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 Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2005 7:26 pm
Pave looked around. 'Why was it a lamp post, of all things?' She wondered. She looked upwards again, just to make sure it was the post that had been specified. Yes, this one had a disco ball on it. Mos clapped his hands a little, warming them in the city air. Pave smiled down at him and lit another cigarette.
Mos looked around expectantly. Something was happening, he knew. But what? And was someone interesting going to be there?
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Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 6:40 am
Three.
Far above the duo, in another plane, Ritika Lachetti crouched on a dusty windowsill, specially-modified binoculars to her face. Yes, it seemed to be them--small boy, dark haired, larger woman. Of course, there were infinities of the combination spread across the city, but surely none of those other combinations would be standing in the middle of an abandoned train track by The Slums, staring, confused up at a disco ball. HER disco ball--Ritika had always had a hard time getting home.
"Target identified," she whispered to herself, savouring the words. With a quick, flicking motion of the hand, she beckoned her sulky ToR closer. "Rachael, stop that long face, it's definitely TIME TO GO."
Rachael kicked idly at the window ledge. "But MOMMY..."
Ritika smiled razor-edged at her charge. "What did you say...? If you'd rather stay at HOME and WAIT FOR ME..." She inclined her head politely, and by the merest coincidence managed to point exactly at a certained shadowy doorway with her index finger.
Shuddering, Rachael clambered up beside her guardian. Words were unneeded to express her disinterest in this other option.
Two...
Grabbing Rachael firmly by one hand, Ritika reached deep into her pocket and found a short-term, short-distance Switcher stolen from her company. Blowing bits of unidentified fluff off it, she flicked the top open, revealing a small, glimmering lightbulb and what seemed to be several pages of warning in very, very small print.
"Get ready," she told Rachael, more out of habit than anything else, as--
One.
Her finger crushed down on the lightbulb with speed and efficiency. A brief light flared up, enveloping Ritika's thumb in its dying throes--the smell of slightly-burned meat rose through the air. (The multiple blisters and calluses gathered across Ritika's right thumb bore evidence to the number of times she had done this.) Before them, a flickering brown nimbus rose out of the air, and, following vocal instructions in shorthand as well as several rather obscene looking hand commands from Ritika, disengaged a floating thread of brown to jet downwards towards the disco ball.
"Looks a bit old, let's hope it works," is what Ritika would have commented, but there was no time. Checking her grip on the ToR, she leapt bodily out of the window and into the nimbus. (Any watches below in the same plane as the Two Under The Disco Ball might have seen what appeared to be two figures sailing through the air before an abrupt combustion.) A moment later, two tiny stars sped down the line and alighted on a disco ball.
Zero.
Where they abruptly appeared, bending the streetlight towards the ground with their weight. Pushing Rachael off the gentle stem genially (the ToR fell towards the ground with a sad sort of a cry) while stepping off herself, Ritika allowed the light to snap back to its original position.
"You look rather like an ant," she told the boy cheerily, waving the still-smoking Switcher (looking rather like half a cigarette lighter, albeit one with small green tentacles pulsing at the bottom end). "Anyone up there could mistake you for one, you know, and then they might squash you, or possibly spray ant poison on you. And how would you like that?"
((That was longer than it was meant to be...but I really wanted to describe the Switcher for some reason. XD;;
edit: Er...Rachael cannot talk (much), just very basic things. Like, er, "mommy," "buy stuff", "hate", "not", simple words and phrases like that. So sometimes her speech can come out a little weird. XD; ))
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Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 12:53 pm
((O.o Wow.))
Pave did not expect this sudden falling and strangeness of the arrival of the ToR and her guardian. When Rachael fell to the ground, Pave gasped. When Ritika came after, Pave almost screamed. This was not the way she expected to meet the two! She held Mos close and stared. Rachael seemed relatively normal, save for a few drops of what looked, to Pave's horrified curiosity, very much like blood.
Mos simply screamed. All of these new sights and sounds, all of this explosions and falling, it was perilously close to his nightmares. He gripped tightly to the closest thing he could find, Pave's hair, and tugged hard. "NO!" he cried. "No no no!" He was frightened by the new people and somehow angered.
Pave felt her head being yanked downward by a surprisingly strong Mos and she let out a strange noise that was something like "Gack!" The cigarette fell out of her mouth and onto the ground. She had some sense left in her and stamped it out before attempting to free her hair from Mos's hands. "I'm..." She started, but then Ritika spoke to Mos, which frightened him more and he yanked a few strands of her hair right out of her head. "Ouch! Mos, let go!" She lifted him up and tried to tease the hair out of his hands. No go, he held tight. "Sorry about all this." She turned and apologized to Ritika. "I'm Pave, this is Mos, and you must be...?" She smiled weakly, Mos still shouting and attacking her hair.
