|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 6:33 pm
**A Modest Proposal** Nahuel had gone to work instead of school today. He was just getting in now, dusting the dirt from the site off his jeans and tracking mud across the tile. Orli was at the table, playing solitaire with a deck of cards she had scavenged.
“Hey,” said Nahuel. His sister looked like a person now, instead of a baby-shaped blob sort of thing. It was kind of weird.
“Hey,” said Orli. “Where’s Mom?”
“She had a meeting after work. She’ll be home later.”
“Okay,” said Orli. She went back to her cards. Nahuel rooted around in the cabinets to see what they had to eat.
“Mom won’t be home to cook,” he said. “You want anything in particular?” Orli shrugged. Nahuel found a carton of pasta and put a pot of water on to boil. “Where’s Ranza?” he asked.
“Sulking,” shrugged Orli, finishing her game and shuffling the cards. “Why aren’t you mad about the garden?” she asked. “Wasn’t it yours first?”
Nahuel made a sound like he was thinking and clattered the pots around for a bit. “I am mad about it,” he said finally, “But I have better things to be doing and worrying about than the fact that someone sold something I didn’t own in the first place and now it’s condos.”
He inspected the refrigerator. “Do you want marinara or Alfredo?”
Orli knew her brother couldn’t eat cheese sauce and didn’t feel like being a brat and making him cook something inedible (at least by his standards). “Marinara,” she said with a sigh, and gathered the cards up to shuffle. Nahuel got out a jar of red sauce and dumped it into a bowl.
“You know what I’ve been thinking?” he asked.
“What?” asked Orli, beginning to lay the cards out again.
“We should audition for the school play.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” said Nahuel. He wiped his hands on a dishrag and pulled a battered paperback out of his back pocket. He tossed it to her. “It’s Romeo and Juliet,” he said. “You should read it. Shakespeare’s a cool guy. I’ve been reading a lot of his stuff lately.”
Orli flipped through the book. A play, huh? Could be cool. “What part do you want?” she asked.
“Tybalt,” said Nahuel, going back to cooking. “He gets to kill someone, and then he gets killed.”
“Ooh, who kills him?” asked Orli, thinking this might be a part she wanted.
“Romeo,” said Nahuel. “Male lead.”
“Oh,” said Orli, deciding she would not like to play Romeo. “Who’s he kill?”
“Mercutio,” answered her brother. “He’s got a really great monologue. So I see Queen Mab hath been with you!”
Orli giggled. “Ooh, I see it,” she said, finding it in the book. “This is cool!” It was neat to be included in Nahuel’s plans for mischief rather than Ranza. Served Ranza right for locking herself in their room and reading Twilight over and over. “We should definitely try out.”
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 6:36 pm
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Mar 22, 2009 6:23 am
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2009 4:49 pm
**One Fish Two Fish** Library time was one of the better parts of school, because they got to leave the nursery classroom and walk across the building, passing all the mysterious sights and sounds of the hallways as they went. There were closets with funny noises in them. There were classrooms full of older students. There were janitors pushing carts. There were bulletin boards full of bright, shiny art projects and poster boards about the Gaian government. Other electives, like art and music and PE, happened in the nursery room or in the yard, but for Library time they actually got to go on adventures.
Being in the library was exciting, too. It was so big! With so many shelves! Fish was starting to learn his letters and what sounds they made and how to spell his name – Eff Aye Ess Aeche, F I S H. This meant he could try to read some of the books, at least the littler ones; like the ones on the low shelves with the bright covers and happy pictures.
While his classmates gathered around a computer that let them fingerpaint by touching the screen and read animated fairytales aloud, Fish made his way over to one of the low shelves with bright colored books. He stared at the mysterious covers, pictures of bears and princes and princesses and astronauts and mermaids, and all the words he didn’t know, until he spotted a word he actually understood.
That book had his name on it!
He eagerly reached forward and picked it up. He sounded out the words on the cover. “One Fish, Two Fish,” the book said. He opened it, and quickly realized he was in over his head. He took off into the maze of shelves in search of someone who might be able to reveal to him the secrets of the book. His sojourns brought him across a girl.
She was petite, scarcely larger than some of the bigger kids in the pre-school, but her shape and bearing declared her to be one of the older students. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, a book in her lap and a pair of heavy leather boots lined up neatly beside her (her feet were bare.)
Fish approached with caution. “Can you read this t’me?” he asked, holding up One Fish Two Fish. The girl looked up and examined him with bright yellow eyes.
“Dr. Seuss?” she asked. She motioned for him to join her. Fish hurried to sit down next to her, feeling extremely cool. “This is kiddy stuff.”
She held up the book in her lap. It had a werewolf on the cover. “You want this. It’s better.” Fish’s eyes went wide. She laughed. “What’s your name?”
