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 Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 9:42 pm
That had definitely been an odd dream. More odd than the dream she'd had about devouring people. Well, it certainly had to be if she was dreaming about other people devouring her right? And not just anyone, but Zeke of all people! Zeke certainly wouldn't do something like that.
With a soft groan, Piper brought an arm up to her face, trying to shield the sunlight that was streaming in through her window. It was hard though because there was a lot of it. With a small groan, she reached out to try and grab the curtains on her window, rolling somewhat onto her side in her bed, grasping and grasping and.. where in the world were her curtains? Come to think of it, why was her bed so hard?
Piper's eyes shot open slowly and were flooded with sunlight which, oddly enough, didn't hurt despite being closed so long. At first glance, she immediately noticed that she wasn't in bed. In fact, she wasn't even in the school. Piper was sitting in the center of a trail that led into the forest on grounds. When did she get out here? Maybe she'd been sleep walking again. With a sigh she sat up, reaching up to rub her eyes. However, as she glanced down and saw her clothes, she immediately frowned. Why was she covered in so much blood? Come to think of it, why was her collar bone showing? That was interesting.
Piper reached up and plucked a small twig from where it had been caught under her clavicle, bringing it up to her eyes so she could inspect it. Huh, and now she could grow trees? That was even stranger. She dropped it to the ground and reached up to poke at her exposed bone, finding that it actually.. didn't hurt. If she'd been anyone else, she probably would have been screaming from shock at this point. Perhaps her brain would have even shut down. But Piper? No, she just sat there, looking around like she was lost.
So that wasn't a dream after all? Then she expected Zeke to come back right this instant from wherever he had wandered off to because she was already bored.
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Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:21 pm
Piper had to wait there alone for a few more minutes before she heard the sound of sneakers. If anyone had walked on the path while they were a student, there was a good chance they had seen Zeke running. He liked running on this path, the scenery was good and constantly changing. The trees met overhead like the arches in a church, and the sun was shining through the branches and hitting the ground in small diamond-shards. It would've been beautiful, if it weren't for the fact that the runner had a javelin through his stomach and he was running to the girl he had partially eaten.
"Uh... hey!" Zeke slowed to a stop when Piper came into his view. Even though she had a green tint to her olive skin and her collar bone was visible, Zeke found his ears turning a darker green. She sure was pretty. He took a couple of steps, nervously chewing on his lower lip.
"I hope you aren't mad or anything. Really, isn't this okay? If you want to try running sometime, you'll see! We can go faster than ever before!" Zeke smiled, and for a moment he almost looked like his old self. But then his smile disappeared, and he looked worried. "There's just... hunger. Even after I ate you, the pain was only gone for a little while. But it's okay, I found something!"
With a smile, he held up a hand. It didn't look too fresh, but it was edible. He didn't know it, but that hand had once belonged to Andeon. Why it was seperated from his body (and head), no one could tell. But Zeke had found it, and finders-keepers, right? He looked sheepish again as he looked down at his mud (and blood)-covered sneakers.
"You wouldn't want to share it with me, would you?"
Even as the confidence of a zombie, his flirtation skills needed working on.
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Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:39 pm
Piper had leaned back on her hands and taken to staring blankly up at the tree tops, her mind zoning out as it normally did while she waited. She was positive that Zeke had to be coming back, because it just wasn't like him to leave her waiting. Then again, it wasn't really like him to kill her either, but that was dirt under the rug. She blinked rapidly as she heard the sound of footsteps, her head snapping to look down the open end of the trail. A pleasant smile broke out onto her face as a familiar blue head came bobbing into view.
"I guess it's okay, I've only been awake a little while so I wouldn't really know if it wasn't, would I?" She shifted and started to push herself to her feet, using her arms to shove herself up. Just as she got to a standing position, however, she caught sight of her arm moving and was distracted by the way she could see her bones working. "This is really odd," she said, half to herself and half to no one in particular. She brought up her finger and prodded at the joint of her shoulder as she rotated her arm a bit, her brows raising in surprise.
"I'm not mad though," she chirped, turning to look at him as her attention suddenly left her arm and her hand fell back down to her side. "I mean, I didn't like it a whole lot, but I feel better now, so I guess that's what matters isn't it? I can be here with you instead of being upset about you being gone!" She grinned, pleased with her revelation, and crossed her arms over her chest as she listened to what else he had to say. Now that he mentioned it, she did have this odd hollow feeling in her gut, one that felt like it was going to claw her from the inside out. "That's what that is?" Zombie hunger was a lot different from human hunger, she noted.
"I would love to, I'm starving," she groaned, her crossed arms falling so she could put a hand over her stomach. She took a few steps forward, almost as if she might pounce on the Zeke just to get to the hand, but thought better of it instantly. That was no way to treat someone who had just gone out and found you a nice meal, after all. Besides that, jumping on him looked like it might actually be kind of painful. "Shouldn't you get rid of that thing?" She reached out to wiggle the javelin with her hand a bit, her head tilting to the side as she did so. "It looks really inconvenient and all."
