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 Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 10:12 pm
Hunka Hunka Burnin' Pain::
Players:: romantic wishes, kotaline
Gladiers:: Nerissa, Milo
Glade:: Epheria Lakefront
Setting:: Sunset. The day is clear and warm, and the stars are just coming out.
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Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 10:19 pm
Milo was contemplating drowning.
Staring into the lake's glassy surface, he didn't see his reflection in the water. Only the hollow shell, the thing that society had deemed to be named Milo, and when one got right down to it, Milo was really a terrible name anyway. No one understood him. No one got what was under this cruel facade, the natural monochrome fur and dark eye circles that made him seem 'depressing'.
He wasn't depressing! Just because he looked the way he did, just because he listened to metal music, like, all the time, didn't mean people could just judge him! Well, they had anyway, and they had pushed him to this. Well, now he'd show them. He'd show all those mindless sheep exactly what they had done to him by being part of the cold, unfeeling System. He narrowed his eyes and dipped a toe into the water, then jumped in before he could think about it.
"OH GOD, I'm drowning!" he shouted, panicking immediately upon impact. "Help, oh God, I didn't mean it to end like this! It was all a mistake!"
There was no real cause for alarm. He hadn't noticed that he had only managed to jump into the shallows.
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Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 10:23 pm
Certain people would call Milo very depressing. Certain people might wish him drowned, if only so that they wouldn't have to deal with him anymore. Certain people might even push him into the water if they had a chance.
Certain people were not Nerissa, who happened to be staring at the gray-furred Cetus and feeling very unimpressed. She let him flail for a minute, and then bounded into the water to pull him out. Unimpressed, she sat in the sand and attempted to stare him into submission; this did not work out too well. She liked to be in motion, to be doing stuff! Stuff like surfing!
"You were in the shallows, dude," said the dude, hopping up and prancing in a circle around the sopping wet Cetus. "No danger there at all." And she stopped where she had been previously sitting, shook herself free of water, and then plopped herself back in place. "Don't go near water if you can't even swim, it's just totally injust."
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Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 10:31 pm
Milo could, in fact, swim. However, in the panic of the moment, he had completely forgotten, and as he felt himself being pulled out, the rescue he had wanted so very badly suddenly seemed to become the most dire insult he could imagine. Getting shakily onto his own two feet, the gladier shot this new Gladier a Look, complete with accompanying pout. "Injust isn't a word," he pointed out prissily, "And I happened to be contemplating a life-changing decision!" Or rather, a life-ending one. "It's very stressful to contemplate a life-changing decision and notice the little details like whether or not I'm in the shallows." Or that he could swim, apparently.
"What are you, anyway, some sort of androgynous life guard?" It was wearing beach shorts, but dude talked like a lady. However, Milo was hardly one to talk about androgyny with his high-pitched whine, natural eye makeup, and long bangs. When he stuck his lip out (as, indeed, he was doing now), he practically seemed like a female himself.
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Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 10:36 pm
"Dude," said Nerissa, apparently impressed by the force of his Look. Or maybe she was just slightly annoyed that her Daring Rescue had gone off without a hitch except for the fact that the damsel in distress hadn't actually be in distress. Whatever the reason, she repeated herself: "Dude."
Stressful or not, man, the beachfront was not a place to be stressed! This guy needed, clearly, to not be stressed at her beachfront. "I'm Nerissa," she informed him with a little toss of her head (her sunglasses almost went flying). "And I am not a dude, or an andro-whatever. You need to stop wigging out, dude. Just chillax, take in some rays!"
She contemplated his colorless fur. "Dude, I bet if you tanned, you'd be happier, dude."
Dude.
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Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 10:47 pm
Now that Milo knew that it was, in fact, a woman (albeit, a woman that had a tendency to call everything dude), he was immediately less irate about being picked up by the neck and dragged. When one had a disposition like Milo, one took all the action that they could get.
Still, he continued to be a least a bit sore about the whole affair, at least for the show of it. Milo had never turned his nose up at an opportunity to sulk before, and he had just been rescued by a chick, after all. That was almost as embarrassing as...
Well, as the circumstance she had rescued him from. Why was his life such a black hole of misery and misfortune?