“M’ Fish,” he answered.
“Orli,” she replied, offering him a hand, which he shook. “And this is Goosebumps. Welcome.”
*
Ultimately, Goosebumps wound up oscillating from utter nonsense to wildly terrifying to blatantly goofy. Orli laughed in weird places, especially when Fish was scared, and that made him laugh so he wouldn’t feel left out. In the end, Dr. Seuss was left forgotten on the ground, and Fish resolved to learn to read better so he might further explore the truly bizarre world that the girl called ‘Goosebumps’.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 8:09 pm
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat May 23, 2009 6:54 am
**Dimmer Switch** Orli stared at Ranza’s sleeping form, frustration growing. Of course, she had known this would happen. Ranza had always always always been older than her – it was just *how* Ranza was presently older than her that frustrated her. Just when she’d thought she’d finally caught up to her sister, her sister was bigger again, in every way imaginable. Ranza had what Orli thought were called “dangerous curves” – hips and a chest to die for. And while Orli could not at present tell what good breasts were, she was still jealous of her sister because this was just the sort of thing that was always so damn important in movies.
So Ranza had killer curves. Where did that leave Orli? She was the shortest and smallest kid in her school. She thought there might even be pre-schoolers bigger than her. She hadn’t heard anything from the star world in ages, even if she sat by the window every night waiting for a summons. Maybe she’d made it all up. Maybe she wasn’t really a star, just some kind of glowing freak.
Even now, she was illuminating the bedroom with her own aura. Glowing freak indeed. She couldn’t even control it – even fireflies could control when they glowed. She shifted uncomfortably – summer was on the way, and the bedroom was hot – and tried to lie down and go to sleep. All she wound up doing was counting the seconds as they ticked by on her digital alarm clock.
Blech. She sat up again, still watching the clock. Usually she had no trouble sleeping this late at night, at least if she’d been out wandering around the city and awake all day. Tonight, though, she just couldn’t get comfortable.
Something on the nightstand caught her eye. Orli reached forward and picked up the small object glittering with her reflected light. Drawing it close to her face, she recognized it as the small star-shaped pendant that the gypsy witch had given her. She’d forgotten all about it until now. You couldn’t really blame her for having forgotten it, of course. It wasn’t like it did anything.
Charm still in hand, she thought again about how she wished she could control her glowing and wished she could be a bit dimmer.
Strangely, this time it worked. Orli opened her palm and blinked at the charm, which now glowed with captured light. Could it really do that? She experimented again, willing the glow completely gone – that worked. Then, a bit nervous that she had messed herself up for good, she willed it back. That worked as well.
She put the charm back on the nightstand. Someone had given her a dimmer switch for her own body.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2009 11:58 am
PRP The Clam Hunt - Polly, Orli, and Austin go digging for clams. Orli mentions the magic charm. Polly initiates an adventure.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 4:42 am
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Jul 02, 2009 5:18 pm
**Has it always done that?** In late June, Durem was hit with the worst heat wave in five years, and Orli found herself unusually affected. Extremes in temperature didn’t usually bother her – she recalled running around in February in only a light jacket and never feeling the cold – but this was different. The weather felt hellishly hot. Feverishly hot, even.
As it turned out, it felt that way to Orli for a perfectly explainable, though not necessarily good, reason. It took a few days, but eventually Eshaa chalked up the sudden change in Orli’s behavior – from roaming the streets and markets of the city on the bike she had newly inherited from Nahuel and Ranza (they had both outgrown it, and Orli was still on the small side for it) to lollygagging aimlessly around the apartment – to illness rather than the excessive heat.
It was then that they realized Orli was running a body temperature of upwards of one-hundred and five degrees.
“How are you even still alive?” demanded Eshaa, and dragged her youngest child off to the emergency room.
Presently, Orli was still there. Since she was obviously not passed out, and you regularly got all sorts of creatures on Gaia, the doctors were not placing her on as high a priority basis as the other patients. So Orli sat boredly in the waiting room while the boy with the broken leg, the woman giving birth to quadruplets, and the teenaged couple with heatstroke were admitted ahead of her. Finally, a nurse tapped her on the shoulder.
“They’ll see you now,” she said.
“I’ve only been here for like three hours,” grumbled Orli as she shot a glare at her mother before following the nurse back into the exam rooms.
The doctor came in a few minutes later. He was a rather tired looking older man, plain run of the mill human. He had a file open and was reading it.
“Orli Cooper?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I’ve got your medical record here. It says you… came out of a cabbage?”
Orli nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“Dr. Akari maintains a fully-functioning hospital as part of Liberty Center,” said the doctor. “Wouldn’t they be more prepared to …?”
“This was closer,” shrugged Orli. “We live in Durem. It’s all the way out between Barton and Aekea.”
