Welcome to Gaia! ::

It seemed like not many people visited his mama, as he'd decided Antanasia must be, except Amagi. And Amagi got really boring after a while. Think, super boring, like watching paint dry. So he didn't actually want to open the door. Except he didn't like letting other people opening it, since he could reach the latch. Crowley stood on his toes and tripped the switch, then shoved the heavy oak door open wide.

He stared up at the man and the boy for a minute, thinking very hard, and then he brightened up and shrieked, "FISHY!"

This brought his mother running, in the figurative sense, as best a floating head could run. She paused in the doorway of the entre-sol, as she called it. It was more of a main lobby- in the style of a hotel, or a large corporation. Antanasia alone rather was a one-women corporation. Shadow tendrils pulled the gray folds of her cloak over the ominous, smiling red faces.

"Hello," she said, gliding over to stand at her son's right shoulder. Who was she expecting today? Amagi, the meddling b*****d, and... Micheal Prosper, or something. A painter. More importantly, a world-painter. They were exotic rarities in Nur, long envied. She considered herself lucky this one did commissions.

"Fishy!" The dark-skinned little boy threw his arms up and ran a tight little circle around Prosper.

She frowned, and the unseen shadows gave an ominous growl. "Crowley," she snapped, bringing him to an abrupt halt, arms still in the air. "You're Micheal Prosper? I'm Antanasia Howl."

Talking to artists always sent her a bit off balance.

She narrowed her eyes at the blond child. "At some beach," she decided, "I think I saw..." A distasteful look. Food just discomfited her on account of not actually needing it, and as strange as her thought process in naming things could be (Teabots, Plot Devices, and Weapons of Mass Creation being the tamest creations) naming a child after food was a tad bit strange. "...Fish and his sister?"

"Feely," Crowley piped before dragging Fish out into the wet grass. Not as good as an ocean, of course not, but the rolling hills were pretty fun. Especially for the thing implied by their name... Rolling. There was a stone wall, about hip-high on a normal adult, that delineated the edges of the property. It effectively cut off the view of a small child. "I gots a ball," he intoned once they'd reached the wall. "Sum'time I kick it 'gainst wall." Not many people wanted to visit floating heads, so not many people to play with. "Want to play?"

He totally understood why, being currently trapped in a family unit with one.

Antanasia pretended not to notice a small, mechanized teapot directing a soccerball towards Crowley and Fish, though the boy shrieked a greeting at it, too. "Of course," she said to Prosper. "Come in, come in. The Cogitors and Number 42-" the spindly-legged teapot "-should be able to keep an eye on them, yeah?"

Crowley snagged the soccer ball, held it over his head and looked at Fish with huge eyes. "Issa lots fun," he said, excited.

"Kick it," said Crowley. "Here. I show you." After all, Fish had been nice enough to show him how to move around in the big water. He'd show his friend the awesome Game Involving the Spotty Ball. Dropping the ball, he stopped it with his foot- a bit, or a lot, clumsily. Presumably grace would come with age. "Kick it an' it comes back an' you kick it again!"

He ran a couple of steps away, ran up to the ball and kicked it hard. Only it didn't have as much of an effect as he might have wished, since he actually stopped running before kicking. The ball flew off, straight, but then ricocheted off at an odd angle. It collided with the teabot and knocked the black iron thing over, but the solid structure of the machine stopped it quite well. (It made an alarming ping sound as it straightened itself.)

Crowley retrieved the ball and escorted it back over to Fish. "Your turn," he said magnanimously. "Teabot stops it if it goes crazy."

Antanasia drifted up a set of stairs, set against a solid stone wall. Both wall and steps were solid granite, polished to a high gleam on the actual step but still rough on the sides. It would be hell to stub one's toes on it. "No, at some little beach on Gaia called Tide... something." She'd forgotten. "Tideflow? Tidewater? Tide... Oh, hell." Why should she bother with a place her Commonwealth would never try to conquer?

Which reminded her, she had an appointment with the Legal Division tomorrow.

"Here," she said, stopping in front of a large section of open wall. Two large windows framed it, and it was a good-sized spot; it overlooked the main room, or lobby, or whatever it was the two adults had just walked through. They stood on a balcony that overlooked the body of the room. "The spot's been bothering me," she explained, "Because I used to have some tapestries here but there was an incident with a teabot, and well, they sort of caught fire. Now I know better, so of course I will actually remember to protect this spot with the fire-retardant rune-things which have a proper name but I forgot it."

"Fish!" Crowley started forward as the teabot puttered off, resolute, after the soccer ball. "You is okay?" He patted his friend's head for a second, carefully looking for bumps. Well, perhaps causing some new ones, too. For a toddler, he was sort of strong. "Is okay. Kinda hard to kick ball when grass is all wet."

