Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was mid-afternoon on a saturday. The malls were teeming with life, the streets full of people, and the sun was baking the pavement underfoot. This was not the usual setting for such a meeting.

The chef lay face down in a pool of tomato sauce and human bean-juice. His chest looked like it had been snapped and broken and his wide glassy eyes seemed... sad. A flutter of silks and Aphrodite stood from her examination of the body. This was bad. The Other was near and she was hot on the trail of a new beacon. Someone with sunglasses.

dancing past the body and pushing out of the small back kitchen, Aphrodite tried to ignore the fridge door slowly opening as something the size of a circus trained bear, with blue fuzzy feet emerged from within.

The little cafe was very busy and a few heads turned as the woman moved out of the kitchen. considering she was wearing a sarong and the semi-transparent material left verrrry little to the imagination, this was to be expected. A tug on her hands and she found herself standing at a table, looking down at a girl with two-tone hair and a boy with very bright eyes. Well well... she had something in a back pocket for him.

"Hi. I have a special order for you."

From the kitchen something made a high-pitched growling noise. Like a rabbit on steroids.

"Very fresh. And just to get this over with." She bent over the table, whispering like they were on stage. "I might be the villain of your story."

One of the wait-staff screamed as the went through the swinging doors. And did not come back out.

Quite contrary to what Eolande was thinking, Marlon couldn't possibly think of a better way to spend the day. He couldn't remember the last time he had just hung out with someone; probably way back when didn't need an ID and pogs were a big deal. He considered Eolande to be a great person, and one he wouldn't mind hanging out with in the least. He could only hope that he would prove an interesting enough companion so he could be asked by her again to hang out more.

He had liked the street vendors; he had read about the ones south of their hemisphere who actually liked to run up to people and try to talk them into buying what they had for sale be showing them how it worked and how neat it was. Although none of them were quite so eager to sell their wares, they still had some pretty neat things for sale. He had actually ventured to try a deep fried Snickers bar; he was still trying to figure out whether he liked it or not. He felt much more enthusiastic about the idea of a cinnamon bun and a drink; perhaps that would be just the thing to wash that funky, deep-friend chocolate taste from his mouth.

He was thoroughly enjoying his cinnamon bun and Irish cream cappuccino and was just about to remark that Eolande looked just how she thought, when the girl in the sarong approached their table. He blinked as his eyes traveled up and down the length of her outfit, coloring slightly at the semi-transparency of the fabric. Was she a friend of Eolande's? Probably not, judging by his friend's clearly indignant look. He could only blink at the girl's cryptic words and stammer a reply. "Uhm.....do I....know you?"

He was so intent on hearing the reply that he failed to notice the strange noise coming from the kitchen, and even if he had, the noise wouldn't have been nearly as puzzling as the strange woman leaned over their table and whispered about maybe bring the villain of their story. "What are you talking about? What-?" He didn't get any further as the scream sounded; he jumped in his seat and banged his knee against the bottom of the table. "Holy crap, what was that?!" He looked over at the double doors, expecting to see smoke; if this place was about to catch fire, strange woman or not, they were getting the Hell out of there.

The sounds coming from the kitchen were incredibly disturbing. They made Eolande want to pick up her drink and high tail it to where she had parked her bike. However, the woman who had at first seemed to be intruding on her outing with her friend was holding something out. At some point Eolande's irritation had evaporated. Perhaps it was when the glow of the glasses in her hand struck her eyes...or around the time the weird noises within the kitchen had come. Eolande found herself reaching out to take the glasses, even as she tugged her new pair off and dropped them to the table. "Wow..." she murmured with fascination. What were these? " Thanks..." It was more of a after thought to thank the woman for the strange gift. Eolande opened the arms of the glasses and looked over the tinted glass with clear appreciation. "Yeah...I will take this...thanks again. I just..wow..."

Aphrodite smiled, disregarding any silly little squelching sounds that made their way to her fine, dainty ears. She clapped her hands and beamed at the two. "Oh! Wonderful," she chimed, her voice full of almost child-like. She momentarily turned to the door to see something beginning to gnaw at the door.

She placed gentle hands on a shoulder of each of them, her eyes looking at them with an odd fondness as if looking at her two children. "Now, to activate these beauties you need only hold them up and call out to your heart. Your powers will immediately tell you how they will help you in battle, so please, go right ahead." As she finished speaking the creature had gnawed its way clean through the door, again something she seemed not to notice as she gave their shoulders reassuring pats. "Don't be afraid to have a little fun with them," she chuckled, gracefully passing some hair over her shoulder as she started walking by them with a look that screamed 'Ahh, I did a good thing'. But what could she do? The children would need to deal with the sharp-toothed menace, she needed to see more little ones to awaken their powers as well...ahh, how troublesome.

