So line up your armies
burn down my home please
Take the part that's in my lungs
and the song I'm singing

@alex - outfit

Gael bought in bulk because she didn't like having to leave Sidhe for extended periods of time. She bought metal and jewels in bulk, crystals and precious stones, pearls and ingredients to make glass, flowers and petals and all sorts of little details that she could use to make jewellery with. The thing was that Gael was unused to being outside her cottage, and if she left it then it was usually just to take a walk around in the fields or the caves, sometimes to go into the town's shops. They had a café and a grocery store and an apothecary, so she usually didn't need much. It was only when she ran out of her work supplies or had to get new clothes that she ever had to leave. Even then, it usually took her about a week to convince herself that she really did have to go. She was trying to be better, honestly, but after her parents' death and then her grandmother and then her great grandfather, she'd just... stayed at home. Being someone who preferred places that weren't crowded or noisy in the first place, it was easy to just retreat and stay there. It wasn't right, though, she shouldn't do that. She had to leave at some point because- well, because Gal was her only contact with the world outside, except for the occasional customers that either came to her cottage or who she had to meet up with. Admittedly, with everything that was going on it'd gotten even more difficult to leave the safety of her home. Ollivanders hadn't really had a good time the last time the Death Eaters took control, great grandfather had been kidnapped and the rest of them had left for France for two entire years. Just because she'd learned to speak French at the time didn't mean that it had been a good trip.

The point was that she was trying. She was trying to get out of her door more often, she was trying to talk to more people. It hadn't taken her a week to come out and get more supplies, this time. Only about three days. It was an improvement. Last time, she'd gone to Diagon Alley. Yes, a crowded and loud place, but only for a little bit until she retreated to the back rooms at Ollivander's to have tea with Gal. It had been harrowing, but she had survived it. This time, it wasn't nearly such a difficult place to navigate. This was a usually empty store, not many people came here, and she'd been here often. So she could be here, she could come by herself and not be too nervous. Probably. Maybe it would have been better if she didn't have to go everywhere alone, if she'd had a bit of company or a familiar presence to concentrate on and not feel so nervous. The problem was that she was alone. Her close relatives were mostly dead and Gal had a family and a shop to run. She didn't have any friends left from Hogwarts, she'd transferred away to be homeschooled when her parents died and she hadn't really kept in touch with anyone. That was a pity because now she was too shy to really reach out all over again to anyone.

At least today was going fine. Mostly. The shop was familiar, silent, there weren't any other people that she saw when she came in. Then again, there were tall shelves and containers everywhere so they blocked her sight. Even so, it gave her the sense of being alone, which was just as well. With one of the shopping baskets hooked in an elbow, she wandered between the aisles, picking out little boxes of jewels and beads. Sometimes she dropped in bigger ones, or little masses of crystals. Stones and little pouches full of jewels. It was good, she'd run out. Maybe she'd stop by a flower shop on her way home, if she wandered the side streets nearby. The glass pendants with flower petals inside were getting popular, really, though she didn't think they were such a great choice in autumn. As she thought, she spotted a nice little clump of what seemed to be purple opal, or lilac crystals. Until she got them in the jewels, she shouldn't cast any spells on them, not even levitation spells, so she tried to reach it. It was up in a high shelf and she... couldn't. Not even reaching as high as possible and standing on the tips of her toes. She let out a small, dismayed sigh. What was it doing all the way up there?

Just because he was in Britain, it didn't mean that his work stopped. Sure, he had his unofficial job at the Ministry, shadowing his föðurbróðir and learning whatever he could about their relationship with Britain. Whilst his marriage to Erik technically had nothing to do with the relationship between the two countries, it could come to a point where it would be relevant for the better or the worse and Afi wanted him to be able to respond no matter what. But that wasn't his main occupation, not at all. He was a father and a metal charmer and that was what filled most of his days. Alexander worked from home, where he could keep an eye on Sigrid and Helga and be part of their daily life. He'd set up a forge already, had received his first direct shipment of Tungl Málmur just in the beginning of the week and he was ready to start working at earnest, making a dent in the orders he had to fulfil and in the requirements of his clan's business for export. Since exporting just the raw metal was profitable but had limited application - as not everyone knew how to manipulate it -, Alex was the one who dealt with the specific production cases, whilst there were many people involved in the general matter. He liked it, he really did, and it was as much of a delight to work with as jewellery. Besides, he did get to make jewellery with it so it was almost perfect.