The doctor nodded. “With Gaia-born children, I like to speak to them without the parents. Usually they can give me better information. For example, I know from your mother that you’re running a high fever, but in the last minute and a half I have noticed that you’re glowing.”
“I’ve always done that,” Orli told him. He nodded.
“Can I take some blood samples for testing?” he asked. Orli nodded. “I get the feeling you’re not human.”
“No,” said Orli, admiring how perceptive he was. “I’m not.”
He wiped the crook of her arm with an alcohol swab, inserted a needle, and took a few vials. He held it up to examine. “Has your blood always glowed?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Orli.
The doctor tucked the vials into his coat pocket. “I’ll take these to the lab for analysis,” he said, “And request that you stay overnight for observation, if that’s alright with you.”
“It’ll make my mom happy,” shrugged Orli.
“And I know this is asking a lot of you,” added the doctor, “But if you do know what exactly you are…?”
Orli frowned at her hands. Well, she did know, but she’d always figured it was some sort of secret.
“Only if you won’t tell my mother,” she said. “It needs to be a secret.”
The doctor smiled. “I promise.”
“I’m a Star,” she said. “Or something like one. Originally I was a Star. Capital S.”
The doctor nodded, taking this in stride, and let a nurse in to take Orli down to a real room.
“I’ll speak to you later.”
Orli nodded.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Jul 03, 2009 6:07 am
**A late night visit from the red man** That night, the red man came. It was the first time Orli had seen him since she’d grown, and the first time that she had come to her, rather than taking her away to that far-off star city. He sat on the end of her hospital bed, looking utterly incongruous, and shook her awake. Even through the sheet, she could feel his hand was impossibly warm, yet it did not burn her.
Orli opened one eye and looked at him.
“Hi,” she said sleepily.
“I thought I might come check on you,” he said.
Orli looked around the room and motioned to it simply. “I’m in the hospital,” she said with frustration.
“Why?”
“I’ve got a fever,” she shrugged. “My blood’s glowing.”
The red man looked pensive for a moment. Finally he said, “I thought this might happen.”
“What?” asked Orli.
“There are certain things I have refrained from telling you until now,” he sighed, “But it would seem I have no other choice,” he said. Orli sat up and leaned forward attentively. “You were sent to Gaia for observational purposes, but the plan hit a snag. During your descent, you encountered a biotechnological cabbage that consumed your genetic material and altered it. Your resulting form was something perhaps eighty percent Star and twenty percent human.”
“What about my mission?” asked Orli. “Have I been neglecting it for a year and a half?”
“It’s been taken care of by other operatives,” said the red man, waving the question away. “However,” he said, “What I suspect is happening to you is that the human section of your DNA is being rejected.”
“I’m breaking?” asked Orli.
The red man shook his head. “No, you don’t need to be alarmed. It means more of your original nature as a Star is being manifested.”
“Oh,” said Orli. “But why now?” she asked.
The red man shrugged. “There’s no way for me to know. Perhaps you are due for a growth spurt again?”
Orli grinned. “I would like that.” The red man smiled. When he laughed, it sounded like stars clinking together. He ruffled her hair, then leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.
“Good night, Orli,” he said with a smile, and was gone. Orli fell back asleep.
In the morning, the doctor returned and gave her a clean bill of health and told her to go home. Although the fever remained, no foreign infection had been detected by the advanced medical technology. Orli, meanwhile, had gotten the answers she desired during the night, and so left happily and without complaint.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Jul 03, 2009 8:32 pm
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 11, 2009 7:22 pm
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2009 9:34 am
**Only a Matter of Time** It was seldom that the entire Cooper household could be persuaded to sit down and eat dinner together. Eshaa usually had meetings after the dig finished for the day, and Nahuel would take the bus back into town rather than wait for her, so he ate early with Orli. Ranza usually wandered in around midnight and raided the fridge before going to bed. However, tonight the stars had somehow aligned that all four Coopers were sitting around the table at the same time eating spaghetti.
“How was school?” asked Eshaa, eyes panning between each one of her children in turn. It was summer, but Liberty still had classes. Attendance typically dropped during the summer months and the teachers were a bit less zealous about the subject matter, but when children were growing as quickly as the students did, they needed all the instruction time they could get.
“Good,” said Orli.
“Okay,” said Nahuel, who was adamant that he only had a few more months of it before trying to pursue university studies.
Ranza grunted noncommittally. She did not, nor had she ever, attended Liberty and since her growth, her schooling had been largely a matter of self-instruction. She had money, which Eshaa was a bit unclear on the origins of beyond that Ranza assured her it had not come from prostitution.