"This isn't a wig!" he insisted sourly, shaking his head to prove it. "It's my real hair. And how can I chillax when the world is such a terrible place? Can't you see that we're all just meaningless? Just amusing little pets waiting for some hulking human to pick us up and take us home! Nothing we do will ever matter to a species that technologically advanced!" He scrunched up his face, talking in a deep, goofy, mock-human voice. "Oh, you invented a subatomic particle accelerator? That's so cute, good fluffy! It's a serious problem, but society just sits there and makes polite conversation with each other while we stagnate in the technological dark age and ignore the unsung, if not a tad quirky, and perhaps not as handsome as they'd really like, geniuses who can open our eyes!"
He breathed heavily after that rather long-winded rant and said, "I'm Milo." Then, hopefully added, "Call me xMilo."
No one ever did.
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Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 11:11 pm
She waited out his rant, blue eyes staring at him over the rims of her glasses. Then she whapped him upside the head with a paw, a big grin on her face. That was a good human imitation. Nerissa liked that imitation of a human, it was pretty true to form. Maybe she should keep this dude around. "It's not bad," said Nerissa, "as you're sayin', dude. Milo. Dude." What should she call him? He wasn't an ex-Milo, so she clearly wasn't going to call him that, ever. Made a lot more sense to just address him as he was while he was a current Milo.
"We don't have thumbs," she pointed out, "can't Hang Ten. No sub-whatchamacallits for us."
And then, after a bit of a wait, she said, "Wait, dude, were you talkin' about you?" She was giving him the stinkeye, skeptical of his possible claims of possible geniushood.
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Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 11:26 pm
"Ow!" Milo said, and flinched, which was his immediate reaction to any gesture that involved people suddenly touching him or making loud noises in his immediate vicinity. Milo was the sort of nervous gladier who assumed that most everyone around him was planning violence to his person, and considering his unfortunate penchant for rubbing people precisely the wrong way, this was not too dramatic a misevaluation.
He didn't bother to correct her about the subatomic particle accelerator. Instead, he filed it in his mind as yet another thing to be affronted at Gladierkind for: Poorly educated lifeguards.
Not that he blamed her. The more female and less likely to refuse to make out with him a gladier was, the less blame Milo found himself able to assign to them. Even though this one wasn't that female, she was pretty female, and she hadn't yet walked away in a huff, so Milo was pretty willing to blame the System on her lack of expertise on all things subatomic and particley.
Then she gave him the stinkeye, and he leapt to his own defense, puffing out his rather skinny, soaking wet chest indignantly. "Who else? I know everything about their big person technology, and I made my own headphones." If there were two things Milo didn't hate about his life, they were his music and his self-professed enormous intellect. "Anyway, I don't need thumbs. I can make stuff without thumbs. Thumbs are just an illusion the humans use to oppress us, and we buy it like... stupid things, like sheep."
He paused, and realized something, indignantly exclaiming, "Wait, you don't think I'm handsome?"
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Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 11:51 pm
The flinching and the ow-ing didn't seem to put her off at all; Nerissa flopped down on Milo's back, in essence pinning him in place. She didn't know what this System he was going on about was; she didn't really want to know, being pretty happy as long as she was near water enough to surf. Surfing was pretty hardcore. She liked it, a lot. And the rare Gladier who didn't get run off by her excessive 'dude'-ing was pretty, well, rare. And appreciated.
"That's pretty rad, dude," said Nerissa. "You should invent, like, a thumb. Hard to surf without thumbs."
One track mind, thy name is Nerissa. She adjusted her sunglasses, yawned. "You're pretty frosted," she admitted, patting his back with a paw, "And I guess your headphones are pretty gnarly. They waterproof or something?"
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Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 12:15 am
As he was flopped on, Milo flinched again, squeaking as the wind was pushed out of him. He could say 'Hey!' but for once, something in his social consciousness, or perhaps his hormones intervened. It, somewhat excitedly, pointed out that he had never been laid on by a girl before, and though this was perhaps not the most ideal thing ever, it was the closest he'd ever been to romance since the day that one gladier had thought he was a girl and attempted to come on to him. And unlike that situation, Nerissa was the right gender, which made things a whole lot more palatable.
