#ruthie;arrival at falls inn

[ruthiesalenger]

September 2, 1923 3:56am Falls Inn

Wet.

Rainwater splashed off her shoulders and onto the wide planks of the porch floor. Little rivulets cascaded down her cheeks, aided by plastered tendrils of honey-blonde hair. Even her eyelashes held water -- not delicately, like gems, but heavily, with weight. Peeling her cardigan off, Ruthie wrung it out as the rain clattered on the porch roof.

Opening the ledger exuded a puff of dust -- or smoke, more accurately. Ruthie reached for the peregrine quill and inscribed her name, along with a check-in time. Three-fifty-seven in the morning.

Talia looked like an angry white rat, her tiny brow in a scowl as she shivered past.

Ruthie sighed, and knelt to feed her an edge of plum tart. With a sniff and an edge of scorn, Talia rejected it and trotted into the parlor, edging as close to the hearth as she could without catching an ember. Ruthie’s gaze focused upon her palm, sugar melting into damp skin.

“If it makes you feel better,” she murmured, casting a look over her shoulder. Her handkerchief was damp without being thoroughly soaked, and she used it to clean her fingers.

Coming around the corner, the key rack shimmered as though touched by an unnatural glimmer. The tiniest of breezes swept through the otherwise-still hallway. She paused. Water collected along the line of her jaw, trembling.

Rosemary seemed nice. Soothing. Predictable. Or the moon, with its smile. Ruthie swallowed. Was it a wicked smile?

Her gaze kept tracking back to one, ornate. The head of a wolf with two faces, staring to-and-fro. One bared its teeth, the other stared solemnly. She did not like the teeth.

Snatching it off the rack, Ruthie turned to find Talia already trotting up the staircase.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she called into the shadows. “I’m taking a bath first.”

[spookylittletownhq]

A RUTH “RUTHIE” MILLICENT SALENGER has arrived in Albion. While they may seem FAMILIAR, they are connected to the LOWER VALLEY ALKIRES. Their passport was stamped at Falls’ Inn and shows that they are THIRTY-TWO, 5’4”, with BLONDE HAIR and GREEN EYES. Mrs. Kuiper at the Inn said that they seemed HELPFUL AND UPLIFTING, though they were seen GRATING HER TEETH AS SHE STARED, FROWNING INTO A CORNER as they departed St. Catharine’s Depot. Be wary, and report any sightings to Madame Lange’s Tea Room.

INTRODUCING RUTHIE SALENGER

No sooner had she arrived in Meridian, obtained the keys for her cabin, put the pillowcases on the fraying wash line, than Mr. Gregory died.

Ruthie’s hand froze on the door handle, staring out at the chestnut-haired man who told her so. She had pulled the cabin door open, intent on meeting her new charge – and was instead greeted with the chaplain, a somber man with rough cheeks. He had warm, brown eyes, and she thought he would have taken her hand in compassion, had she asked it.

Surely not, thought she, the optimist. Ruthie had grated ginger over an uncracked, ivory bowl just that morning, thinking only the warmest of thoughts. Surely there is still time.

The scene that greeted her told her otherwise. Already, the room was smocked in white linen, the embers of rosemary ash burning in a slate bowl. He had passed, and the gingersnaps were too late.

“Do you need to sit?” The chaplain had a kind voice, round and low, like biting into a chip of molasses. His hand went to her elbow, touched it.

Ruthie stared at the smoke and watched it swirl, softly out the window. Joy was a thing that slipped between the cracks.

“No,” she said softly. “‘M all right.” She stepped aside, allowing him to pass over the threshold and onto the lane. The chaplain hesitated, looking over his shoulder. His brow held no ripples until worry placed them there, as he dispatched a singular warning:the coroner would be on his way shortly. There would be little for her to do, save the wash.

The candle flickered late into the night against the walls of her own, smaller, cottage. Ruthie’s long fingers templed against each other, propped up by the weight of pressing.

It was always like this, after the valley. She traveled and tended, took care of the ailing and the elderly and most importantly, the dying. There were villages scattered all along the hills and grand lake, and Ruthie visited them. She had no healing practice. She knew no medicine. Her function was entirely companionship, compassion, and comfort.

Below her fingertips lay violet petals, pulled from their stalks to accent a set of shortbread cookies. Ruthie dropped to them, then, piecing velvet-violet together like they were a puzzle. She sucked on a lozenge, thinking.

