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 Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:06 pm
Who: Dayo & Zul [with appearanced by Mouse & Alex?]
When: Early evening; almost dark
Where: Gambino Mall parking lot
Weather: The breeze rattles decaying leaves, a chill in the air...
The Frei was restless. After his little display at home, Alex needed to replace the papers that were lost, which found them at the mall. There was some specialty place in the area that were still open; surprisingly to the demon, she had declined to leave Zul home and had driven them both out to Gambino to run her errand. He could still hear the grim tone of her voice as she told him to stay outside, just in case he decided to 'throw another tantrum.' She didn't say it, of course, but he knew it. He could almost hear the words that were unspoken, that she'd rather he burned her vehicle and not the store, if he was going to fight with her again.
Zul thus found himself outside, waiting. His intense blue eyes had already stared down the sun, even though the rays defied his annoyance by still trying to spread over the horizon. The demon leaned against the side of Alex's truck, elbows up on the lip of the bed and his head slightly lowered. Fingers ticked with his own inner thoughts against the warm metal of the vehicle, a light breeze teasing his hair around his tri-horned crown. Bone wings angled over his shoulders, the tips resting against his collar bone while the marbled webbing brushed against the frame of the truck. There was an uncomfortable itch, a threading warmth within his chest that was begging to be scratched, although he didn't know how.
Were he fully formed, he'd have the appearance of the ones you avoid on a dark night.
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Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:28 pm
Late in the day as it was, the Gambino Mall was still as bursting with activity as it had been when the sun was high above, baking its roof. There had been a shoe sale in one part of the massive shopping center, a two-for-one special on board shorts in the other; the stores were all having clearance sales so they could get rid of their warmer-weather inventory and clear the way for winter wear and Christmas decorations.
Sales of any kind drew customers like locusts to a well-tended garden. A sale that practically encompassed the entire mall, and Dayo was positively reveling in the rush without ever having to spend a single penny. She'd spent the whole afternoon here and the air around her had become thick and electric, fizzing and popping with the druglike excitement that trailed behind the throes of shopaholics she followed.
The haze of adrenalin and joy drifted through the parking lot, erratically. The eagle girl didn't want to leave quite yet, but her guardian had been very clear about her curfew.
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Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:46 pm
Puzzling over the itch was only irritating him, ignoring the sideways glances he was getting from passerbys. It was in this that the demon knew the itch was a bad thing; one of his favorite hobbies of all time was people-watching, and just then, he couldn't have cared less if a parade of Wit's waltzed by him. (It might have been a lie, but it was how he felt at the time.)
Zul's blue eyes continued to turn around the parking lot without really seeing anything - or seeing something no one else could - before something worth his attention grabbed it. Grabbed said attention and shook it rather violently! An unfamiliar feeling tumbled around his chest as his face reacted in a new way; a slow, malicious grin, displaying his slightly sharper-than-normal teeth and lowering his brows over his intense gaze. It was his favorite not-prey, who was acting so much like prey in her enthusiastic, wavering manner that the predator in him began to unfurl.
And for a moment, that itch was satisfied by the scratch of letting himself go. The demon floated between shadows of parked vehicles, resisting the urge to curl his fingers and claw his way through them. His intense gaze remained fixed on the wobbling femme, ducking behind a van and feeling. Listening would do no good when one's prey didn't make a noise moving, but Dayo had a delicious, intoxicating feel about her that made his grin grow widely and his eyes light. When he could feel the excitement beginning to ebb out of him, he moved around the vehicle and just as quietly floated behind her.
There was a brief rustle of ribbon as he vaulted himself forward. His tanned, bare arms slipped around her torso, face momentarily hidden in a curtain of her wild, feathered locks before his own half-formed chest found her back, her wings splayed on either side of him. Zul shifted his head next to her ear, purring in a low, self-satisfied tone, "Caught you."
Exuberant laughter escaped him as he quickly beat his bone wings to disengage from the Hawk, not wanting her to retaliate. Would she retaliate? Why did he think she would? And did it matter? Zul decided it didn't, awaiting her reaction with open, almost vicious glee.
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Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 6:07 pm
Dayo was full - full to bursting with the emotions she'd absorbed over the past several hours, like a practiced gourmet who had just finished sampling everything at a five star buffet, minus the laziness-inducing lead gut that came with a satisfying and overindulgent meal when one had a stomach. She was high on excitement, as swallowed up by her own haze as it could intoxicate others, and it was because she was so well-fed that she didn't register the spine-tingling sensation of a predator about to strike lurking after her. Following. Waiting, for just the right moment.