Being in Britain opened up a bit of a new path for him, to experiment with local stones and metals and such. At first, Alex hadn't known where to look for it, really, and he'd felt pretty lost until frænka Verena had taken pity on him and asked around for names of the best shops for this sort of thing. To his dismay, it appeared that the pool to choose from was ridiculously narrow but he could work with that. After all, his systir had sent most of his storage from back home - even though she grumbled all the time about it. No, Alex had more than enough to do what he had to do but it still upset him a little that he wouldn't be able to branch off as much as he wanted to. He'd visited almost all the shops from the list his frænka had given him and only two of them had showed any promise - and not wanting to count on luck, Alex had bought things by bulk. He also didn't want to go trekking everywhere every time he wanted something and the shops here were strange. Like stepping into a village straight from two centuries ago, sans all the plague and weird English. Enough to make any man have whiplash. Sure, keeping architecture and tradition was important, his people knew it well enough. The homes where his fjölskylda spread in their capital reflected that but...they had to. They were a relic, the bastion of their culture. Seen and admired by people as keeping the flame of their ancestors alive but everyone else just...they moved with times. They cities weren't crowded and horribly Victorian. Instead, they followed the cleaner, if a little quaint style of the Muggi world. There were places that were even sleek in the modern, technological way of the cosmopolitan metropolis of the world. Whilst they didn't adopt muggle technology, per se, they had enough to surpass it or adapt it into their own needs - perfecting it.

In comparison, these dingy, dimly lit shops irritated his sensibilities deeply. What happened with wide corridors and well appointed shelves? Helpful people to help them shop? What happened to, you know, practicality? He didn't know why Erik liked this place so much. Compared to their home, it was positively barbaric - on par with the most isolated villages full of hard-core traditionalists that no clan wanted to claim but had to out of filial duty. He'd been on the hunt for zircon and garnets when he heard someone sighing and he had to stop himself from snickering. There was a girl, short as they come - even though he was too tall to be a good judge of that - trying to reach something on a shelf. Except she couldn't reach it. Knowing that there must be a reason for her not to use any spells to get it to a height she could deal with, Alex walked over quickly, taking care not to come up behind her but from the side instead - so she could see him coming. Amused, he plucked the wicker basket that she'd been trying to get and placed it at eye level for her, effortlessly. He didn't even have to actually raise his arm all that much. "There you go, miss."

tags: @ gael

outfit

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“So line up your armies”

[attr="class","character-spring-1d"]Making her own jewellery had been something she did early on in her life. As a child, she'd loved making daisy chains and flower crowns out in the garden, and then as she grew she liked braiding bracelets and playing around with little beads. Then, when she started her homeschooling, she'd begun to much about with metal charming and found that it was rather an enjoyable thing to do. It relaxed her and it was creative and it made people happy, to get new, pretty things. Her jewellery was usually delicate, simple, with details and usually inspired in the nature she could see around her. Living in a small Scottish village had its perks, some of them being the vast amounts of natural places around her. From the caves to forests and hills and fields. Her garden had an array of colour and flowers and herbs. It was wonderful to just sit outside and draw what she saw and then go back into her workroom and design something inspired by her day. That was why she didn't understand everyone's insistence on her going out into society more. For her to talk to more people and be in more cities. Why should she? She was perfectly happy and at peace where she was. Until the Death Eater take over happened, she hadn't heard a good reason from anyone at all. Even afterwards, nobody had told her what she needed to hear. She'd told herself. That answer was; she couldn't help anyone if she was isolated.

