Welcome to Gaia! ::

Who: Orestae, Mouse, Jasper, Dayo, and Dayo’s boobs.
Where: The video store.
When: Sometime between when Jesus died and the Apocalypse.
Weather: Sarcastic with a forecast of hilarious antics in the afternoon.



Jasper sighed.

It wasn’t a real sigh, given out of dreamy pleasure or thoughtful sadness. Rather, it was the kind of sigh that came with a heavy shrug, blown out through the nose and mouth simultaneously and bordering on a rude throat clear. It was the kind of sigh one gave after an hour and a half in the local Blockbuster, drifting up and down the same three aisles of outdated action movies with faded cardboard boxes and chipped plastic sleeves.

His bare shoulders arched up on either side of his neck, his waist-up posture practically screaming impatience in the tone of crossed arms and a narrowed stare. His waist-down posture, of course, screamed nothing but, “Oh please oh please oh please give me legs.”

“Dude,” Jasper said abruptly, his wings fluttering momentarily with a metallic buzz, “How many times do you need to look at the same five action movies before you decide which chinese dude you want to see kicking another Chinese dudes a**?”

Orestae did not glance up from the boxes, one in each hand, but simply mumbled as she glanced from one to the other, carefully scanning their synopses, “We’re talking Jet Li versus Jackie Chan. This is important s**t.”

“But they all look the saaaame,” Jasper grumbled, snatching a box from the shelf with one hand and using the other to pull at the side of his eyelid, “See?”

“That’s a little bit racist, sweetie,” she mumbled again, placing the Jackie Chan film back on the shelf and plucking a Bruce Lee classic in it’s place.

“Your face is a little bit racist,” Jasper huffed, leaning back against the side of the shelf.

“That one didn’t even make sense. Your jokes are getting old.”

“Your face is getting old. HA!” Jasper raised a fist in victory, but edged around the shelf nevertheless. A barrier between his face and the edge of a hard plastic VHS cassette was never a bad thing.

There was only one other person in the aisle, which as luck would have it, contained rows of horror films. It begged the question as to why that one other person was a little boy, when the majority of the video covers depicted women scantily clad in sheet-like dresses, which Jasper was sure would be ripped off by the end of each film if his guardian’s video collection was of any indication. And then she would have sex with several people and an assortment of plastic objects, if his guardian’s other video collection was any indication.

He picked one from the shelf by a corner, holding it between his thumb and forefinger as he brought it a few inches from his face. The cover was mostly black and red, and depicted a woman with fangs sucking the blood out of another woman’s neck. What caught his interest, however, was that the aforementioned woman was clad in little leather bits, placed with strategy such that a Risk board would envy them.

Jasper’s eyes glazed over, and his lips curled into a goofy, dreamy grin. Had he spoken, the likely product would have been a long, drawn out, “hurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.”

Naturally, the only thing that could draw his attention from the funbags stamped in this particular movie cover was a pair that, it seemed, had begun wandering towards him. There was a distinct sense of panic. Oh god. Oh crap. Oh Buddah. He shoved the box suddenly into the hands of the child next to him, before abruptly pointing an accusing finger.

“My goodness,” He said in a breathy and “I’m so full of s**t” voice, “young men shouldn’t be looking at such garbage! Didn’t your mother teach you anythi-?” Too late. The boobs had arrived. Jasper’s head jerked up and, to his pleasure, discovered that there was a face attached to them, and a distinctly familiar lack of legs below. It took him a moment, during which is expression fell into one of telltale confusion, before two and two clicked in his head, and spat out four in the form of, “Someone stole your butt too, huh?”

Goddamn butt thieves were everywhere.

Jasper looked at his fellow Raevan appraisingly. That is to say, he managed to occasionally drag his eyes away from her chest long enough to decide that she was pretty above the neck as well. Jasper had a natural admiration for anything of beauty, and Dayo seemed to simply radiate it in every way. He curled his fingers at his sides, largely to keep himself from letting them get tangled up in her web of hair.

“Uh…sup?” He thought he had heard Stae use that word several times before as a form of greeting, though in his obsessive reading it had turned out to be a verb meaning ‘to eat’. Nevertheless, it made him sound cool. He was hip. He used slang. He was quite obviously therefore a badass. Jasper smiled proudly, that crooked smile which started at one corner of his mouth a few seconds before the other followed along.

“Jasper,” He said, assuming she was intelligent enough not to need the addon of ‘Why hello there pretty lady! My name is...’

Jasper had picked up the language remarkably fast. He was, after all, produced from the soul of one of the most remarkably intelligent creatures known to exist – even if he did frequently fake stupidity in order to make life easier. People tended to ignore you if they thought you were a blathering idiot. That knowledge had come in quite handy.

“The pleasure is mine,” he said smoothly, with a surprising degree of sincerity. There was something overly charming about the fellow frei, above and beyond the fact that she possessed a rockin’ pair of tatas. He couldn’t seem to remove the smile from his face, despite his attempts to look casual and unconcerned. One was simply not casual when in the presence of, well, Ekundayo.

