Who: Lara, Merlin, Ivy aaand YOU
Where: Lakeside port
When: Saturday-Tuesday, whenever works for you!
What: Various DitL-type threads! Posted in the OP rather than comments because I'm on my phone, so please note what you're replying to in the header! Or...don't, context will make it obvious.
Warnings: Likely spoilers in the Lara threads; outside chance of non-explicit sexual content (read: needlessly graphic flirting, plant metaphors in dubious taste) in the Ivy threads.
Notes: If I've made plans to meet up and have adventures with your characters then feel free to put a thread starter of your own here. Or we can play it out somewhere else, I'm not fussy <3 And even if we haven't made plans, go ahead - Merlin and Lara are busy explore-y types and Ivy won't venture into the village but you can find her anywhere out in the wilds.

[Merlin]

It's not really home - the nonhuman presence is much more overt, and the magic is almost palpable in the air - but as ports go, Merlin feels more at home here than he has almost anywhere previous. The sounds of industry and the scents of smoke and hay feel more like Camelot or his hometown Ealdor than anywhere he's visited via the Barge. It gives him a sharp sense of homesickness and guilt (he still doesn't know if he's planning to go home, at least, not the place and time he left it) but even alongside that, it's soothing to be somewhere he understands.

He checks on Arthur as often as he can bear to (which isn't as often as his conscience demands), but otherwise he finds a quiet town of largely peaceable people who need help in large or small ways, and he's happy to oblige. Small favours become larger ones when he starts using magic to carry them out; by the end of the first day he finds himself helping out a local healer, casting spells on people's vegetable gardens to repel pests, and repairing things too rare or expensive or beloved to replaced -harmless, everyday jobs of the kind he wishes it wouldn't have cost him his life to do at home. It's so easy here it hurts. Magic is just a resource - sought-after and much-valued, but not fraught with politics and fear. By the second day it's a genuine ache in his heart that he's only going to be here for three or four days at the most.

During the day he can be found around the village and somewhat beyond, staying busy in a way the Barge only really makes possible in times of dire crisis. In the mornings and evenings (except one, which he has strictly ringfenced for his....well, for Cassandra) he can be found in one of the town's few taverns, eating and listening to the locals talk and sometimes chatting with them himself.

[Ivy]

The townspeople will talk, to treasure-seekers and those wondering about the local curiosities, about a forest spirit living in the deep of the woods. It is said that she has a long-standing grudge against the heartless, half-dead prince whose vile dungeons threaten to spread their toxicity out into the green lands she considers her protectorate. If you care to fight through the criminals and wild creatures that also make the woods their home, it's said she will bestow magical favours and the promise of great gifts upon those who agree to act as the champions of the forest. None have yet returned alive to claim their prize.

On a more mundane note, she has also been known to charge less ambitious adventurers with tasks to help the animals of the forest and deal with the poachers and thieves who care nothing for the land they're desecrating. And she does enjoy human company without any such strings attached, provided that company is respectful.

She can be found in the heart of the forest, in a bower where the darkness and gloom of the thick deep woods gives way to sunlight-dappled vines and sweetly scented flowers. If you're particularly lucky, or tread softly, Ivy's strange guardians - rabbits, mice and birds made entirely from leaf and moss and branch - will guide you down a safe path.

[Lara #1]

Lara has, in her own opinion, adjusted very quickly to the fact that she's in what she would have previously considered a fantasy kingdom - elves and all the rest. She never gave Tolkien and his ilk much of a look-in because if she wanted to hear lengthy narratives about imaginary kingdoms, she had her father. Or so she'd thought at the time.

Now, though, she's just curious - poking around the village, walking out to the woods and around the lake, shopping around for written histories and anything of a mythological bent that this (already mythological) place has to offer. Maybe none of it will have any resonance with what she previously thought of as the 'real' world, but - she has to know.

She walks like she knows where she's going, with her bow and quiver slung across her body, and even though her wounds have started to heal she still doesn't look like she's in the best condition by any means.

[Lara #2]

Unfortunately nobody gave her the memo about the woods being dense with criminals. Also unfortunately, nobody gave them the memo about Lara having recently emerged from the worst week of her life and being in no mood for fun and games of the sort that involved surrendering her money and weapons and quite possibly her life, just because there happened to be three of them and one of her.

Right now she's running but she's not running away - this is their territory and she'd be a fool to think she could lose them. What she can do is profit from their overconfidence. When a crossbow bolt burns across her ribs, barely skimming, she drops like she's been hit full-force; when the leader of the pack comes to investigate, grabbing her arm to roll her over, she already has a rock waiting in the other hand to smash across his face. He goes down - dead, stunned, she doesn't care - and the confusion gives her time to duck behind a tree and ready an arrow as his friends start their approach.