As she walked away the creature was already starting to escape the kitchen, and from the sounds a riffling through the kitchen there were more, perhaps only one...but enough to need to be dealt with fast.

For the short period of time that the strange woman had her hand on his shoulder, all Marlon could seem to focus on was her; her words, her touch, and most importantly it seemed, the wondrous gift she had just given him. He could see the fondness in her eyes and felt his own fondness well up inside of him, though he was still so certain that he had never seen this woman before. He absorbed her words like a sponge, taking them in as though already knowing just how vitally important they would become in the next several minutes. The shell itself seemed happy in his hands, as though it has been waiting all this time to be pulled from the ocean that had cradled it for possibly hundreds of years and placed here, now, in his care. He felt a strange feeling inside of him as he stared down at the shell; like although he had never seen this shell before, he had but to look at it to realize that it was what he had always wanted. It belonged with him, and he belonged wit it.

And then suddenly, the woman was gone, and he was staring across the table at Eolande, with the sounds of the beast in the kitchen all around them. He looked around frantically, but the woman was nowhere to be found. "Hey, where-?" His question was cut off by an earsplitting shriek, and he looked back at the kitchen with wide eyes. People were streaming out of the cafe, and the door was disappearing bit by bit as the creature within continued to eat its way out. He turned back to look at Eolande with his own fear plain in his eyes. "Is she expecting US to do something?"

In answer to his own question, he looked down at the shell, no longer glowing but still holding that strange allure to him. The words of the woman rang in his ears: Hold them up and call out to your heart. It seemed so easy to dismiss as a bad line from a sappy play, but as he looked more closely at the shell in his hand, the more the words seemed genuine and possible. He carefully brought the shell up close to his chest, closing his eyes and hoping to feel the force. When nothing happened, he decided on an impulse to place the shell close to his ear, as though hearing the ocean. He listened to the noise around him becoming distorted in the shell, and then......his eyes snapped open. He hadn't heard anything different, but he found himself overcome with a sudden desire to seek out a place with water; a fountain. Yes! Right outside the cafe was a fountain, absurdly huge and absurdly deep, with a cutesy yet rusty latticed fence around it to keep inquisitive little children from wandering away from distracted parents and falling in. Right now every fiber of his being was telling him to run to that fountain.

Rising up quickly from his chair, Marlon called out to Eolande. "Come on! Follow me out! We have to fall back first! Clutching to shell to his chest, he dashed out the door of the cafe and toward the fountain, where an ungainly leap landed him in water from the waist down. He took a deep breath to shove away the shock and held the shell up to his ear again. Before he quite realized it, he was holding the shell up on his head, with the point facing outward like an absurd little unicorn head. He gasped aloud as he felt the shell sink into his head, and as he pulled his hands away, he squeezed his eyes shut as he felt something sprout from his head like a weed. He felt a strange sort of chill race down his back, and he suddenly felt as though his shirt was becoming too small. He reached up to wrestle the stifling shirt off of his frame, and started to see that his arms were darkening, a pattern of dark red stripes the same as his conch shell spreading on his arms like huge bruises. Along the outside of his arm, he could see what looked like spines rapidly growing in a line from his wrists to his elbows, each one steadied and connected by shimmery webbing. Careful not to touch them, he turned slightly and looked behind his back, astonished to see more of the strange growths sprouting all along his spinal column, waving slightly in a nonexistent breeze. He shook his head a little and saw a tiny wisp of his blond hair swing forward to land on his nose; at least he still had THAT.

When the strange tingling chill finally subsided, he peered down at himself. He was striped with maroon from head to toe, interchanging with pearly bluish-white. Spines on his arms bristled menacingly, while more on the back of his legs swished lazily in the water. His entire body seemed utterly devoid of the clumsiness that had so marked him; he could feel the power contained within his muscles, the untapped poison within his spines humming with the yearning for release. He looked down at the choppy reflection before him and understood; somehow, that shell had turned him into......well, a lionfish. He had seen one of them in a dentist's aquarium; so graceful and beautiful, and potentially deadly. His face broke into a wide, toothy grin; this HAD to be better than the wrestling team.

"Eolande! Look! Look at me!" He called out, peering around for her as he suddenly remembered the matter at hand and the monster that they were supposedly supposed to be doing something about. Knowing at least enough right away to not leave the fountain in such a state, Marlon quickly dunked himself once before reemerging to peer around for his friend. When he finally spotted her, his blue eyes went wide, and his jaw dropped. "Look at you! Look at you.......wow!"