With a shrug, he reclaimed the ball from the teabot (which had been chugging away, moving closer quite surely) and placed it back in its spot. "'Kay," said Crowley, "Don't fall over." With his sage instructions dispensed, he backed up to sit on the wet grass. Just in case, he sat a little further away than he might have. "Go Fish," he cheered, because maybe his friend would feel discouraged or something!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Antanasia was distracted by the view out one of the windows. Oddly, it showed a desolate plain rather than the wild, moorish setting of the front of the house. Closer inspection would have revealed it was merely a holograph projected into the glass. "Taller than it is wide," said the High Chancellor when her attention returned. If she had had hands, she would have set one on her chin while she considered this question. Without the hand, her thoughtful expression was rather strange.

"As for the width, about the width of the windows, I suppose. Threes are good numbers, especially similar threes, do you agree?" The tone of her voice implied that it would be ridiculous for Prosper to not agree, and if he did happen to disagree it'd be best not to answer. Her decision had roots in her culture's deepest superstition, which involved infinity and spirals and was quite hard to explain to an outsider. Three was a good number: You couldn't make a spiral with only three points. Since Antanasia was a good Amedian (despite having aided in its destruction) it was very hard to find a spiral in her house. "And as for subject..."

She paused, turned to overlook the austere lobby. "Do what you will," said Antan with a shrug. "If I didn't trust you to paint an acceptable subject, based on what I know, I would not have approached you."

It was the truth.

He cheered as loud as he could, waving both arms over his head- back and forth and back and forth. Happy for his friend, he yelled, "You did it!" And then he got up and stopped the ball with his foot, almost toppling as he did so; it had rolled a bit as he stomped on it. "Yeah. This time you gotta kick when it comes back, 'kay?"

The rather confused teabot ran around in a circle, since Crowley was no longer sitting on it. Focused, the dark-skinned boy nudged the ball away from Fish and then kicked the ball, hard. It slammed into the wall and came back at an angle that would bring it directly to Fish, low on the ground and easy to hit.

Antanasia looked slightly surprised- not at the subject, of course she didn't expect him to work for free. The Commonwealth was best described as capitalism, pure laissez-faire capitalism, and no one worked for free. It had never crossed her mind to pay someone with a cabbage. To not pay as much as she should, yes. But to-

"Magical cabbage?" She looked distracted for a moment, tilted her head in a different direction. "Did it sprout a kid? Not like I honestly expected it to, except."

Then she shrugged. "Of course. Name your currency."

Crowley was focused. This was his game, and it was a great game as far as solo games went. It proved to be more fun with a friend, though, so he grinned and shouted "Yay!" when he saw the ball coming back his way. He would probably never look at solo kick-the-wall-at-the-ball the same away again. Then he reeled backwards and hauled off a kick that sent the ball moving entirely too fast towards the wall. Luckily, it ended up going wildly out of the way. It suddenly made sense why the teabot had been sent out with them, since it headed off after the ball much faster than Crowley, who had slipped a little.

"Sorry," he said sheepishly, though whether he was speaking to Fish or to the teabot was uncertain.

Her head whipped around, back to Prosper. "I had a biotechnical cabbage, emphasis on the had," she explained. "That's where Error- Crowley- came from."

Which was also neither here nor there but if he asked she'd say it was his fault.

"Of course," she said. "When you give me a quote, I will pay you promptly."

He grinned, proud of both his skill at this game and the fact that Fish thought he was good, too. "You kick good, too," he said, watching the teabot happily. Some of the little cast-iron robots had lasers in them. This one didn't look like an example of that type, mostly because it didn't emote. The glowing red disc on the one side of the teapot had blinked out a resolute "42" the entire time. Dangerous teabots, or poisoned scones, had interesting faces on them.

Crowley had learned to not trust food if it could smile at you.

He watched Fish kick the ball, and when it came his way, he kicked it back at the wall to his friend. "Sometime on TV I see people just kicking the ball at each other," he said wistfully. "Maybe next we play that?"

Antanasia hovered near Prosper, enough that a vague chittering noise could be heard from beneath the cloak, and considered this. "Both of them," she repeated. "Well that would seem to take all the fun out of it." Clearly her opinion of children, especially the one she was raising, was quite low. "Ophelia and Phineas." Well, at least she wasn't the only one with a freaky cabbage child who seemed more fascinated by soccer than was good for him.

"I have no limit," she said, which was true. Her talents extended not only to the field of science, but to embezzling from her Lord Major General. The only reason he had found out, both times, was because she had slipped up and told the wrong person. "Charge what you like." And, if it was reasonable, she wouldn't dither about the cost.

She supposed not, anyway.