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 Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 12:04 pm
"Alright, Ms. Weathersby, I'm going to need you to sign here, here, here, and..." The Liberty Center attendant paused, running her finger up and down the cover sheet of a packet. "...Here. That's the health and liability signature. People forget that one all that time."
Kit seemed somewhat flustered by the amount of paperwork thrown at her, though she supposed that, all in all, it made sense, considering that she was registering Mari for school, daycare, and as a Gaian citizen, all in one. Nevertheless, it was a bulky pile of paper, and as Kit carried it over to a table to read it over and sign, she thought that perhaps she could hear her arm muscles wail. Maybe it was just her imagination. Or the daycare center. It had to have been one of the two.
Mari had, in the meanwhile, taken observations on the waiting room fish tank, eyeing a red guppy with particular interest. She put her hand to the glass and then lifted it, jumping at the popping noise she made, then with a wiggle of her ear fins, she walked back over to her guardian, peering over the woman's shoulder curiously.
"Fiiiish," she murmured, pointing back to the tank and the guppy. "They have fish, Kitty." When Kit didn't respond all at once, the girl gave an indignant huff and started pulling at the hem of her guardian's shirt. "I said fish!"
"I told you I wasn't going to answer to Kitty," the woman responded, her eyes never looking up from the paper. "What are you supposed to call me?"
"Kit or Mommy, they have fish!" Mari cried out, continuing to tug at her shirt. "Can we get fish, too, Kit or Mommy?"
Kit sighed, and thought perhaps that she should reiterate the fact that it was 'Kit' or 'Mommy', not both. But, considering the slowly building headache from all the small print, Kit found that she could only close her eyes and nod once. "Sure thing, Mari, just as soon as we get all this paperwork done."
Satisfied, Mari nodded in response, then wiggled her way into a seat beside Kit's, flapping her ear-fins idly as she looked down at the starfish attached to her waterlogged boots. It had been raining outside, and as much as Starry liked the water, he didn't seem to appreciate the flecks of mud across his exoskeleton. Mari internally promised to put him in good water later, then went back to her idle-ear flapping, her gaze and her thoughts somewhere far off in the distance.
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Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 2:04 pm
A few more instances of redecorating the classroom walls, and Fish had found himself dismissed to the office. However irresponsible it might have been to send a kindergartner to the office by himself, that was what was presently occurring. The little boy pushed the door open and slipped in.
The only thing he liked about getting sent to the office was looking at the fish tank. He climbed up onto a row of chairs and peered in, watching the guppies flit about.
Only then did he notice a most peculiar creature on the other side of the tank.
Fish hopped off the chair and went around to investigate.
"Are you a really big fish?" he asked the little girl he found.
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Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2009 10:32 am
It was too early in the morning for strangers, and when the boy approached Mari, she blinked, her blank eyes wide, and her ear-fins flared out in surprise. However, after clutching at the arm of her chair for a moment, she realized that the chubby one was no threat, and she relaxed, though admittedly somewhat perplexed by his question.
"Fish?" Mari asked, shaking her head. "I'm not a fish, I'm a Mari. That's a fish," she said, pointing to the fishtank. She then looked up to Kit, who while still doing paperwork was watching the exchange with amused curiosity. "And that's my Kit or Mommy." She nodded, feeling that her introductions were adequate enough.
She then gave the boy a critical stare, noticing the webbing on his hands. "Are you a Dutchman?" she asked, her gills flaring. Chloe got mad whenever she said Dutchman, so it had to be a bad thing.
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Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 1:47 pm
"No," replied Fish, blinking. He climbed up onto a chair next to her and regarded the tank from a different angle. Then he looked back at the girl, blue eyes wide. "Whassa Dutchman?" he asked curiously.
He pointed to himself. "I'm not a dutchman," he assured her. "I'm a person. M'name's Fish." He beamed at her, rather proud of himself and his glorious name and its appropriate fit in context.
This was quickly getting rather confusing.
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Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 8:08 pm
"A Dutchman's a...uh...iunno," Mari concluded, shaking her head. "Aunt Chloe keeps saying stuff about a Dutchman, so I want to find him."
And that was about the point when things got confusing for her. "You're a fish, and you thought I was, too?" At this, her fins drew back closer to her head, her expression perplexed. "How are you a person and a fish at the same time?"
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Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2009 8:35 pm
Fish furrowed his brow in consternation. How was she confused? It made perfect sense to him. "I'm a person," he repeated, "An' my name's Fish."
He motioned to the tank. "Those're fish, but not people. I'm Fish, and I'm a person, and Fish's my name."
He thought for a moment, and then added, "Lemme know what a Dutchman is once you know."
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Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2009 8:15 pm
"Ohhhhhh," Mari replied, and having been enlightened, she let out a hiss-like giggle that came mostly through her gills. Starry the creatively-named starfish inched about halfway up her boot, but other than that, made no other response to the new source of stimuli. In the meanwhile, Kit was looking up from her papers, still suitably amused.
"It all sounds pretty fishy to me," the woman added, chuckling to herself at her own pun. However, the utterly blank look Mari gave back in reply caused her laughing to die off into a weak mutter, the toddler staring her down until she went back to her paperwork, circling strange figures and x-ing and o-ing where need be.
"'ll tell you when I know," Mari said with an indicative nod, once she was sure that her Kit or Mommy was back to being obedient. Then, something occured to Mari, and she tensed, her ears flapping with the sudden discovery.
"Wanna help me find him?" She asked the fishy boy, clasping her hands together. "It'd be an addendur, I think..."
"Adventure," Kit corrected without looking up, for fear of catching the girl's silent creeper gaze.
"That thing," Mari nodded, as if she'd said it right the first time.
