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 Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 3:43 pm
It had been unusual to Shehk when she’d returned to her dorm room after a long day of running around and other team-related-practices to find Precious preening on her bed with a letter. Certainly it wasn’t strange of her to have found the Corrividus grooming itself, that in and of itself was normal behavior. However, it was the letter that had caught her attention. When the Pricolici had attempted to take the letter from Precious at first, the bird had nipped at her, Shehk immediately retracting her hand and baring her fangs at the bird and it’s sudden ‘possessiveness’ over said letter.
When her second attempt had garnered the same results, Skoll had immediately lunged at the bird, barking and snapping at its wings and chasing it to a higher perch in the room. Skoll paced the rom anxiously while Shehk finally retrieved the letter with a sort of carefulness that one would use when skirting around an unexpectedly found spider. Only she didn’t try to pet the letter with her shoe as one may a spider. Instead, she settled on her bed, Nuk Jr walking over to settle his head into the ghoul’s lap, his skeletal tail wagging lamely while Shehk slowly slid one finger under the flap that sealed the envelope, doing her best to not rip it before she pulled the piece of paper out of it.
Or rather, pieces of paper out of it. Shehk’s expression was completely baffled as she flipped through the pages and counted seven pages worth of writing. It was even more unexpected than having a letter at all. She looked at the front of the envelope, noting that she didn’t see an actual return location. Was she supposed to write this stranger back? She nearly threw the letter aside without reading it. None the less, she hesitated to start the first page.
Dear Shehk –
I still find it odd to write out that name for you, when that wasn’t the name you had when we met so many years ago. However, for the sake of preventing being the cause of an identity crisis for you, I maintain that I should use it instead of who you were before. I hope telling you this doesn’t make you wonder who you were before too strongly. I sent you away to let you develop on your own without me telling you what you had and had not liked before.
Shehk immediately paused after the first paragraph of the letter, the words left a ringing in her head and a bad taste in her mouth, nearly crinkling up the page and throwing the whole thing away. Instead, she just set the pile of papers aside and pet Nuk Jr’s head absent-mindedly. Skoll finally returned from bothering Precious, settling next to Hati, who keened anxiously at Shehk’s sudden mood swings, tail thumping lamely against the bed. Shehk simply turned her attentions to getting her own four paws back and curling up in the middle of the pile of her ‘supporters’. Her head hurt. Her brain was flashing through images of some dark body she could recall in the peripheral of her visual memory in some building she didn't recall entirely.
The Corrividus flew over and started pulling apart the pages of the letter, forming a small nest out of them, the edges tattering from the abuse. For some reason, Shehk just couldn’t leave it be and barked, chasing the bird back to it’s previous perch once again and settling in, still in her canid body, to fuss with the pages, carefully reorganizing them as best as she could without a thumb and smoothing them out, feeling her three ‘packmates’ leaning against her and heads resting on her back as she resumed reading the letter once again.
Though she skipped the first paragraph that time around.
”I hope your education has been treating you well, Shehk, I have tried to be sure any financial problems the academy has had with you have been taken care of. It is the least I can do while still remaining hidden away from you. I hope any lingering memories that you have of my on your psyche aren’t bothering you too much.”
The more she read as the mysterious writer, who she assumed was male, went on, the more it made her head throb with some sort of familiarity. She was so sure she knew who this person was. Yet she couldn’t quite be sure of it. It made her uneasy, glancing over talk of her school studies and talk about how her stitches were treating her. If they itched. Talking about her clothing, if she’d worn anything out, needed it replaced. How much she was planning to do over the break. If she'd kept up with playing the piano. Reminding her that the one at 'home' was still there, waiting for her to come and play it for him some more.
She remembered that piano well. It was beautiful, carved from a deep mahogany wood and treated with the utmost care. The keys had been real ivory as well. She'd cherished that thing. She remembered someone had sat with her when she was much weaker, still learning to move her fingers again and had helped her with remembering the notes. It had been a long time before she'd gained much proficiency with it.
Her now-fingers tapped absentmindedly, as though she was reliving some small tune she'd played on said piano at some point in time. None the less, she kept reading, each line of text more disturbing to Shehk than the last.
The letter was far too concerned about her, but it kept being laced with hints of some sort of former relationship the pair seemed to have had. She finally folded up the pages, having not even finished the letter, putting it back into the envelope as carefully as possible before she got up, moving over to her desk and fishing for some paper to write on. Ultimately she found a few pieces that were clean enough to be worth considering writing-return-mail on. Did she have any envelopes? The sudden realization she didn’t wasn’t lost on her.
None the less, she sat down and wrote, frowning. Upset. She wasn’t sure how to handle this situation she’d suddenly had sprung onto her.
”Dear Stranger,
I am not sure who you are, but the letter you sent me was both long and caused my deja-vu like headaches. I couldn’t bring myself to finish reading it. To be honest, it’s put some butterflies in my stomach that I just can’t deal with as easily as I wanted to say I was able to.