She continued to drift along to the edge of the parking lot, eyes wandering as much as her mind was. The bright paint and chrome of the cars occasionally provided warped reflections of tanned skin and whiteflame hair, violently blue eyes and smoke-on-leather wing membranes, but her gaze slid right past them, or drifted away right before she could notice the sunset's illumination of the pavement becoming slightly more orange nearby.
It had been a good day, she thought. She'd even seen a scarf she thought would look pretty awesome on her.
There was a fluttering noise. A sudden halt in her movements, a flash of bronze wrapping tightly around her form. Dayo let out the smallest gasp of surprise, shivering a bit as she felt... it reminded her almost of Jasper, a tiny bead of static something winding into her body.
It wasn't Jasper, though. This wasn't childish, ticklish tingling, it was a single, swift ripple, buzzing its way to her very core. She hovered there in silence even as the baphomet released her - she should have been thrilled to see Zul after such a long while - but there was only the faintest start of a joyous return to their game of chase before it faded as quickly as a breath, and the only motion of her form was a gentle sea breeze pulling at her hair. The bubbly atmosphere was slowly deflating, fading, flickering away from the space around her until there was...
Nothing.
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Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 6:57 pm
Nothing.
Zul was disappointed. The tightly wound spring of devious joy slowly began to stretch and lose its buoyancy, leaving the male Frei discontent and more annoyed that he'd started out. There was no real physical reaction, just a gasp and that was it? No shout, no jump, no whirling, no wild whirlwind of wings with a chase? She couldn't even turn around to see him, which rubbed him the wrong way. Dayo wasn't even moving!
That struck a strange, worrisome chord in him, his self-righteous anger fizzling out into a sore spot glossed over with concern. The demon held onto his smile, no longer the dangerous grin from before, floating around to face the Eagle and really look at her. If it weren't for the ocean breeze toying with her unruly tresses, he would have thought he was looking at a very immaculate statue of his friend. It was rather unsettling, that absence of a smile on her face, the utter stillness she displayed. How badly had he frightened her, he wondered?
His bone wings beat a few times to keep himself upright; the lack of anything coming off of her was seeming to make him feel unstable, more acutely aware that something wasn't right more than his own symptoms. "Dayo?" he ventured to speak to her, his voice mostly 'normal.' "Did I scare you?"
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Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 7:15 pm
It was strange, to see someone who was normally so exuberant, who usually had such a massive presence, suddenly devoid of that large, unseen but colorful aura that gave her the ability to light up all the faces in a room-- it was as if Zul had witnessed an erasure of her identity as a whole, leaving only a still, silent shell in its place. There she sat on the air, the only sign she was still alive being the sky-colored not-flame-but-not-smoke of her rune, smoldering and glowing.
Upon being addressed, her eyes slowly rolled upward to meet his own. What should have been wide gold discs ready to burst with emotion were tarnished, half-lidded, almost unfocusing. Dayo's lack of a smile was the least of one's concerns. Her lips had been slacked into an inert downward curve; her expression was blank, unreadable, every bit as emphatic as the pavement below them. Even before her lips finally peeled open to respond, the answer was clear, Zul hadn't scared her. He couldn't have. There was no sign of fear anywhere on her, everything was loose and inert, hanging in the air like an abandoned marionette.
"Cold," she said, as another breeze brushed past them.
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Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 7:46 pm
Indeed, the demon had enough presence of mind to glance down to Dayo's rune to make sure he hadn't killed her like he had Lorenzo; the spike of guilt there was enough to swallow down the encroaching darkness in him, which instead settled heavily in his chest. What was wrong with him...?
When her eyes found his, he felt...empty. Hollow, almost. As if she was looking right through him rather than at him. The very influence of her nothing was akin to a black hole, making it difficult for Zul to find any clear thought or feeling in the presence of the sheer blankness. It was almost like looking out over a frozen canopy of winter, full of snow and ice but empty of any life within. Did he do that to her?
The single word that came from her lips brought him back to himself, blue eyes refocusing. "Dayo," he murmured, floating closer to her. He thought of Cordelia in that moment, of her cold skin and her attraction to his heat; would Dayo feel the same? The demon had little concept of normal, outside temperature, and couldn't tell if it truly was cold. His skin warmed considerably, the heat rising from his tan skin making his hair shift in the invisible waves. Like the Basilisk, he drew the Eagle against him and held her carefully, bone wings curling over his shoulder to brush some of her hair back.