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Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2009 8:26 pm
Fish clapped in excitement and hopped down from the chair. "Oooh, yeah!" he said. "I like adventures!"
He looked around the office, eyes wide in curiosity. There were lots of cabinets and stuff in here - would the Dutchman be hiding in one of those? Or in the ceiling? People always hid in ceilings in movies. What about under the couch? If the boogeyman could be under the bed, surely the dutchman could be under the couch...
He looked back at Mari, figuring she knew more about it than he did.
"Okay," he said, "Where do we look?"
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Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2009 8:53 am
Mari gave a definitive nod, stepping forward from her guardian to start her bold new adventure!
...Except she really didn't know how to find a Dutchman, either.
She had a few options. She could steal Kit's magic call box and press the buttons until Aunt Chloe answered her call box and ask her, but Aunt Chloe was not a person she really wanted to talk to. She could ask Kit or Mommy, but she probably didn't know a thing about the Dutchman, and then she'd be losing face in front of her new-found friend. She was supposed to be an expert.
What would experts do? Nothing less than charge in confidently, that's what!
"Uhhh...that way!" Mari shouted with a finger outstretched to the front door, where just outside she happened to spy a sinister-looking mud puddle. With a jump, she bounded through the doors and promptly began to splash her boots in the darkly colored slop, much to her starfish's dismay.
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Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2009 8:57 am
Fish cast one baleful look back into the office, where he supposed he was supposed to be getting a lecture about how it was bad to draw on the walls, and followed Mari happily out the door. He took a running leap into the puddle and landed with an oozy squish, sending a torrent of muddy water into his sneakers and splattering his shorts and t-shirt with dark flecks.
"Dutchmen live in mud puddles?" he asked, thinking that, perhaps, he was beginning to understand.
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Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 11:42 am
"Sometimes they do," Mari said, stomping at the mud, "But you have to splash extra loud to wake them up so they come out." With that, she began to jump up and down, her eyes alight with purpose. And the mud, being somewhat slippery as most mud tends to be, responded by being especially slippery where her feet landed next, causing her to slip right into the muddiest, wettest part of the puddle.
She sneezed, flapping the mud off of her ear fins as she looked up to her newfound companion, who also seemed a bit less clean after the whole incident. "Uhhh...sorry," she murmured, blinking slowly while, in the meanwhile, her starfish warbled in irritation. "Guess I splashed too extra loud."
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Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 11:51 am
"Guess so," nodded Fish, flicking mud out of his eyes. He smiled a slightly muddy smile at her, just to show her it was okay, and then looked around curiously. He didn't think he saw any dutchmen.
"If that didn't wake 'em up," he observed, "D'you think there are any here?"
Maybe they should try more puddles!
"Let's go splash in another!" he enthused, doing a muddy little dance.
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Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 12:40 pm
"Hmm..." Mari thought pensively, or at least as pensively as a five year old was capable. "Maybe he heard us, so he moved." An uncharacteristically wicked grin curled up from her blue lips, and she stumbled up from her seated position, flopping into the next puddle on her hands and knees with a self-satisfied cry. None of the roommates had ever offered to play in the mud with her before, not even Devan, so Mari found the experience rather exciting. It occurred to her that maybe she could, in fact, enjoy the company of someone her age.
"Mari," Kit called out with a frown, half-emerged from the front door with a rather flustered-looking administrator. It was only then that the fish-girl remembered her manners, and with a quiet flap of her ear fins once again, she murmured, "Uh-oh..."
Kit stepped forward towards the two toddlers, more concerned than upset but her mouth turned downwards nonetheless. "Really, Mari? I mean, we just gave you a bath, and you're killing the water bill as it is--" She paused, looking at the other aquatic-looking boy for a moment. She opened her mouth to complain about their actions, but realized in that moment how parent-y and uncompromisingly uncool she sounded, so she simply let out her gathered air with a sigh.
"I guess its too late to tell you to get out of the puddle at this point, but please try to consider Aunt Chloe's bathing schedules next time?" The administrator seemed unhappy with Kit's assessment of the situation, but did not move to comment, except to stare down at Fish in that disapproving way that only administrators can seem to do. In the meanwhile, Mari looked at Fish with a blank stare, unsure of what to do now that she'd been caught mud-handed.
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Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 1:01 pm
Fish frowned, caught in the act, and shrugged to Mari. He was good at getting into trouble, but not necessarily at getting out of it. Cautiously, he met the administrator's eyes.
"Oops," he whispered to Mari. The administrator's hand closed around his wrist and began to tug him back towards the building.
"Byeeeeee!" he called as he was dragged away. "Bye, Mari! We friends, right?"
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Posted: Sat May 09, 2009 8:18 am
Mari's eyes widened as she watched the strange lady carry off with Fish, her ear fins flaring up in the face of a perceived sudden danger. She half-stood, hesitant of what to do in the situation, but nevertheless she nodded at his question, murmuring a "Yeah, friends" low enough so that the administrator would have no reason to turn her scary eyes upon herself. She watched the woman walk away with her first real friend, though it was only once they'd gone through the door that it hit her.
That was no office lady. It was the Dutchman, here for Fish after being disturbed in his puddle.
The fish girl let out a cry, and stumbled to her feet, but before she could get any farther she found herself stopped by a pair of peachy arms. "Hey, now, where are you going? You can't go inside all muddy," Kit said softly, pulling the girl up to rest on her hip.
"But the Dutchman took Fish!" Mari said, suppressing a whine because that was something that Mari simply didn't do. Kit sighed, smoothing out the girl's hair before shaking the mud off of her hand.
"Chloe's been telling you that stuff again, huh?" Kit groaned, walking away with the fish-girl bundled in her arms. "Let me tell you some things about Chloe and the Dutchman..."
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