Seventy-Five!

Seventy-Five!

Postby Treadwell » Mon Jun 01, 2020 9:37 am

June 1, 220.

Today finds much celebrating, feasting, and enjoying of cakes at the Treadwell home. Aloisius and Alice, who share their birthday, turn seventy-five today. With servants and children helping out as possible, the Treadwells are indulging in a rare day of total pampering.

Granted, Aloisius will have plenty to catch up on tomorrow, but, for now, he and his Alice will spend a day at rest.
"Looks like a table to me. Do you think it could hold up someone as bulbous as Treadwell?" -- Dr. Brennan, Myrken Wood Rememdium Edificium
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No Time to Say...

Postby Glenn » Thu Jun 04, 2020 2:27 am

These things had to be planned precisely. Why, one might ask, would that be the case? On the surface, it all seemed innocuous enough: why, it was a birthday! And not just any birthday at that, but some especially celebratory one. Symbolic, ritualistic gestures were well understood by the party at hand. Unfortunately, Aloisius Treadwell was well understood as well. Were this a time and place of more idyllic repast, Glenn Burnie might have spent his years documenting the odd peculiarities of Treadwell's life. He might have organized and categorized and created a taxonomy that might have made blasted sense of it all. Impersonations and outlandish kidnappings and fairies of a more stereotypical sort and gods that looked harmless at a distance and horrific up close (the opposite of most gods, Burnie would add, though only to himself). But this was Myrken Wood, and here the threats were Fiends and Sellswords and Demons and Dark Elves and Mentalists (only two of the five listed being specifically Burnie's fault, it could also be added; well, maybe three). Treadwell's story then was a tangential tale, a bizarre and impossible addendum that had a gravity all its own.

Yet, he was a constant in a land of chaos, for no matter what outlandish malady or misadventure might have befallen the old gent, it only ever seemed to indirectly afflict Myrken as a whole. In fact, the parallel narrative of Treadwell's existence seemed almost a comfort, a hefty counterbalance to the wretched and cursed 'normalcy' of Myrken Wood.

Still, Glenn Burnie was no fool. There was power in rituals and power more in symbols and he wasn't about to stumble in on one as potent as a seventy-fifth birthday.

No, instead, he, so newly returned to the province, battered physically, obviously and unsurprisingly, by some response to his eternal defiance to literally everything around him, yet otherwise looking at least a few years younger than he ought to (for it was thirteen years now since he first arrived in Myrken Wood) knocked hard on the toy store's door just past closing hours on the day following. "Aloisius. If you're in there, do open up. I haven't all day and you haven't many days left by my or anyone else's accounting."
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Re: Seventy-Five!

Postby Treadwell » Sat Jun 06, 2020 11:55 am

Tready's Toys.

A knock outside catches a lazily puttering Aloisius doing a mundane thing at the toy store this night: sweeping! It's the closest to real exertion he manages, it seems, a finishing activity to tidy up the store's front room before closing up business for the night.

And then a voice to go with the knock. Ears wiggle-wriggle, straining to make out the owner, and then? Those ears' owner chuckles merrily enough, and broom is swapped for walking cane, and across the floor Aloisius wobbles, soon to open the door with florid face and wheezy breath and huffed, "Mister Burnie!" as the fellow is lit from the fire behind the toymaker, across the room.

A moment or so later, there is a simple question.

"What, hrm hrm, brings you here this late of the night?"
"Looks like a table to me. Do you think it could hold up someone as bulbous as Treadwell?" -- Dr. Brennan, Myrken Wood Rememdium Edificium
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Re: Seventy-Five!

Postby Glenn » Tue Jun 09, 2020 2:26 am

There was an art to speaking with Aloisius Treadwell. One laid one's pieces out on the board. One watched the septuagenarian do the same. From there pieces were moved not towards one another but past one another. It was your choice, then whether or not to veer and engage, for he almost certainly would not. If so, a brief encounter might be had amongst these pieces before the initial directions were resumed. Burnie, in particular, excelled in dancing his pieces around Treadwell's but that wasn't the same as true engagement, simply the illusion of it.

A frustrating endeavor, perhaps, especially once one learned the secret of it. Until then, there was real value in it, of testing one's prowess against that which simply would not engage. The rotund man of many hats (all out of style, both in haberdashery and in proefssion) was neither an unstoppable force nor an immovable object but instead a large mound of dirt rolling downhill. Some of its coherence might dissolve during its journey. Get in its path and you'd not be harmed but almost certainly sullied. Try to stop it and it would dissipate around you, likely reforming due to the contours of the road on the other side.

At least until Burnie might gain ingress, he was more than willing to attempt a direct approach. "Your birthday, Aloisius. I'm only back to Myrken from Razasan, years there, might I add. I'd wish you well and offer a present. I'd provide answers, too, if you wanted them, but I imagine we're well past that point." And Glenn Burnie would watch the older man carefully as he said that, assuming, with high likelihood, that the only question Treadwell might have would be why he would possibly have any questions.
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