Follow him? Eolande did so without question. If they were supposed to be acting on impulse then there was no purpose in asking Marlon 'why' he wanted to go elsewhere when they clearly needed to be at the cafe to deal with whatever it was that was coming. So when he only went a little ways away and jumped into the fountain, Eolande bite back the automatic desire to ask him if he was really that thirsty. She didn't want to have to stop in the middle of whatever was going to happen so he could take a pee break.

Instead she swallowed the smart comment and watched as he placed the shell he had taken from the strange woman to his forehead. When Marlon began to change, Eolande found herself wondering if perhaps she had looked as odd as him when her power thing had started. After a few more seconds though, she decided that no. She certainly did not look as strange as Marlon. Was it strange though? Or cool? She hovered between the two for a moment until Marlon looked at her. Yes...that was definitely cool for him. All the same, even as Marlon took in her appearance, Eolande started to giggle. Lifting a hand, she pointed at Marlon. "Well no wonder your so clumsy all the time! Your a fish outta water!" She laughed with amusement as she stepped towards Marlon in the fountain.

"Seriously though, that is such an awesome change. Your hair looks so perfect! I am going to write a song about this when I get home." Eolande eagerly shared with Marlon...then paused. The sound of fear had tapered off and laughter sounded, that was something that caught her attention. Eolande turned towards the cafe and peered at the fuzzy pink creature.

"Marlon would you...isn't it..." Eolande leaned forwards a bit and placed her hands on her knees as she peered at the fuzzy creature. "The cutest thing you've ever seen?" Her eyes lit up slightly as she looked at the adorableness of the creature when it squeaked at her. Though that light quickly vanished as the chompah then bounded into the glass, causing it to crack. It was then that she took note of the bloody prints. So then. This thing was what had caused all those screams... Eolande dropped her hand to the whip at her side instinctively and with a small tug it popped free. She had not even realized she had uncoiled the whip until she snapped it out in front of her.

"Okay...so... I got a whip." She spoke with a small quaver in her voice that ranged somewhere between fright and laughter. She retreated a few steps from the glass and lifted the whip in her hand to deal with the creature when it came out from behind the glass. "I hope you have something more to add. Should I..finish breaking the glass before it does? I'd rather have the glass break inwards then out towards us....how does something so sweet looking hurt someone?"

It was too late for much more fishy talk or breaking more public property as the glass shattered on the third blow from the pink creature's body and out it came--- prancing. On a robot of single-minded destruction, wreathed in flames, it might have been intimidating. As it was, this was a pink fuzzle covered in blood raining glass. It would soon become intimidating.

as it got closer to the two magical ko it snarled and a double edged row of teeth was exposed. Like a shark's mouth in a rabbit's body.

Eyes widening as the seemingly harmless and diminuitive little puff ball finally broke through the glass and landed before them accompanied by a rain of glass and blood, Marlon gave a start when the creature righted itself, seemingly unharmed by it's assault on the glass. But when the puffball showed its pointy-toothed piano of a mouth, he couldn't help but grin and show his own toothy smile, speaking through clenched teeth. "I'll show you mine if you show me yours, you little squirt." He toned down his smile before turning to look at Eolande, fighting down a retort at being called a guppy. Perhaps it was just her way of keeping things light when they were face with a killer puffball, like a cheesy scene from a Mel Brooks movie.

At least the thing seemed particularly interested in them now. Ever since they had transformed themselves, the rabid little chompah had seemed focused solely on them, now ignoring the potentially tasty meat that fled screaming from it. Was it something to do with the magic that surrounded them? Perhaps it was drawn to magic; it would cdertainly make sense, seeing the thing didn't even appear until that woman had, the one who had given them their items. He reached up thoughtfully to touch his forehead, his view of the chompah momentarily obscured and them blocked by the spines and membranes along his arm. He wondered where the conch shell was now; was it gone entirely, or was it just lodged somewhere in his brain? Making a face, he withdrew his hand and forced the idea from his mind.

Blinking suddenly at Eolande's own idea of shaking the unease away, he managed a weak chuckle. "Hey, if it can help us out here, that outfit can make your butt whatever size it wants. Though truthfully, it looks pretty slimming on you." He returned his gaze to the chompah, but continued to speak to Eolande. "Well, even if it could understand us, the fact still remains that we're bound to clash. It wants to come after us, and we want it to come, so really there's no need to worry about the how, so much as the when." He tried to sound convincing, but it was mostly to convince himself that they could get the upper hand on this deceptive little creature.

He nodded as he registered Eolande's words about her power working in shadows, and wondered if the same applied to him and water. Well, now probably wasn't the best time to find that out; he had to make sure he would be able to help his friend. Time enough to expirament later. "Okay; you can get out of the way in time, right? Because these things can fly pretty fast, and I'm still working on my shots. But if it isn't stunned or it doesn't go for it, can I try luring it?"