The Wizard of Elsewhere

1.4 - Thee Shalt Not Take These Children Mine

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe

— Excerpt from a poem by Lewis Carrol, which makes far more sense to some then to others

* * *

It was a curious tableau around the fire.There were five of them — a fact which had given the Wizard pause and Leinan a minor heart attack as she saw him pause — but the Wizard had rallied and quickly seated everyone on logs or stones at equal distances from the other.

Well, He seated Leinan, Keimen, Aemon, and he himself shifted to the side. The Forerunner stayed right where she had flopped back down. Pouting.

The Wizard held another skewer of fish over the fire and Leinan, helpfully held a second one. The two children held plates with fish on them which they did not touch no matter how their stomachs rumbled because they were being carefully, carefully polite.

The Wizard hummed because he didn't really know what else to do and because humming was good naturedly and could be construed as mysterious.

The Forerunner folded her arms and sulked.

* * *

Barnibus, was not quite certain, how the day, which had started in the most mundane fashion possible — washing potions bottles and re-cataloguing sections of the Barnwinkle ancestral library — had spiraled quite the way it had.

First there was one — Hats didn't count.

Then he had inadvertently empowered a rune in one of his Grandfathers forgotten laboratories, been spilled through an eldritch hole in reality into a quite furiously raging river, and was now in a land of "Fell Doom and Grand Demise" — at least according to his grandfather's hastily scribbled note.

Then he had encountered the sulking, otherworldly beauty with hair the color of bleached ivory and eyes like thunderclouds, and there had been two, a number which was unfortunately a prime, but at least had been even.

Now there were five.

Prime, odd five... and of course, oddly enough, one member of their group was looking at him as if he'd cheated her out of her favorite desert... which, he supposed he might have.

Fish Feathers! What a mess.

He didn't say any of this. Instead, he sniffed the air, peered skeptically at the fish slabs sizzling on his skewer and then brightened. "Done, I should say!" At the same time as his stomach audibly rumbled the same thing.

Leinan — Barnibus had made sure to learn everyone's names — good hosts did that — blinked at him uncomprehendingly, but then picking, up on his queues, lifted her skewer away and smiled wanly at him.

And there was that. They didn't all speak the same language.

At first, when he had met the Forerunner, he had thought that he had been lucky enough to meet a local who spoke the same language, namely, English. He... was less sure about that now.

When the Forerunner spoke, he understood her clearly. The part that was tying his cap into knots was that the newcomers also understood her, judging by the looks on their faces whenever she spoke, but he, sure as hat-hair did not understand them.And they likewise.

They spoke a sort of guttural language — lots of hard 'ch' sounds, and 'ghu' sounds that came from the back of the throat and sounded like water 'glug glugging' out of a water bottle. Not a language that produced the same mouth motions at all. It was enough for him to think that Forerunner wasn't speaking English either, and that —