Milo frowned. The only kind of surfing he knew was internet surfing, and he had never met a Gladier with a computer. Or a decent connection. Feirion wasn't much for wifi. "You have a laptop?" he asked, perplexed. It had to be a laptop, Feirion was also pretty short on outlets. "How would that even work?"
"I'm not a cupcake," Milo insisted peevishly, a man used to being compared to sprinkly baked goods. His tone changed when she asked about his headphones though, and he looked almost happy to be talking about them. On Milo, this emotion looked vaguely unsettling. "Yeah, they're pretty indestructible," he bragged, "Unlike our fragile and inevitably transient forms."
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Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 12:26 am
"You're a benny," surmised Nerissa. Whatever a laptop was, she did not own one. She had a surfboard though. It was pretty radical, all blue and red. It matched her shorts, actually, which was pretty radical, rather like the surfboard. "Surfing. Waves? Hang ten?"
She was thinking about walking away.
In the end, she did not. "If you were a cupcake," started the Cetus, "I'd eat you, dude. Frosted's different." Clearly, frosted was different. And that was all the explanation the benny called Milo was gonna get.
"Transwhatsit," asked Nerissa, patting Milo's side. "You gotta use smaller words, dude."
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Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 12:32 am
"My name is Milo. Look, the only nickname I'm really okay with is xMilo-" He trailed off, because then she began speaking another language. "Ten what?" he asked, clearly perplexed.
He was beginning to wonder if all this was worth it. Yes, she was lying on him, but she was clearly wrong in the head. Leave it to him to have his first non-inadvertently homoerotic romantic encounter with a girl who wasn't right in the head. He had to learn to stop expecting good things from life, because life was like a shank, and the people he met in it were like saltshakers aiming for his wounds. He was was surrounded by sheep.
Or in this case, underneath a foreigner.
"Well, if I do, then so do you!" he said hotly. "I still don't know what frosted means, so fair's fair. I mean, no, life is not, in fact, fair, since it's actually full of pain and anguish, but I think that my demand isn't that unreasonable."
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Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 2:56 pm
She gave him an incredulous look. "Hang ten, ten fingers. Surfing. You're being totally mal, dude." Fully harshing the glory of the beach. Of the waterfront in general! Did this dude just go through life completely bananas, talking about trans-whatsits and sub-whatchamacallits? His life had to be a total taco stand, and it was with this thought she decided that, as an enlightened Sister of the Salt, she had to educate the new kid.
"C'mon, shoobie, let's chuck it," said Nerissa, apparently having nicknamed Milo 'shoobie' whether he liked it or not. Of course, there was also the ubiquitous 'dude'. "We'll make you boss, dude, whether you wanna or not."
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Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 3:06 pm
"We don't have fingers," Milo pointed out somewhat snippily, irked by her tone. She was talking down to him! If anyone was going to be talked down to here, it should be the girl who didn't know what 'transient' meant! But he got up anyway, figuring that was what it sounded like she wanted him to do, that and chuck something. "And I don't have shoes, either."
Sitting in front of her, he asked "Now what?" He was pretty used to being pushed around, and at least she wasn't attempting to wound him or anything yet. "I don't see how I can be the boss if you're the one who's ordering me around like I'm some kind of robot. What are you going to do with me, anyway? In English, this time." The longer she talked, the more incomprehensible she got, and Milo thought that it was lucky for her that she was female and possibly more into him than most Gladiers her gender. (Not saying much.)
It was largely complaining for complaining's sake. By now, Milo had pretty much accepted his shoobie fate.
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Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2010 7:01 pm
Totally, totally mal. How he had not caused sinkholes with how totally mal he was being? Because his malness, it was mal, italics underscore bold strikethrough allcaps, mal. Was Nerissa unimpressed by this? No. She was very impressed by exactly how depressing this guy managed to be. However, she also did not feel like being as depressing as he, and so she bounded away.
Milo had exactly three seconds of solitude before she was back, dragging along her totally radical blue-and-red-shorts-matching board. She set it in the surf, then rejoined the monochrome Cetus. "We're gonna surf, dude," said Nerissa, and she started to herd Milo towards her surfboard. "Gonna hang ten! Blow this taco stand! You know the drill, shoobie!"
If he did not know the drill, he was unfortunate. Nerissa apparently could not be denied.
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