Welcome to Gaia! ::

Taji never really understood her mother's distaste for the fancy, colorful painted writing that often decorated their local basketball court. Sure, she couldn't read it, but legibility hardly seemed to be the point of it. She'd been mystified when blue painter's tape went up on the rough concrete walls a few weeks prior, but asking her mom had been little help -- she'd just started in again on the vulgarity of graffiti and the shortcomings of a generation equipped with spray paint and back in her day people respected public property and blah blah blah.

Today, the mystery was partly solved. Taji had arrived early on a Saturday afternoon, jump rope in hand, to practice a few tricks on the spongy asphalt and watch the older kids play a few rounds of basketball. It was more crowded than she was expecting, and it was hard to find enough space to properly swing her jump rope without hitting anyone. She stood off at a corner of the basketball court, shading her eyes against the sun with a flattened hand pressed to her brow, and squinted at the row of volunteers with cans of paint and rollers. She tried to mentally guess what the emerging splotches of color were eventually going to turn out to be. It turned out to be difficult to keep her theories to herself.

The person closest to her was a girl with hair that reminded Taji of strawberry sherbert, which probably explained her choice of greeting. She hovered curiously over the girl's shoulder, supremely interested in the few specks of paint she had started on. The handles of her jump rope clinked together as she crossed her arms behind her back and leaned forward. "Is that supposed to be ice cream? You know, vanilla with chocolate chunks. Or... is that a cow?"

Draping the jumprope across the crooks of her elbows so that her hands were free to press themselves into a 'v' beneath her chin, Taji also attempted her best impression at an art critic, exhaling in a long and drawn out hmmm resembling Gemma's own.

"Needs more," she started, and immediately racked her brain for an important-enough sounding word. "Dynamics." She gestured vaguely at the wall. "Like, it's always more interesting when the subject is doing something. So maybe it could tap dance. Or..." Did she say a UFO was going to steal the cow? Taji tilted her head up to look at the rest of the wall, but was unable to find anything even vaguely resembling the flying saucer she was expecting.

"Shouldn't it be a little more worried, then? If the UFO is going to kidnap it? Maybe it should be trying to get away." The subject of aliens was far more interesting than her attempt at art criticism, and so was the prospect of getting to help paint.

"Flowers! Okay!" Setting her jump rope down, she squatted down by the paint and selected a thin paintbrush. Unmindful of how she might splatter her clothes, she eagerly stuck the paintbrush in a cannister almost up to where she was holding it in her fingers, and swirled it energetically. Now the happy bearer of a sloppily dripping paint brush, she paused, squinted at the wall, and immediately attacked it directly beneath the cow, swirling her chosen pink paint into the green of the depicted grass.

Attempting nothing more complicated than a sort of lopsided circle, the results looked less like a flower and more like a... sort of pink sinkhole. Taji looked towards Gemma for approval.

Gemma's most recent addition prompted a giggle from the shorter girl. "Mama would say she needs her eyebrows done, 'cos --" she slipped here into her imitation of her mother's creole accent, though her attempt at it sounded more generally southern than anything, "'They all waaaaaaaaaild.' Maybe she's just nervous that the aliens will think she's too ugly to kidnap?"

Happy with her conversational partner's approval of her flower, Taji dipped her paint brush back in the can and set about adding more swirls of color to the green field beneath the cow's unfinished hooves. Her face scrunched in concentration, and her tongue slipped between her teeth as if to hold it down, the tip of it poking out of the very corner of her mouth.

"I dunno!" Was her brilliant response to Gemma's question after three more flowers had been diligently painted. "You said earlier about McDonald's an' hamburgers. You don't think they eat them?" This was sort of an unexpectedly gruesome thought, and Taji paused mid-stroke to consider the cow's fate with shades of worry creasing her face.

"Well," she said, with just a hint of a tremble, "There are only aliens in cartoons and movies. So the cow should be fine. Right?" This last bit was directed to the cow itself, as if she expected it to answer. "She can just stay here and eat her flowers."

"Maybe," she added at the last second, "The aliens just want to make the cow prettier. I don't really think she's ugly, but maybe they care about things like that. Like judges at a show. Maybe they'll do her eyebrows."

The things about complexes and society and image issues went right over Taji's head. She had a basic understanding that People Were Different And That Was Great, but also that Wild Eyebrows Should Be Plucked. "I didn't mean," Taji started to say, her tone rising with each successive word so that her statement ended up as more of a question, "That you gave her bad eyebrows..."

Despite what seemed to be an admonition to the small girl, Gemma didn't appear that upset. Taji mentally noted to never talk about eyebrows with Cool Older Kids ever again.

Returning her attention to her flowers, Taji considered the rest of Gemma's words carefully. "Why would they want cow-alien babies though?" She wondered aloud, attempting some variety in the shape of her flowers by slapping the painted bricks with the bristles of her brush. "Like... why not birds? Birds can fly. I guess cows can make milk, but maybe cow-alien babies would make... green milk."

She turned and gave Gemma a slightly skeptical look. She knew that she was supposed to listen to her elders and all, but the last representation of aliens that Taji was at least allowed to see had been the Yip-Yips on Sesame Street, and they didn't even know how to pick up a ringing phone. "Why do you think that? Do you have any proof? Of aliens?" She waited expectantly, brush dripping paint on the ground, as if the other girl was to immediately give a presentation complete with photographs and charts.

"Well," Taji dragged out the word far longer than necessary, ending it with a smack of her tongue against her hard palate, "Aliens..." The colorful girl was no longer so certain of her alien lore. Gemma certainly seemed insistent on them. Taji, to her credit, fell into thoughtful silence at the question of aliens. "I guess I don't know -- maybe you're right. You're probably right," she amended, since the pink-haired girl had obviously studied much more about the universe. "I guess they just haven't taught us yet in school."

"So there are aliens, but they haven't been found yet, right? So their spaceship is prob'ly invisible. Or... the color of space. Like this." She ran her hand through the hairs of her ponytail, spreading out the purple-red color for the other girl to inspect.

"Did they tell you to paint aliens?" She suddenly thought to ask, turning her head to properly look at the other Saint Magdalena students for the first time. Many people in her neighborhood went there, so it wasn't as if they stuck out, but the idea of teachers -- adults -- asking for aliens also seemed a little odd. "Is it supposed to be... educational? Like ahm, one of those cultural... inclusivity... things? Wait," she rocked forward on her heels, looking expectantly at the spot that Gemma had started painting over, "Do you know what they look like?