Welcome to Gaia! ::

It had been quite the week. Wasabineko's afternoons were spent gathering her belongings, placing them in boxes, realizing the boxes were far to heavy to move, and then taking all the items out and placing them in different boxes. The pattern should be recognizable... it was nearing moving day.

The young eccentric had been happily rooted for nearly four years now, but necessity in the form of her school landlords giving her the congratulatory-graduation heave-ho had diced up her roots and sent her free floating to her next locale.

There was optimism, however. Her new house was filled with greater potential than her little white box suite could ever have offered. It was and old house, perhaps not quite old by say, European standards, but by her own new world view a century old Victorian was quite the relic. Thin, dark hallways that turned, dropped, and otherwise snaked though the house connected its numerous rooms and overall there was a sense of deep mystique that intrigued her. Indeed, her fortune had been grand.

So, here she was for yet another evening, shuffling and rearranging in an involved task that was not likely to be finished until the day the boxes finally left. A stack of books lay beside an empty box with Wasa sitting crosslegged before them, lips locked in a thin, contemplative look. Why... for being made out of paper alone, were books so damn heavy? The box was far too large to be filled entirely with tomes and still remain transportable. She would have to cut it with something... DVDs perhaps? No, those had already been used to help pack her glass collection. That only reminded her that there was a movie in that box she desperately wanted to watch tonight which meant that she would have to find the box, half unpack it, and then put the whole mess together again. Sigh...

She shifted around, turning immediately to a pile of odds and sorts that had been created as she sifted through her studio, hands down the hardest room to tackle. In truth, this was pile 3 of a predicted 5, which no doubt meant an eventual 8. Wasa picked through it, dropping a piece of paper in the trash and sending a button flying across the room into a bucket of other buttons with a satisfying click.

Somewhere towards the third layer of the pile her fingers pinched a strap of leather. What was... oh! Now she remembered as she pulled an odd patchwork of leather out of the pile. Karma had given this to her last week with explicit instructions to keep it close and to keep an eye on it. It had taken her parading it around on her finger like a puppet to figure out what it was, a falconer's hood. The why of it she never bothered asking, having figured out long ago that in Gaia such questions led to answers that were either unwelcome or just more confusing than the original quandary.

Now to be fair she had followed Karma's instructions to the letter until last night, when in a moment of exasperation she just shoved every free floating item in the room into a single heap. Until that point it had been sitting a top the lamp of her drawing desk, staring down at her with its deep red "eyes," looking every bit as expectant as she. What was it for? Ah ah ah she almost went there! It probably wasn't anything at all, though Karma had never struck her as the sort to play that kind of game. She gave the top tassel a little flick before tying it onto a belt loop for safekeeping, lest it end up in another pile.

Wasa stood, giving the edge of the heap a little nudge towards the center to make it appear just a teensy bit smaller, full justification for a short break. She shouldn't have let it fool her though... at this rate she was going to be up until dawn every day of the remaining month to get this mess sorted out. She stretched, falconer's hood bobbing at her hip. It was a good time for some tea.

Someone else has also apparently taken interest in the little 'sculpture'. Tiny, light imprinted footprints mark their way around and around the collection, a few pieces still seeming to sway lightly in the non-existant breeze when it's seen again.

Her lawn was a sight for mishaps.

Had she known then what she knew now, that her lawn seemed to be the new inter-dimensional drop off point for the wayward, she would have built a pool. Now here she was, staring down at was no doubt another lump of trouble, and she barely had the nerve to get off her porch.

But she had to, for it was in her nature- her vulnerable, charitable nature. She took a sip from her coffee mug and started to stroll across the lawn. With each step, her resolve to be impersonal and unsympathetic began to wane. What was it? She crossed the brick pathway. Was it hurt? Her shawl snagged and released a rose bush but she didn't notice. Did she have room? Nothing ever showed up on her lawn that wasn't planning on staying, she knew this from experience. She didn't absolutely need to have a room for her studio... there was still the whole basement. She would have been standing beside one of her more hideous sculptures if the blanketed lump didn't stand between them.

"Can you talk?"

No answer.

"Can you understand?"

No indication.

Sighing, but more in fatigue than actual frustration, Wasabineko crouched in the grass and drew back a bit of the fabric. Another amendment to the rules of her lawn that she made right on the spot was that nothing was very easy to describe. What lay in the bundle was the rough size and shape of an infant. She had been around quite a few of them lately so it was becoming a new standard of measurement. "About how big would you say that pot was?" someone might ask and her ready response would be "Oh about the rough size of an infant, give or take an inch or a month." Very few things were actually baby shaped though, as this was.

There were other parts in the bundle, and after closer examination it was clear that the chicken feet, snake tail, and lizard wings belonged to the over all baby package, which in turn was wrapped in tan skin dappled with rusty feathers. Oddest of all was that just under the red hair shot through with green quills was a scrap of cloth. It wound about the child's head, most notably over its eyes. Seemed an odd thing to do to a child. What if it became tangled and choked? Of course, leaving a child in a blanket in some grass was a weird thing to do too. Weirder still was to remain hovering over it, sipping French roast, rather than doing something.

Gingerly she set her knee down by the child's head and loosened the knot. What would one have to worry about an infant seeing? In the movies people were always blind folded before being taken to a secret location so they wouldn't remember how they got there, but this was just a baby, far too young to commit such a thing to memory. "Lets see what you look like under there." She cooed softly as she pushed back the band.

Regret visited itself upon her swiftly as her eyes made contact with its. Even through the filtering tint of the lenses of her mask something, some force, cause them to well and sting. She closed them tight, not just out of pain but because, from the pit of her stomach, muffin, coffee, and bile were rising. She dropped her mug as she spat on the grass, gasping. The baby had begun to cry.

Wasabineko rocked onto her backside, letting her slip out from underneath her as she stared through watery eyes and the now squirming mass. What in the world had she been sent now? After a tense moment she reached out and, with eyes closed, re-tied the no-longer-mysterious band of cloth. When she was confident it was back in place, she opened her eyes and scooped the infant up.

"Well, I think I know what to do now." She said with confidence as she rocked the bundle carefully. "It's time to call Karma."