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 Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2008 9:44 pm
A large amount of air escaped her lips in a sigh of relief. "Good, I feared I as going to scare off any of the normal people who applied." She laughed more openly.
Oh yeah, the sister. Though Tourmaline got along well enough with other girls her age, she tended to have more guys for friends. Granted, she didn't have a lot of long term friends outside of the large extended family. Her fingers were crossed.
The noise dragged her out of her head as she tilted her head downward to stare at the ringing pants. She didn't recognize the song, and she found herself attempting to peer at the cell phone from the distance between them. "Do you need to head out?"
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Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2008 9:53 pm
"Nope." he said, ticking out a quick response to Ray with the phone's keys
"Didn't forget. Might be late. Find something to do."
"She was just making sure I didn't forget to pick her up from work." he assured her with a chuckle. "I threaten sometimes to make her walk home. I haven't yet, though. I value my life."
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Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2008 10:12 pm
"Awesome," she said while clapping her hands together in excitement. "Time to fix your car. Come on, I need to change, so... If you want something to drink the kitchen's open. Just don't take my last V8." The teen offered him a look that showed she knew he wouldn't touch V8 with a stick. "I'll be down in a second."
Slipping out of the room and into her own a few doors down the hall, she cautiously locked it behind her. She -had- just met this kid.
Five minutes later and Tourma walked into the kitchen in a simple wife beater and a pair of sweat pants that were cut off at the knee. It was a stark contrast to what she had been wearing earlier, and the teen offered him an apologetic look. "I must protect my good clothes from oil."
In all honesty, she felt comfortable, but less vibrant.
"Shall we go pop the hood?" She asked innocently, but with a slight eyebrow wag.
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Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2008 10:32 pm
The car...right, he'd forgotten about the car.
As Tourma slipped off to change, he wandered out of the vacant bedroom, lingering in front of it with his hands in his pockets as he rocked on his heels once idly. His mom had thumped it into him early-on that it was impolite to go wandering in other people's houses when you were a visitor.
Though, technically, that wasn't exactly the case here...
Taking her up in her invitation, he retraced his steps back to the kitchen opening the fridge to scan it over. The amount of greenery and health food inside took him a bit offguard....but, like a holy beacon amid it all, sat the last two survivors of what had once been a six pack of Sprite.
He had no sooner broken one off and popped the tab as he let the fridge door close than Tourma returned. He started a bit at the sudden change in her wardrobe, but it was not a violent reaction.
"I don't blame you." he told her, smiling as he drank off a swallow of the soda. "I lost one of my favorite shirts last time its radiator overheated..."
That, however, had not been due to oil. THAT had been due to not being able to touch the cap because it was too hot and having no rags on-hand to put between his palm and the searing metal....so his 1-Up shirt had been made to suffice. No amount of washing had been able to remove the stains of the engine crud.
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Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2008 11:00 pm
"I guess it'd be extreme to assume that you have rags in your car now?" The sarcasm revealed just how nervous she had been earlier meeting a complete stranger earlier. It was naive to think that she now knew Ken, but he at least didn't give her the 'HeeBee-GeeBees'.
Tying her hair back with an old bandanna to keep the grease out of it, she ducked impatiently into the garage, which unlike most garages, was heated. It cost more, but with the time her father and her used to spend in there, it was worth it not to always be wearing overly large jackets. They were cumbersome, to say the least.
Tourmaline turned the light on and gathered a selection of general tools that she assumed they'd need. "Could you pop the hood for me? Since it's your car and all..." She gave a sheepish smile when she realized that she was ordering around the other teen a bit.
Oh that spoiled girl habit.
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Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2008 12:15 am
"Yeah rags, old shirts, they're all in the trunk." he told her with a dismissive wave of his hand. "I'm not going through trying to troubleshoot my radiator with no shirt on in the middle of March again."
His tail gave a twitch, betraying his agitation as he recalled the incident, but he laughed a bit nonetheless.