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Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 1:09 pm
((Uhmyah. XD;;;; Uhm...lessee...Rachael can't die this early in RP, so I'm going to be a bad, bad person and add an aftereffect-of-Switcher that I didn't mention before. XD;;;;;;;;; Dunkillmeforthatthankyou.))
The ground sped upwards towards her, choking Rachael's scream back into her throat. She clenched her eyes shut, hunching into a little ball, expecting to be impaled on sharp rocks or at least mashed to a bloody pulp at any moment.
She kept on squeezing herself smaller and smaller.
And smaller. When suddenly, she realized that she'd been involved in this whole activity for almost ten seconds, now, and surely the lamp post hadn't been THAT far from the ground?
Tentatively, she opened her eyes, and found herself floating inches away from the ground, feet pointing downwards. So, she wasn't dead! Or if she was, at least she was floating! The ToR let out a small giggle, and wiggled in the air happily before suddenly finding herself deposited on her butt as the last vestiges of the nimbus abruptly faded.
She let out a woeful wail at this new turn of events, scrambling up onto hands and knees and crawling towards her Guardian - not because she wanted to be by Ritika, of course, only because she didn't know who anyone here was. She wanted to go HOME!
Tika took no notice of her charge. "Hey, Mos, Pave...wait, Mossy is the little shrieking barber, right? Yah. I'm Tika, this...er...where is she...YEAH, this is Rachael."
She paused. "Uhm, yeah. Sooo...er...he's a cutie!"
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Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 1:47 pm
Mos's eyes were turning slowly yellow and Pave hurriedly searched around. "You don't happen to have a goldfish on you? A worm? Anything?" Mos's nails were elongating and growing sharper. Pave searched her pockets frantically and produced a lot of lint, a rubber band, a pencil, a highliter, a few pennies, and a piece of gum. She set Mos on the ground quickly and looked around for something. In the dirt, she managed to find a worm, but it was already dead. She swore and glanced back at Mos. Half yellow, not good. She dug around, severed another worm on accident, and threw a rock into the street. "Come on." She whispered desperately to herself. Triumphantly, she held Up a struggling worm and handed it to Mos, who promptly squished it. His eyes returned to their melancholy green and his nails shrank. Pave sighed and stood again, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe Mos's hands. "Sorry about that." She sweated a little. Mos burbled quietly to himself, all emnity forgotten. "He's getting like that more and more. Yeah, this is Mos, the one who's emphatically enjoying Storm's new haircut. Good to meet you Tika."
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Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 5:19 pm
Ritika's eyes glazed slightly as she tried to accept this abrupt metamorphosis. "Uhm, yeah, that's...great," she said brightly, tapping at the ground with one foot and dislodging her ToR from her leg in one - er, some motions. "So, does the Fungi Guy - is moss even a fungi? - turn into Sharp-Clawed Lemon Dude a lot? And what was that with the worm? You guys have some PROBLEM with the invertebrates of the world?"
She paused, considered, continued. "I mean, if you do, yeah, go you! Worms are so bleccch, I didn't even consider them as an appetizer, and we're talking FAMINE."
Rachael, meanwhile, dragged herself over to the other ToR curiously. Well, all right, so he seemed a little bit scary, but Mos was OK now, right? She hadn't had anyone to interact with besides the Creepy Guy That Her Mommy Yelled at and her mommy all week, and she was getting a bit lonely, truth be told. If she didn't like Mos, maybe she could at least watch him from afar.
She listened to his burbling thoughtfully, before joining in with a few babbles of her own. "Gamblagah?"
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Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 7:02 pm
"Fungi?" Pave asked confusedly. "Oh! Mos! No, Mos is short for Mosrael, and it's just faster to say Mos." She smiled. "And no, he doesn't usually transform like that." Pave looked down at him and continued. "It's his curse. Some poeple, I dunno, they just make Mos mad. Remind him of scary stuff, I guess, so he ends up having to kill something." She smiled weakly at this. "So I try to carry little things around that he can relieve his anger on. It's usually okay if I don't let his eyes turn completely yellow." She nodded matter-of-factly.
Mos looked at Rachael curiously. "Storm?" He asked. But this wasn't Storm. "Pave!" He tried again. No, this wasn't his mother either. "Tofu." He concluded. "Hug?" He wondered if this new entity liked hugs.