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Posted: Tue Dec 08, 2009 3:52 pm
"Actually, it's not inconvenient at all!" Zeke grinned, showing his red-stained teeth. "I stick it in there because it's easier to carry around that way. I mean, you never know when you'll need a javelin, right?" Zeke slowly pushed it through his stomach and let it clatter out on the other side, leaving shreds of his sweater to cover the abominable hole. "I suppose Lucy never knew that the javelin would be useful to her. So, I never know when I'll find it useful to me!"
Zeke tried to mimic Piper's motion of patting the stomach, but it was rather difficult given that there was a hole there.
"Eating is kind of messy for me," he admitted. "But somehow it still works for me. I guess some of the nutrition is absorbed on the way down or something..." Zeke offered Piper a shrug before ripping off the hand's pinkie finger. To him, it was as easy as ripping off a turkey leg.
"Here!" he said as he offered Piper the rest of the hand. "You can have the thumb. It's only fair, since I kind of already had a meal... you know..."
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Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2009 4:42 pm
Piper's eyes followed the javelin as if it were a flame and she were a moth, her eyes watching it until it clattered against the trail beneath their feet. She wasn't certain she'd ever be quite content around the thing, especially when it was going in or out of Zeke's stomach, because even if the two of them were perfectly fine (depending on the definition of 'fine', of course) she still remembered exactly what it had done. Staring up at him, she could remember the emotions she had felt before, and they were not good.
Instead of letting herself get down, she stuffed those creeping emotions back into her human memories where they belonged, successfully managing to do a complete 180 in mood. Typical Piper fashion.
"It's probably just magic," she said with a little shrug, not too concerned with the details of his digestive tract and how it worked now that it had been shredded. Instead, she reached out to grab the hand he offered and stared at it as she tried to figure out how to go about this eating thing. She probably could have just ripped the thumb off, but being that she was used to being such a small girl, she brought the thumb up and wedged it between her teeth. Then, in a bottle-opener kind of motion, she yanked down on the hand until the thumb and part of the hand itself ripped away. She succeeded in spattering her face with bloody bits of tissue, but more than anything she just looked amused.
"Well that's sweet of you!" She smiled as she held the remainder of the hand out to Zeke, apparently unaffected by his mentioning his previous meal. Instead, she was concentrating on devouring the thumb, holding it by the thumb end and ripping off bits like it were a giant piece of jerky. As soon as she started to eat, though, she felt the hunger swarming around in side of her, like a shark enticed by the smell of blood. It was unsettling, so she simply fell into silence, making no noise other than the subtle ripping of the flesh from the thumb she was devouring.
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 10:16 am
"Magic?" Zeke laughed. "You know, before all this started I had never really thought about magic." He took the rest of the hand back before walking a step closer to her. Maybe it was the smell of the flesh, but Piper looked irresistible eating. When he had been human, he might have found it cute... well, maybe. Zeke never had really understood the workings of what was 'cute' or not. Girls were friends, they weren't really all that different.
But now he was undead, and everything was very, very different. He took a bite out of Andeon's wrist (though he didn't know that it belonged to Andeon), chewing on the skin like it was the crispy skin of fried chicken. He took another step towards Piper and reached out to put a hand on her shoulder when the sky went black.
He stared up at the barrier that the Negaverse had made with horror painted across his face. He even dropped the fleshy hand to the ground before hugging Piper in a panic. It was almost a mimic of the terror he had felt when he saw that hand slam against his window, and how he clung to Mackenzie. He couldn't even think about that situation, though. All that mattered was the sky, and its darkness.
"Piper... what's going on?"
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 10:52 am
Piper paused over her half devoured thumb, lips stained from congealed blood and bits of flesh hanging out of her mouth (after all, zombies weren't exactly graceful eaters). "What do you mean you never thought about magic?" She seemed a little stunned, but didn't elaborate, mostly because there was a half eaten body part still dangling in her hands. She still looked quite confused as she went back to nawing on it, making sure to strip every edible piece of flesh from the bone. Whatever Piper thought Zeke should have been thinking of in reference to magic was up in the air, one could only guess with her imagination.
She was still busily eating as Zeke drew near, unsurprisingly unaware of his presence closing in on her. She was hungry and her single-minded attitude towards food as a zombie didn't exactly increase her attentiveness. It was only as Zeke dropped the fleshy hand to the ground that her attention snapped away from the thoroughly mangled bone. For a moment, her face screwed up in confusion again. "Zeke, why on earth did you -"
Then she dropped her own bone as two arms wrapped tightly around her, arms that were zombie-strong and crushing around her tiny, decaying body. For a moment panic set in and she struggled, squealing in his grasp as she fought for air. Oh god, he was going to kill her! Then, reason dawned on her and she stopped wiggling as quickly as she had started. She was already dead, she remembered, which meant she probably had very little use for oxygen.
"What's what?" She asked, shifting in his arms to look up where his attention was focused. She was just thinking about how silly it was to imagine Zeke, dear sweet Zeke, trying to squeeze her to death when she saw it. Her eyes widened as she wrapped her arms around Zeke and squeezed herself against him in a panic, all thoughts of food forgotten for the moment. "Oh god, it's aliens!"