As she asked him to pop the hood, he nodded, setting aside the can of Sprite. "Oh! Sorry, yeah." he told her, moving to obey. She was being nice enough to look at the car for him, he wasn't going to get snippy about being told what to do.
He slipped in the driver's side fumbling for a moment until the hood gave a loud CHUNK as its latch popped, yawning open a short distance in an almost ominous fashion.
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Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2008 1:13 am
Her tail swished behind her as she walked around his car to pull the rags and old out of the trunk before checking under the hood. To her, it was a good sign that he had learned from his prior mistake, because as far as her experience with boys was concerned, they didn't really learn from their mistakes.
If she was lucky, this one would even put the toilet seat down.
Returning to the car and pushing the hood up to it's full open state before grabbing a rag and bending over under the hood. Whistling to herself, she started simple, checking the oil first and then continued her systematic search for the main problem. Something to fix now and keep the car from dying anytime soon. She didn't have enough time to fix everything, but if Ken did move in, she figured he'd let her play Miss Fix-It.
"So, do you dance at all?" Tourmaline asked suddenly, poking her head out from behind the hood for brief moment and then ducking back behind it.
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Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2008 1:23 am
He gave a startled chuff of laughter at the question as he withdrew from the driver's seat and retrieved his soda from where he'd set it. "Dance? Me?" Moving around the side of the car where he could better watch her, he watched her go through checking the car's vital signs with the same practiced precision of a surgeon.
"Nah, can't say I do....well, I mean, I've never been, rather." He highly doubted the little victory jaunts around his room when a boss died in one of his games counted as dancing and wisely didn't mention it.
Stealing a quick look at Tourma as she worked, he supposed she likely did, though. She had a body that looked well-toned and suggested that if she DIDN'T dance, she was surely doing something else to keep it in shape.
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Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2008 1:56 am
She didn't even bother to suppress the grin that had appeared with his response. "You don't have to go anywhere special to dance. It's about expressing emotions through your body... Telling a story."
She'd totally have to make him dance sometime.
Pausing to shine a flashlight at the engine, she let out a noise of realization followed by a tut-tutting noise. "There's a crack in your engine block, for starters..." Tourma stood up and wiped her hands on a clean rag before rummaging through a few labeled drawers along the wall. As messy as she may be in her room, the garage was well organized and looked like an OCD owned the place.
"I can stitch it back together no problem, but don't try this yourself if it happens again." The probability of him even identifying this problem without the aid from someone was laughable, but she didn't hold it against him. After all he probably knew lots about computers that she had no clue about. To each their own.
With the supplies in her hands, the Skullmonkey returned and set up a hanging light. "So what kind of games do you play?" Game store employees had to play games too right?
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Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2008 2:12 am
What she was telling him were things that, when heard at one of the garages he'd gone to in the past, would have made him want to cry. Hell, even when they said its oil filter needed a change, that usually meant spending more money than he had on him.
A cracked engine block sounded ominous....and expensive. Even if, for some reason, Tourmaline decided she didn't want him and Raven moving in, he would have to come up with SOME way to thank her for doing this.
At the mention of games, he perked visibly. "Mostly Xbox right now, but me and Raven run a Warcraft guild too. Its mostly casual players so we only get to raid on weekends, but we all kinda take care of each other."
He realized he was being rude, and tried to ping the conversational ball back into her court. "How about you? Any hobbies aside from cars?"
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Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2008 8:30 pm
As if she read his thoughts, a voice echoed from underneath the hood, "You save buttloads of money on car repairs when you do them yourself." Poking her head out, Tourma threw him a wink to show that she was just giving her a hard time.
Once her supplies had been regathered, she disappeared again, making a sort of 'uh huh' noise in response to his talking about raiding and Warcrack. She just, didn't want to seem rude or disrespectful. Though, in retrospect an actual word probably would have been better than a noise that resembled a grunt.
With delicate fingers, she began stitching the crack closed with slow, yet purposeful movements. His question caused her to swish her tail in thought. "Well... I used to dance, I really wanted to become a famous choreographer... But I had to stop." The abrupt pause only amplified the strain in her voice.