Perhaps that was why she found the chaplain so jarring. In the transient state of dying, he was also the one repeatedly left behind.

Ruthie swallowed, touching yellow violet tip to yellow tip and coating it in sugar granules.

Mr. Gregory was the latest in a long line of respite carers, an elderly man with a son, far away. Ruthie had been sent to tend to his laundry, prepare his meals. The letter had a special request for her strawberry pound cake, the strawberries cut and measured in triplicate. She had bought a punnet from a roadside stand on her way to Meridian, and they found their way to her mouth, idly, then.

You could stay.

The voice echoed from nowhere except the shadows, a clever, close sound. Like someone whispered in her ear.

There was always the next, the next, the next. A new house, a new carer. A new personality for her to absorb, a new recipe of sweetness to mask the bitterness of her sigils. Cinnamon – ginger – apricot – thyme. There was nothing that would mask a sigil of gentle passage. Nothing could change the inevitable. Joy slipped between the cracks like rosemary smoke into the air.

In the darkness, the golden eyes of a cat echoed back to her. The moonlight caught a tuft of white fur.

You could stay here. She repeated, her voice silky.

Ruthie stared. Not with aggression, or that dull patience that her teachers used. Impassive, possibly. “Stay,” she repeated. “And do what?”

You know what.

“I don’t.”

The sigh was forced, and rang in her ears, rather than her thoughts. Talia swished her tail. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Ruthie had lost her patience along the way.

Stay, said Talia, her tiny feet priming for something. A breeze finally caught through the open window. And be glad.

Two things happened at once: Talia leapt, and the chaplain knocked.

“Gott im Himmel.” said Ruthie – once, then, and once, tangled in sheets that still did not smell like her own, later. The chaplain was handsome with the candle out.

—

Ruth Millicent Salenger was born on a crisp October morning, and summarily named for her grandmothers. It was an easy birth, as she was told, though the tradition in the Green Valley was not to complain. Her mother bore her easily. And while she never knew her father, Tom Salenger dead in an accident six months before Ruthie was born, her adoptive father was exactly the medicine Ruthie – and Hilda – needed.

Growing up at Alkire Farm, Ruthie learned to shear sheep, tend goats, and most importantly, bake. Hilda Alkire – previously Salenger – nee Flory – was a skilled sweetsmith, and an absolute devil with spun sugar. Ruthie spent much of her childhood carting along the long lanes of the Alkire peach orchard, stuffing her pockets full on the way to school – and much more trundling home, keen to lick spoons or stir butter.

She remembers her child in stripes of happiness and pain, warm delight and bitter disappointment. Hilda had a way for measuring each, highlighting the balance. Ruthie learned, standing on a sun-warmed flagstone, that they always brought it back around to good.

Hilda had a great passion for caring. She wrote sigils into pie lattice, spending half a morning focusing her intention for healing, tending her lavender into tidy rows for tidiness, burnishing the edge of a scalded pot late into the night. Ruthie learned her mannerisms from her mother, and followed in her beliefs. Joy is a choice. We make it every day.

There are many ways to care for another. They all begin with caring for yourself.

—

Ruthie left the Green Valley at half-past twenty six. By then, her hands were well-worn with a rolling pin, and she carried a lattice of scars across her wrists from brushes with the cantankerous oven. It had been time for some time, her mother thought. If Ruthie were not to be married she would at least be useful.

An ailing aunt in South Burnet required care. Ruthie – with her five favorite dresses, two packets of canned peaches, and a recipe book – would go.

And Talia, too, of course.

—

Now.

She stayed in Meridian longer than she knew, the days blurring like butter, rushing from a bubbling pan. Without caring, Ruthie made her way the best way she had ever known: pies. Apple pies. Pear pies. Boison-bramble pies. Pies with golden crusts and pies with lattices, pies with thyme and savory baked into the dough and others where the filling boiled to the edges.

It was an easy life, in Meridian. John would check on her from time to time – when she needed him, or more likely, when he needed her. Without the chaplain’s coat, he was a handsome man, hewn in much the same way as her cabin: rough, and for utility.

He would have been more for her, had she let him. She knew because he asked, time and again, who she was. What she was. What she wanted to be.

He never asked what they were to each other, and perhaps he knew. There was no answer.

Who are you? His voice echoed long into the night, after he’d fallen into exhausted sleep.

Ruthie stared at the ceiling.

She had told him that she was Ruthie Salenger, the pie mistress. And he had laughed, and shaken his head. Who are you? He asked again. What do you want?