Gael had been trying to think of ways to help out the people that were currently in need, that was to say, muggleborns. They'd been held in camps, and they were made to work for no pay before and very little pay now. How long before the Death Eaters started to hunt down- no, wait, they already had done that. They'd hunted down any muggleborns that hadn't willingly registered, and if anyone had any memory of what had happened twenty years ago that would've been most muggleborns. She herself remembered the fear of the aftermath of her grandfather's disappearance. They'd been gone to France for years and years, light of ideology but not willing to get into the fray and end up vanished like Garrick. Many not as many people were dying as before, but that didn't mean that the current regime's ideology was any less purist or bigoted. Their nature was violent, they grew up with the dark arts as something normal, and that sort of magic usually turned people somewhat violent. Or at least, to naturalise that sort of thing. Those people couldn't be trusted to hold back on those they thought of as less than human, even less could they be trusted to want what was best for their society as a whole. No, they should not be ruling.

Still, there was nothing she could do about that, was there? All she could do was try to help people. Her only idea so far had been to make wands for the poor muggleborns whose original wands had been taken away. There was no way for her to really get those wands to them, she didn't know how to contact them. Perhaps she'd just deliver them to Gal, who she knew had had a similar idea. Or perhaps she would get her own wand shop, smaller, in a less crowded place than Diagon Alley. If only to have a foothold in the wandmaking market, since she'd never really made wands to sell before. She experimented, she made things for the fun of it, but she didn't dedicate herself to the family business like Gal's line did. It was something she had to ponder on, until then she would focus on her jewellery. Which was why she was trying to reach those crystals, and they were far too high- oh. Gael blinked as a man approached from the side, at least two heads taller than her, and brought down the basket of jewels for her. "Oh, thank you. That's kind of you." She took the basket with both hands, looking down at the pretty small things. She offered him a small smile. "I'm Gael."

[attr="class","character-spring-1e"]Words: 699 • outfit • @ alexander

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Small, seemingly insignificant things were all that made this stay in Britain bearable. Because Alexander didn't like this place, the people, the weather or the food. He had a healthy distaste for the fashion - though, to be rather honest, he didn't dress traditionally in his day to day back home either - and the way they behaved in general. It seemed to him that no one ever went out of their way for anything, even if it was to do something nice to someone else. According to Frænka Verena - who was rather biased but not in the habit to lie to twist things anymore -, things weren't much better back before those...Death Eaters took over. It seemed like a cultural thing, completely rooted in the way people here behaved. Alex didn't know whether to pity them or scorn their ridiculous behaviour. For all that his people killed each other sometimes for land and power and control, they didn't need to base their disagreements in ridiculous discrimination and, in times of peace, the spirit of kinship and solidarity was predominant everywhere - no matter if they were close blood kin or not. They were, in the end, Íslendingar. And that had to mean something.

Alexander didn't have to be kind to these people, he didn't need to go out of his way to make sure someone's day wouldn't be awful. But, then again, no one needed to do it but it was still a nice thing to be done. And he hated those who only did things because they had to. So Alex...he didn't change his behaviour. Britain could go rot but he'd be the same as he always was, for the better or worse. Erik was often very exasperated with him whenever he decided to do so, likely thinking that Alex didn't have an obligation to be more than passingly polite. It was true, yes. But not to him as a person. Maybe in general but that wasn't who Alexander was. He'd reached out to Megaera's British family, had made friends among the locals. He'd even started to like some of them, gods help him. It wasn't like going native, not at all. It was more like...making the most of the time he had to spend here anyway so why not, right? It would help no one, least of all him, if he was a grumpy bastard that only thought about returning home instead of accepting his situation and making the most of it.

It hadn't cost him anything to change his path for a couple of seconds and hand the unreachable basket to the tiny pixie that was trying to get it. She looked to be a bit shy and her smile was very pretty - the sort that Alex thought that Sigrid would have when she was older. His youngest dóttir was sweet-natured and shy with strangers, whereas Helga was a lot more outgoing and incredibly witty. It was funny, really, considering that Sigrid's móðir was probably the most manipulating bitch he'd ever met. Served her right, that their sweet dóttir ended up being better than what she'd wanted her to be. Alex smiled back at the tiny girl, thinking that she was likely older than her shy disposition and height led him to believe. "My pleasure, really," he shook his head, waving away any claim of kindness. It wasn't that, he just did it because he could and she couldn't. It was the logical step, in his mind. "Alexander Eriksson, Ms Gael. Nice to meet you."

tags: @ gael

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words: 591