I am doing fine here, I feel I owe you at least that much of an answer for how much you wrote and seemed concerned about such things. If you wish to keep writing, you are free to. I will try to read them as much as possible, but I make only one request of you:
Please stop making implications of my past life. I think it causes me more psychological issue than I would like to handle. So please. No mentions of name-relations or any other things that remind you of who I used to be.
My name is Shehk Strigoi. That is all I need to worry about at this time.
Thank you.
-SHEHK”
It was a relatively short letter, but her head throbbed painfully. She folded it up haphazardly, got up and left her room to seek out an envelope to stuff it in in a huff. Only by the time she had returned, Precious, and the letter, were gone. Shehk frowned.
“If she went off to make a nest out of that, I will bite her head off.” She hissed, sitting down on her bed again and giving up on re-writing the letter again for the time being, instead looking back over that letter again.
She’d forget about the letter she’d written until the second one came later.
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Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2011 8:13 am
(Posting these two solos in this thread too because they're related and why make people hunt for the entire story :V ) The Second Letter Shehk stared at the second letter when it had arrived with the same uncertainty as she had the first, giving it a rather stressed looking face, before she had cracked it open. It was, fortunately, much smaller than the first one she had received (and not entirely read).
“Dear Shehk,
Clearly while you were still under my care I should have taught you how to properly write a letter…..”
The Pricolici immediately made a face at that starting line of text, her nose crinkling at it. Oh. She wanted to punch whoever this was in the face. Her fingers crinkled the edges of the paper, before she settled in to read the meager three pages that made up this letter. It sounded almost wounded in response to the last letter she had sent back to this mystery writer, her eyes half lidded over.
She felt like a small child who was being chided by her grandmother for stealing all of the cookies from the cookie jar. Or at least, she imagined that would be a similar feeling. All she’d done was write a stupid letter, why was this guy giving her so much grief?
Over paper and proper pacing and all that bullshit, at that. Shehk didn’t want to read a novel most of the time, so why would she want to write one? She settled into her bed, crossing her legs as she went over the pages of annoyance. Why did she even read these letters anyways? They struck her in a way that just bothered her and got underneath her skin.
It mad her both depressed and pissed off at the same time. It was disgusting. She wished she had the power to make sure nothing ever got underneath her skin ever, but she wasn’t as powerful as that would have needed her to be and she just…. She felt a little bit helpess in her own skin. None the less, she soon set the letter aside and made a face, relaying over the letter in her head.
‘Plz 2 B learn 2 write then try that last letter over again’ it had said, in a nutshell. Though not that poorly written. That was the kind of letter that Shehk would have sent over texting to someone else who was just as button-retarded as she herself was. None the less, she thought about the letter she’d written back and pondered how to make such a small amount of information take up more than a single page of ‘STFU’.
She had a feeling her letters would start getting critiqued if she left them to their own devices. Did she want to put up with more Daddy Long Leg’s bullshit about her letters or get a whole second helping of grief from the man?
Part of her was very confused on how somebody she hardly even knew could get underneath her skin so effectively. She took a deep breath and held it in, feeling it try to burn her dead lungs, breathing it out through her nose after a length of time had passed before she finally sat up, stuffing the letter back into the envelope from which it had came.
The second letter ended up hidden away like the first, something she would deal with later if a third letter was received. She needed to force herself to figure out a plan of action. A very grand plan of action. Maybe drawn out on a piece of paper. Did she have any paper?
Shehk grumbled under her breath.
Battleplan: Get paper to draw battleplans on. The Third Letter A split in the road. It wasn’t a real road, so in that sense there wasn’t a real fork in it even if she wanted to pretend there was one. There was a part of her that longed to crack open the letter from her mysterious sire, write some overly passionate letter to him, and send it off. She’d thought about it a lot of times since that first letter had arrived.
But now the envelopes of the letters that followed sat on her desk by themselves, the most recent untouched. She’d barely manage to browse through the first two letters at all. Though the second one had started off by telling her she needed to learn how to compose a proper letter. It had been a rather blunt statement, but it had been very much honest. Shehk never wrote letters to anybody. However, she hadn’t been sure how to respond to either of the most recent two she’d gotten.
She hadn’t even opened up one of them.
That first letter had struck something inside of her; she wasn’t sure how she’d describe it to somebody else. Part of her wondered if she just read the letter in a room with the mindflayer, her emotional contortion would be picked up and Riley would be able to tell how Shehk felt and the stress it was causing her. Shehk rolled over on her bed and buried her face into a pillow, sighing deeply. A heavy sigh into the pillow, allowing the breath to remain out and not breathing back in. She didn’t require the oxygen at that point. She needed to get herself out of her body. Just a little bit.
There was something about being able to close her eyes and let her body go heavy that was soothing. She imagined that this was how it felt to be a corpse. With absolutely no life in it. Only she was a very much alive corpse. Perhaps that was ultimately her problem; she was a corpse. She was dead and walking on artificial life. Part of her mind drifted back to the letter on her desk wondering if she should have simply thrown the letter out.
