Welcome to Gaia! ::

Taji found herself skipping for her life in the ninth level of hopskotch hell.

To be fair, she had subjected herself to it -- the bucket of chalk used to make such a demonic childhood ritual lay tipped on the outside stairs leading to a house that was definitely not hers. She lived several blocks away, and was not actually supposed to come out this far on her own, except this block had the longest, flattest stretch of good clean pavement that was just begging to be defaced. Doodles of blue flowers and radioactivively green mice and pink and orange ice cream surrounded the hopskotch boxes; Taji's white shorts sported tell-tale handprints of colorful chalky residue.

Inhaling deeply, the star spirit hovered just before the box marked a very wobbly one, and winding back, pitched the marker rock as far as she could. It flew across five squares of pavement before skidding across the sixth and landing resolutely on the box marked '87'. Taji squinted at it, a hand held over her eyes to shield them from the sun, and locating her target, began to skip and hop -- not only in straight lines but in circles, spirals, forwards, backwards, and sideways.

She only made it as far as 47 before, confused, she hopped back and landed on 23. "Aww, maannnnnn!" She whined at nothing in particular, stomping a foot against the pavement and sending up a fruttitutti cloud of dust.

"I am hopping," Taji told the other girl proudly, sticking her hands into her pockets and beaming as if she had just told her she was saving the world by spaztically throwing herself regularly into the air. "It's called hopskotch! you throw the rock and then you have to hop-hop-hop over to it, pick it up, and hop-hop-hop back. In order of the numbers!"

She skipped and jumped back from 27 to 1 in demonstration, leaving the rock where it was for the moment. "Oh, this is your sidewalk? Sorry," she said, not sounding very sorry at all. Squinting at Uziri, she took a step back, pointed, and said, "You know you got little purpley thingies coming out of your back there?"

"Swear words?" Taji repeated, tilting her head to the side in an oddly birdlike manner. "Like.. 'promise'? Swear words?" Hunh. Maybe they were magic words. She wasn't given very much time to think about it -- her attention was soon captured with the movement of one of the purple glowy tentacles.

"I'd much rather have things like yours," Taji pointed again and flicked away one of the dust bunnies gravitating slowly around her. "Is that -- do you get those if you eat your vegetables?" If they were, perhaps it was about time Taji actually started to eat her broccoli.

Hopscotch, on the other hand, was something she knew very well. Immediately grinning, Taji nodded and ran off to collect her marker-rock. "Okay," she said as soon as she returned, "You start off here." She jabbed a toe at the very first box. "Then you throw the rock." She didn't put so much energy into it this time, and it only landed on the fifteenth box.

"Then you have to hop through the boxes, one-by-one. You can't touch the chalk-borders, or the cracks on the sidewalk, else your mother's back will break and then... Locusts." Very cheerfully she began hopping from one box to the next, following an S-shaped curve to the patch the rock had landed on. Balancing on one foot, she bent down to collect the rock before twisting around and hopping back.

"I can't go very far yet. But there are hundreds of boxes and one day I will hop through them all!" She struck a dramatic pose for emphasis but only held it for a few seconds before becoming bored and offering the rock to Uziri.

Words that should not be said? Then what was the entire purpose of their existance in the first place?! "Crap," Taji replied stubbornly, deciding to take these poor words under her wings. She could very easily have them make friends with all the other words, and other people, she could. "What's the 'f' word?" It would be very useful to know a word that made people turn red, especially since it was an unspeakable word that she could add to her collection.

She thought suddenly of vegetables and broccoli and having to crunch down on it with all the gristles in between her teeth and on her plate and in her hair, and she turned red herself at the thought. Was it worth it, she thought to herself as she stared longingly at her new companion's Special Extra Arms, to have to go through that torture in order to obtain those?

Perhaps. "I will try, then," Taji said bravely, hoping Uziri would not notice the slight waver in her voice. "Cos..." She wanted Special Extra Arms. "...You never know." She hesitated for a moment before continuing very rapidly, rattling off the next set of words in a matter of seconds: "Maybe I will get to be like you and Con and have purple arm thingies and then be able to shoot lazer beams out of my eyes and lift things and fly and wear underwear on the outside! He always eats the spinach, I've seen him."

She was clearly in awe of anyone who could eat their vegetables, and as far as she knew, Uziri was one of them. She watched the Loa spirit begin her hopping trek down the hopscotch lane, gaze glued to her feet, and only remembered to blink when the other girl addressed her.

"U-zeer-ee. Uzeeeeee....ree." Taji thoughtfully tried the name out and decided that it was not entirely bad -- the 'zee' part tickled her tongue and was especially fun to say. "I am Taji! Do you live here, then?"

"Fnuck!" Said Taji, rapidly flailing her arms as if expecting herself to spontaneously take off into the air. "Fnuck! Sounds like duck. Muck. Puck. Luck. Fnuck." How could any word that sounded like 'duck' be forbidden? Of course, it was a little funny-sounding, which probably accounted for why people did not like to say it very often, but Taji did not voice these thoughts for fear of offending the fnuck word.

"I heard about moo-tants," she balled her fists and placed them on her hips, puffing her chest out in pride to know that she could at least measure up a little bit to this vegetable-eating girl and her seemingly unsurpassed knowledge of Neat Things. Taji was as comfortable changing subjects as she was changing socks, apparently.

"They get.. they get a duck thing, by the green aliens in gravy boats. A duck. A duck ted..." Taji thought fast. "...Bear. I would like one, but my brothers say I scare all the aliens away."

She only paused long enough to gape some more at Uziri upon the confession that the other girl lived on the moon. The moon! Could she be any cooler! "Is it made of cheese?" She wanted to know, hopping from one foot to the other in her excitement, and balanced still on one foot to admit shyly, "I wish I could live on the moon."

"Thank you fnuckly," Taji said as gracefully as she could, plopping one foot behind her and curtesying quickly with a creak of her knee. Meanwhile, she kept an eye on the other girl's progress -- Taji fully expected her to progress farther than she herself had ever been, so when she was done with her hopscotch round, she would just have to ask to.. to be her apprentice! Something like that. Taji shuffled her feet impatiently at the thought.

"What's it like on the moon?" The star spirit began to ask, but realizing Uziri had just asked something else, belatedly scrambled to answer, "An alien is big and green and squishy and likes cows a lot, and ducks too, and they live on other planets but they come to pick on us sometimes."

"How many doors do you have?" Taji wanted to know, waiting the other girl's return eagerly. "Do they go other places too? I -- I want to see..." She thought quickly about this, not so much considering the politeness of her demands but rather whether she'd prefer being millions of miles underwater of millions of years into the past. "Dinosaurs!" Taji finally declared with an emphatic nod. "'Specially the Tyrannysoarus Rex!"

"An' aliens are green and ugly anyway, I seen pictures, their eyes are too big," she continued dismissively. "They're not very nice, either. How can you tip cows?"