I want–

Ruthie’s eyes were wide, unblinking. There were seventeen boards on the ceiling above her head.

I want–

It was a new thought, strange and dangerous. What did she want? She was wanted: to bake, to tend, to help, to care. But did she want? And how?

I want–

With a groan, Ruthie pulled the quilt over her shoulders, turned on her hip to face the wall, and shut her eyes.

—

There was no end to the sentence, Ruthie realized. She did not want for a home, or for love, or for money. She simply wanted.

And to that, there was no end.

---

Welcome to the valley! Please send in your account within 24 hours.  💚

[distant-rose]

★ the LP significant others - we don’t know them aside from Jim

Oooooh this is an interesting one. Apologies on the lateness on this ask, I decided to give you probably more detail than I needed on Nas, Bobbi, Gideon, Jim and Hazel. I know I write Jim a lot but Hazel is probably my favorite because she’s just a straight up bad ass and she and Emma bond over the fact they’ve both been arrested, granted Hazel was arrested for overzealous activist that lead to a bit of a riot. I hope you enjoy them as much I do.

Nasira, Harrison’s wife - eldest daughter of Jasmine and Aladdin, she’s vivid, vibrant and loves wearing things with a lot of color and personality. She will never go out in public without wearing jewelry or make-up. She loves incense and strong perfumes and often you can smell her coming before she even arrives. Like Harrison, she’s very self-conscious and an ambivert. She’s reserved and blunt, which some people sometimes take her attitude as someone whose a stuck-up bitch but really,  she’s a deeply caring and fierce person. Because she grew up somewhat privileged and sheltered, she sometimes can be naive about things and has no sense of money. I would call her a less offensive, midget version of Tahani from the Good Place. She’s tiny as hell. She’s 5’0’’ to Harrison’s 6’4’’ but when she’s pissed off she can make herself the most terrifying person in the world. If anyone messes with Harrison, she’s the first to smack the shit out of them. She abdicates from the throne to her younger brother Malik so she could be with Harrison. She ends up being Regina’s protege and takes over for her as mayor. Nasira is capable of magic but she’s not as strong as the Magic Trio (Wes, Bobbi and Gideon) and has a penchant for healing and protective magic. 

Bobbi, Gideon, Jim and Hazel facts are under the cut.

Bobbi, Wes’s baby mama - my version of Zelena’s daughter Robin. I call her Bobbi because I think it’s fucking weird that they named her Robin and I thought Bobbi would be a chic and cool nickname. She’s tall and thin with long wavy auburn hair instead of blonde. Bobbi is a sarcastic glamour queen with a fondness for green flowy dresses and pea coats. She’s always dressed to kill and ready to kill you with her sick burns. She’s incredibly witty but hot tempered and easily goaded by Wes into crazy stunts. She’s a powerful witch and is incredibly close to both her mother and her aunt Regina. Her magical speciality is cursing and enchanting objects, most notably a scarf that compels you to tell the truth and her very own invisibility cloak. She’s an avid horse rider and often can be found with her horse Fiyero whenever she is troubled by something. Despite Regina’s urgings, Bobbi was never interested in leadership and her career of choice is working as a hematologist at the hospital.

Gideon, Wes’s occasional boyfriend. Wes has complicated relationships and can’t pick a lane. It’s frustrating for everyone. Anyway, my version of Gideon is sensitive, slightly tortured, super nerdy dork. He’s a total Momma’s boy and has a tense relationship with his father despite his love for magic. He was often picked on as a kid and didn’t have a lot of friends outside Bobbi and Wes. Like his mother, he loves book and has a near photographic memory. Because he spent a lot of time hiding in his father’s pawnshop, he has a huge love for vintage things including vintage clothes and old music. Him and Wes both have intense love for vinyls. Gideon is often the voice of reason out of him and Bobbi and is the only one who can generally talk Wes out of his ridiculous plans and ideas. Naturally because he’s a part of the magical trio, Gideon has magic (duh) and his specialty is often potions and magical horticulture. He has a fondness for flowers and always had a preference for his grandfather’s flower shop rather than the pawn shop. Gideon ends up inheriting the majority of his father’s business endeavours but spends the majority of his time in the music shop he co-owns with Wes. He also owns the flower shop, which was given to him after his grandfather passed but allows Ruthie Nolan to manage it.