They went back to eating in silence. Eshaa had never been good at this parenting thing, particularly once her kids were too large to carry around on her hip. Nahuel was close with her, but it had been more professional than familial as of late. Ranza had been steadily withdrawing from all aspects of family life for the past year and a half and it was probably only a matter of time until she made the point of moving out.
Which left Orli. Tiny, glowing Orli. The odd child out, some sort of magical being where her siblings were clearly animal based. If Orli knew what she was, then she hadn’t told her mother. Still, the youngest sibling seemed to be likewise withdrawing from the family, as if certain that she would be leaving it shortly to fulfill some greater destiny.
“My grandfather is coming to visit for a few weeks,” said Eshaa eventually.
Orli dropped her fork and looked up happily. “He is? Sweet!”
“Okay,” said Nahuel, who hadn’t been impressed with Nat Cooper the last time he’d visited. Orli, meanwhile, worshipped the ground the man walked on.
Ranza got up. “I’m leaving,” she announced. She picked up her plate and put it in the sink. “I’m moving out.”
She left the room. No one made any move to stop her. The remaining three Coopers blinked at each other. A moment later, Ranza walked past dragging her ‘Trunk of holds damn near everything’ behind her. No one moved to stop her as she stomped out the front door.
Eventually, they went back to eating. It had only been a matter of time until that happened.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Tue Aug 18, 2009 10:01 pm
**Nat Cooper Returns** While their mother went to the spaceport to pick up Nat, Orli and Nahuel were left to clean house and cook dinner. Orli was mostly too small and too young to do much in the way of the kitchen, so she wound up doing chores while her brother boiled pasta and heated up meat sauce.
She made a game of how quickly she could assemble the camp bed in Nahuel’s bedroom, but did not set up the sheets. (Nahuel could do that himself. Nat got the real bed and that had already been changed.) She vacuumed the living room at lightning speed, though did manage to hit her knees on the coffee table six times in the process. She set the table as fast as she could and barely managed to not break any plates. She even had time to crash in front of the television and watch a few minutes of a Twilight Zone rerun before Eshaa returned.
When she heard the door open, she jumped back up off the couch to go greet her great-grandfather.
And then she hesitated, because she had not seen him in a year and they had both changed in the interim. Nat looked frailer than she remembered – he’d begun to use a cane, and as a result his posture had gone from upright and confident to slightly stooped. He looked thinner, like he’d been ill perhaps, but not like he was ill at present.
He looked right at her and broke into a grin. “Orli?” he said incredulously. “Wow, you’ve grown!”
Orli found herself wrapped in a hug that smelled thoroughly of old person. Had he smelt like that last year? She didn’t remember.
“Where’s Nahuel?” asked Nat, letting go of her.
“In the kitchen,” said Eshaa. “Is dinner almost ready?”
“Yes!” called Nahuel.
They sat down at the table. Eshaa passed around the pasta and a basket of garlic bread.
“Where’s your sister?” asked Nat. “The birdy one.”
“Ranza,” said Nahuel. “She’s gone. She moved out.”
Nat seemed taken aback by this. Eshaa placed a hand on his shoulder.
“That’s what happens on Gaia, Grandad,” she said reassuringly. “Kids come in and out and they live with you until one day they don’t and they grow faster than anywhere else. Everyone here is used to it.”
Orli looked at her mother and wondered if it would mean anything to her when she returned to the night sky. The fevers had finally gone away, but the glowing blood had remained.
“Eh,” grunted Nat, nudging his pasta around on his plate. He looked over at Nahuel and asked, “So why are you still here?”
Orli nearly choked on her roll trying not to laugh. Nahuel looked like he’d just been caught with his hand in a chicken coop.
“Because I’m not apeshit crazy like Ranza is,” he said. Eshaa coughed in a way that seemed to ask him to watch his language. Nat laughed.
“I like this kid,” he said. “Keep him. What about you, Orli? Any daring plans to set out on your own?”
“Eventually,” admitted Orli. “Nothing yet, though…” She hesitated. She’d been toying with the idea of fleet academy more and more lately, but she’d never mentioned it to anyone else before. “I think I’d like to go to fleet academy,” she said. “I want to learn to be a pilot.”
She understood that it did not make sense for a Star to be a pilot, but for the time being she was somewhat human as well, and there was no sense in wasting the opportunity. She had no memories from when she was a Star, at least none she could remember, and as a result felt like every experience was new.
Nat smiled at her, the same sort of roguish, lopsided grin she remembered from last year. “You’re a bit young for fleet academy yet,” he said, “but I might be able to arrange something for you further down the line.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Aug 19, 2009 7:36 pm
PRP Hobby Shop Heroes - Orli and Miles. Orli describes her future career plans, and Miles persists in being blunt and objective, which is not to her satisfaction. She decides that he might be Fish's friend, but that doesn't mean he has to be hers.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