The passion that she always carried for dancing had been tainting with the issues with weight that had stemmed from something she loved so much. Oddly enough, it remained the closest thing to a break up that she had ever experienced.
Time for a subject change.
"Now I mainly do mechanics stuff, and it gets kind of lonely to be honest." She blinked to herself post utterance, seriously grateful that he couldn't see her face well enough, if at all. Wow, what an amazing subject change.
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Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 8:07 pm
Kendall had been about to ask her why she'd had to stop dancing, but at the subject change, decided it likely wasn't something she cared to talk about.
As she ventured down the new path of conversation, he seemed oblivious to the awkward turn her demeanor had taken with the statement and leaned against the frame of the car where he could hear her better without her having to yell and without him having to keen his ears.
"I can imagine." he said. "Not like there's a lot of room for socializing when you're up to your shoulders in a car."
"I get plenty of socializing at my job, its just not the kind I really benefit from." he told her with a wry chuckle. "Nobody asks how I'm feeling, they just yell at me to hurry and find them 'onna them thar Nintendey machines'."
At the last words, he did a poor imitation of a hillbilly-type voice. Stupid? Yes. Accurate? Unfortunately. The joys of retail.
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Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 8:50 pm
His obliviousness, no doubt genuine, put her at ease and she chuckled lightly into the bowels of the car. At his impression, her head popped up abruptly, nearly taking out the hanging light in the meantime. "You've got to be kidding me. People really ask that sort of stuff?" Her mouth hung open somewhat, and she shook her head. "I mean, I'm not exactly gamer savvy, but I know what a GameCube is..."
Never mind that she had only seen them in the stores and in Morty's clutches whenever he had lived with her grandmother.
"There's a reason I never wanted to work in customer service, but hey... Look on the bright side, at least you don't work on tips. I hear that's brutal." A 'you should be dearly lucky' look was sent his way on top of a too serious nodding, but she soon broke into a smile.
This was great. Tourma had forgotten what it was like to just sit and talk to someone about normal little things. It seemed that whenever she spoke to someone lately, the topic remained serious. It exhausted her, to be honest.
A sudden thought entered her head and she cocked her head to the side while staring thoughtfully at Ken. Not a word left her as she let the silence build. A concentrated nibble graced her lips as she stepped closer to him. Reaching out towards him, she brought her hand up to his face. And with a quick, planned movement forward...
...She dragged her finger between his eyebrows, smearing engine grease with the precision of a great artist to form the most beautiful uni-brow in the existence of Gaia.
Her Cheshire grin and sharp step backwards out of arms' reach explained it all. There were, no words.
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Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 9:27 pm
"Yeah, no tips where I work. But I still have to count out the till every night and put it in the...."
He hadn't noticed she was drawing closer until she was nearly in his face, staring at him. He blinked at her in confusion, his tail giving another flick behind him. "Uh..."
The tension had allowed him just enough time to wonder what she had in mind before her finger had brushed between his eyes and she was back at a safe distance again.
....okay?
He reached up, rubbing at where she'd touched with the back of his hand and eyeing the smear of brown-black on his skin. The impish grin suddenly made all the sense in the world.
"Aw, what the hell?!" he exclaimed in playful outrage, laughing as he rubbed at it again, trying to make it disappear without much success.
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Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 9:55 pm
"I just had the urge," she explained behind a smile straining with the flood of laughter pushing to break out. The dam broke when he smeared the grease across his forehead, defeating the purpose of connecting the eyebrows in the first place.
Gathering her composure, her tail tip flicked while the rest stayed still. "You need a goatee, too," she finally said, taking a cautious step towards the other teenager.
With the utmost care, her left hand reached into the car to gather more ammo. When it became visible once more, the pads of her fingers were covered in an ominous black substance. "Or better yet," Tourma continued, eying him like an art project, "How about one of those curly mustaches... And some chops."
All of a sudden, she fenced forward with her finger outstretched, her target this time being his upper lip.
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