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Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 7:24 pm
"Oh. Oh, okay." Tika nodded sagely, hand on hip. She cleared her throat, running over the conversation in her head before adding another bit of wise input. "Oh."
She glanced over at the two infants, who seemed to be hitting it off. Kind of. "Uhm, okay, Mossy, Mosrael, Mos...that works. Yeah, my name is really Ritika but everyone calls me Tika. Nothing to do with tiki lanterns!" She grinned at Pave, before scowling suddenly (all this smiling was making her cheeks hurt).
Rachael blinked at Mos slowly, taking in his words and having no idea what they meant. "Hug?" she repeated uncertainly, sitting back on her haunches before reaching down and plucking a thin blade of grass, proffering this to Mos with an uncertain mumble. "You want?"
Tika looked down at the two for a bit. "Tofu? He likes tofu? Oh, I like tofu. Especially if you kill it humanely. No tofu fisheries for me, animal abuse is not the way to go. --Rael hasn't tried tofu yet, dunno if she likes it..."
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Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 7:40 pm
"Yeah tofu's his favorite. Er, kill it humanely? Tofu is...from what I gather, curds and grains and such. Animals aren't involved, or not at least with the tofu I buy Mos." Pave laughed in a confused sort of way. "Right, not tiki lamps." She smiled a little. This Tika was putting her on edge. Should she really let Mos hang around with Rachael if she was...similar in any way to Tika?
Mos took the blade of grass with excessive wonder and stared at it for a second. He stuffed it into the pocket of his shorts and grinned. "Hug!" He laughed and scooted forward, moving to wrap his arms around Rachael. If she did not know what a hug was, he would have to show her.
((Hohoho, blade of grass!))
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Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 7:53 pm
"Uh huhn, just kidding! I knew that!" (She didn't.) Tika beamed at Pave, mind still on tofu animals. "Well, I mean, when I kill tofu it doesn't scream. So yeah! Grains, sure! I don't think grain screams."
A pause. "Does it?" She shook her head. "But enough about tofu and more about you. Is Mossy Floss a brat (and does he like toothpaste)? Rael is, she was seriously WHINING when I helped her make her bed. I mean, come on. It was just a smidgen of junk, nothing I couldn't get rid of in a jiffy."
She paused and leaned forward conspirationally. "And I don't think she likes Edmund much, either, don't think she MET Edmund"--nasty chuckle here--"since Edmund doesn't like little kiddlets, especially not brats, and I didn't hear any loud yelling yesterevenhour, but hey!"
Rael giggled as Mos accepted her blade of grass. They were friends now...were they? At the least Mos had to be at least somewhat more positively inclined towards her than before...somehow...after all, she had made the offering. Now it was time to wait until her dues came in. Surely they someday would.
The ToR laughed as Mos scooted forward, bouncing slightly. As he opened his arms, presumably to give her a "hug", she reflected the action, leaning in, face split with a wide, mostly-toothless grin. This was fun! Mos seemed to like to move, which was fine with her, because she did too. Just not with Tika because Tika was a POO.
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Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2005 5:47 pm
Pave laughed nervously and scooted a little away, hopefully not conspicuously so. She wasn't sure if this Tika was completely sane. Maybe all this dropping out of the sky rattled her brain? "Er, Mos isn't a brat. When he transforms, he gets a little crazy, but other than that, he's a good boy."
Mos grinned when Rachael did. She seemed to want a hug. She opened her arms, so he scooted very far forward and wrapped his arms lovingly around her. "Hug!" He laughed. He did love hugs. He hoped that Rachael liked this hug.
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Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2005 6:37 pm
"Really?" Tika seemed a bit disheartened; her full lips pulled into a pout. "Pity, that. If he were a brat maybe we could have fed him to Edmund and partied."
She considered this option, eyes lingering on her ToR thoughtfully. "Of course, we could party anyway, but there'd be nothing to celebrate! Unless we fed RAEL to Edmund, but she won't go with the plan...we need an innocent victim." She beamed back at Pave, oblivious to the other woman's backing away. "Do you want to meet Edmund?"