"Sorry, Dayo," he apologized, "for this." Zul didn't know the magnitude of what he was apologizing for, but he still took the blame for her condition. What should have worried him was the spark of amusement that burned in him for her sudden shift, making him wonder if he was truly sorry at all.
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Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 8:08 pm
As his arms snaked around her once again, Zul would find that Dayo was, indeed, cold to the touch. It wasn't something quite like Cordelia's reptilian cold-bloodedness; instead it was more like touching a windowpane during a rainstorm, or the chill clinging of the air to one's skin on a foggy autumn morning. The latter was probably a bit more accurate, as the baphomet would find, curiously enough, that she was also damp, and parts of his skin took on a bit of extra glow from the moisture as he adjusted his embrace.
The gentle rise in heat around her was producing a strange, but not entirely unpleasant smell. It was a scent like a sweltering summer day, when the air would sag of humidity - the scent was what one experienced when they made the mistake of going outside on those days, taking in drenched breath after drenched breath.
More silence happened. Gravity and inertia had caused Dayo's head to curl in and lean on Zul's shoulder, almost giving off the impression that she was responding to the comfort if one ignored that her arms were still dangling uselessly at her sides. Then, just as suddenly as all trace of her vanished, something changed again-- right when the tiny bit of mirth alit in the horned Frei, her eyes snapped wide open and she moved, shoving her form forcibly into him even though there was no getting any closer. Her little bronze-lacquered claws raised and scraped against his chest as if searching for something to grab onto.
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Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 6:11 pm
She forcefully reminded the demon of a doll; the blank, unmoving features where there was once such potential of joy, the boneless limbs, the way she just pressed against him as if he were all that was keeping her upright. And she was leaking. Zul's temperature lifted just a little more to combat the wetness, which was likely only causing an odd type of humidity in the immediate area. It was beginning to smell like rain between them.
He wouldn't have minded to just float there and hold the despondant Frei, to revel in his sense of irony that he had such a power over his beloved friend and fellow predator, but it seemed the Eagle found that spark of life within her.
Or rather, within him.
Zul's amusement quickly capsized. One moment, he felt the warmth of an inner joy, malicious as it were, and then it was gone - stolen from him, as if sucked right out of his chest and into the claws that were drawing irritated lines down his chest. "Dayo?" he purred, although there was a slight inflection of his voice to pose it as a question. Pride was on the heels of the murdered amusement; the predator in his arms was not yet bested!
"What," came that same, purred tone, not in the least bit upset at the odd feeling of having something taken from him, "are you doing?"
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Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 6:25 pm
That strange buzzing, that curious tingling, the foreign sensation that had entered the eagle appeared to have done more than suppress her normally wild and encroaching emotions -- whatever it was, it had literally devoured the very magical charge of those emotions, almost as if to... make more room for itself, one could almost say. It had left the Frei suddenly drained and empty, as hollow inside as the space around her, starving. It was a hunger that ached down to her incomplete core. Simple, passive absorption couldn't suffice it.
And so her claws had fired themselves forward with her being, piercing into the demon's heart and outright devouring his amusement right from its source. It was gone along with the Dayo he had known a few moments ago; that feeling wouldn't come back until something else came along to rekindle it.
It wasn't enough.
The swell of pride was ripped out of him just as quickly, the eagle's claws digging into him ever deeper. "Hungry," she breathed, and it seemed as though her grip on him was determined to drag him down into the same empty void he had brought to her.
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Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 6:53 pm
The demon had no previous knowledge of Dayo's source of feeding, but he was getting a quick, messy lesson on it right then and there. It felt like her taloned fingers were digging inside of him, rending at parts of him he didn't even know he possessed. Zul grimaced, but his grin was as wide and fixed in place as it had ever been; she was utterly fascinating to him.
That, too, felt snuffed, but with each emotion drawn out of him, more tumbled forth to replace the fallen. He was laughing then, the edge of it not quite right, not quite himself. Zul turned his head this way and that, his jackolantern grin growing into something even a cheshire cat would envy. His arms never left her, despite the ache in his chest and the hold she had on him, instead drawing her towards an unsuspecting family a few aisles down. They were smiling and laughing; a woman, a man and two kids. Would they cease to laugh, once Dayo had her way with them? Would she rend their joy from them, force them to partake in her heart of marionettes?
"There?" he whispered into her feathered hair, a terrible type of glee settling in him. She could eat that too, if she wanted - this, this was far more fun than chasing her! Working with her was like finding a morbid, untapped potential in him. And with each absence of emotion came the absence of conscience - and the desire to see it befall others.
