodness the first team just got a magical slap on the wrist, so to say..." But when he asks if she wants to go to the lab, she says, "Yes!" Loudly and suddenly, as if she had been looking forward to the opportunity for all her life instead of the last couple minutes. "Yes, Yes I do. I want to take all the photos. And see all the cool things. What does Enzo think he'd do with the land if he buys it?"

It clicks that he said Estella can help give them access and she asks, "is she like... normal?" Yes, she's still trying to figure out that mystery. "A vampire or some other immortal creature?"

"More?" she asks and nods. "I should have known there would be more... And uh, yeah! Of course the personal tea!" Putting on her brightest, most charming smile that makes her glow that old familiar glow a bit, she says, "you have to sprinkle some drama amongst the trauma!"

"Yeah," Trace says. "I think maybe that's because we weren't trying to 'hurt' it? Like, nobody tried to forcibly remove it. They just reached out and touched it, and it said 'no touchy' back, like a magical smack," Trace says with a wry bit of a smile. "Well, the land has the lab on it. And Enzo's a city planner/developer. So the goal I think is to build one of his future cities, and, if the tech can be adapted, maybe use some of the magical technology, if we can get it to work outside the park, to create cleaner, sustainable transportation with the use of teleportation." He smiles a little wryly, "Which of course leads us to even more of the more.." There's a lot.

"Yeah, Estella's like, a normal twenty-something, couple of years younger than Enzo and I I'd wager. British. Soft-spoken. Sweet, really. She's been very helpful in trying to figure all of this out. Kind of hoping we can help her get her memories back so we can figure out what happened to her," Trace says, of Estella Waverly. "I don't think she's any kind of creature. She doesn't seem like it anyway. But I'm a chemist not a cryptobiologist."

"So, the Siphon built a whole structure brass complex out in the woods, with a house in the trees, and a replica of the portal room in the lab. So like, it seems to be trying to build the place it was supposed to go to. And we think, when we put it together with the Looking Glass that we got from the lab, that it might be able to open doorways into other worlds," Trace says before laughing at the need for some personal tea and drama.

"More dramatic than your boyfriend's dad ransoming you off and his thugs nearly killing you?" he asks with his brows raised. But then he says, "So, Enzo told his dad he's not working for him anymore. Angelo and he and I went out to Ann Arbor and got his stuff out of the house and moved him out. And the park offered him a new job working on developing Moonrise Island. And he and I are going to be moving in together, since now we don't have to hide anything anymore.. since anyone we were hiding it from already knows." He then is quick to say, "But we're only moving to the fourth floor. So we're still going to be RIGHT here.. and can hang out all the time still."

"True. Like, it probably didn't feel too threatened by curiosity." With a small giggle, she adds, "no touchy reminds me of that crab commercial... from forever ago. We were kids... like for Honda or something? The car is talking and the crab goes..." Setting the bottle between her knees, she lifts both hands and holds her fingers to mimic crab pincers. "I pinch." Fin looks at him, brows raised to question whether he remembers, making a couple more pinching motions with her crab-hands.

"Oh man... I used to wish for teleportation all the time. Imagine the possibilities? Like, I know here, you still have to be able to see where you are jumping or something, but like, what if it was like Star Trek and just - poof, you could be wherever, whenever. No more long distance relationships. No more not going on vacation because you can't afford a flight..." Not that Trace has had that problem, like ever. "I have no idea if that is at all possible or would be, but yeah, I used to wish for it all the time." Her eyes lift to his and she asks, "are you saying it might be possible?" It didn't seem like that was what he was saying in describing what Enzo might do, but, she had to ask anyway.

"Twenty something?" Skepticism returns. Her hand moves to scratch lightly, thoughtfully at the side of her neck. "Frozen in ice? Born from a... preserved semen specimen almost 200 years old?" She blinks several times, not really coming up with a good, seemingly likely idea. "I hope she is sweet and not like, sweet like the witch's house in hansel and gretel was sweet..."

"That's crazy. I want a house in the trees! I wonder why it is doing that... I'm not a scientist at all, I do like a good mystery and researching things but... man, I want to study the heck out of all this and put the pieces together like a giant puzzle."

She starts to laugh then, genuinely, despite the topic. "I consider that more on the trauma side than the drama, but... perhaps that's more of a mixture of both... But no, I was thinking a bit less dramatic than that." She then goes on a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. "Oh, he's working here now? That's so cool!" But then, "wait... like, you're moving out? He's not moving in?" She sticks her bottom lip out in an extreme pout. "I mean.. I'm happy for y'all but... you're gonna have to sneak in when I am asleep and leave me food to eat or I might starve..." She sniffs and says, "it's better to have had the best roomie ever and lost than to never have had the best roomie ever at all..." Sniff.

Trace laughs and lifts up his fingers and does the crab-pincer movement at the same time. "I peeeench," he says. Yep, he remembers.

"It might be," Trace nods. "At least, that's the theory, that some manner of teleportation might be possible with it. That's the end-goal I guess. Reduce carbon emissions, find ways for people to get where they need to without any need for fossil fuels, that sort of thing. Make walkable, beautiful natural cities with clean transporation."

"Not sure. We think maybe she got sucked out of time somehow? And then.. spit back out?" Trace says. "Honestly, it's still as much a mystery to us as anyone else."

"I mean, he's always been working here..." Trace squints, not quite sure what Fin means. "But he'll be working on Moonrise Island. The undeveloped one between here and Spellbound. But yeah he'll probably be working from home a lot when he's not on site." Though when she realizes he means that he's moving out and up two floors, he leans over and bumps shoulders with her. "You won't starve. You can always come up and I'll cook for you," he points out. "And I'll stop by and drop off care packages." Then he groans and says, "You're not looooosing me. I'm still gonna be right here!" He knows it won't be quite the same, though, and he winds an arm around her shoulders to give her a hug. "You are also the bestest of roomies. None better."

Fin makes a couple more crab claw pinches in the air before moving on.

"That's... wow. I didn't think it would actually be possible. I always imagined, wished, but... thought it was just a thing for sci-fi movies. If it can actually happen..." She stops talking as her mind has her actually picturing what life in such a place... such a time would be like. "It could save Earth."

"Ahhh, like Bill and Ted and their traveling buddies. Got it."

"I mean, yeah... but, this is a fancy new position, and more in line with what he you know, does, trained for, all that." She knew what she meant. That's the important part.

The also-important-but-pout-inducing part is the whole moving thing. "As long as he is prepared to see a lot of me. Might find me some mornings sitting in the hallway with my back against your door patiently waiting for morning tea." She gives a wiggle of her nose and a sniff. "I know, I'm not losing you. And I am very happy for you. You two deserve a cozy place for just the two of you without feeling the need to hide or lie or... anything from anyone. Just being you."

"Yeah, it's all a whole lot," Trace says with a chuckle. "But, I mean, what a wild and fascinating ride to be on, huh? I bet when we get to travel places they'll want you to go along to document things." He thinks for a little bit and then says "I wonder if they need a chemist -- not like, full time or anything, but maybe to consult from time to time." He's not thinking of changing careers, after all.

"But yeah, he's going to have a lot of work and big projects to do, and that's great. I'm really glad he'll be doing something that interests him," Trace says, pretty proud of Enzo for the steps that he's taking. "I don't think he'll mind," Trace chuckles. "He likes you."

But then he nods and says, "That trip to Paris was.. everything. Just being able to be us, together, and not think about what anybody thought or saw was really perfect. And sure, his dad's still a threat, but at least people are watching out for him now."