Rachael giggled as Mos hugged her, the sound tinkling and like a bell; a small bell, shrill, perhaps ornamented with obscure symbols and carvings in silver, hung on a thin chain or from an elaborate mobile. The bell rang gently, and apparently this "hugging" wasn't so bad, she thought, because really it was quite nice - she should get Tika to do this sometime - and Mos smelled good, the smell of an infant. She couldn't have known that because one is oblivious - largely - to one's natural smells, so she simply thought of the milky scent as a Mos-smell, unique and categorized carefully in a large filing cabinet slowly storing information on Mos. She allowed herself to curl her hands around Mos, and the bell rang gently, and dues were forgotten for the moment with the ringing, the laughter sound of a hyperactive child experiencing a new sensation, the bell sound, which was now quickly shrilling and tolling now in alarm as Rael found, suddenly and to her own surprise, that hugging was somehow inherently wrong. Her small fingernails clutched at Mos, and she let out a despairing wail - why was anything fun always bad? - as the pain rushed over her in undulating stripes and she found herself gasping for air nervously. Still hanging onto Mos, despite the shrill screams she now occasionally emited between each choking breath, she found herself hurling through a frightening maze of strange images, the monsters did exist, she thought, really.
Really.
Their teeth gaped widely and their throats snapped, or perhaps it was the other way around. Maybe she was hurting Mos, now, as fingernails dug into flesh, but she was beyond noticing. The monsters existed and their yellow eyes flickered at her in the dark, the dark, the dark of Tika's apartment. They approached her, slowly, and strange flickering images crowded her mind, the essence of a man, of several, of woodlandsmoonserenity that had been disrupted by that nasty robot who had brought her to nasty Tika, only it wasn't! And the bird, it fluttered but wings were broken and trampled and flecked with - she screamed, once, loudly, and let go abruptly, rolling face down to feel the cool grass tickling her skin. The monsters were real.
And yet they weren't. She lay there for a while, comatose, aware vaguely of the sun warming her back and the cool soil between her toes.
"What the f*ck?" Rii commented mildly, staring at the scene.
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Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2005 7:01 pm
"Riiiiiiiight." Pave was completely at a loss for what to say. This girl really was crazy. She nodded and pretended to listen as the crazy girl as she spoke. Then she heard a question directed at her. "Meet?" She faltered. "Meet Edmund? Oh, er, I don't...don't think so." She smiled nervously. "I am rather busy, so I don't think so."
Mos was surprised and scared when Rael started to scream. He screamed too. He started screaming out the first word that came to mind. "Storm!" He cried. Storm had helped him through the nightmares, now he must help him now. "PAVE! STORM! PAVE!" He screamed.
Pave looked down at Mos suddenly, worried at this sudden release of his whole vocabulary. "Mos?" She asked worriedly. He would not stop screaming! She bent down and put a hand on his shoulder. He stopped screaming and reduced the noise to mere whimpers. She looked confusedly at Tika and Rael. "What happened?"
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Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2005 7:11 pm
Tika took her sweet time responding to Pave's question, scratching at the back of her shin with a big toe as she watched her charge slowly grow quiet and still. "No effing idea," she said finally. "Nothing like this has ever happened before. I think. Maybe it did yesterday...? I mean, I've only had her for two days, really, so I don't know her very well, except that she's a brat. And she doesn't like Edmund."
The woman bent down towards the ToR, smoothing her hula skirt in a subconscious reflection of a coquettish movement. "Uhm, Rachael?" She breathed in the girl's ear softly.
Rael felt the dirt against her eyelids, her bare skin. The pain was gone, now, no longer in waves but rather in occasional fleeting instants. Memories, she thought to herself, but was not reassured. Someone was talking to her, but she paid it no mind, instead focused on shrinking, concentrating herself into a thin acid-of-Rael, seeping into the earth slowly, where one could hide from monsters, because seriously monsters couldn't like the dark too much either; the dark was too scary for everyone. Except for her. She liked the dark unless monsters did.
Tika flipped Rael over onto her back with a nearby twig, before reaching out tentatively and shaking her. "Raaaaeeeeel? Hullo? You there?"
The ToR's eyes flicked open automatically as bright sunlight doused her eyelids a pale red. She closed them again - no monsters - and got her bearings for a few moments. "Scary," she said finally, dragging herself upright by pulling hard on Tika's arm. And then promptly toddled towards Mos, an uncertain smile back on her face. What had happened? Had good-smelling Mos caused it? Would it happen again?
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Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2005 7:34 pm
Mos turned to Pave with a quivering lip and pointed in a frightened way at Rael. "Pave." He said quietly. Pave smiled and patted his head. "It's okay Mos." She stood and turned to Tika. "Well, at least he stopped screaming." She laughed gently.
Mos patted his pocket. It still held the blade of grass. Somehow he felt comforted by this. His nails had gotten a teeny bit longer. The scream freaked him out, but the blade of grass pushed his nails back to their original length. He smiled gently.
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