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No, but I know someone who does.

...The human boy in true love with the demon girl, whose twin brother didn't approve of the match? The brother has the Jagan. As far as I know, he sought it specifically to be able to keep tabs on his sister from afar.

Taking "disapproval" to an entirely new level.

How would a ward disrupt such a thing?

His concerns aren't entirely unfounded. She has certain capabilities that make her extraordinarily valuable to unscrupulous humans, should they happen to get their hands on her.

And: by behaving like a jamming signal. Searching for a unique energy signature could be rendered fruitless if that signature is concealed behind a barrier wall of disruptive wards.

Capabilities such as what?

And what would happen if he tried to pass by the wards? Would they repel him, or simply act like a distortion signal to a bat: that is, he'd grow disoriented and unable to focus any of his abilities?

She cries priceless gems — the sort that, sold on the black market, could make a given human extraordinarily rich extraordinarily quickly. Being aware of this, she was reluctant to cry for any reason. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her captors resorted to some particularly ugly forms of coercion in their attempts to force her tears.

He would be repelled, burned, shocked, or some mixture of the three. A painful discovery, no matter the outcome.

There was a fairy story I was told, once, when I was a child. It had a girl who was kind, and so was blessed with a gift like that: the ability to produce priceless gems whenever she spoke. It being a fairy story, it all ended in marriage and true love, but I'd always thought it would be an awful curse.

[There's a difference, she notices. If, he'd said a moment ago. If some unscrupulous humans should get their hands on her; now it's when.

No wonder her brother had gotten such a surgery.]

Did her captors use such wards against him?

Edited 2017-02-15 03:03 (UTC)

Woe betide her if she happened to talk in her sleep, I should think.

In a sense. Their wards served a dual purpose — making it difficult for anyone on the outside to find her, and making it impossible for her to escape the confinement they'd put her in.

They certainly used them against her. I saw the burns firsthand.

I assume she was rescued?

I'll give you three guesses who was sent after her, as a matter of fact.

[It's difficult to think of Urameshi doing such a thing, frankly. It isn't that she doubts his moral character so much as his physical ability: he looks like any other teenager, and how on earth could any teenager do such a thing?

But he had. And he'd defeated the Adh Seid-- he'd vaporized it, in fact. So clearly there's far more to Urameshi than meets the eye.]

As if I've ever needed three. Though I'd be interested in hearing the specifics of that tale.

As stories go, that one is fairly straightforward, actually. It's what we were doing immediately before we were both plucked up and brought here.

[Ah. Hmmm.]

It's also why I was...I suppose you might say a bit resigned, when Yusuke arrived here about a month after I did. I'd thought that he was here to collect me for violating my parole, and consequently wasn't precisely sure what ratio of "friend" to "detective" I was facing.

Well. I'm glad it turned out for the best (although I think even if he had come here as detective, it would have soon evolved into purely friend: it isn't as if he could somehow take you back or arrest you).

Do you imagine

[--? Imagine what? But there's nothing else written, and Rosalind doesn't add anything, not for a long minute. Then, suddenly and frantically:]

i need you to come down to the emporium right now please

Rosalind??

[That's the message that she gets sent during the space of that long minute, when only half a sentence arrives and then the rest of it is conspicuously blank.

Where is she? Where had she been? Bouquets, she'd been at her house — no, the ojigi is there, it would attack if something had got in, but then what could —

...Oh.

Oh, she's at the Emporium, and he's buzzing with all his nerves alight, winding back down from the beginnings of a heart attack.]

Are you in danger?

no
but i need you to come RIGHT NOW

[She's being stupid, she knows, but she doesn't dare take her eyes off the item that's caught her attention. She doesn't dare move an inch, though she knows it's overwhelmingly likely the item won't vanish.]

[Don't scare me like that again, he almost writes, but deletes it halfway through and scrubs a hand over his face, taking a steadying breath even as he gives Parappa instructions how to manage the shop and then heads off to find his coat.]

I'm coming. Please tell me you're all right. I understand it's urgent.

Tell me you're all right, Rosalind.

yes
im all right
im all right i promise you i'm entirely unharmed/span>

I'm on my way. Expect me shortly.

[z o o m]

[She'll feel a touch guilty later for worrying him, but she hasn't room for such thoughts now. Rosalind drops the watch into her pocket and promptly forgets Kurama, too busy focusing on what's in front of her. Her fingers slide across the cover of a notebook (1890, part I), and she bites her bottom lip. She's flipped through them, of course, searching page after page with desperate scrutiny, hardly able to believe it's truly what she thinks it is. But no, it's all truly there: notebook after notebook filled with her handwriting, years of correspondence all hers for the taking.

All she needs is a friend's help, and they'll be hers.

She stands stock still in the Emporium, blue eyes wide, head bent as she reads line after line. Which one was this? 1890, yes, June 6th, the evening of their nineteenth birthday: Rosie, I feel most remiss in not giving you a gift today, but--]

[He's quite the sight when he ultimately comes through the door, mostly on the part of his hair — it's tousled and windswept, gone in all directions, and though he's far from out of breath, it's still immediately apparent that he's literally run the entire way from the flower shop to the Emporium, and the first time he's stopped is when he appears in the doorway and braces his hands on either side of the frame to look around for her.]

