There is no escaping the birthday post

[ephemeralflow]

Who: Timekeeper and whoever is enough of a snoop!
What: What's in the box, TK?
When: October 23rd, so after the mansion (but before her clock tower is built)
Where: At or around the inn
Warnings: Will update if needed but this is probably just going to be silly/cute

[Well it started as a normal day, or normal enough of one when everyone is still in the midst of weeding out any remaining doppelgangers. Timekeeper has also been slightly more on edge than usual, bothering the few people she cares about more frequently and keeping as sharp an eye as she can out. Still, she's yet to do any of that this morning, and it's when she's on her way back from getting breakfast at the cafe that she's all but ambushed by Ydalir.

Who cheerfully hands her a little boxed cake and wishes her happy birthday.

Timekeeper won't admit later that she had to stand there and blink for a moment, but she did. Oh, it is today, isn't it. Well. Hmm. That's something she hasn't thought about in probably the equivalent of centuries!

So, after that entirely too awkward an encounter for her tastes, she attempts to slip quietly back to her inn room with the box. It's not like she's had reason to tell anyone else her bakeday, after all, and surely it's not something anyone would care to celebrate anyway.

Unfortunately, she's not very good at stealth checks and someone could have totally seen Ydalir stop her.]

Comments

[ghostharasser]

[He's not going to give up the deets until he has it in his hands, so she will just have to follow him!]

[Up the stairs to his Darkroom. That, uh, place he got murdered in, but it's fine now. It's all been cleaned up. When he unlocks the door and pushes it open it looks perfectly normal. Though, Dipper now keeps his bloodmagic tools put away when he isn't using them. Stab me once, shame on you, but stab me twice-]

Give me a couple of seconds to gather it up.

[And he will pull out what looks like a few banker's boxes full of folders. He flips through them and pulls out...one labeled Timekeeper! As he opens the folder it becomes clear, though its probably not a surprise, that these are all photos and he has a small stack of them in his hands. He picks out about four or five of them before he offers them to her.]

[They're candids from around the Grove. She's seen him with the camera and everyone at this point knows he's been working on photos for some time.]

These are for you. There's some normal ones, and there's also some cool ones I developed using blood magic. The ones with you in them turned out really interesting.

[He grins because he figures she'd be very interested in those. Anything treated with paleblood is likely to reveal secret stuff, maybe even prophetic stuff? So someone who is drenched in time surely would come out very interesting.]

This place is weird and does stuff to our heads so, photos are important- they're records of points in time that even if we forget, they won't. Hopefully you never need them for that reason, but I'd still like you to have them.

[ephemeralflow]

[Ah good, Dipper is suggesting there's a practical use for these, as well. She can work with that. Her smile spreads as she sets the cake down to take the photos, though there's perhaps a bit of melancholy in it. Yes, she's well aware that Dipper has been taking these - and she has her ways of avoiding being in them if she wants, but for him, she's allowed it.]

Records of points in time, hmm? You know, even I hadn't thought of photos that way before.

[The Time Registry Division mostly works with written logs, after all. Photos can sometimes be easily disrupted by temporal anomalies - and indeed, as she shuffles through them, it's one of the paleblood developed photos that catches her eye enough to pull it out from the others.

She hasn't yet had someone tell her what she looks like through the golden glasses, but it's not dissimilar to that. It's as if a multitude of images have been developed at once, overlapping each other until it's a mess of gold and black and brown, and at the center is a blurry silhouette that doesn't much look like Timekeeper... but is familiar nonetheless. Possible temporal instances. It doesn't escape her that where she can discern enough detail, the photo's color is oversaturated or washed out over instances of her left eye, sometimes with cracklike distortions. Hm, what else is new?]

My, that is interesting. You could certainly find ways to put such phenomena to use! I admit, I'm not myself certain whether you would be better suited for... hmm?

[She's reached the very last of the paleblood photos now, sliding it out from the others. It has much the same effects in it, but... the silhouette in the center has an odd shape. Not distinctly Croissant Cookie's outline, as she saw in the others, nor quite recognizable as her past self from the Grove either. The hair and outfit is perhaps the wrong shape?

It's familiar, somehow. She's never worn a hood, that she recalls, but what else could the strange shape of the head be? And that shape near it, a ponytail perhaps, though she never remembers wearing one so low. Regardless, it's certainly shaped like a croissant. What on Earthbread...?

Her smile stays, but her brow knits, ever so slightly.]

[ghostharasser]

[He bounces on the balls of his feet a little in anticipation, before trying to school himself and settle down. Ah, maybe he should stop coming off as such an over-eager kid to the person who literally wanted to hire him for a Time Organization, but he's been working on these for a while and he's been excited to show off. Of course, that doesn't help the touch of anxiety in him, too.]

[He is watching her expression with interest because the photos effects were incredibly curious, and while he wants to know more about what might be presented in them, he's not unaware of the idea that they could be too revealing, too. TK was willing to murder on his behalf, so he doesn't want to accidentally show her something that upset her somehow, too, you know. That wouldn't good, and on her bakeday no less.]

Better suited for...?

[She trails off as something seems to catch her eye. He frowns a little, peering over her shoulder to look at the photo.]

What's up? Is there something weird about that one?