“What a mouthful,” he managed with a small laugh, trying to reign in his giddiness, “I hope you don’t mind if I call you Dayo.” Of course, he probably would anyways.

---

Stae was still staring between two movies, though her face was turned down it utter disgust as she looked at one in particular. Abruptly, she turned, shoving the box in the face of the nearest person.. who just so happened to be Mouse.

“Do you see this s**t? Do you?!” One of the fingers grasping the case tapped indicatively against the grinning faces of Jackie Chan and Chris Rock, the brightly lacquered blue fingernail pressing down so hard that it threatened to rip a hole right through one of the beloved actors foreheads, “Who the hell has the nerve.. the audacity to put this garbage in the same category as Bruce Lee?”

As Dayo laid a finger on Jasper’s bare skin, she would notice a faint tingle. It would begin in her fingertip, and the longer she kept it in place, the farther it would travel, as though her limb had fallen asleep. It was a side effect of his beginnings. He fed on electricity, and rather than blood in his veins, he had electron particles that shifted in intensity with his moods. When he was happy, or even calm, it was just that light tingle that one would feel from his skin. In worse conditions, it could be potentially lethal.

Jasper smiled in a way that only a somewhat feline soul could manage, and lifted his chin a bit. He was proud of his jewelry, and the beads in his hair clicked with the movement of his head, as though to voice their agreement. Fact was, they were more than symbols of his ancient status. More than an indication of his origin. The metal pieces acted somewhat as a grounding device, keeping the electricity from running amuck, giving it somewhere to go other than harmless passersby. Each piece was part of the complex circuit board that he composed.

“I don’t like clothes,” he said, still smiling. His grey eyes focused on her, a great deal of effort needed to keep them above her collar bone, “Though I can’t say you’re that much more clothed than I am.” It was daring, but Jasper extended a finger as well, placing it on her chest. Not that part of her chest, mind you, but on the smooth plane of skin between her collar bone and cleavage.

- - -

Stae huffed, snatching the case from the shelf and marching it over to the comedy section. She placed it not so quietly between a couple of Pauly Shore movies; that was fitting enough.

Upon her return, she looked at Mouse with what seemed like surprised approval, nodding once before plucking up Enter the Dragon, “Sometimes I want to burn places like these,” she grumbled, only half to herself. “You don’t happen to have gasoline and a few discreet incendiary devices, do you?”

Jasper laughed quietly, mostly to himself. It was unusual, considering his guardian had gotten to the point of flat out refusing to touch him without a thick set of rubber gloves. It made sense, then, that Dayo must be less severely affected due to either their shared ‘species’, or whatever her own personal mixture was. It was something that he would have to look into, an experiment, of sorts. He only hoped there was a water-based frei somewhere out there. The possibilities were delightfully insane.

Of course, he could feel it as well. The electrons always returned to his body, whether though contact or by a static discharge if their temporary host happened to break contact. It was an altogether pleasant sensation, and his calm, happy expression echoed that feeling. It was interrupted only when his Guardian noticed the strange exchange and rolled her eyes; a common response.

“Jesus Christ, Jasper,” Stae said, storming around the end of the case, movie still in hand. “Leave it to you to go around groping othe- Oh!” The small woman stopped short, looking at the lower half of Dayo’s body as intently as Jasper had been earlier looking at the top. “Well, isn’t that a coinky-dink.”

Jasper winced visibly at his Guardians embarrassing choice of outdated wording, casting Dayo an apologetic glance. He, of course, made no move to remove his hand in spite of it, and instead became fascinated with the effect it had on her hair. Stae’s hair was too short to react in such a way, and had only turned into an afro-esque abomination whenever they made contact.

Dayo, however… Her hair swam as though gravity couldn’t hold it. It coiled and twisted in ways the mesmerized Jasper. He tried, as his Guardian started babbling nonsensically, but couldn’t manage to give Stae enough attention to break his stare. His eyes shone with something that could be accurately compared to worship.

Jasper giggled. And it was not in that stifled way that men usually giggle. He made no attempts, not that they would have had a chance of being successful if he had, to stifle the sound. It rose from his throat like the sound of bells, almost musical in its sheer joy. It ended with a long, quiet “Hnnnnnn….” of appreciation as he let her draw herself in closer. Jasper all but melted, letting his head slide down to rest on her shoulder. Not particularly because it brought his face within closer proximity of her chest, but simply because he felt a wave of lazy, heavy joy settling on his shoulders.

He lets his fingers toy idly with her floating hair, sometimes sapping the electricity out of a small segment in order to twine it around his fingers without the risk of tangling it. His nose twitched as her hair brushed against and clung to his face, but he made no attempts to calm it.

“This is going to make me puke.” Stae said at length, eyeing Mouse through the web of floating hair, “How about we take this party to my place? If nothing else, we can watch Enter the Dragon, and I think I have cheesecake.”

Jasper smiled at the thought. It couldn’t take Stae that long to pick out a movie, and he wasn’t fond of the idea of letting Dayo go when the movie store was no longer fit to hold his guardian’s interest.