Jim, Beth’s husband and parter-in-crime. You’re right, you probably know the most about Jim considering he’s featured in Once and Future Thing and various other snippets, however I’m not sure I’ve shared a lot about his past. Jim grew up with his mother who raised him alone after his father walked out on him. His mother owned an inn when the events of Treasure Island happen. When he returns with his part of the treasure, he comes back only to discover his mother has died in his absence and the inn had been foreclosed on. He uses a good chunk of his money to pay for his mother’s burial and tombstone. Because he’s still a minor, he’s taken in by the local schoolteacher and his family as an indentured servant. Needless to say, they were very abusive to him and he runaway at 17 with what’s left of his treasure and joins the navy. He’s stationed on a ship that helped protect slaver ships from pirates and when he protested against this, he was dishonourably discharged, beaten and left to die in a pirate port where he was saved by John Silver from being hung by an angry mob. He joins Silver’s crew and quickly becomes quartermaster due to his diligence and dedication. Sensing that the crew’s preference for Jim over him and seeing him as a potential issue to his captaincy, Silver gives Jim his own ship. He meets Beth four years into his captaincy of the aptly named Silver’s Spell. And well, it takes them five years to become a couple. They elope after they find out Beth’s pregnant with their son and have a massive argument because Jim wants to settle down and Beth wants to keep sailing. They compromise with spending the majority of the year in Storybrooke and sail in the summer. Jim works repairing boats and as unofficial harbourmaster while they’re in Storybrooke while Beth does private investigation.

Hazel, Ned’s wife, she’s honest to god my favorite. Hazel is Tiana and Naveen’s daughter. In this universe, Naveen is prince of Maldonia, which is a kingdom south of the Enchanted Forest. He slept with a witch and left her, which pissed her off and she sent him to the World Without Magic, specifically New Orleans which he met Tiana, helped her open her restaurant and raised four kids Reuben, Pepper, Ginger and Hazel with her. When the witch found out he was perfectly happy, she turned him into a frog. Of course, the family had no idea and thought he abandoned them. Hazel and her siblings were raised on stories of other realms, which is kinda the catalyst to her meeting Ned. Hazel is very clever and intelligence as well as a social activist and isn’t afraid to speak her mind. Her favorite memory is getting arrested during a protest against corruption by the Louisiana governor when she was 16. She has a strong sense of justice and while her teachers encouraged her to pursue law, she always had a preference for exposing injustice through the press. She goes to college and becomes the head of both the newspaper and the lit magazine as well as the BLSU and Ned submits a story based off his family to the lit magazine and she confronts him about it because it sounds similar to her dad’s stories and essentially because she’s a force of nature forces him to tell her about the EF, Storybrooke and everything. They basically decide to try to find her dad together, which they do and kinda fall in love along the way, though they don’t admit it for awhile. They’re “friends” for two years before they admit they’re a couple. They end up living outside Storybrooke with Ned as a lawyer and her as a leading journalist for New York newspaper.  

For every “★” I get, I will post a fact about my characters.

[ruthiesalenger]

🪜 … to notice a trap door in the hallway ceiling and find a ladder to the third floor behind it. @devilallthethyme​

02 September 1923 Late morning

Ansel Kuiper, the innkeeper’s son, had volunteered to take a group of visitors on a birdwatching expedition. Ruthie recalled this pattern at Falls Inn: arrivals and departures only happened every other day. Prevailing wisdom said that it was how the valley allowed it, though she knew no ward or witch who would make it so. 

Or, it was Mrs. Kuiper’s way of staving off the inevitable gloom. The house was warm and cozy, even in the shadows. Thick rugs lay over the polished floors, and the lamplight glowed in amberine sconces, even in midday. Light streamed in through the waved-glass of the windows, directionless and strange. Ruthie did not care for birds, but without an outing, she found herself restless.

And then, she found herself on the second floor.

It took her a moment to understand the scene before her: a man, tall and elongated, stretching to a square overhead. Only the square was not ceiling, but nothingness. The ladder materialized slowly -- and Eddie Warren, slower still.

Talia strutted forward merrily, immediately sniffing the hem of his trousers.

Ruthie paused, two paces back.

Albion. He’d said. But he said it wrong, with emphasis on the A and not the B, the io elongating to an e, and not rounding to a u, as it should.

“You aren’t from here.”

It was obvious, and she said it so.

“Someone should tell you not to go looking for trouble.” A beat. Talia’s bell jingled as she began to wind herself through his legs. Ruthie caught a smile. “Shouldn’t they?”