Rosalind?

Here.

[It takes her a long few seconds to tear her eyes away from the notebook. Rosalind takes a step back, and then another. Now a slight bit of guilt curls in her stomach, but she doesn't move to him. She won't leave those notebooks.]

Kurama--

...There's something of yours in here.

[It's not so hard to guess, really. Tonika had been this way, too, about her music player technology, hadn't she? Not wanting to leave it, desperate for assistance. He'd built her a battery and it had enabled her to take her prized possession free, and she'd never had to leave it.

Rosalind is acting the same way, now. The difference is, when it's Rosalind, he's got slightly more of a breadth of knowledge to draw on about what that certain something might be — and in his estimation, the only thing that's likely to have provoked a reaction like this is probably something to do with Robert.

So.

Watch yourself, he reminds himself, as he walks over to her. Check your words. Don't be careless or needlessly cruel. Be careful, because likely this is something raw to her, something involving Robert, something that needs particular consideration and care.]

Do you need help meeting the price for it?

. . . yes.

[Notable, that he asks about the price before the item. She takes in the details of his appearance now: the way his hair is tousled, the way his chest rises and falls a little quicker. He'd run here. He'd run here, run because he'd been scared, and god, but he deserves much more than an explanation, doesn't he?]

I--

[She hesitates for just a moment, her fingers wrapping tight around one of the notebooks. Time isn't of the essence, not really. The notebooks will linger here no matter how long this takes. Hell, she can even carry them around the shop if she pleases, and that thought comforts her. Gathering the rest in her arms, she nods towards the back, where a few antique chairs sit.]

I do require your help. But . . . I would show you what I had you race over here for, before anything.

Rest assured — you have my help, even without it.

[He moves automatically, arms extending as if to offer to help carry the load for her, but then it occurs to him that she might just as well not want to share it, and it makes him pause and glance toward the chairs instead.

...No, let her, he decides. She's hardly going to find him rude if he doesn't offer, the way that some people would, and it's not as though she's incapable of managing it, anyway. Let her have them. Let her be the dragon with her hoard, the thief with her haul.

He nods, retreating to the antique chairs as bidden, and finds himself a seat in one of them.]

But I'm happy to hear what it is, of course.

[And, let's be real: he's curious, too.]

[All right. She relaxes a little. He isn't offended she'd had him run across town, thank god, and this will smooth over any lingering ruffled feathers. Rosalind curls on one chair, an unusual enough action for her: legs tucking beneath herself, her fingers wrapped tightly around her notebooks, she looks younger in that moment.]

I told you Robert and I were from different universes, and I told you we were united: that I brought him over to my world. But I made it sound rather simple, I think, when in truth it was an endeavor that took us quite a long while.

[She glances down for a few seconds, thinking, before meeting Kurama's gaze.]

We discovered one another when we were around your age, in fact. Two months after our seventeenth birthday. I'd just graduated university, and I was experimenting with what would eventually become my Lutece field. I measured a particular atom, encasing it in light, suspending it in midair.

[Odd: she's told a fragment of this story to Urameshi, but not Kurama. It hadn't been a deliberate exclusion; it had simply panned out that way. And yet the fact strikes her, as she tells the story.]

I woke up one morning to find my atom suspended, when I'd known for a fact I had left it in a different state. The oddness continued over the next few days: the atom would fall and be resuspended at odd intervals, on and off. It took Robert and I less than a week to realize what was happening: that the atom itself was caught between universes, and that he and I were both experimenting with the same methods. Rather like two people fiddling with two light switches that are connected to the same light, in fact.

Once we realized, of course, we were desperate to communicate with one another, and so we used the atom itself to do so: we used it as a morse code. Dots and dashes, as rendered by an atom encased in light.

[She taps the notebooks.]

It took us seven years to find a way to one another. And in that time . . . well. I could hardly translate morse code in my head at first, and so I wrote it all down. And then after . . . sentimental, perhaps, but I enjoyed having the written word to look back on.

Seven years worth of correspondence from him. That's what these are.

...That's fascinating. So that same atom somehow spanned both universes, or at least straddled them in such a way that you were both able to reach it? And the chances of you selecting the same atom — no, perhaps that's not surprising at all, given the nature of who was doing the selecting, but still...

[You know, there was an explanation about why she wants these notebooks in there somewhere that he should probably respond to, but consider: the ramifications of the science she's describing are breathtaking, and this shit is just plain interesting.

(Is this how she feels when he describes demon norms, he wonders? Is this what it's like? No wonder she's always eager to hear more, if it is...)

Amazing. An atom encased in light. And who would have thought —]

And you found a way to use that to communicate. Remarkable — how did you settle on the Morse Code? Which of you thought of it first? What was the first message you sent — the first exchange that was received successfully?

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