Therein lied the problem that Shehk was struggling with. Did she want to open the letter, keep getting the letters, and feel the frustration of something she couldn’t quite access anymore keep digging into her?
She did. But the man who wrote seemed to genuinely care about her in a way that very few at the school had ever expressed caring about her. She grabbed the single pelt that laid on her bed and wrapped herself in it, inhaling after several minutes of having kept herself from it. It was a deep scent. It smelled of some sort of herb, smoke, and..something else. It smelled like the wilds and a part of her that wanted to go outside and run through the trees. But the letter kept dragging her back in. Away from the feeling that was trying to liberate her from whatever guilt it was that was weighing on her conscious.
What did she do?
Down one path, there was a possibility that if she struggled through the frustrations that would come with the letters, she would find something more about herself…or come to create something new in herself. Who she was then. It would be like cleaning out a house, Shehk thought. A house full of so many old things that were held onto, it took a long time to tell yourself to pry your fingers off of one thing and let it go.. pass it on to somebody else.
The other path was one where she handed that house off to somebody else, left it to be abandoned and only explored by the brave. Told herself no treasure was worth the effort and just going back to her life as she knew it in that moment. Well…before the first letter moment. Shehk again exhaled, freeing her body of any function it may have needed to assume itself as something ‘living’, before she allowed her mind to wander again.
She allowed her mind to create a space in it. She needed to try to visualize; a task that was difficult in and of itself. Shehk had never been a ghoul who was good at creating the visual. She was a bit more…well..she was better at showing it with a badly drawn diagram that didn’t reasonably fit the space it was meant to. Her spatial reasoning, even was lacking. Sometimes it felt like Shehk was unable to do much of anything that didn’t involve her flailing around.
None the less, she forced herself to enter the poorly drawn split in the path her mind had managed to create for itself. She needed to push herself past her comfort zone. Down one path she allowed herself to struggle through her discomfort. Down another, she put the discomfort aside. However, she couldn’t really see anything beyond the stepping points. Clearly Shehk needed to work on her visualizing skills.
And her confidence. She was just making herself loom there, on the cusp of an issue she needed to work on smoothing out, building over, even. She couldn’t make any sort of step forward. There was something about standing on that brink of indecision that made her feel safe; as long as she didn’t make up her mind, she didn’t have to be disappointed by the results of her own choices…and she couldn’t make the wrong choice.
Because once she started walking, she couldn’t step back and start over again. As soon as she made up her mind, she was trapped with her decision until she came to another fork in the path. As soon as she thought she was heading towards something, she’d become spooked;
She would run away, hoping it would settle itself and let her get out of the problem guilt free. Shehk had passed that bridge before. That fork in the road had been called ‘skinwalker’. It had turned out interestingly, as of yet. But still, there was a part of her that wondered if she should have tied a lifeline back at the sign back at the fork so she could find her way out of it.
What if Nukpana suddenly decided he hated her?
What if she stopped being interesting?
What if she just wasn’t worth it?
There were too many ‘what ifs’ in Shehk’s mind that caused her to suddenly jerk herself out of her mental maze she’d created for herself, wrapping herself up in the pelt further, hoping if she put it between herself and her doubt she could come to a conclusion somehow. She would have killed to have Riley’s confidence..or Sammy’s… or hell, even Altair’s. She surrounded herself with confidence, yet seemed to struggle keeping herself afloat in any of it.
Only when somebody else threw her the lifeline did she function in it.
Never the less, she soon forced herself to sit up, looking at the letters, getting up to pick up the stack of envelopes, walking back to settle onto her bed, wrapping herself up in the pelt as she carefully debated if she was even going to open the third letter. She wanted to see what it said…
But she was afraid to open it. Once she opened it, she knew exactly what it was going to say. And she’d have to face another part of herself. A part of herself she wasn’t sure she wanted to face.
There was so much doubt. She’d forced Nukpana away from her, then she’d forced him back to her. He was patient with her; he was good for her. Did she risk having him around to keep exploring this other part of herself? Did she have the balls to risk destroying who she was at that moment because of letters from the past?
She didn’t want the letters from the past, but she didn’t have the heart to try and ruin somebody else’s sense of well being. Was who she was worth destroying somebody else? From all of the stress she was piling upon herself she could just feel the demons being born that would arrive at Amityville at any moment. Follow her around her house like a giant pile of guilt.
Shehk crumpled the letters in her hands, before shoving them underneath her pillow and burying her face into sad pillow, her brain turning into a violent torrent of madness that sifted and turned over onto itself. Turning its judging eyes upon itself an inwards onto her. Judging herself.
The Pricolici still stood at the cusp of a decision, unsure about what to do with it and unsure what would break first; her indecision, or her reality of her life. Why couldn’t she just have them both?
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