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Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 7:16 pm
The eagle tore at each new emotion wildly and ravenously. Both sets of fingers were raking into his flesh now, creating a hodgepodge of scrapes that sealed themselves up as quickly as they were made; her fingertips were becoming slick with cherry-tar dribblings that caked under her nails and ran down to stain the worn denim on her wrists. Zul didn't seem to mind, and Dayo didn't seem intent on stopping, not so long as he kept popping out new feelings like a masochistic vending machine--
She slowed to a stop, her arms limping once again, when she felt behind her four pristine, intoxicating beacons of joy. Slowly, she was already turning even as Zul's whisper too-gently kissed at her ears. From the distance the happy family was at they probably looked like a set of lovers, half-bodied but still in a sweet embrace. Sharing sweet nothings - that part of it was true, in an unorthodox sense.
Dayo's hands lifted up once again, this time to unwind the demon's from their grip around her so she could float slowly forward, very much the dark cloud on the horizon of the humans nearby. As she approached they couldn't help but stare. Who wouldn't, if they happened to cross a half-bodied, floating beauty? One of the children, a boy at about seven years of age, pointed and grinned, awe and wonderment plain on his face.
The blonde Frei's eyes locked onto him, blank and predatory.
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Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 8:02 pm
Zul was only dimly aware of the strange pang in his chest, not feeling any pain or discomfort at his skin was sheared beneath desperate talons, only a sense of bemused confidence. He was dictating her desperateness for feeding, and even if he was handing over emotions like choice cuts of meat to a starving lioness, he could not stop himself, even if it meant he would be left with none for several days. There were no consequences for him, in his mind, only the power and sway of being dominant.
And so he let her go, unleashing the caged animal to the unsuspecting onlookers. How easily they were captivated by Dayo, not realizing that they stood like sheep to the inevitable slaughter! How malleable the herd could be when the predator was all beauty and intrigue. How had Zul missed this all this time?
The demon floated back a bit, letting the sick light of the parking lot fall off of him. This wasn't his show - he simply was supporting the lead, as Dayo knew well what it seemed she should - and could - do. Zul meandered towards the side of the family's vehicle, resting his arms over the top of it and staring eagerly at their faces, which were all focused on Dayo. His anticipation lead fuel to their own emotions, his own sick game of calling the dark enchantress to her stage.
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Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2009 1:06 pm
In retrospect, the family probably should have noticed some ominousness about the eagle girl as she drifted ever closer to them: the blankness of her gaze, the uneasy silence of her approach, how hands were smeared and spattered with still-fresh strings of Zul's blood. But she was a pretty thing with a human face. Fluffy, biscuit-colored hair and gorgeous wings and how her body suddenly but gracefully ended right where her diaphragm should be had captured all of their attention, and they seemed elated that they had captured hers.
Even the warning sign that was the curious, pulling nothing of the air around her reached their senses too late.
The overexcited child was first. Before his grin had time to falter Dayo's claws were hooked into the flesh of his face, the force making him caterwaul backwards until he'd gotten himself pinned to the ground. His own skinny, weak limbs struggled, uselessly, rapping against the Frei's arms for a moment that decayed into motionlessness. Her hand had been cold and damp. When she finally let go it was stained with lighter, more human blood and the boy's face was slicked with moisture, his own expression turned shocked, glassy-eyed, hopeless.
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Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 8:54 pm
The parents probably moved. Or they should have. The wild sparks of fear that crested into a roaring wave of outrage were just as quickly stripped from their confused, pale faces. Motions began but ended in a slow lull of nothing, watching the bird of prey mark their child's face. On the heels of each emotion came another; roiling at what had happened, alarm, and even the helplessness that came with it all - it became garnish to the feast, stuffing to the fatter onslaught of fear and uncertainty that continued to be removed from their beings.
The humans stood there, and were devoured inside out.
Blue eyes of hottest flame simply bore witness to the emotional murder. He was, for the most part, rather apathetic to the destruction of their free will, the carnage of their feelings. Each minscule bolt of amusement or trickle of mirth was lost in the feeding, but it was a willing sacrifice, a spice over the dish that was being devoured. Zul would have felt pride, but he was content enough - while he could be - to see his friend play with her food.
She was a fearsome, terrible beauty. All honey and cerulean, with a small splatter of vivid red painted over a darker, brackish blot on her fingers. He dimly knew that the darkness there was his, just as he knew her insatiable appetite had to have something to do with him, but he couldn't find it in him to care. No doubt, that had also been fed upon. Laying one arm over the top of the car, he rested his chin and jaw against his forearm and smiled. The demon would not begrudge the Eagle her first real meal.
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