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 1:33 pm
"Aliens?!" Zeke's panicked voice came out more like a wheeze than a screech or yell. "I thought they were zombies! I thought we were zombies!"
The two of them had a vice grip on each other, staring at the sky with not just fear, but trepidation.
"What are we going to do?" Zeke cried. "I suddenly wish that magic were real... I need to think!"
What did a zombie do when it had to think? Well, I'm not too sure, the fact that even youma could think came as a surprise. But, I do know what Zeke did when he needed to think. Zeke ran.
So, still clutching onto Piper, much like he did when they were escaping the fiery dormitory, he started to run. The trees were whirring by, and from the direction Zeke was going in it looked like he was headed towards the track.
"I need to think!!" he repeated.
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 3:10 pm
"We are zombies," she said impatiently, her voice lowering to a quiet whisper as she suddenly realized the aliens might be able to hear them. She hadn't even started to breech the idea of mind-reading devices yet, but she was hoping maybe that didn't work on zombies. "Maybe they're here to harvest us for the secret of life!" Her eyes widened a little at that thought and she dug her nails into his partially ripped jacket, tugging at it as if the idea were of the utmost importance.
"Well.. I dunno what we should do," she said with a blank stare, her hand loosening on his jacket as she stopped and tilted her head to the side in thought. She was good at coming up with conspiracy theories, not so much at finding ways to solve them. Her zoned-out mind was snapped back to reality when she felt him grab her and rush into motion.
"How can you think like this!" She was yelling, despite all notions of aliens having super hearing, because Zeke was running really fast and all she could hear was the sound of wind in her ears. She clutched to his jacket again, staring down at the ground as different things whizzed by beneath their feet. "I think that was a ladybug," she said, blinking and trying to crane her next around and look at something that was already completely gone.
After a moment, she simply sighed and peered up at him again. "So, maybe we should go find the aliens?" Running was good and all, but she wasn't really sure what it was going to accomplish. After all, Piper certainly didn't try anything to make her thought process work better.
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 4:20 pm
When they finally made it to the track, Zeke could concentrate. Even with Piper babbling about ladybugs and aliens and the like, his head was clear... well, clearer than it was normally (being a zombie didn't exactly add to his brain mass).
To be honest, Zeke doubted that aliens had invaded. If she was being sarcastic, he couldn't tell (being a zombie didn't exactly add to his failed sense of humor), but was Piper ever sarcastic? Maybe it was just a storm? A very big, horrible-looking storm. Yes, that had to be it!
"Piper," he sat her down. "We should look around and see what we can find out. Maybe someone knows a lot about weather, or something. This could be a freak typhoon, even! We should try to find out what's going on, and see if we need to seek shelter."
He was awfully safety-oriented for being a zombie.
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 4:38 pm
For what is was worth, when he set her down, she actually looked up at him and paid attention. Well, she at least seemed to be paying attention. Just because Piper was staring at him didn't mean she was really registering a thing he was saying - anyone that had spent five minutes with her was probably aware of that.
"Oh, that's probably a good idea, I bet they've already sent someone down to investigate the planet." She looked around sharply, eyes widened as if she expected ET to come wandering out of the woods at any moment. She let go of his jacket slowly and half turned to look around. Any mention of storms seemed to be lost upon her, but one could always hope she'd actually heard and was just choosing to ignore it in favor of a more interesting hypothesis. Maybe.
"Well, uh, how about I go check out the school?" That was probably the first place aliens would look for signs of life, right? Or.. unlife, anyway.
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 4:49 pm
"Right, okay..." Zeke's head hurt when he was around Piper sometimes. Still, he cared about her so if she was worried about aliens then by-golly he was going to protect her from those aliens!
"You investigate the school, I'll take care of the grounds." Zeke looked at Piper, at her intense stare. A part of him wanted to believe that she was listening to him, but he didn't know. You never really did with Piper, I guess that was part of her mystery. Out of all the people for Zeke to really get his first crush on, it had to be someone who didn't make him seem so dimwitted. Maybe that was part of the attraction, maybe he enjoyed feeling important? He didn't know. He just looked at her, and a grim smile appeared on his face.
"Hey, Piper..." he trailed off before shaking his head. "Be careful out there, okay?
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 5:16 pm
"Alright!" She said, or rather, shouted. It was like a secret mission and she was excited by the prospect of what they might find, even if was questionable whether or not her body was producing adrenaline any longer.
She turned to head towards the charred remains of the school in the distance, humming quietly to herself as she went, and only stopped when she heard Zeke speaking to her. She had only gotten a few feet, so she simply turned and gave her that bright smile that had always been characteristic of Piper - even if it was now a little marred by the bitten chunk that he'd taken out of her cheek. "Don't worry, Zeke, what else can happen? I already died, I'm invincible now!" She knew for a fact that even if she went down, she'd just get back up! After all, she'd spoken to Calintha after they'd beaten her down.
With a little grin and a wave, she turned and began to head back in the direction of the school, a skip in her step. So there was doom looming on the horizon - Piper was going to face it with smile and optimism, like always.
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